Jordan Villegas-Verrone
Assistant Professor
Education
Ph.D., History, Columbia University, 2025
M.A., History, Columbia University, 2022
A.B., Anthropology & Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University, 2020
Biography
Jordan Villegas-Verrone is a historian of twentieth-century Mexican American history, focusing especially on gender history, history of sexuality, and histories of youth and childhood. His first book, Club Chapultepec: Mexican American Girls and Radical Politics in the Great Depression, forthcoming from University of California Press, weaves together threads of cultural, intellectual, and social history to examine how girls articulated a unique and heretofore unacknowledged vision of “Mexican American” culture and politics distinct from — and in some cases directly oppositional to — the political cultures of adult male-led ethnic Mexican organizations in Depression-era Texas. The book identifies Mexican American girls’ radical politics not just in manifestos, speeches, organized labor actions, and rigorous, self-directed public affairs study programs but also in the choreography of folk-dance expositions, the planning of enchilada dinner fundraisers, girls’ choices of entertainment at their birthday parties, and in the contours of everyday lives of working-class Mexican American girls at the height of the Great Depression. Villegas-Verrone’s scholarship has been supported by fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and has been awarded the Organization of American Historians’ Louis Pelzer Memorial Award and Harvard University’s Bowdoin Prize. His writing has also been featured in the Journal of American History, Southwestern Historical Quarterly, and Latina Magazine.
Peer-reviewed Publications
Club Chapultepec: Mexican American Girls and Radical Politics in the Great Depression (University of California Press, forthcoming)
‘For the Girls’: Organizing Mexican American Girlhood in Depression-era Texas,” The Journal of American History 111, no. 4 (March 2025): 663-685.
“The Long-Haired Gang Murder Trial: Mexican American Gender Deviance and WWII Youth Gang Panic in Houston, Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 128, no. 4 (April 2025): 362-385.
