CSSW News and Events

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. 

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.