
The University of New Mexico
NEWS RELEASE
Contact: Benson Hendrix, 505-277-1816
bhendrix@unm.edu
Law Professor Discusses Origin of Mexican Americans in New Book, Tour
With Hispanics now the largest U.S. minority group, there has been increasing national interest about Mexican Americans, who make up two-thirds of all Hispanics. University of New Mexico Professor Laura E. Gómez has published a new book which provides answers about the early history of Mexican Americans in the U.S. The book, “Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race,” will be out October 5 from New York University Press.
Gómez, who has three-quarters of her UNM appointment at the School of Law and one-quarter in the College of Arts and Sciences' American Studies Department (she is the only professor jointly appointed between the two UNM schools), focuses on the experience of "the first Mexican Americans"--the 115,000 Mexicans who became American citizens by virtue of the peace treaty that ended the U.S. war with Mexico in 1848. The war resulted in increasing by more than one-third the land mass of the U.S., adding all or part of eight western states where almost 85 million Americans live today.
"Many Americans view Manifest Destiny as a moment of national triumph before the dark years of conflict over slavery that culminated in the Civil War," says Gómez, but the truth is considerably more complicated. "Manifest Destinies, as used in the book's title, is at once a reference to the ideology of Manifest Destiny as wrapped up in race and racism and is, at the same time, about how the competing destinies of many groups--including Pueblo Indians, other Indians, Euro-Americans, African Americans, and Mexican Americans--came together to ultimately produce the Mexican American race and permanently change the American racial order at the turn of the twentieth century."
“Manifest Destinies” focuses a great deal on New Mexico history, since two-thirds of all Mexican Americans in 1850 lived in present-day New Mexico (the remaining one-third was divided between California and Texas). Gómez draws on her expertise in the fields of law, history, and sociology to explain why New Mexico remained in political limbo as a federal territory for so long before gaining statehood in 1912.
Gómez, who was born in Roswell in 1964 and grew up in Albuquerque where she attended public schools in the North Valley, is a graduate of Harvard and Stanford universities. At Stanford, she completed a law degree (J.D.) and Ph.D. in Sociology in six years. She went on to become a tenured professor at UCLA, where she taught for 12 years. Gómez returned to New Mexico to permanently join the UNM faculty in 2005.
Gómez will be traveling nationally to launch “Manifest Destinies.” In Albuquerque and Santa Fe, she has the following book signings scheduled: Nov. 1, UNM Bookstore; Dec. 6, National Hispanic Cultural Center; Dec. 14, Collected Works in Santa Fe.
Gómez is available for media interviews and the publisher welcomes media requests for review copies of “Manifest Destinies.”
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