The Judy Ewell Award honors the best publication, book or article, on women’s history or written by a woman, that began as a RMCLAS presentation.
Interwoven focuses on the lives of native Andean families in Pelileo, a town dominated by one of Quito’s largest and longest-lasting textile mills. Rachel Corr reveals the strategies used by indigenous people to maintain their families and reconstitute their communities in the face of colonial disruptions.
In the award ceremony, the committee said, “Interwoven is a tactile, resonant work that exposes the ties that bind the global to the local and reveals how the textile economy impacted indigenous families. Most crucially, Corr argues that despite the horrendous conditions that shaped their subjectivity, the “obraje Indians” of Pelileo found ways to forge connections with one another and create a semblance of community. This study will be required reading for all of those interested in indigenous labor, community, and ethnogenesis.”
Rachel Corr is an associate professor of anthropology at the Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Ecuador since 1990. She is the author of Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes.
Thank you to the National Association of Chicanas and Chicanos Studies members and NACCS leadership for a fantastic meeting in Albuquerque. We are so grateful for the overwhelming support we received this year! Special thanks goes to Kathryn Blackmer Reyes, Associate Director, for the singular thought and care she invests in creating a welcoming, energetic, and successful exhibit space year after year. Thank you, Kathy!
Below, find several photos our Editor-in-Chief, Kristen Buckles, took of our authors at the conference.
Savage Kin restructures readers’ views of relationships between Indigenous informants, such as Gladys Tantaquidgeon, Jesse Cornplanter, and George Hunt, and anthropologists, such as Frank Speck, Arthur C. Parker, William N. Fenton, and Franz Boas. Like other texts focused on this era, it features anthropological luminaries credited with saving material that might otherwise have been lost. Unlike other texts, it highlights the intellectual contributions of unsung Indigenous informants without whom this research could never have taken place.
The book “distinguished itself among an impressive field of Indigenous scholars nominated for this year’s award,” said Labriola Book Award Selection Committee Chair David Martínez.
Established in 2008, the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award celebrates books that focus on topics and issues that are pertinent to Indigenous peoples and nations. Of particular interest are those works written by Indigenous scholars or in which Indigenous persons played a significant role in the creation of the nominated work.
This is the second time a University of Arizona Press title has been honored with the award. In 2012, Daniel Herman was awarded for his work Rim Country Exodus: A Story of Conquest, Renewal, and Race in the Making, which examines the complex, contradictory, and very human relations between Indians, settlers, and Federal agents in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Arizona—a time that included Arizona’s brutal Indian wars.
Located in the heart of beautiful Portland, Oregon, the 2019 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference was a huge success! We extend our greatest thanks to all of our authors and supporters of the Press for coming by our booth to say hello, dance, and buy books! We continued our partnership with the Latinx Writers Caucus this year, and many amazing authors affiliated with the Caucus signed books in our booth. Overall, it was an incredible AWP, and we look forward to seeing you all again in San Antonio next year!
Below, find some photos from this year’s AWP conference.
Our Assistant Editor, Scott DeHerrera, with poet Vickie Vértiz.Poet Jennifer Givhan with poet Ysabel Y. Gonzalez signing their books at the UA Press booth.Poet Casandra López with her new UA Press book, Brother Bullet.We’re always happy to see Rigoberto González, thanks for stopping by!The conference was minutes away from the iconic Portland Old Town sign, the beautiful river, and lots of fantastic local establishments.Portland was exploding with blooms during the week of the conference.It was nice to see this sign outside of the beloved Powell’s Books!
The Feminist Wire has long provided an online community and intellectual home for more than a million activists, scholars, and artists. Building on their mission to “valorize and sustain pro-feminist representations and create alternative frameworks to build a just and equitable society,” the book series provides a platform for longer-format critiques of popular culture, media, and politics from a diversity of perspectives The Feminist Wire followers have come to expect.
“At a time when misinformation and disinformation travel with head-spinning speed, TFW’s short-form books let readers pause,” said University of Arizona Press Director Kathryn Conrad during this year’s University Press Week. “They are provocative conversation starters that call us to think and to act.”
From Indigenous and Latinx studies to current anthropology, the Press has a long history in publishing works that elevate and examine the social and political issues our world faces. As we enter our sixtieth year, this series provides yet another exciting avenue to explore both contemporary and pertinent social justice issues.
“This partnership benefits both parties,” said Tamura Lomax, co-founder of The Feminist Wire. “The UA Press has an established reputation publishing books about race and social justice, thus serving as a strategic and welcoming outlet for books in this series.”
“Not only does it complement the Press’s charge to bring scholarship to readers all over the world, but it is yet another opportunity to engage with the wonderful students and faculty in our campus community,” said Conrad.
With the release of the first two titles within the series, we’re excited to bring the conversation to the University of Arizona campus with The Feminist Wire Books Symposium.
Slated for April 10, the symposium will host series editors Tamura Lomax and Monica Casper for an evening of readings and panel discussions with authors, contributors, and editors.
Marquis Bey will present his debut essay collection, Them Goon Rules, and his work to unsettle normative ways of understanding Blackness, Black feminism, and queerness.
“I’m hoping those who tune in take away a sense of how life persists amid abjection, and how radically recalibrating what we’ve come to know about Blackness and feminism and gender might give us over to a world that is otherwise than this, a world in which we all might finally be able to live,” said Bey, who is currently a PhD candidate in English at Cornell University.
Editors from The Chicana M(other)work Anthology will speak to their work to bring together emerging scholarship and testimonios by and about self-identified Chicana and Women of Color mother-scholars, activists, and allies who center mothering as transformative labor.
“I’m thrilled to have our project be part of this event not only because we get to be in conversation with other brilliant scholars and writers, but also because The Feminist Wire Books series already shows evidence of highlighting intersectional, groundbreaking scholarship and activism that is central to transforming the ways in which we understand knowledge production inside and outside of the academy,” said Michelle Tellez, an editor of The Chicana M(other)work Anthology and assistant professor in the UA Department of Mexican American Studies.
To close out the evening, Julia Jordan-Zachery and Duchess Harris will preview their forthcoming book in the series, Black Girl Magic Beyond the Hashtag, which
Special thanks to the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, the University Libraries, the Office of the Provost, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Africana Studies Program and the Department of Religious Studies and Classics for their generous support of The Feminist Wire Book Symposium.
Join us in celebrating The Feminist Wire Books, Wednesday, April 10 at 5:30 p.m. at the UA Women’s Studies Building (925 N. Tyndall Ave.) or via the livestream and stay tuned for more from the series.
During my brief three and a half years in
Tucson, this quirky little town has grown very special to me, and I have become
quite fond of the desert, the University of Arizona, and the kindness of the
people here. As an avid reader, I had visited the Tucson Festival of Books
before, but I had only wandered around the University of Arizona’s Mall
aimlessly, with no plan, nor had I looked at any of the events or visiting
authors. So with a large camera and University of Arizona Press badge in tow, I
set off to truly experience the Tucson Festival of Books. It was hot, and
crowded, and I got sunburned the first day (My native Pennsylvanian skin is
still adjusting to the desert sun). I went to writing workshops and panels, did
mini-science experiments, ate bugs, and submerged myself into the literary
world.
The funny thing was that Tucson, and more expansively, the American Southwest, was special to many of the authors, too. Scott Whiteford, editor of Shadow of the Wall: Violence and Migration on the U.S.-Mexico Border(UAP, 2018), told me how Tucson, specifically the University of Arizona, was an interesting place to live in relation to his area of study, as the research for his book was all student-driven. The desert, both Tucson’s Sonora Desert and neighboring Mojave Desert, are special to Lawrence Walker, Rebecca Robinson, and Stephen Strom, all published authors by the University of Arizona Press. They all shared their touching personal stories and love for the deserts in their “Stories from Special Places” panel, discussing encounters with wildlife and natives, which I was lucky enough to be able to attend.
Not only did the Tucson Festival of Books give me the opportunity to speak with scholars and authors, it also allowed me to put faces to the names of authors that I worked with as an intern this year. Being able to speak to these scholars and hear them explain what inspired and motivated their projects, and seeing the excitement in their eyes when they spoke about their work was undoubtedly my favorite part of the Festival. This phenomenon was not uncommon during the weekend, as I observed many with this same expression as they found a particular book, learned something new, participated in an experiment, saw a performance, or found their favorite snack. The Tucson Festival of Books allows us to explore our interests as well as ourselves in a place truly loved by its inhabitants.
Victoria Wacik is an intern in our acquiring department. A senior at the University of Arizona, she is majoring in English with minors in Classics and French. She enjoys embroidery, hiking, and reading. Her poetry will be published in the Punk Lit Press, forthcoming April 2019.
The Chicana M(other)work Anthology is a call to action for justice within and outside academia. Edited by Cecilia Caballero, Yvette Martínez-Vu, Judith Pérez-Torres, Michelle Téllez, and Christine Vega, with a foreword by Ana Castillo, this volumebrings together emerging scholarship and testimonios by and about self-identified Chicana and Women of Color mother-scholars, activists, and allies who, using an intersectional lens, center mothering as transformative labor. Today, we offer a brief excerpt from this innovative new book.
Chicana M(other)work is a concept and project informed by our shared gendered, classed, and racialized experiences as first-generation Chicana scholars from working-class, (im)migrant Mexican families. Through Chicana M(other)work, we provide a framework for collective resistance that makes our various forms of feminized labor visible and promotes collective action, holistic healing, and social justice for Mother-Scholars and Activists of Color, our children, and our communities. Furthermore, rather than understanding Chicana identity as a singular monolith, we view it as ever evolving. Here we use the term “Chicana” conceptually to integrate our varying identitarian positionalities as cisgender mother-scholars who identify as Chicana, Xicana-Indigena, Chicana/x Latina, and Afro-Xicana.
“Chicana M(other)work is not a project of assimilating or diversifying academia; on the contrary, we aim to transform it.”
We are daughters of working-class Mexican migrant parents, and we are Chicana Mother-Scholars to Children of Color born in the United States. We use a Chicana feminist framework (Anzaldua 1987; Delgado Bernal 1998; Garcia 1997; Sandoval 2010; Tellez 2005; Villenas et al. 2006) as our theoretical grounding to explore and challenge white heteropatriarchy as it continuously marginalizes Women of Color in the academic pipeline (Harris and Gonzalez 2013; Solorzano and Yosso 2006). While we self-identify as Chicana Mother-Scholars, however, we do not view our work as restricted to academic or domestic spaces; rather, the concept Mother-Scholar transgresses these spaces. Our work exists in the classrooms, community, with each other, and with our children. We view our care work and mothering, specifically “motherwork” (Collins 1994), as an interwoven political act that responds to multiple forms of oppression experienced by Mothers of Color in the United States.
We
borrow the term “motherwork” from Patricia Hill Collins and modify it by
embracing the term “other” through the use of parentheses. Chicana M(other)work
calls attention to our layered care work from five words into one—Chicana, Mother,
Other, Work, Motherwork. We see Chicana M(other)work as being inclusive to
Women of Color (trans and cis), nonbinary Parents of Color, other-mothers, and
allies because mothering is not confined to biology or normative family
structures. We strive to build community within and outside academic
institutions, and one way we do this is by mothering others and ourselves
(Gumbs 2010; Gumbs, Martens, and Williams 2016). Building on Chicana feminists’
critiques of institutional heteropatriarchal violence in the academy (Castaneda
et al. 2014), Chicana M(other)work challenges increasingly corporatized
neoliberal institutions by holding spaces accountable through activism when
they are not supporting Mothers of Color and working-class families. In these
ways, we make it clear that Chicana M(other)work is not a project of
assimilating or diversifying academia; on the contrary, we aim to transform it,
for instance, by choosing not to hide our children, instead including them
within our work for social justice. Furthermore, despite the possibility of our
individual upward mobility with our doctoral degrees, we will always remain committed
to our poor and working-class origins. As such, Chicana M(other)work is a call to
action for justice within and outside academia.
For
Patricia Hill Collins (1994, 2000), her theorization of motherwork centers
race, class, gender, and other intersectional identities to challenge Western
ideologies of mothers’ roles. Collins’s theoretical framework disrupts gender
roles and defies the social structures and constructions of work and family as
separate spheres for Black women; it acknowledges women’s reproductive labor as
work on behalf of the family as a whole rather than to benefit men. Motherwork
also goes beyond the survival of the family by recognizing the survival of one’s biological kin, as well as attending to the individual
survival, empowerment, and identity of one’s racial and ethnic community to
protect the earth for children who are yet to be born. These concepts were instrumental
for our own theorization of Chicana M(other)work.
As Chicana Mother-Scholars, our concept of Chicana M(other)work
is informed by the labor we perform in the neoliberal university model, which
exploits our work as doctoral students, contingent faculty, and tenure-line faculty.
Although women who are adjunct faculty now compose the new faculty majority in
the United States, the difficulties of advancing in PhD programs and then into
tenure-track and tenured careers are often framed as individual failings rather
than fully recognized as institutional barriers that push Mothers of Color
outside academia. In turn, the university is seldom held accountable for the
institutional violence and exploitation faced by first-generation, low-income, and
working-class Mother-Scholars of Color.
The editors of this volume are part of the grassroots collective, Chicana M(other)work, which offers a blog, podcasts, and original essays in an accessible venue.
About the Editors Cecilia Caballero is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
Yvette Martínez-Vu is the assistant director of the University of California, Santa Barbara, McNair Scholars Program. She is an interdisciplinary scholar with a PhD in theater and performance studies from University of California, Los Angeles.
Judith Pérez-Torres is an adjunct faculty member at California State University, Fullerton, in the College of Education. She is an interdisciplinary scholar with a PhD in educational leadership and policy from University of Utah.
Michelle Téllez is an assistant professor of Mexican American studies at the University of Arizona. She is an interdisciplinary scholar with a PhD in community studies in education from Claremont Graduate University.
Christine Vega is a PhD candidate in the Social Sciences and Comparative Education Division at the University of California, Los Angles.
Talking Indian explores community, tribal identity, and language during rapid economic and demographic shifts in the Chickasaw Nation. These shifts have dramatically impacted who participates in the semiotic trends of language revitalization, as well as their motivations. Jenny L. Davis uncovers how such language processes are intertwined with economic growth.
Jenny L. Davis is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where she is also the director of the Native American and Indigenous Languages (NAIL) Lab and affiliated faculty in the American Indian Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies Departments.
Mark Nelson’s Pushing Our Limitsis a finalist in the Ecology & Environment category. One of the eight crew members locked in Biosphere 2 during its first closure experiment, Mark Nelson offers a compelling insider’s view of the dramatic story behind the mini-world. Nelson clears up common misconceptions about the 1991–1993 closure experiment as he presents the goals and results of the experiment and the implications of the project for today’s global environmental challenges and for reconnecting people to a healthy relationship with nature.
Stephen Strom’s Bears Ears: Views from a Sacred Land was named a finalist in the Regional Books category. This book captures the singular beauty of Bears Ears country in all seasons, its textural subtleties portrayed alongside the drama of expansive landscapes and skies, deep canyons, spires, and towering mesas. To photographer Stephen E. Strom’s sensitive eyes, a scrub oak on a hillside or a pattern in windswept sand is as essential to capturing the spirit of the landscape as the region’s most iconic vistas. Years from now, this book may serve as either a celebration of the foresight of visionary leaders or as an elegy for what was lost.
According to a Foreword Reviews press release, more than 2,000 entries spread across 56 genres were submitted for consideration. Finalists were determined by Foreword’s editorial team. Winners are now being decided by a panel of librarian and bookseller judges from across the country.
Winners in each genre—along with Editor’s Choice Prize winners and Foreword’s Independent Publisher of the Year—will be announced June 14, 2019.
An estimated 130,000 book lovers attended this past weekend’s 11th annual Tucson Festival of Books. We’ve been a proud supporter of the festival since its inception, and we’re thrilled to have had more than thirty of our authors participate in panels, readings, and booth signings during this year’s event.
Internationally renowned, award-winning essayist Ilan Stavans presented his UA Press Latinx Pop Culture series book Sor Juanaat both the Pima County Libraries Nuestra Raices and UA Social and Behavioral Sciences stages.
Mario T. García, who has published more than twenty books on Chicano history, also flew in for the event. He presented his most recent UA Press book The Making of a Mexican American Mayor.
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