Andrés Reséndez
Department of History
University of California at Davis
C.V. - Updated 06/07/10

My main research interests revolve around how people construct their ethnic and national identities in North America, and the ways in which these identities intersect with state power, economic change, biology, language, and other phenomena.

A Land So Strange looks at North America at the dawn of European colonization and through the eyes of the last four survivors of a disastrous expedition to Florida. In the course of eight years, these castaways would cross the entire continent describing previously unknown (to the Europeans) natives and lands of what is now the American Southeast and Southwest as well as northern Mexico.

Changing National Identities at the Frontier explores how Spanish-speakers, Native Americans, and Anglo-American settlers living along Mexico's northernmost frontier-Texas and New Mexico-came to think of themselves as members of one ethnic/national community or another in the crucial decades leading up to the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. This work also intersects with the recent historiography on frontiers. For a recent discussion see Continental Crossroads.

A Texas Patriot on Trial in Mexico: José Antonio Navarro and the Texan Santa Fe Expedition looks at how this process of identity formation took place in the life of one individual. The core of the book consists of a translation of the trial of José Antonio Navarro, a Mexican-Texan who had supported the secessionist movement of Texas from Mexico in 1835-36 and subsequently took part in a disastrous expedition that sought to annex portions of neighboring New Mexico to the upstart Republic of Texas. He was apprehended by Mexican authorities in 1841 and tried in Mexico City for treason.

Clearly, state power, economic interests, and shared cultural elements bind polities and peoples together. But collective identities can also be related to biological markers. After all, with whom we have children is a way of defining community. DNA information is especially valuable to track population movements and identities of pre-contact or early colonial peoples for which we lack other sources of information. References for "Genetics and the History of Latin America" Hispanic American Historical Review (May 2005)

I grew up in Mexico City where I received my B.A. in International Relations at El Colegio de México. I then moved to the Windy City and earned a PhD in History at the University of Chicago. I have been a faculty member of the Department of History at UC Davis since 1998. I live with my wife and two children in Davis, California.