LALSI Directors

Salvador Acosta, LALSI's Director, is a Professor of History who specializes in the history of Latinos in the United States. He focuses on the social impact of the development of the Southwest and on the social and cultural experiences of Latinos since 1846. He is currently preparing a manuscript on interethnic marriages in Arizona (1854-1930). His quantitative and qualitative research helps to reevaluate the perception that intermarriages in the nineteenth-century Southwest occurred primarily among enterprising white men and the daughters of the old Mexican/Spanish elites.

Dr. Acosta teaches courses in the histories of the United States and Latin America, including: History 3950: Latino History; History 3968: Mexico; History 3969: Latin America and the United States; History 4008: Race and Gender in the Old West; History 4760: Immigration to the U.S.; History 5924: Latin American History and Culture.

Publications 

His publications include:

Sanctioning Matrimony: Western Expansion and Interethnic Marriage in the Arizona Borderlands. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016.

“Against the Odds: Chinese-Mexican Marriages in Southern Arizona, 1880-1930,” New Mexico Historical Review 89:2 (Spring 2014): 179-207.

“Racial Fluidity in the Borderlands: Intermarriage between Blacks and Mexicans in Southern Arizona, 1880-1930,” Journal of the Southwest 56:4 (Winter 2014): 555-581.

“En el corazón del pueblo: Pedro Infante’s Funeral, the Pueblo Motif, and the Contest over his Legacy,” in Latin American Popular Culture since Independence: An Introduction, 2nd Ed, ed. William H. Beezley and Linda A. Curcio-Nagy. Rowman & Littlefield, 2012.

“Pedro Infante and the Mexican Imagination,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, ed. William H. Beezley. New York, Oxford University Press, 2019.