Monica Perales recognized with best urban history book award

Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community author earns top prize in her field

Dr. Monica Perales (photo credit: Nick De La Torre)

Perales' award-winning book about the making and dismantling of her hometown

Monica Perales, an associate professor in the Department of History, has been awarded by the Urban History Association the Kenneth Jackson Award for Best Book in North American urban history for Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community.

“Monica Perales’ Smeltertown is a powerful study because it is as personal as it is universal,” said Martin V. Melosi, Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Professor of History and recipient of the Jackson Best Book Award in 2000.

“Her gift for oral history puts life into a story about Mexicans and Mexican Americans living and working in a community surrounding the American Smelting and Refining Co. in El Paso, Texas – her home town,” he said.

The 2011 prize committee said of Perales’ work:

Monica Perales’ new book, Smeltertown is an extraordinary study of a city that once epitomized industrial might, labor exploitation, and human resilience in the face of both, that today lives on only in memory.

Smeltertown, once the largest city on the U.S./Mexican border, brought together countless Mexican workers, and created a complex and vibrant community that would, from the 1890s until the 1970s, define the urban landscape of the Southwest over the long 20th century in ways that scholars have not yet appreciated fully.

Eventually Smeltertown faded from the landscape of the Southwest, but thanks to historian Monica Perales, and her gift for oral history and for the recovery of collective memory, urban historians now have much to mull over, and much to reconsider, about cities are defined and understood in the long 20th century.

Melosi, a past president of the Urban History Association, noted that the award is “the most prestigious in the field, which speaks to the high scholarly achievement Dr. Perales has attained.”

Perales has a doctorate in history from Stanford University. She earned a master’s degree in history and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Texas at El Paso.

She is the recipient of several fellowships, including the 2009 Women’s Studies Faculty Summer Fellowship and the 2006-2007 Summerlee Fellow in Texas History at the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University.

Her current research explores questions of race, gender, nation, community and identity on the border. She is writing a manuscript that explores the multiple meanings of Mexican motherhood on the border during the Progressive Era.

The formal presentation of the Kenneth Jackson Award, which also includes a cash prize of $500, will be during the association’s biennial conference October 26-28, 2012 in New York City.