History Department Open House begins at 3:00 so please come and visit with your favorite professors until our first annual Homecoming lecture begins at 3:30.  Dr. Durwood Ball, Associate Professor of History and Editor of the New Mexico Historical Review,  will present “Contesting the Memory of Spanish Empire in New Mexico: History, Politics, and Conflict in Modern Times” 

Dr. Ball will give a brief presentation on the recent protests against public memorials and festivals that recall or memorialize Spanish conquest, conquerors, and empire in New Mexico and the Southwest. The roots of these memorials and memories in New Mexico both parallel and diverge from the enshrinement of Confederate heroes by the South's Lost Cause myth in the early twentieth century. Going back nearly five decades, the media criticism of and street protests against these memorials, icons, and festivals in New Mexico have profoundly rocked long-cherished regional history, myth, and identity formed in specific times and places to confront racial and cultural politics in modern America.