Danzirly is a striking bilingual poetry collection that fiercely examines the nuances of the American Dream for Latinx people in the United States. With a backdrop of stringent immigration policies, the #MeToo movement, and the increasingly tangible threat of climate change, this collection considers multigenerational Latinx identities in a rapidly changing country and world. Through the author’s Colombian American lens, the poems explore the intersections of culture, gender, history, and intergenerational grief.
Gloria Muñoz is a Colombian American writer and translator. She is the author of Danzirly, winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Ambroggio Prize, and the chapbook Your Biome Has Found You. Her work has won a Lumina multilingual award, a New York Summer Writers Fellowship, a Creative Pinellas Grant, and a USF Humanities Poetry Prize. She holds degrees from Sarah Lawrence College and the University of South Florida, and she teaches at Eckerd College.
We are excited to participate in the Society for Linguistic Anthropology spring conference! You can browse our books at an un-staffed table at the in-person conference in Boulder, Colorado, or you can learn more about our recent titles by visiting our virtual booth or reading the information below. Use the code AZSLA22 for 30% off all titles, plus free U.S. shipping, until 5/15/22.
If you have questions about our publishing program, visit this page or contact our Senior Editor, Allyson Carter, PhD, at ACarter@uapress.arizona.edu.
Revitalization Lexicography by Patricia M. Anderson is a unique look under the hood of lexicography in a small community, highlighting how the creation of the Tunica dictionary was intentionally leveraged to shape the revitalization of the Tunica language. It details both the theoretical and the practical aspects that contributed to the Tunica dictionary in manner compelling to readers from all walks of life.
Why can’t a Quechua speaker wear pants?Anna M. Babel uses this question to open an analysis of language and social structure at the border of eastern and western, highland and lowland Bolivia. Between the Andes and the Amazon opens new ways of thinking about what it means to be a speaker of an indigenous or colonial language—or a mix of both.
Naming the World by Andrew M. Cowell 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.
Talking Indian explores community, tribal identity, and language during rapid economic and demographic shifts in the Chickasaw Nation. These shifts have dramatically impacted who participates in the semiotic trends of language revitalization, as well as their motivations. Jenny L. Davis uncovers how such language processes are intertwined with economic growth.
Language, Coffee, and Migration on an Andean-Amazonian Frontier by Nicholas Q. Emlen takes us to remote Amazonian villages, dusty frontier towns, roadside bargaining sessions, and coffee traders’ homes to offer a new view of settlement frontiers as they are negotiated in linguistic interactions and social relationships. The book brings together a fine-grained analysis of multilingualism with urgent issues in Latin America today. It is a timely on-the-ground perspective on the agricultural colonization of the Amazon, which has triggered an environmental emergency threatening the future of the planet.
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.
The Florida Book Awards, established in 2006, is an annual awards program that recognizes, honors and celebrates the literature by Florida authors and books about Florida published in the previous year. The awards program is coordinated by the Florida State University Libraries and co-sponsored by the State Library and Archives of Florida, the Florida Humanities, the Florida Literary Arts Coalition, the Florida Library Association, Friends of the Florida State University Libraries, the Florida Writers Association, and the Florida Chapter of the Mystery Writers of America. Florida Book Award-winning books are on permanent display in the library at the Governor’s Mansion in Tallahassee, and in an exhibit case on the third floor of Florida State University’s Strozier Library.
Danzirly is a striking bilingual poetry collection that fiercely examines the nuances of the American Dream for Latinx people in the United States. With a backdrop of stringent immigration policies, the #MeToo movement, and the increasingly tangible threat of climate change, this collection considers multigenerational Latinx identities in a rapidly changing country and world. Through the author’s Colombian American lens, the poems explore the intersections of culture, gender, history, and intergenerational grief.
Gloria Muñoz is a Colombian American writer and translator. She is the author of Danzirly, winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Ambroggio Prize, and the chapbook Your Biome Has Found You. Her work has won a Lumina multilingual award, a New York Summer Writers Fellowship, a Creative Pinellas Grant, and a USF Humanities Poetry Prize. She holds degrees from Sarah Lawrence College and the University of South Florida, and she teaches at Eckerd College.
Throughout human history, humans have faced periods of intense food shortages and even famines. The cause of famines can differ, and whether it is due to poor economic policy, drought, crop disease, or pests, one thing remains the same: humans seek out alternative food sources to fill the gap. This week, on the Foodie Pharmacology Podcast, ethnobotanist Dr. Cassandra Quave talks with author Paul Minnis about his book Famine Foods. Minnis is an ethnobiologist and expert on famine foods. Quave and Minnis talk about the role of famine foods in history and their importance to the future of food security.
Foodie Pharmacology is a science podcast built for the food curious, the flavor connoisseurs, chefs, science geeks, plant lovers, and adventurous taste experimenters out in the world. On the podcast, Quave discusses history, medicine, cuisine, and molecules to explore the amazing pharmacology of our foods.
Reyes Ramirez’s The Book of Wanders is No. 10 on the Most Anticipated 2022 Latinx Books.
The Book of Wanderers deeply explores Houston, a Gulf Coast metropolis that incorporates Southern, Western, and Southwestern identities near the borderlands with a connection to the cosmos. As such, each story becomes increasingly further removed from our lived reality, engaging numerous genres from emotionally touching realist fiction to action-packed speculative fiction, as well as hallucinatory realism, magical realism, noir, and science fiction.
To read the entire list from Latinos in Publishing, go here.
The Latinx Project at New York University recently published an op-ed from Christopher Chavez on the themes and issues shared in his new book, Sound of Exclusion: NPR and the Latinx Public, that dives into National Public Radio’s history of centering white listeners and relegating Latinx listeners to the side.
An except from the op-ed:
This is not NPR’s first public reckoning on race. Over the course of its fifty-year history, the network has frequently felt pressure to defend the ways in which it serves the needs of Black and Latinx listeners. NPR’s history tells us that the network has been caught up in a continuous cycle of public critique followed by internal reflection. Rarely, however, has this self-examination resulted in meaningful change. The network may make moves to hire Latinx journalists to headline its flagship programs, but the institution itself is never under question. Nor is there a wholesale reconceptualization of the public that it is tasked with serving.
And herein lies the problem. NPR’s inaction on diversity issues reflects a failure of imagination that prohibits the network from seeing Black and Latinx listeners as truly being members of the public for whom it creates programming. This complacency comes at an important time in American democracy, in which there are growing systematic efforts to exclude Latinx voters. The book calls for a reimagining of NPR as a public good that is meant to be accessed by the broader spectrum of the American public, not just the country’s most elite.
A recent article in USA Today featured University of Arizona Press author and editor Frederick Luis Aldama, exploring the growing use of Latinx, a gender-neutral term for all who claim a Latinx identify.
Aldama, co-editor of the Press’s Latinx Pop Culture Series, has a new book out with the Press this May, Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century, which takes an expansive and critical look at contemporary television by and about U.S. Latinx communities. This volume is comprehensive in its coverage while diving into detailed and specific examples as it navigates the complex and ever-changing world of Latinx representation and creation in television.
In the USA Today article on Latinx:
Frederick Luis Aldama, whose family is Irish, Guatemalan and Mexican, loved Latinx when he first learned of the term from his students. It acknowledged the complexity of his own cultural and geographic identities. The X reminded him of Professor X, who provides refuge for other X-Men in Marvel Comics. It also recalled Malcolm X, whose new identity denounced his slave name.
“There’s so much power for me in Latinx,” he said. “I just love that it feels fresh and new and future-looking.”
Aldama is the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin, and is known as Professor Latinx by other comic book aficionados. His works include the book “Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics” and “Latinographix,” a trade press that publishes graphic stories.
He said he gets attacked on social media whenever he brings up Latinx. And at Christmas, one of his cousins demanded to know why he used Latinx.
“I was like, ‘Why are you so fired up?’” Aldama said. “He was like, ‘You are destroying the language!”
No one can fill Big Jim Griffith’s shoes, for he—more than any other Tucsonan—triggered enormous and lasting community pride in our “folk” traditions of music, food, santos, architecture, and border culture.
From the co-founding of the Tucson Meet Yourself Folklife Festival in 1974 with his equally-talented wife Loma Griffith, to initiating the first national tour of Cowboy Poets, Jim left an indelible mark on Western folklore both in content and in inclusiveness. His pioneering scholarship of the folk architecture and music of the Tohono O’odham—his neighbors who surrounded his home near San Xavier Mission—is one example of his many academic achievements. Fortunately, several of his most memorable books and recordings will be around forever. As he often said about his extensive archives, “Our chivos are your chivos.”
Big Jim’s role in stimulating community-based participatory folklore studies, festivals, and archives spread far beyond Southern Arizona. Furthermore, his banjo-playing, singing and tall-storytelling made him a full participant in these traditions, from playing music at Sunday masses in New Pascua Pueblo, to sitting in with other musicians at the National Cowboy Poetry Festival in Elko, to winning a banjo contest at Uncle Dave Macon Days Music and Dance Competition at a Roots Rendezvous festival. He was the anchor folklorist/mentor for the multiple-year Sonoran Heritage Programming that Kathy Dannruether managed for the Pima County Public Library System. And none of us who were involved in forwarding Tucson as a UNESCO City of Gastronomy in 2016 could have achieved that designation without the groundwork that Big Jim had developed though years of food folklore celebrations sponsored by the Southwest Folklore Alliance and the University of Arizona’s Southwest Center.
I first met Big Jim back in the 1970s while he was co-starring with the band Summer Dog in a series of performances of the saloon musical Diamond Studs—the Life of Jesse James. We soon began doing fieldwork together on the Tohono O’odham reservation where he researched folk Catholic chapels for his University of Arizona dissertation, in bootleg distilleries in Eastern Sonora, in ranching towns where he recorded cowboy recitations, and in the Comccac (Seri) Indian villages while he recorded Sonoran corridos for the Western Folklife Center. We ate more tepary beans and chiltepins together than most human beings could (or should) ever swallow. We hopped from bar to bar, and cruised cantinas in South Phoenix searching for Norteño conjuntos who could play the following fall at Tucson Meet Yourself. We dialogued at conferences of the American Folklore Society, Association for Living History, Farm and Agricultural Museums and the Western Folklife Center where it was clear that he not only had many friends and admirers, but disciples and fans who worshipped the dusty ground his big boots walked upon.
James “Big Jim” Griffith with his new book, Saints, Statues, and Stories, hanging out at the Tucson Meet Yourself store book in 2019.
Because Big Jim could comfortably talk and listen to nearly anyone of any ethnic background, it was hard for those of us who were his local friends to remember that he was also a national celebrity. Over the decades, he attracted to Tucson many musicians and musicologists who regarded him as an esteemed peer, from Lalo Guerrero, Alan Lomax, Mike Seeger, Linda Ronstadt, Dom Flemons, Nick Spitzer, and Tommie Vennum.
Those of us who knew Big Jim at his home savored the late summer Club Pimatleño outdoor barbecue that Loma and Jim annually hosted, where dozens of friends came to hear his barking vocals and banjo, his punishing puns, and his bilingual tall tales. With one eye closed, and the brow on the other raised high like it was about to touch the mole on his forehead, his facial expressions, gestures, and mimes could entertain us for hours. But most of what he did also had a higher purpose: To remind all borderlands residents in Arizona that our shared heritage is multi-cultural, trinational—involving Mexico, U.S., and the Tohono O’odham Nation—and the best antidote against the divisiveness that threatens to pull us asunder. In everything he did and said and sang, Big Jim built bridges, not walls.
Poet and space lover Christopher Cokinos recently made a pitch for the creation of Mission Laureates, artists in all areas that would be part of the public engagement process with all space missions.
Here’s an excerpt of the pitch from the co-author of Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight, an anthology of poetry that spans from the dawn of the space age to the imagined futures of the universe:
The arts have long been engaged with the night sky, astronomy, and, more recently, with space programs. Consider, in the latter case, NASA’s famed fine arts program that placed painters and illustrators such as Norman Rockwell and Robert Rauschenberg in the middle of launch facilities, training centers and recovery zones. There is a long tradition of “space art,” first popularized by Chesley Bonestell. Fine arts photographers, such as Michael Light, have given their craft over to space imagery. Many writers have turned their attention to space; in the modern era, consider Oriana Fallaci or Margaret Lazarus Dean. As co-editor of Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight, I know that poets have responded vigorously—if not always enthusiastically—to the Space Age.
A fine overview of NASA, ESA, and the visual arts can be found in Dr. William A. Bezouska’s paper for The Aerospace Corporation, Space and Art: Connecting Two Creative Endeavors. His focus, as has been the focus of most art-space ventures, is strictly with the visual, from Apollo 15’s Fallen Astronaut memorial to various imagery, from large installation work to film, from classroom displays to art contests. And, of course, we await the possibility of the SpaceX dearMoon mission, in which artists will be billionaire-curated for a lunar orbital flight.
Yet other arts have gotten the short shrift: ceramicists, say, or modern dancers or textile artists. Or, in my case, poetry, though listing the number of real and fictional aerospace figures who have called on poets to be launched in space would take some time. (It’s interesting to note that at least two astronauts have come back from space to write poetry, Story Musgrave and Alfred Worden, both of whom are represented in Beyond Earth’s Edge.)
We’re thrilled to be participating in the virtual component of the 2021 Western History Association conference! We’ve got fantastic new titles for you to browse, and a great conference discount to use on our website. Use the code AZWHA21 at checkout for 40% off all titles, plus free U.S. shipping through 11/30/21.
Are you interested in our publishing program? Read about the details here, and contact our Editor-in-Chief Kristen Buckles at kbuckles@uapress.arizona.edu.
We are excited to announce a new series, BorderVisions, edited by Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez and Yvette J. Saavedra! BorderVisions engages the U.S. Mexico borderlands’ dynamic histories and cultures and expands our understanding of the borderlands beyond a site of geopolitical inquiry. This series will deepen our understanding of the ways in which gender, class, race, sexuality, and other intersectional concerns are reflected in humanities and humanistic social science borderlands scholarship. BorderVisions will publish monographs and edited collections by new and established authors who employ innovative interdisciplinary methodologies on topics reflecting both sides of the U.S. Mexico border. Learn more here.
We’ve put together a video that highlights some of our recent Western History titles, thanks to the help of our authors! We hope you enjoy the video.
New from the University of Arizona Press
The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature is unprecedented. It showcases the breadth, depth, and diversity of Diné creative artists and their poetry, fiction, and nonfiction prose. This wide-ranging anthology brings together writers who offer perspectives that span generations and perspectives on life and Diné history. The collected works display a rich variety of and creativity in themes: home and history; contemporary concerns about identity, historical trauma, and loss of language; and economic and environmental inequalities.
Becoming Hopi is a comprehensive look at the history of the people of the Hopi Mesas as it has never been told before. The product of more than fifteen years of collaboration between tribal and academic scholars, this volume presents groundbreaking research demonstrating that the Hopi Mesas are among the great centers of the Pueblo world.
“Becoming Hopi brilliantly combines Hopi and non-Hopi voices in helping to rewrite Hopi history and the process of becoming Hopi…The combination and use of traditional, archaeological, and documentary histories unfolds a rare perspective on what it means to be Hopi.”—Barbara Mills, co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Southwest Archaeology
Duane Champagne and Carole Goldberg are leading experts in Native sovereignty policies and histories. They worked in collaboration with members of the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians to illustrate how the community formed and persisted.A Coalition of Lineages is not only the story of a Native Southern California community, it is also a model for multicultural tribal development for recognized and nonrecognized Indian nations in the United States and elsewhere.
“Written to dispel the idea that these lineages ever ceased to exist under colonial power, this book offers a conceptual framework around the lineage that can be useful to historians and scholars.”—Lisbeth Haas, author of Saints and Citizens: Indigenous Histories of Colonial Missions and Mexican California
Diverting the Gila explores the complex web of tension, distrust, and political maneuvering to divide and divert the scarce waters of Arizona’s Gila River among residents of Florence, Casa Grande, and the Pima Indians in the early part of the twentieth century. It is the sequel to David H. DeJong’s 2009 Stealing the Gila, and it continues to tell the story of the forerunner to the San Carlos Irrigation Project and the Gila River Indian Community’s struggle to regain access to their water.
View photos and read extended captions that help highlight the history in Diverting the Gilahere.
Rewriting the Chicano Movement is an insightful new history of the Chicano Movement that expands the meaning and understanding of this seminal historical period in Chicano history. The essays introduce new individuals and struggles previously omitted from Chicano Movement history.
Watch a recording of our book release celebration for Rewriting the Chicano Movementhere, then read a brief interview with authors Mario T. García and Ellen McCrackenhere, and read an excerpt from the book here.
Empowered! examines Arizona’s recent political history and how it has been shaped and propelled by Latinos. This book shows how Latinos are mobilizing to counter proposals for Draconian immigration laws with new and innovative approaches.
Watch a recording of our book release celebration for Empowered!here, then read a brief interview with author Lisa Magañahere.
The early twentieth-century roots of modern American Indian protest and activism are examined in We Are Not a Vanishing People. It tells the history of Native intellectuals and activists joining together to establish the Society of American Indians, a group of Indigenous men and women united in the struggle for Indian self-determination.
In 1924, the United States began a bold program in public health. The Indian Service of the United States hired its first nurses to work among Indians living on reservations. Strong Hearts and Healing Hands shows how field nurses and Native people formed a positive working relationship that resulted in the decline of mortality from infectious diseases. With strong hearts, Indians eagerly participated in the tuberculosis campaign of 1939–40 to x-ray tribal members living on twenty-nine reservations. Through their cooperative efforts, Indians and health-care providers decreased deaths, cases, and misery among the tribes of Southern California.
Museum Matters tells the story of Mexico’s national collections through the trajectories of its objects. The essays in this book show the many ways in which things matter and affect how Mexico imagines its past, present, and future.
“This exciting new volume gathers penetrating new studies on the formation of Mexico’s national collections, from antiquities to natural history specimens. The volume is essential reading for anyone interested in the formation of museums, particularly how such institutions participate in the production of knowledge over time. Filled with strikingly original and important contributions, the volume will be widely read by scholars in history, anthropology, museum studies, art history, archaeology, and other related fields.”—Joanne Pillsbury, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Postcards have a magical pull. They allow us to see the past through charming relics that allow us to travel back in time. Daniel D. Arreola’sPostcards from the Baja California Borderoffers a window into the historical and geographical past of storied Mexican border communities. Once-popular tourist destinations from the 1900s through the 1950s, the border communities explored inPostcards from the Baja California Border used to be filled with revelers, cabarets, curio shops, and more. The postcards in this book show the bright and dynamic past of California’s borderlands while diving deep into the historic and geographic significance of the imagery found on the postcards.
The Beloved Border is a potent and timely report on the U.S.-Mexico border. Though this book tells of the unjust death and suffering that occurs in the borderlands, Davidson gives us hope that the U.S.-Mexico border could be, and in many ways already is, a model for peaceful coexistence worldwide.
Returning Home features and contextualizes the creative works of Diné (Navajo) boarding school students at the Intermountain Indian School, which was the largest federal Indian boarding school between 1950 and 1984. Diné student art and poetry reveal ways that boarding school students sustained and contributed to Indigenous cultures and communities despite assimilationist agendas and pressures.
“By bringing to light a wide collection of creative writings and artwork, this book offers an unprecedented window into the lives of Diné students at a federal boarding school in the second half of the twentieth century. Students’ words need to be heard and their artwork needs to be seen in order to better understand their schooling and personal experiences at Intermountain.”—Marinella Lentis, author of Colonized through Art: American Indian Schools and Art Education
As an Indigenous scholar researching the history and archaeology of his own tribe, Tsim D. Schneider— author of The Archaeology of Refuge and Recourse— provides a unique and timely contribution to the growing field of Indigenous archaeology and offers a new perspective on the primary role and relevance of Indigenous places and homelands in the study of colonial encounters.
“Combining the best of data-driven archaeology with the archaeologist-as-storyteller approach, Schneider blends scientific expertise with his cultural knowledge as a tribal member, resulting in a rare and powerful analysis. This outstanding case study in Indigenous archaeology productively merges archaeological and historical methods with sophisticated yet accessible social theory. The result is an engaging history and hopeful look to the future of Indigenous resiliencies.”—Sarah Cowie, co-editor of Collaborative Archaeology at the Stewart Indian School
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