Andres Resendez

Andrés Reséndez is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis. A native of Mexico City, he studied international relations, briefly went into politics, and served as a consultant for historical soap operas before receiving a Ph.D. in history. He has taught at Yale University and the University of Helsinki and is currently a professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Davis. His first book, "Changing National Identities at the Frontier" (2005), explores how Spanish speakers, Native Americans, and Anglo-American settlers living in Texas and New Mexico came to think of themselves as members of one national community or another in the years leading up to the U.S.-Mexico War. "A Land So Strange" (2007) looks at North America at the dawn of European colonization through the eyes of the last four survivors of a disastrous expedition to Florida in the 1520s. "The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America" (2016), winner of the Bancroft Prize and finalist for the National Book Award, considers the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Indians in the Caribbean, Mexico, and the American Southwest between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. His latest book, "Conquering the Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery" (2021), is about the tumultuous expedition that first went from America to Asia and back, thus transforming the Pacific Ocean into a vital space of contact and exchange in 1565.