The University of Arizona Press

September 25, 2026

Peter Murrieta, co-author with Frederick Luis Aldama, of Two Vatos Talk Pop Cultura, was interviewed on KJZZ radio. Over the last two decades, Murrieta has produced more than three hundred hours of television, including hit shows One Day at a Time (Netflix), Lopez (TV Land), Superior Donuts (CBS), and Cristela (ABC). Murrieta, who is Mexican American, created the acclaimed WB series Greetings from Tucson, a groundbreaking series that was one of the first ever to feature a diverse, biracial family, set in Peter’s native Arizona.

In the interview, Murrieta spoke about the origins of Latinx influence in Hollywood starting with the show I Love Lucy: “Desi Arnaz had so much to do with the beginnings of television, and how to re-run a show, how to syndicate show, how to shoot a show live with a studio audience. He had so much to do with the creation of that business model, and he and Lucy made so much money that they ended up buying a studio.”

Listen to the full interview here.

About the book:

Two Vatos Talk Pop Cultura brings a leading Latinx media studies scholar, Frederick Luis Aldama, together with an award-winning television writer and producer, Peter Murrieta, to examine how Latinx representation has evolved—and stagnated—across seven decades of American TV, film, and pop culture.

Born from the popular podcast Mighty Peter and Professor Latinx but written in a collective voice with breakout discussions shaped by specific experiences and insights—Aldama’s theoretical acumen and Murrieta’s industry war stories—the book exemplifies what the authors call the collective shaping of “borderlands epistemology.” It analyzes shows while accounting for the behind-the-scenes industry battles such as those fought in writers’ rooms.

Two Vatos Talk Pop Cultura aims to be an essential book for students and lay readers alike, shedding light on who shapes representation—and why it matters.

September 23, 2026

In the new work Understanding Tribal Sovereignty historian Donald L. Fixico unpacks the complex history and legal foundations of tribal sovereignty in the United States. From traditional Native governance to landmark treaties, federal laws, and court cases, Fixico guides readers through the evolution of tribal self-rule and its modern expressions—from tribal constitutions to license plates and casinos.

Today, the author answers a few questions about this new work.

What started you thinking about this topic, and in particular, as a book in this format? 

As tribal sovereignty became more evident in the last twenty-five years, I wanted more people to understand the legal rights for tribes to have casinos, license plates, and the opportunity to build museums, colleges, businesses, health clinics and hospitals on their reservations.

Your work is grounded in history, taking readers back to understand traditional sovereignty grounded in sacred places. It also gives readers an overview of treaty history in the United States. Why did you start this work, which is very topical, with historical context? 

Native nations have a very long collective past that began well before the arrival of Columbus, and it is within this early Indigenous reality where traditional sovereignty began with the forming of these tribal nations. Origins of natural freedom often derived from sacred places and the nature of sovereignty was reshaped by treaties and federal laws.

Why is it important to understand the evolution of tribal self-rule and its modern expressions? 

A lot of people have a misunderstanding of tribal sovereignty or do not even know that it exists. Most important is understanding how and why it has changed throughout the course of U.S.-Indian relations and how tribes express tribal self-rule today. When you look across the modern landscape of many reservations today, it is astonishing what the tribal nations have accomplished during the last 100 years. This is modern tribal sovereignty at work for Native people and non-Native people living nearby.

This work is accessible and very readable. Who do you think are the primary audiences?

The primary audience is everyone from people who are curious about Indian legal rights, including students, teachers, professors, paralegals, lawyers, tribal leaders, and bureaucrats at all levels. Tribal sovereignty is complex, and this volume is meant to be a go-to book for understanding the evolution of tribal sovereignty.

What are you working on now?

Presently, I am working on a comprehensive history of Indian Territory and Manifest Destiny. It involves stories about removal, cattle drives, outlaws, lighthorsemen, battles, missionaries, the Civil War, land allotment, and how the Indian nations rebuilt their communities against the competing forces of Manifest Destiny.

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Donald L. Fixico (Shawnee, Sac and Fox, Muscogee and Seminole) is Regents’ and Distinguished Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University. He has been on faculty at four universities and a visiting professor at seven universities, including in England and Germany, with postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA and the Newberry Library in Chicago. He has worked on more than twenty-five documentaries on American Indians, and he is the author and editor of twenty books.

August 31, 2026

Today, we look back into the mists or dusts of time at the 1972 Tucson Rodeo Program (program cover above). For those unfamiliar with this Tucson tradition, February’s rodeo week officially starts with the rodeo parade on Thursday morning, and a few University of Arizona Press staff remember watching the parade of horses, horse-drawn wagons, and every high school marching band from southern Arizona. The parade was followed by rodeo events on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Public schools closed for “rodeo vacation” on Thursday and Friday. Tucson’s rodeo tradition continues, celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2026.

Below is the University of Arizona Press advertisement in the official Rodeo Program. Lots of cowboy books which makes sense for this audience. Sadly, none of the bookstores listed are still in business. The Arizona Bookstore on campus has been renamed The University of Arizona Campus Store. One purveyor of books and other items has stood the test of time: Bahti Indian Arts (now run by Mark Bahti, son of Tom Bahti) is still open for business. Also look at our old logo in the lower left corner; to some, this logo looks like a saguaro and a picnic table.

For contemporary books on the west, check out a few of our recent titles:

Thursday was also University of Arizona Day at the rodeo, as seen in this page that faced The University of Arizona Press advertisement.

Our friends at the Arizona Historical Society also supported the rodeo with a full page advertisement:

July 22, 2026 

Thanks to all the authors, editors, and new friends who visited our booth at MALCS Summer Institute at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis last week! We were proud to participate in this Institute with the theme: “Movements along Bdote: Disruption and Solidarity Sin Fronteras.” Below, check out a few highlights from our time at the Institute.

Left is Yvette G. Flores author of Chicane Mental Health, Second Edition and Natalia Deeb-Sossa co-editor with Yvette G. Flores and Angie Chabram of Testimonios of Care. Right is Editor-in-Chief Kristen Buckles and Brenda L. Sendejo, author of the forthcoming Chicana Spiritual Activism. 

Aída Hurtado, author of Intersectional Chicana Feminisms; Irene Lara, co-editor with Elisa Facio of Fleshing the Spirit; and Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez co-editor with Yvette J. Saavedra of meXicana Roots and Routes.

We look forward to seeing you again at MALCS in 2027! 

July 30, 2026 

As we prepare to publish This Music: Record of a Poet Becoming, the one hundredth volume in the Sun Tracks series, we want to take a moment to remember the origins of this award-winning series. 

Today we share a special feature, diving into the archives and traveling 55 years into the past for a look at our history and our authors. 

Launched in 1971, Sun Tracks was one of the first publishing programs to focus exclusively on the creative works of Native Americans. The series has included more than eighty volumes of poetry, prose, art, and photography by such distinguished artists as Joy Harjo, N. Scott Momaday, Simon J. Ortiz, Carter Revard, and Luci Tapahonso. 

Do you have a project that might be a good fit for the Sun Tracks series? Learn more about submitting a proposal or manuscript for consideration. 

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.

March 25, 2026

In The Unruly Wild: Embracing Ecological Change in the Southwest, author Juliet C. Stromberg challenges the traditional invasion biology paradigm. She invites readers to reconsider the “alien invader” narrative and explore the beneficial roles that newly arrived plants can play in our ecosystems. Drawing from her extensive experience as a plant and restoration ecologist, Stromberg introduces a cast of plant characters that includes longtimers as well as newcomers. Through compelling stories and scientific insights, she explains why some plants are thriving while others are in decline. Stromberg is the photographer of photos below unless otherwise indicated.

Prickly stems of silverleaf nightshade (Solanum eleagnifolium)

I authored this book because there was a story that needed to be told. In truth, I wish there hadn’t been a need. I do not enjoy the controversy that comes with challenging entrenched and outmoded paradigms or with confronting deeply-held beliefs.

Left: Abandoned farm field in the desert with “volunteer” annual plants and brittlebush (Encelia farinosa). Right: Western pygmy blue butterfly nectaring on globe chamomile (Oncosiphon pilulifer), photo by Liz Makings

However, I felt a sense of obligation. My ecological field studies and the works of others were painting a more complex and nuanced picture of  “invasive” species. Management actions based on a philosophy of native plant purism seemed increasingly extreme, rigid, and even harmful. I wanted to provide an alternative view and explain why my views on plant conservation biology have transformed over the decades.

Sacaton (Sporobolus) grasslands persisting along the San Pedro River, photo by Liz Makings

As a botanist, I feel compelled to help others understand the world from the perspective of a plant. As an ecologist, I want us to consider how our actions influence the environment of plants, whether they are growing in a city, rangeland, or wildland preserve. When we understand why new plants arrive and thrive in our neighborhoods, I believe we are less likely to condemn them. When we know their stories, we may be inspired to deepen existing relationships and to widen our networks and embrace something new.

A moth navigating the intricate flowers of nodding milkweed, Asclepias elata, photo by Liz Makings

While sharing my views during one-on-one conversations with fellow plant enthusiasts, I often sense a release of tension and a receptivity to a new world view. Just the other day, at a meeting of the Arizona Native Plant Society, I heard someone say, “I always felt that pulling that plant was not the right thing to do.”  It was time to reach a larger audience. This book, in a sense, is one more “seed” blowing in the wind. But like a viable seed, it contains information. As you read it you will find guidelines on how to adapt to the changing world, how to nurture your relationships with plants—be they wild, feral, or domesticated, and how to strengthen your inner ecologist. You also will encounter suggestions for actions you can take to address the root causes of undesirable change. Enjoy!

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Juliet C. Stromberg, professor emerita at Arizona State University, is a plant ecologist who specializes in riparian ecosystems. She studied plant community dynamics and vegetation-hydrology interactions in the American Southwest for several decades and authored one hundred peer-reviewed publications. She continues to write about plants while also tending a food forest in the city.

March 11, 2026

In Forging a Mexican People, scholar Pablo Zavala shows how illustrated print culture helped to construct and deconstruct versions of “a people” in postrevolutionary Mexico. The author demonstrates how print culture provided alternative—sometimes contradictory—collective subjectivities that challenged hegemonic conceptions of a so-called national people in the formative years of the Mexican state. Today he offers an inside look at some of the archival works discussed in his new work.

By Pablo Zavala

Doing archival research is always simultaneously an adventure and an investigation. El Machete, the one-time newspaper of the Mexican Communist Party, is not digitized anywhere; rather, its original issues live in Mexico City’s archives. Located at the Autonomous University of Mexico City, the CAMeNA generously allowed me to look through their copies of the radical newspaper. As I put on the latex gloves and donned a surgical mask to flip through the timeworn pages, I slowly entered a time warp that took me to the days after the revolution (1910-20), when Mexico experienced a wave of optimism that promised a more equitable country. Such enthusiasm floods the pages of the periodical, shown in the picture here in its different sizes that include a smaller version published when the newspaper was outlawed during the late 1920s and early 1930s.

At other times, the archival investigation for Forging a Mexican People consisted not so much of a geographical exploration but a quest to acquire the publishing permissions. In the case of The Masses (1935), I contacted José Clemente Orozco’s grandson who has been extremely kind in this regard. I think that such collaboration allows the world to continue studying and preserving historical memory through cultural artifacts, Orozco’s images in this case, especially in light of new ways of thinking about the past and present. I like this image because it shows the different, cacophonous, and often contradictory ways there have been to portray a people.

Some images, fortunately, are also stored in archives outside of Mexico. I found Celia Calderón’s 1960 Mexico, Owner of All Its Resources in a public library in Milwaukee where the librarians in the Rare Books Collection have been very helpful in giving patrons access free of charge and providing, with an appointment, a special viewing room. According to their website: “The Milwaukee Public Library’s rarities collection gathers, preserves, and provides access to significant materials of historic and aesthetic value for the people of the City of Milwaukee and future generations of residents.” The image’s portrayal of the people as a giant Leviathan recalls Thomas Hobbes’s allusion to a powerful state, but Calderón subverts that interpretation by vesting a woman of color with the ability to safeguard the nation’s sovereignty.

When Mexican students protested their repressive state in the summer of 1968, their prints were often done anonymously and quickly, responding to the exigencies of the situation. Arnulfo Aquino and Jorge Perezvega, present at the protests, subsequently gathered, categorized, identified, and eventually published the prints over the years in collections distributed by the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City. They also donated the primary artifacts to the UNAM’s art museum, now called the University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC). This particular print references the biases of some of the mainstream mass media at the time, like the newspaper El Sol de México, toward the government’s narrative that blamed the students for the skirmishes.

Finally, Ester Hernandez’s La Virgen de Guadalupe defendiendo los derechos de los Xicanos shatters the society-imposed gender confines by representing a radical Virgin of Guadalupe. Such iconoclastic narratives are fundamental in challenging exclusionary practices, like the kind Chicanas faced then and continue to encounter today. Hernandez’s graphic art is iconic of the Chicano movement and beyond and prominent cultural institutions like the Smithsonian Institution have recently recognized her work (e.g., in ¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now. I was fortunate enough that Hernandez responded positively to my work and granted me permission and a high-resolution version of the print to include in my analysis.  

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About the Author

Pablo Zavala is an assistant professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies and director of the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies (CLAXS) at Loyola University New Orleans. He was born in Ciudad Juárez and now resides in New Orleans.

February 5, 2026

The Borderlands Regional Library Association (BRLA) selected The Molino: A Memoir by Melani Martinez and Frontera Madre(hood): Brown Mothers Challenging Oppression and Transborder Violence at the U.S.- Mexico Border, edited by Cynthia Bejarano and Maria Cristina Morales for the 2025 Southwest Book Awards. The BRLA is an organization founded in 1966 for the promotion of library service and librarianship in the El Paso/Las Cruces/Juárez Metroplex. Current membership includes over 100 Librarians, Paraprofessionals, Media Specialists, Library Friends and Trustees from all types of libraries in the Tri-State area of Trans-Pecos Texas, Southern New Mexico and Northern Chihuahua. The complete list of award-winning books is here.

Congratulations Mele, Cynthia, and Maria Cristina!

About The Molino:

Set in one of Tucson’s first tamal and tortilla factories, The Molino is a hybrid memoir that reckons with one family’s loss of home, food, and faith.

Weaving together history, culture, and Mexican food traditions, Melani Martinez shares the story of her family’s life and work in the heart of their downtown eatery, El Rapido. Opened by Martinez’s great-grandfather, Aurelio Perez, in 1933, El Rapido served tamales and burritos to residents and visitors to Tucson’s historic Barrio Presidio for nearly seventy years. For the family, the factory that bound them together was known for the giant corn grinder churning behind the scenes—the molino. With clear eyes and warm humor, Martinez documents the work required to prepare food for others, and explores the heartbreaking aftermath of gentrification that forces the multigenerational family business to close its doors.

About Frontera Madre(hood):

The topic of mothers and mothering transcends all spaces, from popular culture to intellectual thought and critique. This collection of essays bridges both methodological and theoretical frameworks to explore forms of mothering that challenge hegemonic understandings of parenting and traditional notions of Latinx womxnhood. It articulates the collective experiences of Latinx, Black, and Indigenous mothering from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Thirty contributors discuss their lived experiences, research, or community work challenging multiple layers of oppression, including militarization of the border, border security propaganda, feminicides, drug war and colonial violence, grieving and loss of a child, challenges and forms of resistance by Indigenous mothers, working mothers in maquiladoras, queer mothering, academia and motherhood, and institutional barriers by government systems to access affordable health care and environmental justice.