Omar Valerio-Jimenez, Winner of the David J. Weber Book Prize
Book Prize Award Lecture: Tuesday, April 7th, 2025
Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship
6 pm lecture followed by book signing.
The Texana Room, Fondren Library
6404 Robert S. Hyer Lane, SMU
Please register at swcenter@smu.edu.
The 2023 David J. Weber Prize for the Best Non-fiction Book on Southwestern America will be presented to Omar Valerio-Jimenez at a at a special ceremony and book signing at SMU honoring his volume, (University of North Carolina Press, 2024).
Omar Valerio-Jiménez addresses the politics of memory by exploring how succeeding generations reinforced or modified earlier memories of conquest according to their contemporary social and political contexts. The book also examines collective memories in the US and Mexico to illustrate transnational influences on Mexican Americans and to demonstrate how community and national memories can be used strategically to advance political agendas.
The judging committee wrote:
Omar Valerio-Jiménez’s Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenshipprovides a shrewd model for analyzing the political memories and historical consequences of borderland wars. Expansive in scope and ambitious in argument, this book shows how the memory of the U.S.-Mexico War lingered in the minds of Mexican Americans for more than a century. The author examines a wide array of archival evidence—more than a century's worth of legal activism, social organizing, academic insurgency, and political theater—to reveal how historical memory became a tool in claims for citizenship rights, and a motivation for political action. Remembering Conquest demonstrates that the trauma of the U.S. conquest of Mexico reverberated well beyond the nineteenth century, and even lingers today as a source of both collective grievance and action.
Omar Valerio-Jimenez is professor of history at UT San Antonio. His research and teaching focuses on Latinxs, Borderlands, Memory, Public History, and Immigration. He is also the author of River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands.
Victor M. Valle is a professor emeritus at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo. A native of Los Angeles, Victor Valle worked as a Los Angeles Times staff writer, during which time he won a Pulitzer Prize as a member of the reporting team that wrote the series Southern California’s Latino Community. He writes extensively on urban politics, economy, and food for a variety of media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times and Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies. He is the author of Recipe of Memory: Five Generations of Mexican Cuisine.
Please register at swcenter@smu.edu.
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