The Mitchell-Reed Community of Learners is honored to host Dr. Brenda Matthews at 12:30 p.m. on April 4 in room 203 of the library. Her topic will be “The Farm Security Administration and Health Care in Taos, New Mexico, 1940-1947.”

From 1940 to 1947, the Farm Security Administration joined the Taos County Project to "vanquish the disguised joker" that clouded government-sponsored programs in northern New Mexico. The Hispanos of Taos County, steeped in the legal and cultural ethos of Spain and later Mexico, encountered a new set of values and laws when the Americans seized control of the area after the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo and remained guarded of Washington. Decades of exploitation made them suspicious of programs offered by outsiders. Therefore, the FSA’s medical cooperative, part of the Harwood Foundation Taos County Project, had to overcome the wariness of Taoseños, or "vanquish the disguised joker," to engage them successfully in medical care and sanitation projects.

Dr. Brenda Matthews, A.M. Pate Professor of History, researches the New Deal. Her latest projects include the 1930s Writers Project and the subject of this presentation, the Farm Security and its medical efforts in Taos County, New Mexico, between 1940 and 1947. She co-authored "College on the Hill: Texas Wesleyan University, 125 Years", published in 2015, and published several chapters in books, including "The New Deal in Cass County, Texas, 1933-1943," in "Conflict and Cooperation: Reflections on the New Deal in Texas," in 2019. She has also authored many articles with the most recent being "When New Deal Medicine Came to the Texas Plains" in Journal of the West, 2020, and "The WPA Helps Fashion Twentieth Century Texas: Texas, A Guide to the Lone Star State, 1940," pending in The New Deal Review.