The University of Arizona Press

September 15, 2026

Timely, urgent, and deeply humane, Legal Care: Advocacy and Friction in Family Detention speaks to scholars and practitioners across anthropology, law and society, migration studies, and carceral justice. Eric Routon’s accessible and evocative writing invites readers to reconsider activism and advocacy, offering new language for understanding resistance and solidarity in the face of institutional violence. This book is essential reading for anyone committed to justice, care, and the future of immigration policy in the United States.

In Legal Care, anthropologist Erin Routon explores the operations of these facilities through the unique perspectives of volunteer legal advocates. Routon offers a compelling ethnographic account of the hidden labor and emotional resilience of those advocates. Through the lens of “legal care,” Routon reframes legal aid as a form of caregiving, revealing how these advocates resist the structural and legal violence of family detention while supporting asylum-seeking parents and children. Drawing on immersive fieldwork and firsthand narratives, the book exposes the human cost of administrative incarceration and the quiet power of care in spaces designed to exclude. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

The middle of nowhere is how just about everyone describes places like this. By that, they usually mean there aren’t any big malls, no tall buildings, far too much dirt. It’s full of sights like wooden fenceposts stringing together limp barbed wire and swaths of open land dotted by fading billboards with ominous religious pronouncements. It’s too bright during the day, too dark at night, and traffic is determined by loose cattle and wide, unhurried farm machinery. I grew up in a place like this, and in the late summer of 2015, I find myself making my way through terrain that strangely reminds me of home.

Driving down a lonely dirt road, I lean into the steering wheel and squint to see the silver metal gate past a slight turn. They said to keep an eye out because there wouldn’t be a sign. The dust kicks up in cream-colored clouds behind me, and the sun is starting to slip below the distant horizon, turning the sky to its usual vibrant, dusky hues. I think I’m lost. They had told us the road would come right after the detention center, but I never saw the center, just a wide paved path leading off beyond some small hill. I’m already sweating, partially because it’s August in South Texas, but I’m also nervous. The next day will be my first day in an immigrant detention center, and the same distracting thoughts keep running through my head: What am I doing here? I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t really know how to help people with their legal cases. Why would they even want my help? I feel the chunky bits of the road knock the floorboards under my feet, kicking my mind back to the present concern.

I see what looks like the right spot, so I get out to drag the gate open just enough for me to pass through. I drive slowly along a narrow sandy road shrouded with cacti and mesquite trees until coming upon a white, one-story ranch-style home. There’s a row of sparkling clean rental cars with out-of-state plates parked along the side. I rumble over the cattle guard at the entrance and park next to the others. I walk past a rusted barbecue to a back door by the covered patio carrying a tote bag with my notebook and stacks of orientation paperwork, a six pack of Shiner beer in hand. The door swings open, and I’m enthusiastically welcomed by a group I will come to know well in the coming years, though the faces will change. I will also come to know this particular house, known by many who pass through this little town as “the ranch,” eventually thinking of it as a kind of home, and the people who pass through it as an unexpected kind of kin.

What follows is a story of liminal space, of a “nowhere” place caught somewhere in the middle, and the people within it that, in many different ways, find themselves similarly caught. Even the place and people at this story’s center find themselves at a crossroads. Called a baby jail by some, a migrant family detention center by others, and a residential facility by an influential few, it’s all the same place. The people are “legal assistants” or “legal advocates” on paper and “warriors” among compañerxs. In my view, they are also caregivers, and this is a story about why I believe this to be so.

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Erin Routon is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Houston in Houston, Texas. She also teaches advanced social scientific writing for Harvard Extension School. Her research, activism, and teaching center social justice causes related to immigration and incarceration, particularly in the United States and Latin America. She is a member of the Abolitionist Anthropology Working Group and has worked as a volunteer with various immigrant advocacy organizations and projects across the United States.

September 10, 2026

Felger’s own voice, paired with reflections from twenty colleagues, creates a rich, multifaceted narrative, offering readers a rare glimpse into the life of a scientific icon whose legacy continues to inspire desert researchers and conservationists across the globe. The Botanical Odyssey of Richard S. Felger is a vibrant tribute to Richard Stephen Felger, who was one of the most influential scientists of the American Southwest and northwestern Mexico. Known as a desert botanist, Felger’s work transcended regional boundaries, blending rigorous fieldwork with global ecological vision. This work offers an intimate and multifaceted portrait of a man whose tireless advocacy for biodiversity and biocultural conservation shaped generations of desert scientists.

Edited by Benjamin Theodore Wilder, Bill Broyles, and Thomas Bowen, this book is both a celebration and a resource. The work is separated into four parts. With humor, insight, and deep empathy, Felger’s own voice leads the journey in part 1, recounting his most memorable field experiences with masterful prose and sly wit. Part 2 brings together heartfelt reflections from colleagues who worked alongside Felger in the field, revealing the eccentric brilliance and relentless curiosity that defined his career. Part 3 explores his family history and the unconventional path that shaped his life’s work, while part 4 presents a comprehensive bibliography of his most important publications. Read an excerpt from the book’s Chapter 1: A Sapling Grows Up below.

I thought about lots of things walking to Third Street grammar school and then bicycling to John Burroughs Junior High on sycamore-shaded sidewalks in mid-twentieth-century early smog days. Our street trees were European sycamores, the London plane, even though our street was named Las Palmas. I would have preferred California sycamores, even though the trunk grows too crooked for a normal street tree. Native trees for native microcosms reaching native birds.

I imagined all the people gone, as they will be someday. Trees and vines growing through the ruins. Most non-natives will vanish from lack of artificial water. I figured which ones would reproduce. Natives would return in stages of succession, even though I did not know there was an ecological theory of succession. There were still vacant lots sporting native plants, although the majority of the Los Angeles flora consisted of weedy Eurasian invasives. Sometimes I thought about bringing extirpated mountain lions and condors and resurrecting Ice Age La Brea Tar Pits creatures—ground sloths, dire wolves, sabertoothed tigers, and mammoths. What would it be like to see muscular sabertoothed tigers in action? Or might they use their sabers to rake rotting flesh off mammoths mired in the tar? What’s wrong with a heroic animal being a scavenger? America’s national symbol is a carrion eater and so is Mexico’s.

The rundown house that looked like a miniature castle, where a young movie star once lived, had Italian cypress trees. Tall dark columns, green on the outside and itchy scratchy dead twigs inside full of spiders and mites. Those trees would live on in this Mediterranean climate but would not spread. I never saw seedlings and later learned they are a sterile horticultural selection, cloned by cuttings. Olive trees, also cloned Mediterranean selections, would keep going, some for centuries or a thousand years, but I never saw seedlings. Each tree produces thousands of one seeded olives every year, so maybe a few would germinate and survive and admit olives to a future flora.

Our neighbor, a world-renowned allergist, had a whole grove of olive trees providing the neighborhood with hay fever. Olive pollen is a top listed allergen. A favorite trick was to give fresh juicy olives to a new kid from back East. Unprocessed olives will pucker your mouth for a long time.

Sidewalk edges and street cracks would fill first with weedy non-natives like Bermuda grass, but to make things more interesting, I imagined natives like coastal prickly pear (Opuntia littoralis) and Los Angeles manzanita (Arctostaphylos glauca). They would thrive in cracks opening from earthquakes. Being a California kid, I thought earthquakes were normal. Native and naturalized species could move in from vacant lots and big open spaces like the La Brea Tar Pits, about a mile away, still vaguely natural. The tar pits were our hunting grounds. Most were not fenced, incredible as it might seem in our litigious society. After spring rains, we found California tree frogs breeding in water topping off tar pools. Two striped garter snakes lurked for fat little frogs. Some years later the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Page Museum of tar pit fossils and their parking lots smothered our hunting grounds.

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Benjamin T. Wilder is a biogeographer, botanist, and desert ecologist whose research looks at the origin and future of the Sonoran Desert. He is co-founder and director of the Next Generation Sonoran Desert Researchers (N-Gen). He is the co-author of Plant Life of a Desert Archipelago with his mentor Richard Felger and Humberto Romero Morales. His scientific and conservation efforts strive to combine multiple disciplines and perspectives to better understand and care for the desert that drives his passion.

Bill Broyles is a student in the Sonoran Desert’s schoolhouse, where he studies and writes about human and natural history of southwestern Arizona and northwestern Sonora. His books include Sunshot, Dry Borders with Richard Felger, Among Unknown Tribes, Flying for the U.S. Border Patrol, 1940–2005, and Remembering Ranches Around Ajo, Arizona.

Thomas Bowen is professor emeritus in the Department of Anthropology, California State University, Fresno, and a research associate at the Southwest Center at the University of Arizona. His research has focused on the archaeology and history of the islands in the Gulf of California, especially as it relates to the Seri people. His books and monographs include Unknown Island, The Record of Native People on Islands in the Gulf of California, and On Desert Shores.

September 8, 2026

In Arizona’s Quest for Reform: Socialists, Unionists, and Progressives, 1900–1920, David R. Berman traces the rise and fall of a dynamic coalition of socialists, labor activists, and progressive Democrats led by the influential Governor George Hunt as they pursued sweeping reforms in a rapidly changing state. From the fight for workers’ rights and women’s suffrage to the use of the initiative process and the role of radical newspapers, Berman brings to life the people and movements that shaped Arizona’s early political identity. This landmark work will appeal to scholars of western history, labor studies, and political science, as well as general readers interested in Arizona’s unique place in the national Progressive movement.

Arizona’s Quest for Reform not only deepens our understanding of the past but also offers timely insights into the enduring challenges of coalition building, grassroots activism, and political reform. Drawing on extensive primary sources and organized in a clear chronological structure, Berman’s study reveals the tensions, alliances, and dramatic events that defined Arizona’s reform efforts between 1900 and 1920. The book explores the impact of powerful mining interests, railroad companies, and labor unions, while also examining the racialization of Mexican miners and their evolving role in the labor movement. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

Newspapers were of considerable importance in this study, not only as a major source of information on what was going on but because they were combatants in the political and industrial struggles, taking sides and affecting both the course of reform and the perception and success of the radical forces. In 1914 the state had, by one count, sixty newspapers, forty-six of which were published weekly, thirteen of which were published six times a week, and one, the Arizona Republican in Phoenix, which was published daily. Not included in this count were socialist and radical labor papers, the editors of which, as Linda J. Lumsden has pointed out, were “activists first, journalists second.”

Some of the mainstream newspaper editors declared that their newspapers were politically independent, a claim that others contended was far from accurate. Many more papers were openly aligned with a political party or a particular faction within one of the major parties. The third-party press made its presence known in the 1912–1914 period, but from 1915 to 1919, most of the papers were aligned with one of the two major parties. During the period under review, a majority of the papers were aligned with the Democratic Party (though many of these were on the conservative side). Editors were well known in their communities and often influential political figures. Still, the “facts” they printed ran the risk of being ignored, misinterpreted, or rejected by the “public communities” they served.

Political parties initially subsidized many newspapers, and when the party’s candidates won, the party papers received valuable government printing contracts. Aspiring politicians often purchased or launched newspapers to promote their candidacies. As time went on, railroads and mining companies also sought to promote their interests through the purchase of a paper or, more commonly, by exerting control through the financial hold they had on a newspaper because of a loan made somewhere down the line. Over time, corporations replaced political parties as the financial supporters of newspapers.

Changes in the ownership and direction of papers were common. In 1901, for example, the sale of the Tucson Citizen converted it from a Republican paper to a Democratic paper, and another purchase in 1910 converted it back to a Republican paper. In a 1914 survey, the Arizona Gazette in Phoenix was found to have changed hands and its political orientation more often than any other paper in the history of the state or territory. Originally a Republican paper, it switched from one party to another several times.

While partisanship helped shape mainstream newspapers’ opinion pages and coverage of events, corporate ownership and control over many if not most of the mainstream daily papers, be they aligned with the Republicans or Democrats, was far more salient in Arizona politics by promoting a common pro-business, free-enterprise perspective regardless of the papers’ party affiliations. Railroads spread the message through the party newspapers they controlled—the Santa Fe through papers affiliated with the Republican Party, the Southern Pacific acting through papers affiliated with the Democratic Party. Mining companies, too, used the papers they controlled—some Democratic, some Republican—to advance the conservative business cause. By 1905 mining companies were said to control at least nine daily papers and five weekly papers in the territory.

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David R. Berman is a professor emeritus of political science at Arizona State University. He has written twelve books and more than one hundred published papers, book chapters, or refereed articles. His latest book is Arizona Politics and Government; others include Socialist Mayors in the United States, Governors and the Progressive Movement, and George Hunt: Arizona’s Crusading Seven-Term Governor.

September 3, 2026

This bold and timely anthology interrogates the British monarchy through the lens of race, gender, and postcolonial critique. The contributors of ten original essays use Meghan Markle’s public life and identity as a nexus for understanding the enduring legacies of empire, white supremacy, and institutional exclusion. In Meghan Markle: Essays on Monarchy, Race, and Colonialism, edited by Duchess Harris and Julie Schwietert Collazo, each chapter blends academic analysis with the authors’ own lived experiences and identities, creating a deeply engaging and multifaceted narrative. Essays cover media representation, mental health, motherhood, and the politics of belonging. 

Written in an accessible and engaging style, this volume speaks to readers interested in the intersections of monarchy, race, feminism, and celebrity culture. Through its interdisciplinary approach and critical insight, these essays reveal how one woman’s experience within the royal family brings into focus broader social and historical processes of racial identity making and colonial power. This is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the cultural and political significance of Meghan Markle’s story—and what it tells us about the world we live in. Read an excerpt from the book’s Chapter 1: Under the Gaze.

Prior to her marriage to Prince Harry, Meghan Markle’s public appearances and speech were arguably race neutral: unmarked, inoffensive, and palatable to the public at large. The ease with which she appeared to occupy spaces such as the United Nations as a goodwill ambassador, the roles she played as an actress, and even her self-presentation on platforms such as Instagram all pointed to a woman who seemed to have evaded the limitations of race, particularly the unique burdens placed on Black women in the entertainment industry. What changed, then, when she married Prince Harry and became the Duchess of Sussex? How did a woman seemingly acceptable to the mainstream media and the public become so vilified, even accused of collapsing the British monarchy? We propose that the answer is because Markle dared to exercise her voice and agency, and in doing so, she moved from being raceless to raced. In sum, she became Black.

Historically, women who have married into the British royal family have survived and thrived in their roles either by being silent or by being silenced. Markle, a Black American woman, defied this code. In the overwhelmingly white space that is the palace, she talked back, and she talked Black. This was a problem. This chapter interrogates the shift in media perceptions of her from this standpoint. We argue that although in the past Markle may have performed race neutrality in professional and public settings, and hence, stayed silent on matters of race, politics, and social justice, this posture was impossible at the palace. There, she was, in the words of Zora Neale Hurston, “thrown against a sharp white background” and thus hyper-visible. There, she was forced to confront realities of Black womanhood that she, a light- skinned biracial woman, may have previously evaded. In this vein, central to our argument is the notion of the palace (a term used interchangeably throughout this essay for the royal family and the British monarchy as an institution) as a site of racial and cultural reckoning for Markle. Specifically, pitched against the whiteness of the palace, Markle became Black. That is, as argued by Stuart Hall, the shift in public perception of Markle and the ways in which she, after leaving Britain as a “working royal,” now clearly aligns with the Black community on race matters and social justice attest to the notion that identity is not static. It is a constant production of both being and becoming.

In this chapter, we have selected moments in the public lives of Markle and Prince Harry, loosely categorized under the labels of courtship, engagement, marriage, and life outside England. We analyze examples from these to show how Markle progressively becomes Black in media representations. As her relationship with the prince deepens, Blackness is publicly thrust upon her and she must decide either to embrace it or ignore it with the world watching.

Courtship 
To understand Markle’s relationship with Prince Harry, and the many courses it has taken in the public eye, one needs to place Markle and her transition from an actress to a member of the royal family in historical context: Traditionally, there have been limited roles available to Black women in the public sphere, and Hollywood has been instrumental in ensuring this. As a commercialized entity, the film industry aided and abetted in cultural and discriminatory practices. The image of Black and other nonwhite people suffered. The roles minorities occupied reinforced colonial and slave-era stereotypes, namely Black people as subordinate, marginalized, or subjugated individuals or criminals. The presence of Black and nonwhite people existed to bolster the presence of white people and to affirm white superiority as societal norm. Specifically in America, cinema became a space in which contested ideas about history, citizenship, and racial and gender identities were debated and solidified. David Wark (D. W.) Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), the first feature-length film, tackled all these subjects, but from a particular viewpoint. On the surface, Birth is a narrative that is clichéd: Two families, geographically and politically opposed, one based in the slaveholding South and the other in the North, collide when their sons befriend each other at school. Griffith uses this simple narrative, however, to present a particular vision of American society that emphasizes racist ideologies and Black abnormality—for example, the inherent criminality of Black people and the uncontrollable sexual appetites of Black men that endanger white women. The popularity of Griffith’s film —aided by its viewing at the White House on February 18, 1915, by then-president Woodrow Wilson— helped cement problematic Black presence in American cinema.

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Duchess Harris is the chair of the history department at Macalester College. She is a professor of American studies and is also an affiliated member of the political science department. Her academic books include Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity with Bruce D. Baum, four editions of Black Feminist Politics (2009, 2011, 2018, and 2026) and Black Girl Magic Beyond the Hashtag: Twenty-First-Century Acts of Self-Definition with Julia S. Jordan-Zachary.

Julie Schwietert Collazo is a former social worker and creative arts therapist turned writer-editor-translator. She holds a BA in English and women’s studies from Emory, a MSW from NYU, and she has completed doctoral work in Spanish at Centro de Estudios Avanzados in Puerto Rico. She has written or worked for a number of media outlets, including Audubon Magazine, the Guardian, Longreads, and the New York Times, among many others. She is the co-author of The Book of Rosy, which was named by Kirkus as one of the best nonfiction books of 2020.

August 28, 2026

This work presents the results of more than a decade of archaeological fieldwork at the Rooney Ranch site in Oro Valley, Arizona—an upland Hohokam village that played a key role in regional agave production. Edited by Jeffrey T. Jones and Helen L. O’Brien, Hohokam Along the Cañada del Oro: Specialized Land Use at the Rooney Ranch Site synthesizes extensive data collected by the Pima Community College Centre for Archaeological Field Training, offering a rare and richly detailed look at how small peripheral settlements contributed to the sustainability of larger Hohokam communities in the Sonoran Desert. Through GIS-based mapping and the analysis of ceramics, lithics, and faunal and botanical remains, the book reveals how specialized land use shaped the economic and social fabric of the region for centuries.

This legacy project stands out not only for its depth but also for its educational significance. As one of the few long-term, community-college-led excavations in the Southwest, the Rooney Ranch project highlights the vital role of student training and local collaboration in archaeological research. With more than seventy data-rich tables and contributions from leading specialists, this volume is an essential resource for archaeologists, historians, and anyone interested in Indigenous land use, desert adaptation, and the enduring legacy of the Hohokam in southern Arizona. Read an excerpt from the book’s Chapter 3, Ceramics, below.

Pottery collected during excavation was assigned a lot and sequence number; these were correlated to provenience. When identified, partially reconstructible vessels, worked sherds, and miscellaneous ceramic artifacts were bagged separately. In the laboratory, sherds were sorted into gross categories—buff ware, decorated brown ware, plain ware, worked, and other (includes polychromes and surface manipulated pieces). Body sherds were separated from rim sherds. They were then counted and weighed by lot. Information including feature, lot, and sequence numbers; artifact category, and weight were recorded in a computerized database using Microsoft ACCESS® software.

Efforts were then made to reconstruct vessels. Larger vessels often included sherds from more than one lot. Once all of the sherds from one vessel had been located, they were sometimes, but not always, assigned a new lot number. Some reconstructed vessels thus may have more than one lot and sequence number.

In my analysis, I counted each reconstructed vessel as one, even if it came from more than one lot or sequence. Variables recorded for each whole or reconstructed vessel included type or ware, vessel shape, rim finish shape, tempering material, surface finish, vessel wall thickness, and percentage of vessel represented. Rim diameter was measured for vessels when 5 percent or more of the rim was available. Vessel heights and body diameters were also measured when possible and neck heights were measured on jars. I also made note of whether interior vessel walls were eroded.

Variables recorded during analysis of the rest of the ceramic collection were similar to those recorded for the reconstructed vessels. Sherds were sorted by size, type or ware, vessel part, and vessel shape. Seven hundred dime sized or smaller sherds were counted in regard to size but were not analyzed further. Additional information recorded on larger sherds included jar neck height, rim finish shape when applicable, rim diameter if 5 percent or more of the rim was found, surface finish, presence or absence of erosion on the sherd interior, and temper particles. Each of the variables recorded are described next. Details regarding analytic methods and results are reported in Appendix B.

The Rooney Ranch ceramics that were analyzed came primarily from pithouse floors; from intrusive features within houses, such as roasting pit Feature 4.01; from subfloor pits in houses; and from middens. The ceramics were used to determine depositional context and date ranges for each feature. The sizes and types of pots found in each feature reflected on activities within the features including possible closure rituals for houses and the use of middens as storage or ritual locations. The collection of worked sherds, clay figurines, and modeled spindle whorls also provide clues on activities such as fiber processing that may have occurred at the site. Pottery from other parts of the Tucson Basin and from outside of the Tucson Basin allow speculation as to how the villagers at the Rooney Ranch site interacted with others in the region.

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Jeffrey T. Jones is a retired cultural resource management (CRM) archaeologist with over thirty-five years of experience in the American Southwest and northwest Mexico. His formal training is in archaeological field methods and cartography, and he has conducted field mapping and cartography for projects in Central America, Brazil, southern France, and Sudan. He last worked as a field/project director for Tierra Right of Way Services in Tucson. He has more than four hundred project reports on file at the Arizona State Museum, ranging from negative survey reports to major excavation reports.

Helen L. O’Brien is an archaeologist specializing in field mapping, data management, CAD, GIS, and student training. She has been employed at the Pima Community College Archaeology Centre since 1985. She has conducted field mapping, data collection and management, and cartography at sites in southern Arizona, Brazil, southern France, Hawai‘i, Egypt, and Sudan.

July 10, 2026

Interwoven Rosewood: Collaborative Ecologies, Colonial Entanglements, and Indigenous Resistance authors Julie Velásquez Runk, Wounaan National Congress, and Wounaan Local Congress of Majé recently launched a website featuring resources and background for their book. The Interwoven Rosewood website includes a remarkable digital collage photo of the book’s authors and collaborators, as well as videos from the Wounaan community.

The Wounaan Podpa Nʌm Pömaam (Wounaan National Congress) is comprised of all Wounaan in urban and rural areas and the sixteen Wounaan communities in Darien and Panama Provinces of Panama. The Wounaan Podpa Nʌm Pömaam is the highest body of religious, cultural, and political-administrative expression, deliberation, and decision-making of Wounaan in Panama. The Wir Haigpai Podpa Nʌm Majé (Wounaan Local Congress of Majé) is made up of members of the community of Majé and elected authorities.  It also is part of the Wounaan Podpa Nʌm Pömaam. Julie Velásquez Runk is director, professor, and Weigl Fellow in Environment and Sustainability Studies at Wake Forest University and a research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Trained as an ecologist and anthropologist and taught by Indigenous Wounaan, she has fostered socioecological research through community-based knowledge co-production for more than thirty years.

About the book:

Interwoven Rosewood is a collaborative exploration of the global rosewood trade and its entanglements with Indigenous lifeways, colonial histories, and environmental crises. Co-authored by Julie Velásquez Runk and members of the Wounaan National Congress and its Local Congress of the Majé community, this book traces the story of cocobolo rosewood from Wounaan lands in Panama to international markets, revealing how centuries of settler colonialism and extractive capitalism continue to shape landscapes, livelihoods, and relationships. At its heart, the book is a meditation on well-being and belonging—how people live in relation to land, each other, and the more-than-human world.
 
Drawing on more than a decade of community-based research and six collaborative book workshops, the authors weave together first-person narratives, ecological analysis, historical context, and Indigenous knowledge. The result is a richly textured account that challenges dominant narratives of environmental degradation by centering Wounaan experiences of joy, resistance, and conviviality. The book’s structure reflects its method: interwoven chapters authored or spoken by Wounaan colleagues, grounded in consent protocols and shaped by ancestral storytelling traditions.

June 9, 2026

Co-authored by Julie Velásquez Runk and members of the Wounaan National Congress and its Local Congress of the Majé community, Interwoven Rosewood: Collaborative Ecologies, Colonial Entanglements, and Indigenous Resistance is a collaborative exploration of the global rosewood trade and its entanglements with Indigenous lifeways, colonial histories, and environmental crises. This book traces the story of cocobolo rosewood from Wounaan lands in Panama to international markets, revealing how centuries of settler colonialism and extractive capitalism continue to shape landscapes, livelihoods, and relationships. At its heart, the book is a meditation on well-being and belonging—how people live in relation to land, each other, and the more-than-human world.
 
Drawing on more than a decade of community-based research and six collaborative book workshops, the authors weave together first-person narratives, ecological analysis, historical context, and Indigenous knowledge. The result is a richly textured account that challenges dominant narratives of environmental degradation by centering Wounaan experiences of joy, resistance, and conviviality. The book’s structure reflects its method: interwoven chapters authored or spoken by Wounaan colleagues, grounded in consent protocols and shaped by ancestral storytelling traditions. Accessibly written, Interwoven Rosewood is ideal for courses in environmental conservation, Indigenous studies, anthropology, Latin American studies, and political ecology. With its interdisciplinary reach and classroom-ready discussion questions, the book invites readers to reflect on the global forces behind environmental catastrophe—and the enduring power of Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and becoming. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

This story of cocobolo rosewood pillage was one we wanted told, but we wanted it to be more than that. We wanted to show wajaup hʌidʌmW (to be good with others, or to be in good relation) of maach durrW (Wounaan lands/nation). To do that well took some time.

“The logging of cocobolo rosewood trees in the community of Majé happened [in 2014],” Hirwin Ortiz Chamapuro wrote, “because colonists were illegally removing them, while the residents had been preserving this species on their land. The local and national congresses had been fighting against this, filing complaints and lawsuits with the competent local government authorities, ministers, the justice of the peace, the mayor’s office, and the National Environmental Authority, but almost all of these
documents were ignored. Cocobolo fever affected artisans, there was and still is little wood for carvings, and at that time there was a shortage of fish and shrimp in the river. As a result, there was a slight loss of population, and some people began to migrate to the city.”

We began this research together just after Majé’s rosewood logging, just over a decade ago. We are members or national authorities of the Indigenous Wounaan people, the Wounaan Podpa Nʌm Pömaam (WPNP, Wounaan National Congress), members or local authorities of the Wounaan community of Majé, the Wir Haigpai Podpa Nʌm Majé (WHPNM, Wounaan Local Congress of Majé), and Julie Velásquez Runk. We, a changing group depending on elections and expertise, have worked together since 2001 on a series of research projects, often with the Congress’s sibling organization (a non-governmental organization, NGO) the Fundación para el Desarrollo del Pueblo Wounaan (Foundation for the Development of Wounaan People).

We have learned together over years to co-labor, to collaborate, and hãba poso honee nʌmW (to be convivial or joyful in our work together). “The recordings of our final book workshop in June 2025,” Julie said, “reminded me a bit of how ancestral stories were told: one person narrating, others commenting, another narrating, and still carrying the story through the joyous community interaction.” “It [the book and its methods],” Chenier Carpio Opua said, is “familial coexistence; what makes a group, a collective.”

“This book,” Julie wrote, “uses the global illegal rosewood logging boom as a means to reflect on who we are (being) and how we are in relationship with others and place (belonging). It does so by showing the beauty and joy of Wounaan life, the conviviality that persists as resistance to centuries of colonialism and extractive capitalism.”

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Julie Velásquez Runk is director, professor, and Weigl Fellow in Environment and Sustainability Studies at Wake Forest University and a research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Trained as an ecologist and an anthropologist and taught by Indigenous Wounaan, she has fostered socioecological research through community-based knowledge co-production for more than thirty years. She mixes social sciences, natural sciences, and the humanities, and authors and co-authors work for academic and nonacademic publics.

May 5, 2026

Excavating narrative memories, Across Canons: Language, Latin American Immigrant Literature, and the Making of Latinx Narratives by Thania Muñoz D. examines literary allusions to a classic Latin American canon that resurface in the work of Latin American writers who live and work in the United States. The immigrant literature of Edmundo Paz Soldán, Alberto Fuguet, and Cristina Rivera Garza from the late 1990s and early 2000s provides an important glimpse into representations of Latin America’s relationship with the United States and how immigration has shaped it. This book highlights the benefits of comparative, interdisciplinary interpretations that allow readers and scholars to grapple with the realities of a multilingual Latin American–origin literary present and future of the United States.

Author Thania Muñoz D. looks at immigrant experiences impacted by a prism of social and political factors, including free trade agreements, drug trafficking, political violence, massive foreign debt, and economic dependency. The author examines why these writers refuse to identify as immigrants and reject stereotypical portrayals. Throughout, Muñoz D. makes the case for a new field within Latinx literature: Latin American immigrant writing in Spanish. She explains why this type of literary work is critical across Latin American, Latinx, and U.S. literature. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

I owe my love for literature to my experience as a public high school student in Southern California. As a recent immigrant from Mexico (Jalisco) in the late 1990s, I was placed in bilingual education for the first months after my arrival—until California’s Proposition 227 (passed in 1998) eliminated bilingual education in public schools. As the school struggled to place all immigrant non-English speakers in “regular” classes, they were quick to put Latin American immigrant students in Advanced Placement (AP) Spanish courses to provide us with a safe place—even though not all of us spoke or wrote “advanced” Spanish. In those courses, I read the Latin American and Hispanic literary canon our teachers assigned. Although most of us were recent immigrants, we did not read any immigrant stories or Latinx narratives. I learned about Jorge Luis Borges’s (Argentina) labyrinths and Miguel de Unamuno’s (Spain) obsession with death, but we read nothing of Cherríe Moraga’s, Gloria Anzaldúa’s, Tomás Rivera’s, or Oscar “Zeta” Acosta’s literature about being an immigrant or being Chicana/e/o in the United States. The Hispanic canon fed my intellectual curiosity but did not help me ease into my new identity as an immigrant, Chicana, and Latina, as the latter authors might have. The present book is a response to the conventional Spanish-language canon in the United States, which is mostly classified as Latin American or Hispanic in school curricula, university courses, and literary anthologies.

In Across Canons: Language, Latin American Immigrant Literature, and the Making of Latinx Narratives (hereafter Across Canons), language is an essential question in bridging the conversation between Latin American and Latinx literary studies in the United States. Latinx studies are often framed in terms of history, generations, and proficiency, as if Spanish-language literature were written in the past and belonged to “others”: immigrants, our parents, nostalgia—those who are not quite Latinx yet. In Latin American literary studies in the United States, Spanish is framed as “our language,” our identity, our nation, although these conversations often leave out our Indigenous languages. Hispanic studies, modern languages programs, and English departments in U.S. institutions, to name a few examples, replicate this division due to the historical racialization of Spanish in the United States. In this context, Across Canons shows why Spanish-language literature has struggled to find a “home” in the United States. By using a comparative approach to Latin American and Latinx literary studies, taking immigrant literature by Edmundo Paz Soldán (Bolivia), Alberto Fuguet (Chile), and Cristina Rivera Garza (México) as examples, I show how the Latin American literary canon fails in some ways to narrate the immigrant experience in the United States. I argue that Latinx literary studies help bridge this gap by considering the role of language and immigration in this field. In Across Canons, I nonetheless underscore how these fields struggle with multilingualism due to our diverse histories of belonging in the United States. I am in dialogue with these struggles via a fundamental question: How to narrate? What does it look like to narrate in Spanish contemporary immigrant experiences? How do past literary canons shape these narratives? How and why should we read these Spanish texts as Latinx and Latin American? And finally, why does this matter for Latinx and Latin American literary studies?

The how is also at the center of my own writing in this book. As I have shared, my interest in narratives of immigration originated in my own experience as an immigrant, student, and reader of literature. As a 1.5-generation Mexican immigrant, I wanted to read immigrant literature in my own language, but canonical discourses about Latin American identity were replicated even in my public Southern California high school classes. After high school, the question of language became part of my own academic research on immigration and Latin American and Latinx literature. I was continuously asked by peers and professors: Is your research on Latin American immigrant literature in Spanish or in English? Are you looking at immigrant literature from the perspective of Latin American or Latinx studies? In Across Canons, I seek to answer these questions using a comparative and interdisciplinary approach. I argue that Spanish-language immigrant literature, although intrinsically hemispheric, examines the perspectives of immigrants living (or once living) in the United States and the role of language in Latin American and Latinx studies.

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Thania Muñoz D. is an immigrant educator, translator, poet, and scholar. Her writing and translations have appeared in Copihue, Acentos Review, Circumference, Fence, Firmament, La Bloga, Catedral Tomada, MARLAS, the Latin American Literary Review, and others. She immigrated in 1998 to Southern California from Jalisco, México, and since 2015 has lived in Maryland. She is an associate professor of Latinx and Latin American literature, director of the MA Program in Intercultural Communication at UMBC, and the managing editor and founder of Latin@ Literatures.

April 30, 2026

In the shadow of Mexico’s ongoing human rights crisis, Digging for Hope offers a powerful feminist ethnography of resistance, care, and collective memory. Drawing on nearly a decade of fieldwork, R. Aída Hernández Castillo documents the courageous work of women-led search collectives who, in the face of extreme violence, search for their disappeared loved ones. Digging for Hope is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the gendered dimensions of violence and the grassroots movements that rise in response. With clarity and compassion, Hernández Castillo brings readers into the intimate spaces of grief and resistance, offering a model for feminist ethnography that is both rigorous and deeply humane.
 
Through physical and spiritual practices such as exhumation, mourning, and poetic remembrance, these women reclaim dignity for the dead and challenge a society that has normalized disappearance. At the heart of this book is a profound exploration of what Hernández Castillo calls a “pedagogy of love”—a political and ethical framework rooted in care, solidarity, and the refusal to forget. These women are not only searching for bodies; they are building emotional communities, crafting new languages of justice, and offering a reimagining of what it means to resist violence. Their practices, often overlooked by traditional scholarship, restore humanity and dignify the disappeared. Read an excerpt from the book’s Sorographic Overture below.

During almost a decade (since 2016) of walking alongside searching collectives in Mexico, I have often listened to the relatives of the disappeared claim that in order to be in solidarity, one must put one’s body in the search. Anything else is lip service. Churches, government officials, political parties, and the academic community have publicly addressed the phenomenon of enforced disappearances and the need to stop violence and promote a culture of peace. Nevertheless, most of the time, these speeches are performed on the sidelines, by people who have never picked up a shovel, wheatpasted a disappeared person poster, or helped someone submit a police report. When we approach their fights, these collectives invite us to “make a path by walking” (hacer camino al andar. . .), to walk alongside them on the streets, to join them in their searches, to be willing to learn from them. In this shared walk, a sense of community is built. It transcends families and embraces anyone who is willing to “put their body in it.”

Sometimes, this walk also implies witnessing tensions and conflicts, agreements and disagreements. Sharing risks, but also findings; disappointments, but also hope . . . In this text, I use the concept of “sorography,” originally developed by my friend and colleague Lucy Bell to refer to ethnographic writing as a political act that contributes to the construction of sororal communities. She uses this term to describe the political project of the Hermanas en la Sombra (Sisters in the Shadows) editorial collective. This is a form of sorority that does not deny differences but acknowledges the multiple intersections of violence that mark the lives of female searchers, a form of sorority committed to the possibility of
building a community based on diversity. With said commitment, I have “made a path by walking” alongside them, going down ravines and wandering into territories controlled by organized crime, all while taking care of each other.

During the final revision process for this book, my friend Angélica Rodríguez Monroy, with whom I share one of the strongest bonds I have encountered during this social struggle, invited me to walk the streets of Guadalajara along with her, joining the alive-search for her daughter, Viridiana Morales Rodríguez, who disappeared on August 12, 2012. After overcoming many bureaucratic obstacles, Angélica managed to get the State of Mexico Public Prosecutor’s Office (an institution from the state where her daughter disappeared) to promote a coordinated search with the Jalisco Search Commission, an institution from the state where certain evidence suggested her daughter was abducted as a victim of trafficking. While the General Law on Disappearance established the right of relatives to participate in the searches, the logistical and financial support to make this possible depends on the families’ persistence and ability. Angélica’s thirteen-year experience looking for her daughter has transformed her into a professional searcher who has traversed the labyrinths of judicial and forensic bureaucracy multiple times.

This was not the first time that Angélica and members of her collective traveled from Cuernavaca to Jalisco to search for Viridiana. With the support of a sensitive official from the Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos (National Human Rights Commission, CNDH), a search caravan was conducted in Jalisco. Persons in prison mentioned they had seen a young woman similar to Viridiana, describing certain details and body marks. A window of hope opened, hope of finding her alive. When plans for a third trip—which I was invited to, alongside other searchers close to Angélica—were just beginning, we could not have imagined that our visit would coincide with the discovery of a forced recruitment and extermination camp in the Teuchitlán municipality, an hour and a half from Guadalajara.

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R. Aída Hernández Castillo is a professor and senior researcher at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS) in Mexico City. Since her undergraduate days, Hernández Castillo has combined her scholarship with feminist activism and projects in radio, video, and journalism. Her academic work has promoted Indigenous and women’s rights in Latin America. Her research interests cover Indigenous studies, legal and political anthropology, decolonial feminisms, and activist research. She has published twenty-two books, and her scholarship has been translated to English, French, Portuguese, and Japanese.

April 27, 2026

Grounded in decades of collaborative research with Pueblo communities, Transilient Acts and Resilient Villages: Pueblo Community Persistence in the Northern Rio Grande by Michael A. Adler is a vital contribution to southwestern archaeology. It offers a compelling model for how archaeology can respectfully engage with descendant communities and provides essential insights for scholars, students, and community members seeking to understand the complexities of cultural persistence in the face of change.

A powerful rethinking of resilience through the lens of Pueblo history, this work reveals how Tiwa communities in the Northern Rio Grande used culturally intentional strategies to adapt, transform, and endure across a millennium of change. Anthropologist Michael A. Adler introduces the concept of transilience—culturally intentional acts that address existential threats and enable transformation—as a framework for interpreting the long-term persistence of Tiwa communities. Focusing on the Tiwa-speaking communities of Taos, Picuris, and Pot Creek Pueblos, Adler shows how social and ritual organization, architectural change, and sacred geographies were mobilized in response to disruption. He challenges conventional resilience theory, which emphasizes systemic stability, instead centering Indigenous agency, mobility, and sacred practice as key to understanding cultural endurance. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

Like all long-lived communities, the story of Picuris Pueblo is complex, interwoven with their specific locality and interactions with other groups in the region, and massively impacted after European colonization of the northern Southwest beginning in the late sixteenth century. Prior to contact, Picuris was one of the major waystations for peoples, goods, and identities flowing out from the Pueblo world into the Southern Plains, part of the Plains-Pueblo Interaction System (Kelley 1984; Spielmann 1991a, 1991b). Agricultural goods, many likely grown on the landesque agricultural complexes around Picuris, were exchanged for all manner of materials from the plains, including bison meat, hides, and stone tool material from the Alibates quarries near Amarillo, Texas. Remains of all these exchange relationships show up in significant amounts in the archaeological assemblages recovered at Picuris Pueblo in the 1960s and 1970s, largely by Herbert Dick and his students (Adler and Dick 1999). The reference in the oral tradition above to “going east where there wasn’t enough water” likely refers to this period of extensive exchange with groups on the Southern Plains. It also may refer to another significant event in Picuris’ history, their nearly complete move from Picuris to live with Apachean groups in southwestern Kansas, at or near the location known today as Quartelejo (also Cuartelejo). Following the failed Pueblo Revolt of 1696, in which Picuris has a significant role, the Picuris people moved north to avoid the ensuing retribution from the Spanish. According to oral tradition, a few villagers remained at Picuris to watch over the settlement (Richard Mermejo, personal communication, 2021), but all the women and children, accompanied by warriors, headed north to live with their longtime trade and marriage partners, the Apache, in what is now Scott County, Kansas. Along the way, the Spanish soldiery caught up with the last of the migrants, and captured 82 women and children, all of whom were sold into servitude after being taken back to New Mexico. The Picuris returned to their longtime home in 1706, squired back at the insistence of Juan de Ulibarri, who was sent to Quartelejo to “free” the “enslaved” Picuris from their hosts (Schroeder 1974). By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Picuris numbered around 300 people. During the seventeenth century CE, 80%–90% of the considerable population at Picuris Pueblo was lost. Colonization, loss of land base, disease, enslavement, and religious persecution, all the ingredients of what Levene (1999) has aptly called “creeping genocide,” the slow erosion of population, autonomy, health, and well-being in a populace.

I present this condensed history of Picuris Pueblo to pose a question that guides much of this present work. Specifically, given the durability of the Picuris community throughout their immensely difficult and traumatic history, is this not a perfect case study in cultural resilience? This is an important question that requires consideration of just what we mean by “resilience.” Entire subfields of study in ecology, psychology, and social-environmental research have colonized the concept of resilience. In its classic form, resilience is the capacity for a system to experience a perturbation, shock, or similar challenge to its systemic continuity and integrity, and still be able to return to a similar system state of function (Holling 1973). The ancestral and contemporary Native American peoples of the American Southwest have provided a small cottage industry in resilience studies, for the very simple reason that their cultural, social, ceremonial, linguistic, and technological continuities have been widely documented, dated, measured, and plumbed for insights into the durability of these communities. Objectives of these resilience studies into Pueblo community persistence have been to better understand how, as with cases of great travail and challenge experienced by Picuris Pueblo, resilience has been the outcome of these community journeys. This work will also delve into some of the quandaries surrounding “resilience thinking,” requiring close study and critique. I argue throughout this work that for there to be any responsible and useful assessment of a community’s history as an example of resilience, several things need attention. First, while there has been a long, durable concept of cultural identity in a community such as Picuris, we also need to also attend to what has been lost, stolen, or forgotten during the past millennium. What actually is resilient from the standpoint of systemic integrity and system identity? Second, what strategies, beliefs, understandings, and acts have the Picuris people and other Pueblo communities employed to endure the “perturbations” that have been both internal and external to the communities over these centuries of purported resilience? In other words, resilience is a possible outcome of long histories of loss, transition, and accommodation. Finally, what strategies fostered this endurance, and how can our understanding of this durability benefit the ongoing challenges we contend with in the face of environmental degradation, technological change, and social change?

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Michael A. Adler is an associate professor in the anthropology department at Southern Methodist University. He received his academic training in archaeology at Princeton University and the University of Michigan. He collaborates with Pueblo communities in the American Southwest to understand their complex ancestries, concepts of cultural identity, and how communities create that complicated concept called “the past.”