CMAS-Harrington Symposium: Pushing Borders

Friday Feb 28, 2014 10:00 AM - 6:00 PM | Texas Union Eastwoods Room (UNB 2.102)

"Pushing Borders: Extending Mexican, U.S. and Chicano Historiographies"

This academic symposium, organized by Ana Raquel Minian, a 2013-2014 Donald D. Harrington Faculty Fellow, will explore the histories of multiple border crossings in and across Mexico and the United States. The presenters will push the geographic, thematic, and temporal boundaries of Mexican, U.S., and Chicano historiographies.

Although “transnationalism” has become a popular topic of study in recent years, most scholarship remains bounded, with few historians talking across “seemingly-evident” geographic divisions. This symposium brings together historians who focus on the United States, Mexico and the Mexico-U.S. borderlands to expand our understandings of geographic boundaries as well as to blur the existing intellectual borders in Mexican, U.S., and borderlands historiographies.

Because la frontera has been porous to the circulation of people, capital, violence and drugs, religious and cultural understandings, sexual behaviors and gendered identities, environmental degradation, regulatory institutions, notions of human rights, and diplomatic negotiations, this symposium will inevitably open a space to bring cultural, political, social, and economic historiographies in dialogue with one another.

The symposium will also help to complicate our understandings of existing binaries including legal/illegal, Mexico/United States, cultural/materialist and gender/sexuality. Finally, the symposium will contribute to a growing trend in Mexican, Mexican American, and U.S. historiographies that seeks to push the temporal boundaries of study into the 1970s and beyond.

This event is free and open to the public. No registration is required.

Welcome

10:00 AM

Panel 1: (Un)Holy Practices and Pleasures

10:15 AM

• Pablo Piccato, Columbia University, "Mexican Detective Novel: Crime, Justice and Americanization in the Mid-Twentieth Century"
• Anne Martinez, The University of Texas at Austin, “Catholic Borderlands: Mapping Catholicism into American Empire, 1905-1935"
• Gabriela Cano, El Colegio de México, “Bohemian Nights, Anxieties and Pleasures of Modernization in Mexico City”

Lunch

11:45 AM

Panel 2: Contested Space

1:00 PM

• Jocelyn Olcott, Duke University,  “Cosmopolitans, Internationalists, and 'Visiting Lesbians': Mexican Feminism Takes the Transnational Turn”
• Ana Raquel Minian, Stanford University, “De Terruño a Terruño: Re-imagining Belonging Through the Creation of Clubs Sociales”
• Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, University of Southern California, “Contested  Migrations and the Making of California Gardens”

Panel 3: Divisions and Bridges

2:30 PM

• Nicole Guidotti-Hernández, The University of Texas at Austin, “Borderlands Histories of Exclusion”
• George J. Sánchez, University of Southern California, “Crossing Borders & Building Bridges in Urban America:  The Case of Boyle Heights, California”

Commentary and Discussion

4:00 PM

• Led by Monica Muñoz Martinez, The University of Texas at Austin

Reception

5:00 PM

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