Category: Excerpt

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.

Excerpt from “La Plonqui”

Posted on September 22, 2023September 25, 2023 by Riley Brown

Celebrating more than forty years of creative writing by Chicana author Margarita Cota-Cárdenas, La Plonqui edited by Jesús Rosales and Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez includes critical essays, reflections, interviews, and previously unpublished writing by the author herself to document the lifelong craft and legacy of a pioneering writer in the field.

Nicknamed “La Plonky” by her family after a made-up childhood song, Cota-Cárdenas grew up in California, taught almost exclusively in Arizona, and produced five major works (two novels and three books of poetry) that offer an expansive literary production spanning from the 1960s to today. Her perspectives on Chicana identity, the Chicanx movement, and the sociopolitical climate of Arizona and the larger U.S.-Mexico border region represent a significant contribution to the larger body of Chicanx literature. Additionally, the volume explores her perspectives on issues of gender, sexuality, and identity related to the Chicanx experience over time.

Divided into three major parts, this collection begins with an introduction, followed by two testimonial essays written by the author herself and a longtime colleague, as well as an interview with the author. The second section contains nine essays by well-established literary critics that analyze Cota-Cárdenas’s literary output within a Chicano Movement literary context and offer new readings of Cota-Cárdenas’s fiction and poetry. The third part presents poetry and fiction from Cota-Cárdenas, including an excerpt from a work in progress. As a whole, the collection aims to affirm Margarita Cota-Cárdenas’s significant role in shaping the field of Chicana literature and emphasizes the importance of honoring a celebrated author who wrote a majority of her works in Spanish—one of the few Chicana writers to do so. Read an excerpt from the book below.

This collection is an open invitation to readers to share in the legacy of Chicana writer Margarita Cota-Cárdenas and to learn more about the impact of her work, which spans more than forty years in the state of Arizona. The authors who graciously contributed essays to this volume have been impacted in profound ways by the carefully crafted words Cota-Cárdenas has placed on paper, often with the assistance of La Malinche, her typewriter. If you ever had the chance to be at a poetry reading or a presentation given by Cota-Cárdenas, there is no doubt that those words shared aloud impacted you—as they did many of the authors in this collection. To know Cota-Cárdenas is to understand the plight of Chicanas/os within a historical and contemporary context. This collection is an act of love that honors the many paths that Cota-Cárdenas has paved to inspire Chicanas/os to find their voice, be fearless in calling out systemic and oppressive structures, and hold ourselves and those around us accountable for the creation of a more just world. Always knowing that la lucha sigue.

Margarita Cota-Cárdenas was born on November 10, 1941, in Heber, California, a small town located approximately five miles northwest of the border city of Calexico. Cota-Cárdenas’s father, Jesús Cota, was born in Cócorit, Sonora, Mexico, and her mother, Margarita Cárdenas de Cota, in Tortugas, New Mexico. Early in their life they both worked as migrant workers throughout the U.S. Southwest, but, tired of the constant movement this type of job required, Cota-Cárdenas’s parents soon decided to settle down in central California, earning their living as labor contractors. This occupational change provided Cota-Cárdenas with a stable living environment that allowed her to benefit from an uninterrupted educational experience, an opportunity uncommon in those days for many migrant families.

Cota-Cárdenas graduated from Orestimba High School in Newman, California, and later from Modesto Junior College. In 1966, she received her BA from California State College, Stanislaus (now California State University, Stanislaus), with a major in Spanish and a minor in English. She promptly continued her graduate studies, earning an MA in 1968 from the University of California, Davis. The PhD took longer to complete, but Cota-Cárdenas eventually received her degree in 1980 from the University of Arizona, specializing in the narrative of Carlos Fuentes. The following year Cota Cárdenas began her professional career teaching Spanish, Latin American, and Chicana/o literature and culture at Arizona State University, in Tempe, until her retirement in 2002.

Cota-Cárdenas is the author of three books of poetry and two novels. In 1976, she published Noches despertando inConciencias, her first book of poetry. This collection was followed by Puppet: A Chicano Novella (1985); Marchitas de mayo (Sones pa’l pueblo) (poetry, 1989); Sanctuaries of the Heart / Santuarios del corazón (novel, 2005); and Poemática inspiración y fiebre: Poesía mechicana y relato (poetry, 2016). Here we wish to offer a brief synopsis and analysis of Cota-Cárdenas’s body of work, representing forty years of literary production.

Contributors
Laura Elena Belmonte
Margarita Cota-Cárdenas
José R. Flores
Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez
Carolyn González
Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs
Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez
Kirsten F. Nigro
Margarita E. Pignataro
Tey Diana Rebolledo
Jesús Rosales
Charles St-Georges
Javier Villarreal

Excerpt from “Mexico’s Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán”

Posted on September 19, 2023July 25, 2023 by Riley Brown

Mexico’s Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán: From Deserts to Clouds by David Yetman and Alberto Búrquez provides an accessible and photographic view of the culture, history, and environment of an extraordinary region of southern Mexico. The Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán are lauded by botanists for their spectacular plant life—they contain the densest columnar cacti forests in the world. Recent archaeological excavations reveal them also to be a formative Mesoamerican site as well. So singular is this region that it is home to the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Biosphere Reserve and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Through firsthand experience and engaging prose, the authors provide a synthesis of the geology, ecology, history, and cultures of the valleys, showing their importance and influence as Mesoamerican arteries for environmental and cultural interchange through Mexico. It also reveals the extraordinary plant life that draws from habitats ranging from deserts to tropical forests. Below read an excerpt from the book.

I first traveled through the Valley of Tehuacán in 1969, driving an old Land Rover south en route to the city of Oaxaca. I recall very little of the region, except for a semidesert landscape, unending mountains, interminable curves, and the plodding, smoking diesel trucks crowding the narrow, shoulderless highway. Those trucks, known in Mexico as tórtones, heavy, usually overladen, are seldom seen now. In those days, tórtones clogged the mountain roads, belching black clouds of diesel smoke. Their parking brakes would often fail, so when drivers suffered a flat tire, they would block the wheels with large rocks to keep the monsters from rolling out of control. The tire replaced, the operators would drive away, leaving the large rocks behind for other vehicles to run into. My Land Rover was a good choice for that terrain, for the road was also laden with potholes, cracks, washouts, and landslides.

A modern expressway connecting the cities of Tehuacán and Oaxaca would not be completed until after the turn of the twenty-first century. The road through the Cuicatlán Valley, which connects to the Valley of Tehuacán and leads nearly to Oaxaca, was still a dirt track. It often washed out during the summer rains or was rendered impassable by multiple landslides. If paved, that route would have shortened the trip by a couple of hours.

It was not until the year 2000 that I visited the valleys themselves, walking through the hills and stopping by some of their small towns. By then the roads had been expanded and improved, and graded roads replaced many unimproved tracks. Since that trip I have logged more than twenty visits, discovering sights, peoples, and natural history features I had previously overlooked. Potholes are now fewer. Road-blocking landslides are still a hazard.

Alberto Búrquez joined me on an exploration of the valleys in 2003. He had visited previously as a lecturer in ecology at UNAM, Mexico’s National Autonomous University. He could hardly resist bringing his students to one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots. I have often envied the easy access he had in those years to the valleys of Tehuacán and Cuicatlán, only a few hours’ drive from the southern limits of Mexico City, where UNAM is situated.

Alberto and I collaborated on projects throughout the 1990s, focusing on the plants and vegetation of the northwestern Mexican state of Sonora, where he had been born and raised and now held a distinguished post as professor of ecology for UNAM. We had a list of places in Sonora to visit and study, he as an ecologist studying the relationships between plants and animals, I as a philosopher who found Mexico’s natural and cultural history so rich that I abandoned my philosophical musings. On another visit to Oaxaca around 2005, we agreed that it was time for us to collaborate on a book on the valleys we had come to hold in the highest esteem. Though they lie far from the Sonora with which we are familiar, the valleys bear a close ecological resemblance to that state far to the northwest. Out of that easy agreement with my friend came this book.

What would impel us to expend the effort and expense in writing a book about these valleys, so far from our homes in the Sonoran Desert? After all, the first impression visitors experience for much of the year is one of semidesert, drought, and, in places, a parched, often eroded landscape (except after summer rains). Yet unless one is in a hurry to get from Tehuacán to Oaxaca or the reverse, it is difficult not to be impressed by the vegetation and landscapes visible from a vehicle. The combination of cactus forests, plants of unusual shapes and densities, and minor roads leading off into the bush and hills in all directions poses an irresistible draw to anyone with a curiosity about natural and human history. The mountains on either side that engulf the valleys seem to shield mysteries beyond the cliffs and forests that ring the east side and the forbiddingly steep desert slopes on the west. The landscapes away from the cities and viewed up close reveal human occupation deep in antiquity. Churches, ancient as well as new, most of them visible from afar, grace every settlement, be it a village or a town. Place names roll off the tongue, evoking times long before Europeans ordered the prefacing of aboriginal names with the titles of saints, Indigenous names like Alpizagua, Atatlahuca, Altepexi, Atolotitlán, Axuxco, Coxcatlán, Metzontla, Miahuatlán, Nanahuatípam, Tecomavaca, Teotitlán, Zapotitlán, Zinacatepec, and on and on. The modern, urban Mexico of the city of Tehuacán grades quickly into hamlets and villages, where old traditions endure and life proceeds at a slower pace. Sophisticated dwellers from the megapolis of Mexico City find the allure of the valleys as compelling as I do.

The closer we looked, the more extraordinary and complex the valleys became. Dense forests of columnar cacti swathe the hillsides with their color: there are eighteen species of the giants, more than in any similar tract in the world. Within the valleys we find not just unusual vegetation, but also a host of endemic species and strange plants with names like elephant’s foot, mother-in-law’s chair, old man, and (ahem!) ball swellers. The endless varieties and combinations of trees, shrubs, agaves, yuccas, and cacti poke out of cliffs, protrude from tropical forests adjacent to barren deserts, emerge from unexcavated pyramids, lurk in obscure canyons, and hide in oak woodlands and pine forests. The Indigenous peoples of the valleys, at least eight different linguistic groups, persist, some even thriving.

Excerpt from “Urban Indigeneities”

Posted on September 14, 2023August 15, 2023 by Riley Brown

Today a majority of Indigenous peoples live in urban areas: they are builders and cleaners, teachers and lawyers, market women and masons, living in towns and cities surrounded by the people and pollution that characterize life for most individuals in the twenty-first century. Despite this basic fact, the vast majority of studies on Indigenous peoples concentrate solely on rural Indigenous populations.

Aiming to highlight these often-overlooked communities, Urban Indigeneities: Being Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century edited by Dana Brablec and Andrew Canessa is the first book to look at urban Indigenous peoples globally and present the urban Indigenous experience—not as the exception but as the norm. The contributing essays draw on a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, architecture, land economy, and area studies, and are written by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars. The analysis looks at Indigenous people across the world and draws on examples not usually considered within the study of indigeneity, such as Fiji, Japan, and Russia.

Indigeneity is often seen as being “authentic” when it is practiced in remote rural areas, but these essays show that a vigorous, vibrant, and meaningful indigeneity can be created in urban spaces too. The book challenges many of the imaginaries and tropes of what constitutes “the Indigenous” and offers perspectives and tools to understand a contemporary Indigenous urban reality. As such, it is a must-read for anyone interested in the real lives of Indigenous people today. Read an excerpt from the book below.

We are all familiar with the image of the Indigenous person in forests or mountains living close to and in harmony with the natural environment, enjoying a traditional lifestyle distant from the realities of a modern world. The reality is that an increasing proportion of Indigenous peoples today live in urban areas (UN Habitat 2010). They are builders and cleaners, teachers and lawyers, market women and masons, living in towns and cities surrounded by the people and pollution that characterize life for most of us in the twenty first century.

Despite this basic reality of contemporary Indigenous life, the vast majority of studies on Indigenous peoples still concentrate on the rural Indigenous. There are a number of reasons for this. Even though Indigenous peoples have lived in cities for centuries and even created some of the largest cities of their era (e.g., Cuzco in Peru, and Tenochtitlan in Mexico), from the time of Rousseau, Hobbes, and Locke, Europeans and their descendants have seen Indigenous peoples as living in a “state of nature” and so were not only blind to an Indigenous history in cities, but even when they did appear in urban spaces, they were considered to be no longer Indigenous by definition. This close association of indigeneity with the wild spaces continues right through to the twenty-first century, where the “authentic” Indigenous subject is deemed to live in the forests and mountains far from urban life and, if not in a state of nature, certainly in harmony with it. To situate so resolutely the Indigenous beyond the urban is not only to ignore history but also to deprive Indigenous peoples of their cultural agency and their ability to create identities in any space they choose. The social sciences in general have been largely complicit in this, although there are some notable exceptions (Howard and Proulx 2011; Furlan 2017; Horn 2019). This book, written by Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors, is the first to look at urban Indigenous peoples globally and to present the urban Indigenous experience not as the exception, but as the norm it is.

Contributors
Aiko Ikemura Amaral
Chris Andersen
Giuliana Borea
Dana Brablec
Andrew Canessa
Sandra del Valle Casals
Stanislav Saas Ksenofontov
Daniela Peluso
Andrey Petrov
Marya Rozanova-Smith
Kate Stevens
Kanako Uzawa

Excerpt from “Listening to Laredo”

Posted on September 6, 2023September 7, 2023 by Riley Brown

Nestled between Texas and Tamaulipas, Laredo was once a quaint border town, nurturing cultural ties across the border, attracting occasional tourists, and serving as the home of people living there for generations. In a span of mere decades, Laredo has become the largest inland port in the United States and a major hub of global trade. Listening to Laredo: A Border City in a Globalized Age by Mehnaaz Momen is an exploration of how the dizzying forces of change have defined this locale, how they continue to be inscribed and celebrated, and how their effects on the physical landscape have shaped the identity of the city and its people.

Bringing together issues of growth, globalization, and identity, Momen traces Laredo’s trajectory through the voices of its people. In contrast to the many studies of border cities defined by the outside—and seldom by the people who live at the border—this volume collects oral histories from seventy-five in-depth interviews that collectively illuminate the evolution of the city’s cultural and economic infrastructure, its interdependence with its sister city across the national boundary, and, above all, the strength of its community as it adapts to and even challenges the national narrative regarding the border. The resonant and lively voices of Laredo’s people convey proud ownership of an archetypal border city that has time and again resurrected itself. Read an excerpt from the book below.

The largest inland port of the United States along the U.S.-Mexico boundary is Laredo, which before the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) used to be a dusty little border town with a quaint history. Nestled between the U.S.-Mexico territory along the Rio Grande in Texas, the city is older than the United States. Fueled by a dizzying spell of growth that occurred in the short span of three decades, Laredo surpassed Los Angeles to become the largest port of any kind—sea, land, or air—in the United States in 2019. The aura of the bygone age surrounding its charming downtown is now overshadowed by negative ordeals associated with trade and migration. The flocks of tourists and traders to the twin cities on both sides of the Rio Grande—Laredo and Nuevo Laredo—are now memories of a departed era. The same features of proximity to Mexico and ease of passage currently spell disorder and chaos in the political discourse. The border of Laredo has become synonymous with international trade to a greater extent than in the past. Under this new iteration, the remarkable history of the rich culture, economic success, and spatial evolution of Laredo is being buried. This book attempts to excavate the story of the city from the viewpoints and experiences of the people who actually live there to make sense of the concurrent drifts of being a historic city, a border city, and a global trade center.

Historic cities emphasize their glorious pasts; border cities are perceived as intermediate sites between nation-states, allowing clandestine activities; and global cities are centers of unmitigated growth. Historic cities are formed by the annals of antiquity, border cities are characterized by peripheral conflicts around boundaries, and global cities attempt to navigate national boundaries with the promise of economic boons. Laredo boasts of the distinct record of having been under seven flags (one as the capital of a short-lived republic), and its intricate history has served as a matter of pride for the people. The overwhelmingly Hispanic town relished its interdependent relationship with the people of Nuevo Laredo, which included family and business bonds going back several generations. Even though borders are contested sites for nation-states—and Laredo had been disputed terrain between Mexicans, Texans, and Americans—the umbilical cord between Laredo and Nuevo Laredo remained robust until Laredo evolved into a global port. Geography situated the coupled cities along a navigable river but detached from other metropolises, which strengthened their mutual dependence. Laredo has a long history of benign neglect by all the nation-states to which it belonged. The city flourished organically by taking advantage of its location and cultivating a socioeconomic hierarchy nuzzled in ethnic and cultural homogeneity.

An economic windfall came to Laredo during the Civil War when Laredo became a center for smuggling the cotton that funded the Confederate army. The city blossomed into a trade center by the turn of the twentieth century. Local folklore goes so far as to claim that by the 1950s, downtown Laredo was more prosperous than New York. The 1980s devaluation of the peso brought disaster to the retail economy heavily dependent on Mexican customers. Globalization ushered in a new meaning for border territories in the 1990s, as Laredo found itself perfectly situated to be a key locale in the postindustrial economy in the thriving Sunbelt, with an existing transportation network and abundant cheap labor on its periphery. The neoliberal growth rationale for border zones is based on transportation, consumption, and enhancement of the state apparatus with incessant surveillance, a notable deviation from the established pattern of the gradual progress of a city.

As the busiest land port, Laredo functions as a major link in the expansive global trade web, which requires simultaneous speedy transit and strict policing of the nation-state’s boundary. With its newfound international trade link, the codependency between Laredo and Nuevo Laredo has evaporated. Nuevo Laredo, the largest transportation nerve center in Mexico, fell under the power of the drug cartels as its location in the global network abetted narcotics transactions. In this new reality, the river, roads, and bridges are all under constant supervision, impairing the previous openness of the border. Only large freight trucks enjoy swift entrance from the south. The ceaseless flow of people across the border is a not-so-distant memory and is mourned by residents. Local concerns about preserving water quality and the riverbank or even investing in homegrown businesses have to compete with national or international trade and growth imperatives. The evolution of Laredo reveals both internal and external elements in the process of economic advancement and the formation of cultural identity in the border city.

In Honor of Aurelie Sheehan: An Excerpt from “Demigods on Speedway”

Posted on August 22, 2023February 25, 2025 by Cameron Quan

August 18, 2023

In the tradition of Joyce’s Dubliners, Demigods on Speedway is a portrait of a city that reflects the recession-era Southwest. Inspired by tales from Greek mythology, these gritty heroes and heroines struggle to find their place in the cosmos.

In 2014, we celebrated the publication of Aurelie Sheehan’s book, Demigods on Speedway. Today, we re-share a portion of the excerpt in honor of her memory and tremendous contributions:

Tucsonans might trash their sister city, but all things considered, Phoenix does wield some charms. It has an echelon of restaurants and hotels mostly lacking here, for instance. Because landowners care not about the cost of water or the environmental impact of watering the desert, it’s much greener overall. Little rivulets by malls. Major, awesome lawns. In fact, it was some kind of hardcore lawn fertilizer that killed Fandango . . . at this moment being cremated. Or who will be, soon. His body is waiting somewhere, in the sort of place it’s preferable not to think about at all.

All beauty is wasted, all beauty will end, Terri is thinking, keenly aware of the unholy joke of immediate, rude extinction, the disregard the majority partner seems to have when it comes to maintaining the social contract—the capacity to be social, as Terri now interprets it, to look and listen and feel. Fandango is dead. And it goes on from there: we’re talking doom, individually and in great swaths. We’re talking the aging process. And so you need to capture life for the brief moments you can. Look at that barrel cactus.

Terri would not have come down to Tucson if Chris had been around, but he is working on a project in New Orleans this week. The kids are also both gone for the night—sleepovers. To be frank, her husband may not have been as helpful as Sarah (a good listener, Terri knows), because he adopts a fatalistic, purportedly practical stance in times of trouble: “It was his time,” “Crying can’t bring him back,” “We’ll get another one,” et cetera. Still, it would have felt awkward to leave for the weekend, if he were home. “Sisters have a special bond” might have come in handy in that circumstance. All in all, it was cleaner and easier not to have had to talk about it, to have just gotten in the car, turned on the A/C, and pretended for a couple of hours that life could be a song on the radio and a Starbucks in the cup holder and vague attention to a stretch of highway notable for its ugliness, give or take a few patches of cacti, a kitschy ostrich farm, and Picacho Peak, a lump of molten lava people climb when they have nothing better to do.

Poor Sarah. She looks like complete shit. Her very thinness looks unhealthy, a diminishing. Not the product of a compulsive fitness regimen, but of illness and overwork. It’s all because of that moron Wilbur. Ever since he broke up with her, Sarah has been a tall, thin moper. She looks like an ostrich herself, hanging her head.

“To hell with it,” says Terri, “I’m going to buy one of these small ones and just see how it does in the car.”

“Good,” says Sarah.

“I know, you have to, right?” says Alyssa.

And so the three women trudge farther into the maelstrom of xeriscape terrain, pots filled with this and that Martian-like form: the one with glorious black hair holding the spiky thing to her belly as if she’s pregnant; the squat, shorter one from Phoenix holding up, as if for inspection, a fat miniature cactus with a pink head, resembling the penis of a prickly circumcised frontiersman; the willowy one with the membership card and the 20 percent discount not holding anything at all but casting the remnant of her gaze bitterly over the entire venue, or so it seems.

The cacti aren’t really dry or barren. They just know how to conserve.

Aurelie Sheehan was the author of two novels and two short story collections. Her short fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Fence, The Mississippi Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review. She taught fiction at the University of Arizona.

Excerpt from Urban Imaginaries in Native Amazonia

Posted on July 5, 2023June 23, 2023 by Riley Brown

July 5, 2023

Urban life has long intrigued Indigenous Amazonians, who regard cities as the locus of both extraordinary power and danger. Modern and ancient cities alike have thus become models for the representation of extreme alterity under the guise of supernatural enchanted cities. This volume seeks to analyze how these ambiguous urban imaginaries—complex representations that function as cognitive tools and blueprints for social action—express a singular view of cosmopolitical relations, how they inform and shape forest-city interactions, and the history of how they came into existence.

Urban Imaginaries in Native Amazonia edited by Fernando Santos-Granero and Emanuele Fabiano features analysis from historical, ethnological, and philosophical perspectives, contributors seek to explain the imaginaries’ widespread diffusion, as well as their influence in present-day migration and urbanization. Above all, it underscores how these urban imaginaries allow Indigenous Amazonians to express their concerns about power, alterity, domination, and defiance. Below read an excerpt from the Introduction to the book.

Although urbanization is an ancient phenomenon, going back in time at least nine thousand years (P. Taylor 2012), for most of human history people lived in dispersed, low-density rural settlements. This began to change as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), when, due to technological changes in production and manufacturing, rural emigration increased and urban populations began to grow rapidly. In 1800, only 10 percent of the world’s population lived in urban areas. Today, 55 percent of the world’s population (according to the United Nations) or as much as 85 percent (according to the European Commission) live in urban settings (Ritchie and Roser 2019), the discrepancy deriving from different definitions of urban—an issue that will be discussed in more detail below. Regardless of these differences, however, what the above figures indicate is that urbanization has not only accelerated sharply in the past two hundred years but has, in the process, become a global phenomenon.

This rapid process of urbanization has had significant social, economic, and political impacts. On the positive side, high population density (and the concentration of resources in cities) has fostered technological advancements, economic specialization, higher productivity, and lower costs of production. It has promoted new forms of connectedness, political activity, and social solidarity, and it has encouraged creativity and the development of a broad range of cultural activities and forms of entertainment. On the negative side, it has deepened social inequalities, leading to the emergence of slums, overcrowding, and an urban underclass. It has promoted individualism and anonymity, thus weakening traditional family networks and forms of cooperation. And it has increased pollution, waste production, environmental degradation, and crime. In brief, although urbanization has generally led to higher standards of living, it has also condemned a large proportion of urban dwellers to a life of poverty and squalor. Despite lingering perceptions of Amazonia as a wild, remote, mostly rural space, the region has not escaped this global trend. Thanks to the building of a large network of roads and the development of better means of transportation, since the 1960s Amazonia has experienced a rapid process of urbanization. By 1985, with over 50 percent of the population of Amazonia living in urban areas, Bertha K. Becker (1985) had already described it as an “urbanized forest.” Today, almost forty years later, with approximately 70 percent of the Amazonian population living in cities (Becker 2013, 310; Chaves et al. 2021, 1187), urbanity has become hegemonic, and Amazonia is now an urban forest. The appeal of cities and urban lifeways has extended to the region’s every corner, including its three million Indigenous people belonging to some 350 ethnic groups (Charity et al. 2016, 26). As a result, by 2010, 36 percent of Brazil’s Amazonian Indigenous population lived in urban settings (Santos et al. 2019). Although the pace of Indigenous urbanization has varied in other Amazonian regions, it is safe to assume that between 30 and 40 percent of Amazonia’s Indigenous population now lives, more or less permanently, in cities. The urbanization of Amazonia has neither been the result of a unidirectional process nor been limited to the Indigenous people living closest to cities. Migrants to Amazonian cities often originate from the rural and urban areas of the Andes or the coastal regions of Brazil (Emlen 2020; Ødegaard 2010). In some cases, they are international migrants coming from neighboring countries (Aragón 2011). It is therefore appropriate to consider Amazonian cities and their current population as the result of complex demographic flows between rural and urban areas, often leading to the multisite household pattern that characterizes Amazonian populations nowadays (Padoch et al. 2008).

Contributors:
Natalia Buitron
Philippe Erikson
Emanuele Fabiano
Fabiana Maizza
Daniela Peluso
Fernando Santos-Granero
Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen
Robin M. Wright

The University of Arizona Press