ToniAnn Treviño | Department of History

ToniAnn Treviño

Assistant Professor
Office: 
WH 231B
Highlights: 
20th-Century United States, Mexican American History, War on Drugs, Mass Incarceration, Texas History, Urban Studies, Gender & Sexuality, Hospitalization and Rehabilitation, Racialized Policing, Governing through Crime, Eugenic Sterilization

EDUCATION

  • Ph.D., History, University of Michigan, Latina/o Studies Graduate Certificate Student
  • M.A., History, University of Michigan
  • B.A., Mexican-American Studies & International Relations, University of Texas at Austin

ToniAnn Treviño is a scholar of Mexican American history, with a focus on the war on drugs, urban history, and policing in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

ToniAnn's manuscript in progress examines how ethnic Mexicans in San Antonio experienced overlapping anti-narcotics crusades and crafted responses to drug policing through religious, medical, and social institutions. She explores how federal, state, and local narcotics-control programs framed transnational urban spaces as extensions of lawless U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Her research centers an untold, community-based history of how Mexican and Mexican Americans in San Antonio navigated the nation's escalating drug war. Community stakeholders, many of whom identified as recovering addicts, contested racially discriminatory narcotics policing, fought for federal funds to establish local rehabilitation programs, and reached out to neighborhood drug users through grassroots Latinx-led support groups.

Her dissertation that will serve as the foundation for this manuscript won the 2022 Arthur Fondiler Prize, the University of Michigan History Department's highest student honor awarded yearly to the best doctoral dissertation.

Digital Humanities & Public History

Dr. Treviño is a project lead for the Sterilization and Social Justice lab, an interdisciplinary research team studying the history of eugenic sterilization in the United States. She is also a lead author for Eugenic Rubicon: Sterilization Stories in America, a digital humanities project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Between 2021 and 2022, she served as a researcher for The First 100: 50 Years of Chicanas Changing Knowledge, an oral history project documenting the lives, research, and legacies of Chicana historians.

Dr. Treviño served as an intern for the Texas Historical Commission in 2014 and authored a successful proposal to memorialize Mexican American playwright Estella Portillo Trambley in a historical marker. The marker was unveiled in Chamizal National Park in El Paso, Texas on February 24, 2018. She is currently working with San Antonio community members on a historical marker that will commemorate the legal activism of Gustavo C. García, a lead Mexican American lawyer in the landmark Supreme Court case, Hernandez v. Texas (1954).

Grants & Funding

2019-2020 Rackham Humanities Research Dissertation Fellowship

2018-2019 Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship

2017 Rackham Humanities Candidacy Fellowship- University of Michigan

2017 CMAS-Benson Latin American Collection Research Fellowship

2017 Department of History Research/ Study/ Travel Grant- University of Michigan

2017 Institute for Research on Women and Gender: Community of Scholars Fellowship

2016 Social Science Research Council: Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship

2016 Rackham Conference Travel Grant

2015 Rackham Graduate Student Research Grant

2014 Texas Historical Commission, Diversity Internship Award

2012 Center for Mexican American Studies, Funding for Thesis Completion