Past Events

Hear about the experiences of Indigenous students attending Fort Lewis Indian School during its two decades of operation under the US federal policy of assimilation.

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The Center’s 2019-2020 Doctoral Fellow Cony Márquez will present on her doctoral dissertation, Voices of Women in the Mexican Army: 1936-2018, on Wednesday, October 16^th at 5:30 pm in the Center’s Lyceum Room #120.

Márquez’s research is based on several interviews of first generation female officers that document the transformation within the traditionally male Mexican military. Since 2007 women have been able to enter the Military Academy, Military Police, Air Force and the School of Superior Studies, broadening their access to higher ranks including the unprecedented option to become Secretary of Defense. Her dissertation also includes the role of army wives in their husband’s careers, particularly high ranking officers, through life stories and official sources. 

Cony Márquez is the Center’s 2019-2020 doctoral fellow in Southwestern history. The fellowship is a collaborative effort between the Center, Fort Lewis College, and the graduate program in the history department at the University of Arizona. Márquez will spend the academic year in residence at the Center working on archival projects, in addition to teaching for the College’s department of history.

María Concepción Márquez Sandoval (Cony), is a Mexican born historian with a Master’s Degree in Art History from the National Autonomous University of Mexico – UNAM, and is currently a Ph. D candidate in history at the University of Arizona. Her academic interests are cultural history, ethnomusicology, art history, gender studies and Mexican military history.

On the 150th Anniversary of John Wesley Powell's first Colorado River Run, retired Justice Gregory Hobbs of the Colorado Supreme Court will revisit Powell's journeys into the Colorado River Plateau and his genius as a first-hand leading spokesperson of the western experience.

Friday, September 20th - 5:30 p.m. - Fort Lewis College Ballroom - Free.

This driving tour will focus on sites near Ophir and Telluride related to the development of alternating current, and will include information on early energy entrepreneurs like L.L. Nunn, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse. Part of the Durango History Live! programming.

Saturday, September 7th - 9:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. - Limited to 25 participants. Tickets: $15 for CSWS members, $25 for non-members. Lunch on your own in Telluride.
Call for reservations: 970-247-7456.

The Center of Southwest Studies at Fort Lewis College is celebrating its 55^th anniversary with a gala on Thursday, August 22^nd from 6:00-9:00 pm in the Center’s Plaza. Tickets are $100.00 supporting the Center’s educational programming aimed at student success. Attendees will be treated to live guitar music, a performance from the college’s Ballet Folklorico, and delicious food and beverages. Please visit www.fortlewis.edu/55thgala for ticketing and charitable contribution information. Limited seating. Please make your reservation by August 16^th.
 

The Center of Southwest Studies provides an active program of free public lectures and events year-round at its museum, research library, and archives facility on the campus of Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. The Center was imagined and founded in 1964 by Morley and Arthur Ballantine, former publishers of the Durango Herald, college president John Reed, and professor of history, Dr. Robert Delaney, to collect and curate all aspects of the history of the Southwest. The Center was the first of its kind to exclusively focus on the Southwest. Over the years the Center has collected thousands of original documents, photos, artifacts and rare books, all to be cared for and made readily available to faculty, students and researchers from all over the world. It remains as one of the premier facilities with the best archival photograph collection and textile collection, the Durango Collection®, of any undergraduate institution in the West.
 

According to Center director, Shelby Tisdale, “It is through the insight and vision of our founders, Morley and Arthur Ballantine, and the ongoing generous support of the Ballantine family that the Center of Southwest Studies has grown from a modest library and archives in a small lean-to attached to the Academic Building, to the 50,000 square foot building on the north end of the Fort Lewis College campus that houses the Center’s archives, library and museum as well as academic classrooms, faculty and staff offices, and a storage area for the college’s collections. As we celebrate our 55^th anniversary we look to a future of continuing our support of student success and community engagement. Please join us in honoring our founders and thanking the Ballantine family for more than half a century of ongoing support.”

For more information, please contact the Center’s business office at 970-247-7456.

The Center wraps up the summer series with Ruth Lambert's Documentation of Three Hispano Cemeteries along the San Juan River, on Wednesday, August 21st. The year's series theme is Hispanidad!, dovetailing with our newly updated Treasures of the Southwest exhibit featuring items from our Hispanic collections.

The Center welcomes Frank Graziano. He'll present on Historic Churches of New Mexico: A Visual Tour, on Wednesday, August 7th. The year's series theme is Hispanidad!, dovetailing with our newly updated Treasures of the Southwest exhibit featuring items from our Hispanic collections. The lectures take place in the Center's Lyceum Room #120 at 1:30 p.m. Free and open to the public.

The Center welcomes Frank Graziano. He'll present on Historic Churches of New Mexico: A Visual Tour, on Wednesday, August 7th. The year's series theme is Hispanidad!, dovetailing with our newly updated Treasures of the Southwest exhibit featuring items from our Hispanic collections. The lectures take place in the Center's Lyceum Room #120 at 1:30 p.m. Free and open to the public.

In this illustrated talk Frank Graziano provides an overview of historic churches throughout New Mexico and surveys themes pertinent to the churches’ current situation. The talk is based on Frank’s research in villages, Indian pueblos, and archives for his new book, Historic Churches of New Mexico Today.

Frank Graziano’s books on religious cultures include THE MILLENNIAL NEW WORLD (1999), WOUNDS OF LOVE: THE MYSTICAL MARRIAGE OF ST. ROSE OF LIMA (2003), CULTURES OF DEVOTION: FOLK SAINTS OF SPANISH AMERICA (2007), MIRACULOUS IMAGES AND VOTIVE OFFERINGS IN MEXICO (2016), and HISTORIC CHURCHES OF NEW MEXICO TODAY (2019), all published by Oxford University Press.

Graziano is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright and Fulbright-Hays programs, the John Carter Brown Library, Duke University, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, among many others. Between 1999 and 2016 he was John D. MacArthur Professor of Hispanic Studies at Connecticut College.

The Summer Lecture Series continues with Andy Gulliford returning to give a talk about, La Estrella del Pastor - Hispano Sheepherders from Colorado and New Mexico: Culture, Tradition, and Sheepscapes, on Wednesday, July 24th. The lectures take place in the Center's Lyceum Room #120 at 1:30 p.m. Free and open to the public.

From his book The Woolly West, Dr. Andrew Gulliford will speak about poor Hispanic sheepherders pastores, and wealthy Hispanic sheepowning families or ricos who transformed the West by the grazing of thousands of sheep across New Mexico and Colorado. He will discuss the history of sheep grazing as well as describe a powerful love story between Aldo Leopold and Estella Luna Otero Bergere. Gulliford will discuss the brutal sheep and cattle wars and explain historical archaeology and the wide variety of sites related to sheep movements, sheep camps, cairns, aspen tree carvings, and lonely sheepherder lifeways in Colorado’s high country for summer grazing. He will show photographs, and discuss cultural traditions, sheep camp recipes, high country wild herbs, and stories of Hispano herders who have grazed and still graze U.S. National Forest and BLM lands. Questions and stories from the audience will be welcomed.

Gulliford received the National Individual Volunteer Award from the U.S. Forest Service. The Woolly West won the Colorado Book Award for History and the Wrangler Western Heritage Award for Outstanding Non-Fiction from the National Cowboy Museum & Heritage Center. Books will be available for sale. Dr. Gulliford is a professor of history and Environmental Studies at Fort Lewis College in Durango.

The Summer Lecture Series continues. Lois Rudnick will return to give a talk on, La Fabulosa Fabiola (Cabeza de Baca): First ‘Lady’ of New Mexican Cuisine, on Wednesday, July 10th.
The series' theme Hispanidad! dovetails with our newly updated Treasures of the Southwest exhibit featuring items from our Hispanic collections.

The lectures take place in the Center's Lyceum Room #120 at 1:30 p.m. Free and open to the public.

Fabiola Cabeza de Baca was descended from one of the oldest land grant families in Northeastern New Mexico. Growing up on the “llano,” the vast plains east of Las Vegas New Mexico on her family’s ranch, she demonstrated an impassioned curiosity and intelligence that led her on a path to an extraordinary life devoted to teaching, writing, preserving and celebrating the lifeways of Hispano/a peoples of her land. She published two of the earliest cookbooks about New Mexico cuisine, touting the health of the land-based diet, and is credited with introducing the New Mexico chile into American cooking. She was one of the founders of the Spanish Folklorica Society of Santa Fe, served for many years as a food economist and trainer for the Agriculture Department, during which she travelled hundreds of miles throughout the state visiting small villages and pueblos, and had a weekly bi-lingual program on food and health, on Santa Fe radio.

Lois Rudnick is Professor Emerita of American Studies, University of Massachusetts Boston, where she taught for 36 years and chaired the American Studies Department for 26 years. During her time at UMB, she earned the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and the National American Studies Association award for outstanding teaching, mentoring, and program development. Rudnick has lectured and published nationally and internationally on Modern American and Southwest American culture and history. Her most recent project was co-curating the travelling exhibition, and co-editing the book, “Mabel Dodge Luhan & Company: American Moderns and the West.”