The Portal to Texas History 2025 Research Fellowship Awardee
Leslie N. Torres
Project Title
‘Can’t Keep Good Girls Down’: Negotiations of Identity, Civil Rights, and the Cultural Belonging of Mexican American Women in Early 20th Century Texas
Project Description
This dissertation will examine the spaces Mexican American women cultivated in both interethnic and intra-ethnic reform organizations. Through newspapers, I seek to uncover an imagined community of civil rights activists – how they referred to one another, advertised or critiqued each other’s organizations, and how reformers implemented or decried transnational influences in their work. Overall, I seek to understand how Mexican American women reformers mobilized and unified their communities in and outside of Mexican cultural spaces, especially during the Americanization movement occurring simultaneously across the United States.
Biography
Leslie Torres is a Ph.D. student in the History Department at Texas A&M University. Her research centers Mexican American women in state-based and greater national Progressive Era and reform movements, with focuses on racial identity formation and transnational influences. She is interested in unraveling how Mexican American women demanded cultural and political belonging through civil rights movements in and outside of Texas, while also navigating activism with a triple consciousness: race, gender, and citizenship. Torres received her Bachelor of Arts in History from the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley in 2022 and her Master of Arts in History at Texas A&M University in 2024.
