Category: Excerpt

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

Excerpt from “Ready Player Juan”

Posted on November 8, 2023November 6, 2023 by Riley Brown

November 8, 2023

Written for all gaming enthusiasts, Ready Player Juan by Carlos Gabriel Kelly González fuses Latinx studies and video game studies to document how Latinx masculinities are portrayed in high-budget action-adventure video games, inviting Latinxs and others to insert their experiences into games made by an industry that fails to see them.

The book employs an intersectional approach through performance theory, border studies, and lived experience to analyze the designed identity “Player Juan.” Player Juan manifests in video game representations through a discourse of criminality that sets expectations of who and what Latinxs can be and do. Developing an original approach to video game experiences, the author theorizes video games as border crossings, and defines a new concept—digital mestizaje—that pushes players, readers, and scholars to deploy a Latinx way of seeing and that calls on researchers to consider a digital object’s constructive as well as destructive qualities. Read an excerpt from the book below.

In the past decade, I have taken to thinking more deeply and critically about video games, which has been my longest running and most beloved entertainment choice. Video games, just the words bring me joy and a possible connection to others— “you play video games?” A ‘Yes’ (a more common answer as the years have passed) always fills me with energy, excitement to know what this person plays and what games they love, or what console they play on, “oh PC, so cool!” I mean whatever people are playing on, I am pumped to hear their stories.
Games are full of stories, whether from the game’s narrative or from the people recounting a moment from their gameplay experiences. I once learned about an amazing game from a former student at a youth summer camp where I taught. The student chatted me up about all the games they played when at home. With excitement he pointed to a game’s alternate and shifting storylines, how cool it was that you could be three different people, and how there were consequences beyond what he was used to all in studio Quantic Dream’s Detroit: Become Human. I was also impressed by its story and how personal decisions left me asking what if I had chosen differently? Was there another way? The storytelling in video games compels me to play, to think about the game even when I should be doing other things; I revel in the stories video games provide.
Like the young boy at the camp, I didn’t know one could study video games beyond making them. I thought playing and enjoying games was all there was for me. I came to know this only because I was in a PhD program, which makes me think of how many people from other marginalized groups do not know or have the access they need to study video games? When you think about the low number of Latinxs in gaming production or in games’ representations, it isn’t surprising to see very little about Latinxs or games that continually stereotype us when that’s all we see in media. Then add the fact video games have always been an expensive hobby. The PlayStation 5 (PS5) is currently $750 in Brazil (2021, July), that’s over $250 more than the $500 US retail price. Or what about the 16-year-old Max Hayden buying and reselling PS5s for a total profit of over $1.7 million dollars? Video games and the new consoles are expensive and for the most part, because of the pandemic you are lucky to get one. All this to say that I have been fortunate in my access to the worlds made possible by video game creators and I consider it a privilege to be able to study, play, and love these stories.
We are living in a boom period for video games, in every sense of it. The attention to gaming has led to streaming favorite players, to esports competition, to websites dedicated to critiques and reviews, to next generation consoles, to more films and TV series about video games, to Twitter updates on where you can snag a next gen console; video games are it right now. Before I started to get into this research, I used to think video games had to prove they were worthy of attention or study, etc. This stance was a way for me to answer the criticism of video games being a waste of time, to study and examine the games I love to show people what was up! Yet, video games are worthy, and this idea runs less circles around me than before. However, I am plagued by yet another concern, this one more critical to unlocking the full potential of the stories I love in video games. In the face of this undeniable and infinite growth video games continue to lack diversity, especially when it comes to more completely capturing the extent of non-White peoples’ humanity. We just don’t see many stories not centering whiteness.
Video game storytelling has the potential to be boundless, to create what our other media cannot achieve, and yet we continue to see the same characters and the same stereotypes. Without diversity how can video games aspire to technology’s boundless possibilities? I’m reminded of Christopher González’s Permissible Narratives and how he writes about the limits experienced by Latinxs who were publishing their stories. He investigates how the early success of Latinx narratives set limits on the types of Latinx storytelling, creating a phenomenon of what was or is deemed permissible, which was/is based on audiences’ receptions to what stories they thought were authentic Latinx stories. He writes that “the earliest Latino/a authors were already attempting to break from a priori expectations of what types of narratives they could create; what they lacked was narrative permissibility from their audiences” (González 177). We continue to see this in the way Latinxs are represented in video games, with not much being permissible beyond the stereotypes involving White protagonists and Latinx side characters—if we even make it that far into the script.
Game production in the US (and globally) needs a more well-rounded dialogue that makes space for marginalized peoples, and no Naughty Dog Studios (creator of Last of us Two), you don’t just throw in a Latinx character and expect us to be like, “cool, cool, you did it!” I love that game, but it tokenizes people of color and treats us like horror movie characters where we have a role and then we do not, usually by brutal death. This role given to marginalized groups is usually in the service of expanding upon the protagonists’ story, just like Manny in Last of us Two. Thus, as consumers of games and producers of games we need to recognize that with the growing popularity and the immense storytelling power of video games comes responsibility— yes; Uncle Ben/Aunt May telling Spidey with great power. . . you know the rest.
Video games can and do provide a multitude of experiences that work on us physically, mentally, and emotionally. Again, which is why it is so critical to be more inclusive instead of recreating the same White male lead with a slightly modified 5’o clock shadow. When it comes to Latinxs, we really don’t exist in the same ways that White characters do. In fact, Latinx masculinities (in mostly male bodies) exist only in stereotypes, and I can only name three playable Latina characters in the last 20 years: Isabella Keyes, Christie Monteiro, and Sombra. Notable here, Sombra was only added after the launch of Overwatch, again pointing to how Latinxs are afterthoughts. How is this possible when according to Pew Research, Latinxs are considered the fastest growing group of people to identify as gamers? (Pew). Latinxs are continually underrepresented as marginalized peoples in all our media even though we make up the most sizeable portion of non-gringo peoples in the US. This erasure, this ignoring, this way of seeing worlds without Latinxs just can’t stand anymore. As gamers, as people, as heavy consumers of video games (the highest consumers of video games) Latinxs deserve better.

Excerpt from “Construction of Maya Space”

Posted on November 1, 2023October 12, 2023 by Riley Brown

November 1, 2023

Construction of Maya Space, edited by Thomas H. Guderjan and Jennifer P. Mathews, sheds new light on how Maya society may have shaped—and been shaped by—the constructed environment. Moving beyond the towering pyramids and temples often associated with Maya spaces, this volume focuses on how those in power used features such as walls, roads, rails, and symbolic boundaries to control those without power, and how the powerless pushed back.

Through fifteen engaging chapters, contributors examine the construction of spatial features by ancient, historic, and contemporary Maya elite and non-elite peoples to understand how they used spaces differently. Through cutting-edge methodologies and case studies, chapters consider how and why Maya people connected and divided the spaces they used daily in their homes, in their public centers, in their sacred places such as caves, and across their regions to inform us about the mental constructs they used to create their lives and cultures of the past. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

The purpose of this volume is to examine the construction of spatial features by ancient, historic, and contemporary Maya people of Mesoamerica. As humans such as Maya peoples encounter spaces like a tropical landscape, they modify them to meet their social and economic needs. They built towering pyramids around public plazas and constructed vast networks of ditched fields to produce food and other agricultural products, however, much of the focus of this volume goes beyond these spaces. Instead, we consider how and why Maya people of the ancient past and more recent present connected and divided the spaces they used daily in their homes, in their public centers, in their sacred places, and across their regions. How does the evidence of walls, roads, rails, and boundary markers that they left on today’s archaeological landscape inform us about the mental constructs they used to create their lives and cultures of the past?

This theoretical approach is essentially a Taylorian view – one that believes that we can understand the behaviors that caused and created the archaeological data and then, by extension, inform us about their defining mental constructs (Taylor 1948). Like Walt Taylor himself, we may never fully reach that final goal. However, we challenged ourselves and our colleagues to reexamine how and why walls, roads and other features can both connect and divide space. At first blush, the idea that “walls divide” or “roads connect” sounds simplistic. However, as the papers in this volume demonstrate, the answers to our questions are complex and nuanced. To arrive where we wanted this study to end involves deconstructing archaeological data, both temporally and in terms of the behavior that created those data. We believe we have made strides in our own understanding and hope to share them in this volume by thinking about how our notion of Maya landscapes, placemaking, and memory work have evolved.

Contributors
Elias Alcocer Puerto
Alejandra Alonso Olvera
Traci Ardren
Jaime J. Awe
Alejandra Badillo Sánchez
Nicolas C. Barth
Grace Lloyd Bascopé
Adolpho Iván Batún-Alpuche
Elizabeth Beckner
M. Kathryn Brown
Bernadette Cap
Miguel Covarrubias Reyna
Juan Fernandez Diaz
Alberto G. Flores Colin
Thomas H. Guderjan
C. Colleen Hanratty
Héctor Hernández Álvarez
Scott R. Hutson
Joshua J. Kwoka
Whitney Lytle
Aline Magnoni
Jennifer P. Mathews
Stephanie J. Miller
Shawn G. Morton
Holley Moyes
Shannon Plank
Dominique Rissolo
Patrick Rohrer
Carmen Rojas Sandoval
Justine M. Shaw
J. Gregory Smith
Travis W. Stanton
Karl A. Taube
Daniel Vallejo-Cáliz

The University of Arizona Press