Kevan Aguilar | University of California, Irvine (original) (raw)

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine. I earned my doctorate in Latin American History from the University of California, San Diego (2021). My research focuses on transnational histories of race formation, migration, and working-class culture in twentieth-century Mexico and Mexican America.

I am currently working on first book manuscript, “Revolutionary Encounters: Race, Ideology, and Exile in Mexico and Spain,” which examines the perceptions and receptions of Mexicans toward political refugees fleeing the Spanish Civil War. The study examines the radical imaginaries of Mexico’s laboring classes and Spanish political refugees to demonstrate the impact of internationalist and postcolonial thought on both societies. Drawing on documentary materials and oral testimony transcripts collected from seventeen archives in Mexico, Spain, the United States, and the Netherlands, I demonstrate how solidarities between Indigenous, Mexican, and Spanish peoples proposed new revolutionary demands that challenged the Mexican state’s racial and economic modernization initiatives.

I am also working on a second research project that follows the trajectories of Mexican and Mexican American anarchists between the 1920s and 1970s. Beginning with the deportation of Mexican anarchist Enrique Flores Magón, this work will delve into the profound impact of Borderland Internationalism on anti-authoritarian movements and the ways in which it informed a transnational critique of U.S. racial and economic inequalities, the Mexican state, and the cultural nationalism of the burgeoning Chicanx Movement.

I have recently published work in the Journal of Latin American Studies, as well as edited collections such as Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW (Pluto Press, 2017), the Oxford Encyclopedia of Mexican History and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2019). I have also published public history articles for KCET: Departures and KCET: Artbound.

My research has been supported by the University of Maryland President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Social Science Research Council, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, and the UC San Diego Frontiers of Innovation Scholars Program.
Supervisors: Eric Van Young and Matthew Vitz

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