Category: Author Q&A

Podcast: Rick A. López Talks about Nature and Nation in Mexico

Posted on by maryreynolds

November 6, 2025

The University of Arizona Press’ podcast features an interview with Rick A. López, author of Rooted in Place: Botany, Indigeneity, and Art in the Construction of Mexican Nature, 1570–1914. Rick López is Anson D. Morse 1871 Professor of Latin American History and Environmental Studies at Amherst College. He has published articles and essays on the history of nation formation, race, aesthetics, and the environment in Mexico, as well on the history of the Latinx population in the United States.

Asked about why he started writing the book in the podcast, López answered, “As a historian, I began as a modernist, and I accidentally went back to study colonial era Mexico. And it all started because I wanted to read a book when I got interested in environmental studies. And I wanted to know about the connection between nature and nation in Latin American countries.” He says there were many books about the connection between American exceptionalism and wilderness as well as books about the connection to nature for European countries, but not about other places. “I was surprised to find there weren’t any such studies [connecting nature and nation] of Latin America . . . so before I knew it, I was writing this book!”

Listen to the full podcast here.

About the book:

Since the first moment of conquest, colonizers and the colonized alike in Mexico confronted questions about what it meant to be from this place, what natural resources it offered, and who had the right to control those resources and on what basis.

Focusing on the ways people, environment, and policies have been affected by political boundaries, historian Rick A. López explores the historical connections between political identities and the natural world. López analyzes how scientific intellectuals laid claim to nature within Mexico, first on behalf of the Spanish Empire and then in the name of the republic, during three transformative moments: the Hernández expedition of the late sixteenth century; the Royal Botanical Expedition of the late eighteenth century; and the heyday of scientific societies such as the Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural of the late nineteenth century.

“meXicana Roots and Routes” on Podcast

Posted on by maryreynolds

October 31, 2025

The University of Arizona Press’ first podcast of the Fall 2025 season features an interview with Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez and Anita Huízar-Hernández, editors of meXicana Roots and Routes: Listening to People, Places, and Pasts. The book is the inaugural title in the the Arizona Crossroads Series.

Asked about the origin story for the book in the podcast, Fonseca-Chavez answered, “[We saw] the opportunity to bring Arizona to the center of the conversation and more importantly to speak about marginalized communities that have not been written about all that much within the larger trajectory of Arizona . . . then Anita said, ‘what do you think about a book?’ So we quickly shifted started thinking about a book, to really center Arizona in the conversation and bring in other scholars who were thinking about Arizona alongside other southwestern states.”

Listen to the full podcast here.

About the book:

In this collection, established and emerging scholars draw upon their rootedness in the U.S. Southwest and U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The meXicana contributors use personal and scholarly inquiry to discuss what it means to cultivate spaces of belonging, navigate language policies, and explore and excavate silences in various spaces, among other important themes. From the recruitment of Latinas for the U.S. Benito Juárez Squadron in World War II, to the early twentieth-century development of bilingual education in Arizona, to new and insightful analyses of Bracero Program participants and their families, the book details little-known oral histories and archival material to present a rich account of lives along the border with emphasis on women and the working class.

Five Questions with Kip Hutchins

Posted on by maryreynolds

October 21, 2025

This month we publish A Song for the Horses: Musical Heritage for More-than-Human Futures in Mongolia by Kip Hutchins. As permafrost in Siberia continues to melt and the steppe in the Gobi turns to desert, people in Mongolia are faced with overlapping climate crises. Some nomadic herders describe climate change as the end of a world. They are quick to add that the world has ended before for Indigenous people in North Asia, as waves of colonialism have left the steppe with a complicated web of apocalypses. A Song for the Horses by K. G. Hutchins examines cases in which people respond to the pressures of climate change by drawing on cultural heritage to foster social resiliency. Today we the author about his research and playing the horse fiddle.

How did you first become interested in Mongolia as a place for research?

When I started my undergraduate degree, I signed up for Mongolian language class for the simple reason that it was the one language on offer that I had never heard anyone speak before. Through language classes I became involved in the local Mongolian community, which then led to traveling to Mongolia to teach English and take music lessons. When I arrived in Mongolia, I found a country where nomadism is still going strong, which is exceedingly rare in an era in which most nomadic communities are relentlessly oppressed by settler states or coerced into urbanization by the demands of capitalism. This realization opened my eyes to the fact that other ways of living are still possible. If other ways of living are possible, then other futures are possible too.

Cranes in Dundgovi province, photo by Kip Hutchins

Your experience as a musician enriches your research. Tell us about one of your favorite times playing the horse fiddle in Mongolia.

The fiddle has always been one of my primary research tools. Playing with other musicians or, better yet, learning a song from a seasoned fiddler, has opened up conversations that I don’t think would have come about otherwise. A couple of my more standout memories of playing the horse fiddle appear in the book. It starts off with probably my favorite memory of playing the fiddle, when I learned from three venerated nomadic elders in the rural Gobi at a local kind of celebration called a nair. This event is paired against a later story about me shivering through a winter rehearsal with an orchestra in the capital city. That particular rehearsal sticks out in my mind because the heat had not yet been turned on in the concert hall, so all the performers were in full winter coats, some trying to play their fiddles through fingerless gloves. Perhaps my strangest performance was when a former student of mine asked me to do a fiddle performance and short talk in Mongolian as an interlude in a full day TedXUlaanbaatar event for an audience of hundreds of people in the Corporate Hotel in Ulaanbaatar. I think the official video from the event is still floating around online somewhere. 

Screenshot from Kip Huthins TEDX talk in Ulaanbaatar

In one part of your book, you write that the three singers imagined a different part of the Gobi landscape while performing. How does geography and spiritual connection to land shape the way Mongolian music is performed?

There is a genre of Mongolian traditional music called urtyn duu, commonly referred to in English as “long-song.” Singers unspool dense, relatively short poetic texts over soaring, semi-improvisational melodies. Central to the philosophy of this genre is the idea that landscapes have particular moral characters. The steppe, vast and expanding, carries with it serenity and generosity. The high mountains of the Altai, with peaks packed in tightly, are garrulous and joyful. Long-song singers let the topography of the land guide their improvisations, singing melodies that move slowly through gently warbling sustained notes to evoke the steppe, or that briskly rise and fall to mimic the dramatic silhouettes of the mountains. Ideally, a great performance allows the singer to tap into the moral character of that landscape and inspire similar feelings in their audience.

What does the concept “more-than-human futures” mean, and how do you see Mongolian herders and musicians using music to imagine alternative, non-extractive ways of living with the land and animals?

Put simply, a more-than-human future is a vision of what could be that is defined not by human domination over nature, but by a purposeful recognition of people’s interdependence with nonhuman animals, plants, and the land itself. Mongolia is caught between the southward spread of permafrost melting in Siberia and the northward creep of desertification in the Gobi. People throughout the country, from nomadic herders to the most cosmopolitan urbanites, find themselves faced with two encroaching walls of anthropogenic ecological disaster that they have contributed little to and have basically no control over. In response, musicians and herders have been using music to build connections with nonhuman animals and spiritual landscapes to put together a blueprint for a future that is resilient against worsening ecological conditions—precisely because it positions humans alongside those ecological nonhumans, rather than above them.

You touch on the tension between rural musical practices and the urban institutions that now teach horse fiddle. How is the growing distance between young urban musicians and rural livestock affecting the transmission of Mongolian musical heritage?

Most of the horse fiddle instructors at places like the National Conservatory or the Arts and Culture University grew up in an era in which it was very common for musicians to come from rural nomadic backgrounds. In that time, it was an expected part of life that you would visit rural encampments somewhat often, even if you were employed as a professional musician in the city. As Mongolia continues to urbanize, it is becoming less and less likely for new fiddle students to have that pastoralist background. Some horse fiddle teachers are afraid that their students won’t be able to connect as well with the many songs in the fiddle’s traditional canon that are meant to evoke the particular sounds and rhythms of different horse gaits. In response to this anxiety, teachers and students alike have been experimenting with a variety of creative ways to bring the sounds of horses and other parts of nomadic life into professional music education.

About the Author
K. G. Hutchins is a cultural anthropologist interested in the intersection of music and the environment. He is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Oberlin College. His research focuses on the roles that nonhuman animals, spirits, and other beings can play in cultural heritage, particularly in Mongolia and southern Appalachia. His first book, A Song for the Horses, draws on research with nomads and musicians he has undertaken since 2010.

Five Questions with Chloe Garcia Roberts

Posted on by maryreynolds

October 16, 2025

Homero Aridjis’s novel, Carne De Dios, vividly translated by Chloe Garcia Roberts, tells the story of the motley crew of bohemians, researchers, and holy fools, both real and imagined, who descend on the town of Huautla de Jiménez searching for inspiration, distraction, and salvation in the sacred mushrooms. These seekers melt in and out of a narrative infiltrated by the slipstream logic of dreams. As John Lennon plays jazz on the patio of the Hotel Grande, Juan Rulfo contemplates horror movies, and Allen Ginsberg recites mantras at Philip Lamantia’s wedding, María Sabina’s life is increasingly thrown into turmoil. Today, we interview translator Chloe Garcia Roberts.

How did you meet Carne de Dios author Homer Aridjis and come to translate this novel?

I met Homero by way of his daughter, Chloe Aridjis, who I interviewed regarding a translation of her father’s memoir, The Child Poet. The magazine publishing the interview asked if her father would have something they could publish as well, and Homero sent me a copy of his newest novel in thanks. I fell in love with the novel and the focus it gave to María Sabina, a figure I’d always been fascinated with, and asked if I could translate it. Thanks to an NEA grant and UA Press, it all ended up coming together.

Tell us about the special friendship between Homer Aridjis, his wife Betty, and the real María Sabina, who is the main character of this book.

Homero talks about his personal relationship in his afterward in the novel, but the basic story is that when he and Betty found out that Sabina was gravely ill, they brought her to Mexico City to live with them and arranged for her to get medical treatment. They have some wonderful pictures of their family with Sabina taken then, and Homero has confided in me that much of her words in the book are direct quotes from their conversations during that time. 

How do you think your work as a poet influences your work as a translator?

My work as a poet and as a translator are inseparable. I always need to have a project in both genres going so that I can move around as the day takes me. The word-work which is the foundation of translation has also given me a more expansive and deeper understanding of the English language, which is the language I write poetry in. I think I am a better poet for being a translator and better translator for being a poet.

Thinking about his novel, can you provide an example or two of phrases or concepts that are clear in Spanish, but difficult to put into English words? How did you find the right words?

Well I had a lot of talks with Homero about how to describe the landscape of Huautla de Jiménez. The word in Spanish for the geography there is cerro, not a high mountain but a little more than a hill, and given that this is a geography very familiar to Homero he did not like the word hill as a translation at all. I ended up using the word mountain in most cases, but I tried to use adjectives or other words throughout to convey that these were low mountains or high hills. There were many terms of words that came up similarly as I worked, words that were so completely themselves in Spanish that we ended up leaving them in their original forms, vela, the word Sabina used for her mushroom ceremonies, or even Carne de Dios, the name of one of the mushrooms she used and the title of the book. 

There was a lot of work put into the poetry of Sabina and also of the author, but that was fun, a lot of reading aloud to myself, making sure that there was as much music in the translation as there is in the original.

This novel takes place in 1957. Why do you think it will appeal to modern readers?

Well I think there will be appeal on several different levels. One, Sabina was a conduit to a knowledge that had been private up until that point, and this novel is the story of that moment of encounter, a moment that is still reverberating today. Two, she is considered by many to be Mexico’s greatest poet and yet she remains largely unknown. This book pays homage to her influence on the burgeoning cultural movement of the 1960s in the U.S. and Europe. Finally, there is a resurgence of American citizens living in Mexico since the pandemic, so there will be echoes here of the clash of cultures going on right now.

About the Translator
Chloe Garcia Roberts is a poet and translator from Spanish and Chinese. She is the author of a book of poetry, The Reveal, which was published as part of Noemi Press’s Akrilica Series for innovative Latino writing, and Fire Eater: A Translator’s Theology. Her translations include Li Shangyin’s Derangements of My Contemporaries: Miscellaneous Notes, which was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, and a collected poems of Li Shangyin published in the New York Review Books / Poets series. She lives outside Boston and works as deputy editor of the Harvard Review and as a lecturer of poetry at MIT.

Five Questions with Stephanie M. Crumpton

Posted on by Victoria Stapleton

October 7, 2025

We Gon’ Be Alright: Resistance and Healing in Black Movement Spaces, 2012–2021 by Stephanie M. Crumpton is a profound exploration of Black activism and organizing during a pivotal decade in American history. Rev. Dr. Stephanie M. Crumpton explores the practices of care, reflection, and creativity that Black activists employed to heal and resist amidst the sociopolitical turbulence from the Obama era through the first Trump presidency. This period, marked by the myth of a “post-racial” America, saw a resurgence in racial violence and hate crimes, culminating in the 2021 Capitol insurrection. Against this backdrop, Crumpton captures the resilience and ingenuity of Black movement workers as they navigated these challenges.

Drawing on oral histories and personal narratives, Crumpton provides an intimate look at the lived experiences of thirty-seven full-time community organizers. These activists and organizers share their strategies for maintaining an ethic of care that sustains them while fighting against both external oppression and internal community struggles. The book highlights how contemporary Black resisters have leveraged a growing understanding of trauma and healing to enhance their activism. This blend of historical knowledge and modern therapeutic practices has equipped them with a broader array of tools to support their communities.

Today, Crumpton answers five questions about her work.

What inspired you to write this book?

The seeds for this work were planted in 2014.  That was the year that Eric Garner and Michael Brown were murdered, and I saw Black activists and organizers respond to their deaths as a call to action. They locked-in and then began to burnout. When I noticed what was happening, I started asking them about how they were struggling because I wanted to figure out how the church could step up and support them. As time passed, because I started this project in 2014 and didn’t finish interviews until 2021, I learned there was a better question: what do the front lines of Black movement work have to teach us about resistance and healing? Eric Garner and Michael Brown died horribly in separate police-involved events about a month into my first semester of teaching at a small seminary in Pennsylvania. Videos of Garner gasping out, “I can’t breathe” and Brown’s bleeding body on Canfield Drive in Ferguson were everywhere. Several of my students were on the front lines of protests, and they brought the anguish, fatigue, determination and questions about this gruesome violence that they were dealing with to the classroom. Many felt very much unsupported by churches that talked about justice but weren’t active in the streets. They brought me to the work that became this book. I wrote We Gon’ Be Alright to capture Black activists’ and organizers’ stories because I believe they have something to teach us about what it looks like to attend to ourselves while we address what continues to harm us.

Your title, “We Gon’ Be Alright” conveys a message of hope. What led you to choose this as the title for your work?

I wish I had some deep answer about hope to this question, but the truth is that I borrowed the title from Kendrick Lamar’s song of the same title. It’s on his 2015 release, To Pimp a Butterfly. The year before it came out, we’d been bombarded by footage of Brown and Garner, and then after that: Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, the nine people killed in prayer service at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston by a self-proclaimed white supremacist, and so many more. We were in the middle of Black deaths going viral across social media, and then here comes Kendrick Lamar with this squeaky voice talking about “We Gon’ Be Alright.” There is a part in the refrain where he repeats the word, “alright.” The sound of his voice is so tight and sharp that it almost sounds like a bark. It feels like he’s forcing the word “alright” out into the air. Growing up in the Black church, I learned to look a dead thing in the face and then proclaim something contrary to (perhaps in spite of) what I saw. Maybe that’s what I latched onto in the song, because Kendrick isn’t denying what was going on in those days. He sees, and then (based on the fact that we’ve been here before) barks out the word “alright.” When I look at Black activists and organizers as they stay committed to fighting injustice, they personify this same determination, and Kendrick captures it sonically when he snaps out the word “alright.” What I appreciate the most is that his message comes from his place alongside communities that know suffering, but that also know more. We know suffering, perseverance, and determination. We also know what we want, which is to be whole, free and well. We lean in, face reality, and say “alright” in that way that proclaims that this thing is not over. We find the wherewithal to do this even while we are forced to grieve death. If there’s hope, it’s in the wherewithal that gets summoned every time we dare to proclaim that we are indeed going to be alright.

You talk about the importance of healing through persistent communal practices of care, reflection, and creativity. Can you share one of the oral histories or narratives from your book that exemplifies these kinds of practices?

One activist, who stays in the streets as a serious agitator, tells the story of how critical rest and being in the care of her community is to her well-being. She talks about how periodically an elder from the community will call her and send her money with a note that this is just for her to take care of herself. Not to spend on others, but just for her. She talked about being mothered well by her birth mother, and the communal mothering that others do to keep her on track as she does such deep work with and on behalf of others. Perhaps the most tender part of her story, for me at least, was her sharing about how a friend will call her and sing her name. The friend is a professional vocalist. She’ll answer the phone and, at some point in the conversation, the friend will begin to sing her name back to her. Now, I can’t speak to all of what that did for her. What I can say is that I observe in that act of sister-friending a moment of someone gathering her—calling her back from the places where her energy has been dispersed. There is something powerful about when someone who loves you, and that you love back, calls you by your name. But to sing it—to call your name in rhythm. There’s something there, and those are the kinds of moments that matter when you’re doing work against people and structures that want to dehumanize you. I learned that it’s not always the big things, like restorative justice circles and abolition trainings (which are vital), but also the little practices like singing someone’s name back to them that bring us in and closer to one another.

The book is written through a lens of “womanist practical theology.” Can you unpack that concept for us just a bit for folks who might not be familiar with it?

The best way to say it is that the book looks at the challenge of fighting injustice and being well in mind, body, and spirit through lenses that are informed by how the many ways that Black women decipher challenges in our communities and then move to address them. In the words of Alice Walker, who first published womanism as a term, I am “dedicated to the wholeness” of Black people. I want to, as she would say, “know more and in greater depth” how Black communities define ourselves for ourselves according to what we believe is most important and to then move to make it real. In this project Womanism looks like using my awareness of how race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and carceral status become identifying markers used to justify violence, structural oppression, and other forms of collective harm. It also looks like taking a deep dive into the inner lives of Black communities to examine how we manage to build barriers against what assaults us, to hold one another in dignity even in times of conflict, to refuse to give up or in, and all the while practice the futures we want. It is sacred work.

What are you working on next?

There is so much more that we can learn from Black activists and organizers. I’m thinking about what it might look like for these stories and others that didn’t make it into the book to make their way out into community theater. The power of these stories is that they let us see what it looks like to turn so many things on their heads so that we can come to different conclusions. I’d like to learn about the theater models that invite the audience to take an active role in storytelling by joining the experience to create alternative outcomes. I want to see if we can take stories that are so filled with healing wisdom, truth, and a bit of humor as guides for helping us all envision something different: viable futures where we all have what we need to thrive—not just survive. What would it be like to bring that directly into communities to practice the worlds we want to know?

A scholar, teacher, and ordained minister, Rev. Dr. Stephanie M. Crumpton is an associate professor of practical theology at McCormick Theological Seminary, where she is also the director of the Trauma Healing Initiative. She leads THI’s mission to cultivate a prepared community of learners and educators who take their knowledge, experience, and practical skills for trauma-informed and healing-centered restoration into communities dealing with the impact of trauma. THI is funded by a $1 million Pathways for Tomorrow Initiative grant from the Lilly Endowment Incorporated.

Five Questions with Stephanie Lewthwaite

Posted on by Cameron Quan

September 29, 2025

Scarred Landscapes: Place, Trauma, and Memory in Caribbean Latinx Art is a groundbreaking exploration of the rich and complex works of Caribbean Latinx artists. Scholar Stephanie Lewthwaite documents the work of ten influential artists of Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican descent, based in New York City from the 1970s to the present. Through their diverse practices, including painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, installation, video, and performance art, these artists confront the legacies of colonial trauma and their own experiences of diasporic unbelonging and artworld marginality.

Today, Lewthwaite answers five questions about her work.

What inspired you to write Scarred Landscapes?

I’ve always been fascinated by the relationship between place and memory. My earlier research on Mexican communities and migration in Los Angeles and artistic and cultural exchange in New Mexico led me to consider borderland spaces beyond the U.S. Southwest, namely, the Hispanophone Caribbean and diaspora city of New York, which scholar Melissa Castillo Planas refers to as a “North Atlantic borderlands.” Following the lead of scholars such as Laura E. Pérez, I became interested in parallels between the border theory of Gloria Anzaldúa and the coalitional thought of Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta, whose work emerged in different geographic contexts but in relation to similar discourses of third-world solidarity and transnational feminism. I began exploring New York as a site of productive exchange between Caribbean Latinx artists with different island and cultural roots who faced old and new traumas in their search for belonging. Teaching students about the diversity of Latinx cultural expression and participating in a memory studies network also led me to write about Caribbean Latinx artists with ties to Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico whose diasporic identities informed what I saw as productive forms of relationality.

Your book puts forth the wonderful concept of “archipelagic memory.” Can you unpack this idea a bit for us?

Scholars have harnessed the idea of the archipelago and archipelagic thought to understand patterns of relationality that inform Caribbean Latinx history and culture. Although centuries of colonialism, imperialism, enslavement, migration, and exile divided the Caribbean and its diaspora communities into nation-bound groups and racial formations, Caribbean Latinx artists have confronted the aftermath of these traumatic histories and their own contemporary unbelonging and marginality by exploring possibilities for solidarity and affirming their multiple diasporic experiences and connections to the rest of the world. The term “archipelagic memory” captures this relationality, and how Caribbean Latinx artists have promoted connectionist sensibilities of different kinds in their work in response to the divisions brought about by trauma: entangling different people, pasts, and places to expose how violence and coloniality resonate in the present and drawing on relational thought to call for justice and solidarity with others in and beyond the Caribbean and New York. In this way, the book frames archipelagic memory as a generative and decolonial form of memory work that imagines other worlds and futures beyond the continuation of trauma in the present.

You talk about work by well-known figures like Ana Mendieta and Coco Fusco but also give space to discussion of lesser-known artists. Could you tell us a bit about one of these lesser-known artists and what drew you to their work?

Following the lead of Latinx art scholars, this book argues that nation-, race-, and class-based hierarchies in society and dominant art worlds lead to the marginalization of some artists over others. Thus, the phrase “lesser-known artist” must be understood in this context and in relation to changes in contemporary art worlds and the academy that have seen some long-established if less visible artists gain increasing recognition in the mainstream as debates about the (mis)representation and erasure of Latinx art have opened up. With respect to younger artists though, I was drawn to the work of Joiri Minaya who views her diasporic experience (Minaya was born in the United States, raised in the Dominican Republic, and trained in Santo Domingo and New York) as a powerful tool for looking across borders and seeking affiliations with others. For example, using performance, photography, sculpture, and installation, Minaya has fashioned a subversive tropical aesthetic that ties the imperial trauma of the Caribbean with that of other archipelagos, such as Hawaiʻi. Minaya’s work shows how archipelagic memory is a vital and ongoing tradition in contemporary Caribbean Latinx art.  

Were there any particular stories, images, or archival discoveries that profoundly impacted you during your research for this book?

My correspondence with the Dominican-born artist Freddy Rodríguez really encouraged me to continue researching this book. I position Rodríguez as a foundational figure in Caribbean Latinx art who negotiated various exclusions in U.S. society and mainstream art worlds. One particularly striking image that caught my attention early on was Rodríguez’s use of a disembodied leg belonging to a cimarrón (a maroon or enslaved subject in search of freedom) to symbolize connections between different historical traumas across time and space, his own flight from the D.R., and sense of diasporic un/belonging in N.Y.C. This powerful symbol underscored for me the complexity of memory work in Caribbean Latinx art and how artists such as Rodríguez have had to negotiate multiple worlds, pasts, and presents.

Caribbean Latinx art has a rich and expansive heritage with roots in the Americas as well as ties to different parts of the world. I hope this book will help readers understand this reach and complexity by showing how Caribbean Latinx artists are absolutely vital to narratives of contemporary global art and more inclusive models of justice and belonging that extend beyond territorially bound communities.

What are you working on next?

I continue to work on contemporary Latinx visual culture. I’m in the process of writing a project about Chicanx photography and its relationship with settler colonialism in the Americas, political activism since the 1960s, and debates about border violence, kinship, and decoloniality.

Stephanie Lewthwaite is an associate professor in the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles, 1890–1940 and A Contested Art: Modernism and Mestizaje in New Mexico. Her interests lie in the field of Latinx visual culture and cultural history. 

How John Schaefer Transformed UA in 5 Photos

Posted on by Cameron Quan

September 25, 2025

John P. Schaefer was only thirty-six years old when he assumed the role of fifteenth president of the University of Arizona in 1971. Earning a PhD in chemistry in 1958, Dr. Schaefer’s career skyrocketed through the ranks of academia, moving him from junior faculty to university president in a mere decade. As president, he led the University of Arizona through a transformational period of growth and is credited with securing the university’s status as a top-tier research institution.

His new memoir, A Chance to Make a Difference, recounts poignant, eye-opening, and often humorous stories from childhood to presidency, revealing the characteristics of an inspiring university leader.

Today, we go on a short virtual tour of the University of Arizona to explore Schaefer’s legacy and highlight a few anecdotes from his memoir.

Describing the summer of 1961 after his first year in Arizona, Schaefer recalled, “The chemistry building was not air conditioned. I began to arrive at seven in the morning to beat the heat. The laboratories were so hot that I came to work in shorts and a T-shirt every day…I decided to buy an air- conditioning unit myself. ‘Sorry, you can’t do that. It’s against university policy. The only reason for allowing the installation of an air-conditioning unit is if it’s required to protect a sensitive instrument.’ Faculty members were clearly not sensitive instruments, worthy of preservation or protection.”

“The records of the University of Arizona in football and basketball compared to Arizona State University and others resulted in [President Richard] Harvill being labeled as anti-athletics by boosters and alums. The football facilities were unlikely to attract aspiring stars. Basketball was being played in Bear Down Gym, built in 1926. With fold-down bleachers, it could seat a few thousand spectators, but it was rarely filled. However, Harvill and [Richard Clausen] succeeded in getting funding to build McKale Memorial Center, a state-of-the-art arena with office space and facilities to house the entire athletic department. The basketball court would seat over fourteen thousand fans. That would prove to be a catalyst for change and progress.”

“Grace Flandrau was a successful and well- respected novelist, writer of short stories, and journalist. She came to Tucson in the 1940s and stayed with the family of Isabella Greenway, her husband’s niece and founder of the Arizona Inn. In 1960, she purchased a home near the inn and became a familiar presence in the community. She died in 1971 and left a portion of her estate to the university, given with the understanding that the university president would use it to benefit the institution. I chose to use it to build a planetarium.”

“Over the years, Curving Arcades has come to be an object of affection, sometimes likened to ‘marching clothespins’ or ‘dancing daddy longlegs.’ Art can be provocative as well as beautiful. The art committee deserves our lasting gratitude for their dedication to seeing the project through to completion, despite the public criticism they had to endure. And, over the years, I have come to regard the work as lovely in its simplicity and an enduring enhancement to the campus landscape.”

“The College of Agriculture provided a horse and plow to celebrate the
groundbreaking of the new library building, July 27, 1973…Libraries are the only college and university facilities that are never finished. Books and journals and records of all sorts are constantly being added. Computers expand the access to news and ideas; new approaches to teaching and learning evolve. Libraries are the heart of a university!”

John P. Schaefer is president emeritus of the University of Arizona, where he had an active twenty-one-year career in teaching and research. A conservationist and avid birdwatcher, he helped organize the Tucson Audubon Society and found the Nature Conservancy in Arizona. In addition to his academic and conservation work, Dr. Schaefer is a skilled photographer. He is the author of several books on photography, including Desert Jewels: Cactus Flowers of the Southwest and Mexico. He and Ansel Adams founded the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in 1975.

Five Questions with Melani Martinez

Posted on by maryreynolds

September 9, 2025

This month we publish the paperback version of The Molino by Melani Martinez. Pima County Public Libraries selected this memoir as a Top Pick for 2024, and the book was a finalist for the Kitchen Arts & Letters Nach Waxman Prize for Food and Beverage Scholarship.

The hybrid memoir reckons with one family’s loss of home, food, and faith. Weaving together history, culture, and Mexican food traditions, 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. 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.

Today we revisit our 2024 interview with the author about her memoir.

What sparked your interest in publishing the story of your family and your family’s business?

I wanted my family, and families like mine, to be represented in published stories of American experiences. The Mexican-American community and communities from Tucson and the Borderlands have incredible stories, but they are not shared or platformed as much as they could be for many readers and listeners who care about these stories. I knew El Rapido, our family business, mattered to this community. I believed El Rapido’s stories should be published for Tucson. My personal stories that also make up the memoir may be new for this audience, but I hope they resonate.

How has your relationship with the molino changed over time?

I think about the molino in three different ways: the grinding machine itself, the name my family gave to our place of work, and my reflective writing on the memories of this work with my family. In all three ways, the molino is all about process. It is sometimes a representative of the past, but for me it is more often a symbol of how things are constantly changing. I’ve written about the tension I felt with the molino and how I experienced a fear of it, a desire to get away from it. Putting these ideas in writing has helped me see that it is not something I can just walk away from—it never was. But I am not afraid of the machine anymore. I’m able to mourn the loss of the place where we lived and worked. I feel like I can more authentically celebrate the molino now.

What was the connection between El Rapido and México?

It seems like a tamalería/tortillería would have a pretty clear connection to México, but I’m not sure if it was always clear for me and my brother growing up as workers at El Rapido. This disconnect was often tied to language—even though we used some Spanish vocabulary regularly and listened to Mexican music everyday at El Rapido, we didn’t learn to speak the language fluently and struggled to communicate with our co-workers as well as customers and familiar people in our own community. As third generation, we were very isolated from México. Even though we were part of Tucson and Sonoran culture, we didn’t know quite how to connect to the land, the people, and the culture of a place just 70 miles south of us. In terms of our sense of place, El Rapido was one of the only ways we would experience a microcosm of this big idea that was “México.”  El Rapido let us taste something, hear something, and through iconic images that were all around us to also see something that told the story of México for us. It wasn’t the same story that we learned in school. It wasn’t the same story on television or in the movies. It might have been a little fuzzy and vague sometimes, but it was our most compelling artifact. If we needed any proof of our ancestry and ties to México, El Rapido was a definite “X” on the map we could point to.

Why did you decide to use the sometimes controversial figure of “El Pensamiento” to tell your story?

I had been writing the memoir for over a decade before El Pensamiento was named in the manuscript. I knew the storefront mural was very important to my family, especially my father, but I had only written this idea with plenty of space between me and the image of “The Sleep Mexican.”  I knew it was a complex and powerful image but I didn’t know how to address it confidently. Once I started to imagine the house itself as a character in the story, I realized that I had been missing the voice of an incredibly important El Rapido figure (the mural image) and I wanted to know where he really came from. Searching for “Sleepy’s” origin story made his character come alive for me. I realized his name (El Pensamiento) and then I could hear his voice. He is a narrator in the story because he reveals truth, especially as mijita (me as the primary narrator) struggles to articulate truth to herself. He is also a vessel for compassionately sharing the faith traditions and christian doctrines that have been rejected, resisted, or misunderstood. In this way, he serves as a typology of Christ for mijita. He speaks multiple languages, including the love languages recorded in scripture. His message and his likeness will always be controversial, but full of wisdom for those who listen to his words. 

What project are you working on now?

At the University of Arizona, I teach Borderlands writing courses for first-year students and I’ve been working on a Department of Education grant initiative called Project ADELANTE. The Borderlands classroom is some rich territory for dreaming up new and creative ideas! This year, I hope to participate, alongside my students, in various Borderlands genres including corridos, testimonios, fotonovelas, and more.  

About the Author
Melani “Mele” Martinez is a senior lecturer at the University of Arizona, where she teaches writing courses. She earned a BA in creative writing at the University of Arizona and an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College. Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, Bacopa Literary Review, BorderLore, Bearings Online Journal,Telling Tongues: A Latin Anthology on Language Experiences, and Contemporary Chicanx Writers Anthology. Her family has lived in the Sonoran Desert for at least nine generations

Five Questions with Laura Da’

Posted on by Cameron Quan

August 26, 2025

Severalty begins in a garden and moves through ancestral and contemporary hometowns that shimmer between wholeness and severing. In these poems, river currents tick with the intrusion of the clock’s lavish precincts. From powerfully compressed lyrical fragments to pulsing narrative sequences, Severalty shifts perspectives to examine devastation and healing, transience and seasonality, loss and resurrection.

With clear roots in her first two books of poetry, Tributaries and Instruments of the True Measure, this volume joins the author’s poetic trilogy with a deeply personal accounting of history, community, and selfhood. Weaving the past and present into a stunning tapestry, this collection is a powerful testament to Indigenous endurance and creativity, offering readers a deeply insightful and necessary work.

Today, Da’ answers five questions about her work.

Your title, Severalty, is a reference to the Dawes Severalty Act of the late nineteenth century. How does this title (and the related legislation) frame the book?

Allotment is the fundamental act of fragmenting integrity. The Dawes Severalty Act is an agent of genocide enacted against Indigenous nations which attempted to sever the political, familial, and landed bonds of communal life. This time in Shawnee history is still just inside living memory, which is to say that my grandparents, great aunts and uncles, beloved elders who I knew as a very small child, were directly impacted by these policies. This relates to the book and to me as its author by connecting the lived present to the purportedly historical past. As I was creating this book I was writing to an understanding of fragmentation and wholeness that shifted from personal and tribal trauma to an openness to wholeness.

Twelve of the poems in this book have arrows as titles. Can you tell us about the function of these arrows, or how these poems are related?

The twelve poems mentioned are anchored to the concept of time, directionality, and seasonality. Each of these poems is titled by an arrow and each one reaches to a place or sensation that is nestled inside linear time, growing and harvesting time, and fragmented time, but also exists outside these frameworks. The collection begins with the line: Mistaken for a gardener upon my return which offers a preamble for the book’s inquiries concerning resurrection, analogy as a spiritual practice and source of comfort, and the ultimate generosity of the land.

You’ve published two other books with the University of Arizona Press: Instruments of the True Measure and Tributaries. How does Severalty continue, transform, and/or diverge from those projects?

I see Severalty as a final painting of the tryptic. It engages with the past as do the other collections, lives in Shawnee history, culture, language, and people from the inside and from the outside, and reflects personal inquiry through poetry. Each project naturally diverges with my own sensibilities, experiences, and affinities. I hope that readers might enjoy these poems individually and as a collection.

Two of my favorite poems from the book are “Painterly” and “Eye Turned Crow,” which both take up notions of seeing and point-of-view (both in place and time). Can you talk about how Shawnee perspectives shape the language of these poems, or your work in general?

Thanks for your kind words and close reading of these two poems. I appreciate the connection between them as poems that mark a sense of distress by turning to perspective. I wrote Painterly during a difficult period in which I was experiencing complications related to my organ transplant. I was stuck for a long time in the hospital, feeling quite poorly, and I was reading Alberti’s De pictura but struggling to focus. Alberti was exiled from Florence during the renaissance and I too felt a sense of exile that I was writing against in that poem. In Eye Turned Crow, the perspective borrows from a library and considers different acts of genocide and the ways that they are acknowledged or obscured.

What are you working on next?

I’ve been writing poems about places I love. A few can be found on the Seattle Met website.

Laura Da’ is a poet and teacher who studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is the author of Tributaries, an American Book Award winner; Instruments of the True Measure, a Washington State Book Award winner; and Severalty. Da’ is Eastern Shawnee, and she lives in Washington with her family.

Julie Swarstad Johnson Interviews Denise Low

Posted on by maryreynolds

August 22, 2025

Denise Low recently spoke about her book, House of Grace, House of Blood, with Julie Swarstad Johnson, a guest contributor to Under a Warm Green Linden. Low is a former Kansas Poet Laureate and a founding board member of Indigenous Nations Poets. She currently is a literary co-director for The 222 in Sonoma County, California, and on the advisory board of Write On Door County. She has Northern European and Lenape/Munsee (Delaware) heritage. Johnson is co-editor with Christopher Cokinos of Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight; and she is Archivist and Outreach Librarian at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

In 1782, a renegade Pennsylvania militia killed ninety-six pacificist Christian Delawares (Lenapes) in Ohio. Those who escaped, including Indigenous eyewitnesses, relayed their accounts of the atrocity. In House of Grace, House of Blood, Low delves into a critical incident of Indigenous peoples’ experiences. Readers will explore with the poet how trauma persists through hundreds of years, and how these peoples have survived and flourished in the subsequent generations.

Johnson asked Low about her family connections to both sides of the massacre, as well as questions about her research. Below is an excerpt from the interview.

Johnson: As you mention, House of Grace, House of Blood makes extensive use of archival documents. As an archivist myself, I’m always interested in people’s experience with archival materials. Can you describe your experience with archives as you worked on this book? Were you able to see physical items in person or did you access them digitally? Did this have any impact on your writing?

Low: The most important archive was the intangible one of oral tradition—family and tribal. A number of enrolled Delaware elders were generous in sharing unwritten information, which was essential to me personally. And I did not proceed until I heard my uncle affirm our family origins; my brother was also an important source for the memoir. The lacuna in family stories is informative also—what was not said/documented/remembered. Talks with elders was the most impactful of the sources, and the least material.

I appreciate Kevin Young’s discussion of “shadow books” in The Grey Album: Music, Shadows, Lies (2012). These are “books” that were never written because of impediments to black authorship, “removed” books or books with gaps/censored redactions, and lost books—“the oral book of black culture is at times not passed down, at others simply passed over,” Young writes. I appreciate the specific ways these shadow books exist in black United States culture and also, in analogous ways, in Indigenous cultures. Glyphic language of Lenapes is denied legitimacy yet glyph carvings on trees were accurate signposts; rock art is plentiful, and narrative glyphs in basketry, on clan poles, and wampum are all part of a literary cultural legacy.

Read the full interview on the Under a Warm Green Linden website.

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