Sandra I. Enríquez (Project Co-Director) is an Assistant Professor and the Director of the Public History emphasis at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. She received a BA in History and an MA in U.S.-Mexico Border History from the University of Texas at El Paso, and earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Houston. Trained as both a traditional academic historian and a public historian, Enríquez’s research and teaching interests center on Latinx and urban histories, social movements, and public and local histories. She is completing a book titled ¡El Barrio No Se Vende!: Community-Controlled Neighborhood Preservation in El Paso, Texas, which examines grassroots activism in the 1970s-1980s to keep Mexican American barrios from the bulldozer.
As the Director of Public History at UMKC, Enríquez trains and provides professional opportunities for future Public Historians, and cultivates public-facing student research projects on the histories of Missouri and the Midwest. While at UMKC, she has authored and collaborated on several public history projects, including the award-winning Kansas City’s Guadalupe Centers: A Century of Serving the Latino Community, the LatinxKC Oral History Project, Profiles in Kansas City Activism, African American Heritage Trail.