A US Fulbright Scholar Grant to the Philippines has been awarded to José Angel Hernández, Associate Professor of History in the Department of History.

Professor Hernández was awarded his Fulbright to research the Colonial Archives of Cebu City and Manila, Philippines for the 2019 Academic Year. Aside from doing primary and secondary research on the Philippines during the Spanish colonial era, Hernández is also learning Bisayâ (Cebuano/Binisayâ), one of the most spoken languages of the archipelago, in order to analyze the linguistic influences with that of Spanish. His project is titled "Comparative Colonizations on a Global Scale" and seeks to compare the varied experiences, effects, and expressions of Spanish Colonization in Asia with that of the Americas and the Caribbean.

For Hernández, this particular leg of the long-term research project is perhaps the most difficult, but it is also only the beginning. Research trips to Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Bolivia, Peru, and Spain are also in the schedule because of the impact and influence of Spanish colonization. This is Hernández's third Fulbright.

While in the PhD program at The University of Chicago, he received a 2004–05 Fulbright-Hays to research his dissertation in Ciudad Juárez and Mexico City; his dissertation was the basis of his first book, "Mexican American Colonization during the Nineteenth Century: A History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands" (Cambridge University Press, 2012), which received an inaugural "William M. LeoGrande Prize" from American University and the "Américo Paredes Book Award" from South Texas College.

He returned to Mexico City and Baja California as a US Fulbright Scholar in 2015 to follow up on his second project titled "Colonizing Modernities: Back to Mexico Movements and Colonization Schemes during the Nineteenth Century," which he is currently in the process of writing and editing. At its core, the research project examines those resettlement projects implemented during this period known as The Porfiriato. Hernández concludes the vast majority of Mexico’s “immigrants” during this period were, in fact, not immigrants from Europe or Asia, but Mexican migrants leaving north for the U.S.

“The focus of my research examines Mexico’s first modern immigration and colonization program, one in which an agency was redeveloped and highly funded in order to entice and resettle thousands of ethnic Mexicans back to Mexico during the Porfiriato (1876-1911),” notes Hernández.