James A. Garza

Associate Professor of History and Ethnic Studies

Contact Information:

639 OLDH

Department of History
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Lincoln, NE 68588, USA
Phone: (402) 472-2406
Fax: 402-472-8839
E-mail:

Joined the Department:

August 2001

James A. Garza, Associate Professor of History and Ethnic Studies, earned his Ph.D. from Texas Christian University in 2001. He is a specialist on 19th Century Mexico and the Porfiriato. In 2008, his book, The Imagined Underworld: Sex, Crime and Vice in Porfirian Mexico, was published by the University of Nebraska Press. In 2008, the study was published in Mexico by Editorial Aguilar under the title El Lado Oscuro del Porfiriato: Sexo, crimenes, y vicios en la Ciudad de Mexico. Garza's study explores how late 19th Century Mexican elites both imagined and constructed a criminal underworld, in the process transforming the world of Mexico City's underclass into a social and cultural landscape of criminality and danger.

In 2006, Garza published an article in Journal of the West, "The Long History of Mexican Immigration to the Rural Midwest." The piece won a prize as the best article published by the journal in 2006.

Currently, Garza is at work on several projects, including a reader focusing on Mexican-American history, a history of Mexican immigration to the United States, a textbook on Latin American history and an environmental and cultural history of Mexico City. His work continues to focus on both Mexican and Mexican-American history. He has an essay "Conquering the Environment and Surviving Natural Disasters" in A Companion to Mexican History and Culture (Blackwell)

Garza is also the Program Director for Nineteenth Century Studies. He teaches a variety of courses, including Latin American history, Colonial Mexico, Modern Mexico, Mexican-American History, Ethnic Studies, and Borderlands History.

Expertise:

• Borderlands
• Chicano/a
• Latin America
• Modern Mexico