The University of Arizona Press

Community voices are often an underrepresented aspect of our historical and cultural knowledge of the U.S. Southwest. In meXicana Roots and Routes, Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez and Anita Huízar-Hernández edit a collection of work by established and emerging scholars drawing 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.

The Department of Homeland Security began condemnation proceedings on the property of Dr. Eloisa Tamez, a Lipan Apache (Ndé) professor, veteran, and title holder to land in South Texas deeded to her ancestors during a time when Indigenous lands were largely taken and exploited by Spanish colonizers. In Gathering Together, We Decide, editors Margo Tamez, Cynthia Bejarano, and Jeffrey P. Shepherd spotlight powerful voices and perspectives from Ndé leaders, Indigenous elders, settler-allies, Native youth, and others associated with the Tamez family, the Ndé defiance, and the larger Indigenous rights movement to document their resistance.

Focusing on the ways people, environment, and policies have been affected by political boundaries, historian Rick A. López explores the historical connections between political identities and the natural world in Rooted in Place. López analyzes how scientific intellectuals laid claim to nature within Mexico, first on behalf of the Spanish Empire and then in the name of the republic, during three transformative moments: the Hernández expedition of the late sixteenth century; the Royal Botanical Expedition of the late eighteenth century; and the heyday of scientific societies such as the Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural of the late nineteenth century.

The Tarahumara Rebellion of 1690 examines a seventeenth-century Indigenous uprising in northern Mexico aimed at driving out Spanish miners, missionaries, and settlers from Tarahumara (Rarámuri) and Tepehuanes homelands. Historian Joseph P. Sánchez argues that the revolts of the Tepehuanes and the Tarahumaras in northern New Spain, or Nueva Vizcaya, were well-planned, inspired by outside events, and drew in multiple communities and ethnicities. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, including Jesuit accounts and archival documents, Sánchez offers a comprehensive narrative that challenges conventional interpretations of colonial Mexican uprisings.

As debates around food sovereignty, globalization, and sustainable development intensify globally, México Between Feast and Famine provides a timely analysis that counters conventional narratives about Mexican cuisine. Enrique C. Ochoa provides one of the first comprehensive analyses of Mexico’s food systems and how they reflect the contradictions and inequalities at the heart of Mexico by examining the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of policies that have reshaped food production, distribution, and consumption in Mexico. Ochoa analyzes the histories of Mexico’s mega food companies, including GRUMA, Bimbo, Oxxo, Aurrera/Walmex, and reveals how corporations have captured the food system at the same time that diet-related diseases have soared. 

An essential read for scholars and activists alike, Mapping Neshnabé Futurity urges a rethinking of how we conceive of futurity and sovereignty. By fusing ethnography of tribal nation-building projects and analysis of Indigenous speculative fiction, Blaire Morseau provides a path to Indigenous futurisms and its role in imagining decolonization. Morseau’s analysis underscores the potency of Indigenous knowledge systems and ceremonial practices in imagining and actualizing alternative futures. This work shows how counter-mapping projects both on the ground and in the skies reclaim space in the Great Lakes region—Neshnabé homelands—and are part of larger constellations of Indigenous futurities and stories of survivance.