Category: Media

Podcast: Gabriella Soto Explains How Mass Casualties on the Border Can Inspire Us to Act

Posted on by maryreynolds

July 23, 2026

What is the interplay between federal immigration policy and local practices of death care on the border, and the implications of policies that cause increased death tolls? In the latest University of Arizona podcast, Jennifer Rose Najera interviews Gabriella Soto, author of Border Afterlives: Migrant Deaths, Forensic Investigations, and the Politics of Haunting, the book that answers these questions.

In the interview, Soto, a contemporary archaeologist and teaching professor at Arizona State University, explained how her research project started: “I decided to focus my field work in Brooks County, Texas, where border crossing had moved from Arizona into Texas after 2011. Border crossing was concentrated Brooks County, which has a population of less than 7,000 people. And they documented that since 2009, there were at least one thousand of what were thought to be border-crossing deaths. . . . And the local officials investigating the deaths were doing the best they could, they didn’t have medical background [to determine how people died], . . . but were just burying the people without investigation who they thought were undocumented border-crossers. And when this got national attention, they tried to reform their ways, but there was a lack of resources.”

Listen to the entire podcast here.

About the book:

Border Afterlives begins with the undocumented individuals who die crossing the U.S.-Mexico border—deaths that are both preventable and politically produced.
 
Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic, participatory, and community-engaged research, author Gabriella Soto examines the postmortem journeys of these migrants through the fragmented infrastructure of medicolegal death investigation in the U.S. Southwest. She reveals how the state’s deterrence-based border policies not only generate death but also fail to provide adequate care for the dead. Soto argues that these deaths should be understood as structural homicides and that the forensic neglect they face is a form of ongoing violence.

Podcast: Meena Khandelwal Discusses How Cookstoves Empower Women in India

Posted on by maryreynolds

July 9, 2026

Why do so many Indian women in India continue to use their wood-burning, smoke-spewing stoves called “chulhas” when they have other options? In the latest University of Arizona podcast, Miranda Melcher interviews Meena Khandelwal, author of Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life of a Women’s Technology in India about women’s local low-tech technology as well as craft and work in Rajasthan, India.

In the interview, Khandelwal, an anthropologist and women’s studies scholar, explains how environmentalists have blamed deforestation on the use of chulhas: “These stoves were mostly used by women, and they cut wood to use as fuel for daily cooking. So my engineering colleague and his students designed a solar cooker. These prototype stoves were abandoned after a couple years in the villages. My colleague realized that he had to better understand women’s cooking practices.” Khandelwal’s colleague invited her to collaborate, but before she went to Rajasthan to do field work, she noted, “I had to learn a whole lot about the region, and the social and environmental history, before I could even have an an opinion about cookstove improvement projects.”

Listen to the entire podcast here.

About the book:

Based on anthropological research in Rajasthan, Cookstove Chronicles argues that the supposedly obsolete chulha persists because it offers women control over the tools needed to feed their families. Their continued use of old stoves alongside the new is not a failure to embrace new technologies but instead a strategy to maximize flexibility and autonomy. The chulha is neither the villain nor hero of this story. It produces particulate matter that harms people’s bodies, leaves soot on utensils and walls, and accelerates glacial melting and atmospheric warming. Yet it also depends on renewable biomass fuel and supports women’s autonomy as a local, do-it-yourself technology.

Food Sleuth Radio Interviews Andrew Flachs on Food Production and the Efficiency Trap

Posted on by maryreynolds

June 23, 2026

Food Sleuth radio host Melinda Hemmelgarn recently interviewed Andrew Flachs author of Feeding the World as if People Mattered: How Small Farms Produce Value Beyond Yields. This book draws on fifteen years of anthropological research, taking readers to fields in South India, Eastern Europe, and North America, where people are already feeding the future amid global change. From these fields, Flachs shows us how a radical rethinking of the value of small farms and farmers is already happening. Listen to part 1 of the interview here and part 2 here. Flachs is an associate professor of anthropology at Purdue University, a father of two children, and a semi-retired musician.

Asked about creating more farms and more farmers instead of increasing yields, Flachs replied, “When we think about increasing yields, what sort of systems are we perpetuating? There is this specter of food production, overpopulation, and environmental degradation that is so tied to a crisis mode of thinking (from the 1970s). If we see it simply as a production question, then all of our solutions end up being how do we create more and more of this thing. The United Nations [and other international researchers] have concluded that the problem of world hunger is not that there is not enough food, it’s that food cannot reach the people who really need it.” This food distribution problem is already being solved with a variety of local farming methods in different parts of the world. Listen to the full podcast interview: part 1 here and part 2 here.

About the book:

Backyard gardens flush with cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers where bees buzz and chickens scratch. Beyond, a forest filled with blackberries and jewelweed. Inspired by childhood memories of his grandmother’s overflowing backyard garden, author Andrew Flachs has embarked on a multi-continent, decades-long look at agriculture and its value.
 
The dominant view of agriculture has focused only on what we produce. It sees value in terms of capital gains or yield efficiency, masking how our global food system produces tremendous amounts of food commodities while failing to feed people, support rural communities, or enhance ecological well-being. Feeding the World as if People Mattered asks us to look more deeply and more humanely at what we perceive to be most valuable in our agricultural systems. Bringing together conversations in agriculture, economics, anthropology, and the environmental humanities, Flachs deftly shows how small farms reproduce social and ecological relationships that are the only sustainable path forward.

Kimberly Blaeser Featured on NPR

Posted on by maryreynolds

February 4, 2026

Neda Ulaby interviewed Kimberly Blaeser, author of Ancient Light on National Public Radio for “All Things Considered.” Blaeser spoke about her book being a National Book Foundation Science +Literature selected title, and she spoke about finding inspiration from social issues. Ancient Light is a poetry collection that uses lyric, narrative, and concrete poems to give voice to some of the most pressing ecological and social issues of our time.

In the interview, Blaeser read her poem “About Standing (in Kinship).” Listen to the full interview here.

Blaeser is the author of six poetry collections and served as Wisconsin Poet Laureate from 2015–16. An Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, Blaeser is an enrolled member of White Earth Nation, an MFA faculty member for Institute of American Indian Arts, and professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She also mentors Indigenous poets through Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po), an organization she founded in 2020.

Mujeres de Maiz Featured on Mexican TV News

Posted on by Anissa Suazo

November 21, 2025

Mexico’s Canal Once (Channel Eleven, Mexico’s public television network) featured the Mujeres de Maiz organization on its Cooltureando program. The reporter interviewed Felicia ‘Fe’ Montes, co-editor with Amber Rose González, and Nadia Zepeda, of Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento: Spiritual Artivism, Healing Justice, and Feminist Praxis. In the interview, Montes talks about the Mexican inspiration for Mujeres de Maiz, and the need to create a “safe space and a brave space” in Los Angeles for women who are artists and activists. She also emphasized the organization’s indigenous roots; she explained: “There’s a Native concept of braiding mind, body, and spirit. So we are always trying to put those together.” Montes visited Mexico City to share her work at Chicanxs Sin Fronteras, as part of “Encuentro de Cultura Chicana.”

Watch the Cooltureando video here.

About the book:

Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento: Spiritual Artivism, Healing Justice, and Feminist Praxis‘ political-ethical-spiritual commitments, cultural production, and everyday practices are informed by Indigenous and transnational feminist of color artistic, ceremonial, activist, and intellectual legacies. Contributors fuse stories of celebration, love, and spirit-work with an incisive critique of interlocking oppressions, both intimate and structural, encouraging movement toward “a world where many worlds fit.”

The multidisciplinary, intergenerational, and critical-creative nature of the project coupled with the unique subject matter makes the book a must-have for high school and college students, activist-scholars, artists, community organizers, and others invested in social justice and liberation.

Tim Z. Hernandez on Latino USA Podcast

Posted on by maryreynolds

July 14, 2025

Fernanda Echavarri of Latino USA interviewed Tim Z. Hernandez, author of All They Will Call You and They Call You Back, about the lasting impact of deportation over generations. She first interviewed him in 2018 about his life’s mission to find the families of the victims of the 1948 plane crash in Los Gatos Canyon, California. This new podcast interview reveals interesting developments on his search, including a forthcoming documentary film, and how the original Latino USA story uncovered clues that helped his search.

All thirty-two people on board died in the 1948 crash. Twenty-eight of them were Mexican farmworkers who were in the United States because of the Bracero Program, which brought millions of Mexican guest workers to the United States. All the people on the plane died the same way, but in death, they were not treated the same. For the four American crew members, U.S. officials gathered what remains they could, and sent caskets to their families. The remains of the twenty-eight Mexican braceros were not sent back to Mexico to be repatriated or given proper burial by their families. It was the deadliest crash in California history.

Listen to the Latino USA podcast here.

About All They Will Call You:

All They Will Call You is the harrowing account of “the worst airplane disaster in California’s history,” which claimed the lives of thirty-two passengers, including twenty-eight Mexican citizens—farmworkers who were being deported by the U.S. government. Outraged that media reports omitted only the names of the Mexican passengers, American folk icon Woody Guthrie penned a poem that went on to become one of the most important protest songs of the twentieth century, “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee).” It was an attempt to restore the dignity of the anonymous lives whose unidentified remains were buried in an unmarked mass grave in California’s Central Valley. For nearly seven decades, the song’s message would be carried on by the greatest artists of our time, including Pete Seeger, Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, yet the question posed in Guthrie’s lyrics, “Who are these friends all scattered like dry leaves?” would remain unanswered—until now.

About They Call You Back:

In this riveting new work, Hernandez continues his search for the plane crash victims while also turning the lens on himself and his ancestral past, revealing the tumultuous and deeply intimate experiences that have fueled his investigations—a lifelong journey haunted by memory, addiction, generational trauma, and the spirit world. They Call You Back is the true chronicle of one man’s obsession to restore dignity to an undignified chapter in America’s past, while at the same time making a case for why we must heal our personal wounds if we are ever to heal our political ones.

Enrique Ochoa on New Books Network Podcast

Posted on by maryreynolds

April 24, 2025

Enrique C. Ochoa spoke with New Books Network podcast host Miranda Melcher from Kings College, London, on how Mexico’s corporations shaped global demand for Mexican foods, while twenty-five percent of Mexicans lived in poverty, without access to nutritious foods. Ochoa is the author of México Between Feast and Famine: Food, Corporate Power, and Inequality.

When asked about how he started writing this book, Ochoa said, “I started exploring the contradictions in the 1980s and 1990s, where Mexico on the one hand begins to have a booming capitalist food sector that dominated markets globally, for example Bimbo bread, the leading packaged bread producer in the world at this point. And by 2020, there were Forbes Magazine millionaires from Mexico’s corporate food sector. But at the same time, Mexico’s poverty rates and lack of access to food in Mexico continued to hover at about a fourth of the population. So we had a global food boom, and global corporate chefs talking about Mexican food and how wonderful it is on the one hand, but at the same time we had all these people with lack of access to nutritious food in Mexico. They suffered from the twin scourge of malnutrition and the modern junk food diet.”

Listen to the full podcast here.

***

About the book:

México Between Feast and Famine provides one of the first comprehensive analyses of Mexico’s food systems and how they reflect the contradictions and inequalities at the heart of Mexico. Ochoa examines the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of neoliberal policies that have reshaped food production, distribution, and consumption in Mexico. Ochoa analyzes the histories of Mexico’s mega food companies, including GRUMA, Bimbo, Oxxo, Aurrera/Walmex, and reveals how corporations have captured the food system at the same time that diet-related diseases have soared. The author not only examines the economic and political dimensions of food production but also interrogates the social and cultural impacts.

Enrique Ochoa on the “Esculent” Podcast

Posted on by maryreynolds

April 3, 2025

Enrique C. Ochoa spoke with “Esculent” podcast host Elizabeth McQueen from University of California, Davis, on the role of corporations in constructing a thread of Mexico’s culinary history. Ochoa is the author of México Between Feast and Famine: Food, Corporate Power, and Inequality.

In the interview titled, “Corporate Power and a visit to Disneyland’s Mission Tortilla Factory,” Ochoa talked about what happened after 1492 contact with Europeans: “Eighty to ninety percent of the indigenous population is wiped out in the areas where Europeans go in a short period of time. And that leads to the takeover of those lands, the expansion of wheat and of European notions of food at the expense of indigenous ways of knowing and foodstuffs. And over time, indigenous foods were seen as poor people’s foods. Instead of talking about pulque and maize and eating from nature, the notion is that to live well, one has to eat wheat bread and drink wine like Europeans do.”

Listen to the full podcast here.

***

About the book:

México Between Feast and Famine provides one of the first comprehensive analyses of Mexico’s food systems and how they reflect the contradictions and inequalities at the heart of Mexico. Ochoa examines the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of neoliberal policies that have reshaped food production, distribution, and consumption in Mexico. Ochoa analyzes the histories of Mexico’s mega food companies, including GRUMA, Bimbo, Oxxo, Aurrera/Walmex, and reveals how corporations have captured the food system at the same time that diet-related diseases have soared. The author not only examines the economic and political dimensions of food production but also interrogates the social and cultural impacts.

Washington Post Interviews Tim Z. Hernandez

Posted on by maryreynolds

February 4, 2025

Tim Z. Hernandez, author of All They Will Call You and They Call You Back, spoke to Washington Post reporter Petula Dvorak about deportees who were victims of the 1948 plane wreck in Los Gatos Canyon, California.

In the article “Deportees died in a plane crash. Woody Guthrie wrote a song about it,” Hernandez shared some of his research from interviews about the plane wreck: “’There were hundreds of Mexicans in line waiting to be deported, and they were cramming many into that first plane,’ Hernandez said. The stories suggest that some passengers may have been sitting in the aisle or on baggage, overloading the World War II surplus plane. He found an eyewitness account from a man who tried to get on that first plane, but it was too full. They made him wait and board the second one, saving his life. It was the deadliest crash in California history.'”

Read the Washington Post article here.

About All They Will Call You:

All They Will Call You is the harrowing account of “the worst airplane disaster in California’s history,” which claimed the lives of thirty-two passengers, including twenty-eight Mexican citizens—farmworkers who were being deported by the U.S. government. Outraged that media reports omitted only the names of the Mexican passengers, American folk icon Woody Guthrie penned a poem that went on to become one of the most important protest songs of the twentieth century, “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee).” It was an attempt to restore the dignity of the anonymous lives whose unidentified remains were buried in an unmarked mass grave in California’s Central Valley. For nearly seven decades, the song’s message would be carried on by the greatest artists of our time, including Pete Seeger, Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, yet the question posed in Guthrie’s lyrics, “Who are these friends all scattered like dry leaves?” would remain unanswered—until now.

About They Call You Back:

In this riveting new work, Hernandez continues his search for the plane crash victims while also turning the lens on himself and his ancestral past, revealing the tumultuous and deeply intimate experiences that have fueled his investigations—a lifelong journey haunted by memory, addiction, generational trauma, and the spirit world. They Call You Back is the true chronicle of one man’s obsession to restore dignity to an undignified chapter in America’s past, while at the same time making a case for why we must heal our personal wounds if we are ever to heal our political ones.

Theodore H. Fleming on WICN’s “Inquiry”

Posted on by maryreynolds

January 24, 2025

Get to know our authors via podcasts and radio programs!

New England radio station WICN’s “Inquiry” host Mark Lynch recently interviewed Theodore H. Fleming about his book Birds, Bats, and Blooms: The Coevolution of Vertebrate Pollinators and Their Plants.

During their conversation, Fleming speaks about differences in the way bats and hummingbirds carry pollen. He says, “Hummingbirds tend to be highly territorial when they are feeding, and they have small territories. But bats are not territorial and have large feeding ranges. They can carry pollen kilometers at a time.”

Fleming also talks about early hummingbird fossils found in Europe: “The earliest fossils dating from 32 to 30 million years ago were first unearthed in shale deposits in Germany. Previous to this fossil discovery in 1984, we thought of hummingbirds as New World only, but now we think they probably developed in tropical Eurasia.”

Listen to the entire interview here.

***
Theodore H. Fleming is a professor emeritus of biology at the University of Miami. He spent thirty-nine years in academia at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and the University of Miami, teaching ecology courses and conducting research on tropical rodent populations and plant-visiting bats and their food plants in Panama, Costa Rica, Australia, Mexico, and Arizona. He lives in Tucson.

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