Date/Time
Date(s) - 10/03/2024
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Location
EIZ Theater - JFSB B192
Category(ies)
The Humanities Center is pleased to welcome Anna Nogar, Professor of Hispanic Southwest Studies at the University of New Mexico, as our colloquium speaker on Thursday, October 3 at 3:00 PM in the EIZ Theater (B192 JFSB). Her presentation will examine the Columbus Raid and the Pershing Punitive Expedition from a Hispanophone Borderlands perspective, highlighting how citizens responded to these historical events. We hope you will join us.
Title: “A Window into the Mexican Revolution: Pancho Villa’s 1916 Raid and La punitiva in the Hispanophone Borderlands”
One of the most significant moments of the Mexican Revolution occurred outside of the borders of the Mexican nation. On March 8th and 9th, 1916, Pancho Villa rode with his men, La División del Norte, into Columbus, NM from Palomas, Mexico where they had been camped, the two sites separated by less than five miles. Attacking the town and its military garrison Camp Furlong, from which they took arms and supplies, Villa’s troops were outnumbered by American military and crossed the border back to Mexico, declaring victory in the skirmish. In short order, American President Woodrow Wilson authorized military action in Mexico in pursuit of Villa and his men for the attack on United States soil and mobilized additional American troops to the border. Led by General John J. Pershing, the hunt for Pancho Villa in Mexico became known as the Pershing Punitive Expedition, or “La punitiva” in Spanish.
The Columbus Raid and Punitive Expedition are often taught within the arc of Mexican or American histories of the Mexican Revolution. In this talk, I propose a view onto these events from a primarily Hispanophone Borderlands perspective, speaking between and to these two narratives. The materials and instructional approaches I explore provide an essential balancing conversation, showing how Borderlands citizens, communicating across the national narratives that came to define the events, responded to them.
About our guest:
Anna María Nogar is Professor of Hispanic Southwest Studies and Associate Dean of Humanities at the University of New Mexico. She has published many works treating colonial Mexico, New Mexico and the US/Mexico Borderlands, including Quill and Cross in the Borderlands: Sor María de Ágreda and the Lady in Blue, 1628 to the Present (2018, 2025); El Feliz ingenio neomexicano: Felipe M. Chacón and Poesía y prosa (2021, 2023); Colonial Itineraries of Contemporary Mexico (2014); and Sisters in Blue/Hermanas de azul (2017). She is co-editor of the three volume on Mexican literature: A History of Mexican Literature (2016, 2019), A History of Mexican Poetry (2024) and A History of the Mexican Novel (forthcoming).
