Category: Author Q&A

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.

Five Questions with Mary Whisenhunt and Patricia Gilman

Posted on by maryreynolds

August 19, 2025

Mimbres Far from the Heartland: Identity at the Powers Ranch Site of East-Central Arizona offers a unique investigation into the complexities of Mimbres identity and social dynamics beyond the traditional Mimbres Valley heartland. Situated at the western edge of the Mimbres region, the Powers Ranch site is a professionally excavated Classic period settlement in Arizona’s Gila River Valley. Through excavation and analysis of architecture and a rich array of artifacts, including ceramic sherds, projectile points, and shell artifacts, authors Mary E. Whisenhunt and Patricia A. Gilman provide a detailed look at the lives of Mimbres people on the periphery.

Today, the authors answer five questions about their work.

What inspired you to write this book?

Gilman: I was interested in the Powers Ranch site because it would help me address one of my research interests—what were the lives of Mimbres people like beyond the Mimbres Valley heartland? It was becoming more apparent to us Mimbres archaeologists that things were different outside the Mimbres Valley, but how and why? Powers Ranch, being located 119 kilometers west of the valley, would help me consider these questions. Although parts of the site were excavated in 1983, the materials were never analyzed, and the excavation was never written up. My students at the University of Oklahoma and I analyzed the ceramics and the projectile points, and so I had a bit of an obligation to write up the site.

Whisenhunt: I was thrilled when Pat asked me to co-author this publication! The Powers Ranch site lies about 5 kilometers north of the area where I did my 2020 dissertation research on precontact settlement patterns in the Gila River Valley between Duncan and York, Arizona. We first visited the site in 2016 and were fascinated by it. Almost all the Classic sites on or near the Gila River in Arizona are on private property, and all have been looted. We’re extraordinarily blessed that the Powers family allowed us access to the property and supported the early investigations on which the book is based. Only one other Mimbres Classic site besides Powers Ranch has been professionally excavated in Arizona’s Gila River Valley, so the data from the Powers Ranch site really filled in a lot of the gaps in our knowledge.

What do you mean when you talk about an “edge community” in archaeology?

Gilman and Whisenhunt: Archaeologists tend to emphasize “core areas” or cultural heartlands where distributions and types of material culture, site layouts, burials, and architecture are strongly patterned. Research focused on the edge communities or regions at the boundaries of these archaeological core areas offers insights into the creation and manipulation of social identity and cultural change. Based on site organization, ceramic types and distributions, and architecture, the Powers Ranch site and several other Mimbres Classic settlements in the Gila River Valley in south-central Arizona represent edge communities of the greater Mimbres cultural region in New Mexico.

What are examples of ceramic items found at the Powers Ranch site in Arizona that helped you connect this site to Mimbres sites in New Mexico?

Gilman and Whisenhunt: We analyzed pottery distributions and designs to determine whether and how those who lived at the Powers Ranch site were affiliated with Mimbres people in the heartland. To represent a Mimbres connection, the painted ceramics in the Classic (CE 1000-1130) parts of the site would have been dominated by Mimbres Classic Black-on-white pottery. We found there were higher proportions of Mimbres pottery at the site than any other kind of painted ceramics, supporting the idea that people living there in the Classic period were affiliated with others in the core Mimbres area. We also found that Classic painted pottery designs at the Powers Ranch site were generally like those in the New Mexico heartland, although there were significant differences in certain design elements. For example, the core area had much higher ratios of pots with figurative designs than those in Arizona’s Gila Valley, and some of the geometric design elements were different. Those differences suggest the Powers Ranch site and the other occupations on the Gila River represent a distinct Western Mimbres identity, but one still affiliated with the Mimbres heartland.

What do you hope readers and researchers take away from this work?

Gilman: I hope that researchers and others interested in Mimbres archaeology will see that people can be fully Mimbres, even though they lived beyond the Mimbres Valley heartland. Their lives were different in that they either chose not to participate in the religion/cosmology that involved the Hero Twins and scarlet macaws, or they were not allowed to participate.

I also hope that readers will see that it is possible to gain insights from analyzing materials that were excavated long ago using different methods than we use today. Publication makes appropriate data available to everyone for thinking about life and lives in the past.

Whisenhunt: I think we know quite a bit about very large Mimbres sites in the core Mimbres area, so I hope this book will be of interest to those who seek to understand Mimbres community life on a smaller scale. And of course, how they were similar or different than others who lived in the Mimbres Valley heartland, and whether the site layout and material culture mirror those further downriver in the Gila River Valley. Like Pat, I hope readers, including other archaeologists, will see the value in analyzing data from sites excavated in the more distant past. My current project focuses on something similar—examining data derived from a Works Progress Administration archaeological excavation from the 1930s.

What is your next project?

Gilman: I am working on three projects right now. My co-authors and I have almost completed a monograph on West Baker, another Mimbres site far beyond the Mimbres Valley that was excavated in 1964 but never analyzed or written up. This site has a water shrine—a pit with layers of turquoise, shell, and other artifacts—a unique feature in Mimbres archaeology.

Other co-authors and I are also working on a monograph for Mogollon Village, a Pit Structure period site (CE 200-1000) in west-central New Mexico. Emil Haury defined the Mogollon Tradition in part using material from his 1933 excavation there, and we are incorporating unpublished data from his work as well as more recent excavations that we did. Mogollon Village is particularly interesting because it appears that one or just a few families lived on the site relatively continuously for several hundred years.

My third project, again with other co-authors, is investigating the presence of scarlet macaws, birds of the tropical rain forests, on southwestern archaeological sites from about CE 950-1400. We suggest that ancient people raised these birds locally and perhaps even bred them, an interpretation far different from the traditional one of trade in these birds from Mesoamerica.

Whisenhunt: I’m working with two co-authors on a book about the Morhiss mortuary site in south Texas. Dating back more than 7,000 years, and with more than 250 recorded burials, it’s one of the largest and oldest hunter-gatherer cemeteries in the U.S. The Works Progress Administration fully excavated it back in the 1930s. Using data derived from original excavation records, radiocarbon dating, stable isotope analysis, and diagnostic lithic material, we’re exploring the evolution of precontact hunter-gatherer dietary and mobility patterns in response to population and environmental pressures.

Mary E. Whisenhunt has conducted archaeological research in the U.S. Southwest since 2014 and has worked at the Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) since 2020 and at Statistical Research Inc. (SRI) in Tucson since late 2024. Patricia A. Gilman has done archaeological research in the Mimbres region of New Mexico and Arizona for more than fifty years. One of her research interests is the role of small Mimbres Classic sites beyond the Mimbres Valley.

Leigh McDonald on the New Cover of “Encantado”

Posted on by Cameron Quan

August 5, 2025

Today, University of Arizona Press Art Director, Leigh McDonald, shares a behind-the-scenes look at the process of designing a new cover for the paperback edition of Pat Mora’s Encantado, the poetic monologues of an imagined southwestern town.

First published in 2018, each poem forms a story that reveals the complex and emotional journeys we take through life. Mora meanders through the thoughts of Encantado’s residents—the mothers and sisters, brothers and fathers in whom we see slivers of ourselves and our loved ones—and paints a portrait of a community through its inhabitants’ own diverse voices. Even the river has a voice we understand. Inspired by both the real and imagined stories around her, Mora transports us to the heart of what it means to join in a chorus of voices. A community. A town. Encantado.

Can you tell us about the artwork you chose for the paperback edition of Encantado?

This cover was a particular challenge because Encantado is a fictional place, but one based firmly in the humanity, emotions, and landscape of real Southwestern towns. Most of the artwork I found that had the right feeling for the book also had something else about it that was too specific to fit—a recognizable real-world location, or a person or setting that was too at odds with the descriptions in the book. When I came across Ed Sandoval’s work, I knew I had finally struck gold. His warm, colorful paintings of quiet moments in a remembered New Mexico evoked the sense of place and the people of Encantado perfectly; through a different medium, they tell a similar story.

Are there certain themes, tones, or other connections to the poems that you see reflected in the new cover? 

The river in Encantado is not just a beautiful piece of landscape, but actually a figure with its own voice and place in the journey—it was a key feature to include in the landscape of the cover image. We also knew from the beginning that we wanted artwork with people and buildings in it, because at its heart, that’s what the book is about: the human experience, in community.

Were there other directions or artworks you were considering?

The hardcover edition of Encantado was designed as a beautiful abstraction that would feel like a small, precious gift of a book. We knew for the paperback that we wanted to go in a new direction, one that reflected the content and tone of Pat’s work more directly, so I immediately began looking for representational art. Ed’s work was, however, the only existing artwork I found that I felt was right for this edition. It really stood out as a match head and shoulders above everything else I considered.

Are there any special considerations for redesigning covers? Were there author requests? Constraints?

Redesigning covers for a paperback is different from designing for frontlist titles because there is an existing cover you want the new book to be in conversation with, and yet also distinct from. It’s an opportunity to reimagine how the cover can reflect the work, but also an additional challenge. The time and resources for design are also typically more limited at this stage, but I really wanted to make sure that Pat felt the artwork I chose reflected Encantado as she had envisioned it. Fortunately, both she and her daughter were thrilled at the choice.

What is something you love about this cover?

One of my favorite unexpected moments in cover design is when I am able to link an artist and author who really appreciate and want to support each other’s work. Ed was absolutely fantastic to work with, and graciously offered to donate the use of the piece in support of a fellow New Mexican artist. Similarly, Pat and her daughter were delighted to learn about him and his beautiful work and so thankful to make the connection. There is something special about bringing wonderful, creative people together!

Pat Mora is an author, speaker, educator, and literacy advocate. She has written more than forty-five books for adults, teens, and children. The recipient of two honorary doctorates and a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Melani Martinez Featured in Arizona Highways

Posted on 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 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 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 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.

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 the “Esculent” Podcast

Posted on 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:

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.

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