Beyond Earth’s Edge is a groundbreaking anthology of poetry centered on space that features a beautiful line-up of poets, such as Robert Hayden, Rae Armantrout, N. Scott Momaday, Adrienne Rich, Tracy K. Smith, Ray Bradbury, May Swenson, Pablo Neruda, and many other engaging poetic voices. This book was edited by Julie Swarstad Johnson, Christopher Cokinos.
The Arizona Diary of Lily Frémont, edited by Mary Lee Spence, is a rich detail, and day-by-day narrative of Territorial life in Arizona. For students of western history, Lily Frémont’s diary provides a wealth of fresh information on frontier politics, mining, army life, social customs, and ethnicity. The book was recently released as a paperback.
Rewriting the Chicano Movement, edited by Mario T. García and Ellen McCraken, is a new collection of powerful new essays on the Chicano Movement that expand and revise the understanding of the movement. These essays capture the commitment, courage, and perseverance of movement activists, both men and women, and their struggles to achieve the promises of American democracy. The contributors to this book highlight the role of women in the movement, the regional and ideological diversification of the movement, and the various cultural fronts in which the movement was active.
Here, García and McCraken answer question about this new book:
Why is it important to revisit the history of the Chicano Movement through this book?
It’s important to revisit the history of the Chicano Movement through this book because the Movement represents a seminal part of the history of Chicanos (Mexican Americans) in the United States. It was the largest and most widespread civil rights and empowerment movement by people of Mexican descent up to the 1960s and 1970s. The Chicano Movement through its struggles opened up new opportunities for Chicanos in areas formerly restricted such as in education, especially higher education, politics, culture, media, and business. These opportunities were not given willingly, but had to be forced by mass peaceful struggles. The Movement for the first time made Chicanos, and by extension other Latinos, into national political actors. The roots of Latino political power, which is a reality, lie in the Chicano Movement as well as similar struggles by other Latino groups such as Puerto Ricans in the United States. It is important to know about the history of the Chicano Movement as a reminder of how power and opportunities are accessed. It comes through people power and the organization of this power. We need to learn these lessons at a time when reactionary forces led by Donald Trump would impose an American form of totalitarianism. Chicanos and Latinos must be in the forefront of defending American democracy and civil rights and we can be inspired to do so by learning how our communities in the past have struggled for our rights such as in the Chicano Movement.
Is there a commonality worth noting that runs through the book’s essays?
The commonality that runs through the book is the commitment by Chicanos through the Chicano Movement to achieve recognition, respect, and dignity in American society through various forms of struggles including political, educational, and cultural ones. What is also common in the book is that we need to rewrite the Chicano Movement to take into consideration the diversity of the Movement. There was no one Movement but many in different regions of the country, which included both men and women.
What conversations, in community or classroom, do you hope rise from the book?
We hope that the book will be used by both educational groups and community ones to re-discover the historical importance of the Chicano Movement and its continued relevance to today’s conditions and struggles. The Chicano Movement did not eliminate racism, class discrimination, cultural discrimination, and gender discrimination for Chicanos and other Latinos. What the Movement did was to empower Chicanos to believe that they and they alone could change history and pressure the system to become more equitable and democratic. We are not there yet, but the Movement can still inspire and guide us in continuing the struggle. We hope that readers will confront the question: How is the Chicano Movement still relevant to us today?
How can telling untold stories about the Movement help the momentum of today’s activists and organizers?
Telling untold stories about the Chicano Movement, as noted, can hopefully inspire and guide today’s activists in learning that the struggles for democratic rights has a long history and with many heroic figures, male and female, who have participated in earlier struggles to empower the Chicano and Latino communities. There is a praxis involved in our book. First, we want people to read about these untold stories of the Movement. Then we want readers to reflect on the meaning and importance of these stories. And then, and this is most important, we want readers to act on these stories. How can I take up the legacy of the Chicano Movement and apply it to my current conditions? How can I continue the struggle?
The struggle continues, does that mean the Movement continues, too?
We hope that the struggle inspired by the Chicano Movement will continue. Does this mean that the Chicano Movement is still alive? Yes and no. As a historical movement set in the late 1960s and 1970s, the Movement no longer exists as such; it is a historical movement set in time and place. However, the legacy of the Movement continues. It is a legacy of the struggle for democratic and human rights and for the rights of people such as Chicanos and other Latinos to define themselves and be proud of their ethnic background. That struggle has continued in the post-Movement years and still does in the new millennium.
***
Mario T. García is Distinguished Professor of Chicano Studies and History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, specializing in Chicano history, Chicano/Latino autobiography, and Chicano/Latino religion. He is the author, co-author, and editor of more than twenty books in Chicano history, including Blowout! Sal Castro and the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice, The Making of a Mexican American Mayor, and Literature as History. He has won a number of awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Ellen McCracken is a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at University of California, Santa Barbara, specializing in U.S. Latino and Latin American literature. Her books include New Latina Narrative, The Life and Writing of Fray Angélico Chávez, and Paratexts and Performance in the Novels of Junot Díaz and Sandra Cisneros.
Publisher’s Weekly, an international news platform for book publishing and bookselling, recently reviewed Devon A. Mihesuah’s new mystery novel, The Hatak Witches.
Set to publish in late April 2021, The Hatak Witches follows Detective Monique Blue Hawk in Norman, Oklahoma. Blending tribal beliefs and myths into a modern context, the book continues the storyline of Choctaw cosmology and cultural survival that are prominent in Mihesuah’s award-winning novel, The Roads of My Relations.
From Publisher’s Weekly:
“As informative as it is gripping, this supernatural mystery from Mihesuah—the 88th installment of Sun Tracks: An American Indian Literary Series—is rooted in Choctaw cosmology and contemporary Native American life. … The author’s ability to immerse the reader in the lives of her characters is prodigious, making the social realism of Monique’s life as fascinating as the supernatural elements. … Readers looking for intelligent, diverse supernatural fiction will be captivated.”—Publishers Weekly
The book is a collection of essays that celebrate the bounty and the significance of desert places, including an extended essay by Nabhan. The celebrated author and ethnobiologist brought friends, colleagues, and advisors together from his more than four decades of study of deserts—to bring their own perspectives. Scientists, artists, desert contemplatives, poets, and writers bring the desert into view and investigate why these places compel us to walk through their sands and beneath their cacti and acacia.
Thank you, Jim Nintzel, Weekly editor, for the kind words and sharing a bit of Nabhan’s desert love.
Here’s some of the excerpt shared from Nabhan’s essay:
The horizon was dull edged and hazy from a recent sandstorm. Nevertheless, the sun beamed down on me with what seemed to be a preternatural force.
I stood there alone (I believed), silent enough to hear my own heart beating and the breeze brushing at my sleeves. I could not immediately figure out the patterns of the place—the relationships among weather, substrate, flora, fauna and human influence.
A dust devil, or chachipira, suddenly swept by me and then disappeared into thin air, leaving bushes rustling and empty beer cans rolling around in eddies.
Then my eyes began to tear up in brightness, and I wiped them clean with a sweep of my shirtsleeve. Instantly, I was looking at this world as if I had come to another planet for the very first time.
While grappling with anxiety and the physical and mental health consequences of the way the United States treats immigrant bodies, in UNDOCUMENTS, John-Michael Rivera documents and scrutinizes what it means to seek opportunities in America. With a focus on the poetics of Latinx documentality itself, this book is concerned with the complicated and at times contradictory ways peoples of Greater Mexico have been documented and undocumented within systems of colonial knowledges, and how these peoples have been rendered as specters of the bureaucratic state. Rivera takes us through the painful, anxiety-ridden, and complex nature of what it means to be documented or undocumented, and the cruelty married to each of these states of being.
Below, read an excerpt from UNDOCUMENTS:
Tile Martyrs Two unsolved murder mysteries remain open in Boulder: one surrounding the murder of a young girl named JonBenét Ramsey who has received hundreds of thousands of hours of news coverage, and another surrounding the murders of six young Chicanx activists who, to Chicanxs, are known as Los Seis de Boulder, the lost children of El Movimiento. Boulder and the nation have nearly been successful in erasing the bodies of Francisco Dougherty, 20; Heriberto Terán, 24; Florencio Granado, 31; Reyes Martínez, 26; Una Jaakola, 24; and Neva Romero, 21. Their cars were blown up with professionally made car bombs two days apart in the month of May 1974. Their homicides are still listed as a cold case, but Chicanxs know it was the work of the FBI. The FBI had been trying to infiltrate El Movimiento and break down its resistance. Reports state that the blasts were so powerful that pieces of their bodies were found miles away from the explosion site.
Forty-five years later in a studio on the Boulder campus, my daughter and I join dozens of activists who are attempting to reconstruct the bodies of Los Seis and build a memorial called “Los Seis de Boulder.” She and I work on small colored tiles that will re-create the face of Reyes Martínez. With each tile we attempt to piece together his dead body and resurrect it from obscurity. The ceremony is haunting. It feels like something between a celebration of community and a somber wake that I was not invited to. We all hope, perhaps in vain, that the university will allow us to resurrect the memorial by Temporary Building 1, the place on campus where one of the cars blew up, making it a sacred site and a haunting reminder of those who lost their lives here. An older woman working on the tiles says that we should be listening to their corrido. Dad, what is a corrido? The lady smiles at me and begins to hum:
Voy a cantar un corrido, Que . . . en Colorado pasó. Murieron los Seis de Boulder, Dos noches en mayo, En setenta y cuatro Los almas de seis soldados Seis fusilados Seis hijos del bien
The same month that we fight for the memorialization of these young activists, John Ramsey sits down with Dr. Oz to do yet another in-depth interview about the JonBenét murder. Let me begin by saying this is such a tragedy, Dr. Oz laments. America’s daughter is lost to us forever.
*** John-Michael Rivera is an associate professor and writer at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he serves as director of the Program for Writing and Rhetoric. He has published memoir, creative nonfiction, poetry, and scholarship. He is the curator of El Laboratorio, a literary space for Latinx writers, and was co-founder of Shadowbox Magazine, a literary journal for creative nonfiction.
In the forthcoming book, Rewriting the Chicano Movement offers 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.Today we offer a brief excerpt:
From the Introduction By Mario T. García The profound changes directly and indirectly attributable to the Chicano Movement have led to increased interest in the history of the Chicano Movement. It is not that historians neglected the movement in the post-movement period of the 1980s and 1990s. However, with some exceptions, historians focused on earlier periods in order to better understand the roots of the Chicano experience. This was understandable given the dearth of research in Chicano history as a whole. Moreover, the immediacy of the movement meant historical perspective was lacking.
As a result of this research, publications on Chicano history as a whole have exploded over the last fifty years. This research includes studies of the Spanish conquest of areas that became part of the United States, such as from Texas to California. Others have focused on the Mexican experience after Mexican independence in 1821 and up to the time the United States forced a war on Mexico and conquered its northern frontier—El Norte. The period following the American conquest of what became the American Southwest has also received attention. However, historians have tended to study the twentieth century more, including mass Mexican immigration to the United States during the first three decades of the century. The Great Depression years have likewise received attention, as has World War II, when thousands of Mexican Americans went to war in support of the United States. Finally, the post–World War II era, especially the 1950s, is also beginning to receive attention. Some pioneering studies on the Chicano Movement also appeared during the last two decades of the twentieth century. These include works by Juan Gómez-Quiñones, Gerald Rosen, Carlos Muñoz, Richard Santillán, Christine Marín, Ignacio García, Ernesto Chávez, and Marguerite Marín. Gómez-Quiñones wrote on the Chicano student movement, as did Carlos Muñoz with a focus on Los Angeles. Gerald Rosen examined the ideology of the movement. One of the best works in this early literature was Ignacio García’s history of La Raza Unida Party. Richard Santillán also focused on La Raza Unida Party. Ernesto Chávez and Marguerite Marín, like Muñoz, focused on Los Angeles as a key location by examining manifestations other than the student movement. Finally, Christine Marín wrote one of the first biographies of Corky Gonzales, a key movement leader in Denver.
These early studies are being significantly augmented in the new millennium. There has emerged a renaissance of Chicano Movement studies. Historians and other scholars, many of them younger professors or graduate students, are rediscovering the Chicano Movement. This new generation seems even more aware of how the movement impacted the lives of many Chicanos and other Latinos in the country. They recognize the movement as a seminal event in the long history of Mexican Americans. While they note that there were earlier civil rights and labor rights struggles, they recognize that the Chicano Movement was unprecedented in its size and impact. The Chicano Movement created the new Chicano and Chicana, and by extension the new Latino and Latina. Contemporary Latino political power is the direct result of the movement.
What distinguishes this new historiography is its focus on the diversity of the movement. Earlier views seemed to suggest that the movement was more monolithic and that the cultural nationalism of the movement was adhered to by most activists. Contemporary historians and other students of the movement see much more diversity in all movement aspects. For example, the movement is being studied in a variety of locations and spaces, not just the main centers of the movement such as California and Texas. Now movement history is being excavated in the Pacific Northwest, New Mexico, Arizona, and the Midwest.
Also, greater attention is being paid to the role of women in the movement and their key contributions. Studies of new locations and different communities reveal how the movement manifested itself regionally and locally and how it was mobilized around community issues pertinent to that locale. In other words, the Chicano Movement was not only a national movement but a local one. Moreover, beginning with Jorge Mariscal’s groundbreaking 2005 book, Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun, some scholars revealed how the cultural nationalism of the movement, Chicanismo, was not monolithic. Other ideological influences such as Third World consciousness, Marxism, and feminism also affected the mindset of Chicano activists, and we saw how the four could be combined. As a result of looking at the Chicano Movement in such a diverse way, this new literature is revisionist and critical. It is a rewriting of the Chicano Movement. This new Chicano Movement history is also impacting our understanding of American history.
*** Mario T. García is Distinguished Professor of Chicano Studies and History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, specializing in Chicano history, Chicano/Latino autobiography, and Chicano/Latino religion. He is the author, co-author, and editor of more than twenty books in Chicano history, including Blowout! Sal Castro and the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice, The Making of a Mexican American Mayor, and Literature as History. He has won a number of awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Below, browse our recent and forthcoming historical archaeology titles, and get a 35% discount with free U.S. shipping when you use the code AZSHA21 at checkout. If you would like to know more about our publishing program, visit our proposal guidelines page here, or contact our Senior Editor, Allyson Carter, at acarter@uapress.arizona.edu.
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.
Tewa Worlds by Samuel Duwe offers an archaeological history of eight centuries of Tewa Pueblo history in the Rio Chama Valley through the lens of contemporary Pueblo philosophical and historical discourse. The result gives weight to the deep past, colonial encounters, and modern experiences. It challenges archaeologists to both critically reframe interpretation and to acknowledge the Tewa’s deep but ongoing connection with the land.
More than a history of coveted commodities, the unique story that unfolds in John R. Gust and Jennifer P. Mathews’s new historySugarcane and Rumis told through the lens of Maya laborers who worked under brutal conditions on small haciendas to harvest sugarcane and produce rum in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.
Narratives of Persistence charts the remarkable persistence of California’s Ohlone and Paipai people over the past five centuries. Lee M. Panich draws connections between the events and processes of the deeper past and the way the Ohlone and Paipai today understand their own histories and identities.
Decolonizing “Prehistory” critically examines and challenges the paradoxical role that modern historical-archaeological scholarship plays in adding legitimacy to, but also delegitimizing, contemporary colonialist practices. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this volume empowers Indigenous voices and offers a nuanced understanding of the American deep past.
How people eat today is a record of food use through the ages, and Famine Foods offers the first ever overview of the use of alternative foods during food shortages. Paul E. Minnis explores the unusual plants that have helped humanity survive throughout history.
Alluvium and Empire examines the archaeology of Indigenous communities and landscapes that were subject to Spanish colonial forced resettlement during the sixteenth century. Written at the intersections of history and archaeology, the book critiques previous approaches to the study of empire and models a genealogical approach that attends to the open-ended—and often unpredictable—ways in which empires take shape.
The University of Arizona Press publishes a wide range of fascinating ethnobiology and ethnobotany titles. Below, read about our most recent titles in these fields.
Use the code AZETHNO20 to receive 35% off all of the titles mentioned in this post, plus free U.S. shipping, until January 15, 2021.
Do you have an ethnobiology or ethnobotany manuscript? To learn more about our publishing program, visit here.
The Prehispanic Ethnobotany of Paquimé and Its Neighbors is a major ethnobotanical study for the ancient U.S. Southwest and northwestern Mexico. The results reorient our perspective in the rise of one of the most impressive communities in the international region.
Based on Valentina Peveri’s prolonged engagement with this “virtuous” plant of southwestern Ethiopia, The Edible Gardens of Ethiopia provides a nuanced reading of the ensete ventricosum (avant-)garden and explores how the life in tiny, diverse, and womanly plots may indeed offers alternative visions of nature, food policy, and conservation efforts.
Chie Sakakibara shows how knots of connection came into being between humans and nonhuman others and how such intimate and intense relations will help humans survive the Anthropocene. Whale Snow offers an important and thought-provoking look at global climate change as it manifests in the everyday life of the Iñupiat in Arctic Alaska.
The desert inspires wonder. Attending to history, culture, science, and spirit, The Nature of Desert Nature celebrates the bounty and the significance of desert places.
A Desert Feastoffers a food pilgrimage, where stories and recipes demonstrate why the desert city of Tucson became American’s first UNESCO City of Gastronomy. You’ll meet the farmers, small-scale food entrepreneurs, and chefs who are dedicated to making Tucson taste like nowhere else.
Watch the Tucson Festival Of Books’ virtual event with Carolyn Niethammer & Andi Berlin here, then watch Carolyn introduce her new book here. Read an excerpt from A Desert Feasthere, then visit our Facebook page or YouTube page to watch a video series about the book.
More than a history of coveted commodities, the unique story that unfolds in John R. Gust and Jennifer P. Mathews’s new history Sugarcane and Rum is told through the lens of Maya laborers who worked under brutal conditions on small haciendas to harvest sugarcane and produce rum in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.
Read an excerpt from Sugarcane and Rumhere. We are thrilled that Smithsonian Magazine selected Sugarcane and Rum for their weekly reading series!
The saguaro, with its great size and characteristic shape, has become the emblem of the Sonoran Desert of southwestern Arizona and northwestern Mexico. The Saguaro Cactus offers a complete natural history of this enduring cactus, the largest and tallest in the United States. From its role in Sonoran Desert ecology, to its adaptations to the desert climate, to its sacred place in Indigenous culture, this book offers a definitive source on a distinguished desert plant.
Read an excerpt from The Saguaro Cactushere. Read about a great book release event we hosted for The Saguaro Cactus, back in the pre-covid days, here.
Leafing through documents in the archives could only ever tell historian Nathaniel Morris half of the story he was trying to piece together. He wanted to reconstruct the way in which the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1940 had unfolded in the remote, mountainous Gran Nayar region of western Mexico, and the effects this had had on the identities of its inhabitants. But few of the bandits, teachers, generals, politicians, agronomists or rebel guerrillas active there during that turbulent era left detailed records of their activities. And most of the local population – mostly Indigenous Náayari (Cora), Wixárika (Huichol), O’dam (Tepehuano) and Mexicanero people – had been illiterate, which meant their voices were also largely missing from the documentary record. It was vital, then, for Morris to travel to the Gran Nayar itself, to track down the area’s oldest remaining inhabitants and hear directly from them about how, and why, their forebears (and, in some cases, they themselves) had taken part in the peasant uprisings, military revolts, coups, agrarian reforms and radical cultural projects that swept Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century. These interviews form the core of Morris’ new book, Soldiers, Saints and Shamans, which explores the complex and often conflictive relations between Náayari, Wixárika, O’dam and Mexicanero communities and the revolutionary Mexican state.
Today we share a few of Morris’ photos and extended captions from his fieldwork, which offer insight into the stories and methods that have informed his work.
1: To carry out my research in the Gran Nayar – a region of mountains, canyons, pine forests and scrubland with a scattered population and few paved roads – I had to walk, hike, ride horses, and hitch rides in the backs of pick-up trucks. This sort of travel – often gruelling, sometimes scary, but always eye-opening – enabled me to track down many of the region’s surviving eyewitnesses to the revolution; and it also helped me to understand the diverse landscapes and climates in which they and their forebears have made their lives, and the routes and connections between places and people. The beliefs, practices, and the very ethnic identity of the Náayari, Wixárika, O’dam and Mexicanero peoples is completely tied up with the lands in which they live, which the gods brought into being to replace previous worlds destroyed as part of an ongoing “cosmic battle” between light and darkness, order and chaos, aridity and fertility. The story of this creation is inscribed in the geography of the Gran Nayar, which is strewn with thousands of sites identified with the gods and ancestors and their stories. In the Gran Nayar, land is simultaneously culture, identity, and history.
2: Here you can see the great-grandson of Mariano Mejía – one of the central characters in my book, and the single most powerful man in the whole Gran Nayar during the 1920s – showing me Mejía’s sword. Meeting the relatives of the historical figures I was investigating, hearing the stories that had been passed down within their families, and – as in this case – seeing and even being able to hold artefacts from the Revolutionary era, really helped me to connect to my research. While gathering this oral testimony I lived with Náayari, Wixárika, O’dam, Mexicanero and mestizo families. I ate their food, slept on their floors, learned a little (far too little) of their languages, and listened to their own stories — often sad, sometimes hilarious — of their own lives in the region. And so it became almost a personal quest for me to fill in this gaping hole in our records of the Revolution where the Gran Nayar should’ve been.
3: You can’t understand politics in the Gran Nayar – even today – without understanding local ceremonial practices, such as the Semana Santa (Holy Week) festival pictured here. Religious beliefs, rituals, prayers, fiestas and thanksgivings still permeate every aspect of Náayari, Wixárika, O’dam, and Mexicanero life, from farming and hunting to politics and warfare. And so the Mexican Revolution was locally experienced—and is today remembered—as both a political and a supernatural event: an era of widespread intercommunal and factional conflict, when the still-unfinished agrarian reform that today divides the region was first begun; but also a time when local warlords channelled occult forces to defend their communities from raiders, and when miraculous statues of Catholic saints resisted the attacks of bandits or soldiers, or even took on human form to lead the charge against their enemies. It is natural, then, to find historical narratives of the Mexican Revolution embedded in the modern ceremonial practices of the Gran Nayar’s inhabitants, whether in the form of bandolier-draped dancers demanding gold from village elders in Tuxpan de Bolaños; painted “devils” shouting their allegiance to the Carrancistas, Villistas, or cristeros in Santa Teresa; or glazed-eyed peyote pilgrims in Santa Catarina irreverently yelling “Long live the supreme government!” as they romp around their ritual dance grounds. Many of the political outcomes of the revolution are also conceived of in terms of their effects on local ethno-religious identities.
4: In order to try and really understand the relationship between rituals, politics, and history, I had to try and be an ethnologist as well as a historian. And that meant helping to prepare ritual feasts, dancing, praying, drinking, and in Santa Teresa running laps and fighting other stick-wielding “devils” during Semana Santa – here you can see me in my clay- and ash-painted finest at the climax of that exhausting four-day fiesta. Taking part in, rather than just watching, helped me to understand how local rituals express both collective memories and more far-reaching mythical-historical narratives, all of which have been inflected to some degree by local experiences of the revolution.
5: It wasn’t just strictly religious, Indigenous festivals that I found myself taking part in – here you can see cockfight – which is about as secular an event as it gets – in Huajimic, a mestizo, rather than Indigenous, community in the mountains of Nayarit. Spanish-speaking mestizo people are a minority in Gran Nayar, but make up the majority of the population in Mexico as a whole. For that reason mestizo people born and raised in the Gran Nayar often played key roles in linking the region to the rest of the country, and so have had an influence on the history of the region that belies their limited numbers. During the Revolution, political violence, exile, political manoeuvring by pro-agrarian reform factions, state-promoted shifts from subsistence agriculture to extractive industry, and the arrival of mestizo settlers from elsewhere in Mexico, also transformed a few originally Indigenous communities into mestizo settlements. And so ethnic tensions between mestizos and Indigenous people that have roots in the Revolution continue to shape politics in the Gran Nayar today.
6: As well as interviews and what ethnologists would call ‘participant observation,’ music was also essential to my research in the Gran Nayar. Here you can see a group of Náayari musicians laying down some tunes in the open air just after a fiesta. During the Revolutionary era – and still, to an extent, today – ballads known as ‘corridos’ functioned almost like newspapers in much of rural Mexico, spreading the word about important happenings, the rise and often violent fall of key local leaders, new political movements and much else of interest to a population that was largely illiterate. Today, ballads celebrating—or condemning—the paramount caciques, or telling of important battles, personal tragedies or political victories of the Revolution in the Gran Nayar, endure as popular entertainments during communal fiestas. These songs often contain key details that helped me better piece together not only the local events of the Revolution, but also the ways in which these were perceived and later remembered by the people of the Gran Nayar.
Nathaniel Morris is a historian of modern Mexico. He is currently a Research Fellow at University College London, where he is studying the participation of Indigenous militias in both the Mexican Revolution of 1910-40, and the ‘Drug War’ wracking the country today. Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans is Morris’s first book.
A Marriage Out West is an intimate biographical account of two fascinating figures of twentieth-century archaeology. Frances Theresa Peet Russell, an educator, married Harvard anthropologist Frank Russell in June 1900. They left immediately on a busman’s honeymoon to the Southwest. Their goal was twofold: to travel to an arid environment to quiet Frank’s tuberculosis and to find archaeological sites to support his research.
We have long studied how women overcame economic and social barriers as they strove to be successful anthropologists. We have emphasized the hard work, perseverance, and resilience this required, given the asymmetrical reality in what was always considered the most welcoming of the sciences. Anthropology had its limits to the welcome, of course. Interested in the rise of professorships as a form of professional occupation in America, elsewhere we have looked at how anthropological careers compared to those of women who became professionals in the hard sciences, the natural sciences, sociology, and history, but we have never studied someone who pursued a career in English and philosophy, intentionally leaving anthropology behind. This is one reason Theresa Russell’s story is important.
Like several of our colleagues, we have focused primarily on the careers of women with a passion for anthropology who succeeded. We have used grounded methods to identify their strategies to overcome societal and professional obstacles, generate resources, and find interesting problems to tackle. This is one reason why we have both been fascinated with how women have thrived at disciplinary boundaries and margins, often espousing theories and writing programs that would take years for men to discover and exploit. From these biographies we have discovered patterns that reflect access and participation in American professions as a form of specialized work based on esoteric knowledge. One was that women gained initial recognition by writing popular accounts of their adventures in the field— that is, travelogues— and getting paid well for these works. Theresa employed this option to establish a new scholarly path, but it was not a path to an archaeological career. It is one where anthropological exploratory research was used as the entry into English, philosophy, and psychology. We welcome other scholars to look for similar instances. We are sure they exist.
Also critical for understanding the Russells’ fieldwork were the development of anthropology as a national discipline and the growth of physical anthropology/ anthropometry as a distinct subdivision of the multifaceted endeavor to understand humanity’s development and variability. This involved more than expounding interpretations and developing framing theories. Striving for professional status included demonstrating that anthropology was a natural science, with original data that could be standardized and measured. Frank was concerned with improving anthropometric and osteological techniques, inventing precise measuring tools, and standardizing methodologies as well as with how anthropology would be taught in universities.
When they made their first trip, the Russells had intended to return to Harvard University, where Frank would pursue the institutionalized academic year of teaching and a summer fieldwork schedule. Theresa could continue to study philosophy and have stimulating conversations with her peers. They did not think they would spend the next two years surveying Arizona and participating in ethnographic field work full time. They covered a phenomenal area. Frank estimated that by October 1902, they had traveled 4,000 miles exclusive of train travel each year. The undertaking was comparable to the areas covered by European scholar explorers Adolph Bandelier, who looked for sites in Arizona between 1880 and 1885; and Alphonse Pinart, who searched for sites in 1876, traveling from San Diego to Tucson and around central and southern Arizona. As J. Jefferson Reid and Stephanie Whittlesey discuss in their excellent history of Arizona archaeology, archaeologists in the 1880s and 1890s did not attempt to survey the entire state as they searched for suitable sites. Most men and women worked in a single region each season. This in itself makes Theresa and Frank’s stories memorable.
Nancy J. Parezo is a professor emerita of American Indian studies at the University of Arizona. In addition to teaching at the institution for almost forty years, she was curator of ethnology at the Arizona State Museum and loaned executive to the Arizona Board of Regents. She also participated for ten years in the Smithsonian Institution summer training program in museum anthropology. The author of more than two hundred books and articles, she is currently working through the nine large four-drawer file cabinets that are full of data for more histories of anthropologies and museums, collecting behavior, and Native American repatriation. Her next project documents missionary Henry Voth’s collecting and ethnographic activities among the Hopi and Cheyenne. With her dear friend Don D. Fowler, she is dedicated to honoring the invisible female scholars who helped develop anthropology in the American Southwest.
Don D. Fowler is the Mamie Kleberg Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Historic Preservation, Emeritus, at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR). In 2019 the Don Frazier & Don Fowler Endowed Chair in Archaeology was established at UNR in his honor. His PhD is from the University of Pittsburgh. He has taught anthropology and historic preservation at UNR for forty years. He was a postdoctoral fellow in anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution in 1967–68, a research associate in anthropology for the Smithsonian Institution from 1970 to 2004, a past president of the Society for American Archaeology. He received the SAA’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003 and the Byron Cummings Award from the Arizona Archaeological & Historical Society in 1998, among other honors. He is the author or co-author of dozens of papers and reports on southwestern and Great Basin archaeology and cultural resources management, and, with co-author and great friend Nancy Parezo, publications on the history of European and American archaeology and ethnology.
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