Historian Andrés Reséndez was featured on Apr. 21 for his research into early European exploration and colonization of the Americas, as well as the historical connections between the Americas and Asia. Raised in Mexico City, Reséndez has focused his career on uncovering lesser-known aspects of history, including forms of indigenous slavery that paralleled those experienced by Africans.
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Reséndez said his academic journey led him from studying the Mexican Revolution further back into earlier centuries: “I started in the Mexican Revolution, then went back to the early 19th century. Once you become familiar with a certain period, you want to understand what led to that to begin with. And that’s what ultimately took me back to the 16th century.”
After earning his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1998 under Professor Friedrich Katz, Reséndez joined UC Davis’s history department that same year. He teaches courses on Latin America and Mexico and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021. Reflecting on joining UC Davis, he said: “I was very impressed with the history department when I first arrived in the late ‘90s… It was a department that was up and coming, and it was growing.”
His books include “A Land So Strange,” which recounts an ill-fated Spanish expedition through pre-colonial Florida, and “The Other Slavery,” which examined how Native Americans were subjected to forced labor by European settlers—a work recognized as a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction and winner of the Bancroft Prize.
To access primary sources about Spain’s colonial activities, Reséndez conducted research at Seville’s Archivo General de Indias but later benefited from digital archives made available by efforts from Spain’s Ministry of Education.
His most recent book explores trans-Pacific exchanges via Spanish ships between Acapulco and Manila—an area he continues researching today: “Acapulco and Manila really served as continental hubs for these transpacific permanent contacts… not only [Peruvian] silver flows to China… but also various plants,” he explained.
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Reséndez described historical research as “looking for needles in a haystack” but called it both painstakingly slow yet rewarding.