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Book Prize Award Lecture: Tuesday, March 11, 2025

The Poetics of Fire: Metaphors of Chile Eating in the Borderlands 

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 Victor Valle at a at a special ceremony and book signing at SMU honoring his volume, (University of New Mexico Press, 2023).

Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and Chicano author Victor M. Valle posits the chile as a metaphor for understanding the shared cultural histories of ChicanX and LatinX peoples from preconquest Mesoamerica to twentieth-century New Mexico.

The judging committee wrote:

Victor Valle's searing analysis of the historical and cultural meanings of the chile is impressively multidisciplinary, nearly exhaustive, and highly imaginative. In tracing the chile's place in ancient Mesoamerican cosmology, regimes of European conquest, and ongoing projects of liberation today, Valle brings into relief the chile's magnetic and mesmerizing force across the greater U.S. Southwest and beyond. 

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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