Baylor Libraries Honor Dr. Ricardo Álvarez Pimentel with Inaugural Guittard First Book Award
The Baylor Libraries are proud to announce Dr. Ricardo Álvarez‑Pimentel, Assistant Professor of History at Baylor University, as the inaugural recipient of the Charles Guittard First Book Publishing Award. This award is given to Baylor tenure-track faculty who have not previously published an academic book and is designed to offset publishing subventions often paid to academic book publishers.
Dr. Álvarez‑Pimentel began his tenure at Baylor University in 2022 after completing his Ph.D. in History at Yale University. He and his family immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico over 25 years ago, and he is the first person in his family to attend college in the U.S. and to attain a doctorate. This lived experience informs his research, teaching, and commitment to Baylor’s first-generation students.
His research explores the history of revolutions and upheavals, authoritarian politics, nationalism, religion, gender, and race relations as they pertain to Latin America and the Caribbean region. The Guittard Award will support the publication of a revised version of Álvarez‑Pimentel’s dissertation with the University of Nebraska Press entitled, “Counterrevolutionary Women: Race, Gender, and Mexico's Unfinished Religious Restoration, 1917-1946.” The book is part of their Engendering Latin America series and is currently slated for release on December 1, 2026.
The book examines the rise and fall of Acción Católica Mexicana, a social, political, and right-wing religious movement spearheaded by women and youth from Mexico City. It traces the evolution of this group's political projects, from the peak of the Mexican Revolution (1910-20) to the early Cold War. The research for the book draws on more than a dozen archives across Mexico, Spain, and the United States, surfacing pedagogical materials, laywomen’s magazines, and institutional correspondence to show how elite activists pursued moralization campaigns among Indigenous and mixed-race peasants. The result is a vivid account of grassroots authoritarianism—as lived and led by women—that stitched “order,” “purity,” and “restoration” into everyday politics.
“The Baylor Libraries are proud to award the inaugural Guittard First Book Publishing Award to Dr. Álvarez‑Pimentel to bring this significant chapter of Latin American history to the broader world,” said Jeffry Archer, Dean of University Libraries, Museums, and the Press. “By showing how women and youth in Acción Católica Mexicana advanced religious conservatism as a mainstream political force, Álvarez‑Pimentel brings new insight to the conversation.”
The Charles Guittard First Book Publishing Award was established in 2025 by Charles Frances Guittard (BA ’64) and Nancy Davis Labastida and reflects the family’s decades-long investment in the Department of History that stretches back to Dr. Francis Gevrier Guittard’s tenure from 1902 to 1950. The family’s commitment reinforces Baylor’s mission to support academic excellence in the humanities and across other disciplines.