“Visions of Transformation” Excerpt

April 29, 2025

Based on nearly two years of immersive fieldwork, Visions of Transformation: Hegemony, Plurinationality, and Revolution in Bolivia, explores the relation between theoretical production and political practice. Through the contrasting perspectives of hegemony and plurinationality, Aaron Augsburger analyzes three specific conjunctural moments—a proposed highway through the TIPNIS, a conflict over representation of the highland Indigenous movement organization CONAMAQ, and the struggle for Indigenous autonomy—to shed light on the primary economic, social, political, and theoretical tensions at the heart of Bolivia’s proceso de cambio. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

The sky is still black when we leave the house in the early morning hours of June 21, the winter solstice in the southern hemisphere. It is cold, below freezing, as a friend and I hail a taxi to El Alto. We are not sure exactly where we need to go, but, with a quick phone call, our cab driver helps us find the corner where we can catch a minibus at this early hour to Jesús de Machaca for the ritual celebration of Willkakuti, the Aymara New Year. Officially named a national holiday in 2009, the celebration is a ritual inviting Tata Inti, the sun god, to provide a bountiful harvest in the coming year through offerings of coca, alcohol, and a sacrificial llama. Critics have charged the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS, Movement Toward Socialism) government with mobilizing indigenous symbols and practices such as Willkakuti for political gain, which is certainly true, but it is also possible to read these ritual celebrations as expressions of the power, vitality, and continuing relevance of indigeneity in Bolivian society.

We arrive to the area just outside Jesús de Machaca, near the ruins of Qunqhu Wankani, about an hour before sunrise, to a crowd of people surrounding a large fire in celebration of Willkakuti 5523. Not nearly as popular as the celebration at the pre-Incan ruins of Tiwanaku, where thousands gather for Willkakuti, this gathering is one of the less prominent across the highlands and attendees number in the hundreds. As bottles of the local Bolivian spirit Singani and bags of coca are shared, we shiver and wait for the first rays of sunlight to creep over the horizon, bringing both a reprieve from the cold and a new year. Hands raise to the sky as the sun begins to appear, and cheers ring out while offerings are made to Tata Inti, to Pachamama (Mother Earth), to health, to land, to Qullasuyu, to Bolivia, even to hermano Evo. More than just a celestial ritual of rejuvenation, the celebration and its accompanying symbols are thoroughly embedded in and representative of the ongoing processes of political, social, and economic transformation. With these thoughts in mind, I ask those around me how Willkakuti relates to the ongoing changes under the government of Evo Morales and his MAS party. A few people express to me their ongoing hope that the attention Morales has brought to the country can bring more tourists to the half-buried ruins, whose weatherworn structures might both provide economic benefits and foster appreciation of precolonial indigenous history. “While these cultural ruins are buried, they are still present,” one man tells me. “We are different now, nowadays we live in different ways, but what you see in the dirt here gives us life. It is a history with knowledge, one that offers guidance.”

Additionally, as part of the day’s celebration, community members choose their leaders for the upcoming subnational elections. Demonstrating a particular vision of democratic responsibility and accountability, community members line up behind their chosen candidates in an open grass field for all to see. After the electoral proceedings, the party really gets underway, with music, dancing, drinking, and general merriment to usher in the Aymara machaq mara (new year), at the midpoint of the Gregorian calendar year.

Willkakuti is organized through indigenous symbols and ritual practice that point to a continuous indigenous history in what is today called Bolivia. Yet, despite this traditional underpinning, Willkakuti is interlaced and overlaid with any number of other, so-called modern symbols and practices. In its current form, the solstice celebration emerged in the late 1970s as part of a larger indigenous cultural revival, and its official recognition in 2009 symbolizes the continuation of that movement in a new phase. The ritual, at least at the local level, expresses the salience of a plurinational project that emerged around the same time as the current version of Willkakuti. At a larger national or international level, the ritual celebration also provides legitimacy for the MAS project of nation-state hegemony as one composed of indigenous worldviews and indigenous bodies. This ritual offers a contrasting set of social symbols and practices and, therefore, serves as a good representation for much of what I analyze and argue in this book. The juxtaposition of “tradition” and “modernity” in the particular ritual of Willkakuti, I believe, offers insight into Bolivia as a social and political formation, while also helping us interpret contemporary processes of change that have been underway since the beginning of the twenty-first century. With both the national tricolor Bolivian flag and the indigenous multicolored wiphala flying over the festivities, local modes of democratic practice and official electoral contests operating alongside one another, and temporalities based on indigenous and Western calendars occurring concurrently—this scene offers a vision of Bolivian society as a mosaic of contrasting yet overlapping political, social, and cultural forms that exist side by side yet express distinct historical trajectories and alternative visions of a future Bolivia. Yet, more than just symbolizing Bolivian society, the solstice celebration offers a theoretical and empirical point of entry for making sense of the ambiguous and contradictory process of social change in Bolivia during the era of Evo Morales.


Aaron Augsburger is an assistant professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies at the University of South Florida.

Excerpt from “Mexico Between Feast and Famine”

April 9, 2025

México Between Feast and Famine: Food, Corporate Power, and Inequality provides one of the first comprehensive analyses of Mexico’s food systems and how they reflect the contradictions and inequalities at the heart of Mexico. Enrique C. Ochoa examines the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of neoliberal policies that have reshaped food production, distribution, and consumption in Mexico. Ochoa analyzes the histories of Mexico’s mega food companies, including GRUMA, Bimbo, Oxxo, Aurrera/Walmex, and reveals how corporations have captured the food system at the same time that diet-related diseases have soared. The author not only examines the economic and political dimensions of food production but also interrogates the social and cultural impacts. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

Food as a Way of Being and Living

For thousands of years, the country now known as Mexico was a complex mix of diverse regions and societies. The numerous communities and civilizations that developed over millennia formed distinct ways of life, languages, cultures, and ways of knowing. Food sources, cooking methods, and even concepts of food varied regionally, contributing to the formation of different cuisines. The cultivation of maize shaped many regional and community identities in central and southern Mexico, fostering the creation of sedentary communities. Nevertheless, the diversity and autonomy of local communities and cultures remained strong. While scholars have recognized this diversity, the power of centralizing nation-states, capitalist markets, and conventional scholarship have obscured the history of this México profundo rooted in diverse Indigenous histories and constructed an imaginary Mexico that appears as a unified whole, in the words of Mexican anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla. This México imaginario undermines and erases the pluriverse of cultures, communities, and knowledges.

Beginning approximately eight to ten thousand years ago in Mesoamerica, including present-day central and southern Mexico and the Central American countries of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, food and cuisine were closely connected to the development of sedentary agriculture and the cultivation of maize. Maize was cultivated from wild grasses, known as teosinte, at least eleven thousand years ago (between 10,000 and 9,000 BCE). The earliest archaeological evidence of maize cultivation has been found in the current state of Guerrero, Mexico, dating back to 8759 BCE and in the Tehuacán Valley in Puebla (7900 BCE). The oldest “distinctly recognizable, unequivocally dated maize cobs” were found in the Valley of Oaxaca dated from approximately 6,230 years ago. It is believed that maize cultivation spread throughout Mesoamerica and then to North America and South America such that by 1700 BCE maize was found as far north as Ohio and as far south as Chile.

Maize cultivators developed the knowledge of which seeds do better in which soil depending on climatic conditions over generations. This knowledge and way of reading the land and the elements was central to how communities developed their worldviews. The taming of teosinte and the cultivation of larger ears of maize for various uses was the result of intentional seed saving, experimentation, and breeding processes developed over the course of millennia. The holistic science of maize cultivation that emphasized quality over quantity has persisted despite colonial and capitalist obsession with quantity above all else. At present, scholars identify at least fifty-nine landraces of maize in Mexico and thousands of different varieties.

The care with which communities cultivated and prepared maize and other crops reflected their importance both as ways of life and sources of nutrition. Maize developed as the basis of Mesoamerican cuisines and was consumed in numerous forms, including solids (tortillas, tamales, memelas, tlacoyos, totopos, gorditas, pinole, rosetas, and palomitas), and semi- solids and liquids (pozole, atole, tejate, rescalate, esquiate, chicha, tesgüiño, tepache), to name but a few. There were significant regional variations in the preparation of these foods. Tamales, for example, with masa (maize dough) as their base, included different ingredients reflecting on local history and agro-ecological factors, such that “the choice of tamale fillings was endless.” Hence tamales varied widely by region, as cooks creatively adapted them for different occasions.

The innumerable uses of maize are also reflected in the multiple names in Indigenous languages for maize in its different forms and stages of development. Early Spanish conquerors remarked on the diversity of names in Nahuatl, “when it is on the cob (mazorca in Spanish) it is called centli; after it has been taken off the cob it is called tlaullii; when the seed sprouts until it is an arm’s length it is called tloctli. . . . When the cob is . . . young it is called xilotli.” The numerous varieties of maize and the complexities of breeding maize for different uses, soils, and climatic conditions, naming different types of maize, and preparing it in innumerable ways attests to the centrality of maize in Mesoamerican communities.

Many Mesoamerican origins stories link maize to the creation of humans. According to the the Popul Vuh, the K’iche Maya book of creation, after searching for a good material to make humans, the gods decided on masa: “From yellow corn and white corn his flesh was made; from corn dough the arms and legs.” In Mexica or Aztec creation stories, humans were created five different times. On the fifth attempt, humans were nourished with maize, which helps explain why the world has lasted so long. Variants of Mexica lore explain that maize was introduced by the god Quetzalcoatl and served as the basic building block of Mexican civilization. Alfredo López Austin documented several Mesoamerican origin stories that center maize at the beginning of civilization: “many of these myths concerning maize have been passed down from a remote and imprecise time in ancient Mesoamerican history up to our present day, making it evident that rural maize has been of vital historic concern to rural communities.” Thus, the presence of maize created a common food history and culture throughout Mesoamerica despite the great diversities of peoples, histories, and cultures.

Excerpt from Walled

March 27, 2025

Bringing together recognized scholars in border studies, Walled: Barriers, Migration, and Resistance in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands delves into the varied manifestations and lived experiences associated with U.S.-Mexico border walls. The Introduction by Andréanne Bissonnette and Élisabeth Vallet offers a thorough review of the border walls’ thirty-year history, placing it within a global context. Contributions offer diverse perspectives of the border experience, from state policies and migrant experiences to the daily lives of border residents. Topics such as militarization, migration, artistic resistance, and humanitarian aid are carefully examined. This volume is an essential resource for policymakers, activists, scholars, and anyone seeking to understand the intricate realities of border communities and the far-reaching consequences of border policies. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

In 1993, then-U.S. president Bill Clinton oversaw the construction of the first stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border walls. Since then, every U.S. president has allowed for the construction of additional miles of walls or fences. Most recently, despite promising to halt Donald J. Trump’s plans for the southern border, in July 2022 President Joe Biden authorized the construction of a wall in four places in Arizona. From San Diego-Tijuana to Brownsville- Matamoros, swathes of border walls lacerate the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. However, through the years, the nature of fencing has evolved. On the one hand, physical constructions have changed from low-rise fences to thirty-foot-high-steel walls; on the other, border walls have also morphed into a sophisticated, sprawling administrative, legal, legislative, and biometric apparatus. Far from merely marking the international line, they have permeated many aspects of daily life in the borderlands and beyond.

To understand the current state of the U.S.-Mexico border and the walls that shape it, we need to delve into this space’s various historical phases.

The Establishment of the U.S.- Mexico Border as We Know It

Understanding the current state of the U.S.-Mexico border—and its walls—requires stepping back to grasp how the border came to be, as the history of the border still lingers today, impacting the territory, social relations in the region, and the way the region is constructed and perceived (Ganster and Lorey 2008; Grandin 2019). In 1848, the ratification of the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty marked the end of the U.S.- Mexico war, which originated in dissonant visions of the two countries’ territorial expansion aims (St. John 2012). Following the victory of U.S. troops, the treaty conferred parts of Mexico to the United States. On its eastern part, the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo delineates the boundary between the two nation- states, effectively dividing communities that previously belonged to the same country. On its western front, in the absence of a continuous natural marker, the border has been created “by simply drawing straight lines between a few geographically important points on a map—El Paso, the Gila River, the junction of the Colorado and Gila rivers, and San Diego Bay” (St. John 2012, 2). Five years later, a renegotiation of the treaty ceded southern Arizona and southwest New Mexico to the United States, establishing the borderline as we know it now.

While initially considered a rough and remote zone of the United States that elicited little economic or political focus from Washington, the region—and more specifically the border—attracted people as west-ward expansion and capitalist activity increased. The meanings of the border as an interface between two sovereignties, a place of economic activity and growth, and a filter for individual movements gradually cemented themselves: they still influence the perception, discussion, and policing of the border.

The Wall, an Idea Across Decades

Tightening surveillance and border controls have accompanied economic activity and population growth in the border region. The 1910 Mexican Revolution and the deterioration of relations between Mexico City and Washington added to the U.S. government’s insecurities, which translated into a need for increased border security. This was reflected in particular by a surge in controls on cross-border mobility and the erection of the first sections of fences between the two states (St. John 2012). These first manifestations of a physical divide between the two countries stemmed from ranchers’ push to prevent cattle movements across the border and from border towns’ initiatives to channel individuals toward official points of entry. Initially, as St. John highlights, these fences were not aimed at demarcating a division or preventing crossings. However, in 1929, the fence that had been erected in Ambos Nogales in response to the instability stemming from the Mexican Revolution was reinstated in the form of a six-foot-high chain-link fence with electric lights at the two border gates (Arreola 2004). Thus, since 1920, the southern border has been perceived and defined as a place of immigration control, with the first screenings of Mexican nationals occurring in 1930 (St. John 2012) and fences to reinforce crossing points appearing during the 1940s (St. John 2018). By the end of the 1970s, Congress had approved funding to replace some of the existing rusted urban fences and add six miles to them (Grandin 2019), a policy that sparked strong opposition from Mexican-American civil rights groups over the initial intention to deploy razor wire on this new wall: this “tortilla curtain” episode resulted in the construction of a chain-link fence, without the razor wire (Townley 2016).


Andréanne Bissonnette is a postdoctoral researcher at the Border Policy Research Institute at Western Washington University and holds a PhD in political science. Her research, anchored in an intersectional analysis, focuses on Latinas’ experiences and perceptions of reproductive health services in the United States. Élisabeth Vallet is an associate professor at RMCC–Saint Jean, director of the Center for Geopolitical Studies (Raoul-Dandurand Chair, University of Quebec at Montreal—UQAM), affiliate professor at the UQAM Department of Geography. She is one of the co-researchers for the Borders in the 21th Century Program at the University of Victoria.

Excerpt from Specters of War

March 18, 2025

Specters of War: The Battle of Mourning in Postconflict Central America explores mourning practices in postwar Central America, particularly in El Salvador and Guatemala. Ignacio Sarmiento delves into the intricate dynamics of grieving through an interdisciplinary lens, analyzing expressions of mourning in literature, theater, and sites of memory. At the heart of this analysis is the contention over who has the right to mourn, how mourning is performed, and who is included in this process. Sarmiento reveals mourning not as a private affair but as a battleground where different societal factions vie for the possibility of grieving the dead.

Through meticulous research and theoretical nuance, Specters of War sheds light on the politics of mourning in postconflict societies. Sarmiento argues that mourning is not merely a personal experience but a deeply political act intertwined with power struggles and societal divisions. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

This chapter explores memorialization projects in postwar El Salvador and Guatemala. This topic is particularly relevant because, unlike cultural productions, such as the theater and fiction that will be studied in the following chapters, memorials, sites of memory, and museums are inscribed in the public landscape and as a result often enjoy larger visibility. Thus, independently of citizens’ religious beliefs and cultural, political, economic, or social capital, they often interact with different forms of memorialization in their daily lives even without noticing it. Studying processes of memorialization is relevant because despite the common assumption among academics and practitioners that memorialization is anything but neutral or apolitical, these sites are considered by many to be a reliable source of truthful information.

Memorialization in postwar El Salvador and Guatemala has been a controversial issue since the signing of the peace accords. The building (and also the absence) of memorials, museums, and sites of memory results from the struggle between power factions vying for visibility and legitimacy in postwar societies. In their study of postwar Guatemala, Steinberg and Taylor claim that landmarks and memorials can tell the observer not only who won the discursive battle of the internal armed conflict but also about the “continuing struggle for power.” Thus, what is at stake in the memorialization battle is not only who or what is memorialized but also who has the authority to memorialize.

Despite the overt recommendations made by the truth commissions, as of 2023 none of these countries has an official state- sponsored memory museum or memorial, as we find in other Latin American countries such as Chile and Argentina. Also, very little has been done overall to memorialize and honor the victims of the armed conflicts with the exception of some questionable or irrelevant projects that are discussed in the following pages. While someone not familiarized with Central America may be surprised at the almost nonexistent politics of memory, the truth is that this absence is well aligned with the general disinterest expressed by almost all postwar administrations. For example, human rights violations were systematically denied by postwar governments in El Salvador and Guatemala for over one decade after the end of the wars. Only in 2009, thirteen years after the signing of the peace accords, did Guatemalan president Álvaro Colom apologize concretely in the name of the state for the crimes committed during the internal conflict. (Previously, in 1998, President Álvaro Arzú offered a vague apology on the second anniversary of the peace accords, where he stated “yo pido perdón al pueblo de Guatemala por nuestras acciones u omisiones, por lo que hicimos o dejamos de hacer.” In 2005, Vice President Eduardo Stein apologized only to the relatives and victims of the 1982 massacre of Plan de Sánchez, during Óscar Berger’s presidency, following the sentence of the Inter- American Court of Human Rights. The absence of the president in such an important event cannot go unnoticed.) In 2011, Colom also apologized specifically to the victims of the massacre of Dos Erres, which took place in December 1982. Nevertheless, asking forgiveness in the name of the state did not introduce any lasting transformation either in terms of furthering transitional justice or in public opinion.

Starting in 2009 a handful of trials against high-ranking officials took place in Guatemala, but only a small number of them were convicted, and in only a few cases did the sentences involve reparation to the victims. The most noticeable case is arguably the trial of General Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemalan dictator from March 1982 to August 1983, accused of genocide. During Ríos Montt’s administration, the army conducted the most ruthless slaughtering of the civilian population, especially targeting Indigenous com-munities. In 2013 Ríos Montt went to trial for several massacres that had occurred in the Ixil region. Guatemala’s Supreme Court found Ríos Montt guilty, acknowledging the existence of a genocide against the Maya population during his administration, and sentenced him to eighty years in prison. Nevertheless, the trial was annulled a few days later for alleged flaws in the process, and Ríos Montt only remained under house arrest. New attempts to bring him to justice were made in 2015 and 2017, but none of them succeeded. Ultimately, Ríos Montt died, at age ninety- one, in 2018. Large segments of Guatemalan society seem unperturbed by all this. After the death of approximately two hundred thousand people and the juridical confirmation of the genocide against the Indigenous population, several powerful voices (including former presidents and presidential candidates) still claim that no hubo genocidio (there was no genocide) during the internal conflict.

The situation in El Salvador is no less disheartening. Only in 2010, eighteen years after the signing of the peace accords, President Mauricio Funes, the first FMLN president since the end of the war, asked for forgiveness in the name of the state for the crimes committed by the army during the internal conflict. Nevertheless, he specified that apologizing for war crimes did not mean seeking justice for the victims. Although transitional justice in Guatemala is scarce, there is more progress than in El Salvador, where the amnesty law remained in effect until 2016, but as of 2023 no case has been successfully prosecuted. The only person condemned for human rights violations during the Salvadoran civil war is former vice president of public security, Colonel Inocente Montano Morales, who stood trial in Spain, not in El Salvador, for the murdering of six Jesuit priests and two women in the Central American University in November 1989. He was sentenced to 133 years in prison in 2020.

The victims of the Central American civil wars are barely acknowledged by postwar administrations. Therefore, a politics of memory and projects of memorialization seem, unfortunately, a far- fetched idea even three decades after the end of the armed conflicts. The following pages will explore how some locations in postconflict Central America play an active role in the rich and complex web of memorialization and how they participate in the battle of mourning.

The tasks of grieving, humanizing, honoring, and remembering the dead have primarily been carried out by civil society organizations. In Diane M. Nelson’s words, this includes “DIY (do-it-yourself) projects—of memorials, reports, and other forms of commemoration.” It would be incorrect, how-ever, to say that the political parties, the former guerrillas, and the national armies do not mourn their dead. They do. But they have little interest in building a far- reaching community that can come together and grieve the dead, privileging instead a self- centered narrative that often seeks to justify the biggest atrocities. While I will consider several aspects in the analysis of these sites—such as their rhetoric, aesthetics, and historicity—my focus will be on how these places undertake (or avoid) the task of mourning the civil war’s losses. This chapter opens with theoretical and historical considerations regarding the construction of museums and memorials and their inherent connection to the work of mourning. The second part offers an overview of memorialization in postwar Guatemala, particularly in Guatemala City. The third and final section, which is also the lengthiest, provides an in- depth study of six sites of memory in present-day El Salvador.


Ignacio Sarmiento is an associate professor of Central American and Transborder studies at the California State University, Northridge. He is the co-editor of Central American Migrations in the Twenty-First Century and (Re)Imaginar Centroamérica en el siglo XXI. Sarmiento’s research focuses on postwar Central America and the Central American diaspora.

Excerpt from The Documented Child

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

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

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!

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.

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

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 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 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

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!

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.

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”

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.

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