Category: Excerpt

Excerpt from “Central American Women in Diaspora”

Posted on March 12, 2026March 9, 2026 by Victoria Stapleton

March 12, 2026

Central American Women in Diaspora, edited by Karina Alma and Ester E. Hernández, centers Central American women’s voices within the growing narrative of the Central American diaspora. It provides a tapestry of testimonios—from grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and sisters—who explore what it means to be Central American women in the United States. An intervention that centers gendered experiences and challenges oppressive structures, this volume celebrates the solidarity, cultural memory, and healing found within transnational ties.

Through the practice of testimonio, contributors create intergenerational dialogues between mothers and daughters, engage with Indigenous oral traditions, and reflect on the violent histories of war in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. The volume is organized around five themes: political histories, migration, gender and sexuality, navigating institutions, and healing. Within each theme contributors tackle a range of issues, including Central American political histories, healing, grief, Indigenous knowledge, memory, trauma, post-traumatic growth, organizing, creativity, and agency. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

In the globally precarious time of the COVID-19 pandemic, I (Karina Alma) convened a group in the fall of 2021 to discuss a book project focused on diverse women from the Central American diasporas, specifically, to compile an anthology by women for women. Given the labor such a project would require, however, was the timing right? The world was dealing with loss, grief, illness, family, and other responsibilities caused or heightened by the pandemic. Academics’ responsibilities included transitioning to remote teaching, supporting the varied needs of students that arose because of the virus while continuing forth with research. We were cognizant that our Central American communities, comprising naturalized, legal residents and undocumented individuals (including TPS and DACA recipients), were essential workers in service, domestic, agricultural, and manufacturing fields as well as in health-care occupations (Alvarado et al. 2017; Kerwin et al. 2020; Peri and Wiltshire 2020).

We were living a social trauma exacerbated by a presidential administration that targeted Latinxs people and immigrants, especially those from Central America, a situation worsened if Indigenous, transgender or otherwise LGBTQ, unaccompanied, a woman, or a child. As in the 1990s, young men were being targeted and deported to countries in Central America where their persecution by the police state continued regardless of gang affiliations (Osuna 2020; U.S. DOJ 2020; Zilberg Introduction Central American Testimonio and U.S. Diaspora 2011). While young men are historically targeted by U.S. and Central American presidential administrations, families were also being persecuted. Xenophobic punitive acts targeting mixed-status families such as the CARES Act, which denied rebates if at least one person on a joint tax return provided a tax identification number rather than a social security number. Additionally, the administration eliminated protections for asylum on account of gender-based violence, which made it more difficult to obtain protection for women and LGBTQ people (Foxen 2021). Although the courts and the Biden administration reinstated these protections in 2021, asylum claims remained a fraction of total migration flows for the most likely applicants from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Zero tolerance policies implemented by the Trump administration caused mestiza/o/e, Afro-Indigenous, and Indigenous children from Central America to be torn from their parents or perish at the U.S./Mexico border (Abrego and Hernández 2021; Cattan 2019; Chiedi 2019; U.S. CBP 2020–21). Added to the social trauma in the United States was the brutally racist treatment of Black people by the police. U.S. cities filled with protestors seeking justice for the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, among many others.

Some of us hesitated with this project for other, more practical reasons; the experience of the 2017 anthology U.S. Central Americans: Reconstructing Memories, Struggles, and Communities of Resistance taught us a few lessons. Coeditors have overly demanding jobs. As Central American scholars and as women of color in the academy most carry extra labor, though faculty from the California State University system can apply for compensation for “cultural taxation” (established through the CBA, collective bargaining agreement). Regardless of how much labor coeditors invest, we learned that contributors may pull out of the project at any moment. We understood that the final manuscript might not turn out exactly as first envisioned. For example, four editors became two midway through the trajectory of this book. Additionally, academic review boards do not value the coediting of book anthologies, which they consider more in line with service, something for especially junior faculty to be concerned about. Regardless, the work needed to get done. We needed to create the book that we wished for: the one that would tell our multiple stories as Central American women so that others could be inspired and see ourselves reflected in one another. We needed to create a platform for our communities to listen to our women’s voices, healing voices. We needed this book to assign to our students, as they saw themselves in our multigenerational testimonios. Perhaps if we yearned for such a book, others did too.

Karina Alma is an assistant professor in the Chicano/a and Central American Studies Department at University of California, Los Angeles. Her research includes U.S. Central American and Latinx interrelations, labor, race-gender diversities, feminisms, cultural memory and making, creative agency, and social death. She is a published poet and a co-editor of U.S. Central Americans: Reconstructing Memories, Struggles, and Communities of Resistance.

Ester E. Hernández is a professor of anthropology at California State University Los Angeles. She is co-editor of the anthology U.S. Central Americans: Reconstructing Memories, Struggles, and Communities of Resistance about 1.5- and second-generation Centroamericanas/os and U.S. Central Americans. Her current research is linked to immigrant rights and cultures of memory among children of immigrants. She is involved in community radio and other immigrant advocacy initiatives.

Excerpt from “Commod Bods”

Posted on January 20, 2026January 16, 2026 by Victoria Stapleton

January 20, 2026

In Commod Bods, Kasey Jernigan shares her ongoing collaborative research with Choctaw women and describes the ways that shifting patterns of participation in food and nutrition assistance programs (commodity foods) have shaped foodways; how these foodways are linked to bodies and health, particularly “obesity” and related conditions; and how foodways and bodies are intertwined with settler colonialism and experiences of structural violence, identity making, and heritage in the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

The term “commod bod” is used with humor and affection. It also offers a critical way to describe bodies shaped by long-term reliance on U.S. federal commodity food programs. Food is critical to cultural survival and affirmation. For Choctaw people, the intentional demise of traditional foodways and dependence on federal food programs are specific experiences that inform part of what it means to be Choctaw today. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

“Commod bod,” a term used to link large bodies with high-calorie, high-fat food commodities, is used humorously and is an example of in-group teasing about fat bodies. Across social media, there are a variety of “commod bod” cultural examples, including T-shirts and online forums for sharing pictures, stories, and memes about “commod bods.” There is even a comic series: Super Indian, about a superhero who got his power from eating tainted government cheese, and his trusty sidekick Mega Bear, who is notorious for his “commod bod” (Starr 2012). Further, while the “commod bod” originates in relation to government-issued commodity foods, its usage has expanded to describe broader patterns of embodiment shaped by the consumption of calorie-dense, high-fat foods—whether or not they come from official commodity programs. For example, one woman I interviewed was eating a large roast beef sandwich from Arby’s, the sauce running down her hand as we talked about foods, obesity, and identity. She laughed, pointed to the sandwich (even licked off the dripping sauce!) and commented that she was “working on her ‘commod bod.’”

Notably, the term “commod bod” is used playfully and as a signifier for obesity, but it also does another kind of work: “Commod bod”—the term itself and the ways it is used—links present experiences of loss of food sovereignty, fat bodies, poverty, and disenfranchisement with the past by actively calling on specific material culture (i.e., commodity foods and “commod bods”) produced in response to past injustices. It reflects the reality of shifting food sovereignty from self-sufficiency to lack of control over food systems; this links historical trauma with contemporary forms of violence. The use of this term alters inquiries surrounding large bodies away from medical and public health discourses to social and cultural discourses. Moreover, it serves as a marker for Indianness by linking commodities and poor food environments with large bodies. Darla, a woman I interviewed during my exploratory fieldwork, shared this sentiment with me when describing a connectedness between obesity and Indianness: “When I’m around other Indians, the really traditional Indians, and we’re all overweight, I feel like it’s okay to be fat. I feel more Indian.” She went on to describe how she felt a connection with other Natives from across dozens of different tribal nations because they shared a sense of relatedness through embodied colonialism—through the “commod bods” that are physical manifestations of a shared past and current contemporary violences.

The use of the term “commod bod” then, evokes a past in ways that acknowledge collective suffering while at the same time wrestling back a sense of control. “Commod bods” come from a shared Indian experience of land and livelihood disenfranchisement, but they are symbolic of resistance and accepted as part of the collective in particular ways. Through the use of the term, people are interacting with the past while staying rooted in the present (Loulanski 2006). They are creating heritage by attributing meaning and value and even selecting what is to become remembered (Smith 2006).

Kasey Jernigan is an assistant professor of American studies and anthropology at the University of Virginia, where she also co-directs the Black and Indigenous Feminist Futures Institute. She received her doctorate in medical anthropology and a graduate certificate in Native American Indigenous studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a master’s in public health from the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center’s Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology. Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the USDA, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. She is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

Excerpt from “Flows of Violence”

Posted on December 1, 2025November 24, 2025 by Victoria Stapleton

December 1, 2025

Flows of Violence by Felipe Fernández offers a profound ethnographic exploration of the intricate relationship between violence and water infrastructure in one of Colombia’s most marginalized cities. This groundbreaking work engages with the concept of “infrastructural violence,” revealing how the Colombian state’s neglect and inadequate provision of water services perpetuate inequality and suffering among Buenaventura’s residents. Through extensive fieldwork, Fernández provides rich empirical data and firsthand accounts that bring to light the daily struggles and resilience of the city’s inhabitants.

Flows of Violence is an essential read for scholars in anthropology, geography, and Latin American studies, offering valuable insights into the sociopolitical impacts of infrastructure. This timely contribution underscores the urgent need for equitable infrastructure development and social justice, making it a pivotal text for understanding urban poverty and state dynamics in Latin America and beyond. The book critically examines how everyday crime and state neglect intersect, altering the improvised practices of water storage and access among the population. It also highlights the innovative mechanisms employed by social movements and ordinary citizens to cope with and resist these challenges. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

In Buenaventura, water comes and goes every day, people tell me. It comes only for a few hours and then it goes again. But what do they actually mean? When people say “se fue el agua” (the water is gone), they mean that the water supply has been cut off and are referring to the intermittent nature of the service. This water (the water coming to and going from the pipes) seems to be so different from those other waters in the city: the surrounding rivers and the estuaries, the sea water, and the nearly omnipresent rainwater in one of the regions with the highest precipitation levels in the world (Taussig 2003, 51–56; Oslender 2002). These waters seem to be abundant, even infinite, while the liquid that comes from the pipes is scarce. The modern urban promise of available water seems to have failed in Buenaventura. Infrastructure as a technological project has not fully succeeded in its attempt to capture water, regulate its flux and pressure, and distribute it to households (Swyngedouw 2004; Gandy 2017; Bakker 2014; Linton 2010). Water flows for a few hours through the pipes, and then it stops. As a result, people construct small-scale infrastructures to store water during the cut-offs (Lawhon et al. 2018; Furlong 2014). Some water tanks and domestic pipelines are provisionally installed on the rooftops of dwellings in order to bypass the outages and generate an effect of constant supply. But these fragile and often improvised assemblages fail sometimes too, and then the water goes away again.

Water pipes in Buenaventura are very leaky. They have holes, fissures, and cracks, caused mainly by accident—that is, by unstable topologies, by the weather, and by aging materials. There are many leakages, and they are extremely difficult to measure and repair (Anand 2015a). Some people access water through improvised, “illicit” connections, causing leaks unintentionally. Water pours out from the gap between the hose and the bore, generating losses. Indeed, leaks lead to “unknown and uncontrolled flows of water” in the city, making the aqueduct difficult to govern (Anand 2015a, 308). Leakages “depress” the system, an engineer working for the municipality in Buenaventura told me. The term is borrowed from medical jargon, meaning that the pressure needed to provide for all supply pipes is insufficient. Consequently, water flows must be sectorized using valves, which means that water is supplied in some neighborhoods for only some hours of the day—four hours, on average—while it is cut off for others. A water schedule: the only way the necessary pressure in the system can be guaranteed. Usually, people know when water is coming to their neighborhood. However, the flow can vary, and water can be gone for days. The utility service company announces it through social media and the radio. Sometimes flooding cause damages in the system; sometimes there is construction work to be done. Uncertain flows alter and define everyday life in Buenaventura.

“Come, I will show you,” said Yeison, one of the friends I made during my fieldwork stay in Buenaventura, leading me to a tap installed in an improvised kitchen in his dwelling. He turned the tap; no water. Spooky
sounds came out, as if the pipeline were coughing. A few drops dripped from the tap. “You see? Water is gone,” he told me. The water tank installed on the roof of his dwelling was empty. We went back to the hardware shop where Yeison worked, sat behind the counter, and continued chatting about water infrastructure. It started to rain heavily, and customers became rare. “It is not a coincidence that there is no proper water supply for Black people like me and my family. The state has abandoned us,” Yeison stated. He told me about the construction process of his house: how he and his father built it from scratch with scraps and wood they brought from a junkyard next to the port, and how they extend it by building new stories every year. “This will be a castle someday,” he told me, laughing. He explained how they improvised a connection to the main pipeline with a hose and water storage system, which they must constantly repair. I asked him whether I could write everything down. He agreed. The rain became torrential, creating streams that dragged plastic, gravel, and dirt. That day, an acquaintance of Yeison had been killed nearby, he told me. Just like the water, violence comes and goes.

Felipe Fernández is an assistant professor of social and cultural anthropology at the University of Freiburg, Germany. He trained as an anthropologist and historian at the Freie Universität in Berlin and holds a master’s degree and a PhD in Latin American studies from the same university. His research focuses on infrastructures, state bureaucracy, and expert cultures in Latin America. His work has been funded by the FU Berlin, the DAAD, the German Research Foundation (DFG), and the Humboldt-Foundation.

Excerpt from “Restless Ecologies”

Posted on November 25, 2025November 21, 2025 by Victoria Stapleton

November 25, 2025

For more than two years, Allison Caine herded alongside the women of the Cordillera Vilcanota, observing them and talking with them about their interactions with their animals, landscapes, and neighbors. In Restless Ecologies: Climate Change and Socioecological Futures in the Peruvian Highlands, Caine emphasizes the importance of Indigenous knowledge and traditional ecological practices and argues that Quechua understandings of restlessness align with and challenge broader theoretical understandings of what it is to be vulnerable in a time of planetary crisis.

Drawing on the Quechua concept of k’ita, or restlessness, Allison Caine explores how herders in the community of Chillca in the Cordillera Vilcanota mountain range of the southeastern Peruvian Andes sense and make sense of changing conditions. Capricious mountains, distracted alpacas, and wayward children deviate from their expected spatial and temporal trajectories. When practices of sociality start to fall apart—when animals no longer listen to herders’ whistles, children no longer visit their parents, and humans no longer communicate with mountains—these failures signal a broader ecological instability that threatens the viability of the herder’s world. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

This is a book about the beginnings of fragmentation, specifically the first notes of agitation—of restlessness—as relations between people, animals, and landscapes began to strain and shift. When I arrived in the herding community of Chillca in southeastern Peru in 2015, the rumblings of a larger process of fragmentation were beginning to accelerate. Indeed, in the years after I left, the community would vote to divide their communal pasturelands in the face of increasing conflict over diminishing grasslands and restless animals. This book is, in many ways, the prelude to the breakdown of the commons. But more than that, it is an ethnographic exploration of the attentive forms of attunement, care, and communication through which people both sustain the multispecies assemblages within which they live and notice the first hints of estrangement and detachment in those relationships.

In more concrete terms, this book asks how herders in the community of Chillca sensed and made sense of changing socioecological conditions in the shifting qualities of their interactions with the humans, animals, and landscapes of the Cordillera Vilcanota mountain range of southeastern Peru. Much of this work was undertaken by the women of Chillca, who are the primary pastoralists in the Cordillera Vilcanota and continue to be “stewards of the rangelands” throughout the Andes mountains (Valdivia, Gilles, and Turin 2013). The central theoretical thread of this narrative draws on their utterances and provocations, specifically those shouted at wandering animals: k’ita uywa! Restless animals. In this book, I draw upon the Quechua concept of restlessness (k’ita) to articulate the breakdown of sociality between human and nonhuman social beings, as capricious mountains, distracted alpacas, wayward children, and aging bodies deviated from their expected spatial and temporal trajectories. When practices of sociality began to fall apart in Chillca—when animals no longer listened to the herder’s whistles, humans no longer communicated with mountains, and both bodies and landscapes began to dry out—these failures signaled a broader ecological instability, one that threatened the viability of the herder’s world and their own survival. And the Quechua analytic of restlessness that herders used to describe these changes
both aligned with and challenged prevailing theoretical understandings of what it means to be vulnerable in a time of planetary crisis.

To explore the relationships that hold humans, animals, and landscapes together in the high Andes, I conducted two years of ethnographic and mixed-methods fieldwork (2014–16) in the Cordillera Vilcanota. Between June 2015 and July 2016, I lived in the community of Chillca, a small pastoralist community where people herded their animals in an approximately sixteen-hectare glacial valley system on the southern slopes of the mountain of Ausangate. For one of those years, I herded alongside the women of Chillca, following in their footsteps, observing their interactions with their animals, landscapes, and each other, until eventually I was deemed competent enough to tend a few animals myself. My methods entailed the careful analyses of the “ecology of obligation” of pastoralism (Despret and Meuret 2016, 27)—the multispecies relations of attention, care, affect, and predation—that coalesced in human and animal bodily orientation, communication, recognition, and shared labor in the pasture. While studying the daily practices through which herders and their animals coproduced their lived world, I became especially intrigued by the moments when the work of herding fell apart, and how these moments of frustration and antagonism were interpreted by herders as signals of broader socioecological trouble.

By analyzing climate change from the ground up, this book asks what herders in the high Andes can tell us about climate change in their communities. In the coming chapters, I will suggest that the Quechua con-cept of k’ita provides a compelling articulation of the social and ecological unpredictability that defines the world under a changing climate. Quechua analytics of restlessness both merge with and diverge from recent interpretations of unruly, wild, or feral ecologies. On the one hand, k’ita neatly articulates the confluence of temporal, spatial, and relational qualities that define precarity in a time of climate change. Traces of restlessness are palpable around the globe, as phenomena come untethered from their expected and anticipated positions in time and space, and predictable forms of relationality between beings and entities become increasingly elusive. And yet k’ita also pulls us back from the apocalyptic leanings of wildness, ferality, and unruliness to emphasize the continued practices of relation that endure through disruption.

The central narrative in this book pivots around the life history and experiences of Concepción Rojo Rojo, an alpaca herder and folk singer whose stories and songs provide a touchpoint for the broader discussions around change and continuity, endurance and precarity, and aspirations of improvement that rippled throughout the broader community. This isn’t to suggest that this is her story alone: Concepción would not claim to speak for all herders in Chillca, and indeed there are many voices running throughout this text. Her experience stands not as the definitive story of this time and place but as a guiding line through what is a much larger and more complex story, the details of which will unfold throughout the
ensuing chapters.

Allison Caine is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming with an interest in the environment, rural health, and well-being in the Peruvian Andes and the U.S. Mountain West. Her research in Peru takes a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach to understanding contemporary environmental problems in partnership with international and Indigenous citizen scientists. Her ongoing research program aims to understand diverse experiences of health and aging in changing landscapes in Peru and the United States.

Excerpt from “Mother Tongues of the High Andes”

Posted on November 20, 2025November 21, 2025 by Cameron Quan

November 20, 2025

The Peruvian altiplano, a high plateau around Lake Titicaca, is known for its breathtaking landscapes and the cultivation of commodities like quinoa and alpaca wool. The region also stands out for its history of inter-Indigenous language contact and multilingualism between Quechua- and Aymara-speaking communities. This linguistic ecology predates the Spanish conquest and persists today, making the altiplano, with its capital, Puno, a unique space where Indigenous multiplicity is recognized and celebrated. Yet this celebration is accompanied by additional ideological challenges around defining Quechua and Aymara as distinct Indigenous languages and ethnic groups.

Anthropologist Sandhya Krittika Narayanan begins with these challenges, and asks: What does it mean to be a Quechua or Aymara speaker in Puno today? What does it mean to be an Indigenous ethnic Quechua or Aymara individual? Mother Tongues of the High Andes opens with these questions, exploring what Quechua and Aymara languages and identities mean for Indigenous puneños as they navigate their past and present. Read an excerpt from the book below.

“Qué quieres saber de mi lengua materna?” From the day I first arrived in Puno till my last, I was frequently asked versions of this question, asking me, the researcher, what I wanted to know about the Indigenous languages of Puno. Over time I slowly understood that this rejoinder to my requests to interview Indigenous puneños about their linguistic background was made in reference to the two Indigenous languages of the Peruvian altiplano: Quechua and Aymara. Even as I would grow accustomed to other aspects of living and being in Puno, the phrasing of this invitation to discuss, explore, and compare different communicative social worlds would still catch me off guard. After all, I had come to Puno to see how Indigenous puneños spoke Quechua and Aymara—Indigenous languages that were widely regarded as “languages” in the formal grammatical and sociopolitical sense by academics and the general public. But the Indigenous Quechua-and Aymara-speaking puneños I spoke with rarely would refer to Quechua or Aymara as an idioma, the most direct Spanish translation for a named, grammatically distinct “language.” Instead, my interlocutors more frequently would describe their native linguistic backgrounds through the phrase lengua materna—“ mother tongue.”

This book has been shaped and framed around what it means to be recognized as a speaker of an Indigenous language in multilingual Puno. But this book is also about the personal affective connections that speakers have with the ways that they communicate and interact with each other across social and linguistic differences. In this way, calling one’s native language a lengua materna draws our focus away from thinking about these modes of communication as strictly defined by socially recognized named languages like Quechua or Aymara. Instead, thinking about talk in this region as shaped by different lenguas maternas emphasizes ways of speaking, and the role that they play in building social worlds and nurturing bonds and connections within and across different Indigenous communities in Puno and the Peruvian altiplano. The gendering of the phrase aligns these ways of speaking with mothers and motherhood. It evokes these connections by emplacing these ways of talking within spaces we might typically associate with mothers, such as the home and hearth, which foster talk and other social activities central to creating social relations and bonds. But these activities can also occur outside of the home, transporting these practices to create new connections with people and communities. In these situations, using one’s lengua materna also becomes a vehicle to form new bonds that bridge social differences and relationships between individuals across different communities.

In many ways, the frequent use of lengua materna by puneños to describe their communicative practices felt similar to my own experiences with minoritized languages and multilingualism. I was born in Toronto, a first-generation South Asian immigrant living in Canada as part of the large wave of immigration that came to the nation in the late ’70s through the ’80s. At that time, Toronto and its surrounding neighborhoods transformed to a multilingual hub, with enclaves and boroughs slowly coalescing around distinct diasporic nations and ethnic identities. My early childhood memories include playing primarily with other children of South Indian and Sri Lankan Tamil descent; having to answer to various aunties and uncles when we got caught causing some kind of mischief; and being surrounded by the love that came from these other adults and families in our community, some of whom were connected by blood and others through a shared sense of being foreigners and minorities in Canada. But this sense of community was also made through the commonalities in how the adults in our lives spoke to us in a mixture of their respective mother tongues and English. As a child, I knew that there were differences in how many of those families spoke, and especially the ones who would label what they spoke as “Tamil.” My brother and I would pick up these differences and novelties and sometimes reproduce them at home, only to be corrected by our mother or grandmother as not being how “we spoke.” “Well don’t we speak Tamil too?” I would ask, not always knowing what these terms meant. “Yes, and no,” my mother would respond, and she would end the discussion decisively by saying, “That is not how we speak in our home.” The significance of what my mother and grandmother told me did not make sense till I got older, when I slowly came to learn about the history of my mother’s and grandmother’s mother tongue—a product of contact and multilingualism from the highlands of Kerala. Did that mean that we still spoke Tamil? Or did we speak Malayalam? To this day, I still do not have any straight answers to those questions from my mother, grandmother, or maternal kin. Instead, our mother tongue, a mixed variety that is a testament to both our Tamil and Malayalam linguistic heritages, is used proudly in extended family WhatsApp group chats. Jokingly named “the clan,” the group of extended family members are spread across three continents and frequently post in our mother tongue, discussing family recipes such as the correct way to make aviyyal and puliakuthi (traditional South Indian vegetable dishes) and sharing pictures of all the “clan” women donning their best traditional kasava or mundu saree for festivals like Onam and Trissur Pooram.

Sandhya Krittika Narayanan is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she also directs the Linguistic Anthropology Research Lab (LARL). Her research focuses on Quechua–Aymara language contact and multilingualism in the Peruvian altiplano. Her work has been published in Language and Communication, Signs and Society, and Gender and Language.

Excerpt from “Archaeological Structuration”

Posted on November 19, 2025October 31, 2025 by Victoria Stapleton

November 19, 2025

Archaeological Structuration by Michael T. Searcy not only revisits the foundational influence of structuration theory but also introduces new methodologies to study the longue durée, the long-term historical trajectories of ancient societies. Searcy deftly bridges the gap between theoretical frameworks and practical archaeological applications, providing a thorough analysis of how structuration can address real-world problems through the lens of ancient societal transformations. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

This book is, in part, the result of an attempt to pin down theoretical trends over the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Doing so has been a challenging pursuit especially as the archaeological literature continues to grow, which makes it difficult to characterize the discipline’s current state. Trying to follow the threads of theory across an ever-expanding literature is much like someone attempting to describe the waves of the ocean while in the water bobbing over each passing wave. Floating at the crest of one, you think you have a good perception of waves to come or waves headed to shore, but the fluid movements are not quite predictable. Only as we look back toward the shore and see a wave crashing to its end or retreating to rejoin the ocean can we understand its trajectory. A full view of the ideas simultaneously developing in any discipline proves difficult if not impossible. Even arriving at this juncture over two decades into the twenty-first century, twenty-twenty hindsight has yet to fully develop for the most recent theoretical movements in archaeology.

Over approximately the past forty years, one wave to have washed over and through archaeology has been practice theory. Originating in sociology, much of its influence on archaeological research and thought is clear on the surface, but some of the undercurrents related to more obscure aspects of this theoretical approach have had profound effects on the discipline. Links can be made to the development of symmetrical archaeology, eventful archaeology, entanglement, agency, and even pragmatic or action archaeology. The primary aim of this text is to present a critical analysis of how some of the fundamental tenets of practice theory have been productively yet incompletely applied to archaeological research.

Of the most consequence in archaeology have been the ideas of sociologist Anthony Giddens related to his work on structuration theory. Following a deep reading of his writings on the topic, I hunted for references to Giddens’s work in archaeological literature working to identify scholars who referenced different aspects of structuration. Throughout this review, it was surprising to note the often singular approach to concepts such as agency, and I also noted how few archaeologists engaged directly with the resource side of structure (i.e., rules and resources). There is a noted lack of development of just how archaeologists have interpreted, and thus incorporated, principles of Giddens’s explanation of resources into archaeological versions of structuration. Indeed, symmetrical archaeology and new materialist archaeologies have begun to unravel and more adequately explain the tangled nature of agents with their environments, things, and other people. But some have critiqued structuration as being a vestige of structural approaches, oversimplifying it as a basic dichotomy between agents and structures. This oversimplification of the concepts, however, negates the complexity of what structures represent and the milieux in which they interact with agents. It also glosses over the intrinsic variables of structures such as rules, resources, and environments or the combination of agentive elements such as access to resources, motivations, or knowledge.

Michael T. Searcy is a professor of anthropology and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Brigham Young University. He is also the director of the New World Archaeological Foundation. Michael has worked in the U.S. Southwest/Northwest Mexico and Guatemala for more than twenty years. He is author of The Life-Giving Stone: Ethnoarchaeology of Maya Metates and co-author of Hinterlands to Cities: The Archaeology of Northwest Mexico and Its Vecinos with Matthew C. Pailes.

November 11, 2025

Alterhumanism is a rich, ethnographically grounded perspective on humanity’s evolving relationship with the natural world. Set against the backdrop of southern Chile’s conservation frontier, Piergiorgio Di Giminiani invites us to recognize the centrality of the human condition in the face of an increasingly uncertain world and imagine future forms of coexistence.

Reflecting on more than a decade of ethnographic fieldwork with smallholding settlers, Indigenous Mapuche farmers, environmental activists, entrepreneurs, and conservation scientists, Di Giminiani brings to light how these diverse groups navigate the enduring impacts of settler-caused environmental depletion and their aspirations for new ethics of care. Di Giminiani challenges traditional Western humanism, proposing a more relational and open-ended understanding of humanity shaped by interactions with nonhuman others. Rather than seeking fixed answers, the book explores the fluid and multifaceted nature of becoming human through the lens of conservation politics. By highlighting the entangled, multispecies worlds of southern Chile, Di Giminiani offers a novel approach to understanding the political project of becoming human in the Anthropocene. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

Imagine you are riding a bus or perhaps driving down a fast, single-lane road. Trees line both sides, standing in neat rows as you pass. Expansive fields of lush green grass stretch out around you where large herds of cows placidly graze. In the distance, mountains rise, their slopes blanketed by dense forests that reach all the way to their tops. Along the roadside, various signs catch your eye: advertisements for a small grocery store, directions to a nearby lake, or pointers to a small hotel. The houses you pass are charming, singlestory wooden buildings, each surrounded by a fence that encloses a small garden where carefully tended roses bloom in vibrant colors. If it is a summer day, the weather is likely hot and dry. If it is winter, it is cold, possibly foggy, with snow visible on the mountaintops.

After a while, you turn onto a gravel road, and the ride becomes bumpy. The valley here is much narrower than the one you were in before, now surrounded by dense forests. Amid the thick trees, a small but fast-flowing river winds. Soon, you cross it via a wooden bridge, and the road begins to climb steeply, twisting as it goes. A couple of pickup trucks roll by in opposite directions, announced by a dust cloud. You see a couple of people along the road; one is waiting to hop on the bus, while the other is herding a cow. At some point you hear the sound of a motor. You realize the sound is coming from a modest building with a small zinc roof and no walls. Around the building lie large piles of wood and piles of debris. It is likely a small sawmill.

As you continue along the road through the forest, small patches of grassland enclosed by barbed wire begin to appear. Here and there, old tree trunks bleached by time lie scattered across the ground. Wooden, single story houses are tucked away, blending into the landscape so well that they’re frequently hidden from view. Often, a simple wooden gate is the only clue to their presence. Signs occasionally hang beside these gates, marked with words like “Bread” or “Eggs,” suggesting you might find these items for sale at the nearby houses. One sign reads, “Let’s protect life. No to the hydroelectric plant,” while another features a beautifully painted tree alongside the words “Lodging” and “Indigenous Tourism.”

At some point, you run into a larger building, a one-floor wooden structure with a flagpole and a sign at the entrance saying “School.” You see more signs; many of them simply say “For Sale.” As you go up the valley, you realize many houses are surrounded by understory. Everything points to the fact that they were abandoned years earlier. Finally, the road stops at a gate; you’ve reached the last house. There are trails that you can take to walk farther up the hills and into the dense forest, or perhaps, after taking in the surroundings, you decide to turn around and head back toward the main valley. The gentle slope eases up, the open landscape comes back into view, and soon the familiar sights of the larger valley unfold before you once more.

This brief trip might feel familiar to anyone who lives near or has ventured into one of the world’s many temperate forests. What at first might appear to be untouched nature reveals itself as a complex palimpsest of past and present human labor (Mathews 2022, 54). Scattered around these landscapes lie many signs (in some cases, literal ones) that give clues to the many stories of the people who have made these forests their homes. These signs point to interdependent stories of the growth and retreat of forests as well of the human collectivities dwelling around them (see Rival 1993). Images of land abandonment and rewilding are recurrent, but so are hints of the relentless expansion of residential and transportational infrastructures. The enduring effects of deforestation materialize in the irregular patchwork of grassland and forests.

Piergiorgio Di Giminiani is an associate professor in anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He is the author of Sentient Lands: Indigeneity, Property, and Political Imagination in Neoliberal Chile and co-editor of Theorizing Relations in Indigenous South America and The Futures of Reparation in Latin America: Imagination, Translation and Belonging.

Excerpt from “Avocado Dreams”

Posted on November 4, 2025October 2, 2025 by Victoria Stapleton

November 4, 2025

For more than four generations, Salvadorans have made themselves at home in the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and have transformed the region, contributing their labor, ingenuity, and culture to the making of a thriving but highly neglected and overlooked community. In Avocado Dreams, Ana Patricia Rodríguez draws from her own positionality as a Salvadoran transplant to examine the construction of the unique Salvadoran cultural imaginary made in the greater D.C. area.

Through a careful reading of the creative works of local writers, performers, artists, and artivists, Rodríguez demonstrates how the people have remade themselves in relation to the cultural, ethnoracial, and sociolinguistic diversity of the area. She discusses how Salvadoran people have developed unique, intergenerational Salvadoreñidades, manifested in particular speech and symbolic acts, ethnoracial embodiments, and local identity formations in relation to the diverse communities, most notably Black Washingtonians, who co-inhabit the region. This timely and relevant work not only enriches our understanding of Salvadoran diasporic experiences but also contributes significantly to broader discussions on migration, identity, and cultural production in the United States. Read an excerpt from Chapter 1 below.

In 2011, Salvadorans became the third-largest Latino/a/x demographic group in the United States, after Mexicans and Puerto Ricans (Brown and Patten; Moslimani et al.), as well as consolidated their long-standing status as the largest immigrant, foreign-born, and Latinx ethnic group in the DMV (Singer et al.; see also “American Community”). Ronald Luna, a DMV-based demographer of Salvadoran descent, has noted that from 1990 to 2000, there was a 62 percent nationwide increase in the number of Salvadorans, with an increase of 130 percent in D.C., 118 percent in Maryland, and 132 percent in Virginia, percentages that have continued to grow in successive census counts. In 2019, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that Salvadorans accounted for 2.8 percent of the population of Washington, D.C.; 3.2 percent of the population of Maryland; and 2.1 percent of the population in Virginia. At that time, approximately 19,984 Salvadorans resided in the District of Columbia, 198,863 in Maryland, and 179,437 in Virginia. Overall, 328,477 of these Salvadorans lived just in the D.C. metropolitan area (“B03001”).1 Although the Salvadoran population count in the region is somewhat imprecise due to the large number of undercounted, undocumented, and newly arrived or arriving immigrants, what is certain is that the number of Salvadorans in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area will continue to increase.

In contrast to California and the Southwest, where a majority of Latinxs are of Mexican heritage, or the Northeast and Southeast, where Latinxs of Caribbean or other descents predominate, the DMV is home to the largest concentration of Salvadorans in one region of the United States (Singer; Singer et al.). As such, according to DMV-based sociolinguist Amelia Tseng, Salvadorans serve as the premier Latinx referential group, standing in for Latinidad in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area (“Advancing”; Empanadas). They make up a great part of the labor force not only in the District of Columbia but also in Maryland and northern Virginia and contribute greatly to the local economy and cultural scene. For these reasons, there is a need to understand how Salvadorans make home in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, or the DMV, transform it, and shape it through their significant socioeconomic and cultural contributions, as well as how, in turn, they are transformed by the people, communities, and histories of the Chocolate City, as the District of Columbia is known for its historically Black communities (Asch and Musgrove). This chapter examines how Salvadoran ethnoracial identities are shaped and transformed in diaspora and in proximity to other racialized groups like Black Americans, African and Caribbean migrants, Afro-Latinxs, and Afro-Centroamericanos/ as in sites like the greater DMV. Special attention is paid to the work of D.C. Latino poets Quique Avilés and Sami Miranda and filmmaker Ellie Walton (La Manplesa: An Uprising Remembered), who represent the everyday places, exchanges, and code-meshings of intersecting communities sharing spaces, precarities, and struggles, or what I call the we-is-placemaking of the DMV. Indeed, D.C. is made not by its monuments but by the diverse people and communities that call it home.

Ana Patricia Rodríguez is an associate professor of U.S. Latina/o and Central American literatures at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Transnational Histories, Literatures, and Cultures and co-editor of De la hamaca al trono y al más allá: Lecturas críticas de la obra de Manlio Argueta. She is past president of the Latina/o Studies Association (2017–2019).

Excerpt from “Rooted in Place”

Posted on October 28, 2025October 2, 2025 by Victoria Stapleton

October 28, 2025

Since the first moment of conquest, colonizers and the colonized alike in Mexico confronted questions about what it meant to be from this place, what natural resources it offered, and who had the right to control those resources and on what basis. Rooted in Place by Rick A. López reveals how scientific endeavors were not just about cataloging flora but were deeply intertwined with the construction of identity and the political landscape at three pivotal moments in Mexican history. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

In 1893, a crowd gathered in the Mexican Pavilion of Chicago’s Columbian Exposition to see the publication of recently rediscovered documents from the Royal Botanical Expedition to New Spain (1787–1803), including one of the most comprehensive lists of Mexican flora. Officials and scientists declared on this international stage that Mexico had at last joined the small club of modern, industrializing civilizations. And they presented the Royal Botanical Expedition’s report as a proud assertion of their government’s right to control its own natural resources.

It might seem strange that late nineteenth-century nationalists at this world’s fair would choose a Spanish colonial institution as a symbol of Mexican national sovereignty. The choice comes across as all the more perplexing if we recall that the purpose of the Royal Botanical Expedition had been to assert European imperial domination over Mexico and its natural resources. To make sense of this seemingly odd choice, we need to go a bit further back in time . . . actually, a lot further back, to the 1500s. We need to return to the moment shortly after the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, when the Spanish royal court physician Francisco Hernández arrived in Mexico City, sat down with native doctors known as titicih (sing. ticitl), and recorded what they told him about Mexico’s plants.

Since the first moment of conquest, colonizers and the colonized alike confronted questions about what it meant to be from this place, what natural resources Mexico offered, and who had the right to control those resources and on what basis. Mexico is the third most biodiverse country in the world thanks both to its varied biogeography and to the long and distinctive history of human interactions with the region’s flora and fauna before the arrival of Europeans. This book is an account of how scientific intellectuals in Mexico laid claim to these diverse natural resources, first on behalf of the Spanish Empire and then in the name of the republic. It tells this story through three transformative and interlinked moments: (1) the royal expedition by Francisco Hernández during the late sixteenth century, which inspired naturalists to contemplate how Mexico’s native plants and cultures fit into the expanding world of Renaissance knowledge; (2) the Royal Botanical Expedition of the late eighteenth century that set out to build on the earlier findings by Hernández, while imposing Enlightenment science as a tool for studying and conquering the botanical frontier in New Spain; and (3) the late nineteenth century, when leading scientific intellectuals looked nostalgically on previous expeditions as they sought to forge Mexico’s future progress by harnessing nature, science, and indigeneity for the good of the republic.

These three moments, I argue, were links in a single chain in which scientific intellectuals (known as naturalists during most of the period covered by this book) debated what it meant to know and claim the flora rooted in Mexican soil—ranging from individual plants to forests and vegetated landscapes. And, in each link of this chain, they centered claims about the importance of indigeneity. The views of plants, place, and indigeneity that scientific intellectuals forged during these three crucial historical moments continue to shape current-day debates about what rights Mexico has to its natural patrimony, how these rights are distributed among its population, and how and why species and ecosystems should be protected.

Rick A. López is Anson D. Morse 1871 Professor of Latin American History and Environmental Studies at Amherst College. He is author of Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans, and the State after the Revolution and has published articles and essays on the history of nation formation, race, aesthetics, and the environment in Mexico, as well on the history of the Latinx population in the United States.

Excerpt from “Indigenous Alliance Making”

Posted on October 14, 2025October 1, 2025 by Victoria Stapleton

October 14, 2025

Indigenous Alliance Making by James Andrew Whitaker and Mark Harris brings together historical analyses with anthropological investigations to explore the organizational patterns, goals, and strategies through which Indigenous people have intentionally created various alliances, partnerships, and similar relations with outsiders in lowland South America. Emphasizing class, ethnicity, gender, and race, the chapters bring new dimensions to understanding a vital but understudied region.

During the colonial and postcolonial eras, local people in lowland South America experienced exploitation from outsiders. But as new kinds of societies emerged from engagements between outside and Indigenous communities, Indigenous Amazonians formed strategic alliances to defend livelihoods, territory, and symbolic values, as well as to curb exploitation, predation, and threats.

Through missions, war, and broader conflict, as well as marriage and kinship, local people aimed to maintain control even as personal and collective transformations unfolded. This volume explores the formation of diverse historical relations across regional societies within past and contemporary contexts and contributes to a growing historiographical turn among anthropologists and historians that foregrounds agency in past and present understandings of Indigenous peoples’ engagements with others in lowland South America. Read an excerpt from Chapter 1 below.

António Vieira (1608–97) was a prominent Jesuit missionary known for his work among Indigenous peoples in Brazil. Born in Lisbon, Vieira’s mission work and political negotiations significantly acted within the Portuguese empire and colonies during almost all of the seventeenth century. His writings offer crucial insights into colonial Portuguese strategies and interactions with Indigenous communities. They reflect both the challenges of missionary work and the broader geopolitical and economic motivations behind European colonization.

First published in 1736, Vieira’s Report of Serra de Ibiapaba Mission is a curious text whose trajectory, potential recipients, and true purpose have not yet been sufficiently elucidated.1 This text is historically important as it provides a unique perspective on the relations between the Portuguese and Indigenous communities during a period of intense colonial and religious expansion. The narrative presents a nuanced view of Vieira’s mission, highlighting the resistance and agency of the Indigenous people rather than portraying them as passive recipients of conversion. The report not only documents the geopolitical context of Portuguese and Dutch rivalries but also highlights Vieira’s advocacy within this context for the autonomy of Indigenous peoples, portraying them as active agents rather than passive subjects in the colonial encounter.

Through an analysis of Vieira’s Report, this chapter explores how his missionary activities were aimed at converting the Indigenous population to Catholicism and submission to the Portuguese Crown. It emphasizes Vieira’s view that this process should be conducted with the consent of the Indigenous communities and should respect their sovereignty and freedom. After briefly retracing his biography within the imperial geopolitical context, the chapter analyzes the strategies Vieira employed in his mission in Ibiapaba, the challenges he faced, and the broader implications of his mission within the context of colonial power dynamics. Having had diplomatic experience in Europe before becoming a missionary in Maranhão, Vieira seems to have viewed his experience in Ibiapaba more as a diplomatic mission than as a purely religious one. This provides a new perspective in analyzing his writings about Indigenous peoples.

To understand his ideas requires two contextual pieces of information at the outset. The first is the Portuguese-Dutch global rivalry in the spice trade. The Ibiapaba mission was one episode in the “global struggle” between the Portuguese and Dutch for control of overseas markets (Boxer 1969; Cardoso 2019). The second is the local competition between settlers and clerics for control of Indigenous labor. Located in the frontier region, the Serra de Ibiapaba mission was relevant to the Portuguese Crown for the trade in violet wood and amber, as well as for overland communication between the Brazilian coast and the frontier (known as Maranhão). Vieira therefore believed it was necessary to neutralize Dutch influence in the region. To do so, it was first essential to protect the Indigenous people from the “greed” of the local settlers.

James Andrew Whitaker is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Southern Mississippi. He is also an honorary research fellow at the University of St Andrews. His research focuses on historical anthropology, historical ecology, and ontologies in lowland South America. Mark Harris is a professor and head of the School of Philosophical, Historical, and Indigenous Studies at Monash University and an honorary professorial research fellow at the University of St Andrews. His research focuses on the Brazilian Amazon and what makes it a place of global historical and anthropological significance.

The University of Arizona Press