A graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, Hooton has long focused her research on race, ethnicity and identity across the United States and Latin America with a focus on African Americans in the US-Mexico borderlands.
Source: NMSU Newsroom
By Azure Mitchell
Photos: Courtesy
Cover Image Caption: The front cover for Assistant Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies at New Mexico State University, Laura Hooton’s book, “Little Liberia: A Dream of Black Freedom in the US-Mexico Borderlands.” (Courtesy University of Oklahoma Press)
“Little Liberia: A Dream of Black Freedom in the US-Mexico Borderlands,” is available here.
New Mexico State University is home to a growing number of authors and excelling academics. Laura Hooton, NMSU assistant professor of history and director of Graduate Studies, recently added to the list on June 30 with her book “Little Liberia: A Dream of Black Freedom in the US-Mexico Borderlands.”
“Little Liberia’s approach to fighting racism in the United States is both highly unique and also strikingly in line with other movements at the time,” Hooton said. “Their engagement with U.S.-Mexico politics, fighting White supremacy, and combining economic growth with social change makes the story intriguing and representative of United States and Mexican history at the time.”
A graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, Hooton has long focused her research on race, ethnicity and identity across the United States and Latin America with a focus on African Americans in the US-Mexico borderlands. In “Little Liberia,” her first solo book, she uncovers a vital, little-known chapter in borderlands history. Her book tells the complete story for the first time of how these Black Americans sought freedom and enterprise in northern Mexico.
Amid rising racial persecution and political turbulence in the United States, African American activists looked beyond create greater freedoms in North America. Chiefly from California and Oklahoma, these African Americans established an agricultural community in northern Baja California, Mexico, known as Little Liberia.
In “Little Liberia,” Hooton traces the community’s eleven-year history. She explores its origins in Los Angeles and recruitment in Oklahoma following the Tulsa Race Massacre to its complex navigation of U.S.-Mexico politics during World War I and the Mexican Revolution, concluding with Little Liberia’s highly public collapse.
Samuel Truett, associate professor in the Department of History at The University of New Mexico, Director for the Center of the Southwest and author of “Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands” called Hooton’s book, “Pathbreaking work.” Assistant Professor Hooton’s work exemplifies NMSU’s commitment to foster diversity and inclusion.
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