Dr. Yolanda Ch谩vez Leyva
Professor of History
Dr. Yolanda Chávez Leyva is a Chicana/ fronteriza historian and writer who was born and raised on the border. She is of Rarámuri descent and honors her grandmother Canuta Ruacho. She is the Director of the Institute of Oral History and Professor in the Department of History. She has spent her life listening to and now documenting the lives of people who live on la frontera. As an oral historian, she has led projects on Bracero History, segregated schooling, and more. She is Co-PI of a Mellon funded project to document shade inequity in El Paso and Ciudad Jurez. She is also PI of the Mellon-funded Humanities Collaborative. Professor Leyva specializes in border history, public history, and Chicana history. She served as the lead historian for the first-ever Bracero Museum (funded by the Mellon Foundation) slated to open in Socorro, Texas. She was co-founder of Museo Urbano in 2011, a museum of the streets that highlighted fronterizo/a history by taking it where people are – from museums to the actual streets of El Paso. She came to academia after a decade of social work in the Black and Brown communities of east Austin, with a desire to make academia and especially history relevant and useful to people. Her work has been recognized nationally. She is the recipient of the National Council on Public History "Best Public History Project Award" and the American Historical Association Herbert Feis Award that recognizes "distinguished contributions to public history." In 2024, she was awarded with the McDonalds Triunfadores Hispanos award. She has also received several faculty awards from 百花视频 and the College of Liberal Arts. In 2014, the government of Brazil invited her to conduct community dialogue training with new and emerging historical sites from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. She has curated, and co-curated, many museum exhibits with her students. Dr. Leyva has published numerous articles on Chicana, lesbian and border history. In addition, she has published poetry in Ixhua, La Voz de Esperanza, and Cantos al Sexto Sol. She blogs at
Contact Info:
Library 101 (inside Media & Microfilm)
(915) 747-7048
Email: yleyva@utep.edu
