The Center of Southwest Studies at Fort Lewis College will host a presentation from the Center’s 2018-2019 Doctoral Fellow, Patrick Troester, on Wednesday, November 28th at 5:30 pm in the Center’s Lyceum Room #120. Troester will present on his dissertation research, Examining Violence in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands and its Impact on Nation Building.

Troester’s research focuses on the role of violence in shaping nationalism and state power in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands during the mid-nineteenth century, drawing from U.S. and Mexican archives to uncover both the lived experiences of borderland violence as well as the ways in which the region’s diverse peoples used it as fodder for constructing political power and collective identities.

The presentation will focus on the project’s central chapter about the U.S.-Mexican War. This conflict has traditionally been understood in simplistic national terms as one between to fully-formed and sovereign “sister republics.” Wartime experiences in the borderlands, however, reveal something more complex. Focusing on guerrilla warfare and attacks upon civilians, Troester will examine the ways in which wartime violence and the struggles over its meanings literally called the nation-state into being, even as bitter internal conflicts continued to split both sides. On paper as well as on the ground, such violence helped to make state power and nationalism unavoidably, often painfully, real for local people.

Patrick Troester is the Center’s 2018-2019 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 Southern Methodist University. Troester will spend the academic year in residence at the Center conducting research in the archives, in addition to teaching for the College’s department of history.

Troester grew up in Pennsylvania, but found borderlands history in graduate school. He has since lived in Dallas, Texas where he is a Ph. D candidate at SMU. He plans to graduate in spring of 2020 and to pursue a university teaching position.

The Center of Southwest Studies, now in its fifty-fourth year, 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. For more information, please contact the Center’s business office at 970-247-7456 or visit http://swcenter.fortlewis.edu