Kevan Aguilar

Kevan Aguilar serves as an Assistant Professor of History in the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, where he joined the faculty in the fall of 2022. He previously held the position of President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. Aguilar earned his Ph.D. in Latin American History and M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of California, San Diego in 2021, following his B.A. in History from California State University, after transferring from Riverside City College. His research examines transnational histories of race formation, migration, and working-class culture in twentieth-century Mexico and Mexican America. Key areas of interest include modern Mexico, the Spanish Civil War in Mexico, immigration and exile, race and indigeneity, revolution and radicalism, and U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

Aguilar is currently completing his first book manuscript, titled “Revolutionary Encounters: Race, Ideology, and Exile in Mexico and Spain,” which explores the interactions between Mexico’s laboring classes and political refugees from the Spanish Civil War, drawing on archives in Mexico, Spain, the United States, and the Netherlands. He is also developing a second project tracing Mexican and Mexican American anarchists from the 1920s to the 1970s. His scholarship has appeared in the Journal of Latin American Studies, Hispanic American Historical Review, Radical History Review, and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Mexican History and Culture. Notable publications include “From Comrades to Subversives: Mexican Secret Police and ‘Undesirable’ Spanish Exiles, 1939-60” (Journal of Latin American Studies, 2021), which earned the Paul Vanderwood Best Article Prize in Mexican History awarded by the Conference on Latin American History in 2023; “Decolonizing Refuge: Indigenous Solidarity toward Spanish Exiles, 1936-1939” (Radical History Review, 2025); and “The ‘Indios’ of Spain and the Mexican Revolution: Racial Ideologies and the Labor of Internationalist Solidarity” (Hispanic American Historical Review, 2024). Aguilar’s research has received support from the Ford Foundation, Fulbright-Hays Program, Social Science Research Council, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, University of Maryland President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, and others. In 2026, he was awarded a UC Alianza MX Research & Innovation: Latino Studies Project seed grant for “Sin Fronteras: Mapping Radical Histories in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” aimed at documenting community organizing in the border region.

Professional Email: kevana@uci.edu