Skip to main content

UTEP to Host Annual Borderlands History Conference

Last Updated on Mon Jan 29 14:23:12 MST 2018

Originally published Mon Jan 29 13:47:41 MST 2018

By lfmartinez6

UTEP Communications

Raphael Folsom, Ph.D., professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, will be the keynote speaker at the 3rd Annual Borderlands History Conference Feb. 2-4, 2018, at venues on and off the UTEP campus. This year’s conference theme is “Violence, Coercion and Social Change in Borderlands History.”

UTEP to Host Annual Borderlands History Conference
UTEP to Host Annual Borderlands History Conference

Folsom will talk about “Violence, Coercion and Consent on the Chichimeca Frontier, 1500-1800” at 6:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 2, in UTEP’s El Paso Natural Gas Conference Center. The focus is on the indigenous people in northern Mexico and their encounters with the Spanish empire. The public is invited to the free presentation. 

Samuel Brunk, Ph.D., chair and professor of history at UTEP, said he expects scholars and historians from Mexico and the United States to attend. A handful of those individuals work along the U.S.-Mexico border region. Participants come to broaden the scope and depth of their understanding of borderlands history.

“This conference is a great way to learn about and appreciate the history of this community, given our presence in the middle of the borderlands,” Brunk said.

The event is organized and sponsored by UTEP’s Department of History and its doctoral program. Those who attend the rest of the three-day conference will need to register and pay the conference fee.

View event schedule below.

UTEP Borderlands History Conference, February 2-4, 2018

Violence, Coercion, and Social Change in Borderlands History

 

Friday, February 02, 2018

Location: Liberal Arts Building 222

Noon to 2pm- Oral History Workshop (Space limited)

The Institute of Oral History is pleased to present "Oral History: An Introduction to the Basics" for scholars interested in conducting oral histories or initiating an oral history project. The workshop is presented by Dr. Yolanda Chávez Leyva, director of UTEP’s Institute of Oral History, who was recently awarded the American Historical Association’s Herbert Feis Award for distinguished contributions to public history. The workshop will cover pre-interview strategies, the interviewing process, and cultural competency. The Institute is currently conducting a long-term project interviewing former students who attended segregated schools in the Borderlands. The Institute was founded in 1972 and currently holds 1,500 oral histories as well as 20,000 pages of transcripts. The workshop will include lunch.

Location: El Paso Natural Gas Conference Center

4:00 to 4:10pm- Opening Remarks

4:10 to 6:10pm- Panel One: Quotidian Violence, Policing, and Incarceration​

Chair: Angelina Martinez

Comment: Dr. Howard B. Campbell- Professor of Anthropology and Chairman of UTEP’s Sociology & Anthropology Department

  •   María del Carmen Zetina Rodríguez, “La violencia cotidiana en los espacios públicos de Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua 1920 – 1940”
  •   Ligia Arguilez, “An Un-Neutral Neutrality: Mexican Internment Camps Along the U.S.- México Border, 1913-14”
  •   Laura Alcántara Duque, “El prohibicionismo en México 1920-1940. La perspectiva sobre la toxicomanía:  autonomía e intervención norteamericana”
  •   Erik Bernardino, “Obreras Clandestinas: Labor and Prostitution in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1903-1917”

6:30 to 7:20 pm-Keynote: “Violence, Coercion, and Consent on the Chichimeca Frontier, 1500-1800”

Professor Raphael Folsom is a scholar of colonial Latin America, focusing on native peoples and imperial borderlands in New Spain.  His first book, The Yaquis & The Empire: Violence, Spanish Imperial Power, and Native Resilience in Colonial Mexico (Yale University Press, 2014), deals with the history of one of Mexico’s most famous native peoples and their negotiations with Jesuit missionaries, Spanish officials, and their indigenous neighbors in colonial Sonora. He is currently at work on two new books: Mestizo Empire, A New History of the Chichimeca War, 1540-1610, and Frontiers of Mexican History, A New History of Mexico from Earliest Times (under contract with Oxford University Press). The first of these deals with an extremely violent and consequential war on Mexico’s northern frontier that, over time, led to the formation of new mixed-race political identities in New Spain and the independent Mexican Republic. The second book is a narrative of Mexican history focusing on three frontiers: the political frontiers, north and south, that Mexican governments have struggled to control; the intellectual frontiers of Mexican thinkers and scientists as they have striven to understand their country and their world; and the scholarly frontiers of today’s historians as they have worked to plumb Mexico’s unique and fascinating past. Professor Folsom received his doctorate from Yale University.

7:30 to 9pm-Reception with Cash Bar

Saturday, February 03, 2018

Location (all Saturday daytime sessions): Hilton Garden Inn El Paso / University

8:30 to 10:30am- Panel Two: State Power and Frontier/Border Formation

Chair: Jose Miguel Leyva

Comment: Dr. Selfa A. Chew-Visiting Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso

  •   Alberto Wilson III, “No port of entry outside of El Paso is necessary,’ Altering Border Landscapes in El Paso-Ciudad Juárez, 1907-1917”
  •   Julia O’Hara, “Memories of Violence: Apache Wars Memoirs and the Making of the Border”
  •   Alejandro Gonzalez Milea, “Reunir pobladores en Paso del Norte en 1782: El Diario para reunión de indios y vecindarios de Diego de Borica”

10:50am to 12:50pm- Panel Three: Displacement and Surveillance

Chair: RaeAnne Swanson

Comment: Dr. Josiah M. Heyman- Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso

  •   Nancy A. Aguirre, “Callista Surveillance of the Mexican Exile Press in the Borderlands, 1924-1928”
  •   Miguel Juárez, “African Americans in Concordia and Lincoln Park: From a Militarized Frontier to Redlined Communities Bordered by Freeways”  
  •   Alana de Hinojosa, "Dis(re)membered Histories of the Chamizal Relocation Project"
  •   José Luis Ortiz Garza, “Espionaje y radiotelegrafía en la frontera norte de México (1914-1918)”

1pm-2:pm Buffet Lunch & Presentation of the Dr. John H. McNeely Graduate Student Oral History Award

2:20 to 4:20pm- Panel Four: Resistance, Rebellion, and Revolution

Chair: Juan Carlos Varela

Comment: Dr. Larisa Veloz- Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso

  •   Carlos Francisco Parra, “Valientes Nogalenses: Violence, Fences, and Memory in the 1918 Battle of Ambos Nogales and the Formation of the U.S.-Mexican Border”
  •   Mario T. García, “Border Walkout! The 1936 Mexican American Student Strike in El Paso and the Struggle for Educational Justice”
  •   Silvia Zueck, “Mineros italianos transfronterizos: entre la violencia laboral del capitalismo minero de Sierra Mojada, Coahuila y la revolucion mexicana.
  •   Marco Antonio Samaniego López, “Hacia la revolución mundial: la frontera México-Estados Unidos y el anarquismo (1904-1918)”

4:30 to 5pm- Wrap Up: Dr. Ernesto Chávez- Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso

Location: Café Mayapan

7 to 11pm- Dinner & Festivities, Café Mayapan

Sunday, February 4, 2018

Location (Pick up & Drop off): Hilton Garden Inn El Paso / University8:30 to 11am- Guided Visits to Notable Border Sites (Space limited)