The University of Arizona Press

October 13, 2026

In Caste War Now and Never: Unreading Gender, Race, and Land in Yucatán, scholar S.B. West considers Yucatán’s nineteenth-century Caste War, the longest and most violent Indigenous uprising of the Western Hemisphere, to argue that it actually never occurred. Instead, West writes that the violent events grouped under the “Caste War” label must be understood through alternative frameworks that resist the emergent logics of race war and include related regulatory matrices like gender and land. Through this lens, the Caste War emerges as a discursive construct rooted in an anti-Indigenous archive that served the political interests of a frustrated regional elite during the rise of liberalism and nationhood. West argues that Caste War discourse unfolds as a technology that mobilized and legitimized genocidal actions against racialized rebels and inspired assimilation into hegemonic political and social structures.

In the second half of the book, West looks at the Caste War to engage its contemporary polysemic nature through close readings of Yucatec Maya texts, stories, and other forms of knowledge production. These sources reframe the Caste War as an important part of a framework of resistance that defies colonial time and reclaims narrative control of its events. Caste War Now and Never captures how Maya communities understand the conflict as ongoing and demonstrates that although the Caste War never occurred as such, it continues to endure presently. Read an excerpt from the book’s Chapter 1 below.

In 1847, seven indios were arrested in the town of Chichimilá, Yucatán, on the grounds of plotting a race war to exterminate the blancos (whites). Drunk on too much aguardiente, rebel leader Manuel Antonio Ay was apprehended one night for conspiring with other indios, which resulted in the discovery of a letter that announced Cecilio Chi’s violent plans for a great indio insurrection. Nineteenth-century regional historian Eligio Ancona marked this incident as one of the first revelations of “la gran sublevación que debía estallar próximamente” (the great uprising that would soon erupt). This great race war would “sacar á la raza blanca de la confianza imperturbable en que vivía en el cráter mismo del volcán” (expel the white race from the imperturbable confidence they enjoyed even while living in the very crater of the volcano). And so began the fifty-year period of peninsula-wide violence between white factions and indio rebels—an era known as the Guerra de Castas, or the Caste War. According to the newspapers, historiographies, and literary narratives of the period, rebel leaders Jacinto Pat of Tihosuco, Cecilio Chi of Tepich, and Manuel Antonio Ay of Chichimilá, among others, led their indio troops against Yucateco- owned haciendas and settlements, killing all the blancos they could find. Reports generated by the victims and their representatives tell tales of rebels taking white men’s wives to be kept as concubines; of houses and possessions burned and pillaged; of entire towns of white families— including the women and children—murdered, their bodies left to decay in the aftermath. Accounts circulated of boys ruthlessly executed before their mothers and sisters, their hearts cut out, their blood drunk; of women and daughters raped, their lifeless bodies left to rot aside the mutilated corpses of their family members.

In this hemisphere’s largest and longest Indigenous uprising, violence spilled outward from Yucatán’s southeastern regions—sugar mills, ranchos, towns, and cities were razed in the war’s path. As Terry Rugeley surmises, “property damage for the years 1840– 76 defies calculation.” In all, it was reported that more than half of Yucatán’s population either fell victim to the violence or fled the peninsula; casualties are estimated between 250,000 and 360,000 throughout the fifty-five years of the war. An estimated 78 percent of those casualties and migrations occurred between 1846 and 1861. Yucatecos rapidly began to realize the depth of the crisis, and they dared to imagine the previously unthinkable—the establishment of Maya hegemony. As white reinforcements began to pour into the greater Tihosuco area to suppress the uprising, a militarized Maya independent state called Chan Santa Cruz formed in the 1850s, encompassing a large portion of what is now the state of Quintana Roo. Chan Santa Cruz was recognized as a de facto independent country by the British government, a reflection of intimate economic and political ties between the rebel state and British Honduras (Belize). While an invasion by Porfirio Díaz’s troops in 1901 is often cited as the official “end” of the Caste War, some historians account for the decades of fighting that occurred after that end point, including the oft- cited “last battle” of Dzulá in 1933 or the continued maintenance of Chan Santa Cruz by community members like Norberto Yeh as late as 1959.

Yet there is a polysemic quality to the Caste War that often goes unaccounted for. If we turn to the nineteenth-century epistolary accounts that Caste War rebel leadership left behind, it becomes clear that for the rebels, the war’s goal was not one of racial antagonism— if it was being conceptualized as such, it was because “the whites began it.” Rebel leaders repeatedly state that the rebellion emerged as a reaction to liberal antagonisms and the loss of life accrued because of political violence. They highlight that the violent rebel responses to these oppressions were only pursued after exhausting all other possibilities. Similarly, we can turn to Chan Santa Cruz to observe that, of its many internal conflicts, some were created or fueled by outside attempts to divide the group through “peace-making” treaties or other tactics. Similar actions are documented against two other resistance groups—the icaichés and los pacíficos—including the use of criminalization and physical violence to stifle these movements. What these perspectives elucidate is that those exercising hegemonic control over Yucatán were deeply engaged in nation-building tactics grounded in the lofty charges of order and progress, as was the case in other (Latin) American geopolitical and national spaces. This grounding is undeniably rooted in whiteness, or the systematic hierarchical prioritization of Eurocentric ways of living and world-building. Given this framing, it becomes clear that the instances of race wars—and the facile ways this concept frames the Caste War—are not happenstance. Such narratives peaked during the implementation of modernity, which mobilized myriad forms of hegemonic violence that suppressed bodies, knowledges, and ways of being that did not fit into the temporal, economic, and political structure encoded through whiteness. Thus, this study maintains that when “race war” is evoked, it is to index an imagined collision between two racialized factions made to occupy certain positions through an ontologized racial identity. While I give more texture to race war and caste war through this text, the rebel epistolary accounts referenced above demonstrate how the conditions of liberalism, nation-building, and capitalism affected and redefined many social categories within the peninsula if we assume this understanding of race war.

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S. B. West is an associate professor of instruction in the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Northwestern University and also affiliate faculty in Spanish and Portuguese and Native American and Indigenous Studies. West’s scholarship focuses on Latin American literatures and cultures, abolition, and transfeminist theory. They have published work in South Atlantic Quarterly, Hispanófila, and the Latin Americanist.

September 29, 2026

How We Came to Be: An Intellectual Genealogy of Chicano Scholars edited by Teresa Córdova, Aída Hurtado, Francisco J. Hernández, and Avelardo Valdez is both a scholarly archive and a call to action, preserving the legacy of those who built Chicano studies and inspiring future generations to continue the work of transformation within and beyond the academy.

This work chronicles the lives and legacies of Chicana and Chicano scholars whose formative experiences in the Chicano Movement shaped the development of Chicano studies and transformed higher education. Originating from the Reuniónes de Colegas—gatherings of veteran scholars reflecting on their shared histories—the volume features sixteen essays organized into five thematic sections that explore the intersections of activism, scholarship, and institutional change.

The contributors document how grassroots organizing evolved into academic inquiry, leading to the creation of departments, student support systems, and policy reforms that advanced equity and representation in universities. Essays address how community-engaged research influenced urban planning, health advocacy, and cultural production, while also highlighting Indigenous and transnational epistemologies that redefined theoretical frameworks in Chicano studies. The volume concludes with reflections on academic leadership and the breaking of barriers by Chicana scholars in higher education administration. Read an excerpt from the book’s Chapter 1, “Crossing Borders: From Immigrant to Activist Scholar,” below.

In this xenophobic climate, as our immigrant communities are blamed and scapegoated for the state of the economy, it is more important than ever to critically recover our history and the role that Chicano and Chicana studies have played in opening the doors of higher education to thousands who are still on the front lines fighting historical oppression. It is vitally important to recover the spirit and intentions of visions, such as those espoused by El Plan de Santa Bárbara, that presented strategies for tackling the root causes of our systemic and structural inequalities. As part of recovering our history, to be passed on to our future generations, it is important to tell the stories of immigrants who overcame the obstacles of racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism to use learning, teaching, research, and organizing in the interests of our communities. It is in this context, as an immigrant brought to the United States by grandparents who were farmworkers all their lives, that I share my story and the role that Chicano and Chicana studies played in a transformation of consciousness and practice that continues to define who I am.

Select moments in my life have influenced who I am and made possible the role that Chicano and Chicana studies played in my development. Whenever the hills of education got too steep and the obstacles seemed impossible to surmount, I always remembered the resilience of my parents in overcoming poverty and exclusion. Born in Madera, Chihuahua, Mexico, I was brought to the United States at the age of seven by grandparents who never learned English and were farmworkers all their lives. Although other Mexican children from our barrio dropped out of school due to language barriers, I was fortunate in having a schoolteacher in the first grade who stayed after school and taught me English. Subsequently, my struggles with learning English and growing up in a poor immigrant farmworker family became the foundation of language, labor, and immigrant rights issues that I passionately championed in my organizing, teaching, and research activities in our communities and in the fields of Chicano/Chicana studies and sociology. Although I attended Northeastern Junior College in Sterling, Colorado, on a track scholarship, the influences from Chicano and Chicana studies did not fully take hold until I was admitted to the University of Colorado (CU) in 1968.

Mexican Origin and Chicano Identity 
My understanding of growing up in a Mexican-origin, non-English speaking farmworker family was framed in my junior year at CU during a Chicano/a studies presentation by Professor Salvador “Huevo” Ramirez. Professor Ramirez used relatable stories to highlight the conditions of farmworkers, including why these workers were stratified into the lowest levels of the economic system and why our families lacked such necessities as indoor plumbing and heat. These stories were connected to my lived experience and showed how we, as students, could use our education to help change those conditions. This growing consciousness led me to run for and get elected to the position of CU student body vice president in 1969. During this time, I was influenced by the examples of farmworker organizers Magdaleno Avila, Jerry Ryan, and Lupe Briseno, who were leading community-based strikes and boycotts in support of farmworkers in Colorado. I also met leaders such as Ricardo Falcon and Freddie Trujillo, who emphasized learning about the Chicano people’s resistance and making the necessary connection between classroom knowledge and organizing to address injustices in our Chicano communities. 

It was through these connections and the organizing efforts of the United Mexican American Students (UMAS) organization that I was first exposed to El Plan de Santa Bárbara, which was composed at a conference in April 1969. El Plan called for organizing community-based recruitment, expanding curriculum, and building Chicano/Chicana studies programs and departments. The document also called for the development of Chicano studies in the interests of our Chicano and Chicana communities, whereby students, faculty, and staff would collaborate with community organizations in taking up key issues and using academic resources to change the conditions in our communities.

Putting El Plan into practice in 1970, I joined other students in confronting the racist policies of Joe Coors, who as owner of the Coors Beer Company and member of the UC Board of Regents voted against any programs that would increase the school’s number of students of color. In exposing how few Chicano and Chicana students attended UC, we raised the contradiction that we comprised a disproportionate part of the 50 percent people of color dying on the front lines in Vietnam. I joined UMAS in demanding funds to develop summer programs to prepare Chicano and Chicana students for college. When Joe Coors took the position that we should not develop programs for unqualified students, as vice president of the student government, I supported and stood with demonstrations that ultimately resulted in programs that graduated some of the first Chicano and Chicana students from UC who went on to become teachers, lawyers, doctors, social workers, and political leaders.

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Teresa Córdova is director of the Great Cities Institute at UIC and professor of urban planning and policy. She collaborates with communities and policymakers to translate research into action, shaping equitable urban development policy and community development practice.

Aída Hurtado, UC Santa Barbara Distinguished Professor and Luis Leal Endowed Chair, researches intersectional feminisms, Latino/a/x identity, and media representations. She has authored several influential books, received notable awards, and spoke at the 2017 and 2018 Women’s March.

Francisco J. Hernández, a history of education expert, has served as vice chancellor for students at multiple universities. He advises the UC Chicanx/Latinx Alumni Association and the NROC Project, and he holds various board positions.

Avelardo Valdez, USC emeritus professor and former Fulbright Scholar, researches substance abuse, violence, and health among high-risk minorities. He has been the recipient of NIH grants, has chaired the National Hispanic Science Network Association, and has served on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Causes and Consequences of Incarceration.

September 24, 2026

Confronting Colonial Legacies: A History of Chicana/o Indigeneities and Transnational Activism by José Luis Serrano Nájera offers a groundbreaking account of how Chicana/o activists have engaged in sustained efforts to reclaim Indigenous identity through political struggle, cultural expression, and transnational solidarity. Drawing on extensive archival research, Serrano Nájera demonstrates how Chicana/o indigeneity has contributed to broader Indigenous rights movements, including efforts that culminated in the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This work highlights the intercontinental dimensions of Chicana/o activism and offers a vital source for scholars and students in Chicana/o studies, Indigenous studies, ethnic studies, history, and political science. Confronting Colonial Legacies is a compelling call to rethink the politics of identity, sovereignty, and solidarity across the Americas.

Author José Luis Serrano Nájera takes an in-depth look at the history of Chicana/o indigeneity, starting with the Chicana/o Movement of the 1960s and 1970s and through twenty-first century transnational activism and solidarity movements. Serrano Nájera reveals how claims to indigeneity were rooted in reciprocal relationships with Indigenous communities and driven by a shared commitment to decolonization. Through chapters on visual and performing arts, ceremony, education, and grassroots organizing, this book challenges reductive narratives of cultural appropriation and instead foregrounds the complex and historically grounded nature of Chicana/o indigeneity. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

Twentieth-and early twenty-first-century Indigenous peoples’ social movements that demand recognition of cultural and political rights have special resonance in the United States and México. These North American countries have large populations of Indigenous peoples and people of Indigenous descent who have impacted the histories of these national societies. Moreover, Indigenous peoples’ cultural vitalities are a significant part of contemporary North American social relations. The United States and México also share a history in which Indigenous peoples have suffered genocide, discrimination, and violations of their civil and human rights, while paradoxically Indigenous cultural symbolisms are mythologized. The context for this paradox has its origins in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as colonial officials celebrated the grandiose accomplishments of pre-Columbian civilizations in patronizing tones, while at the same time validating conquest and colonization of the Americas. The consequence of this line of thought in the Americas had disastrous effects on the political, social, and economic survival of Indigenous peoples in what would become México and the United States.

Although decrees of kings, queens, popes, and viceroys have long since faded in the Americas, the consequences of colonization continue to suppress the self-determination of Indigenous peoples. The founding of nation-states and ideals of freedom influenced by liberalism and republicanism have further entrenched false truths regarding the superiority of Western civilization. Furthermore, in both the United States and México, racist policies hostile to the cultural traditions of Indigenous peoples have been instituted in efforts to force assimilation to promote and further modernity as well as create a laboring class. In this long historic context, twenty-first-century Indigenous peoples’ social movements address the right to autonomously define Indigenous cultural trajectory and in sum demand respect for Indigenous human rights in ways that demand decolonization and synthesize the historical and modern in unique expressions. These movements bring to bear the consequences of five centuries of unjust Western political, social, and economic rule over Indigenous peoples in the Americas. These social movements address the need to challenge the dominance of Western thought in the governing policies of the Americas and point us toward a future in which historic injustices are rectified and notions of superiority are abolished. Indigenous peoples’ social movements seek the decolonization of the Americas in both the policies of nation-states and the hearts and minds of all their citizens.

Indigenous social movements in the Americas have multiple sources, but in regard to Mexican Americans, my focus considers Chicana/o Indigeneities of particular importance to decolonization efforts because of their density, scope, breadth, and spatial location. The purpose of this book is to trace significant cultural and political expressions of Chicana/o Indigeneity from its origins in 1960s and 1970s Chicana and Chicano Movement (CCM) cultural ideas, demands for civil rights, and interethnic activism to twenty-first-century transnational efforts to combat neoliberal economies and pursue decolonization. In doing so, this book reveals that Chicana/o Indigeneity resulted from political struggle within the contexts of Chicana/o and Indigenous coalitional decolonial activism that resulted in complex projects of historical recovery.

Given the coalitional context of Chicana/o Indigeneity, as both political thought and historical recovery, my study answers the following question: How are Chicana/o assertions of Indigeneity intrinsically parallel and related to Chicana/o participation in transnational and decolonial Indigenous struggles for human and civil rights during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? These struggles for human and civil rights involve collaborative political, cultural, educational struggles for Indigenous peoples’ rights to self-determined assertions of identity and decoloniality from local to international levels. As such, the underlying premises for my investigation of Chicana/o Indigeneities are the following sub questions: (1) How has Chicana/o and Indigenous collaborative activism since the 1960s and across borders contributed to alignment in political goals and thought about civil rights, Native sovereignty, and international decolonization?; (2) How do twentieth and twenty-first-century Chicana/o cultural assertions of Indigeneities in the Southwestern United States, in the form of cultural revival and expression as well as religious ceremony, demonstrate the centrality of Indigeneity among Chicanas and Chicanos developing historical consciousness and attempting to self-determine decolonial cultural and social trajectories?; (3) How do these cultural expressions highlight both the feasibility of Indigeneity as a path toward decolonization and the difficulty of taking inventory of historical consciousness and circumstance in the context of the longue durée of Western colonialism?; (4) How did Chicana/o Indigenous political and cultural struggles inspire the creation of educational programs and schools to teach youth to develop critiques of the legacies of colonialism while at the same time creating a space to dismantle the epistemic hegemony of Western civilization and reappraise Indigenous thought and culture?; (5) How did participation in transnational Indigenous advocacy networks since the 1980s redefine Chicana/o understandings of localized control of community politics, respect for Indigenous peoples’ rights, and diverse iterations of decolonial self-determination?; and finally, (6) How does involvement in transnational Indigenous advocacy networks impact localized Chicana/o efforts to combat neoliberal political economies?

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José Luis Serrano Nájera is an assistant professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at the University of New Mexico. His publications, which can be found in the Regeneración Tlacuilolli: UCLA Raza Studies Journal and UCLA Historical Journal, have focused on advocacies, social movements, and armed insurrections countering colonial and imperial powers in the United States and México during the modern era. He is also co-chief editor of Regeneración: A Xicanacimiento Studies Journal.

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.