Category: Author Q&A

Melani Martinez Featured in Arizona Highways

Posted on May 1, 2025May 1, 2025 by maryreynolds

May 1, 2025

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.”

Read the full article in Arizona Highways.

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.

Enrique Ochoa on New Books Network Podcast

Posted on April 24, 2025April 21, 2025 by maryreynolds

April 24, 2025

Enrique C. Ochoa spoke with New Books Network podcast host Miranda Melcher from Kings College, London, on how Mexico’s corporations shaped global demand for Mexican foods, while twenty-five percent of Mexicans lived in poverty, without access to nutritious foods. Ochoa is the author of México Between Feast and Famine: Food, Corporate Power, and Inequality.

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.”

Listen to the full podcast here.

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About the book:

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.

Five Questions with Margaret Cantú-Sánchez

Posted on April 15, 2025April 9, 2025 by Cameron Quan

April 15, 2025

In her groundbreaking book, Empowering Latina Narratives, author Margaret Cantú-Sánchez examines the nuanced experiences of Latinas/Chicanas within the U.S. educational system. Cantú-Sánchez not only identifies the challenges Latina/Chicana students face but also offers a roadmap for overcoming them, making this book an essential resource for scholars, educators, and students committed to culturally inclusive education.

We recently had a chance to interview the author and ask her about the book.

How did your research and/or personal experience lead you to write this book?

My research is entrenched in my personal experiences, and this is especially true for this text. I often tell the story of how I came to this kind of research and I mention it in my introduction. When I was in graduate school, working on my doctorate at UTSA, I came across an author/scholar by the name of Gloria E. Anzaldúa. We read a book called Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. I was shocked to read this book because the author was from the Rio Grande Valley, she was talking about Mexican American history, literature, culture and a lot of what she was discussing I was not familiar with. Yet I related to her experiences of being a Mexican American. What spoke to me was her education experience in which she describes encountering discrimination as a Mexican American girl growing up in Texas. I felt angry, curious, and inspired. I was angry because I had never heard of this author or book, even though my family comes from the Rio Grande Valley area. I was angry for students who would never read her book because it was not taught in schools, or at least not until graduate school. I was also curious to learn more about my own culture, and I was inspired to explore this idea of how Mexican American and other Latinx students learned to navigate discrimination in school. So, Borderlands was literally the catalyst that inspired me to look at literature, testimonios, and pedagogical practices where Mexican American and Latinx students encountered discrimination in schools, but found way to resist and strategize to navigate these systems of learning through the power of storytelling.

Your title sets up the conflict between “education” and “educación.” Can you describe what this conflict looks like for students today?

Today I believe this conflict between education and educación still persists now more than ever and has even become exacerbated given the current political situation in our country. I distinguish between the two terms by referring to “education” as this institutionalized learning we are taught in United States schools, which is primarily Anglocentric and designed to assimilate minority students. In contrast, I define “educación” as the home or cultural knowledge, the consejos (advice), cuentos (stories), and other elements we learn from our families, communities, and cultures. I argue that oftentimes, these two kinds of epistemologies may conflict with one another. For example, at home, we may sit around the kitchen table or help prepare food and while we are doing that our grandmothers, aunts, and other family members will be sharing advice, gossiping, telling family stories. This is valuable knowledge that we pick up from these moments with our cultures and families. Oftentimes at school the sharing of these stories or advice in those spaces is not welcome or teachers do not give students the space to bring in the stories of our families. This can also extend to language barriers: school is seen as an English-only space, versus home, where one can speak Spanish or whatever home language dominates that space. Many students talk about this idea of not being able to speak in Spanish to friends when they are working on group projects and some even talk about being discriminated against or disciplined if they try to do so. In short, this conflict persists when we continue to marginalize Latinx students’ prior knowledge, which includes cultural ways of knowing, their stories, literature, history, etc. This can create identity conflicts for students who just want their cultures, identities, and communities to be validated at home and at school.

In Chapter 3, you apply your theory of a “mestizaje of epistemologies” to Barbara Renaud González’s Golondrina, Why Did You Leave Me? For those who might not be familiar with this text, what is it about and how does it connect to your theory?

Golondrina, Why Did You Leave Me? is one of my favorite texts. I read it when I was working on my doctorate degree and the issues explored in the text highlight this education/educación conflict and my concept of a “mestizaje of epistemologies.” The book is about a mother and daughter and it’s about both of their stories. It begins with the mother’s story, Amada, who is a young girl from a working-class family in Mexico who is desperate to escape her life, so she marries the first man who asks. She experiences abuse and eventually runs away to the United States. In the U.S., Amada marries a Tejano and has many children, but the story then shifts to her daughter, Lucero. The story wavers between Amada and Lucero’s perspectives of living in the United States as they both try to navigate what it means to be Mexican and Mexican American women. When Lucero goes to school, she starts to experience a conflict of identity and loses a sense of belonging at home and school. At school, she tries hard and does well, but that means leaving behind things like her Spanish, and the other Mexican American children scorn her decision to assimilate. At the same time, this alienates her from her mother. Amada notices this distance that emerges between herself and her daughter and works to help Lucero maintain her cultural identity and pride in their family’s histories by sharing family stories throughout the novel. Eventually, both women find ways to reconcile their past experiences and traumas through storytelling and sharing those stories with one another. I argue that this reconciliation or strategizing emerges via a mestizaje of epistemologies, where Lucero learns how to juggle being both Mexican and American and she does this by remembering her family’s stories and sharing them with the world.

It might be an understatement to say that the U.S. education system is in a moment of extreme change, with schools and educators experiencing heightened scrutiny and criticism. Do you have any advice for educators and/or students who are navigating this moment?

I often teach a course titled “Approaches to Teaching Multi-Ethnic Literature.” Admittedly, this course is getting more and more difficult to teach because realistically much of what I talk about in the course teachers cannot teach or discuss because of newly established laws especially in Texas. However, my advice for educators is to look for those glimmers of hope. They are out there, and we can look to the past for examples of how to find that hope as women of color and other minorities have done so throughout the years. The past can teach us so much about resilience and what we can overcome. I would also encourage both educators and students to use their voices to share their stories, whether that is through poetry, testimonios, speeches, social media, etc. Our stories are powerful and empowering—that is one thing they cannot take away from us no matter how hard they try. We will always remember, and we have a duty to preserve those stories and memories.

What are you working on next?

Currently, I am working on applying this idea of radical hope leading to love and joy as resistance, in particular as we see it via pedagogies, literature, and history. “Radical hope” was a concept utilized by women of color during the Third Wave of Feminism to maintain hope and use it to inspire others in the face of discrimination and opposition. Pedagogically speaking, I turn to scholars like bell hooks who ask us to look to joy and love in classroom spaces, and we can do that when we invite our students to share their stories as we examine the stories of minorities throughout literature and history. I think right now the world could use some hope, joy, and love. We need to find our way back to these things, and literature is one avenue to do that.

Margaret Cantú-Sánchez is a visiting assistant professor of English at St. Mary’s University, teaching composition and multi-ethnic and Latinx literature. Her research focuses on decolonializing pedagogies, immigration, border studies, and Chicanx feminist theories. Her publications include approaches to teaching Latinx literature, examinations of contemporary Latinx literature, and applications of Chicana third-space feminist theories. She is the co-editor of Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa, which offers inspiring ideas for the classroom and community utilizing Anzaldúa’s theories and concepts.

“The Molino” Is Food Book Award Finalist

Posted on April 10, 2025 by maryreynolds

April 10, 2025

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.

Enrique Ochoa on the “Esculent” Podcast

Posted on April 3, 2025March 24, 2025 by maryreynolds

April 3, 2025

Enrique C. Ochoa spoke with “Esculent” podcast host Elizabeth McQueen from University of California, Davis, on the role of corporations in constructing a thread of Mexico’s culinary history. Ochoa is the author of México Between Feast and Famine: Food, Corporate Power, and Inequality.

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.”

Listen to the full podcast here.

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About the book:

Five Questions with Jose Fernandez

Posted on April 1, 2025May 1, 2025 by maryreynolds

April 1, 2025

In Publishing Latinidad: Latinx Literary and Intellectual Production, 1880–1960, Jose O. Fernandez meticulously examines the works of notable figures like José Martí, Arturo Schomburg, Jesús Colón, José de la Luz Sáenz, Adela Sloss-Vento, and Américo Paredes, illuminating their innovative approaches to circumventing exclusionary practices in the publishing world. He demonstrates how these writers and intellectuals entered literary, cultural, and intellectual discourses through alternative modes of literary production: crónicas, translations, paratexts, bibliographies, archival practices, sketches, diaries, biographies, unpublished fiction, and scholarly monographs.

Today, Fernandez answers five questions.

What inspired you to write this book?

When I began writing about post-1960s Latinx writers, I became interested in early authors, intellectuals, and civil rights activists that could be considered their predecessors in relation to a shared interests in articulating their unequal treatment within American society. Publishing Latinidad is a continuation of my previous book in which I explored the historical background of certain Latinx literary genres and forms. When I was a graduate student, for example, I was unaware of the rich tradition of early Latinx writers and intellectuals who came before the writers of the Chicanx and Nuyorican movements. I still remember my surprise at finding José Martí in The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, but this should not have been the case. A larger part of Martí’s writings originated in New York City, and his literary and intellectual legacy directly influenced other Latinx writers after him. In this book, I wanted to study these connections in more detail, and specifically how early nontraditional Latinx texts and print forms fit within Latinx literary history.

How do you choose the intellectual analyzed in each chapter?

For the last couple of decades, if not longer, there has been an increased interest in the study of writers and intellectuals who can be considered precursors of Latinx writers who came of age after the 1960s. For this book project, I wanted to highlight writers from the turn of the twentieth century to the mid twentieth century since this is the literary period that I concentrated on in graduate school. There are a number of writers who could have merited a chapter in the book such as Sotero Figueroa, Bernardo Vega, Juan Antonio Corretjer, Eusebio Chacón, Jovita González, and especially Alonso Perales. The authors I selected are connected to each other when divided in two geographic areas, New York City and Texas. My book seeks to explore literary and intellectual ties; for example, Jesús Colón wrote about Arturo Schomburg, who in turned was directly influenced by the writings of Martí. The same happened in Texas as Adela Sloss-Vento met and corresponded with José de la Luz Sáenz and Alonso Perales, and Américo Paredes was aware of the writings and civil rights activism of Perales at the time when Paredes’s poetry was being published in Spanish-language newspapers during the 1930s.

When Texas Mexican soldiers serving in World War I returned to the United States, what was the state of race relations in Texas?

Racialization through legislation and the courts affected the lives of both Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Texas. Their social lives were dictated by “Juan Crow” segregation, which was similar to the segregation and racial violence experienced by African Americans at the time. Sáenz, who fought overseas during World War I, writes about segregated barber shops, restaurants, and public accommodations in Texas after the war. The racial discrimination Mexican communities experienced in Texas before and after the war influenced Sáenz’s writings and social activism. There is an increasing body of scholarship that has focused in detail on the extent of these systems of racial control and racial hierarchies affecting Mexicans and Mexican Americans not only in Texas but across the Southwest. The list of scholars who have written about this is extensive, but in relation to the various Mexican American civil rights activists who emerged after the war, it is important to note the scholarship of Benjamin Johnson, José A. Ramírez, Emilio Zamora, Martha Menchaca, and Cynthia Orozco. What I attempted in Publishing Latinidad was to connect this history with writers such as Sáenz, Perales, and Sloss-Vento, who wrote about this through nontraditional texts and print forms.

What are the connections between Mexican American civil rights and African American civil rights and Indigenous civil rights?

Unfortunately, the prevailing commonality among the experiences of these groups was their shared racialization and exclusion from mainstream social, political, and cultural participation in the United States. At the same time, Latinx, Black, and Indigenous groups during different periods in history also shared their fight for inclusion and for their rightful place in society and inclusion of their cultural and intellectual contributions. Another shared trait of these groups in their fight for civil rights was that while they gained their citizenship at different periods in American history, their social thinking and literary writings have been marked by their attempts to gain full citizenship rights. To bring back Sáenz as an example, some of his arguments when he articulates the need for full rights for Mexican Americans after World War I uncannily resemble some of the claims made by W.E.B. Du Bois when he makes a case during the war for the end of racial violence against African Americans. Sáenz also specifically makes the argument in his war diary that Indigenous groups in the U.S. should be granted citizenship based on their war sacrifices.

What are you working on now?

There is an increased interest in the current role of mainstream publishers in the publication and promotion of authors of color. When it comes to Latinx authors, this exclusion is not new; it is the result of their historical exclusion in cultural, publishing, and academic spaces. One of my current projects focuses on the role and significance of Arte Público Press, the most successful nonprofit Latinx publisher for the last fifty years. This project focuses on the history of Arte Público and its founder, Nicolás Kanellos, and how several of the authors and books published by the press have shaped the trajectory of Latinx literature.

Jose O. Fernandez is an assistant professor in the Latina/o/x Studies Program at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Against Marginalization: Convergences in Black and Latinx Literatures. His research focuses on the emergence and development of the Latinx literary tradition through a comparative ethnic studies lens and the influence of the publishing dynamics that have shaped Latinx literary and intellectual production in the United States.

Five Questions with Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez

Posted on March 20, 2025March 19, 2025 by Abby Mogollon

March 20, 2025

Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez’s latest work, The Rise of Necro/Narco Citizenship investigates the intricate and often harrowing dynamics that define the borderlands between the United States, Mexico, and beyond. This groundbreaking book provides a comprehensive cultural, economic, social, and political-ecological analysis, illustrating how various forms of violence and militarization have reshaped the daily lives and identities of the region’s inhabitants.

Today, Dr. Vélez-Ibáñez answers five questions.

This work has been described as “distressing but essential.” What compelled you to undertake this project at this time?

I have looked at many global and regional indications of this latest version of global capital at this late stage, and it is not serving the livelihoods of millions of communities. I characterize this as “Wars of Omission,” forcing some 80 million globally to try to relocate to more positive conditions only to meet with equivalent situations. Or worse, such Wars of Omission have created conditions in which psychotropic drugs are adopted as a means of dulling the stresses imposed by these processes, generating “Wars of Commission” in response. Both wars generate their attending necro/narco citizenships. The southwest American and northwest Mexican border region, which I refer to as the Southwest North America Region, is the central focus of this narrative. This region is larger than western Europe and Great Britain and is undergoing these process with greater and greater dependence on forced and voluntary migrations of families on both sides of the border bifurcation as well as those seeking to escape through the production, distribution, and consumption of drugs. I am most concerned about the impact on youth and following generations as the primary targeted population.

You have written many books and articles. What are three of the key threads that tie your work together across your long career?

First, finding answers to the question of how people survive economic and social frailties when they should not be able. Second, finding answers to the question of how people manage to excel when everything is stacked up against them. Third, how do following generations utilize and benefit from (or not) those survival and excelling strategies. And now, fourth, understanding how people manage to survive both Wars of Omission and Commission, both much beyond their influence or control.

The Rise of Necro/Narco Citizenship draws on the theorization of Necrocitizenship and takes it further, specifically deploying it for the U.S-Mexico Transborder Region. How do you explain this theory (briefly) to the lay reader?

The manner in which I use necrocitizenship and its companion narcocitizenship is to describe the unquestioning willingness to succumb for an empire, nation, region, or locality in its name. This willingness is commonly formed by highly ritualized practices as it is learned, transmitted, and operationalized. It eventually leads to service, injury, or the death of a participant. Its modern companion of narcocitizenship is its moving from necrocitizenship by offering fulfillment of omitted economic and social functions with alternative rewards, symbols, and rituals. These lead to equivalent service, injury, or certain death because of seeking to ensure the control, production, distribution, and consumption of drugs and range in acquisition from full-fledged membership to muted compliance.

An interview with you appeared in the PBS series American Historia in the second episode “Threads in the American Tapestry.” What was that like?

It afforded me a chance to reemphasize the short duration of the political barrier imposed by war between present populations since it is only two grandmothers old, which is usually referred to by some sort of innocent referent like annexation, integration, appropriation, or sequestration, instead of its simple reality of conquest. The same is true for the Spanish version of conquest three hundred years earlier. Both were unwanted impositions with long-lasting consequences for their original constituents and colonially created populations.

What is one thing you hope scholars in the future will take away from your work and then build on?

Pay attention on the ground to what populations are doing for survival and achievement and their costs and benefits to themselves and following generations. For the most part, there are not only just good guys or bad guys, though it may seem to be so simple. Staying focused on the ground provides the best differentiation and similarities.

Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez received a PhD in anthropology from the University of California, San Diego (1975). His intellectual interests are broadly comparative and applied, and his publications include thirteen books in English and Spanish, as well many articles and chapters. Three of his English-language books have been translated into Spanish. He held tenured professorships in anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Arizona, where, in 1982, he founded the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology. He is Regents’ Professor of the School of Transborder Studies and the School of School of Human Evolution and Social Change and the Motorola Presidential Professor of Neighborhood Revitalization at Arizona State University. He was elected as Corresponding Member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Five Questions with Ezekiel Stear

Posted on March 12, 2025March 4, 2025 by Cameron Quan

March 12, 2025

Nahua Horizons: Writing, Persuasion, and Futurities in Colonial Mexico investigates how Nahua writers in Central Mexico and other Mesoamerican voices in colonial Spanish America played an active role in shaping culture, using writing to persuade their communities to mold their own destinies, even amid colonial upheaval. This work opens up new directions for research and teaching, shifting inquiry from how Nahuas preserved cultural continuity to how they envisioned their roles as pathfinders toward times to come.

Today, the author answers five questions about his work.

What inspired you to write this book?

In part, I wrote this book to offer a fresh approach to how Nahua culture has survived and adapted over the centuries. The conventional buzz words of “mestizaje” and “syncretism” did not sit right with me. They lack the aspect of individual agency. For years, these terms have been the one-size-fits-all approach to describing how Mexico became Mexico. Yet from my own readings, the time I have spent in Mexico, and the meaningful relationships I have there, I knew those generic approaches were insufficient. The many inspiring individuals I have met, from Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, led me to research the lives of past individuals, who, despite the odds, chose to shape their own futures.

Many people have likely heard of the Florentine Codex, one of the more famous documents you discuss. Could you describe the significance of this text to your book?

The Florentine Codex is an expansive and crucial document for understanding colonial Mexico, mainly because it forms a nexus of Nahua-Spanish dialogue at a time of great uncertainty. The Nahua scholars who contributed to the project faced the uncertainty of how their work would allow their ancestral knowledge(s) to endure. That said, the document also conveys processes of Hispanization already well underway during its composition in the 1570s. The Spanish, of course, hoped to gain knowledge from the Florentine Codex for use by colonial administrators and clergy—so, the Codex also conveys a colonizing ethos. That said, my work brings out the fact that Nahua healing practices carry with them the idea that healers would continue their work in the future. Nahua healers who contributed to Books 10 and 11 of the Codex did so with the understanding that they were laying groundwork for the continuation of their practices beyond their own lives.

In this project, one of your goals is to correct the “pervasive presentation of the Nahuas as passive receptors of cultural change instead of active interpreters of events and builders of their own futures.” Why is it important that we shift our perspective on the Nahuas in this way?

The book does call for a shift in the view from Nahuas as passive recipients of cultural accommodation to active generators of cultural change. Nahua futurities work as a counterbalance to a certain theoretical disempowerment in academic and popular discourses. It is true that the military arm of the Spanish invasion looked callously on Indigenous cultures and saw them a source of manual labor. What is more, as multiple epidemics rolled over Central Mexico, religious friars brought a system of knowledge intended to divorce Nahuas from their traditional beliefs. While we cannot overstate the destruction and human suffering the Spanish invasion brought, there is another side of the story. By perpetuating a narrative of Indigenous loss, we run the risk of obscuring the innovative approaches to balanced living that the Nahuas have developed, and continue developing, over the past 500 years. Ironically, the cruelty of European colonization moved the Nahuas to plan for futures despite their losses.

Are there lessons we should take from the ways Nahuas conceptualized their futures?

Two lessons come to mind: first, that Nahuas made strategic use of distance from colonial centers to carve out areas of sovereignty for themselves. The book brings to light the results of deliberations Nahuas made about how to use the Spanish legal system to their advantage, how to make strategic alliances with clergy to further their own goals, and, most importantly, how they used writing as a means to convince their communities that a road worth taking lay ahead.

Along with that realization comes the fact that the future itself is a rhetorical figure. No one speaks to us of any future unless they are trying to get us to think, believe, or do something. The Spanish used religious and juridical rhetoric, along with military force and physical displacement of Indigenous towns to compel cooperation. What amazes me is that in the face of that aggression Nahua writers used tools of persuasion to encourage their people to build, to farm, to heal, to educate, to document, and to celebrate their lifeways.

What are you working on next?

My next project shifts regions but remains in the colonial period. It concerns a cache of letters in my university’s archives from the coastal settlements of Pensacola and Mobile at the end of the Spanish empire. During the early years of the 19^th century, anxious Spanish clergy and Spanish military officers wrote to authorities in Habana, Cuba describing the scarcities they experienced as the Spanish Empire declined. At the same time, Pensacola and Mobile became key commercial outposts for the Mvskoke (Creek) people, who were at war with the United States. The Mvskoke traded with the Spanish in their settlements for guns and ammunition for their ongoing fight against U.S. encroachment on their territories. In addition to the letters, I will examine broken treaties and other Mvskoke documents to write a parallel history of the Mvskoke and Spanish up to the U.S. expansion that drove them both from the region. I hope that the study will expand much-needed dialogue between the Mvskoke Nation, those of us who study the Spanish colonial period, and scholars of the Indigenous Southeast.

Ezekiel Stear is an assistant professor of Spanish and colonial Spanish American literature at Auburn University.

Five Questions with Octavio Quintanilla

Posted on March 10, 2025March 27, 2025 by Cameron Quan

March 12, 2025

Presented in Spanish with English translations, Octavio Quintanilla’s collection Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours comprises lyric and concrete poems—or frontextos—that explore intimacy and different shades of violence as a means to reconcile the speaker’s sense of belonging in the world. From the opening poem to the last in the first section, Quintanilla captures the perilous journeys that migrants undertake crossing borders as well as the paths that lovers forge to meet their endless longing.

Today, Quintanilla answers five questions about his work.

I understand you started writing these poems in 2018 while you were San Antonio’s poet laureate. How, if at all, did serving as laureate shape this book?

Yes, I did. This is the time when I was seeing stories on social media of people being verbally or physically attacked for speaking Spanish in public. This really pissed me off. I am sure it happens all the time, but somehow this time it felt different, more personal. Although I have had a practice of writing in Spanish for years, after these events, and after realizing that I had a public platform as San Antonio’s Poet Laureate, I decided to start sharing my visual poems, which I call Frontextos, on social media. All of the work I shared contained text written in Spanish, which was my way to call attention to the fact that, for some of us, Spanish is our first language, and any sort of violence for speaking it, or writing it, was not going to stop us from doing so. This Frontexto project led me to write longer poems, more lyrical, more narrative, which is what you find in Las Horas Imposibles.

This collection includes concrete poems, which combine visual art with text, and you’re known for your “Frontextos,” which also combine language and graphic elements. Can you talk about what draws you to these hybrid forms of poetry?

I have always been interested in painting and in the challenge visual art poses for me as a viewer, as a reader. It is pleasurable for me to look at a visual poem, for instance, and not be sure of how it wants me to read it, or of where it wants to take me. Being at a loss for direction. It’s exciting for me. To not know, and yet, to apply what I know to try to figure it out. To see what is buried underneath layers of text or images, to look at contours, to see the action on the page and try to figure out how the visual poet/artist is manipulating material to get it the way it is. To arrive at some sort of meaning. I think this interest in hybrid forms originated as a teenager when I started painting, so I have always been interested in how a visual poem can disrupt how I read, and how it disrupts how I see what’s on the page.

One of your concrete poems, “Los Canallas y Asesinos,” looks a bit like an asterisk, with radial lines of text emerging from a center point. The English translation reads: “Thugs and murderers also kiss their children | kiss their mother’s foreheads.” The “Thugs and murderers” here feels like an act of naming, a designation that echoes the dehumanizing political rhetoric we hear constantly about immigrants. It seems like you’re asking us to pay attention to the way we name people, and to shift our perspective. Is this accurate?

The way you explicate this text is one way to read it. But I am sure there are other ways into the text. Here I am thinking of how I answered the previous question, about the pleasure that exists when looking at a thing, a visual poem, to be more exact. I included this visual poem in the book because I find it beautiful. I love looking at it. I suspect some readers will come at it this way—looking at it first, hopefully experiencing some sort of visual pleasure before reading the text itself. Then, of course, the text, paired with the visual image, takes on a deeper, darker meaning when considered within the context of the surrounding poems.

Speaking of form, the second section of your book is written as a single long poem, which is notoriously demanding. What was your process for writing this poem? Did it emerge all at once, or in fragments?

I wrote this poem during the Pandemic. Stuck at home, I bought a bunch of notebooks, one of them being a soft cover, 5.5”x8.25” moleskin. This is where I wrote it. Every day I handwrote one page. Forty in total. Filled the whole notebook. This is why the poem looks the way it does in the book. How the sections are divided by a line. So, I think it’s safe to say it emerged in fragments. The challenge was keeping the momentum of the poem going. Of course, the final version in the book went through heavy revision.

What are you working on next?

I am working on a few projects. Essays on poetics, borderlands, and masculinity. Ongoing Frontextos. And a novel. Let’s see how that goes.

Octavio Quintanilla is the author of the poetry collections If I Go Missing and The Book of Wounded Sparrows. He served as the 2018–2020 Poet Laureate of San Antonio, Texas. His visual work has been exhibited in numerous spaces, including the Mexican Cultural Institute in San Antonio, the El Paso Museum of Art, the Southwest School of Art, Presa House Gallery, the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art, and the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center / Black Box Theater in Austin, Texas. Octavio is the founder and director of the Literature and Arts Festival and VersoFrontera and the founder and publisher of Alabrava Press. Octavio holds a PhD from the University of North Texas and is the regional editor for Texas Books in Review. He is the recipient of the Nebrija Creadores Scholarship, which allowed him a month-long residency at the Instituto Franklin at Alcalá University in Alcalá de Henares, Spain. He teaches literature and creative writing in the MA/MFA program at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas.

Five Questions with Leo Romero

Posted on February 18, 2025February 25, 2025 by Cameron Quan

February 18, 2025

Leo Romero stands as a foundational figure in Latino letters. With six books of poetry and a book of short fiction to his name, Romero’s contribution to the literary canon is profound and enduring. Bringing together for the first time his new and selected poems, Trees Dream of Water: Selected and New Poems reflects Romero’s journey from youth to maturity as a person and a poet, and his deep connection to New Mexico and its culture. Today, the author answers five questions (plus one bonus question!) about his work, process, and career.

This collection spans decades of your work alongside new poems. Looking back, do you feel your writing has changed dramatically since you began publishing, or are there elements of your work that have persisted since the beginning?

Trees Dream of Water are poems from the seventies and eighties. Five books were published from 1978 to 1991. After that, I basically stopped sending poetry (in book form) out for publication.

I stopped sending out manuscripts, but I didn’t stop writing. Writing is something I do naturally. It’s not something I think about doing. It’s just another thing I do in my life, ideas come to me, and I go with them. For a long time, I was happy with just writing and then not thinking about doing anything with the poetry. Over a few months I’d get engaged with a subject, and at the end I’d have a collection of 60-80 pages. But I would do very little (if any) editing to the poems. I would leave them on my computer as a file, and then I would get engaged in doing another collection of poems. Eventually I had many of these collections, and the thought of going back to edit them seemed daunting. So the poems have been languishing as files that I haven’t looked at for a long time. Many years back, the University of New Mexico established an archive for my poetry. Early on, I got them some material, but as my collections of poems kept piling up, I found the thought of editing those poems, those collections, and getting them to my archive too time consuming.

A friend I hadn’t seen since the seventies, Joy Harjo, stopped in my bookstore about three years ago and immediately said, “Leo, why aren’t you publishing!” She woke me up to the fact that I should put together a new manuscript. I edited some older poems and called the collection Beyond Nageezi. That was sent to the University of Arizona Press, and then somehow the idea came about to do my new and selected poems as a book. If not for Joy’s encouragement, I suspect my poems were headed to oblivion as files on my computer.

With the University of Arizona publishing Trees Dream of Water, I’ve been encouraged to start editing some of those old collections, those files. I recently had a health scare but fortunately it’s turned out okay, but my thought at the time was, “I’m not going to have the time to edit many of my old poetry collections.”

Do I feel my work has changed? I feel that from the beginning, I was working towards writing poems in a series, poems that unite to form a contained world. And this really came to fruition in my book Celso. I was already writing the Celso poems from the mid-seventies and finished them in the early eighties, realizing as I was writing them that they were a continuing story with a beginning, middle, and end. That form of writing continued with Going Home Away Indian and San Fernandez Beat. I like creating a world and losing myself in it. One poem inspires another poem, inspires another poem, inspires another poem until the story comes to an end.

Now that I’m editing older collections of poems, I’m seeing that thread in those collections, a wanting to tell a complete story within the bounds of a poetry collection. As I got older, the poems became more narrative, but that had to do with the fact that I was unravelling a story. But there are still lyrical poems mixed in, the type of poems I wrote early on before I realized I could tell a continuing, closely knit story within a collection.

Rigoberto Gonzalez has dubbed you one of the “foundational poets” of the Chicano literary community. What is your reaction to this title?

I was at first surprised. But then I thought of some of my early publications, like We Are Chicanos: An Anthology of Mexican-American Literature (Washington Square Press, 1973). As far as I know, this was the first national publication of Chicano literature. In 1975, I was published in For Neruda, For Chile: An International Anthology (Beacon Press Boston), and early on I was published in the literary magazine The Bilingual Review/Revista Bilingüe (later publishing books as Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe), which also published my book of short fiction, Rita & Los Angeles (1995). Then there was my book Celso, published by Arte Público Press. In 1980, Tonatiuh-Quinto Sol International (an early publisher of Chicano literature in Berkeley) published an early version of Celso through Grito Del Sol: Chicano Indo-Hispano and Mexican-American Literature. And that led to a play called I Am Celso (1985) performed by the Group Theater in Seattle, which toured around the country. And I was published in various anthologies with Latino themes such as After Aztlan: Latino Poets of the Nineties (David R. Godine, 1992).

So since around 1970, I was publishing and people were noticing enough to republish my poems in anthologies. The poems from the first two anthologies I was in had originally been published in The Thunderbird Magazine, a student literary publication from the University of New Mexico. But I didn’t know anyone who was seeing my published poems. It was like the poems were published and then, so what?

By the early nineties, I largely stopped sending poetry out for publication. Poems would sometimes appear in anthologies, but most of those poems had originally been published in literary magazines. It always surprised me that people found my poems in past publications and wanted to publish them in anthologies. Often I didn’t know anything about the selection until I received a copy of the book in the mail. It all somehow didn’t seem that real to me. So when Rigoberto mentioned that he had been aware of my work and thought of me as a foundational poet of the Chicano literary community I first felt surprised. But then I began thinking of all the poetry I had published over the years. Even though I had these credits early on, I didn’t know if my poetry had had any impact on anyone. And then Rigoberto said yes, he had been aware of my poetry and that caught my attention. I wasn’t publishing in as much of a vacuum as I sometimes thought.

In “Beyond Nageezi” you meditate on the dreamlike nature of self, desert, and memory. How has your work been shaped by New Mexico and the borderlands?

When I wrote some of the poems of the desert that are in Beyond Nageezi, I was a graduate student at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. It’s less than an hour from the Mexican border. Something that was important for me when I was in Las Cruces was to go on on hikes in the desert, not always a smart thing to do in the hot sun. But I was drawn to the sparsity of that landscape and by the starkness of the land under a hot sun. When I had been living in Albuquerque I had been reading about the prophets in the Christian bible, about the visions they found in the desert. I sought my visions/poems in the Albuquerque desert, taking the city bus to the end of town, and then walking out into the natural environment, the sparseness of that environment, and seeking there what was within me but not apparent until I searched for it in the desert. When I moved to Las Cruces, I continued this vision quest (this quest for poems) in what most people would think was an arid land, but for me I kept seeing so much there from the tracks of insects in arroyos to the decomposing bones of animals, and it all stirred something with me.

After I left Las Cruces, I moved to Clovis on the high plains of eastern New Mexico. A different landscape, but another place where I sought to understand myself in the vast plains, the vast sky. For me, landscape is a way of going within myself. The desert, the plains, I search there to find myself.

After Clovis, I moved back to northern New Mexico, close to the mountains where I had grown up. It was like returning to old friends. Beyond Nageezi follows my journeys to the desert, the plains, and then the mountains, all of it New Mexico. The land/nature sends me deep within myself, and there I can contemplate who I am, who we are.

You’ve been selling books in Santa Fe since 1988. Has running a bookstore affected your relationship to poetry or literature in general?

My wife and I are both big readers and our bookstore, Books of Interest, provides us with an incredible selection of books to read.

But having a bookstore has had a negative effect on my publishing. Early on, I was seeing how many books are continually being published, I was seeing how many books that were read and cherished at one time are now forgotten, I was seeing how the amount of previously published books seems endless. Even with as long as I’ve been selling books, every week I see piles of books I’ve never seen before. I began to think maybe it didn’t matter if I published a book. There were so many books already. I began losing interest in publishing.

But otherwise, having a bookstore has been a life of riches, the riches of countless books. And always finding the unexpected book to read. I grew up in a house without books. I tell people that by having a bookstore I’m overcompensating for that beginning.

What are you working on now?

I’m just finishing a collection called Leaving Salida. The premise of the collection is that I’ve died, but I find myself in Salida, Colorado, living a life there, without being aware that I’ve died. But as the poetry collection progresses, I start seeing that things are not quite right. What I’m discovering with my editing is that the old poems are triggering new poems. As an example, Leaving Salida is over 100 pages long. More than 80 percent of the poems are new.

A while back, I put the finishing touches to a manuscript called Blossoms That Are Only Snow. It’s a long collection of poems dealing with where I grew up, poems about family and the culture I grew up in. Poems about the ending of a community, of a time. I think of the collection as cathartic.

I’m also putting the finishing touches to a collection of story poems, vignettes of the west, called What’s West, Anyway?

Bonus question: In her foreword, Joy Harjo shares a delightful memory of your contribution to her Thanksgiving dinner. Do you have any memories or anecdotes of her you’d be willing to share?

I went to the University of New Mexico in a program called Upward Bound. About a month before graduating from high school, I had no plans to go to college. There was no money to go to college, and I didn’t know anything about scholarships. A school counselor called me into his office and asked me what I planned to do after graduation. I told him I had no plans. What would have happened is I would have been drafted and sent to Vietnam. That’s what happened to my best friend. The counselor swiveled his chair to the waste basket and picked up a letter. It was about a new program at the University of New Mexico. He asked if I wanted to apply for the program. I certainly did. I got accepted into the program. The students in the program attended a summer session, right after high school graduation, to help us catch up with other entering college students who had gone to better schools. A counselor in the program who I became friends with was Simon Ortiz, who has since become a well-known writer. When we met, he still hadn’t published a book. A year later, I was walking along Central Avenue in Albuquerque and saw Simon sitting at a bus stop reading a book. “Simon!” I said. I hadn’t seen him in a while. He looked up from his book and when he saw who I was he jumped up and said I had to meet someone he was living with. The house was nearby. It was right on Central and next to Interstate 25, which went over Central. We entered the small house, and I saw a young woman about my age sitting at a typewriter at the kitchen table typing something. Simon went right up to Joy and told her he wanted to introduce her to “Pablo Neruda.” Whenever he called me Pablo Neruda I thought Simon was making fun of me, but years later, Joy told me that wasn’t the case. When Simon went into another room, I saw that Joy had been writing a poem, and I felt bad about interrupting her in the middle of it. But Joy didn’t seem too put out by the interruption, and we had a conversation. Joy said that she had wanted to be a painter and had gone to the Indian school in Santa Fe to study art, but she had met Simon at a party and under his influence she was now writing poetry. Later on, Simon, Joy, and I would exchange poems. It was a growth progress. Three poets without a book to their name.

Born in 1950 in Chacón, New Mexico, poet Leo Romero is considered a foundational figure of Latino letters. He holds an MA in English from New Mexico State University. He has worked for the Social Security Administration and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Since 1988, he has been a bookseller in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He’s had five different bookstores at different times. His current bookstore is Books of Interest. Romero has published six books of poetry and a book of short fiction, Rita and Los Angeles. Romero’s poetry has been published in Italy, Germany, and Mexico. The Group Theatre Company in Seattle, Washington, produced a play called I Am Celso, based on poems from Romero’s books Celso and Agua Negra and performed it across the country. Romero received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, was a Pushcart Prize winner, and a Helene Wurlitzer Foundation resident at Taos, New Mexico.

The University of Arizona Press