JOINED THE DEPARTMENT

2001

BIO

James A. Garza, Associate Professor of History and Ethnic Studies, earned his Ph.D. from Texas Christian University in 2001. His research focuses on 19th Century Mexico, Global / Comparative Environmental History and the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands. He is a specialist on the Porfiriato. In 2008, his book, The Imagined Underworld: Sex, Crime and Vice in Porfirian Mexico, was published by the University of Nebraska Press. In 2008, the study was published in Mexico by Editorial Aguilar under the title El Lado Oscuro del Porfiriato: Sexo, crimenes, y vicios en la Ciudad de Mexico. Garza’s study explores how late 19th Century Mexican elites both imagined and constructed a criminal underworld, in the process transforming the world of Mexico City’s underclass into a social and cultural landscape of criminality and danger.

In 2006, Garza published an article in Journal of the West, “The Long History of Mexican Immigration to the Rural Midwest.” The piece won a prize as the best article published by the journal in 2006.

Currently, Garza is at work on a transnational history that examines how, in the late nineteenth century, the Porfirian regime and transnational British interests transformed the Basin of Mexico through the construction of massive engineering works designed to control flood waters and sanitize Mexico City, in the process helping end the basin’s lake system. Rural Mexicans fought back in diverse ways, demonstrating that development projects in Latin America have a complex legacy that exists outside official narratives. Garza has also recently co-edited two volumes,  Technocratic Visions: Engineers, Technology, and Society in Mexico, 1876-1946 with Justin Castro (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022) and Mexico On and Off the World Stage: New Directions in Transnational Mexican History with Matthew Esposito (Lexington Books, 2023). He is also working on an environmental history of commodities. 

Garza also serves on the University of Nebraska Press Advisory Board. He teaches a variety of courses, including Latin American history, Colonial Mexico, Modern Mexico, Ethnic Studies, Environmental History, and the History of Modern Crime.

He teaches a variety of courses, including Latin American history, Colonial Mexico, Modern Mexico, Latin American Studies, Environmental History, and the History of Modern Crime.

CV

BOOKS

• The Imagined Underworld: Sex, Crime and Vice in Porfirian Mexico City. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.
• El Lado Oscuro del Porfiriato: Sexo, crìmenes, y vicios en la Ciudad de México. Trans. Gerardo Piña. Mexico, D.F.: Editorial Aguilar, 2008.

ARTICLES

• “Dominance and Submission in Don Porfirio’s Belle Époque: The Case of Luis and Piedad” in Masculinity and Sexuality in Modern Mexico. Victor M. Macías-González and Anne Rubenstein, editors. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012.
• “Conquering the Environment and Surviving Natural Disasters” in A Companion to Mexican History and Culture, William H. Beezley, Editor. Wiley-Blackwell: May 2011.
• “The Long History of Mexican Immigration to the Rural Midwest.” Journal of the West, 45: 4 (Fall 2006).
• “Foreign Travelers in Mexico: Chronicles and Stories.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. (Online Publication Date: October 2017)

SELECTED CONFERENCE PAPERS AND INVITED PAPERS

• October 30, 2024 – Panel Discussant – Politics, Romance, and a Lost Manuscript: Recovering the Secret History of Key West. Sheldon Museum, UNL.
• October 30-November 2, 2022 – XVI Meeting of International Historians of Mexico, Austin, Texas – “Argumentando por el progreso en el México de finales del siglo XIX: los conflictos por el agua y la vida cotidiana / Arguing for Progress in Late Nineteenth Century Mexico: Conflict over Water and Daily Life.”
• March 18-20, 2021 – Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies 68th Annual Conference, (Virtual) “The Second Conquest: Indianos, Indigenous Communities and Resistance in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Mexico.”
• September 18-21, 2014 – Chicago, Illinois, XIV, Reunión Internacional de Historiadores de México “Poder, negociación e imperio durante el porfiriato: el proyecto del desagüe al norte de la ciudad de México.”
• February 28-March 2, 2013 – Fort Worth, Texas, Texas, Annual Meeting of the Texas State Historical Association “Mexicanos, Americanos, Porfiristas, and Revolucionarios in Laredo, Texas, during the1910 Mexican Revolution.”
• October 25-28, 2012 – New York City, Urban History Association Bi-Annual Meeting – Presentation “El Mundo se va a volver toditito a Chicharron: Earthquakes, Floods, and Perceptions of Disaster in Porfirian Mexico City.”
• January 5-8, 2011 – Chicago, Illinois, American Historical Association Annual Meeting – Presentation “Saints Days’ Temblors, Deadly Floods, and Portents of Doom: Progress, Community, and Disaster in Porfirian Mexico.”
• April 6-9, 2011 – Santa Fe, New Mexico, Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies 58th Annual Conference – Presentation “Investigating Environment, Culture and Race in Porfirian Mexico.”
• April 7-11, 2010 – Boulder, Colorado, Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies-57th Annual Conference – Commentator on Panel “Voicing Resistance: Artistic and Literary Representations of National Dialectics of Difference.”
• March 4-7, 2009 – Santa Fe, New Mexico, Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies 56th Annual Conference – Chair and Commentator on Panel “Satire, Civilizing Agency and Space: Interpretations of Mexican American Self-Expression.”
• April 23-26, 2008 – Denver, Colorado, Western Social Science Association – Presentation – “Omaha Bound: Mexican and African-American Migrations to Nebraska during the WWI Era.”

EXPERTISE

• Modern Mexico
• Latin America, Nineteenth Century
• U.S.-Mexican Borderlands
• Ethnic Studies
• Global Environmental History