Rosina Lozano

Title
Associate Professor of History
Office Phone
Office
G-29 Dickinson Hall
Office Hours

On Leave 2023-2024

Bio/Description

Rosina Lozano is a historian of United States history with a research and teaching focus on Latino/a/e history, the American West, migration and immigration, and comparative studies in race and ethnicity.

Lozano's first book, An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States (University of California Press, 2018), is a political history of the Spanish language in the United States from the incorporation of the Mexican cession in 1848 through World War II, with some discussion of the following decades and present-day concerns. The nation has always been multilingual, and Spanish-language rights, in particular, have remained an important political issue into the present. The book is organized in two parts. The first five chapters argue that Spanish was a language of politics in the U.S. Southwest following the U.S. takeover. The second half of the book transitions to exploring the multifaceted use of Spanish in the twentieth century as it became a political language that instigated local and national political debates related to immigration and Americanization and aided the hemispheric interests of the nation.

An American Language received the PROSE award in Language and Linguistics (2019) and the First Book Prize from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. Lozano was featured on Al Punto with Jorge Ramos and has given numerous academic and public talks about her book.

Lozano is working on a second book, tentatively titled Intertwined Roots: Mexican Americans and Native Americans in the Southwest, which tells the story of the ever-changing relationship between Mexican Americans and Native peoples from 1848 through the 1970s. The results of U.S. policies for each of these groups are well known separately, but Intertwined Roots considers them relationally, never forgetting that their connections preceded these policies and continued to form independent of them, too. Through the comparison, the book also explores the impact of state and federal politics on ethnic identities. Triangulating the analysis of Anglos, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans offers the opportunity to understand how local and state power has shaped the Southwest against the backdrop of federal policy.

Lozano has received fellowships from the Huntington Library and the New Mexico Office of the State Historian to aid her research. During the 2012-2013 academic year, Lozano held a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation that she completed at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) at Stanford University.

At Princeton, Lozano is associated with the Program in Latino Studies, the Program in American Studies, and the Program in Latin American Studies.

Teaching

Lozano joined the Princeton faculty in 2013 and has taught courses including: Becoming Latino in the U.S. (Latino History); Urban Latino History; Borderlands, Border Lives; Comparative Race and Ethnicity in the United States; History 280, 500, and 590; and a History 400 course called Sound, Immigrants and the American West. She plans to teach courses on: the history of immigration and migration; the undocumented; and race, empire, and education in upcoming semesters. Lozano is a faculty adviser in Whitman College and has received the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award (2019) and the President's Distinguished Teaching Award (2023).

Op-Eds and Blog Posts

“Spanish has never been a foreign language in the United States,” Los Angeles Times, May 29, 2018.
“Michigan Claims English as Official Language,” Public Seminar, April 26, 2018.

“Spanish, English, and a Spectrum of Bilingualism,” UC Press Blog, October 18, 2018.
“Rosina Lozano’s “An American Language,” Page 99 Test Blog, May 7, 2018.
“Spanish, an American language,” UC Press Blog, April 11, 2018.

Education

A.B., Stanford University, History

Ed.M., School of Education, Harvard University, Teaching and Curriculum

M.A., University of Southern California, History

Ph.D., University of Southern California, History

 

Selected Publications

"Vote Aquí Hoy: The 1975 Extension of the Voting Rights Act and the Creation of Language Minorities," Journal of Policy History, 35:1 (2023): 68–90,  muse.jhu.edu/article/875929.

"The Early Political History of Spanish in the United States," in The Spanish Language in the United States (Taylor & Francis, 2022).

"Multilingualism in the United States: The Long History of Official Translations," in Language, Nations, and Multilingualisms (Taylor & Francis, 2020).

"New Directions in Latino/a/x Histories of Education: Comparative Studies in Race, Language, Law, and Higher Education." History of Education Quarterly (2020), 612–622. doi:10.1017/heq.2020.43.

Take Three Feature: The Ballot, “Vote Aquí.” Modern American History (2019), 1–4. doi: 10.1017/mah.2019.31.

"The Politics of the Spanish Language." In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. Oxford University Press. Article published June 2018. doi: 10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.368.

“Managing the 'Priceless Gift': Debating Spanish Language Instruction in New Mexico and Puerto Rico, 1930-1950." Western Historical Quarterly 44 (Autumn 2013): 271-293.

"Translating California: Official Spanish Usage in California's Constitutional Conventions and State Legislature, 1848-1894." California Legal History 6 (2011): 321-356.

"Brown's Legacy in the West: Pasadena Unified School District's Federally Mandated Desegregation." Southwestern University Law Review 36.2 (2007): 257-290.

Advisee(s):
Area of Interest
(In alphabetical order)
Immigration & Migration
Latino
Political History
Race & Ethnicity
Social History
Home Department & Other Affiliations
History
Period
19th Century
20th Century
Region
American West
North America
United States