About
a native Nuevo Mexicana
Bernadine Marie Hernández is an Associate Professor of American Literary History in the Department of English at the University of New Mexico. Her work brings transnational feminism, Marxist theory, and archival recovery to bear on the sexual economies of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S.–Mexico borderlands.
Her work theorizes sexual capital: how the racialized sexuality of women of color was mobilized as a technology of power — unseen labor that produced wealth for elite landholders while marking these women's bodies as “excessive” in the historical record. Reading court cases, testimonios, WPA narratives, newspapers, and photographs against the grain, she recovers lives the archive worked to erase.
She earned her PhD at the University of California, San Diego, and was a Visiting Faculty Researcher at UCLA's Chicano Studies Research Center. Her archival research spans collections from the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley to the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at UT Austin. She received UNM's Distinguished Feminist Research Lecture Award (2021) and the OVPR Ovation Award for Research & Scholarship (2024), and co-founded the Fronteristxs Collective, a border art and writer collective.
Based in
Albuquerque, New Mexico
