Category: Excerpt

Excerpt from “Restoring Relations Through Stories”

Posted on April 19, 2024May 6, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

April 19, 2024

This insightful volume delves into land-based Diné and Dene imaginaries as embodied in stories—oral, literary, and visual. Like the dynamism and kinetic facets of hózhǫ́,* Restoring Relations Through Stories takes us through many landscapes, places, and sites. Renae Watchman introduces the book with an overview of stories that bring Tsé Bitʼaʼí, or Shiprock Peak, the sentinel located in what is currently the state of New Mexico, to life. The book then introduces the dynamic field of Indigenous film through a close analysis of two distinct Diné-directed feature-length films, and ends by introducing Dene literatures.

While the Diné (those from the four sacred mountains in Dinétah in the southwestern United States) are not now politically and economically cohesive with the Dene (who are in Denendeh in Canada), they are ancestral and linguistic relatives. In this book, Watchman turns to literary and visual texts to explore how relations are restored through stories, showing how literary linkages from land-based stories affirm Diné and Dene kinship. She explores the power of story to forge ancestral and kinship ties between the Diné and Dene across time and space through re-storying of relations. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

Per Diné protocol, I open with a decolonial Diné approach, “kodóó hózhǫ́ dooleeł,” translated as “it begins in beauty” or “in beauty it begins.” Situated in northwest New Mexico, within the four sacred mountains, Tsé Bit’a’í means “Winged Rock,” “Rock with Wings,” or “Wings of Rock,” but is called Shiprock Peak (or just Shiprock). Tsé Bit’a’í is located on the outskirts of a reservation town formerly known in Diné bizaad (the Navajo language) as Naat’áanii Nééz (“tall leader”), but it is now called Shiprock too. The town is a flourishing reservation metropolis on the northern edge of the great Diné Nation, which spans the states of Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. Locals are primarily Diné. Historian Jennifer Nez Denetdale explains, “We call ourselves the Diné or The People. We also name ourselves Náhookah Diné (Earth Surface People) and Bilá’ ashdla’ (FiveFingered Ones).” Shiprock (the town) prides itself as the “Naashjizhii’ Capital of the World.” Naashjizhii’ is dried steamed corn. This designation of Diné culinary pride is featured on the cover of every issue of the annually published Shiprock Magazine, edited by Eugene B. Joe. The magazine is organized by the Shiprock Historical Society (est. 2010), whose aim is to preserve “the cultural significance of the town, the annual Northern Navajo fair and the historical growth of the community.”

Existence, presence, being, and places are reliant on names, but whose version of a place-name, whose toponym, matters? Shiprock is an English name that eclipses two distinct Navajo names: one a landmark, Tsé Bit’a’í; and the other a nearby reservation community, Naat’áanii Nééz. In N. Scott Momaday’s The Names: A Memoir (1976), he makes a grave error. He refers to “Shiprock, which is called in Navajo Naat’aaniineez [sic] (literally ‘tall chief’; the town takes its name from the great monolith that stands nearby in an arid reach of the San Juan Basin). The name Shiprock, like other Anglicizations in this region, seems incongruous enough, but from certain points of view—and from the air, especially—the massive rock Naat’aaniineez resembles very closely a ship at sea.” The tendency for settlers to claim and name lands that they are unfamiliar with is not surprising; however, Momaday lived in Shiprock from 1936 to 1943. That he would retell a settler’s account of the anglicization of Tsé Bit’a’í is surprising. This demonstrates the prominence of settler narratives eclipsing Indigenous ones. Furthermore, Momaday misunderstands the meaning of Naat’áanii Nééz, which does not literally mean “tall chief.” It literally means “tall leader” or “tall one who speaks.” In the context of Shiprock, the town’s name meant “tall boss,” to describe the height of William Taylor Shelton (1869–1944), who in 1903 was assigned as superintendent for the San Juan Indian Agency by “President Theodore Roosevelt to go to New Mexico and establish the Shiprock Reservation for the Navaho [sic].” Momaday also attributes the wrong Navajo name to the pinnacle and does not acknowledge the Diné name Tsé Bit’a’í. Even more troubling is that he completely ignores the traditional Diné stories about Tsé Bit’a’í and privileges an “incongruous” colonial version. In 1860, prior to the Navajo Long Walk to Fort Sumner, Captain J. F. McComb called Tsé Bit’a’í “The Needle.” The Needle was replaced by the English name Ship Rock (two words) in 1870 because non-Navajo settlers believed that it resembled a nineteenth-century “full-rigged sailing schooner.” This renaming reflects an unimaginative and nonsensical nautical nomenclature that further stripped Tsé Bit’a’í of her origin stories. Place naming, and naming in general, is significant to Diné and other Indigenous Peoples. A narrative of “place links present with past and our personal self with kinship groups. . . . Our knowledges cannot be universalized because they arise from our experience with our places. This is why name-place stories matter: they are repositories of science, they tell of relationships, they reveal history, and they hold our identity.” Margaret Kovach’s observations are relevant to Tsé Bit’a’í and the stories of her presence.

Georges Erasmus is Dene, or Tłįchǫ (Dogrib), from Behchokǫ̀ (which means “Big Knife” and replaced the town’s former name, Rae-Edzo) in the Northwest Territories. He advocated for restoration of Dene place-names and turned to Dene literary autonomy: “We made our own history. Our actions were based on our understanding of the world. With the coming of the Europeans, our experience as a people changed. We experienced relationships in which we were made to feel inferior. . . . They began to define our world for us. They began to define us as well. Even physically, our communities and our landmarks were named in terms foreign to our understanding. We were no longer the actors—we were being acted upon. We were no longer naming the world—we were being named.” This instance of Tsé Bit’a’í’s place-name is a case in point. This act of replacing and renaming our storied places interrupted the process of becoming hózhǫ́, affecting communities on both sides of the Medicine Line. If recognized at all, our stories have been dismissed as quaint storytelling and mythologizing. In thinking about Tsé Bit’a’í, my maternal family’s hometown mother, I am grappling with how the regenerative hane’ responds as a corrective.

Excerpt from “We Stay the Same”

Posted on April 11, 2024March 22, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

April 11, 2024

On a remote island in the South Pacific, the Lavongai have consistently struggled to obtain development through logging and commercial agriculture. Yet many Lavongai still long to move beyond the grind of subsistence work that has seemingly defined their lives on New Hanover, Papua New Guinea, for generations.

Following a long history of smaller-scale and largely unsuccessful resource development efforts, New Hanover became the site of three multinational-controlled special agricultural and business leases (SABLs) that combined to cover over 75 percent of the island for ninety-nine-year lease terms. These agroforestry projects were part of a national effort to encourage “sustainable” rural development by tapping into the growing global demand for agricultural lands and crops like oil palm and biofuels. They were supposed to succeed where the smaller-scale projects of the past had failed. Unfortunately, these SABLs resulted in significant forest loss and livelihood degradation, while doing little to promote the type of economic development that many Lavongai had been hoping for.

It is within this context that Jason Roberts’ “We Stay the Same” grounds questions of hope for transformative economic change within Lavongai assessments of the inequitable relationships between global processes of resource development and the local lives that have become increasingly defined by the necessities and failures of these processes. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

New Hanover (Lavongai) is a relatively small, remote volcanic island located within New Ireland Province (NIP), Papua New Guinea (PNG). The island is 119,140 hectares in size, with a mountainous interior that can reach up to 1,000 m above sea level (Kaiku and Kaiku 2008). It is home to approximately 31,882 people, collectively called the Lavongai (PNG NSO 2021), who speak an indigenous language, Tungak, as well as one of the national languages of PNG—Tok Pisin. “Mipela stap olsem” is a Tok Pisin phrase that means “we live like this,” “we are like this,” or “we stay the same.” It is a phrase that I heard often during my time on New Hanover, normally when people would discuss issues related to economic development, or more likely, the lack of sustained development or positive material change on the island. In this way, the phrase was often used as an implicit critique of a subsistence lifestyle that many Lavongai presented as having existed relatively unchanged since time immemorial. At the same time, “mipela stap olsem” was also a critique of the structural forces that allowed some groups to achieve tremendous prosperity while others were seemingly destined for hardship and toil. While the Lavongai were only too familiar with the comparative affluence that outsiders like me enjoyed by mere circumstance of birth, they were also painfully aware that their own lives remained directly tied to the ground and the necessities of subsistence.

The Lavongai are, and always have been, self-sufficient. They make their living as shifting horticulturalists, producing a variety of food crops including staples such as taro (kirak), sweet potato (“kau”), banana (ur), cassava (“tapiok”), sago (ngavia), and greens (banga). People raise money for other necessities like salt, clothes, medicine, and school fees through the smallscale trade of cash crops like betelnut (vua) and mustard (sia), as well as surplus food crops. The work required to “find money,” therefore, is normally a difficult and slow task. Moving away from the rigors of subsistence living toward the anticipated prosperity of consumer-capitalist lifestyles has been, and continues to be, a prime objective for many Lavongai. Unfortunately, like other politically and economically marginal peoples throughout the world, their options for achieving development within the global market have been slim and poorly supported by successive colonial and national governments (Billings 2002; Tauvasa 1968/1969). Historically, what integration New Hanover has achieved within the global economy has been limited to the intermittent production and export of primary products such as copra, timber, and seafood.

In 2007, however, New Hanover became the site of three large-scale, multinational-controlled special agricultural and business leases (SABLs) that combined to cover approximately 79 percent of the island, for ninety-nine-year lease periods. These SABLs, like SABLs throughout PNG, were supposed to develop commercially viable agricultural plantations through the conversion of forested lands and the broad simplification of communal land tenure structures (95% of PNG’s land base), thought necessary to facilitate private investment (Filer 2011, 2012). SABL expansion throughout the country was part of a larger effort to promote national development and rural economic integration by combining the historically important logging and commercial agricultural industries in a way that would tap into the growing global demand for agricultural lands and crops like oil palm and biofuels (GoPNG 2011). These joint public-private development projects offered the Lavongai the opportunity to exchange timber and land rights for promises of fair-market timber royalties, commercial agricultural development, employment and job training, infrastructure improvements, and enhanced social service provisioning. As the New Ireland provincial administrator suggested above, this opportunity initially proved appealing for many Lavongai—particularly those in positions of decision-making power. People on the island had long been hoping for development to deliver these promises. SABLs seemed to offer a real path toward sustained global economic integration, as well as the social recognition that tends to go along with this integration. These projects appeared capable of succeeding where the smaller-scale, typically state-led projects of the past had failed.

As Abraham, a local landowner director in charge of representing the interests of his lineage group at Sulava village, as well as those of other Lavongai living within the 56,592-hectare Central New Hanover Limited SABL explained:

“The big motivation for making this [SABL] agreement was to improve life for the people of the island. Because we [PNG] got independence in 1975, and so far, there hasn’t been one good change for all of us who live here [on New Hanover]. We haven’t gotten one good service. From the time of the ancestors until now, we’ve stayed the same. There’s been no true development to come here because our government doesn’t work for us. New Hanover is a place where government has no mark. Our politicians only come around here at the time of elections. They make big talk with lots of big promises. Then we mark their names on the ballot and they go back [to town], and that’s where they stay. They forget about us—all of us who live out in the villages, out in the bush. They don’t work to create development for us like they say they will. All the government money that is supposed to be used for these things; it never turns out well. So, that’s why we finally decided that we must try to find a different road [to development]. That’s why we decided to bring the private sector to the island. We wanted the Company [Tutuman Development / Joinland Logging] to bring money, infrastructure, agriculture, and the savvy to help us develop.”

Excerpt from “Central American Counterpoetics”

Posted on March 12, 2024February 28, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

March 12, 2024

Connecting past and present, Central American Counterpoetics proposes the concepts of rememory and counterpoetics as decolonial tools for studying the art, popular culture, literature music, and healing practices of Central America and the diaspora in the United States.

Author Karina Alma offers a systemic method and artistic mode for unpacking social and political memory formation that resists dominant histories. Central American Counterpoetics responds to political repression through acts of creativity that prioritize the well-being of anticolonial communities. Building on Toni Morrison’s theory of rememory, the volume examines the concept as an embodied experience of a sensory place and time lived in the here and now. By employing primary sources of image and word, interviews of creatives, and a critical self-reflection as a Salvadoran immigrant woman in academia, Alma’s research breaks ground in subject matter and methods by considering cultural and historical ties across countries, regions, and traditions. The diverse creatives included explore critical perspectives on topics such as immigration, forced assimilation, maternal love, gender violence, community arts, and decolonization. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

This story is necessary to understand the dimension of exploitation and epistemic violence enacted by United Statesian men who gazed upon Central America as an opportunity to amass wealth. This is also a difficult story to tell because it means processing how people from the Global North exploited a pair of Salvadoran siblings at the close of the nineteenth century. There are no counterpoetics in their story. The fiction of intellectual, moral, racial, and cultural superiority of Euro/Americans plays into my research of another fabrication, that of the microcephalic Salvadoran “Aztec” siblings, Maximo and Bartola. The guardian/owner exhibited the siblings throughout the United States and Europe in the mid- to late 1800s. Their compelling story, fictitious and real, resonates with the Central American humanish as a (neo)colonial construction. Societies influenced by eugenics enslaved, trafficked, legally violated, measured, probed, and categorized the children between human and animal. I posit that their origin story as Indigenous Central American, their small stature, and microcephaly enabled the moral ease of Euro/American owners, men of medicine, science, and visitors to take part in the children’s exploitation. What matters in telling their story is the question of honoring Maximo and Bartola’s lives and asking whether U.S. Central Americans can welcome them as one of the earliest examples of Salvadoran immigrants in the U.S. diaspora.

Viewing Central America/ns within the economic realm rather than the epistemological, social, and cultural has justified historical violences on them. Such is the example of the famed expeditions of John Lloyd Stephens, driven to travel throughout the isthmus by anthropological and economic interests. Stephens states: “The reader is perhaps curious to know how old cities sell in Central America. . . . I was to pay fifty dollars for Copán. There was never any difficulty about price.” The quote shows the historical treatment of Central America/ns as sites of zero internal valuation. If American and European travelers could buy objects, artifacts, and sacred sites at a pittance according to the dominating culture, it is because of the elitist and racist idea that rural, Indigenous, and so-called common people lack knowledge and self-worth.

The Global North racial capitalists see material cultures within the logics of commodities. Even academic and trained professionals that critique American, British, and other (neo)colonial ventures underpin supposed Central American ignorance and American cunning encapsulated in the perspective that the “negative view of ‘primitive’ Hondurans was . . . echoed by nearly every visitor to Honduras. Visitors derided the people’s ignorance, although many arrived precisely to take advantage of that ignorance.” This claim by Alison Acker aims to condemn the exploitative practices of Global North tourists, anthropologists, and so forth. However, the statement ends up affirming the idea that Hondurans are ignorant. Neoliberal critiques rarely account for the internal stratifications by which the neocolonial Criollo governs through a hierarchical social order that sells out its rural, Indigenous, Black, and economically impoverished populations—their lands, bodies, labor, wares, resources, and cultural arts—to American and European investors. Transborder elites hold an attitude of entitlement, of the right to own everything, shown for example by a visiting British foreign secretary speaking on Honduras in 1854. He recommended: “Be careful . . . that you do not lead the people of the country to attach any imaginary value to things they consider at the present as having no value at all.”

Excerpt from “Resistance and Abolition in the Borderlands”

Posted on March 7, 2024February 28, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

March 7, 2024

While there is a long history of state violence toward immigrants in the United States, the essayists in this interdisciplinary collection tackle head-on the impacts of the Trump administration. Resistance and Abolition in the Borderlands, edited by Arturo J. Aldama and Jessica Ordaz, is an essential reader for those wishing to understand the extent of the damage caused by the Trump era and its impact on Latinx people.

This volume provides a well-argued look at the Trump era. Insightful contributions delve into the impact of Donald Trump’s rhetoric and policies on migrants detained and returned, immigrant children separated from their parents and placed in detention centers, and migrant women subjected to sexual and reproductive abuses, among other timely topics. The chapter authors document a long list in what the book calls “Trump’s Reign of Terror.”

Organized thematically, the book has four sections: The first gathers histories about the Trump years’ roots in a longer history of anti-migration; the second includes essays on artistic and activist responses on the border during the Trump years; the third critiques the normalization of Trump’s rhetoric and actions in popular media and culture; and the fourth envisions the future. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

We write from the traditional territories of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute Nations and start by calling out the cruelty of U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers (over 50 percent of whom are Hispanic identified). They mocked and humiliated the children, many Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous identified, who cried from pain and trauma and terror when they were taken from their parents as part of Trump’s family separation policy, a zero tolerance policy that stole more than 2,500 children from their parents as they attempted to seek asylum in the United States. The 2018 ProPublica article “Listen to Children Who’ve Just Been Separated from Their Parents at the Border” provides leaked audio of ten children sobbing, screaming, and crying out for their “mami and papa.” The children were estimated to be between four and ten years old. It is gut wrenching to listen to the “live trauma” of the children trying to process the terror and fear they felt because of Trump’s zero tolerance policy. Their feelings were violated further by the border patrol officers who mocked their pain and humiliated them. The audio reveals the baritone voice of an officer yelling above the crying of the children. He says, “Well, we have an orchestra here.” “What’s missing is a conductor.”

It might be easy to dismiss the border patrol officer’s traumatizing “humor” as that of a stressed-out officer with poor taste. However, this added cruelty, which makes children into literal abjects, underscores Trump’s presidency, rhetoric, political theater, and policies. His callousness inspired others to enunciate their white supremacist views and actions. To augment further this view of Trump and those who feel “liberated” by his white supremacism, we ask readers to engage with the staff report titled The Trump Administration’s Family Separation Policy: Trauma, Destruction, and Chaos. The report concludes that the family separation policy—which was piloted in El Paso, Texas, in 2017 and was prepared within weeks of President Trump’s inauguration—was “driven by an Administration that was willfully blind to its cruelty” and “determined to go to unthinkable extremes to deliver on political promises,” such as stopping migrants from entering the United States.

As editors of this collection, we also recognize, remember, and mourn the countless queer and trans migrants who were incarcerated, deported, or murdered during the Trump era. As the world learned in December 2020, a transgender asylum seeker from Ecuador named C.O. was held in solitary confinement at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia for six months due to his gender identity. Immigration authorities held C.O. and denied him hormone treatment as well as other medical resources. Honduran migrant Roxsana Hernandez died due to medical neglect and the traumatizing experience of the detention center or “icebox,” so named for its cold temperatures and lack of warm bedding. News reports suggest that when Roxsana was transferred to a private prison, she presented with severe symptoms of “dehydration and pneumonia.” Roxsana passed away shortly afterward in a hospital. Johana Medina
León, like Roxsana, died due to medical neglect and the depraved indifference shown to her medical needs. May we remember their names and lives, and may they rest in power.

Contributors:
Arturo J. Aldama
Rebecca Avalos
Cynthia Bejarano
Tria Blu Wakpa
Renata Carvalho Barreto
Karma R. Chávez
Leo R. Chavez
Jennifer Cullison
Jasmin Lilian Diab
Allison Glover
Jamila Hammami
Alexandria Herrera
Diana J. Lopez
Sergio A. Macías
Cinthya Martinez
Alexis N. Meza
Roberto A. Mónico
José Enrique Navarro
Jessica Ordaz
Eliseo Ortiz
Kiara Padilla
Leslie Quintanilla
J-M Rivera
Heidy Sarabia
Tina Shull
Nishant Upadhyay
Maria Vargas
Antonio Vásquez

Excerpt from “The Space Age Generation”

Posted on March 5, 2024February 29, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

March 5, 2024

In 1957 Sputnik launched toward the stars. President Kennedy then announced that the United States would send men to the Moon and then return them to Earth. These pivotal moments sparked an unequaled bound forward in human innovation and scientific exploration.

At the heart of this momentous time were the men and women working behind the scenes. Scientists, historians, and astronomers share their memories and contributions from this unparalleled era in essays told in their own words. They are the remarkable generation who witnessed and contributed to some of space science’s most stunning achievements. In The Space Age Generation: Lives and Lessons from the Golden Age of Solar System Exploration, edited by William Sheehan and Klaus R. Brasch, this generation has recorded their memories—their childhood inspirations, their challenges, failures, and triumphs—for future generations. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

It’s not always clear that one has lived in a golden age until after the fact.

In retrospect, the period from the early fifties until the late eighties was a one-off , a golden age of planetary science. Those like us who lived through it were fortunate in belonging to the generation that was the first to explore the solar system and thereby experienced what can never be experienced again. In our childhood the planets were “distant and indistinct discs moving through the night sky, and . . . in old age, . . . places, diverse new worlds in the course of exploration.”

In the fifties, though full of hope, we actually knew very little. Now we know a great deal but—perhaps—are not so full of hope. In the fifties, the far side of the Moon was terra incognita, and speculation as to what might be found there was rife. The surface of Venus, cloaked under perpetually overcast skies, might be steaming jungles like those on Earth during the Carboniferous period. Mercury was believed to rotate in the same period as it revolved around the Sun, and so it was more or less half-baked and half-frozen—except, perhaps, in the “twilit” zone, which alternately enjoyed day and night and where life might have gotten a foothold. Mars of course was more evocative than any of the others. Percival Lowell’s whims of intelligent beings and canals to pump water from the polar ice caps were still remembered, and though they were no longer viewed as likely, it seemed possible, even probable, that lower life forms, like lichens, might exist on the planet. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot was possibly a large solid body floating in the planet’s atmosphere like an egg in a solution of salt and water. Saturn’s main rings—A, B, and C—were well defined, but the finer structure sometimes glimpsed through large telescopes in excellent seeing conditions was largely unknown, as were the forces controlling that structure. Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto were virtually inscrutable, as were the satellites of all the planets except Earth and the asteroids. The Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud were mere theoretical speculations. Theories of the origin of the solar system and of the Earth-Moon system were primitive. Even the origin of lunar craters was hotly debated, as it had been for centuries, with keen adherents to both the meteoritic and the volcanic schools. Whether the solar system we knew was rare or commonplace in the galaxy was unclear, and we had no firm knowledge, one way or the other, of extra-solar planets. Also unknown was whether life might be rare or commonplace, though as a matter of mere statistics (with an estimated one hundred billion suns in the galaxy), it appeared exceedingly unlikely that ours was the only technologically sophisticated civilization. UFOs were all the rage, and at least a few professional astronomers believed that representatives of the planets of other stars (and perhaps even Venus or Mars) might have visited (or be visiting) our planet. The first SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) programs got under way in 1960, dedicated to picking up extraterrestrial communications with radio telescopes, and though if successful, we could undoubtedly learn a great deal from civilizations more advanced than ours, the prospect of disclosing our whereabouts was not entirely without danger.

The fifties—and on into the sixties and beyond—was certainly a golden age for young people interested in science. There was unprecedented support for science education, and funding for scientific research, especially at the new space agency, NASA, shot upward. Blending astronomy, geology, physics, chemistry and biology, the new discipline of planetary science emerged to interpret the enormous amounts of data spacecraft were returning from other worlds, and within planetary science, subspecialities became more and more complex and particularized. Before long, no one person could possibly comprehend the big picture.

It was a golden age, and yet, living through it, it did not always seem like one. The period that saw the culmination of some of our oldest dreams, in which we ventured beyond the Earth, “the cradle of humanity,” in Russian space visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s words, came hard on the heels of a singularly horrific period of human history, which included the hideous stalemate of trench warfare in World War I; Stalin’s collectivization of farming, resulting in the starvation of millions; the gulags; the Nanjing Massacre; Hitler’s war; the Holocaust; and atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ironically, the drive for more deadly weapons of warfare (modified ballistic missiles) became the very means that would allow voyages to the Moon and planets. It was the best and the worst of times, no different from any other except possibly more extreme.

Though the space age had many antecedents, it is usually said to have begun with the launch of Sputnik (i.e., “satellite”) on October 4, 1957. Early achievements include the discovery of Van Allen radiation belts by the U.S. satellite Explorer 1 in 1958 and the three Soviet Lunas of 1959, which were, respectively, the first spacecraft to reach the vicinity of the Moon, the first human object to reach its surface, and the first spacecraft to photograph the hitherto unseen far side of the Moon. The sixties saw the first weather satellite (Tiros), communication satellites (e.g., Telstar 1), men and women in Earth orbit, more probes to the Moon as well as to Venus and Mars, and finally, in President John F. Kennedy’s words, “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”

The backdrop to all this was the Cold War, in which two quasi empires, the democratic and capitalist United States and the autocratic and communist Soviet Union, struggled for global dominance. Politically, space was vital not so much in itself than in the prestige it offered whoever achieved mastery of it first. Each launch was a chance to demonstrate the awesome power of rocket systems to deliver payloads into space, whether these were probes sent to explore the Moon and planets or nuclear warheads intended
for nothing less than the destruction of the Earth. Regardless of these mixed motives, the result was to be a golden age of space exploration, in which humanity first extended its reach into the solar system.

The authors of the present collection of essays are among those who lived during that remarkable era and witnessed, or directly contributed to, its achievements, and now in late middle or old age, they are eager to set down their memories before those fade and are lost to recall forever.

Contributors:
Leo Aerts
Alexander Basilevsky
Klaus Brasch
Clark R. Chapman
Dale P. Cruikshank
William K. Hartmann
William Leatherbarrow
Baerbel Koesters Lucchitta
Yvonne Pendleton
Peter H. Schultz
William Sheehan
Paolo Tanga
Charles A. Wood

Excerpt from “Border Economies”

Posted on February 15, 2024 by Riley Brown

The border between the United States and Mexico is one of the most unique and complex regions of the world. The asymmetry of the border region, together with the profound cultural differences of the two countries, create national controversies around migration, security, and illegal flows of drugs and weapons. The national narratives miss the fact that the 15 million or more people living in the border regions of Mexico and the United States are highly interactive and responsive to conditions on the other side.

Enormous legal cross-border flows of people, goods, and finance are embedded in the region’s history and prompted by the need to respond to new opportunities and challenges that originate on the other side. In Border Economies by James Gerber examines how the interactivity and sensitivity of communities to conditions across the border differentiates them from communities in the interiors of Mexico and the United States. Gerber explains what makes the region not only unique but uniquely interesting. Read an excerpt from the book below.

Permeability is an important feature of the U.S.-Mexico border. It enables the interactions of communities on opposite sides, regardless of migration policies, trade agreements, border walls, or frictions between Washington and Mexico City. Permeability refers to the authorized, constant, bidirectional movement of people, goods, and money across the international boundary. It is what allows the border region to be a unique hybrid space where Mexico’s culture and economy spill into the United States and those of the United States into Mexico. Many residents and businesses on both sides need to cross frequently, if not daily, and their normal routines require them to send and receive goods as well as to provide money and financial assets to the other side. Taken together, the enormous bidirectional flows of people, goods, and finance create a border economy that extends into both countries.

The idea of a peaceful border defined by the interactions of Mexican and U.S. citizens, businesses, and government officials is one part of the story, but an exclusive focus on the positive interactions of residents along the border elides other realities. There are also walls, armed border police, families who lead precarious lives, drug wars, and disturbing acts of violence. Raw sewage periodically spills into shared waterways, while HIV, asthma, diabetes, and other diseases pose public health challenges. It is not hard to paint a distorted and one-sided picture, but the reality of the border is one of a complex mosaic of ethnicities, incomes, social classes, and living conditions. There are difficult problems and challenges but also dynamism, opportunity, and creativity. In addition to the darker elements, both sides offer museums and universities, shopping malls, elegant homes, middle-class suburbs, and gourmet restaurants. In some places, urban areas on the border are graceful examples of cultural hybridity and cooperation across the divides of history and language, but in other places and times, they become examples of misunderstanding, poverty, and threats of violence.

Many people on both sides of the border never cross to the other side. The reasons are various—they are not permitted, they do not want to, or they haven’t enough time or money. But many people do cross, and many of them do so regularly. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2019, there were over 188 million crossings on foot, and in cars, buses, or trains, from south to north. This did not mean that 188 million unique individuals crossed the border, because many people cross daily or weekly, going back and forth to work or school or to visit family. Border crossers take their lives and culture with them when they visit the other side, so Mexico comes to the United States and the United States goes to Mexico. Some observers in both countries fear this exchange will corrupt their nation’s values by turning the border region into a miniature enclave of the country on the other side. Others welcome the influences and see more cultural choices, enrichment for the arts and education, a wider variety of medical services, and new economic opportunities. The perception of the border, like the reality, is not one thing.

The U.S.-Mexico border is perhaps the most traversed in the world. But it is not just people that cross. The United States and Mexico have the second largest trade relationship of any two countries in the world; the largest is trade between the United States and Canada, but only by a relatively small amount. Most of the trade between the United States and its two neighbors crosses the border in trucks and adds to the flow of border crossing. Simultaneously, the flow of goods and people is amplified by the flow of money and finance, including large investments in manufacturing, trade finance, remittances of migrants, tourist dollars, cross-border shopping, the purchase of medical services, and other payments and receipts.

Excerpt from “Ordinary Injustice”

Posted on December 12, 2023November 8, 2023 by Riley Brown

December 12, 2023

Ordinary Injustice by Alfredo Mirandé is the unique and riveting story of a young Latino student, Juan Rulfo, with no previous criminal record involved in a domestic violence dispute that quickly morphs into a complex case with ten felonies, multiple enhancements, a “No Bail” order, and a potential life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Building from author Alfredo Mirandé’s earlier work Rascuache Lawyer, the account is told by “The Professor,” who led a pro bono rascuache legal defense team comprising the professor, a retired prosecutor, and student interns, working without a budget, office, paralegals, investigators, or support staff. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in race, gender, and criminal injustice and will appeal not only to law scholars and social scientists but to lay readers interested in ethnographic field research, Latinx communities, and racial disparities in the legal system. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

Ordinary Injustice is an in-depth ethnographic account of what should have been a routine, simple misdemeanor case involving a young Latino doctoral student, Juan Rulfo, with no previous criminal record who was ultimately charged with multiple felonies stemming from a toxic, romantic relationship. Incredibly, a routine domestic dispute morphed into a complex life case with multiple enhancements, a “No Bail” order, and the defendant initially facing a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Unlike books focusing on high profile celebrity cases like the OJ Simpson trial, or of people wrongly convicted of serious, violent, sensationalized crimes, this book is about the ordinary, yet systemic and endemic injustices experienced by Latinos and people of Color at the hands of the criminal [in]justice system in the United States. The book offers an in-depth ethnographic account of the case written by Juan’s lawyer, “The Professor,” a sociologist pro bono attorney, that follows the case and carefully chronicles the injustices and systemic racism experienced by his client in criminal court from the complaint, investigation, arrest, preliminary hearing, pre-trial motions, to final disposition. The result is a compelling story told from the perspective of the client and his legal defense team; The Professor, and co-counsel, Raphael Guerra, a crafty seasoned trial lawyer and retired Deputy District Attorney, and a cadre of Latina student interns who provided valuable input and support.

The murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other unjustified high profile police killings have triggered massive protests, signaling the emergence of an international Black Lives Matter Movement (BLM) and increased concern not only with the unauthorized use of deadly force by police but the mass incarceration of Black and Latino defendants. Recent protests seeking radical reforms, have pointed to systemic racism at every stage of the criminal justice system, from policing to pre-trial processes, sentencing, treatment within correctional facilities, and even re-entry (Sawyer 2020). Because research has focused largely on the experiences of Black defendants, generally adopting a Black/White binary view of race in the U.S., there is a need for more research and scholarship on racial and economic disparities in the criminal justice system experienced by Latinos and other groups, particularly bottom-up. in-depth, personal, ethnographic accounts.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 35 percent of state prisoners are White, 39 percent Black, and 21 percent Hispanic or Latino, and in twelve states more than half of the prison population is African American. Although ethnicity data are less reliable than data on race, the Hispanic population in state prison is as high as 61 percent in New Mexico and 42 percent in California (Nellis 2016). And in an additional seven states, at least one in five inmates is Hispanic. Latinos are disproportionately incarcerated at a rate that is 1.4 greater than the rate for Whites, and surprisingly these discrepancies are especially high in states like Massachusetts (2.3:1); Connecticut (2.9:1); Pennsylvania 3.3:1) and New York (3.3:1) (Nellis 2016).

Excerpt from “Hottest of the Hotspots”

Posted on November 21, 2023November 8, 2023 by Riley Brown

November 21, 2023

Continually recognized as one of the “hottest” of all the world’s biodiversity hotspots, the island of Madagascar has become ground zero for the most intensive market-based conservation interventions on Earth.

Hottest of the Hotspots by Benjamin Neimark details the rollout of market conservation programs, including the finding drugs from nature—or “bioprospecting”—biodiversity offsetting, and the selling of blue carbon credits from mangroves. It documents the tensions that exist at the local level, as many of these programs incorporate populations highly dependent on the same biodiversity now turned into global commodities for purposes of saving it. Proponents of market conservation mobilize groups of ecologically precarious workers, or the local “eco-precariat,” who do the hidden work of collecting and counting species, monitoring and enforcing the vital biodiversity used in everything from drug discovery to carbon sequestration and large mining company offsets.

Providing a voice for those community workers many times left out of environmental policy discussions, this volume proposes critiques that aim to build better conservation interventions with perspectives of the local eco-precariat. Read an excerpt from the book below.

In the late 1980s, the famed biologist Norman Myers published a series of articles that drastically modified the global conservation map. Calling attention to locations with unusually high concentrations of species endemism found nowhere else on Earth, and areas facing exceptional threats of species extinction, Myers argued that these “hotspots” should be accorded the highest priority for protection. Myers’ original article identified 10 hotspots for protection. Two years later, he expanded his list to 18. By the year 2000, it had grown to 25, and by 2004, 34 hotspots had been proposed for special attention. Yet throughout this period of hotspot proliferation – one site in particular – the island of Madagascar, was continually recognized as one of the ‘hottest’ of all the hotspots.

It is easy to see conservationists’ attraction to Madagascar. Split off from the supercontinent Gondwana roughly 160 million years ago, Madagascar is the fourth largest island and the world’s largest oceanic island. Due to its convergent evolutionary history and unique biogeography, it is endowed with some of the most unique flora and fauna in the world. It is not only conservationists who have taken note of the value of Madagascar’s unique biodiversity, however. For years, thousands of plants, amphibians, insects, marine animals and microorganisms have been identified, collected and transported off the island for use in the discovery and development of new drugs, crops, chemicals and biofuels. Plant parts and insects are extracted out of the high, humid forests of the east; succulents are gathered in the western dry-spiny forests; and soft coral sponges are found on the northern reefs. The unique flora and fauna have distinctive biological traits and exceptional chemical properties, highly attractive to make new natural products, including drugs, biofuels and industrial products. It is in this context that they, like Norman Myers, place a special value on Madagascar’s nature.

The systematic search, screening, collecting and commercial development of valuable genetic and biological resources, is sometimes called “bioprospecting”. As the term suggests, bioprospectors, similar to those who search underground for gold or semi-precious stones, are also on an exploration mission – to locate, test, isolate, and extract the distinctive chemical scaffolding concealed under layers of cellular tissue and transformed by years of evolutionary history.

Excerpt from “Central American Migrations in the Twenty-First Century”

Posted on November 18, 2023October 24, 2023 by Riley Brown

November 18, 2023

The reality of Central American migrations is broad, diverse, multidirectional, and uncertain. It also offers hope, resistance, affection, solidarity, and a sense of community for a region that has one of the highest rates of human displacement in the world.

Central American Migrations in the Twenty-First Century edited by Mauricio Espinoza, Miroslava Arely Rosales Vásquez, and Ignacio Sarmiento tackles head-on the way Central America has been portrayed as a region profoundly marked by the migration of its people. Through an intersectional approach, this volume demonstrates how the migration experience is complex and affected by gender, age, language, ethnicity, social class, migratory status, and other variables. Contributors carefully examine a broad range of topics, including forced migration, deportation and outsourcing, intraregional displacements, the role of social media, and the representations of human mobility in performance, film, and literature. The volume establishes a productive dialogue between humanities and social sciences scholars, and it paves the way for fruitful future discussions on the region’s complex migratory processes. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

In July 2021, the name of a young athlete was heard by every living Guatemalan with WIFI access or a TV: Luis Grijalva. A 22-year-old undocumented Guatemalan immigrant in the United States, Grijalva participated in the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games. On August 6, he became the first Guatemalan to run in the track and field 5K final, where he ultimately finished in 12th place and established a new Guatemalan record. Grijalva came to the United States at the age of one, when his parents decided to leave Guatemala City and––irregularly––migrate to New York. After a couple of years, the family relocated to Fairfield, California, where the father worked at a carwash and at a furniture company. In 2012, Grijalva became a beneficiary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which allows undocumented young immigrants to legally study and work in the United States. Thanks to this program and his talent, Grijalva was admitted with a full scholarship in Northern Arizona University in 2018. In June 2021, at the NCAA Division I Outdoor Track and Field Championship held in Eugene, Oregon, Grijalva secured a spot in the Olympic Games, becoming the last athlete to join Team Guatemala. Nevertheless, qualifying for the Olympic Games was not the hardest challenge––his participation was in jeopardy due to his undocumented status. Like any other undocumented immigrant, Grijalva would be able to leave the country at the cost of having his entrance to the United States prohibited for ten years. Grijalva paid more than $1,000 to file a special petition to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and obtain a permit that would allow him to re-enter the country after participating in the Olympics Games. After several anxious weeks of waiting, on July 27, his petition was ultimately accepted and Grijalva made history in Japan.

Grijalva’s story brings together some of the numerous difficulties faced by the 3.8 million Central Americans living in the United States—1.9 million of whom are believed to be in this country without papers (Babich and Batalova). For example, his legal permanence in the country where he has lived his entire life exclusively depends on the existence of the DACA program, which was in jeopardy when former president Donald Trump tried to cancel it during his first year in office. Fortunately for Grijalva and the other hundreds of thousands of DACA beneficiaries, the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the president did not have legal authority to rescind the program (Totemberg 2020). However, while Grijalva is able to work and study in the United States as long as DACA— which does not offer any path to residency or citizenship—is in effect, his parents are at constant risk of deportation.

Not all stories are the same for the more than 5 million migrants from the isthmus living (with or without documents) around the world. Privileged Central Americans also face forced displacement from their home countries—and not all end up in the United States. Two well-known recent cases are Nicaraguan authors Sergio Ramírez and Gioconda Belli. In September 2021, Ramírez (the 2017 Cervantes Prize winner and Nicaraguan vice president during the Sandinista government between 1985 and 1990) announced on social media that he had been forced into a second exile as a result of his open opposition to the oppressive Daniel Ortega-Rosario Murillo regime in his home country. At the time of this writing (2023), the eighty-year-old man was living in Spain, dealing with the hardships of his new reality (DW 2021). In one interview (given in Costa Rica, where he first fled), the writer addressed the heartbreak that this situation has caused him and which has affected thousands of his compatriots since the violently repressed protests against the current Nicaraguan government took place starting April 2018: “I am one of the 40,000 Nicaraguans exiled in Costa Rica, and I represent them because I have a voice that is heard, but exile is very hard. My house, my books collected during my entire life are there, and the idea that I may never find myself in that place of refuge that I have had for my writing is also very hard” (Santacecilia 2021; our translation). A similar situation has been faced by poet and novelist Gioconda Belli, also a former Sandinista militant, who in October 2021, at the age of seventy-two, was forced to abandon her home country (Barranco 2021). Her poem “No tengo dónde vivir” (I don’t have a place to live) reflects the anguish of having left everything behind (Belli 2021). In February 2023, Belli, Ramírez, and ninety-two other people were stripped of their Nicaraguan nationality by Ortega’s regime.

Belli’s and Ramírez’s experiences are far from being the only ones among Central American authors and creators. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, many people in the world of arts and letters have suffered exile from taking part in political struggles to confront authoritarian governments, or they have left because of a lack of scholarships and financial support to survive and devote themselves completely to their artistic endeavors or as a result of a precarious cultural infrastructure in their home countries.

Contributors
Guillermo Acuña
Andrew Bentley
Fiore Bran-Aragón
Tiffanie Clark
Mauricio Espinoza
Hilary Goodfriend
Leda Carolina Lozier
Judith Martínez
Alicia V. Nuñez
Miroslava Arely Rosales Vásquez
Manuel Sánchez Cabrera
Ignacio Sarmiento
Gracia Silva
Carolina Simbaña González
María Victoria Véliz

***

Mauricio Espinoza is a poet, translator, and researcher from Costa Rica. He is an assistant professor of Spanish and Latin American cultural studies at the University of Cincinnati. Miroslava Arely Rosales Vásquez is a PhD student in literature at Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Germany. Ignacio Sarmiento is an assistant professor of Spanish and Latin American history at the State University of New York–Fredonia whose research focuses on postwar Central America and the Central American diaspora.

Excerpt from “From the Skin”

Posted on November 15, 2023October 23, 2023 by Riley Brown

November 15, 2023

In From the Skin edited by Jerome Jeffery Clark and Elise Boxer with foreword by Nick Estes, contributors describe how they apply the theories and concepts of Indigenous studies to their communities, programs, and organizations. These individuals reflect on and describe the ways the discipline has informed and influenced their community programs and actions. They show the ways these efforts advance disciplinary theories, methodologies, and praxes. Their chapters cover topics that include librarianship, health programs, community organizing, knowledge recovery, youth programming, and gendered violence. Through their examples, the contributors show how they negotiate their peoples’ knowledge systems with knowledge produced in Indigenous studies programs, demonstrating how they understand the relationship between their people, their nations, and academia. We share an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

From the Skin: Defending Indigenous Nations Using Theory and Praxis originates from conversations at the 2016 American Indian Studies Association (AISA) conference held at Arizona State University. The membership met to consider the theme “Native Leadership in Community Building.” Each year the conference concludes with an association business meeting where new board members and the president are nominated and voted on. Once the new board is selected, they decide on the conference location for the next year. We both remember that year for separate conversations. The first conversation had to do with organizational direction and the nomination and election process. The board and membership discussed ways the organization could grow and the areas in which we should put our focus. The membership broadly recognized that the AISA could do more to formalize structure and establish new protocols, so the board established committees to research non-profit status and the adoption of bylaws. Conference attendees then nominated new board members and a president.

The second conversation among J. Jeffery Clark, Eric Hardy, Madison Fulton, and Waquin Preston happened after the business meeting ended. They all listened and participated in the business meeting discussions, offering their professional skills and knowledge to help the organization. Their post-business meeting conversation was about more than offering their abilities because they discussed the organization’s direction and their specific place within it and the field more broadly. They had all attended association meetings throughout their undergraduate studies, sometimes to present but other times to hear panels and to be in community. As graduates of Indigenous Studies programs, some of them had moved on to professional careers, while others enrolled in masters’ programs. They found themselves at a crossroads, recognizing that their work in Indigenous Studies was not visible because they weren’t academic professionals. But they valued and applied the scholarship and intellectual conversations that shaped their thinking and informed their community work. They asked: What is our place in this association? What is our place in the discipline? Does our work in the community have a place? Is our work taken seriously? They knew the worthiness of their work, which they felt deserved the same consideration as scholarship produced by professional academics. Because they applied disciplinary theories and concepts in their work, they knew there was room for their efforts. At that moment, though, they felt like their presence and efforts were underappreciated. At the root of their conversation and questions are matters of belonging, disciplinary scope, academic connections to community, legibility of community intellect and practices, and what counts as Indigenous Studies.

We recount these conversations and questions because this book holds space for former Indigenous students to display the ways they apply and develop Indigenous Studies in community work. If any students of Indigenous Studies have ever asked: What contributions do my practices make? What are my intellectual contributions? Where does my work belong? The response is this project, which is a testament to the creativity, commitment, and intellect of Indigenous students in the discipline. This edited collection features practitioners and thinkers of Indigenous Studies actively working with nonprofits, grassroots organizations, and academic institutions, all of these contexts represent the distinct ways to apply disciplinary knowledge. The collection of essays illustrates how the contributors apply the discipline in community contexts to recover, revitalize, and assert Indigenous knowledge systems. These individuals reflect upon and elucidate the ways the discipline has informed and influenced their community programs and actions, and it also shows the ways these efforts advance disciplinary theories, methodologies, and praxes.

The authors represent nine disciplinary undergraduate and graduate programs that include Arizona State University, University of New Mexico, Fort Lewis College, and the University of California Los Angeles, among others. The authors in this volume work with Indigenous Nations located in the political boundaries of the United States, but the intellectual labor of global Indigenous scholars informs their efforts. A similar project could have included contributors from other countries, but we limited our contributors to the US context for the simple reason of project manageability. Our process of selecting authors was to make a general call to our networks. We do not represent all Indigenous Nations from the US. We selected authors to ensure they covered a range of topics (gender, youth, education, health) and places (university, community, non-profit).

In the following sections, we discuss disciplinary origins and principles to contextualize our contributors’ locations within Indigenous Studies. Primarily, we focus on longstanding debates around the relationship between our discipline and Indigenous communities and nations. We then propose and define the term practitioner theorist to demarcate how the contributors fit in our discipline and intellectual practices and why we must pay attention to how they apply concepts and theories in their communities. We present their work in three sections: Animating Embodied Knowledge, Unsettling Institutions and Making Community, and Making Good Relations Now and Beyond. Although each chapter could fit under multiple sections, we decided on their placements to emphasize key topics and themes in their work and because we saw them in conversation with contributors they’re grouped with.

Contributors
Elise Boxer
Randi Lynn Boucher-Giago
Shawn Brigman
J. Jeffery Clark
Nick Estes
Eric Hardy
Shalene Joseph
Jennifer Marley
Brittani R. Orona
Alexander Soto

The University of Arizona Press