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Javier Cikota received his B.A. (History and Latin American Studies) from the University of Texas at Austin, and his Ph.D. in Latin American History from the University of California, Berkeley. Javier's research centers on how states establish legitimacy in frontier spaces, incorporating issues of legal literacy, gender dynamics, and nationalism to social and political history.

His first book, , looks at how European settlers and  indigenous peoples in Patagonia learned to use the institutions and agents of the Argentine state to practice citizenship while being excluded from formal politics. Using court records to reconstruct how reputations were established and maintained, how that reputation facilitated or hampered access to justice, and how, by mobilizing the power of the judiciary on their behalf, they were able to influence the deployment of state power in their communities. In short, Frontier Justiceshows how the process of state formation responds to local conditions, how citizenship results from quotidian practices, and how Argentina recreated colonial practices and institutions to “civilize” the Patagonian frontier.

Javier is currently working on a series of crisis around the time of Argentina’s centennial celebrations in 1910 that shook the elite’s confidence on their colonial efforts in the interior. A salacious allegation of cannibalism just outside a military base by indigenous brigands, for example, brought to the fore the tensions around the reliance on immigrants to populate the desert, and the government’s failure to protect them. An ambitious project to build a railroad through the Andes precipitated a constitutional showdown when the American-led railroad expedition began meddling in national politics, arousing the ire of a growing cadre of young engineers and their allies in the government. A renegade police chief, driven to expel Chilean citizens from the Andean region, refused to stand down, engulfing the regional capital in a protracted siege by the military. These crises, happening across the frontier in rapid succession between 1910 and 1916, signaled a moment of inflection for the ruling elite, whose cosmopolitan brand of nationalism turned xenophobic, and the promise of nation-building devolved into a stagnant colonial arrangement.

He teaches Latin American history from the fifteenth century to the present, and his courses often look at how historical events had different impacts on the people living through them depending on gender, race, and wealth. Students explore concepts of race and national belonging, issues of power and legitimacy, while paying attention to areas at the margins of empires and nations. He is interested in legal documents (court cases, petitions, complaints) as windows into the beliefs and lives of everyday people.