October 11, 2022
Esther Belin accepted the Before Columbus Foundation’s 2022 American Book Award for The Diné Reader at their virtual awards ceremony on October 9, 2022 on behalf of the editors and contributors to the volume. You can watch her acceptance speech below. Congratulations to all of the editors and contributors to this incredible work!
August 29, 2022
On Thursday, August 25, 2022, the Western National Parks Association and the University of Arizona Press co-hosted an event to celebrate the launch of Michael Chiago: O’odham Lifeways Through Art with Tohono O’odham artist Michael Chiago at the WNPA headquarters in Oro Valley, Arizona.
Joanna Johnson, WNPA operations manager, welcomed the audience of book and art lovers, and introduced Wade C. Sherbrooke, a herpetologist who wrote the book’s forward and helped make it a reality. Chiago spoke to the audience about his work as an artists, the many experiences he’s had in teaching and traveling, and even recalled his military service in Vietnam.
The book, by Chiago and ethnobiologist Amadeo M. Rea, offers an artistic depiction of O’odham lifeways through the paintings of the internationally acclaimed Chiago. Rea collaborated with the artist to describe the paintings in accompanying text, making this unique book a vital resource for cultural understanding and preservation. A joint effort in seeing, this work explores how the artist sees and interprets his culture through his art.
July 27, 2022
We are thrilled to be participating in the 2022 MALCS Summer Institute! While we can’t make it to the meeting in-person, you’ll be able to find some of our new and recent books on display, our latest catalogs, and special discount slips. Were offering a 30% discount plus free U.S. shipping on all titles when you use the code AZMALCS22 at checkout through 8/31/22.
If you have any questions about our publishing program, visit our proposal guidelines page here, or contact our Editor-in-Chief, Kristen Buckles, at kbuckles@uapress.arizona.edu.
We’re excited to highlight our new series, BorderVisions! BorderVisions engages the U.S.-Mexico borderlands’ dynamic histories and cultures and expands our understanding of the borderlands beyond a site of geopolitical inquiry. This series will publish monographs and edited collections by new and established authors who employ innovative interdisciplinary methodologies on topics reflecting both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Read more about the series here, and hear about BorderVisions from series editors Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez and Yvette J. Saavedra in a recorded event here.
Advocating for and demonstrating the importance of an intersectional, multidisciplinary, activist understanding of Chicanas, Intersectional Chicana Feminisms provides a much-needed overview of the key theories, thinkers, and activists that have contributed to Chicana feminisms.
We are thrilled that author Aída Hurtado won the AAHHE Distinguished Author Award, and received an honorable mention for the 2020 NWSA Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize. Intersectional Chicana Feminisms also won a bronze medal for the International Latino Book Awards.
Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture traces the development of Chicana/o literature and cultural production from the Spanish colonial period to the present. In doing so, it challenges us to look critically at how we simultaneously embody colonial constructs and challenge their legacies.
Read an excerpt from the book here, then listen to author Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez speak about the book on NPR here.
The Chicana M(other)work Anthology is a call to action for justice within and outside academia. This volume brings together emerging scholarship and testimonios by and about self-identified Chicana and Women of Color mother-scholars, activists, and allies who, using an intersectional lens, center mothering as transformative labor.
Learn more about the collection here.
In Pasadena Before the Roses, historian Yvette J. Saavedra shows how Indigenous, Spanish, Mexican, and American groups each have redefined the meanings of land use to build their homes and their lives. This social and cultural history illustrates the interconnectedness of power, ideas of land use, and the negotiation of identity within multiple colonial moments.
We are thrilled that author Yvette Saavedra was awarded the 2019 WHA-Huntington Library Martin Ridge Fellowship!
Divided Peoples addresses the impact border policies have on traditional lands and the peoples who live there—whether environmental degradation, border patrol harassment, or the disruption of traditional ceremonies. Anthropologist Christina Leza shows how such policies affect the traditional cultural survival of Indigenous peoples along the border. The author examines local interpretations and uses of international rights tools by Native activists, counter-discourse on the U.S.-Mexico border, and challenges faced by Indigenous border activists when communicating their issues to a broader public.
Read an article by the author here.
Challenging stereotypes, Activist Leaders of San José unearths and makes visible lived experiences of Chicana and Latino activists from San José, California, who made contributions to the cultural and civic life of the city. Through oral histories, we see a portrait of grassroots leadership in the twentieth century.
Watch author Josie Méndez-Negrete and Lorena V. Márquez discuss the book and other topics here. We are thrilled that Josie Méndez-Negrete was chosen as the 2021 NACCS Scholar!
The decolonial approaches found in Writing the Goodlife provide rich examples of mutually respectful relations between humans and nature. Ybarra’s book takes on two of today’s most discussed topics: environmentalism and Latina/o population growth. Ybarra shines a light on long-established traditions of environmental thought that have existed in Mexican American literary history for at least 150 years.
Fleshing the Spirit brings together established and new writers to explore the relationships between the physical body, the spirit and spirituality, and social justice activism. The anthology incorporates different genres of writing—such as poetry, testimonials, critical essays, and historical analysis—and stimulates the reader to engage spirituality in a critical, personal, and creative way.
Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa provides pedagogical applications of Anzaldúa’s noted theories, including la facultad, the path of conocimiento, and autohistoria, among others. This text provides examples, lesson plans, and activities for scholars, professors, teachers, and community members in various disciplines—such as history, composition, literature, speech and debate, and more—and for those interested in teaching the theories of Gloria Anzaldúa.
Watch editors and contributors to the volume discuss the book here.
Silviana Wood’s teatro has elicited tears and laughter from audiences young and old. Barrio Dreams brings together for the first time the plays of Wood, one of Arizona’s foremost playwrights. Wood is acclaimed locally, regionally, and nationally as a playwright, actor, director, and activist.
Author Silviana Wood was featured on New Books Network podcast. You can listen here.
Meditación Fronteriza is a beautifully crafted exploration of life in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Written by award-winning author Norma Elia Cantú, the poems flow from Spanish to English gracefully as they explore culture, traditions, and solidarity.
Read a brief interview with the author here, then watch a conversation with her here. We are thrilled that Meditación Fronteriza won the NACCS Tejas Book Award and that it received an honorable mention for the International Latino Book Award!
Mexican Workers and the Making of Arizona expands our understanding of the critical role played by Mexican and Mexican American laborers in making Arizona a prominent and influential state in the Southwest and beyond.
Read an excerpt from the book here.
To offer testimonio is inherently political, a vehicle that counters the hegemony of the state and illuminates the repression and denial of human rights. Claiming Home, Shaping Community offers the testimonios from and about the lives of Mexican-descent people who left rural agricultural valles, specifically the Imperial and the San Joaquín Valleys, to pursue higher education at a University of California campus. Through telling their stories, the contributors seek to empower others on their journeys to and through higher education.
Letras y Limpias is the first book to explore the literary significance of the curandera. It offers critical new insights about how traditional medicine and folk healing underwrite Mexican American literature. Amanda Ellis traces the significance of the curandera and her evolution across a variety of genres written by Mexican American authors such as Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Manuel Munoz, ire’ne lara silva, and more.
Cultura y Corazón is a cultural approach to research that requires a long-term commitment to community-based and engaged research methodologies. This book presents case studies in the fields of education and health that recognize and integrate communities’ values, culture, and funds of knowledge in the research process.
Reclaiming and reconstructing one’s spirituality based on non-Western epistemologies is central to the process of decolonization. Voices from the Ancestors brings together reflective writings and spiritual practices by Chicanx, Latinx, and Afro-Latinx womxn and male allies in the United States who seek to heal from the historical traumas of colonization by returning to ancestral traditions and knowledge.
Through in-depth interviews and focus groups with both Mexicana/o and Chicana/o students, Cynthia Bejarano explores such topics as the creation of distinct styles that reinforce differences between the two groups; the use of language to further distinguish themselves from one another; and social stratification perpetuated by internal colonialism and the “Othering” process. These and other issues are shown to complicate how Latinas/os ethnically identify as Mexicanas/os or Chicanas/os and help explain how they get to this point.
July 27, 2022
Byron Schenkman and Friends’ Pride Month event, “A Double Portrait: Johannes Brahms & Jonathan Woody”, premiered on June 26. This concert, an intimate, Pride-friendly celebration of Brahms’ music, features two of Jonathan Woody’s works, including the world premiere of ‘nor shape of today’ for voice, viola, and piano set to text by poet Raquel Salas Rivera from his Ambroggio Prize-winner x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación.
Written in the early days of the rise of world-wide fascism and the poet’s gender transition, x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación/poems for the nation accepts the invitation to push poetic and gender imaginaries beyond the bounds set by nation.
From teen dysphoria, to the incarceration of anticolonial activists Oscar López and Nina Droz Franco, to the entanglement of church and state, these poems acknowledge the violence of imposed binaries. For Salas Rivera, the x marks Puerto Rican transness in a world that seeks trans death, denial, and erasure. Instead of justifying his existence, he takes up the flag of illegibility and writes an apocalyptic book that screams into an uncertain future, armed with nothing to lose.
For more on the celebration:
Here is the concert:
July 11, 2022
We are so thrilled to be participating in the 2022 Latina/o Studies Association conference in South Bend, Indiana! Be sure to visit our tables to browse our latest Latinx studies titles and speak with our Editor-in-Chief, Kristen Buckles! If you happen to miss her at the conference, send her a message at kbuckles@uapress.arizona.edu if you have questions about our publishing program.
We are happy to be offering a 30% discount with free U.S. shipping until 8/15/2022. Use the code AZLSA22 at checkout!
Winner of the 2021 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets
Cardinal in My Window with a Mask on Its Beak offers the insightful voice of a first-generation immigrant to the United States in both Spanish and English. The poems, both fantastical and real, create poetic portraits of historical migrants, revealing shocking and necessary insights into humanity while establishing a transatlantic dialogue with the great voices of the Spanish Renaissance.
We are thrilled that Cardinal in My Window with a Mask on Its Beak received an honorable mention for the International Latino Book Awards!
Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century offers an expansive and critical look at contemporary television by and about U.S. Latinx communities. This volume unpacks the negative implications of older representation and celebrates the progress of new representation, all while recognizing that television still has a long way to go.
Watch a special conversation series between the contributors to the book here, then watch editor Frederick Luis Aldama (Professor Latinx) and Mighty Peter talk about their top 5 Latinx TV shows here.
Latinx Teens examines how Latinx teenagers influence twenty-first-century U.S. popular culture. The book explores the diverse ways that contemporary mainstream film, television, theater, and young adult literature invokes, constructs, and interprets adolescent Latinidad.
Read a brief interview with authors Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera here.
We are so thrilled that Latinx Teens received an honorable mention for the International Latino Book Award!
LGBTQ Politics in Nicaragua provides the previously untold history of the LGBTQ community’s emergence as political actors—from revolutionary guerillas to civil rights activists. This is a story of struggle and defeat, progress and joy.
The Book of Wanderers is a dynamic short story collection that shows readers what a family of luchadores, a teen on the run, a rideshare driver, a lucid dreamer, a migrant worker in space, a mecha soldier, and a zombie-and-neo-Nazi fighter can have in common. Reyes Ramirez takes readers on a journey through Houston, across dimensions, and all the way to Mars with riveting stories that unpack what it means to be Latinx in contemporary—and perhaps future—America.
Read a brief interview with the author here!
In 1981, Chicana feminist intellectuals Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa published what would become a foundational legacy for generations of feminist women of color—the seminal This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. To celebrate and honor this important work, editors gloria j. wilson, Joni B. Acuff, and Amelia M. Kraehe offer new generations A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back.
Read an excerpt from the book here!
In The Sound of Exclusion, Christopher Chávez critically examines National Public Radio’s professional norms and practices that situate white listeners at the center while relegating Latinx listeners to the periphery. By interrogating industry practices, we might begin to reimagine NPR as a public good that serves the broad and diverse spectrum of the American public.
Read an excerpt from the book here, then listen to two different interviews with the author here and here. Read an op-ed from the author here, then watch a recorded event that features the book here.
We are thrilled that The Sound of Exclusion received an honorable mention for the International Latino Book Awards!
Land Uprising reframes Indigenous land reclamation as a horizon to decolonize the settler colonial conditions of literary, intellectual, and activist labor. Simón Ventura Trujillo argues that land provides grounding for rethinking the connection between Native storytelling practices and Latinx racialization across overlapping colonial and nation-state forms.
Listen to Simón Ventura Trujillo and Vick Quezada discuss the project here. We are thrilled that Land Uprising received an honorable mention for the MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies!
Letras y Limpias is the first book to explore the literary significance of the curandera. It offers critical new insights about how traditional medicine and folk healing underwrite Mexican American literature. Amanda Ellis traces the significance of the curandera and her evolution across a variety of genres written by Mexican American authors such as Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Manuel Munoz, ire’ne lara silva, and more.
Empowered! examines Arizona’s recent political history and how it has been shaped and propelled by Latinos. This book shows how Latinos are mobilizing to counter proposals for Draconian immigration laws with new and innovative approaches.
Read a brief interview wit Lisa Magaña here, then watch the authors discuss the book here.
Count is a powerful book-length poem that reckons with the heartbreaking reality of climate change. With sections that vary between poetry, science, Indigenous storytelling, numerical measurement, and narration, Valerie Martínez’s new work results in an epic panorama infused with the timely urgency of facing an apocalyptic future.
Read a brief interview with the poet here, then watch a recording of a book celebration event for Count here.
Danzirly is a stunning bilingual poetry collection that considers multigenerational Latinx identities in the rapidly changing United States. Winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Ambroggio Prize, Gloria Muñoz’s collection is an unforgettable reckoning of the grief and beauty that pulses through twenty-first-century America.
Watch the poet read from her collection here!
We are thrilled that Danzirly is the gold-medal winner of the 2021 Florida Book Awards poetry section, and Danzirly also received an honorable mention for the 2021 Foreword INDIES awards!
Transversal takes a groundbreaking, disruptive approach to poetic translation, opening up alternative ways of reading as poems get translated or transcreated into entirely new pieces. In this collection, Urayoán Noel masterfully examines his native Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean as sites of transversal poetics and politics.
Read a brief interview with the poet here, then watch him read from Transversal here and present at New York Public Library’s World Literature Festival here.
We are thrilled that Transversal was on the longlist for the 2022 PEN American Open Book Award, and that it was also chosen by New York Public Library as one of the Best Books of 2021!
Deuda Natal finds the beauty within vulnerability and the dignity amidst precariousness. As one of the most prominent voices in Puerto Rican poetry, Mara Pastor uses the poems in this new bilingual collection to highlight the way that fundamental forms of caring for life—and for language—can create a space of poetic decolonization.
Watch poet Mara Pastor in conversation with Siomara España at International Literature Festival here, then watch the poet read from her collection here.
UNDOCUMENTS is an expansive multi-genre exploration of Greater Mexican documentality that reveals the complicated ways all Latinx peoples, including the author, become objectified within cultures. John-Michael Rivera remixes the Florentine Codex and other documents as he takes an intense look at the anxieties and physical detriments tied to immigration.
Read an excerpt from the book here, then listen to other author read from the book here.
We are thrilled that UNDOCUMENTS won a 2021 Eugene M. Kayden Book Award, and that John-Michael Rivera was awarded by the Carolyn Woodward Pope Endowment for UNDOCUMENTS!
Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture traces the development of Chicana/o literature and cultural production from the Spanish colonial period to the present. In doing so, it challenges us to look critically at how we simultaneously embody colonial constructs and challenge their legacies.
Read an excerpt from the book here, then listen to the author on NPR here. Watch the author, Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, in conversation with other borderlands scholars here, then learn more about her here.
Written in the early days of the rise of world-wide fascism and the poet’s gender transition, x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación/poems for the nation accepts the invitation to push poetic and gender imaginaries beyond the bounds set by nation. For Raquel Salas Rivera, the x marks Puerto Rican transness in a world that seeks trans death, denial, and erasure. Instead of justifying his existence, he takes up the flag of illegibility and writes an apocalyptic book that screams into an uncertain future, armed with nothing to lose.
Read a brief interview with the author here.
We are thrilled that x/ex/exis is a 2022 Lambda Literary Awards finalist!
Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas tells the story of the community’s struggle to carve out space for survival and thriving in the shadows of the U.S.-Mexico geopolitical border. This ethnography by Michelle Téllez demonstrates the state’s neglect in providing social services and local infrastructure. This neglect exacerbates the structural violence endemic to the border region—a continuation of colonial systems of power on the urban, rural, and racialized poor.
We are thrilled that Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas received an honorable mention for the International Latino Book Awards!
June 7, 2022
In April, Arizona State University anthropologist and University of Arizona Press author Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez delivered the Inaugural Bazy Tankersley Southwest Laureate Lecture, “The Southwest Northwest Region, a Political Ecology of Cultures and Hegemonies.” Due to the audience enthusiasm the Southwest Center will schedule a second conversation in September.
Vélez-Ibáñez’s latest book with the Press is Reflections of a Transborder Anthropologist: From Netzahualcóyotl to Aztlán, which takes us on a journey of remembering and rediscovery with the anthropologist as he explores his development as a scholar and in so doing the development of the interdisciplinary fields of transborder and applied anthropology. He shows us his path through anthropology as both a theoretical and an applied anthropologist whose work has strongly influenced borderlands and applied research. Importantly, he explains the underlying, often hidden process that led to his long insistence on making a difference in lives of people of Mexican origin on both sides of the border and to contribute to a “People with Histories.”
If you missed the lecture or want to watch it again, you can catch it here:
May 6, 2022
The NAISA conference shifted to small, local gatherings this year, but we still want to celebrate our new and recent Native American and Indigenous studies books and offer a discount on all of our great titles. From now until 6/30/2022, use the code AZNAISA22 at checkout for 30% off plus free U.S. shipping.
If you have any questions about our publishing program, visit this page, or contact our Editor-in-Chief Kristen Buckles at kbuckles@uapress.arizona.edu.
Returning Home features and contextualizes the creative works of Diné (Navajo) boarding school students at the Intermountain Indian School, which was the largest federal Indian boarding school between 1950 and 1984. Diné student art and poetry reveal ways that boarding school students sustained and contributed to Indigenous cultures and communities despite assimilationist agendas and pressures.
Watch editors Farina King and Michael P. Taylor talk about the book here, then read an excerpt from the book here.
For the first time, Navigating CHamoru Poetry focuses on Indigenous CHamoru (Chamorro) poetry from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). In this book, poet and scholar Craig Santos Perez navigates the complex relationship between CHamoru poetry, cultural identity, decolonial politics, diasporic migrations, and native aesthetics.
As an Indigenous scholar researching the history and archaeology of his own tribe, Tsim D. Schneider provides a unique and timely contribution to the growing field of Indigenous archaeology, and his book, The Archaeology of Refuge and Recourse, offers a new perspective on the primary role and relevance of Indigenous places and homelands in the study of colonial encounters.
Watch Tsim D. Schneider introduce his new book here, then watch him give a talk on the book here.
The Community-Based PhD explores the complex and nuanced experience of doing community-based research as a graduate student. Contributors from a range of scholarly disciplines share their experiences with CBPR in the arts, humanities, social sciences, public health, and STEM fields.
See the table of contents here.
Postindian Aesthetics is a collection of critical, cutting-edge essays on a new generation of Indigenous writers who are creatively and powerfully contributing to a thriving Indigenous literary canon that is redefining the parameters of Indigenous literary aesthetics.
The works featured are inventive and current, and the writers covered are visionaries. The artists covered include Orlando White, LeAnne Howe, Stephen Graham Jones, Deborah Miranda, Heid E. Erdrich, Sherwin Bitsui, and many others.
O’odham artist Michael Chiago Sr.’s paintings provide a window into the lifeways of the O’odham people. This book offers a rich account of how Tohono O’odham and Akimel O’odham live in the Sonoran Desert now and in the recent past.
Watch a talk from the artist, Michael Chicago Sr., here.
We are partnering with Western National Parks Association to host a book launch event for this book on August 25, 2022! Read more information here.
Trickster Academy is a collection of poems that explore the experience of being Native in Academia—from land acknowledgement statements, to mascots, to the histories of using Native American remains in anthropology. This collection illuminates the shared experiences of Indians across many regions, and all of us who live amongst Tricksters.
“With wry humor moistening the margins of her poems, Jenny Davis showcases how her Indigenous people have become experts in sorrow and seethe.”—Matt Sutherland, Foreword Reviews
On the heels of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Department of Diné Education, this important education history explains how the current Navajo educational system is a complex terrain of power relationships, competing agendas, and jurisdictional battles influenced by colonial pressures and tribal resistance. In providing the historical roots to today’s challenges, A History of Navajo Nation Education by Wendy Shelly Greyeyes clears the path and provides a go-to reference to move discussions forward.
Read a brief interview with the author here.
A New Deal for Navajo Weaving provides a history of early to mid-twentieth-century Diné weaving projects by non-Natives who sought to improve the quality and marketability of Diné weaving but in so doing failed to understand the cultural significance of weaving and its role in the lives of Diné women.
Challenging the distinctions between “old” and “new” media and narratives about the deprecation of orality in favor of inscribed forms, The Maya Art of Speaking Writing draws from Maya concepts of tz’ib’ (recorded knowledge) and tzij, choloj, and ch’owen (orality) to look at expressive work across media and languages.
Centering on the relationship between Quaker colonists and the Lenape people, Finding Right Relations explores the contradictory position of the Quakers as both egalitarian, pacifist people, and as settler colonists. This book explores major challenges to Quaker beliefs and resulting relations with American Indians from the mid-seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century. It shows how the Quakers not only failed to prevent settler colonial violence against American Indians but also perpetuated it.
Transforming Diné Education honors the perspectives and voices of Diné educators in culturally relevant education, special education, Diné language revitalization, well-being, tribal sovereignty, self-determination in Diné education, and university-tribal-community partnerships. The contributors offer stories about Diné resilience, resistance, and survival by articulating a Diné-centered pedagogy and politics for future generations.
Pachamama Politics examines how campesinos came to defend their community water sources from gold mining upstream and explains why Ecuador’s “pink tide” government came under fire by Indigenous and environmental rights activists.
“This is a brilliant ethnography of Indigenous anti-mining movements in Ecuador from an activist-scholar who has spent decades working with social movements and learning from them.”—Nicole Fabricant, author of Mobilizing Bolivia’s Displaced: Indigenous Politics and the Struggle over Land
April 29, 2022
We are thrilled to be participating in the virtual LASA Congress! This year’s theme is: Polarización socioambiental y rivalidad entre grandes potencias, or Socio-environmental polarization and rivalry between great powers. If you are participating in the virtual congress, we invite you to visit the virtual exhibit hall and explore our latest titles here. We have also compiled our new and recent Latin American Studies books for you to learn more about below.
We are currently offering a 30% discount with free U.S. shipping when you use the code AZLASA22 at checkout. This discount is valid through 6/15/2022.
To learn more about our publishing program, visit this page, or contact our Editor-in-Chief, Kristen Buckles, at kbuckles@uapress.arizona.edu.
Museum Matters tells the story of Mexico’s national collections through the trajectories of its objects. The essays in this book show the many ways in which things matter and affect how Mexico imagines its past, present, and future.
Watch the book trailer, featuring editors Miruna Achim, Susan Deans-Smith, and Sandra Rozental, here.
This book contextualizes the discovery of a Venus astronomical pattern by a female Mayan astronomer at Chich’en Itza and the discovery’s later adaptation and application at Mayapan. Calculating Brilliance by Gerardo Aldana brings different intellectual threads together across time and space, from the Classic to the Postclassic, the colonial period to the twenty-first century to offer a new vision for understanding Mayan astronomy.
Postcards have a magical pull. They allow us to see the past through charming relics that allow us to travel back in time. Daniel D. Arreola’s Postcards from the Baja California Border offers a window into the historical and geographical past of storied Mexican border communities. Once-popular tourist destinations from the 1900s through the 1950s, the border communities explored in Postcards from the Baja California Border used to be filled with revelers, cabarets, curio shops, and more. The postcards in this book show the bright and dynamic past of California’s borderlands while diving deep into the historic and geographic significance of the imagery found on the postcards.
Take a look inside of the book here.
In The Sound of Exclusion, Christopher Chávez critically examines National Public Radio’s professional norms and practices that situate white listeners at the center while relegating Latinx listeners to the periphery. By interrogating industry practices, we might begin to reimagine NPR as a public good that serves the broad and diverse spectrum of the American public.
Read an interview with the author by NiemanLab here, and listen to the New Books Network podcast about the book here. Read an op-ed by the author featured on the Latinx Project here, and an excerpt from the book shared by Current here.
Drug Wars and Covert Netherworlds describes the history of Mexican narco cartels and their regional and organizational trajectories and differences. Covering more than five decades, sociologist James H. Creechan unravels a web of government dependence, legitimate enterprises, and covert connections.
Watch the author talk about his book to Osher Lifelong Learning Institute members here.
The Beloved Border is a potent and timely report on the U.S.-Mexico border. Though this book tells of the unjust death and suffering that occurs in the borderlands, Miriam Davidson gives us hope that the U.S.-Mexico border could be, and in many ways already is, a model for peaceful coexistence worldwide.
Watch the author talk about her book to Osher Lifelong Learning Institute members here. Read an op-ed by the author in The Progressive here, then read an excerpt from the book here. Read a brief interview with Davidson here.
Winner of the Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets.
Deuda Natal finds the beauty within vulnerability and the dignity amidst precariousness. As one of the most prominent voices in Puerto Rican poetry, Mara Pastor uses the poems in this new bilingual collection to highlight the way that fundamental forms of caring for life—and for language—can create a space of poetic decolonization. This collection was translated by María José Giménez and Anna Rosenwong.
Watch poet Mara Pastor in conversation with Siomara España at the International Literature Festival here. Deuda Natal was featured by Orion Magazine during Latinx Heritage Month! Read about it here.
Latin American Immigration Ethics advances philosophical conversations and debates about immigration by theorizing migration from the Latin American and Latinx context. Following an extended period of near silence on the subject, many social and political philosophers are now treating immigration as a central theme of the discipline. For the first time, this edited volume brings together original works by prominent philosophers writing about immigration ethics from within a Latin American context.
Near Tijuana, Baja California, the autonomous community of Maclovio Rojas demonstrates what is possible for urban place-based political movements. Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas tells the story of the community’s struggle to carve out space for survival and thriving in the shadows of the U.S.-Mexico geopolitical border. This ethnography by Michelle Téllez demonstrates the state’s neglect in providing social services and local infrastructure.
Listen to a New Books Network interview with the author here. We held a wonderful celebration for the book in Tucson, read about it here!
Winnow of the Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets.
Cardinal in My Window with a Mask on Its Beak by Carlos Aguasaco offers the insightful voice of a first-generation immigrant to the United States in both Spanish and English. The poems, both fantastical and real, create poetic portraits of historical migrants, revealing shocking and necessary insights into humanity while establishing a transatlantic dialogue with the great voices of the Spanish Renaissance. This collection was translated by Jennifer Rathbun.
La Bloga highlighted this collection, read about it here.
Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century offers an expansive and critical look at contemporary television by and about U.S. Latinx communities. This volume unpacks the negative implications of older representation and celebrates the progress of new representation, all while recognizing that television still has a long way to go.
Professor Latinx (Frederick Luis Aldama) brought Latinx TV contributors together to celebrate the book in a special video series. Watch it here!
Watch Professor Latinx and Mighty Peter talk about their top five Latinx TV shows here. Aldama was included in a USA Today debate on the use of the word “Latinx”, read more about it here. La Bloga highlighted Latinx TV, read more here.
Latinx Teens by Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera examines how Latinx teenagers influence twenty-first-century U.S. popular culture. The book explores the diverse ways that contemporary mainstream film, television, theater, and young adult literature invokes, constructs, and interprets adolescent Latinidad.
La Bloga highlighted Latinx Teens, read more here.
LGBTQ Politics in Nicaragua by Karen Kampwirth provides the previously untold history of the LGBTQ community’s emergence as political actors—from revolutionary guerillas to civil rights activists.
Karen Kampwirth is a renowned scholar of the Nicaraguan Revolution, who has been writing at the intersection of gender and politics for decades. In this chronological telling of the last fifty years of political history in Nicaragua, Kampwirth deploys a critical new lens: understanding politics from the perspective of the country’s LGBTQ community.
Challenging the distinctions between “old” and “new” media and narratives about the deprecation of orality in favor of inscribed forms, The Maya Art of Speaking Writing by Tiffany D. Creegan Miller draws from Maya concepts of tz’ib’ (recorded knowledge) and tzij, choloj, and ch’owen (orality) to look at expressive work across media and languages.
Running After Paradise by Colleen M. Scanlan-Lyons looks at social-environmental activism in one of the world’s most important and threatened tropical forests—Southern Bahia, Brazil. It explores what it means to be in and of a place through the lenses of history, environment, identity, class, and culture. It uncovers not only what separates people but also what brings them together as they struggle and strive to create their individual and collective paradise.
The book takes an intersectional approach to the study of anti-mining struggles and explains how campesino communities and their allies identified with and redeployed Indigenous cosmologies to defend their water as a life-sustaining entity. Pachamama Politics by Teresa A. Velásquez shows why progressive change requires a shift away from the extractive model of national development to a plurinational defense of community water systems and Indigenous peoples and their autonomy.
Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans by Nathaniel Morris documents how and why the Indigenous Náayari, Wixárika, O’dam, and Mexicanero peoples took part in the Mexican Revolution as they struggled to preserve their cultures, lands, and political autonomy in the face of civil war, bandit raids, and radical political reform. In unpacking the ambiguities that characterize their participation in this tumultuous period, it sheds light on the inner contradictions of the revolution itself.
Watch Nathaniel Morris discuss the book with UCLAmericas here, then read field notes from the book here.
April 19, 2022
Yesterday, Frederick Luis Aldama, aka Professor Latinx, celebrated the launch of Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century with a virtual convo emceed by Ben Lopez, considered a huge champion of diversity, inclusion and belonging in the entertainment and media industries (and happens to be a University of Arizona graduate).
Joining Aldama and Lopez was Cristina Rivera and William “Memo” Nericcio, Latinx TV contributors. The new book, published by the University of Arizona Press and edited by Aldama, brings together leading experts who show how Latinx TV is shaped by historical, social, cultural, regional, and global contexts. Contributors address head on harmful stereotypes in Latinx representation while giving key insights to a positive path forward.
The launch was part of a virtual countdown of conversations between Aldama and Latinx TV contributors posted on the University of Arizona Press’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. Latinx TV is also part of the Press’s Latinx Pop Culture Series, co-edited by Aldama and Arturo J. Aldama. The first chat of the launch series, begn Thursday, April 14 with Mauricio Espinoza and Jim Miranda:
Next on the countdown with Aldama on Friday, April 15 were contributors Irma J. Zamora Fuerte and Carlos Gabriel Kelly González:
Stacey Alex, Mathew Sandoval, and Katlin Sweeny joined Aldama on Monday, April 18 for another Latinx TV convo:
On Tuesday, April 19, followers were given some extra with a bonus convo featuring contributors José Muñoz and Ryan Rashotte before the official launch:
Aldama also got to the heart of the goals and purpose of Latinx TV in an article that came out yesterday in Latinx Spaces:
At the Academy Awards 2022 Ariana DeBose steps up to receive one of those coveted gold statuettes. She invites the audience to celebrate with her as “an openly queer Afrolatina who found strength in life and art.” She opens her arms to everyone who has been forced to “live in those gray spaces.” Audiences around the country let leak tears of joy, celebrating Ariana, LGBTQ+, and Afrolatinx representation.
We did the same when Afrolatino Jharrel Jerome gave his “te quiero” shout outs to his mamá and papá at the 2019 Emmys. On both occasions, we replenished our wells of hope, thinking that maybe now the Media Industrial Complex would finally pay attention to representation of Latinx peoples in all our richness and complexity.
While optimistic, we remain rightfully weary as we continue to carry the huge weight of our continued skepticism.
Read the entire article here.
Big thanks to Professor Latinx for bringing these brilliant contributors together to celebrate the book’s publication!
April 14, 2022
We really enjoyed attending SAA in Chicago this spring! We got to reconnect with so many authors we haven’t seen in years, meet new archaeologists, and talk about our beautiful books with so many scholars. We also had the great honor of attending the award ceremony, where Becoming Hopi was awarded the SAA Scholarly Book Award! We got some great photos of our authors with their books. Take a look below.
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