Category: Excerpt

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

Excerpt from “Nihikéyah, Navajo Homeland”

Posted on October 26, 2023October 12, 2023 by Riley Brown

This anthology of essays edited by Lloyd L. Lee offers perspectives of the Navajo homeland, nihikéyah, highlighting Diné examinations and understandings of the land.

While various books have investigated Native American reservations and homelands, this book is from Diné individuals’ experiences, observations, and examinations. Poets, writers, and scholars frame their thoughts on four key questions: What are the thoughts/perspectives on nihikéyah/Navajo homeland? What challenges does nihikéyah face in the coming generations, and what should all peoples know about nihikéyah? And how can nihikéyah build a strong and positive Navajo Nation for the rest of this century and beyond? Below read an excerpt from the book.

Over 400,000 people are enrolled Navajo Nation citizens and over 150,000 live on the Navajo Nation. The Navajo Nation land base is 27,413 square miles, larger than ten of the fifty states in the United States of America. While the Navajo Treaty of 1868 established an original reservation, Diné people always regard their homeland in relation to their six sacred mountains. This homeland is referred to as Níhi Kéyah. Níhi kéyah means the land the people live and walk upon called home. The Diyin Dine’é (Holy People) created níhi kéyah for the people and instructed them to live within its space. For this book, the term níhi kéyah will be used to refer to Navajo land and the homeland.

Níhi kéyah is the world to Diné people. While many Native Nations and communities have been separated from their original homeland through forced removal and live elsewhere, Diné people continue to live on their original homeland even though some of the land is not designated as part of the reservation.

Níhi kéyah is more than a commodity and property for the people, it is their foundation and hózhǫ́ǫgo iiná (beauty way of life). Níhi kéyah is a physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual existence for the people. Níhi kéyah is the core of what it means to be human and Diné. Níhi kéyah’s energy and spirit are reflected in the creation scripture, journey narratives, matrix, and way of life.

In this book, the eight contributors categorized in the cardinal directions will focus on níhi kéyah’s spirit and the challenges the homeland faces including climate change, oppression, bureaucracy, and the western legal system. The contributors’ examinations, analyses, and/or reflections display a distinct Diné or Navajo matrix. While many non-Diné or non-Navajo have written about the land, philosophy, history, and so many other topics on the Navajo Nation, each of the contributors in this book are Diné, grew up or live on the Navajo Nation, and have observed and/or experienced in their lifetime what they are writing about for the reading audience. Their written words embody níhi kéyah, the love, and concerns each has for their homeland.

We start with a general description of a part of the Navajo creation narratives to provide context to níhi kéyah. The stories come from the book Navajo History Volume I compiled by the Navajo Curriculum Center, edited by Ethelou Yazzie, and published by Rough Rock Press in 1971 and Mike Mitchell’s Origins of the Diné published in 2001 by the Navajo Studies and Curriculum Center at the Rough Rock Community School. Other versions of these narratives exist and each one, including this generalized version, are all accurate. The texts used to discuss the creation narratives have long been thought of by Navajo people and scholars as some of the most reliable sources on Diné baa hane’ (Navajo history).

Contributors
Mario Atencio
Shawn Attakai
Wendy Shelly Greyeyes
Rex Lee Jim
Manny Loley
Jonathan Perry
Jake Skeets
Jennifer Jackson Wheeler

Excerpt from “Our Hidden Landscapes”

Posted on October 18, 2023October 12, 2023 by Riley Brown

Challenging traditional and long-standing understandings, this volume provides an important new lens for interpreting stone structures that had previously been attributed to settler colonialism. Instead, the contributors to this volume argue that these locations are sacred Indigenous sites.

This volume introduces readers to eastern North America’s Indigenous ceremonial stone landscapes (CSLs)—sacred sites whose principal identifying characteristics are built stone structures that cluster within specific physical landscapes. Our Hidden Landscapes edited by Lucianne Lavin and Elaine Thomas presents these often unrecognized sites as significant cultural landscapes in need of protection and preservation.

In this book, Native American authors provide perspectives on the cultural meaning and significance of CSLs and their characteristics, while professional archaeologists and anthropologists provide a variety of approaches for better understanding, protecting, and preserving them. The chapters present overwhelming evidence in the form of oral tradition, historic documentation, ethnographies, and archaeological research that these important sites created and used by Indigenous peoples are deserving of protection.

This work enables archaeologists, historians, conservationists, foresters, and members of the general public to recognize these important ritual sites. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

The purpose of this book is to introduce readers to Indigenous ceremonial stone landscapes in Eastern North America — sacred sites whose principal identifying characteristics are stone cultural features (stone groupings) in a variety of designs that cluster within specific physical landscapes. Such sacred sites have been known and used for thousands of years throughout the Americas; some are still being used today, especially in South and Central America and the North American West. Professional archaeologists working in these regions routinely acknowledge their existence (e.g., Morgan et al. 2014, Reeves and Kennedy 2017; see also Thrane, this volume). This is not always the case for Eastern North America, particularly the Northeast, where such sites are often misidentified and destroyed.

Indigenous-Built Stone Structures and their Early Recordation by Euro-Americans

The designed stone groupings in the form of mounds, rows, enclosures, niches, above-ground and subterranean chambers, perched boulders, split stones, standing stones, and other stone creations are often aligned with astronomic events such as the sunrises and sunsets of the winter or summer solstices, annual meteor showers, certain constellations, cycles of the moon, and other cosmic phenomena. In turn, celestial events are known historically to be associated with – and often are the catalyst for – traditional, annual Native American religious rituals and festivals. For example, anthropologist Dr. Frank G. Speck’s eyewitness account of the Cayuga Iroquois Mid-Winter Festival reported that the eight-day ceremony began five days after the constellation Pleiades was directly overhead at sunset following the first new moon in January (Speck 1949:49). Often the designed stones are in the form of animals, particularly turtles and serpents, which play significant roles in Native American creation stories, folklore, and spiritual practices (Simmons 1986).

Seventeenth, 18th, and 19th century English and Dutch settlers described seeing Native peoples east of the Mississippi create and use these sacred stone landscapes. Some significant examples are the 17th century accounts of Indigenous stone monuments, in the Chesapeake Bay area by English explorer John Smith of Pocahontas fame (called pawcorances by the local tribal peoples), and in the Carolina Piedmont by German explorer John Lederer (King and Strickland, this volume), and the 18th century Journal of Reverend John Sergeant, particularly his Nov. 3, 1734 entry describing a huge stone memorial mound in Great Barrington, Massachusetts actively being visited by Mohican tribal members (Hopkins 1753: 24). Sergeant was the first minister to the Mohican Indian tribe in their main village, which is now Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In the 19th century, the anonymous author of “A Description of Mashpee, in the County of Barnstable” described local Natives building and using stone monuments (Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, written in 1802 and cited by Simmons, 1986: 253). The Indigenous community of Mashpee is located in eastern Massachusetts on what is now known as Cape Cod. In 1907 Frank Speck visited Mashpee and was told by elderly Wampanoag informants that the roadside monuments were spirit-lodges, where tribal members left offerings to the spirits of the dead (Simmons 1986: 254).

Likewise, the spiritual significance of built stone structures was conveyed by Native American leaders and informants to other Euro-American researchers, and subsequently published in the late 19th-21st century anthropological literature. Some of these ceremonial sites continue in use today. Primary documents, like those previously cited, that describe and/or support (through accounts of Indigenous worldview and spirituality) Indigenous creation and use of ritual stone features are not uncommon, and most are easily available to researchers online or through library loan. To make this point, we list a small, additional selection from that body of available literature: Philip L. Barbour (1986), The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, 1580-1631; Joseph Bruchac (1993), The Native American Sweat Lodge: History and Legends; Thor Conway (1993), Painted Dreams: Native American Rock Art; Frank Glynn (1973), “Excavation of the Pilot’s Point Stone Heaps;” Doug Harris and Paul Robinson (2015), “The Ancient Ceremonial Landscape and King Philip’s War: Battlefields of Nipsachuck”; Diamond Jenness (1935), The Ojibwa Indians of Parry Island, Their Social and Religious Life; Charles Leland (1884), The Algonquin Legends of New England; James Mooney (1900), Myths of the Cherokees; Robert E. Ritzenthaler and Pat Ritzenthaler (1970), The Woodland Indians of the Western Great Lakes; Elaine Thomas (2015), “Maintaining the Integrity of the Homeland: Recognizing and Re-Awakening the Memory of Forgotten Places through Mohegan Archaeology.”

Contributors
Nohham Rolf Cachat-Schilling
Robert DeFosses
James Gage
Mary Gage
Doug Harris
Julia A. King
Lucianne Lavin
Johannes (Jannie) H. N. Loubser
Frederick W. Martin
Norman Muller
Charity Moore Norton
Paul A. Robinson
Laurie W. Rush
Scott M. Strickland
Elaine Thomas
Kathleen Patricia Thrane
Matthew Victor Weiss

Excerpt from “Chicana Portraits”

Posted on October 3, 2023October 9, 2023 by Riley Brown

Chicana Portraits edited by Norma Elia Cantú pairs portraits with critical biographies of twelve key Chicana writers, offering an engaging look at their work, contributions to the field, and major achievements.

Artist Raquel Valle-Sentíes’s portraits bring visual dimension, while essays delve deeply into the authors’ lives for details that inform their literary, artistic, feminist, and political trajectories and sensibilities. The collection brilliantly intersects artistic visual and literary cultural productions, allowing complex themes to emerge, such as the fragility of life, sexism and misogyny, Chicana agency and forging one’s own path, the struggles of becoming a writer and battling self-doubt, economic instability, and political engagement and activism.

Arranged chronologically by birth order of the authors, the book can be read cover to cover for a genealogical overview, or scholars and general readers can easily jump in at any point and read about an individual author, regardless of the chronology.

Biographies included in this work include Raquel Valle-Sentíes, Angela de Hoyos, Montserrat Fontes, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Norma E. Cantú, Denise Elia Chávez, Carmen Tafolla, Cherríe Moraga, Ana Castillo, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Sandra Cisneros, and Demetria Martínez. Read an excerpt from the book below.

It is a balmy May evening in Laredo, Texas, in 2001 when we gather in el Café del Barrio, a small café/bookstore that the artist and poet Raquel Valle-Sentíes owns and operates out of her Victorian-era home on Matamoros Street. At this particular gathering, we are celebrating the writers from Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, and Laredo, Texas, who are attending the IV Letras en el Borde (Letters on the Border) conference. The brainchild of José Luis Velarde and Guillermo Lavín, a couple of writers from Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, the annual transnational event has taken place for several years with support from Texas A&M International University (TAMIU), Laredo Community College(LCC), and the cultural affairs office of the city of Nuevo Laredo under the direction of Héctor Romero Lecanda. Like any other literary festival, Letras en el Borde features writers reading their work and academic papers by critics and scholars; because it is being held in the two Laredos and the organizers want to emphasize the transnational aspects of our region, the conference focuses on border writing. The meal and performances—readings and music—at Café del Barrio are a highlight of the conference.

Our host, Raquel Valle-Sentíes herself, is active in the local literary scene. Her dream of owning a bookstore has come true, and it is all she had hoped it would be. In the 1980s Valle-Sentíes had begun writing poetry and taking art classes at Laredo Community College (now Laredo College) with Martha Fenstermaker. I was then a professor at Laredo State University (now Texas A&M International University), and we—the literatontos, as some jokingly referred to us—were a handful who were keeping Chicanismo alive as we engaged with community projects that addressed the raging problems of the day: immigration, illiteracy, erasure of our history, historic preservation, et cetera. By the 1990s, we had coalesced into a force engaged in important interventions, launching a chapter of Amnesty International to do our work in the migrant detention center run by the private carceral company Corrections Corporation of America and establishing the Refugee Assistance Council to provide legal services to migrants. It was the days of massive migration from Central America due to the United States incursions into that region of the Americas. Many of our members were also involved in the feminist group Las Mujeres, and we hosted an annual women’s conference, Primavera, to promote and recognize the accomplishments of women in our community. I discuss Las Mujeres below as I contextualize the work of Café del Barrio and Raquel Valle-Sentíes.

Contributors
Cordelia E. Barrera
Mary Pat Brady
Norma E. Cantú
María Jesus Castro Dopacio
Carlos Nicolás Flores
Myrriah Gómez
Maria Magdalena Guerra de Charur
Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs
Georgina Guzmán
Cristina Herrera
María Esther Quintana
Eliza Rodríguez y Gibson
Meagan Solomon
Lourdes Torres
Raquel Valle-Sentíes
Jen Yáñez-Alaniz

Excerpt from “Latinos and Nationhood”

Posted on September 26, 2023August 21, 2023 by Riley Brown

Spanning from the early nineteenth century to today, Latinos and Nationhood by Nicolás Kanellos examines the work of Latino writers who explored the major philosophic and political themes of their day, including the meaning and implementation of democracy, their democratic and cultural rights under U.S. dominion, their growing sense of nationhood, and the challenges of slavery and disenfranchisement of women in a democratic republic that had yet to realize its ideals.

Over the course of two centuries, these Latino or Hispanic intellectuals were natural-born citizens of the United States, immigrants, or political refugees. Many of these intellectuals, whether citizens or not, strove to embrace and enliven such democratic principles as freedom of speech and of the press, the protection of minorities in the Bill of Rights and in subsequent laws, and the protection of linguistic and property rights, among many others, guaranteed by treaties when the United States incorporated their homelands into the Union.

Latinos have resided in North America since before the arrival of the English at Jamestown and Plymouth. They already lived in lands that became English colonies and later the states of the early American Republic; of course, their largest populations dwelled in what became the southern and western United States, Mexico and the Caribbean, most of which would be conquered and/or bought by the expanding United States during the nineteenth century. Whether before or after their incorporation into US territory, the people that would in the future be called “Latinos” or “Hispanics” had a rich intellectual history, having introduced the first written European language, book culture and universities to the hemisphere. They pondered and wrote about all of the cultural and scientific themes that we think of as part of the Western tradition. They continued this rich intellectual activity in the lands that became part of the United States.

Over the course of United States history, Latinos thought about, struggled with and wrote about the major philosophic and political themes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including: 1) the meaning and implementation of democracy, especially through establishment of a liberal republic; 2) their democratic and cultural rights under United States dominion; 3) their growing sense of nationhood; and 4) the particular challenges of slavery and disenfranchisement of women in a democratic republic that had yet to realize its ideals.

From the very outset, Latinos thought about and expressed their opinions, penned and published philosophical, humanistic, scientific and political discussions on all of the major topics that today we consider as part of the national intellectual heritage of the United States. They did so through speeches in the public arena, books and periodicals, and in the classroom; in fact, the earliest schools on the continent were missionary schools run by the Spanish friars, and the earliest imprints and newspapers in the West and Southwest were Spanish-language publications. What follows below and in the chapters of this book are stories about only a few individuals who made an impact on the spread of intellectual thought, these thinkers and activists were not alone in developing, articulating and publishing important ideas; rather, they were members of communities of thinkers, writers and political activists who helped them hone their ideas. Indeed, it would take volumes to adequately chart the full development of Latino thought; thus, this book is just an initial foray into a rich and complex intellectual history. In this foray, I have chosen not to review the thought about identity and nationhood of such well known giants of Latino thought as, for instance José Martí, who was in the vanguard of so many ideas about democracy, race relations and governance. Rather, the first, larger section of this book will be dedicated to presenting the work lesser-known thinkers, most of whose works have been inaccessible until recently. The traditional Anglo- or Euro-centric history of the United States has consistently ignored Latino intellectual history, and especially is unaware of most of the intellectuals to be covered in this book. Today, this intellectual tradition, like that of other ethnic and minority groups, women and LGBTQ+, is key to achieving a full understanding of our development as a democratic nation striving for equity and the realization of its ideals penned in the Constitution and its amendments. In the last three chapters of the book, I take the liberty of inserting my personal reading of three prominent literary figures from the Chicano movement, a movement in which I have served as the most experienced editor/publisher.

The contributions of Latinos to the civilization of the Americas, including what later would become the United States, begin during the period of exploration and colonization and include such legacies of American life as the technologies of farming, ranching, mining and natural resource management, among many others. Most of these accomplishments can be attributed to mestizo culture (mixed European, African and Native American) that arose not only south of today’s border but also in the lands that would become the United States. However, the starting point for this book will properly be the United States shortly after winning its independence from the British Empire and its establishment of a new form of government.

Since the days of the early American Republic, Latino intellectuals have struggled: 1) to export to their countries of origin the democratic ideas learned from the US “founding fathers” and the texts of the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers and the American Constitution; 2) and from the mid nineteenth century onward under US dominion to demand the implementation of these lofty concepts among minorities and the disenfranchised within the boundaries of the American Republic. From the mid-nineteenth century on, Latinos have struggled to define themselves within the American Republic and to understand their relationship with the Hispanic world write large. At first, these intellectuals from throughout the Americas, from as far away as the River Platte and Peru, idealistically flocked to Philadelphia, Baltimore and Boston to acquire this knowledge, translate it and smuggle it to the various regions of New Spain; they did so in order to prepare for their independent nationhood, as separate from “the mother country” Spain, and create an ideological foundation on which to establish their own republics. As documented in Chapters 1 and 2, most of these political thinkers were drawn to Philadelphia at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, not only because it was the cradle of American independence and at that time the capital of the United States, but also because it was home to numerous printers. For competitive fees, these printers made “freedom of the press” a reality for the Spaniards and Spanish American creoles (criollos) whose mission it was to adapt US democratic and republican principles in the political texts they would smuggle into the Caribbean and as far as south as the River Platte.

The University of Arizona Press