Category: Excerpt

Excerpt from “Mother Tongues of the High Andes”

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

November 20, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpt from “Archaeological Structuration”

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

November 19, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

November 11, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpt from “Avocado Dreams”

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

November 4, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpt from “Rooted in Place”

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

October 28, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpt from “Indigenous Alliance Making”

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

October 14, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpt from “Gathering Together, We Decide”

Posted on October 9, 2025October 1, 2025 by Victoria Stapleton

October 9, 2025

Gathering Together, We Decide: Archives of Dispossession, Resistance, and Memory in Ndé Homelands by Margo Tamez, Cynthia Bejarano, and Jeffrey P. Shepherd is a unique collection that spotlights powerful voices and perspectives from Ndé leaders, Indigenous elders, settler-allies, Native youth, and others associated with the Tamez family, the Ndé defiance, and the larger Indigenous rights movement to document their resistance; expose, confront, and end racism and militarization; and to foreground Indigenous women-led struggles for justice.

In 2007, the Department of Homeland Security began condemnation proceedings on the property of Dr. Eloisa Tamez, a Lipan Apache (Ndé) professor, veteran, and title holder to land in South Texas deeded to her ancestors under the colonial occupation and rule of King Charles III of Spain in 1761, during a time when Indigenous lands were largely taken and exploited by Spanish colonizers. Crown grants of lands to Indigenous peoples afforded them the opportunity to reclaim Indigenous title and control. The federal government wanted Tamez’s land to build a portion of the “border wall” on the U.S.-Mexico border. She refused. In 2008, the Department of Homeland Security sued her, but she countersued based on Aboriginal land rights, Indigenous inherent rights, the land grant from Spain, and human rights. This standoff continued for years, until the U.S. government forced Tamez to forfeit land for the wall. Read an excerpt from the book’s Foreword below.

I’m Eloisa Taméz, and I’m one of the landowners who had the misfortune of being one of those selected to have the border wall built across my land. And I wanna tell you that the land that we’re standing on is a remnant of the San Pedro de Carricitos Land Grant, which was awarded to my family in 1767. At that time, it was over 12,600 acres. I have three acres here, but it is just as special as if it were 12,000 acres. And it’s just as sacred to me and my family as if it were 12,000. The size doesn’t matter; it’s what it represents.

This is the land that—where my father and my grandfather carved a life for us by farming and raising stock so that we would have good nutrition and a good lifestyle. So, in spite of the poverty that we were experiencing, it didn’t seem like poverty to us because we had all the natural foods that were available to us through their efforts. And my father and my grandfather farmed this part of the land grant plus another several acres that went all the way to the river’s edge. So I got the news about the wall that would be constructed across my land on August the 7th, 2007. And apparently the government didn’t have the courage to face me face-to-face, so they had two Border Patrol agents call me at my office.

I’m a professor at the University of Texas in Brownsville, and I was called [by the government] at my [university office] desk. So they got my number. And I was called directly to my extension by them in which they—at that time, there were two of them and they were on speakerphone, and they told me that—they wanted to know what my name was—if I was Eloisa Taméz, and I said, “Yes.” And so then they said, “Well, I am so-and-so from the Border Patrol,” and then the second one introduced himself. And so they told me that they needed to tell me that the land that I owned would be affected by the border wall, had I heard about the border wall.

I said, “Well, yes, I’ve heard about the border wall.” And so they said that they wanted me to agree to sign a—to give them permission to come and do a survey of my land.

And I said, “For what purpose?” They said, “Well, we need to do the survey to determine if the land is appropriate for the building of the wall.” And I said, “And what will that mean?” “Well, we’ll come in and we’ll punch a few holes in your property and then we’ll determine after the analysis what—whether the land is appropriate or not.” And I said, “And you need how much time for that?” “Well, we need at least a year.” And I said, “But you said it was only gonna take you a few hours. Why do you need a year?” And so I said, “Well, you know what? You know, we don’t need to continue this conversation because I don’t do business over the phone. So if you wanna do business with me, you have to come and see me face-to-
face.” And so that’s the way it started.

So it took two more contacts with the same Border Patrol agents, plus some members of the Corps of Engineers, to finally get to the point where they came to see me in my office. Because they would call me on a Saturday evening. More than once. And so I said, “No, you need to come to me and show me the document.” Well, they finally came after contacting [me] more, two or three times. And so, then when I wouldn’t agree to sign the authorization for the initial survey, I then was told that, “Haven’t you heard about eminent domain?” And I said, “Yes, I’ve heard of eminent domain. I know what it is,” and I said, “But I’m still not going to be in favor of this.” So I didn’t sign—I didn’t give them permission to come and do the survey.

Margo Tamez (Ndé) is an associate professor of Indigenous studies in the Community, Culture, and Global Studies Department, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and affiliated in the MFA Creative Writing (Poetry) Program, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, at the University of British Columbia in the unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan People. Cynthia Bejarano is a regents professor and College of Arts and Sciences Stan Fulton Endowed Chair at New Mexico State University. Her research and advocacy focus on embodied border experiences with violence, immigration, migration, and gender-based violence and feminicidios at the U.S.-Mexico border. Jeffrey P. Shepherd is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas at El Paso. His research and teaching focuses on Native Peoples of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and the U.S. Southwest, environmental history, public history, and the history of right-wing extremist movements.

Excerpt from The Tarahumara Rebellion of 1690

Posted on September 23, 2025October 8, 2025 by Victoria Stapleton

September 23, 2025

The Tarahumara Rebellion of 1690 by Joseph P. Sánchez examines a seventeenth-century Indigenous uprising in northern Mexico aimed at driving out Spanish miners, missionaries, and settlers from Tarahumara (Rarámuri) and Tepehuanes homelands.

Previous histories have interpreted this revolt, and other borderlands uprisings, as localized and spontaneous events aimed at rectifying specific grievances. Historian Joseph P. Sánchez argues that the revolts of the Tepehuanes and the Tarahumaras in northern New Spain, or Nueva Vizcaya, were well-planned, inspired by outside events, and drew in multiple communities and ethnicities. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, including Jesuit accounts and archival documents, Sánchez offers a comprehensive narrative that challenges conventional interpretations of colonial Mexican uprisings. Read an excerpt from the book’s introduction below.

From the earliest Indian resistance to Christopher Columbus’s expedition to the Caribbean in 1492, to the last major outbreak of Native–white violence in North America at Wounded Knee in 1890, Indigenous people were, for all intents and purposes, at war with all foreign or alien intruders onto their homelands. Throughout the Americas, Native tribes fought against all trespassers, both European and Indigenous, to defend their land, resources, and people. The Europeans viewed such Native resistance as unjust rebellions or the treacherous revolt of savages against their legitimate sovereign. That legal position conflicted with the Native view that their wars, when undertaken, were a just struggle against European invasion and a righteous defense of their homelands. Perhaps Chiricahua Apache leader Geronimo said it best in 1905 when he met President Theodore Roosevelt. Explaining why he fought to protect his homeland, Geronimo began with “Great Father,” the traditional greeting to a recognized authority or divine figure. He continued: “Did I fear the Great White Chief? No. He was my enemy and the enemy of my people. His people desired the country of my people. My heart was strong against him. I said he should never have my country.” Geronimo’s words echoed the belief of all Native tribes that had resisted or battled imperial and colonial invaders, including those from the United States, since 1492.

Similarly, the Tarahumara rebellions throughout the seventeenth century were not only a continuation but a part of the overall Indigenous struggle for defense of homeland against all intruders that was replicated by thousands of tribes throughout the Americas. For centuries prior to the arrival of Europeans, tribes all over the Americas had defined their boundaries along river valleys, forest lines, mountains, ravines, and other topographical features of their land. Any crossing into their territory by other tribes was considered a hostile act. In prehistoric times, tribes honored topographic boundaries belonging to other tribes. Clearly, trespassing by other tribes onto their lands without permission was unwelcomed. By the middle of the sixteenth century, Indian tribes throughout the Americas were at war with intruding Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, Dutch, and other European invaders and their Native allies who assumed sovereignty over their territorial domains.

The Europeans based their ownership of lands claimed by them by dint of discovery as a part of the domain owned by their sovereign kings. European sovereignty was the basis of claims by Spain, France, Portugal, England, and other powers. Beyond the early Spanish foothold on the Caribbean established by Columbus’s first four voyages of discovery between 1492 and 1502, the fall of the Aztec Empire in 1521 began the Spanish sovereign claim to lands in North America.

Within the historical process, acts of possession were performed and documented by Europeans in the name of their respective kings. European claimants not only presented signed affidavits that such acts had been taken; they also issued land grants to settlers with titles such as mercedes (Spain), charters (England), seignueries (France), Patroon land tracts (Dutch), and seismarias (Portugal). Similarly, the Louisiana Purchase also violated Indian territorial traditions by falsely claiming that those lands stretching from the eastern edge of the Appalachian Mountains, beyond the Mississippi River, and across the Great Plains to the Pacific Northwestern coastline had been legitimately purchased from France. The Great Plains Wars ensued for decades to validate such a claim against Indian territorial ownerships that had existed for hundreds of years. Oddly, almost unconsciously, the Louisiana Purchase appeared as a right to claim Indian lands between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Coast as the United States was the sovereign, in effect, and possessed a document that the land had been purchased and Indians had no rights to their claim. Assumed sovereignty, in European minds and historical legal traditions, justified such actions. Indian uprisings were the response.

Joseph P. Sánchez is founder and former director of the Spanish Colonial Research Center at the University of New Mexico. He retired from the National Park Service (NPS) in 2014 after thirty-five years of service. From 2003 to 2014 he served as superintendent of Petroglyph National Monument. Before his career with NPS, he was a professor of colonial Mexican history and director of the Mexican American Studies and Research Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He has taught at the University of New Mexico, Santa Ana College in California, and the Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara, Mexico. He has published extensively on Spanish colonial histories of New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, California, and Alaska.

Excerpt from “Life Undocumented”

Posted on September 2, 2025August 29, 2025 by Victoria Stapleton

September 2, 2025

Life Undocumented: Latinx Youth Navigating Place and Belonging by Edelina M. Burciaga captures the compelling stories of Latinx undocumented young adults growing up and living in two distinct sociopolitical contexts: California, which provides legal pathways into higher education for undocumented youth, and Georgia, which does not.

The book is about how undocumented young adults in these two contexts navigate the pathway to and through adulthood, and the powerful role state laws and policies play in shaping their prospects for social mobility and their sense of belonging. Burciaga examines how state laws and policies in California and Georgia shape the pathways to adulthood for these individuals. California, with its supportive legal frameworks, contrasts sharply with Georgia’s restrictive environment, highlighting the significant impact of state-level immigration policies. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

Vanessa, an eighteen-year-old Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient, greets me at the door to her home in the Atlanta metropolitan area. It is a mid-weekday morning, and as we sit at her family’s dining room table, Vanessa and I discuss how she and her family ended up in the Atlanta area, migrating from Uruguay when Vanessa was six years old. Like many immigrant families, Vanessa’s father was the first to migrate to the United States, and she, her mother, and her brother followed three months later, migrating on a ninety-day tourist visa. Vanessa started kindergarten at a local elementary school and quickly picked up English. Within that same school year, she moved to first grade and was identified as gifted, remaining in advanced courses through high school. When Vanessa entered high school in 2010, Barack Obama had been president for about two years. In her first year of high school, Vanessa wrote three essays about what it was like to be an undocumented immigrant living in Atlanta, Georgia. She shared that at the time, she was “really tired of people saying that I’m an alien, that I’m ‘illegal,’ that my parents are freeloaders, that I’m a freeloader. Because I’m not. I have struggled my whole life. We pay taxes. We do all of these things.” She chose “the best essay,” recorded herself reading it, and posted the video to YouTube. She was shocked when there were a thousand views in three days. The video also received the attention of her high school principal, who advised her to “lay low” until she turned eighteen, and Vanessa followed his advice, instead focusing on school and her goal of getting into college. Nevertheless, making the video did have one unintended benefit, as Vanessa was connected to a small group of other undocumented students in her high school. By her senior year, Vanessa knew that college would be expensive, but she did not know yet about “the ban” or the University System of Georgia Board of Regents Policies 4.1.6 and 4.3.4, which together effectively exclude undocumented students living in the state of Georgia from attending a public college. Although Vanessa graduated at the top of her high school class and would have been eligible for a state-funded scholarship to attend the University of Georgia, she instead found herself taking a “gap year” as she waited for admissions and funding decisions from out-of-state colleges—a prospect that caused anxiety because she played an important role in her family. She articulated her worries about the possibility of leaving for college in this way: “By me leaving, it’s like who does my mom have to talk to during the day because, like, my brother doesn’t speak well in Spanish, the kids [her younger siblings] don’t speak very well in Spanish. Who is she going to talk to? And my dad, who is going to help him with work problems because he can’t really, like, he can’t express himself well, but you know, it’s just [trails off] . . . Who is going to help my brother out with his homework, who is going to help my other [younger] brother with his homework?”

Vanessa’s experience is emblematic of the experiences of many of the undocumented young people I interviewed in the Atlanta, Georgia, area. Like Vanessa, they were caught between wanting to realize their dreams of going to college close to home and being excluded by restrictive policies in the state. Because of the anti-immigrant context in the state of Georgia, these young people played an important role in their family’s lives, helping them navigate daily life and long-term family goals, as Vanessa described. In sharp contrast, I met Miriam for our interview at her college campus in Southern California. Miriam, a nineteen-year-old DACA recipient, migrated to the United States when she was five years old on a tourist visa with her mother and two sisters. Like many undocumented immigrants, Miriam’s family migrated to Southern California because they had family in the region. Miriam’s father and mother had been living in the Los Angeles, California, area for a year while Miriam and her sisters stayed with their grandparents in Mexico. Miriam’s mother returned to Mexico to bring Miriam and her sisters to California. Miriam recalled they made the trip around her fifth birthday and her mom promised a trip to Disneyland. While the possibility of visiting Disneyland was enticing, Miriam was most excited to see her dad and to have her family be together again. Miriam started kindergarten and, like Vanessa, she learned English quickly and excelled in school. But she also learned early on that she would need to advocate for her education, revealing the everyday complexities of race, immigration, and educational opportunity. During our interview, she shared,

When I went to kindergarten, my teacher used to treat me like I didn’t know anything. She would forget that I was even there. When they [the other students] would start learning the alphabet, they would change me
to a class where a teacher actually spoke Spanish, so that I could learn the alphabet in Spanish, but I already knew it. So, it made me angry. I told my mom that I wanted her to go to the principal’s office and tell them that I didn’t want to be changed to a different classroom. She went, and they got into a fight, but at the end of the day, I was able to stay in my class. I started learning more English then.

By 2014, the same year Vanessa graduated from high school, Miriam was applying to colleges. Unlike Georgia, California has been at the forefront of educational access for undocumented students. California enacted Assembly Bill (AB) 540 in 2001, extending in-state tuition to eligible undocumented students. By 2013, as Miriam was aware, “The California Dream Act was already in order.” The California Dream Act, AB 130 and AB 131, extended state and institutional financial aid to undocumented students who are ineligible for federal financial aid, making it slightly easier for undocumented students to pay for college. While Miriam confronted various barriers throughout college related to her legal status, she planned to graduate in three years and attend law school or graduate school. She shared, “I’m supposed to graduate in 2017. I plan my life a lot, so I have different plans: Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, and everything after that. Plan A would be to graduate from here [college] and go directly to New York University or Cornell to study international law. Maybe get a dual degree, a PhD. But if there’s nothing I can do about the whole [immigration] reform, I’m probably going to end up going to a law school here in California because I can practice here in California.” Although she was cautious about making declarations for her future because of her legal status and an uncertain policy context at the federal level, she was poised to experience the type of social mobility that the “American Dream” promises.

Edelina M. Burciaga is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Colorado, Denver. Her research focuses on undocumented Latinx youth in the United States, examining how state and local laws shape their transition to adulthood. She has conducted studies in California, Georgia, Colorado, and Arizona. Burciaga’s work has been published in several academic journals, contributing to the understanding of the experiences and challenges faced by undocumented immigrant young people in the United States. Burciaga has published her research in journals including Law & Policy, Ethnicities, Mobilization: An International Quarterly, Association of Mexican American Educators Journal, Journal of College Admissions, and elsewhere.

Excerpt from “Au Te Waate / We Remember It”

Posted on June 5, 2025June 3, 2025 by Anissa Suazo

June 5, 2025

Au Te Waate / We Remember It is not just a historical account but a linguistic treasure, preserving the naturally produced speech of five Hiaki speakers from a previous era. Transcriptions of interviews recorded with family members and friends by author Maria Fernanda Leyva, and edited by Heidi Harley, provide invaluable insights into the Hiaki language. The interviews document and preserve the narrative styles, vocabulary, and grammatical constructions of the time. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

Background Concerning the Porfiriato and the Hiaki Diaspora

My name is Maria Fernanda Florez Leyva, and I am a Hiaki woman from Tucson, Arizona. I collected the interviews that are presented in the following pages. Before I give a few details about the collection of the interviews and the five main individuals whose words appear in this book, I will offer a brief perspective on the circumstances which led to the tumultuous years that doña Luisa and the others spoke about.

Porfirio Díaz’s first term as president of Mexico was from 1877 through 1880. Prior to that time Díaz was influenced by his tutor Benito Juárez, who had been a beloved president of Mexico due to his commitment to social justice. Díaz’s early allegiance was thus to the ideal of liberalism. Indeed, during his first term as president of Mexico, Díaz had crafted the Plan de Tuxtepec, a plan of governance that rested on the principle of a one-term presidential office with reelection forbidden. However, despite this, he ran for the presidency again and was reelected in 1884, remaining in power until the Mexican Revolution in 1911.

During this second term as president, he became a notorious dictator, and it was during this time that Díaz formulated the deportation and extermination program against the Hiakis. This program was being carried out against the Hiaki people because for a long time they had been a thorn in the side of the Mexican government. Not only that, the Hiakis lived on delta land that was very rich and fertile. Parts of Hiaki land were also on the coast of the Gulf of California, and the waters had bountiful fish, shrimp, and other seafood. The desert provided many different types of cactus fruit and trees that also yielded fruit. Game was also plentiful in the mountains and desert for my people to feast on. No wonder, then, that the Mexican government coveted Hiaki territory; the dictator Porfirio Díaz made it his goal to wrest this valuable real estate from the Hiakis through whatever means he found at his disposal.

When years of warfare against the Hiakis proved to be unsuccessful in removing them from their territory, Díaz begin to carry out the deportation and extermination program against my people. It was during this time that horrific atrocities were imposed on my people. The Hiakis who were captured were sold to plantation owners as slaves. Those who did not appear to be strong enough to work were put to death, primarily infants, very young children, and the elderly. The elderly knew that they were going to be put to death. They would bid farewell to their children and tell them they were going to be given some kind of injection. Although their children would cry and beg the nurses not to kill their elders, saying that they would do the work of the elders, their pleas fell on deaf ears. By the next day the elders were dead. The Hiakis who were not captured and deported to the henequen plantations in southern Mexico sought refuge in the Vakateeve (Tall Bamboo) Mountains and waged guerrilla warfare against the Mexican soldiers (also known as the pelones or peronim, “bald ones”). Many others came north to Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and California. It is these events, and the continued persecution of Hiakis even following the revolution, that are described in the interviews presented here.

The Collection of the Interviews

So that you can understand something about myself and my reasons for collecting these interviews documenting the history of the Hiaki people, I would like to share with you some of the story of my family and my life.

My siblings, my father’s younger brother, and I grew up in a four-room house in Barrio Libre in South Tucson, Arizona. I had two brothers and three sisters, but one brother died as an infant. My paternal grandmother Maria Carlota Alvarez de Tapia—my Haaka—raised us in that home that her father Juan Alvarez had built, along with my paternal grandfather Fernando Flores and an uncle, Ramon Alvarez. This was in close proximity to a Hiaki settlement, Bwe’u Hu’upa (Big Mesquite). Bwe’u Hu’upa was located between 22nd and 25th Streets immediately east of where I-10 now runs. This comfortable old home, on 26th Street, was built in or around 1914 when my grandmother was about sixteen years of age and already married to my grandfather, Fernando. At that time, they already had my father, Vicente Flores, who was one year old. Prior to that, my grandmother and her parents had lived in Yuma, Arizona, where she was born in 1898. Her father, my great-grandfather, arrived in Yuma when he was sent there by the railroad company, and eventually settled there.

I write primarily about Haaka, as she is the one who raised us. My grandmother was a very intelligent woman who was well-versed in the Hiaki language and also in Spanish. Her mother, my great-grandmother, Eusebia Valenzuela, was also very fluent in Hiaki and Spanish. Haaka’s mother and father arrived in Arizona from Sonora in or about 1877. Prior to coming to Arizona, they had lived in Magdalena, Sonora, Mexico, for a number of years. Eusebia’s mother had traveled to Magdalena, along with her daughter and other Hiakis, to escape the ever-escalating turmoil in Hiaki territory farther south. At that time, Hiakis were being captured and deported to the henequen plantations in southern Mexico. Eusebia’s mother, my great-great-grandmother, purchased several hectares of land by the riverbank there in Magdalena and kept a small farm. However, when the peronim began to arrive in the area looking for Hiakis, my great-great-grandmother sold the farm, and she and her family, including my great-grandmother Eusebia and her husband Juan, made their way to Arizona. According to Haaka, her mother and grandparents were very happy living on their small farm in Magdalena, and it was a sad day when they had to pull up stakes and relocate to Nogales. My great-grandmother Eusebia was about fourteen years of age and already married to Juan when they left Magdalena. They arrived in Nogales, Arizona, and settled there for about three years, during which time Eusebia’s mother, my great-great-grandmother, passed away. They then left Nogales as the peronim made excursions into Arizona to round up Hiakis. The peronim were not concerned that they were entering another country to capture the Hiaki refugees. In fact, they came as far north as Tucson to capture Hiakis and return them to Mexico.

From Nogales, the family joined ranks with other Hiakis and traveled to Tubac. Since there was little work to be had in Tubac, they again pulled up stakes and moved to Tumacacori at the invitation of the missionaries there. Due to the continuous raids and pillaging conducted by the Chiricahua Apaches on the church grounds, the missionaries decided that drastic measures had to be taken. The raiders were making off with foodstuffs that the missionaries and the people, including some Hiakis who had taken up residence there, needed. Some Hiakis and others who lived among the missionaries were killed or injured during those raids. The Apaches would make off with not only vegetables but also horses, cattle, goats, etc.—any livestock that the missionaries had. By inviting more Hiakis to come and settle there, the missionaries hoped to protect the settlement. After spending some time in Tumacacori, however, the family decided to move again, to Tucson, in search of a larger Hiaki community where ceremonies and other traditional activities could be carried out. They also wanted to get as far away as possible from the border dividing Arizona and Mexico, to a place where they felt they could live in relative peace.

Many circumstances led to the Hiaki people leaving their homeland in Hiak Vatwe (the Hiaki River), but primary among those circumstances was that my people were seeking a peaceful existence with their family members, far away from the ravages of war and the cultural genocide that was going on all around them in Sonora. So it was that my ancestors’ and other Hiakis’ arrival in Arizona and other parts of the United States became necessary due to the difficult life that they had in Mexico.

Maria Fernanda Leyva is currently retired but has worked at Tucson Unified School District, the Department of Economic Security, and the Pascua Yaqui Department of Language and Culture, as well as at the University of Arizona with anthropologist Edward Spicer and linguist Heidi Harley. Heidi Harley is a professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and author of English Words: A Linguistic Introduction, as well as numerous journal and book articles and edited volumes.

The University of Arizona Press