Sonia Hernández

Sonia Hernández is an Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University. She is a former UT Board of Regents Scholar and former Fulbright scholar and currently a Chancellor EDGES Fellow. Hernández earned a PhD in Latin American History from the University of Houston in 2006 and specializes in the intersections of gender and labor in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands, Chicana/o history, and Modern Mexico. She is the author of Working Women into the Borderlands (Texas A&M University Press, 2014) which won the Sara A. Whaley Book Prize (NWSA) and the Liz Carpenter Award (TSHA), among others. A Spanish translation of this book was published as Mujeres, trabajo y región fronteriza (Tamaulipas: ITCA; Mexico City: INEHRM, 2017). She is the author of For a Just and Better World: Engendering Anarchism in the Mexican Borderlands, 1900-1938 (University of Illinois Press, 20121) which earned the Philip Taft Labor Book Award (Cornell & LAWCHA) and is co-editor with John Morán González of Reverberations of Racial Violence: Critical Reflections on the History of the Border (University of Texas Press, 2021).

She is co-founder of the award-winning public history project Refusing to Forget which brings public awareness of the role of state-sanctioned, anti-Mexican violence in the early 20th century. Hernández is at work on a new book project, “Por un compatriota: Transnational Networks, State Violence, and the Case of Gregorio Cortez, 1900-1920,” which re-visits the 1901 near-lynching attempt of Cortez in south central Texas from a gendered, transnational, and multi-national archival perspective.