Dear Friends of the Center of Greater Southwestern Studies at UT Arlington:
This is Christopher Conway, Professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages and Faculty Fellow of the Center for Greater Southwestern Studies. During the 2019-2020 academic year, I served as acting director of the Center while Sam Haynes completes his residency as a Bill and Rita Clements Senior Fellow at the Clements Center for Southwestern Studies at SMU.
In Sam’s absence, we continued to develop materials for A Continent Divided, an innovative web resource about the U.S.-Mexican War that is helping educators and students understand this key event through U.S. and Mexican historical documents. In the Fall of 2019, our Center intern, Ms. Alexandra Sánchez, helped us with this project.
On Thursday, February 20, 2020, the Center hosted the day long event “Memories and Legacies of La Raza Unida” to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the groundbreaking Texas political party La Raza Unida. We were honored to feature José Angel Gutiérrez, one of the founders of La Raza Unida, as well as Raza Unida activists and organizers Eva Bonilla, Rosie Castro, Olivia “Evey” Chapa, and Richard Gonzales. Sam started planning this event one year before it happened and it was my pleasure to see it through to completion with Barbara S. Moore, the Center administrator, who lifted heaven and earth to help make it a success. Our Spring 2019 intern, Ms. Valeria Torres, also contributed to this event, as well as assisting with other projects in the Spring semester.
In tandem with the “Memories and Legacies of La Raza Unida,” the Center collaborated with Special Collections at the UT Arlington Library to stage a companion photo exhibit in the Sixth Floor Library Parlor about Mexican American political activism in Crystal City and North Texas.
The Center was also honored to partner with several other units at UT Arlington to support two excellent events: The Mexican Ballet Troupe Nepantla (Primary Sponsor: Center for Mexican American Studies, event held on October 2, 2019), and The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Symposium (Primary Sponsor: Native American Student Association, event held October 16, 2019).
One of my priorities as acting director has been to take our Fronteras Newsletter online in order to more effectively promote the scholarship of UTA faculty and other scholars who work in Southwestern Studies. It was a long process: we had to learn about how to create a site that met UTA’s accessibility requirements, interview authors and professors about their work, do original research, and figure out how to design and organize the newsletter. We launch now but look forward to continued improvements now that the heavy lifting needed for our first issue is done. We want Fronteras to be a hub for learning about the vibrant research being done inside and outside of UTA in Southwestern Studies. We had plans for creating a Fronteras video channel, but global events intruded and have postponed those plans.
Along the same lines, I have been working with the Center administrator, Ms. Barbara S. Moore, on a new and more colorful social media campaign to begin in June of 2020. We have been writing social media posts, combing the Library of Congress website for photographs to use, and banking our work for future posting.
I close with other acknowledgments. I appreciate the support of the Center’s Faculty Fellows, and the Center’s Board. Everyone provided input and offered help. In particular, I thank our partners at the UT Arlington Library, most notably Dean Rebecca Bichel, for her steady and enthusiastic support of some of our most important initiatives. The Center does a great deal of work in collaboration with Special Collections, and we thanks its director Brenda McClurkin, and Ben Huseman in particular, for partnering with us and contributing to the work of the Center in significant ways. On a more personal note, I thank Ms. Barbara S. Moore, the Center’s administrator, for her constant support during my work as acting director.
Please share links to our newsletter articles on your Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. On this site you will find posts celebrating the work of our friends and colleagues, as well as commentary and insights that will be compelling to anyone interested in Southwestern Studies.
