David Rex Galindo

I am an assistant professor of Colonial Latin American History at the University of North Texas, USA. Previously, I was an assistant professor of history at the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Chile, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt, Germany, and an assistant professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas, USA My training is eclectic and international. I received a Ph.D. in History at Southern Methodist University in 2010, where I also taught in the Departments of History and World Languages and Cultures. I hold an M.A. in North-American Studies from the Franklin Institute at the Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, Spain; a Diploma de Estudios Avanzados in Early Modern Spanish History from the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid; and a B.Sc. and M.Sc in Engineering from the Universidad de Valladolid, Spain. I worked as an engineer in Germany and Spain before committing my life to my passion: History. My research focuses on imperial frontiers in the Hispanic world, religion as a tool of Spanish imperialism, and, more recently, Indigenous labor and exploitation in the early modern Spanish empire. My first monograph, To Sin No More: Franciscans and Conversion in the Hispanic World, 1683-1830 (2018), analyzed the Franciscan colleges of propaganda fide, their missionaries, and their multifaceted, sweeping missionary programs in early modern Spain and the Americas. I have also co-edited La Frontera en el Mundo Hispano (2014) and The Franciscans in Colonial Mexico (2022). I am currently working on two book projects. One focuses on southern California Indigenous peoples, the Franciscan missionary Fray Jerónimo Boscana, and their contributions to California ethnology. A second project analyzes various normative systems developed to extract indigenous labor and tribute in New Spain's northern frontier territories from the 16th through the early 19th century.