CSSW News and Events

Public History Alumni help with foundation document for Blackwell School National Historic Site

In late August, CSSW Director, John Mckiernan-González , and TXST Public History alumni Avery Armstrong and Tori Villarreal had the opportunity to participate in the foundation document workshop for the new Blackwell School National Historic Site in Marfa, TX with the National Park Service. Avery and Tori have both worked extensively on collecting and documenting the histories of local communities throughout the Southwest – from Hays County to far West Texas. The creation of the Blackwell School's foundation document is an essential step in the site's designation as a National Historic Site.

Exhibit | Sun City by Gabriela Moreno 
Closing Reception | Thursday, September 5, 2024 
2:00 pm | Brazos Hall

Made in El Paso, Texas on Thanksgiving weekend of 2023, these pictures document aspects of community life in El Paso. Home to one of the nation’s largest military bases and located on the U.S.-Mexico border, El Paso is a unique cultural place, distinct from the other Texan cities both in its diverse heritage as a long-standing place of exchange and crossing and its striking basin and range landscape.

Dr. Sarah Blue Named Jesse H. and Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Southwestern Studies for 2024-2027
The Jones Professor Welcome Reception Will Be Held
Wednesday, September 18, 2024 | 2:00 pm | Brazos Hall

The CSSW is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Sarah Blue, Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, as the Jesse H. and Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Southwestern Studies for 2024 through 2027. 

Dr. Sarah Blue has maintained an ongoing interest in the political geography of migration, gender, and development studies, even as the place, location and focus of the projects have changed. Dr. Blue graduated from the University of Denver with undergraduate majors in geography and philosophy. She completed her master’s degree at the University of Minnesota, focusing the mobilization of Guatemalan refugee women. Her dissertation from the University of California, Los Angeles emphasized the shaping of socio-economic inequality in Cuba. 

The Woman in Blue:  
How Native Storytellers Turned a Bilocating Nun into an Expression of Indigenous Geopolitics  
Dr. Juliana Barr | Friday, September 27, 2024  
1:00 pm | Flowers Hall 230 | Reception to Follow

Juliana Barr will discuss findings from a book manuscript she is now finishing up – La Dama Azul: How to Tell Colonial History in a Supernatural Idiom – that explores the Indigenous side to a seventeenth-century Spanish miracle tale that spread across the far northern provinces of New Spain (what later became Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona).  The Spanish story told of a nun in Spain who was carried to the Americas by angels and, with their aid, miraculously appeared in the sky to Native people, told them of Christianity, and encouraged them to seek out conversion. 

Book Talk | They Call you Back by Tim Z. Hernandez  
Wednesday, October 9, 2024 | 6:30 pm  
Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos | 211 Lee St. San Marcos, TX 78130

Hernandez’s mission to find the families of the twenty-eight Mexicans who were killed in the 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos Canyon formed the basis for his acclaimed documentary novel All They Will Call You, which The San Francisco Chronicle dubbed “a stunning piece of investigative journalism,” and The New York Times hailed as “painstaking detective work by a writer who is the descendent of farmworkers.”

In this riveting new work, Hernandez continues his search for the plane crash victims while also turning the lens on himself and his ancestral past, revealing the tumultuous and deeply intimate experiences that have fueled his investigations—a lifelong journey haunted by memory, addiction, generational trauma, and the spirit world. 

Book Talk | They Call you Back
Tim Z. Hernandez | Thursday, October 10, 2024
2:00 pm | Brazos Hall

In this riveting new work, Hernandez continues his search for the plane crash victims while also turning the lens on himself and his ancestral past, revealing the tumultuous and deeply intimate experiences that have fueled his investigations—a lifelong journey haunted by memory, addiction, generational trauma, and the spirit world.

They Call You Back is the true chronicle of one man’s obsession to restore dignity to an undignified chapter in America’s past, while at the same time making a case for why we must heal our personal wounds if we are ever to heal our political ones.

Film Screening | Las Abogadas   
Charlene D'Cruz | Wednesday, October 16, 2024   
Reception 6:00 pm | Program 6:30pm   
Cephas House | 217 Martin Luther King Dr., San Marcos; TX 78666

Las Abogadas follows four immigration attorneys over a multi-year odyssey as the U.S. government under President Trump upends every law meant to protect those fleeing from persecution, violence and war.  From setting up a legal clinic in a Volkswagen bus in the middle of five thousand desperate migrants, to persuading border guards to follow the law and accept a blind woman into U.S. custody, to crossing the border to counsel African migrants stuck in Tijuana, to giving legal advice in the brutally hot Mexican sun to families desperate to see American soil—we watch our characters’ surreal journeys to try and help.

Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez Wins Ray Allen Billington Prize

Congratulations to former CSSW Jones Professor, Dr. Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez, who has won the Western History Association’s Ray Allen Billington Prize for the best article in the field of western history for "The Unsteady Comanchería: A Reexamination of Power in the Indigenous Borderlands of the Eighteenth-Century Greater Southwest" published in the April 2023 issue of The William and Mary Quarterly. This is the same article that was given honorable mention by the American Society for Ethnohistory’s Robert F. Heizer Award for the best peer-reviewed work in the field of ethnohistory.