The University of Arizona Press
October 31, 2025
The University of Arizona Press’ first podcast of the Fall 2025 season features an interview with Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez and Anita Huízar-Hernández, editors of meXicana Roots and Routes: Listening to People, Places, and Pasts. The book is the inaugural title in the the Arizona Crossroads Series.
Asked about the origin story for the book in the podcast, Fonseca-Chavez answered, “[We saw] the opportunity to bring Arizona to the center of the conversation and more importantly to speak about marginalized communities that have not been written about all that much within the larger trajectory of Arizona . . . then Anita said, ‘what do you think about a book?’ So we quickly shifted started thinking about a book, to really center Arizona in the conversation and bring in other scholars who were thinking about Arizona alongside other southwestern states.”
Listen to the full podcast here.
About 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. From the recruitment of Latinas for the U.S. Benito Juárez Squadron in World War II, to the early twentieth-century development of bilingual education in Arizona, to new and insightful analyses of Bracero Program participants and their families, the book details little-known oral histories and archival material to present a rich account of lives along the border with emphasis on women and the working class.
