Acerca de Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez

Dr. Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez is a professor of History at Texas State University. He holds a licenciatura in History from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and MA and PhD degrees in Anthropology from UCLA. He is a fellow of SMU’s Clements Center for Southwest Studies. He specializes in the early history of the Indigenous peoples of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and the southern Great Plains. His main lines of inquiry include Spanish-Indigenous relations, captivity, and the presence of U.S.-based independent Natives in nineteenth-century Mexico. His scholarship combines extensive archival research in Mexico, Spain, the United States, and France with the use of ethnographic, archaeological, linguistic, and environmental evidence, as well as personal interviews with contemporary Indigenous consultants. He conducts his research in close contact with members of the Comanche Nation of Oklahoma. Various institutions have funded his multidisciplinary research at home and abroad, including The Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Newberry Library, the Spanish Ministry of Culture, and Mexico’s CONACyT. Dr. Rivaya-Martínez is the author of numerous essays and the editor of the volume Indigenous Borderlands: Native Agency, Resilience, and Power in the Americas (University of Oklahoma Press, 2023). He is currently working on a book manuscript provisionally titled Comanche Captivity.