The historian and creator of the Black Mexico seminar and World History Through Soccer on hidden connections, the power of primary sources, and sport as a window onto society.
As an undergraduate, I loved studying African history鈥擡thiopia, Senegal, Angola鈥攁nd literature, film, and history from Latin America. Those two interests felt like separate tracks.
The turning point came in a lecture on Black conquistadores of Mexico. I remember sitting there thinking, 鈥淭his has to be wrong,鈥� because I had never heard this history before鈥攁nd I spent most of my childhood in Mexico. It completely floored me.
Suddenly it clicked: I could bring my two interests together, asking what it means to study Blackness in Mexico, a place so closely associated鈥攙isually and narratively鈥攚ith Indigenous civilizations like the Maya and聽Mexica.
On an exploratory trip to Mexico, 聽I reviewed a box of documents from the 1600s. Right away, I found dozens of references to enslaved Angolans and Congolese. I thought: If this random request yields so much history, what would a true, in-depth study produce?
That led to my first book, (Cambridge University Press, 2018). So much of my archival material never made it into the book, so when Covid hit and the archives closed, I wrote (Hackett Publishing, 2024).
There鈥檚 a will from Zacatecas, in northern Mexico, written by a man in the 1700s who owned something like a convenience store. He lists his stock鈥�20 yards of ribbon and lace, four pounds of candles鈥攁nd then itemizes what people pawned to buy things: a coral bracelet, a silver pendant. A student might read that and think, 鈥淢y sister has a pendant like that.鈥� Suddenly, 1712 doesn鈥檛 feel so distant.
Another document that has stayed with me is an investigation into a gay community in Mexico City. I was never taught that queer communities existed in the colonial period. The document is violent鈥攖hese people are being persecuted by crown officials鈥攂ut within it you find lists of homes where they dined, and their nicknames for each other: La Rosada, 鈥渢he pink one,鈥� and La Coqueta, 鈥渢he flirt.鈥�
Mapping those communities onto the past and then asking what we do with that knowledge has been powerful. A student raised in the 2000s or 2010s will see things in that document that I never would. That鈥檚 what keeps me committed to primary sources: Each generation reads them anew.
My current research follows 1,463 people kidnapped in a pirate attack in Veracruz and dispersed to places like colonial Charleston, South Carolina, and Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). What did it mean for those people, and for those left behind? What did it mean to land in a foreign port, not speaking the language, and, in some parts of Saint-Domingue, in a setting with very few women?
I鈥檝e always been drawn to the footnote on the page that says, 鈥淲e don鈥檛 know what happened to this person.鈥� I鈥檓 obsessed with those gaps. Why don鈥檛 we know? What connections are we missing?
For me, sport offers another way into these questions. I try to HIST 154: World History Through Soccer every World Cup cycle. It always strikes me how central sports are to everyday life in Latin America, the United States, and Europe鈥攁nd yet when we open many standard histories, they鈥檙e barely mentioned. How can that be, when on a given Sunday in some cities a huge share of the population is either at the stadium or listening on the radio?
In Buenos Aires alone there are 79 stadiums; that鈥檚 a profound transformation of urban space that we rarely treat as historically significant.
I鈥檓 especially interested in the history of women鈥檚 soccer. Archival photos of women playing in uniforms in Chile in the early 1900s raise questions about why those stories disappeared in the 1960s. If I ever move fully into researching the 20th or 21st century, it will likely be through this lens. We don鈥檛 take sports seriously enough in academia.
