Jason Ruiz won the Latin American Studies Association’s Best Dissertation in Latino Studies Award for his dissertation, “Americans in the Treasure House: Travel to Mexico in the Popular Imagination of the United States, 1876-1920”
Ruiz’s research examines representations of travel to Mexico that circulated in the United States during the presidency of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1910, known as the “Porfiriato”), a period marked by massive foreign investment and Mexico’s rapid—though incomplete—modernization. It argues that travel was an important practice for the popular conceptualization of Mexico as a place in which to extend the Western frontier, famously lamented as “closed” by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in the 1893.
Ruiz is currently revising his dissertation into a book manuscript.
Originally published by at americanstudies.nd.edu on May 27, 2009.