Stephen E. Strom, author of Forging a Sustainable Southwest: The Power of Collaborative Conservation, spoke with hydrologist Julia Fonseca in the spring as part of the Tumamoc Author Series. In this Southwest Center video of the event, Strom explains how diverse groups of people came together for the good of the Sonoran Desert in Pima County, preserving open spaces that you can see from Tumamoc Hill. We are faced today with an existential environmental and moral challenge: can we find common purpose in protecting and cherishing these masterpieces and in restoring a sense of shared responsibility for stewarding our endowment?
Stephen E. Strom began photographing in 1978, after studying the history of photography and silver and nonsilver photography at the University of Arizona. His photography complements poems and essays in six books published by the University of Arizona Press. Forging a Sustainable Southwest introduces readers to four conservation efforts that provide insight into how diverse groups of citizens have worked collaboratively to develop visions for land use that harmonized sometimes conflicting ecological, economic, cultural, and community needs.
Fernanda Echavarri of Latino USA interviewed Tim Z. Hernandez, author of All They Will Call You and They Call You Back, about the lasting impact of deportation over generations. She first interviewed him in 2018 about his life’s mission to find the families of the victims of the 1948 plane crash in Los Gatos Canyon, California. This new podcast interview reveals interesting developments on his search, including a forthcoming documentary film, and how the original Latino USA story uncovered clues that helped his search.
All thirty-two people on board died in the 1948 crash. Twenty-eight of them were Mexican farmworkers who were in the United States because of the Bracero Program, which brought millions of Mexican guest workers to the United States. All the people on the plane died the same way, but in death, they were not treated the same. For the four American crew members, U.S. officials gathered what remains they could, and sent caskets to their families. The remains of the twenty-eight Mexican braceros were not sent back to Mexico to be repatriated or given proper burial by their families. It was the deadliest crash in California history.
All They Will Call You is the harrowing account of “the worst airplane disaster in California’s history,” which claimed the lives of thirty-two passengers, including twenty-eight Mexican citizens—farmworkers who were being deported by the U.S. government. Outraged that media reports omitted only the names of the Mexican passengers, American folk icon Woody Guthrie penned a poem that went on to become one of the most important protest songs of the twentieth century, “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee).” It was an attempt to restore the dignity of the anonymous lives whose unidentified remains were buried in an unmarked mass grave in California’s Central Valley. For nearly seven decades, the song’s message would be carried on by the greatest artists of our time, including Pete Seeger, Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, yet the question posed in Guthrie’s lyrics, “Who are these friends all scattered like dry leaves?” would remain unanswered—until now.
About They Call You Back:
In this riveting new work, Hernandez continues his search for the plane crash victims while also turning the lens on himself and his ancestral past, revealing the tumultuous and deeply intimate experiences that have fueled his investigations—a lifelong journey haunted by memory, addiction, generational trauma, and the spirit world. They Call You Back is the true chronicle of one man’s obsession to restore dignity to an undignified chapter in America’s past, while at the same time making a case for why we must heal our personal wounds if we are ever to heal our political ones.
Michelle Téllez author of Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas, spoke with Desert Laboratory at Tumamoc Hill Director Elise Gornish in the spring as part of the Tumamoc Author Series. In this Southwest Center video of the event, hear Téllez read a short excerpt from her book, then talk about the book with Gornish. Asked about the transnational lens through which she tells the stories of the women of Maclovio Rojas, Téllez responded, “Maclovio not just a place or location, it’s embedded in longer histories, colonial histories, economic histories that shape the lives of people who live there. So when I say transnational that’s what I mean.”
Michelle Téllez, an associate professor in the Department of Mexican American Studies at the University of Arizona, writes about transnational community formations, Chicana feminism, and gendered migration. Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas tells the story of the community’s struggle to carve out space for survival and thriving in the shadows of the U.S.-Mexico geopolitical border. This ethnography demonstrates the state’s neglect in providing social services and local infrastructure. This neglect exacerbates the structural violence endemic to the border region—a continuation of colonial systems of power on the urban, rural, and racialized poor.
Melani Martinez, author of The Molino: A Memoir, spoke with poet Logan Phillips last winter as part of the Tumamoc Author Series. In this Southwest Center video of the event, hear Martinez read a short excerpt from her memoir. She then tells stories of her family, who owned and operated El Rapido restaurant in downtown Tucson. Phillips asked about how she came up with the format of her memoir, and Martinez responded, “I understood what the book could be structurally after having found the character of ‘El Pensamiento’ [the thinker] to help shape the stories. There are two narrative voices: my narrative voice and the other persona is a character called El Pensamiento. To some degree, I needed a conversation to do the book, so he allowed me to converse with him.”
Melani “Mele” Martinez is a senior lecturer at the University of Arizona, where she teaches writing courses. Her family has lived in the Sonoran Desert for at least nine generations. The Molino weaves together history, culture, and Mexican food traditions, in 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.
William L. Bird Jr., author of In the Arms of Saguaros, spoke with Bruce Dinges, former editor of the Journal of Arizona History last fall as part of the Tumamoc Author Series. In this Southwest Center video of the event, see historic photos and learn how in the late 1800s, the saguaro became a symbol of the west. The railroad first used saguaros to market new destinations in the American West, then all kinds of tourist destinations used saguaro iconography to attract customers to everything from health resorts to dude ranches to shopping centers. Today, the saguaro touches us as a global icon in art, fashion, and entertainment.
William L. Bird Jr. is a curator emeritus of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. His interests lie at the intersection of politics, popular culture, and the history of visual display. Through text and lavish images, In the Arms of Saguaros explores the saguaro’s growth into a western icon from the early days of the American railroad to the years bracketing World War II, when Sun Belt boosterism hit its zenith and proponents of tourism succeed in moving the saguaro to the center of the promotional frame.
Logan Phillips, author of Reckon (forthcoming in spring 2026), will be Writer-in-Residence at Pima County Public Libraries (PCPL), July 5–August 12, 2025. This summer, Logan presents a “Tell Your Story” workshop to kick off his residency on Saturday, July 5, at Valencia Library for writers age 16+. He hosts a workshop and open mic for writers of all ages at MegaMania, PCPL’s ComiCon style event at Pima Community College’s Downtown Campus on Saturday, July 19. Logan also offers two workshops for kids aged 8–13 at Santa Rosa Library: Youth Writing Jam on Wednesday, August 13, and Make Your Own Book on Wednesday, August 20. Additionally, he is available for a limited number of one-on-one consultations with writers (sign up here) and a writing group based at Valencia Library.
Holding collaboration as a core creative practice, Phillips has contributed to a wide range of performance, music, and community-centered education projects in the U.S., Mexico, Colombia, and beyond. Phillips is a volunteer organizer with Tucson Birthplace Open Space Coalition (TBOSC), an intercultural effort to strengthen Indigenous sovereignty at the base of S-Cuk Ṣon / Sentinel Peak / ‘A’ Mountain.
About Reckon:
What’s it like to have been born in Tombstone, Arizona?
In Reckon, artist Logan Phillips returns to the fabled town to face the history he was raised on as a boy—gunfights, outlaws, and Hollywood cowboys—for a new, personal confrontation with the West’s foundational mythology. This hybrid memoir also explores sexuality, masculinity, parenting, and what it means to love a land rife with contradiction and “slathered in murder.”
As innovative as it is moving, this memoir is constructed of essays, photography, poetry, newspaper clippings from the Tombstone Epitaph Local Edition, and of course, movie screenplays. As he writes the characters of his past––including Youngfather and Teenme––Phillips finds the real history to be much more complex than the stories he was told. This is Tombstone in the 1980s and 90s, a century after the West’s most famous gunfight––a fifteen-second event still performed every day in historical reenactments––where Phillips’s father works as a historical exhibit designer at the Courthouse Museum and his uncle as a stuntman at Old Tucson Studios.
David H. DeJong, author of Damming the Gila: The Gila River Indian Community and the San Carlos Irrigation Project, 1900-1942, spoke about his book as part of the Tumamoc Author Series last fall. In this Southwest Center video of the event, DeJong starts by telling how he came to write his books: “The story that’s told here about the San Carlos irrigation project is a story that I live every day. How do I live it? The system that was built in the 1920s is the system we are modernizing today. So it was a very natural step for me, and I had always been interested in going all the way back to when I was sixteen years old and wanting to know what happened [to water in the Gila River]. So this is my forty-first year of researching and writing on the history of the community.”
DeJong is director of the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project, a construction project funded by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and designed to deliver water—from the Central Arizona Project, the Gila River, and other sources—to the Gila River Indian Reservation. Damming the Gila chronicles the history of water rights and activities on the Gila River Indian Reservation. Centered on the San Carlos Irrigation Project and Coolidge Dam, it details the history and development of the project, including the Gila Decree and the Winters Doctrine. Embedded in the narrative is the underlying tension between tribal growers on the Gila River Indian Reservation and upstream users.
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.
***
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.
***
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.
For Authors
The University of Arizona Press publishes the work of leading scholars from around the globe. Learn more about submitting a proposal, preparing your final manuscript, and publication.
The University of Arizona Press is proud to share our books with readers, booksellers, media, librarians, scholars, and instructors. Join our email Newsletter. Request reprint licenses, information on subsidiary rights and translations, accessibility files, review copies, and desk and exam copies.
Support a premier publisher of academic, regional, and literary works. We are committed to sharing past, present, and future works that reflect the special strengths of the University of Arizona and support its land-grant mission.
The University of Arizona Press
