51�ԹϺ���

Historian ’s career is, appropriately, an exercise in moving backwards through time. 

Raised in Mexico City, Reséndez specializes in early European exploration and colonization of the Americas, the U.S-Mexico border region, and the early history of the Pacific, particularly pioneering voyages of discovery and biological exchanges. His work breaks popular historical origin stories, including revelations about how indigenous populations in the Americas faced systemic forms of slavery comparable to African populations. 

For Reséndez, his findings are a product of constantly researching further into what primary sources and historical records he can find.

“I started in the Mexican Revolution, then went back to the early 19th century,” Reséndez explained. “Once you become familiar with a certain period, you want to understand what led to that to begin with. And that's what ultimately took me back to the 16th century.”

Reséndez received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1998, where he worked with “the greatest authority on the Mexican Revolution,” Professor Friedrich Katz, for whom the university’s  was named in 2004. Reséndez’s first book, Changing National Identities at the Frontier, which analyzed the Mexican war of 1846-1848, was a product of his dissertation and time working with Katz. 

Reséndez joined the 51�ԹϺ��� Davis history faculty in 1998. He currently teaches undergraduate courses on Latin America, Mexico and the history of food, in addition to graduate seminars on colonial Latin America and Mexico. Reséndez was  in 2021.  

“I was very impressed with the history department when I first arrived in the late ‘90s,” Reséndez said about Davis. “There was gender parity, for example, which was rare for a history department. It was a department that was up and coming, and it was growing.”

Reséndez continued his scholarship by analyzing moments of first contact and the impact of Europeans exploration of the Americas and subsequent impacts on indigenous populations. His 2007 book, A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (2007), details a disastrous early 16th century Spanish expedition, where four of the original four hundred travelers survive, navigating what is now Florida pre-European colonization. 

His 2016 book, The Other Slavery, analyzes how the enslavement of Native Americans by European settlers paralleled the subjugation of African slaves through forced labor, sexual exploitation and physical violence. With examples spanning the 16th through 19th centuries, The Other Slavery was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction and a winner of the 2017 Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy. 

To research Spain’s early colonial history, Reséndez traveled to the  in Seville, Spain, the definitive repository of archival materials related to the Spanish Empire's history in the Americas and Asia. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the research trips were costly and taxing for Reséndez. Thankfully, a digitization effort by the Spanish Ministry of Education allowed Reséndez to “really access a lot of material digitally from the comfort of my computer because of these major efforts by the Spanish government.”

Importance of the Pacific

Reséndez’s most recent book, Conquering the Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery published in 2021, detailed the first expedition from the Americas to Asia and back. It created an economic and biological exchange powered by Spanish ships known as the Manila Galleon, that traveled between the trading ports of Acapulco, Mexico and Manila, the capital of the Philippines. On the heels of Conquering the Pacific, Reséndez is currently researching the impact of these trans-Pacific trading posts for a forthcoming project. 

“Acapulco and Manila really served as continental hubs for these transpacific permanent contacts. As a result, not only [Peruvian] silver flows to China, and silks from China to Mexico and Peru, but also various plants,” Reséndez explained. 

He is centering his research on this “biological connection” of plants from the Americas making their way to China through the Philippines, including fauna and agrarian plants like sweet potatoes and corn. These months-long journeys were rife with threats to such cargo, including rodents and disease. 

Researching these critical and niche historical moments is, for Reséndez, “a piecemeal kind of work” searching for mentions of plants and crops in numerous archived documents. 

“It's looking for needles in a haystack,” he explained, a reflection of his larger research process. 

“It's painstaking and takes a lot of time,” Reséndez said, “but it is a rewarding and interesting area that is fascinating.”