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Humanities Division
Professor
Faculty
Merrill College
Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas
Latin American & Latino Studies
Stevenson College
Kresge College
Humanities Building 1
542
Fall 2025--Wednesdays 11:45-1 PM or email in advance to set up Zoom meeting at your convenience.
Humanities Academic Services
Grace Peña Delgado is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a historian of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. Her work follows two centuries of migration, identity, and state power, blending archival inquiry with human stories that bring the border’s past and present into sharp relief.
She wrote Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion at the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands (Stanford, 2012), the first study of Chinese communities in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. The Journal of American History praised its originality, and the book remains a touchstone inspiring public history and artistic projects. She also co‑authored Latino Immigrants in the United States (Polity, 2011). Essays appear in the American Historical Review and Hispanic American Historical Review. Recent chapters include “Mexico’s New Slavery: A Critique of Neo‑abolitionism to Combat Human Trafficking (la trata de personas)” in a Cambridge University Press volume (2022) and “The Commerce (Clause) in Sex in the Life of Lucille de Saint‑André” in Intimate States (University of Chicago Press, 2023).
Her award‑winning article, “Border Control and Sexual Policing: White Slavery and Prostitution along the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands, 1903–1910,” linked gender and sexuality to immigration enforcement and opened new directions in the field. She serves as sole editor of the forthcoming Routledge History of Mexican America, a synthesis of two centuries of Mexican American experience. Two new books carry that work forward: The Chosen Line: How the Border Made America, the first full biography of the U.S.–Mexico border, and Trafficking in Black and White: What Black Slavery Has Taught Us About Sex and the U.S.–Mexico Border, which extends her long inquiry into slavery’s afterlives in migration and sexual‑labor policy.
Delgado bridges scholarship and public engagement through work with the Samaritans of Green Valley–Sahuarita, Humane Borders, and Médecins Sans Frontières, and through collaborations with the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center, the Border Community Alliance, and Indigenous and migrant communities connecting archives with lived experience.
An award‑winning teacher, Delgado speaks to broad audiences. Appearances include PBS–Tucson, Good Morning America, and Santa Cruz radio. She joined Pulitzer Prize‑winning historian David Blight on a podcast about slavery, migration, and modern trafficking, and discussed Chinese chorizo with artist Feng Feng Yeh on James García’s Vanguardia América.
Her speaking record includes keynotes at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Cambridge, and more than 150 lectures at conferences, museums, and civic forums across the United States, Mexico, Canada, and Europe. She has addressed audiences at the U.S. Department of the Interior, the Mexican Mission of the State Department, the Tucson Festival of Books, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute. Talks often draw hundreds and pair research with accessible storytelling.
An op‑ed in Lookout Santa Cruz, “A New Approach to Immigration, Not Trump’s,” critiqued punitive immigration policies while positioning The Chosen Line as a narrative and a call to action. Border Futures blends filmmaking, scholarship, and undergraduate training to link research with advocacy. Through books, teaching, and public writing, Delgado invites readers to see the border as a shared story of endurance and belonging and to pursue humane, historically grounded responses to urgent questions.
US-Mexico Borderlands
Immigration: Mexicans, Asians
Gender and Sexuality
Race and Nationalism
Chinese Communities in Mexico and at the US-Mexico Border
Public History
Human Rights
UCSC, Academic Senate, recipient, Excellence in Teaching Award
Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Exclusion, and Localism in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Stanford University Press: 2012) was distinguished as a CHOICE Academic Title.
"Border Control and Sexual Policing: White Slavery and Prostitution along the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1903-1910," Western Historical Quarterly (Summer 2012): 157-178, has won four awards for outstanding scholarly article:
Oscar O. Winther Award (2012) -- best article published in the Western Historical Quarterly in that year
Judith Lee Ridge Award (2012) -- best article in history published by a member of the Western Association of Women Historians
Jensen-Miller Award (2013) -- best article in the field of women and gender in the North American West
Bolton-Cutter Award (2013) -- best article on Spanish Borderlands history
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“Mexico’s New Slavery: A Critique of Neo-abolitionism to Combat Human Trafficking (la trata de personas)” — in Fighting Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking: History and Contemporary Policy, ed. Genevieve LeBaron, Jessica R. Pliley, and David W. Blight (Cambridge University Press: 2022).
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“The Commerce (Clause) in Sex in the Life of Lucille de Saint‑André” — in Intimate States: Gender, Sexuality, and Governance in Modern US History, ed. Margot Canaday, Nancy F. Cott, and Robert O. Self (University of Chicago Press: 2023)
- “The ‘Trafficked Narrative’: Modern Slavery’s Troubling History in the United States and Mexico.” In The Palgrave Handbook on Modern Slavery, edited by Maria Krambia Kapardis, Colin Clark, Ajwang’ Warria, and Michel Dion, 137–156. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.