I write and teach about race, gender, and culture in the United States. My book, Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City, received the Kenneth Jackson Award for Best Book of 2016 North American) from the Urban History Association, the 2017 W. Jackson Turrentine Book Prize from the Western History Association, and the 2017 Julia Ideson Award from the Friends of the Texas Room Houston Metropolitan Research Center) Houston Bound shows how, despite the existence of Jim Crow laws that created a black/white racial binary, converging migrations to Houston—particularly those of ethnic Mexicans and Creoles of color—complicated ideas of blackness and whiteness and introduced different understandings about race between the 1920s and 1960s. The book also uses music to examine these racial complexities, tracing the emergence of Houston's blues and jazz scenes as well as the hybrid forms of these genres that arose when migrants forged shared social space and carved out new communities and politics.