18 February 2025 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100

Diana Montaño (Washington University in St. Louis)

“The White Boys’ Burden: Revolutionary Mexico in the American Imagination”

As part of a larger book project on Mexico’s Necaxa hydroelectric plant, Diana Montaño examines a 1914 American adventure novel, Jack Straw in Mexico, and its account of an imagined attack by Zapatista rebels on the hydroelectric plant.

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Diana Montaño is an associate professor in the History Department at Washington University in St. Louis and is the author of Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City (University of Texas Press, 2023).

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This works-in-progress workshop is co-sponsored by HSTEM and the Latin American History workshops. Please RSVP to  santiago.munoz@austin.utexas.edu or jfstring@utexas.edu to receive the pre-circulated paper that will be discussed at the workshop.

31 January 2025 — 12:00 noon — GAR 4.100

Felipe Vilo Muñoz (UT)

“Under the Desert Spell”: The Atacama Desert Exploration Communities in Chile, 1820–1880

In this dissertation chapter, I examine how explorers’ knowledge production reshaped the Chilean government’s relationship with the Atacama Desert from 1820 to 1880. I argue that explorers such as Claude Gay (1800–1873), Ignacy Domeyko (1802–1889), Rudolph Philippi (1808–1904), Pedro Jose Amadeo Pissis (1812–1889), and Francisco Vidal Gormaz (1837–1907), developed a robust communication network with the Chilean government making the Atacama part of its national construction. Explorers led the Natural History Museum (1830) and the University of Chile (1842), institutions that produced most of the Atacama expedition reports, travelogues, periodicals, and maps to support the exploitation of its untapped resources such as guano, silver, copper, and nitrate. Nevertheless, the exploration was not a peaceful enterprise. It escalated into a conflict with the neighboring countries of Bolivia and Peru. The War of the Pacific (1879–1883), the last major conflict in South America, mobilized the Chilean government to occupy and annex the desert. The consequences of this war have shaped the Atacama to this day. Recent discoveries have demonstrated that the Atacama holds the world’s largest proven reserves of lithium, a promising commodity for the prospective energy revolution, which aim to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. The steady global influence of the Atacama reminds us of how the driest desert on Earth has contributed to the accelerating pace of global connectivity over the past two hundred years.

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Felipe Vilo Muñoz is a PhD candidate in the UT History Department and a 2024–2025 Linda Hall Library Fellow. His research concerns transnational knowledge production from the nineteenth-century exploration of the Atacama Desert.