David Rex Galindo

Assistant Professor

WH 243

Colonial Latin America, Colonial Mexico, Spanish Empire, Religion, Borderlands, Indigenous Labor

I was born in Madrid, Spain. I have had a peripatetic life, living in Chile, Germany, Mexico, Spain, and the United States. My eclectic and international training shows my diversity of interests. I received my Ph.D. in History at Southern Methodist University in 2010, where I also taught in the Departments of History and World Languages and Cultures. I hold an M.A. in North American Studies from the Franklin Institute at the University of Alcalá de Henares, Spain; a Diploma de Estudios Avanzados in Early Modern Spanish History from the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid; and an Industrial/Mechanical Engineering degree from the University of Valladolid, Spain. I worked as an engineer in Germany and Spain before I committed my life to my passion: History.

My research focuses on imperial frontiers in the Hispanic world, religion as a tool of Spanish imperialism, and, more recently, Indigenous labor and exploitation in the early modern Spanish empire. My first monograph, To Sin No More: Franciscans and Conversion in the Hispanic World, 1683-1830 (2018), analyzed the Franciscan colleges of propaganda fide, their missionaries, and their multifaceted, sweeping missionary programs in early modern Spain and the Americas. I have also co-edited La Frontera en el Mundo Hispano (2014) and The Franciscans in Colonial Mexico (2022). I am currently working on two book projects. One focuses on southern California Indigenous peoples, the Franciscan missionary Fray Jerónimo Boscana, and their contributions to California ethnology. A second project analyzes various normative systems developed to extract indigenous labor and tribute in New Spain's northern frontier territories from the 16th through the early 19th century.

I teach courses on colonial Latin America, colonial Mexico, frontiers/borderlands in the Americas, and Indigenous slaveries in the Iberian worlds.

Books:

Thomas Cohen, Jay Harrison, and David Rex Galindo (eds.) The Franciscans in Colonial Mexico, The University of Oklahoma Press and the Academy of American Franciscan History, 2022.

David Rex Galindo, To Sin no More: Franciscans and Conversion in the Hispanic World, 1683-1830, Stanford University Press and the Academy of American Franciscan History, 2018.

Porfirio Sanz Camañes, David Rex Galindo (eds.), La frontera en el mundo hispánico, Abya Yala, 2014.