This interview has been collected and condensed by Kelly Lin-Kremer.

Class of 2022, History

Tell me a little about yourself.

I was born and raised in Dallas, Texas. After getting my history degree at Princeton, I went off to Los Angeles, California, where I became a paralegal at the Los Angeles Center for Law and Justice (LACLJ). LACLJ provides direct legal services to survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking.

I co-created 2 programs at LACLJ: its housing program and its consumer debt program. I was drawn to LACLJ particularly because of the client population that it serves, and because of the unique opportunity to create a nonprofit legal program from scratch. I hope to use this program-building legal experience to create a nonprofit like LACLJ back in my home state of Texas. I anticipate working at LACLJ for another year as I apply to law school.

What led you to history? Did you know when you started that you wanted to do history? Did some course inspire you?

Like many other history majors, I came to Princeton as a pre-law student wanting to declare SPIA or Politics. I already knew I wanted to be an attorney when I first arrived at Princeton. I was raised by two immigrant parents, so I constantly viewed and experienced their interactions with the law and the legal barriers they faced. From a very young age, I paid close attention to any legal or political developments that could have a direct impact on me and my family. So naturally, I wanted to learn more about the law as a form of self-defense.

I did not originally intend on studying history, and when I first got here, my idea of history was like that of many other high school graduates: dates, names, memorization, and fun facts.

But that changed once I started doing coursework. In my first semester, I took a course by Professor Kevin Kruse called The United States, 1920 to 1974. Professor Kruse introduced me to the work of a historian. Historians do not just recite facts; they engage with primary sources and create arguments about what happened, why things happen, and their consequences.

Similar to an attorney, the job of a historian is to craft an argument based largely on primary sources. Sometimes you have to drudge through a lot of non-interesting sources to get to the interesting story you are trying to tell, and I have heard from many attorneys that a lot of the job is sifting through boring documents that you'll never use, but by going through them you build a stronger case for your client. I have confirmed in my work as a paralegal that these rumors are, indeed, true.

Tell me about some of the best history classes you took.

The most important class I took at Princeton was Professor Laura Edwards's U.S. Legal History course. It still affects me and the way I think of the law today. Its primary focus was analyzing the law itself, which up to that point, I hadn't directly studied. The course quickly dispelled many assumptions that I had about the law and forced me to be more open-minded about what I considered to be “the law.” The law is not just composed of court cases and statutes. The law is also defined by how people engage with institutions and customs that govern their behavior and relationships with other people. 

Professor Edwards emphasized that historical events and legal systems cannot be understood with simple explanations of causes and effects, for the answer closest to the truth often incorporates many different factors and explanations in its reasoning. Her insistence on nuance and complexity made me comfortable with the ambiguity that is usually present in the law and history more generally. I'm confident that if you go through Princeton's history education, you will come out of it quite skeptical of anyone who gives you a simple explanation for a current event or a historical issue. There are few substantive historical questions that I have studied that could be adequately explained with a simple explanation, so I am conditioned to be skeptical of any argument that relies on straightforward and simple reasoning with little room for any complications or nuance. 

The study of history makes you constantly evaluate your arguments and their merits. These primary sources are my base of evidence. Can I make an argument about what happened based on that evidence base? Do I have enough evidence to reasonably make my argument?

Tell me about your independent work.

For my senior thesis, I tracked the progression of Mexican-American land dispossession throughout the second half of the 19th century. I looked at the Mexicans who stayed in the Arizona Territory after the Mexican-American War, who went from being Mexican to suddenly being American. They had to adapt to a new legal system with its own customs and practices with little warning. Coming from an immigrant family, I was able to appreciate that transition and the difficulties it presented. My parents experienced the cultural and legal shock that comes from arriving to a new country; they had to adapt to a new legal system and a new socioeconomic culture. In researching the lives of these Mexican-Americans, I saw my own personal experiences and complex relationship with the law reflected on the page. 

In the 1850s, Mexico was still in its infancy at around 30 years old. Mexicans in Arizona did not really hear nor think much about the far-away Mexican government in Mexico City. Legal systems were often driven by local custom rather than formalized, written law. No one really cared if you had a piece of paper saying you owned a given piece of land. As long as your grandparents had lived there and you followed in their footsteps, the land was yours too, and it was respected by the locals. But suddenly, after the Mexican-American War, they had to contend with an American legal system that treated written documentation as sacrosanct proof of property ownership.

Many Mexican-Americans in Arizona lost their land in an unconventional way. I came into this study with an assumption that the federal government was completely in cahoots with the local settlers; I initially thought that the American government wanted to take the land from the Mexican-Americans living there and give it to their American settlers. I quickly discovered a more complicated story.

Much of my thesis focused on a specific American settler who bought a bunch of antiquated property deeds that few respected under Spanish and Mexican rule. This settler approached the Mexican-American families who had been living on the land for generations and declared that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo states that the United States will respect all existing property deeds. And because the American settler owned the property deeds, the Mexican-Americans living there now had to leave. The Mexican-Americans took his word as an official decree from Washington D.C and abandoned their homes and their lives as they knew them. 

Despite his proclamations to the Mexican-Americans, the settler did not have the legal authority to dispossess these Mexican-Americans. The United States had not yet surveyed the land nor verified the authenticity of his “property deeds.” They had not yet created a process to divvy up the land that constituted the Arizona Territory, nor created a legal system for the Mexicans to convert their land claims to a US property deed.

My thesis explored the fascinating legal story about how a single American settler from the East Coast came in and took advantage of the legal ambiguity in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War to illegally drive Mexican-Americans off their land, all while erroneously citing the federal government as his source of legal authority for the dispossession. Perhaps if the Mexican-Americans had stayed and had more knowledge of the legal system they now lived under, they could have fought back against the settler’s claims and kept their land. I also discovered that for the next several decades the federal government fought this settler to take that land back. My study of the Mexican-American property dispossession undermined my assumption of a harmonious relationship between settlers and the federal government. Their goals and their methods were often at odds with each other, setting up conflicts that would be litigated inside and outside the courtroom. Much of the oppression carried out against Mexican-Americans was done by settlers in direct opposition to the federal government.

My thesis ultimately came to the conclusion that the property dispossession of Mexican-Americans in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War was not a top-down operation led by the federal government to serve the interest of local American settlers. Much of the dispossession happened because average settlers took advantage of a confusing, ambiguous legal system to dispossess Mexican-Americans with limited knowledge of said legal system. Not only was it not a top-down operation; the top and the bottom were in constant conflict with each other for over half a century.

It took the government over thirty years to set up a formal system to address these land claims, and by then, the American settler had sold off the property, made his money, and went off to his next venture before his case was resolved. It was a saddening illuminating story about how dispossession can happen at the local level without a mastermind orchestrating it at the top. You don't need a strong federal government or a coordinated conspiracy to create suffering through the law. All you need is a legally ambiguous legal system and a lack of representation for those with limited resources.

Is there any advice you would give to current history majors or people thinking about majoring in history?

If you're thinking about becoming an attorney and going to law school, the History Department is a wonderful place to grow your roots. The work is similar to creating a legal brief. You're taking a bunch of disparate evidence and making an argument. It will make you comfortable with ambiguity. It will teach you how to craft better arguments. Of course, it will force you to read and write a whole lot, which is a cornerstone of law school, so it's better to build that muscle now.

But more broadly, if you're going into the History Department, go into your studies and research willing to be wrong. Dispel all assumptions that you have about how the world works, or how a certain historical period worked, and be willing to let the primary sources change your mind. Let the primary sources determine the argument you make. That sort of thinking and training will be helpful in whichever career you choose to pursue.