The University of Arizona Press
October 23, 2023
We are thrilled to be participating in the 2023 Arizona Historic Preservation Conference this week! This year, the conference will be held October 25-28 right here in Tucson, Arizona. View the full schedule here.
One more reason to attend is a chance to hear keynote speaker, Lydia Otero, who has written extensively on urban space, place, and history. We’ll have extra copies of Otero’s La Calle: Spatial Conflicts and Urban Renewal in a Southwest City at our booth!
If you can’t attend this year, or if you need an extra copy of a book you discover at our booth, we’ve got you covered: use AZHPC23 for 35% off all titles through 11/28/23.
New & Featured History Titles
Becoming Hopi is a comprehensive look at the history of the people of the Hopi Mesas as it has never been told before. The Hopi Tribe is one of the most intensively studied Indigenous groups in the world. Most popular accounts of Hopi history romanticize Hopi society as “timeless.” The archaeological record and accounts from Hopi people paint a much more dynamic picture, full of migrations, gatherings, and dispersals of people; a search for the center place; and the struggle to reconcile different cultural and religious traditions. Becoming Hopi weaves together evidence from archaeology, oral tradition, historical records, and ethnography to reconstruct the full story of the Hopi Mesas, rejecting the colonial divide between “prehistory” and “history.”
Diverting the Gila, the sequel to David H. DeJong’s 2009 Stealing the Gila, continues to tell the story of the forerunner to the San Carlos Irrigation Project and the Gila River Indian Community’s struggle to regain access to their water. DeJong explores the complex web of tension, distrust, and political maneuvering to divide and divert the scarce waters of the Gila River.
On March 1, 1966, the voters of Tucson approved the Pueblo Center Redevelopment Project—Arizona’s first major urban renewal project—which targeted the most densely populated eighty acres in the state. For close to one hundred years, tucsonenses had created their own spatial reality in the historical, predominantly Mexican American heart of the city, an area most called “la calle.” Here, amid small retail and service shops, restaurants, and entertainment venues, they openly lived and celebrated their culture. To make way for the Pueblo Center’s new buildings, city officials proceeded to displace la calle’s residents and to demolish their ethnically diverse neighborhoods, which, contends Lydia Otero, challenged the spatial and cultural assumptions of postwar modernity, suburbia, and urban planning.
La Calle examines conflicting claims to urban space, place, and history as advanced by two opposing historic preservationist groups: the La Placita Committee and the Tucson Heritage Foundation. She gives voice to those who lived in, experienced, or remembered this contested area, and analyzes the historical narratives promoted by Anglo American elites in the service of tourism and cultural dominance.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the canyons and mesas of the Southwest beckoned and the burgeoning field of archaeology thrived. Among those who heeded the call, Marjorie Ferguson Lambert became one of only a handful of women who left their imprint on the study of southwestern archaeology and anthropology. In No Place for a Lady, Shelby Tisdale successfully combines Lambert’s voice from extensive interviews with her own to take us on a thought-provoking journey into how Lambert created a successful and satisfying professional career and personal life in a place she loved (the American Southwest) while doing what she loved.
