WHA 2025: Enchantment in the Desert

Standing in a line of what I assumed were fellow historians, I boarded the free shuttle provided by the WHA. I quickly discovered that I had boarded the wrong shuttle, and I was on my way not to the Clyde Hotel but rather to the rental car pickup area. The man across from me, responding to the bus’ recorded announcement, “welcome to the Land of Enchantment,” remarked, “land of enchantment? There’s nothing here. It’s just a desert.” Perhaps he had caught wind of the theme of our conference, “Roots/Routes: Relationally in Times of Disenchantment.” When the bus dropped us off at the rental car hub, I stood for a long while in the dry air, waiting for my Uber, considering his remark.

The 2025 WHA conference enchanted me all weekend. On Thursday I expanded my understanding of “the West” by considering “when the West was North.” The brilliant panel, “Early Pacific Wests: Probing the Margins of Western American History,” helped to consider how small of a perspective I maintain as a historian of nineteenth and twentieth century California. It was a useful reminder that we all need to continuously question and expand our understanding of “the West.” I followed that panel up with an inspiring roundtable on “Preserving the Black West: Designating Freedom-Seeking Sites in California.” This panel featured an undergraduate student who is doing impressive work with the National Park Service in the Santa Monica Mountains. This teams’ work preserving freedom seeking sites exposed me to a history of my own backyard that I had never known: the role of the Santa Monica mountains in the Underground Railroad.

The next day I presented my own research in a panel titled “Race Science, Eugenics, and the Limits of Belonging in the American West.” It was extremely gratifying to see the fruition of months of planning with scholars I admire and look up to, including the eminent historian Miroslava Chavez Garcia, whose work inspires me endlessly. I was able to present an idea that had been born in the archive of the Autry Museum of the American West a year earlier. Although my work is not done, I was very pleased to present my archival findings in my presentation titled, “‘Our Pioneers, Products of Right Selection’: Californian Racial Exceptionalism in the Eugenics Era.” At UCLA, I am part of the Science, Technology, and Medicine field, and I was happy that our panel was able to speak to historians who find themselves at the intersection of the history of science, medicine, and the American West.

Saturday brought another thought-provoking panel, “Carceral Healing: Outdoor Recreation, Labor, and Incarceration in Western American History.” This panel will stay with me for a long time and is sure to inform my own research—I was deeply impressed by the thorough and thoughtful work all three panelists put into their presentations. That afternoon, I walked through downtown Albuquerque with my co-panelists. We discussed our panel over lunch, remarking on the intersections of our work that we would never have discovered if we hadn’t presented together. We schemed future plans.

The presentations I was fortunate to attend and to participate in were supplemented with rich conversations among peers and professors. The Presidential Plenary, the Graduate Student Reception, and the Award Ceremony all served as excellent opportunities to make new connections with talented and kind WHA attendees. I connected over dinner with a historian of the Early Modern Spanish empire who gave me priceless academic and personal advice despite the fact that we study different regions and time periods. I also talked with people whose work is similar to my own, an occasion that happens only rarely in my day-to-day life as someone in the throes of dissertation writing. Each evening ended with catching up with old friends and meeting new ones, leaving me disappointed when I had to return to my room and go to sleep.

On Sunday, I walked to the train station with two friends. On the way there we ran into someone I knew from Los Angeles. The four of us had all individually decided, at different points during the weekend, to journey from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. One of the best parts about the WHA is the opportunity for these unplanned moments, which often lead to formative experiences. On that hour-long train ride I learned from my train-mates about the indigenous history of New Mexico, Oaxacan labor in Oregon, and Nauhatl translation in Spanish Mexico City. As our train wound past mesas, Pueblos, sagebrush, and pines, I recalled the comments on the bus that I had boarded by mistake a few days ago. Whether one thinks the “land of enchantment” is an apt nickname or not, New Mexico is certainly more than “just a desert.”

I am incredibly grateful for the Graduate Student Prize for enabling me to attend and present at my first Western History Association conference. As a PhD candidate studying the environmental, visual, and cultural history of eugenics in California, I felt truly welcomed by the WHA community. All of our work crosses fields, and the WHA celebrates the interdisciplinary reality of the American West (and beyond). My understanding of race, indigeneity and disability in the West was and will remain profoundly shaped by the panels I attended and conversations I had at the WHA. I look forward to becoming a regular at the WHA’s future conferences.