Arroyo, author of Western Avenue and Other Fictions and The Region of Lost Names: A Novel, is an assistant professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. Chapter 16 is an amazing project with Humanities Tennessee, founded to provide comprehensive coverage of literary news and events in Tennessee.
Sown in Earth is a a collection of personal essays in which Arroyo recollects his childhood, and more specifically his father’s anger and alcohol abuse as a reflection of his place in society, in which his dreams and disappointments are patterned by work and poverty, loss and displacement, memory and belonging.
In trying to convey the cruelty and complexity of his father in the only way he knows how — through writing — Arroyo acts as a witness for all of the men whose names he doesn’t remember. In these essays, he accomplishes what he sets out to do: “to work in a way that honors the struggle and dignity of their lives.” And in doing so, he sets in motion the linguistic memories that compose a life, however incomplete. “The more I delve into the memories of my father, the more I realize his life is an unfinished book; it continues to grow the more I try to write it, new pages revealing themselves day after day, as if this growing will go on without end. Even if I take the next twenty years to write it, I won’t make his life and story any more complete. The story will still be fragmented, small, minor, adrift in a turbulent sea between a kitchen and an island, between a father and son.”
Although his father’s life refuses summation in the end, Arroyo manages to reach an understanding of himself and the forces that shaped him to become the writer he is today.
In March in response to stay-at-home orders to slow the spread of COVID-19 the University of Arizona Press quickly and nimbly shifted focus from in-person to digital events.
We dove into the world of Zoom and live-stream events with our authors across the country. We hosted a series of conversations with our authors, where they shared their poetry, scholarship, and insights into how they crafted their work. If you didn’t have a chance to join us for our panels and conversations, here’s a rundown, really a virtual online celebration of what we love most–books and scholars:
We are already planning for our next season. Take a look at our Fall 2020 catalog here. We can’t wait to continue our important work, connecting our authors with readers.
NAISA had to cancel their annual conference this year, and we really miss the opportunity to meet with our Indigenous studies authors and community. Below, we’ve highlighted our latest Indigenous studies titles that we weren’t able to display at the conference this year. Use the code AZNAISA20 for 40% off all of the titles mentioned in this post, plus free shipping!
Our editor-in-chief, Kristen Buckles, and our senior editor, Allyson Carter, Ph.D., acquire in this field. To propose a project, contact Kristen at kbuckles@uapress.arizona.edu or Allyson at acarter@uapress.arizona.edu.
Land Uprising reframes Indigenous land reclamation as a horizon to decolonize the settler colonial conditions of literary, intellectual, and activist labor. Simón Ventura Trujillo argues that land provides grounding for rethinking the connection between Native storytelling practices and Latinx racialization across overlapping colonial and nation-state forms.
The second of a two-volume series, Moquis and Kastiilam tells the story of the encounter between the Hopis, who the Spaniards called Moquis, and the Spaniards, who the Hopis called Kastiilam, from the Pueblo Revolt through 1781. Balancing historical documents with oral histories, it creates a fresh perspective on the interface of Spanish and Hopi peoples in the period of missionization.
In the fifteen-year span from 1990 to 2005 uprisings of the indigenous peoples of Ecuador and Bolivia changed their societies forever. The combination of mass mobilization, elections, and indigenous socialism created a new form of twenty-first-century revolution that applies to cultures far beyond the Andes. Jeffrey M. Paige’s interviews in Indigenous Revolution in Ecuador and Bolivia, 1990-2005 present the powerful personal experiences and emotional intensity of the revolutionary leadership.
Traditional, National, and International Law and Indigenous Communities, a volume in the Indigenous Justice series, explores the global effects of marginalizing Indigenous law. The essays in this book argue that European-based law has been used to force Indigenous peoples to assimilate, has politically disenfranchised Indigenous communities, and has destroyed traditional Indigenous social institutions. The research in this volume focuses on the resurgence of traditional law, tribal–state relations in the United States, laws that have impacted Native American women, laws that have failed to protect Indigenous sacred sites, the effect of international conventions on domestic laws, and the role of community justice organizations in operationalizing international law.
The book explores the ongoing effects of colonization and emphasizes Native American tribes as governments rather than ethnic minorities. Combining elements of legal issues, human rights issues, and sovereignty issues,Indigenous Environmental Justice creates a clear example of community resilience in the face of corporate greed and state indifference.
Our Bearings is a collection of narrative poetry that examines and celebrates Anishinaabe life in modern Minneapolis. The poems offer a beautifully layered discourse between landscapes, stories, and the people who inhabit them. Through keen observation and a deep understanding of Native life in Minneapolis, McGlennen has created a timely collection which contributes beautifully to the important conversation about contemporary urban Native life in North America and globally.
Informed by personal experience and offering an inclusive view, Diné Identity in a Twenty-First-Century Worldshowcases the complexity of understanding and the richness of current Diné identities.
Fighting for Andean Resources offers a singular contribution to the literature critiquing monolithic views of nation-state dynamics and globalization. Vladimir R. Gil Ramón examines the protocols of accountability and the social critique of the application of environmental impact assessments and safeguard policies. His analysis reveals the complex mechanisms for legitimizing decision-making and adds to an understanding of everyday state-nation conflicts and negotiations.
Girl of New Zealand resurrects Māori women from objectification and locates them firmly within Māori whanau/families and communities. In the wake of the Me Too movement and other feminist projects, Michelle Erai’s timely analysis speaks to the historical foundations of negative attitudes toward Indigenous Māori women in the eyes of colonial “others”—outsiders from elsewhere who reflected their own desires and fears in their representations of the Indigenous inhabitants of Aotearoa, New Zealand.
The Sovereign Streetoffers a rare look at political revolution as it happens, showing how mass street protest can change national political life. It documents a critical period in twenty-first century Bolivia, when small-town protests made headlines worldwide, where a generation of pro-globalization policies were called into question, and where the indigenous majority stepped into government power for the first time in five centuries.
The Global Spanish Empire tackles broad questions about indigenous cultural persistence, pluralism, and place making using a global comparative perspective grounded in the shared experience of Spanish colonialism. Through an expansive range of essays that look at Africa, the Americas, Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific, this volume brings often-neglected regions into conversation.
Yolqui, a Warrior Summoned from the Spirit World is a testimonio, a historia profoundo of the culture of extralegal violence against the Red-Black-Brown communities in the United States that operates with impunity. Framed by Roberto Cintli Rodríguez’s personal testimony of police violence, this book is a clarion call to end that violence and those philosophies that permit such violence to flourish.
Reclaiming Indigenous Governance examines the efforts of Indigenous peoples in four important countries to reclaim their right to self-govern. Showcasing Native nations, this timely book presents diverse perspectives of both practitioners and researchers involved in Indigenous governance in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States (the CANZUS states).
Utilizing archival and ethnographic research, Racial Alterity, Wixarika Youth Activism, and the Right to the Mexican City explores the construction of racial and ethnic imaginaries in the western Mexican cities of Guadalajara and Tepic, and the ways in which these imaginaries shape the contemporary experiences and activism of Wixarika (Huichol) Indigenous university students and professionals living, studying, and working in these two cities.
Divided Peoples addresses the impact border policies have on traditional lands and the peoples who live there—whether environmental degradation, border patrol harassment, or the disruption of traditional ceremonies. Anthropologist Christina Leza shows how such policies affect the traditional cultural survival of Indigenous peoples along the border. The author examines local interpretations and uses of international rights tools by Native activists, counter-discourse on the U.S.-Mexico border, and challenges faced by Indigenous border activists when communicating their issues to a broader public.
How “Indians” Think shines light on Indigenous perspectives of Spanish colonialism through a novel interpretation of the works of the two most important Amerindian intellectuals in the Andes, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala and Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca. Departing from the predominant scholarly position that views Indigenous-Spanish relations as the clash of two distinct cultures, Gonzalo Lamana argues that Guaman Poma and Garcilaso were the first Indigenous activist intellectuals and that they developed post-racial imaginaries four hundred years ago.
Listen to Gonzalo talk about the book on this podcast.
A Diné History of Navajolandbrings much-needed attention to Navajo perspectives on the past and present. It is the culmination of a lifelong commitment from the authors, and it is an exemplary work of Diné history through the lens of ceremonial knowledge and oral history. Klara Kelley and Harris Francis present an in-depth look at how scholars apply Diné ceremonial knowledge and oral history to present-day concerns of Navajo Nation leaders and community members. All readers are invited to come along on this exploration of Diné oral traditions.
Aurumis a fiercely original poetry collection that reveals the marginalized and estranged Native American experience in the wake of industrial progress. With unforgettable imagery and haunting honesty, these poems are powerfully resonant.
Memories of Earth and Sea explores the daily struggles of islanders living in one of South America’s most culturally distinct regions: the Chiloé Archipelago. Connecting the early history of the islands with the industrialization of the last forty years, the book presents a unique study of large-scale economic changes and the impact these can have on the memories and the collective identity of a people.
Detours is an attempt to crack cultural imperialism by bringing forth the personal as political in academia and research. Speaking from the intersection of race, class, and gender, the contributors explore the hubris and nostalgia that motivate returning again and again to a particular place. Through personal stories, they examine their changing ideas of Latin America and the Caribbean and how those places have shaped the people they’ve become, as writers, as teachers, and as activists.
When It Rainsis an intuitive poetry collection that shows us how language connects people. With the poems in both O’odham and English, the volume serves as a reminder of the beauty and changeability of the O’odham language.
Unwriting Maya Literature provides an important decolonial framework for reading Maya and other Indigenous texts. Through insightful analyses of Maya cultural productions—whether textiles or poetry—this perspective offers a point of departure for the study of Maya literature and art that is situated in an Indigenous way of performing the act of reading.
Unwriting Maya Literature just received an honorable mention from the LASA Mexico Section! Read about it here. Listen to Paul M. Worley and Rita M. Palacios talk about their book on these podcasts.
Speaking to both a personal and collective loss, in Brother BulletCasandra López confronts her relationships with violence, grief, trauma, guilt, and, ultimately, survival. Revisiting the memory and lasting consequences of her brother’s murder, López traces the course of the bullet—its trajectory, impact, wreckage—in poems that are paralyzing and raw with emotion, yet tender and alive in revelations of light.
Read an interview with Casandra here, then watch her read poems and talk about the collection in a recorded virtual poetry reading here.
Transcontinental Dialoguespresents innovative discussion, argument, and insight into the interactions between anthropologists and social researchers—both Indigenous and allies—as they negotiate together the terrain of the imposition of ongoing colonialism over Indigenous lives across three countries. The essays explore how scholars can recalibrate their moral, political, and intellectual actions to meet the obligations flowing from the decolonial alliances.
“This country’s first philosophers, poets, artists, and knowledge keepers were Indigenous peoples. The Mvskoke were a major cultural force in the southeast. Laura Harjo’sSpiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity marks a continuation of the development of our cultural knowledge. Community defines us, and we do not go forward together without the revisioning of all elements that make a living culture. Each generation makes a concentric circle that leans outward into the deepest star knowledges even as it leans inward toward the roots of earth knowledge. We are still here within the shape of this cultural geography. We keep moving forward with the tools Harjo has illuminated here. Mvto.”—Joy Harjo (Mvskoke), U.S. Poet Laureate
Indigenous Interfaces rejects the myth that Indigeneity and information technology are incompatible through its compelling analysis of the relationships between Indigenous peoples and new media. The volume illustrates how Indigenous peoples are selectively and strategically choosing to interface with cybertechnology, highlights Indigenous interpretations of new media, and brings to center Indigenous communities who are resetting modes of communication and redirecting the flow of information. It convincingly argues that interfacing with traditional technologies simultaneously with new media gives Indigenous peoples an edge on the claim to autonomous and sovereign ways of being Indigenous in the twenty-first century.
The Continuous Path challenges archaeologists to take Pueblo concepts of movement seriously by privileging Pueblo concepts of being and becoming in the interpretation of anthropological data. The collaborative volume brings together Native community members, archaeologists, and anthropologists to weave multiple perspectives together to write the histories of Pueblo peoples past, present, and future.
We are thrilled that the book recently won the Historical Society of New Mexico’s Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá Award! Read about it here.
From the Pan-Maya Movement in Guatemala and the Zapatista uprising in Mexico to the Water and Gas Wars in Bolivia and the Idle No More movement in Canada, the twenty-first century has witnessed a notable surge in Indigenous political action. Meanwhile, numerous authors use fiction and poetry to combat their invisibility and envision alternatives to coloniality. Revealing Rebellion in Abiayalaprovides a powerful starting point for rethinking inter-American studies through the lens of literature and Indigenous sovereignty.
The Native Americans of Long Island were integral to the origin and development of the first American whaling enterprise in the years 1650 to 1750. In American’s Early Whalemen, John A. Strong has produced the authoritative source on Indians and shore whaling.
Upstream relates the history behind the nation’s largest state-built water and power conveyance system, California’s State Water Project, with a focus on Indigenous perspectives. Author Beth Rose Middleton Manning illustrates how Indigenous history should inform contemporary conservation measures. She uses a multidisciplinary and multitemporal approach and offers a vision of policy reform that will lead to improved Indigenous futures around the U.S.
In Multiple Injustices, R. Aída Hernández Castillo synthesizes twenty-four years of research and activism among indigenous women’s organizations in Latin America, offering a critical new contribution to the field of activist anthropology and anyone interested in social justice.
Global Indigenous Healthis unique and timely as it deals with the historical and ongoing traumas associated with colonization and colonialism, understanding Indigenous concepts of health and healing, and ways of moving forward for health equity.
Instruments of the True Measure charts the coordinates and intersections of land, history, and culture. Lyrical passages map the parallel lives of ancestral figures and connect dispossessions of the past to lived experiences of the present.
We are so happy that Instruments of the True Measure won the 2019 Washington Book Award! Read an interview with Laura Da’here, then watch her read poems and talk about the collection in a recorded virtual poetry event here.
Naming the World is an ethnography of language shift among the Northern Arapaho. It focuses on the often subtle continuities and discontinuities in the society produced by the shift, as well as the diversity of community responses.
Don’t forget, the University of Arizona Press is offering 40% off of all ebooks with the code AZEBOOK40!
The Global Spanish Empire tackles broad questions about Indigenous cultural persistence, pluralism, and place making using a global comparative perspective grounded in the shared experience of Spanish colonialism. Edited by Christine Beaule, and John G. Douglass, the volume’s eleven case studies include regions often neglected in the archaeology of Spanish colonialism. The time span under investigation is extensive as well, transcending the entirety of the Spanish Empire, from early impacts in West Africa to Texas during the 1800s. The contributors examine the making of a social place within a social or physical landscape.
Here, Beaule and Douglass discuss the book, and the unique approach of looking at Spanish colonization globally.
This book has a unique wide scale approach in looking at the colonial Spanish empire beyond the Americas. What drove you to bring this book together?
Christine Beaule: John and I proposed an electronic symposium for the SAA meetings in 2018 on ethnogenesis because we were both very interested in identity formation processes in Spanish colonial contexts. We ended up with 16 papers, and a very well attended symposium. The discussion between the participants and audience members that day was highly engaging and interesting. Winning the SAA-Amerind Foundation prize meant hard decisions about how to winnow the papers down to ten (plus an introduction), but our workshop at Amerind was one of the most personally and professionally rewarding experiences we have ever had. Everyone learned so much from each other, particularly about case studies and regions that we rarely bring into conversations about the archaeology of Spanish colonialism. Moreover, it quickly became apparent on day 1 of the workshop that our ethnogenesis theme was not going to work for the book. The opportunity to talk it through in person, and to put our heads together to work out new themes and a different organizational schema, was invaluable. We believe that the volume is much more cohesive and focused because of the process. From the electronic symposium through several days of working together in person on our chapters, without interruptions or distractions, the process was ideal.
John Douglass: Christine and I went to grad school together many years ago and had wanted to collaborate on something. We both have been researching different aspects of Spanish colonialism for quite some time in different parts of the world from one another, so it seemed like a good match to work on this project together. We both wanted to learn more about other parts of the Spanish Empire than what we were familiar with because, in the end, we wanted to learn more about the parts of the world we did know through comparison. The group of colleagues we worked with on this project really were fantastic as their work spans close to 500 years, and is situated all across the globe.
Why is it important to look at colonialism on a global scale?
Christine Beaule: There is much to learn from in-depth analyses of the impacts of colonialism in a single community or region. However, a comparative approach allows us to see patterns over a longer span of time, as well as bringing disparate regions into conversation with each other. In doing so, we gain perspective on local impacts and local agencies that would not be visible otherwise. As Americanists, John and I do not always have time to keep up with the abundant literature produced by our regional colleagues, let alone cutting edge scholarship about other colonized regions of the world. Comparative projects like this one help us see those all-important similarities and differences in the ways that Indigenous cultures were impacted by and responded to colonialism. Although we often speak of colonists and Indigenous communities in binary terms, each of these groups was itself multicultural, so identity categories such as native and Spanish are problematized when we take a global perspective. Finally, I think that it is important to include cases in which strong Spanish footholds were not successfully established, or where efforts to incorporate peoples in regions outside colonies failed. Although they’re harder to see archaeologically, they remind us that Spanish colonialism was not monolithic or homogeneous, and that its impacts on local religious practices, political organization, and economies were similarly varied in scope and kind. Scholarship in regions such as Central America, Africa, the U.S. southeast, Pacific and Caribbean islands, and the Philippines help us all see the full range of impacts and responses, in ways that focusing on single colonies or heartlands of colonialism do not.
John Douglass: This book focuses not just on the global scale, but the global scale through time, which is an important piece of the puzzle. Chris DeCorse’s chapter looks at the very early spread of Spanish colonialism in west Africa in the 1400s and the last chapter is Steve Tomka’s work looking at what is now southern Texas and northeastern Mexico, and all the other chapters in the book are in other portions of the globe between these two points in time. To me, one of the main utilities of looking globally is that we are able to have comparative viewpoints on the ebb and flow of Spanish colonialism and the diverse actions and reactions by indigenous peoples the Spanish worked hard to colonize (with mixed results). I was also so impressed at the way different chapters were able to communicate with one another due to this global approach. The cultural, linguistic, and social historical connections between the Pacific and South America, between the Philippines and Mexico, between Colombia and west Africa, and many more such examples in the book, all led to extremely interesting conversations.
How does this approach possibly change the way we look at the studies of colonization?
Christine Beaule: Work on this project and others like it has taught me to question assumptions and generalizations about colonialism and colonization. Living in Hawaiʼi, an island archipelago that was colonized and overthrown relatively recently by the U.S., colloquial conversations about colonialism and indigeneity are part of daily public life. The opportunities I have had to work with so many brilliant archaeologists studying Spanish colonialism around the world have equipped me to challenge others’ generalizations about European and American imperial histories. When we are able to see the failures of colonization efforts, the pluricultural actors in these histories, and patterns of cultural persistence through time, it teaches us to talk about colonialism in more nuanced ways. For me, that more nuanced understanding is a gift, one that I try to share with family, friends, students and colleagues here in Hawaiʼi, and one that I look forward to developing further in our next academic project.
John Douglass: Again, to me, the comparative approach of our volume helps bring us to fresh and new ideas about Spanish colonialism and indigenous actions and reactions to it. I’ve done a lot of research on Spanish colonialism in Alta California over the years and my eyes have been opened up in numerous ways by learning more the Spanish colonial experience – including both successes and failures – in other parts of the world. California was relatively late in the sequence and by then the Spanish has honed their models significantly. At the same time, we see some of the same difficulties and gains that were previously experienced in other parts of the world.
Was the Spanish approach to colonization the same globally? How?
Christine Beaule: Oh my goodness, no! Like all imperial powers, the Spanish borrowed an imperfect model from others (in this case, the Portuguese in west Africa), and modified it over time. There were certainly patterns that colonial decision-makers in Europe and in local contexts outside of Iberia tried to impose. Spatial patterns in planned colonies in Central America and missions in Texas and Guam provide one set of examples. Restricted access to sartorial and other material goods under racialized sociopolitical hierarchies are another category. These impositions, like ideological elements of Catholicism, were imperfectly adopted or enforced. The realities of each situation throughout the empire, and through time, meant that translations of beliefs and practices were incomplete. Local geographies and resources (material, capital, and human) meant that outside ideals, categories and standards required modifications. And, of course, Indigenous resistance and cultural persistence meant that, like many other non-colonial cases of intercultural interaction, people did not simply passively substitute one culture for another. The Spanish approach to colonization, as a result of these and many other axes of variability, had to adapt. Even then, they often failed, or some of their successes (e.g., with planned communities) were short lived and incomplete.
John Douglass: To parallel Christine here, while the Spanish did try to adapt in different ways through time, it was a mixed bag in terms of methods and results. I think the Spanish were good, in some ways, in approaching their goals through the lens of the local perspective and situation, although, again, there were varied actions and courses within the same general region. In the case of the Maya, for example, early on the general theme was to do whatever the Spanish could to destroy Maya culture through, among other things, burning almost all examples of their bark paper books. Several hundred years later, the way the Spanish taught local indigenous populations in the highlands of Guatemala about Christianity was through understanding the local oral and written traditions and belief systems, and then recasting Christianity through those same local perspectives. At the same time, like Laura Matthews and Bill Fowler’s example of Ciudad Vieja in San Salvador in the book, the Spanish did try to recreate colonies as they had elsewhere, with poor results.
Looking at all the contributions to this book, were there any surprises that surfaced in Spanish colonization?
Christine Beaule: … our journey began with a focus on documenting variability in processes of ethnogenesis. Once we got a subset of the original symposium’s participants together in a room, we collectively realized that our case studies (with only one exception) did not address ethnogenesis at all the way we were defining it narrowly! The two themes of the edited volume, place making and pluralism, emerged in the course of an intensive discussion of the points of overlap between chapter drafts. That rapid shift in focus informed the workshop discussions for the rest of our time together in Dragoon. I do not believe it would have been possible without the opportunity to work through these issues together, and so the book’s focus turned out to be the first big surprise.
The other surprise was just how powerful the concept of place making turned out to be for our comparative study of Spanish colonialism. We wrestled with conceptions of space and place that incorporated geographic, social, and agency considerations. What we all came up with is a theoretically powerful framework that helped us all to understand and explain patterns in material culture, diverse conceptions and uses of space, and the roots of Indigenous resistance and resiliency.
Because there were so many points of connection between all of the different case studies, despite big differences in their foci and details in their historical trajectories, we came to deeply appreciate how the two related themes wove all of the chapters together into a coherent whole. John and I are proud of both the journey and the final product. We treasure the friendships we fostered and the joy of pure intellectual exchange and growth that this book represents.
John Douglass: I think Christine makes good points. The only other thing I would add is that I was surprised as we discussed our draft chapters during our workshop at the Amerind Foundation how many interesting and pointed connections there were between papers: geographically, thematically, culturally, and the list goes on. This relates to one of my answers above. These connections were clear between the inhabitants of colonies and expeditions even in situations where they were separated vastly geographically or temporally. As one example of many, the papers by Chris DeCorse (west Africa) and Juliette Wiersema (western Colombia) are focused on two regions of the world thousands of miles apart and their papers analyze events hundreds of years apart. Yet, as we discussed the papers in the workshop, we all came to realize that the enslaved, and later freed, Africans working in mines and along the rivers of western Colombia Juliet wrote about were from the region Chris detailed in his paper. These kinds of surprising connections help us better understand the deep, and poignant, history of colonialism across the globe which have created complicated webs of relationships both in the past and present.
The university press community has compiled an “Escape the News” reading list! The escape theme was interpreted broadly: submissions range from music history and poetry, graphic novels, photography and illustrated books, short stories, novels, memoirs, and natural history. There is also an international flavor to the list—especially in the areas of creative literature, fiction, poetry, and fine arts—indicating the global nature of the university press community. The goal for the list is to offer readers a way to entertain and inform in a time when reading allows us a portal to other worlds, when we can’t quite get there in person.
“Daniel Chacón’s collection of stories challenges convention and resolution, offering us thought-provoking insights into our current (and oftentimes surreal) political climate. Kafka in a Skirt breaks new ground in the art of social commentary that highlights the strangeness of our human condition and the follies of the skewed perceptions we maintain of ourselves, our neighbors, and the troubled world we live in.”—Rigoberto González
“Poling-Kempes has done an admirable job scouring archives for these women, who have been largely left out of the historical record of the West. It’s a kind of prequel to our common history of the Southwest, peopled by women with long skirts and cinched waists in the desert heat, riding cowboy style, trying to do right by the land they all loved.”—Los Angeles Times
Readers in Texas now have the opportunity to be part of statewide book clubs, which have started recently as a way for readers to connect while they are staying home and staying safe. We are thrilled that Texas Poet Laureate and University of Arizona Press author Emmy Pérez is one of the featured authors in The Big Texas Read! Her collection, With the River on Our Face, will be one of the books bringing Texans from all over the state together during these stressful times.
“In Texas, the organizations Writing Workshops Dallas and Gemini Ink have joined forces for The Big Texas Read, a statewide book club that will take place over Zoom every two weeks from April 29 through June 10. As described on Writing Workshops Dallas’s site, “[W]e’ll be reading ONE work of prose or poetry written by a Texas author every 1-2 months from now until the bug is squashed…Think of it as a big virtual book club, only you get to stay home, mix a cocktail, eat a big piece of chocolate cake, and snuggle up on the sofa.” Organizer Blake Kimzey told The Dallas Morning News, “Most people are siloed at home with their families, or they’re by themselves. The goal of this is to bring back interactivity with people. Not just to read the books, but to have a release from the current moment.” Independent bookstore partners of the event include Dallas’s Interabang Books and San Antonio’s The Twig Book Shop, where readers can order the titles for home delivery or curbside pickup.”
Emmy Pérez’s poetry collection With the River on Our Face flows through the Southwest and the Texas borderlands to the river’s mouth in the Rio Grande Valley/El Valle. The poems celebrate the land, communities, and ecology of the borderlands through lyric and narrative utterances, auditory and visual texture, chant, and litany that merge and diverge like the iconic river in this long-awaited collection.
“In divided times, Emmy Pérez’s voice speaks not only from America, but from the Americas, north and south. A wise, healing poetry.”—Sandra Cisneros
“Emmy Pérez is a word musician and magician. This book has a powerful pull—it has secret places where part of you will reside. It is a good season when work like this is in bloom.”—Luis Alberto Urrea
Paul M. Worley and Rita M. Palacios discussed their new book, Unwriting Maya Literature, in two podcasts. If you’ve been wanting to hear more about their work, here is your chance!
Historias is a SECOLAS (Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies) production and it has been around for a little while. Until recently, their focus has been History, but its shifting to include other disciplines.
The second podcast is available in both Spanish and English, and was recorded for Mesoamerican Studies Online’sOn Air series. The English version can be listened to here and the Spanish version can be listened to here.
Mesoamerican Studies Online and On Air is a fairly new project by Catherine Nuckols-Wilde, a PhD student of Art History and Latin American Studies from Tulane University. She began the podcast a short while ago, and she interviews experts on Mesoamerica from all different disciplines.
As Rita M. Palacios says, “Listening to these podcasts is like going to a conference but with the ability to space out the talks you attend. That, and you can do it in your PJs. So, do yourself a favor and subscribe to Mesoamerican Studies On Air and Historias.” So, enjoy listening!
Unwriting Maya Literature places contemporary Maya literatures within a context situated in Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Through the Maya category ts’íib, the authors propose an alternative to traditional analysis of Maya cultural production that allows critics, students, and admirers to respectfully interact with the texts and their authors.Unwriting Maya Literatureoffers critical praxis for understanding Mesoamerican works that encompass non-Western ways of reading and creating texts.
In a recent interview with University of Arizona Press author and poet Casandra López published in the Los Angeles Review of Books , author Isabel Quintero asked López about grief and more specifically about navigating the space of grief and violence as an Indigenous and Chicana woman.
López ‘s book with the Press, Brother Bullet, is a deeply personal collection of poetry revisiting the memory and lasting consequences of her brother’s murder in lyrical narrative poems that are haunting and raw with emotion, yet tender and alive in revelations of light.
From the interview:
I think a lot about the ethics of writing about trauma. My own grief is very much linked to experiences of trauma. It’s something that I think about so much because I’m writing about my family, and my brother who is no longer here. So, I think it’s important to always be aware of that privilege and the responsibilities I have. In a very literal sense, I want my family to be physically protected but also protected emotionally.
In the memoir, I’m not just writing about myself. I’m writing intimately about my family, bringing in the history of California and the Inland Empire, along with some community stories. So, I do feel more of a weight to not retraumatize others or to make sure what I’m writing is going to be of service to those in my community and family.
I sometimes hear criticism that too many Native writers write about tragedies or that readers don’t want to read stories about gun violence. But this is part of my reality, as well as of many others in my communities, so it is not something I am going to turn away from.
It has been useful to think about some key questions that Daniel Heath Justice asks in his book Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (2018). He poses certain questions to analyze Native literature, but I have used his questions to guide me as a writer:
1) How do I represent the complexities of my contemporary Indigenous life? What does my work say about what it is to be human?
2) What responsibilities do I have to others when I write about myself, my communities, my family, my ancestors, and the nonhuman world? What meaning can be explored in these relationships and kinships?
We are really missing the NACCS annual meeting right now, so here is a roundup of our latest titles in Latinx studies that we would have been proudly displaying at the conference this year.
Use the code AZNACCS20 to receive 30% off and free shipping on all of the titles mentioned in this post!
Latinx Ciné in the Twenty-First Century is a timeless volume and a significant analysis of the burgeoning field of Latinx filmmaking. Editor Frederick Luis Aldama has gathered together some of the best writing on Latinx ciné in the twenty-first century. Today’s filmmakers show the world a rich Latinidad informed by a complexly layered culture replete with history, biography, and everyday experiences.
In Reel Latinxs, experts in Latinx pop culture Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González explain the real implications of Latinx representation in mainstream TV and film. They also provide a roadmap through a history of mediatized Latinxs that rupture stereotypes and reveal nuanced reconstructions of Latinx subjectivities and experiences.
Read a conversation between the editors here, and watch a video on the topic here.
Daniel D. Arreola’sPostcards from the Chihuahua Border is a colorful and dynamic visual history of Mexico’s northern border. Drawing on more than three decades of archival work, Arreola invites the reader to time travel, to revisit another era—the first half of the last century—when the border towns of Ciudad Juárez, Ojinaga, and Palomas were framed and made popular through picture postcards.
Sown in Earth is a collection of personal memories, which speak to the larger experiences of hard-working migratory men. By crafting a written journey through childhood traumas, poverty, and the impact of alcoholism on families, Fred Arroyo clearly outlines how his lived experiences made him want to become a writer. Sown in Earth is a shocking yet warm collage of memories which serve as more than a memoir or an autobiography. Rather, Arroyo recounts his youth through lyrical prose to humanize and immortalize the hushed lives of men like his father, honoring their struggle and claiming their impact on the writers and artists they raised.
Meditación Fronterizais a beautifully crafted exploration of life in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Written by award-winning author Norma Elia Cantú, the poems flow from Spanish to English gracefully as they explore culture, traditions, and solidarity.
Watch a conversation between Norma Cantú and our publicity manager, Mari Herreras, here. Then, read an interview about the collection and a poem here.
Kafka in a Skirt is not your ordinary short story collection. In his newest work, Daniel Chacón subverts expectation and breaks down the walls of reality to create stories that are intriguing, hilarious, and deeply rooted in Chicano culture.
Indigenous Interfaces rejects the myth that Indigeneity and information technology are incompatible through its compelling analysis of the relationships between Indigenous peoples and new media. The volume illustrates how Indigenous peoples are selectively and strategically choosing to interface with cybertechnology, highlights Indigenous interpretations of new media, and brings to center Indigenous communities who are resetting modes of communication and redirecting the flow of information. It convincingly argues that interfacing with traditional technologies simultaneously with new media gives Indigenous peoples an edge on the claim to autonomous and sovereign ways of being Indigenous in the twenty-first century.
In Saints, Statues, and Stories, beloved folklorist James S. Griffith introduces us to the roadside shrines, artists, fiestas, saints, and miracles of northern Mexico. Full-color images add to the pleasure of this delightful journey through the churches and towns of Sonora.
Listen to an interview with “Big Jim” Griffith here.
Reading Popol Wujoffers readers a path to look beyond Western constructions of literature to engage with this text through the philosophical foundation of Maya thought and culture. This guide deconstructs various translations to ask readers—scholars, teachers, and graduate and undergraduate students—to break out of the colonial mold in approaching this seminal Maya text.
The early 1960s are remembered for the emergence of new radical movements. One such protest movement rose in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. With large timbering companies moving in on the forested sierra highlands, campesinos and rancheros did not sit by as their lands and livelihoods were threatened. Agrarian Revolt in the Sierra of Chihuahua, 1959-1965 is the story of how they organized and demanded agrarian rights—ultimately with deadly consequences.
How did men become the stars of the Mexican intellectual scene? InDude Lit,Emily Hind examines the tricks of the trade and reveals that sometimes literary genius rests on privileges that men extend one another and that women permit.
Advocating for and demonstrating the importance of an intersectional, multidisciplinary, activist understanding of Chicanas, Intersectional Chicana Feminisms provides a much-needed overview of the key theories, thinkers, and activists that have contributed to Chicana feminisms.
Explore other books in the Mexican American Experience series here.
Divided Peoplesaddresses the impact border policies have on traditional lands and the peoples who live there—whether environmental degradation, border patrol harassment, or the disruption of traditional ceremonies. Anthropologist Christina Leza shows how such policies affect the traditional cultural survival of Indigenous peoples along the border. The author examines local interpretations and uses of international rights tools by Native activists, counter-discourse on the U.S.-Mexico border, and challenges faced by Indigenous border activists when communicating their issues to a broader public.
Reclaiming and reconstructing one’s spirituality based on non-Western epistemologies is central to the process of decolonization.Voices from the Ancestorsbrings together reflective writings and spiritual practices by Chicanx, Latinx, and Afro-Latinx womxn and male allies in the United States who seek to heal from the historical traumas of colonization by returning to ancestral traditions and knowledge.
Mexican Waves takes us to a time before the border’s militarization, when radio entrepreneurs, listeners, and artists viewed the boundary between the United States and Mexico the same way that radio waves did—as fluid and nonexistent. Author Sonia Robles explains how Mexican radio entrepreneurs targeted the Mexican population in the United States decades before U.S. advertising agencies realized the value of the Spanish-language market and demonstrates Mexico’s role in shaping the borderlands.
Yolqui, a Warrior Summoned from the Spirit World is a testimonio, a historia profoundo of the culture of extralegal violence against the Red-Black-Brown communities in the United States that operates with impunity. Framed by Roberto Cintli Rodríguez’s personal testimony of police violence, this book is a clarion call to end that violence and those philosophies that permit such violence to flourish.
Read an excerpt from the book here, and read summaries of two book events held on the University of Arizona campus here and here.
The increasingly militarized U.S.-México border is an intensely physical place, affecting the bodies of all who encounter it. The essays in The Border and Its Bodies explore how crossing becomes embodied in individuals on the most basic social unit possible: the human body.
Land Uprising reframes Indigenous land reclamation as a horizon to decolonize the settler colonial conditions of literary, intellectual, and activist labor. Simón Ventura Trujillo argues that land provides grounding for rethinking the connection between Native storytelling practices and Latinx racialization across overlapping colonial and nation-state forms.
Listen to a conversation between Simón Trujillo and New York City-based artist Vick Quezada here.
Unwriting Maya Literature provides an important decolonial framework for reading Maya and other Indigenous texts. Through insightful analyses of Maya cultural productions—whether textiles or poetry—this perspective offers a point of departure for the study of Maya literature and art that is situated in an Indigenous way of performing the act of reading.
Based on more than twenty years of border activism in San Diego–Tijuana and El Paso–Ciudad Juárez, Coloniality of the US/Mexico Border is an interdisciplinary examination that considers the 1984 McDonald’s massacre, Minutemen vigilantism, border urbanism, the ongoing murder of women in Ciudad Juárez, and anti-border music. It is a theoretical and pragmatic analysis of the future of violence at—and because of—national territorial borders, and it offers a call for epistemic and cartographic disobedience.
In Pasadena Before the Roses, historian Yvette J. Saavedra shows how Indigenous, Spanish, Mexican, and American groups each have redefined the meanings of land use to build their homes and their lives. This social and cultural history illustrates the interconnectedness of power, ideas of land use, and the negotiation of identity within multiple colonial moments.
Don’t forget, the University of Arizona Press is offering 40% off all e-books right now! Use the code AZEBOOK40 at checkout. Also, keep an eye on our social media for a different free e-book of the week every week!
Maestra Norma Cantú, author, activist, and scholar, took time to talk with the University of Arizona Press from her San Antonio home about life during COVID-19, community, family, and her poetry collection, Meditación Fronteriza: Poems of Love, Life, and Labor.
Life in Cantú’s Texas-Mexico borderlands is centered in these poems, a collection that celebrates culture, tradition, love, solidarity, and political transformation from Spanish to English.
Cantú, author of Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera, currently serves as the Norine R. and T. Frank Murchison Professor of the Humanities at Trinity University. She is founder and director of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa.
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