Dr. Daniel Santana

Ph.D., Borderlands History – The University of Texas at El Paso
M.A., History – California State University, Northridge
B.A., History & Chicana/o Studies – California State University, Northridge

Dr. Daniel Santana is Assistant Professor of Mexican and Latin American History at CSU, Dominguez Hills. As a historian of masculinities and gender in early colonial Mexico, his research studies colonial constructs of Indigenous masculinities in early colonial Center-West, Mexico, with a particular emphasis on the Purépecha, Otomi, Matlatzinca, and Coca communities from the Jalisco and Michoacán regions. His interest in Indigenous peoples in center-west Mexico derives from his ancestry as a descendant of the Coca Indigenous community of Mezcala de la Asunción, Jalisco, where his mother immigrated from. He has presented his work at national conferences such as the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies (RMCLAS), Ethnohistory, and the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS).

His doctoral dissertation, “Indigenous Masculinities and the Tarascan Borderlands in Sixteenth-Century Michoacán,” studies sixteenth-century colonial texts related to the histories of the Purépecha (Tarascan) State in early colonial Michoacán. He argues that the “narratives elaborated in colonial texts such as the Relación de Michoacán and relaciones geográficas …portray a ‘patriarchal,’ male-centered history of the Tarascan peoples that often overlooked the roles of Indigenous women.” He scrutinizes narratives informed by Indigenous elites and Spanish chroniclers as textual hypermasculine performances that responded to the Spanish colonial order. Dr. Santana is currently working on an article that studies how these androcentric narratives also sought to depict a patriarchal pre-Hispanic state where masculinized or lascivious women who transgressed gender boundaries were vilified as sources of social disorder. He demonstrates that such hypermasculine accounts of pre-colonial Indigenous women contrasted with the realities of feminine power evident in sixteenth-century court cases, litigation, and accounts relating to Purépecha society within the first century following the Spanish conquest.

Dr. Santana’s teaching interests include masculinities, queer histories, gender, sexuality, and colonialism in Latin America. He believes it is important to integrate discussions of intersectional issues in the history classroom, especially at CSUDH, which represents a diverse student body. He is a native of Southeast Los Angeles and has witnessed firsthand the issues underserved communities face and believes it is important to represent their histories. As a queer, first-generation Chicano who came of age in the cities of Lynwood, Compton, Huntington Park, and South Gate, he strives to create an equitable classroom and learning environment.