Event Category: Public Lecture

Melani Martinez in Tucson

Date: Saturday, November 15, 2025

Time: 9:15–10:30 a.m., MST

Where: Pima County Food Alliance, 77 West Washington Street, Tucson, RSVP requested

Melani Martinez, author of The Molino: A Memoir, will host a conversation about food ways and belonging at the Pima County Food Alliance on November 15, 2025. Martinez will tell the story of her family’s downtown eatery, El Rapido, that operated from 1933 to 2000. Her memoir incorporates her personal experiences of growing up with the family business, weaving a narrative of belonging and transformation through food. The event is free and open to the public, RSVP requested.

About the book:

Set in one of Tucson’s first tamal and tortilla factories, The Molino is a hybrid memoir that reckons with one family’s loss of home, food, and faith. Weaving together history, culture, and Mexican food traditions, Melani Martinez shares the story of her family’s life and work in the heart of their downtown eatery, El Rapido. Opened by Martinez’s great-grandfather, Aurelio Perez, in 1933, El Rapido served tamales and burritos to residents and visitors to Tucson’s historic Barrio Presidio for nearly seventy years.

For the family, the factory that bound them together was known for the giant corn grinder churning behind the scenes—the molino. With clear eyes and warm humor, Martinez documents the work required to prepare food for others, and explores the heartbreaking aftermath of gentrification that forces the multigenerational family business to close its doors. The Molino is also Martinez’s personal story—that of a young Tucsonense coming of age in the 1980s and ’90s. As a young woman she rejects the work in her father’s popular kitchen, but when the business closes, her world shifts and the family disbands. When she finds her way back home, the tortillería’s iconic mural provides a gateway into history and ruin, ancestry and sacrifice, industrial myth and artistic incarnation—revealing a sacred presence still alive in Tucson. A must-read for foodies, history lovers, and anyone searching for spiritual truth in the desert, this is a story of belonging and transformation in the borderlands.

Melani Martinez at the Presidio State Park and Museum in Tubac, AZ

Date: Saturday, December 27, 2025

Time: 2-3 p.m., MST

Where: Tubac Presidio State Historic Park and Museum, 1 Burruel Street, Tubac, AZ

Registration: Tickets are $15

Melani Martinez, author of The Molino: A Memoir, shares the story of her family’s 70-year-old tamal and tortilla factory, revealing how food anchors community and preserves cultural identity in the desert borderlands. This event takes place at the Tubac Presidio State Historic Park and Museum. Martinez discusses the compelling story of belonging, transformation, and the sacred work of nourishing others in Southern Arizona’s changing landscape. This event requires purchase of tickets which cost $15.

About the book:

Set in one of Tucson’s first tamal and tortilla factories, The Molino is a hybrid memoir that reckons with one family’s loss of home, food, and faith. Weaving together history, culture, and Mexican food traditions, Melani Martinez shares the story of her family’s life and work in the heart of their downtown eatery, El Rapido. Opened by Martinez’s great-grandfather, Aurelio Perez, in 1933, El Rapido served tamales and burritos to residents and visitors to Tucson’s historic Barrio Presidio for nearly seventy years.

For the family, the factory that bound them together was known for the giant corn grinder churning behind the scenes—the molino. With clear eyes and warm humor, Martinez documents the work required to prepare food for others, and explores the heartbreaking aftermath of gentrification that forces the multigenerational family business to close its doors. The Molino is also Martinez’s personal story—that of a young Tucsonense coming of age in the 1980s and ’90s. As a young woman she rejects the work in her father’s popular kitchen, but when the business closes, her world shifts and the family disbands. When she finds her way back home, the tortillería’s iconic mural provides a gateway into history and ruin, ancestry and sacrifice, industrial myth and artistic incarnation—revealing a sacred presence still alive in Tucson. A must-read for foodies, history lovers, and anyone searching for spiritual truth in the desert, this is a story of belonging and transformation in the borderlands.

Michael Chiago at Tucson Meet Yourself

Date: Friday, Saturday and Sunday, October 17-19, 2025

Time: 11 a.m. – 5 p.m., MST

Where: Tucson Meet Yourself, Pennington Street,  Tucson, AZ

Michael Chiago, Sr. is a featured folk artist at Tucson Meet Yourself: A Folklife Festival, October 17-19, 2025. He will be painting at the Folk Arts area on Pennington Street. Chiago is co-author with Amadeo M. Rea of Michael Chiago: O’odham Lifeways Through Art. Chiago is a Tohono O’odham/Pima Maricopa watercolor artist and illustrator. He was born in the Kohatk Village on the Tohono O’odham reservation in Arizona. He performed as an Indian fancy dancer at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Chiago also served in the United States Marines in Vietnam. Many of Chiago’s paintings provide a glimpse into the traditions of the O’odham, based in part on his recollections of growing up on the reservation, as well as the stories told by his tribal elders.

About the book:

Michael Chiago: O’odham Lifeways Through Art offers an artistic depiction of O’odham lifeways through the paintings of internationally acclaimed O’odham artist Michael Chiago Sr. Ethnobiologist Amadeo M. Rea collaborated with the artist to describe the paintings in accompanying text, making this unique book a vital resource for cultural understanding and preservation. A joint effort in seeing, this work explores how the artist sees and interprets his culture through his art.

A wide array of Chiago’s paintings are represented in this book, illustrating past and present Akimel O’odham and Tohono O’odham culture. The paintings show the lives and traditions of O’odham people from both the artist’s parents’ and grandparents’ generations and today. The paintings demonstrate the colonial Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American influences on O’odham culture throughout the decades, and the text explains how wells and windmills, schools, border walls, and nonnative crops have brought about significant change in O’odham life.

 

“Frontera Madre(hood)” Authors in Las Cruces

Date: Tuesday, October 21, 2025

Time: 5:30 pm, MDT

Where: The Bleachers, Devasthali Hall, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces

Editors Cynthia Bejarano and Maria Cristina Morales will read from their book, Frontera Madre(hood): Brown Mothers Challenging Oppression and Transborder Violence at the U.S.-Mexico Border. The reading will be followed by a discussion and audience Q & A. This event is free and open to the public, and it is sponsored by the New Mexico State University Art Museum. More information is available at the New Mexico State University website.

About the book:

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

Thirty contributors discuss their lived experiences, research, or community work challenging multiple layers of oppression, including militarization of the border, border security propaganda, feminicides, drug war and colonial violence, grieving and loss of a child, challenges and forms of resistance by Indigenous mothers, working mothers in maquiladoras, queer mothering, academia and motherhood, and institutional barriers by government systems to access affordable health care and environmental justice. Also central to this collection are questions on how migration and detention restructure forms of mothering. Overall, this collection encapsulates how mothering is shaped by the geopolitics of border zones, which also transcends biological, sociological, or cultural and gendered tropes regarding ideas of motherhood, who can mother, and what mothering personifies.

Kimberly Blaeser in New York City

Date: Saturday, October 18, 2025

Time: 11:30 a.m., EST

Place: Kray Hall, Poet’s House, 10 River Terrace, New York, NY 10282

Kimbery Blaeser, author of Ancient Light: Poems, joins Chris Hoshnic and Elise Paschen at the panel discussion “Translational Migrations: Indigenous Languages and Bilingual Poetics” at Kray Hall in New York City. This Poet’s House Indigenous Poetics forum is free and open to the public. Blaeser is a former Wisconsin Poet Laureate and founding director of In-Na-Po, Indigenous Nations Poets.

About the book:

Elegiac and powerful, Ancient Light uses lyric, narrative, and concrete poems to give voice to some of the most pressing ecological and social issues of our time.

With vision and resilience, Kimberly Blaeser’s poetry layers together past, present, and futures. Against a backdrop of pandemic loss and injustice, MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women), hidden graves at Native American boarding schools, and destructive environmental practices, Blaeser’s innovative poems trace pathways of kinship, healing, and renewal. They celebrate the solace of natural spaces through sense-laden geo-poetry and picto-poems. With an Anishinaabe sensibility, her words and images invoke an ancient belonging and voice the deep relatedness she experiences in her familiar watery regions of Minnesota.

Eric Hoenes del Pinal at University of Nevada, Reno

When: Tuesday, October 7, 2025

Time: 4 p.m., MDT

Place: Higginbotham Auditorium in the School of Journalism, University of Nevada, 1664 N. Virginia Street, Reno

Eric Hoenes del Pinal, author of Guarded by Two Jaguars: A Catholic Parish Divided by Language and Faith, will talk about his book at the annual LJ and Linda Kutten Religious Studies Lecture. The event is sponsored by the University of Nevada’s Department of Anthropology. Pinal’s work focuses on the intersections of language, religion, and culture in Latin America. The talk is free and open to the public, and it will be held in the Higginbotham Auditorium in the School of Journalism with a catered reception to follow.

About the book:

In Guarded by Two Jaguars, Eric Hoenes del Pinal tells the story of this dramatic split and in so doing addresses the role that language and gesture have played in the construction of religious identity. Drawing on a range of methods from linguistic and cultural anthropology, the author examines how the introduction of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement in the parish produced a series of debates between parishioners that illustrate the fundamentally polyvocal nature of Catholic Christianity. This work examines how intergroup differences are produced through dialogue, contestation, and critique. It shows how people’s religious affiliations are articulated not in isolation but through interaction with each other.

Chloe Garcia Roberts at Harvard Book Store

Date: Thursday, November 7, 2025

Time: 7 p.m., EST

Where: Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA

Chloe Garcia Roberts translated Homero Aridjis’s Carne de Dios: A Novel, and will celebrate the publication of the novel in English at Harvard Book Store. Through Aridjis’s lyrical prose, vividly translated by Garcia Roberts, we first journey to the mountains of Huautla de Jiménez in 1957, where María Sabina’s veladas—mushroom rituals—draw seekers from across the world forever altering the course of Sabina’s life and the world’s perception of Mexico’s Indigenous traditions. Garcia Roberts is a poet and translator from Spanish and Chinese; and she is deputy editor of the Harvard Review and a lecturer of poetry at MIT. She will be joined by Brad Fox, who will talk about his latest book, Another Bone-Swapping Event.

This event is free and open to the public.

About Carne de Dios:

In the remote mountains of Oaxaca, the Beatniks have arrived.

María Sabina, the renowned Mazatec healer, spends her days in the small town of Huautla de Jiménez selling produce at the market and foraging under the new moon for the sacred mushrooms that grow near her home—her Holy Children, Carne de Dios, or Flesh of God. But her life changes forever when an amateur mycologist from New York, with a cameraman in tow, visits her to experience for himself the mushroom ceremony, or velada, he knows only from whispers in anthropological records. When he publishes an unauthorized article about his experience in LIFE Magazine 1957, the stage is set for an explosive encounter between the burgeoning international counterculture and the woman who became an unwilling icon of the psychedelic revolution.

Celebrate “meXicana Roots and Routes” in Tucson

Date: Wednesday, October 29, 2025

Time: 5:30 p.m.

Place: Arizona Historical Society, 949 E. 2nd St., Tucson, AZ

Celebrate the publication of meXicana Roots and Routes: Listening to People, Places, and Pasts at the Arizona Historical Society in Tucson on Wednesday, October 29!  Join co-editors Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez and Anita Huízar-Hernández, along with other contributors who will participate in a panel discussion about the book.

Contributors Christine Marin, Lillian Gorman, and Gloria Holguín Cuádraz will also be on the panel. David Turpie, Vice President of Publications at the Arizona Historical Society and Katherine Morrissey, UA Professor of History will also participate. After the panel discussion, enjoy a celebratory reception for this inaugural book in the Arizona Crossroads Series. The event is free and open to the public.

About the book:

Community voices are often an underrepresented aspect of our historical and cultural knowledge of the U.S. Southwest. In this collection, established and emerging scholars draw upon their rootedness in the U.S. Southwest and U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The meXicana contributors use personal and scholarly inquiry to discuss what it means to cultivate spaces of belonging, navigate language policies, and explore and excavate silences in various spaces, among other important themes.

From the recruitment of Latinas for the U.S. Benito Juárez Squadron in World War II, to the early twentieth-century development of bilingual education in Arizona, to new and insightful analyses of Bracero Program participants and their families, the book details little-known oral histories and archival material to present a rich account of lives along the border with emphasis on women and the working class.

About the Arizona Crossroads series:

Throughout its history, Arizona has long served as a crossroads between Native peoples, settler colonists, and immigrants from around the world. It has been a contested site among peoples, nations, and empires; it is also a place where events, decisions, and struggles have had far-reaching consequences beyond its shifting borders. As the series title suggests, we welcome books that deepen our understanding of Arizona as a diverse crossroads and meeting ground within broad national and transnational contexts, whether topical, thematic, or geographic (the region, the nation, the borderlands).

Open to any topic within any time period of Arizona history, the series will publish scholarship that is cutting-edge and innovative, yet generally accessible and readable to an educated general audience. We are open to a variety of book formats: monographs, multi-authored works, and edited collections, as well as broader more synthetic works. Interdisciplinary projects that engage the past are encouraged.

Ted Fleming at Tumamoc Hill in Tucson

Date: Wednesday, February 11, 2026

Time: 5:30 p.m., MST

Where: Tumamoc Hill Boathouse, 1675 W Anklam Rd, Tucson

For birdwatchers in the Sonoran desert, hummingbirds are the stars of the show. See beautiful photographs of birds, bats, and the flowers that they pollinate. Ted Fleming will speak about his book, Birds, Bats, and Blooms: The Coevolution of Vertebrate Pollinators and Their Plants. Fleming spent thirty-nine years in academia at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and the University of Miami, teaching ecology courses and conducting research on tropical rodent populations and plant-visiting bats and their food plants in Panama, Costa Rica, Australia, Mexico, and Arizona. He will be in conversation with Tucson bee expert, Steven Buchmann.

This talk will be held at the boathouse, at the base of Tumamoc Hill. The event is presented by Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, The University of Arizona Press, and The Southwest Center, and is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase, and the author will be available for signing following the talk. Reserve your spot here (not required but helps us know how many people to expect).

About the book:

Vertebrate pollinators like bats and birds are keystone species of the Sonoran Desert. Biologist Theodore H. Fleming uses these species—found in the desert around his home—to address two big questions dealing with the evolution of life on Earth: How did these animals evolve, and how did they coevolve with their food plants?

A deeply thoughtful and researched dive into evolutionary history, Birds, Bats, and Blooms offers an engaging trip across evolutionary trajectories as it discusses nectar-feeding birds and bats and their coevolution as pollinators with flowering plants. The primary focus is on New World birds such as hummingbirds and their chiropteran counterparts (nectar-feeding bats in the family Phyllostomidae). It also discusses their Old World ecological counterparts, including sunbirds, honeyeaters, lorikeets, and nectar-feeding bats in the Pteropodidae family. Fleming also addresses the conservation status of these beautiful animals.

 

Cancelled: John Schaefer at Tumamoc Hill in Tucson

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED–WE HOPE TO RESCHEDULE

Date: Wednesday, November 12, 2025

Time: 6 p.m., MST

Where: Tumamoc Hill Boathouse, 1675 W Anklam Rd, Tucson

Go behind the scenes at the University of Arizona with John P. Schaefer, former president of the U of A. In this conversation about his new book, A Chance to Make a Difference: A Memoir, find out how Schaefer’s passion for photography and conservation seamlessly coexisted with his pursuit of academic excellence. He will also tell stories of the cutthroat competition that is birdwatching in Tucson and explain why Arizona has a longer bird checklist than any other landlocked state. He will be in conversation with Ken Lamberton, author of Chasing Arizona.

This event is also part of our celebration of University Press Week, November 10-14.

This talk will be held at the boathouse, at the base of Tumamoc Hill. The event is presented by Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, The University of Arizona Press, and The Southwest Center, and is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase, and the author will be available for signing following the talk. Reserve your spot here (not required but helps us know how many people to expect).

About the book:

John P. Schaefer was only thirty-six years old when he assumed the role of fifteenth president of the University of Arizona in 1971. The son of hardworking German immigrants, Schaefer grew up in Queens, New York, where childhood centered on sports, academics, and the great outdoors.

Earning a PhD in chemistry in 1958, Dr. Schaefer’s career skyrocketed through the ranks of academia, moving him from junior faculty to university president in a mere decade. As president, he led the University of Arizona through a transformational period of growth and is credited with securing the university’s status as a top-tier research institution.

A Chance to Make a Difference recounts poignant, eye-opening, and often humorous stories from childhood to presidency, revealing the characteristics of an inspiring university leader.

 

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