The University of Arizona Press

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.

March 18, 2026

The University of Arizona podcast features an interview with Pablo Zavala, author of Forging a Mexican People: Collective Subjectivities in Postrevolutionary Print Culture, 1917–1968.

When asked why he decided to explore this part of Mexican history through print culture, Zavala replied, “I wanted to focus specifically on how artists, photographers, print makers, intellectuals, and journalists printed collected subjectivities. These denote a common sense of belonging, and group members that share some sort of identity. . . . I wanted to see how the prints, the newspapers and the magazines really negotiated with phenomena that was going on in Mexico during and after the revolution: state formation, modernization, urbanization, political ideology, popular movements, state repression and worker exploitation.”

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

About the book:

Forging a Mexican People shows how illustrated print culture helped to construct and deconstruct versions of “a people” in postrevolutionary Mexico.

Through meticulous research, Pablo Zavala uncovers the ways photographers, graphic artists, writers, and activists used print culture to challenge hegemonic conceptions of state-guided narratives and forge alternative collective subjectivities. This book offers a fresh perspective on the sociopolitical landscape of postrevolutionary Mexico, revealing how cultural artifacts simultaneously crafted and reflected the people vis-à-vis different political and social categories. By examining print culture, editorial practices, and related processes such as the creation, consumption, and distribution of said culture, Zavala’s research contributes to scholarship that has recently reexamined the construction of nationalism by moving away from the focus on state formation and addressing the horizontal and aesthetic dimensions in products by cultural producers from nonstate and grassroots political sectors.

March 5, 2026

The University of Arizona Press podcast features an interview with Dorothy Denetclaw and Matt Fitzsimons authors of The Sons of Gunshooter: A Navajo Resistance Story. Dorothy Denetclaw is Tótsohnii born for Tł’ááschí’í. She has lived in Indian Wells, Arizona, her whole life. Dorothy is a survivor of the U.S. government’s boarding school system. After studying business in college, she worked on community development projects across the Navajo Nation as an organizer, activist, and interpreter. Dorothy especially enjoys researching her family history, a legacy for her children and grandchildren. Matt Fitzsimons is a former newspaper reporter and the author of The Counterfeiters of Bosque Redondo: Slavery, Silver, and the U.S. War Against the Navajo Nation. He lives in San Diego, California, serves on the board of the Gaslamp Quarter Historical Foundation, and is a member of the Diné Studies Conference, based in Window Rock, Arizona.

When asked about how she met Matt and decided to tell her family’s story in a book, Dorothy replied, “Throughout my childhood, my father was always telling stories about his family, and we would all sit and listen to him, and it was like watching a movie. I developed a passion to record his stories. Beginning in the 1990s, I teamed up with Navajo Times reporter Cindy Yurth to write my father’s stories and publish them in the Navajo Times. . . . Matt read the stories in the Navajo Times and contacted Cindy who called me and told me that Matt wanted to talk to me.”

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

About the book:

In 1919, the brother of one of the West’s most famous Indian traders was shot to death in a remote corner of the Navajo Nation.
 
Part history, part true crime, The Sons of Gunshooter reexamines the killing and subsequent murder trial, while simultaneously embedding the story in a much larger saga of colonization and resistance. The result is a book that’s sweeping in its scope and surgical in its approach. Rewinding the clock to 1868, the authors follow the intertwining paths of two families to offer a riveting, deeply personal account that has been hailed as “a new way of doing historiography.”
 
One of the authors is a descendant of participants in the case; the other is an investigative journalist. By merging Diné oral traditions with archival evidence, they succeed in upending one false narrative after another.

March 2, 2026

We are thrilled to announce that the City of Tucson, in partnership with the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona and the University of Arizona Poetry Center, has appointed Logan Phillips, author of Reckon, as the 2026-2029 Tucson Poet Laureate!

The City of Tucson announcement describes the committee’s decision: “[Logan Phillips] frames poetry as an important tool for building connection and resilience amid current social and environmental challenges and describes laureateship as an honor in the city where he is raising his children. Selected by a seven-person panel of literary community members, Phillips was chosen for his experience, artistic strength, and leadership.”

Phillips is a poet and cultural worker based in Tucson. A seasoned performer and collaborator, Phillips has toured his work internationally, working on a wide range of arts, education, and land-based projects.

As Poet Laureate, Phillips plans to launch the ¡Somos Uno! Poetry & Storytelling Series, a set of multilingual open mics with writing workshops in small businesses, libraries, and underused spaces to support citywide cultural initiatives and document Tucson’s evolving story. This series would be part of the City of Tucson’s ¡Somos Uno! A Cultural Heritage Strategy, a 2023 initiative to steward the City’s rich cultural heritage, jointly led by the Office of Mayor Regina Romero and the Office of the City Manager.

The Laureate will also give an inaugural reading at the Tucson Festival of Books on March 15 at 4:00 p.m. in the Student Union Kiva Room, appearing alongside Arizona’s newly appointed Poet Laureate, Laura Tohe, who was named to the post this year by Governor Katie Hobbs.

Congratulations Logan!

About Logan Phillips’ recently published hybrid memoir, 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. 

February 26, 2026

Native America Calling radio program “Indigenous Food News and Stories” 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 Jernigan connected specific life experiences to the food available to women named Linda and Sherry who she interviewed, Jernigan replied, “What we often call obesity or poor health isn’t just about individual choices, it’s deeply shaped by land loss, government food programs, poverty and historical trauma. . . . The stories show the connection between health and heritage. When the Choctaw women in chapter two talk about food or diabetes, they’re also talking about their families, land, history, and survival. Linda’s story reflects those everyday realities of care giving for her mother, poverty, and diabetes. Sherry is a dress-maker, she makes Choctaw dresses; and she’s literally watched bodies change over time as she sews traditional dresses. She’s been having to make the dresses larger and larger to accommodate larger bodies.”

Listen to the full radio program here; “Indigenous Food News and Stories” interview with Jernigan starts at minute 7:28 of the program.

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.

February 25, 2026

The Border Chronicle podcast features an interview with Logan Phillips author of Reckon. Phillips is a poet and cultural worker based in Tucson, Arizona (traditional lands of the Tohono O’odham). He is author of Sonoran Strange, alongside numerous poetry chapbooks and art books. A seasoned performer and collaborator, Phillips has toured his work internationally, working on a wide range of arts, education, and land-based projects.

When asked about how Reckon shifts between poetry and essays, Phillips replied, “I was really not interested in pre-determining the outcome. This book was about writing the questions, and not knowing [the format of the answers]. And in that not-knowing, I became very genre-agnostic and let the piece decide for itself if it wanted to use line breaks or if it was using paragraphs. Genre itself is part of the way we frame history: when we take complex human contradictory history and try to fit it into a Hollywood movie plot, there are going to be things that are left out of that inherently.”

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

About the book:

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.