De la Teja elected to Texas State Historical Association position

Date of Release: 03/29/2005

Jesus F. de la TejaSAN MARCOS —Jesús F. de la Teja, Ph.D., chair of the history department at Texas State University-San Marcos, was elected second vice president of the Texas State Historical Association at the TSHA’s 109th annual meeting in Fort Worth. He will assume the association’s presidency at the 111th annual meeting in March 2007.

Born in Cuba in 1956, De la Teja grew up in New Jersey and earned the B.A. and M.A. degrees from Seton Hall University and his doctoral degree in Latin American history from the University of Texas at Austin. He completed his dissertation on Spanish colonial San Antonio in 1988.

Since 1991 he has been a member of the faculty at Texas State and currently serves as managing editor of Catholic Southwest: A Journal of History and Culture and book review editor for the TSHA’s Southwestern Historical Quarterly. De la Teja serves on the editorial advisory boards of the Library of Texas, the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, and the New Mexico Historical Review. He has collaborated on documentaries and educational videos and served as a consultant to the Texas State History Museum and on the John Lee Hancock film The Alamo.

De la Teja has published extensively on Spanish, Mexican, and Republic-era Texas. His most recent book, coauthored with Paula Mitchell Marks and Ron Tyler, is a college-level history textbook, Texas: Crossroads of North America, published by Houghton-Mifflin in 2004. His San Antonio de Béxar: A Community on New Spain’s Northern Frontier, published by the University of New Mexico Press in 1995, won the Presidio La Bahía Award and a citation from the San Antonio Conservation Society.

Organized on March 2, 1897, the TSHA is the oldest learned society in the state. Its mission is to foster the appreciation, understanding, and teaching of the rich and unique history of Texas and by example and through programs and activities encourage and promote research, preservation, and publication of historical material affecting the state of Texas. For more information, contact the Texas State Historical Association at (512) 471-1525 or online at www.tsha.utexas.edu/index.html.