Dr. Christina Villarreal Receives a Prestigious Fellowship in Support of Research
After earning her PhD in History from the University of Texas-Austin in spring 2020, Dr. Villarreal joined the Department as an Assistant Professor of History during the fall of 2020. During the 2021-2022 academic year, Dr. Villarreal will be the “Summerfield G. Roberts Fellow for the Study of Texas History,” at the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University. This generous fellowship will allow her to focus on her manuscript, “Resisting Colonial Subjugation: Sanctuary, Asylum, and Refuge in the Texas-Louisiana Borderlands, 1714-1803.”
According to Dr. Villarreal, her study is a “pioneering history of the Spanish borderlands from the perspectives of subjugated people in the Gulf Coast. Based on colonial, military, and civil manuscript sources from fifteen archives in the United States, Mexico, Spain, and France, I trace the physical movement of Indians, soldiers, and enslaved Africans and Indians who fled forced missionization, conscription, or enslavement in coastal colonies. Using interdisciplinary methods from feminist and critical geography and African diaspora studies, I reconstruct geographies of resistance to understand how challenges to colonial oppression shaped imperial territory and created alternative spaces for asylum. While the overarching focus of my work is political space-making at the ground-level, the pivotal change occasioned by the Treaty of Paris (1763) serves as the central arc of the manuscript. The treaty, in which Spain acquired Louisiana from France, signified a major imperial transformation of the Gulf Coast. Initiated “from above,” this geopolitical transition expanded the Spanish borderlands over former French territory and altered the locations where Indians, soldiers, and enslaved people could find or avoid colonial oppression.”
Dr. Villarreal teaches graduate and undergraduate classes in Latin American, Gulf Coast, and Borderlands History; and she is the principal faculty member responsible for our Texas History class. She is collaborating with the Texas General Land Office on an edited volume titled, Slavery in Spanish and Mexican Texas. The book, under contract with the University of Texas Press, will feature her English translations of Spanish manuscript sources regarding slavery in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Texas. It will also include her co-authored introduction and original chapter, “Black Fugitive Strategies: Slavery and Self-Emancipation in the Spanish Gulf Coast Borderland” to the edited volume, At the Heart of the Borderlands: Africans and Afro-descendants on the edges of Colonial Spanish America, under contract with New Mexico University Press. These works revise the historiography on Afro-descendants in the Spanish Borderlands of North America.
Please join us in congratulating Dr. Villarreal.
Clements Center Research Fellows
https://www.smu.edu/Dedman/Research/Institutes-and-Centers/SWCenter/Fellowships/Announce
Dr. Villarreal’s UTEP page
https://www.utep.edu/liberalarts/history/people/faculty-pages/christina-villarreal.html
