February 19, 2025: ToniAnn Treviño

Noon Talk: Outcries in the Barrio: Chicano Visions for Drug Rehabilitation and Community Recovery in San Antonio 

ToniAnn Treviño, Summerlee Fellow for the Study of Texas History
12 noon to 1 PM
The Texana Room, Fondren Library, 6404 Robert S. Hyer Lane, SMU

This talk examines how ethnic Mexicans in San Antonio experienced overlapping anti-narcotics crusades, and how community members crafted responses to drug policing through religious, medical, and social institutions. She explores how federal, state, and local narcotics-control programs framed transnational urban spaces as extensions of lawless U.S.-Mexico borderlands. This presentation will draw from Chicano-made newspapers, publications, and films to explore how self-identified Chicanos waged their own war against drugs and police brutality in San Antonio throughout the 1970s.

ToniAnn Treviño is the Summerlee Fellow for the Study of Texas History. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2022 with a certificate in Latina/o Studies. She is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Texas. Her research focuses on ethnic Mexicans in the Texas-Mexico borderlands, the twentieth century war on drugs, urban history, policing, and contesting visions for drug rehabilitation in urban Latinx communities. ToniAnn will use her time at the Clements Center to revise her book manuscript, “San Antonio After Sundown: The War on Drugs & Envisioning Rehabilitation in Postwar Mexican Neighborhoods,”

Free and open to the public. No reservations necessary. Questions? Email swcenter@smu.edu.  

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