Nicholas (Nick) Villanueva is a lecturer of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Villanueva is a first generation college student originally from Gary, Indiana, and grew up in the Chicago metro area. Villanueva earned his Ph.D. in History with a concentration in Race and Ethnicity in 20th Century U.S., from Vanderbilt University, 2014. His first book, Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands , examines the increase in Mexican lynching during the first ten years of the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920. As few other works have, his book explores the increase in Mexican lynching cases in the Texas borderlands. This work contributes to the historical work on lynching, global perspectives of violence, and borderland studies by differentiating between the lynching of African Americans and the borderland lynching of ethnic Mexicans. He asserts that the latter was about contesting citizenship and sovereignty in the Texas borderlands. His book reconstructs some of the earliest efforts by ethnic Mexicans to organize the defense of their rights as Americans. He is currently working on his second book, Making Citizens?: Segregation and Assimilation of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands . His fellowships and awards include the National Endowment for the Humanities, Ford Foundation, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Excellence in West Texas History Association, and the Walter Prescott-Webb publishing award. An avid outdoors person, Villanueva is thrilled to call Boulder, Colorado, his home.