Category: Excerpt

Excerpt from The Documented Child

Posted on January 28, 2025January 27, 2025 by Anissa Suazo

January 28, 2025

In The Documented Child, scholar Maya Socolovsky demonstrates how the portrayal of Latinx children has shifted over the first two decades of the twenty-first century in literary texts aimed at children and young adults and looks at how these shifts map onto broader changes in immigration policy and discourse.

Through a critical inquiry into picture books and middle-grade and young adult literature, Socolovsky argues that the literary documentations of—and for—U.S. Latinx children have shifted over the decades, from an emphasis on hybrid transnationalism to that of a more American-oriented self. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

In his 1997 afterword to the thirtieth-anniversary edition of Down These Mean Streets, originally published in 1967, Piri Thomas considers the status of minority children as citizens of the nation, writing, “When we hear society expressing that ‘the children are our future,’ many of us ask, ‘Whose children and whose future?’” He continues, “I believe every child is born a poet” and wonders, “How can any child be considered unimportant and dehumanized, relegated to being a minority, a less than?” The rhetoric of nation and citizenship has long pervaded children’s texts, which, as dis-cussed in the introduction, are recognized as culturally, educationally, and socially formative, while ethnic children’s literature in particular shapes and determines children’s discourses of nationhood and difference. Although critics understand the high stakes in ethnic children’s literature, as it explores intercultural relationships and differences for a readership that is still solidifying its racial attitudes, minority children’s experiences continue to be underrepresented and hard to access. How then do children on the margins, particularly undocumented Latinx migrants, participate in and respond to literary expressions of nationhood? In what ways do the stories that we do have about immigration allow a migrant/immigrant child reader to identify with the material, and in that sense, to believe that they belong to, inspire, and are part of the nation’s literary, cultural, and creative identity?

One of the biggest challenges posed by literary representations of immigrant experiences is the tendency toward monolithic stereotyping. As Phillip Serrato argues in his blog post “Working with What We’ve Got,” school reading lists are “risk-averse,” tending to offer a standard “go-to” Latinx text (such as Pam Muñoz Ryan’s Esperanza Rising) and precluding “any opportunity for readers to chance upon and explore something new, something different, something out of the ordinary that . . . might prove to be extraordinary.” The three picture books I analyze in this chapter, however, do present something different. Written during a time of rising nativism and punitive, anti- immigrant policymaking, the social realism of Pat Mora’s Tomás and the Library Lady (1997), Luis J. Rodriguez’s América Is Her Name (1998), and Amada Irma Pérez’s My Diary from Here to There (2002) gives readers “extraordinary” material that can begin to push back against the political environment. Specifically, the texts overturn some commonplace expectations for children’s experiences of literacy by disrupting the traditional thematic quest narrative that determines the structure of so many children’s books. The traditional story often follows a pattern of home–adventure/school–return home, but such linearity, of course, does not always fit experiences of migrancy and undocumented residency. When there is no stable home, when the very notion of a return to it implies continual movement away from it, and when the school or institution is just as likely to perpetuate feelings of dislocation and nonbelonging as it is to offer safety and citizenship, how can these picture books build personal and national identity, and develop literacy, for their marginalized audience?

Here, I argue that Mora’s, Rodriguez’s, and Pérez’s books all document immigrant and migrant belonging by demonstrating the acquisition of literacy through multiliterate experiences, as their protagonists continually renegotiate their own relationships to reading and writing. According to Georgia García, literacy itself is a set of practices that develops to meet the needs of a particular culture. Literacy studies researches classroom instruction and canon development, conducts national research reports, and engages in national and state educational decision- making but has been slow to embrace diversity. The term multiliteracy was coined in 1994 by the New London Group (a group of scholars and teachers) to develop a new approach to literacy pedagogy. In this new approach, “authoritarian” literacy would be replaced (or supplemented) by broader modes of representation that reflected increased linguistic and cultural diversity and adapted to rapidly changing technologies of writing (Cope and Kalantzis, “Multiliteracies: The Beginnings” 5). As Elizabeth Boone notes, “We have to think more broadly about visual and tactile systems of recording information, to reach a broader understanding of writing.” The pedagogical theory of multiliteracy has thus, since the late 1990s, advocated using more than one communication mode (visual, aural, oral, gestural, spatial) to make meaning, in turn expanding “literacy” to include broader textual practices that are also more culturally inclusive. The approach emphasizes the importance of oral vernacular genres and believes that reading is a critical, social, and ideological practice that impacts canon choices and at times disenfranchises certain population groups. Mora’s, Pérez’s, and Rodriguez’s picture books, then, present multi-literacy as a politically significant strategy for the entire community, one that can counter prejudice, stabilize identity, and forge belonging and thus serve as an apt “reading” experience for validating and recognizing migrant life.

In general, picture books are a natural space for multimodal representation, as their visual illustrations, as well as their tactile, oral, and aural features, require readers to engage in more inclusive modes of communication. In addition, these picture books highlight the difficulties of labor conditions, border crossing, and immigration and thus represent migrant and undocumented children’s experiences of journeying and literacy as alinear rather than linear. Such alinear patterns encourage synesthesia and imagine a child reader who can move between these modes of communication to re- represent the same things. According to Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, much of our everyday representational experience is in fact intrinsically multimodal (gestures may come with sounds; images and text sit side by side on pages; architectural spaces are labeled with written signs), and children in particular have natural synesthetic capacities (“Multiliteracies” 179, 180). This recognition of broader literacy practices coalesces with recognizing the cultural, political, and economic realities that shape minority students’ literacy acquisition, as texts imagine “a sophisticated and multiply literate ethnic child reader” who can move fluidly between genres and modes (Capshaw Smith 7). Potentially, such privileging of multiliterate communication offers children the ability to heal from difficult experiences and the stability of “complete literacy,” which Rodriguez himself, in his memoir Always Running, defines as the ability to participate competently and confidently in any level of society that one chooses. In thus bringing together questions of national belonging and new practices of literacy, the texts normalize alter-native strategies for storytelling and play a crucial role in shaping all future citizens, motivating migrant children and— one hopes— encouraging empathy in nonmigrant children.

Maya Socolovsky is an associate professor of English and Latinx literature at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is a contributor to numerous journals, and the author of Troubling Nationhood in U.S. Latina Literature.

Excerpt from Battle Against Extinction

Posted on January 13, 2025January 8, 2025 by Anissa Suazo

January 13, 2025

This month, we’re highlighting a few of our open access books on our Open Arizona platform. These books are available to read for free!

In its earliest iteration funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, titles published in Open Arizona explored the histories and experiences of Indigenous and Latino groups in the southwestern United States, foundational areas of the Press’s long publishing history. In June 2022, thanks to a grant from the NEH, the Press was able to expand offerings in Open Arizona by adding twenty backlist titles in archaeology to the platform. These titles expand our understandings of the ancient Southwest and demonstrate the University of Arizona Press’s long-standing excellence in the field of archaeology. In Spring 2023, the Press published its first simultaneous print and open-access frontlist title.

In covering fishes in arid lands west of the Mississippi Valley, Battle Against Extinction, edited by W. L. Minckley and James E. Deacon, contributors provide a species-by-species appraisal of their status and potential for recovery, bringing together in one volume nearly all of the scattered literature on western fishes to produce a monumental work in conservation biology. They also ponder ethical considerations related to the issue, ask why conservation efforts have not proceeded at a proper pace, and suggest how native fish protection relates to other aspects of biodiversity planetwide. Their insights will allow scientific and public agencies to evaluate future management of these animal populations and will offer additional guidance for those active in water rights and conservation biology. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

Discovering the Fishes of Western North America
The Fauna

There are approximately 810 species of native fishes breeding in fresh waters of North America north of (but including) the Río Grande de Santiago and Río Pánuco basins of southern Mexico (see contributions in D.S. Lee et al. 1980, 1983; and Hocutt and Wiley 1986). Excluding transcontinental forms, about 170 species occur west of the Rocky Mountain axis, compared with 600 in waters draining east from that divide. Only about 40 species (ca. 5% of the total fauna) occur both east and west of the continental divide; 28 ( 70%) of these live far to the north, attaining transcontinental distributions by passing through estuaries or coastal seas. Evolution of the depauperate western fauna has been tied to a long history of disruptive geologic and climatic events, all of which substantially reduced the diversity, availability, and reliability of aquatic habitats (G. R. Smith 198 r b; Minckley et al. 1986).

The modern western ichthyofauna is further characterized by many endemic subfaunas, most of which also result from geologic and climatic disruptions of aquatic habitats (R. R. Miller 1959; G. R. Smith 1978). The smallest of these are single endemic species restricted to springs, streams, or individual lakes of endorheic intermontane basins. Larger, more complex aquatic systems often have two or more subfaunas represented, reflecting the fact that modern river drainages commonly comprise two or more original sub-basins brought together by geologic events (McPhail and Lindsey 1986; Minckley et al. 1986; M. L Smith and Miller 1986). For example, the upper Colorado River watershed has a subfauna distinct from that in its lower part (Gila River basin), while distinctive “middle” Colorado River fishes (R. R. Miller 1959; R. R. Miller and Hubbs 1960) are associated with another, formerly independent, system separated prehistorically from both the upper and lower parts.

At the largest scale, major drainage basins have few fish species in common, and those which do usually share species that: (1) can travel through seawater, (2) occupy montane tributaries subject to interbasin stream piracy, or (3) are confined to areas of high latitude but low relief, where divides between basins are weakly developed. All these factors aided and abetted the splendid isolation of western fishes, not only from related species in other parts of the continent but just as frequently from sister taxa within the region.

Discovery and Description: Geography and Chronology

Naturalists working before 1800 described only 20 (13.2 %) of the 151 western American fish species recognized by Lee et al. (1980) in their Atlas of Freshwater Fishes of the United States and Canada. Most were circumpolar in distribution and important for food or commerce, caught from the great coastal fisheries that were then (as now) exploited in subarctic seas. Most have type localities in Europe or the Soviet Union. About 30% of them were named by Linnaeus (1758), the father of modern taxonomy, in Systema Naturae, and 40% by Linnaeus’s colleague Johann Julius Walbaum (1792), who edited Peter Artedi’s Genera Piscium: Ichthyologiae Pars III and added descriptive footnotes. A handful of other authors described the remainder.

From 1801 to 1850, sixteen more taxa (10.6%) were named. A few were from the northwestern United States, but most (75°/o) were again collected farther north in association with the British Hudson’s Bay Company and expeditions to locate the fabled Northwest Passage (Dymond 1964), a fictitious waterway purportedly connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and thus providing a prime trade route to the Orient. The search for this passage was fueled by dreams of historical fame, for the first navigation of such a route would achieve a reward of twenty thousand pounds sterling offered by Great Britain. John Richardson described nine fish species in his Fauna Boreali-Americana (1836) after serving as a naval surgeon and naturalist with Sir John Franklin on two separate searches for the passage. Fortunately, Richardson did not participate in Franklin’s third expedition, which disappeared with all hands in 1843. Nearly fifty additional expeditions searched for them, but never a trace was found.

Excerpt from Landscapes and Social Transformations on the Northwest Coast

Posted on January 7, 2025December 16, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

January 7, 2025

This month, we’re highlighting a few of our open access books on our Open Arizona platform. These books are available to read for free!

The Fraser Valley in British Columbia has been viewed historically as a typical setting of Indigenous-white interaction. In Landscapes and Social Transformations on the Northwest Coast, author Jeff Oliver now reexamines the social history of this region from pre-contact to the violent upheavals of nineteenth and early twentieth century colonialism to argue that the dominant discourses of progress and colonialism often mask the real social and physical process of change that occurred here—change that can be more meaningfully tied to transformations in the land. Read an excerpt from the book’s introduction below.

From the window of the plane, the Fraser Valley appears as a great funnel enclosed by mountains. In the east at Hope it begins, a narrow sliver of green farmland on either side of the river, in places only one or two kilometers wide. Flying west past the town of Chilliwack, one sees the valley expand into a quilt of mixed land use—arable, pasture, and sprawling urban development, all set within a geometric grid that spans the space between the mountains. At Abbotsford the valley widens to perhaps fifteen or sixteen kilometers; the mountains on its southern flank fall away, and the ramrod-straight ditch that is the American border hems in the patchwork of intensive agriculture.

The tiny cars racing to Vancouver along the straight and narrow Trans-Canada Highway and much else that I see from the plane reminds me of a motto for our times: you can’t stop progress. Having lived away from the valley for over nine years in Britain, I am from my vantage point in the sky introduced to an uninterrupted view of the valley’s most recent transformations. New shopping malls mushroom in former green fields around the city of Langley, and new industrial parks and bypasses have apparently eaten their way into places where hobby farms and stands of deciduous forest once thrived. As we approach the Vancouver International Airport on the estuary of the Fraser River, the scale of change takes sharper focus. To the south the neighborhoods and shopping centers covering the slopes of the Semiahmoo Peninsula, my childhood home, have spread downward from their hilltop perch, absorbing the agricultural land reserves of the Nicomekel Valley; suburb begets suburb.

Suspending this bird’s-eye view for just a moment and thinking back in my mind’s eye, I can recall another view of the valley that belies this sense of prominent development and that resonates more strongly with a different temporality. In parts of the glacial uplands, one can still find original frame-built farmhouses surrounded by groves of weary fruit trees, slouching barns, and fence lines in desperate need of a coat of stain. And near the river’s mouth, the keen observer will make out the disintegrating skeletons of former salmon canneries whose wooden pilings still haunt the riverbank. There are other reminders as well. Perhaps the most poignant examples are the place names of the land’s first inhabitants. Toponyms like Semiahmoo and Nicomekel, although current words, still hint at an earlier Native geography echoed in the names of the many Indian reservations that dot the land. These relics evoke images of a time very different from today, the “time of the longhouses” (Wells 1987) when, it has been said, the land’s first people lived in harmonious equilibrium with nature, before the violent transformations brought about by the white man.

These images of the past lie in some tension to the view from my aerial platform. They have a fleeting quality: fading memories of an almost forgotten, distant summer displaced by the immediate tangible realities of concrete, asphalt, and glass. If there is a perception that is dominant and that seeks to envelop this place, then it is surely the sweeping and uncompromised view sustained from my window in the sky. Ushering aside questions of nostalgia, it boldly speaks of the triumph of humanity over nature, and the triumph of progress over the past, symbolized by the march of the strip malls and the urban tendril across the landscape. The disjuncture produced by these competing views of the Fraser Valley, which are caricatures to be sure, may seem to be overly simplistic, yet it still encapsulates an important premise about the history of this place, as well as providing considerable supporting foundation for this book.

Excerpt from Ancestral Landscapes of the Pueblo World

Posted on January 2, 2025December 18, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

January 2, 2025

This month, we’re highlighting a few of our open access books on our Open Arizona platform. These books are available to read for free!

In Ancestral Landscapes of the Pueblo World, James Snead uses an exciting new approach—landscape archaeology—to understand ancestral Pueblo communities and the way the people consciously or unconsciously shaped the land around them. Snead provides detailed insight into ancestral Puebloan cultures and societies using an approach he calls “contextual experience,” employing deep mapping and community-scale analysis. This strategy goes far beyond the standard archaeological approaches, using historical ethnography and contemporary Puebloan perspectives to better understand how past and present Pueblo worldviews and meanings are embedded in the land. Read and excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

Flying into the Albuquerque International Airport on a clear day—which is almost any day in New Mexico—a traveler sees the landscape 25,000 feet below as a vast pattern of monumental landforms. The jet approaches from the east, paralleling the route of Interstate 40, and the southern Great Plains give way to the southernmost outcrops of the Rocky Mountains. From this height the basic facts of the land stand out literally in relief. The Pecos and Canadian Rivers sketch narrow, fertile valleys through flat, dry terrain interrupted by mesas and hills. The historic settlement of the region has clearly been influenced by topography and environment. Riverside towns such as Fort Sumner and Santa Rosa, with their associated farmland, are visible on either side of the airplane. The economic structures of modern society also stand out, from the circular imprints of irrigated fields drawing water from subsurface aquifers to the web of highways, roads, and tracks that carry people and goods around the state.

Social elements can be discerned in this tableau, too. The compact grids of small towns contrast with scattered dots that signal the occasional isolated ranch complex. Nearer Albuquerque there are neatly delineated ‘‘ranchettes,’’ a few developments with curvilinear plans, and then comes the strict geometry of the city itself. Each layout reflects a different conception of domestic space. It is also possible to see how this built landscape has changed over time. In the southern distance the course of the nineteenth-century railroad parallels the jet’s path. An occasional shrunken village along the tracks contrasts mutely with the more prosperous communities linked by the interstate highway.

This aerial panorama conveys a great deal of information about modern society in the American Southwest. Yet looking out the airplane window, I find myself searching for a different landscape, one far more interesting to me than abstract patterns of economy and ecology. Looking north to the rugged country of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range, I can often pick out places of personal significance—peaks I have climbed, side roads I have driven, and especially the valley of the Rio Sapello, where my family has owned land since the 1880s.

Thinking about the Sapello Valley brings to mind the history of the property, the names and lineages of the neighbors, and many more specific recollections, such as the sweet-sharp flavor of apples from the old trees around the pond. All these experiences are bound up in the physicality of the place, and those who know it well can remember and describe it even if they have been away for decades. To me that landscape is more immediate and perhaps more important than the larger-scale historical and geographic record passing beneath the jet’s wings. As the plane descends, I crane my neck and hope that the storm clouds building over the mountains will not block the view and thwart this colloquy between memory and place.

Excerpt from On a Trail of Southwest Discovery

Posted on December 13, 2024December 16, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

December 13, 2024

This month, we’re highlighting a few of our open access books on our Open Arizona platform. These books are available to read for free!

On a Trail of Southwest Discovery, edited by Curtis M. Hinsley and David R. Wilcox, examines the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition, directed by Frank Hamilton Cushing, through the diaries of two participants who fell in love on the expedition: the field secretary, Fred Hodge—who became a major figure in early twentieth-century anthropology—and the expedition artist, Margaret Magill. Divided into three parts, the book’s first two sections chronicle the field operations of the expedition, while the third part describes the anthropological career of Hodge after the end of the expedition. This book is the third installment of a multivolume work by Hinsley and Wilcox on the Hemenway Expedition. The second installment, The Lost Itinerary of Frank Hamilton Cushing, and the first, The Southwest in the American Imagination, are also available on Open Arizona.

Read an excerpt from the first chapter of On a Trail of Southwest Discovery below.

“Terrible nightmare. Were the oysters to blame? Falling over precipices and facing revolvers all night and hollowing to the top of my voice (at least so the porter tells me).” Thus twenty-two-year-old Fred Hodge recorded the night of December 5, 1886, on the train from Baltimore to Rochester. The following day he traveled on to the family homestead of Frank Hamilton Cushing near Albion, in western New York State, where he met up with Cushing and his wife, Emily Tennison Magill Cushing (1859–1920), her sister Margaret Whitehead Magill (1865–1935), and three prominent Zuni men, Palowahtiwa, Waihusiwa, and Heluta. Less than a week later the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition—named for its Boston patron, Mary Tileston Hemenway (1820–94)—departed for Arizona Territory, with Hodge employed as personal secretary to director Cushing. Hodge had no way of knowing that the next two years in Arizona and New Mexico would become his introduction to the Southwest, to archaeological fieldwork, and ultimately to a half-century career at the institutional centers of American anthropology. He would also learn the risks of life on the edge in America—and the dangers of falling over personal and professional precipices.

Frederick Webb Hodge (1864–1956) was blessed with ninety-two years of life. Born in Plymouth, England, toward the end of the American Civil War, he passed away quietly in Santa Fe, New Mexico, ten years after the end of World War II. He arrived in America with his parents, Edwin and Emily Webb Hodge, and four siblings in 1872. His father (1831–1919) worked briefly as a coachman before finding a permanent position as a watchman with the U.S. Postal Department; the family soon settled in downtown Washington. Mr. Hodge became a naturalized American citizen in 1882, thereby conferring the same on his family. Emily Hodge (1833–1924) had been trained as a seamstress and taught her first-born daughter, Emlyn, that trade as well. Of the six Hodge children, only the youngest, Charles, was born in the United States. Emlyn and her sister, Evelina, eventually established a real estate and insurance office in the capital. Edwin fils went to Yale and Johns Hopkins Medical School, later becoming an army physician and working on yellow fever with Walter Reed. Charles attended Swarthmore and became a businessman. We know nothing of son Ernest. Third-born Fred grew up as a child in the middle, surrounded by family.

When he was fourteen Hodge went to work for the summer at the offices of Henry N. Copp, a Washington lawyer who specialized in the public lands of the American West. His publications—Copp’s Land-Owner: Real Estate and Land Law and The American Settler’s Guide: A Brief Exposition of the Public Land System— served as legal guides for investors and settlers regarding the operations of the General Land Office and the Department of the Interior. With his constantly updated manuals Copp stood at the center of the vigorous, often corrupt disposition of the nation’s public lands during the swashbuckling post–Civil War decades.

At the end of summer 1878, Fred expected to return to school, but Copp—who was also his school principal—advised him to drop out and continue working: “I think you’ll learn just as much in my office here as you would in school. . . . All you’re going to have [in school] is word analysis, or something like that,” he told the boy. Hodge ended up staying with Copp for five formative years (1878–83). Beginning as an office clerk, he was soon gathering information from federal bureaus for Copp’s magazines, editing and proofreading materials, and seeing publications through the entire printing process. In the course of his work the teen also was getting his first close-up look at the daily intricacies of business, publishing, and government practices. But he was developing higher ambitions too. While he never entered high school or finished any formal schooling, Hodge enrolled in night classes: first at Arlington Academy, a one-man operation, then in the “science course” at Columbian University (later part of George Washington University). His main interest was topographic drafting, because he dreamed of fieldwork under John Wesley Powell with the new U.S. Geological Survey, formed in 1879. But he also made time to study the skill that would open his career: stenography.

Excerpt from “Heritage in the Body”

Posted on December 5, 2024October 8, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

December 5, 2024

Through storytelling, ethnography, and interviews, Heritage in the Body: Sensory Ecologies of Health Practice in Times of Change, by Kristina Baines, examines the links between health and heritage in times of change. Using a series of case studies, anthropologist Baines tells the intimate stories of how Indigenous Maya and Garifuna Belizeans—both in Belize and in the United States—navigate macro-level processes such as economic development, climate change, political shifts, and global health crises in the context of changes in their own lives.

Employing an embodied ecological heritage (EEH) framework, Baines explores the links between health and heritage as a fluid series of ecological practices. Health and wellness are holistically defined and approached from a phenomenological perspective. Baines focuses on how sensory experiences change the body through practice and provides insights into community-driven alternatives as a means to maintain and support happy, healthy lives. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

“CHANGE IS GONNA COME”

Accepting the inevitability of change can be seen as equal parts ambivalence and pragmatism. Whether people like it or not, change happens, and they must prepare for the inevitable and roll with the punches. People negotiate changes in subtle ways, both preempting and responding to the changing conditions of their lives. It is this perspective that guided the decision-making of many of the Maya community members I have worked with, exemplified by the quote in the opening vignette about how the road was both good and bad and the next part of the assessment from the person who said it, a former alcalde: “Well, it’s coming.” There is an element of inevitability or personal powerlessness when it comes to individual experience of large-scale changes. That said, however, Belizean communities have been unusually successful in many ways when it comes to accepting seemingly inevitable development changes: notable examples include the public burning of genetically modified corn seed to avoid its introduction into the country and the failure of international fast-food chains to open successful branches in Belize.

In the popular narrative, the effects of change on Indigenous communities can be oversimplified to evoke pictures of a cultural and physical genocide. There are certain truths to reckon with in this assessment; however, while the negative effects of climate change and global development processes on Indigenous and other marginalized groups are well-documented, so too are examples of resilience and adaptive practices among the communities impacted by these changes. It is my hope that this book will go some distance in illuminating this resilience without minimizing the real challenges these communities face, both in their histories and in their everyday lives. Change need not necessarily be embraced or feared; it simply is a part of life, with moments of increased dimensions and intensities. Perhaps this moment, the “Anthropocene,” as it has been termed in recent years, is one of these times of intensification.

EMBODIED ECOLOGICAL HERITAGE

The effect of changes on individuals, of course, is more than a series of clichés, whatever truth they may contain. As I asked people about their health, I noted that answers increasingly included how changes across multiple dimensions—spatial, temporal, ecological—had manifested in individual bodies. People had moved for work, gone to college, changed their farming practices, and stopped drinking herbal medicines—for example—and they felt the impact of these changes in their bodies. With my ongoing ethnographic work guided by the embodied ecological heritage (EEH) framework, I have sought to capture how Indigenous Belizeans have navigated these ever-present environmental and economic changes throughout their lived experience. Embodied ecological heritage kept my focus on the role of heritage, traditional ecological practices, and, more specifically, on how the individuals and communities I studied maintained healthy lives. People spoke about the maintenance and loss of “traditions” and of what it meant to be Maya or to be Garifuna in the context of changing practices. While heritage should not be conceptualized as a static concept, it brings with it a sense of continuity, in which the past informs individual and group identity, which was helpful to community members in the context of change.

I developed the EEH framework in 2011 during my first long research period, living in Santa Cruz, a small, primarily Mopan Maya village in southern Belize. The way that community members spoke about and conceptualized their health was intimately connected to how they spoke about “being Maya” or about participating in traditional ecological practices. The relationship between health and what the Maya community members defined as heritage practices existed on many levels and incorporated ideas about food, work, and education. The connections were simultaneously physical, mental, and social, with the healthy body described as that which could work and grow and prepare food in the traditional way. Their lived experience could be understood as EEH. This lens is useful describing health, particularly in communities that are not fully steeped in the legacy of Cartesian dualism. It is complementary to more politicized, critical health perspectives, which highlight structural forces and impacts on health. Embodied ecological heritage is an important intervention in this perspective in that it allows individual sensory experience to be understood in the context of both the physical and the social, which is an aspect of health understanding that receives little attention. Bodies change through everyday practices, and these changes matter for health. Embodied ecological heritage guides the understanding and explanation of these changes, illuminating the role of heritage practices in the maintenance of health.

Embodied ecological heritage brings together seemingly disparate theories about the ways in which anthropologists have historically understood bodies and bodily practice. Phenomenology seeks to capture “being in the world”—the lived and embodied experience, felt through action or practice. This perspective has been set in contrast with more cognitive theoretical orientations, which aim to capture the internal structures of the mind and how they classify external factors they encounter. In my work, and through the development of EEH, I argue that these orientations need not be in opposition. Through a focus on how sensory experiences change the body (including the brain), EEH reveals how phenomenological and cognitive perspectives can coexist. Cognitive phenomenology as a theoretical orientation shows heritage is not static, not a list of traditional plants or foods, not simply knowledge stored in the brain; rather, it is something that is carried in the body. Embodied ecological heritage is a grounded theory: people speak about their heritage in terms of practice, or what they do with their bodies, and how those practices relate to how they feel. The language of sensory experiences—the smells, tastes, sounds, and feelings of doing and being in the world—is rich with connections to tradition, to heritage identity, to health. Documenting and understanding how these connections happen and how they form a critical way of not only being well in, but also in thinking about, the world is vital.

Excerpt from Embodying Biodiversity

Posted on November 27, 2024December 4, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

November 27, 2024

Embodying Biodiversity: Sensory Conservation as Refuge and Sovereignty, by Terese Gagnon, harnesses a myriad of methodologies and research spanning multiple continents. This volume delves into the power of everyday forms of biodiversity conservation, motivated by sensory and embodied engagement with plants. Through an array of interdisciplinary contributions, the authors argue that the vast majority of biodiversity conservation worldwide is carried out not by large-scale, hierarchical initiatives but by ordinary people who cultivate sensory-motivated, place-based bonds with plants.

Acknowledging the monumental role of everyday champions in tending biodiversity, the contributors write that this caretaking is crucial to countering ecological harm and global injustice stemming from colonial violence and racial capitalism. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

I recently had a flashback of refugia. The memory was intimate, painful, and brimming with agrobiodiversity. The vivid image was triggered when I heard an ophthalmologist say the word “scarring.” She was gazing into my eyeball, and her assistant diligently wrote down my maladies. As a participant observer, I had, five years earlier, written my own field note after hacking into the soil with a sickle: “As I chopped at the dirt, some dirt flew in my eye. And it made me think almost immediately about what was in the dirt—were there any chemicals in it that I should be worried about?”

I remained silent as this memory passed through my mind, and my silence yielded the unintended consequence of no further investigation by the ophthalmologist despite the everyday hypothesis that was now spinning in my head: Those agrichemicals did something to me. Agrichemicals do a lot of things to a lot of bodies of people who rarely complain but frequently wonder about them. Agrichemicals contaminate soils that plants nonetheless find ways to grow in. From 2015 to 2020, I conducted fieldwork in and around Chalatenango, a rural northern region of El Salvador, where agrobiodiversity is found in small subsistence farms, and where farmers narrate and remember stories of agrichemicals entering the region. My flashback of refugia is not traumatic, because it is overpowered by the intimacy of cultivating maíz capulin (capulin corn) and maíz blanco (white corn) from soil that was and will continue to be contaminated with agrichemicals. It was one fleeting reassembly of refugia, memory, and embodiment.

This chapter is concerned with epistemic entanglements amid the everyday farming practices of subsistence corn farmers who live in, emigrate from, and send parcels to and from rural El Salvador. I first provide some context regarding the transnational and affective processes implicated in this agrarian assemblage, and then describe a minor intervention that slices, pokes, and pulls at imbricated knowledges therein. Findings from this small and nongeneralizable process concern soil chemistry in relation to local farming techniques, calling attention to epistemic entanglements in the material world of subsistence farmers, as well as the methods that social scientists rely on to examine them.

Corn and a Rural Salvadoran Diaspora

In the creation narrative of the Popol Vuh, grandmother Xmucane grinds white corn and yellow corn to make the flesh of the first humans. Corn is also the plant that Xmucane’s grandchildren (Hunahpu and Xbalanque) use to provide a sign to their grandmother of their death and life before they embark on their journey to Xibalba (Tedlock 1996). While this narrative is almost never discussed among the subsistence farmers with whom I farmed corn in Chalatenango, its absence did not preclude our kneeling before every planted seed and manipulating the terrain to aid its growth in the twenty-first century.

In the second decade of this twenty-first century, the harvested corn will be brought to a Chalateca grandmother, who will compile maíz blanco seeds into a woven sack, which she will send to her migrant kin living in Colorado. She will send them by means of a courier, who will examine them for narcotics before packing them into a polypropylene-lined carboard box, which is one of multiple layers of protection for what will soon become airborne corn seeds. Eventually, the corn seeds will be stripped back down as an isolated parcel presented to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent in Houston who wants to know what this is. The corn seeds will be used to make atoll or nixtamalized tortillas in a place far away from the location in which the corn was grown. If I turn on a tape recorder and ask the parcel’s recipient questions about why she requested the seeds, she might start by making comparisons between nation-states, people, sounds, and spaces. She might also perform nostalgia for my audio recorder. If in Chalatenango I ask her father to show me how he cultivates maíz blanco, he may choose to show me only parts of the process. He might secretly set fire to the weeds, producing an ash residue on the topsoil, after I leave because he knows that gringos do not like it when campesinos use fire to farm their food. He will smother his testimony simply because I am present, watching and observing (McKinnon 2016). The farmer and I might later talk until we are lost in wonder about what is really happening in the soil beneath our feet from which the maíz blanco grows. We might again kneel down on the soil before each seed in the coming rainy season, an act that clears the weeds but nonetheless causes us to genuflect before these signs of life and death.

Excerpt from Savages and Citizens

Posted on November 25, 2024January 10, 2025 by Anissa Suazo

November 25, 2024

Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State, by Andrew Canessa and Manuela Lavinas Picq, delves into European political philosophy, comparative politics, and contemporary international law, showing how the concept of indigeneity has shaped the development of the modern state. The exclusion of Indigenous people was not a collateral byproduct; it was a political project in its own right. The book argues that indigeneity is a political identity relational to modern nation-states and that Indigenous politics, although marking the boundary of the state, are co-constitutive of colonial processes of state-making. In showing how indigeneity is central to how the international system of states operates, the book forefronts Indigenous peoples as political actors to reject essentializing views that reduce them to cultural “survivors” rooted in the past.

With insights drawn from diverse global contexts and empirical research from Bolivia and Ecuador, this work advocates for the relevance of Indigenous studies within political science and argues for an ethnography of sovereignty in anthropology. Savages and Citizens makes a compelling case for the centrality of Indigenous perspectives to understand the modern state from political theory to international studies. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

The role of anthropology in exoticizing and “othering” Indigenous people has long been noted. For Franz Boas (1848–1942), widely considered to be the founder of modern U.S. cultural anthropology, anthropology was primarily concerned with Indigenous peoples of North America who had just been crushed militarily and dispossessed of their lands. His was an urgent task to collect material culture and record memory of a way of life before it was gone forever. This “salvage anthropology,” as Kahnawà:ke Mohawk anthropologist Simpson (2014) calls it, maintained a dualistic binary that kept a particular political order intact. Simpson (2018) refers to it as the grammar of Indigenous dispossession when analyzing why white people love Franz Boas. The politics of the U.S. then (as now) has little room for contemporary Indigenous peoples, and it is not without coincidence that Boasian anthropology is so much rooted in understanding an Indigenous past. The Indigenous of the past are no threat and are available to be romanticized.

British social anthropology as developed by Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942) emerged in the context of a British Empire, which still sought to engage with living communities under the imperial yoke. Unsurprisingly, Malinowski functionalism looked to explain how contemporary societies continued to function explicitly not as vestiges of history. It is no coincidence that British social anthropology was concerned with the continued functioning of Indigenous peoples that it sought to absorb into an imperial state. This is not to say that both anthropologists were simply products of their time, for each was also unfashionably and explicitly antiracist as they and their students insisted on Indigenous peoples being understood in their own terms. But it would be naive to ignore the state formations in which their anthropology was produced and how it served—even when unwittingly– those state formations.

The severest critique is that anthropology was colonialism’s handmaiden (Asad 1973) and that anthropology itself produced an Indigenous subordinate alterity. However, this Indigenous alterity long predates even the earliest versions of Western anthropology. Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2003) sees anthropology as drawing on preexisting notions of the savage and, to be sure, developing them. For him, this “savage slot” is precisely what made the West conceivable and that, indeed, is a central thesis of this book: the existence of Indigenous peoples is precisely what makes the politically modern West imaginable, whether or not this is explicitly recognized by political actors. In turn, “anthropology belongs to a discursive field that is an inherent part of the West’s geography of imagination.”

There is a long tradition of anthropologists being concerned with the ways in which the state represents itself to its subjects (Bouchard 2011), what Thomas Hansen and Finn Stepputat (2001) call the “languages of stateness.” Anthropological studies analyze how the state is perceived through specific cultural lenses—how state practices are made manifest, performed, and given meaning (cf. Gupta and Sharma 2006, 277). The discipline is increasingly shifting its focus “toward state images and representations in research and theorizing” (Thelen, Vetters, and Benda-Beckmann 2017). Some examples of this are Fernando Coronil’s (1997), Alec Leonhardt’s (2006), and Michal Taussig’s (1997) work on the “magic” of the state; Clifford Geertz’s (1980) state as “theatre”; Begoña Aretxaga’s 2000 “ghostly” state; Akil Gupta’s (1995) “imagined” state; and Bruce Kapferer’s (1988) work on “myths” of state. These approaches are summarized by Aradhana Sharma and Akil Gupta (2006) when they write, “the anthropological project attempts to understand the conditions in which the state successfully represents itself as coherent and singular.”

A quite different anthropological approach moves beyond how the state is represented to people in an imagined or abstract form to look at the ways in which it is made manifest: Serena Tennekoon (1988) looks at how the state manifests through “rituals of development,” and Anya Bernstein and Elizabeth Mertz (2011) edited a special volume of PoLAR on bureaucracies (see also Ranta 2022). Hastings Donnan and Thomas Wilson (1999) look at the ways in which state presence is felt on borders, Townsend Middleton (2011) offers an ethnography of state surveys, and Brett Gustafson (2009a) looks at cartography. There has, however, been insufficient theorizing of stateness from Indigenous perspectives. Some anthropologists, such as Nancy Postero (2017) and Alpah Shah (2010), have looked at the rare examples of Indigenous states in Bolivia (2005–19) and Jharkhand, India, but to date there has been little work in anthropology that considers not only what the state looks like from an Indigenous perspective but how the state creates those spaces where Indigenous cultures exist, that is, where state formation produces indigeneity as a meaningful political category.

Most studies of the state draw explicitly or implicitly on a Weberian idea of a state as a bounded sovereign entity encompassing a clearly defined territory with a monopoly of violence over that territory and governed by a rational bureaucracy (Hansen and Stepputat 2001). Yet few scholars have interrogated the boundary of that (idealized) state or considered, not only what formations it produces beyond the boundary but, most importantly for our considerations, how formations beyond the notional limits of the state in themselves produce the entity we understand as being the state. This is a very different way of approaching the study of the state and departs from much of the anthropological tradition which has largely focused on representation of the state or everyday practices relating to it.

The work of James Scott (e.g., 1998, 2009, 2017) is a notable exception here, and he has shown how cultural forms and identities of people denoted as “Tribal” are themselves cultural forms of communities beyond the state, of people who explicitly reject the state and we draw heavily on his work. To express it at its simplest, our anthropological approach is not so much to see the state as a cultural form but to see how the state produces the spaces for political forms that are recognized as Indigenous. What makes them Indigenous per se is the ways in which they occupy a political space created by a particular state formation and contributed dynamically to that state formation. What we offer here is a model for understanding indigeneity not as sui generis but as cultural formations that occupy a specific political space. This avoids any kind of essentialization of Indigenous politics and sidesteps the tendency to see Indigenous cultures as historical “survivals” of a contact with Western (neo)colonization—sometimes described as living in the past, even in the “stone age”—to locate them in contemporary sovereignty-making. Indigenous peoples are neither atavistic nor static but dynamic actors in the construction of modern world politics.

Excerpt from Caracoleando Among Worlds

Posted on November 15, 2024December 4, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

November 15, 2024

Silvia Soto’s Caracoleando Among Worlds: Reconstructing Maya Worldviews in Chiapas provides an in-depth analysis of poetry, short stories, and one of the first novels written by a Maya Tsotsil writer of Chiapas alongside close readings of the EZLN’s six declarations of the Lacandon Jungle. Themes echoing ancestral connections, informing epistemologies, and sustaining cultural and spiritual practices emerge and weave the texts to each other. The work brings into the conversation literature that has been translated into English for the first time and places Maya writers of Chiapas in discussion with other Native American and Indigenous scholars.

This work shows how literature, culture, and activism intertwine, and offers a compelling narrative that transcends boundaries and fosters a deeper understanding of Maya identities and resilience. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

From the moment the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN or Zapatistas) burst into the public eye, it stated its position and vision as an organized guerrilla movement through the release of the First Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle of January 1, 1994, published in its newly established paper, El Despertador Mexicano (Mexican Awakener), and made available online. The media surrounded the Zapatistas as they declared control of the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas and six other cities in the state of Chiapas (captured in the special coverage by Canal 6 de Julio), bombarding them with questions about their uprising, despite their position having already been clearly stated. In the years since this New Year’s uprising, Zapatistas have released six declarations and hundreds of communiqués stating the philosophy of the movement, giving rise to what they call the power of the word, which has allowed them agency in the narrative of their movement. As books, films, music, and art about the EZLN continue to be produced to capture their struggle, their stream of communiqués stating the position and direction of the movement grants them control of their histories.

The contemporary Maya literary movement of Chiapas unfolded alongside the EZLN’s initial steps of underground organizing, with Indigenous intellectuals at the time reframing the ways they related to state projects of Indigenismo. Enrique Pérez López (Tsotsil) (2008), former director of the Centro Estatal de Lenguas, Arte y Literatura Indígenas (State Center for Indigenous Languages, Art, and Literature, CELALI), refers to this period of time as a reawakening of Indigenous peoples of Chiapas. The strides made by this Indigenous intellectual movement coincided, too, with shifts in Mexican policy toward a neoliberal agenda; changes to Article 4 of the Mexican Constitution, recognizing the plurality of the state; and the state’s endorsement of the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Convention 169, which recognizes Indigenous rights in addition to labor and economic rights. In the late 1970s, these Indigenous intellectuals (young men and women who had mostly formally trained as teachers) had begun organizing by engaging in a shared reflection on the current state of their communities. The focus of these intellectuals was on education, the rescue and teaching of histories, reading and writing, and song and art rooted in their Maya belief system. There was no initial systematic application of this vision; instead, they were simply a group of people coming together to reflect and dialogue on new possibilities in their own relationship to their Maya worldviews.

Thus, in the last four decades, these two movements have flourished parallel to each other, crossing paths in different stages along the way. Local languages, Maya and Spanish, are central to this process. Orality and the written word are the guiding forces in the articulation of their positions. Such action connects to the Nahuatl concept of in xochitl in cuicatl or floricanto (flower-and-song), which captures the way that poetry and poetry’s metaphors unlock the mysteries of life and dreams that are central to a Nahuatl worldview (León-Portilla 1990a, 75). The EZLN has strategically and powerfully used this approach to deliver its flowery word through the written, audio, and visual release of communiqués. This approach is captured in its fourth declaration—further developed in chapter 4—which declares that “the flower of the word will not die,” in relation to the war Zapatistas are waging in defense of the rights of Indigenous peoples of Mexico (EZLN 1996a, 1996b).

In this chapter I examine the poetry of three Maya writers. The first section of the chapter centers on four poems and the ways the poets engage with the writing process of the poetry, allowing the written word to take center stage: “Sts’ibujon: Yo escribo” (I write) by Tseltal poet Adriana del Carmen López Sántiz, from her poetry collection Jalbil k’opetik: Palabras tejidas (Woven words, 2005); “A’yej: Discurso” (Speech) by Tsotsil poet Andrés López Díaz, published in the anthology Sbel sjol yo’nton ik’: Memoria del viento (Memory of the wind, López Díaz, Díaz Ruiz, and López Díaz 2006); and both “Slikebal Kuxlejaltik: Creación” (Creation) and “Vu’un Li’oyunkutike: Soy los que Estamos Aquí” (I am the we who are here) by Tsotsil poet Enriqueta Lunez, from her poetry collection Yi’ Beltak ch’ulelaletik: Raíces del alma (Roots of the soul, 2007). The second section of the chapter engages with the oral deliverance of the poetry and the immediacy such an act carries in the production of the poetry by centering on four additional poems by the same poets and from the same publications: “Jun k’ak’al: Un día” (One day) and “Ta’lo xa: Basta” (Enough) by López Díaz, “K’unil lajel: Agonía” (Agony) by López Sántiz, and “Yavu: Lunario” (Lunary) by Lunez. The movement the work of these poets creates—and the reclamation of their role as orators and carriers of knowledge—recenters their presence in the world and sets forward new possibilities and new visions for the future. Such a position connects to the trajectories of the EZLN and its narratives of the insurgency, particularly regarding its vision of “a world where many worlds fit” (further developed in chapter 4), where the recognition of “different” is essential to the continuation of the collective.

I frame my analysis of the poetry in direct dialogue with the work of U.S. Native scholars of the last five decades, such as N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma), and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo). This analysis highlights the relationship between the role of language, the written and oral word, the interweaving of their stories to reveal their worldviews, and the reclamation of their place in history. These relations are always rooted to place (land) and time and are in continuous dialogue with one another. My analysis also brings into conversation the work of Indigenous and Indigenous studies scholars, such as Gloria E. Chacón’s (2018) concept of kab’awil or the double gaze, which addresses Indigenous writers’ search within their worldviews to reaffirm their presence as Indigenous peoples;
Paul M. Worley and Rita M. Palacios’s (2019) concept of ts’íib, which decenters the Latin alphabet by placing other methods of recording knowledges alongside it; Elicura Chihuailaf Nahuelpan’s (Mapuche from Chile) (2009) concept of oralitor (oraliture), which underscores the ways textual narratives are informed by millennia-old oral traditions; and Miguel Rocha Vivas’s (2021) concept of “oralitegraphy,” which, in line with the work of Chacón and Chihuailaf, stresses the usage of multimedia in Indigenous scholarship, and the ways that textual, oral, and visual narratives are in constant dialogue in Indigenous knowledge production. The work of these poets also brings out the concept of caracoleando, which speaks of the movement the poetry creates, the production of new ways of being that are drawn from the old ways and in a constant process of change. Through my readings of the poetry, I ask the following questions: What are the central themes articulated by the EZLN and Maya writers of Chiapas? How do orality and writing, as well as the specific languages used, produce these central themes? As these poets move through the practices of orality and writing, I suggest that the central theme the poems address is this notion of presence, revealing new visions of Maya worlds that are not just about claiming a Maya identity but also about claiming a space to perform this Maya identity.

Silvia Soto is an assistant professor in Chicano and Latino Studies at Sonoma State University (SSU). She earned her doctoral degree from the University of California, Davis, in Native American Studies. Her research focuses on the contemporary Maya literary movement of Chiapas, Mexico, more specifically on concepts of identity formation, gender relations, and Maya cosmovisions. Soto has been the recipient of the postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in American Indian Studies.

Excerpt from Cold War Anthropologist

Posted on November 13, 2024December 4, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

November 13, 2024

Cold War Anthropologist: Isabel Kelly and Rural Development in Mexico, by Stephanie Baker Opperman, delves into distinct facets of Kelly’s international journey, with a particular emphasis on her involvement in cooperative programs aimed at fostering diplomatic relations with Mexico. Through this narrative framework, readers are immersed in a compelling exploration of Dr. Isabel T. Kelly’s (1906-1983) enduring impact on both the field of anthropology and the realm of international diplomacy.

This book is indispensable for historians, anthropologists, and individuals intrigued by the nuanced complexities of Cold War politics, presenting pioneering research at the intersection of history and anthropology. Opperman skillfully brings to light the previously untold narratives of Isabel Kelly, unveiling her influence on mid-twentieth-century Mexico. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

In March 1952, Dr. Isabel Kelly attended the tenth annual meeting of the United States–Mexico Border Public Health Association (USMBPHA) in the northern Mexican state of Monterrey. The Pan American Sanitary Bureau (PASB) helped to establish the association “in order to foster understanding of public health needs and through mutual assistance to promote public and personal health along the United States– Mexico border.” The wartime alliance, however, did not easily transfer into postwar solidarity among health officials in the region. The meeting’s attendees included PASB director Fred Soper and secretary general Miguel Bustamante; USMBPHA president Wilton L. Halverson and secretary J. C. Ellington; U.S. health officers from the states of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas; Mexican health officers from the states of Coahuila, Chihuahua, Nuevo Leon, Sonora, and Tamaulipas; and “federal representatives of the health services of Mexico and of the United States.” Kelly served as a U.S. delegate to the meeting on behalf of the Smithsonian’s Institute of Social Anthropology (ISA). Beginning in 1943, the ISA established a series of cooperative agreements with the Mexican government to expand social science research in the country.

In summarizing her experience to her supervisors in Washington, D.C., Kelly acknowledged an air of tension that permeated the meetings. She commented, “It was clearly evident that the rapport between the representatives of the two nations was neither very close nor very warm.” Rather than working together to resolve common health problems along the border, she identified a “direct competition” between representatives as each side prioritized their own initiatives while giving less consideration to that of their counterparts. Many of the U.S. delegates could not understand Spanish and therefore, according to Kelly, felt “no obligation to sit through a paper in a foreign tongue.” They also expressed frustration that the Mexican representatives did not adhere to presentation time limits set by the organizing committee. Mexican delegates, in turn, voiced their exasperation with the association for designing the event without seeking their input on topics, formatting, or other cultural considerations. Kelly concluded that “far from fostering cordial relations between the two countries, it seems to have fostered a feeling of rivalry and to have intensified the local national inferiority complex. Under the circumstances, the meeting probably did more harm than good.”

Kelly’s report points to larger tensions within mid-twentieth-century relations between the two countries. After World War II, U.S. foreign policymakers attempted to exert “hegemonic influence through expertise.” State officials offered to educate their international counterparts in public health, industrial development, and modernization practices through development projects that aligned with U.S. culture. Arturo Escobar argues, “Development fostered a way of conceiving of social life as a technical problem.” Consequently, U.S. officials approached foreign relations from a position of authority, believing their technical knowledge to be superior to non-U.S. intellectuals. Rather than establishing reciprocal relationships with foreign diplomats, U.S. officials followed a top-down model of engagement. In contrast, Mexican officials hoped to shift postwar diplomatic dialogues away from U.S. exceptionalism toward a more inclusive approach that valued the technical knowledge and contributions of Mexicans and, more broadly, Latin Americans. As Kelly’s notes exemplify, the contradictions between these two styles of diplomacy resulted in heightened animosity between the representatives and consequently limited opportunities for collaboration.

Whereas other scholars focus on Kelly’s career as an archaeologist or briefly note her role on a particular anthropological project, the depth and breadth of her international work remains largely untouched. Yet her extensive experiences in Mexico in the decades immediately following World War II, as well as brief assignments in Bolivia and Pakistan, offer a distinct perspective on the changing nature of the relationship between anthropologists and technical cooperation programs during the Cold War. They highlight Kelly’s intentional efforts to combat professional gender bias and to amplify women’s voices in community studies. And they demonstrate the significant role that anthropology played in politicizing modernization programs aimed at assimilation. Although anthropologists working in rural areas spoke directly with community members to learn more about their health and economic needs, the data they collected confirmed for politicians a general call for state intervention. Consequently, decisions regarding project programming, funding, and desired outcomes were based almost entirely on the agendas of state, national, and international leaders rather than on the expressed needs of the local citizens.

Isabel Kelly’s international work grew out of her well-established career as an anthropologist and archaeologist in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. She was born in Santa Cruz, California, in 1906 and raised in a nurturing household that encouraged independence and intellectual thought. Both she and her younger sister, Evelyn, attended the University of California, Berkeley. Isabel graduated with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology in 1926 and remained at the school to pursue graduate study. She worked with some of the biggest names in the field, including Alfred L. Kroeber, Robert H. Lowie, Edward W. Gifford, and Carl O. Sauer, while researching her master’s thesis on northwestern California Indian art. After spending a summer conducting fieldwork with archaeologist Alfred V. Kidder in New Mexico’s Pecos Pueblo, she completed her own doctoral research on the Northern Paiute and Coast Miwok Indigenous cultures of Northern California. She earned her PhD in anthropology with a dissertation on the “Fundamentals of Great Basin Culture” in 1932. After graduation, she received funding from the National Research Council to conduct research among the Southern Paiute as a counterpart to her work on the Northern Paiute. While in the field, however, she received word that Kroeber and Sauer nominated her to lead an archaeological project in Sinaloa, Mexico. She moved to Mexico in 1935 to oversee the initial excavation of Sinaloa’s Culiacán and Chametla sites. After returning to the United States to lead Gila Pueblo’s excavations of the Hodges site, a Hohokam village in Tucson, Arizona, she again found her way to Mexico to continue working on excavations in Sinaloa, Jalisco, Colima, and Nayarit. She also expanded her reputation among intellectual circles in this period by publishing several research papers in academic journals and edited volumes.

This impressive list of accomplishments, particularly by a woman in what was still a male-dominated field, emphasizes Kelly’s determination to continuously learn and lead in anthropological and archaeological circles. Her strong nature, however, was not universally enjoyed. Marian E. Cummings, a photographer hired by Kroeber to accompany Kelly on an assignment in Jalisco, left the project early due to Kelly’s “constant complaining and bad disposition.” Kroeber, responding to Cummings’s resignation, wrote, “I am sure you will agree with me when I say that these unreasonable tensions in Isabel are the counterpart of the dynamic energy which causes her to be so grand and successful a scientist. Add the fact that she is over thirty, unmarried, and has never had a permanent job, and I think the psychology is understandable.” This quote is indicative of the prejudice against single, independent professional women during this period. Kelly regularly faced opposition to her strong will and staunch work ethic, even among her female collaborators. Regardless of how she came across to her colleagues, Kelly loved her work and became increasingly attracted to Mexico as a place to combine her passion for archaeological exploration and ethnographic fieldwork. She moved to the country permanently in 1939.

Nancy J. Parezo argues that contrary to the common belief that anthropology has historically been more open to women scholars than other fields, the influence of gender on power relations ensured that women have not always been treated as equals to their male counterparts. While many women “were determined that they be judged on the basis of their talents and merit alone,” they could not ignore the gender dynamics that kept them subservient to male leaders in the field. For her part, Kelly routinely pushed back against this norm, using correspondence, social occasions, and official reports to challenge her treatment as a female professional. She vocalized her dissatisfaction with often being mistaken for a diplomatic wife rather than a professional and advocated for more opportunities to work in the field as well as the classroom. She also encouraged young Mexican women to pursue degrees in anthropology and often hired her best female students to serve as her research assistants. All of these examples point to an intentional effort at capacity building for women who traditionally stayed home to provide domestic care for their families.

Kelly’s gendered experiences are also evident in her personal life. She maintained a close relationship with Bertha Harris, a U.S. librarian and cultural liaison who moved to Mexico City in 1941. Together, the two women worked, traveled, and shared a home that they co-designed on the outskirts of Mexico City. They were invited to events as a couple and hosted several parties of their own. These public expressions of their connectedness undoubtedly influenced how their U.S. and Mexican colleagues treated them, and after Bertha’s unexpected death in 1949, Kelly increasingly withdrew from public functions and social engagements. Instead, she focused all of her attention on work. Her research interests gradually shifted to follow the trajectory of women’s lives, from midwifery, curanderas, and maternal and child health to household dynamics, motherhood, and educational opportunities for working mothers. She recognized that she and her female students gained access to more domestic spaces than their male counterparts and utilized this advantage to learn more about the experiences, needs, and contributions of women in both domestic and community settings. She leveraged her position to document and record ideas related to morality, tradition, progress, and modernity as seen through the eyes of rural families. And her research clarified many discrepancies between official programming and individual interests as she found ways to bring women’s voices to the forefront of social welfare programs.

The University of Arizona Press