About me
I’m a historian, political thinker, writer, and educator from South Texas.
History has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, but what keeps me fascinated by it isn’t simply knowing what happened. It’s trying to understand why.
Why do societies change? Why do people accept authority—and why do they sometimes resist it? How do ideas about liberty, government, citizenship, and power become institutions that shape people’s lives? And how much of the world we live in today can really be understood without knowing the world that came before it?
Those questions eventually took me from loving history to teaching it, researching it, and writing about it.
The Historian
My academic work focuses on American history and the Texas-Mexico borderlands, with particular interests in political violence, sovereignty, law enforcement, state power, and the relationship between border communities and government authority.
The border has given me an especially fascinating place to explore those ideas. Here, national borders, local traditions, political interests, violence, law, and individual people have repeatedly collided in ways that don’t always fit neatly into the stories nations tell about themselves. But I’ve never wanted my work to exist only in an archive, dissertation, or academic journal.
I believe history belongs in public conversation.
The Teacher
I’ve spent more than a decade in the classroom, and teaching has fundamentally shaped the kind of historian I’ve become.
I don’t want students simply memorizing what happened long enough to pass a test. I want them to ask questions, examine evidence, challenge assumptions, make arguments, and sometimes disagree with me. Because education, at its best, shouldn’t teach people what to think. It should teach them how to think.
That’s also the philosophy I bring to my writing.
Why STXHistorian?
STXHistorian (South Texas Historian) is my attempt to bring together the different parts of my intellectual life.
It’s where I can be a historian without writing only for historians, an educator without always standing in a classroom, and a political thinker without pretending that complicated questions have easy answers. Here, I write about history, political thought, politics, education, the borderlands, and whatever else makes me stop and ask:
How did we get here?
My goal isn’t to tell you what you’re supposed to think about the answer. It’s to give you something worth thinking about.
Beyond the Website
I write A Historian’s Take on Substack and continue to develop STXHistorian as a home for my research, essays, teaching, lectures, and public-facing historical work.
I’m also available for guest lectures, paid speaking engagements, historical presentations, educational workshops, and history education and curriculum consulting.
Whether I’m writing for one reader or speaking to a room full of people, the purpose is ultimately the same:
Understand the past. Question the present. Keep thinking.