Category: Excerpt

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edited by Jesús Rosales and Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez includes critical essays, reflections, interviews, and previously unpublished writing by the author herself to document the lifelong craft and legacy of a pioneering writer in the field.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

Excerpt from ‘Juan Felipe Herrera’

Posted on June 15, 2023May 23, 2023 by Riley Brown

June 15, 2023

Juan Felipe Herrera edited by Francisco A. Lomelí and Osiris Aníbal Gómez presents the distinguished, prolific, and highly experimental writer Juan Felipe Herrera. This wide-ranging collection of essays by leading experts offers critical approaches on Herrera, who transcends ethnic and mainstream poetics. It expertly demonstrates Herrera’s versatility, resourcefulness, innovations, and infinite creativity. This book includes an extensive interview with the poet and a voluminous bibliography on everything by, about, and on the author. The chapters in this book offer a deep dive into the life and work of an internationally beloved poet who, along with serving as the poet laureate of California and the U.S. poet laureate, creates work that fosters a deep understanding of and appreciation for people’s humanity. Below read an excerpt from the book.

The Chicano Cultural Poetics of Juan Felipe Herrera: The Artist as Shaman and Showman

By Rafael Pérez-Torres

“I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are merely drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.”

– Matsuo Basho Narrow Road to the Interior

Juan Felipe Herrera spins out a whirlwind of creativity and expression. A writer with a voracious curiosity, an absurdist humor, and a showman’s flare for style, he is also an artist who uses his craft to inspire deep human emotion as a pathway toward greater insight and understanding – what in some spiritual and philosophical contexts is called illumination. His poetry moves in multiple modes and directions. These movements may have contributed to a notable dearth of critical study addressing the critical and cultural significance of the broad aesthetic palette – incantatory, comical, improvisatory, anecdotal, hallucinatory, theatrical, minimalist, parodic, cosmic – Herrera employs. His profusion of styles may confound critics who seek to capture the qualities of this quicksilver poet in a circumscribed way. Much of his work appears spontaneous or extemporized, and this may add to the difficulties in developing an effective critical approach to his work. A broader critical focus may afford a perspective on his poetry and how it often relies on affective responses in order to achieve both aesthetic surprise and pleasure – aspects of a showman’s brio – and suggest a transformative moment that invites reflection on the spiritual dimensions of human impermanence – a shaman’s transformative incantation.

His dynamic poetry restlessly seeks to delight and transport the reader as it generates a Chicano performative cultural poetics. Improvisational and even elusively experimental, Herrera’s artistry comes into sharper focus if we consider the manner that it forms a performative cultural poetics. This term is one Herrera employed to describe the work of Latina/o writers and thinkers who for decades have sought to shape new cultural formations. Their work draws from devalued forms of knowledge to help generate a decolonial consciousness.Herrera recognizes those artists and activists who through their artistry and performances have given us, “long lost and abandoned ancestral concepts that we can envision and apply in one way or another, along with a Mexica performative cultural poetics that we have been attempting to build in the U.S.- Mexico borderlands since the Indigenista cultural revolution of the first half of the twentieth century” (“Foreword to the New Edition” xiv). Herrera identifies (and identifies with) a Mexicano-Chicano-Latino cultural performativity as a component of decolonial cultural activism. It is this sense of transformative performance that informs and drives his own restless artistic creation that echoes and evokes and conjures other forms of knowledge.

The present discussion considers the double role of Herrera as poet: as showman, playing aesthetic slights of hand, and as shaman, using language for spiritual and emotional transportation and transformation. The poetry employs linguistic and poetic forms as part of a performance meant primarily to generate an awareness of shared human suffering and, consequently, connection. Poetry makes evident that this suffering often results from long colonial legacies and continuing inequities related to state power, patriarch, and nationalism. As such, it demonstrates a decolonial impetus as it aspires – often employing experimental aesthetic form – to enact a type of cultural, spiritual, and emotional transformation. His vast, eclectic, and restless poetic output generates a performative cultural poetics premised on three central compositional elements: 1) acknowledging and honoring a sense of origin; 2) recognizing the social and even physical materiality of language; and 3) pursuing and encouraging a growth of consciousness. His poetic concerns thus resonate with a reclamation of suppressed knowledges and repressed languages (often associated with Mayan, Mexican, Huichol, and other Meso- American Indigenous practices) to experiment with dialogue and dramatic re-enactments (an association with his early involvement in theater) to invocations of language as a medium for incantatory powers. They all serve to generate an enveloping performativity. Throughout, Herrera serves as a kind of postmodern conjurer. The emphasis on play and performance, on the poet as protean creative force and sideshow entertainer, undergirds much of Herrera’s poetry and asserts his commitment to a Chicano performative cultural poetics.

His poems at times suggest a literal script – indicating setting, actors, and audience – that draws the reader into becoming a creative participant in a poetic enactment generated through the language on the page. As his poetry crosses aesthetic and national and philosophical borders in a variety of ways, it performs a decolonial crossing of signification and positionality – an enactment of a performative cultural poetics – in order to resituate the role of reader in relation to the poem. The poet acts through language to create the poems and, simultaneously, to prompt his readers to conjure themselves into an awareness of greater human connection.

Excerpt from ‘No Place for a Lady’

Posted on June 12, 2023May 23, 2023 by Riley Brown

June 12, 2023

In the first half of the twentieth century, the canyons and mesas of the Southwest beckoned and the burgeoning field of archaeology thrived. In this delightful biography, No Place for a Lady by Shelby Tisdale, we gain insight into a time when there were few women establishing full-time careers in anthropology, archaeology, or museums. Tisdale successfully combines Lambert’s voice from extensive interviews with her own to take us on a thought-provoking journey. Today we offer an excerpt from the Introduction of the book.

A Chance Meeting

I first met Marjorie Ferguson Lambert in 1984 while I was working for the School of American Research, now the School for Advanced Research (SAR), in Santa Fe, New Mexico. As the assistant collections manager at the SAR’s Indian Arts Research Center (IARC), I was periodically asked to transport Marjorie to meetings and “Brown Bag” lectures at the School. During these travels back and forth between her home and the SAR we would talk about southwest archaeology, and she mentioned her frustration with her failing eyesight and how difficult it was to keep up with her professional reading and writing. On one of these trips, I offered to read archaeological reports and other anthropological publications to her, and we agreed to get together on Wednesday evenings.

I would go over to Marjorie’s apartment after work and she would fix a light dinner or we would go out to eat at one of her favorite restaurants. Afterwards I would read whatever was on her list. I mostly read archaeological reports and book chapters. Marjorie was also fascinated with primates, so we sometimes ventured away from archaeology and anthropology to articles or books on the study of mountain gorillas in Rwanda by Dian Fossey or Jane Goodall’s study on chimpanzees in Tanzania. Marjorie contributed to organizations, such as the Jane Goodall Institute, that focus on the conservation and protection of primates and their habitats throughout the world.

Marjorie and I discussed what was in the reading each evening and sometimes our discussions turned to the issues faced by women in archaeology specifically, and in anthropology and museums in general. It was during these reading sessions that Marjorie started to share her experiences as a young female archaeologist in the 1930s. As these spirited discussions progressed and we got to know each other, we compared my own experiences as a 1980s anthropologist with hers and we both realized that the position of women in anthropology and archaeology had improved little over the years despite the attempts by feminists during the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Fortunately, this has changed as more women entered archaeology and anthropology and started taking on leadership roles at universities and in museums in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Throughout the years Marjorie and I continued to keep in contact with one another and we found that we shared many common interests. We especially shared a love for the Southwest, its diverse cultures and landscapes, and its deep history. In 1989 I left New Mexico for Tucson, Arizona to study for my doctorate at the University of Arizona. Shortly after I started my studies Nancy Parezo hired me as a graduate research assistant to work on the Hidden Scholars volume that she was editing. This project was an outgrowth of the papers delivered at the Wenner-Gren sponsored “Daughters of the Desert” conference held in Tucson in 1986. The conference was related to a traveling exhibition and publication by the same name organized by Barbara A. Babcock and Nancy J. Parezo.

Nancy and I discussed the women in these two publications at length and I felt that the history of anthropology and archaeology would benefit from more complete biographies on some of these “daughters.” I approached Marjorie about the possibility of writing a biography on her. I proposed it as a cross-generational collaboration, which would be a significant contribution to the intellectual history of women’s roles in southwestern archaeology. There is much to gain from the experiences of others, and for those of us following in a similar path we could benefit from Marjorie’s willingness to share her personal and professional experiences with us.

Excerpt from ‘Where We Belong’

Posted on June 6, 2023May 23, 2023 by Riley Brown

June 6, 2023

Where We Belong by Daisy Ocampo dispels the harmful myth that Native people are unfit stewards of their sacred places. This work establishes Indigenous preservation practices as sustaining approaches to the caretaking of the land that embody ecological sustainability, spiritual landscapes, and community well-being. The author brings together the history and experiences of the Chemehuevi people and their ties with Mamapukaib, or the Old Woman Mountains in the East Mojave Desert, and the Caxcan people and their relationship with Tlachialoyantepec, or Cerro de las Ventanas, in Zacatecas, Mexico. Below read an excerpt from the Introduction to the book.

This book explores the historic preservation of Indigenous sacred places as sites embedded with their own value systems. Concepts of Indigenous historic preservation emerged out of cultures and are not uniform. Indigenous people in Mexico and the United States understand historic preservation through their own cultural lens, not necessarily that of government officials. This work offers an Indigenous comparative approach of two Public History projects within the field and profession of historic preservation. This research juxtaposes two sets of relationships: the Chemehuevi people and their ties with Mamapukaib (Old Woman Mountains in the Eastern Mojave Desert), and the Caxcan people and their relationship with Tlachialoyantepec (Cerro de las Ventanas in southern Zacatecas). Caxcan and Chemehuevi’s sacred mountains provide an entry point into understanding the importance of creation narratives and sacred sites to Native sovereignty, and how the colonial targeting of sites through nationalist preservation projects rupture Native ties to their land. Caxcan and Chemehuevi cultures contain active preservation practices, which counters colonial accusations that Indigenous people are ill equipped to preserve their respective mountains.

Chemehuevi people are the southern-most group of Nuwuvi or Southern Paiutes whose ancestral homelands extends into the current-day states of Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and California. Contemporary Chemehuevi are enrolled in three different reservations, including the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe located along the western shore of the Colorado River across from Lake Havasu City. In addition, Chemehuevi are enrolled on the Colorado River Indian Tribes along the Colorado River in present-day California and Arizona. Finally, Chemehuevi are enrolled in the Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians located in Coachella Valley of Southern California. On the other hand, Caxcan people’s ancestral homelands extends into the Mexican states of Zacatecas, Jalisco, Durango, and Nayarit although the majority reside in an area known as the Caxcan Region in southern Zacatecas. Today, numerous Chemehuevi and Caxcan people reside outside of their ancestral homelands.

The stories of these two peoples and places in North America inform us about concepts of power and significance of Indigenous sovereignty within the field of Public History, which is closely tied to governmental policies, museums, archives, and agencies involved in historic preservation. Government and educational institutions, often considered to be democratic, steward many collections connected to Native spirituality, including historical documents and cultural items. These sources offer elements of cultural knowledge germane to landscapes, but most often, they are not curated, maintained, and preserved by Indigenous people. The materials relating to the past often emerged from a colonial past and present, which has dominated their use and interpretation without the consent and leadership of Indigenous people. As a result of the colonial past, institutions and agencies continue to undermine Native stewardship of the Indigenous past. Therefore, Public History projects in relationship to and with Native communities must privilege tribal scholars, intellectuals, and members. Indigenous people, sovereignty, and preservation ontologies must be at the center of historic preservation projects. My research into Indigenous historic preservation focuses on two mountain ranges, but the work begins with my family and community.

Excerpt from Pyrocene Park

Posted on May 16, 2023May 15, 2023 by Riley Brown

May 16, 2023

Its monumental rocks, etched by glaciers during the last Ice Age, have made Yosemite National Park a crown jewel of the national park system and a world-celebrated destination. Yet, more and more, fire rather than ice is shaping this storied landscape.

In the last decade, fire has blasted into public attention. California’s blazes have captured national and global media interest with their drama and urgency. Expand the realm of fire to include the burning of fossil fuels, and the fire story also subsumes climate change. Renowned fire historian Stephen J. Pyne argues that the relationship between fire and humans has become a defining feature of our epoch, and he reveals how Yosemite offers a cameo of how we have replaced an ice age with a fire age: the Pyrocene.

Organized around a backcountry trek to a 50-year experiment in restoring fire, Pyrocene Park by Stephen J. Pyne describes the 150-year history of fire suppression and management that has led us, in part, to where the park is today. But there is more. Yosemite’s fire story is America’s, and the Earth’s, as it shifts from an ice-informed world to a fire-informed one. Pyrocene Park distills that epic story into a sharp miniature.

Flush with people, ideas, fires, and controversy, Pyrocene Park is a compelling and accessible window into the American fire scene and the future it promises. Below read an excerpt from the book.

A trek to the Illilouette began as a thought by Jan van Wagtendonk, evolved into a resolve by the park’s upper administration, advanced to a project under the fire management program, and became a reality on September 13–15, 2021. Behind that undertaking lay the massif of the Sierra Nevada Range, California’s Mediterranean climate, a biota built to burn, humanity’s monopoly over fire, America’s halting history from laissez-faire burning to universal suppression to restoring good fires, Yosemite’s status as an emblem of the wild, the Earth’s hastening spiral from ice to fire, and those ineffable moments when planet and people converge.

The Illilouette Valley—hidden in the aesthetic shadow of Half Dome—is not a destination landscape. No John Muir has rhapsodized over its wild splendor. No Ansel Adams has immortalized it in photographs. No guidebooks identify it as one of Yosemite’s many iconic scenes. It boasts no towering granite domes, no Big Trees, no historical markers, no cult of climbing routes. In a place that overflows with the photogenic and the monumental, it projects no special vision or public voice. It is neither in Yosemite Valley nor along the Range of Light that forms the Sierra Crest. Its trees are Jeffrey pine, lodgepole, and aspen patches, not giant sequoias.

Which makes all the more astonishing that the superintendent, deputy superintendent, chief ranger, wilderness policy and recreation planner, chief of resources management and science, chief of ecological restoration, vegetation ecologist, fire ecologist, wilderness manager, park physical scientist, chief of staff, fire management officer, deputy fire management officer, and fuels battalion chief—most of the governing cadre of the park concerned with Yosemite’s natural endowment—along with two academics planned a three-day trek to the basin on September 13–15, 2021. These are the people who must decide how to manage the park’s natural estate.

That domain has been undergoing a slow, now quickening upheaval that makes Yosemite a microcosm of the Earth. Nearly all Yosemite’s fabled sites were shaped by Pleistocene ice as the planet flickered over the past 2.6 million years into and out of long glacial epochs broken by short bouts of warming. That ice was the most visible feature of a makeover that repeatedly recast the Earth’s lands, seas, and air. At Yosemite it widened and deepened valleys, rounded exposed granite, cached moraine and soils, and scoured routes for runoff that became rivers and waterfalls. Over and again, the ice made its mark, departed, and repeated.

The last interglacial, known as the Holocene, began roughly 12,000 years ago. But something new intervened in the rhythm of returning ice. This time a fire-wielding creature, Homo sapiens, interacted with a progressively fire-receptive world. The cooling stalled, then reversed. It was as though the expected ice age had refracted through a pyric prism and re-emerged as a fire age. Fire replaced ice, fire drove off ice. Visible flames reshaped living landscapes of conifers, shrubs, grasses, and peat, while combustion hidden in machines, burning the fossilized residue of formerly living biomes—call them lithic landscapes—began reforging how humans lived on the land. When the effluent from that industrial-scale firing marinated the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, it perturbed the climate, which reconfigured everything it touched. Local fires massed into a globalized fire age.

Even Yosemite, a monument to ice, is being refashioned by the hastening fires. That is what makes the Illilouette, otherwise so mundane, of interest to park management: it is a place informed by fire. It is where the park sought to test the notion, an amalgam of hope and alarm, that good fires might restore the lost fires and help stave off the bad burns, the feral flames, and the megafires that a blowup fire age threatens. It is where a landscape bequeathed by the Pleistocene has morphed into a Pyrocene.

The University of Arizona Press