Category: Excerpt

“Warfare and the Dynamics of Political Control” Excerpt

Posted on by maryreynolds

June 3, 2025

Warfare and the Dynamics of Political Control draws on a wealth of interdisciplinary perspectives to explore how conflict shapes the establishment and maintenance of political institutions, from small-scale societies to expansive empires. Edited by Brian R. Billman, the book brings together case studies from diverse regions and time periods and illuminates the multifaceted nature of political violence. The volume includes discussions of human sacrifice, slave-taking, ideological signaling, and military strategy and tactics. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

Politics by Other Means: Toward an Understanding of the Role of Violence in the Origins of Political Control

By Brian R. Billman

This book is about how leaders and groups use warfare and other forms of political violence, such as torture, slavery, and human sacrifice, to create centralized institutions of political control in which the few dominate the many. It is also about how groups during periods of endemic warfare resist domination by ambitious leaders. The case studies are drawn from historic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological sources and involve societies of varying scales, from small, autonomous farming communities to empires. The temporal range is equally broad, from the Late Shang Dynasty in China (ca. 1250–1050 BCE) to the first contact between the Māori of New Zealand and Europeans in the 1700s.

In our modern era, warfare has been one of the primary means by which political organizations have gained political control over land and people. From Henry VIII to Vladimir Putin, states (be they nation-states, kingdoms, or empires) have achieved political domination through the use of warfare and other judicial and extrajudicial forms of violence. With the emergence of global capitalism, warfare has been to the formation of states like water is to the ocean. Without warfare, there wouldn’t be modern nation-states. Political violence by states is not the only means to political control in the modern era; however, it has been fundamental to seizing control of land and people and maintaining political, ideological, and economic domination.

Modern history raises key questions. What was the relationship of warfare, and other forms of coalitional violence, to the emergence of systems of political control in human history and prehistory before the rise of global capitalism? Are there commonalities between the politics of modern warfare and the politics of conflict in noncapitalist political formations? Clearly, capitalism and nation-states are profoundly different from antecedent political economic formations. Likewise, modern warfare is significantly different from earlier forms of coalitional violence in scale, lethality, and in kind. Nonetheless, one wonders if the past, and the myriad noncapitalist political formations, can help us understand our modern world. To use the words of a renowned scholar of the politics of modern wars, Barbara Tuchman: Is the past a distant mirror (Tuckman 1978)?

The case studies presented here reveal the complex and often contradictory relationships between warfare and the development of institutions of political control. In several of the cases presented here, endemic raiding led to the formation of communities that successfully resisted attempts by ambitious leaders to gain control over the community, whereas, in two case studies, conflict led to two of the largest empires prior to the modern era: the Inka and the Han Empires. This is not surprising; we all know that history is inherently complex. What is surprising is that there are similarities among these case studies even though they involve profoundly different historical and cultural contexts. No uniform or unified theory of conflict and political formation emerges from these case studies. Rather, they reveal parallels in historical sequences, political strategies, and reoccurring relationships. If not exactly a distant mirror, they do provide a means of placing the warfare, political violence, and nation building of our time within the broader context of human experience over the longue durée of history and prehistory. They reveal what is unique to our times and what is recurrent and, therefore, perhaps, fundamental to human violence and politics.

DEFINING QUESTIONS

All the lead authors in this volume were participants in a SAA-Amerind Advanced Seminar in September 2023. They brought to the table a great diversity of theoretical perspectives and research experiences. Remarkably, in our discussions at Amerind there emerged a general framework for discussing the politics of conflict. Not mutual agreement but rather a framework for disagreement, discussion, and exploration. In this chapter, I present this framework, lay out the thematic foundations for the case studies, and discuss some new ways of thinking about warfare and political control that emerged from our discussions and the case studies.

I suggest that we need to move beyond leader-centric models of social and political change to models that encompass group power and collective action. Key to the success of the seminar was the formation of a set of defining questions for establishing the parameters of our discussion of our case studies. These questions developed from the papers we presented at a session at the Annual Meetings of the Society for American Archaeology in April 2023. Prior to the Amerind seminar, these questions, as well as revised drafts of the SAA papers, were circulated to all the seminar participants. The questions were not rules of engagement but rather a beginning point for open discussions:

• How did leaders use warfare, raiding, and other forms of political violence to gain control over or influence others?

• What specific strategies did leaders use and what were the outcomes of those strategies?

• How did groups resist the development of political control by ambitious leaders during periods of intense warfare and raiding?

• Why did conflict inhibit the creation of institutions of political control in some cases while promoting it in others?

In the seminar, we agreed on a broad definition of warfare for the purposes of our discussions: “We adhere to a more inclusive definition of warfare as organized aggression and violence between socially distinct or autonomous groups of people” (Kissel and Kim 2019:2). While agreeing with Kissel and Kim (2019), we broadened the scope of our discussions to include other forms of political violence, such as human sacrifice as a means of ideological signaling and slave taking as a form of political terror and economic capital-building.

Brian R. Billman is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Billman’s research interests include the prehistory of Andean South America and southwestern North America, community-based archaeology and heritage preservation, community organizing, prehistoric political economies, origins of states and empires, causes and consequences of warfare, household archaeology, and settlement pattern and landscape studies.

Excerpt from “Betrayal U”

Posted on by Cameron Quan

May 23, 2025

Higher education is in trouble, and not only due to a decline of public trust. As a microcosm of our broader culture, universities are inequitable and often harmful, especially for marginalized people.
 
Betrayal U: The Politics of Belonging in Higher Education intervenes in this context with a diverse, rich collection of essays, art, poetry, and research that explores these inequities through the lens of institutional betrayal, theorized by psychologist Jennifer Freyd. Edited by Rebecca G. Martínez and Monica J. Casper, this collection brings together thirty-six contributors who share personal experiences covering a range of topics in higher education. The work spans five thematic sections that examine the complexities of belonging and exclusion in academic settings.

Read an excerpt from the book’s introduction below.

Our (Partial) Stories of Institutional Betrayal
As women with doctorates, we each have our own stories of institutional betrayal—the lived experiences that brought us here, to each other as friends and colleagues, and to the making of this collection of heartfelt, painful, and galvanizing stories of rejection, harm, institutional malfeasance, and courage. Though no story is the same, because people are not widgets despite how institutions may treat them, the stories we offer here, both our own and those of our contributors, share common themes of betrayal, including dashed professional expectations, myriad forms of violence and harm, psychological abuse, racism, misogyny, classism, homophobia, ableism, elitism, hazing, and business as usual no matter the consequences. Universities are, in a word, dangerous—but not for everyone and not equally, as Candia-Bailey’s story reveals. Higher education is as stratified as any other industry in the United States, despite its alleged ethos of inclusion, and inequalities have only deepened in the long pandemic. In 2021, for example, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that only 2.1 percent of tenured associate and full professors in 2019 were Black women. The numbers were even lower at public flagship universities such as University of California, Berkeley, where Black women represent a mere 1.3 percent of tenured faculty (June and O’Leary 2021).

In sharing our own stories as a prelude and companion to the others in this collection, we aim not to be exceptional—indeed, we are anything but. Our experiences mirror those of so many other scholars at the margins, especially women. Some of what we share below is simply par for the course of academic life, the daily ins and outs of being employed in/by complex institutions. But some of what we share extends beyond the Sturm und Drang of academic life, into the realm of preventable harm and institutional malfeasance, even while we hold certain privileges. The American Association of University Women (n.d.) reports that only 36 percent of full professors are women, while women make up the majority of non- tenure-track lecturers and instructors. Malika Jeffries-El (2022) notes that “non-white groups are underrepresented in the academy, accounting for a collective total of only 25.1 percent of all faculty positions, despite representing nearly 40 percent of the U.S. population.” She suggests the term systematically marginalized groups rather than underrepresented minorities, “because the underrepresentation of certain people in certain places is not coincidental, it is intentional” (Jeffries-El 2022).

Rebecca’s Story
As the daughter of parents who never attended high school, as the daughter of an immigrant woman from Mexico, and as a woman of color who grew up poor, I was not supposed to be an academic. The ivory tower was never meant for people like me, like many of us whose stories are told in this anthology. We have fought for our inclusion and representation and, through our stories here, continue to illuminate exclusionary practices in higher education, so that we can spur change. When we do make it into the rarefied spaces of academia in a tenure-track position, the tenure process can be particularly alienating and harsh for women of color, who must deal with sexist and racist microaggressions from students, faculty colleagues, administrators, and staff, as well as the sexism, racism, classism, heteronormativity, and ableism that are built into the very structures of our “hallowed halls.” Add to this mix of marginalization the fact that we also lack role models and mentors who understand what we experience and who can help guide us through it.

Rebecca G. Martínez is an independent researcher and writer, formerly at the University of Missouri. Her research interests and publications are in the areas of reproductive health and health inequities in Latin America and the United States, gender and migration, and critical university studies. Her first book, Marked Women: The Cultural Politics of Cervical Cancer in Venezuela, was awarded the Eileen Basker Prize by the Society for Medical Anthropology.

Monica J. Casper is dean of arts and sciences and a professor of sociology at Seattle University. A First Gen scholar, she is the author of numerous books, essays, and articles and is also a creative writer. Her first book, The Making of the Unborn Patient: A Social Anatomy of Fetal Surgery, won the C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Her most recent book, Babylost: Racism, Survival, and the Quiet Politics of Infant Mortality, from A to Z, explores ignorance and inaction in relation to maternal and infant death in the United States. With expertise in women’s health, racial and gender disparities, trauma, disability, gender-based violence, and bioethics, her work centers questions of whose lives are worth saving, whose deaths are accelerated, and whose existence matters. A seasoned university leader, she has been recognized for her efforts to foster humane workplaces.

“Visions of Transformation” Excerpt

Posted on by Anissa Suazo

April 29, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpt from “Mexico Between Feast and Famine”

Posted on by Anissa Suazo

April 9, 2025

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

Food as a Way of Being and Living

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpt from Walled

Posted on by Anissa Suazo

March 27, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Wall, an Idea Across Decades

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

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

Excerpt from Specters of War

Posted on by Anissa Suazo

March 18, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpt from The Documented Child

Posted on by Anissa Suazo

January 28, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpt from Battle Against Extinction

Posted on by Anissa Suazo

January 13, 2025

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

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

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

Discovering the Fishes of Western North America
The Fauna

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

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

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

Discovery and Description: Geography and Chronology

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

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

Excerpt from Landscapes and Social Transformations on the Northwest Coast

Posted on by Anissa Suazo

January 7, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpt from Ancestral Landscapes of the Pueblo World

Posted on by Anissa Suazo

January 2, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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