From December 9 to 17, 2025, all our books are 50% off! Plus, we’re offering free shipping on orders over $75 within the contiguous U.S.
Enter promo code AZWINTER50 when you check out on our website. This deal is good for any of our books, but just in case you need some inspiration, check out a few of our recommended bundles below.
Browse all of our books here.
October 29, 2025
The University of Arizona Press hosts the Association of University Presses’ Book, Jacket, and Journal Show in November. It is all part of our celebration of University Press Week, November 10-14. The award-winning books are on display at the Press offices on the 5th Floor of the University of Arizona Main Library. The winners are also on virtual display here.
Now in its 60th year, the show honors the university publishing community’s design and production professionals. By recognizing achievement in design, production, and manufacture of print publications, it also sparks thoughtful, creative, and resourceful publishing design in the future.
Check out a few of the winning designs below, and a photo of the Show at the Press offices above.
October 23, 2025
Thank you to all of the authors and editors who visited our booth at the Western History Association Conference in Albuquerque last week! Below, check out a few snapshots from the conference.
There’s still time to take advantage of the conference discount, too! Until October 25, use AZWHA25 when you check out on our website for 40% off all books and free shipping on orders over $60.
Arizona Crossroads series editors Anita Huizar-Hernández, Eric V. Meeks, and Katherine G. Morrissey
Cynthia Bejarano, co-editor of Frontera Madre(hood)
BorderVisions series editors Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez and Yvette J. Saavedra
Margo Tamez, Cynthia Bejarano, and Jeffrey P. Shepherd, co-editors of Gathering Together, We Decide
From left to right: Anthony Macías, author of Chicano-Chicana Americana; Kristen Buckles, University of Arizona Press Editor-In-Chief; L Heidenreich, co-author of Writing that Matters; and Myrriah Gómez, author of Nuclear Nuevo México.
We look forward to seeing you again at the 2026 Western History Conference in Portland!
November 10, 2025
The University of Arizona Press’ podcast features an interview with Joe Watkins, author of Indigenizing Japan: Ainu Past, Present, and Future. Watkins, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, is an affiliated faculty member in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. He was president of the Society for American Archaeology during 2019–2021. His study interests concern the ethical practice of anthropology and anthropology’s relationships with descendant communities and populations on a global scale.
Asked about SOMETHING, Watkins answered, “ANSWER HERE”
Listen to the full podcast here.
About the book:
In this collection, established and emerging scholars draw upon their rootedness in the U.S. Southwest and U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The meXicana contributors use personal and scholarly inquiry to discuss what it means to cultivate spaces of belonging, navigate language policies, and explore and excavate silences in various spaces, among other important themes. From the recruitment of Latinas for the U.S. Benito Juárez Squadron in World War II, to the early twentieth-century development of bilingual education in Arizona, to new and insightful analyses of Bracero Program participants and their families, the book details little-known oral histories and archival material to present a rich account of lives along the border with emphasis on women and the working class.
September 18, 2025
The University of Arizona Press, in collaboration with the Arizona Historical Society, proudly announces the publication of the inaugural book in the new Arizona Crossroads Series on September 23: meXicana Roots and Routes: Listening to People, Places, and Pasts. Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez and Anita Huízar-Hernández co-edited the book.
In this collection, established and emerging scholars draw upon their rootedness in the U.S. Southwest and U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The meXicana contributors use personal and scholarly inquiry to discuss what it means to cultivate spaces of belonging, navigate language policies, and explore and excavate silences in various spaces, among other important themes. Chapters elevate community voices that are often an underrepresented aspect of our historical and cultural knowledge of the U.S. Southwest.
The book is not just about Arizona. Each section of the book intentionally centers Arizona within broader comparative and cross-state dialogues, alongside chapters that reflect regional concerns in other southwestern states, including Texas, California, Colorado, and New Mexico.
Arizona Crossroads is led by a team of three editors: Anita Huízar-Hernández, Arizona State University; Eric V. Meeks, Northern Arizona University; and Katherine G. Morrissey, University of Arizona. Morrissey explained, “Crossroads is an intersection, but we also mean it as an analogy that brings together ideas and peoples. It is of course a geographical place, that we know today as Arizona, a place that has long been an intersection of indigenous peoples, of settler colonialists, and immigrants from around the world.”
For the Arizona Crossroads series, UA Press is open to any topic within any time period of Arizona history. The series will publish scholarship that is cutting-edge and innovative, yet generally accessible and readable to an educated general audience. Arizona has been a contested site among peoples, nations, and empires; it is also a place where events, decisions, and struggles have had far-reaching consequences beyond its shifting borders.
Arizona’s history is a useful entry point for contemporary conversations about people and issues in the state today. Kristen Buckles, UA Press Editor-in-Chief said, “As the series title suggests, we welcome books that deepen our understanding of Arizona as a diverse crossroads and meeting ground within broad national and transnational contexts, whether topical, thematic, or geographic.”
For more information, visit the Arizona Crossroads Series.
July 22, 2025
We are thrilled to announce The University of Arizona Press Podcast on The New Books Network (NBN)! NBN hosts have interviewed our authors about new books for more than ten years, and now we have officially partnered with the Network, creating a dedicated channel of our past and forthcoming author interviews.
Recently, the NBN featured an interview with Enrique C. Ochoa, author of México Between Feast and Famine. Andrew Canessa and Manuela Lavinas Picq were interviewed about their book, Savages and Citizens. Last year, NBN interviewed Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo, author of Growing Up in the Gutter.
Wondering if you can hear your favorite author on the pod? Check out the complete list of interviews with U of A Press authors. Podcasts are available on the New Books Network website, Apple , Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts.
The New Books Network is a consortium of author-interview podcast channels dedicated to public education. Covering more than one hundred subjects, disciplines, and genres, NBN publishes seventy to one hundred episodes a week. The Network reaches about 250,000 people every month; listeners download close to 850,000 episodes each month.
Kathryn Conrad, director of The University of Arizona Press said, “We’re excited to collaborate with New Books Network to introduce our authors to new readers. Podcasts also give educators another resource to enrich the discussion of our books in their classrooms.”
Caleb Zakarin, editor of The New Books Network, said, “The University of Arizona Press publishes across many disciplines that are of great interest to our listeners. I have personally enjoyed my interviews with U of A Press authors and look forward to many more in the future.”
In the Fall, listen for interviews with authors of forthcoming books: Kip Hutchins, author of A Song for the Horses, and Joe Watkins, author of Indigenizing Japan.
Watch this space and our social media, we’ll let you know when new podcasts drop.
July 16, 2025
Summer is a great time to meet the people at The University of Arizona Press who turn book dreams into reality. We are a small but mighty team!
Today, we feature our Assistant to the Director & Rights Administrator, Ashley Amacher.
Hi Ashley! What do you do for the Press?
I wear two hats at The University of Arizona Press, acting as both the rights administrator and the assistant to our wonderful director, Kathryn Conrad. Essentially, I handle matters related to author contracts, copyright, permissions, and subsidiary rights licensing while also performing a host of administrative tasks to keep UAP organized.
How long have you been at UAP?
I have been at UAP for about eight months now, so I’m still relatively new to the world of scholarly publishing. It has been a lifelong dream of mine to work with books, so I feel very lucky to kickstart my publishing career at my alma mater. Bear down!
What do you like most about working here?
I love working in an environment that is so mission-driven. The pursuit and dissemination of knowledge is an undeniable priority for everyone who works here. Since I manage our translation and foreign rights licensing, I appreciate that I help share the valuable work of our authors with people all over the world. I love to connect new audiences with impactful books. You also can’t beat the satisfaction of digging through the records and uncovering the answer to a tricky permissions question!
What would people be surprised to learn about your work?
I think people would be surprised to learn how much research is involved in determining whether we can grant other people the rights to use or republish content from our books. My job involves constant investigation, and I feel like there is always something new to learn about copyright law and how it applies to different scenarios. People might also be surprised about the wide variety of different requesters I get to interact with, including scholars, musicians, creative writers, artists, and publishers of all sizes.
What do you like to do in your free time?
To no one’s surprise, I love to read! While I really enjoy working with academic monographs every day, my perfect evening at home involves sitting on the couch with my cat and falling headfirst into a fictional world. I currently cannot stop thinking about R.F. Kuang’s Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History. I am also on a mission to expand my music taste, so I try to listen to a new album every day. My all-time favorites range from Taylor Swift’s evermore to David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
For ten days only, all our books are 50% off! Plus, we’re offering free shipping on orders over $50 within the continental U.S.
Use promo code AZSummer50 between July 8 and July 18 when you check out on our website. This deal is good for any of our books, but just in case you need some inspiration, check out a few of our recommended book bundles below.
Browse all of our books here.
Located in Tucson, the University of Arizona Press has a long tradition of publishing diverse perspectives regarding the border and immigration. This week, alongside other members of the Association of University Presses (AUPresses), we’re sharing a roundup of recent works whose authors provide valuable context on current events.
Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States
Illegalized 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.”
Rafael A Martínez, an undocu-scholar, intricately weaves his lived experience into this deeply insightful exploration. Martínez’s interdisciplinary approach will engage scholars and readers alike, resonating with disciplines such as history, American studies, Chicana and Chicano studies, and borderlands studies.
Illegalized shows that undocumented youth and their activism represent a disruption to the social imaginary of the U.S. nation-state and its figurative and physical borders. It invites readers to explore how undocumented youth activists changed the way immigrant rights are discussed in the United States today.
Resistance and Abolition in the Borderlands: Confronting Trump’s Reign of Terror
While there is a long history of state violence toward immigrants in the United States, the essayists in this interdisciplinary collection tackle head-on the impacts of the Trump administration.
This volume provides a well-argued look at Trump’s first term (2017-2021). Insightful contributions delve into the impact of Donald Trump’s rhetoric and policies on migrants detained and returned, immigrant children separated from their parents and placed in detention centers, and migrant women subjected to sexual and reproductive abuses, among other timely topics. The contributors document a long list in what the book calls “Trump’s Reign of Terror.”
Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours
In Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, Octavio Quintanilla takes us on a profound journey to witness what it means to erase those boundaries devised by genre and politics intent on stifling memory, imagination, and creativity.
Presented in Spanish with English translations, this poetry collection comprises lyric and concrete poems—or frontextos—that explore intimacy and different shades of violence as a means to reconcile the speaker’s sense of belonging in the world. From the opening poem to the last in the first section, Quintanilla captures the perilous journeys that migrants undertake crossing borders as well as the paths that lovers forge to meet their endless longing. These themes are skillfully woven by Quintanilla, guiding us back and forth across the Rio Grande to encounter the apparitions of the disappeared and to witness the willingness of many to risk life and limb for a better life.
Kids in Cages: Surviving and Resisting Child Migrant Detention
In recent years, the plight of immigrant children has been in the national spotlight. A primary issue of concern is the experience of child migrants in detention by the U.S. government.
The authors in this volume approach the topic of child migrant detention from a range of perspectives. Some authors, particularly those who provide a legal perspective, chronicle the harms of detention, arguing that despite governmental assurances of child protection, detention is fundamentally a state-sanctioned form of violence. The social scientists in the volume have worked closely with detained youth themselves; in these chapters, authors highlight the ways in which youth survive detention, often through everyday acts of resistance and through the formation of temporary relationships. Practitioners including psychologists, activists, and faith leaders look at forms of resistance to detention. From retheorizing psychological interventions for detained youth to forming hospitality homes that act as alternatives to detention, these practitioners highlight ways forward for advocates of youth. At the heart of these narratives lies a crucial debate: the tension between harm-reduction strategies and abolition.
Walled: Barriers, Migration, and Resistance in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
In 1993, then-U.S. President Bill Clinton oversaw the construction of the first stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border walls. Since that pivotal moment, every subsequent U.S. president has allowed for the construction of additional miles of walls or fences. Despite his initial pledge to halt the expansion of border walls, in July 2022, President Joe Biden authorized the construction of new sections in four locations within Arizona. This decision underscores the enduring complexity and contentious nature of the U.S.-Mexico border infrastructure.
From the bustling San Diego–Tijuana region to the borderlands of Brownsville-Matamoros, the U.S.-Mexico border is marked by extensive stretches of walls. Over the past thirty years, these walls have evolved from purely physical barriers into multifaceted systems encompassing administrative, legal, legislative, and biometric components. Walled invites readers to reflect on the transformations of the border since the construction of the initial fourteen miles of wall, and the subsequent addition of 1,940 miles. It provides a comprehensive exploration of the border’s evolution, and its profound and lasting impacts.
Accompaniment with Im/migrant Communities: Engaged Ethnography
This collection brings together the experiences and voices of anthropologists whose engaged work with im/migrant communities pushes the boundaries of ethnography toward a feminist, care-based, decolonial mode of ethnographic engagement called “accompaniment.”
Accompaniment as anthropological research and praxis troubles the boundaries of researcher-participant, scholar-activist, and academic-community to explicitly address issues of power, inequality, and the broader social purpose of the work. More than two dozen contributors show how accompaniment is not merely a mode of knowledge production but an ethical commitment that calls researchers to action in solidarity with those whose lives we seek to understand. The volume stands as a collective conversation about possibilities for caring and decolonial forms of ethnographic engagement with im/migrant communities.
With the arrival of the summer months, we welcome a slower pace in Tucson: shorter lines at your favorite restaurant, fewer emails in your inbox, and perhaps some extra time to dig into a good book while cicadas buzz outside.
At the University of Arizona Press, we find that this annual summer slowdown is the perfect moment to revisit some of the incredible titles in our backlist (i.e., books from our previous seasons, sometimes going back many, many years), in particular those that are now available in paperback.
And while we’re excited about the books we’re going to publish soon, we think it’s always worth taking the time to revisit a few remarkable books from our backlist. After all, as those old song lyrics go, “Make new friends, but keep the old!” Check out the roundup of books now in paperback below.
Postcards from the Sonora Border: Visualizing Place Through a Popular Lens, 1900s–1950s
Young men ride horses on a dusty main road through town. Cars and gas stations gradually intrude on the land, and, years later, curiosity shops and cantinas change the face of Mexican border towns south of Arizona. Between 1900 and the late 1950s, Mexican border towns came of age both as centers of commerce and as tourist destinations. Postcards from the Sonora Border reveals how images—in this case the iconic postcard—shape the way we experience and think about place.
Making use of his personal collection of historic images, Daniel D. Arreola captures the evolution of Sonoran border towns, creating a sense of visual “time travel” for the reader. Supported by maps and visual imagery, the author shares the geographical and historical story of five unique border towns—Agua Prieta, Naco, Nogales, Sonoyta, and San Luis Río Colorado.
Postcards from the Sonora Border introduces us to these important towns and provides individual stories about each, using the postcards as markers. No one postcard view tells the complete story—rather, the sense of place emerges image by image as the author pulls readers through the collection as an assembled view. Arreola reveals how often the same locations and landmarks of a town were photographed as postcard images generation after generation, giving a long and dynamic view of the inhabitants through time. Arranged chronologically, Arreola’s postcards allow us to discover the changing perceptions of place in the borderlands of Sonora, Mexico.
Gerard P. Kuiper and the Rise of Modern Planetary Science
Astronomer Gerard P. Kuiper ignored the traditional boundaries of his subject. Using telescopes and the laboratory, he made the solar system a familiar, intriguing place. “It is not astronomy,” complained his colleagues, and they were right. Kuiper had created a new discipline we now call planetary science.
Kuiper was an acclaimed astronomer of binary stars and white dwarfs when he accidentally discovered that Titan, the massive moon of Saturn, had an atmosphere. This turned our understanding of planetary atmospheres on its head, and it set Kuiper on a path of staggering discoveries: Pluto was not a planet, planets around other stars were common, some asteroids were primary while some were just fragments of bigger asteroids, some moons were primary and some were captured asteroids or comets, the atmosphere of Mars was carbon dioxide, and there were two new moons in the sky, one orbiting Uranus and one orbiting Neptune.
He produced a monumental photographic atlas of the Moon at a time when men were landing on our nearest neighbor, and he played an important part in that effort. He also created some of the world’s major observatories in Hawai‘i and Chile. However, most remarkable was that the keys to his success sprang from his wartime activities, which led him to new techniques. This would change everything.
Derek W. G. Sears shows a brilliant but at times unpopular man who attracted as much dislike as acclaim. This in-depth history includes some of the twentieth century’s most intriguing scientists, from Harold Urey to Carl Sagan, who worked with—and sometimes against—the father of modern planetary science. Now, as NASA and other space agencies explore the solar system, they take with them many of the ideas and concepts first described by Gerard P. Kuiper.
Gardening at the Margins: Convivial Labor, Community, and Resistance
Gardening at the Margins tells the remarkable story of a diverse group of neighbors working together to grow food and community in the Santa Clara Valley in California. Based on four years of deeply engaged ethnographic field research via a Participatory Action Research project with the people and ecosystems of La Mesa Verde home garden program, Gabriel R. Valle develops a theory of convivial labor to describe how the acts of care among the diverse gardeners—through growing, preparing, and eating food in one of the most income unequal places in the country—are powerful, complex acts of resistance.
Participants in La Mesa Verde home garden program engage in the practices of growing and sharing food to envision and continuously work to enact alternative food systems that connect people to their food and communities. They are building on ancestral knowledge, as well as learning new forms of farming, gardening, and healing through convivial acts of sharing.
The individuals featured in the book are imagining and building alternative worlds and futures amid the very real challenges they embody and endure. Climate change, for example, is forcing thousands of migrants to urban areas, which means recent immigrants’ traditional environmental, nutritional, and healing knowledge will continue to be threatened by the pervasiveness of modernity and the homogenization of global capitalism. Moreover, once rural people migrate to urban areas, their ability to retain traditional foodways will remain difficult without spaces of autonomy. The stories in this book reveal how people create the physical space to grow food and the political space to enact autonomy to revive and restore agroecological knowledge needed for an uncertain future.
Celluloid Pueblo: Western Ways Films and the Invention of the Postwar Southwest
The five Cs of Arizona—copper, cattle, cotton, citrus, and climate—formed the basis of the state’s livelihood and a readymade roster of subjects for films. With an eye on the developing national appetite for all things western, Charles and Lucile Herbert founded Western Ways Features in 1936 to document the landscape, regional development, and diverse cultures of Arizona, the U.S. Southwest, and northern Mexico.
Celluloid Pueblo tells the story of Western Ways Features and its role in the invention of the Southwest of the imagination. Active during a thirty-year period of profound growth and transformation, the Herberts created a dynamic visual record of the region, and their archival films now serve as a time capsule of the Sunbelt in the mid-twentieth century. Drawing upon a ten-year career with Fox, Western Ways owner-operator Charles Herbert brought a newshound’s sensibility and acute skill at in-camera editing to his southwestern subjects. The Western Ways films provided counternarratives to Hollywood representations of the West and established the regional identity of Tucson and the borderlands.
Jennifer L. Jenkins’s broad-sweeping book examines the Herberts’ work on some of the first sound films in the Arizona borderlands and their ongoing promotion of the Southwest. The book covers the filmic representation of Native and Mexican lifeways, Anglo ranching and leisure, Mexican missions and tourism, and postwar borderlands prosperity and progressivism. The story of Western Ways closely follows the boom-and-bust arc of the midcentury Southwest and the constantly evolving representations of an exotic—but safe and domesticated—frontier.
Translation and Epistemicide: Racialization of Languages in the Americas
Translation has facilitated colonialism from the fifteenth century to the present day. Epistemicide, which involves destroying, marginalizing, or banishing Indigenous, subaltern, and counter-hegemonic knowledges, is one result. In the Americas, it is a racializing process. But in the hands of subaltern translators and interpreters, translation has also been used as a decolonial method.
Author Joshua Martin Price gives an account of translation-as-epistemicide in the Americas, drawing on a range of examples from the early colonial period to the War on Terror. The first chapters demonstrate four distinct operations of epistemicide: the commensuration of worlds, the epistemic marginalization of subaltern translators and the knowledge they produce, the criminalization of translators and interpreters, and translation as piracy or extractivism. The second part of the book outlines decolonial translation strategies, including an epistemic posture the author calls “bewilderment.”
Translation and Epistemicide tracks how through the centuries translation practices have enabled colonialism and resulted in epistemicide, or the destruction of Indigenous and subaltern knowledge.
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