Mary E. Mendoza

Mary E. Mendoza is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, the environment, and the history of race relations across the United States and Latin America.

Her current book project, Deadly Divide: How Insects, Pathogens and People defied the U.S.-Mexico Border (UNC, 2026), which how the natural world shaped ideas about race, gender, and security. Mendoza also co-edited Not Just Green, Not Just White: Race, Justice, and Environmental History, which brings together a group of diverse contributors to explore the rich intersections between race and environment. Together these contributors demonstrate that the field of environmental history, with its core questions and critical engagement with the nonhuman world, provides a fertile context for understanding racism and ongoing colonialism as power structures in the United States.

Mendoza has also written about migration, public health, race and racism, disability history and ableism, the carceral state, and U.S.-Mexico relations. She has published op-eds for the Washington Post and TIME Magazine, been interviewed for major news outlets, joined podcasts, and seen elements of her research featured in the New York Times and on The Daily Show. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian Institution, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Huntington Library, and the Clements Center for Southwest Studies, among other institutions.

Recent Publications:

Books:

Deadly Divide: How Insects, Pathogens and People Defied the U.S.-Mexico Border (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, in press, expected April 2026).

Not Just Green, Not Just White: Race, Justice, and Environmental History, co-edited with Traci Voyles (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2025).

Selected Articles and Book Chapters:

“Diagnosing the Problem: Scientific Nomenclature, Race, and Disability in Modern Medicine,” Environmental History, forthcoming.

“The Production of Vulnerability: Disability, Climate Change, and Environmental Justice,” co-authored with Elaine LaFay, in A Historian’s Handbook for Saving the World: Responding to the Climate Change Emergency, ed. Alexandra Hui and Emily Pawley (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2026).

“Nature Knows no Bounds,” in Mapping Nature Across the Americas, ed. James Akerman and Kathleen Brosnan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), pp. 209-222.

“Caging Out, Caging In: Building a Carceral State at the U.S.-Mexico Divide,” Pacific Historical Review 88, no. 1 (Winter 2019): 86-109, Special Issue on the Carceral West.

“Treacherous Terrain: Environmental Control at the U.S.-Mexico Border,” Environmental History 23, no. 1 (January 2018): 117-126.

“La Tierra Pica/The Soil Bites: Hazardous Environments and the Degeneration of Bracero Health, 1942-64,” in Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory, ed. Sarah Jaquette Ray and Jay Sibara (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), pp. 474-501.

Selected Honors and Awards:

Gordon Bakken Award of Merit for outstanding service to field of western history, Western History Association, 2021.

Vicki L. Ruiz Award for best peer-reviewed article on race in American West, for “Treacherous Terrain,” Western History Association, 2019.

W. Turrentine Jackson Dissertation Award, Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, 2016.

Selected Fellowships and Grants:

Smithsonian Institution Fellowship for Residence at the National Museum of American History, 2018-2020.

Nancy Weiss Malkiel Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, 2018-2019.

David J. Weber Fellowship for the Study of Southwestern America, Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University, 2018-2019.

David and Dana Dornsife Fellowship for Historical Work in the American West, Huntington Library, 2017-2018