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Revolutionary lectures examine U.S.-Mexico relations

Written by Alysia Brooks, The Shorthorn staff

Tuesday, 09 March 2010 06:34 PM

This year, the History Department’s 45th Annual Walter Prescott Webb Lecture Series is co-hosted by the Center for Greater Southwestern Studies and the History of Cartography as part of an ongoing centennial commemoration of the Mexican Revolution.

This year the series highlights the topic, “The Mexican Revolution: Conflict and Consolidation, 1910-1940.” The lecture series are usually a one-day event, but the series has been expanded to two days this year in honor of the centennial. Speakers will be coming in from all across the U.S. and Mexico.

UTA history professor Doug Richmond provided an outline of what topics each speaker will cover.

He said Wednesday’s speakers will cover how Texas responded to the revolution, how the city of Monterrey endured the revolution, the three politicians from Sonora who dominated Mexican politics in the 1920s and Mexico’s return to the use of strong executive politics after 1928.

Richmond said Thursday’s speakers will discuss Mexican immigration into the U.S. during the 1920s and 1930s, the regional governments of Mexico during the revolution and how the Mexican government tried to bring its indigenous peoples into the mainstream.

The keynote speaker Thomas L. Benjamin, of Central Michigan University, will discuss various myths and legends that have arisen about the revolution and how the way the revolution is depicted and discussed has affected Mexico.

The revolution impacted relations between Mexico and the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans immigrated into the U.S. during this time and changed the demographic of the American Southwest, Texas in particular, according to the History Department’s Web site.

45th Annual Walter Prescott Webb Lecture Series

Wednesday

10 a.m. — “Wire Me Before Shooting”: Federalism in In(action)— The Texas-Mexico Border during the Revolution
Don M. Coerver, History Department, Texas Christian University
11 a.m. — The Rhetoric and Reality of Nationalism: Monterrey in the Revolution
Miguel Angel Gonzalez Quiroga, College of Philosophy and Letters, Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon, Monterrey, Mexico
1 p.m. — Sons of the Desert: The Sonoran Dynasty in Revolutionary Mexico
Jurgen Buchenau, History Department, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
2 p.m. — Back to Centralism, 1920-1940
Carlos Martinez Assad, Institute of Social Sciences, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico

Thursday

9:30 a.m — Refugees and Immigrants: The Obregon Administration and Mexicans in the United States, 1920-1924
Linda B. Hall, History Department, University of New Mexico
11 a.m. — The Mexican Revolution and the Mexican Immigrant Community: Memory, Identity and Survival, 1910-1940
Francisco E. Balderrama, Chicano Studies and History, California State University, Los Angeles
1:30 p.m. — Better Late Than Never: Chiapas and the (Imposed) Mexican Revolution, 1910-1940
Steve E. Lewis, History Department, California State University, Chico
7:30 p.m. — The Revolution is History: One Hundred Years of Looking Back (and Looking Forward)
Thomas L. Benjamin, History Department, Central Michigan University

All lectures will be given in the Central Library sixth floor parlor, with the exception of the keynote address, which will be in the Rosebud Theatre.