The University of Arizona Press
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.
