Event Speakers' Biography
From the School House to the Court House: The History of Policing Mexican American Students in Houston Schools
Wednesday, October 9th from 5:30 – 7:00 p.m.
(Guest Speakers)
Dr. Carlos Cantú (UHD) & Dr. Jesús Jesse Esparza (Texas Southern University)
Dr. Carlos Cantú
Dr. Jesús Jesse Esparza
Dr. Carlos Cantú currently teaches at the University of Houston Downtown and Texas Southern University. Dr. Cantú serves on the board of the Holocaust Museum Houston’s Latinx Initiatives Advisory Committee and co-founded the Collective of Progressive Educators, a Houston-based non-profit group focused on promoting public history projects. He has won grants and research fellowships from the Center for Puerto Rican Studies -Hunter College and the Center for Mexican American-The University of Texas. Dr. Cantú has studied and researched the history of Mexican American educational activism, alternative Chicana/o education, and Texas-based independent Chicana/o colleges for over fifteen years. He has published his work on alternative Chicana/o colleges in South Texas Studies and The Journal of South Texas Studies. He has presented papers on the educational histories of Mexican Americans at annual regional and national conferences, including the Texas States Historical Association, the Western History Association, the American Historical Association-Pacific Coast Branch, and the Alumni of Color Conference at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He received his B.A. and a master’s degree in History from the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley and a Ph.D. in History in 2016 from the University of Houston.
Dr. Jesús Jesse Esparza is an Associate Professor and Interim Chair of the Department of History at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas. His area of expertise is on the history of Latinos in the United States, emphasizing civil rights activism. Dr. Esparza’s manuscript, Raza Schools: The Fight for Latino Educational Autonomy in a West Texas Borderlands Town, was published by the University of Oklahoma Press as part of the New Directions in Tejano History series. It received two book awards: the 2024 Outstanding Book Award by the Texas Association of Chicanos in Higher Education and the 2024 Tejas Foco Nonfiction Book Award by the National Association of Chicana and Chicanos Studies. Dr. Esparza teaches Mexican American, Texas, and Civil Rights history. He received his B.A. and a master’s degree from Southwest Texas State University and a Ph.D. from the University of Houston.
For more information contact Steven Villano, director of the Center for Public Service and Community Research at villanos@uhd.edu.