CSSW Projects Archive

Beginning in the late 1960s, a group of Chicanos and Chicanas gathered together as Brown Berets to advance and defend Mexican American issues and people in Austin.  Part of a transnational movement, the Brown Berets embraced direct action and confrontation to change and transform the situations facing Mexican American communities.

It is our hope that the East Austin Brown Beret Geographies Project will help people recognize the many ways Brown Beret chapter members helped shape the cultural geographies of Austin, Texas and the United States through actions grounded in the communities that made up East Austin.

More Information | East Austin Brown Beret Geographies 
Project Date | 2022

Migration Stories is an oral history project focusing on personal narratives of how we arrived to where we are now. We all have a migration story, some are closer than others. Participants to this event will learn more about the project and be invited to explore their own family history. Together we will produce broadsides of our own migration stories to be shared at the Center for the Study of the Southwest.

More Information | Migration Stories Workshop
Project Date | October 13, 2021

The At Play: Futbol in the Land of Football project started in Fall 2015, with a proposal for a class on the global history and local realities of soccer to the Honors College. “A ball, a field, at least five people: elements which have evolved into a global phenomenon, providing fodder for claims about national identity, and establishing the most watched activity ever. Soccer is too important to leave to fans. This course investigates the institutions, aesthetics, and ideologies shaping the game.” The goal of the class was to research what soccer meant to people playing the game in central Texas, to use the tools of collaborative social history to turn soccer into a particular kind of mirror for life in Texas.

More Information | At Play: Futbol in the Land of Football
Project Date | 2021

Sitting at the crossroads of empires, nation states, and migration streams, the American Southwest has long been a site of labor exploitation, and it continues to be a home to modern slavery. Since the 2000 passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and the formation and adoption of the United Nations’ Palermo Protocol, human trafficking and modern slavery has captured the attention of human rights activists, academics, jurists, labor organizers, and many others. Reports that the number of people caught in conditions of modern slavery continue to rise, as do the types of interventions to fight modern slavery. This symposium seeks to take the global phenomenon of modern slavery and trafficking, and ground it in the Southwest, considering the ways that labor migration, immigration restriction, border violence, and economic inequality combine to produce the soil that can give rise to modern slavery.

More Information | Chasing Slavery
Project Date | October 26 & 26, 2019

Covering a wide chronological and geographical span, from Colonial Yucatán to twentieth-century Bolivia, this symposium explores the manifold ways in which natives across the Americas resisted and adapted to the intrusion of people of European descent to preserve their political autonomy and their cultural identity, thus shaping the indigenous borderlands of the Western Hemisphere.

More Information | Indigenous Borderlands of the Americas
Project Date | April 6-7, 2018

Developments along the US-Mexico Borderlands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had long-lasting effects and contributed decisively to give the region its current configuration. This symposium offers a fresh look at some of the ways in which peoples of diverse ethnic backgrounds and geographical origins adapted to the borderlands environment and to one another during that period. As the conquest and colonization of northern New Spain progressed, crown officials and churchmen endeavored to enhance their knowledge of the land and its indigenous inhabitants, and to extend Spanish civil, military, and religious jurisdictions, social practices, and cultural traditions across the region, often at the expense of native peoples and cultures.

More Information | Landscapes, Peoples, and Institutions
Project Date | April 1, 2017

Join historians Frank de la Teja, Byron Price, Joyce Roach, and Richard Slatta for a look at cattle trail history in Texas and around the world. To request tickets, visit the Fort Worth Library Lonesome Dove Trail page.

More Information | Vaqueros, Cowboys, and Cowgirls
Project Date | April 2, 2016

This symposium explores some of the ways in which the residents of the US-Mexico Borderlands have adapted to the changing circumstances of the frontier over the last two centuries. Presenters will discuss how interethnic cooperation and marriage, the legal and illegal movement of people and goods, labor unionism, and other strategies have permitted border dwellers to overcome the hardships and exploitation of border life, and, in some cases, to thrive.

More Information | Opportunity and Adaptation across the US-Mexico Borderlands
Project Date | February 27, 2016

Seven graduates of the History MA program who work in Texas history came together for a one-day symposium “Views from the Hill: History, Myth, and Memory in Texas,” to discuss the research on a broad range of regional topics.

More Information | Views from the Hill
Project Date | January 31, 2015

Latinos and Sports in the Southwest explores the participation of Latinos in sports in the Southwestern borderlands. The presentation series is complemented by an exhibit of photographs in Brazos Hall portraying Latino participation in Texas State University’s sports programs.

More Information | Latinos in Sports in the Southwest
Project Date | Fall 2014

Presented by Texas State’s Center for the Study of the Southwest and The Wittliff Collections, and funded in part by a grant from the Summerlee Foundation, this symposium explored the diversity of that opposition and challenged the myth of a monolithic pro-Confederate Texas. Hosted at The Wittliff Collections in Alkek Library on the campus of Texas State University, the symposium consisted of two morning sessions and one afternoon session of three presentations each, followed by a keynote address and a Q&A period.

More Information | Lone Star Unionism and Dissent
Project Date | April 5, 2014