Category: Author Q&A

Five Questions for Alan Pelaez Lopez

Posted on December 5, 2023September 12, 2023 by maryreynolds

December 5, 2023

When Language Broke Open, An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent collects the creative offerings of forty-five queer and trans Black writers of Latin American descent who use poetry, prose, and visual art to illustrate Blackness as a geopolitical experience that is always changing. Telling stories of Black Latinidades, this anthology edited by Alan Pelaez Lopez, centers the multifaceted realities of the LGBTQ community.

By exploring themes of memory, care, and futurity, these contributions expand understandings of Blackness in Latin America, the Caribbean, and their U.S.-based diasporas. The volume offers up three central questions: How do queer and/or trans Black writers of Latin American descent address memory? What are the textures of caring, being cared for, and accepting care as Black queer and/or trans people of Latin American descent? And how do queer and trans embodiments help us understand and/or question the past and the present, and construct a Black, queer, and trans future?

What first sparked your interest to bring writers together for this anthology?

In the United States, there is a narrative that Black people from/ in/ with heritage from Latin America do not know that they are Black, or that they reject their Blackness. This is false. Black Latinxs, Black Latin Americans, Black Antilleans, and African writers in Latin America and the Antilles each understand their experience through the unique legal, cultural, and political reality of the regions they currently live in. I first envisioned a volume that demonstrated the nuances, similarities, and radical departures that exist across the Black of Latin American descent diaspora. This collection is one that does not explain Black Latinidades but instead attends to what I think are pillars of Black queer and trans life: memory, care, and futures.

How did living in Mexico City inform the way you edited this volume?

I was sick and in medical treatment while editing When Language Broke Open and questions of trans* and Black futurities kept lingering in my mind, especially as I was actively witnessing the rise of anti-trans feminist organizing in CDMX [Mexico City] alongside constant news reports of Black migrants presenting themselves at the US-Mexico and Mexico-Guatemala borders. Witnessing these material realities helped me form questions for contributors during the editing process that I would not have been able to craft otherwise. While When Language Broke Open primarily includes contributions from writers based in the settler United States, the anthology contributes to migration studies, border studies, and trans* feminist studies in unique and crucial ways.

Mexico City also helped me contextualize why the volume is necessary: In the introduction to When Language Broke Open, I outline being racially profiled in my own country of birth and having to guarantee local police that I am indeed Mexican despite my Blackness. This constant interaction with the nation-state made me realize that Black Latin Americans are often treated as foreigners and/or irregular migrants in our countries of birth, and when we do leave our countries, we become doubly displaced, which is a theme that evolves as readers read about the migratory journeys from contributors with roots in South America, Central America, North America, and the Antilles. The volume does not, however, solely critique our countries of birth for this displacement. Instead, the volume critically analyses settler colonialism, capitalism, ableism, trans* misogyny, and Indigenous and Black erasure as forces that shape our different experiences across the hemisphere.

Why did you include a variety of genres in this anthology?

While putting the call for submissions together, I was interested in narratives that explored queer and trans* Blackness in the everyday, not only through “memorable events” such as coming out of the closet, experiencing racial or gender violence, etc. Expanding the genres felt like the only way to get to the quotidian experiences of–for example–watching a hip-hop YouTube video, washing one’s hair, blowing out a candle, and watching the sunset (all of which can be found in the volume). I am quite moved by the way in which contributors used visual images throughout the collection: some added photographs of themselves, others of family members, and there is one series of paintings and one graphic memoir. When we read across the presented visual images, letters, and the various forms of fragmentation and redaction that appear in When Language Broke Open, readers encounter a complex narrative of how race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and culture inform the radical Black imagination.

The volume repeatedly uses the phrase “queer and trans Black writers of Latin American descent,” can you explain what this means in relation to the word “Afro-Latina/o/x”?

One of the harder editorial decisions I had to grapple with was encountering the refusal within myself to lean on an already existing grammar and allow the contributors to lead me to new theories and frameworks. Many of the contributors were vocal about their racialized Black experience, some rejected the notion of being “Afro-Latinx” due to the ways in which the word has been used to exclude countries like Haiti, Belize, and others; some refuse “Afro-Latinx” so that readers wouldn’t assume “mixed race”; and some refused it in order to speak of African migrants in Latin America and the Antilles who have found kinship amongst Black Latin Americans. “Queer and trans Black writers of Latin American descent” is a framework that understands queer and trans* Black people as existing throughout the hemisphere while embodying different legal, social, cultural, spiritual, and historical experiences of Blackness. “[O]f Latin American descent” points to Latin America as a part of our lives while not landlocking us solely to Latin America. Through this language, we insist on multiple diasporic formations. The language in the volume is akin to collage practice: we cut what we know, reassemble our pieces, and in the fragmentations, make ourselves anew.

What is your next book or creative project?

I am working on a theoretical poetry collection titled trans*imagination that addresses the mechanisms of surveillance and criminalization that the heterosexual-cisgender gaze perpetuates against trans* migrants in the United States and Mexico. The work is informed by 10+ years of community organizing with undocumented trans* migrants who have been held in migrant detention centers and/or federal prisons. In the collection, I examine the prison as a container of the imagination and argue that we (trans* migrants) are targets of the criminal justice system for being hyper-imaginative subjects who transgress settler time and settler laws with our visions of the future and our practices of kinship-making.

***
Alan Pelaez Lopez is an Afro-Indigenous poet and installation and adornment artist from Oaxaca, Mexico. Their work attends to the realities of undocumented migrants in the United States, the Black condition in Latin America, and the transgender imagination. They are an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis.

David Yetman on ‘Mexico’s Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán’

Posted on October 19, 2023October 12, 2023 by Abby Mogollon

October 19, 2023

In the new book Mexico’s Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán, authors David Yetman and Alberto Búrquez provide an accessible and photographic view of the culture, history, and environment of an extraordinary region of southern Mexico. The Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán are lauded by botanists for their spectacular plant life—they contain the densest columnar cacti forests in the world. Recent archaeological excavations reveal them also to be a formative Mesoamerican site as well. So singular is this region that it is home to the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Biosphere Reserve and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The authors have been traveling to the area for two decades. Today, David Yetman answers a few questions about their newest collaboration:

What inspired you to collaborate on this work?

Alberto and I gained familiarity with Sonora via different routes, he as a Sonoran-born Cambridge-trained ecologist, I as a wandering desert rat trained in philosohy. We met at a field research school in Alamos, Sonora, sponsored by Tucson Audubon Society in, I believe, 1993 and immediately discovered our shared interests. We also realized rather quickly that our areas of interest complemented each other. Two years later we initiated a study of buffelgrass ecology in the small town of Tecoripa in eastern Sonora. During meeting key members of the community, we learned that representatives of the Mexican department of land reform were in the town discussing with townspeople the prospect of converting their cooperatively owned lands to private. We at once realized this was a historic moment in Sonora and spent the next year following the privatization procedures and interviewing the landowners involved. We published an article with our findings in 1997. In 2003 Alberto joined me in filming an episode of The Desert Speaks in the valleys called Cuicatlán in northern Oaxaca and Tehuacán in adjacent southern Puebla. We realized then that we had been pulled into a region with uncanny resemblance to the Sonoran Desert. We also realized that we enjoyed working together. Some twenty trips to that area later, we have published the book.

The plants in the region are so varied and so unusual that Mexico has designated it as a biosphere reserve, and UNESCO has followed, designating it a World Heritage Site. Why is the area so singular?

The valley’s peculiar location as connected desert valleys among several mountain ranges in the tropics has given rise to a bewildering variety of ecological zones or habitats, notably a desert environment where lusher vegetation would be expected. Those unusual conditions and a climate more or less stable for millions of years have combined to produce an astonishing array of desert plants, especially columnar cacti, many of which occur nowhere else. The high degree of endemism within the valleys means that it is the place to study these species and the evolutionary processes that promotes widespread speciation. At the same time, the region has seen the evolution of peoples of many different ethnicities. We long ago that discovered that they have stories to relate that complement the high diversity of the valleys.

The Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán also have a long human history. What are a few of the ways that visitors to the area today can see the continuity of human experience?

The archaeological sites within the valleys have not received the attention they merit, so visitors often must discover their location and history on their own. Alberto and I have presented four of these and their developmental history in a way that will assist visitors in locating and visiting these sites. One such site is Purrón Dam, which was the largest dam in the Americas two thousand years ago, but today not even located on maps. Another is the astonishing site of Cerro Quiotepec, located in an extraordinarily scenic hilltop far above where the two valleys converge and form a profound canyon. It is a highly developed site that was occupied for six hundred years before the Zapotec builders abandoned it in about 300 CE. At the same time the valleys’ varied resources have brought together at least eight different indigenous groups. They have established the human history of the valleys, with connections throughout Mesoamerica. Many towns in the valleys retain their indigenous identity.

What is your next project?

We have repeatedly discussed the importance of returning to Tecoripa after nearly thirty years to see what changes have occurred in the town’s social and economic structure because of the move from cooperatively owned to privately-owned land. We also have many places of ecological and social significance that we would like to visit, study, and describe. We have separate careers, but we remain close friends with a tacit agreement that soon we must find another area to visit, study, discuss, and describe. Sonora has a wealth of ecological and cultural surprises, all within a day’s drive of Tucson, less yet from Hermosillo, where Alberto lives. It is only a matter of time.

***
David Yetman is distinguished outreach faculty and a research social scientist at the Southwest Center of the University of Arizona, where he has worked since 1992. His research specialties include the peoples and ecology of northwest Mexico and the southwestern United States. Yetman has a PhD in philosophy and is author of numerous books and articles, including Sonora: An Intimate Geography, Natural Landmarks of Arizona, and The Saguaro Cactus: A Natural History. Yetman is the former host of the PBS series The Desert Speaks and current host and co-producer of the PBS travel/adventure series, In the Americas with David Yetman.

Alberto Búrquez works as a researcher at the Instituto de Ecología, Department of Ecology of Biodiversity, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He is a co-author (with David Yetman) of The Saguaro Cactus.

Five Questions for Alma García

Posted on October 10, 2023September 11, 2023 by maryreynolds

October 10, 2023

Alma García’s debut novel All That Rises is about secrets, lies, border politics, and discovering where you belong—within a family, as well as in the world beyond. It is a novel for the times we live in, set in a place many people know only from the news.

In the border city of El Paso, Texas, two guardedly neighboring families have plunged headlong into a harrowing week. Rose Marie DuPre, wife and mother, has abandoned her family. On the doorstep of the Gonzales home, long-lost rebel Inez appears. As Rose Marie’s husband, Huck (manager of a maquiladora), and Inez’s brother, Jerry (a college professor), struggle separately with the new shape of their worlds, Lourdes, the Mexican maid who works in both homes, finds herself entangled in the lives of her employers, even as she grapples with a teenage daughter who only has eyes for el otro lado—life, American style.

What first sparked your interest in telling this story?

All That Rises started its life almost twenty-five years ago as a single short story—my first published story, as it so happens. It won a debut writer’s award. I was floored.

Fearing that this might be the only writing success I might ever have, I set out to keep the protagonist of this story alive. And so, I began a collection of linked stories that took place in the neighborhood and amongst the neighbors of this protagonist: a young Mexican-American gardener grappling with the loss of his complicated father. Semi-consciously, I understood this neighborhood to be located in El Paso, Texas, where I grew up, though this setting remained quietly in the background.

Little did I know that this was to be the start of an epic journey, in which—owing to a variety of major life transitions and the fact that it was eventually made clear to me that the manuscript wasn’t working as a collection of linked stories—the book would be transformed, over another decade and a half, into a full-blown novel. As I completely re-envisioned the story I meant to tell, centering different characters and entangling their families with one another, I discovered that the characters had become a part of something far larger: the history of El Paso itself, which is inextricably bound up in the cultures, legacies, geography, and the ever-evolving politics of the borderlands. What I also discovered was that I had been writing this book because I wanted to tell stories about the kinds of people I grew up with—people with their feet in more than one culture, whose lives I hadn’t seen much of on the page.

How has your relationship to the Southwest and the U.S./Mexico border changed over time?

I lived the first part of my life in El Paso, and later, in Albuquerque. My extended family still lives in the El Paso area and has roots in the area that go back for many generations. With a few exceptions, I have gone back to visit for most of the years of my life.

Of course, it’s a different world there now than it was when I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s. In those days, as was common, my family thought nothing of crossing the border to buy groceries or go to dinner; my older relatives would go over to get their hair done or for dental work, and of course, then as now, many families (though not mine) are split between El Paso and across the border in Ciudad Juárez. That’s to say, it was fairly free-flowing and easy to go back and forth; the two cities felt very much like two sides of the same coin. Sadly, a number of realities in recent years have chilled that dynamic—safety issues south of the border, the new complexities of mass migration and the politicization that surrounds it; a horrific act of home-grown terrorism in 2019 that demonstrated how white nationalism can force its way even into a Mexican American-majority border city.

But as much as things have changed, there is also much that remains deeply familiar to me. During the years I spent writing this book, as the city transformed from a mere blip beneath the radar of the national consciousness to a place that became the epicenter of the news again and again, I felt even more urgency to portray it with all the depth and complexity that is its due, and to reflect its inhabitants back to the world in a way that centers their humanity—even when that sense of humanity is complicated.

In any case, it might be ironic that I wasn’t able to write this novel until I moved away from the border itself. I’ve lived in Seattle since 2001, and it was only here—in the cool, dark, misty, green Pacific Northwest—that I was able to separate myself enough from the world that I came from in order to reflect upon it, to truly see it for what it is, to be able to re-enter it in my memory and in my imagination—at least until the next time that I physically returned to it. There’s plenty I miss about this world. For sure, there are days I miss being in a place where I never have to tell anyone how to spell or pronounce my name.

Do you think family dynamics are an ideal way to reflect border issues?

It might be more accurate to say that, on the border, border issues are frequently reflected in family dynamics. There are the literal realities of those whose families are split between two cities and two countries, of course, and the cultural legacies that anyone with a family history in the area inherits (and often passes on in complex ways). Heritage itself is a fraught concept, especially as who or what people understand themselves to be is sometimes at odds with a family’s beliefs or perceptions or records. Add to this brew the fact that the border is always about duality—where you “belong,” and where you do not belong. From there, it’s not a very big leap to start asking yourself where you belong within your own family, and how that determines where you belong in the world beyond.

The border is also a powerful metaphor, and this metaphor can manifest itself in the psychological and emotional borders people create between themselves. When people become entangled with one another—whether by accident or intention or geographical location or by blood relation—the boundaries between them sometimes blur in unexpected ways. Where does one person’s world end and another’s begin? Who is “us” and who is “them”?

The political issues facing the border today are many, as you reference above, and the book also brushes up against a number of related phenomena unique to this area, including Border Patrol culture, the economic inequality exacerbated by the American-owned maquiladora system in Ciudad Juárez, and the prosaic struggles of domestic workers whose well-being depends on access to the American side of the border. Yet with the many up-to-the-moment social urgencies and emergencies issues you could draw upon, the novel is set in 2005 and 2006, rather than the present day. What’s behind this choice?

There are two reasons for this. One was practical: Originally, this book was set in the present, whatever “the present” means when you’re writing a book over a very long period of time. But the current events, politics, and even the landmarks of the city changed so much over the years, it became impossible to keep up. The world was evolving—and continues to evolve—rapidly, and I needed a fixed point from which to examine it.

The second is a reason that proved to be far more thematically meaningful. The mid-2000s marked a period of time in which the border first began to noticeably tighten, but it was still a deeply different world than the one we find ourselves in today. You can trace the development of our current affairs to this time; had we but known, we could have seen a lot coming. As one character puts it, “The problem with history is that by the time you realize it’s repeating itself, it’s already happened.” I think the book offers a fair amount to unpack around that notion—especially in a time when what happens at the Texas/Mexico border has implications far beyond the borderlands themselves.

Do you have an idea for your next novel or other project that you would like to share?

I can only provide you with a hint, because what’s new in my writing world is currently evolving as well, wildly and deeply. Suffice it to say that there is likely to be intrigue surrounding secret identities; the unholy trio of fact, fiction and fake news; and the shape-shifting world of ethnic impostors. Suffice it to say that the story might be set in a place just slightly further north than this one, but I am still keeping one foot in a place I recognize as home.

***

Alma García is a writer whose award-winning short fiction has appeared in Narrative Magazine and most recently in phoebe and the anthology Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century. This is her first novel.

Five Questions for William L. Bird Jr.

Posted on October 7, 2023August 16, 2023 by maryreynolds

October 7, 2023

An essential—and monumental—member of the Sonoran Desert ecosystem, the saguaro cactus has become the quintessential icon of the American West.

In the Arms of the Saguaros by William L. Bird Jr., shows how, from the botanical explorers of the nineteenth century to the tourism boosters in our own time, saguaros and their images have fulfilled attention-getting needs and expectations. Through text and lavish images, this work explores the saguaro’s growth into a western icon from the early days of the American railroad to the years bracketing World War II, when Sun Belt boosterism hit its zenith and proponents of tourism succeed in moving the saguaro to the center of the promotional frame.

What first sparked your interest to write this book?

I trained as a historian at the University of Arizona, so you can probably understand how the saguaro came to lodge in my head as an impressionable student from the east. Pictures of people posing with saguaros have a certain timeless quality. Most of the pictures of—let’s call them social saguaros—bridge no distance between person and plant. People posing with saguaros sometimes reach out and touch them, but actually it’s the other way around. These special plants touch us.

What was the first image of a saguaro that inspired you to personally own this image?

I found a dog-eared copy of a 1950s Arizona annual magazine in a used bookstore in Washington, D.C. shortly after returning home from my studies in Tucson in 1975. The magazine’s cover pictures a western wear model wearing a saw-tooth pocket shirt and a cowboy hat, with her folded arms resting on the curve of a spineless saguaro arm. I kept this thing for years. I was lucky enough to find a clean copy and made it my frontispiece.

Sometimes saguaro images are misplaced—What is the place farthest from the Sonoran Desert that a saguaro has been used to represent?

The saguaro’s success as a far-flung western symbol lies in the assumptions that people have picked up about its habitat, most of them mistaken. And this is where the fun begins. Transplanted saguaros popped up throughout the west and beyond after the railroad came to Tucson in 1880. At first there were so-called Arizona gardens in California and track side displays that the Southern Pacific railroad mounted at select passenger stations. Saguaros and other native plants rode the rails to the era’s world’s fairs. Out-of-habitat transplants might cheat death for a summer or for a little while longer in the care of a botanical garden. The New York Botanical Garden, the Missouri Botanical Garden (Shaw’s Garden) and Pittsburgh’s Phipps Botanical Garden all had them. Their pictures circulated in the press. With the first rush of conspicuous transplants and publicity about them, you might be excused for thinking that they grow anywhere.

Why are saguaros so interesting to people from around the world?

The saguaro joined the travel industry’s toolkit of symbols freely associated with the American West. Historically southwestern tourism’s fun-in-the-sun sales message has featured freshly starched western wear, horseback rides, campfires, bathing suits, swimming pools and saguaros, whose welcoming arms wave you in, closer and closer. This anthropomorphic quality may be the basis of the saguaro’s success as a symbol, which though ephemeral, is nevertheless powerful. And this is pretty much where we are today in fashion, art and craft.

What is your next book or research project?

I am working on a couple of publication projects with the Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation, that focus upon the development of graphic identities in the American Southwest. One is a book-length illustrated history of Tucson’s Cabat-Gill Advertising Agency, which among other things pioneered in early television production. Another is a short piece on stylized linen postcard images picturing downtown Tucson and their acceptance as actualities.

***
William L. Bird Jr. is a curator emeritus of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. His interests lie at the intersection of politics, popular culture, and the history of visual display.

Five Questions for Louis Friedman

Posted on September 18, 2023August 18, 2023 by maryreynolds

September 18, 2023

Humans have always been fascinated by the possibility of extraterrestrial life, often wondering if we are alone in the universe. Alone but Not Lonely, Exploring for Extraterrestrial Life answers those questions. Drawing on nearly fifty years as a leader in planetary exploration, author Louis Friedman brings into focus the subject of extraterrestrial life, separating knowledge from conjecture, fact from fiction, to draw scientific and technical conclusions that answer this enduring question.

What first sparked your interest to write this book?

I was motivated to write this book by the work I was doing with colleagues at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory about using the solar gravity lens to image exoplanets. Magnifying light by 100 billion times with the solar gravity lens would give us the ability to see life on other worlds throughout the galaxy! The challenge of designing a mission to reach the focus of the solar gravity lens is an exciting one to be working on. It’s hard, but we can do it; as opposed to interstellar flight which is not practical.

Why do you think people are so interested in life beyond planet Earth?

For the whole of human history we have wondered about the nature of life and our place in the Universe. We wandered through religion and folklore, myths and stories—but now we wonder through science and exploration. As Carl Sagan used to say, if you are not interested in the question of “are we alone and the nature of life in the Universe,” you must be made of wood.

Why are you excited about comparative astrobiology?

Comparative astrobiology will teach us about ourselves and our place in the Universe. When we eventually find and compare life on other worlds to what has happened here, it will give us insights just as did the discovery of the nature of gravity and that the Earth was not the center of the Universe, but one object among billions of other—that we compare our planet to.

Why did you, Carl Sagan, and Bruce Murray start the Planetary Society?

In the late 1970s NASA was planning to cease planetary exploration entirely, despite the enormous success and public interest from the Viking and Voyager missions. Sagan and Murray recognized that public interest needed to be expressed and thus we began the development of The Planetary Society as a citizens-based advocacy group promoting exploration of other worlds and the search for extraterrestrial life.

What is your next research project?

I am following up the subject in this book of exploring exoplanets remotely by use of the solar gravity lens. I hope to contribute to making a mission to the foci of habitable exoplanets possible in the next decade.

***
Louis Friedman co-founded the Planetary Society with Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray and was its executive director for thirty years. He has contributed to numerous journals and is the author of Starsailing: Solar Sails and Interstellar Travel, Human Spaceflight: From Mars to the Stars, and Planetary Adventures: From Moscow to Mars.

Five Questions for Mehnaaz Momen

Posted on September 12, 2023September 11, 2023 by maryreynolds

September 12, 2023

Nestled between Texas and Mexico, the city of Laredo was a quaint border town, nurturing cultural ties across the river, attracting occasional tourists, and populated with people living there for generations. In Listening to Laredo, Mehnaaz Momen traces Laredo’s history and evolution through the voices of its people. She examines the changing economic and cultural infrastructure of the city, its interdependence with its sister city across the national boundary, and, above all, the resilience of the community as it adapts to and even challenges the national narrative on the border.

Why did you embark on this work?

I moved to Laredo from Cleveland in 2002 because I got a job at Texas A&M International University. I always loved the historic feel of the city and its rich heritage. However, I could not make sense of its urban growth patterns. All the theories I had learnt in my Urban Studies program felt inadequate for the then second-fastest growing city with its core of Spanish plazas, which remained underutilized, and the growing warehouses that surrounded the city. There were no delineable suburbs and yet there was a striking north/south divide. I wanted to study the city through the lenses of urban theory, so I wrote a few articles on Laredo. But it was much later in 2017 that I started working on a book-length manuscript. I was inspired by academic curiosity about the city at first, but after living here for two decades, it feels like an intellectual responsibility to understand the city and share my frame of analysis with a broader audience.

Your approach is very hands-on. You conducted interviews with 75 residents of Laredo. Why did you choose an ethnographic approach for your research?

My original plan was to contrast urban theory with material from the interviews of local residents. Almost as soon as I started the interviews, I knew that the local narratives about the border deserved exclusive attention. The local and national implications of a border region are not only different but often in conflict. When Laredo emerged as the largest inland port of the nation, global trade eclipsed all other frames of viewing the border. In the literary and cultural spheres, as well as in academia, the border has seldom been defined by the people who live in that space. It was fascinating how the different aspects of their stories were connected organically, which allowed me to weave a comprehensive story of Laredo. This is one of the main contributions of my work, namely to bring out the voices from the border to define the problems and possibilities of border cities.

Laredo is not only the locus of your research, it is also your home. What do you want the world to know about Laredo and border communities like it?

Laredo was the place where I got a job and reluctantly settled in. It took me a number of years to look at Laredo without preconceived notions even though I was living there. The cultural stereotype of the border is ingrained in all of us. I want my readers to see Laredo from the eyes of the people who live there by choice. We always hear about the dangers of the border, but the border is fragile, the border is beautiful, and the border is evolving. The border is full of possibilities, especially because it is always a little wild. For the people who live on the border, it was historically an abstract notion that had legal and political restrictions but did not obstruct cultural and economic exchanges. It is global trade and the politics surrounding the border wall that have turned the border into a concrete obstruction that has significantly curtailed economic and social flows between the two sides of the river. This hasn’t made the border safer; rather, it is stripping away the unique features of border areas.

Even though you’ve been a resident of Laredo for more than two decades, you’re careful to point out in the book that you are still an outsider. Why was this important?

With the exception of my home city, Dhaka, where I grew up and lived for twenty-five years, Laredo is the only other city where I have lived so long, especially as an adult. I was an outsider in Laredo in all senses of the term. As an outsider, perhaps I was able to perceive a lot more anomalies of the city than a local person. The city is 95% Hispanic but has a stable history of intermarriages and has always made room for outsiders. Actually, in Laredo vocabulary, the outside/insider divide is neither national nor ethnic, but rather who is part of the community. In that sense, my relationship with the city changed because of this book. Laredo became a home for me through this process.

I was very conscious that I was writing the stories of a number of people with whom I don’t have a shared memory or shared history. I was bringing my academic and other life experiences to connect their stories to a framework of analysis, but my voice is not the nucleus. It is important to note that although I am an observer and a participant, this story belongs to the people of Laredo.

What is your next project?

I am working on a couple of articles using the materials from the interviews, information that I could not incorporate in the book because of the word limit. I am also working on a project with Webb County which will collect primary information about county services. Hopefully by next year I can expand my research to other border cities and explore their growth patterns. I want to start an alternate conversation about the border which acknowledges the prospects of the border and border people beyond the myopic view of disorder and trade calculations.

***
Mehnaaz Momen is an associate professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Texas A&M International University. Her research interests include citizenship, immigration policy, urban theory, public space, political satire, and marginality. She is the author of The Paradox of Citizenship in American Politics: Ideals and Reality and Political Satire, Postmodern Reality, and the Trump Presidency: Who Are We Laughing At?

Author photo by Laila Nahar

Mehnaaz Momen Reveals Laredo’s Border Battles in the L.A. Times

Posted on September 11, 2023June 18, 2025 by maryreynolds

September 11, 2023

Mehnaaz Momen, author of Listening to Laredo, tells the story of the largest port in the United States through the voices of its residents. In this L.A. Times Editorial, Momen writes, “The flow of money has shifted from the city itself to the four international bridges tying the local economy to the crumbs of international trade. Homegrown economic growth helped bring prosperity to the city in the 1960s and ’70s. The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, however, transformed the beautiful downtown and the mighty Rio Grande into a mere passage for money, merchandise and narcotics.”

She interviewed Alec Martinez, a local resident who has worked in city government. He told her, “Laredo is like the goose that lays the golden eggs. Everyone is interested in the eggs, but no one cares about the goose.”

Momen offers hope for the city, in spite of state and national efforts to militarize the border. She writes, “Laredoans are excitedly awaiting the construction of the River Vega project, a binational park planned to run along the much-maligned Rio Grande for residents of Laredo as well as Nuevo Laredo across the border. This project has grown out of a community-driven master plan, Viva Laredo, focused on reanimating the historic downtown and enhancing quality-of-life features for residents.”

About the book:

Listening to Laredo is an exploration of how the dizzying forces of change have defined this locale, how they continue to be inscribed and celebrated, and how their effects on the physical landscape have shaped the identity of the city and its people.

In contrast to the many studies of border cities defined by the outside—and seldom by the people who live at the border—this volume collects oral histories from seventy-five in-depth interviews that collectively illuminate the evolution of the city’s cultural and economic infrastructure, its interdependence with its sister city across the national boundary, and, above all, the strength of its community as it adapts to and even challenges the national narrative regarding the border.

Five Questions with “Bennu 3-D” Authors

Posted on July 17, 2023July 13, 2023 by maryreynolds

July 17, 2024

Bennu 3-D, Anatomy of an Asteroid, the world’s first complete (and stereoscopic) atlas of an asteroid, is the result of a unique collaboration between OSIRIS-REx mission leader Dante Lauretta and Brian May’s London Stereoscopic Company. Lauretta’s colleagues include Carina Bennett, Kenneth Coles, and Cat Wolner, as well as Brian May and Claudia Manzoni, who became part of the ultimately successful effort to find a safe landing site for sampling. The text details the data collected by the mission so far, and the stereo images have been meticulously created by Manzoni and May from original images collected by the OSIRIS-REx cameras. The book includes a stereoscopic viewer.

Why did your team choose Bennu as the destination for the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft?

Data from telescopes suggested that Bennu would be a “primitive” asteroid that preserves organic molecules (the building blocks of life as we know it) and water-bearing minerals from early in solar system history. This time-capsule aspect made it a high-value scientific target with the potential to shed light on how our planet and the life on it originated.

There was also a practical consideration in the selection of Bennu—it is a (relatively) nearby asteroid with an orbit that brings it close to Earth every few years. This makes it much more feasible to send a spacecraft there and back than if we were to go to an asteroid in the main belt.

How many cameras were on OSIRIS-REx and what were their different purposes?

The spacecraft has two camera suites, each with three cameras, for six cameras total.

The OSIRIS-REx Camera Suite (OCAMS) (built by U of A) imaged the asteroid at global to local scales, providing data to construct the maps and digital terrain models needed for effective and safe sampling. OCAMS includes:

PolyCam, a telescopic camera with a zoom lens, which first detected Bennu from more than two million kilometers (1.24 million miles) away and later imaged the sample site in millimeter-scale detail;
MapCam, a multispectral imager that used color filters to map the diversity of materials on Bennu’s surface;
SamCam, a close-range camera used to photo-document the sample collection event.

The Touch and Go Camera System (TAGCAMS) (built by Malin Space Systems) is an engineering camera suite designed to support navigation and operations. It also ended up serendipitously supporting science by capturing images of rock particles ejecting from Bennu. TAGCAMS includes:

NavCams 1 and 2, two identical imagers that photographed Bennu and the background starfield for navigation purposes.
StowCam, which photo-documented the stowage of the sample in the capsule for delivery to Earth.

What did you learn about Bennu that you didn’t expect?

Lots! A primary theme of the mission was the curveballs that Bennu threw at us. Probably the biggest surprise was that we expected Bennu to be covered in sandy material, like a beach, that would be relatively easy to sample. In fact, it turned out to be covered in boulders, some the size of buildings, which was scientifically fascinating but made sampling a real challenge.

Another surprise was the serendipitous discovery, in navigation images, of tiny shards of rocks ejecting from Bennu’s surface, apparently spontaneously. This phenomenon was observed many times over the course of the mission. The science team concluded that it is probably caused by rocks breaking when meteoroids strike them and/or cracking under the strain of Bennu’s dramatic temperature changes.

A third surprise was the discovery of large (meter-scale) veins of carbonate minerals in some boulders. (An example of carbonate minerals on Earth is the white crust that forms around sinks and water fixtures.) Such large veins mean that back when Bennu was part of a larger asteroid, there was water flowing extensively under the surface, depositing the veins.

Finally, we were surprised to find that when our sampling device made contact with the surface, it sunk into Bennu as though into a plastic ball pit, rather than coming to rest on firm ground. This means that Bennu’s surface is made of particles that are very loosely packed and barely held together by any cohesion at all. If we had not fired the thrusters to back away, the spacecraft might have been swallowed by the asteroid as a result.

How did you happen work with Brian May and the London Stereoscopic Company to create Bennu 3-D, Anatomy of an Asteroid?

Brian and Dante first began corresponding as early co-supporters of the global Asteroid Day campaign. This correspondence eventually grew into Brian and his colleague Claudia Manzoni becoming active members of the OSIRIS-REx science team. They created numerous stereo (3-D) images from the spacecraft camera imagery that, in addition to being stunning to look at, were instrumental in helping the team understand Bennu’s rugged terrain and identify a safe sampling site. So it made perfect sense to work with them when it came time to create this atlas of Bennu.

What are the next steps for the OSIRIS-REx mission?

We are all looking forward to the delivery of the sample from Bennu to Earth on September 24, 2023. That event will kick off two years of intense laboratory analyses all over the world to test hypotheses about Bennu’s origin and evolution.

After the spacecraft drops off the sample, it will continue on its orbit in preparation for a second mission, called OSIRIS-APEX, that will rendezvous with the asteroid Apophis in 2029. Observing another asteroid with the same state-of-the-art cameras and instruments will offer exciting opportunities for comparison.

Cynthia Guardado Video Interview about Cenizas

Posted on July 11, 2023May 22, 2023 by maryreynolds

July 11, 2023

The University of Arizona’s Nancy Montoya interviewed Cynthia Guardado about her poetry collection, Cenizas, during the 2023 Tucson Festival of Books. The UA’s Digital Futures Bilingual Studio hosted the interview, and the video is available here.

Guardado talks about her poetry influenced by her family, violence and civil war in El Salvador, and shared grief through migration. Asked about the home that exists in her heart, she says “Home is the cobbled stone and dirt road that arrives at my Mama Chila’s house, my grandmother’s house,” in El Salvador.

Cenizas offers an arresting portrait of a Salvadoran family whose lives have been shaped by the upheavals of global politics. The speaker of these poems—the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants—questions the meaning of homeland as she navigates life in the United States while remaining tethered to El Salvador by the long shadows cast by personal and public history. Cynthia Guardado’s poems give voice to the grief of family trauma, while capturing moments of beauty and tenderness. Maternal figures preside over the verses, guiding the speaker as she searches the ashes of history to tell her family’s story. The spare, narrative style of the poems are filled with depth as the family’s layers come to light.

Tom Zoellner Video Interview about Rim to River

Posted on June 27, 2023May 22, 2023 by maryreynolds

June 27, 2023

The University of Arizona’s Nancy Montoya interviewed Tom Zoellner about his book, Rim to River during the 2023 Tucson Festival of Books. The UA’s Digital Futures Bilingual Studio hosted the interview, and the video is available here.

The book is 17 essays inspired by Zoellner’s walk across the state, from Utah to Mexico, on the Arizona Trail. “There’s a chapter in the book called ‘White Bones’ and it’s about the water shortage and the Colorado River,” says Zoellner in the interview. “And we’re running into a harsh reality in Arizona. To put it simply, it’s going to be farmers versus cities. And cities are going to win.” He thought a lot about water while hiking: “I developed a profound appreciation for water, the feeling of your body as you dehydrate. It’s a terrifying feeling.” In one of his chapters, Zoellner links this feeling of dehydration to the experience of border crossers, “the hardship of crossing the desert, and what they endure to feed their families back home.”

Rim to River is the story of his extraordinary journey through redrock country, down canyons, up mesas, and across desert plains to the obscure valley in Mexico that gave the state its enigmatic name. The trek is interspersed with incisive essays that pick apart the distinctive cultural landscape of Arizona: the wine-colored pinnacles and complex spirituality of Navajoland, the mind-numbing stucco suburbs, desperate border crossings, legislative skullduggery, extreme politics, billion-dollar copper ventures, dehydrating rivers, retirement kingdoms, old-time foodways, ghosts of old wars, honky-tonk dreamers, murder mysteries, and magical Grand Canyon reveries.

The University of Arizona Press