Category: Excerpt

Excerpt from “Healing Like Our Ancestors”

Posted on August 29, 2024July 2, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

August 29, 2024

Healing Like Our Ancestors: The Nahua Titiçih, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Central Mexico, 1535-1660, by Edward Anthony Polanco, offers a provocative new perspective the examines sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Nahua healers in central Mexico and how their practices have been misconstrued and misunderstood in colonial records.

Early colonial Spanish settlers defined, assessed, and admonished Nahua titiçih (healing specialists) and tiçiyotl (healing knowledge) in the process of building a society in Mexico that mirrored Iberia. Nevertheless, Nahua survivance (intergenerational knowledge transfer) has allowed communities to heal like their ancestors through changes and adaptations. Polanco draws from diverse colonial primary sources, largely in Spanish and Nahuatl (the Nahua ancestral language), to explore how Spanish settlers framed titiçih, their knowledge, and their practices within a Western complex. Polanco argues for the usage of Indigenous terms when discussing Indigenous concepts and arms the reader with the Nahuatl words to discuss central Mexican Nahua healing. In particular, this book emphasizes the importance of women as titiçih and highlights their work as creators and keepers of knowledge. These vital Nahua perspectives of healing—and how they differed from the settler narrative—will guide community members as well as scholars and students of the history of science, Latin America, and Indigenous studies. Read an excerpt from the book’s introduction below.

“From the Peruvian Andes to the French court, the potato’s voyages”—thus reads the title of a sign explaining how the potato made its way to Spain. In July 2022, I had the privilege of visiting the Real Jardín Botánico (Royal Botanical Garden) in Madrid. I had read about the garden in books and was curious about its contents. When I asked a garden employee where I could see plants indigenous to the Americas, she informed me that the gardeners had dispersed them throughout the grounds and that the garden’s sections were not organized by geographic location. I immediately looked for corn (Zea mays) and tobacco (Nicotiana sp.), which I was surprised to find growing next to each other in the huerta, or orchard, section. There, like thousands of visitors every year, I was also able to see squash, beans, potatoes, sunflowers, tomatoes, and peppers. Though many of the plants in the orchard are native to Turtle Island (what is now called North America) and Abya Yala (what is now called Central and South America), there was no such descriptor or recognition. I then moved on to the medicinal section, which contained only two plants from Abya Yala, huevo de gallo (Salpichroa origanifolia) and epazote (Dysphania ambrosioides).

In the entire botanical garden, the only placard I found that explained an “American” plant was a sign for what Spaniards call the patata, or the papa in Quechua and Latin American Spanish (potato in English). Most of the text about the potato revolved around its European “discovery” in the Americas and the untapped knowledge about its nutritional attributes, unknown to Europeans until the eighteenth century. One short sentence explained that papas had been domesticated in the Chilean and Peruvian Andes eight thousand years ago. The placard made no mention of the Native cultures that had cultivated (and continue to cultivate) the root, nor did it explain the cultural significance of the papa in what is today known as South America.

This situation embodies the erasure of Native knowledge and culture that occurs with the extraction of native plants. The Real Jardín Botánico presents corn, tomatoes, beans, squash, and tobacco as plants with no Native history or culture. Though this is largely true for many of the plants in the garden irrespective of their origin, it is particularly troubling when the plants were extracted from other parts of world through colonial ventures. In the case of the papa, it appears as a once exotic plant that Europeans haphazardly dominated with their culinary and economic control. The botanical garden’s thousands of visitors could be learning about the vibrant, complex, and diverse knowledge and goods that Native people have willingly and unwillingly provided Spain and its once global empire. Visitors could also learn the importance of native plants in their Native contexts, their uses, and their indigenous names. For instance, corn is originally from Mesoamerica, and it is important to many Native communities throughout Turtle Island and Abya Yala for sustenance, healing, and as a relative. Tobacco, similarly, is a spiritual medicine, and the aromatic plant enjoys therapeutic uses as well.

Before Columbus arrived in the Western Hemisphere, Native peoples throughout Turtle Island and Abya Yala knew about corn and tobacco and grew it. Jesuit priest and settler Francisco Clavijero noted in the late eighteenth century that to Nahuas in Mexico tlaolli (corn kernels) were one of the most important food items, like wheat to Europe and rice to Asia. Nahuas had diverse types of corn that were nutritious and often eaten as “bread” (i.e., tortillas) made by women, and atolli (atole, a corn-based beverage), which had medicinal properties. Nahuas in the sixteenth century often gave cocoxqueh (sick people) atolli to nurse them back to health. Cintli (the entire corn plant) forms a core component of Indigenous foods from Mesoamerica, including tortillas, tamales, and atoles.

Moreover, many Native communities attributed special powers and reverence to tobacco. The Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas reported in the sixteenth century that the Taíno people in what is now the Dominican Republic and Haiti smoked leaves resembling lettuce, which they dried and rolled into the shape of a musket (the musket was called a tabaco). The leaves functioned as a corporal sedative, and Taínos also used them to suppress hunger and fatigue. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés further recorded sixteenth-century ceremonial uses of tabaco among the Taíno, who employed the leaves to gain unknown information. Las Casas reported that in what is now Mexico, the Tlaxcalteca used tobacco (piçiyetl in sixteenth-century Central Mexican Nahuatl and iatl in modern variants of Nahuatl) to tranquilize snakes and that it also boasted many medicinal properties, though he did not expand on them. By the 1570s, the physician Francisco Hernández had learned of a number of health benefits to be gained from smoking the dry leaves: tobacco was a great expectorant, cured asthma and difficulties breathing, was good for women having irregularities with their uterus, fortified the mind, caused drowsiness, and calmed pain. Fresh leaves were good for digestion and cured empacho (abdominal bloating and pain). Nahua specialists also used piçiyetl as an entheogen—a substance to release a nonhuman life force within. For example, healers used piçiyetl and other entheogens to communicate with nonhuman forces and to diagnose and prognosticate illnesses and injuries. Thus, it seems that tobacco might have been better suited to the Real Jardín Botánico’s medicinal section.

Effacing or obfuscating the names and knowledge of indigenous plants is part of the colonial game. Now operated by the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, the Real Jardín Botánico could use its privilege and status to acknowledge the Indigenous names of native plants when making use of plants, technologies, and knowledge acquired from Indigenous peoples.

Excerpt from “Kidnapped to the Underworld”

Posted on August 14, 2024August 19, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

August 14, 2024

Víctor Montejo’s Kidnapped to the Underworld recounts the near-death experience of his grandfather, Antonyo Mekel Lawuxh (Antonio Esteban), who fell gravely ill in Guatemala in the late 1920s but survived to tell his family and community what he had witnessed of the afterlife.

Narrated from Antonio’s perspective, the reader follows along on a journey to the Maya underworld of Xibalba, accompanied by two spirit guides. Antonio traverses Xibalba’s levels of heaven and hell, encountering instructive scenes of punishment and reward: in one chapter, conquistadors are perpetually submerged in a pool of their victims’ blood; in another, the souls of animal abusers are forever unable to cross a crocodile-infested river. Infused with memory, the author illustrates Guatemala’s unique religious syncretism, exploring conceptions of heaven and hell shared between Catholicism and Indigenous Maya spirituality. In the tradition of both the Popol Vuh and the Divine Comedy, Montejo’s narrative challenges easy categorization—this is a work of family history, religious testimony, political allegory, and sacred literature. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

It was already late as I was coming back from working in the milpa that day. Though I knew the way to my pueblo very well, I suddenly found myself lost in the thick woods, unsure where I was going. The solitude took my heart prisoner, and I grew sad thinking that no one accompanied me on that grim and desolate path. Oh, how terrible is solitude! I walked and walked with no one to give me directions or point the correct way home. Time passed, bit by bit, and I began to lose hope. Father Sun was dying, and night darkened the peaks of the far-off mountains.

The birds in the forest started flying like crazy, their melodious trills bidding farewell to the melancholy afternoon. Everything seemed to be falling asleep under the looming black cloak of night. Only my constant and hurried steps broke that sepulchral silence, and from time to time I whistled, hoping it could help me escape the overpowering fear. Thousands of thoughts pecked at my brain like a crazed woodpecker, forcing me to reflect on my past life. And so, pensive and sweaty, I gave myself over into an uncontainable soliloquy.

My thoughts took wing, flying to the infinite, forgetting my poor body that walked fatigued within that shadow of chilling monotony. Soon something called powerfully to my attention, shaking me from my meditations. It was a bird of many-colored feathers that hopped in the middle of the path, not a bit disturbed by my presence. Oh, how beautiful was that bird!

I approached cautiously, hoping to catch it, but just when my hands almost had it, the bird would jump nimbly from the ground, making me fail each time. I took off my hat in hopes of using it to catch the bird, but again it scurried away from my clumsy hands. Ah, I didn’t want to let that most beautiful and strangely colored fowl get away, but my efforts kept proving futile.

Before my eyes the bird arose and flew to a small branch, nearly within my reach. I jumped as high as I could, but I couldn’t grasp it because it flew to a higher branch. Now very desperate, I picked up a round stone and rashly threw it. In vain! The bird had flown higher, to a ceiba branch. Frantically, I hurled a second stone, but the extraordinary bird kept ascending and going further away. Meanwhile, I was dying from the intense desire to contemplate and caress it between my hands. I kept throwing my hopeless stones, but the colorful bird continued until it was lost in the topmost canopy of the enormous ceiba.

It was as if that multicolored bird had guided me to the highest elevations, toward a higher goal that I would have to reach, but which would require much more effort. Saddened by my failure, I sat down, sweaty, at the foot of that tree without even caring about the time passing by. I felt so sad, as if I had just lost the most valuable treasure, or as one who loses part of their own being.

Weariness finally took me over, and I decided to lie down on the ground and rest. But as I was doing that, my head started spinning like I was drunk. Then the earth seemed to move dizzily from under my feet, and I collapsed on the ground, losing consciousness.

Suddenly I was in great danger, as I somehow found myself attached to the roots and vines growing on the wall of a great abyss.

Poor me! There I was, clinging helplessly to the rock like a climber stuck on that vertical wall. I had managed to reach the middle of the abyss when I began to lose strength and give up. From below, I heard the frightening rumble of a prodigious river running precipitously through gigantic rocks. Over my head rose the vertical side of the ravine, impossible to climb.

I couldn’t even take another step, I was stuck, holding onto those fragile roots to keep from falling into the precipice. One false step meant certain death. Who could save me if there was no one with me? To whom could I scream? Where could I direct my voice if no one could hear me? Never in my life have I felt so alone and wretched as I found myself in those moments. But I had one hope; and therefore, I made a great effort to maintain my balance. More than anything, I had the desire to keep living and return to my pueblo with my family.

There I was, fighting desperately against the death that was stalking me, when I was amazed to see a ball of fire come falling from the sky to strike my trembling chest. That unbelievable light strengthened my body and infused me with tremendous valor. In this way I felt myself a man full of bravery and with new hopes to keep living. Then, with utmost care I began the dangerous ascent, holding tightly to those tenuous roots in the vertical wall of that overwhelming precipice. Great was my astonishment when I found I had reached the top of the abyss and could finally move unscathed from that immense danger.

I don’t know how I happened to expose my life to the middle of that great precipice, nor did I see the benevolent hand that rescued me from such horrible risk, placing me on the most accessible path.

Tired and dazed, I lay down at the foot of some old guava trees. The afternoon continued on its sad way, grey and unforgettable, and the clouds rolled apart and back together, forming strange figures that found no exit from the sky. There was sun, but it was a pale sun whose rays brought no heat.

There I stayed, quietly contemplating the grey and nebulous sky. I was so engrossed that I failed to dodge the droppings a damned vulture left on my head. At that precise moment also a husky-voiced owl began to sing, sometimes sounding like the cackle of the very devil, laughing at my lamentable situation. That owl was the messenger of the lords from beyond, and its song sounded to me like the funeral chimes that tolled when they buried someone in my pueblo.

Excerpt from “Accompaniment with Im/migrant Communities”

Posted on July 12, 2024May 14, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

July 12, 2024

Accompaniment with Im/migrant Communities edited by Kristine E. Yarris and Whitney L. Duncan, brings together the experiences and voices of anthropologists whose engaged work with im/migrant communities pushes the boundaries of ethnography toward a feminist, care-based, decolonial mode of ethnographic engagement called “accompaniment.”

Accompaniment as anthropological research and praxis troubles the boundaries of researcher-participant, scholar-activist, and academic-community to explicitly address issues of power, inequality, and the broader social purpose of the work. More than two dozen contributors show how accompaniment is not merely a mode of knowledge production but an ethical commitment that calls researchers to action in solidarity with those whose lives we seek to understand. The volume stands as a collective conversation about possibilities for caring and decolonial forms of ethnographic engagement with im/migrant communities. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

This edited volume brings together anthropologists whose engaged work with im/migrant communities pushes the boundaries of ethnography toward a mode of engagement inspired by feminist care ethics, decolonial methodologies, and Latin American activist traditions of acompañamiento, or accompaniment. Collectively, this volume contributes to applied anthropological scholarship by challenging prescribed boundaries and dichotomies, such as researcher-participant, scholar-activist, and academic-community member. In so doing, the chapters collected here unsettle received ways of doing anthropology and explicitly address issues of power, positionality, inequity, and the broader social purpose of our work. We also situate this work within a longer trajectory of applied, engaged, and activist anthropological research and within contemporary decolonial and feminist critiques of anthropology, which seek to redress historical inequities within the discipline and beyond. Drawing together an array of anthropologists working with im/migrant communities in various research settings and experimenting with different modes of doing and writing ethnography, the volume represents a collective conversation about possibilities—both epistemic and empirical—for caring, decolonial forms of ethnographic engagement.

Many of the authors featured in these pages originally came together in the fall of 2016, at the American Anthropological Association (AAA) meetings in Minneapolis. There, we attempted to gather our collective
responses to the rise of a xenophobic, racist, and white supremacist political moment in the United States, which culminated in the election of the forty-fifth president. Reeling in the wake of the presidential election, we organized a late-breaking AAA session to talk and strategize about how best to support our im/migrant research participants, students, friends, family members, and communities experiencing overt and rhetorical attacks on their safety, health, wellbeing, and very existence. From this initial encounter, we established the Anthropological Action Network for Immigrants and Refugees (AANIR), an informal collective of engaged anthropologists working with immigrant communities. AANIR has continued to meet regularly since our 2016 founding, acting as a space of solidarity, information-sharing, inspiration, and organization. We have shared strategies for creating sanctuary campuses and advocating for policy change; we have offered webinar series; we have organized conference sessions; we have collectively drafted op-eds, policy papers, and position statements together. In the process, we’ve offered and received care, community, and encouragement. In these ways, AANIR itself has served as a space of accompaniment that helps inspire this volume.

We are mindful of the historical specificity and the collegial solidarity that has given rise to and sustained the ethnographic engagements detailed here. At the same time, of course, troubling xenophobic, racist, and anti-immigrant tendencies have deep roots in the United States, just as efforts to build a more welcoming and inclusive society and polity also have longstanding roots in social movements for civil rights and immigrant justice in this country and beyond. Though we represent a variety of training backgrounds and perspectives, as U.S.-based anthropologists our work collectively responds to and addresses present sociopolitical conditions: entrenched inequality, heightened xenophobia, unbridled white nationalism, and the challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, with its disparate impacts on marginalized and impoverished communities. We have invited all volume contributors to reflect on how the current political and historical moment has inspired and shaped our scholarship and relationships as engaged anthropologists working with im/migrant communities.

The central questions guiding this volume are: How do we understand and enact accompaniment with im/migrant communities? What does accompaniment offer our engaged anthropological work—as research modality, as practical engagement, and as a collaborative option for thinking and writing together and with our interlocutors? While we situate our approach to accompaniment historically within related theoretical concepts and methodologies, we do not intend to provide a definitive account or to foreclose avenues for thinking about accompaniment. Indeed, one commonality across the work of the authors in this volume is our willingness to engage with the uncertainties and discomfort that our shifting subjectivities as anthropologists accompanying im/ migrant communities require. We seek to draw forward these tensions, describing how and why our roles may shift from scholar to social worker, observer to friend, witness to advocate. Across the chapters, then—as contributors describe fighting deportations, engaging in social protest, writing reports and editorials, developing immigrant-friendly programs, advocating for inclusive health and social policies, and fostering systems of support for migrants—accompaniment acts as a grounding force, a being-with and standing alongside, a form of care that shifts us away from received ways of doing ethnography into more unsettled but productive spaces of possibility for solidarity and social justice.

Excerpt from “Indigenous Health and Justice”

Posted on June 18, 2024May 9, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

June 18, 2024

Colonial oppression, systemic racism, discrimination, and poor access to a wide range of resources detract from Indigenous health and contribute to continuing health inequities and injustices. These factors have led to structural inadequacies that contribute to circular challenges such as chronic underfunding, understaffing, and culturally insensitive health-care provision. Nevertheless, Indigenous Peoples are working actively to end such legacies.

In Indigenous Health and Justice, edited by Karen Jarratt-Snider and Marianne O. Nielsen, contributors demonstrate how Indigenous Peoples, individuals, and communities create their own solutions. Chapters focus on both the challenges created by the legacy of settler colonialism and the solutions, strengths, and resilience of Indigenous Peoples and communities in responding to these challenges. It introduces a range of examples, such as the ways in which communities use traditional knowledge and foodways to address health disparities. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter “Indigenous Peoples’ Involvement in the U.S. Justice System, Trends, Health Impacts, and Health Disparities” below.

To more fully grasp the significance of strides made in recent decades to introduce Indigenous cultural and spiritual practices into correctional facilities, these practices must be understood within the context of colonialism. The Indigenous experience with settler-colonial states through systemic means of oppression is a long one. Countries such as the United States, Canada, and Australia have historically passed and upheld national and state or provincial laws aimed at dismantling Indigenous cultural identities and traditions through religious suppression—instituting bans on practices and rites expressive of Indigenous spirituality, obstructing access to sacred sites, and outlawing possession of ceremonial objects such as peyote and sacred pipes (Irwin 2006).

Attempting to simplify Indigenous religious beliefs and practices for generalizable consumption is a daunting and nearly impossible task. Generally, most Indigenous Peoples around the world view their everyday cultural ways of being and living as being spiritually purposeful and significant. Hence, culture and spirituality (or religious practice) are inextricably connected because one structures the other. Unlike Euro-Western notions of religion, which impose a separation between God and the world we exist in, Indigenous spirituality and religious orientations see a Creator or multiple sacred deities as a part of the world. This difference in the perception of religion and the human relationship to the “holy” is but one aspect of the Othering process employed by Westerners to cast Indigenous Peoples as primitive, ahistorical, unsophisticated, uncivilized, unstable, and savage nonhumans. This was a means to justify colonial tactics of genocide (e.g., subjugation of Indigenous Peoples, atrocious acts of violence, removal from homelands, and cultural assimilation) that were employed in order to lay claim to Indigenous land and natural resources for the establishment of settler-colonial expansion, wealth, and prosperity (Nielsen and Robyn 2019).

Indigenous individuals have only been granted U.S. citizenship within the last century through the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which also conferred the right to vote. After that, it took another half century before all Native citizens were afforded protection of the right to practice their religious, spiritual, and cultural beliefs, with the 1978 passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA). Between 1993 and 2000, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) were passed to increase these protections. Regarding RFRA and RLUIPA, a guidance document produced by the Native American Rights Fund (2016) and intended for Indigenous people in correctional facilities explains, “Both statutes prevent the government from substantially burdening [an inmate’s] religious practice unless it has a compelling reason to do so in [the inmate’s] particular case,” and that prisons may only burden or hinder religious practices if they have “no other, less restrictive alternatives available.” Admittedly, this is a very condensed presentation of some of the historical strides made by the U.S. government to suppress and then protect and preserve Indigenous traditional religious beliefs and practices, but this contextual information is pertinent for understanding the advances made from the 1960s forward.

The 1960s and 1970s marked a social movement in the United States that was pushing for the right of Indigenous individuals who were incarcerated to exercise their Native religious practices. In the early 1960s, Clyde Bellecourt, an Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) man, met a young Anishinaabe spiritual leader named Eddie Benton-Banai when they were both serving time in Minnesota’s Stillwater prison (Reha 2001). Bellecourt and Benton-Banai, known for their founding roles in the American Indian Movement, formed the American Indian Folklore Group while incarcerated, to help incarcerated Indigenous people heal by learning about Native history, epistemologies, culture, and spirituality through pan-Indian frameworks (Tighe 2014). Tighe (2014, 5) describes this effort as a “model for Indian cultural renaissance within prisons.” Bellecourt affirms that ceremonies are an integral component of the healing process that can support individuals involved in the criminal justice system to make positive changes in their lives, and credits how establishing a spiritual base in his own life helped him to overcome his battle with alcoholism (Reha 2001).

With the aid of the Native American Rights Fund, one of the oldest and largest legal organizations committed to defending the legal rights of Indigenous people and nations, Indigenous individuals incarcerated in Nebraska won a federal court consent decree in Wolff v. McDonnell (1974), which allowed them to practice their religious and cultural beliefs in prison. This opened the way in Nebraska for sweat lodges to be conducted, Native clubs and spiritual collectives to be formed, and elders to serve as spiritual advisors and cultural-based counselors inside correctional facilities (Irwin 2006). Irwin (2006, 42) notes that the consent decree “established an important precedent for native prisoners in other states.”

Traction on this issue continued to grow in other parts of the United States during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Incarcerated Indigenous people were increasingly bringing suits against prison administrators for denying their rights to religious freedom. In the Southwest, the Navajo Nation appointed a Navajo spiritual advisor who eventually was conducting ceremonies in nineteen prisons throughout the region (Echo-Hawk 1996). Incarcerated Indigenous women formed a spiritual organization within a Montana state prison in the early 1990s and perceived their unification as threatening to prison staff (Ross 1998). As a way of weakening the close bonds formed through the organization, the women felt staff strategically targeted Indigenous women who were labeled as “troublemakers” and then written up for “trumped-up charges” (Ross 1998, 243) which resulted in their transfer to a maximum-security facility. White women incarcerated in prison interviewed by Ross also noticed the same pattern, identifying it as “prejudiced” practice (265). At that time, Indigenous women made up 25 percent of the prison population while making up 6 percent of the Montana state population. In addition to the institutional discrimination experienced by incarcerated Indigenous women, Ross (278) notes the direct racist remarks about “Indians” and “Indian culture” made by prison staff and incarcerated white individuals to her and incarcerated Indigenous individual. By the time RFRA was passed in 1993, a large number of successful suits were being filed by Indigenous individuals incarcerated in prison, who were protesting infringement of their religious and spiritual needs and advocating for the right to bring traditional tobacco pipe and sweat lodge ceremonies into the prison complex (Irwin 2006).

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.

The University of Arizona Press