The Association for Borderlands Studies (ABS) awarded James Gerber its Lifetime Achievement Award at their 2025 annual conference in Seattle. Gerber is author of Border Economies: Cities Bridging the U.S.-Mexico Divide; he is the Director of the Center for Latin American Studies and a professor of economics at San Diego State University. In announcing the award, ABS stated: “James is an extremely well-regarded member of the ABS community and is approachable and welcoming. He is a mentor and guide, whose wise counsel is often sought on ABS matters and border studies more generally. He is a distinguished and respected member of the global border studies community and a source of inspiration for younger generations of students and scholars interested in border studies.”
Congratulations, James!
About the book:
Enormous legal cross-border flows of people, goods, and finance are embedded in the region’s history and prompted by the need to respond to new opportunities and challenges that originate on the other side. In Border Economies James Gerber examines how the interactivity and sensitivity of communities to conditions across the border differentiates them from communities in the interiors of Mexico and the United States. Gerber explains what makes the region not only unique but uniquely interesting.
In Border Economies readers who want to understand the conditions that make the border controversial but also want to go beyond shallow political narratives will find an in-depth exploration of the economic forces shaping the region and an antidote to common prejudices and misunderstandings.
Napo Kichwa communities in the Upper Ecuadorian Amazon find themselves doubly marginalized by settler colonialism and well-intentioned language revitalization projects.InRainforest Radio: Language Reclamation and Community Media in the Ecuadorian Amazon, 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.
By Georgia Ennis
Rainforest Radio follows Amazonian Kichwa media through production, reception, and circulation to understand the role of media in language reclamation.
One of the main sites of my research was the radio program Mushuk Ñampi or A New Path. I followed its radio hosts across sites, from communities where they recorded interviews with local elders to glitzy beauty pageants and other public performances connected to the radio.
In this photo from 2016, Rita Tunay, co-host of Mushuk Ñampi, records a resident of the community of La Libertad for the radio’s community archive.
I appeared as a guest host on A New Path during the time I worked with them. Like in this photo with co-host James Yumbo, I spoke in Kichwa about my research and assisted in sending “shout outs” to local communities. Photo courtesy of the Munipalidad de Archidona, 2016.
This photo shows the program’s first wayusa upina broadcast, hosted by the Association of Kichwa Midwives of the Upper Napo in March 2016. A New Path based an innovative monthly radio program around thewayusa upina or the “drinking of guayusa tea.” These are the pre-dawn hours when Kichwa families get up to drink infusions of guayusa, share stories and dreams, and prepare for their day. These live broadcasts and their daily, studio-based counterparts created spaces for intergenerational interaction in both production and reception and extended verbal artistry like narrative, jokes, and laments to listeners.
I studied radio reception with a multi-generational household in the community of Chaupishungo. The family usually awoke by 4 a.m. to drink guayusa and listen to the radio, as you see in this photo. The gatherings recreated on the radio during live programs evoked these intimate morning hours.
Napo radio also addressed Kichwa speakers who were committed to their regional varieties. Language standardization has been a significant method for language revitalization in Ecuador, with the standard Unified Kichwa used widely in national politics and bilingual education. Unified Kichwa is a historical reconstruction, which is more like the dialects spoken in the Andean highlands than those of the Amazonian lowlands. Radio and other performance media created public space for these different varieties. I learned a great deal about the beliefs surrounding orality, writing, and language variation by recording and transcribing narratives with Kichwa colleagues for a multimodal storytelling project, as well as through interviews about the linguistic histories of Napo residents.
Environmental destruction in the Amazon provides an important background to the book. Through these media events, many activists seek to recall and recreate time periods and ways of living that are less possible today.
I hope readers will consider how global consumption practices relate to local experiences of environmental and social disruption that drive linguistic and cultural shift. Gold mining, as seen here on the Jatunyacu River in 2023, is just one of the ways that extractive and settler colonialism have reshaped the environmental conditions of Napo Kichwa communities.
Against this background, the book focuses on the reclamation of women’s environmental knowledge through the production of a fiber called pita. In the final chapter, I trace pita production across sites— from face-to-face interactions to the radio to beauty pageants to a women’s cultural center—to understand how media production continues to circulate knowledge of the fiber among participants and audiences.
Elder Serafina Grefa processes pita fiber by hand in 2017. Photo by the author.
Radio host Rita Tunay leads a discussion with members of the community of Santa Rita about pita production during a live wayusa upina program. Photo courtesy of the Municipalidad de Archidona, 2016.
By examining media in their social contexts, the book provides an ethnographic confirmation of what activists have long suggested: the production and reception of Indigenous-language media can promote cultural and linguistic revalorization and reclamation. Crucially, it is not the media technologies that “save” a language or culture, but how such technologies are utilized by communities.
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Georgia C. 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. Rainforest Radio is her first book. In 2017, she edited the collaborative trilingual community media project Ñukanchi sacha kawsaywa aylluchishkamanda/Relaciones con nuestra selva/Relating to our forest with the Association of Upper Napo Kichwa Midwives.
Reframing Paquimé: Community Formation in Northwest Chihuahuais a groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Casas Grandes region by scholars Michael E. Whalen and Paul E. Minnis. This final installment in their comprehensive study challenges the dominant view of Paquimé as a hierarchical society founded by outsiders, presenting instead a compelling case for a largely locally organized society with Mesoamerican and Puebloan characteristics. Drawing on twenty-five years of extensive survey and excavation data, the authors offer a fresh perspective that reframes our understanding of this remarkable archaeological site.
Today, the authors share photos from each of the five phases of their expedition.
The Joint Casas Grandes Expedition (JCGE) excavated the western portion of the Paquimé in the mid-twentieth century. In addition to the massive multistory room blocks, a variety of ritual structures were excavated. These include mounds in geometric and animal shapes, ballcourts, and feasting ovens. The results of the JCGE demonstrated how important this community was.
An aerial view of with the colonial town of Casas Grandes in the background (to the north).
When we began field work, we concluded that the information most lacking about the Casas Grandes archaeological tradition was its regional setting; how did other communities interact with each other and with Paquimé? Consequently, our field research included five phases:
Regional survey, both reconnaissance and systematic surveys.
Excavation of sites in the Outer Core Zone.
Excavation of sites very near Paquimé, the Inner Core Zone.
Studies of ancient farming.
Excavation of small sites that might have been occupied after the height of Paquimé.
Phase 1: Regional Survey
We began by visiting and recording sites in a wide area of northwestern Chihuahua. This was followed by years of systematic survey (that is, intensive coverage of specific locations). We recorded hundreds of sites, with most dating to the Medio Period (A.D. 1200-early 1400s), which means they were contemporary with Paquimé.
A typical small site, a mound composed of collapsed adobe walls and roofs. Almost all Medio Period sites have suffered severe looting in the search for whole pots to sell.A few other sites are large. The mounds in the center of the photo are Site 204, one of the largest we recorded with about 200 rooms.In addition to domestic room blocks, we recorded many ceremonial features such as this ballcourt.Another ritual feature we found during the survey was this “stone circle,” which is actually an earthen oven. This oven was especially well constructed and most likely was used for the cooking of agave consumed during important community events.
Phase 2 & 3: Outer and Inner Core Excavations
We excavated four sites, 317, 231, 204, and 242, in the Outer Core. We then excavated two sites, 315 and 565, which are in the Río Casas Grandes river valley within two kilometers of Paquimé itself. Each of these six sites is unique, so we could begin to study how different Medio Period communities interacted with each other.
This map shows Outer Core sites in relation to Paquimé.The excavation at one of the small Outer Core sites (231). The Sierra Madre Occidental are in the background.Outer Core site 204.
Another Outer Core site is 204, one of the largest sites we recorded. In addition to three mounds with a total of about 200 rooms, this site had a ballcourt, two earthen ovens, and many fields on the hills around the site. On the hill to the south is an atalaya, a shrine with a clear view of Cerro Moctezuma, an important mountain top shrine on a mountain directly west of Paquimé.
The pictures above show the excavation of rooms at Sites 315 and 565 which are located very near Paquimé. Despite the extensive looting at all the sites we studied, we were able to acquire surprisingly robust data.
Phase 4: Studies of Ancient Farming
We also studied upland field systems noted by check-dams (locally known as trincheras), which are linear rock lines like those across the small drainage as seen in the photo below (left). A few of the agricultural fields likely were “chief’s fields” where the local population tended large fields controlled by leaders. We also test excavated a number of ritual earthen ovens like the one in the photo below (right).
Phase 5: Excavation of Small Sites
Small Late Medio Period sites were also excavated to understand the area’s occupation after Paquime’s decline. Note the thin walls at Site 290 (6 km north of Paquimé) indicative of vernacular construction unlike the massive walls found at Paquimé.
Site 290
We suggest that Paquimé was the center of the Casas Grandes tradition with wide influence but limited regional control. If the Medio Period began before Paquimé was at its height, perhaps it wasn’t always the most important community. The Paquimé centered society was more like the cooperative Puebloan communities with limited elite control than those in core Mesoamerica with formidable elite domination.
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Michael E. Whalen is a professor emeritus in the department of anthropology at the University of Tulsa. His research interests include complex societies, processes of sociocultural evolution, prehistoric social structure, and ceramic analysis. Before coming to the Casas Grandes area in 1989, he worked in southern Mesoamerica and in the U.S. Southwest. He has published books, monographs, chapters, and journal articles on Oaxaca, western Texas, and northwestern Chihuahua. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society.
Paul E. Minnis is a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma, now living in Tucson, Arizona, where he is a visiting scholar in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. He conducts research on the prehispanic ethnobotany and archaeology of the northwest Mexico and the U.S. Southwest. He has published extensively on ethnobotany. He is the author or editor of fifteen books and numerous articles. He has received the E. K. Janaki Amal Medal, the Distinguished Ethnobiologist Award, and the Byron Cummings Award, and he was a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer.
Arizona Highways May 2025 issue includes an interview with Melani Martinez about El Rapido, her family’s eatery that is the focus of her book The Molino: A Memoir. The article includes family photos from Martinez’s personal collection.
In the article, Martinez explained her writing process: “When I first started recording the stories of my family, I had a feeling of: Why aren’t these stories in the world? But, really, there wasn’t an absence of stories. Borderland stories have been here for a long time, and they will continue to be around. Many of us near the border or in the families of people who are from these places, we’ve heard them and we’ll continue to hear them.”
Set in one of Tucson’s first tamal and tortilla factories, The Molino is a hybrid memoir that reckons with one family’s loss of home, food, and faith.
Weaving together history, culture, and Mexican food traditions, Melani Martinez shares the story of her family’s life and work in the heart of their downtown eatery, El Rapido. Opened by Martinez’s great-grandfather, Aurelio Perez, in 1933, El Rapido served tamales and burritos to residents and visitors to Tucson’s historic Barrio Presidio for nearly seventy years. For the family, the factory that bound them together was known for the giant corn grinder churning behind the scenes—the molino. With clear eyes and warm humor, Martinez documents the work required to prepare food for others, and explores the heartbreaking aftermath of gentrification that forces the multigenerational family business to close its doors.
When asked about how he started writing this book, Ochoa said, “I started exploring the contradictions in the 1980s and 1990s, where Mexico on the one hand begins to have a booming capitalist food sector that dominated markets globally, for example Bimbo bread, the leading packaged bread producer in the world at this point. And by 2020, there were Forbes Magazine millionaires from Mexico’s corporate food sector. But at the same time, Mexico’s poverty rates and lack of access to food in Mexico continued to hover at about a fourth of the population. So we had a global food boom, and global corporate chefs talking about Mexican food and how wonderful it is on the one hand, but at the same time we had all these people with lack of access to nutritious food in Mexico. They suffered from the twin scourge of malnutrition and the modern junk food diet.”
México Between Feast and Famine 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. Ochoa examines the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of neoliberal 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. The author not only examines the economic and political dimensions of food production but also interrogates the social and cultural impacts.
The Society for American Archaeology (SAA) announced the recipients of its 2025 awards, which will be bestowed on April 25, 2025 at the SAA 90th Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado.
“The Society has a long tradition of acknowledging excellence in the field of archaeology through our awards, which pay tribute to those performing outstanding archaeological scholarship and research,” said SAA President Dan Sandweiss. “In addition to honoring highly trained and experienced archaeologists, SAA awards also identify up-and-coming leaders in the field. We are particularly pleased that this year’s Lifetime Achievement recipient is Joe Watkins, a past SAA president and only the second Native American SAA president.”
The press release shares that Watkins, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, served as SAA president from 2019 to 2022. The only previous Native American SAA president was the SAA’s founder and first president, Arthur C. Clark. Dr. Watkins was selected because he has opened up the discipline for Indigenous archaeologists with accomplishments like beginning the SAA Native American Scholarships and “his tireless efforts to elevate both institutional and public images of archaeology as a profession, especially those in which Indigenous peoples globally are welcomed and respected as collaborators and beneficiaries.”
“To be recognized by my peers for an award of this magnitude is beyond belief,” Watkins said. “I am humbled and honored to have my contributions to the discipline considered to be on a similar level to those who have previously earned this award.”
SAA award recipients, such as for the Lifetime Achievement honor, are selected by dedicated and knowledgeable award committees made up of SAA member volunteers.
Watkins is the author of the forthcoming work from the University of Arizona Press Indigenizing Japan: Ainu Past, Present, and Future. The work provides a comprehensive look at the rich history and cultural resilience of the Ainu, the Indigenous people of Hokkaido, Japan, tracing their journey from ancient times to their contemporary struggles for recognition. It will be published in November 2025.
Reyes Ramirez, author of The Book of Wanderers, has been appointed Houston Poet Laureate for 2025-2027. The appointment was announced by the City of Houston at the Houston Public Library celebration of National Poetry Month and National Library Week. Library Director Sandy Gaw praised Ramirez as “the future of Houston’s literary landscape.”
The City of Houston press release described the appointment: “The Poet Laureate plays an important role in stimulating creative expression, fostering a deeper appreciation for poetry in all its forms, and using words to connect residents and visitors with Houston’s cultural fabric.”
Ramirez accepted the appointment and said, “As the next Poet Laureate, I want to show how amazing the city of Houston is for art, because Houston itself is a juncture of all sorts of diasporas, of cultures, of peoples that are talking to each other just so casually. I want to highlight how Houston incorporates histories of the South, of the borderlands, of the Southwest, of the West, of the urban, of the rural, of farms, of city skyscrapers. All these things are in conversation with each other. I want to show how Houston not only is a major point of literature for Texas and the United States but the world.”
Congratulations, Reyes!
Reyes Ramirez is a Houstonian of Mexican and Salvadoran descent. Ramirez’s dynamic short story collection, The Book of Wanderers, follows new lineages of Mexican and Salvadoran diasporas traversing life in Houston, across borders, and even on Mars. Themes of wandering weave throughout each story, bringing feelings of unease and liberation as characters navigate cultural, physical, and psychological separation and loss from one generation to the next in a tumultuous nation.
The Molino: A Memoir by Melani Martinez is on the shortlist for Kitchen Arts & Letters second annual Nach Waxman Prize for Food and Beverage Scholarship. According to the Kitchen Arts & Letters announcement: “The prize includes an award of $5,500 and highlights a U.S.-published book which invites the general public to seriously consider issues in culinary and beverage history, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, geography, and other fields of study.” Other authors on the shortlist are Christopher Beckman, Lisa Jacobson, Pascaline Lepeltier, and Nicola Twilley.
The winner of the prize will be announced May 6,2025. The prize is named for Nach Waxman (1936–2021), the founder of Kitchen Arts & Letters bookstore, where he ardently championed the work of food and beverage scholars, as well as authors who illuminated the culture behind cooking, eating, drinking, and culinary history.
Congratulations Mele!
About the book:
Set in one of Tucson’s first tamal and tortilla factories, The Molino is a hybrid memoir that reckons with one family’s loss of home, food, and faith.
Weaving together history, culture, and Mexican food traditions, Melani Martinez shares the story of her family’s life and work in the heart of their downtown eatery, El Rapido. Opened by Martinez’s great-grandfather, Aurelio Perez, in 1933, El Rapido served tamales and burritos to residents and visitors to Tucson’s historic Barrio Presidio for nearly seventy years. For the family, the factory that bound them together was known for the giant corn grinder churning behind the scenes—the molino. With clear eyes and warm humor, Martinez documents the work required to prepare food for others, and explores the heartbreaking aftermath of gentrification that forces the multigenerational family business to close its doors.
In the interview titled, “Corporate Power and a visit to Disneyland’s Mission Tortilla Factory,” Ochoa talked about what happened after 1492 contact with Europeans: “Eighty to ninety percent of the indigenous population is wiped out in the areas where Europeans go in a short period of time. And that leads to the takeover of those lands, the expansion of wheat and of European notions of food at the expense of indigenous ways of knowing and foodstuffs. And over time, indigenous foods were seen as poor people’s foods. Instead of talking about pulque and maize and eating from nature, the notion is that to live well, one has to eat wheat bread and drink wine like Europeans do.”
México Between Feast and Famine 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. Ochoa examines the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of neoliberal 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. The author not only examines the economic and political dimensions of food production but also interrogates the social and cultural impacts.
The Academy of American Poets has announced that The Whole Earth Is a Garden of Monsters | Toda la tierra es un jardín de monstruos, written by Manuel Iris (in photo above) and co-translated by Iris and Kevin McHugh, was selected by Giannina Braschi as the winner of the 2025 Ambroggio Prize. The Prize is given annually for a book-length poetry manuscript originally written in Spanish and with an English translation. The winners receive $1,000 and publication by the University of Arizona Press, a nationally recognized publisher of emerging and established voices in Latinx and Indigenous literature. The book will be published by the University of Arizona Press in 2026. Previous winners include Octavio Quintanilla, author and co-translator with Natalia Treviño; Margarita Pintado Burgos, with translator Alejandra Quintana Arocho; and Elizabeth Torres.
Braschi commented on the collection: “The poet pays homage to the migrant who will not be remembered or missed if lost. There is an intriguing parallel between two main characters—Juan Dominguez, migrant of fire, and Hieronymus Bosch, portraitist of fire—whose early lives are marked by the catastrophic fire from which they were born into new names, new ways, new lives.”
Manuel Iris is a Mexican-born American poet based in Ohio. He holds a Ph.D. in Romance Languages from the University of Cincinnati. The former Poet Laureate of Cincinnati, Iris currently serves as Writer-in-Residence for the Hamilton County Public Library; is Writer-in-Residence at Thomas More University; and is a member of Mexico’s National System of Art Creators.
Kevin McHugh is a translator, poet, and editor with over thirty years of experience in writing and teaching. He holds an MA in English from the University of Windsor, specializing in Irish literature. McHugh’s career spans both education and the literary world, having taught writing at the secondary and college levels, while also serving as a fellow of the National (Ohio) Writing Project.
We are thrilled to be publishing this award-winning collection. Congratulations, Manuel!
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About the Academy of American Poets
The Academy of American Poets is the United States’ leading champion of poets and poetry. The organization annually awards more than $1.3 million to poets across the nation. It also operates Poets.org, the world’s largest publicly funded poetry website, and organizes National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world. Additionally, the Academy publishes Poem-a-Day and American Poets magazine, provides free educational resources for K–12 educators and adult learners, and leads the Poetry Coalition, a network of organizations dedicated to promoting the vital role of poetry in our culture. Visit poets.org for more information.
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