ToniAnn D. Treviño

Biography

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

AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION

Twentieth Century United States, Mexican American History, Antinarcotics Policing, Mass Incarceration, Texas History, Mexican American Women, Latinos and American Law, Punitive Hospitalization and Addict Rehabilitation, Community Responses to Policing, Racialized Policing Practices, Governing through Crime, Eugenic Sterilization

RESEARCH

ToniAnn Treviño is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Texas Lutheran University. She is a scholar of twentieth century United States and Mexican American history, with a focus on the carceral state, the war on drugs, and policing in Latinx communities and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

Her book manuscript, “San Antonio After Sundown: The War on Drugs and Envisioning Rehabilitation in Postwar Mexican Neighborhoods” examines how Mexican and Mexican American communities in Texas experienced the postwar antinarcotics crusade and crafted responses to narcotics policing through religious, medical, and social institutions. This project unearths the overlapping forces that shaped narcotics control programs in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Her research includes Latinos in literature related to the national antinarcotics crusade, the carceral state, and urban histories of racialized policing.

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. She is in the process of co-authoring two mixed-methods articles in collaboration with SSJL team members. She has also served as a research assistant for The First 100: 50 Years of Chicanas Changing Knowledge, an oral history project documenting the lives, research, and legacies of Chicana historians. During her time with the project, she spearheaded the project’s public digital humanities initiatives and conceptualized the project’s data visualizations.

Dr. Treviño has also served as an intern for the Texas Historical Commission and authored a successful proposal to commemorate the history of 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 to propose a historical marker that would commemorate the legal activism of Gustavo C. García, a lead Mexican American lawyer in the landmark Supreme Court Case, Hernandez v. Texas (1954).