Dr. Max Grossman (Art Historian, UT El Paso)
“The Native American Origins and Post-Colonial Architectural Developments of El Paso, Texas”
Friday, November 8, 3:00-5:00 pm in Art B-01
Every history book on El Paso begins with Juan María Ponce de León, who crossed the Rio Grande from Paso del Norte (now Ciudad Juarez) in 1827 with a Mexican land grant in hand and established a ranch on the north bank of the river. In the last six years, however, scholars of Indigenous history have uncovered eighteenth-century Spanish documents proving there was a pervasive Mescolero Apache presence in what is now downtown El Paso from 1778 through 1825. This revelation is forcing scholars to re-write the history of El Paso and the Borderlands region and re-evaluate the significance of Spanish-Apache relations during the Spanish colonial period.
Dr. Grossman will discuss the Indigenous origins of El Paso and its subsequent architectural development during the Mexican and American periods. The post-colonial architecture of El Paso begins with the adobe period, continues with the arrival of the first railroad in 1881 and the advent of the Victorian style, and then changes radically with the construction of the first reinforced concrete skyscrapers starting in 1908, when El Paso started to assume the character of a modern metropolis.
Presented by the Art History area of the School of Art.
