Lilia Raquel Rosas is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area and is the proud daughter of a father, who is a retired cook, former bracero, and a mother, who is a retired domestica. She also calls Austin home and has resided in the southside and eastside for over two decades. She received a Bachelor of Arts in American Studies from Reed College in Portland, Oregon. After completing her undergraduate studies, she worked as an administrative assistant and teacher for One Stop Immigration, an immigrant rights advocacy organization, in Riverside, California. She moved to Austin to enter the Graduate School at The University of Texas at Austin where she received a Master of Arts in United States History.
In 2012, she completed her Ph.D. in History at The University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation, “(De)sexing Prostitution: Sex Work, Reform, and Womanhood in Progressive Texas, 1889-1925,” examines the participation and regulation of African American and ethnic Mexican women in sex work but also the surrounding social movements that converged in Texas in the Progressive Era. She is the author of several publications, including: “On Grinding Corn and Plaiting Hair: Placing Tejanas and Black Texan Women in the Progressive Era, ” in Chican@ Critical Perspectives and Praxis at the Turn of the 21st Century, and “Afterward on Resistencia, Liberación y tapón,” in Memoir of Un Ser Humano: The Life and Times de raúlrsalinas, edited by Louis Mendoza.
Since 2004, Rosas has served as a volunteer and is currently the Executive Director for the nonprofit Red Salmon Arts, which is dedicated to Chicana/o/x, Latina/o/x, and indigenous cultural arts programming. In 2018, Rosas joined the faculty of the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at The University of Texas at Austin as an Assistant Professor of Instruction. Last, Rosas was awarded a U.S. Latino Digital Humanities-Mellon Foundation Grants-in-Aid to initiate the project, “Tejana Historias: Indigenous Indentations and Transfrontera Transformation,” a visualization of the Tejana experiences from the Paleoindian Period to the present.