Fernando Pérez Montesinos
Fernando Pérez Montesinos
Associate Professor
Email: fperez@history.ucla.edu
Office: 5280 Bunche Hall
Research
I am historian of modern Mexico with a focus on the nineteenth century and the Mexican revolution. My research combines environmental, social, and indigenous history to study the connections between processes of land privatization, class and state formation, and ecological change. My first book, Landscaping Indigenous Mexico: The Liberal State and Capitalism in the Purépecha Highlands (UT Press, 2025), focuses on the Purépecha people of Michoacán, Mexico, and examines why and how long-standing patterns of communal landholding changed in response to liberal policies, railroad expansion, and the rise of the timber industry in Mexico. I teach courses on modern Latin America and Mexico, as well as environmental and indigenous history. I am currently one of the senior editors of the Hispanic American Historical Review. A chilango at heart, I enjoy tacos al pastor, the Mexican summer rains, and playing fingerstyle guitar.
Publications
- Landscaping Indigenous Mexico: The Liberal State and Capitalism in the Purépecha Highlands (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2025)
- Fernando Pérez Montesinos, Tatiana Pérez Ramírez, and Edgar Urbina, eds., El ascenso maderista y el fin del régimen porfiriano (Mexico: INEHRM/El Colegio Mexiquense, 2024).
- “Las tres etapas del reparto liberal en Zacapu, Michoacán, 1824-1911,” in Matthew Butler et al, eds, Tras las huellas de las tierras comunales indígenas. Los libros de hijuelas y el liberalismo decimonónico en Michoacán (México: CIESAS / El Colegio de Michoacán, 2023), 201-224.
- “Tierra, bosques y pueblos en la meseta purépecha, 1869-1911,” in México contemporáneo. Aspectos económicos, políticos y sociales, ed. José Galindo (Xalapa, México: Universidad Veracruzana, 2018), 121-158.
- “Geografia, politica y economia del reparto liberal en la meseta purepecha, 1851-1914,” Historia Mexicana, 66.4 (April-June 2017): 2073-2149. http://historiamexicana.colmex.mx/index.php/RHM/article/view/3427/3209
- “Land, Forest, and Pueblos in the Meseta Purepecha, 1869-1911.” In: Jose Galindo, ed., Mexico in Focus: Political, Environmental, and Social Issues (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2014), 177-196.
- “Las raíces locales de la participaci6n indígena en la vida nacional.” In: Participación indígena en Los procesos independencia y revolución (Mexico: CDI,2011), 61-76.
