The University of Arizona Press

May 19, 2026

The University of Arizona podcast features an interview with Georgia C. Ennis author of Rainforest Radio: Language Reclamation and Community Media in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Ennis is an assistant professor of anthropology in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Western Carolina University, where she coordinates the Multimodal Ethnographic Learning and Design (MELD) Lab, an ethnographic media center focused on applied ethnographic media production.

When asked about what motivated her to write this book, Ennis said, “Since I was an undergraduate, I’ve always been interested in how language affects social life and social relationships in Ecuador. First, I’m interested in how environmental change and destruction have affected language and culture in the Amazon there. Second, I’m interested in how communities are using grassroots media to respond to various kinds of oppression. And third, I want to show how well-meaning approaches to language revitalization, especially language standardization, have sometimes have unintended consequences for the communities they’re meant to serve.”

Listen to the full podcast here.

About the book:

Napo Kichwa communities in the Upper Ecuadorian Amazon find themselves doubly marginalized by settler colonialism and well-intentioned language revitalization projects.

In Rainforest Radio Georgia C. Ennis provides a comprehensive ethnographic exploration of Amazonian Kichwa community media, offering a unique look at how Indigenous broadcast and performance media facilitate linguistic and cultural reclamation in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

This work offers a critical analysis of how standardized language revitalization efforts, like the imposition of Unified Kichwa, can inadvertently perpetuate linguistic oppression. Ennis follows producers, performers, and consumers to understand the role of media in language reclamation. Through extensive fieldwork, she provides vivid portrayals of community efforts to sustain the language and cultural practices of their elders amid environmental and social upheaval.

May 14, 2026

The University of Arizona podcast features an interview with Kasey Jernigan author of Commod Bods: Embodied Heritage, Foodways, and Indigeneity. Kasey Jernigan is an assistant professor of American studies and anthropology at the University of Virginia, where she also co-directs the Black and Indigenous Feminist Futures Institute. She received her doctorate in medical anthropology and a graduate certificate in Native American Indigenous studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a master’s in public health from the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center’s Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology. She is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

When asked about how hearing stories from her grandmother helped her connect to women she interviewed for the book, Jernigan said, “Growing up in an Indian community in Oklahoma, I watched people I loved like my grandmother, mother, and father struggle with things like diabetes, high blood pressure, and poverty—illnesses that felt like they were just part of life. We normalized it. When someone died at an early age from a heart attack, it was like we just expected it, no one asked questions, no one asked why. And the stories I heard growing up definitely came through in this ethnography. This book is my attempt to make the argument in full that colonial policies get written in our bodies across generations.”

Listen to the full podcast here.

About the book:

The term “commod bod” is used with humor and affection. It also offers a critical way to describe bodies shaped by long-term reliance on U.S. federal commodity food programs.
 
In Commod Bods, Kasey Jernigan shares her ongoing collaborative research with Choctaw women and describes the ways that shifting patterns of participation in food and nutrition assistance programs (commodity foods) have shaped foodways; how these foodways are linked to bodies and health, particularly “obesity” and related conditions; and how foodways and bodies are intertwined with settler colonialism and experiences of structural violence, identity making, and heritage in the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
 
Organized thematically, the book moves from a critical history of obesity and health in Indian Country to narratives of Choctaw women navigating food, memory, and belonging. Chapters such as “Food and Fellowship” and “Heritage, Embodied” center personal stories that show how food is not only sustenance but also a site of connection, resistance, and meaning making.

May 8, 2026

The Border Chronicle interviewed Gabriella Soto author of Border Afterlives: Migrant Deaths, Forensic Investigations, and the Politics of Haunting. Soto is an associate teaching professor and honors faculty fellow at Arizona State University’s Barrett, the Honors College. She is affiliated faculty with the Binational Migration Institute at the University of Arizona. Soto studies death investigation for undocumented people on the U.S.-Mexico border and the contemporary archaeology of militarized borders.

When asked about defining border deaths as homicides, Soto replied: “We know from border policy, from when prevention through deterrence was first articulated—it was written into a 1994 strategy document—that the goal was to increase the cost of migrating to deter people’s entry. And that ‘cost’ seemed to be a euphemism for mortal risk. They talked about hostile terrain. They talked about the desert surrounding urban centers that was being closed off in the U.S. Southwest as places where people could find themselves in mortal danger.”

Read the full interview here.

About the book:

Border Afterlives begins with the undocumented individuals who die crossing the U.S.-Mexico border—deaths that are both preventable and politically produced.
 
Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic, participatory, and community-engaged research, author Gabriella Soto examines the postmortem journeys of these migrants through the fragmented infrastructure of medicolegal death investigation in the U.S. Southwest. She reveals how the state’s deterrence-based border policies not only generate death but also fail to provide adequate care for the dead. Soto argues that these deaths should be understood as structural homicides and that the forensic neglect they face is a form of ongoing violence.
 
Moving between the practical and the philosophical, Soto asks what it means to care for the dead and what society owes to those who die in its name. Through the lens of haunting, she explores how the dead continue to shape the living, not as objects of horror but as moral agents whose presence demands justice.

May 6, 2026

The University of Arizona Press’ latest podcast features an interview with Arely M. Zimmerman, author of Contentious Citizenship: Salvadoran Activism and Belonging Across Borders. Zimmerman is associate professor in the Intercollegiate Department of Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies at Pomona College. She earned her PhD in political science from University of California, Los Angeles and has been a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in social movements at University of Southern California, and a Latino/a Studies Faculty Fellow at New York University.

Asked about the origin story for the book, Zimmerman answered, “I remember the first time I heard the testimonios of some of the people featured in the book. As the daughter of Salvadorans who immigrated prior to the civil war, I felt a connection to their stories. But I was also surprised that I had never heard of the activism that had taken place in the 1980s through the sanctuary and solidarity movement. This is when I was an undergrad in college, and these testimonios sparked my curiosity and a deep desire to understand what took place. My hope is that this book will fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge about Salvadoran migrant activists.”

Listen to the full podcast here.

About the book:

Contentious Citizenship reshapes how we understand belonging, identity, and political participation in the context of migration. Drawing on decades of Salvadoran activism from the 1980s solidarity movement to the post–civil war era, Arely M. Zimmerman offers a powerful ethnographic account of how migrants challenge exclusionary state practices and redefine citizenship on their own terms using transnational networks and revolutionary politics that transcend borders.
 
Drawing on nearly fifty interviews with activists who fled El Salvador, Zimmerman traces how political refugees carried with them strategies of resistance and community organizing that shaped social justice movements in the United States. The book addresses the political turmoil and grassroots mobilizations in El Salvador, the sanctuary movement of the 1980s, contemporary activism, and the impact of women’s strategies and forms of resistance.

April 16, 2026

The University of Arizona podcast features an interview with Gabriel S. Estrada author of Queer Indigenous Cinemas: Sovereign Genders from Seven Directions. Estrada is a professor in religious studies at California State University Long Beach, where ze teaches queer spirituality, Indigenous graduate classes, and Nahuatl texts. A Caxcan/Xicanx genderqueer author, ze published over twenty works on Indigenous LGBTQI+/Two-Spirit film and literature.

When asked about what drew Estrada to Indigenous cinema as a scholarly subject, Estrada replied that ze received their Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Arizona and “Media studies was part of comp lit. Then I found my first job in American Indian studies . . . and I identify both with Indigeneity and being Xhicanx (I’m using the gender queer form of that with double x at beginning and at the end). So I was interested in Indigenous and Xhicanx cinema and film throughout my education. . . . Then I got a new job teaching religious studies, and I noticed that with teaching graduate classes, some students who were neurodivergent said: ‘we can’t just read and write essays, we need to look at other visual things, we need to write poetry.’ And I thought this is great because film allows us to look at the world in so many different ways that go beyond just looking at a text.”

Listen to the full podcast here, on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

About the book:

The seven Indigenous directions—east, south, west, north, down, up, and center—provide a map of understanding gender in media history.

In Queer Indigenous Cinemas, scholar Gabriel S. Estrada offers an analysis of queer Indigenous media from the Americas, the Pacific, and the Caribbean. This groundbreaking work uses Indigenous directional space and sovereign mapping methods to uncover the emotional, spiritual, and cultural dimensions of queer Indigenous lives. The book’s seven chapters—each one of the directions—look closely at media such as cinema and streaming videos that draw on Indigenous concepts from diverse nations such as Diné, Caxcan, Kanaka Maoli, and Nehiyawak. Estrada discusses how the cinema brings into focus the ways that many Indigenous genders do not conform with the male/female binary, genders and sexualities that may or may not overlap with contemporary constructions of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and two-spirit (LGBTQI2+) identities.

April 9, 2026

Sam Dingman interviewed Gabriella Soto author of Border Afterlives: Migrant Deaths, Forensic Investigations, and the Politics of Haunting on KJZZ’s “The Show.” Soto is an associate teaching professor and honors faculty fellow at Arizona State University’s Barrett, the Honors College. She is affiliated faculty with the Binational Migration Institute at the University of Arizona. Soto studies death investigation for undocumented people on the U.S.-Mexico border and the contemporary archaeology of militarized borders.

In the interview, Soto discusses “bodies as objects of horror,” explaining how the Border Patrol, Department of Homeland Security, and other groups circulate images of the dead in public outreach to achieve different effects. She said, “First, there has been an outreach campaign, first by the Border Patrol, then the Department of Homeland Security, had images that were circulated beyond the border, into the south, into Mexico, into Central America, that said, ‘Do not come.’ You know, there are dangers here. And they consider this a public outreach campaign that we’re preventing deaths by circulating these images [of dead people]. . . . And then the other thing that happens is also in the circles of people who want to bring attention to these deaths that are happening. They will use some of these images, too, to shock the public. And you know, in shocking too, you [try] to make people change their minds.”

Listen to the full radio show online here.

About the book:

Border Afterlives begins with the undocumented individuals who die crossing the U.S.-Mexico border—deaths that are both preventable and politically produced.
 
Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic, participatory, and community-engaged research, author Gabriella Soto examines the postmortem journeys of these migrants through the fragmented infrastructure of medicolegal death investigation in the U.S. Southwest. She reveals how the state’s deterrence-based border policies not only generate death but also fail to provide adequate care for the dead. Soto argues that these deaths should be understood as structural homicides and that the forensic neglect they face is a form of ongoing violence.
 
Moving between the practical and the philosophical, Soto asks what it means to care for the dead and what society owes to those who die in its name. Through the lens of haunting, she explores how the dead continue to shape the living, not as objects of horror but as moral agents whose presence demands justice.

April 3, 2026

The Latin@ Stories podcast features an interview with Gabriella Soto author of Border Afterlives: Migrant Deaths, Forensic Investigations, and the Politics of Haunting. Soto is an associate teaching professor and honors faculty fellow at Arizona State University’s Barrett, the Honors College. She is affiliated faculty with the Binational Migration Institute at the University of Arizona. Soto studies death investigation for undocumented people on the U.S.-Mexico border and the contemporary archaeology of militarized borders.

When asked about the concept of “migration materiality,” Soto said her study of twentieth-century conflict archaeology at the University of Bristol and her father inspired her: “As part of my master’s program, I studied mass graves in Spain and Latin America, and the objects that were on remains that helped identify people. And my father said to me, ‘don’t you think there’s some conflict archaeology here in Arizona?’ And this was in the early 2000s when areas on the border line were routes of migration. The change was noticeable, with people leaving objects behind. And so in this space, there were industrialized objects of war and walls, and right next to them there were things like tortilla wrappers, worn-out shoes, and backpacks with holes in them where people rubbed up against a cactus. It is such a laden place . . . with a combination of high tech and low tech material.”

Listen to the full podcast here, on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

About the book:

Border Afterlives begins with the undocumented individuals who die crossing the U.S.-Mexico border—deaths that are both preventable and politically produced.
 
Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic, participatory, and community-engaged research, author Gabriella Soto examines the postmortem journeys of these migrants through the fragmented infrastructure of medicolegal death investigation in the U.S. Southwest. She reveals how the state’s deterrence-based border policies not only generate death but also fail to provide adequate care for the dead. Soto argues that these deaths should be understood as structural homicides and that the forensic neglect they face is a form of ongoing violence.
 
Moving between the practical and the philosophical, Soto asks what it means to care for the dead and what society owes to those who die in its name. Through the lens of haunting, she explores how the dead continue to shape the living, not as objects of horror but as moral agents whose presence demands justice.

March 26, 2026

The University of Arizona podcast features an interview with Manuel Iris, author of The Whole Earth Is a Garden of Monsters / Toda la Tierra Es Un Jardín de Monstruos. This book is Winner of the 2025 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets. Manuel Iris is is a Mexican-born American poet who has served as poet laureate of Cincinnati, Ohio, writer-in-residence at the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library, and writer-in-residence at Thomas More University. Iris is the author of five poetry collections, published in several countries.

When asked about how he decided to pair one Renaissance character with a contemporary Mexican character, Iris replied, “I have always been intrigued by Bosch’s paintings, especially The Garden of Earthly Delights. This painting was a contemporary of The Mona Lisa, but Bosch’s painting seems to be centuries ahead, in the future, like a contemporary of Dalí, as a surrealist. It’s even crazier than the surrealists. I first wanted to write about Hieronymus Bosch, but then I wanted a way to bring all those creative struggles and epiphanies to our reality. I am a believer that every human being is a representation of all humanity.”

Listen to the full podcast here, on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

About the book:

This award-winning bilingual collection intertwines the lives of a Renaissance painter and a modern migrant worker, offering a fresh perspective on art and migration. In this highly imaginative work, the lives of the northern Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch (1450–1516) and an imagined contemporary migrant worker named Juan Coyoc, later known as Juan Domínguez, run in parallel as they mirror each other across languages, time, and continents.

By comparing and at times intertwining these two poetic narratives, the book explores themes of art, migration, narco-violence, family, spirituality, and the idea that every human being represents all humanity at any moment in history. Both Hieronymus Bosch and Juan Domínguez become relatable and intimate figures, part of our own story.

March 19, 2026

The University of Arizona podcast features an interview with Anne Johnson author of Mexico in Space: From la Raza Cósmica to the Space Race. Anne Johnson is a professor in the graduate program in social anthropology at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. Her research interests include the anthropology of outer space, the social studies of science, technology, and art, material culture, and performance studies.

When asked about how she became interested in the topic of Mexico in space, Johnson replied, “I took my daughter to a talk at UNAM [National Autonomous University of Mexico] on dark energy, and the person who was giving the talk said that UNAM has an experiment on the International Space Station; UNAM has been in space. And this general idea kept coming up, that Mexico has this connection with space, and it became really interesting to me. I had just read Lisa Messeri’s book, Placing Outer Space, about how scientists in the United States turn outer spaces into outer places through cartography and meaning-making practices. And I thought what would it look like for outer space to contain Mexican places? How could I anthropologically investigate Mexico in outer space?”

Listen to the full podcast here, on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

About the book:

From Aztec sun stones to satellite launches, from muralist visions to dark sky parks, Mexico’s engagement with outer space is fundamental to its identity. Mexico in Space offers a groundbreaking look at how the country has navigated the tensions between technological dependence and sovereign dreams.
 
Anthropologist Anne W. Johnson reveals Mexico’s unique relationship with outer space, describing Indigenous knowledge, nationalist projects, artistic visions, and community practices. Through rich ethnographic detail and historical insight, Johnson challenges the notion that space is for everyone and shows whose voices truly shape the world’s cosmic futures. Johnson introduces us to satellite engineers, community astronomers, space generation youth, and artists imagining Mars, each crafting alternative cosmic futures.