The University of Arizona Press
September 18, 2025
The University of Arizona Press, in collaboration with the Arizona Historical Society, proudly announces the publication of the inaugural book in the new Arizona Crossroads Series on September 23: meXicana Roots and Routes: Listening to People, Places, and Pasts. Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez and Anita Huízar-Hernández co-edited the book.
In this collection, established and emerging scholars draw upon their rootedness in the U.S. Southwest and U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The meXicana contributors use personal and scholarly inquiry to discuss what it means to cultivate spaces of belonging, navigate language policies, and explore and excavate silences in various spaces, among other important themes. Chapters elevate community voices that are often an underrepresented aspect of our historical and cultural knowledge of the U.S. Southwest.
The book is not just about Arizona. Each section of the book intentionally centers Arizona within broader comparative and cross-state dialogues, alongside chapters that reflect regional concerns in other southwestern states, including Texas, California, Colorado, and New Mexico.
Arizona Crossroads is led by a team of three editors: Anita Huízar-Hernández, Arizona State University; Eric V. Meeks, Northern Arizona University; and Katherine G. Morrissey, University of Arizona. Morrissey explained, “Crossroads is an intersection, but we also mean it as an analogy that brings together ideas and peoples. It is of course a geographical place, that we know today as Arizona, a place that has long been an intersection of indigenous peoples, of settler colonialists, and immigrants from around the world.”
For the Arizona Crossroads series, UA Press is open to any topic within any time period of Arizona history. The series will publish scholarship that is cutting-edge and innovative, yet generally accessible and readable to an educated general audience. Arizona has been a contested site among peoples, nations, and empires; it is also a place where events, decisions, and struggles have had far-reaching consequences beyond its shifting borders.
Arizona’s history is a useful entry point for contemporary conversations about people and issues in the state today. Kristen Buckles, UA Press Editor-in-Chief said, “As the series title suggests, we welcome books that deepen our understanding of Arizona as a diverse crossroads and meeting ground within broad national and transnational contexts, whether topical, thematic, or geographic.”
For more information, visit the Arizona Crossroads Series.
