Co-Director
Sandra Enríquez is an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Public History Emphasis at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. Dr. Enríquez is a social historian of modern United States history with particular research and teaching interests in Chicanx and Latinx history, urban history, borderlands, social movements and public history. She is currently completing her first book ¡El Barrio No Se Vende!: Grassroots Activism and Revitalization in El Paso (forthcoming, University of Texas Press), which examines how Mexican American tenants organized to save their border neighborhood from the bulldozer and their integral role in shaping urban redevelopment policies in the 1970s and 1980s. Dr. Enríquez supervises the Public History internship program and is an affiliated faculty member with the Race, Ethnic and Gender Studies Department.
Dr. Enríquez is a native of Ciudad Juárez, México, and earned her Ph.D. from the University of Houston in 2016. She has served in a number of public history initiatives both in and out of UMKC and is currently a member of the Steering Committee for UMKC’s Center for Digital and Public Humanities. She recently co-created “Show Me Missouri,” a statewide collaborative digital exhibit in commemoration of the bicentennial of Missouri statehood. The project involved collaboration with universities and historic and cultural institutions throughout the state and tells the story of Missouri and Missourians through the lens of 200 historically and culturally significant objects. Dr. Enríquez co-curated the award-winning Guadalupe Centers Centennial projects, is the director of the Latinx KC Oral History Project, and the co-editor of a digital project on Kansas City activism. Outside of UMKC, she was a co-curator for the multi-venue exhibition El Paso: The Other Side of the Mexican Revolution, and for Museo Urbano, a grassroots community-based museum that celebrates the history and heritage of ethnic Mexicans in El Paso. She also served as an oral historian for the Gulf Coast Food Project and the Civil Rights in Black and Brown Oral History Project, a public history and digital humanities initiative that collects, interprets, and disseminates interviews to the wider public.