Education
B.A. and M.A., San Francisco State University
Ph.D., University of California, San Diego
Research and Teaching Interests
- Chicanx History and Chicanx Studies
- Queer History and Queer Studies
My work focuses on Chicanx and Latinx histories (especially queer Chicanx histories) as well as borderlands histories – with borderlands understood as sites of conflict. My first monograph, ‘”This Land was Mexican Once: Histories of Resistance from Northern California,” was an attempt to understand how white supremacy came to dominate my hometown, and to excavate the multiple histories that preceded the arrival of Euro-American settlers. In 2012 Antonia Castañeda allowed me to edit and compile a number of her essays into a cohesive volume for North Texas Press. Luz María Gordillo, another historian with our unit conducted interviews for the volume and eventually produced a documentary on the life of this powerful founder of our field. The result of our efforts was Three Decades of EnGendering History: Selected Works of Antonia Castañeda (2014).
Not to dwell exclusively on publications, but my second monograph allowed me to explore trans-ing history. Applying the Mexican/Anzaldúan concept of nepantla to our continent, I mapped relationships between the movement of capital, culture, and people – especially, but not exclusively transgender Latin@s–in the late nineteenth and late-twentieth centuries. That work, Nepantla2, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in 2021.
Today, I am working on a project that excavates, maps, and analyzes sex, gender, faith and power in the history of the United Farm Worker movement. I was first attracted to this topic when I had the opportunity to explore the relationship of faith and queerness in the speeches of Dolores Huerta. It is intersections such as these that I enjoy bringing into the classroom, where, with the students of WSU, I explore connections between sex, gender, capital, and race in constructing a useable past.
Battles over classroom textbooks throughout the U.S. remind us that history is a powerful tool for shaping the present and the future. To quote la estimada Gloria E. Anzaldú, “a misinformed people is a subjugated people.” Come work with us as we learn to wield the power of the past to inform our present, and to fuel liberatory movements.
Professional Positions
- Lead Editor, Proceedings of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies, Spring 2018-2023
- Committee on LGBTQ Status in the Profession, American Historical Association, 2021 –
- National Endowment for the Humanities Peer Review Panelist, June 2020
- Board Member, National Collaborative for Women’s History Sites, Spring 2019 – 2022
- Book Review editor for the journal of Chicana/Latina Studies 2012-2017
Selected Publications
Books:
L. Heidenreich and Rita Urquijo-Ruiz, Writing that Matters: A Handbook for Chicanx and Latinx Studies, University of Arizona (forthcoming) Spring 2024.
Nepantla2: Excavating Transgender Mestiz@ Histories in Times of Global Shift, University of Nebraska Press, 2020.
(ed.) L. Heidenreich with Antonia Castañeda, Three Decades of EnGendering History: Selected Works of Antonia Castañeda. University of North Texas, 2014.
“This Land Was Mexican Once”: Histories of Resistance from Northern California. University of Texas Press, 2007.
Chapters and Articles:
“Word and Deed: Dolores Huerta, Chicana Feminism and a Zurdo Ethos of Faith in Action,” in Catholic Women’s Rhetoric in America, eds. Elizabethada A. Wright and Christina Pinkston. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2021.
“Colonial Pasts, Utopian Futures: Reclaiming the Monstrous as Salvific,” in Altermundos: Latin@ Speculative Literature, Film, and Popular Culture eds. Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson and B. V. Olguín, UCLA Chicano Research Center, 2017.
“Teaching Liberatory Chicana/o Studies in the Corporate University,” in El Mundo Zurdo 5: Selected Works from the 2015 Meeting of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa eds. Domino Renee Pérez, et al. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2016.
“Jack Mugarrieta Garland: A Queer Mestiz@ in the ‘American West,’” Lilith 21 (August 2015).