Forgotten Frontera: The Mexican American Southern Plains

FAIN: AC-284513-22

West Texas A & M University (Canyon, TX 79016-0001)
Alex Hunt (Project Director: May 2021 to present)
Alexandria Janette McCormick (Co Project Director: December 2021 to September 2022)
Katelyn Denney (Co Project Director: January 2023 to August 2024)
Benjamin Pascoe (Co Project Director: August 2024 to present)

A curricular and co-curricular enrichment initiative focused on the cultural and historical roles of Mexican Americans in the Southern Plains region.  

The Center for the Study of the American West (CSAW) at WTAMU undertakes “Forgotten Frontera: The Mexican American Southern Plains” to preserve cultural heritage and to further teaching/learning in the humanities, including Spanish language and culture, through curricular innovation, faculty development, and community outreach. To build strength in humanities through HSI status, the project emphasizes a marginalized ethnic regional history and the under-appreciated importance of that group’s contribution to regional culture. Visiting scholars will address annual topics of “The Llaneros,” “Mexicanidad,” and “Becoming Mexican American.” WTAMU faculty will develop and offer thematically aligned humanities and language courses each year. Working between the university, its museum, and the community, CSAW will oversee curricular development, discussion of HSI best practices, delivery of new research, and student internships.

Associated Products

Forgotten Frontera Ethnography (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Forgotten Frontera Ethnography
Author: Alex Hunt
Abstract: This paper and this panel are envisioned with an audience primarily of New Mexicans and Texans; our papers would be appropriate for any community group or club interested in regional history and literature. The “forgotten frontera” explored is that borderland between eastern New Mexico and western Texas, the isolated llano, the southern Great Plains. In 1786, peace treaties between Span and the Comanches led to a period of peace and trade. For the next 90 years, New Mexican pioneers ventured further east onto the plains to hunt bison, trade with the Comanches, and herd sheep. By the time this period came to an end in the 1870s and 80s, New Mexican sheepmen had established ranchos and small settlements in the Texas panhandle and beyond. This period is paid little attention in New Mexican histories more focused on the Rio Grande valley and other more populated areas of the territory. More troubling, the history is largely omitted and whitewashed in Texas because it implicates Texas cattlemen in a violent territorial takeover. This project is thus engaged in analyzing two ethnographic texts, Fabiola Cabeza de Baca’s We Fed Them Cactus (1954) and Samuel Leo Gonzales’ The Days of Old (1993). Multivalent and genre crossing, these books include rich oral tradition that recount pioneer days, lifeways, and the end of the period with the coming of the Texans.
Date: 09/20/2022
Primary URL: https://www.westernlit.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Program-2022-for-distribution-side-by-side.pdf
Primary URL Description: Western Literature Association conference program 2022 see page 15

Plazas, Cañones and Acequias: A Cartographic Narration of the Mexican Llano Estacado (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Plazas, Cañones and Acequias: A Cartographic Narration of the Mexican Llano Estacado
Author: Andrew Reynolds
Abstract: The southern plains of West Texas has a rich Mexican cultural history that is also a history of indigeneity, mestizaje, and colonialism. The 19th century American cartographic archive of the region maps the development of settler culture while also recording remnants of Mexican and indigenous presence and subsequent removal. This presentation, as part of the West Texas A&M University “Forgotten Frontera” NEH-funded project, uses the region’s map archive to create a toponymic storytelling of the Mexican cultural and historical record of Llano Estacado. The spatial reconstructions of place names and geography in maps recount historical and cultural authority. Toponyms also serve as generalizing metaphors that erase narrative and fail to pronounce plot lines, conflict, stories, and histories. Nevertheless, a critical reading of maps can reveal unseen trail ways, riverbeds, and plaza structures that help to reconstruct new stories of the southern plains. A new narrative cartography of the Mexican cultural history of the region resists White Supremacist settler colonialism through the recovery of stories, histories, and cultures with lasting legacies of colonial resistance, agricultural ingenuity, and an ecology of preservation and care.
Date: 09/20/22
Primary URL: https://www.westernlit.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Program-2022-for-distribution-side-by-side.pdf
Primary URL Description: Western Literature Association, 2022 conference program see page 15

Forgotten Frontera: Latina/o Histories and the Center for the Study ofthe American West (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Forgotten Frontera: Latina/o Histories and the Center for the Study ofthe American West
Author: Alex Hunt
Abstract: Roundtable Discussion, "Latinx Public History:Taking Our History Out of the Shadows." Hunt presentation discussed the whitewashing of Lantinx history on the southern plans and CSAW's Forgotten Frontera program goals, including visiting scholars and oral history project.
Date: 09/14/2022
Primary URL: https://www.dropbox.com/s/0doown54mjb4lve/2022%20WHA%20Conference%20Program_Final%20-%20V2.pdf?dl=0
Primary URL Description: Western History Association 2022 conference progam see page 36

ENGL 4360: Ethnic Homelands, Migrations, and Place (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: ENGL 4360: Ethnic Homelands, Migrations, and Place
Author: Alex Hunt
Abstract: This course will first provide an overview of literary regionalism as it developed in the US. It will then focus on Mexican American southwest regionalism as a study of issues of place, the geography of ethnicity, and the meaning of regionalism at a time of globalism and increasing migration. The course’s regional focus includes the Texas Panhandle/Southern Plains region and is connected to CSAW’s “Forgotten Frontera” program, which will include some special features and opportunities.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.wtamu.edu/_files/docs/ENGL%204360%202022SP%20Hunt.pdf
Primary URL Description: Link to course syllabus found on CSAW's Forgotten Frontera webpage.
Audience: Undergraduate

SPAN 2315: Hispanic High Plains (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: SPAN 2315: Hispanic High Plains
Author: Andrew Reynolds
Abstract: This course will enhance your Spanish language skills by providing you with new and important contexts for the use of Spanish. Through various forms of media such as literature, non-fiction, journalism, television, and film, you will be able to address questions about bilingualism, immigration, national and cultural borders, oral history, and globalization that will expand your language proficiency. This course is not designed to “reform” your language abilities, but to add to them specific proficiencies directly related to professional activities, community interaction, and cultural awareness. Additionally, this course will introduce you to several important social and cultural themes. While the first semester of Spanish for Heritage Speakers explores questions of Latina/o identity in the United States more generally, the second semester will delve into the impact of Hispanic people, cultures, and language on the Panhandle of Texas and the High Plains, also known as the “Llano Estacado.” We will explore how Spanish-speaking people travelled, settled, and worked in the High Plains, and how the deep historical and cultural roots impact the region today.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.wtamu.edu/museum/csaw/forgotten-frontera-2022/Forgotten%20Frontera%202022.html
Audience: Undergraduate

ENGL/SPAN 4392/5392: The Llaneros (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: ENGL/SPAN 4392/5392: The Llaneros
Author: Andrew Reynolds
Author: Alex Hunt
Abstract: This course, cross-listed between English and Spanish, undergraduate and graduate, is connected to a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, concerns Hispanic culture on the high plains. In particular, we will read Spanish, New Mexican, and Mexican American texts from or concerning the era of “discovery” through the nineteenth century. Our readings will be diverse, including exploration narrative, historical scholarship, folklore, and fiction. Reading with such breadth is necessary for the “recovery” of Mexican American legacies in our region. Students in this course will have the opportunity both to learn about this legacy and to contribute new knowledge to the field.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.wtamu.edu/_files/docs/Syllabus%208.19%204392%20Llaneros%20Fall%202022.pdf
Audience: Graduate

Oral History Resources (Web Resource)
Title: Oral History Resources
Author: Alex Hunt
Abstract: This website includes links to two documents, the oral history best practices guide and the oral history interview consent form. The resources are here made readily available to grant personnel, associated faculty/staff, and students involved in oral history collection.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.wtamu.edu/museum/csaw/forgotten-frontera-2022/Overview.html
Primary URL Description: CSAW's NEH Forgotten Frontera Overview page, including Oral History Resources

Hunt, Rudolfo Anaya, Llanero: Bless Me, Ultima in Southern Plains Context (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Hunt, Rudolfo Anaya, Llanero: Bless Me, Ultima in Southern Plains Context
Author: Alex Hunt
Abstract: Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima has, it seems, fallen from favor among Latinx scholars today. And this is no wonder, as Anaya’s novel, with its interests in Mesoamerican and archetypal myths and its gender chauvinism, is dated. Even at its first publication in 1972, the novel’s rural setting and pastoral themes seemed somewhat at odds with Chicano activism of the day. Yet the novel remains in many ways important, especially for residents of the southern plains of eastern New Mexico and western Texas, a region not rich in literary tradition. Even more importantly, as I will argue in this presentation, Bless Me, Ultima has been insufficiently understood in terms of the complex colonial histories of the southern plains. Reading Anaya’s work in this way opens a new political and historical dimension to the novel. Read in this context, the novel is work of recovery and remembrance that explores the implications of multiple waves of colonization—Spanish and Mexican colonization of Comanche lands, Anglo-American colonization of New Mexico—from Coronado to Oppenheimer. This paper is part of an ongoing National Endowment for the Humanities grant, “Forgotten Frontera: The Mexican American Southern Plains,” won by the Center for the Study of the American West at West Texas A&M University.
Date: 10/12/23
Primary URL: http://https://westernlit.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Program-2023-with-corrections-low-res.pdf
Primary URL Description: Western Literature Association 2023 Conference Program, see p. 17

Garcia-Oyervides, Under the Shadow of Greater Mexico: Yaqui Autobiographical Writings in Transnational Contexts (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Garcia-Oyervides, Under the Shadow of Greater Mexico: Yaqui Autobiographical Writings in Transnational Contexts
Author: Juan Garcia Oyervides
Abstract: Rosalio Moises and Refugio Zavala’s autobiographies invite us to rethink Americo Paredes’ conceptualization of Greater Mexico from the perspective of displaced cultural identities. Following the work of Yariel Zatarani Tumbaga, I interpret the works of native Yoeme individuals with the Yaqui warrior myth as a cultural backdrop. The dialectically constructed myth renders indigeneity in general, and yaqui culture in particular, as a romanticized trait to be assimilated by expanding mexicana/chicana consciousness, and a source of abjection. Sustained by the expansion of hegemonic notions of mexicanidad along the US/Mexico border in the 20th century, the myth visibilized an conceptual framework that excluded intellectual involvement of the Yoeme with non-native cultural spheres. The life-journeys represented in the work of these writers contributes to a nuanced appreciation of the cultural expansion of mexicanidad during the first half of the 20th century, and invites us to reflect critically about our responsibilities as participants/advocates of these communities, and its future development.
Date: 01/07/23
Primary URL: http://https://mla.confex.com/mla/2023/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/21804
Primary URL Description: Modern Language Association Conference 2023, See conference agenda

Bowman, John Chávez’s _The Lost Land_ (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Bowman, John Chávez’s _The Lost Land_
Author: Timothy Bowman
Abstract: I had thought initially that I would make some remarks on some of the specific ways in which Dr. Chávez helped shape my own work. For example, although it doesn’t figure heavily in The Lost Land, those of you who are familiar with Dr. Chávez’s later and more recent works will now that he is one of the leading proponents for the internal colonial model of race relations, a theory which posits that people can be colonized in their homelands inside of modern borders, and that the primary extracted resource from the colonized space is human capital. These ideas that he introduced me to, which no doubt played a major role in Chicano historiography in the 1970s a little bit before The Lost Land came out, helped shape the early part of my career. Perhaps an even clearer relationship between The Lost Land and some of the work produced my panelists today can be seen in Aaron Sánchez’s recent monograph, Homeland: Ethnic Mexicans and Belonging since 1900, which is an intellectual history of belonging in Mexican and Mexican-American thought. The relationship between these two monographs, which I will not comment on too deeply here, will be apparent to anyone in the audience who has read them both. So, how to prepare for a panel like this, in order to honor and do justice to my professor’s work? I went back to the book, which was something that I had not done since the spring of 2005, when I was interviewing for the program at SMU and familiarizing myself with some of the faculty’s work. I was immediately reminded upon picking the book back up of one thing, a quality of Dr. Chávez’s that I’ve always admired—the elegance of his writing.
Date: 10/28/23
Primary URL: http://https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/5b0iiyxm8khuvihi3bvxd/2023-Western-History-Program-FINAL-for-web.pdf?rlkey=u8cy6h3jv0sz1yksxfgxexjwz&e=1&dl=0
Primary URL Description: Western History Association Conference 2023, see page 51

Bowman, From Fascists to Farm Workers: the Racialization of Agricultural Labor in Hereford, Texas (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Bowman, From Fascists to Farm Workers: the Racialization of Agricultural Labor in Hereford, Texas
Author: Timothy Bowman
Abstract: Awaiting document
Date: 03/02/23
Primary URL: http://https://am.tsha.events/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/2023-El-Paso-TSHA-Annual-Meeting-Program.pdf
Primary URL Description: Texas Historical Association Conference Program, see p. 9

Reynolds, Affective Modernismos (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Reynolds, Affective Modernismos
Author: Andrew Reynolds
Abstract: Modernista expressions influenced many affective communities across Latin America and other latitudes, resulting in diverging forms of literary production and a far-reaching network of readers on both sides of the Atlantic. The study of modernismo through the lens of affect theories situates authors and readers in sites of emotive and bodily authority that both uphold long-standing sociopolitical perspectives on the literary movement and elicit renewed approaches to modernismo. This roundtable invites participants to consider the following questions on the critical connections between modernismo and affect: What are the theoretical possibilities that emerge when the affective turn and modernismo engage in dialog? How do theories and conceptualizations of affect reshape modernismo? Who is included and excluded in the horizon of possibilities that emerge from affective readings of modernismo as a heterogenous movement, period, or network of cultural agents? How does affect assist in reconceptualizing modernismo and questions on gender and sexuality? In what ways might affective approaches help expand, complicate, or enrich long-standing definitions and literary historiographies of what constitutes modernismo? In what ways does affect elicit comparative approaches to modernismo? What are some of the possible geographical networks and connections that modernismo and affect produce? If modernistas were concerned with aesthetic questions, how do affective categories respond to or update such aesthetic concerns? How might affective concepts lead to an engagement with questions of race appearing in modernista texts? Our roundtable aims to explore and generate discussions that rethink modernismo(s) through notions of affect.
Date: 05/25/23
Primary URL: http://https://lasaweb.org/uploads/lasa2023-program-optimized-may26-v8.pdf
Primary URL Description: LASA, 2023, Vancouver, BC See p. 43

Reynolds, Nation, Anticolonialsm and Utopia: Nicol Garay and the Creation of a New Panamanian Modernism (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Reynolds, Nation, Anticolonialsm and Utopia: Nicol Garay and the Creation of a New Panamanian Modernism
Author: Andrew Reynolds
Abstract: Nicole Garay, a nearly forgotten modernista poet from Panama who wrote in dialogue with the likes of Rubén Darío and Gabriela Mistral, redefined Panamanian modernism through the poetical tropes of patriotism, anticolonialism, and a profound connection to the ecology of the tropics. In this presentation, I propose that through Garay’s work, we should see Panamanian and indeed Central American modernism anew. Her strong feminist perspective rejects the masculine desire for coloniality in poems like “La llama inextinguible” and “Femina.” In “Paisaje tropical” and “El arbol” Garay turns to an eco-sensibility and the particular and uncommon natural environment foundational to the new Panamanian state. Additionally, and like other Panamanian modernistas, many of Garay’s poems are intensely patriotic. Nevertheless her "himnos" dedicated to Panama’s new nationhood speak of working women and provocative metaphors of death and femininity in relation to the Isthmus’ separation from Colombia in the early 20th century. Recovering Nicole Garay’s work and positioning her poetic production as integral in rereading modernism in the region contributes to the burgeoning field of feminine modernismos and aids in the creation of divergent readings of the male-centered Spanish American literary movement.
Date: 05/27/23
Primary URL: http://https://lasaweb.org/uploads/lasa2023-program-optimized-may26-v8.pdf
Primary URL Description: LASA program, see p. 139

SPAN 4392 "Contemporary Immigration Narratives" (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: SPAN 4392 "Contemporary Immigration Narratives"
Author: Andrew Reynolds
Abstract: Course Description: This course will explore narratives of contemporary immigration in the context of our Panhandle culture. We will read fiction and non-fiction, historical texts, and watch films on issues surrounding immigration today. The goal of the class is not to debate immigration issues, but to better understand the current Hispanic culture and the impacts of immigration, and to think critically about these issues and current cultural expression around ideas of immigration. Through discussions, note taking, and writing assignments, we will focus on analyzing and expressing ideas clearly in Spanish and improving our oral and written skills in the Spanish language.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: http://https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vCJo6tJnU3CF_Lpalceni6xmwcPr4AhN/view
Audience: Undergraduate

HIST 3366 "Borderlands History" (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: HIST 3366 "Borderlands History"
Author: Tim Bowman
Abstract: In this course, we will examine North American borderlands from the colonial period to the modern era. Although we will study borderlands from regional perspectives, we will also consider how the concept of “borderlands” has become fertile ground for analyzing broader questions about how interaction, contestation, and exchange between cultures, empires, and nations produces new ideologies, identities, and social formations. Recent scholarship on the borderlands has also been at the center of explorations of nation-building and transnational processes such as migration and economic globalization. Building upon this scholarship, this course will focus on North American borderlands in order to explore the links between the global political economy and the social construction of race, ethnicity, gender, community, and nation.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: http://https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HyQVyRb2SEFNpwcgM8-J7eM81jUabTUo/view
Audience: Undergraduate

HIST/SPAN 4392/5392 Braceros: Beyond Labor and Language (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: HIST/SPAN 4392/5392 Braceros: Beyond Labor and Language
Author: Andrew Reynolds and Tim Bowman
Abstract: This class examines the lasting cultural influences of the bracero program in the American Southwest. Aside from providing important manual labor that sustained imperial expansion of the United States, Mexican migrant workers and their families left long lasting impressions on the cultural landscape along the US/Mexico border. By surveying some of the most important historical and cultural markers surrounding the transnational labor agreement, the class will pay particular attention to the human experiences affected by and represented in historical and artistic artifacts. This course is cross-listed between the WTAMU Departments of History and Spanish. For history students, no knowledge of Spanish is required, and all reading assignments will be available in English.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: http://https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZkmIT3BviRRZhD3wEXq2I9JLABs4c0Ti/view
Audience: Undergraduate

Student Project, HIST/SPAN 4392 Bracero course (Web Resource)
Title: Student Project, HIST/SPAN 4392 Bracero course
Author: Ileana Escobar, Alejandro Piñon, Bennett "Skip" Stephens
Abstract: Student Project, HIST/SPAN 4392 Bracero course
Year: 2023
Secondary URL: http://https://sites.google.com/view/bracero-program?usp=sharing

Open Access Collection (Open Access eBook or Collection)
Publication Type: Open Access Collection
Title: Voces de Inmigrantes: Life After Moving to the Panhandle
Year: 2023
Publisher: WTAMU
Editor: Andrew Reynolds
Abstract: Student work: oral histories, poems, and analysis completed and published in support of SPAN 4392.
Primary URL: http://https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mme3i7FgIotB-zsWViXzxeEJiWfuCzUd/view
Primary URL Description: Voces de Inmigrantes
Type: Edited Volume

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