Category: Media

Enrique Ochoa on the “Esculent” Podcast

Posted on April 3, 2025March 24, 2025 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.

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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 February 4, 2025February 3, 2025 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 January 24, 2025January 22, 2025 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.

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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.

Stephanie Opperman on the “Unsung History” Podcast

Posted on January 21, 2025January 17, 2025 by maryreynolds

January 21, 2025

Get to know our authors via podcasts and radio programs!

Stephanie Baker Opperman spoke with “Unsung History” podcast host Kelly Therese Pollock recently about Isabel Kelly, the subject of the new book Cold War Anthropologist: Isabel Kelly and Rural Development in Mexico.

Opperman remembers discovering Kelly when looking through archives in Mexico related to her dissertation work, “I came across this thoughtfully articulated ethnographic report of a community and a community center with all of its details about what was working in this community and what wasn’t. And it was written in English. It seemed like a thorough and well-researched piece. . . . and I wanted to know who is this person? What is her story?”

Opperman also discusses how Kelly’s story illuminates changes happening in Mexico and in the field of anthropology at the time. “In the post-World War II period, Mexico is going through industrialization, towards unification, towards having global alliances,” Opperman says. “The field of anthropology is also changing in the midst of all of this. It’s going through changes, many ups and downs and swerves and twists in this period. And for me, she’s the connecting piece.”

Listen to the full podcast here.

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Stephanie Baker Opperman is a professor of Latin American history at Georgia College. Her work has been published in the Journal of Women’s History, Bulletin of Latin American Research, the Latin Americanist, and Endeavour.

Authors on Podcasts and Radio

Posted on December 19, 2024December 20, 2024 by maryreynolds

December 19, 2024

Treat yourself to some excellent listening to celebrate the end of the year. Recently, our authors were featured guests or guest hosts on radio programs and podcasts. Tune in to go behind the scenes of three of our 2024 books, and listen to a brand new poem from one of our poets!

Phoenix’s KJZZ public radio station interviewed Rafael A Martínez about his new book, Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States. Martínez talked about how today’s youth movements were inspired by the history of activism. He says, “Most of these activists that I write about were trained by folks and leaders in the civil rights movement. [In the 1960s] there was a lot of civil disobedience in the country, but then they also had to push politicians to pass things that would actually make significant change. Undocumented youth took a page from that history book and started to say: we need to take our activism to sites and places like detention centers where undocumented communities are being criminalized and we need to change the narrative.” Listen to the radio show here. The full transcript is also available.

Rick Tabenunaka of the “Decolonized Buffalo” podcast interviewed Andrew Canessa and Manuela Lavinas Picq, authors of Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State. The authors talk about Westphalian sovereignty and its Eurocentric roots, in comparison to Indigenous sovereignty. Canessa and Picq also discuss the concept of “tribalism” within a Eurocentric concept of sovereignty, and they also analyze the “Doctrine of Discovery” as a pillar of the modern political system. Listen to the podcast here or watch the video here.

Diego Báez, author of Yaguareté White, was guest host on the “Poetry Centered” podcast. He introduced three poems from Voca, the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s online audiovisual archive. Báez discusses poems by Gabriel Dozal, Gabriel Palacios, and Jimmy Santiago Baca. Then he reads a new poem of his own “Neuropathy with Lamb.” Listen to the podcast here.

“Imagine Otherwise” podcast host Cathy Hannabach interviewed Amber Rose González, Felicia Montes, and Nadia Zepeda, editors of Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento: Spiritual Artivism, Healing Justice, and Feminist Praxis. In the conversation, Amber, Felicia, and Nadia share their journey with the Mujeres de Maiz organization and the collective liberation the group is building. Traversing poetry, performance, zines, healing ceremonies, visual art, autoethnography, and a plethora of other mediums, these scholars demonstrate the power of collaboration and intersectional solidarity. Listen to the podcast here.

Meena Khandelwal and “Cookstove Chronicles” on Jugaand Project Podcast

Posted on October 24, 2024October 23, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

October 24, 2024

Why do so many Indian women in India continue to use their wood-burning, smoke-spewing stoves called “chulhas” when they have other options? Meena Khandelwal, Associate Professor of Feminist Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Iowa, explores this paradox in her new book Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life of a Women’s Technology in India. Based on multidisciplinary collaboration with engineers, archaeologists, development specialists, and others, Khandelwal discusses chulhas as women’s local low-tech technology as well as craft and work.

In The Jugaad Project: Material Religion in Context podcast, Khandelwal explains the questions that led to her research: “Why do these old technologies persist? Why does the chulha persist? I believe that re-imagining the chulha as a dynamic technology helps us understand the reasons that people and especially rural women may retain older technologies . . . despite the allure of modern energy infrastructures.”

The author also addressed the multidisciplinary aspect of the book: “We’re all trying to have a conversation. The language that we use is very different. The methods in each discipline are different. What counts as reliable data?” For example, the engineers wanted GIS data on forests and harvesting wood, with women’s stories as narratives about that data. But as an anthropologist, Kehandelwal believes women’s words and stories were the actual data. She said, “I pushed back at that moment and said stories are data too, not just embellishment of so-called ‘hard data.’”

Listen to the entire podcast interview 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.

Author Rafael Martínez Receives Líderes Under 40 Award

Posted on October 15, 2024October 10, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

October 15, 2024

Congratulations to author Rafael Martínez, who has received the “Líderes Under 40 Award” from the Arizona Diamondbacks and Los D-backs Hispanic Council. The award honors leadership in Arizona’s Hispanic community.

Martínez was recently interviewed by Scott Bordow of Arizona State University News about the honor, which recognizes Martinez’s 2023 oral history project Querencia: Voices from Chandler’s Latinx Barrios. They also discussed Martinez’s new book Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States, and the Latinx Oral History Lab.

Martínez tells Bordow, “The questions are framed around the idea of querencia. It’s a common Spanish word that means love to place. It’s terminology that’s been developed by Latino and Hispanic Southwest authors. Mexican Americans and people of Spanish descent have been in this region for multiple generations. The idea of connection to place is embodied in this concept of querencia. So, the questions really revolve around talking about growing up in the city of Chandler. What did the city look like at that time? What did their neighborhood look like?”

In the photo above, Rafael Martínez and his daughter are on the left with other award winners at Diamondbacks’ stadium.

Read the full interview here.

About the book:

Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States takes readers on a journey through the history of the rise of undocumented youth social movements in the United States in the twenty-first century. The book follows the documentation trail of undocumented youth activists spanning over two decades of organizing. Each chapter carefully analyzes key organizing strategies used by undocumented youth to produce direct forms of activism that expose and critique repressive forms of state control and violence. This inquiry is particularly generative in relation to how immigrant bodies are erased, contained, and imagined as “aliens” or “illegal.”

July 1, 2024

Miranda Melcher of New Books Network podcast interviewed Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo, author of Growing Up in the Gutter: Diaspora and Comics. In the interview, Quintana-Vallejo offers many examples of what happens in the gutter, the margins between the story panels in graphic novels and comics. For example, he explains a specific subtext in one author’s illustration style. In The Best We Could Do, author Thi Bui chose a particular color to convey their message:

“In using orange in order to represent that wound, that trauma, that she has to carry as a child into adulthood, the author and illustrator is kind of leveraging something that we might think is decorative in order to convey so much meaning.”

Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo, in Comics and Graphic Novels on New Books Network

Listen the full podcast here.

Quintana-Vallejo is an assistant professor at Rhode Island College. He is the author of Children of Globalization: Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels in Germany, England, and the United States. He studies migration and diasporas in narratives about youth development in the context of globalized and de facto multicultural societies. His essays have appeared in Literary Geographies, Norteamérica, the North Meridian Review, and Chasqui, and in several edited volumes. He grew up in Mexico City.

About Growing Up in the Gutter:

Growing Up in the Gutter offers new understandings of contemporary graphic coming-of-age narratives by looking at the genre’s growth in stories by and for young BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and diasporic readers. Through a careful examination of the genre, Quintana-Vallejo analyzes the complex identity formation of first- and subsequent-generation migrant protagonists in globalized rural and urban environments and dissects the implications that these diasporic formative processes have for a growing and popular genre.

June 24, 2024

Diné geographer Andrew Curley, author of Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation, discusses “The Colorado River and the Colonial Blindspot” as part of the “Natural History for a World in Crisis” series. This panel discussion, moderated by Beka Economopoulos, is the first in the year-long series produced by the The Natural History Museum. Curley is joined by Teresa Montoya (Diné), Traci Brynne Voyles, and Erika M. Bsumek, to explore the impact of colonial intrusions and challenge the audience into seeing “colonial blindspots” in the water crisis.

“We tend to focus on this issue of climate change, when really there’s never been enough water for settler designs. And each time there’s a new infrastructure built onto the river’s tributaries, it’s satisfying a temporary problem that is quickly overwhelmed by more and more settlers. It’s the nature of settler colonialism in the region.”

Andrew Curley, in The Colorado River and the Colonial Blindspot

Watch or read the transcript of the full video here. This link also includes an additional video: “Rethinking the Water Paradigm with Andrew Curley.”

Curley is a member of the Navajo Nation and an assistant professor in the School of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of Arizona. He has studied the social, cultural, and political implications of coal mining in the Navajo Nation, and his latest research is on the environmental history of water diversions on the Colorado River and the impact of colonial infrastructures on tribal nations.

About Carbon Sovereignty:

This comprehensive new work offers a deep dive into the complex inner workings of energy shift in the Navajo Nation. Geographer Andrew Curley, a member of the Navajo Nation, examines the history of coal development within the Navajo Nation, including why some Diné supported coal and the consequences of doing so. He explains the Navajo Nation’s strategic choices to use the coal industry to support its sovereignty as a path forward in the face of ongoing colonialism. Carbon Sovereignty demonstrates the mechanism of capitalism through colonialism and the construction of resource sovereignty, in both the Navajo Nation’s embrace and its rejection of a coal economy.

May 29, 2024

Mark Brodie of KJZZ public radio in Phoenix interviewed Stephen J. Pyne, author of Pyrocene Park: A Journey Into the Fire History of Yosemite National Park. Pyne says that the Yosemite fire story is a story of good fire that was lost, but has now been partly restored. He believes that the restoration of good fire should inform fire management on other federal lands.

“It’s not just the ecological deterioration that results when fire is removed. I mean, fire is a broad spectrum ecological catalyst. It does a lot of things. We’re still learning about all the things that it does. But it’s also a case of if you don’t burn it, stuff keeps building up, combustibles accumulate and the fires that you do get will be uncontrollable. So it, you’re removing your choice, your ability to choose what fires you want and what you don’t.”

Listen or read the full interview here.
Stephen Pyne, KJZZ interview

Pyne is a fire historian, urban farmer, and emeritus professor at Arizona State University. He spent fifteen seasons with the North Rim Longshots, a fire crew at Grand Canyon National Park. Out of those seasons emerged a scholarly interest in the history and management of fire and he has written over thirty books. His most recent book is Five Suns: A Fire History of Mexico (2024).

About Pyrocene Park:

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. Renowned fire historian 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.

The University of Arizona Press