Category: Excerpt

An Excerpt from ‘A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back’

Posted on June 29, 2022June 28, 2022 by Mari Herreras

June 29, 2022

In 1981, Chicana feminist intellectuals Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa published what would become a touchstone work for generations of feminist women of color—the seminal This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. To celebrate and honor this important work, editors gloria j. wilson, Joni B. Acuff, and Amelia M. Kraehe offer new generations A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back.

Here’s an excerpt from the book’s introduction that’s part of a larger Q&A interview the editors did with each other that shares details of the book, and more specifically here, why Love Letters:

AMY So why create a collection of love letters? What is the significance of that framing?

GLORIA Perhaps it’s because I grew up listening to stories my mother told about my father writing so many love letters to her during their courtship! It signifies deep commitment to human-being and living.

AMY gloria, that sounds so intimate.

JONI It’s very intimate. Meaning, it takes more time and effort. When you think about a love letter, you don’t think about somebody typing something out on a computer. You think about a handwritten letter, in cursive. It’s a romanticized representation of something mundane. It is illustrative of how something so simple can be presented in a profound way. Crafting a love letter is time- consuming, it takes effort and intentionality, and it also takes patience. It’s a different kind of energy, meaning that it’s an opportunity to be vulnerable in ways one might not be face-to-face.

AMY The intimacy that’s conveyed and captured in a love letter can, like you said, Joni, be about quotidian happenings, but life’s texture and complexity are contained in the everyday. So much insight can come from sharing the small bits of life. Those bits are passageways to deeper levels of understanding of another person and their condition. They are symbolic spaces for relationship, and those spaces are opportunities to touch or come into the presence of another being.

gloria, you said that your dad wrote love letters to your mom. We now have digital technologies that allow people to engage with each other very quickly all the time through text and social media, but a love letter is a classic form that has existed across time and in different geographic and cultural locations. It is inflected culturally and differently depending upon who is writing and the tradition that they come from, but it endures as a classic form of dialogue. I think that is important here. This book is in conversation, a deep, committed kind of conversation with the original Bridge authors, and with thousands of other folks. If we look at the number of Google citations for This Bridge Called My Back, it is in the thousands, and they keep climbing every day. That is just citations, to say nothing of the incalculable numbers of other readers who thumb the book’s pages each day. So A Love Letter is in conversation not only with the original Bridge writers but also with every-one who is reading that text and, like us, is passionate about theory in the flesh, sensing and making sense through aesthetic forms of philosophy, knowledge, communication, and collectivity. That is exciting to me, and maybe it is only possible through a love letter.

GLORIA Yeah. You know, as I was thinking about this question, I was thinking that one has to be vulnerable. So when I think of a love letter, I think of it as a radical act of care. It’s like humbling yourself to someone else, opening yourself wide and performing an act that is so private and personal. You know, a love letter is not intended for the world to witness, necessarily, although there are examples of public pronouncements of love. In all, it’s intended for the recipient in a very direct manner.

When I think about love letters that I have written, I recall including traces of myself in the form of swatches of fabric from clothing or artwork, with the intent of distilling, suspending, or cementing a memory. In the case of this Love Letter anthology, my desire was to offer an extension of the sentiments tied to the expression of a love letter, and yet I felt the need to share a space and record it collectively and in material form—record it with others for whom the original book has made an impact. In doing this, the question I thought with and attempted to answer was: What opportunity might be created as an acknowledgement of thanks for each of these women, for their work and its impact on my life because it may not be possible to do so in person?

My response was to attempt a collective love letter, as an insistence for radical love for women of color in the wake of forced silences and settlements via colonialisms and imperialisms; it is an aesthetic pronouncement—an outward declaration of gratitude. But in excess of this, to create an archive of collective voice. Moraga and Anzaldúa would refer to the contributors to This Bridge as “women from all kinds of childhood streets,” who speak to past, present, and current conditions of life in and into the afterlives of containment, migration, silencing, diaspora. For the contributors of the original text, This Bridge Called My Back, who are still present in this life and for those who exist with us in the afterlife— this book serves to express that I am thinking about and with them; thinking with their thoughts and sentiments and creative pronouncements, which reveal the conditions of their existence forty years ago. This Love Letter might illuminate traces of what is still occurring and what might emerge as contemporary conditions and our current moment. And that’s what is, in my opinion, the most radical act of care, like we said in the beginning. Like Joni said, it’s something that you put energy into, writing it out.

AMY Along the same lines as This Bridge, a collection like this one can be healing for so many people. Many contributors returned to the idea of bridges and bridging. Can a love letter be a bridge? Here I’m thinking not only of connection but also healing. Love letters heal in ways that may be different from bridges. Bridges enable us to move and transition. They connect one realm to another because they are liminal spaces, in- between spaces. But love letters might do something else. So in that sense, A Love Letter does not seek to replicate This Bridge. It is not an addition to a series or an attempt to replicate the original text. It is intending something different and for a very different moment in time.

***

gloria j. wilson is co-founder and co-director of Racial Justice Studio and an assistant professor in the School of Art at the University of Arizona. Her research centers cultural studies and Black studies engagements with theories of racial formations, anti-racism, and critical arts-based praxis.

Joni B. Acuff is an associate professor in the Department of Arts Administration, Education, and Policy at The Ohio State University. Acuff utilizes frameworks such as critical race theory, critical multiculturalism, Black feminist theory, and Afrofuturism to develop and disseminate pedagogical and curriculum strategies that activate critical race knowledge in art education.

Amelia M. Kraehe is associate vice president for equity in the arts, co-founder and co-director of Racial Justice Studio, and an associate professor in the School of Art at the University of Arizona. She researches and teaches about intersectional anti-racism, the arts, and creative agency. She is co-author of Race and Art Education and co-editor of Pedagogies in the Flesh: Case Studies on the Embodiment of Sociocultural Differences in Education and The Palgrave Handbook on Race and the Arts in Education.

Birds of the Sun: An Excerpt

Posted on March 30, 2022March 30, 2022 by Savannah Hicks

March 30, 2022

Birds of the Sun explores the many aspects of macaws, especially scarlet macaws, that have made them important to Native peoples living in this region for thousands of years. Although macaws have been noted and marveled at through the decades, new syntheses of early excavations, new analytical methods, and new approaches to understanding the past now allow us to explore the significance and distribution of scarlet macaws to a degree that was previously impossible. The expertise offered in this stunning new volume, which includes eight full color pages, will lay the groundwork for future research for years to come. The volume is edited by Christopher W Schwartz, Stephen Plog, and Patricia A. Gilman, and includes contributions from leading experts in their fields. Enjoy this excerpt from the book’s foreword, which was written by Charmion R. McKusick:

George H. Pepper was the first trained archaeologist to excavate Pueblo Bonito. Little could he have imagined that the macaws he placed in neatly labeled brown paper bags in 1896 would be removed seventy years later for species identification, aging, and illustration of pathologies; and then, fifty years later, they would be reanalyzed using current scientific methods, as part of this study. This examination illustrates the way in which avian studies can contribute to ongoing research. Pepper’s Room 38 macaws were unusual in that they had deeper crania and longer wings than the main body of archaeological macaws, and they appear to have been inbred. The available data suggest that at Chaco Canyon, a special group of humans bred scarlet macaws for some important purpose, over a long period of time.

Although the question of the relationships among Mesoamerica and the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico (SW/NW) has a long history in archaeological research, various studies in the twenty- first century have sought to trace the provenance of objects and materials that originated in Mesoamerica and were acquired and circulated interregionally. The study of scarlet macaws (Ara macao) and, to a lesser extent, military macaws (Ara militaris) and thick- billed parrots (Rhynchopsitta pachyrhyncha; plate 1) has received a particular emphasis due to their multifaceted significance, which stretches throughout the Americas. The presence of living macaws and other parrots in settlements of the SW/NW for months and occasionally years not only requires us to understand the cultural significance of these birds but also allows us to address key questions using new analytical techniques that target skeletal material. Some of these studies employ previously underutilized analytical techniques such as isotopic analyses (Schwartz 2020; Schwartz et al. 2021; Somerville et al. 2010), radiocarbon dating (Gallaga et al. 2018, 2021; George et al. 2018; Watson et al. 2015), and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analysis (Bullock 2007; Bullock and Cooper 2002; George et al. 2018).

New research on macaws is not limited to these types of analyses, however. Others have reviewed the historical issues in SW/NW macaw studies, focusing on key matters such as reassessing the likelihood of macaw breeding at Paquimé and determining the ages at which each macaw from archaeological deposits died (Abramson 1995; Crown 2016; Whalen, this volume). Still other analyses have examined previously gathered collections of macaws and other parrots to identify skeletal pathologies (Fladeboe and Taylor, this volume), clarify frequencies of the macaws and parrots in particular museum collections, and determine whether complete or only partial birds were recovered (e.g., Bishop 2019; Gilman, this volume; Lyons and Crown, this volume; Plog et al., this volume; Schwartz, this volume; Szuter, this volume), or explore the spatial distribution of macaws and parrots within sites relative to other birds and animals (Bishop and Fladd 2018; Plog et al., this volume). This recent spate of complementary research provided the impetus for an Amerind Foundation seminar on macaws and other parrots in April 2019, which in turn has led to the collection of studies presented in the following chapters.

In the archaeological record of the greater Southwest/Noroeste (SW/NW), the presence of macaws and other parrots dates back to at least 600 CE, in the Hohokam area, and to the Ancestral Pueblos in the Mimbres and Chaco regions at least by the tenth century CE (Gilman et al. 2014; Szuter, this volume; Vokes and Gregory 2007:328– 334; Watson et al. 2015). For the protohistoric Pueblos, macaw images are common on kiva murals in the Hopi and Rio Grande regions and on Sikyatki Polychrome by the fourteenth century (Crown 2016; Schaafsma, this volume). Pre- Columbian, historical, and present uses of macaw feathers in Pueblo ritual are profuse (Ladd 1963; Parsons 1939; Tyler 1991). At Hopi, for example, “there is archaeological evidence that parrots were sometimes kept alive by the Hopi for ceremonial purposes. . . . Parrot- bones have also been found in ruined villages of the Hopi not far from their present pueblos. . . . Parrot- feathers are highly prized by the Hopi for the ornamentation of their masks, and in former times were brought from the [O’odham and/or Maricopa] settlements on the Rio Gila and from the northern states of Mexico, where they were obtained by barter” (Fewkes 1900:691– 692, emphasis added). In this connection, sometimes the Hopi Parrot/Macaw Katsina (Kyarkatsina) performs as a huuyan, “bartering,” Katsina (Stephen 1936:282), seemingly encoding the earlier material practice.

The behavioral and genetic characteristics of parrots, including macaws, offer hints as to why human cultures have been so interested in them: “Like humans, parrots as a group have large brains relative to body size, a high density of neurons in the forebrain, advanced cognitive abilities including object permanence and tool use, complex social organization, vocalizations learned through cultural transmission using specialized brain circuits, cooperative problem solving, extended developmental and rearing periods, and exceptional longevity” (Wirthlin et al. 2018:4001). Add the beauty and polychromaticism of their feathers, susceptibility to domestication, and capacity to mimic human speech, and it is no wonder that macaws and parrots— throughout Europe, the Middle East, South and East Asia, and the Americas— have served as symbols, partners, and metonyms of their human “masters” globally: “The Maharajah of Nawanagar had a parrot, one hundred and fifteen years old, which traveled in a Rolls Royce and possessed an international passport; George V’s parrot, Charlotte, used to peruse state and confidential documents over his master’s shoulder. . . . As early as Ctesias, the parrot was praised for its bright plumage and its ability to speak. . . . A fine- looking parrot, wearing a collar and evidently a household pet, still remains on the walls of Pompeii” (Rowland 1978:120–121).

Preparing Native Graduate Students for Success: An Excerpt from American Indian Studies

Posted on March 18, 2022March 18, 2022 by Savannah Hicks

March 18, 2022

In American Indian Studies, Native graduates of the University of Arizona’s American Indian studies (AIS) doctoral program, the first of its kind, share their personal stories about their educational experiences and how doctoral education has shaped their identities, lives, relationships, and careers. Essayists share the benefits of having an AIS program at a mainstream academic institution—not just for the students enrolled, but also for their communities. American Indian Studies also offers Native students aspiring to a PhD a realistic picture of what it takes. While each student has their own path to walk, these stories provide the gift of encouragement and serve to empower Native students to reach their educational goals, whether it be in an AIS program or other fields of study. Read the excerpt below for a glimpse into the experiences of the essayists.

The editors asked Native UArizona AIS PhD graduates to write about their educational experiences earning their doctorates using storytelling, a traditional means of passing knowledge and information for Native Peoples. In the resulting chapters, nine Native graduates who hold the highest scholarly degree in the academy from the first AIS program highlight their personal voices and stories, sharing their messages, lessons, and advice as gifts to future American Indian graduate students.

Personal stories of mentorship, networking, relationships, reciprocity, sacrifices, commitment, challenges, and triumphs shape this book. These stories are unique to the individuals, their families, and their communities. Their narratives provide insight into the journeys of American Indian graduate students pursuing advanced degrees and their experiences after earning the degree. We (co-editors) hope that giving voice to the AIS Native doctoral graduates in these stories will inspire future generations of American Indian students to follow in their footsteps—stories that are realistic so Native students are better prepared to succeed.

The personal narratives of struggle and success shared throughout this book help to reduce the invisibility of Native doctoral students and graduates in the larger mainstream dialogue that result from such statistics (Blair 2015; Brayboy et al. 2012; Shotton et al. 2013). While each student has their own path to walk, these stories can also serve to empower others to reach their own educational goals, whether it be in an AIS program or other field of study.

American Indian Studies: Native PhD Graduates Gift Their Stories is a collection of personal narratives from nine Native graduates of the UArizona AIS doctoral program. Here, these alumni tell their own stories of endurance and resiliency, hardship and struggles, and accomplishment and success in their own words. Not only do their perspectives provide insight into the diverse and dynamic experiences of Native doctoral students but they also serve as role models of encouragement for those following in their footsteps. In all ways, they illustrate the extensive benefits of having an AIS program at a mainstream academic institution, not just for the students enrolled but for Native communities as well.

‘Once Upon the Permafrost’ Excerpt Printed in Sapiens Magazine

Posted on January 14, 2022 by Mari Herreras

January 14, 2022

Sapiens, an anthropology magazine of the Wenner‑Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, recently published an excerpt from Susan Alexandra Crate‘s new book, Once Upon the Permafrost: Knowing Culture and Climate Change in Siberia.

Crate has spent three decades working with Sakha, the Turkic-speaking horse and cattle agropastoralists of northeastern Siberia, Russia. In her book, she reveals Sakha’s essential relationship with alaas, the foundational permafrost ecosystem of both their subsistence and cultural identity. Sakha know alaas via an Indigenous knowledge system imbued with spiritual qualities. This counters the scientific definition of alaas as geophysical phenomena of limited range. Climate change now threatens alaas due to thawing permafrost, which, entangled with the rural changes of economic globalization, youth out-migration, and language loss, make prescient the issues of ethnic sovereignty and cultural survival.

From the excerpt:

“Our ancestors lived by the alaas, the round fields with forests shaped like an alaaji (small round pancake) with a lake,” Agrafina Vasilyevna Nazarova, a veteran preschool teacher, told me. Agrafina described the alaas as “a small world in and of itself” and a “birthplace” where a person could find fish and game, pasture and hay, and berries—everything needed to live.

These carefully articulated testimonies cast the alaas as an otherworldly place imbued with a lush, abundant, and vibrant nature. Yes, alaas is a physical place, but it is also a sacred vow with the ancestors—an entangled, interdependent set of relationships between human and nonhuman animals, plants, lakes, glades, and spirits.

Sakhas’ identity is founded upon their intimate human-environment relationship with alaas. What are the implications when they lose their alaas?

Across the planet, communities are witnessing the transformation of their significant cultural places, similar to how Sakha are losing alaas. What can forefronting these ways of knowing bring to the table in global climate policy configurations?

Botanist and Indigenous scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer offers her reflections on the matter in Braiding Sweetgrass. She contemplates the “energetic reciprocity” between the complementary colors of purple asters and goldenrod, likening it to the complementarity of Indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge.

As humans, we live interdependently within not only a planetary biosphere but what anthropologist Wade Davis terms the “ethnosphere,” or “the sum total of all the thoughts, dreams, ideals, myths, intuitions, and inspirations brought into being by the imagination since the dawn of consciousness.” Our common future depends not only on ameliorating the biophysical consequences of climate change but also on facilitating multiple cultural transformations, with a greater awareness of how different peoples are affected by and responding to unprecedented change.

We need both the goldenrod and the asters.

Metaphorically speaking, we all live on permafrost. Only by integrating scientific knowledge with Indigenous knowledge and local knowledge can we fully grasp the depth and breadth of our common plight and have any hope of finding our way out of the existential crisis of climate change.

To read the entire excerpt and check out Sapiens, visit here.

Diné Creativity and Identity: An Excerpt from ‘Returning Home’

Posted on January 14, 2022January 14, 2022 by Savannah Hicks

January 14, 2022

Returning Home features and contextualizes the creative works of Diné boarding school students at the Intermountain Indian School, which was the largest federal Indian boarding school between 1950 and 1984. Diné student art and poetry reveal ways that boarding school students sustained and contributed to Indigenous cultures and communities despite assimilationist agendas and pressures. Below, read an excerpt from the book.

In the twentieth century, Diné students attended an array of school programs, including (but not exclusively) the program at Intermountain. Returning Home contextualizes the various dynamic forms through which Native American students continued to deﬁne their identities in relation to their homelands, urban settings, and new spaces—in this case, at Intermountain. Such forms of Indigenous revitalization and innovation came through ceremony, prayer, music, song, speech, art, dance, and poetry, to name only a few examples and other forms of expression. In an analysis of the media through which boarding school students speak for themselves, this book delves into the intricacies of Indian boarding school experiences. While students faced forces to eradicate, manipulate, and diminish their Diné cultures and identities at the Intermountain boarding school during the late twentieth century, student artists and writers also harnessed their educational experiences for their empowerment and revival as Indigenous youth. By collaborating with Diné communities such as the Navajo Intermountain Alumni Association, and then by centering on student experiences, this book underscores Indigenous living histories that continue to revitalize and affect many Indigenous families and communities.

We seek to bridge different communities and primarily serve Diné Intermountain alumni by “returning home” their creative works and acknowledging their pains and joys lived in colonizing systems of boarding school education. Ho- Chunk scholar Amy Lonetree exempliﬁes the signiﬁcance of “shared authority” in Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums, which we have sought to emulate by working with Diné communities, families, and professionals. Lonetree also stresses “speaking the hard truths of colonialism”: “It is time for us communities to acknowledge the painful aspects of our history along with our stories of survivance, so that we can move toward healing, well-being, and true self-determination.” This work pays tribute to Intermountain students’ lives and stories, for their posterity and for all to remember what they endured and created in some of the hardest circumstances that power dynamics and injustices of colonialism set. Because we are trying to reach a spectrum of audiences, including the general public and Diné communities, we pursue a balance that prioritizes the students’ own voices over academic terms, theories, and frameworks. This book is based on our co-curated exhibit, Returning Home: The Art and Poetry of Intermountain Indian School, 1954–1984, which carried home the arts and creative writing of former Intermountain students to the Navajo Nation. The traveling exhibit featured the students’ learning journey and expressions of home, family, school, and global consciousness, paralleling Diné teachings of the seasons of life that align with the Four Sacred Mountains from East, South, West, and North.

Message from Miriam Davidson’s ‘Beloved Border’ Reaches Op-Ed Pages

Posted on November 8, 2021 by Mari Herreras

November 8, 2021

The Progressive Magazine recently published an editorial by Miriam Davidson, author of Beloved Border: Humanity and Hope in a Contested Land, examining the latest statistics on border life and policy with a reminder that the problems can be resolved with “radical rethinking and deep, consistent attention.”

Davidson’s new book, published by the University of Arizona Press, shares the history of sanctuary and argues that this social movement and others that have originated on the border are vanguards of larger global movements against the mistreatment of migrant workers and refugees, police brutality, and other abuses of human and natural rights. Davidson gives concrete examples of positive ways in which border people are promoting local culture and cross-border solidarity through health care, commerce, food, art, and music. While death and suffering continue to occur, the book shows us how the U.S.-Mexico border could be, and in many ways already is, a model for peaceful coexistence worldwide.

Here’s an excerpt from the editorial:

In September, we all saw the pictures of mounted patrolmen maneuvering their horses and long reins in an attempt to corral Haitian migrants along the Texas border. These photos evoked the ugliness of 19th century “slave patrols” in the United States, as well as the enslavement of Haitians under French colonial rule in the 18th century.

Less well known is that, so far this year, at least 190 sets of human remains have been found in Arizona’s deserts. Forty-three were found in June, the highest one-month total since July 2010. More than half of the remains were discovered within one week of death—16 were located within one day. Migrants have also died while trying to cross the Rio Grande, including a nine-year-old girl in March.

To read the entire editorial, go here. The editorial was picked up by The Miami Herald.

Local Love for ‘Discovering Mars’ on History of the Red Planet

Posted on November 2, 2021November 2, 2021 by Mari Herreras

November 2, 2021

Big thanks to the Tucson Weekly for featuring Discovering Mars A History of Observation and Exploration of the Red Planet on a recent cover with an excerpt on the history of the Phoenix mission:

A successful and historic Mars landing occurred during the eventful first decade of the 21st century. NASA’s Discovery program of small, competitively selected missions led by individual scientists was proving to be a success not only in terms of cost-effective science return, but also in terms of innovative ideas captured for new missions. (The program typically attracted around 25– 30 proposals from the planetary science community for each of the four open competitive opportunities that had been announced since 1994.) However, the program presented an additional hurdle for Mars exploration: while Mars missions could be proposed to Discovery, they had to compete with outstanding mission proposals to the rest of the solar system and thus had low odds of success and couldn’t be built into a more strategic component of NASA’s Mars program. G. Scott Hubbard and others thus came up with the idea of creating a low-cost and high-innovation set of missions following the Discovery model, but specifically for NASA’s long-term Mars Exploration Program. The resulting “Mars Scout” program announced its first mission proposal opportunity in 2002. Around 25 proposals were submitted, reinforcing the notion that the community had lots of great Mars-specific mission ideas to pitch to NASA.

Discovering Mars, by William Sheehan and Jim Bell, vividly conveys the way our understanding of this other planet has grown from earliest times to the present. The story is epic in scope—an Iliad or Odyssey for our time, at least so far largely without the folly, greed, lust, and tragedy of those ancient stories. Instead, the narrative of our quest for the Red Planet has showcased some of our species’ most hopeful attributes: curiosity, cooperation, exploration, and the restless drive to understand our place in the larger universe. Sheehan and Bell have written an ambitious first draft of that narrative even as the latest chapters continue to be added both by researchers on Earth and our robotic emissaries on and around Mars, including the latest: the Perseverance rover and its Ingenuity helicopter drone, which set down in Mars’s Jezero Crater in February 2021.

To read the entire excerpt, visit here.

Inside the Book: Postcards from the Baja California Border

Posted on September 28, 2021 by Abby Mogollon

September 28, 2021

Postcards have a magical pull. They allow us to see the past through charming relics that allow us to travel back in time. Daniel D. Arreola’s Postcards from the Baja California Border offers a window into the historical and geographical past of storied Mexican border communities. Once-popular tourist destinations from the 1900s through the 1950s, the border communities explored in Postcards from the Baja California Border used to be filled with revelers, cabarets, curio shops, and more. The postcards in this book show the bright and dynamic past of California’s borderlands while diving deep into the historic and geographic significance of the imagery found on the postcards. With 313 color images, this book creates a vivid picture of what life was like for tourists and residents of these towns in the early and mid-twentieth century. Today, we share a sample of the wonderful postcards pictured in this new work.

Fig. 2.12 Tourist group in front of Magruder’s Photo Shop, Tijuana real photo.
Tourist group sans costumes in front of Magruder’s Photo Shop next door to the Big Curio Store in downtown Tijuana. In front of Magruder’s are panels holding sale samples of his real photo postcards. On the verso of some of his postcards, Magruder had ink stamped “Duplicates of this Photo can be had by sending 15c and mentioning Negative Number to—ROY W. MAGRUDER, SAN DIEGO, CAL.” Roy W. Magruder, 1910s.

Fig. 4.6 Greetings from Tijuana Mexico, print postcard.
“Greetings from Tijuana, Mexico.” This postcard was published for The Big Curio Store, Lower California Commercial Co., Inc., Tijuana, Mexico by Western Publishing and Novelty Co., no. 123366, Los Angeles, CA, 1920s. The Big Curio Store published additional versions of this postcard printed by Curt Teich, Chicago, IL, in 1935 (5A-H1106) and in 1950 (OC-H961).

Fig. 4.20 Honeymoon couple posed in a Tijuana burro cart, real photo postcard.
Honeymoon couple posed in a Tijuana burro cart, 1951. So-called burros pintados de cebra (burros painted to look like zebras) became all the rage by the 1950s. The burros were rented to photographers by the Lorenzo Franco family, who maintained the animals in a corral on Callejón Z, an alley off Avenida Revolución.

Fig. 9.24 Residences in Colonia Moderna, Mexicali, real photo postcard.
Residences in Colonia Moderna. A post–World War II neighborhood in Mexicali, these housescapes mirrored those common to American middle-class suburbs with sidewalks, property setbacks, ornamental landscaping, and modern house plans. México Fotográfico 116, 1950s.

Fig. 10.5 Governors meet on Baja boundary dividing Calexico and Mexicali, real photo postcard.
William Stephens, Governor of California, and Esteban Cantú, governor of the northern district of Baja California, meet on the boundary line dividing Calexico and Mexicali, June 11, 1918. Photo postcard, 1918.

Fig. 11.9 Palace Cabaret and Cantina, Mexicali, nighttime real photo postcard.
Palace Cabaret and Cantina. Nighttime photography became something of a specialty of Mexicali postcard photographers who documented the “White Way” cabarets of the border town. Foto. Iris, 1910s.

***

Daniel D. Arreola is a cultural and historical geographer who specializes in the study of the Mexican American borderlands. He is an emeritus professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University. His most recent book is Postcards from the Chihuahua Border: Revisiting a Pictorial Past, 1900s–1950s.

Excerpt from Miriam Davidson’s ‘Beloved Border’

Posted on September 22, 2021September 20, 2021 by Mari Herreras

September 22, 2021

The Tucson Weekly recently ran a excerpt from University of Arizona Press author Miriam Davidson‘s new book, The Beloved Border: Humanity and Hope in a Contested Land as a cover story. The excerpt features Gary Paul Nabhan, a University of Arizona Press author and ethnobotonist, on looking at the border wall differently.

Here’s a portion of the excerpt:

The Solar Wall

Ethnobotanist, nature writer and sustainable agriculture advocate Gary Nabhan was another Mexican-identified, Anglo border person with a vision for the future. Founder of Native Seeds/SEARCH, Nabhan held the Kellogg Endowed Chair in Food and Water Security for the Borderlands at the University of Arizona Southwest Center. He lived with his wife, a nurse practitioner, on a quiet ranch nestled among the rolling hills outside Patagonia, Arizona. I drove down from Tucson to interview him on a crystal-blue-sky winter morning in February 2018.

Nabhan met me at the highway in his Prius, and I followed him along a winding dirt road, past the Native Seed farm, with a sign that said “Nabhan” in Arabic (he is of Lebanese descent), then up a small hill to a comfortable, light-filled home. The living room overlooked the farm and had a sweeping view of the surrounding mountains. There we talked about the solar wall and other forward-thinking ideas for sustainable border development.

The idea for a solar wall was first proposed by Mexican poet, diplomat and environmental activist Homero Aridjis in response to Trump’s call to build a wall. A friend of Nabhan’s, Aridjis was known for his innovative, problem-solving ideas. He’d founded an organization called the Group of 100 that, among other efforts, helped fight air pollution in Mexico City, create monarch butterfly sanctuaries in Michoacán, and save endangered whales, sea turtles and vaquitas (tiny, nearly extinct porpoises) in the Gulf of California. In a December 2016 Huffington Post article, Aridjis and solar energy advocate James Ramey proposed, instead of a wall, an array of solar collectors on the border that would generate power, provide jobs, and be wildlife friendly and culturally sensitive.

The idea was later picked up in a Wall Street Journal op-ed written by Vasilis Fthenakis, director of the Center for Life Cycle Analysis at Columbia University, and Ken Zweibel, then director of the Solar Institute at George Washington University. They calculated that a string of solar panels built along on the Mexican side could generate two thousand gigawatts of electricity a year, enough to power the entire border region on both sides, while being far less costly and environmentally damaging than a wall.

To read the entire excerpt, visit the Tucson Weekly here.

Children of the Dragonfly: The Literature of Boarding Schools

Posted on July 23, 2021July 28, 2021 by Abby Mogollon

July 26, 2021

By Robert Bensen

The recent discoveries of over 1,000 Indigenous children’s graves near boarding and residential schools are the latest developments in the story of assimilative, arguably genocidal education in the U.S. and Canada. In poetry, fiction, and memoir, the boarding school experience is represented in Children of the Dragonfly, the first anthology of Indian literature devoted to Indian child education and welfare. The anthology also includes literature on adoption and foster care, when some 35 percent of Indian children were raised in non-Indian settings during the Sixties Scoop in Canada and the U.S. crisis that led to passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978. Dragonfly is an ancient spirit in the Zuni story that saves two abandoned children and restores them to their people. That spirit is infused in the literature collected in Children of the Dragonfly.

Boarding schools were created to assimilate Indian children to the white world, which required the loss of cultural traditions. The literature tells us, however, that children kept their stories and practices as much as they could. U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky” (1994) retells the ancient creation story in the story of Johnny and Lila. Together they endured the rigors and privations of boarding school, but afterward went their separate ways. Johnny joined the army. Lila worked at Dairy Queen and cleaned houses until she entered the story that had been her refuge at school. She married one of the stars and lived in the Sky World, where she was sure “she could find love in a place that did not know the disturbance of death.” One day, however,

a song climbed up her legs from far away, to the rooms of her heart. Later she would tell Johnny it was the sound of destiny, which is similar to a prayer reaching out to claim her. You can’t ignore these things, she would tell him, and it led her to the place her husband had warned her was too sacred for women. She looked into the forbidden place and leaped.

Lila fell from the sky world into Johnny’s arms in the parking lot of a Safeway store. The poem enacts what boarding school had not destroyed: the strength of survivorship in him, and in her, knowing that the old story she first heard in her mother’s womb would guard and nurture her all her life long.

By separating children from their tribe and family, the boarding school created problems in parenting and in inter-generational relations. The anthology includes an excerpt of the 1891 War Department propaganda novel Stiya, ghost-written to discourage Carlisle graduates from returning to their families and tribal ways. Other fiction by Lee Maracle (“Black Robes”) and Luci Tapahonso (“The Snakeman”) trace generational conflicts and social relations created by removal. Black Bear’s memoir “Who Am I?” portrays the extreme emotional, physical, and spiritual damage to parent-child relations and to identity from boarding school life, and the cost of rebuilding what had been lost.

Many boarding schools were operated by religious organizations to convert as well as assimilate Native children. E. Pauline Johnson’s 1913 story “As It Was in the Beginning” reveals the hypocrisy beneath the promise that the Black Robe Father made to Esther’s Cree father to “save her from hell” and make of her a “noble woman.” Esther grows to womanhood in the school of the Black Robe Father, whose nephew falls in love with her and asks his uncle for permission to marry her. The Black Robe is horrified and says that despite her upbringing she “comes of uncertain blood…[and] you can never tell what lurks in a caged animal that has once been wild.” Esther overhears him denying her everything he had promised plus the love of her life because of her race, calling her a “strange snake.” She thinks,

What were his years of kindness and care now? What did I care for his God, his heaven, his hell? He had robbed me of my native faither, of my parents, of my people, of this last, this life of love that would have made a great, good woman of me. God! how I hated him!

She remembers the arrow-head tipped with snake venom that her mother had given her years before and warned her not to touch. She steals into her beloved’s room when he’s asleep and scratches his wrist twice, like a snake bite. Then she leaves and returns to her family, only to dream nightly her nightmare “of the white man’s hell. Why did they teach me of it, only to fling me into it?”

Children were often punished brutally for speaking their Native language, since language is the repository of culture and collective memory. Gordon D. Henry, Jr’s short story “The Prisoner of Haiku” (1992) is at once a horrific and lyrical imagining of a cruel but ultimately unsuccessful repression for The Prisoner’s speaking his language:

Two strong men with the force of God and Jesus who knows what else dragged him outside on a bitter wind-chilled Minnesota day and tied him to an iron post. They left him then without food, without water, through the night. Somehow the men believed the force of the cold, the ice hand of winter would reach out and take the boy by the throat and silence his native language. The other boys heard the punished boy screaming in defiance all night, defending the language, calling wind, calling relatives, singing, so he wouldn’t forget. The screaming went on all night, and in the morning, on a bright, winter day, when the school fathers went out to untie him, the boy could speak no more. When he opened his mouth to try, less than a whisper stirred air. Boys who were close to him then said that though they heard nothing, they felt something: a coolness floated out of his mouth and went directly to their ears to the point where—the boys claimed—their hearing was frozen in time. They felt the breath-held syllables melt in their heads later, in the words of the Anishinaabe language, and still later in Native translations of circumstances and relationships that they never would have thought of without remembering the cold in their ears. Moreover, boys who went to the same boarding school, years later, testified to hearing Native words whirling up with every snow from sundown to sunrise in their winters at that place.

New revelations about the Boarding School Movement will continue to come to light and add to our factual knowledge. The effects of the schools will also continue to be represented in poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and other imaginative literature by Indigenous writers. The work collected in Children of the Dragonfly is part of that legacy.

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Robert Bensen is co-editor of Iroquois Voices, Iroquois Visions: A Celebration of Contemporary Six Nations Arts and has authored numerous essays on Native literature and child custody. He is Professor Emeritus and Director of Writing (1978-2017) at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, where he taught American Indian law and literature. His poems have been published in six collections and in numerous journals. His work has been recognized with fellowships and awards from the NEA, the NEH, Harvard University, NYSCA, Illinois Arts Council, and others. He is the director of Woodland Arts Editions and of the Seeing Things community workshop at Bright Hill Press and Literary Center. https://robertbensen.com/

The University of Arizona Press