A specialist in urban history, Sandoval-Strausz’s first book, “Hotel: An American History” (Yale University Press, 2007), won the American Historical Association-Pacific Coast Branch Book Award and was named a Best Book of 2007 by Library Journal.
He started working on the book as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago. Searching for a unique dissertation topic, he said, he was walking through Chicago’s Palmer House Hilton one afternoon when the idea hit him.
“I stepped up into this fantastic interior space with its bar and balconies and thought, ‘Huh, hotels. You know, that’s an urban institution with likely dozens of histories,’” he said. “Turns out, there were none written since 1930. To me, this was an intrinsically interesting topic, to take something that you totally take for granted, and see what you can learn about it. And in a scholarly sense, I had a fantastic time working on the book the entire 10 years it took. I would wake up at four in the morning and think, ‘I should work on my book right now.’”
Designed to be both intellectually rigorous and appealing to a general readership, “Hotel” received a rave review in The New York Times Book Review and sold out its initial printing in just a few weeks.
For his most recent book, 2019’s "Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City” (Basic Books), Sandoval-Strausz examined the role Latino immigration played in reviving America's largest cities in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. To illustrate his thesis, he focused specifically on two neighborhoods — Chicago’s Little Village and Dallas’s Oak Cliff — where Latino immigrants turned around population numbers that had been significantly declining since the 1950s.
“Barrio America” received the Caroline Bancroft History Prize and the International Latino Book Award for Best Academic Book, and was covered by numerous media outlets, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR’s Marketplace, Slate, Foreign Affairs, the Texas Observer, and The Dallas Morning News.
As the son of immigrant parents, Sandoval-Strausz said it was critical that the book be broadly accessible to the Latino community (a Spanish version will be published soon). He also viewed it as a rebuke to the anti-immigration sentiment that has caught on with a segment of the population in recent years.
“I felt very angry that a lot of politicians were saying all these things that were untrue about Latin American migrants,” he said. “So, I feel like it’s my duty as an American to set the record straight. These people did all these indispensable, city-saving, nationally revitalizing things for the United States. So as a matter of public engagement, it was something I had to publicize.”
Sandoval-Strausz is continuing that theme but staying closer to home for his current book project, which finds him researching how large Latino communities have been able to flourish in post-industrial Pennsylvania cities like Allentown, Reading, York, and Lancaster. All of those cities, he said, now have populations that are between one-third and two-thirds Latino.
“That’s kind of a big story that people haven’t said that much about,” he said. “One of the ways of narrating the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment is to look at other cities that have Latinized peacefully. How did they do it? A lot of people think of Pennsylvania as this 'old white state,' and some parts of it are. But big parts of it are not.”
He expects to have the book completed in the next few years, with an article ready for publication in 2024. Until then, he’ll continue to take inspiration from his new SAH cohorts.
“The best historians are deeply knowledgeable, but are also good at making history surprise you,” he said. “The subject could be anything, but you think, ‘I never would have expected that.’ And great history is in the writing — you don’t know what you have until you have it written down. It’s a lot of fun, and I would do that part of the job for free.”