Historian wins book award for Chicana and Chicano studies
An associate professor of history at The University of Texas at Arlington has won the 2020 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) Book Award for her work examining connections between the agricultural industry and border enforcement in the Rio Grande Valley.
Cristina Salinas, who specializes in U.S. and Mexican-American history, won the award for Managed Migrations: Growers, Farmworkers, and Border Enforcement in the Twentieth Century. She is a faculty associate for UTA’s Center for Mexican American Studies.
“Mexico and the United States have always been connected,” Salinas said. “In the Southwest particularly, they have been built up and grown up together. There is a very complex set of issues, history and cultural identity of Latinos and Mexican Americans in the U.S.”
Her book examines the development of the agricultural industry along the border, alongside the changing methods of border enforcement in the Rio Grande Valley during the past century.
“It’s a historical account of the relationship between workers and growers, industry and labor on the border and the role of the Border Patrol in shaping those relations,” she said. “The law and the practices in the 20th century were fashioned by the realities of a growing industrial and agricultural sector along the border. Much of what we see now as current immigration law came out of what was going in in the 20th century.”
The NACCS formed in 1972 is the oldest professional interdisciplinary association focused on Chicana and Chicano studies. Its annual award recognizes an outstanding new book in the field.