Fall 2025 News and Events
Immigration and Asylum Seeking at the US-Mexico Border
Drs. Jennifer Devine and Sarah Blue | Texas State University
Wednesday, September 10, 2025 | 6:30 - 7:30 pm | Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos
and
Friday, September 12, 2025 | 1:00 - 2:30 pm | Brazos Hall
Immigration at the US-Mexico border has undergone major changes in the past decade with varying responses from different presidential administrations. Drs. Blue and Devine will give an overview of changes in US policies and immigrant arrivals at the border, discussing policy consequences for migrant arrivals and for organized crime. They will draw on a recent research project that included over 150 interviews with migrant families and local experts conducted in 2023-2024.
Spring 2025 News and Events
Chicana Activism and Reproductive Care:
Past, Present, and Future
Dr. Lina-Maria Murillo | University of Iowa
Tuesday, February 25, 2025 | 12:30 pm | TMH 101 & Online via Zoom
Based on the Lina-Maria Murillo’s book, Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the US-Mexico Borderlands, this lecture will center on Chicana and Mexican-origin women activists as they fought to provide care to their communities in El Paso, Texas, throughout the twentieth century. Even as they confronted population control advocates and increased reproductive health scrutiny, they came together to help their families live and thrive opening clinics and organizing residents to demand health care on their own terms.
When Latinas Fought Fascism:
Remembering and Recovering Activism through Writing and Public History
Dr. Sarah McNamara | Texas A&M University
Tuesday, March 4, 2025 | 12:30 pm | TMH 101
Feminist oral history and archival methods have helped transform our understanding of 20th century American history. Historian Sarah McNamara has focused on a key urban hub in the New South, tracing out the ways Latinas have carved a not-so delicate path in challenging and, some times, confirming politically exclusionary projects in the Jim Crow South. From Luisa Moreno coordinating a cigar roller’s strike to women defending Republican Spain during the Civil war, Dr. McNamara helps us understand the inspiring and troubling dimensions of women’s labor history in a trying time in U.S. history.
Saint Rosalía of Palermo in New Spain and New Mexico:
Circulating Gender Roles in the New World
Dr. Catherine Jaffe | Texas State University
Tuesday, March 18, 2025 | 2:00 pm | Brazos Hall & Online via Zoom
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Society of Jesus circulated images and texts promoting the cult of Saint Rosalía of Palermo throughout Spain’s American viceroyalties. They thus introduced European models of femininity to the New World, adapting them to the local needs. This presentation will consider the visual and literary transformation of Saint Rosalia, patroness of Palermo, from medieval anchorite to Baroque protectress from plagues and earthquakes, to gender model in New Spain during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.
Photo courtesy of the Mcnay Museum of Art
Space is my Barrio:
The Brown-Blended Poetry Of Juan Manuel Perez
Juan Manuel Pérez | Thursday, March 20, 2025
2:00 pm | Brazos Hall and Online via Zoom
Join us for a presentation and reading by award-winning author, Juan Manuel Pérez. His poetry topics will include Chicano and Chicana futurismo, migrant fieldwork, Indigenous and Indigenous futurism, speculative writing, horror, cryptozoology, politics, food, family, and military life.
2025 CSSW Undergraduate Research Conference
Congratulations to our 2025 CSSW Undergraduate Research Conference winners!
Poster Winner
- Memphis Mallory | 1st Place
Paper Winners
- Jessica Seajack | 1st Place
- Daniel Suarez | 2nd Place
- Memphis Mallory | 3rd Place
Creative Works Winners
- Miranda Treviño | 1st Place
- Brookelynn Andler | 2nd Place
Visit the Conference Portal for registration and more information.
2025 CSSW Undergraduate Research Conference
This multidisciplinary undergraduate research conference will highlight and award original works relating to Texas, the Southwestern United States, and Northern Mexico. We are interested in research that examines the region’s peoples, institutions, histories, cultures, and ecologies. Students are encouraged to submit research or creative works from past or current classes.
The conference will be held from 10:00 am - 1:00 pm on Friday, March 21, 2025.
Visit the Conference Portal for registration and more information.
Straight out of El Paso:
The Anthropology of Thickening Borders
Dr. Gilberto Rosas | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Tuesday, March 25, 2025 | 12:30 pm | TMH 101 and Online via Zoom
Borders, as sites of robust crossings and spaces long inhabited by marginalized populations, generate deep anxiety across much of the contemporary world. Rosas demonstrates how 21st century US presidential regimes have amplified and weaponized immigration and border policy, including family separation, torture, and murder. None of this dehumanization and violence was inevitable, however. The border zone in El Paso (which translates to "the Pass") was once a very different place, one marked by regular and inconsequential crossings to and from both sides—and, it could become that once again.
The Food Voice of Black Freedom:
A View from Food Power Politics
Dr. Bobby J. Smith II | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Thursday, March 27, 2025 | 12:30 pm | TMH 101 & Online via Zoom
Food Power Politics reconfigures how we understand the American Civil Rights Movement, uses the movement in Mississippi as a litmus test to measure how Black people interface with the nation’s food system, and identifies blind spots that illuminate the persistence of food inequities.
This talk is organized by African American Studies and co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Southwest.
First We Bombed New Mexico
Lois Lipman | Producer & Director
Tuesday, April 1, 2025 | 2:00 pm | Brazos Hall & Online via Zoom
After the United States detonated the world's first nuclear bomb - codename Trinity - in southern New Mexico, Tina Cordova, a cancer survivor, has reinvogorated a movement demanding justice for a legacy of lethal radiation. Lois Lipman, filmmaker, discusses the film, the bomb and the movement.
Texas: An American History
Dr. Benjamin Johnson | Loyola University Chicago
Thursday, April 10, 2025 | 12:30 pm | TMH 101 and Online via Zoom
When Americans turn on their laptops, play video games, go to church, vote, eat TexMex, buy groceries, listen to music, grill steaks, or watch football, they are paying tribute to Texas. Johnson’s lecture shines new light on why Texas has had such a powerful influence on U.S. history.
Texas historian Ben Johnson decided to put together a history of Texas that emphasized connections to the world, not differences. This is that book.
On a NASA Flight to Heaven: A Reading
Dr. D. Seth Horton | University of Virginia
Thursday, April 10, 2025 | 3:30 pm | Brazos Hall & Online via Zoom
Set throughout the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, the stories in On a NASA Flight to Heaven explore the various ways in which the border fractures traditional narratives. Standing between North American and Latin American literary traditions, these stories are highly speculative in their approach. By consistently blurring together the genres of fiction and nonfiction, and by furthermore resisting all gestures towards completeness and finality, this collection of stories offers a completely novel interpretation of the borderlands.
Unholy Sensations: A Story of Sex, Scandal, and California's First Cult Scare
Drs. Joshua Paddison, Jennifer Graber, and Joseph Laycock
Friday, May 2, 2025 | 12:30 pm | Brazos Hall & Online via Zoom
The project takes a close-up look at the Fountaingrove scandal to examine religion, gender, sexuality, and race in the Gilded Age from a fresh perspective. By chronicling the life stories of the people swept up in the scandal, Unholy Sensations reveals connections and tensions between a wide variety of nineteenth-century religious and social groups, including suffragists and spiritualists, Christian Scientists and Theosophists, journalists and politicians, and Protestant ministers and urban reformers. Together, these disparate groups helped spark California's first cult scare, demonizing Harris as the first-but far from the last-dangerous California cult leader. By showing that the term “cult” has always been a marker of race, sexuality, and religion, Unholy Sensations reveals the limits of American freedom and the centrality of religion to the policing of whiteness, family, and nation.