Texas Border Business
EDINBURG, Texas — March 9, 2018 — From March 13 through April 29, the “Vaquero: Genesis of the Texas Cowboy” exhibition will be available for viewing at the Museum of South Texas History in Edinburg. To further expand on this topic, the museum will host Caroline Miles, an associate professor at UTRGV, who will present “From Vaquero to Cowboy, Free-Grazer to Barbed Wire: Contested Borders” Sunday, March 18, at 2 p.m.
Miles will discuss how the vaquero is part of a largely forgotten history of rich and contested relationships between the U.S. and Mexico. This presentation will also examine the controversy surrounding the UTRGV mascot, the vaquero. “Vaquero: Genesis of the Texas Cowboy” will be available for viewing after the presentation which will feature photographs with “bilingual narrative text that reveal the muscle, sweat, and drama that went into roping a calf in thick brush or breaking a wild horse in the saddle.”
Miles is an associate professor of English and the Coordinator of Border Studies at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley. She received a bachelor of arts in American Studies from the University of Wales in the U.K., and master and doctorate degrees from the University of Southern Mississippi. She has published numerous articles on global capitalism and the South as well as on dime novels and Latin American feminism. Her current research examines how global borders quarantine and distract from racial, economic and national problems. She is also the recipient of the prestigious UT System Regents’ Teaching Excellence Award.
