Omar Valerio-Jimenez is Associate Professor of History at the University of Iowa, where he teaches courses on Latinas/os, immigration, borderlands, and the American West. He received his S.B. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. His first book, River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands (Duke University Press, 2013), explores state formation and cultural change along the Mexico-United States border during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He has won fellowships from the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University, the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego, the Western History Association, and the Newberry Library. His next project is a transnational study of the U.S.-Mexican War that examines memory, identity, and civil rights.