Field Notes: Excavations of Paquimé’s Site 204

October 22, 2020

By Paul Minnis and Michael Whalen

Our research in northwestern Chihuahua focused on the area around the famous and important site of Paquimé (or Casas Grandes), which was most influential during the Medio Period, AD 1200–1450 (give or take a few decades either way). Over the past two decades, we directed multiple field projects in the region. At first, we conducted surveys, systematically walking over an area to record whatever archaeological remains were observable. Then we transitioned to the excavation of a range of sites in an attempt to understand how the Paquimé-dominated society was organized and when it dated to, among other questions.

One of the most important sites we studied—Site 204—is located west of Paquimé in a tributary drainage. We selected this site because it was one of the two largest Medio Period sites near Paquimé, so we could compare it with the small villages we studied at one end of a continuum of size and the premier and largest site, Paquimé, at the other extreme.

1a. before excavation

Image 1a: Site 204 is located in a small valley that also has a large number of Medio Period villages. The atalaya is a feature on a hilltop that probably was a shrine and communication point visible from Cerro Moctezuma, which is just west of Paquimé. Cerro Moctezuma was probably one of the major shrines in the local area.

1b. before excavation

Image 1b: Site 204 has three “mounds” that are the remains of adobe room blocks that have decayed over the centuries into piles of dirt. There are three mounds for a total of about two hundred rooms. In addition, this site has two large ritual roasting pits and a ball court. Like nearly all Medio Period sites, the room blocks have been severely looted.

2 first day

Image 2: The first day of excavation is always exciting and, in a way, terrifying. Questions go through your mind: What is below the ground, what will you find, or did you start in the best place to excavate?

3a. excavated rooms
3b. excavated rooms

Image 3a & 3b: Excavating using a precise grid system, you slowly find walls and outline rooms. Then you remove the fill in the room in layers, carefully screening the dirt so as not to miss small artifacts. Unfortunately, much of each room has been looted, which mixes the artifacts. Finally, there’s the reward: the excavation of the floor and its features such as hearths and pits. You are not actually done after excavating, mapping, and photographing the rooms: the area below the room is excavated to look for evidence of earlier occupation.

3c. ball court trench

Image 3c: Ball courts were important locations of community events. Site 204 has one ball court that had been dug into the ground forming an I-shape. We also excavated a trench across the ball court.

3d. hillside fields

Image 3d: Not all archaeological features are visually interesting or obvious. The faint lines of rocks are rock walls (trincheras) that form small farming plots. The hillside above Site 204 is filled with these features, as are many hillslopes in the Casas Grandes region. While most were farmed by small families, a few seem to have been cacique or chief fields, controlled by leaders and worked by the populous.

4a. stairs

Image 4a: Although not common, we excavated several stairs at the six sites we studied.

4b. closed T-door

Image 4b: T-shaped doorways are common and likely had important ritual significance. This example is of a T-shaped doorway that was filled to block it off as part of the room’s renovation.

4c. ritual room

Image 4c: Most rooms at sites in the Casas Grandes region appear to have been used as domestic space where people lived their daily lives. We did excavate some that appear to have had ritual use. This room originally had two columns, and some are artifacts. As you can see, the open space between the columns were closed with a later wall. Also present is a T-shaped door at the far end of the room. The many asymmetrical holes in the floor are the bottom of looters’ holes, an ever-present factor in studying Medio Period sites.

4d corn cobs

Image 4d: The value of archaeological remains are not determined by their aesthetic appeal or rarity. These charred corn cobs are not especially beautiful, but they help tell us about how the people lived. There is evidence that important community events that drew people from throughout the Casas Grandes area required massive amount of food for feasts.

4e. stone face

Image 4e: Figures and effigies are common from the Casas Grandes region. While this artifact obviously is a human head, we don’t know what it meant to the ancient peoples of the region.

4f. parrot burial

Image 4f: One of the most remarkable activities was the raising of macaws. This is the only macaw skeleton we found in our excavations. It was in a subfloor pit, probably an offering dedicating the room.

4g. pendant
4h. turquoise

Image 4 G: This pendant may be of a macaw, a parrot, or another bird.

Image 4h: Turquoise is quite rare in Casas Grandes sites, compared to other sites in the U.S. Southwest and northwestern Mexico.

4i. plain ware vessel

Image 4i: This is a reconstructed pot. Although most attention is on the beautiful and iconic Ramos Polychrome ceramic, most clay vessels were plain like this one.

5 lab work

Image 5: Survey and excavation are the best known parts of archaeological research, but at least an equal amount of time is spent in the laboratory analyzing the materials removed during fieldwork.

6 crew friendships

Image 6: One wonderful outcome of being on an archaeological project is that you often develop friendships that last a lifetime . . . literally. This is especially delightful among crews from different countries or regions within a country. Here, one of our crews with members from Mexico, the Unites States, and Canada enjoy a day off visiting the famous cliff dwelling site, Cueva de la Olla, with it enormous granary located in the mountains west of Paquimé.

The Prehispanic Ethnobotany of Paquimé and Its Neighbors is the first large-scale investigation of the prehispanic ethnobotany of this important ancient site and its neighbors. Paul Minnis and Michael Whalen examine ethnobotanical relationships during Medio Period, AD 1200–1450, when Paquimé was at its most influential. Based on two decades of archaeological research, this book examines uses of plants for food, farming strategies, wood use, and anthropogenic ecology. The authors show that the relationships between plants and people are complex, interdependent, and reciprocal. This volume documents ethnobotanical relationships and shows their importance to the development of the Paquimé polity.

Paul E. Minnis is a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author or editor of twelve books and numerous articles. He has been president of the Society of Ethnobiology and treasurer and press editor for the Society for American Archaeology, and he is co-founder of the Southwest Symposium.

Michael E. Whalen is a professor emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tulsa. He has published a series of books, monographs, chapters, and journal articles on Oaxaca, western Texas, and northwestern Chihuahua. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society.


All images in the post are copyright the authors.

University Press Week: Read. Think. Act.

October 7, 2019

According to Publisher’s Weekly, this year’s theme for University Press Week is, Read. Think. Act.

From Sunday, November 3 through Saturday, November 9, the Association of University Presses encourages readers to dive into publications about the issues that affect our present and future.

The theme, the AUPresses said in its statement, is timely in that “many citizens around the globe continue to engage in important debates that will influence vital decision-making in the months ahead; in fact, this year’s UP Week will begin exactly one year to the day before the 2020 Election Day in the U.S.” The organization added: “AUPresses members worldwide seek to encourage people to read the latest peer-reviewed publications about issues that affect our present and future—from politics to economics to climate change to race relations and more—and to better understand academic presses’ important contribution to these vital areas of concern.”

UA Press Director Kathryn Conrad, who currently serves as president of the Association of University Presses, said this in the same statement:

“Many of us choose to work for university presses because we believe in the UP mission of bringing the latest research and ideas to diverse audiences of readers, [and] the success of recent university press books such as White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo (Beacon Press) and Cyberwar by Kathleen Hall Jamieson (Oxford University Press) make it clear that there is a hunger for these books,” Kathryn Conrad, AUPresses president and director of the University of Arizona Press, said in a statement “In the last few years many people have found it difficult to have effective conversations about the most serious and important issues facing our communities, nations, and world. We hope that by encouraging readers to explore university press works on topics that affect everyone—and to reflect on their reading—our publications might help stimulate positive conversations and actions.”

To kick off your celebration, AUPresses put together a reading list from all of its membership that you can download and share. Recommended from the UA Press is a new book edited by Thomas E. Sheridan and Randal H. McGuire, The Border and Its Bodies.

The Border and Its Bodies examines the impact of migration from Central America and México to the United States on the most basic social unit possible: the human body. It explores the terrible toll migration takes on the bodies of migrants—those who cross the border and those who die along the way—and discusses the treatment of those bodies after their remains are discovered in the desert.

Read. Think. Act.

Kathryn Conrad Begins Term as President of AUPresses

June 26, 2019

Kathryn Conrad, director of the University of Arizona Press, assumed the presidency of the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) on June 12, 2019, during the Association’s Annual Meeting. Conrad was preceded by Jennifer Crewe, associate provost and director of Columbia University Press.

In her inaugural address, Conrad commended university presses for working “to advance scholarship, to preserve cultural heritage, and to build the scholarly record.” Read Conrad’s full remarks.

Conrad began her publishing career as an editorial assistant for both Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill and Houghton-Mifflin’s Best American Short Stories, an editor for River Styx—a literary magazine based in St. Louis—and a typesetter. She joined the marketing department of the University of Missouri Press in 1989, where she worked as advertising manager, promotion manager, and finally assistant marketing manager. She moved to Tucson in 1995 as the marketing and sales manager of the University of Arizona Press and served as its interim director, while continuing in her marketing and sales duties, for four years before her appointment as director in 2012.

The leader of a university press that reports to its university’s library—as do 20 percent of the Association’s member presses—Conrad speaks and writes frequently on the synergies that academic libraries and scholarly presses share. In addition, she earned a master’s degree in information and library sciences (MALIS) from the University of Arizona last year.

Conrad has advanced the work of the AUPresses community in many volunteer capacities. She served on the Association’s Board of Directors from 2002-2005 and also for three, multi-year terms on the Marketing Committee, including a stint as its chair. She has been a member and chair of the Library Relations Committee and has served on the Nominating and Program Committees and the University Press Week Task Force.

As a longtime leader within the Association, President Conrad offered her special thanks at the Detroit conference to all volunteers who will lead and serve AUPresses committees this year, including a new Equity, Justice, and Inclusion Committee.

She also welcomed all newcomers to the conference and profession. “The university press of the future may not look like the university press of today, but it will keep quality and expertise at its core,” she concluded. “I have a lot left to learn about publishing, and I expect to learn it from you. You are the future of AUPresses.”

About the 2019-2020 AUPresses Board of Directors

Other AUPresses leadership changes for 2019-2020 include:

  • Treasurer Jean Kim, Stanford University, took office, as Robbie Dircks, University of North Carolina Press, wrapped up his 2018-2019 term.
  • Niko Pfund, president of Oxford University Press USA, was chosen as President-Elect.
  • Alice Ennis, chief financial officer of University of Illinois Press, was named Treasurer-Elect.
  • New board members began three-year terms: Mary C. Francis, editorial director of the University of Michigan Press/Michigan Publishing, and Lara Mainville, director of the University of Ottawa Press.
  • Past president Nicole Mitchell, director of the University of Washington Press; past treasurer Nadine Buckland, finance manager of University of West Indies Press; John Donatich, director of Yale University Press; and Donna Shear, director of the University of Nebraska Press concluded their terms on the board as the Association thanked them for their dedicated service.

About the Association

The Association of University Presses is an organization of 150+ international nonprofit scholarly publishers. Since 1937, the Association of University Presses has advanced the essential role of a global community of publishers whose mission is to ensure academic excellence and cultivate knowledge. The Association holds integrity, diversity, stewardship, and intellectual freedom as core values. AUPresses members are active across many scholarly disciplines, including the humanities, arts, and sciences, publish significant regional and literary work, and are innovators in the world of digital publishing.

Five Questions for Amber Rose González, Felicia ‘Fe’ Montes, and Nadia Zepeda

March 18, 2024

Founded in 1997, Mujeres de Maiz (MdM) is an Indigenous Xicana–led spiritual artivist organization and movement by and for women and feminists of color. Chronicling its quarter-century-long herstory, editors Amber Rose González, Felicia ‘Fe’ Montes, and Nadia Zepeda weave together diverse stories with attention to their larger sociopolitical contexts. Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento crosses conventional genre boundaries through the inclusion of poetry, visual art, testimonios, and essays.

What made you want write a book about the Mujeres de Maiz movement?

Nadia: We all saw the importance of documenting the work of Mujeres de Maiz. All three of us were working with Mujeres de Maiz in some capacity as well as finishing our thesis and dissertations about the work. We also wanted to highlight other folk who were writing about Mujeres de Maiz in academic spaces. It made sense to weave together this collective history and also highlight and elevate the art and writing that has been produced. The task of documenting Mujeres de Maiz was a big one because we wanted to encompass as many elements of the collective as possible. This meant highlighting the work of early members through testimonies, featuring the work in the zines that have been part of the collective since its inception, and incorporating the art and performances that make Mujeres de Maiz. 

Fe: From the very beginning of Mujeres de Maiz we knew we were doing something special. There was an energy, a spark, a connection, emotions, love, and what felt like a change in our DNA. We knew that we had to document it, whether it was through video, writing, or telling our stories in the same traditions that our women of color predecessors had. The book is our story, our documentation of our herstory, and the femmifestation of our prayer and of prophecy. We see it as our own codex. 

How do the people of Mujeres de Maiz bring Indigenous systems of communalism and spirituality to today’s urban spaces?
Amber: Mujeres de Maiz is an Indigenous Xicana/x-led organization and movement with many of the individuals belonging to/having heritage within different nations that span the continent. As feminists, cultural bearers, artists, activists, teachers, parents, etc., we bring many overlapping worldviews, spiritual practices, and ways of being, teaching, and learning into the spaces we create. Spirituality is a part of everything we do!

Why does the book include visual art as well as text?
Amber: Mujeres de Maiz is a multidisciplinary, multimedia spiritual artivist collective. Many of the artivists cross artistic genres, whether written or visual. The written work in the book includes testimonios or life writing, academic essays, and poetry, with many authors blending prose, theory, and poetic expression. This hybrid approach that breaks with dominant writing conventions (borders), is part of a long tradition of feminist of color writing. Visual art is equally important in the documentation of MdM’s herstory. The combination of the written and the visual to tell an epic story is also part of a centuries-old Mesoamerican tradition. This book is our present-day Xicana/x amoxtli, our codex.

Why is maiz important to Chicanas?
Fe: Maiz is our sacred mother—it is our creation story, our sustenance, our prayer, our lineage, and our direct connection to the land.

What is your next project?
Amber: We plan to create a suite of teacher resources to accompany the book that will be free and available on our website. We’ve discussed a possible second book that will feature some of the cultural production of MdM artivists and additional essays and testimonios that we either didn’t have space for or were otherwise unable to secure for the first project. We’ve also talked about an MdM archive project. We look forward to translating the book into Spanish. 
***

Amber Rose González is a queer Apachicana born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley, California, and ancestrally rooted in New Mexico and Jalisco. She is a professor of ethnic studies at Fullerton College, a writer-researcher-organizer with Mujeres de Maiz, and a co-author and editor of the open-access textbook New Directions in Chicanx and Latinx Studies.

Felicia “Fe” Montes is a Chicana Indigenous artist based in Los Angeles. Montes is a multimedia artist, poet, performer, educator, professor, and emcee.

Nadia Zepeda is an assistant professor in the Department of Chicana/o Studies at California State University, Fullerton. Through collaborative and community-based research, she traces the genealogy of healing justice in Chicana/x feminist organizing.

March 13, 2024

Thank you to everyone who made the 2024 Tucson Festival of Books another spectacular celebration of literacy, books, and authors! We are grateful to the authors who shared their time and work, our staff who made our booth so special, the volunteers who work behind the scenes to make it all happen, and our community who showed up to support the Press and our authors.

We’re continuing the celebration for just a few more days by offering a 35% discount off all books when you use code AZTFB24 on our website.

Here are just a few highlights from the weekend:

Bennu 3-D author Carina A. Bennett, Catherine W.V. Wolner, and Dante S. Lauretta signing copies of their book.
University of Arizona Press staff Elizabeth Wilder, Cameron Louie, Leigh McDonald, and Anissa Suazo get ready for the day.
Melissa L. Sevigny, Shelby Tisdale, and Marie Buck before their panel on the National Parks stage.
Carolyn Niethammer and staff member Leigh McDonald visit in our booth.
Daisy Ocampo and Simon Ortiz sign books in our booth.
Reyes Ramirez and Tim Z. Hernandez signing books before their panels.
Ricardo Báez, Diego Báez, and Sara Báez during Diego’s signing in our tent.
William L. Bird Jr. and staff member Kristen Buckles near our booth.
Diane Dittemore and staff member Alana Enriquez during Diane’s signing in our booth.
A. Thomas Cole and Shelby Tisdale sign copies of their books in our booth.
Stephen J. Pyne and Tom Zoellner in our booth.

Excerpt from “Central American Counterpoetics”

March 12, 2024

Connecting past and present, Central American Counterpoetics proposes the concepts of rememory and counterpoetics as decolonial tools for studying the art, popular culture, literature music, and healing practices of Central America and the diaspora in the United States.

Author Karina Alma offers a systemic method and artistic mode for unpacking social and political memory formation that resists dominant histories. Central American Counterpoetics responds to political repression through acts of creativity that prioritize the well-being of anticolonial communities. Building on Toni Morrison’s theory of rememory, the volume examines the concept as an embodied experience of a sensory place and time lived in the here and now. By employing primary sources of image and word, interviews of creatives, and a critical self-reflection as a Salvadoran immigrant woman in academia, Alma’s research breaks ground in subject matter and methods by considering cultural and historical ties across countries, regions, and traditions. The diverse creatives included explore critical perspectives on topics such as immigration, forced assimilation, maternal love, gender violence, community arts, and decolonization. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

This story is necessary to understand the dimension of exploitation and epistemic violence enacted by United Statesian men who gazed upon Central America as an opportunity to amass wealth. This is also a difficult story to tell because it means processing how people from the Global North exploited a pair of Salvadoran siblings at the close of the nineteenth century. There are no counterpoetics in their story. The fiction of intellectual, moral, racial, and cultural superiority of Euro/Americans plays into my research of another fabrication, that of the microcephalic Salvadoran “Aztec” siblings, Maximo and Bartola. The guardian/owner exhibited the siblings throughout the United States and Europe in the mid- to late 1800s. Their compelling story, fictitious and real, resonates with the Central American humanish as a (neo)colonial construction. Societies influenced by eugenics enslaved, trafficked, legally violated, measured, probed, and categorized the children between human and animal. I posit that their origin story as Indigenous Central American, their small stature, and microcephaly enabled the moral ease of Euro/American owners, men of medicine, science, and visitors to take part in the children’s exploitation. What matters in telling their story is the question of honoring Maximo and Bartola’s lives and asking whether U.S. Central Americans can welcome them as one of the earliest examples of Salvadoran immigrants in the U.S. diaspora.

Viewing Central America/ns within the economic realm rather than the epistemological, social, and cultural has justified historical violences on them. Such is the example of the famed expeditions of John Lloyd Stephens, driven to travel throughout the isthmus by anthropological and economic interests. Stephens states: “The reader is perhaps curious to know how old cities sell in Central America. . . . I was to pay fifty dollars for Copán. There was never any difficulty about price.” The quote shows the historical treatment of Central America/ns as sites of zero internal valuation. If American and European travelers could buy objects, artifacts, and sacred sites at a pittance according to the dominating culture, it is because of the elitist and racist idea that rural, Indigenous, and so-called common people lack knowledge and self-worth.

The Global North racial capitalists see material cultures within the logics of commodities. Even academic and trained professionals that critique American, British, and other (neo)colonial ventures underpin supposed Central American ignorance and American cunning encapsulated in the perspective that the “negative view of ‘primitive’ Hondurans was . . . echoed by nearly every visitor to Honduras. Visitors derided the people’s ignorance, although many arrived precisely to take advantage of that ignorance.” This claim by Alison Acker aims to condemn the exploitative practices of Global North tourists, anthropologists, and so forth. However, the statement ends up affirming the idea that Hondurans are ignorant. Neoliberal critiques rarely account for the internal stratifications by which the neocolonial Criollo governs through a hierarchical social order that sells out its rural, Indigenous, Black, and economically impoverished populations—their lands, bodies, labor, wares, resources, and cultural arts—to American and European investors. Transborder elites hold an attitude of entitlement, of the right to own everything, shown for example by a visiting British foreign secretary speaking on Honduras in 1854. He recommended: “Be careful . . . that you do not lead the people of the country to attach any imaginary value to things they consider at the present as having no value at all.”

Excerpt from “Resistance and Abolition in the Borderlands”

March 7, 2024

While there is a long history of state violence toward immigrants in the United States, the essayists in this interdisciplinary collection tackle head-on the impacts of the Trump administration. Resistance and Abolition in the Borderlands, edited by Arturo J. Aldama and Jessica Ordaz, is an essential reader for those wishing to understand the extent of the damage caused by the Trump era and its impact on Latinx people.

This volume provides a well-argued look at the Trump era. Insightful contributions delve into the impact of Donald Trump’s rhetoric and policies on migrants detained and returned, immigrant children separated from their parents and placed in detention centers, and migrant women subjected to sexual and reproductive abuses, among other timely topics. The chapter authors document a long list in what the book calls “Trump’s Reign of Terror.”

Organized thematically, the book has four sections: The first gathers histories about the Trump years’ roots in a longer history of anti-migration; the second includes essays on artistic and activist responses on the border during the Trump years; the third critiques the normalization of Trump’s rhetoric and actions in popular media and culture; and the fourth envisions the future. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

We write from the traditional territories of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute Nations and start by calling out the cruelty of U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers (over 50 percent of whom are Hispanic identified). They mocked and humiliated the children, many Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous identified, who cried from pain and trauma and terror when they were taken from their parents as part of Trump’s family separation policy, a zero tolerance policy that stole more than 2,500 children from their parents as they attempted to seek asylum in the United States. The 2018 ProPublica article “Listen to Children Who’ve Just Been Separated from Their Parents at the Border” provides leaked audio of ten children sobbing, screaming, and crying out for their “mami and papa.” The children were estimated to be between four and ten years old. It is gut wrenching to listen to the “live trauma” of the children trying to process the terror and fear they felt because of Trump’s zero tolerance policy. Their feelings were violated further by the border patrol officers who mocked their pain and humiliated them. The audio reveals the baritone voice of an officer yelling above the crying of the children. He says, “Well, we have an orchestra here.” “What’s missing is a conductor.”

It might be easy to dismiss the border patrol officer’s traumatizing “humor” as that of a stressed-out officer with poor taste. However, this added cruelty, which makes children into literal abjects, underscores Trump’s presidency, rhetoric, political theater, and policies. His callousness inspired others to enunciate their white supremacist views and actions. To augment further this view of Trump and those who feel “liberated” by his white supremacism, we ask readers to engage with the staff report titled The Trump Administration’s Family Separation Policy: Trauma, Destruction, and Chaos. The report concludes that the family separation policy—which was piloted in El Paso, Texas, in 2017 and was prepared within weeks of President Trump’s inauguration—was “driven by an Administration that was willfully blind to its cruelty” and “determined to go to unthinkable extremes to deliver on political promises,” such as stopping migrants from entering the United States.

As editors of this collection, we also recognize, remember, and mourn the countless queer and trans migrants who were incarcerated, deported, or murdered during the Trump era. As the world learned in December 2020, a transgender asylum seeker from Ecuador named C.O. was held in solitary confinement at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia for six months due to his gender identity. Immigration authorities held C.O. and denied him hormone treatment as well as other medical resources. Honduran migrant Roxsana Hernandez died due to medical neglect and the traumatizing experience of the detention center or “icebox,” so named for its cold temperatures and lack of warm bedding. News reports suggest that when Roxsana was transferred to a private prison, she presented with severe symptoms of “dehydration and pneumonia.” Roxsana passed away shortly afterward in a hospital. Johana Medina
León, like Roxsana, died due to medical neglect and the depraved indifference shown to her medical needs. May we remember their names and lives, and may they rest in power.

Contributors:
Arturo J. Aldama
Rebecca Avalos
Cynthia Bejarano
Tria Blu Wakpa
Renata Carvalho Barreto
Karma R. Chávez
Leo R. Chavez
Jennifer Cullison
Jasmin Lilian Diab
Allison Glover
Jamila Hammami
Alexandria Herrera
Diana J. Lopez
Sergio A. Macías
Cinthya Martinez
Alexis N. Meza
Roberto A. Mónico
José Enrique Navarro
Jessica Ordaz
Eliseo Ortiz
Kiara Padilla
Leslie Quintanilla
J-M Rivera
Heidy Sarabia
Tina Shull
Nishant Upadhyay
Maria Vargas
Antonio Vásquez

Excerpt from “The Space Age Generation”

March 5, 2024

In 1957 Sputnik launched toward the stars. President Kennedy then announced that the United States would send men to the Moon and then return them to Earth. These pivotal moments sparked an unequaled bound forward in human innovation and scientific exploration.

At the heart of this momentous time were the men and women working behind the scenes. Scientists, historians, and astronomers share their memories and contributions from this unparalleled era in essays told in their own words. They are the remarkable generation who witnessed and contributed to some of space science’s most stunning achievements. In The Space Age Generation: Lives and Lessons from the Golden Age of Solar System Exploration, edited by William Sheehan and Klaus R. Brasch, this generation has recorded their memories—their childhood inspirations, their challenges, failures, and triumphs—for future generations. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

It’s not always clear that one has lived in a golden age until after the fact.

In retrospect, the period from the early fifties until the late eighties was a one-off , a golden age of planetary science. Those like us who lived through it were fortunate in belonging to the generation that was the first to explore the solar system and thereby experienced what can never be experienced again. In our childhood the planets were “distant and indistinct discs moving through the night sky, and . . . in old age, . . . places, diverse new worlds in the course of exploration.”

In the fifties, though full of hope, we actually knew very little. Now we know a great deal but—perhaps—are not so full of hope. In the fifties, the far side of the Moon was terra incognita, and speculation as to what might be found there was rife. The surface of Venus, cloaked under perpetually overcast skies, might be steaming jungles like those on Earth during the Carboniferous period. Mercury was believed to rotate in the same period as it revolved around the Sun, and so it was more or less half-baked and half-frozen—except, perhaps, in the “twilit” zone, which alternately enjoyed day and night and where life might have gotten a foothold. Mars of course was more evocative than any of the others. Percival Lowell’s whims of intelligent beings and canals to pump water from the polar ice caps were still remembered, and though they were no longer viewed as likely, it seemed possible, even probable, that lower life forms, like lichens, might exist on the planet. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot was possibly a large solid body floating in the planet’s atmosphere like an egg in a solution of salt and water. Saturn’s main rings—A, B, and C—were well defined, but the finer structure sometimes glimpsed through large telescopes in excellent seeing conditions was largely unknown, as were the forces controlling that structure. Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto were virtually inscrutable, as were the satellites of all the planets except Earth and the asteroids. The Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud were mere theoretical speculations. Theories of the origin of the solar system and of the Earth-Moon system were primitive. Even the origin of lunar craters was hotly debated, as it had been for centuries, with keen adherents to both the meteoritic and the volcanic schools. Whether the solar system we knew was rare or commonplace in the galaxy was unclear, and we had no firm knowledge, one way or the other, of extra-solar planets. Also unknown was whether life might be rare or commonplace, though as a matter of mere statistics (with an estimated one hundred billion suns in the galaxy), it appeared exceedingly unlikely that ours was the only technologically sophisticated civilization. UFOs were all the rage, and at least a few professional astronomers believed that representatives of the planets of other stars (and perhaps even Venus or Mars) might have visited (or be visiting) our planet. The first SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) programs got under way in 1960, dedicated to picking up extraterrestrial communications with radio telescopes, and though if successful, we could undoubtedly learn a great deal from civilizations more advanced than ours, the prospect of disclosing our whereabouts was not entirely without danger.

The fifties—and on into the sixties and beyond—was certainly a golden age for young people interested in science. There was unprecedented support for science education, and funding for scientific research, especially at the new space agency, NASA, shot upward. Blending astronomy, geology, physics, chemistry and biology, the new discipline of planetary science emerged to interpret the enormous amounts of data spacecraft were returning from other worlds, and within planetary science, subspecialities became more and more complex and particularized. Before long, no one person could possibly comprehend the big picture.

It was a golden age, and yet, living through it, it did not always seem like one. The period that saw the culmination of some of our oldest dreams, in which we ventured beyond the Earth, “the cradle of humanity,” in Russian space visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s words, came hard on the heels of a singularly horrific period of human history, which included the hideous stalemate of trench warfare in World War I; Stalin’s collectivization of farming, resulting in the starvation of millions; the gulags; the Nanjing Massacre; Hitler’s war; the Holocaust; and atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ironically, the drive for more deadly weapons of warfare (modified ballistic missiles) became the very means that would allow voyages to the Moon and planets. It was the best and the worst of times, no different from any other except possibly more extreme.

Though the space age had many antecedents, it is usually said to have begun with the launch of Sputnik (i.e., “satellite”) on October 4, 1957. Early achievements include the discovery of Van Allen radiation belts by the U.S. satellite Explorer 1 in 1958 and the three Soviet Lunas of 1959, which were, respectively, the first spacecraft to reach the vicinity of the Moon, the first human object to reach its surface, and the first spacecraft to photograph the hitherto unseen far side of the Moon. The sixties saw the first weather satellite (Tiros), communication satellites (e.g., Telstar 1), men and women in Earth orbit, more probes to the Moon as well as to Venus and Mars, and finally, in President John F. Kennedy’s words, “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”

The backdrop to all this was the Cold War, in which two quasi empires, the democratic and capitalist United States and the autocratic and communist Soviet Union, struggled for global dominance. Politically, space was vital not so much in itself than in the prestige it offered whoever achieved mastery of it first. Each launch was a chance to demonstrate the awesome power of rocket systems to deliver payloads into space, whether these were probes sent to explore the Moon and planets or nuclear warheads intended
for nothing less than the destruction of the Earth. Regardless of these mixed motives, the result was to be a golden age of space exploration, in which humanity first extended its reach into the solar system.

The authors of the present collection of essays are among those who lived during that remarkable era and witnessed, or directly contributed to, its achievements, and now in late middle or old age, they are eager to set down their memories before those fade and are lost to recall forever.

Contributors:
Leo Aerts
Alexander Basilevsky
Klaus Brasch
Clark R. Chapman
Dale P. Cruikshank
William K. Hartmann
William Leatherbarrow
Baerbel Koesters Lucchitta
Yvonne Pendleton
Peter H. Schultz
William Sheehan
Paolo Tanga
Charles A. Wood

TFOB 2024: See you this week at booth #242!

March 4, 2024

Book lovers rejoice: the 2024 Tucson Festival of Books is happening this weekend, March 9th and 10th! As white tents start to pop up on the mall and bibliophiles begin to arrive from all over the world, the University of Arizona Press team is busy getting ready to welcome you to booth #242!

We are thrilled to have a wide variety of authors presenting on panels and signing books at our tent this year. Stop by our booth to browse hundreds of amazing titles and get them signed by the authors. All books will be 25% off during the festival with code AZTFB24, and as always, we’ll have our ever-popular $5 book shelf.

Take a look at the full Tucson Festival of Books schedule to find out where and when you can meet our authors, and come visit them during our booth signings. The lineup is below. We look forward to seeing you this weekend!

Saturday, March 9

10:00 AM: Judith X. Becerra and David Yetman, authors of Elephant Trees, Copales, and Cuajiotes

11:00 AM: Daisy Ocampo, author of Where We Belong

12:00 PM: Simon J. Ortiz, author of Light as Light

12:30 PM: Dante S. Lauretta, Catherine W. V. Wolner & Carina A. Bennett, authors of Bennu 3-D

1:00 PM: Shelby Tisdale & A. Thomas Cole, authors of No Place for a Lady & Restoring the Pitchfork Ranch

2:00 PM: Tim Z. Hernandez & Reyes Ramirez , authors of All They Will Call You & Book of Wanderers

Sunday, March 10

10:00 AM: Diego Báez, author of Yaguareté White

11:00 AM: Diane D. Dittemore, author of Woven from the Center

1:00 PM: Tom Zoellner, author of Rim to River

2:00 PM: Stephen J. Pyne, author of Pyrocene Park

For the full festival schedule, click here.

Author Ken Lamberton Wins Fellowship

March 1, 2024

Ken Lamberton is one of the first recipients of the new Writing Freedom Fellowship. He is the author of several works, including Chasing Arizona, Dry River, and Time of Grace.

Haymarket Books and the Mellon Foundation jointly announced the inaugural cohort for the newly established Writing Freedom Fellowship—a program to support writers of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction impacted by the criminal legal system. Writing Freedom was envisioned and funded by the Mellon Foundation and the Art for Justice Fund, and developed and administered by Haymarket Books.

“This exceptional group of Fellows further reveals the profound literary achievement and vital perspectives of those who have been touched by our country’s carceral system,” said Mellon Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander. “We at Mellon are honored to join Haymarket in driving connection among these voices, galvanizing them in their advocacy, craft, and future work.”

Congratulations Ken!

Read more about the program and see the complete list of 2024 Fellows here.

About the books:

Chasing Arizona takes readers on a yearlong, twenty-thousand-mile joy ride across Arizona during its centennial, racking up more than two hundred points of interest along the way. This book is an adventure story, a tale of Arizona, and a celebration of what makes the state a great place to visit and live. In Dry River, Lamberton takes us on a trek across the land of three nations—the United States, Mexico, and the Tohono O’odham Nation—as he hikes the river’s path from its source and introduces us to people who draw identity from the river—dedicated professionals, hardworking locals, and the author’s own family. Far more than a “prison memoir,” Time of Grace is an intimate and revealing look at relationships—with fellow humans and with the surprising wildlife of the Sonoran Desert, both inside and beyond prison walls.

William L. Bird, Jr. on New Books Network

February 29, 2024

New Books Network “American West” podcast host Daniel Moran interviewed William L. Bird, Jr., author of In the Arms of Saguaros. An essential—and monumental—member of the Sonoran Desert ecosystem, the saguaro cactus has become the quintessential icon of the American West. Bird talks about the “social saguaro.” He explains how, from the botanical explorers of the nineteenth century to the tourism boosters in our own time, saguaros and their images have fulfilled attention-getting needs and expectations. Listen to the podcast on New Books Network, or find on Apple or Spotify.

About the book:

Through text and lavish images, this work explores the saguaro’s growth into a western icon from the early days of the American railroad to the years bracketing World War II, when Sun Belt boosterism hit its zenith and proponents of tourism succeed in moving the saguaro to the center of the promotional frame. This book explores how the growth of tourism brought the saguaro to ever-larger audiences through the proliferation of western-themed imagery on the American roadside. The history of the saguaro’s popular and highly imaginative range points to the current moment in which the saguaro touches us as a global icon in art, fashion, and entertainment.

De Los Angeles Features “When Language Broke Open”

February 28, 2024

De Los Angeles by The Los Angeles Times features When Language Broke Open, An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent , edited by Alan Pelaez Lopez, in “6 books to shake off colonialism and rethink our Latino stories.”

Reviewer Roxsy Lin says, “This anthology reflects on the lives of 45 contributors who generously share their experiences of pain, rejection and humiliation while highlighting their strength, pride and beauty.” The article praises specific contributors to the volume including Álida, a Dominican queer writer and educator, and Louie Ortiz-Fonseca, an Afro-Puerto Rican queer storyteller.

Read the full article here.

About the book:

By exploring themes of memory, care, and futurity, these contributions expand understandings of Blackness in Latin America, the Caribbean, and their U.S.-based diasporas. The volume offers up three central questions: How do queer and/or trans Black writers of Latin American descent address memory? What are the textures of caring, being cared for, and accepting care as Black queer and/or trans people of Latin American descent? And how do queer and trans embodiments help us understand and/or question the past and the present, and construct a Black, queer, and trans future?

Diego Báez Interview in Chicago Review of Books

February 26, 2024

Mananda Chaffa recently interviewed poet Diego Báez, author of Yaguareté White, in an article titled, “A Welcome Displacement: Diego Báez On Memory, Language and Belonging,” in the Chicago Review of Books. The interview delves into his poetry’s complex issues of colonialism, language, culture and identity, as well as familial intimacies related to his young daughter.

In the interview, Báez talks about getting comfortable with unfamiliar language:

The speaker of “Yaguareté White” surely knows more Guaraní than most readers (an admittedly low bar to clear). I thought it would be interesting to open with a speaker who seeks to reassure readers, or who positions himself as sympathetic to readerly frustrations with pronunciation and interpretation, only to subvert that originally accommodating tone in later poems, almost to the point of sharpness or hostility. I’m interested in the ways poetic speakers contradict, undermine, or unsettle their own positions. That aspect of the human condition is just so much more relatable to me.

Read the complete interview here.

About the book:

In Diego Báez’s debut collection, Yaguareté White, English, Spanish, and Guaraní encounter each other through the elusive yet potent figure of the jaguar.

The son of a Paraguayan father and a mother from Pennsylvania, Báez grew up in central Illinois as one of the only brown kids on the block—but that didn’t keep him from feeling like a gringo on family visits to Paraguay. Exploring this contradiction as it weaves through experiences of language, self, and place, Báez revels in showing up the absurdities of empire and chafes at the limits of patrimony, but he always reserves his most trenchant irony for the gaze he turns on himself.

February 23, 2024

The Wall Street Journal featured Woven from the Center: Native Basketry in the Southwest, by Diane Dittemore. Reporter Peter Saenger wrote about how the book relates to the Arizona State Museum’s permanent exhibit, Woven Through Time: American Treasures of Native Basketry and Fiber Art: “Diane D. Dittemore uses the baskets to illustrate an encyclopedic survey of Native American basketry in the U.S. Southwest. The earliest North American baskets are almost 10,000 years old, and basketry often features in Native lore.” Dittemore is the Associate Curator of Ethnological Collections at the Arizona State Museum, located at the University of Arizona. 

About the book:
Woven from the Center presents breathtaking basketry from some of the greatest weavers in the Southwest. Each sandal and mat fragment, each bowl and jar, every water bottle and whimsy is infused with layers of aesthetic, cultural, and historical meanings. This book offers stunning photos and descriptions of woven works from Tohono O’odham, Akimel O’odham, Hopi, Western Apache, Yavapai, Navajo, Pai, Paiute, New Mexico Pueblo, Eastern Apache, Seri, Yaqui, Mayo, and Tarahumara communities.

This richly illustrated volume stands on its own as a definitive look at basketry of the Greater Southwest, including northern Mexico.

“Yaguareté White” Playlist

February 21, 2024

What do Raffi and Pharrell Williams have in common? They’re both on Poet Diego Báez’s Spotify playlist for his collection Yaguareté White!

Báez introduces his musical influences:

Growing up in Bnorm, IL, two genres dominated our household boombox: Christian rock and Paraguayan folk. Also, Kenny G. (Mom was a fan.) The arpa and accordion of polka paraguaya spun almost exclusively on bootleg CDs burned and returned undeclared on flights back from Asunción. Occasionally, cassettes.

Yaguareté White came together, slowly, over the course of 15 years. But the book’s narratives, images, and fables stretch back to my earliest memories: Curled up on the floor of a jet over the Amazon, en route to São Paulo or Buenos Aires, before that fourth and final airborne leg to my father’s home country.

Go to the Largehearted Boy Book Notes series to read more; listen to the music here.

About the book:

In Diego Báez’s debut collection, Yaguareté White, English, Spanish, and Guaraní encounter each other through the elusive yet potent figure of the jaguar.

The son of a Paraguayan father and a mother from Pennsylvania, Báez grew up in central Illinois as one of the only brown kids on the block—but that didn’t keep him from feeling like a gringo on family visits to Paraguay. Exploring this contradiction as it weaves through experiences of language, self, and place, Báez revels in showing up the absurdities of empire and chafes at the limits of patrimony, but he always reserves his most trenchant irony for the gaze he turns on himself.

Five Questions for A. Thomas Cole

February 20, 2024

Restoring the Pitchfork Ranch tells the story of a decades-long habitat restoration project in southwestern New Mexico. Author A. Thomas Cole explains what inspired him and wife Lucinda to turn their retirement into years dedicated to hard work and renewal. The book shares the past and present history of a special ranch south of Silver City. The ranch is home to a rare type of regional wetland, a carbon-capturing sweet spot, a fragile desert grassland ecosystem, archaeological sites, and a critical wildlife corridor in a drought-stricken landscape.

Why did you write this book?

George Orwell identified four reasons for writing a book, one of which is the political purpose of wanting to push the world in a certain direction. We bought the ranch to restore the land and improve it for wildlife and at-risk species to breed, birth and raise their young. Along the way we realized our restoration of the ranch’s near-extinct watercourse, the ciénaga, can help address the climate crisis.

The book uses the captivating history of the ranch as a platform to describe our multiple planetary crises: climate, species extinction, soil depletion and loss, among others, who caused these crises, how they knowingly created it, our government’s complicity and how long this civilization-threatening crisis, the biggest crime in human history, has been known, and the corruption to conceal it.

Why did you and Lucinda decided to retire to the ranch, off-grid, 6 miles from neighbors and an hour from town?

Cinda’s interest is based on her fondness for nature, mine comes from the summer of my eleventh year when my parents took our family to harvest an apple orchard in Oak Creek Canyon, Arizona, and run a fruit market near Slide Rock. I roamed wild-like in the mountains. Running free through the woods set a hook in me I’ve never spit out. During our marriage, we helped out with a number of two-week volunteer restoration trips that were gratifying and offered a template for retirement.

What do you want to accomplish with the book?

The land restoration we’re doing here can be done by anyone, anywhere, on any size property. We all need to team up and take the myriad crises overwhelming the planet seriously, adopt the well-established solutions and take part in fixing the mess we’re in. Congress ignored science when the West was re-settled by Americans and that mistake is being repeated today, caused by the same greed that led to thousands of failed western homesteaders. Despite terrifying weather, fire, and bad environmental news, there is much to be hopeful for because there is so much individuals can do. Solutions are well established. The only thing missing is the political will.

What is your biggest worry?

The rich one percent have many billions invested in fossil fuels that need to remain in the ground, yet they are insisting the Congress they bought and paid for: drill, drill, drill. And we’ve all become so accustomed to convenience that we might not be able to adapt to a different lifestyle: consume less, fly less, eat less meat and a number of “must-do” adjustments. Despite having entered a permanent era of boiling, cauldron-like weather, our preoccupation with fortune, fame, and fashion may cause us to ignore these ecological and biological threats, forestall the pivot from consumption and so-called progress to saving our wounded world.

What is the most important sentence in the book?

This quote:
“By far the most fundamental driver of environmental destruction is the excessive consumption by the wealthy.”
***
A. Thomas Cole spent thirty-two years as a small-town lawyer in Casa Grande, Arizona—in which A.T. Cole successfully defended a dozen murder cases, two of which risked the death penalty, and co-counsel in the largest personal injury jury verdict in Arizona history. For his so-called “retirement,” Cole and his wife Lucinda have been rehabilitating a ranch in southwestern New Mexico, where they focus on protecting wildlife and wildlife habitats, wetland restoration, and carbon sequestration. Their aim is to draw down their carbon use and to encourage others to do the same. Cole once Chaired the Arizona Humanities Council. Restoring the Pitchfork Ranch is A.T. Cole’s first book.

Natasha Varner on Tucson’s Settler History in “Electric Literature”

February 19, 2024

In an essay for Electric Literature, Natasha Varner explores her ancestral ties and Tucson’s settler history from The Castle Apartments, a landmark developed in 1906. Varner’s research sends her to a time when the city was riddled with disease, shedding light on the role the building had in Indigenous dispossession:

“None of the ads mentioned that this health-seeker haven was being built atop Tohono O’odham land, atop Yoeme land. That while Tucson signified a chance at survival to some, its original inhabitants were being forced into ever-dwindling reservations bordering its city limits.”

Read the Essay

About La Raza Cosmética: Beauty, Identity, and Settler Colonialism in Postrevolutionary Mexico:

In the decades following the Mexican Revolution, nation builders, artists, and intellectuals manufactured ideologies that continue to give shape to popular understandings of indigeneity and mestizaje today. Postrevolutionary identity tropes emerged as part of broader efforts to reunify the nation and solve pressing social concerns, including what was posited in the racist rhetoric of the time as the “Indian problem.” Through a complex alchemy of appropriation and erasure, indigeneity was idealized as a relic of the past while mestizaje was positioned as the race of the future. This period of identity formation coincided with a boom in technology that introduced a sudden proliferation of images on the streets and in homes: there were more photographs in newspapers, movie houses cropped up across the country, and printing houses mass-produced calendar art and postcards. La Raza Cosmética traces postrevolutionary identity ideals and debates as they were dispersed to the greater public through emerging visual culture.

***

Natasha Varner is a writer and historian whose work focuses on race, identity, and settler colonialism in Mexico and the United States. She is the recipient of the 2017 Lewis Hanke postdoctoral research award presented by the Conference on Latin American History. In addition to traditional academic pursuits, she is a public scholar who has written for Public Radio International and Jacobin, among other outlets.

February 16, 2024

As everyone returns to their routines after the 2024 Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference, we want to take a moment to express our sincere gratitude to the many authors, editors, contributors, and new friends who spent time at our booth.

If you weren’t able to visit us at the bookfair, there’s still time to order the books we had on display. Get 35% off with discount code AZAWP24 at checkout until 3/10/24.

Check out the photos of the event below!

Inside the Kansas City Convention Center, attendees gather on their way up to the bookfair.
Our booth at the bookfair was a perfect spot to host authors, meet new friends, and share our books.
Juan Martinez signs copies of Extended Stay.
Juan Martinez draws customized creatures as he signs books for AWP attendees.
Assistant Editor, Elizabeth Wilder (left) and Kim Blaeser (right) with her book, Ancient Light, at the Indigenous Nations Poets booth.
Author Diego Báez shows off Yaguareté White, his debut collection of poems.
Author Margarita Pintado Burgos signs copies of Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat, winner of the 2023 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets.
Authors Sergio Troncoso (left) and Alma García (right) display their books.
Author Alma García signs copies of her debut novel, All That Rises.
Author Reyes Ramirez signs copies of The Book of Wanderers.
Authors Reyes Ramirez (left) and Diego Báez (right) swap books!

Mil gracias to everyone who came by to say hello, browse books, and talk with our staff. If you’re an author and you have questions about working with us, please reach out to Elizabeth Wilder.

See you all next year in Los Angeles for AWP 2025!

Excerpt from “Border Economies”

The border between the United States and Mexico is one of the most unique and complex regions of the world. The asymmetry of the border region, together with the profound cultural differences of the two countries, create national controversies around migration, security, and illegal flows of drugs and weapons. The national narratives miss the fact that the 15 million or more people living in the border regions of Mexico and the United States are highly interactive and responsive to conditions on the other side.

Enormous legal cross-border flows of people, goods, and finance are embedded in the region’s history and prompted by the need to respond to new opportunities and challenges that originate on the other side. In Border Economies by James Gerber examines how the interactivity and sensitivity of communities to conditions across the border differentiates them from communities in the interiors of Mexico and the United States. Gerber explains what makes the region not only unique but uniquely interesting. Read an excerpt from the book below.

Permeability is an important feature of the U.S.-Mexico border. It enables the interactions of communities on opposite sides, regardless of migration policies, trade agreements, border walls, or frictions between Washington and Mexico City. Permeability refers to the authorized, constant, bidirectional movement of people, goods, and money across the international boundary. It is what allows the border region to be a unique hybrid space where Mexico’s culture and economy spill into the United States and those of the United States into Mexico. Many residents and businesses on both sides need to cross frequently, if not daily, and their normal routines require them to send and receive goods as well as to provide money and financial assets to the other side. Taken together, the enormous bidirectional flows of people, goods, and finance create a border economy that extends into both countries.

The idea of a peaceful border defined by the interactions of Mexican and U.S. citizens, businesses, and government officials is one part of the story, but an exclusive focus on the positive interactions of residents along the border elides other realities. There are also walls, armed border police, families who lead precarious lives, drug wars, and disturbing acts of violence. Raw sewage periodically spills into shared waterways, while HIV, asthma, diabetes, and other diseases pose public health challenges. It is not hard to paint a distorted and one-sided picture, but the reality of the border is one of a complex mosaic of ethnicities, incomes, social classes, and living conditions. There are difficult problems and challenges but also dynamism, opportunity, and creativity. In addition to the darker elements, both sides offer museums and universities, shopping malls, elegant homes, middle-class suburbs, and gourmet restaurants. In some places, urban areas on the border are graceful examples of cultural hybridity and cooperation across the divides of history and language, but in other places and times, they become examples of misunderstanding, poverty, and threats of violence.

Many people on both sides of the border never cross to the other side. The reasons are various—they are not permitted, they do not want to, or they haven’t enough time or money. But many people do cross, and many of them do so regularly. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2019, there were over 188 million crossings on foot, and in cars, buses, or trains, from south to north. This did not mean that 188 million unique individuals crossed the border, because many people cross daily or weekly, going back and forth to work or school or to visit family. Border crossers take their lives and culture with them when they visit the other side, so Mexico comes to the United States and the United States goes to Mexico. Some observers in both countries fear this exchange will corrupt their nation’s values by turning the border region into a miniature enclave of the country on the other side. Others welcome the influences and see more cultural choices, enrichment for the arts and education, a wider variety of medical services, and new economic opportunities. The perception of the border, like the reality, is not one thing.

The U.S.-Mexico border is perhaps the most traversed in the world. But it is not just people that cross. The United States and Mexico have the second largest trade relationship of any two countries in the world; the largest is trade between the United States and Canada, but only by a relatively small amount. Most of the trade between the United States and its two neighbors crosses the border in trucks and adds to the flow of border crossing. Simultaneously, the flow of goods and people is amplified by the flow of money and finance, including large investments in manufacturing, trade finance, remittances of migrants, tourist dollars, cross-border shopping, the purchase of medical services, and other payments and receipts.

Jesús Rosales featured on Arizona Public Media

February 14, 2024

Jesús Rosales was interviewed on Arizona Public Media about the book he co-edited with Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez: La Plonqui: The Literary Life and Work of Margarita Cota-Cárdenas. The video also features an interview with Margarita Cota-Cárdenas at her 82nd birthday celebration. Cota-Cárdenas was a pioneer in Chicano Studies: the first courses she taught in Chicano literature were in Spanish at Arizona State University. Watch the full video here.

In the interview, Rosales said, “Margarita is part of the Chicano movement writers from the sixties and seventies. I believe she is a pioneer in the sense that she was one of the first writers who introduced courses also at the university level of Chicano writers. She wrote most of her stuff in Spanish and in Spanglish. It was a really challenging writing for her and for the readers as well.”

About the book:

Celebrating more than forty years of creative writing by Chicana author Margarita Cota-Cárdenas, this volume includes critical essays, reflections, interviews, and previously unpublished writing by the author herself to document the lifelong craft and legacy of a pioneering writer in the field.

Nicknamed “La Plonky” by her family after a made-up childhood song, Cota-Cárdenas grew up in California, taught almost exclusively in Arizona, and produced five major works (two novels and three books of poetry) that offer an expansive literary production spanning from the 1960s to today. Her perspectives on Chicana identity, the Chicanx movement, and the sociopolitical climate of Arizona and the larger U.S.-Mexico border region represent a significant contribution to the larger body of Chicanx literature. Additionally, the volume explores her perspectives on issues of gender, sexuality, and identity related to the Chicanx experience over time.

UA Press Wins Three PubWest Design Awards

February 12, 2024

Congratulations to The University of Arizona Press Editing, Design, and Production team: Amanda Krause, Leigh McDonald, and Sara Thaxton! Because of their amazing creativity and dedication to excellence, the team received three awards for book design at The Publishers Association of the West’s (PubWest) 2024 conference.

UA Press designers won gold in the Academic/Reference category for Woven from the Center, Native Basketry in the Southwest by Diane Dittemore. The awards committee noted about Woven from the Center: “Amazing cover! Perfectly on point for the genre. Great design and package all around. Good crossover potential from Academic to trade.”

Judges awarded silver to UA Press in the Adult Trade Book (Non-illustrated) category for Rim to River by Tom Zoellner. Finally, UA Press received bronze in the Academic/Reference/Non-Trade category for When Language Broke Open, edited by Alan Pelaez Lopez.

PubWest is a national trade organization of publishers and associated publishing-related members. The association presents annual design awards for book design, book cover design, and graphic novel design.

TFOB 2024: Book Signings & Panels with Our Authors

February 8, 2024

Join us for the 2024 Tucson Festival of Books on March 9th and 10th! We will be setting up shop on the University of Arizona campus for a weekend of literary fun.

We are thrilled to have a wide variety of authors presenting on panels and signing books in our booth this year. Stop by booth #242 to browse our amazing books and get them signed by the authors below. All books will be 25% off during the festival, and as always, we’ll have our ever-popular $5 book shelf.

Take a look at the schedule below to find out where and when you can meet our authors, or view the complete Tucson Festival of Books schedule. We look forward to seeing you at the festival!

Book Signing Schedule

Saturday, March 9

10:00 AM: Judith X. Becerra, author of Elephant Trees, Copales, and Cuajiotes

11:00 AM: Daisy Ocampo, author of Where We Belong

12:00 PM: Simon J. Ortiz, author of Light as Light

12:30 PM: Dante S. Lauretta, Catherine W. V. Wolner & Carina A. Bennett, authors of Bennu 3-D

1:00 PM: Shelby Tisdale & A. Thomas Cole, authors of No Place for a Lady & Restoring the Pitchfork Ranch

2:00 PM: Tim Z. Hernandez & Reyes Ramirez , authors of All They Will Call You & Book of Wanderers

Sunday, March 10

10:00 AM: Diego Báez, author of Yaguareté White

11:00 AM: Diane D. Dittemore, author of Woven from the Center

1:00 PM: Tom Zoellner, author of Rim to River

2:00 PM: Stephen J. Pyne, author of Pyrocene Park


Panel Schedule – Saturday, March 9th

10:00 AM

Title:Intersections of Verse y Voz
Location:Nuestras Raíces Stage
Date/Time:Saturday, 10:00 am to 11:00 am
Panelists:Mari Herreras, Simon Ortiz, Brandon Som
Moderators:Melo Dominguez
Genres:Nuestras Raices, Poetry
Signing Area:Pima County Public Library/Nuestras Raíces/Craft Tent & Signing Area
Description:Discover the work of these poets with Southwestern roots who explore the intersection of language, identity, and place in their writing.
Title:Unearthing Legacies
Location:WNPA Stage
Date/Time:Saturday, 10:00 am to 11:00 am
Panelists:Melissa Sevigny, Shelby Tisdale
Moderators:Marie Buck
Genres:Nature / Environment
Signing Area:Sales & Signing Area – National Parks
Description:Embark on a captivating journey as you hear the authors tell two remarkable stories. Discover the trailblazing life of Marjorie Ferguson Lambert, a pioneer in southwestern archaeology, and then brace yourself for the daring 1938 expedition of botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter as they braved the treacherous Colorado River. Learn about these untold adventures and resilience of these women that helped shape the American West.
Title:The Wonders of Bennu
Location:Science City – Main Stage
Date/Time:Saturday, 10:00 am to 11:00 am
Panelists:Carina Bennett, Dante Lauretta, Cat Wolner
Moderators:Jennifer Casteix
Genres:Science / Medicine / Technology
Signing Area:Sales & Signing Area – Science City
Description:The authors of “Bennu 3-D” share the story of OSIRIS-REx and Bennu through vivid descriptions and extraordinary photos. Listeners and readers of the book will feel like they are right there exploring along with the scientists.

11:30 AM

Title:Dual Identities in the Americas
Location:Student Union Kiva
Date/Time:Saturday, 11:30 am – 12:30 pm
Panelists:Diego Báez, Manuel López, Reyes Ramirez
Moderators:Estella González
Genres:Poetry
Signing Area:Sales & Signing Area – UA Bookstore, Main Floor
Description:Three experimental poets discuss how their Salvadoran, Paraguayan, and Mexican heritage has impacted their poetry and their lives.

1:00 PM

Title:Restoring Indigenous Heritage
Location:WNPA Stage
Date/Time:Saturday, 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm
Panelists:Daisy Ocampo, Jared Orsi
Moderators:Jacelle Ramon-Sauberan
Genres:Nature / Environment
Signing Area:Sales & Signing Area – National Parks
Description:Join these two insightful authors for a profound discussion as they explore the preservation of the land and its people. Discover the connection between ecological sustainability, spiritual landscapes, and community well-being in a conversation that reaches beyond the border of time and tradition.

2:30

Title:Looking Beyond the Stars
Location:Science City – Main Stage 
Date/Time:Saturday, 2:30 pm – 3:30 pm
Panelists:Dante Lauretta, Aomawa Shields
Moderators:Carmala Garzione
Genres:Science / Medicine / Technology
Signing Area:Sales & Signing Area – Science City
Description:Award-winning space scientists Aomawa Shields and Dante Lauretta sit down with Science Dean Carmala Garzione and share the stories that shaped them to do the extraordinary.

4:00 PM

Title:Nature’s Revival
Location:WNPA Stage 
Date/Time:Saturday, 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Panelists:A. Thomas Cole, Curtis Freese
Moderators:Jessica Moreno
Genres:Nature / Environment
Signing Area:Sales & Signing Area – National Parks
Description:Have you ever wondered how you can help the environment? Listen as these two remarkable individuals, dedicated to ecosystem restoration, share their experiences and inspiration for renewing unique habitats. Discover how we can all contribute to a sustainable and thriving future.

Panel Schedule – Sunday, March 10

10:00 AM

Title:Tales from the Trail
Location:WNPA Stage
Date/Time:Sunday, 10:00 am – 11:00 am
Panelists:Suzanne Roberts, Tom Zoellner
Moderators:Wendy Lotze
Genres:Nature / Environment
Signing Area:Sales & Signing Area – National Parks
Description:Explore the profound journey of these two authors as they share tales of inspiration, contemplation, and realization. Discover how the trails they traveled became more than a physical experience, but a symbolic connection on a path to greater understanding.

11:30 AM

Title:A Celebration of Southwest Poetry
Location:Student Union Kiva
Date/Time:Sunday, 11:30 am – 12:30 pm
Panelists:Tommy Archuleta, Mari Herreras, Simon Ortiz, Brandon Som
Moderators:Gregory McNamee
Genres:Poetry
Signing Area:Sales & Signing Area – UA Bookstore, Main Floor
Description:Today we will celebrating the top works of poetry as judged by the Southwest Books of the Year Award. These four accomplished poets will share the inspiration for their work that is deeply rooted in the Southwest.

1:00 PM

Title:What’s New Latino Poetry
Location:Student Union Kiva
Date/Time:Sunday, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Panelists:Diego Báez, Tim Z. Hernandez, Reyes Ramirez
Moderators:Paola Valenzuela
Genres:Poetry
Signing Area:Sales & Signing Area – UA Bookstore, Main Floor
Description:In this session we will invite three popular poets to discuss their approach to contemporary themes of Latino identity.

2:30 PM

Title:Iconic Southwest Poets in Conversation
Location:Student Union Kiva
Date/Time:Sunday, 2:30 pm – 3:30 pm
Panelists:Simon Ortiz, Ofelia Zepeda
Moderators:Paola Valenzuela
Genres:Poetry
Signing Area:Sales & Signing Area – UA Bookstore, Main Floor
Description:Iconic Indigenous poets Simon J. Ortiz and Ofelia Zepeda discuss their poetic journeys.
Title:Distinctively Arizona
Location:UA Library/Special Collections
Date/Time:Sunday, 2:30 pm – 3:30 pm
Panelists:Virgil Hancock III, Tom Holm, Tom Zoellner
Moderators:Mark Athitakis
Genres:Southwest Books of the Year
Signing Area:Sales & Signing Area – Integrated Learning Center
Description:Iconic Indigenous poets Simon J. Ortiz and Ofelia Zepeda discuss their poetic journeys.

4:00 PM

Title:Discovering Arizona
Location:Student Union Santa Rita
Date/Time:Sunday, 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Panelists:Chels Knorr, Roger Naylor, Tom Zoellner
Moderators:Kelly Vaughn
Genres:Memoir / Essays / Creative Nonfiction, Nature / Environment
Signing Area:Sales & Signing Area – UA BookStore Tent
Description:Are you interested in exploring the Grand Canyon State? These three authors have been there and done that. What is more, they love talking about it, and will be happy to recommend their favorite places to hike and explore.

For the full festival schedule, click here.

2024 AWP Conference: Discounts, New Books, and More

February 5, 2024

We are thrilled to be attending the 2024 AWP Conference & Bookfair in Kansas City, Missouri, this week! From February 7 to 10, find us at booth #821 to browse our latest titles and meet with editor Elizabeth Wilder, who oversees our two award-winning series, Camino del Sol and Sun Tracks.

If you can’t attend this year, or if you need an extra copy of a book you discover at our booth, we’ve got you covered: use AZAWP24 for 35% off all titles through 3/9/24.

Are you an author or editor? Do you have a project that would be a great fit for The University of Arizona Press? To learn more about publishing with us, click here.

New & Featured Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction Titles

Winner of the 2023 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets

Aflame with desire, the eye conjures, dreams, invents itself, sees what it wants. The eye sees what it is able to see. Ojo en celo / Eye in Heat brings into sharp relief the limits of our gaze. It shows us what it is to escape the mirror and move beyond mirages. Margarita Pintado Burgos invites us to ponder the impasse while showing us ways to see better, to break the habit of lying, and to confront images along with language.

In Diego Báez’s debut collection, Yaguareté White, English, Spanish, and Guaraní encounter each other through the elusive yet potent figure of the jaguar. The son of a Paraguayan father and a mother from Pennsylvania, Báez grew up in central Illinois as one of the only brown kids on the block—but that didn’t keep him from feeling like a gringo on family visits to Paraguay. Exploring this contradiction as it weaves through experiences of language, self, and place, Báez revels in showing up the absurdities of empire and chafes at the limits of patrimony, but he always reserves his most trenchant irony for the gaze he turns on himself.

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. 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.

Light As Light is acclaimed poet Simon J. Ortiz’s first collection in twenty years. The poems in this volume celebrate the wonders and joy of love in the present while also looking back with both humorous and serious reflections on youth and the stories, scenes, people, and places that shape a person’s life. Light As Light brims with giddy, wistful long-distance love poems that offer a dialogue between the speaker and his beloved. Written in Ortiz’s signature conversational style, this volume claims poetry for everyday life. The collection also includes prayer poems written for the speaker’s son; poems that retell traditional Acoma stories and history; and poems that engage environmental, political, and social justice issues—making for a well-rounded collection that blends the playful and the profound.

When Language Broke Open collects the creative offerings of forty-five queer and trans Black writers of Latin American descent who use poetry, prose, and visual art to illustrate Blackness as a geopolitical experience that is always changing. Telling stories of Black Latinidades, this anthology centers the multifaceted realities of the LGBTQ community. By exploring themes of memory, care, and futurity, these contributions expand understandings of Blackness in Latin America, the Caribbean, and their U.S.-based diasporas. The works collected in this anthology encompass a multitude of genres—including poetry, autobiography, short stories, diaries, visual art, and a graphic memoir—and feature the voices of established writers alongside emerging voices.

In the border city of El Paso, Texas, two guardedly neighboring families have plunged headlong into a harrowing week. Rose Marie DuPre, wife and mother, has abandoned her family. On the doorstep of the Gonzales home, long-lost rebel Inez appears. As Rose Marie’s husband, Huck (manager of a maquiladora), and Inez’s brother, Jerry (a college professor), struggle separately with the new shape of their worlds, Lourdes, the Mexican maid who works in both homes, finds herself entangled in the lives of her employers, even as she grapples with a teenage daughter who only has eyes for el otro lado—life, American style. All That Rises is a story in which mysteries are unraveled, odd alliances are forged, and the boundaries between lives blur in destiny-changing ways—all in a place where the physical border between two countries is as palpable as it is porous, and the legacies of history are never far away.

Featured Series

Camino del Sol was established in 1994 by writer and poet Ray Gonzalez. As one of the first publishers to spotlight poetry, fiction, and essays from both emerging and established voices in Latinx literature, the University of Arizona Press and its critically acclaimed Camino del Sol series have provided a literary home for distinguished writers such as Juan Felipe Herrera, Carmen Giménez Smith, Luis Alberto Urrea, Richard Blanco, Alberto Ríos, Pat Mora, Tim Z. Hernandez, Emmy Pérez, and Francisco X. Alarcón.

Sun Tracks was one of the first publishing programs to focus exclusively on the creative works of Native Americans. Launched in 1971, the series has included more than eighty volumes of poetry, prose, art, and photography by such distinguished artists as Joy Harjo, N. Scott Momaday, Simon J. Ortiz, Carter Revard, and Luci Tapahonso.

For questions or to submit a proposal to any of these series, please contact Elizabeth Wilder, EWilder@uapress.arizona.edu.

Celebrating “Light As Light”: Photos from Simon J. Ortiz’s Poetry Reading

February 1, 2024

Our wonderful Tucson community came out on January 30, to celebrate the publication of Simon J. Ortiz’s first collection of poems in 20 years, Light As Light. Hosted by the University of Arizona’s Special Collections, we had the privilege of hearing Simon read from his poems. Afterward, Ortiz discussed language, literature, and sovereignty in a conversation with Ofelia Zepeda. The event was sponsored by The University of Arizona Press, the University Libraries Special Collections, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. Special thanks to everyone who came out to support our authors!

Enjoy the photos below for a recap of the event:

Simon J. Ortiz introducing himself in Keres and English at the University of Arizona Library’s Special Collections Reading Room.
Author Simon J. Ortiz reading from his first book in 20 years, Light as Light (University of Arizona Press, 2024)
Simon Ortiz and Ofelia Zepeda in conversation about poetry, place, the power of language, Indigenous literature, and sovereignty. As Ortiz observed during the discussion, “More language, more knowledge.”
Simon Ortiz and Ofelia Zepeda answering questions (and receiving praise) from the audience.
Simon Ortiz signing copies of Light as Light for Tucson community members.
A long line of patient attendees waited to get their books signed and meet the authors. In the background are materials from the Special Collections exhibit, “Sanctuary: Who Belongs Here? The Search for Homeland on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1848 to Today,” on exhibit until August 9, 2024.

About the book:

Light As Light is acclaimed poet Simon J. Ortiz’s first collection in twenty years. The poems in this volume celebrate the wonders and joy of love in the present while also looking back with both humorous and serious reflections on youth and the stories, scenes, people, and places that shape a person’s life. Light As Light brims with giddy, wistful long-distance love poems that offer a dialogue between the speaker and his beloved. Written in Ortiz’s signature conversational style, this volume claims poetry for everyday life as the poems find the speaker on a morning run, burnt out from academic responsibilities, missing his beloved, reflecting on sobriety, walking the dog, and pondering the act of poem making. The collection also includes prayer poems written for the speaker’s son; poems that retell traditional Acoma stories and history; and poems that engage environmental, political, and social justice issues—making for a well-rounded collection that blends the playful and the profound.

Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo) is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and storyteller, and a retired Regents Professor of English and American Indian Studies at Arizona State University. Ortiz is the author of Out There SomewhereMen on the Moon: Collected Short StoriesAfter and Before the LightningWoven Stone, and from Sand Creek. He is also the editor of Beyond the Reach of Time and Change: Native American Reflections on the Frank A. Rinehart Photograph Collection and Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing, as well as the author of the children’s book, The Good Rainbow Road. In 1982, Ortiz won a Pushcart Prize for from Sand Creek. He is also the recipient of the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, the New Mexico Humanities Council Humanitarian Award, the National Endowment for the Arts Discovery Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and he was an Honored Poet at the 1981 White House Salute to Poetry. In 1993, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Returning the Gift Festival of Native Writers (the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers) and the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas.

2023 Southwest Book Award Winners

January 24, 2024

We are thrilled to announce that two of our books were recently selected as 2023 Southwest Book Award winners! Nuclear Nuevo México by Myrriah Gómez and Rim to River: Looking into the Heart of Arizona by Tom Zoellner have both been selected by the Border Regional Library Association, along with four other books. See the full list of 2023 winning titles at the BRLA website.

The Border Regional Library Association (BRLA) “is an organization founded in 1966 for the promotion of library service and librarianship in the El Paso/Las Cruces/Juárez Metroplex. Current membership includes over 100 Librarians, Paraprofessionals, Media Specialists, Library Friends and Trustees from all types of libraries in the Tri-State area of Trans-Pecos Texas, Southern New Mexico and Northern Chihuahua.”

About the books:

Contrary to previous works that suppress Nuevomexicana/o presence throughout U.S. nuclear history, Nuclear Nuevo México focuses on recovering the voices and stories that have been lost or ignored in the telling of this history. By recuperating these narratives, Myrriah Gómez tells a new story of New Mexico, one in which the nuclear history is not separate from the collective colonial history of Nuevo México but instead demonstrates how earlier eras of settler colonialism laid the foundation for nuclear colonialism in New Mexico.

Gómez examines the experiences of Nuevomexicanas/os who have been impacted by the nuclear industrial complex, both the weapons industry and the commercial industry. Gómez argues that Los Alamos was created as a racist project that targeted poor and working-class Nuevomexicana/o farming families, along with their Pueblo neighbors, to create a nuclear empire. The resulting imperialism has left a legacy of disease and distress throughout New Mexico that continues today.

Tom Zoellner walked across the length of Arizona to come to terms with his home state. But the trip revealed more mountains behind the mountains.

Rim to River is the story of this extraordinary journey through redrock country, down canyons, up mesas, and across desert plains to the obscure valley in Mexico that gave the state its enigmatic name. The trek is interspersed with incisive essays that pick apart the distinctive cultural landscape of Arizona: the wine-colored pinnacles and complex spirituality of Navajoland, the mind-numbing stucco suburbs, desperate border crossings, legislative skullduggery, extreme politics, billion-dollar copper ventures, dehydrating rivers, retirement kingdoms, old-time foodways, ghosts of old wars, honky-tonk dreamers, murder mysteries, and magical Grand Canyon reveries.

Congratulations, Myrriah and Tom!

Five Questions for Margarita Pintado Burgos

January 23, 2024

Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat, winner of the 2023 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets, is a collection that challenges the limits of our gaze. It shows us what it is to escape the mirror and move beyond mirages. Margarita Pintado Burgos invites us to ponder the impasse while showing us ways to see better, to break the habit of lying, and to confront images along with language.

We recently had a chance to delve further into the book, asking the author about her inspiration, the translation process, and more.

What inspired you to write this collection?

What inspired me to bring these poems together under Ojo en celo / Eye in Heat, (a collection that includes poems from three previous books, and new poems) was the desire to understand myself and my poetic expression better throughout time, to share with others those findings about who I am as an artist, mother, daughter, friend, lover, etc., and to try to make something beautiful, something honest, somehow restorative, hopeful. I wanted to trace a zone in my poetics, go deeper into that zone from which a considerable part of who I am as a poet emerges. I began writing poetry soon after leaving Puerto Rico, which meant leaving family, friends, pets, sounds, smells, the landscape…I was departing from myself (in a sense), and I was very aware of that. What moved me to write poetry in the first place was, I think, a sense of displacement, and a desire to belong. I realized language was a place I could belong to. That discovery filled me with hope.  

What was it like working with Alejandra Quintana Arocho to create the English translations?

I loved working with Alejandra. She is cool and relaxed but also very responsible, organized, mature, and receptive to my ideas. You know, it is different when you are translating a writer who is bilingual, like I am. It can be either frustrating or fulfilling for the translator. Alejandra is super bright and confident, so it was definitively fulfilling. I learned a lot with her, and I hope she learned too about the whole process. We enjoyed getting into deep conversations trying to find the perfect sound and meaning, without losing the cultural reference or linguistic twist, etc. I would describe her and our approach as conservative, with a twist here and there. Conservative, but exciting. Alejandra’s translations attempted to be as close as possible to the original language, choosing words that resemble meaning and sound, respecting the syntax, the word choice, the mood. She is a creative translator who is not trying to replace the poet. So, she uses her creativity to solve problems, not to change the poem. She can really listen to a poem. That’s huge. I have worked with other translators who are kind of deaf to the poem. They can read the words, they can understand the words, but they don’t get the whispers, the silence of the poem. Alejandra does. That, I repeat, is huge. Some poems were a real challenge because I use a lot of repetition and alliteration, and words that are open to more than one interpretation. Trying to convey all of that was like trying to solve a puzzle. But Alejandra is great at solving puzzles, so we never really struggle too much, I don’t think. I remember we took our time deciding on how to translate the title of the poem “Espantar unos pájaros”/“Shooing Some Birds.” We felt that “espantar” was such a serious word compared to “shooing,” but we decided that it really captured what I was trying to express, which is shooing (literal and metaphorical) birds. Also, there is the poem, “Censura”/”Censorship,” that ends with different verses in each language. I suggested it to Alejandra, and she just gave me a huge smile. The Spanish version reads, “Sólo pido/ que el halcón que a veces me visita/ no me niegue,” while the English one reads, “I only ask/ for the hawk that sometimes visits me/ not to unfriend me.” There is a bit of a play in the poem with social media and the whole idea of being cancelled, so we felt it was the right choice.

The idea of observing, watching, seeing is central to this book—but I love how it is almost always a reciprocal act: a watcher being watched, an observer being observed. I’m thinking of your wonderful poem, “The Contortionist,” which ends the speaker’s narrative with a meditative move inwards, the eye turning back on itself. Has this always been a prominent aesthetic concern of your work, or did it emerge for this collection?  

I love this question. Yes, seeing is central to this book. I was referring to a zone in my poetics before, and that zone is heavily invested in what you are bringing up here: watching the world, having that gaze returned to you, and looking at yourself with the same critical eye you have used to evaluate the world. The desire to see is the desire to understand and to be critical, to move beyond the appearance, to recognize that our perception might be wrong, to consider that a scene or event can be observed from many places. Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat, among other things, delves into the desire to see also what remains hidden. After finishing that poem, “Ojo en celo,” which I chose as the title for the collection, I felt that I had found a way to explain, to understand and to approach my poetic universe. Observing the world and imagining how the world stares back at me has been a constant in my work. I believe that moving from the island of Puerto Rico to the U.S. made me a more contemplative person, and more sensitive to how people see/perceive me. Also, I think being a poet is being a witness, so the act of watching, bearing witness, is central. We are here to listen, to pay attention to the world, and to keep discovering who we are in the process. I think the poem “The Contortionist” is a perfect example of that reciprocity, about the desire to find myself in others, and to love them, in a way. I was living in this tiny town in Arkansas when a circus came to town. In this town there was a Walmart, a few gas stations and like twenty churches. So, the circus was a big deal. I was feeling very deprived from beauty those days and seeing the performer that day, this small woman from Mongolia contort herself in the middle of nowhere… it was too much for me. I wrote the poem in my head right there. I felt that she and I were One. Both displaced, both exposed, and having to perform for others (having to fit). And I understand that we are all “performing,” but perhaps this feeling is accentuated when you are in a foreign country. 

Achy Obejas, who selected your book for the Ambroggio Prize, writes that the speaker is “both attracted to and repelled by the world.” Are there particular social, political, or personal events or circumstances that you can point to as contributing to this ambivalence?

That took me by surprise. I think Achy nailed it, but that surprised me. Of course, I can see that ambivalence, or tension everywhere, but “repelled” seemed to me like a strong word at first. I think because I am a contemplative poet (an observer) who is critical of the world and of herself, I keep trying to find a place in the world (Achy also mentioned this) knowing that perhaps that place will remain elusive. But I keep trying because I know that I am bound to find beauty and meaning in the journey. I wouldn’t describe it as a love-hate relationship, is more about just being in the world with your eyes wide open. The world is in a love-hate relationship with itself, sort of speak. I am just observing. And participating, of course. About the personal circumstances, well, I am who I am: a Puerto Rican woman who left her country and found out that returning is much harder than expected because there are not enough opportunities there for Puerto Ricans who want to contribute directly to their country. I am openly bitter about the political and economic situation of the island, and I blame both colonialism and corrupt Puerto Ricans in power. For people like me (people from colonized nations) the political and the personal are inseparable, although in my poetry politics emerge almost as a subtext, it does make its way, but it is not at the center of my poetics. I am proud of being Puerto Rican. I am proud of my language, and I am committed to continue writing in Spanish and to celebrate my heritage and my culture with hope, always trying to find new ways to express the beauty and complexity of that place I call home.  

What are you working on now?

Right now, I am working on a poetry book called Failing to Assimilate that explores the good and the bad, the gains and the losses inherent in the process of assimilation. It is a book about what’s accomplished when one fails to “successfully” assimilate to a culture, a country, a language, a family, new roles (job, motherhood, etc.). I am still thinking about it, but the poems are coming, and I feel very excited about it. I am also working with Alejandra on the translation of my book Una muchacha que se parece a mí/ A Girl Who Looks Like Me, and working on Distropika, a poetry website I co-direct, among other projects I am keeping to myself for now.

***
Margarita Pintado Burgos holds a PhD in Spanish from Emory University. The author of Ficción de venado (2012), Una muchacha que se parece a mí (Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña Award, 2016), and Simultánea, la marea (2022), Pintado is also a Mellon Foundation Letras Boricuas Fellow and a full professor of language and literature at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. She co-directs the poetry website Distrópika.

2024 Southwest Books of the Year

January 18, 2024

It’s always exciting when University of Arizona Press authors are recognized for their work, but it’s especially meaningful to know that our books resonate with local readers in Tucson and the wider Southwest.

Each year, the Pima County Public Library releases their Southwest Books of the Year list, honoring “titles published during the calendar year that are about Southwest subjects, or are set in the Southwest.”

“The Southwest Books of the Year panel of reviewers—subject specialists and voracious consumers of Southwest literature all—are pleased to offer up their personal favorite titles of the year, complete with brief reviews to whet your appetite and leave you wanting more. Books selected by two or more panelists become Southwest Books of the Year Top Picks, our designation for the best of the best. Their choices are published in our annual publication, Southwest Books of the Year.”

Below, read about our books that were selected for 2024, or visit the Pima County Public Library website to see the full list.


Southwest Book of the Year – Top 10

Light As Light is acclaimed poet Simon J. Ortiz’s first collection in twenty years. The poems in this volume celebrate the wonders and joy of love in the present while also looking back with both humorous and serious reflections on youth and the stories, scenes, people, and places that shape a person’s life. Written in Ortiz’s signature conversational style, this volume claims poetry for everyday life as the poems find the speaker on a morning run, burnt out from academic responsibilities, missing his beloved, reflecting on sobriety, walking the dog, and pondering the act of poem making, making for a well-rounded collection that blends the playful and the profound.

Tom Zoellner walked across the length of Arizona to come to terms with his home state. But the trip revealed more mountains behind the mountains. In Rim to RiverZoellner does for Arizona what Larry McMurtry did for Texas in In a Narrow Grave and what Wallace Stegner did for Utah in Mormon Country: paint an enduring portrait of a misunderstood American state. An indictment, a love letter, and a homecoming story all at once.


Other University of Arizona Press Southwest Book of the Year Picks

The stunning photographs in Desert Jewels allow us to appreciate the spectacular range of color and form cactus flowers have to offer. For the cactus enthusiast, the book offers a comprehensive collection of high-quality flower photographs unlike any other. The photographs cover more than 250 cactus species organized by genus. The book starts with an introduction by John P. Schaefer that is both autobiographical and informative, offering a glimpse into his process for capturing these elusive desert gems, resulting in photographs so beautiful they were featured as a book of stamps issued by the U.S. Postal Service.

In this delightful biography, we gain insight into a time when there were few women establishing full-time careers in anthropology, archaeology, or museums. Shelby Tisdale successfully combines Marjorie F. Lambert’s voice from extensive interviews with her own to take us on a thought-provoking journey into how Lambert created a successful and satisfying professional career and personal life in a place she loved (the American Southwest) while doing what she loved. Women’s voices have long been absent throughout history, and No Place for a Lady adds to the growing literature on feminist archaeology.

Sabino Canyon, a desert canyon in the American Southwest near Tucson, Arizona, is enjoyed yearly by thousands of city residents as well as visitors from around the world. Picturing Sabino tells the story of the canyon’s transformation from a barely known oasis, miles from a small nineteenth-century town, into an immensely popular recreation area on the edge of a modern metropolis. Covering a century of change, from 1885 to 1985, David Wentworth Lazaroff rejoices in the canyon’s natural beauty and also relates the ups and downs of its protection and enjoyment.

In Sonoran Desert Journeys ecologist Theodore H. Fleming discusses two remarkable journeys. First, Fleming offers a brief history of our intellectual and technical journey over the past three centuries to understand the evolution of life on Earth. Next, he applies those techniques on a journey of discovery about the evolution and natural history of some of the Sonoran Desert’s most iconic animals and plants. Fleming details the daily lives of a variety of reptiles, birds, mammals, and plants, describing their basic natural and evolutionary histories and addressing intriguing issues associated with their lifestyles and how they cope with a changing climate. Finally, Fleming discusses the complexity of Sonoran Desert conservation.

book cover with a photo of riparian garden in the American southwest

Bringing Home the Wild follows a two-decade journey in ecologically guided gardening on a four-acre irrigated parcel in Phoenix, Arizona, from the perspective of a retired botanist and her science historian partner. Through humor and playful use of language, Juliet C. Stromberg not only introduces the plants who are feeding them, buffering the climate, and elevating their moods but also acknowledges the animals and fungi who are pollinating the plants and recycling the waste. Some of the plants featured are indigenous to the American Southwest, while others are part of the biocultural heritage of the cityscape. This book makes the case for valuing inclusive biodiversity and for respectful interactions with all wild creatures, regardless of their historical origin.

Congratulations to all!

Five Questions for Diego Báez

January 18, 2024

In his stunning debut collection, Yaguareté White, Diego Báez undertakes a lyrical exploration of Paraguayan American identity and what it means to see through a colored whiteness in all of its tangled contradictions. We recently had a chance to talk with Diego about his inspiration, the symbolism of the titular yaguareté (jaguar), and why nostalgia might be a shared part of the Paraguayan American experience.

What inspired you to write this collection?

One inspiration for writing Yaguareté White is the desire to share stories I hadn’t seen or heard before. For all the influential authors of Xicano and Mexican, puertorriqueño, Salvadorean, Dominican, Columbian, and Cuban heritages, I’ve not encountered a single Paraguayan American author. But that’s not surprising. Of the roughly 63 million Latinx people in the U.S., only 25,000 are Paraguayan American. So it’s not necessarily that we’re underrepresented; it’s that my people comprise a statistically infinitesimal portion of the population. Perhaps it’s not surprising we haven’t produced many poets, novelists, or journalists. Or rather, it’s not surprising that publishers in the U.S. haven’t recognized Paraguayan-American writers, as yet. Perhaps my book can serve as one small step toward people like me seeing themselves in American letters.

Allison Escoto wrote that the poems in this collection share “a consistent tone of longing, nostalgia, and searching.” Can you talk about where that nostalgia comes from, or how it functions in the book?

I so appreciate Escoto’s insight, because I think “nostalgia” is exactly the right descriptor for the measure of pain that attends my memories of Paraguay. Growing up, my family flew down every few years to stay at the farm mi abuelo y abuela inhabited until their respective deaths in 2012 and 2019 (QEPD). Every time we boarded that first flight from O’Hare, I felt the faint sense of discomfort that joins the uncertainty of international travel. But that sensation always faded as the snowy terrain of Illinois disappeared beneath the clouds, and my brothers and I slept on the floor of the jet from Miami, only to arrive in sun-scorched Asunción the next day, sleepy and cautious, but embraced immediately by tíos and tías and our rambunctious primos, all of whom made us feel at home for the month we’d usually stay in Paraguay. So much of the book is informed by those journeys, and by the more profound, lingering heartache that tends to sting upon returning stateside.

It’s an experience most Paraguayans in this country share: flight. Distance and topography prevent Paraguayans from undertaking the journey overland, so many fly over. This is obviously a position of material privilege relative to those who migrate over sea and by land, or even others who must fly under emergency circumstances or conditions of duress. It’s odd to occupy this position of relative privilege, while also failing to see those stories reflected in mainstream Latinx and literary cultures in the U.S. I’m not sure whether this compounds the pain, contributes to a sense of nostalgia, or simply adds another dimension to an already gnarly, complicated relation.

In Yaguareté White, place, race, and language converge in the symbol of the jaguar. Has this always been an important symbol in your work, or did it emerge particularly for this book?

The jaguar didn’t really emerge until a later draft of the manuscript. I had originally called the book, “Valleys Full of Jaguars,” taken from a line in Argentine author César Aira’s 1981 novel Ema, la cautiva (trans. 2016). I had intended the title to be ironic, since I had never seen a jaguar in Paraguay, nor, to my knowledge, do they regularly inhabit much of the country at all. But jaguars do occupy a central role in Guarani mythology, a cosmos I did not grow up with, and one that I’ve really only learned about online. I hope this tension surfaces in the poems, between the things we access through family or heritage, and the things the internet teaches us about ourselves.

The book is also interested in language, and the word “Yaguareté” itself is notable for its suffix, “-eté,” which means “real or true” (an origin noted also by C. S. Giscombe in the aftermatter of Negro Mountain). It’s difficult for me to separate preoccupations with language and linguistic acquisition from questions I hope the book confronts around authenticity and identity: what stories belong to a people? Are they mine to tell? What must remain off limits? It feels fitting to see that uncertainty embodied in the titular figure of the jaguar.

Many of the poems in this collection are “hybrid” in the sense that they’re between forms, entering into prose or inventing their own structures, as in “Chestnut People,” which is symmetrical on the page, or “Punchline” where there are two lines of prose literally punched out of the middle of the verse. Why is this formal hybridity important to this collection?

Racial, ethnic, and linguistic hybridities are central to the identities of the book’s primary speakers and, of course, for myself, so it felt necessary for the poems to manage those variables, as well. I can’t be alone in loving the creative possibilities generated by linear and syllabic limits. Of course, I learned about iambic pentameter and Shakespearean sonnets in school, but I’ll be forever indebted to Rachel Hadas, a former professor of mine, who ran a workshop at Rutgers that required us to experiment with different forms every week. I learned a lot about my own personal preferences, but also about the liberties poets can take with any given prescribed form. Lately, I find poetic forms (and derivations therefrom) to be crucially useful when I want to begin something new. It helps me get started, especially when faced with the white, wide-open maw of an empty page ready to devour every key I punch or, worse, to spit nothing back.

What are you working on now?

I’ve been unexpectedly invested in Formula 1 racing since 2021, when Lewis Hamilton was robbed of his 8th world drivers championship. Even as a new fan, I felt personally wronged by the manipulated result of that last race in Abu Dhabi. It’s silly, but also real? I’m exacting revenge by writing a chapbook of poems about F1, which ought to just about balance the scales.

I’m also working on Season 2 of “Unique Niche,” a monthly book review column I write for Letras Latinas Blog 2 that focuses on contemporary books of poetry in translation, about translanguaging, or related to transcultural subjects. The editors, Laura Villareal and Brent Ameneyro, are seriously invested in covering Latinx poetry, and I’m looking forward to continuing our work together.

I’m also excited for the publication of Library of America’s anthology, Latino Poetry: Places We Call Home, which will include the title poem from Yaguareté White. There will be celebrations all across the country in Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 to coincide with the anthology’s release, and I look forward to those events!

***
Diego Báez is a writer, educator, and abolitionist. He is the recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, the Surge Institute, and the Poetry Foundation’s Incubator for Community-Engaged Poets. His writing has appeared in Freeman’s, The Rumpus, Harriet Books, and The Georgia Review. He lives in Chicago and teaches at the City Colleges.

Five Questions for Kimberly Blaeser

January 11, 2024

Ancient Light by Kimberly Blaeser 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.

What inspired you to write this collection?

Because I grew up “off the grid” on White Earth Reservation, my perspective or world view has often not run parallel with contemporary beliefs. Because the lens through which we view the world arises partly from cultural influences, I sometimes see things in a different light—measure it against another value system. I have written, for example, about a “cosmology of nibi,” a cosmology of water.

The more the functioning of the current systems in power have faltered or failed, the more my awareness of older stories, traditional knowledge, as well as Anishinaabe beliefs, understandings, and ways of being has seemed to assert itself. The current paths look more and more like dead ends or like they will lead to continued exploitation and ultimate destruction of our planet as well as to deterioration of our spiritual health. Many people realize we need a new model.

I began to think of the imprint of Anishinaabe teachings as “ancient light,” as wisdom that can help to illuminate the current situation and serve as a method for navigating new challenges.

The phrase itself arose when I was working on the title poem and the picto-poem “Waaban: ancient light enters.” Both feature a great blue heron and arise out of a pair of lengthy encounters with herons. In one, my son and I paused while canoeing, mesmerized as the heron landed and lifted off dramatically, skewered and feasted on fish, and flew elongated against the setting sun. In another encounter I observed a heron panting and backlit by the sun, its long tongue visible through the thin membrane of its neck. Each of these felt like stop-time moments, but remained “flat” in the photos I had made of the encounters. I realized we regularly enhance our seeing with our bank of understanding. The moments for me felt linked to Anishinaabe stories of birds as messengers, felt illuminated by stories of the crane clan. I worked with layers of text and image to help suggest the larger context. As I added woodland beadwork for the sky and snippets of language into the image, I further solidified my notion of “ancient light” as alive in our everyday experiences and began to write and create with that focus in the back of my mind.

How did the themes of MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) and hidden graves at Native American boarding schools inform the poems in this collection?

Each of these contemporary situations arise out of a possessive mindset, a colonial perspective that claims “ownership” and the right to manipulate, consume, destroy. The power dynamic such a system represents permeates other aspects of our society—may stand behind much of the environmental destruction, for example. Taken together, I think the poems indict settler colonialism as a system. They ask: How do we survive colonization? How do we resist? More importantly, they ask: How can we recover and flourish? They ask this not only for Indigenous people, but for all human beings and more than human beings.

Ancient Light includes pieces of your artwork. Would you tell us more about how your art and your poetry work together in the collection?

Working within and between mediums feels like my adult playground. Of course, Indigenous creative work comes out of a tradition of intermingled arts—dance, beadwork, weaving, song poems, drums, etc. In contemporary literature, the work of many Indigenous writers often spills across genres and artistic forms. For a long time, I have made photos and written in several genres, I have created ekphrastic poetry in response to other people’s art or, if truth be known, in response to the art in nature. For example, I have one piece which I entitled “The Lineation of Water.” It demonstrates my long-held belief that we exist in an environment filled with many kinds of communication (with many kinds of poems) and we can learn to “read” the other languages around us.

I spend a good deal of time out of doors in natural areas, often kayaking in the waterways near our cabin which is adjacent to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The many transformational moments I have experienced in nature have over the years been cast in art as both photographic and poetic images. They began to blend and inform one another. I might have a moving photo and write a poem in concert with that or vice versa. Then, inspired by Anishinaabe pictographs and Native American Ledger art, I started experimenting with layers of text and image. I leaned into palimpsest as a form, and began to create what I call Picto-Poems.

Although different pieces work differently—some ekphrastically in pairs, some as a single layered picto-poem, I continue to play with creating intersections of meaning through layers of text and image. One image in the book, a silhouette of a Green Heron, felt like a poem itself. It moved me in the way poetry does as it pushes you beyond language into experience (like haiku). I think a lot about gesture in poetry and silence that vibrates with possibility. Both poetry and photos can bring us to the edge of the known and invite us or push us into the unknown. That particular moment and later the photo had that impact on me. I experimented with ways to match that energy in words, to match the delicate lines of the bird. I turn to suggestive concrete poetry in the process. In the poem, I use the word “trace,” and I think that word suits both visual and verbal renderings—suits each vision.

What is the connection between being an Anishinaabe or environmental activist and a poet?

For me, poetry has dual roles to play—to be beautiful as language, as art; and to do something in the world. I talk about it as both affective and effective. I am aware not everyone holds this belief about poetry or art, but in Indigenous traditions our arts play a role. They were not and are not only beautiful or merely decorative. Songs are used for healing or protection as well as celebration. We wear intricately embroidered clothing, dance on “priceless” beaded moccasins. The process of making poetry/art or using art is often tied to ceremonial or subsistence elements of culture, often arises in community (think, for example, of harvest festivals that involve song or dance).

In contemporary circumstances that celebration, protection, or healing I mention as among the roles or impacts of song poems, might extend to our environment—to water bodies, animal relatives, etc. In a culture based in animacy and reciprocity, we use our gifts responsibly when we use them for the earth community to which we belong.

That philosophical system may seem naïve or stereotypic, but in my day-to-day life I do use my writing, photos, and picto-poems frequently in my activist or environmental work. We need poetry/art because it is an act of attention and can become an agent of change. When we awaken someone to the experience of an alive world that may be new to them, we plant a seed. Seeing differently may be the first step toward acting differently. In the ideal scenario, successfully rendering in lyric a particularly impactful natural scene, image, moment changes both writer and reader.

On a yet more practical level, I literally fold my creative work into my activist work. For example, I am a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed against the United States to protect the BWCAW from potential copper mining. The official declaration I wrote actually includes passages extracted from creative works—since that art arises out of the same ethic of reciprocity, kinship, and sustainability.

For me, one other important aspect of creative activism, especially Indigenous environmental activism, involves the use of Anishinaabemowin, the Ojibwe language. Because the language carries important teaching—environmental, spiritual, and subsistence teaching (among others)—using the language in poetry can also carry that Traditional Indigenous Knowledge into the world at a time our planet desperately needs it. Through the #LanguageBack focus initiative in the nonprofit I founded (IN-NA-PO, Indigenous Nations Poets), we recognize the way language learning and teaching through poetry supports our survivance as Indigenous peoples and protectors of the planet.

What is your next book or creative project?

I have several projects I am excited about. Although I have been less prolific in fiction and creative nonfiction, I do write and publish both. I am very close to completing a short fiction collection—I am in the arranging, revising stage. I am also more slowly at work a memoir, gathering flash memoir pieces that I can weave into a full volume with other kinds of text and images (including letters, boarding school documents, etc.).

Of course, I also have another poetry project in the works, too. I won’t say too much lest it slip away in the telling, but I have a foundation of poems and phrase my focus this way: “What If We Are Not Broken By Our Histories.” Finally (and with excitement) I am working on an art exhibit (which may become the seeds for a book) which will include photos, poems, and picto-poems. In the wings, I have a tentative editing project.

I’m taking bets on which of these will surface first!

***
Kimberly Blaeser, former Wisconsin Poet Laureate and founding director of In-Na-Po, Indigenous Nations Poets, is a writer, photographer, and scholar. Her poetry collections include Copper Yearning, Apprenticed to Justice, and Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance. Recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, Blaeser is an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist enrolled at White Earth Nation. She is a professor emerita at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and an Institute of American Indian Arts MFA faculty member.

January 9, 2024

In Woven from the Center: Native Basketry in the Southwest, author Diane Dittemore presents breathtaking basketry from some of the greatest weavers in the Southwest. Today, Dittemore has provided us with field notes and insights into her work.

My first encounter with Southwestern basketry was a Tohono O’odham basket I grew up with, one my grandmother Minnie Harper kept on her dresser and used to hold letters. I never thought to ask her where she got it, but it likely dates to the 1920s when she was living in Trinidad, Colorado.

Tohono O’odham “letter holder” basket of my grandmother’s (left) and two Comcaac (Seri) baskets collected in 1977 while conducting fieldwork in Desemboque, Sonora.

I began serious study of Native art in graduate school for anthropology and museum studies at the University of Denver beginning in 1975. The Native American Arts and Industries class instructor was Richard Conn, renowned Curator of Indian Art at the Denver Art Museum. The Native Arts floor at DAM was our classroom, my first “fieldwork” site, albeit in a domesticated space largely absent images of the people responsible for the works displayed. For the class, we were tasked with drawing selected pottery, basketry, weavings, and beadwork on display. This was an excellent means of studying Native cultural arts, although my artistic skills were and still are wanting! In a foreshadowing of my eventual professional life’s work, I rendered a Pima (Akimel O’odham) jar.

Drawing from class assignment to draw Native arts on display at Denver Art Museum

In 1977, I conducted my first actual fieldwork in Mexico for a master’s thesis researching one-stringed fiddles made by Comcaac (Seri) of Sonora’s west coast.  My thesis topic ended up a comparison of Seri and Western Apache fiddles. While concentrating on musical traditions and conducting fieldwork in the Comcaac village of Desemboque, I also purchased several baskets and learned from weavers about materials, technology, and cultural contexts.

My field partner, Seth Schindler, who was researching for his PhD dissertation on Comcaac material culture, later became my husband. Nothing like having a first date consist of weeks on end camped on the beach, sharing a tent much to the disapproval of a few Comcaac women.

I began work as curator of the ethnology collections at the Arizona State Museum in 1979. Included in these collections are over 4000 examples of basketry from all over the world but primarily from the American Southwest and Northwest Mexico. This collection offers limitless opportunities for museum-based research. 

Diane (on ladder) with former Curator of Collections, Jan Bell, in old basket storeroom, c. 1980. Photographer, Helga Teiwes.
A very pregnant Diane (left) discussing basket she is purchasing for ASM with trading post operator Joyce Montgomery at Peridot Trading Post, San Carlos Apache Reservation, Arizona, February 23, 1985. Photographer, Helga Teiwes. (ASM 64897) . (Daughter Anna was born May 18, 1985!).

In the 1980s and early 1990s I set out with museum photographer Helga Teiwes to document O’odham and Western Apache basket weavers. We took trips to the Apache reservations of San Carlos and Ft. Apache, and to the Pima (Akimel O’odham) Gila River Indian Community.

Diane with San Carlos Apache basketry matriarch Cecilia Henry, learning about her weaving techniques, April 18-19, 1990. Photographer, Helga Teiwes (ASM c-20843).
Diane discussing basketry materials and techniques with Katherine Brown, San Carlos Apache Reservation, Arizona. April 18-19, 1990.  Photographer, Helga Teiwes (ASM 84090).
Diane taking a close look at a basketry tus, or water bottle, prior to its being coated with piñon pitch to make it water tight, with Minnie Narcisco, Cibecue, Ft. Apache Reservation, Arizona, May 16-17, 1984. Photographer, Helga Teiwes (ASM 64817).

My first publication, in American Indian Art Magazine, focused upon unique Akimel O’odham (Pima) baskets decorated with glass beads. By this time, the weavers at Gila River (of which there were very few) were no longer incorporating beads, so fieldwork was a very limited component of this research.

First basketry publication in Winter 1986 American Indian Art Magazine.

The 1990 fieldwork at the San Carlos Apache Reservation was conducted in part to talk to weavers and other culture bearers about certain eccentric marks on early 20th century coiled basketry, to determine whether they might have special significance. This resulted in a 1998 publication with Museum Conservator Nancy Odegaard, Eccentric Marks on Western Apache Coiled Basketry.

I co-authored another American Indian Art Magazine article, Anonymous Was a Weaver: In Search of Turn-of-the-Century Western Apache/Yavapai Basketry Artists (Summer 1999). At this time there were no Apache or Yavapai weavers still making the gargantuan ollas that were the subject of this article, so the fieldwork involved visiting sister institutions.

In 2010, with ASM’s basketry collection given the designation as an American Treasure through the federal Save America’s Treasures program, planning commenced for a permanent ASM basket exhibit that came to be called Woven through Time: American Treasures of Southwest Native Basketry and Fiber Art. I served as the lead curator for this exhibit, which opened in 2017. We commenced a major initiative to acquire examples of work by contemporary basket weavers, in order to  show visitors to Woven through Time that the millennia-old tradition continues to the present. With museum photographer Jannelle Weakly, we traveled to weavers’ homes, and to galleries and art fairs to purchase baskets and photograph the makers.

Jilli Oyenque, Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo (San Juan) basket weaver holding willow wicker basket Diane purchased for ASM at Santa Fe Indian Market, August 2012. Photographer, Jannelle Weakly (SWIA_2012_p33).

ASM secured the services of AZPM to create a video for the Woven through Time gallery about the continued importance of basketry among Arizona’s Native communities. We recorded weavers from the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community as they gathered willow and cattail basketry materials.  Of course, the time to collect these materials is in July!  So, on a day in 2016 when the high was expected to be 114 degrees, we met the weavers and video graphed their efforts.

Diane interviewing basket teacher Alice Manuel of Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community for inclusion in a gallery video, July 16, 2016. Photographer, Jannelle Weakly (ASM 2016-325-image287).

I began serious work on the basket book, Woven from the Center during a 2013 sabbatical, envisioning it as a companion to the exhibit Woven through Time: American Treasures of Native Basketry and Fiber Arts.  After numerous delays, involving weathering the scourge of Covid with attendant museum closures and other challenges, I submitted the manuscript in 2022.

A major goal of Woven from the Center: Native Basketry in the Southwest, in addition to sharing the Arizona State Museum’s unparalleled collection of Southwest Native basketry, is to bring the weavers—past and present—out of anonymity and give them full acknowledgment as keepers of traditions that continue to have deep resonance within their respective tribal communities.

***

Diane Dittemore is the Associate Curator of Ethnological Collections at the Arizona State Museum, an anthropology museum at the University of Arizona.  For forty-five years, she has curated, interpreted, and written about ASM’s peerless collection that is focused on historic and contemporary works made by Indigenous people of the American Southwest and Mexico.

Winter is Poetry Season!

December 18, 2023

Celebrate winter with four new collections of poetry from UA Press. We publish two veteran poets, the Ambroggio Prize winner, and one poet’s first collection. May this poetry bring light and warmth to close out 2023, and begin the new year brightly.

Light As Light brims with giddy, wistful long-distance love poems that offer a dialogue between the speaker and his beloved. Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo) writes in conversational style; and this volume claims poetry for everyday life as the poems find the speaker on a morning run, burnt out from academic responsibilities, missing his beloved, reflecting on sobriety, walking the dog, and pondering the act of poem making. Celebrate on January 30, 2024, with Ortiz as he reads and discusses his poetry on the University of Arizona campus. Click here for details.

Kimberly Blaeser, former Wisconsin Poet Laureate and founding director of In-Na-Po, Indigenous Nations Poets, is a writer, photographer, and scholar. In her new collection, Ancient Light, she uses uses lyric, narrative, and concrete poems to give voice to some of the most pressing ecological and social issues of our time. 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.

Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat, by Margarita Pintado Burgos (Author) and Alejandra Quintana Arocho (Translator), is the Winner of the 2023 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets. With devastating clarity, Pintado Burgos’s poems, presented in both Spanish and English, give voice to the world within and beyond sight: the plants, the trees, the birds, the ocean waves, the fruit forgotten in the kitchen, the house’s furniture. Inspired by the poet’s homeland in Puerto Rico, light takes on new dimensions to expose, manipulate, destroy, and nourish.

In his first published collection Yaguareté White, Diego Báez writes in English, Spanish, and Guaraní. The languages encounter each other through the elusive yet potent figure of the jaguar. The son of a Paraguayan father and a mother from Pennsylvania, Baéz grew up in central Illinois as one of the only brown kids on the block—but that didn’t keep him from feeling like a gringo on family visits to Paraguay. Exploring this contradiction as it weaves through experiences of language, self, and place, Baéz revels in showing up the absurdities of empire and chafes at the limits of patrimony, but he always reserves his most trenchant irony for the gaze he turns on himself.

Excerpt from “Ordinary Injustice”

December 12, 2023

Ordinary Injustice by Alfredo Mirandé is the unique and riveting story of a young Latino student, Juan Rulfo, with no previous criminal record involved in a domestic violence dispute that quickly morphs into a complex case with ten felonies, multiple enhancements, a “No Bail” order, and a potential life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Building from author Alfredo Mirandé’s earlier work Rascuache Lawyer, the account is told by “The Professor,” who led a pro bono rascuache legal defense team comprising the professor, a retired prosecutor, and student interns, working without a budget, office, paralegals, investigators, or support staff. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in race, gender, and criminal injustice and will appeal not only to law scholars and social scientists but to lay readers interested in ethnographic field research, Latinx communities, and racial disparities in the legal system. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

Ordinary Injustice is an in-depth ethnographic account of what should have been a routine, simple misdemeanor case involving a young Latino doctoral student, Juan Rulfo, with no previous criminal record who was ultimately charged with multiple felonies stemming from a toxic, romantic relationship. Incredibly, a routine domestic dispute morphed into a complex life case with multiple enhancements, a “No Bail” order, and the defendant initially facing a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Unlike books focusing on high profile celebrity cases like the OJ Simpson trial, or of people wrongly convicted of serious, violent, sensationalized crimes, this book is about the ordinary, yet systemic and endemic injustices experienced by Latinos and people of Color at the hands of the criminal [in]justice system in the United States. The book offers an in-depth ethnographic account of the case written by Juan’s lawyer, “The Professor,” a sociologist pro bono attorney, that follows the case and carefully chronicles the injustices and systemic racism experienced by his client in criminal court from the complaint, investigation, arrest, preliminary hearing, pre-trial motions, to final disposition. The result is a compelling story told from the perspective of the client and his legal defense team; The Professor, and co-counsel, Raphael Guerra, a crafty seasoned trial lawyer and retired Deputy District Attorney, and a cadre of Latina student interns who provided valuable input and support.

The murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other unjustified high profile police killings have triggered massive protests, signaling the emergence of an international Black Lives Matter Movement (BLM) and increased concern not only with the unauthorized use of deadly force by police but the mass incarceration of Black and Latino defendants. Recent protests seeking radical reforms, have pointed to systemic racism at every stage of the criminal justice system, from policing to pre-trial processes, sentencing, treatment within correctional facilities, and even re-entry (Sawyer 2020). Because research has focused largely on the experiences of Black defendants, generally adopting a Black/White binary view of race in the U.S., there is a need for more research and scholarship on racial and economic disparities in the criminal justice system experienced by Latinos and other groups, particularly bottom-up. in-depth, personal, ethnographic accounts.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 35 percent of state prisoners are White, 39 percent Black, and 21 percent Hispanic or Latino, and in twelve states more than half of the prison population is African American. Although ethnicity data are less reliable than data on race, the Hispanic population in state prison is as high as 61 percent in New Mexico and 42 percent in California (Nellis 2016). And in an additional seven states, at least one in five inmates is Hispanic. Latinos are disproportionately incarcerated at a rate that is 1.4 greater than the rate for Whites, and surprisingly these discrepancies are especially high in states like Massachusetts (2.3:1); Connecticut (2.9:1); Pennsylvania 3.3:1) and New York (3.3:1) (Nellis 2016).

Esther Belin Named Durango’s Poet Laureate

December 7, 2023

The City of Durango, Colorado, named Esther Belin as its first-ever Poet Laureate. She has lived in Durango since 1997, and has published two poetry books: From the Belly of My Beauty and Of Cartography. Belin is also one of the editors of The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature.

High school student Zoe Golden was named the Rising Poet Laureate. Starting January 1, 2024, the Poets Laureate will provide a constant presence of poetry at community events. A poetry column in Durango’s newspaper, The Telegraph, and poetry installations on city buses will contribute to that presence, to “bring the magic of poetry to everyday life,” according to a press release from the Durango Poet Laureate Program.

Durango Public Library Supervisor Daisy Grice said, “We are so excited to see the poets in action starting next year. We think there will be an aura of more poetry around Durango, hopefully fostering a sense of creativity and beauty.”

Congratulations Esther!

Five Questions for Alan Pelaez Lopez

December 5, 2023

When Language Broke Open, An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent collects the creative offerings of forty-five queer and trans Black writers of Latin American descent who use poetry, prose, and visual art to illustrate Blackness as a geopolitical experience that is always changing. Telling stories of Black Latinidades, this anthology edited by Alan Pelaez Lopez, centers the multifaceted realities of the LGBTQ community.

By exploring themes of memory, care, and futurity, these contributions expand understandings of Blackness in Latin America, the Caribbean, and their U.S.-based diasporas. The volume offers up three central questions: How do queer and/or trans Black writers of Latin American descent address memory? What are the textures of caring, being cared for, and accepting care as Black queer and/or trans people of Latin American descent? And how do queer and trans embodiments help us understand and/or question the past and the present, and construct a Black, queer, and trans future?

What first sparked your interest to bring writers together for this anthology?

In the United States, there is a narrative that Black people from/ in/ with heritage from Latin America do not know that they are Black, or that they reject their Blackness. This is false. Black Latinxs, Black Latin Americans, Black Antilleans, and African writers in Latin America and the Antilles each understand their experience through the unique legal, cultural, and political reality of the regions they currently live in. I first envisioned a volume that demonstrated the nuances, similarities, and radical departures that exist across the Black of Latin American descent diaspora. This collection is one that does not explain Black Latinidades but instead attends to what I think are pillars of Black queer and trans life: memory, care, and futures. 

How did living in Mexico City inform the way you edited this volume? 

I was sick and in medical treatment while editing When Language Broke Open and questions of trans* and Black futurities kept lingering in my mind, especially as I was actively witnessing the rise of anti-trans feminist organizing in CDMX [Mexico City] alongside constant news reports of Black migrants presenting themselves at the US-Mexico and Mexico-Guatemala borders. Witnessing these material realities helped me form questions for contributors during the editing process that I would not have been able to craft otherwise. While When Language Broke Open primarily includes contributions from writers based in the settler United States, the anthology contributes to migration studies, border studies, and trans* feminist studies in unique and crucial ways

Mexico City also helped me contextualize why the volume is necessary: In the introduction to When Language Broke Open, I outline being racially profiled in my own country of birth and having to guarantee local police that I am indeed Mexican despite my Blackness. This constant interaction with the nation-state made me realize that Black Latin Americans are often treated as foreigners and/or irregular migrants in our countries of birth, and when we do leave our countries, we become doubly displaced, which is a theme that evolves as readers read about the migratory journeys from contributors with roots in South America, Central America, North America, and the Antilles. The volume does not, however, solely critique our countries of birth for this displacement. Instead, the volume critically analyses settler colonialism, capitalism, ableism, trans* misogyny, and Indigenous and Black erasure as forces that shape our different experiences across the hemisphere.

Why did you include a variety of genres in this anthology? 

While putting the call for submissions together, I was interested in narratives that explored queer and trans* Blackness in the everyday, not only through “memorable events” such as coming out of the closet, experiencing racial or gender violence, etc. Expanding the genres felt like the only way to get to the quotidian experiences of–for example–watching a hip-hop YouTube video, washing one’s hair, blowing out a candle, and watching the sunset (all of which can be found in the volume).  I am quite moved by the way in which contributors used visual images throughout the collection: some added photographs of themselves, others of family members, and there is one series of paintings and one graphic memoir. When we read across the presented visual images, letters, and the various forms of fragmentation and redaction that appear in When Language Broke Open, readers encounter a complex narrative of how race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and culture inform the radical Black imagination.

The volume repeatedly uses the phrase “queer and trans Black writers of Latin American descent,” can you explain what this means in relation to the word “Afro-Latina/o/x”? 

One of the harder editorial decisions I had to grapple with was encountering the refusal within myself to lean on an already existing grammar and allow the contributors to lead me to new theories and frameworks. Many of the contributors were vocal about their racialized Black experience, some rejected the notion of being “Afro-Latinx” due to the ways in which the word has been used to exclude countries like Haiti, Belize, and others; some refuse “Afro-Latinx” so that readers wouldn’t assume “mixed race”; and some refused it in order to speak of African migrants in Latin America and the Antilles who have found kinship amongst Black Latin Americans. “Queer and trans Black writers of Latin American descent” is a framework that understands queer and trans* Black people as existing throughout the hemisphere while embodying different legal, social, cultural, spiritual, and historical experiences of Blackness. “[O]f Latin American descent” points to Latin America as a part of our lives while not landlocking us solely to Latin America. Through this language, we insist on multiple diasporic formations. The language in the volume is akin to collage practice: we cut what we know, reassemble our pieces, and in the fragmentations, make ourselves anew.

What is your next book or creative project?

I am working on a theoretical poetry collection titled trans*imagination that addresses the mechanisms of surveillance and criminalization that the heterosexual-cisgender gaze perpetuates against trans* migrants in the United States and Mexico. The work is informed by 10+ years of community organizing with undocumented trans* migrants who have been held in migrant detention centers and/or federal prisons. In the collection, I examine the prison as a container of the imagination and argue that we (trans* migrants) are targets of the criminal justice system for being hyper-imaginative subjects who transgress settler time and settler laws with our visions of the future and our practices of kinship-making.

***
Alan Pelaez Lopez is an Afro-Indigenous poet and installation and adornment artist from Oaxaca, Mexico. Their work attends to the realities of undocumented migrants in the United States, the Black condition in Latin America, and the transgender imagination. They are an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis.

Open Arizona Adds 26 New Titles

November 30, 2023

The University of Arizona Press is pleased to announce that 26 titles have been added to Open Arizona. The titles are available Open Access for download or can be read online. These new additions bring our total OA titles available in Open Arizona to 125 items!

Now available:

Persistence of Good Living
For the Indigenous A’uwẽ (Xavante) people in the tropical savannas of Brazil, special forms of intimate and antagonistic social relations, camaraderie, suffering, and engagement with the environment are fundamental aspects of community well-being. In this work, the author transparently presents ethnographic insights from long-term anthropological fieldwork in two A’uwẽ communities, addressing how distinctive constructions of age organization contribute to social well-being in an era of major ecological, economic, and sociocultural change.

Once Upon the Permafrost
Once Upon the Permafrost is a longitudinal climate ethnography about “knowing” a specific culture and the ecosystem that culture physically and spiritually depends on in the twenty-first-century context of climate change. Through careful integration of contemporary narratives, on-site observations, and document analysis, Susan Alexandra Crate shows how local understandings of change and the vernacular knowledge systems they are founded on provide critical information for interdisciplinary collaboration and effective policy prescriptions.

Decolonizing “Prehistory”
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.

Transcontinental Dialogues
Transcontinental Dialogues presents 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.

Latin American Immigration Ethics
Latin American Immigration Ethics advances philosophical conversations and debates about immigration by theorizing migration from the Latin American and Latinx context.

See the complete collection of new and recently added titles.

About Open Arizona
Open Arizona is a collection of open-access University of Arizona Press titles made available through the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), as well as other sources of support. The scholarship, histories, and approaches in the selected titles emphasize the significance of the southwestern United States in a multitude of disciplines and fields, as well as the fields in which the University of Arizona Press excels in publishing.

Alma García Featured on Texas Standard News Show

November 29, 2023

Alma García was featured on the Texas Standard News Show and spoke about her debut novel, All That Rises. In the interview, she spoke about her inspiration for the book, her personal ties to El Paso and Albuquerque, key themes in her book, and how she makes the story come alive.

The inspiration from the story came from a character that she wrote about in short story 20 years ago, a Mexican-American working class gardener.

“And once I wrote the story and it was published and it had received some attention, I felt like ‘oh, I can’t quite let go of this character. I am interested in spinning a world around him.’ And I already understood that El Paso was sort of the background of where he was in his world. But as I began to spin a world around him, I began to understand that there was something bigger happening here,” she said.

One of the key themes in her book is “that history repeats itself no matter how many times we think humanity has surely learned its lesson,” said García.

Another key theme she would like readers to take away is “the idea of what borders mean in a larger sense. I mean, a border is a place that both divides and joins in. It’s a geopolitical gesture.”

If you would like to listen or read the full interview click here.

About the book:

In the border city of El Paso, Texas, two guardedly neighboring families have plunged headlong into a harrowing week. Rose Marie DuPre, wife and mother, has abandoned her family. On the doorstep of the Gonzales home, long-lost rebel Inez appears. As Rose Marie’s husband, Huck (manager of a maquiladora), and Inez’s brother, Jerry (a college professor), struggle separately with the new shape of their worlds, Lourdes, the Mexican maid who works in both homes, finds herself entangled in the lives of her employers, even as she grapples with a teenage daughter who only has eyes for el otro lado—life, American style.

Excerpt from “Hottest of the Hotspots”

November 21, 2023

Continually recognized as one of the “hottest” of all the world’s biodiversity hotspots, the island of Madagascar has become ground zero for the most intensive market-based conservation interventions on Earth.

Hottest of the Hotspots by Benjamin Neimark details the rollout of market conservation programs, including the finding drugs from nature—or “bioprospecting”—biodiversity offsetting, and the selling of blue carbon credits from mangroves. It documents the tensions that exist at the local level, as many of these programs incorporate populations highly dependent on the same biodiversity now turned into global commodities for purposes of saving it. Proponents of market conservation mobilize groups of ecologically precarious workers, or the local “eco-precariat,” who do the hidden work of collecting and counting species, monitoring and enforcing the vital biodiversity used in everything from drug discovery to carbon sequestration and large mining company offsets.

Providing a voice for those community workers many times left out of environmental policy discussions, this volume proposes critiques that aim to build better conservation interventions with perspectives of the local eco-precariat. Read an excerpt from the book below.

In the late 1980s, the famed biologist Norman Myers published a series of articles that drastically modified the global conservation map. Calling attention to locations with unusually high concentrations of species endemism found nowhere else on Earth, and areas facing exceptional threats of species extinction, Myers argued that these “hotspots” should be accorded the highest priority for protection. Myers’ original article identified 10 hotspots for protection. Two years later, he expanded his list to 18. By the year 2000, it had grown to 25, and by 2004, 34 hotspots had been proposed for special attention. Yet throughout this period of hotspot proliferation – one site in particular – the island of Madagascar, was continually recognized as one of the ‘hottest’ of all the hotspots.

It is easy to see conservationists’ attraction to Madagascar. Split off from the supercontinent Gondwana roughly 160 million years ago, Madagascar is the fourth largest island and the world’s largest oceanic island. Due to its convergent evolutionary history and unique biogeography, it is endowed with some of the most unique flora and fauna in the world. It is not only conservationists who have taken note of the value of Madagascar’s unique biodiversity, however. For years, thousands of plants, amphibians, insects, marine animals and microorganisms have been identified, collected and transported off the island for use in the discovery and development of new drugs, crops, chemicals and biofuels. Plant parts and insects are extracted out of the high, humid forests of the east; succulents are gathered in the western dry-spiny forests; and soft coral sponges are found on the northern reefs. The unique flora and fauna have distinctive biological traits and exceptional chemical properties, highly attractive to make new natural products, including drugs, biofuels and industrial products. It is in this context that they, like Norman Myers, place a special value on Madagascar’s nature.

The systematic search, screening, collecting and commercial development of valuable genetic and biological resources, is sometimes called “bioprospecting”. As the term suggests, bioprospectors, similar to those who search underground for gold or semi-precious stones, are also on an exploration mission – to locate, test, isolate, and extract the distinctive chemical scaffolding concealed under layers of cellular tissue and transformed by years of evolutionary history.

November 20, 2023

We were thrilled to see so many authors and editors stop by our booth at the joint conference of the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society in Toronto this year! If you weren’t able to visit our booth, there’s still time to order the books we had on display. Get 35% off with discount code AZAAA23 at checkout in our website shopping cart until 12/19/23.

Check out the photos of the event below!

A quiet moment before the exhibit hall opened on the first day of the conference.

Look at all those books! So many new Anthropology titles to display.

University of Arizona Press Senior Editor, Allyson Carter, standing beside Randall H. McGuire with his book, The Border and Its Bodies.

Maximilian Viatori with his books, The Unequal Ocean and Coastal Lives.

Thanks to everyone who came by to say hello, browse books, and talk with our staff. See you next year!

Excerpt from “Central American Migrations in the Twenty-First Century”

November 18, 2023

The reality of Central American migrations is broad, diverse, multidirectional, and uncertain. It also offers hope, resistance, affection, solidarity, and a sense of community for a region that has one of the highest rates of human displacement in the world.

Central American Migrations in the Twenty-First Century edited by Mauricio EspinozaMiroslava Arely Rosales Vásquezand Ignacio Sarmiento tackles head-on the way Central America has been portrayed as a region profoundly marked by the migration of its people. Through an intersectional approach, this volume demonstrates how the migration experience is complex and affected by gender, age, language, ethnicity, social class, migratory status, and other variables. Contributors carefully examine a broad range of topics, including forced migration, deportation and outsourcing, intraregional displacements, the role of social media, and the representations of human mobility in performance, film, and literature. The volume establishes a productive dialogue between humanities and social sciences scholars, and it paves the way for fruitful future discussions on the region’s complex migratory processes. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

In July 2021, the name of a young athlete was heard by every living Guatemalan with WIFI access or a TV: Luis Grijalva. A 22-year-old undocumented Guatemalan immigrant in the United States, Grijalva participated in the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games. On August 6, he became the first Guatemalan to run in the track and field 5K final, where he ultimately finished in 12th place and established a new Guatemalan record. Grijalva came to the United States at the age of one, when his parents decided to leave Guatemala City and––irregularly––migrate to New York. After a couple of years, the family relocated to Fairfield, California, where the father worked at a carwash and at a furniture company. In 2012, Grijalva became a beneficiary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which allows undocumented young immigrants to legally study and work in the United States. Thanks to this program and his talent, Grijalva was admitted with a full scholarship in Northern Arizona University in 2018. In June 2021, at the NCAA Division I Outdoor Track and Field Championship held in Eugene, Oregon, Grijalva secured a spot in the Olympic Games, becoming the last athlete to join Team Guatemala. Nevertheless, qualifying for the Olympic Games was not the hardest challenge––his participation was in jeopardy due to his undocumented status. Like any other undocumented immigrant, Grijalva would be able to leave the country at the cost of having his entrance to the United States prohibited for ten years. Grijalva paid more than $1,000 to file a special petition to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and obtain a permit that would allow him to re-enter the country after participating in the Olympics Games. After several anxious weeks of waiting, on July 27, his petition was ultimately accepted and Grijalva made history in Japan.

Grijalva’s story brings together some of the numerous difficulties faced by the 3.8 million Central Americans living in the United States—1.9 million of whom are believed to be in this country without papers (Babich and Batalova). For example, his legal permanence in the country where he has lived his entire life exclusively depends on the existence of the DACA program, which was in jeopardy when former president Donald Trump tried to cancel it during his first year in office. Fortunately for Grijalva and the other hundreds of thousands of DACA beneficiaries, the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the president did not have legal authority to rescind the program (Totemberg 2020). However, while Grijalva is able to work and study in the United States as long as DACA— which does not offer any path to residency or citizenship—is in effect, his parents are at constant risk of deportation.

Not all stories are the same for the more than 5 million migrants from the isthmus living (with or without documents) around the world. Privileged Central Americans also face forced displacement from their home countries—and not all end up in the United States. Two well-known recent cases are Nicaraguan authors Sergio Ramírez and Gioconda Belli. In September 2021, Ramírez (the 2017 Cervantes Prize winner and Nicaraguan vice president during the Sandinista government between 1985 and 1990) announced on social media that he had been forced into a second exile as a result of his open opposition to the oppressive Daniel Ortega-Rosario Murillo regime in his home country. At the time of this writing (2023), the eighty-year-old man was living in Spain, dealing with the hardships of his new reality (DW 2021). In one interview (given in Costa Rica, where he first fled), the writer addressed the heartbreak that this situation has caused him and which has affected thousands of his compatriots since the violently repressed protests against the current Nicaraguan government took place starting April 2018: “I am one of the 40,000 Nicaraguans exiled in Costa Rica, and I represent them because I have a voice that is heard, but exile is very hard. My house, my books collected during my entire life are there, and the idea that I may never find myself in that place of refuge that I have had for my writing is also very hard” (Santacecilia 2021; our translation). A similar situation has been faced by poet and novelist Gioconda Belli, also a former Sandinista militant, who in October 2021, at the age of seventy-two, was forced to abandon her home country (Barranco 2021). Her poem “No tengo dónde vivir” (I don’t have a place to live) reflects the anguish of having left everything behind (Belli 2021). In February 2023, Belli, Ramírez, and ninety-two other people were stripped of their Nicaraguan nationality by Ortega’s regime.

Belli’s and Ramírez’s experiences are far from being the only ones among Central American authors and creators. Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, many people in the world of arts and letters have suffered exile from taking part in political struggles to confront authoritarian governments, or they have left because of a lack of scholarships and financial support to survive and devote themselves completely to their artistic endeavors or as a result of a precarious cultural infrastructure in their home countries.

Contributors
Guillermo Acuña
Andrew Bentley
Fiore Bran-Aragón
Tiffanie Clark
Mauricio Espinoza
Hilary Goodfriend
Leda Carolina Lozier
Judith Martínez
Alicia V. Nuñez
Miroslava Arely Rosales Vásquez
Manuel Sánchez Cabrera
Ignacio Sarmiento
Gracia Silva
Carolina Simbaña González
María Victoria Véliz

***

Mauricio Espinoza is a poet, translator, and researcher from Costa Rica. He is an assistant professor of Spanish and Latin American cultural studies at the University of Cincinnati. Miroslava Arely Rosales Vásquez is a PhD student in literature at Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Germany. Ignacio Sarmiento is an assistant professor of Spanish and Latin American history at the State University of New York–Fredonia whose research focuses on postwar Central America and the Central American diaspora.

Excerpt from “From the Skin”

November 15, 2023

In From the Skin edited by Jerome Jeffery Clark and Elise Boxer with foreword by Nick Estes, contributors describe how they apply the theories and concepts of Indigenous studies to their communities, programs, and organizations. These individuals reflect on and describe the ways the discipline has informed and influenced their community programs and actions. They show the ways these efforts advance disciplinary theories, methodologies, and praxes. Their chapters cover topics that include librarianship, health programs, community organizing, knowledge recovery, youth programming, and gendered violence. Through their examples, the contributors show how they negotiate their peoples’ knowledge systems with knowledge produced in Indigenous studies programs, demonstrating how they understand the relationship between their people, their nations, and academia. We share an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

From the Skin: Defending Indigenous Nations Using Theory and Praxis originates from conversations at the 2016 American Indian Studies Association (AISA) conference held at Arizona State University. The membership met to consider the theme “Native Leadership in Community Building.” Each year the conference concludes with an association business meeting where new board members and the president are nominated and voted on. Once the new board is selected, they decide on the conference location for the next year. We both remember that year for separate conversations. The first conversation had to do with organizational direction and the nomination and election process. The board and membership discussed ways the organization could grow and the areas in which we should put our focus. The membership broadly recognized that the AISA could do more to formalize structure and establish new protocols, so the board established committees to research non-profit status and the adoption of bylaws. Conference attendees then nominated new board members and a president.

The second conversation among J. Jeffery Clark, Eric Hardy, Madison Fulton, and Waquin Preston happened after the business meeting ended. They all listened and participated in the business meeting discussions, offering their professional skills and knowledge to help the organization. Their post-business meeting conversation was about more than offering their abilities because they discussed the organization’s direction and their specific place within it and the field more broadly. They had all attended association meetings throughout their undergraduate studies, sometimes to present but other times to hear panels and to be in community. As graduates of Indigenous Studies programs, some of them had moved on to professional careers, while others enrolled in masters’ programs. They found themselves at a crossroads, recognizing that their work in Indigenous Studies was not visible because they weren’t academic professionals. But they valued and applied the scholarship and intellectual conversations that shaped their thinking and informed their community work. They asked: What is our place in this association? What is our place in the discipline? Does our work in the community have a place? Is our work taken seriously? They knew the worthiness of their work, which they felt deserved the same consideration as scholarship produced by professional academics. Because they applied disciplinary theories and concepts in their work, they knew there was room for their efforts. At that moment, though, they felt like their presence and efforts were underappreciated. At the root of their conversation and questions are matters of belonging, disciplinary scope, academic connections to community, legibility of community intellect and practices, and what counts as Indigenous Studies.

We recount these conversations and questions because this book holds space for former Indigenous students to display the ways they apply and develop Indigenous Studies in community work. If any students of Indigenous Studies have ever asked: What contributions do my practices make? What are my intellectual contributions? Where does my work belong? The response is this project, which is a testament to the creativity, commitment, and intellect of Indigenous students in the discipline. This edited collection features practitioners and thinkers of Indigenous Studies actively working with nonprofits, grassroots organizations, and academic institutions, all of these contexts represent the distinct ways to apply disciplinary knowledge. The collection of essays illustrates how the contributors apply the discipline in community contexts to recover, revitalize, and assert Indigenous knowledge systems. These individuals reflect upon and elucidate the ways the discipline has informed and influenced their community programs and actions, and it also shows the ways these efforts advance disciplinary theories, methodologies, and praxes.

The authors represent nine disciplinary undergraduate and graduate programs that include Arizona State University, University of New Mexico, Fort Lewis College, and the University of California Los Angeles, among others. The authors in this volume work with Indigenous Nations located in the political boundaries of the United States, but the intellectual labor of global Indigenous scholars informs their efforts. A similar project could have included contributors from other countries, but we limited our contributors to the US context for the simple reason of project manageability. Our process of selecting authors was to make a general call to our networks. We do not represent all Indigenous Nations from the US. We selected authors to ensure they covered a range of topics (gender, youth, education, health) and places (university, community, non-profit).

In the following sections, we discuss disciplinary origins and principles to contextualize our contributors’ locations within Indigenous Studies. Primarily, we focus on longstanding debates around the relationship between our discipline and Indigenous communities and nations. We then propose and define the term practitioner theorist to demarcate how the contributors fit in our discipline and intellectual practices and why we must pay attention to how they apply concepts and theories in their communities. We present their work in three sections: Animating Embodied Knowledge, Unsettling Institutions and Making Community, and Making Good Relations Now and Beyond. Although each chapter could fit under multiple sections, we decided on their placements to emphasize key topics and themes in their work and because we saw them in conversation with contributors they’re grouped with.

Contributors
Elise Boxer
Randi Lynn Boucher-Giago
Shawn Brigman
J. Jeffery Clark
Nick Estes
Eric Hardy
Shalene Joseph
Jennifer Marley
Brittani R. Orona
Alexander Soto

Arizona Bookstores Celebrate University Press Week, Nov. 13 – 17

November 14, 2023

Thank you to Bright Side Bookshop in Flagstaff, Antigone Books in Tucson, and the University of Arizona Bookstore for highlighting University of Arizona Press books this week! They are part of a national independent bookstore campaign to celebrate University Press Week, November 13 – 17, 2023.

The Association of University Presses‘s theme for this year’s University Press Week is ”Speak UP.” See the complete list of SpeakUP books here. The SpeakUP list of 103 publications represent the many areas in which university presses and their authors #Speak UP. Below are a few photos from Arizona bookstores that show the range of University of Arizona Press books.

Photos from University of Arizona bookstore above show our latest books in borderlands studies, Chicano/Chicana studies, Indigenous studies, best-selling poetry, and desert natural history books.

Bright Side Bookshop’s UA Press display includes this year’s popular Rim to River, the classic Science Be Damned, along with the recently published Nihikéyah, Navajo Homeland and Becoming Hopi, A History.

Antigone Bookstore in Tucson celebrates University Press Week with UA Press books, including Raven’s Echo and Cardinal in My Window with a Mask on Its Beak.

2023 AAA/CASCA Annual Meeting: Discounts, New Books, and More

November 13, 2023

We are thrilled to be participating in the 2023 AAA/CASCA Annual Meeting in Toronto, Ontario this week! November 15-19, find us at booth #211 to browse our latest anthropology titles and meet with our Senior Editor, Allyson Carter.

If you can’t attend this year, or if you need an extra copy of a book you discover at our booth, we’ve got you covered: use AZAAA23 for 35% off all titles through 12/19/23.

Are you an author or editor? Do you have a project that would be a great fit for The University of Arizona Press? To learn more about publishing with us, click here.

New & Featured Anthropology Titles

In Persistence of Good Living: A’uwe Life Cycles and Well-Being in the Central Brazilian Cerrados, anthropologist James R. Welch transparently presents ethnographic insights from his long-term fieldwork in two A’uwẽ communities. He addresses how distinctive constructions of age organization contribute to social well-being in an era of major ecological, economic, and sociocultural change. Welch shows how A’uwẽ perspectives on the human life cycle help define ethnic identity, promote cultural resilience, and encourage the betterment of youth.

Through careful analysis, Welch shows how contemporary traditional peoples can foster enthusiasm for service to family and community amid dominant cultures that prioritize individual well-being.

Urban Indigeneities: Being Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century is the first book to look at urban Indigenous peoples globally and present the urban Indigenous experience—not as the exception but as the norm. Edited by Dana Brablec and Andrew Canessa, the contributing essays draw on a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, architecture, land economy, and area studies, and are written by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars. The analysis looks at Indigenous people across the world and draws on examples not usually considered within the study of indigeneity, such as Fiji, Japan, and Russia.

Based on a decade of ethnographic and archival research in Peru, The Unequal Ocean: Living with Environmental Change along the Peruvian Coast reveals how prevailing representations of the ocean obscure racialized disparities and the ways that different people experience the impacts of the climate crisis.

Maximilian Viatori analyzes a multitude of timely topics, including waves and coastal development, the circulation of ocean waste, El Niño warming events, and the extraction of jumbo squid. This book also addresses expanding scholarly interest in the world’s oceans as sites for thinking about social inequities, environmental politics, and multispecies relationships.

Urban life has long intrigued Indigenous Amazonians, who regard cities as the locus of both extraordinary power and danger. Modern and ancient cities alike have thus become models for the representation of extreme alterity under the guise of supernatural enchanted cities. In Urban Imaginaries in Native Amazonia: Tales of Alterity, Power, and Defiance, editors Fernando Santos-Granero and Emanuele Fabiano seek to analyze how these ambiguous urban imaginaries—complex representations that function as cognitive tools and blueprints for social action—express a singular view of cosmopolitical relations, how they inform and shape forest-city interactions, and the history of how they came into existence.

The Carbon Calculation examines how climate science, the policy world, and neoliberalism have mutually informed each other to define the problem of climate change as one of “market failure”—precluding alternatives to market-based solutions.

Raquel Rodrigues Machaqueiro critically highlights the ways in which politics has reinforced a scientific focus on one possible solution to the problem of climate change—namely those that largely absolve the industrialized world from undertaking politically painful transformations in its own economic model.

Continually recognized as one of the “hottest” of all the world’s biodiversity hotspots, the island of Madagascar has become ground zero for the most intensive market-based conservation interventions on Earth. Hottest of the Hotspots: The Rise of Eco-precarious Conservation Labor in Madagascar details the rollout of market conservation programs, including the finding of drugs from nature—or “bioprospecting”—biodiversity offsetting, and the selling of blue carbon credits from mangroves. It documents the tensions that exist at the local level, as many of these programs incorporate populations highly dependent on the same biodiversity now turned into global commodities for purposes of saving it. Providing a voice for those community workers many times left out of environmental policy discussions, Benjamin Neimark proposes critiques that aim to build better conservation interventions with perspectives of the local eco-precariat.

Challenging traditional and long-standing understandings, Our Hidden Landscapes: Indigenous Stone Ceremonial Sites in Eastern North America provides an important new lens for interpreting stone structures that had previously been attributed to settler colonialism. Instead, the contributors to this volume argue that these locations are sacred Indigenous sites.

Editors Lucianne Lavin and Elaine Thomas introduce readers to eastern North America’s Indigenous ceremonial stone landscapes (CSLs)—sacred sites whose principal identifying characteristics are built stone structures that cluster within specific physical landscapes, presenting these often unrecognized sites as significant cultural landscapes in need of protection and preservation.

Featured Series

Amerind Studies in Anthropology is a series that publishes the results of the Amerind Seminars, annual professional symposia hosted by the Amerind Foundation in Dragoon, Arizona, and cosponsored by the Society for American Archaeology (SAA). Series titles that emerge from these symposia focus on timely topics like the analysis of regional archaeological sites, current issues in methodology and theory, and sweeping discussions of world phenomena such as warfare and cultural settlement patterns.

The Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona is a peer-reviewed monograph series sponsored by the School of Anthropology. Established in 1959, the series publishes archaeological and ethnographic papers that use contemporary method and theory to investigate problems of anthropological importance in the southwestern United States, Mexico, and related areas.

Critical Green Engagements: Investigating the Green Economy and Its Alternatives is a series that critically engages with the growing global advocacy of the “green economy” model for environmental stewardship and puts forth alternatives to discourses that dominate “green” practices. The series explores how different advocates, bystanders, and opponents engage with the changes envisaged by policy directives and environmental visions.

Native Peoples of the Americas is an ambitious series whose scope ranges from North to South America and includes Middle America and the Caribbean. Each volume takes unique methodological approaches—archaeological, ethnographic, ecological, and/or ethno-historical—to frame cultural regions. Volumes cover select theoretical approaches that link regions, such as Native responses to conquest and the imposition of authority, environmental degradation, loss of Native lands, and the appropriation of Native knowledge and cosmologies.

Biodiversity in small spaces is a series that provides short, to-the-point books that re-examine the conservation of biodiversity in small places and focus on the interplay of memory, identity, and affect in determining what matters, and thus what stays, thereby shaping the fabric of biodiversity in the present and, ultimately, the future.

Critical Issues in Indigenous Studies anchors intellectual work within an Indigenous framework that reflects Native-centered concerns and objectives. Series titles expand and deepen discussions about Indigenous people beyond nation-state boundaries, and complicate existing notions of Indigenous identity.

The Archaeology of Indigenous-Colonial Interactions in the Americas is a series that highlights leading current research and scholarship focused on Indigenous-colonial processes and engagement throughout all regions of the Americas. The series builds on the success of its predecessor, The Archaeology of Colonialism in Native North America.

Global Change/Global Health: Revealing Critical Interactions Between Social and Environmental Processes is a new series for scholarly monographs that treat global change and human health as interconnected phenomena. The goals of the series are to advance scholarship across the social and health sciences, contribute to public debates, and inform public policies about the human dimensions of global change.

For questions or to submit a proposal to any of these series, please contact Allyson Carter, acarter@uapress.arizona.edu.

Elizabeth Henson Essay in “The Brooklyn Rail”

November 10, 2023

Elizabeth Henson, author of Agrarian Revolt in the Sierra of Chihuahua, 1959–1965, writes about the Sojourner Truth Organization in The Brooklyn Rail. In her essay titled “When We Win, We Lose: The Story of a Run-Away Shop,” Henson details a critical event during her years as an activist and member of the Sojourner Truth Organization from the early 1970s to 1983. Similar to her book about the history of revolt and activism in Chihuahua, Mexico, the essay reveals her personal history of activism in the labor movement in Chicago.

She writes:

In the spring of 1976, Val Klink and I formed a legal collective downtown with Kingsley Clarke from the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO), the revolutionary communist group that we were close to. . . . South Chicago was grimy, with blocks of bungalows, menudo on weekends, and a thrift store opposite the bank. It was an espresso-free zone, but the train connected it to Hyde Park and downtown. In segregated Chicago, South Chicago was the one working-class district where Black, Mexican, and white folks lived more or less together. Our clients had real estate problems, contract disputes, and custody battles, a litany of tedious and intractable difficulties, exacerbated by the massive layoffs of the mid-1970s. Many had been employed by local steel mills.

Read the entire essay here.

About Agrarian Revolt in the Sierra of Chihuahua, 1959–1965:

The early 1960s are remembered for the emergence of new radical movements influenced by the Cuban Revolution. One such protest movement rose in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. With large timber companies moving in on the forested sierra highlands, campesinos and rancheros did not sit by as their lands and livelihoods were threatened. Continuing a long history of agrarian movements and local traditions of armed self-defense, they organized and demanded agrarian rights.

Thousands of students joined the campesino protests in long-distance marches, land invasions, and direct actions that transcended political parties and marked the participants’ emergence as political subjects.

Excerpt from “Ready Player Juan”

November 8, 2023

Written for all gaming enthusiasts, Ready Player Juan by Carlos Gabriel Kelly González fuses Latinx studies and video game studies to document how Latinx masculinities are portrayed in high-budget action-adventure video games, inviting Latinxs and others to insert their experiences into games made by an industry that fails to see them.

The book employs an intersectional approach through performance theory, border studies, and lived experience to analyze the designed identity “Player Juan.” Player Juan manifests in video game representations through a discourse of criminality that sets expectations of who and what Latinxs can be and do. Developing an original approach to video game experiences, the author theorizes video games as border crossings, and defines a new concept—digital mestizaje—that pushes players, readers, and scholars to deploy a Latinx way of seeing and that calls on researchers to consider a digital object’s constructive as well as destructive qualities. Read an excerpt from the book below.

In the past decade, I have taken to thinking more deeply and critically about video games, which has been my longest running and most beloved entertainment choice. Video games, just the words bring me joy and a possible connection to others— “you play video games?” A ‘Yes’ (a more common answer as the years have passed) always fills me with energy, excitement to know what this person plays and what games they love, or what console they play on, “oh PC, so cool!” I mean whatever people are playing on, I am pumped to hear their stories.
Games are full of stories, whether from the game’s narrative or from the people recounting a moment from their gameplay experiences. I once learned about an amazing game from a former student at a youth summer camp where I taught. The student chatted me up about all the games they played when at home. With excitement he pointed to a game’s alternate and shifting storylines, how cool it was that you could be three different people, and how there were consequences beyond what he was used to all in studio Quantic Dream’s Detroit: Become Human. I was also impressed by its story and how personal decisions left me asking what if I had chosen differently? Was there another way? The storytelling in video games compels me to play, to think about the game even when I should be doing other things; I revel in the stories video games provide.
Like the young boy at the camp, I didn’t know one could study video games beyond making them. I thought playing and enjoying games was all there was for me. I came to know this only because I was in a PhD program, which makes me think of how many people from other marginalized groups do not know or have the access they need to study video games? When you think about the low number of Latinxs in gaming production or in games’ representations, it isn’t surprising to see very little about Latinxs or games that continually stereotype us when that’s all we see in media. Then add the fact video games have always been an expensive hobby. The PlayStation 5 (PS5) is currently $750 in Brazil (2021, July), that’s over $250 more than the $500 US retail price. Or what about the 16-year-old Max Hayden buying and reselling PS5s for a total profit of over $1.7 million dollars? Video games and the new consoles are expensive and for the most part, because of the pandemic you are lucky to get one. All this to say that I have been fortunate in my access to the worlds made possible by video game creators and I consider it a privilege to be able to study, play, and love these stories.
We are living in a boom period for video games, in every sense of it. The attention to gaming has led to streaming favorite players, to esports competition, to websites dedicated to critiques and reviews, to next generation consoles, to more films and TV series about video games, to Twitter updates on where you can snag a next gen console; video games are it right now. Before I started to get into this research, I used to think video games had to prove they were worthy of attention or study, etc. This stance was a way for me to answer the criticism of video games being a waste of time, to study and examine the games I love to show people what was up! Yet, video games are worthy, and this idea runs less circles around me than before. However, I am plagued by yet another concern, this one more critical to unlocking the full potential of the stories I love in video games. In the face of this undeniable and infinite growth video games continue to lack diversity, especially when it comes to more completely capturing the extent of non-White peoples’ humanity. We just don’t see many stories not centering whiteness.
Video game storytelling has the potential to be boundless, to create what our other media cannot achieve, and yet we continue to see the same characters and the same stereotypes. Without diversity how can video games aspire to technology’s boundless possibilities? I’m reminded of Christopher González’s Permissible Narratives and how he writes about the limits experienced by Latinxs who were publishing their stories. He investigates how the early success of Latinx narratives set limits on the types of Latinx storytelling, creating a phenomenon of what was or is deemed permissible, which was/is based on audiences’ receptions to what stories they thought were authentic Latinx stories. He writes that “the earliest Latino/a authors were already attempting to break from a priori expectations of what types of narratives they could create; what they lacked was narrative permissibility from their audiences” (González 177). We continue to see this in the way Latinxs are represented in video games, with not much being permissible beyond the stereotypes involving White protagonists and Latinx side characters—if we even make it that far into the script.
Game production in the US (and globally) needs a more well-rounded dialogue that makes space for marginalized peoples, and no Naughty Dog Studios (creator of Last of us Two), you don’t just throw in a Latinx character and expect us to be like, “cool, cool, you did it!” I love that game, but it tokenizes people of color and treats us like horror movie characters where we have a role and then we do not, usually by brutal death. This role given to marginalized groups is usually in the service of expanding upon the protagonists’ story, just like Manny in Last of us Two. Thus, as consumers of games and producers of games we need to recognize that with the growing popularity and the immense storytelling power of video games comes responsibility— yes; Uncle Ben/Aunt May telling Spidey with great power. . . you know the rest.
Video games can and do provide a multitude of experiences that work on us physically, mentally, and emotionally. Again, which is why it is so critical to be more inclusive instead of recreating the same White male lead with a slightly modified 5’o clock shadow. When it comes to Latinxs, we really don’t exist in the same ways that White characters do. In fact, Latinx masculinities (in mostly male bodies) exist only in stereotypes, and I can only name three playable Latina characters in the last 20 years: Isabella Keyes, Christie Monteiro, and Sombra. Notable here, Sombra was only added after the launch of Overwatch, again pointing to how Latinxs are afterthoughts. How is this possible when according to Pew Research, Latinxs are considered the fastest growing group of people to identify as gamers? (Pew). Latinxs are continually underrepresented as marginalized peoples in all our media even though we make up the most sizeable portion of non-gringo peoples in the US. This erasure, this ignoring, this way of seeing worlds without Latinxs just can’t stand anymore. As gamers, as people, as heavy consumers of video games (the highest consumers of video games) Latinxs deserve better.

Photos from Alma García’s Book Launch in Seattle

November 8, 2023

Alma García, celebrated her debut novel All That Rises at two Seattle bookstores. Although originally from Texas and New Mexico, García now makes her home in the Pacific Northwest. She launched her novel at Secret Garden Books where she used to work as a bookseller. Her “OG” booksellers surprised her at the celebration. Everyone enjoyed music by Jenny&Birch and Los Flacos. Next up, Kristen Millares interviewed García at Elliott Bay Book Company. Seattle is a great town for authors and readers!

If you live in Texas or New Mexico, Alma García is coming your way:

Nov. 10: Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio

Nov. 11: Texas Book Festival in Austin

Nov. 14 Búho Books in Brownsville

Nov. 16 Daniel Chacón Talks with Alma García in El Paso

Nov. 17 Bookworks in Albuquerque

Readers with the book and Alma García reading at Secret Garden Books. Los Flacos and Jenny&Birch brought the book launch rhythm.

At Elliot Bay Book Company, readers celebrated the debut novelist. Kristen Millares (on the right in red) interviewed Alma García, then the author read from All That Rises.

About the book:

In the border city of El Paso, Texas, two guardedly neighboring families have plunged headlong into a harrowing week. Rose Marie DuPre, wife and mother, has abandoned her family. On the doorstep of the Gonzales home, long-lost rebel Inez appears. As Rose Marie’s husband, Huck (manager of a maquiladora), and Inez’s brother, Jerry (a college professor), struggle separately with the new shape of their worlds, Lourdes, the Mexican maid who works in both homes, finds herself entangled in the lives of her employers, even as she grapples with a teenage daughter who only has eyes for el otro lado—life, American style.

A Yavapai Night to Remember: Presenting to Carlos Montezuma’s Ancestral Community

November 7, 2023                                    

By David Martínez

Every aspect of my experience writing My Heart Is Bound Up with Them: How Carlos Montezuma Became the Voice of a Generation has been profoundly rewarding and fulfilling. From delving into the treasures of the Carlos Montezuma Archival Collection in ASU’s Hayden Library to first holding the book in my hands, I felt a genuine satisfaction with the work I created and an immense amount of gratitude for everyone who has helped along the way. However, now that the book is out, the focus is more on the historic figure at the center of my book than it is on me as researcher and author. As an Indigenous scholar and public intellectual, a unique experience in my professional career is sharing my work with Indigenous communities. Of particular importance is the opportunity to speak with an historic figure’s living descendants. On the evening of October 5, 2023, I had the honor of telling members of Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation what I had written about their revered ancestor, Wassaja, also known as Carlos Montezuma. It was a night I will always remember.

         While many today think of the Wekopa Resort and Casino complex when they think of Fort McDowell, for others the lands along the Verde River are the ancestral Yavapai homeland. For my Akimel O’odham ancestors, however, the Yavapai were o’ob, which is how we say “enemy” in our ne’oki, our O’odham language. In turn, the Yavapai called us jo’go ha’na. Nonetheless, as Arizona Territory was building its economy for the purpose of being admitted into the Union as the forty-eighth state, which it did in 1912, local business interests in the Verde Valley coveted Yavapai land and water. Toward that end, they convinced the Office of Indian Affairs under Commissioner Cato Sells to take steps at relocating the Yavapai from Fort McDowell to the Salt River Pima-Maricopa reservation. Needless to say, neither tribe was pleased with this proposition. Fortunately, someone arrived, a protector, who would fight the Indian Office, advocate for their rights, and avert an economic catastrophe and a humanitarian crisis. His Yavapai relatives knew him as Wassaja and always addressed him in their copious letters as “Dear Cousin.” The rest of the country, including my O’odham ancestors, knew him as Carlos Montezuma, the author of “Let My People Go” (1915). What Montezuma did for Salt River, not to mention the Gila River reservation, which would have also felt the impact of the Yavapai forced removal, was the story that I wanted to tell at Fort McDowell.

               When Clissene Lewis, director of the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation Museum & Cultural Center, invited me to present, it was at the behest of Irasema Coronado, director of ASU’s School of Transborder Studies, where I have a joint appointment (with American Indian Studies). Clissene, in addition to other Yavapai community leaders, were given signed copies shortly after the book’s release this past February. So, it was no surprise that Clissene was anxious to organize an event. She had read the book already and had written to me to share her favorable opinion. The only restriction with respect to the event was limiting it to Fort McDowell community members. Irasema and I were amenable to this request. Fort McDowell wanted this to be just for them. Consequently, my wife Sharon and I drove from our home in Tempe to the Fort McDowell Recreation Center, which contains a ballroom and theater stage. A sign inside called this venue the “Large Room.”

               While the recreation center, which stands near the museum, isn’t that far away from the casino and resort complex, it feels a world apart. The facility was decorated for Halloween and the workout room, gymnasium, pool, and other rooms were busy with Yavapai children and adults. Clissene was waiting for us in the Large Room. Having arrived early, Sharon and I were introduced to the small team of community members that were there to help make the night’s event run smoothly. I wish I could recall all of their names. But the night turned into a whirlwind. Not long before 6 pm, the room began to fill. Before I knew it, Clissene was greeting the audience. She then asked an elder to say a prayer and bless the refreshments. People ate and visited, all the while laughing and having a pleasant time. A few minutes later, it was time to begin.

               After thanking Clissene for her warm introduction, I began telling my Yavapai audience why their ancestor, Wassaja, was so important to my people as well. I showed them the ooshikbina, the calendar sticks, which recounted how my O’odham ancestors at Salt River and Blackwater villages remembered young Wassaja as Hejel-wi’ikam, or “Left Alone,” when he was captured by O’odham scouts, who were working for the US Army during the late 1860s. I told them what the Indian Office wanted to do to Yavapai; how their rights were disregarded and their well-being ignored, all in the name of progress. Significantly, I shared with them my feelings when Montezuma showed compassion for the O’odham, even though they were the ones that stole him and sent him into exile from his homeland. In fact, as Anna Moore Shaw related in A Pima Past, Montezuma once visited Sacaton Village on the Gila River reservation, where he asked to meet his captors. According to oral history, Wassaja’s captors, now elderly, were apprehensive about meeting the young boy who was now a man. Yet, when Montezuma met one of these former scouts, he shook his hand and thanked him for saving him from the devastating conditions that his Yavapai family had to endure in the aftermath of the Army’s invasion. My story concluded with an account from Yavapai oral history, which said that not long before Montezuma passed away in January 1923, he was taken to Skeleton Cave, the site of an 1872 massacre that shattered the community. Ancestral remains were being recovered. However, even after fifty years, the cave walls still showed the blood stains. Montezuma wept. My presentation concluded with a reverential silence, which I honored by saying that whatever one may think about Montezuma’s political legacy—he was a friend to Carlisle Indian School founder Richard Pratt and a strong proponent of abolishing the Indian Office—no one should ever doubt that Montezuma loved his people.

               In conclusion, as people applauded, a little girl, about seven years old, came rushing up to the stage. When she gestured to me that she wanted to say something, I leaned forward so I could hear her. “Can I have your autograph?” Needless to say, I was delighted. At the same time, I noticed that she wasn’t holding anything. Clissene had purchased books for community members, however, I didn’t expect a little girl to be among my readers. “What did you want me to sign?” I asked her. “I don’t know. But my grandmother said that we could get your autograph.” Naturally, like a typical college professor, I had a pen and yellow pad with me, complete with my lecture notes. I then led her to the table where Sharon was sitting. While writing a thank you note to my young autograph seeker, others began lining up to get their books signed. One at a time, they told me their names, expressed appreciation for my lecture, and asked me an assortment of questions about my book, Montezuma, and me. Among the attendees was the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation president, Bernadine Burnette; the vice president, Paul J Russell; and the treasurer, Pansy P Thomas. Only on my own reservation have I felt so moved and honored. Thank you all.

***
David Martínez is professor of American Indian and Transborder studies at Arizona State University and is enrolled in the Gila River Indian Community. He is the author of My Heart Is Bound Up with Them: How Carlos Montezuma Became the Voice of a Generation, Life of the Indigenous Mind: Vine Deloria Jr. and the Birth of the Red Power Movement, and Dakota Philosopher: Charles Eastman and American Indian Thought.

Anthony Macías on Latinopia Cinema

November 3, 2023

Anthony Macías, author of Chicano-Chicana Americana: Pop Culture Pluralism Starring Anthony Quinn, Katy Jurado, Robert Beltran, and Lupe Ontiveros, was interviewed on Latinopia.com. In the short video, he talks about how the actors subtly transformed American culture through film imagery. He explains about two actors featured in the book: “When I was telling people about the book, I was shocked that they had no idea who Anthony Quinn is. And he has been in hundreds of movies, co-starring with all these Academy Award winners. He’s a four-time Academy Award winner and people haven’t heard of him! And then Katy Jurado—I wasn’t aware of her other than her groundbreaking, legendary role in ‘High Noon.’ She was bigger in the golden age of Mexican cinema than in the classic Hollywood studio system.”

About Chicano-Chicana Americana:

Each biographical chapter analyzes an underappreciated actor, revealing their artistic contributions to U.S. common culture. Their long-shot careers tell a tale of players taking action with agency and fighting for screen time and equal opportunity despite disadvantages and differential treatment in Hollywood. These dynamic and complex individuals altered cinematic representations—and audience expectations—by surpassing stereotypes.

The book explores American national character by showing how ethnic Mexicans attained social and cultural status through fair, open competition without a radical realignment of political or economic structures. Their creative achievements demanded dignity and earned respect. Macías argues that these performances demonstrated a pop culture pluralism that subtly changed mainstream America, transforming it from the mythological past of the Wild West to the speculative future of science fiction.

When Language Broke Open Makes #SpeakUp List

November 2, 2023

To celebrate University Press Week (November 12-17, 2023), the Association of University Presses created a list of “103 University Press Publications that #SpeakUp”. Selected by member presses to celebrate UP Week 2023, these 103 publications represent the many areas in which university presses and their authors #Speak UP. We are happy to announce that When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent, edited by Alan Pelaez Lopez, is on the list.

When Language Broke Open collects the creative offerings of forty-five queer and trans Black writers of Latin American descent who use poetry, prose, and visual art to illustrate Blackness as a geopolitical experience that is always changing. Telling stories of Black Latinidades, this anthology centers the multifaceted realities of the LGBTQ community.

Alan Pelaez Lopez is an Afro-Indigenous poet and installation and adornment artist from Oaxaca, Mexico. Their work attends to the realities of undocumented migrants in the United States, the Black condition in Latin America, and the transgender imagination. Their poetry collection, Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien, was a finalist for the 2020 International Latino Book Award. They are an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis.

November 2, 2023

We were thrilled to see so many authors and editors stop by our booth at the Western History Association Conference in Los Angeles in October. If you weren’t able to stop by, there’s still time to order our western history titles. For 30% off and free shipping in the continental U.S., use discount code AZWHA23 at checkout in our website shopping cart. The discount ends 11/28/23.

Yvette Saavedra and Vanessa Fonseca-Chavez with their books. They are also editors for our new series BorderVisions.

Author Doug Hurt speaks with Editor-in-Chief Kristen Buckles.

Co-Editor Elise Boxer with her new book!

José Alamillo (center) speaks with Arizona Crossroads series editors Katherine Morrissey (left) and Eric Meeks (right).

Author Nancy Marie Mithlo speaks with Kristen Buckles.

Yvette Saavedra (Pitzer) and Publicity Manager Mary Reynolds (Pomona) realize they are both Claremont Colleges graduates. Go Sagehens!

Aldama, Lomelí & Gómez Winners for 2023 International Latino Book Awards

November 1, 2023

Francisco Lomeli, a smiling man with white hair and glasses, posing beside his book and an award
Photo credit: Paul Meyers / UC Santa Barbara

We are pleased to announce that two of our books were recently selected as winners for the 2023 International Latino Book Awards. Juan Felipe Herrera: Migrant, Activist, Poet Laureate, edited by Francisco A. Lomelí and Osiris Aníbal Gómez, won a gold medal in the “Best Biography” category.  Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama won a bronze medal in the “Best Academic Themed Book, College Level – English” category.

In their remarks about Juan Felipe Herrera: Migrant, Activist, Poet Laureate, the judges complimented the book’s inclusion of “19 writers’ diverse thoughts about the works and life of a national treasure.” Commenting on Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century, the judges wrote that the book “would make an interesting documentary. Very interesting to read about the growth and nurturing of the development of Latina/o actors.”

The International Latino Book Awards recognize excellence in literature, honoring books written in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, with the goal of “growing the awareness for books written by, for and about Latinos.”

International Latino Book Awards event group photo

About the authors:

Frederick Luis Aldama, also known as Professor Latinx, is the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as Adjunct Professor and Distinguished University Professor at The Ohio State University. He is the award-winning author of more than forty-eight books, including the bilingual children’s books The Adventures of Chupacabra Charlie and With Papá. He is editor or co-editor of nine academic press book series, including Latinographix, which publishes Latinx comics. He is the creator of the first documentary on the history of Latinx superheroes and the founder and director of UT Austin’s Latinx Pop Lab.

Francisco A. Lomelí is professor emeritus and distinguished professor of Chicano/a studies and Latin American literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published extensively on Mexican, Chilean, Argentine, and Chicano/a literatures, as well as multiple reference works in the field of Chicano/a studies.

Osiris Aníbal Gómez is an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His areas of expertise include contemporary Indigenous literatures of Mexico, Mexican literature, Chicano/a literature, and translation studies. His work explores the condition, aesthetics, and social justice possibilities of bilingual Indigenous and Chicanx writers.

Congratulations to all!

Excerpt from “Construction of Maya Space”

November 1, 2023

Construction of Maya Space, edited by Thomas H. Guderjan and Jennifer P. Mathews, sheds new light on how Maya society may have shaped—and been shaped by—the constructed environment. Moving beyond the towering pyramids and temples often associated with Maya spaces, this volume focuses on how those in power used features such as walls, roads, rails, and symbolic boundaries to control those without power, and how the powerless pushed back.

Through fifteen engaging chapters, contributors examine the construction of spatial features by ancient, historic, and contemporary Maya elite and non-elite peoples to understand how they used spaces differently. Through cutting-edge methodologies and case studies, chapters consider how and why Maya people connected and divided the spaces they used daily in their homes, in their public centers, in their sacred places such as caves, and across their regions to inform us about the mental constructs they used to create their lives and cultures of the past. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

The purpose of this volume is to examine the construction of spatial features by ancient, historic, and contemporary Maya people of Mesoamerica. As humans such as Maya peoples encounter spaces like a tropical landscape, they modify them to meet their social and economic needs. They built towering pyramids around public plazas and constructed vast networks of ditched fields to produce food and other agricultural products, however, much of the focus of this volume goes beyond these spaces. Instead, we consider how and why Maya people of the ancient past and more recent present connected and divided the spaces they used daily in their homes, in their public centers, in their sacred places, and across their regions. How does the evidence of walls, roads, rails, and boundary markers that they left on today’s archaeological landscape inform us about the mental constructs they used to create their lives and cultures of the past?

This theoretical approach is essentially a Taylorian view – one that believes that we can understand the behaviors that caused and created the archaeological data and then, by extension, inform us about their defining mental constructs (Taylor 1948). Like Walt Taylor himself, we may never fully reach that final goal. However, we challenged ourselves and our colleagues to reexamine how and why walls, roads and other features can both connect and divide space. At first blush, the idea that “walls divide” or “roads connect” sounds simplistic. However, as the papers in this volume demonstrate, the answers to our questions are complex and nuanced. To arrive where we wanted this study to end involves deconstructing archaeological data, both temporally and in terms of the behavior that created those data. We believe we have made strides in our own understanding and hope to share them in this volume by thinking about how our notion of Maya landscapes, placemaking, and memory work have evolved.

Contributors
Elias Alcocer Puerto
Alejandra Alonso Olvera
Traci Ardren
Jaime J. Awe
Alejandra Badillo Sánchez
Nicolas C. Barth
Grace Lloyd Bascopé
Adolpho Iván Batún-Alpuche
Elizabeth Beckner
M. Kathryn Brown
Bernadette Cap
Miguel Covarrubias Reyna
Juan Fernandez Diaz
Alberto G. Flores Colin
Thomas H. Guderjan
C. Colleen Hanratty
Héctor Hernández Álvarez
Scott R. Hutson
Joshua J. Kwoka
Whitney Lytle
Aline Magnoni
Jennifer P. Mathews
Stephanie J. Miller
Shawn G. Morton
Holley Moyes
Shannon Plank
Dominique Rissolo
Patrick Rohrer
Carmen Rojas Sandoval
Justine M. Shaw
J. Gregory Smith
Travis W. Stanton
Karl A. Taube
Daniel Vallejo-Cáliz

Brandy McDougall Is Keynote Speaker at Schools of the Future Conference

October 31, 2023

Brandy Nālani McDougall will speak at the The Schools of the Future Conference (SOTF Conference) on November 16, 1 -2 p.m., in Honolulu. In her keynote presentation, she will share her poems and poems by other Hawaiʻi poets, as well as reflections on her experience as both a haumana (student) and as a kumu (teacher) within Hawaiʻi school systems.

McDougall, the author of  Aina Hanau/Birth Land and Finding Meaning, (Kanaka ‘Ōiwi) is a poet, scholar, mother, and aloha ‘āina from Aʻapueo, Maui, and now living with her ʻohana in Kalaepōhaku, Oʻahu. She is director of the Mānoa Center for the Humanities and Civic Engagement and an associate professor of Indigenous studies in the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s American Studies Department.

The SOTF Conference explores a wide-range of topics and ideas related to best and emerging practices in education. The annual conference is the largest event of its nature in Hawai’i and serves as an opportunity for teachers and administrators, across Hawaii’s public, private and charter schools, to reflect upon how to better serve children. The conference is produced annually in partnership with the Hawai’i State Department of Education, the Hawai’i Association of Independent Schools, the Hawai’i Community Foundation and the Hawai’i Society for Technology in Education.

National Book, Jacket, and Journal Show at UA Press

October 27, 2023

The University of Arizona Press will host this year’s Association of University Presses 58th annual Book, Jacket, and Journal Show, Nov. 13 – Dec. 23, 2023. The show coincides with the 10th anniversary University Press Week, Nov. 13 – 17. One winning design above is from Princeton University Press Designer Chris Ferrante and The Original Bambi, The Story of a Life in the Forest, by Felix Salten, illustrated by Alenka Sottler.

The show will recognize, honor, and celebrate the work of design and production professionals in university publishing.

“There is so much knowledge and creativity in this community,” said Wendy McMillen, Production and Design Manager at the University of Notre Dame Press, who, along with Mindy Basinger Hill, Art Director at the University of Washington Press, co-chaired this year’s Book, Jacket, and Journal Show Committee. “The AUPresses Book, Jacket, and Journal Show gets better every year!”

Open to AUPresses member publishers worldwide, this year’s competition attracted 488 submissions, published during 2022 in these categories:

  • Scholarly typographic books
  • Scholarly illustrated books
  • Trade typographic books
  • Trade illustrated books
  • Poetry and literature books
  • Reference books
  • Journals
  • Jackets and covers (of books and journals)

Come check out the winners at the UA Press office, 5th Floor of the Main Library, University of Arizona.

Excerpt from “Nihikéyah, Navajo Homeland”

This anthology of essays edited by Lloyd L. Lee offers perspectives of the Navajo homeland, nihikéyah, highlighting Diné examinations and understandings of the land.

While various books have investigated Native American reservations and homelands, this book is from Diné individuals’ experiences, observations, and examinations. Poets, writers, and scholars frame their thoughts on four key questions: What are the thoughts/perspectives on nihikéyah/Navajo homeland? What challenges does nihikéyah face in the coming generations, and what should all peoples know about nihikéyah? And how can nihikéyah build a strong and positive Navajo Nation for the rest of this century and beyond? Below read an excerpt from the book.

Over 400,000 people are enrolled Navajo Nation citizens and over 150,000 live on the Navajo Nation. The Navajo Nation land base is 27,413 square miles, larger than ten of the fifty states in the United States of America.  While the Navajo Treaty of 1868 established an original reservation, Diné people always regard their homeland in relation to their six sacred mountains.  This homeland is referred to as Níhi Kéyah.  Níhi kéyah means the land the people live and walk upon called home. The Diyin Dine’é (Holy People) created níhi kéyah for the people and instructed them to live within its space.  For this book, the term níhi kéyah will be used to refer to Navajo land and the homeland.

Níhi kéyah is the world to Diné people.  While many Native Nations and communities have been separated from their original homeland through forced removal and live elsewhere, Diné people continue to live on their original homeland even though some of the land is not designated as part of the reservation. 

Níhi kéyah is more than a commodity and property for the people, it is their foundation and hózhǫ́ǫgo iiná (beauty way of life).  Níhi kéyah is a physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual existence for the people. Níhi kéyah is the core of what it means to be human and Diné.  Níhi kéyah’s energy and spirit are reflected in the creation scripture, journey narratives, matrix, and way of life. 

In this book, the eight contributors categorized in the cardinal directions will focus on níhi kéyah’s spirit and the challenges the homeland faces including climate change, oppression, bureaucracy, and the western legal system.  The contributors’ examinations, analyses, and/or reflections display a distinct Diné or Navajo matrix.  While many non-Diné or non-Navajo have written about the land, philosophy, history, and so many other topics on the Navajo Nation, each of the contributors in this book are Diné, grew up or live on the Navajo Nation, and have observed and/or experienced in their lifetime what they are writing about for the reading audience.  Their written words embody níhi kéyah, the love, and concerns each has for their homeland.  

We start with a general description of a part of the Navajo creation narratives to provide context to níhi kéyah.  The stories come from the book Navajo History Volume I compiled by the Navajo Curriculum Center, edited by Ethelou Yazzie, and published by Rough Rock Press in 1971 and Mike Mitchell’s Origins of the Diné published in 2001 by the Navajo Studies and Curriculum Center at the Rough Rock Community School.  Other versions of these narratives exist and each one, including this generalized version, are all accurate. The texts used to discuss the creation narratives have long been thought of by Navajo people and scholars as some of the most reliable sources on Diné baa hane’ (Navajo history).

Contributors
Mario Atencio
Shawn Attakai
Wendy Shelly Greyeyes
Rex Lee Jim
Manny Loley
Jonathan Perry
Jake Skeets
Jennifer Jackson Wheeler

2023 Arizona Historic Preservation Conference: Discounts, Featured Books, and More

October 23, 2023

We are thrilled to be participating in the 2023 Arizona Historic Preservation Conference this week! This year, the conference will be held October 25-28 right here in Tucson, Arizona. View the full schedule here.

One more reason to attend is a chance to hear keynote speaker, Lydia Otero, who has written extensively on urban space, place, and history. We’ll have extra copies of Otero’s La Calle: Spatial Conflicts and Urban Renewal in a Southwest City at our booth!

If you can’t attend this year, or if you need an extra copy of a book you discover at our booth, we’ve got you covered: use AZHPC23 for 35% off all titles through 11/28/23.

New & Featured History Titles

Becoming Hopi is a comprehensive look at the history of the people of the Hopi Mesas as it has never been told before. The Hopi Tribe is one of the most intensively studied Indigenous groups in the world. Most popular accounts of Hopi history romanticize Hopi society as “timeless.” The archaeological record and accounts from Hopi people paint a much more dynamic picture, full of migrations, gatherings, and dispersals of people; a search for the center place; and the struggle to reconcile different cultural and religious traditions. Becoming Hopi weaves together evidence from archaeology, oral tradition, historical records, and ethnography to reconstruct the full story of the Hopi Mesas, rejecting the colonial divide between “prehistory” and “history.”

Diverting the Gila, the sequel to David H. DeJong’s 2009 Stealing the Gila, 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. DeJong explores the complex web of tension, distrust, and political maneuvering to divide and divert the scarce waters of the Gila River.

On March 1, 1966, the voters of Tucson approved the Pueblo Center Redevelopment Project—Arizona’s first major urban renewal project—which targeted the most densely populated eighty acres in the state. For close to one hundred years, tucsonenses had created their own spatial reality in the historical, predominantly Mexican American heart of the city, an area most called “la calle.” Here, amid small retail and service shops, restaurants, and entertainment venues, they openly lived and celebrated their culture. To make way for the Pueblo Center’s new buildings, city officials proceeded to displace la calle’s residents and to demolish their ethnically diverse neighborhoods, which, contends Lydia Otero, challenged the spatial and cultural assumptions of postwar modernity, suburbia, and urban planning.

La Calle examines conflicting claims to urban space, place, and history as advanced by two opposing historic preservationist groups: the La Placita Committee and the Tucson Heritage Foundation. She gives voice to those who lived in, experienced, or remembered this contested area, and analyzes the historical narratives promoted by Anglo American elites in the service of tourism and cultural dominance.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the canyons and mesas of the Southwest beckoned and the burgeoning field of archaeology thrived. Among those who heeded the call, Marjorie Ferguson Lambert became one of only a handful of women who left their imprint on the study of southwestern archaeology and anthropology. In No Place for a Lady, Shelby Tisdale successfully combines Lambert’s voice from extensive interviews with her own to take us on a thought-provoking journey into how Lambert created a successful and satisfying professional career and personal life in a place she loved (the American Southwest) while doing what she loved.

Western History Association 2023: Discounts, New Books, and More

October 23, 2023

We are thrilled to be participating in the 2023 Western History Association meeting in Los Angeles, California this week! Find us near the exhibit hall entrance at booth #201 to browse our latest history titles and meet with our Editor-in-Chief, Kristen Buckles.

If you can’t attend this year, or if you need an extra copy of a book you discover at our booth, we’ve got you covered: use AZWHA23 for 30% off all titles through 11/28/23.

Are you an author or editor? Do you have a project that would be a great fit for The University of Arizona Press? To learn more about publishing with us, click here.

New & Featured History Titles

In From the Skin, contributors demonstrate the real-world application of Indigenous theory to the work they do in their own communities and how this work is driven by urgency, responsibility, and justice—work that is from the skin.

Editors J. Jeffery Clark and Elise Boxer propose and develop the term practitioner-theorist to describe how the contributors theorize and practice knowledge within and between their nations and academia. The practitioner-theorists of this volume envision and labor toward decolonial futures where Indigenous peoples and nations exist on their own terms.

In the Arms of the Saguaros shows how, from the botanical explorers of the nineteenth century to the tourism boosters in our own time, saguaros and their images have fulfilled attention-getting needs and expectations. Through text and lavish images, author William L. Bird Jr. explores the saguaro’s growth into a western icon from the early days of the American railroad to the years bracketing World War II, when Sun Belt boosterism hit its zenith and proponents of tourism succeed in moving the saguaro to the center of the promotional frame.

While various books have investigated Native American reservations and homelands, Nihikéyah is from Diné individuals’ experiences, observations, and examinations. Lloyd L. Lee gathers poets, writers, and scholars who frame their thoughts on four key questions: What are the thoughts/perspectives on nihikéyah/Navajo homeland? What challenges does nihikéyah face in the coming generations, and what should all peoples know about nihikéyah? And how can nihikéyah build a strong and positive Navajo Nation for the rest of this century and beyond?

Where We Belong dispels the harmful myth that Native people are unfit stewards of their sacred places. In this comparative work, Daisy Ocampo brings together the stories of two peoples and places in North America, establishing Indigenous preservation practices as sustaining approaches to the caretaking of the land that embody ecological sustainability, spiritual landscapes, and community well-being.

Celebrating more than forty years of creative writing by Chicana author Margarita Cota-Cárdenas, La Plonqui includes critical essays, reflections, interviews, and previously unpublished writing by the author herself to document the lifelong craft and legacy of a pioneering writer in the field. Editors Jesús Rosales and Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez affirm Margarita Cota-Cárdenas’s significant role in shaping the field of Chicana literature and emphasize the importance of honoring a celebrated author who wrote a majority of her works in Spanish—one of the few Chicana writers to do so.

A comprehensive new work, Carbon Sovereignty offers a deep dive into the complex inner workings of energy shift in the Navajo Nation. Geographer Andrew Curley, a member of the Navajo Nation, examines the history of coal development within the Navajo Nation, including why some Diné supported coal and the consequences of doing so. He explains the Navajo Nation’s strategic choices to use the coal industry to support its sovereignty as a path forward in the face of ongoing colonialism.

Chicano-Chicana Americana is a cultural history of Mexican Americans in film, television, and theater. Through biographical sketches of performers such as Anthony Quinn, Katy Jurado, Robert Beltran, and Lupe Ontiveros, this work asserts Mexican Americans’ proper place in the national narratives of our collective imaginary. Conveying a multicentered, polycultural America, Anthony Macías shows us intriguing performers in bit parts who steal the scene and redefine what it means to be American.

Featured Series

We are excited to be adding new titles to our BorderVisions, Arizona Crossroads, Modern American West, and Critical Issues in Indigenous Studies series this year! Learn more below.

BorderVisions, edited by Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez and Yvette J. Saavedra, engages the U.S.-Mexico borderlands’ dynamic histories and cultures and expands our understanding of the borderlands beyond a site of geopolitical inquiry. We are especially interested in books that address the complexities and richness of borderlands experiences at different historical, cultural, and sociopolitical moments. Watch a recording of the series launch for BorderVisions here.

Arizona Crossroads, edited by Anita Huizar-Hernández, Eric V. Meeks, and Katherine G. Morrissey, is a series in collaboration with the Arizona Historical Society that explores the history of peoples and cultures, events and struggles, ideas and practices in the place we know today as Arizona. 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.

Critical Issues in Indigenous Studies, edited by Jeffrey P. Shepherd and Myla Vicenti Carpio, anchors intellectual work within an Indigenous framework that reflects Native-centered concerns and objectives. Series titles expand and deepen discussions about Indigenous people beyond nation-state boundaries, and complicate existing notions of Indigenous identity. The series editors are especially interested in works that analyze colonization, land dispossession, and oppression while foregrounding Indigenous peoples’ resistance to these processes.

Modern American West, edited by Flannery Burke and Andrew G. Kirk, seeks to advance scholarly and public understanding of the rich history of the twentieth-century American West by publishing creative works of research and synthesis. Volumes in the series are distinguished by both original research and careful analysis of existing secondary literature. The series editors seek single- or co-authored works that identify new directions for scholarship and develop new interpretive frameworks, while also providing comprehensive introductions to particular topics.

For questions or to submit a proposal to any of these series, please contact Kristen Buckles, kbuckles@uapress.arizona.edu.

Alma García Essay in “Poets & Writers”

October 20, 2023

“Poets & Writers,”  the nation’s largest nonprofit organization serving creative writers, invited 5 over 50 authors to write essays for the November/December 2023 magazine. One of them is Alma García, author of All That Rises. In the introduction, the editor says, “These first-time authors, who range from their early fifties to early seventies, remind us that time, and its inevitable passage, is a gift that enriches our personal and literary lives and that age can make us both robust and nimble, ready to persevere, to put words on the page.”

García explains her writing journey from short stories to journalism to debut novel. She writes:

Writing a book over a very long time is sometimes a deadly enterprise. Ideas drift. The end point disappears. A lack of urgency can overtake you. You might find yourself appalled when you pass your own characters in age. You become aware of your own mortality, of the soul-sucking thought that your best creative years already might be behind you.

But if you listen quietly, sometimes you’ll hear the truth of your own creative being whispering in your ear.

Read her beautiful essay here.

About the book:

In the border city of El Paso, Texas, two guardedly neighboring families have plunged headlong into a harrowing week. Rose Marie DuPre, wife and mother, has abandoned her family. On the doorstep of the Gonzales home, long-lost rebel Inez appears. As Rose Marie’s husband, Huck (manager of a maquiladora), and Inez’s brother, Jerry (a college professor), struggle separately with the new shape of their worlds, Lourdes, the Mexican maid who works in both homes, finds herself entangled in the lives of her employers, even as she grapples with a teenage daughter who only has eyes for el otro lado—life, American style.

David Yetman on ‘Mexico’s Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán’

October 19, 2023

In the new book Mexico’s Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán, authors David Yetman and Alberto Búrquez provide an accessible and photographic view of the culture, history, and environment of an extraordinary region of southern Mexico. The Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán are lauded by botanists for their spectacular plant life—they contain the densest columnar cacti forests in the world. Recent archaeological excavations reveal them also to be a formative Mesoamerican site as well. So singular is this region that it is home to the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Biosphere Reserve and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The authors have been traveling to the area for two decades. Today, David Yetman answers a few questions about their newest collaboration:

What inspired you to collaborate on this work?

Alberto and I gained familiarity with Sonora via different routes, he as a Sonoran-born Cambridge-trained ecologist, I as a wandering desert rat trained in philosohy. We met at a field research school in Alamos, Sonora, sponsored by Tucson Audubon Society in, I believe, 1993 and immediately discovered our shared interests. We also realized rather quickly that our areas of interest complemented each other. Two years later we initiated a study of buffelgrass ecology in the small town of Tecoripa in eastern Sonora. During meeting key members of the community, we learned that representatives of the Mexican department of land reform were in the town discussing with townspeople the prospect of converting their cooperatively owned lands to private. We at once realized this was a historic moment in Sonora and spent the next year following the privatization procedures and interviewing the landowners involved. We published an article with our findings in 1997. In 2003 Alberto joined me in filming an episode of The Desert Speaks in the valleys called Cuicatlán in northern Oaxaca and Tehuacán in adjacent southern Puebla. We realized then that we had been pulled into a region with uncanny resemblance to the Sonoran Desert. We also realized that we enjoyed working together. Some twenty trips to that area later, we have published the book.

The plants in the region are so varied and so unusual that Mexico has designated it as a biosphere reserve, and UNESCO has followed, designating it a World Heritage Site. Why is the area so singular?

The valley’s peculiar location as connected desert valleys among several mountain ranges in the tropics has given rise to a bewildering variety of ecological zones or habitats, notably a desert environment where lusher vegetation would be expected. Those unusual conditions and a climate more or less stable for millions of years have combined to produce an astonishing array of desert plants, especially columnar cacti, many of which occur nowhere else. The high degree of endemism within the valleys means that it is the place to study these species and the evolutionary processes that promotes widespread speciation. At the same time, the region has seen the evolution of peoples of many different ethnicities. We long ago that discovered that they have stories to relate that complement the high diversity of the valleys.

The Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán also have a long human history. What are a few of the ways that visitors to the area today can see the continuity of human experience?

The archaeological sites within the valleys have not received the attention they merit, so visitors often must discover their location and history on their own. Alberto and I have presented four of these and their developmental history in a way that will assist visitors in locating and visiting these sites. One such site is Purrón Dam, which was the largest dam in the Americas two thousand years ago, but today not even located on maps. Another is the astonishing site of Cerro Quiotepec, located in an extraordinarily scenic hilltop far above where the two valleys converge and form a profound canyon. It is a highly developed site that was occupied for six hundred years before the Zapotec builders abandoned it in about 300 CE. At the same time the valleys’ varied resources have brought together at least eight different indigenous groups. They have established the human history of the valleys, with connections throughout Mesoamerica. Many towns in the valleys retain their indigenous identity.

What is your next project?

We have repeatedly discussed the importance of returning to Tecoripa after nearly thirty years to see what changes have occurred in the town’s social and economic structure because of the move from cooperatively owned to privately-owned land. We also have many places of ecological and social significance that we would like to visit, study, and describe. We have separate careers, but we remain close friends with a tacit agreement that soon we must find another area to visit, study, discuss, and describe. Sonora has a wealth of ecological and cultural surprises, all within a day’s drive of Tucson, less yet from Hermosillo, where Alberto lives. It is only a matter of time.

***
David Yetman is distinguished outreach faculty and a research social scientist at the Southwest Center of the University of Arizona, where he has worked since 1992. His research specialties include the peoples and ecology of northwest Mexico and the southwestern United States. Yetman has a PhD in philosophy and is author of numerous books and articles, including Sonora: An Intimate Geography, Natural Landmarks of Arizona, and The Saguaro Cactus: A Natural History. Yetman is the former host of the PBS series The Desert Speaks and current host and co-producer of the PBS travel/adventure series, In the Americas with David Yetman.

Alberto Búrquez works as a researcher at the Instituto de Ecología, Department of Ecology of Biodiversity, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He is a co-author (with David Yetman) of The Saguaro Cactus.

Excerpt from “Our Hidden Landscapes”

Challenging traditional and long-standing understandings, this volume provides an important new lens for interpreting stone structures that had previously been attributed to settler colonialism. Instead, the contributors to this volume argue that these locations are sacred Indigenous sites.

This volume introduces readers to eastern North America’s Indigenous ceremonial stone landscapes (CSLs)—sacred sites whose principal identifying characteristics are built stone structures that cluster within specific physical landscapes. Our Hidden Landscapes edited by Lucianne Lavin and Elaine Thomas presents these often unrecognized sites as significant cultural landscapes in need of protection and preservation.

In this book, Native American authors provide perspectives on the cultural meaning and significance of CSLs and their characteristics, while professional archaeologists and anthropologists provide a variety of approaches for better understanding, protecting, and preserving them. The chapters present overwhelming evidence in the form of oral tradition, historic documentation, ethnographies, and archaeological research that these important sites created and used by Indigenous peoples are deserving of protection.

This work enables archaeologists, historians, conservationists, foresters, and members of the general public to recognize these important ritual sites. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

The purpose of this book is to introduce readers to Indigenous ceremonial stone landscapes in Eastern North America — sacred sites whose principal identifying characteristics are stone cultural features (stone groupings) in a variety of designs that cluster within specific physical landscapes. Such sacred sites have been known and used for thousands of years throughout the Americas; some are still being used today, especially in South and Central America and the North American West. Professional archaeologists working in these regions routinely acknowledge their existence (e.g., Morgan et al. 2014, Reeves and Kennedy 2017; see also Thrane, this volume). This is not always the case for Eastern North America, particularly the Northeast, where such sites are often misidentified and destroyed.

Indigenous-Built Stone Structures and their Early Recordation by Euro-Americans

 The designed stone groupings in the form of mounds, rows, enclosures, niches, above-ground and subterranean chambers, perched boulders, split stones, standing stones, and other stone creations are often aligned with astronomic events such as the sunrises and sunsets of the winter or summer solstices, annual meteor showers, certain constellations, cycles of the moon, and other cosmic phenomena. In turn, celestial events are known historically to be associated with – and often are the catalyst for – traditional, annual Native American religious rituals and festivals. For example, anthropologist Dr. Frank G. Speck’s eyewitness account of the Cayuga Iroquois Mid-Winter Festival reported that the eight-day ceremony began five days after the constellation Pleiades was directly overhead at sunset following the first new moon in January (Speck 1949:49). Often the designed stones are in the form of animals, particularly turtles and serpents, which play significant roles in Native American creation stories, folklore, and spiritual practices (Simmons 1986).

Seventeenth, 18th, and 19th century English and Dutch settlers described seeing Native peoples east of the Mississippi create and use these sacred stone landscapes. Some significant examples are the 17th century accounts of Indigenous stone monuments, in the Chesapeake Bay area by English explorer John Smith of Pocahontas fame (called pawcorances by the local tribal peoples), and in the Carolina Piedmont by German explorer John Lederer (King and Strickland, this volume), and the 18th century Journal of Reverend John Sergeant, particularly his Nov. 3, 1734 entry describing a huge stone memorial mound in Great Barrington, Massachusetts actively being visited by Mohican tribal members (Hopkins 1753: 24). Sergeant was the first minister to the Mohican Indian tribe in their main village, which is now Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In the 19th century, the anonymous author of “A Description of Mashpee, in the County of Barnstable” described local Natives building and using stone monuments (Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, written in 1802 and cited by Simmons, 1986: 253). The Indigenous community of Mashpee is located in eastern Massachusetts on what is now known as Cape Cod. In 1907 Frank Speck visited Mashpee and was told by elderly Wampanoag informants that the roadside monuments were spirit-lodges, where tribal members left offerings to the spirits of the dead (Simmons 1986: 254).

Likewise, the spiritual significance of built stone structures was conveyed by Native American leaders and informants to other Euro-American researchers, and subsequently published in the late 19th-21st century anthropological literature. Some of these ceremonial sites continue in use today. Primary documents, like those previously cited, that describe and/or support (through accounts of Indigenous worldview and spirituality) Indigenous creation and use of ritual stone features are not uncommon, and most are easily available to researchers online or through library loan. To make this point, we list a small, additional selection from that body of available literature: Philip L. Barbour (1986), The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, 1580-1631; Joseph Bruchac (1993), The Native American Sweat Lodge: History and Legends; Thor Conway (1993), Painted Dreams: Native American Rock Art; Frank Glynn (1973), “Excavation of the Pilot’s Point Stone Heaps;” Doug Harris and Paul Robinson (2015), “The Ancient Ceremonial Landscape and King Philip’s War: Battlefields of Nipsachuck”; Diamond Jenness (1935), The Ojibwa Indians of Parry Island, Their Social and Religious Life; Charles Leland (1884), The Algonquin Legends of New England; James Mooney (1900), Myths of the Cherokees; Robert E. Ritzenthaler and Pat Ritzenthaler (1970), The Woodland Indians of the Western Great Lakes; Elaine Thomas (2015), “Maintaining the Integrity of the Homeland: Recognizing and Re-Awakening the Memory of Forgotten Places through Mohegan Archaeology.”

Contributors
Nohham Rolf Cachat-Schilling
Robert DeFosses
James Gage
Mary Gage
Doug Harris
Julia A. King
Lucianne Lavin
Johannes (Jannie) H. N. Loubser
Frederick W. Martin
Norman Muller
Charity Moore Norton
Paul A. Robinson
Laurie W. Rush
Scott M. Strickland
Elaine Thomas
Kathleen Patricia Thrane
Matthew Victor Weiss

OSIRIS-REx Celebration in Downtown Tucson

October 16, 2023

On October 14, author Dante Lauretta hosted an “Orbits and Elixirs Celebration” for contributors and supporters of the NASA OSIRIS-REx Mission, at the Don Martini Bar on top of the Rialto Theater in downtown Tucson. Lauretta and Mayor Regina Romero spoke; they talked about the sample return mission, the work of the mirror lab for the Giant Magellan Telescope, and the opening of the Center for Astrobiology.  UA Press Director Kathryn Conrad and Editor Allyson Carter joined in the celebration, along with UA Lunar Planetary Laboratory Director Mark Marley. Below are photos from the event.

About the book: Bennu 3-D, Anatomy of an Asteroid, is the world’s first complete (and stereoscopic) atlas of an asteroid, is the result of a unique collaboration between OSIRIS-REx mission leader Dante Lauretta and Brian May’s London Stereoscopic Company. Lauretta’s colleagues include Carina Bennett, Kenneth Coles, and Cat Wolner, as well as Brian May and Claudia Manzoni, who became part of the ultimately successful effort to find a safe landing site for sampling. The text details the data collected by the mission so far, and the stereo images have been meticulously created by Manzoni and May from original images collected by the OSIRIS-REx cameras.

Dante Lauretta speaks about the mission to Bennu and back.

Allyson Carter, Dante Lauretta, and Kathryn Conrad

Slide show celebrating all University of Arizona space and astronomy accomplishments.

Tucson Mayor Regina Romero congratulates the OSIRIS-REx team on a successful mission.

October 12, 2023

In Bringing Home the Wild, A Riparian Garden in a Southwest City, author Julie Stromberg demonstrates how ecologically guided gardening develops a sense of place, restores connections to nature, and brings joy and meaning to our lives. When living in a large sprawling city, one may feel disconnected and adrift. Finding ways to belong and have positive effects is challenging. Today, Stromberg has provided us with field notes and insights into her work.

For three decades of my life, I was a professor at Arizona State University. During that time, I made many field trips to rivers of the American Southwest and published many research papers about the ecological relationships of riparian plants. These studies increased our understanding of the ways in which human activities alter riparian plant communities and informed the efforts of those who were working to restore them.

A riparian ecosystem in the mountains of Arizona
Author relaxing in a ratama (Parkinsonia aculeata)

Once I retired, my engagement with riparian biota became more personal. My attention turned to the forests and shrublands my partner and I were tending on a patch of abandoned farmland we had purchased near the Salt River. Revitalizing our own patch of green has been deeply satisfying. I love engaging with trees not just as study organisms, but as partners and even as friends. Ecosystem restoration has been called, somewhat dismissively, glorified gardening. I am proud to be a gardener. I firmly believe that urban gardeners, collectively, can do much to help tackle the pressing issues of our time. Our ecosystem garden is a multitasker. For one, we have a working food forest of velvet mesquite, a tree which once covered much of the area that is now Phoenix. Agroecosystems such as these are a sustainable alternative to industrialized agriculture.

Second, by tending a bioproductive climate garden, we help mitigate the rising air temperatures in the city and offset a share of our own carbon emissions. Connecting with the plants who sequester the carbon is an important first step in undertaking climate action.

Third, our patch of green provides habitat for birds, mammals, and other wildlife whose numbers are in decline. Pollinators, herbivores, predators, and decomposers all thrive in our ecosystem garden: all have roles to play. The diversity of life in our garden has astounded me.

Finally, our garden provides ecotherapy. Anxiety is high among many urban dwellers, but the colors, sounds, smells, and patterns of the flora and fauna keep us calm and hopeful. Ecotherapy is a powerful force, especially when the greenery embraces you right as you step outside the door.

I wrote this book to inspire and guide others. I hope that our joyful experiences in urban ecosystem gardening will tempt others to deepen their connection to the natural world and nurture life-filled bounty in their own backyards. I hope more urban dwellers will unplug from the digital world, for a bit, and put on their gardening gloves. When we connect strongly to a place and feel as if we are part of the local ecosystem, we are more likely to take actions that benefit us all.

***

Julie Stromberg is a professor emeritus at Arizona State University and a plant ecologist who specializes in wetland and riparian ecosystems of the American Southwest. For the past thirty years, she has studied plant population and community dynamics and vegetation-hydrology interactions. The author of more than a hundred peer-reviewed publications, Stromberg continues to write about plants while also tending a riparian forest garden in the city.

2024 Ambroggio Prize Submissions Open Now

October 10, 2023

Norma E. Cantú, editor of Chicana Portraits: Critical Biographies of Twelve Chicana Writers, is the judge of the 2024 Academy of American Poets Ambroggio Prize.

The Ambroggio Prize is a $1,000 publication prize given for a book-length poetry manuscript originally written in Spanish and with an English translation. The winning manuscript is published by the University of Arizona Press. Established in 2017, it is the only annual award of its kind in the United States that honors American poets whose first language is Spanish.

The 2023 prize winner was Margarita Pintado Burgos for Ojo en Celo /Eye in Heat.

Submissions for the 2024 Ambroggio Prize will be accepted from September 15, 2023 to February 15, 2024. 

Chicana Portraits is an innovative collection pairs portraits with critical biographies of twelve key Chicana writers, offering an engaging look at their work, contributions to the field, and major achievements. Artist Raquel Valle-Sentíes’s portraits bring visual dimension, while essays delve deeply into the authors’ lives for details that inform their literary, artistic, feminist, and political trajectories and sensibilities.

Norma E. Cantú is a scholar-activist who 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. She has published fiction, poetry, and personal essays in a number of publications.

Five Questions for Alma García

October 10, 2023


Alma García’s debut novel All That Rises is about secrets, lies, border politics, and discovering where you belong—within a family, as well as in the world beyond. It is a novel for the times we live in, set in a place many people know only from the news.

In the border city of El Paso, Texas, two guardedly neighboring families have plunged headlong into a harrowing week. Rose Marie DuPre, wife and mother, has abandoned her family. On the doorstep of the Gonzales home, long-lost rebel Inez appears. As Rose Marie’s husband, Huck (manager of a maquiladora), and Inez’s brother, Jerry (a college professor), struggle separately with the new shape of their worlds, Lourdes, the Mexican maid who works in both homes, finds herself entangled in the lives of her employers, even as she grapples with a teenage daughter who only has eyes for el otro lado—life, American style.

What first sparked your interest in telling this story?

All That Rises started its life almost twenty-five years ago as a single short story—my first published story, as it so happens. It won a debut writer’s award. I was floored.         

Fearing that this might be the only writing success I might ever have, I set out to keep the protagonist of this story alive. And so, I began a collection of linked stories that took place in the neighborhood and amongst the neighbors of this protagonist: a young Mexican-American gardener grappling with the loss of his complicated father. Semi-consciously, I understood this neighborhood to be located in El Paso, Texas, where I grew up, though this setting remained quietly in the background.

Little did I know that this was to be the start of an epic journey, in which—owing to a variety of major life transitions and the fact that it was eventually made clear to me that the manuscript wasn’t working as a collection of linked stories—the book would be transformed, over another decade and a half, into a full-blown novel. As I completely re-envisioned the story I meant to tell, centering different characters and entangling their families with one another, I discovered that the characters had become a part of something far larger: the history of El Paso itself, which is inextricably bound up in the cultures, legacies, geography, and the ever-evolving politics of the borderlands. What I also discovered was that I had been writing this book because I wanted to tell stories about the kinds of people I grew up with—people with their feet in more than one culture, whose lives I hadn’t seen much of on the page.

How has your relationship to the Southwest and the U.S./Mexico border changed over time?

I lived the first part of my life in El Paso, and later, in Albuquerque. My extended family still lives in the El Paso area and has roots in the area that go back for many generations. With a few exceptions, I have gone back to visit for most of the years of my life.

Of course, it’s a different world there now than it was when I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s. In those days, as was common, my family thought nothing of crossing the border to buy groceries or go to dinner; my older relatives would go over to get their hair done or for dental work, and of course, then as now, many families (though not mine) are split between El Paso and across the border in Ciudad Juárez. That’s to say, it was fairly free-flowing and easy to go back and forth; the two cities felt very much like two sides of the same coin. Sadly, a number of realities in recent years have chilled that dynamic—safety issues south of the border, the new complexities of mass migration and the politicization that surrounds it; a horrific act of home-grown terrorism in 2019 that demonstrated how white nationalism can force its way even into a Mexican American-majority border city.

But as much as things have changed, there is also much that remains deeply familiar to me. During the years I spent writing this book, as the city transformed from a mere blip beneath the radar of the national consciousness to a place that became the epicenter of the news again and again, I felt even more urgency to portray it with all the depth and complexity that is its due, and to reflect its inhabitants back to the world in a way that centers their humanity—even when that sense of humanity is complicated.

In any case, it might be ironic that I wasn’t able to write this novel until I moved away from the border itself. I’ve lived in Seattle since 2001, and it was only here—in the cool, dark, misty, green Pacific Northwest—that I was able to separate myself enough from the world that I came from in order to reflect upon it, to truly see it for what it is, to be able to re-enter it in my memory and in my imagination—at least until the next time that I physically returned to it. There’s plenty I miss about this world. For sure, there are days I miss being in a place where I never have to tell anyone how to spell or pronounce my name.

Do you think family dynamics are an ideal way to reflect border issues?

It might be more accurate to say that, on the border, border issues are frequently reflected in family dynamics. There are the literal realities of those whose families are split between two cities and two countries, of course, and the cultural legacies that anyone with a family history in the area inherits (and often passes on in complex ways). Heritage itself is a fraught concept, especially as who or what people understand themselves to be is sometimes at odds with a family’s beliefs or perceptions or records. Add to this brew the fact that the border is always about duality—where you “belong,” and where you do not belong. From there, it’s not a very big leap to start asking yourself where you belong within your own family, and how that determines where you belong in the world beyond.

The border is also a powerful metaphor, and this metaphor can manifest itself in the psychological and emotional borders people create between themselves. When people become entangled with one another—whether by accident or intention or geographical location or by blood relation—the boundaries between them sometimes blur in unexpected ways. Where does one person’s world end and another’s begin? Who is “us” and who is “them”? 

The political issues facing the border today are many, as you reference above, and the book also brushes up against a number of related phenomena unique to this area, including Border Patrol culture, the economic inequality exacerbated by the American-owned maquiladora system in Ciudad Juárez, and the prosaic struggles of domestic workers whose well-being depends on access to the American side of the border. Yet with the many up-to-the-moment social urgencies and emergencies issues you could draw upon, the novel is set in 2005 and 2006, rather than the present day. What’s behind this choice?

There are two reasons for this. One was practical: Originally, this book was set in the present, whatever “the present” means when you’re writing a book over a very long period of time. But the current events, politics, and even the landmarks of the city changed so much over the years, it became impossible to keep up. The world was evolving—and continues to evolve—rapidly, and I needed a fixed point from which to examine it.

The second is a reason that proved to be far more thematically meaningful. The mid-2000s marked a period of time in which the border first began to noticeably tighten, but it was still a deeply different world than the one we find ourselves in today. You can trace the development of our current affairs to this time; had we but known, we could have seen a lot coming. As one character puts it, “The problem with history is that by the time you realize it’s repeating itself, it’s already happened.” I think the book offers a fair amount to unpack around that notion—especially in a time when what happens at the Texas/Mexico border has implications far beyond the borderlands themselves.

Do you have an idea for your next novel or other project that you would like to share?

I can only provide you with a hint, because what’s new in my writing world is currently evolving as well, wildly and deeply. Suffice it to say that there is likely to be intrigue surrounding secret identities; the unholy trio of fact, fiction and fake news; and the shape-shifting world of ethnic impostors. Suffice it to say that the story might be set in a place just slightly further north than this one, but I am still keeping one foot in a place I recognize as home.

***

Alma García is a writer whose award-winning short fiction has appeared in Narrative Magazine and most recently in phoebe and the anthology Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century. This is her first novel.

Myrriah Gómez Speaks at ASU Science and Mathematics Colloquium

October 9, 2023

Myrriah Gómez, author of Nuclear Nuevo México, was a guest speaker at the Science and Mathematics Colloquium series presented by the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University.

“In her book and through her public outreach, she is bringing to light the long-term impacts of the nuclear industrial complex, emphasizing what she sees as the five tenets of nuclear colonialism: intergenerational trauma; disease and death; contamination; secrecy and obscurity; and environmental racism. Gómez argued that a combination of these injustices continue to plague Nuevomexicano communities,” Sona Patel Srinarayana wrote in an ASU News article about the series.

About Nuclear Nuevo México:

Contrary to previous works that suppress Nuevomexicana/o presence throughout U.S. nuclear history, Nuclear Nuevo México focuses on recovering the voices and stories that have been lost or ignored in the telling of this history. By recuperating these narratives, Myrriah Gómez tells a new story of New Mexico, one in which the nuclear history is not separate from the collective colonial history of Nuevo México but instead demonstrates how earlier eras of settler colonialism laid the foundation for nuclear colonialism in New Mexico.

Gómez examines the experiences of Nuevomexicanas/os who have been impacted by the nuclear industrial complex, both the weapons industry and the commercial industry. Gómez argues that Los Alamos was created as a racist project that targeted poor and working-class Nuevomexicana/o farming families, along with their Pueblo neighbors, to create a nuclear empire. The resulting imperialism has left a legacy of disease and distress throughout New Mexico that continues today.

Five Questions for William L. Bird Jr.

October 7, 2023

An essential—and monumental—member of the Sonoran Desert ecosystem, the saguaro cactus has become the quintessential icon of the American West.

In the Arms of the Saguaros by William L. Bird Jr., shows how, from the botanical explorers of the nineteenth century to the tourism boosters in our own time, saguaros and their images have fulfilled attention-getting needs and expectations. Through text and lavish images, this work explores the saguaro’s growth into a western icon from the early days of the American railroad to the years bracketing World War II, when Sun Belt boosterism hit its zenith and proponents of tourism succeed in moving the saguaro to the center of the promotional frame.

What first sparked your interest to write this book?

I trained as a historian at the University of Arizona, so you can probably understand how the saguaro came to lodge in my head as an impressionable student from the east. Pictures of people posing with saguaros have a certain timeless quality. Most of the pictures of—let’s call them social saguaros—bridge no distance between person and plant. People posing with saguaros sometimes reach out and touch them, but actually it’s the other way around. These special plants touch us.

What was the first image of a saguaro that inspired you to personally own this image?

I found a dog-eared copy of a 1950s Arizona annual magazine in a used bookstore in Washington, D.C. shortly after returning home from my studies in Tucson in 1975. The magazine’s cover pictures a western wear model wearing a saw-tooth pocket shirt and a cowboy hat, with her folded arms resting on the curve of a spineless saguaro arm. I kept this thing for years. I was lucky enough to find a clean copy and made it my frontispiece.

Sometimes saguaro images are misplaced—What is the place farthest from the Sonoran Desert that a saguaro has been used to represent?

The saguaro’s success as a far-flung western symbol lies in the assumptions that people have picked up about its habitat, most of them mistaken. And this is where the fun begins. Transplanted saguaros popped up throughout the west and beyond after the railroad came to Tucson in 1880. At first there were so-called Arizona gardens in California and track side displays that the Southern Pacific railroad mounted at select passenger stations. Saguaros and other native plants rode the rails to the era’s world’s fairs. Out-of-habitat transplants might cheat death for a summer or for a little while longer in the care of a botanical garden. The New York Botanical Garden, the Missouri Botanical Garden (Shaw’s Garden) and Pittsburgh’s Phipps Botanical Garden all had them. Their pictures circulated in the press. With the first rush of conspicuous transplants and publicity about them, you might be excused for thinking that they grow anywhere.   

Why are saguaros so interesting to people from around the world?

The saguaro joined the travel industry’s toolkit of symbols freely associated with the American West. Historically southwestern tourism’s fun-in-the-sun sales message has featured freshly starched western wear, horseback rides, campfires, bathing suits, swimming pools and saguaros, whose welcoming arms wave you in, closer and closer. This anthropomorphic quality may be the basis of the saguaro’s success as a symbol, which though ephemeral, is nevertheless powerful. And this is pretty much where we are today in fashion, art and craft.

What is your next book or research project?

I am working on a couple of publication projects with the Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation, that focus upon the development of graphic identities in the American Southwest. One is a book-length illustrated history of Tucson’s Cabat-Gill Advertising Agency, which among other things pioneered in early television production. Another is a short piece on stylized linen postcard images picturing downtown Tucson and their acceptance as actualities.

***
William L. Bird Jr. is a curator emeritus of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. His interests lie at the intersection of politics, popular culture, and the history of visual display.

Excerpt from “Chicana Portraits”

Chicana Portraits edited by Norma Elia Cantú pairs portraits with critical biographies of twelve key Chicana writers, offering an engaging look at their work, contributions to the field, and major achievements.

Artist Raquel Valle-Sentíes’s portraits bring visual dimension, while essays delve deeply into the authors’ lives for details that inform their literary, artistic, feminist, and political trajectories and sensibilities. The collection brilliantly intersects artistic visual and literary cultural productions, allowing complex themes to emerge, such as the fragility of life, sexism and misogyny, Chicana agency and forging one’s own path, the struggles of becoming a writer and battling self-doubt, economic instability, and political engagement and activism.

Arranged chronologically by birth order of the authors, the book can be read cover to cover for a genealogical overview, or scholars and general readers can easily jump in at any point and read about an individual author, regardless of the chronology.

Biographies included in this work include Raquel Valle-Sentíes, Angela de Hoyos, Montserrat Fontes, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Norma E. Cantú, Denise Elia Chávez, Carmen Tafolla, Cherríe Moraga, Ana Castillo, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Sandra Cisneros, and Demetria Martínez. Read an excerpt from the book below.

It is a balmy May evening in Laredo, Texas, in 2001 when we gather in el Café del Barrio, a small café/bookstore that the artist and poet Raquel Valle-Sentíes owns and operates out of her Victorian-era home on Matamoros Street. At this particular gathering, we are celebrating the writers from Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, and Laredo, Texas, who are attending the IV Letras en el Borde (Letters on the Border) conference. The brainchild of José Luis Velarde and Guillermo Lavín, a couple of writers from Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, the annual transnational event has taken place for several years with support from Texas A&M International University (TAMIU), Laredo Community College(LCC), and the cultural affairs office of the city of Nuevo Laredo under the direction of Héctor Romero Lecanda. Like any other literary festival, Letras en el Borde features writers reading their work and academic papers by critics and scholars; because it is being held in the two Laredos and the organizers want to emphasize the transnational aspects of our region, the conference focuses on border writing. The meal and performances—readings and music—at Café del Barrio are a highlight of the conference.

Our host, Raquel Valle-Sentíes herself, is active in the local literary scene. Her dream of owning a bookstore has come true, and it is all she had hoped it would be. In the 1980s Valle-Sentíes had begun writing poetry and taking art classes at Laredo Community College (now Laredo College) with Martha Fenstermaker. I was then a professor at Laredo State University (now Texas A&M International University), and we—the literatontos, as some jokingly referred to us—were a handful who were keeping Chicanismo alive as we engaged with community projects that addressed the raging problems of the day: immigration, illiteracy, erasure of our history, historic preservation, et cetera. By the 1990s, we had coalesced into a force engaged in important interventions, launching a chapter of Amnesty International to do our work in the migrant detention center run by the private carceral company Corrections Corporation of America and establishing the Refugee Assistance Council to provide legal services to migrants. It was the days of massive migration from Central America due to the United States incursions into that region of the Americas. Many of our members were also involved in the feminist group Las Mujeres, and we hosted an annual women’s conference, Primavera, to promote and recognize the accomplishments of women in our community. I discuss Las Mujeres below as I contextualize the work of Café del Barrio and Raquel Valle-Sentíes.

Contributors
Cordelia E. Barrera
Mary Pat Brady
Norma E. Cantú
María Jesus Castro Dopacio
Carlos Nicolás Flores
Myrriah Gómez
Maria Magdalena Guerra de Charur
Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs
Georgina Guzmán
Cristina Herrera
María Esther Quintana
Eliza Rodríguez y Gibson
Meagan Solomon
Lourdes Torres
Raquel Valle-Sentíes
Jen Yáñez-Alaniz

“Mexico’s Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán” Book Launch

September 26, 2023

David Yetman and Alberto Búrquez celebrated the publication of Mexico’s Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán last night, hosted by the gracious Consulate of Mexico in Tucson, AZ and supported by The Southwest Center. Special thanks to everyone who came out to support our authors!

Enjoy the photos below for a recap of the event:

Alberto Búrquez presents photographs from Mexico’s Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán
David Yetman presents photographs from Mexico’s Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán
A packed house! The consulate staff had to bring in lots of extra chairs
Yetman and Búrquez during the audience Q & A
David Yetman signs copies of his new book during the reception
Lots of book signing!
Thanks to everyone who came out to support our authors

About Mexico’s Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán:

Mexico’s Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán: From Deserts to Clouds provides an accessible and photographic view of the culture, history, and environment of an extraordinary region of southern Mexico. The Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán are lauded by botanists for their spectacular plant life—they contain the densest columnar cacti forests in the world. Recent archaeological excavations reveal them also to be a formative Mesoamerican site as well. So singular is this region that it is home to the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Biosphere Reserve and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Through firsthand experience and engaging prose, the authors provide a synthesis of the geology, ecology, history, and cultures of the valleys, showing their importance and influence as Mesoamerican arteries for environmental and cultural interchange through Mexico. It also reveals the extraordinary plant life that draws from habitats ranging from deserts to tropical forests.

The authors, both experts in their respective fields, begin with a general description of the geography of the valleys, followed by an introduction to climate and hydrology, a look at the valleys’ often bewildering geology. The book delves into cultural and linguistic backgrounds of the valleys and discusses archaeological sites that that encapsulate the valleys’ fascinating history prior to the arrival of Europeans. The book concludes by describing the flora that makes the region so singular.

Excerpt from “Latinos and Nationhood”

Spanning from the early nineteenth century to today, Latinos and Nationhood by Nicolás Kanellos examines the work of Latino writers who explored the major philosophic and political themes of their day, including the meaning and implementation of democracy, their democratic and cultural rights under U.S. dominion, their growing sense of nationhood, and the challenges of slavery and disenfranchisement of women in a democratic republic that had yet to realize its ideals.

Over the course of two centuries, these Latino or Hispanic intellectuals were natural-born citizens of the United States, immigrants, or political refugees. Many of these intellectuals, whether citizens or not, strove to embrace and enliven such democratic principles as freedom of speech and of the press, the protection of minorities in the Bill of Rights and in subsequent laws, and the protection of linguistic and property rights, among many others, guaranteed by treaties when the United States incorporated their homelands into the Union.

Latinos have resided in North America since before the arrival of the English at Jamestown and Plymouth. They already lived in lands that became English colonies and later the states of the early American Republic; of course, their largest populations dwelled in what became the southern and western United States, Mexico and the Caribbean, most of which would be conquered and/or bought by the expanding United States during the nineteenth century. Whether before or after their incorporation into US territory, the people that would in the future be called “Latinos” or “Hispanics” had a rich intellectual history, having introduced the first written European language, book culture and universities to the hemisphere. They pondered and wrote about all of the cultural and scientific themes that we think of as part of the Western tradition. They continued this rich intellectual activity in the lands that became part of the United States.

Over the course of United States history, Latinos thought about, struggled with and wrote about the major philosophic and political themes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including: 1) the meaning and implementation of democracy, especially through establishment of a liberal republic; 2) their democratic and cultural rights under United States dominion; 3) their growing sense of nationhood; and 4) the particular challenges of slavery and disenfranchisement of women in a democratic republic that had yet to realize its ideals.

From the very outset, Latinos thought about and expressed their opinions, penned and published philosophical, humanistic, scientific and political discussions on all of the major topics that today we consider as part of the national intellectual heritage of the United States. They did so through speeches in the public arena, books and periodicals, and in the classroom; in fact, the earliest schools on the continent were missionary schools run by the Spanish friars, and the earliest imprints and newspapers in the West and Southwest were Spanish-language publications. What follows below and in the chapters of this book are stories about only a few individuals who made an impact on the spread of intellectual thought, these thinkers and activists were not alone in developing, articulating and publishing important ideas; rather, they were members of communities of thinkers, writers and political activists who helped them hone their ideas. Indeed, it would take volumes to adequately chart the full development of Latino thought; thus, this book is just an initial foray into a rich and complex intellectual history. In this foray, I have chosen not to review the thought about identity and nationhood of such well known giants of Latino thought as, for instance José Martí, who was in the vanguard of so many ideas about democracy, race relations and governance. Rather, the first, larger section of this book will be dedicated to presenting the work lesser-known thinkers, most of whose works have been inaccessible until recently. The traditional Anglo- or Euro-centric history of the United States has consistently ignored Latino intellectual history, and especially is unaware of most of the intellectuals to be covered in this book. Today, this intellectual tradition, like that of other ethnic and minority groups, women and LGBTQ+, is key to achieving a full understanding of our development as a democratic nation striving for equity and the realization of its ideals penned in the Constitution and its amendments. In the last three chapters of the book, I take the liberty of inserting my personal reading of three prominent literary figures from the Chicano movement, a movement in which I have served as the most experienced editor/publisher.

The contributions of Latinos to the civilization of the Americas, including what later would become the United States, begin during the period of exploration and colonization and include such legacies of American life as the technologies of farming, ranching, mining and natural resource management, among many others. Most of these accomplishments can be attributed to mestizo culture (mixed European, African and Native American) that arose not only south of today’s border but also in the lands that would become the United States. However, the starting point for this book will properly be the United States shortly after winning its independence from the British Empire and its establishment of a new form of government.

Since the days of the early American Republic, Latino intellectuals have struggled: 1) to export to their countries of origin the democratic ideas learned from the US “founding fathers” and the texts of the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers and the American Constitution; 2) and from the mid nineteenth century onward under US dominion to demand the implementation of these lofty concepts among minorities and the disenfranchised within the boundaries of the American Republic. From the mid-nineteenth century on, Latinos have struggled to define themselves within the American Republic and to understand their relationship with the Hispanic world write large. At first, these intellectuals from throughout the Americas, from as far away as the River Platte and Peru, idealistically flocked to Philadelphia, Baltimore and Boston to acquire this knowledge, translate it and smuggle it to the various regions of New Spain; they did so in order to prepare for their independent nationhood, as separate from “the mother country” Spain, and create an ideological foundation on which to establish their own republics. As documented in Chapters 1 and 2, most of these political thinkers were drawn to Philadelphia at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, not only because it was the cradle of American independence and at that time the capital of the United States, but also because it was home to numerous printers. For competitive fees, these printers made “freedom of the press” a reality for the Spaniards and Spanish American creoles (criollos) whose mission it was to adapt US democratic and republican principles in the political texts they would smuggle into the Caribbean and as far as south as the River Platte.

Excerpt from “La Plonqui”

Celebrating more than forty years of creative writing by Chicana author Margarita Cota-Cárdenas, La Plonqui edited by Jesús Rosales and Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez includes critical essays, reflections, interviews, and previously unpublished writing by the author herself to document the lifelong craft and legacy of a pioneering writer in the field.

Nicknamed “La Plonky” by her family after a made-up childhood song, Cota-Cárdenas grew up in California, taught almost exclusively in Arizona, and produced five major works (two novels and three books of poetry) that offer an expansive literary production spanning from the 1960s to today. Her perspectives on Chicana identity, the Chicanx movement, and the sociopolitical climate of Arizona and the larger U.S.-Mexico border region represent a significant contribution to the larger body of Chicanx literature. Additionally, the volume explores her perspectives on issues of gender, sexuality, and identity related to the Chicanx experience over time.

Divided into three major parts, this collection begins with an introduction, followed by two testimonial essays written by the author herself and a longtime colleague, as well as an interview with the author. The second section contains nine essays by well-established literary critics that analyze Cota-Cárdenas’s literary output within a Chicano Movement literary context and offer new readings of Cota-Cárdenas’s fiction and poetry. The third part presents poetry and fiction from Cota-Cárdenas, including an excerpt from a work in progress. As a whole, the collection aims to affirm Margarita Cota-Cárdenas’s significant role in shaping the field of Chicana literature and emphasizes the importance of honoring a celebrated author who wrote a majority of her works in Spanish—one of the few Chicana writers to do so. Read an excerpt from the book below.

This collection is an open invitation to readers to share in the legacy of Chicana writer Margarita Cota-Cárdenas and to learn more about the impact of her work, which spans more than forty years in the state of Arizona. The authors who graciously contributed essays to this volume have been impacted in profound ways by the carefully crafted words Cota-Cárdenas has placed on paper, often with the assistance of La Malinche, her typewriter. If you ever had the chance to be at a poetry reading or a presentation given by Cota-Cárdenas, there is no doubt that those words shared aloud impacted you—as they did many of the authors in this collection. To know Cota-Cárdenas is to understand the plight of Chicanas/os within a historical and contemporary context. This collection is an act of love that honors the many paths that Cota-Cárdenas has paved to inspire Chicanas/os to find their voice, be fearless in calling out systemic and oppressive structures, and hold ourselves and those around us accountable for the creation of a more just world. Always knowing that la lucha sigue.

Margarita Cota-Cárdenas was born on November 10, 1941, in Heber, California, a small town located approximately five miles northwest of the border city of Calexico. Cota-Cárdenas’s father, Jesús Cota, was born in Cócorit, Sonora, Mexico, and her mother, Margarita Cárdenas de Cota, in Tortugas, New Mexico. Early in their life they both worked as migrant workers throughout the U.S. Southwest, but, tired of the constant movement this type of job required, Cota-Cárdenas’s parents soon decided to settle down in central California, earning their living as labor contractors. This occupational change provided Cota-Cárdenas with a stable living environment that allowed her to benefit from an uninterrupted educational experience, an opportunity uncommon in those days for many migrant families.

Cota-Cárdenas graduated from Orestimba High School in Newman, California, and later from Modesto Junior College. In 1966, she received her BA from California State College, Stanislaus (now California State University, Stanislaus), with a major in Spanish and a minor in English. She promptly continued her graduate studies, earning an MA in 1968 from the University of California, Davis. The PhD took longer to complete, but Cota-Cárdenas eventually received her degree in 1980 from the University of Arizona, specializing in the narrative of Carlos Fuentes. The following year Cota Cárdenas began her professional career teaching Spanish, Latin American, and Chicana/o literature and culture at Arizona State University, in Tempe, until her retirement in 2002.

Cota-Cárdenas is the author of three books of poetry and two novels. In 1976, she published Noches despertando inConciencias, her first book of poetry. This collection was followed by Puppet: A Chicano Novella (1985); Marchitas de mayo (Sones pa’l pueblo) (poetry, 1989); Sanctuaries of the Heart / Santuarios del corazón (novel, 2005); and Poemática inspiración y fiebre: Poesía mechicana y relato (poetry, 2016). Here we wish to offer a brief synopsis and analysis of Cota-Cárdenas’s body of work, representing forty years of literary production.

Contributors
Laura Elena Belmonte
Margarita Cota-Cárdenas
José R. Flores
Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez
Carolyn González
Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs
Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez
Kirsten F. Nigro
Margarita E. Pignataro
Tey Diana Rebolledo
Jesús Rosales
Charles St-Georges
Javier Villarreal

Margarita Pintado Burgos wins 2023 Ambroggio Prize with “Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat”

September 21, 2023

The Academy of American Poets awarded the 2023 Ambroggio Prize to Margarita Pintado Burgos for Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat. Alejandra Quintana Arocho translated the collection. The is $1,000 prize is given for a book-length poetry manuscript originally written in Spanish and with an English translation. The winning manuscript is published by the University of Arizona Press, a nationally recognized publisher of award-winning works of emerging and established voices in Latinx and Indigenous literature, as well as groundbreaking scholarship in Latinx and Indigenous studies. Established in 2017, the Ambroggio Prize is the only annual award of its kind in the United States that honors American poets whose first language is Spanish. This year’s judge was Achy Obejas.

Obejas commented on the work: “The phrase ‘eye in heat’ can have a few different meanings. It can refer to a state of intense sexual desire, but it can also refer to a heightened awareness and excitement. Here, the phrase is used to describe the speaker’s state of mind as they try to make sense of the world around them. The speaker is both attracted to and repelled by the world. The poems here capture the poet’s intense desire to find meaning in this paradox.”

Margarita Pintado Burgos, a professor, poet, and essayist, was born on January 16, 1981, in Bayamón, Puerto Rico. She was raised in this municipality’s barrios of Cerro Gordo and Braulio Dueño. She studied journalism at the University of Puerto Rico and completed her doctorate in Spanish at Emory University.

Pintado Burgos’ published books include ​​​​​​Simultánea, la marea (Blurb, 2022); Una muchacha que se parece a mí (Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 2016), for which she received the poetry award in a contest held by the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture in 2015; and Ficción de venado (la secta de los perros, 2012). With Cuban poet Lorenzo García Vega, Pintado cowrote the experimental novel Ping-Pong Zuihitsu, published by Indiana University Press. She edited the bilingual (Spanish-Portuguese) anthology of García Vega poems, Palabras que repito (Ed. Lumme, 2017). Pintado Burgos’s poems have also been published in multiple anthologies and magazines.

Pintado Burgos is a professor of language and literature at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California. She is also a reviewer for the blog El Roommate and co-director of a poetry space called Distrópika. In 2022, she was named an inaugural Letras Boricuas Fellow by the Flamboyan Foundation.

We are thrilled to be publishing this award-winning collection. Congratulations, Margarita!

University of Arizona Press at 2023 FILUNI Book Fair

We’re excited to share some images from La Feria Internacional del Libro de las Universitarias y de los Universitarios, (FILUNI) 2023!

This year’s book fair was held in late August at the UNAM Center in Mexico City. FILUNI brings together editors, academics, librarians, researchers, professors, and the general public with the goal of supporting international university publishers. Learn more about FILUNI by visiting their website.

Though we weren’t able to attend in person, we’re grateful to the Association of University Presses for displaying our books at the fair!

Below, you’ll see a few of our books on display: Federico: One Man’s Remarkable Journey from Tututepec to L.A. by Federico Jiménez Caballero, edited by Shelby Tisdale; Border Water: The Politics of U.S.-Mexico Transboundary Water Management, 1945–2015 by Stephen P. Mumme; and Where We Belong: Chemehuevi and Caxcan Preservation of Sacred Mountains by Daisy Ocampo.

The flyer tucked inside each book has a list of titles, including the ones you see here, that are available for translation!

New Titles Available for Translation

One of the reasons we love FILUNI is that it helps us connect with translators! Translation rights are currently available for many of our titles. To learn more, or to request a complimentary PDF for review, please contact our subsidiary rights department.

Photo Credit: Kate Kolendo, AUPresses

Shelby Tisdale Presents “No Place for a Lady” at the University of Arizona

September 19, 2023

Shelby Tisdale gave a talk on her recent book, No Place for a Lady, on September 18th, 2023 at the University of Arizona’s ENR2 building. We were delighted to attend this event, which was hosted by the Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society. Thanks for including us!

Held in the beautiful ENR2 building on the University of Arizona campus, we were happy to display Shelby Tisdale’s recent No Place for a Lady (2023) and Federico (2021), which she edited.
Shelby Tisdale gave a wonderful presentation on the life and work of Marjorie F. Lambert, the subject of No Place for a Lady.
Thanks to everyone for coming and attending on Zoom!
We love our authors!

About No Place for a Lady:

In the first half of the twentieth century, the canyons and mesas of the Southwest beckoned and the burgeoning field of archaeology thrived. Among those who heeded the call, Marjorie Ferguson Lambert became one of only a handful of women who left their imprint on the study of southwestern archaeology and anthropology.

In this delightful biography, we gain insight into a time when there were few women establishing full-time careers in anthropology, archaeology, or museums. Shelby Tisdale successfully combines Lambert’s voice from extensive interviews with her own to take us on a thought-provoking journey into how Lambert created a successful and satisfying professional career and personal life in a place she loved (the American Southwest) while doing what she loved.

Through Lambert’s life story we gain new insight into the intricacies and politics involved in the development of archaeology and museums in New Mexico and the greater Southwest. We also learn about the obstacles that young women had to maneuver around in the early years of the development of southwestern archaeology as a profession. Tisdale brings into focus one of the long-neglected voices of women in the intellectual history of anthropology and archaeology and highlights how gender roles played out in the past in determining the career paths of young women. She also highlights what has changed and what has not in the twenty-first century.

Women’s voices have long been absent throughout history, and Marjorie Lambert’s story adds to the growing literature on feminist archaeology.

Excerpt from “Mexico’s Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán”

Mexico’s Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán: From Deserts to Clouds by David Yetman and Alberto Búrquez provides an accessible and photographic view of the culture, history, and environment of an extraordinary region of southern Mexico. The Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán are lauded by botanists for their spectacular plant life—they contain the densest columnar cacti forests in the world. Recent archaeological excavations reveal them also to be a formative Mesoamerican site as well. So singular is this region that it is home to the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Biosphere Reserve and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Through firsthand experience and engaging prose, the authors provide a synthesis of the geology, ecology, history, and cultures of the valleys, showing their importance and influence as Mesoamerican arteries for environmental and cultural interchange through Mexico. It also reveals the extraordinary plant life that draws from habitats ranging from deserts to tropical forests. Below read an excerpt from the book.

I first traveled through the Valley of Tehuacán in 1969, driving an old Land Rover south en route to the city of Oaxaca. I recall very little of the region, except for a semidesert landscape, unending mountains, interminable curves, and the plodding, smoking diesel trucks crowding the narrow, shoulderless highway. Those trucks, known in Mexico as tórtones, heavy, usually overladen, are seldom seen now. In those days, tórtones clogged the mountain roads, belching black clouds of diesel smoke. Their parking brakes would often fail, so when drivers suffered a flat tire, they would block the wheels with large rocks to keep the monsters from rolling out of control. The tire replaced, the operators would drive away, leaving the large rocks behind for other vehicles to run into. My Land Rover was a good choice for that terrain, for the road was also laden with potholes, cracks, washouts, and landslides.

A modern expressway connecting the cities of Tehuacán and Oaxaca would not be completed until after the turn of the twenty-first century. The road through the Cuicatlán Valley, which connects to the Valley of Tehuacán and leads nearly to Oaxaca, was still a dirt track. It often washed out during the summer rains or was rendered impassable by multiple landslides. If paved, that route would have shortened the trip by a couple of hours.

It was not until the year 2000 that I visited the valleys themselves, walking through the hills and stopping by some of their small towns. By then the roads had been expanded and improved, and graded roads replaced many unimproved tracks. Since that trip I have logged more than twenty visits, discovering sights, peoples, and natural history features I had previously overlooked. Potholes are now fewer. Road-blocking landslides are still a hazard.

Alberto Búrquez joined me on an exploration of the valleys in 2003. He had visited previously as a lecturer in ecology at UNAM, Mexico’s National Autonomous University. He could hardly resist bringing his students to one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots. I have often envied the easy access he had in those years to the valleys of Tehuacán and Cuicatlán, only a few hours’ drive from the southern limits of Mexico City, where UNAM is situated.

Alberto and I collaborated on projects throughout the 1990s, focusing on the plants and vegetation of the northwestern Mexican state of Sonora, where he had been born and raised and now held a distinguished post as professor of ecology for UNAM. We had a list of places in Sonora to visit and study, he as an ecologist studying the relationships between plants and animals, I as a philosopher who found Mexico’s natural and cultural history so rich that I abandoned my philosophical musings. On another visit to Oaxaca around 2005, we agreed that it was time for us to collaborate on a book on the valleys we had come to hold in the highest esteem. Though they lie far from the Sonora with which we are familiar, the valleys bear a close ecological resemblance to that state far to the northwest. Out of that easy agreement with my friend came this book.

What would impel us to expend the effort and expense in writing a book about these valleys, so far from our homes in the Sonoran Desert? After all, the first impression visitors experience for much of the year is one of semidesert, drought, and, in places, a parched, often eroded landscape (except after summer rains). Yet unless one is in a hurry to get from Tehuacán to Oaxaca or the reverse, it is difficult not to be impressed by the vegetation and landscapes visible from a vehicle. The combination of cactus forests, plants of unusual shapes and densities, and minor roads leading off into the bush and hills in all directions poses an irresistible draw to anyone with a curiosity about natural and human history. The mountains on either side that engulf the valleys seem to shield mysteries beyond the cliffs and forests that ring the east side and the forbiddingly steep desert slopes on the west. The landscapes away from the cities and viewed up close reveal human occupation deep in antiquity. Churches, ancient as well as new, most of them visible from afar, grace every settlement, be it a village or a town. Place names roll off the tongue, evoking times long before Europeans ordered the prefacing of aboriginal names with the titles of saints, Indigenous names like Alpizagua, Atatlahuca, Altepexi, Atolotitlán, Axuxco, Coxcatlán, Metzontla, Miahuatlán, Nanahuatípam, Tecomavaca, Teotitlán, Zapotitlán, Zinacatepec, and on and on. The modern, urban Mexico of the city of Tehuacán grades quickly into hamlets and villages, where old traditions endure and life proceeds at a slower pace. Sophisticated dwellers from the megapolis of Mexico City find the allure of the valleys as compelling as I do.

The closer we looked, the more extraordinary and complex the valleys became. Dense forests of columnar cacti swathe the hillsides with their color: there are eighteen species of the giants, more than in any similar tract in the world. Within the valleys we find not just unusual vegetation, but also a host of endemic species and strange plants with names like elephant’s foot, mother-in-law’s chair, old man, and (ahem!) ball swellers. The endless varieties and combinations of trees, shrubs, agaves, yuccas, and cacti poke out of cliffs, protrude from tropical forests adjacent to barren deserts, emerge from unexcavated pyramids, lurk in obscure canyons, and hide in oak woodlands and pine forests. The Indigenous peoples of the valleys, at least eight different linguistic groups, persist, some even thriving.

Five Questions for Louis Friedman

September 18, 2023


Humans have always been fascinated by the possibility of extraterrestrial life, often wondering if we are alone in the universe. Alone but Not Lonely, Exploring for Extraterrestrial Life answers those questions. Drawing on nearly fifty years as a leader in planetary exploration, author Louis Friedman brings into focus the subject of extraterrestrial life, separating knowledge from conjecture, fact from fiction, to draw scientific and technical conclusions that answer this enduring question.

What first sparked your interest to write this book?

I was motivated to write this book by the work I was doing with colleagues at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory about using the solar gravity lens to image exoplanets. Magnifying light by 100 billion times with the solar gravity lens would give us the ability to see life on other worlds throughout the galaxy!  The challenge of designing a mission to reach the focus of the solar gravity lens is an exciting one to be working on. It’s hard, but we can do it; as opposed to interstellar flight which is not practical.

Why do you think people are so interested in life beyond planet Earth?

For the whole of human history we have wondered about the nature of life and our place in the Universe.  We wandered through religion and folklore, myths and stories—but now we wonder through science and exploration.  As Carl Sagan used to say, if you are not interested in the question of “are we alone and the nature of life in the Universe,” you must be made of wood. 

Why are you excited about comparative astrobiology? 

Comparative astrobiology will teach us about ourselves and our place in the Universe.  When we eventually find and compare life on other worlds to what has happened here, it will give us insights just as did the discovery of the nature of gravity and that the Earth was not the center of the Universe, but one object among billions of other—that we compare our planet to.  

Why did you, Carl Sagan, and Bruce Murray start the Planetary Society?

In the late 1970s NASA was planning to cease planetary exploration entirely, despite the enormous success and public interest from the Viking and Voyager missions. Sagan and Murray recognized that public interest needed to be expressed and thus we began the development of The Planetary Society as a citizens-based advocacy group promoting exploration of other worlds and the search for extraterrestrial life.  

What is your next research project?

I am following up the subject in this book of exploring exoplanets remotely by use of the solar gravity lens.  I hope to contribute to making a mission to the foci of habitable exoplanets possible in the next decade.  

***
Louis Friedman co-founded the Planetary Society with Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray and was its executive director for thirty years. He has contributed to numerous journals and is the author of Starsailing: Solar Sails and Interstellar Travel, Human Spaceflight: From Mars to the Stars, and Planetary Adventures: From Moscow to Mars.

Texas Book Festival Invites García and Momen

September 15, 2023

Authors Alma García and Mehnaaz Momen have been invited to the Texas Book Festival in Austin, Texas, November 11 -12. García will talk about her debut novel, All That Rises, and Momen will discuss Listening to Laredo, A Border City in a Globalized Age.

The Texas Book Festival (TBF) began with a simple purpose: to bring authors and readers together in a celebration of literature and literacy. Founded in 1995 by Laura Bush (a former librarian and then First Lady of Texas), Mary Margaret Farabee, and a dedicated group of volunteers, the TBF set out to honor Texas authors, promote the joys of reading, and benefit the state’s public libraries. The first Festival took place in November 1996 and is now one of the nation’s premier annual literary events, featuring 300 authors of the year’s best books and drawing 50,000 book lovers. Discover all the 2023 Festival authors.

Congratulations to Alma and Mehnaaz!

About All That Rises:

In the border city of El Paso, Texas, two guardedly neighboring families have plunged headlong into a harrowing week. Rose Marie DuPre, wife and mother, has abandoned her family. On the doorstep of the Gonzales home, long-lost rebel Inez appears. As Rose Marie’s husband, Huck (manager of a maquiladora), and Inez’s brother, Jerry (a college professor), struggle separately with the new shape of their worlds, Lourdes, the Mexican maid who works in both homes, finds herself entangled in the lives of her employers, even as she grapples with a teenage daughter who only has eyes for el otro lado—life, American style.

About Listening to Laredo:

Nestled between Texas and Tamaulipas, Laredo was once a quaint border town, nurturing cultural ties across the border, attracting occasional tourists, and serving as the home of people living there for generations. In a span of mere decades, Laredo has become the largest inland port in the United States and a major hub of global trade. Listening to Laredo is an exploration of how the dizzying forces of change have defined this locale, how they continue to be inscribed and celebrated, and how their effects on the physical landscape have shaped the identity of the city and its people.

Excerpt from “Urban Indigeneities”

Today a majority of Indigenous peoples live in urban areas: they are builders and cleaners, teachers and lawyers, market women and masons, living in towns and cities surrounded by the people and pollution that characterize life for most individuals in the twenty-first century. Despite this basic fact, the vast majority of studies on Indigenous peoples concentrate solely on rural Indigenous populations.

Aiming to highlight these often-overlooked communities, Urban Indigeneities: Being Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century edited by Dana Brablec and Andrew Canessa  is the first book to look at urban Indigenous peoples globally and present the urban Indigenous experience—not as the exception but as the norm. The contributing essays draw on a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, architecture, land economy, and area studies, and are written by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars. The analysis looks at Indigenous people across the world and draws on examples not usually considered within the study of indigeneity, such as Fiji, Japan, and Russia.

Indigeneity is often seen as being “authentic” when it is practiced in remote rural areas, but these essays show that a vigorous, vibrant, and meaningful indigeneity can be created in urban spaces too. The book challenges many of the imaginaries and tropes of what constitutes “the Indigenous” and offers perspectives and tools to understand a contemporary Indigenous urban reality. As such, it is a must-read for anyone interested in the real lives of Indigenous people today. Read an excerpt from the book below.

We are all familiar with the image of the Indigenous person in forests or mountains living close to and in harmony with the natural environment, enjoying a traditional lifestyle distant from the realities of a modern world. The reality is that an increasing proportion of Indigenous peoples today live in urban areas (UN Habitat 2010). They are builders and cleaners, teachers and lawyers, market women and masons, living in towns and cities surrounded by the people and pollution that characterize life for most of us in the twenty first century.

Despite this basic reality of contemporary Indigenous life, the vast majority of studies on Indigenous peoples still concentrate on the rural Indigenous. There are a number of reasons for this. Even though Indigenous peoples have lived in cities for centuries and even created some of the largest cities of their era (e.g., Cuzco in Peru, and Tenochtitlan in Mexico), from the time of Rousseau, Hobbes, and Locke, Europeans and their descendants have seen Indigenous peoples as living in a “state of nature” and so were not only blind to an Indigenous history in cities, but even when they did appear in urban spaces, they were considered to be no longer Indigenous by definition. This close association of indigeneity with the wild spaces continues right through to the twenty-first century, where the “authentic” Indigenous subject is deemed to live in the forests and mountains far from urban life and, if not in a state of nature, certainly in harmony with it. To situate so resolutely the Indigenous beyond the urban is not only to ignore history but also to deprive Indigenous peoples of their cultural agency and their ability to create identities in any space they choose. The social sciences in general have been largely complicit in this, although there are some notable exceptions (Howard and Proulx 2011; Furlan 2017; Horn 2019). This book, written by Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors, is the first to look at urban Indigenous peoples globally and to present the urban Indigenous experience not as the exception, but as the norm it is.

Contributors
Aiko Ikemura Amaral
Chris Andersen
Giuliana Borea
Dana Brablec
Andrew Canessa
Sandra del Valle Casals
Stanislav Saas Ksenofontov
Daniela Peluso
Andrey Petrov
Marya Rozanova-Smith
Kate Stevens
Kanako Uzawa

Five Questions for Mehnaaz Momen

September 12, 2023

Nestled between Texas and Mexico, the city of Laredo was a quaint border town, nurturing cultural ties across the river, attracting occasional tourists, and populated with people living there for generations. In Listening to Laredo, Mehnaaz Momen traces Laredo’s history and evolution through the voices of its people. She examines the changing economic and cultural infrastructure of the city, its interdependence with its sister city across the national boundary, and, above all, the resilience of the community as it adapts to and even challenges the national narrative on the border.

Why did you embark on this work?

I moved to Laredo from Cleveland in 2002 because I got a job at Texas A&M International University. I always loved the historic feel of the city and its rich heritage. However, I could not make sense of its urban growth patterns. All the theories I had learnt in my Urban Studies program felt inadequate for the then second-fastest growing city with its core of Spanish plazas, which remained underutilized, and the growing warehouses that surrounded the city. There were no delineable suburbs and yet there was a striking north/south divide. I wanted to study the city through the lenses of urban theory, so I wrote a few articles on Laredo. But it was much later in 2017 that I started working on a book-length manuscript. I was inspired by academic curiosity about the city at first, but after living here for two decades, it feels like an intellectual responsibility to understand the city and share my frame of analysis with a broader audience.

Your approach is very hands-on. You conducted interviews with 75 residents of Laredo. Why did you choose an ethnographic approach for your research?

My original plan was to contrast urban theory with material from the interviews of local residents. Almost as soon as I started the interviews, I knew that the local narratives about the border deserved exclusive attention. The local and national implications of a border region are not only different but often in conflict. When Laredo emerged as the largest inland port of the nation, global trade eclipsed all other frames of viewing the border. In the literary and cultural spheres, as well as in academia, the border has seldom been defined by the people who live in that space. It was fascinating how the different aspects of their stories were connected organically, which allowed me to weave a comprehensive story of Laredo. This is one of the main contributions of my work, namely to bring out the voices from the border to define the problems and possibilities of border cities.

Laredo is not only the locus of your research, it is also your home. What do you want the world to know about Laredo and border communities like it?

Laredo was the place where I got a job and reluctantly settled in. It took me a number of years to look at Laredo without preconceived notions even though I was living there. The cultural stereotype of the border is ingrained in all of us. I want my readers to see Laredo from the eyes of the people who live there by choice. We always hear about the dangers of the border, but the border is fragile, the border is beautiful, and the border is evolving. The border is full of possibilities, especially because it is always a little wild. For the people who live on the border, it was historically an abstract notion that had legal and political restrictions but did not obstruct cultural and economic exchanges. It is global trade and the politics surrounding the border wall that have turned the border into a concrete obstruction that has significantly curtailed economic and social flows between the two sides of the river. This hasn’t made the border safer; rather, it is stripping away the unique features of border areas.   

Even though you’ve been a resident of Laredo for more than two decades, you’re careful to point out in the book that you are still an outsider. Why was this important?

With the exception of my home city, Dhaka, where I grew up and lived for twenty-five years, Laredo is the only other city where I have lived so long, especially as an adult. I was an outsider in Laredo in all senses of the term. As an outsider, perhaps I was able to perceive a lot more anomalies of the city than a local person. The city is 95% Hispanic but has a stable history of intermarriages and has always made room for outsiders. Actually, in Laredo vocabulary, the outside/insider divide is neither national nor ethnic, but rather who is part of the community. In that sense, my relationship with the city changed because of this book. Laredo became a home for me through this process.

I was very conscious that I was writing the stories of a number of people with whom I don’t have a shared memory or shared history. I was bringing my academic and other life experiences to connect their stories to a framework of analysis, but my voice is not the nucleus. It is important to note that although I am an observer and a participant, this story belongs to the people of Laredo.

What is your next project?

I am working on a couple of articles using the materials from the interviews, information that I could not incorporate in the book because of the word limit. I am also working on a project with Webb County which will collect primary information about county services. Hopefully by next year I can expand my research to other border cities and explore their growth patterns. I want to start an alternate conversation about the border which acknowledges the prospects of the border and border people beyond the myopic view of disorder and trade calculations. 

***
Mehnaaz Momen is an associate professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Texas A&M International University. Her research interests include citizenship, immigration policy, urban theory, public space, political satire, and marginality. She is the author of The Paradox of Citizenship in American Politics: Ideals and Reality and Political Satire, Postmodern Reality, and the Trump Presidency: Who Are We Laughing At?

Author photo by Laila Nahar

Mehnaaz Momen Reveals Laredo’s Border Battles in the L.A. Times

September 11, 2023

Mehnaaz Momen, author of Listening to Laredo, tells the story of the largest port in the United States through the voices of its residents. In this L.A. Times Editorial, Momen writes, “The flow of money has shifted from the city itself to the four international bridges tying the local economy to the crumbs of international trade. Homegrown economic growth helped bring prosperity to the city in the 1960s and ’70s. The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, however, transformed the beautiful downtown and the mighty Rio Grande into a mere passage for money, merchandise and narcotics.”

She interviewed Alec Martinez, a local resident who has worked in city government. He told her, “Laredo is like the goose that lays the golden eggs. Everyone is interested in the eggs, but no one cares about the goose.”

Momen offers hope for the city, in spite of state and national efforts to militarize the border. She writes, “Laredoans are excitedly awaiting the construction of the River Vega project, a binational park planned to run along the much-maligned Rio Grande for residents of Laredo as well as Nuevo Laredo across the border. This project has grown out of a community-driven master plan, Viva Laredo, focused on reanimating the historic downtown and enhancing quality-of-life features for residents.”

About the book:

Listening to Laredo is an exploration of how the dizzying forces of change have defined this locale, how they continue to be inscribed and celebrated, and how their effects on the physical landscape have shaped the identity of the city and its people.

In contrast to the many studies of border cities defined by the outside—and seldom by the people who live at the border—this volume collects oral histories from seventy-five in-depth interviews that collectively illuminate the evolution of the city’s cultural and economic infrastructure, its interdependence with its sister city across the national boundary, and, above all, the strength of its community as it adapts to and even challenges the national narrative regarding the border.

Excerpt from “Listening to Laredo”

Nestled between Texas and Tamaulipas, Laredo was once a quaint border town, nurturing cultural ties across the border, attracting occasional tourists, and serving as the home of people living there for generations. In a span of mere decades, Laredo has become the largest inland port in the United States and a major hub of global trade. Listening to Laredo: A Border City in a Globalized Age by Mehnaaz Momen is an exploration of how the dizzying forces of change have defined this locale, how they continue to be inscribed and celebrated, and how their effects on the physical landscape have shaped the identity of the city and its people.

Bringing together issues of growth, globalization, and identity, Momen traces Laredo’s trajectory through the voices of its people. In contrast to the many studies of border cities defined by the outside—and seldom by the people who live at the border—this volume collects oral histories from seventy-five in-depth interviews that collectively illuminate the evolution of the city’s cultural and economic infrastructure, its interdependence with its sister city across the national boundary, and, above all, the strength of its community as it adapts to and even challenges the national narrative regarding the border. The resonant and lively voices of Laredo’s people convey proud ownership of an archetypal border city that has time and again resurrected itself. Read an excerpt from the book below.

The largest inland port of the United States along the U.S.-Mexico boundary is Laredo, which before the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) used to be a dusty little border town with a quaint history. Nestled between the U.S.-Mexico territory along the Rio Grande in Texas, the city is older than the United States. Fueled by a dizzying spell of growth that occurred in the short span of three decades, Laredo surpassed Los Angeles to become the largest port of any kind—sea, land, or air—in the United States in 2019. The aura of the bygone age surrounding its charming downtown is now overshadowed by negative ordeals associated with trade and migration. The flocks of tourists and traders to the twin cities on both sides of the Rio Grande—Laredo and Nuevo Laredo—are now memories of a departed era. The same features of proximity to Mexico and ease of passage currently spell disorder and chaos in the political discourse. The border of Laredo has become synonymous with international trade to a greater extent than in the past. Under this new iteration, the remarkable history of the rich culture, economic success, and spatial evolution of Laredo is being buried. This book attempts to excavate the story of the city from the viewpoints and experiences of the people who actually live there to make sense of the concurrent drifts of being a historic city, a border city, and a global trade center.

Historic cities emphasize their glorious pasts; border cities are perceived as intermediate sites between nation-states, allowing clandestine activities; and global cities are centers of unmitigated growth. Historic cities are formed by the annals of antiquity, border cities are characterized by peripheral conflicts around boundaries, and global cities attempt to navigate national boundaries with the promise of economic boons. Laredo boasts of the distinct record of having been under seven flags (one as the capital of a short-lived republic), and its intricate history has served as a matter of pride for the people. The overwhelmingly Hispanic town relished its interdependent relationship with the people of Nuevo Laredo, which included family and business bonds going back several generations. Even though borders are contested sites for nation-states—and Laredo had been disputed terrain between Mexicans, Texans, and Americans—the umbilical cord between Laredo and Nuevo Laredo remained robust until Laredo evolved into a global port. Geography situated the coupled cities along a navigable river but detached from other metropolises, which strengthened their mutual dependence. Laredo has a long history of benign neglect by all the nation-states to which it belonged. The city flourished organically by taking advantage of its location and cultivating a socioeconomic hierarchy nuzzled in ethnic and cultural homogeneity.

An economic windfall came to Laredo during the Civil War when Laredo became a center for smuggling the cotton that funded the Confederate army. The city blossomed into a trade center by the turn of the twentieth century. Local folklore goes so far as to claim that by the 1950s, downtown Laredo was more prosperous than New York. The 1980s devaluation of the peso brought disaster to the retail economy heavily dependent on Mexican customers. Globalization ushered in a new meaning for border territories in the 1990s, as Laredo found itself perfectly situated to be a key locale in the postindustrial economy in the thriving Sunbelt, with an existing transportation network and abundant cheap labor on its periphery. The neoliberal growth rationale for border zones is based on transportation, consumption, and enhancement of the state apparatus with incessant surveillance, a notable deviation from the established pattern of the gradual progress of a city.

As the busiest land port, Laredo functions as a major link in the expansive global trade web, which requires simultaneous speedy transit and strict policing of the nation-state’s boundary. With its newfound international trade link, the codependency between Laredo and Nuevo Laredo has evaporated. Nuevo Laredo, the largest transportation nerve center in Mexico, fell under the power of the drug cartels as its location in the global network abetted narcotics transactions. In this new reality, the river, roads, and bridges are all under constant supervision, impairing the previous openness of the border. Only large freight trucks enjoy swift entrance from the south. The ceaseless flow of people across the border is a not-so-distant memory and is mourned by residents. Local concerns about preserving water quality and the riverbank or even investing in homegrown businesses have to compete with national or international trade and growth imperatives. The evolution of Laredo reveals both internal and external elements in the process of economic advancement and the formation of cultural identity in the border city.

Tom Zoellner Is Keynote Speaker for Arizona Library Association

August 31, 2023

Tom Zoellner will speak on “The Arizona Literary Tradition” at the Arizona Library Association conference on October 19, 2023, at the We Ko Pa Resort in Fort McDowell, Arizona. Zoellner, author of Rim to River, will talk about the writing tradition in Arizona. Many great works of non-fiction come from Arizona; however, something is missing. He says, “There have been plenty of very good novels set here, but none that has truly captured the essence of the state. This is a challenge laid before the state’s fiction writers: where is the Great Arizona Novel? Can you write it, please?”

About the book:

Rim to River is the story of Zoellner’s walk on the Arizona Trail. Follow his extraordinary journey through redrock country, down canyons, up mesas, and across desert plains to the obscure valley in Mexico that gave the state its enigmatic name. The trek is interspersed with incisive essays that pick apart the distinctive cultural landscape of Arizona: the wine-colored pinnacles and complex spirituality of Navajoland, the mind-numbing stucco suburbs, desperate border crossings, legislative skullduggery, extreme politics, billion-dollar copper ventures, dehydrating rivers, retirement kingdoms, old-time foodways, ghosts of old wars, honky-tonk dreamers, murder mysteries, and magical Grand Canyon reveries.

Aldama, Lomelí & Gómez Finalists for 2023 International Latino Book Award

August 28, 2023

We are pleased to announce that two of our books were recently selected as finalists for the 2023 International Latino Book Awards: Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama in the “Best Academic Themed Book, College Level – English” category, and Juan Felipe Herrera: Migrant, Activist, Poet Laureate, edited by Francisco A. Lomelí and Osiris Aníbal Gómez in the “Best Biography” category.

The International Latino Book Awards recognize excellence in literature, honoring books written in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, with the goal of “growing the awareness for books written by, for and about Latinos.”

Frederick Luis Aldama, also known as Professor Latinx, is the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as Adjunct Professor and Distinguished University Professor at The Ohio State University. He is the award-winning author of more than forty-eight books, including the bilingual children’s books The Adventures of Chupacabra Charlie and With Papá. He is editor or co-editor of nine academic press book series, including Latinographix, which publishes Latinx comics. He is the creator of the first documentary on the history of Latinx superheroes and the founder and director of UT Austin’s Latinx Pop Lab.

Francisco A. Lomelí is professor emeritus and distinguished professor of Chicano/a studies and Latin American literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published extensively on Mexican, Chilean, Argentine, and Chicano/a literatures, as well as multiple reference works in the field of Chicano/a studies.

Osiris Aníbal Gómez is an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His areas of expertise include contemporary Indigenous literatures of Mexico, Mexican literature, Chicano/a literature, and translation studies. His work explores the condition, aesthetics, and social justice possibilities of bilingual Indigenous and Chicanx writers.

Congratulations to all!

Dante Lauretta and Brian May Interviewed about “Bennu 3-D”

August 29, 2023

In England, The Guardian newspaper featured Bennu 3-D, Anatomy of an Asteroid and its authors in the week leading up to the book launch at the London Museum of Natural History on July 27. Dante Lauretta told his side of the story about how he and Brian May came to collaborate: “As the OSIRIS-REx mission progressed, I couldn’t help but share some of the latest developments with him … To my delight, Brian showed a keen interest in the mission and the science behind it. It was clear that he was not just a casual fan, but a true space enthusiast and an advocate for space exploration.” Lauretta eventually brought May on to the mission, who, alongside his collaborator Claudia Manzoni, created stereo images from original images that were collected by the OSIRIS-REx cameras.

Space.com’s Tereza Pultarova interviewed Brian May, co-author of Bennu 3-D. She spoke with May about his role in bringing stereoscopic photography to the OSIRIS-REx NASA mission.

The rock-star-turned-astrophysicist explained how he came to be part of the team: “So what happened with me and Dante, is that I sent him just off the cuff a couple of OSIRIS-REx images which I’d made into 3D. And he was amazed. He said ‘I have never seen it like this, this is such a great tool and this might be able to help us find the landing site that we need in order to get that sample safely.'”

In another article focusing on the book, Space.com listed May’s other scientific projects. May, who holds a PhD in astronomy, had previously collaborated with the science teams behind Europe’s comet-chasing Rosetta probe and NASA’s Pluto explorer New Horizons. He joined the OSIRIS-REx team in January 2019, a few months after the probe reached its destination, after striking up a friendship with Lauretta over shared interests.

In fact, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx chief scientist Dante Lauretta and Brian May challenge Space.com readers to photograph objects in the solar system. The prize? A signed copy of Bennu 3-D, Anatomy of an Asteroid. Watch the contest announcement video here. Astrophotographers can submit their entries into the competition by email to spacephotos@space.com by Sept. 15. Be sure to include “astrophoto competition” in the subject line to be considered.

About the book:

The world’s first complete (and stereoscopic) atlas of an asteroid, this book is the result of a unique collaboration between OSIRIS-REx mission leader Dante Lauretta and Brian May’s London Stereoscopic Company. Lauretta’s colleagues include Carina Bennett, Kenneth Coles, and Cat Wolner, as well as Brian May and Claudia Manzoni, who became part of the ultimately successful effort to find a safe landing site for sampling. The text details the data collected by the mission so far, and the stereo images have been meticulously created by Manzoni and May from original images collected by the OSIRIS-REx cameras.


The print edition includes 120 illustrations, 50 maps, 80 stereoscopic images, and includes stereoscopic glasses.

Diego Báez and the Evolution of his Political Consciousness in Alta

August 28, 2023

In the Alta article Abolition, Anarchism, and a Question of Action, Diego Báez reflects on the books and editorials that have shaped his political view. He begins his review in 2009 and concludes with the present time. These writings include Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire and Revolution in the Borderlands, and an editorial for the New York Times titled “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.”

Diego Báez has a debut collection coming out in February 2024, Yaguareté White. In this collection English, Spanish, and Guaraní encounter each other through the elusive yet potent figure of the jaguar. 

The son of a Paraguayan father and a mother from Pennsylvania, Baéz grew up in central Illinois as one of the only brown kids on the block—but that didn’t keep him from feeling like a gringo on family visits to Paraguay. Exploring this contradiction as it weaves through experiences of language, self, and place, Baéz revels in showing up the absurdities of empire and chafes at the limits of patrimony, but he always reserves his most trenchant irony for the gaze he turns on himself.

“Discover Arizona” Class with Our Authors

August 24, 2023

Our authors are teaching a class this fall at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Arizona! Tim Hunter, Juliet Stromberg, Tom Zoellner, and William L. Bird take you behind the scenes of their books in “Discover Arizona Days and Nights with The University of Arizona Press Authors,” four Wednesdays starting October 18. The classes meet 1:00 – 2:45 p.m., at the Central Tucson campus, 4485 N. 1st Ave. (at the NW corner of 1st Avenue and Wetmore Road). Classes will be in person and via zoom. Registration is open for all fall OLLI-UA classes.

Tim Hunter, author of The Sky at Night, covers all the basics—from the Moon, planets, and stars to the history and origins of constellations and selected famous astronomers and events. Emphasis is on naked-eye viewing with an occasional reference to using a pair of binoculars or a small telescope, encouraging beginners to explore the skies.

Tom Zoellner, author of Rim to River, hiked the Arizona Trail through redrock country, down canyons, up mesas, and across desert plains. The trek is interspersed with incisive essays that pick apart the distinctive cultural landscape of Arizona: the wine-colored pinnacles and complex spirituality of Navajoland,  desperate border crossings, extreme politics, billion-dollar copper ventures, old-time foodways, and more.

William “Larry” Bird, author of In the Arms of Saguaros, shows how, from the botanical explorers of the nineteenth century to the tourism boosters in our own time, saguaros and their images have fulfilled attention-getting needs and expectations. The history of the saguaro’s popular and highly imaginative range points to the current moment in which the saguaro touches us as a global icon in art, fashion, and entertainment.

In Bringing Home the Wild, Juliet Stromberg tells of her 20-year journey in ecologically guided gardening on a four-acre irrigated parcel in Phoenix, from the perspective of a retired botanist. Some plants are indigenous to the American Southwest, while others are part of the biocultural heritage of the cityscape. She makes the case for valuing inclusive biodiversity.

Class Schedule

Oct. 18 Tim Hunter, The Sky at Night (in person)

Oct. 25 Tom Zoellner, Rim to River (zoom or in person, to be determined)

Nov. 1 William “Larry” Bird, In the Arms of Saguaros (in person)

Nov. 8 Juliet Stromberg, Bringing Home the Wild (zoom)

In Honor of Aurelie Sheehan: An Excerpt from “Demigods on Speedway”

August 18, 2023

In the tradition of Joyce’s DublinersDemigods on Speedway is a portrait of a city that reflects the recession-era Southwest. Inspired by tales from Greek mythology, these gritty heroes and heroines struggle to find their place in the cosmos.

In 2014, we celebrated the publication of Aurelie Sheehan’s book, Demigods on Speedway. Today, we re-share a portion of the excerpt in honor of her memory and tremendous contributions:


Tucsonans might trash their sister city, but all things considered, Phoenix does wield some charms. It has an echelon of restaurants and hotels mostly lacking here, for instance. Because landowners care not about the cost of water or the environmental impact of watering the desert, it’s much greener overall. Little rivulets by malls. Major, awesome lawns. In fact, it was some kind of hardcore lawn fertilizer that killed Fandango . . . at this moment being cremated. Or who will be, soon. His body is waiting somewhere, in the sort of place it’s preferable not to think about at all.


All beauty is wasted, all beauty will end, Terri is thinking, keenly aware of the unholy joke of immediate, rude extinction, the disregard the majority partner seems to have when it comes to maintaining the social contract—the capacity to be social, as Terri now interprets it, to look and listen and feel. Fandango is dead. And it goes on from there: we’re talking doom, individually and in great swaths. We’re talking the aging process. And so you need to capture life for the brief moments you can. Look at that barrel cactus.


Terri would not have come down to Tucson if Chris had been around, but he is working on a project in New Orleans this week. The kids are also both gone for the night—sleepovers. To be frank, her husband may not have been as helpful as Sarah (a good listener, Terri knows), because he adopts a fatalistic, purportedly practical stance in times of trouble: “It was his time,” “Crying can’t bring him back,” “We’ll get another one,” et cetera. Still, it would have felt awkward to leave for the weekend, if he were home. “Sisters have a special bond” might have come in handy in that circumstance. All in all, it was cleaner and easier not to have had to talk about it, to have just gotten in the car, turned on the A/C, and pretended for a couple of hours that life could be a song on the radio and a Starbucks in the cup holder and vague attention to a stretch of highway notable for its ugliness, give or take a few patches of cacti, a kitschy ostrich farm, and Picacho Peak, a lump of molten lava people climb when they have nothing better to do.

Poor Sarah. She looks like complete shit. Her very thinness looks unhealthy, a diminishing. Not the product of a compulsive fitness regimen, but of illness and overwork. It’s all because of that moron Wilbur. Ever since he broke up with her, Sarah has been a tall, thin moper. She looks like an ostrich herself, hanging her head.

“To hell with it,” says Terri, “I’m going to buy one of these small ones and just see how it does in the car.”

“Good,” says Sarah.

“I know, you have to, right?” says Alyssa.

And so the three women trudge farther into the maelstrom of xeriscape terrain, pots filled with this and that Martian-like form: the one with glorious black hair holding the spiky thing to her belly as if she’s pregnant; the squat, shorter one from Phoenix holding up, as if for inspection, a fat miniature cactus with a pink head, resembling the penis of a prickly circumcised frontiersman; the willowy one with the membership card and the 20 percent discount not holding anything at all but casting the remnant of her gaze bitterly over the entire venue, or so it seems.

The cacti aren’t really dry or barren. They just know how to conserve.


Aurelie Sheehan was the author of two novels and two short story collections. Her short fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Fence, The Mississippi Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review. She taught fiction at the University of Arizona.

Monsoon Book Roundup: Poetry & Prose to Welcome the Rain

The rain falls
on everyone’s skull
with equal charity
in a lapse from realism
makes us subjects of something more than flesh and blood
we are children of water
of longing
of uncertainty.

Elizabeth Torres, “The Rain” (Lotería, 2023)

In Tucson, the month of August is always exciting: school is about to resume, the students begin to trickle back into town, and new books are on their way. But this year, the natural flow of the season has been hampered by the unrelenting heat and scarcity of serious rain. Even the desert’s best-adapted plants have struggled to make it through this summer’s heat-wave.

At the University of Arizona Press, we find that it’s a little easier to exercise hydrological patience by looking back to some of our favorite water-writing. We hope you’ll enjoy this roundup of monsoon books—and who knows—maybe you’ll even be reading one on your back porch when the rain starts. We can always hope!

Lotería

Elizabeth Torres

The vision begins with a river. From this river, you can see a village, marine life, and ancestral rituals. It is here that you recognize origins, and a poison beginning to spread through paradise. Suddenly, a premonition: a wounded animal. The certainty of war cries. What you take with you is what you become, each movement a gamble, a lottery of life that transforms you until this moment, when uncertainty becomes an ally.

Lotería: Nocturnal Sweepstakes is a collection of deeply evocative coming-of-age poems that take the reader on a voyage through the intimate experiences of displacement. Conjuring dreamlike visions of extravagant fruits and rivers animated by the power of divination, these poems follow the speaker from the lash of war’s arrival through an urgent escape and reinvention in a land that saves with maternal instinct but also smothers its children.

In this bilingual collection, Colombian American poet Elizabeth Torres threads together the stories of family dynamics and the realities of migration with the archetypes of tarot and the traditional Lotería game, used for centuries as an object of divination and entertainment. Through these themes and images, the poems in Lotería narrate intimate moments in the lives and journeys of migrants, refugees, and all who have been forced into metamorphosis in order to reach the other side of the river.

Winner of the 2022 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets, this collection showcases masterfully crafted and translated poems.

When It Rains

Ofelia Zepeda

When it was first released in 1982, When It Rains was one of the earliest published literary works in the O’odham language. Speakers from across generations shared poems that showcased the aesthetic of the written word and aimed to spread interest in reading and writing in O’odham.

The poems capture brief moments of beauty, the loving bond between family members, and a deep appreciation of Tohono O’odham culture and traditions, as well as reverent feelings about the landscape and wildlife native to the Southwest. A motif of rain and water is woven throughout the poetry in When It Rains, tying in the collection’s title to the importance of this life-giving and sustaining resource to the Tohono O’odham people. With the poems in both O’odham and English, the volume serves as an important reminder of the beauty and changeability of the O’odham language.

Bringing Home the Wild: A Riparian Garden in a Southwest City

Juliet C. Stromberg

book cover with a photo of riparian garden in the American southwest

Please note: this book is forthcoming in October 2023

When living in a large sprawling city, one may feel disconnected and adrift. Finding ways to belong and have positive effects is challenging. In Bringing Home the Wild, botanist Juliet C. Stromberg demonstrates how ecologically guided gardening develops a sense of place, restores connections to nature, and brings joy and meaning to our lives.

This book follows a two-decade journey in ecologically guided gardening on a four-acre irrigated parcel in Phoenix, Arizona, from the perspective of a retired botanist and her science historian partner. Through humor and playful use of language, Bringing Home the Wild not only introduces the plants who are feeding them, buffering the climate, and elevating their moods but also acknowledges the animals and fungi who are pollinating the plants and recycling the waste. Some of the plants featured are indigenous to the American Southwest, while others are part of the biocultural heritage of the cityscape. This book makes the case for valuing inclusive biodiversity and for respectful interactions with all wild creatures, regardless of their historical origin.

As author and partner learn to cohabit with the plants who feed them, calm them, entertain them, and protect them from the increasing heat, their desire to live sustainably, ethically, and close to the land becomes even stronger, revealing the importance of observing, appreciating, and learning from the ecosystems of which we are a part.

The Desert Smells Like Rain

Gary Paul Nabhan

Published more than forty years ago, The Desert Smells Like Rain remains a classic work about nature, how to respect it, and what transplants can learn from the longtime residents of the Sonoran Desert, the Tohono O’odham people.

In this work, Gary Paul Nabhan brings O’odham voices to the page at every turn. He writes elegantly of how they husband scant water supplies, grow crops, and utilize edible wild foods. Woven through his account are coyote tales, O’odham children’s impressions of the desert, and observations of the political problems that come with living on both sides of an international border. Nabhan conveys the everyday life and extraordinary perseverance of these desert people.

This edition includes a new preface written by the author, in which he reflects on his gratitude for the O’odham people who shared their knowledge with him. He writes about his own heritage and connections to the desert, climate change, and the border. He shares his awe and gratitude for O’odham writers and storytellers who have been generous enough to share stories with those of us from other cultural traditions so that we may also respect and appreciate the smell of the desert after a rain.

When the Rains Come

John Alcock

Life in the desert is a waiting game: waiting for rain. And in a year of drought, the stakes are especially high.

John Alcock knows the Sonoran Desert better than just about anyone else, and in this book he tracks the changes he observes in plant and animal life over the course of a drought year. Combining scientific knowledge with years of exploring the desert, he describes the variety of ways in which the wait for rain takes place—and what happens when it finally comes.

When the Rains Come is brimming with new insights into the desert, from the mating behaviors of insects to urban sprawl, and features photographs that document changes in the landscape as drought years come and go. It brings us the desert in the harshest of times—and shows that it is still teeming with life.

Cornerstone at the Confluence

Jason A. Robison

Signed on November 24, 1922, the Colorado River Compact is the cornerstone of a proverbial pyramid—an elaborate body of laws colloquially called the “Law of the River” that governs how human beings use water from the river system dubbed the “American Nile.”

No fewer than forty million people have come to rely on the Colorado River system in modern times—a river system immersed in an unprecedented, unrelenting megadrought for more than two decades. Attempting to navigate this “new normal,” policymakers are in the midst of negotiating new management rules for the river system, a process coinciding with the compact’s centennial that must be completed by 2026.

Animated by this remarkable confluence of events, Cornerstone at the Confluence leverages the centennial year to reflect on the compact and broader “Law of the River” to envision the future. It is a volume inviting dialogue about how the Colorado River system’s flows should be apportioned given climate change, what should be done about environmental issues such as ecosystem restoration and biodiversity protection, and how long-standing issues of water justice facing Native American communities should be addressed.

In one form or another, all these topics touch on the concept of “equity” embedded within the compact—a concept that tees up what is perhaps the foundational question confronted by Cornerstone at the Confluence: Who should have a seat at the table of Colorado River governance?

In Honor of Roberto Cintli Rodriguez: An Excerpt from Yolqui, A Warrior Summoned from the Spirit World

August 11, 2023

In Nahuatl yolqui is the idea of a warrior brought back from the dead. For Roberto Cinctli Rodríquez, it described his own experience one night in March 1979 after a brutal beating at the hands of L.A. sheriffs.

In November 2019, we celebrated the publication of his book Yolqui, a Warrior Summoned from the Spirit World: Testimonios on Violence. Today, we re-share a portion of the excerpt in honor of his memory and his tremendous contributions:


In the middle of a cornfield in Huitzilac, Morelos, Mexico, I am given aguamiel, the juice of the maguey plant, to drink. That night, presumably, it prompts a dream.

I am hovering above a sprawled body.

Suddenly, I realize that the body is mine.

My spirit and my consciousness are outside of my body.

But how can this be possible? How can I be here, looking down at my own body?

I observe my bloodied body sprawled on the ground below me. I know it is me because those are my pants, my jacket, my hair.

I am not struggling. I am not moving. I am lifeless. A cold realization sets in, but it doesn’t make sense.

If my spirit and my consciousness are outside of my body, what does this mean?

I know I am not awake. This must be a dream. How else could this be happening?

The only other explanation is that I am no longer alive . . . that I am dead. No. This must be a mistake. There must be another explanation. I’m not going anywhere—I’m not ready to go!

At that, I am startled awake. I am in shock, trying to understand what I just saw.

For the past twenty years I’ve not had any dreams nor nightmares; either I
was not dreaming, or I was unable to remember my dreams. Either way, something changed that day in the cornfield, and that night I finally had a dream that I could remember. I was very disturbed by the dream, knowing full well there was meaning attached to it.

In the dream I’d been conscious of observing myself. It was the night of March 23–24, 1979, in East L.A., the night I was assaulted while photographing the brutal beating of a young man on Whittier Boulevard. Once I understood what I was looking at and where I was, my mind forced me to wake up.

That long-ago night resulted in my being arrested and charged with attempting to kill the four deputies who almost took my life. It took nine months to win that trial and another seven years to win the lawsuit I filed against those same deputies and the Los Angeles County Sheriff ’s Department.

Even as I write this, I realize that something else happened to me all those years ago, beyond the constant harassment and death threats, beyond having to live in fear and operating on survival instincts. Something was taken from me that night in 1979: the trauma to my brain and skull also had a long-term impact on my ability to process my thoughts in the dreamworld. I lost the ability to recall my dreams. A psychologist could probably comment about that; I know our ability to dream is a critical part of what makes us human. Dreams permit us to process our thoughts, our emotions, and our experiences, and dreams are what connect us to that other world. That was taken from me that weekend. Many Indigenous healers whom I am close to believe that our dream state is as important, if not more so, as our awakened state, and most view the inability to dream as unhealthy. I am also conscious as I write this that I am providing a psychological portrait of my mind and my spirit some forty years after that night in 1979 in East Los Angeles.

What was the meaning of the dream I had in Huitzilac? At the time, I was unsure, and that was disconcerting. In subsequent days, I internalized the idea that I had died that night in East L.A. Was that a nightmare, or was it a memory of what had happened to me that weekend? Regardless, I realized I had become a spirit walking outside of my body.

Sometime later, when I was living in San Antonio, Texas, I discussed that disturbing dream with a good friend, Enrique Maestas, who is also an Azteca/Mexica danzante. I told him I remembered having had recurring bouts of fear between 1979 and 1986, fear that I was going to be killed. “The dream is nothing to worry about,” Enrique told me.

All warriors have to die.

Okay. I got that. I now understand that I died on March 23, 1979, and on March 24, 1979, I was resuscitated. But why?

So that as warriors, we can come back and fight again.

Perhaps that was the answer I was looking for, though Enrique’s explanation did not sink in right away.


Roberto Cintli Rodríguez was an associate professor in the Department of Mexican American Studies at the University of Arizona. He wrote for Truthout’s Public Intellectual Page and was an award-winning journalist, columnist, and author. His first book with the UA Press was Our Sacred Maíz Is Our Mother: Indigeneity and Belonging in the Americas.

Sarah Hernandez and Tom Zoellner Represent Their States at National Book Festival

August 8, 2023

Sarah Hernandez and Tom Zoellner will represent South Dakota and Arizona, respectively, at the National Book Festival in Washington, DC, on August 12. Hernandez wrote We are the Stars: Colonizing and Decolonizing the Oceti Sakowin Literary Tradition, selected by The South Dakota Humanities Council. Tom Zoellner wrote Rim to River, selected by the Arizona State Library, Archives & Public Records.

The South Dakota Humanities Council plans to give away ten copies of We Are the Stars at their Festival booth. Meanwhile, at the Arizona booth, Tom Zoellner will be available 1:00 – 2:30 p.m. to talk with readers.

Both books will be part of the “Great Reads from Great Places” reading list, distributed by the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book. Books may be written by authors from the state, take place in the state, or celebrate the state’s culture and heritage.

One way the Library of Congress strives to bring the 2023 festival experience to all Americans is through the creation of recorded online conversations featuring the Great Reads authors talking about their books and about the theme of this year’s festival: “Everyone Has a Story.” Videos from both Hernandez and Zoellner will be available here, shortly after the Festival.

The 23rd annual Library of Congress National Book Festival will be held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., on August 12, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. A selection of programs will be live-streamed online and videos of all programs will be available shortly after the Festival.

Congratulations Sarah and Tom!

About We Are the Stars:

Women and land form the core themes of the book, which brings tribal and settler colonial narratives into comparative analysis. Divided into two parts, the first section of the work explores how settler colonizers used the printing press and boarding schools to displace Oceti Sakowin women as traditional culture keepers and culture bearers with the goal of internally and externally colonizing the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota nations. The second section focuses on decolonization and explores how contemporary Oceti Sakowin writers and scholars have started to reclaim Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota literatures to decolonize and heal their families, communities, and nations.

About Rim to River:

Rim to River is the story of this extraordinary journey through redrock country, down canyons, up mesas, and across desert plains to the obscure valley in Mexico that gave the state its enigmatic name. The trek is interspersed with incisive essays that pick apart the distinctive cultural landscape of Arizona: the wine-colored pinnacles and complex spirituality of Navajoland, the mind-numbing stucco suburbs, desperate border crossings, legislative skullduggery, extreme politics, billion-dollar copper ventures, dehydrating rivers, retirement kingdoms, old-time foodways, ghosts of old wars, honky-tonk dreamers, murder mysteries, and magical Grand Canyon reveries.

Pyrocene Park Makes List from Yale Climate Connections

August 1, 2023

With many North American cities enveloped by wildfire smoke this summer, Yale Climate Connections has published a round-up of must-read new fire books. Stephen J. Pyne’s newest work, Pyrocene Park, made their list, which features new works that help us better understand the dynamics of fire and our changing climate.

Yale Climate Connections Book Review Editor Michael Svoboda, writes, “Publishers and nongovernmental organizations seem already to have noticed the uptick in the number, intensity, and duration of wildfires in the past several years.”

In Pyrocene Park, Pyne focuses on one of America’s most beloved and iconic national parks, Yosemite. Pyne deftly tells the park’s history through a look at its fire story.

Yale Climate Connections is a nonpartisan, multimedia service providing daily broadcast radio programming and original web-based reporting, commentary, and analysis on the issue of climate change, one of the greatest challenges and stories confronting modern society.

About the Book
The Earth is fast transitioning from a planet shaped by ice to one shaped by fire in all its manifestations. Yosemite National Park offers a microcosm for understanding our current world. Stephen J. Pyne tells the story of how fire got removed from the landscape and the ways, both deliberate and feral, it is returning.

About the Author
Stephen J. Pyne is a fire historian, urban farmer, and emeritus professor at Arizona State University. He spent fifteen seasons with the North Rim Longshots, a fire crew at Grand Canyon National Park. Out of those seasons emerged a scholarly interest in the history and management of fire, with major surveys for America, Australia, Canada, Europe (including Russia), and the Earth, some thirty-three books both large and small. From that career, Pyne has developed the notion of a Pyrocene, a human-driven fire age.

Reyes Ramirez Receives Honorable Mention for the 2023 Eric Hoffer Book Award

July 28, 2023

Reyes Ramirez has received an honorable mention for The Book of Wanderers in the short story/anthology category for the 2023 Eric Hoffer Book Award.

The Eric Hoffer Book Award “honors the memory of the great American philosopher Eric Hoffer by highlighting salient writing, as well as the independent spirit of small publishers. Since its inception, the Hoffer has become one of the largest international book awards for small, academic, and independent presses.”

Congratulations, Reyes!

About the book:

What do a family of luchadores, a teen on the run, a rideshare driver, a lucid dreamer, a migrant worker in space, a mecha soldier, and a zombie-and-neo-Nazi fighter have in common?

Reyes Ramirez’s dynamic short story collection follows new lineages of Mexican and Salvadoran diasporas traversing life in Houston, across borders, and even on Mars. Themes of wandering weave throughout each story, bringing feelings of unease and liberation as characters navigate cultural, physical, and psychological separation and loss from one generation to the next in a tumultuous nation.

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.

Authors Dante Lauretta and Brian May featured in the Arizona Daily Star

July 27, 2023

Recently, the Arizona Daily Star interviewed author Dante Lauretta about how Brian May and his London Stereoscopic Company came to be involved in the publication of Bennu 3-D, Anatomy of an Asteroid.

Lauretta, Director of NASA Mission OSIRIS-REx, explained to reporter Henry Brean how he started working with Brian May, “Brian and I corresponded briefly about the mission and my hometown of Tucson, Arizona, where he had spent some time enjoying the natural beauty of the Sonoran Desert and using it for self-reflection, as many do.”

Lauretta had always been a fan of Brian May’s music, May was a founding member of the band Queen. Lauretta mentioned that Queen’s song “Under Pressure,” helped him through some tough times as a kid.

Lauretta said, “The fact that I was corresponding with one of my childhood heroes was beyond cool.”

Lauretta told Brean that he May kept in touch as the mission progressed. Lauretta said, “I couldn’t help but share some of the latest developments with him. To my delight, Brian showed a keen interest in the mission and the science behind it. It was clear that he was not just a casual fan, but a true space enthusiast and an advocate for space exploration.”

After Lauretta invited May to officially join the team, May and his London Stereoscopic team went to work. May and his collaborator, Claudia Manzoni, used early, publicly available data collected by the spacecraft to produce stereoscopic images that showed Bennu’s rugged and dangerous landscape in what Lauretta describes as “glorious 3-D.”

Watch preparation behind the scenes and evening book launch from London on Thursday, July 27. Live streaming starts at noon (GMT+1), 2:00 a.m. AZT, on Brian May’s Instagram: @brianmayforreal.

About Bennu 3-D, Anatomy of an Asteroid:

The world’s first complete (and stereoscopic) atlas of an asteroid is the result of a unique collaboration between OSIRIS-REx mission leader Dante Lauretta and Brian May’s London Stereoscopic Company. Lauretta’s colleagues include Carina Bennett, Kenneth Coles, and Cat Wolner, as well as Brian May and Claudia Manzoni, who became part of the ultimately successful effort to find a safe landing site for sampling. The text details the data collected by the mission so far, and the stereo images have been meticulously created by Manzoni and May from original images collected by the OSIRIS-REx cameras.

The print edition includes 120 illustrations, 50 maps, 80 stereoscopic images, and stereoscopic glasses.

Laura Da’ Named Poet Laureate Fellow

July 26, 2023

Congratulations to Laura Da’, public school teacher and poet laureate of Redmond, Washington! She is one of 23 poets laureate in the United States to receive $50,000 as Poet Laureate Fellow in The Academy of American Poets. Da’ is author of Instruments of the True Measure and Tributaries.

According to The Academy of American Poets, funding will enable Da’ to “produce a poetic map and walking installation of the Lake Sammamish ecosystem. The project will include an online, interactive brochure that encourages participants to learn more about the history of Lake Sammamish, a poetry walk installed at the sites of Idylwood Creek and Idylwood Park on the shores of Lake Sammamish, and a permanent installation of selected prompts.”

“The Academy of American Poets celebrates the unique position poets laureate occupy at state and local levels, elevating the possibilities poetry can bring to community conversations and reminding us that our national spirit can be nourished by the power of the written and spoken word,” said Ricardo Maldonado, president and executive director of the Academy.

Congratulations again, Laura!

Gloria Muñoz and Brandy Nālani McDougall Named Poet Laureate Fellows

July 25, 2023

Congratulations to Gloria Muñoz, author of Danzirly, and Brandy Nālani McDougall, author of Aina Hanau / Birth Land ! They are two of 23 poets laureate in the United States to receive $50,000 as Poet Laureate Fellows in The Academy of American Poets. These 23 individuals serve as poets laureate of states, counties, and cities across the United States and will be leading public poetry programs in their respective communities in 2023–24. Muñoz is St. Petersburg, Florida, poet laureate, and McDougall is Hawai’i poet laureate.

“The Academy of American Poets celebrates the unique position poets laureate occupy at state and local levels, elevating the possibilities poetry can bring to community conversations and reminding us that our national spirit can be nourished by the power of the written and spoken word,” said Ricardo Maldonado, president and executive director of the Academy.

Francisco Aragón, editor of Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, was one of the panelists who recommended the recipients of the 2023 Fellowships. Aragón is the founding director of Letras Latinas at Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies.

Congratulations again to Gloria and Brandy!

Book Lovers of UA Press: Cameron Louie

July 25, 2023

Summer is a great time to meet the people at the University of Arizona Press who turn book dreams into reality. We are a small but mighty team.

Today, we feature our Marketing Specialist, Cameron Louie.

Hello Cameron, what do you do for the Press?

I am the Marketing Specialist for the University of Arizona Press. One of the major components of my job is facilitating exhibits, which is all about the press’s physical presence: knowing which conferences and events make sense to attend, handling pre-exhibit logistics, representing the press at events, and generally just making sure that our books and authors are visible in their communities. I also contribute to advertising and social media, and I submit our authors’ books for awards.

How long have you been at UAP?
About a week—I’m brand new! While I have a background in literature, publishing, advertising, and education, this is my first time working at a university press. In my previous life as a student at the University of Arizona, I always admired the mysterious folks on the fifth floor of the library, who seemed to materialize incredible books at a breakneck pace, and now I’m excited to be part of the action.

What do you like most about working here?
The experience and knowledge of my colleagues is incredible. Being surrounded by people who are passionate about literature and language is nurturing, and everyone I’ve met has been welcoming and supportive. I love being part of a culture that acknowledges the profound responsibility and privilege of getting to help shepherd these books into the world. I also love that marketing is involved in the whole life of the book, getting to see it in its primordial state and then being able to observe its impact on people out in the world. It’s pretty magical.

What would people be surprised to learn about your work?
One of the things that is currently boggling my mind is how far out the planning needs to happen. Everyone is constantly thinking about the next season, the next year. Marketing requires so much attention to detail, and when those details are provisional, or TBD, or a year out, it requires a lot of flexibility and scrappiness to make sure that people and things are where they need to be. The stakes are high, too! Our authors’ ideas are crucial.

What do you like to do in your free time?
I’ve been rock climbing since I was a teenager, and it’s my favorite way to catch up with friends, spend time outside in the desert, move around, and (cheesy as it sounds) be in the present. Climbing is playful, social, and mentally/physically engaging, so it checks all my boxes for quality recreation.

Book Lovers of UA Press: Mary Reynolds

July 20, 2023

Summer is a great time to meet the people at the University of Arizona Press who turn book dreams into reality. We are a small but mighty team.

Today, we feature our Publicity Manager, Mary Reynolds.

Hello Mary, what do you do for the Press?

I let everyone know about our awesome books! Book promotion starts early. Pre-publication, I work with trade authors to find people to write blurbs for their books. I send out press releases, digital and print Advance Reader Copies of books, review copies to scholarly journals and popular media outlets. I contact podcasters, bloggers, radio shows, and more to get our authors and books promoted in as many places as possible. I manage UA Press social media and write news and event items for our website. I also coordinate author events for our trade authors.

How long have you been at UAP?
Seven whole months! I’m a rookie at the Press, but I’ve worked in the areas of publicity, writing, and editing for 20 years or so. And once upon a time, I even worked in a bookstore.

What do you like most about working here?
I like knowing what’s behind the scenes in book publishing and working with other friendly people who love books. I love working with authors to bring their books out into the world, and learning about how authors came to write a particular book. But my favorite part so far is working at the UA Press tent at the Tucson Festival of Books where I can see authors interacting with readers, and witness the joy on everyone’s faces. I also see this at author events, authors enjoy answering readers’ questions.

What would people be surprised to learn about your work?
Unless you are a published author, you would be surprised at how early our team starts to work on publicity for your book. About a year before the publication date, we contact trade authors and talk with them about our process. We partner with authors on publicity; authors come up with great ideas themselves about book promotion, and how to reach their target audiences. For trade and scholarly titles, we work way in advance of publication date to get books into our catalog, on our website, on other online distribution sites; and for scholarly titles, we send their books to appropriate journals for review. I am always looking for ways to promote our authors. Early book buzz is the best book buzz.

If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go and why?
Someday, I will travel to Machu Pichu and hike the Inca Trail. I’ve wanted to make the trip since I learned about the Incas in my 7th grade Spanish class. I’m in awe of the stone remains of this intriguing civilization. I’m happy in high mountains, I enjoy hiking, and I would love to visit other Inca sites in the Peruvian Andes, too.

Author David DeJong on PBS News Hour

PBS News Hour interviewed David DeJong, author of Stealing the Gila and Diverting the Gila, about water rights. DeJong is Director of the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project. PBS NewsHour correspondent Stephanie Sy spoke with DeJong and community members Ramona Button and Terry Farms about how the federal government took water from the Gila River Indian Community by building the Gila River dam. The Gila River is part of the Colorado River watershed. And now the federal government has finally provided funds to the Gila River Indian Community to bring back water to their lands and restore the agricultural economy. Watch the PBS News Hour Story: “Despite owning rights to Colorado River, tribes largely cut off from accessing water.”

About Stealing the Gila:

By 1850 the Pima Indians of central Arizona had developed a strong and sustainable agricultural economy based on irrigation. As David H. DeJong demonstrates, the Pima were an economic force in the mid-nineteenth century middle Gila River valley, producing food and fiber crops for western military expeditions and immigrants. As immigrants settled upstream from the Pima villages, they deprived the Indians of the water they needed to sustain their economy. DeJong traces federal, territorial, and state policies that ignored Pima water rights even though some policies appeared to encourage Indian agriculture. This is a particularly egregious example of a common story in the West: the flagrant local rejection of Supreme Court rulings that protected Indian water rights.

About Diverting the Gila:

Water was as vital to newcomers to Arizona’s Florence and Casa Grande valleys as it had always been to the Pima Indians, who had been successfully growing crops along the Gila River for generations when the white settlers moved in. Diverting the Gila explores the complex web of tension, distrust, and political maneuvering to divide and divert the scarce waters of the Gila River. Residents of Florence, Casa Grande, and the Pima Reservation fought for vital access to water rights. Into this political foray stepped Arizona’s freshman congressman Carl Hayden, who not only united the farming communities but also used Pima water deprivation to the advantage of Florence-Casa Grande and Upper Gila Valley growers.

Five Questions with “Bennu 3-D” Authors

July 17, 2024

Bennu 3-D, Anatomy of an Asteroid, the world’s first complete (and stereoscopic) atlas of an asteroid, is the result of a unique collaboration between OSIRIS-REx mission leader Dante Lauretta and Brian May’s London Stereoscopic Company. Lauretta’s colleagues include Carina Bennett, Kenneth Coles, and Cat Wolner, as well as Brian May and Claudia Manzoni, who became part of the ultimately successful effort to find a safe landing site for sampling. The text details the data collected by the mission so far, and the stereo images have been meticulously created by Manzoni and May from original images collected by the OSIRIS-REx cameras. The book includes a stereoscopic viewer.

Why did your team choose Bennu as the destination for the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft?

Data from telescopes suggested that Bennu would be a “primitive” asteroid that preserves organic molecules (the building blocks of life as we know it) and water-bearing minerals from early in solar system history. This time-capsule aspect made it a high-value scientific target with the potential to shed light on how our planet and the life on it originated.

There was also a practical consideration in the selection of Bennu—it is a (relatively) nearby asteroid with an orbit that brings it close to Earth every few years. This makes it much more feasible to send a spacecraft there and back than if we were to go to an asteroid in the main belt. 

How many cameras were on OSIRIS-REx and what were their different purposes?

The spacecraft has two camera suites, each with three cameras, for six cameras total.

The OSIRIS-REx Camera Suite (OCAMS) (built by U of A) imaged the asteroid at global to local scales, providing data to construct the maps and digital terrain models needed for effective and safe sampling. OCAMS includes:

  • PolyCam, a telescopic camera with a zoom lens, which first detected Bennu from more than two million kilometers (1.24 million miles) away and later imaged the sample site in millimeter-scale detail;
  • MapCam, a multispectral imager that used color filters to map the diversity of materials on Bennu’s surface;
  • SamCam, a close-range camera used to photo-document the sample collection event.

The Touch and Go Camera System (TAGCAMS) (built by Malin Space Systems) is an engineering camera suite designed to support navigation and operations. It also ended up serendipitously supporting science by capturing images of rock particles ejecting from Bennu. TAGCAMS includes:

  • NavCams 1 and 2, two identical imagers that photographed Bennu and the background starfield for navigation purposes.
  • StowCam, which photo-documented the stowage of the sample in the capsule for delivery to Earth.

What did you learn about Bennu that you didn’t expect?

Lots! A primary theme of the mission was the curveballs that Bennu threw at us. Probably the biggest surprise was that we expected Bennu to be covered in sandy material, like a beach, that would be relatively easy to sample. In fact, it turned out to be covered in boulders, some the size of buildings, which was scientifically fascinating but made sampling a real challenge.

Another surprise was the serendipitous discovery, in navigation images, of tiny shards of rocks ejecting from Bennu’s surface, apparently spontaneously. This phenomenon was observed many times over the course of the mission. The science team concluded that it is probably caused by rocks breaking when meteoroids strike them and/or cracking under the strain of Bennu’s dramatic temperature changes.

A third surprise was the discovery of large (meter-scale) veins of carbonate minerals in some boulders. (An example of carbonate minerals on Earth is the white crust that forms around sinks and water fixtures.) Such large veins mean that back when Bennu was part of a larger asteroid, there was water flowing extensively under the surface, depositing the veins.

Finally, we were surprised to find that when our sampling device made contact with the surface, it sunk into Bennu as though into a plastic ball pit, rather than coming to rest on firm ground. This means that Bennu’s surface is made of particles that are very loosely packed and barely held together by any cohesion at all. If we had not fired the thrusters to back away, the spacecraft might have been swallowed by the asteroid as a result.

How did you happen work with Brian May and the London Stereoscopic Company to create Bennu 3-D, Anatomy of an Asteroid?

Brian and Dante first began corresponding as early co-supporters of the global Asteroid Day campaign. This correspondence eventually grew into Brian and his colleague Claudia Manzoni becoming active members of the OSIRIS-REx science team. They created numerous stereo (3-D) images from the spacecraft camera imagery that, in addition to being stunning to look at, were instrumental in helping the team understand Bennu’s rugged terrain and identify a safe sampling site. So it made perfect sense to work with them when it came time to create this atlas of Bennu.

What are the next steps for the OSIRIS-REx mission?

We are all looking forward to the delivery of the sample from Bennu to Earth on September 24, 2023. That event will kick off two years of intense laboratory analyses all over the world to test hypotheses about Bennu’s origin and evolution.

After the spacecraft drops off the sample, it will continue on its orbit in preparation for a second mission, called OSIRIS-APEX, that will rendezvous with the asteroid Apophis in 2029. Observing another asteroid with the same state-of-the-art cameras and instruments will offer exciting opportunities for comparison.    

Cynthia Guardado Video Interview about Cenizas

July 11, 2023

The University of Arizona’s Nancy Montoya interviewed Cynthia Guardado about her poetry collection, Cenizas, during the 2023 Tucson Festival of Books. The UA’s Digital Futures Bilingual Studio hosted the interview, and the video is available here.

Guardado talks about her poetry influenced by her family, violence and civil war in El Salvador, and shared grief through migration. Asked about the home that exists in her heart, she says “Home is the cobbled stone and dirt road that arrives at my Mama Chila’s house, my grandmother’s house,” in El Salvador.

Cenizas offers an arresting portrait of a Salvadoran family whose lives have been shaped by the upheavals of global politics. The speaker of these poems—the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants—questions the meaning of homeland as she navigates life in the United States while remaining tethered to El Salvador by the long shadows cast by personal and public history. Cynthia Guardado’s poems give voice to the grief of family trauma, while capturing moments of beauty and tenderness. Maternal figures preside over the verses, guiding the speaker as she searches the ashes of history to tell her family’s story. The spare, narrative style of the poems are filled with depth as the family’s layers come to light.

MALCS 2023: Recent Books & Conference Discounts

July 10, 2023

We’re thrilled to be attending the 40th Anniversary MALCS Summer Institute at the University of California, Riverside July 13-15. This year’s theme is “40 years of MALCS, Centuries of Activism: La Lucha Sigue for Racial, Reproductive and Decolonial Justice.” In honor of this special occasion, we are offering 30 percent off all titles on our website with discount code AZMALCS23 through 8/12/2023. Here are just a few of the books we’ll be featuring at the conference:

Letres y Limpias by Amanda V. Ellis
Letras y Limpias is the first book to explore the literary significance of the figure of the curandera within Mexican American literature. Amanda Ellis traces the significance of the curandera and her evolution across a variety of genres written by leading Mexican American authors, including Américo Paredes, Rudolfo Anaya, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Manuel Munoz, ire’ne lara silva, and more.

Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa edited by Margaret Cantú-Sánchez, Candace de León-Zepeda, Norma Elia Cantú
Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa is a pragmatic and inspiring offering of how to apply Anzaldúa’s ideas to the classroom and in the community rather than simply discussing them as theory. The book gathers nineteen essays by scholars, activists, teachers, and professors who share how their first-hand use of Anzaldúa’s theories in their classrooms and community environments.

Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas by Michelle Téllez
Near Tijuana, Baja California, the autonomous community of Maclovio Rojas demonstrates what is possible for urban place-based political movements. This work tells the story of Maclovio Rojas, a women-led social movement that works for economic and political autonomy to address issues of health, education, housing, nutrition, and security.

Latinx Belonging edited by Natalia Deeb-Sossa &, Jennifer Bickham Mendez
Latinx Belonging is anchored in the claim that Latinx people are not defined by their marginalization but should instead be understood as active participants in their communities and contributors to U.S. society. The volume’s overarching analytical approach recognizes the differences, identities, and divisions among people of Latin American origin in the United States, while also attending to the power of mainstream institutions to shape their lives and identities.

Nuclear Nuevo México by Myrriah Gómez
Contrary to previous works that suppress Nuevomexicana/o presence throughout U.S. nuclear history, Nuclear Nuevo México focuses on recovering the voices and stories that have been lost or ignored in the telling of this history. By recuperating these narratives, Myrriah Gómez tells a new story of New Mexico, one in which the nuclear history is not separate from the collective colonial history of Nuevo México but instead demonstrates how earlier eras of settler colonialism laid the foundation for nuclear colonialism in New Mexico.


Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture by Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez
Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture exposes the ways in which colonialism is expressed in the literary and cultural production of the U.S. Southwest, a region that has experienced at least two distinct colonial periods since the sixteenth century. Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez traces how Spanish colonial texts reflect the motivation for colonial domination. She argues that layers of U.S. colonialism complicate how Chicana/o literary scholars think about Chicana/o literary and cultural production.

La Gente by Lorena V. Márquez
La Gente traces the rise of the Chicana/o Movement in Sacramento and the role of everyday people in galvanizing a collective to seek lasting and transformative change during the 1960s and 1970s. In their efforts to be self-determined, la gente contested multiple forms of oppression at school, at work sites, and in their communities.

Activist Leaders of San José by Josie Méndez-Negrete
The community of San José, California, is a national model for social justice and community activism. This legacy has been hard earned. In the twentieth century, the activists of the city’s Mexican American community fought for equality in education and pay, better conditions in the workplace, better health care, and much more. Sociologist and activist Josie Méndez-Negrete has returned to her hometown to document and record the stories of those who made contributions to the cultural and civic life of San José in Activist Leaders of San José.

Calling the Soul Back by Christina Garcia Lopez
Calling the Soul Back explores the spiritual and ancestral knowledge offered in narratives of bodies in trauma, bodies engaged in ritual, grieving bodies, bodies immersed in and becoming part of nature, and dreaming bodies. Reading across narrative nonfiction, performative monologue, short fiction, fables, illustrated children’s books, and a novel, Garcia Lopez asks how these narratives draw on the embodied intersections of ways of knowing and being to shift readers’ consciousness regarding relationships to space, time, and natural environments.

Excerpt from Urban Imaginaries in Native Amazonia

July 5, 2023

Urban life has long intrigued Indigenous Amazonians, who regard cities as the locus of both extraordinary power and danger. Modern and ancient cities alike have thus become models for the representation of extreme alterity under the guise of supernatural enchanted cities. This volume seeks to analyze how these ambiguous urban imaginaries—complex representations that function as cognitive tools and blueprints for social action—express a singular view of cosmopolitical relations, how they inform and shape forest-city interactions, and the history of how they came into existence.

Urban Imaginaries in Native Amazonia edited by Fernando Santos-Granero and Emanuele Fabiano features analysis from historical, ethnological, and philosophical perspectives, contributors seek to explain the imaginaries’ widespread diffusion, as well as their influence in present-day migration and urbanization. Above all, it underscores how these urban imaginaries allow Indigenous Amazonians to express their concerns about power, alterity, domination, and defiance. Below read an excerpt from the Introduction to the book.

Although urbanization is an ancient phenomenon, going back in time at least nine thousand years (P. Taylor 2012), for most of human history people lived in dispersed, low-density rural settlements. This began to change as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), when, due to technological changes in production and manufacturing, rural emigration increased and urban populations began to grow rapidly. In 1800, only 10 percent of the world’s population lived in urban areas. Today, 55 percent of the world’s population (according to the United Nations) or as much as 85 percent (according to the European Commission) live in urban settings (Ritchie and Roser 2019), the discrepancy deriving from different definitions of urban—an issue that will be discussed in more detail below. Regardless of these differences, however, what the above figures indicate is that urbanization has not only accelerated sharply in the past two hundred years but has, in the process, become a global phenomenon.

This rapid process of urbanization has had significant social, economic, and political impacts. On the positive side, high population density (and the concentration of resources in cities) has fostered technological advancements, economic specialization, higher productivity, and lower costs of production. It has promoted new forms of connectedness, political activity, and social solidarity, and it has encouraged creativity and the development of a broad range of cultural activities and forms of entertainment. On the negative side, it has deepened social inequalities, leading to the emergence of slums, overcrowding, and an urban underclass. It has promoted individualism and anonymity, thus weakening traditional family networks and forms of cooperation. And it has increased pollution, waste production, environmental degradation, and crime. In brief, although urbanization has generally led to higher standards of living, it has also condemned a large proportion of urban dwellers to a life of poverty and squalor. Despite lingering perceptions of Amazonia as a wild, remote, mostly rural space, the region has not escaped this global trend. Thanks to the building of a large network of roads and the development of better means of transportation, since the 1960s Amazonia has experienced a rapid process of urbanization. By 1985, with over 50 percent of the population of Amazonia living in urban areas, Bertha K. Becker (1985) had already described it as an “urbanized forest.” Today, almost forty years later, with approximately 70 percent of the Amazonian population living in cities (Becker 2013, 310; Chaves et al. 2021, 1187), urbanity has become hegemonic, and Amazonia is now an urban forest. The appeal of cities and urban lifeways has extended to the region’s every corner, including its three million Indigenous people belonging to some 350 ethnic groups (Charity et al. 2016, 26). As a result, by 2010, 36 percent of Brazil’s Amazonian Indigenous population lived in urban settings (Santos et al. 2019). Although the pace of Indigenous urbanization has varied in other Amazonian regions, it is safe to assume that between 30 and 40 percent of Amazonia’s Indigenous population now lives, more or less permanently, in cities. The urbanization of Amazonia has neither been the result of a unidirectional process nor been limited to the Indigenous people living closest to cities. Migrants to Amazonian cities often originate from the rural and urban areas of the Andes or the coastal regions of Brazil (Emlen 2020; Ødegaard 2010). In some cases, they are international migrants coming from neighboring countries (Aragón 2011). It is therefore appropriate to consider Amazonian cities and their current population as the result of complex demographic flows between rural and urban areas, often leading to the multisite household pattern that characterizes Amazonian populations nowadays (Padoch et al. 2008).

Contributors:
Natalia Buitron
Philippe Erikson
Emanuele Fabiano
Fabiana Maizza
Daniela Peluso
Fernando Santos-Granero
Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen
Robin M. Wright

Book Lovers of UA Press: Amanda Krause

June 28, 2023

Summer is a great time to meet the people at the University of Arizona Press who turn book dreams into reality. We are a small but mighty team.

Today, we feature our Editorial, Design, and Production Manager, Amanda Krause.

Hello Amanda, what do you do for the Press?

I oversee our Editorial, Design, and Production department, handle manuscript editorial tasks like maintaining our house style guide and hiring freelance copyeditors, manage the production schedules of all our new books and reprints, and host of other tasks to make sure our books are both timely and something we and the authors can be really proud of.

How long have you been at UAP?
I just hit my ten-year anniversary earlier this year, though I’ve been in university press publishing in some capacity or another for about fifteen. In a past life, I’ve also worked in other editorial and publishing jobs as a proofreader for a company that made marketing materials for colleges and universities, an assistant editor at a buildings and facilities trade magazine, and a beat reporter for covering school boards for two small-town newspapers in eastern Iowa.

What do you like most about working here?
The people! Both our authors and our staff here at the press are some of the smartest, most creative and passionate people you’ll ever meet. I constantly learn new things from the people I get to work with—both interesting facts and new ways of thinking. . . . And I’d be remiss in my duties as a bibliophile if I didn’t also say that I love that new-book smell.

What would people be surprised to learn about your work?
How collaborative a process making a book is. When a manuscript goes through copyediting, it isn’t just a “hey we’ve edited your book to conform to the press’s house style and we’re done”; there’s a lot of back-and-forth between the copyeditor and the author, and then oftentimes consultation with me on the best way to handle a particular style issue for a particular book. Grammar isn’t a one-size-fits-all thing where all the rules can or should apply uniformly to all text. The goal instead is to make sure the author’s ideas are communicated clearly and the style is consistent, and you have to take into consideration how to make sure the language is free of bias, which could undermine the author’s expertise. And language doesn’t stay static over time. Plus there’s all the internal communication on everything from schedules to cover design. It’s a lot of meetings and emails.

If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go and why?
Morocco! I studied French from middle school up through college (I missed the last class needed for a minor in order to do an internship at Northwestern University Press), and I became fascinated with Francophone Africa. Morocco has such a unique blend of French, Arabic, and African cultures. And I recently read one of Karen Armstrong’s books about the prophet Muhammad and am very interested in learning more about the Islamic world as well. Unfortunately, I’d really need to brush up on my French before I go—my language skills are VERY rusty after years of disuse, though I used to be pretty conversational.

Tom Zoellner Video Interview about Rim to River

June 27, 2023

The University of Arizona’s Nancy Montoya interviewed Tom Zoellner about his book, Rim to River during the 2023 Tucson Festival of Books. The UA’s Digital Futures Bilingual Studio hosted the interview, and the video is available here.

The book is 17 essays inspired by Zoellner’s walk across the state, from Utah to Mexico, on the Arizona Trail. “There’s a chapter in the book called ‘White Bones’ and it’s about the water shortage and the Colorado River,” says Zoellner in the interview. “And we’re running into a harsh reality in Arizona. To put it simply, it’s going to be farmers versus cities. And cities are going to win.” He thought a lot about water while hiking: “I developed a profound appreciation for water, the feeling of your body as you dehydrate. It’s a terrifying feeling.” In one of his chapters, Zoellner links this feeling of dehydration to the experience of border crossers, “the hardship of crossing the desert, and what they endure to feed their families back home.”

Rim to River is the story of his extraordinary journey through redrock country, down canyons, up mesas, and across desert plains to the obscure valley in Mexico that gave the state its enigmatic name. The trek is interspersed with incisive essays that pick apart the distinctive cultural landscape of Arizona: the wine-colored pinnacles and complex spirituality of Navajoland, the mind-numbing stucco suburbs, desperate border crossings, legislative skullduggery, extreme politics, billion-dollar copper ventures, dehydrating rivers, retirement kingdoms, old-time foodways, ghosts of old wars, honky-tonk dreamers, murder mysteries, and magical Grand Canyon reveries.

Dante Lauretta Hits the Airwaves

June 26, 2023

Arizona Public Media’s “The Buzz” interviewed Dante Lauretta about what to expect when OSIRIS-REx returns to earth. Lauretta is co-author of the forthcoming book, Bennu 3-D, Anatomy of an Asteroid. In the interview, Lauretta explained: “We’ve got to do multiple things. First of all, we got to get ready to receive that capsule. . . . Of course, the sample has to get to Houston, to NASA’s Johnson Space Center. So we’ve been doing a lot of work building the curation lab, making sure it’s ultra clean, getting all the hardware in place, and reviewing the procedure for disassembling the flight hardware. Then for me, the best part is the real science. This is a sample return mission. Our goal is to analyze that material and we’re going after the whole history of the solar system.”

On “Houston We Have A Podcast,” Gary Jordan interviewed the OSRIS-REx mission’s deputy project manager, Mike Moreau, and the mission’s lead curator, Nicole Lunning. Lunning detailed the sample protection process for when the capsule carrying the Bennu asteroid sample lands in the Utah desert on September 24, 2023: “We’ll collect the sample as quickly as possible and actually connect it basically to a nitrogen bottle here in Utah to maintain that nitrogen atmosphere, and keep it from having any of the contact with Earth’s atmosphere that just always happens to meteorites no matter how rapidly you collect them.”

About Bennu 3-D, Anatomy of an Asteroid:

The world’s first complete (and stereoscopic) atlas of an asteroid is the result of a unique collaboration between OSIRIS-REx mission leader Dante Lauretta and Brian May’s London Stereoscopic Company. Lauretta’s colleagues include Carina Bennett, Kenneth Coles, and Cat Wolner, as well as Brian May and Claudia Manzoni, who became part of the ultimately successful effort to find a safe landing site for sampling. The text details the data collected by the mission so far, and the stereo images have been meticulously created by Manzoni and May from original images collected by the OSIRIS-REx cameras.

The print edition includes 120 illustrations, 50 maps, and 80 stereoscopic images

Author Andrew Curley on NBC News

June 23, 2023

NBC News interviewed Andrew Curley, author of Carbon Sovereignty, about the Supreme Court decision regarding water rights on the Navajo Nation. The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against the Navajo Nation in a dispute involving water rights in the lower Colorado River Basin. Curley said, “It’s not surprising that the Supreme Court, a colonial court, would side with a colonial government. The power is stacked against tribes in this scenario.”

In the minority opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that he would have allowed the case to go forward and he characterized the Navajo’s position as a “simple ask.” Lawyers for the Navajo Nation stated that they were seeking only an assessment of the tribe’s water needs and a plan to meet them. Gorsuch also offered hope for the Navajo Nation indicating that his colleagues in the majority recognized that the tribe may still be able to “assert the interests they claim in water rights litigation, including by seeking to intervene in cases that affect their claimed interests.”

About Carbon Sovereignty:

For almost fifty years, coal dominated the Navajo economy. But in 2019 one of the Navajo Nation’s largest coal plants closed. This comprehensive new work offers a deep dive into the complex inner workings of energy shift in the Navajo Nation. Geographer Andrew Curley, a member of the Navajo Nation, examines the history of coal development within the Navajo Nation, including why some Diné supported coal and the consequences of doing so. He explains the Navajo Nation’s strategic choices to use the coal industry to support its sovereignty as a path forward in the face of ongoing colonialism. Carbon Sovereignty demonstrates the mechanism of capitalism through colonialism and the construction of resource sovereignty, in both the Navajo Nation’s embrace and its rejection of a coal economy.

***
Andrew Curley is a member of the Navajo Nation and an assistant professor in the School of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of Arizona. He has studied the social, cultural, and political implications of coal mining in the Navajo Nation, and his latest research is on the environmental history of water diversions on the Colorado River and the impact of colonial infrastructures on tribal nations.

Book Lovers of UA Press: Abby Mogollon

June 22, 2023

Summer is a great time to meet the people at the University of Arizona Press who turn book dreams into reality. We are a small but mighty team.

Today, we feature our Marketing Director, Abby Mogollon.

Hello Abby, what do you do for the Press?
I am the Marketing Manager for the University of Arizona Press. With a three-person marketing team, we have an all-hands-on-deck approach to our marketing and communications. It takes everyone doing their part. I have a wide variety of duties, from guiding our overall marketing strategy to overseeing our website and metadata. I work on book covers and jackets with our designer, coordinate with our sales reps across the country, and much more. All to help our authors share their vital scholarship! My favorite work is when I get to spend time at an exhibit or book festival, hand-selling our books and meeting authors and customers.

How long have you been at UAP?
I’ve worked at the Press since 2009. I started doing marketing for the press’s Andrew W. Mellon funded project, First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies. This was a tremendous, four-press project. After that, I was able to move into the Press’s amazing marketing department!

What do you like most about working here?
I am constantly learning from our authors and my colleagues. I feel so lucky to be in such a dynamic field. Publishing is constantly changing and evolving. It is not boring. And the scholarship our authors produce is truly cutting-edge and vital. I also really love when we get to see an author present their work. It isn’t always possible because our authors are all over the world. But for those rare times when I can hear an author present their scholarship at an academic conference, book festival, or cozy book event, it’s just the best.

What would people be surprised to learn about your work?
So much of book publishing is invisible. It takes a great partnership between the Press and the author to spread the word about a book, and a lot of thought and planning is happening behind the scenes. For example, for every review a book receives, there were probably ten or even twenty pitches to outlets. I think people may also be surprised to learn how much thought goes into those quotes on the back of a book. We call them blurbs and think carefully about who we request them from, and the authors who provide blurbs spend a significant amount of time with a work to come up with those two sentences that appear on the back of a book. It’s a real craft. With the advent of digital marketing and metadata, the traditional channels for sharing and publishing information has become exponentially more interesting and complex.

What is something you like to do in your free time to relax?
I read! In my free time you’re likely to find me snuggled up with one of my pets reading a mystery.

Excerpt from ‘Juan Felipe Herrera’

June 15, 2023

Juan Felipe Herrera edited by Francisco A. Lomelí and Osiris Aníbal Gómez presents the distinguished, prolific, and highly experimental writer Juan Felipe Herrera. This wide-ranging collection of essays by leading experts offers critical approaches on Herrera, who transcends ethnic and mainstream poetics. It expertly demonstrates Herrera’s versatility, resourcefulness, innovations, and infinite creativity. This book includes an extensive interview with the poet and a voluminous bibliography on everything by, about, and on the author. The chapters in this book offer a deep dive into the life and work of an internationally beloved poet who, along with serving as the poet laureate of California and the U.S. poet laureate, creates work that fosters a deep understanding of and appreciation for people’s humanity. Below read an excerpt from the book.

The Chicano Cultural Poetics of Juan Felipe Herrera: The Artist as Shaman and Showman

By Rafael Pérez-Torres

“I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are merely drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.”

– Matsuo Basho Narrow Road to the Interior

Juan Felipe Herrera spins out a whirlwind of creativity and expression. A writer with a voracious curiosity, an absurdist humor, and a showman’s flare for style, he is also an artist who uses his craft to inspire deep human emotion as a pathway toward greater insight and understanding – what in some spiritual and philosophical contexts is called illumination. His poetry moves in multiple modes and directions. These movements may have contributed to a notable dearth of critical study addressing the critical and cultural significance of the broad aesthetic palette – incantatory, comical, improvisatory, anecdotal, hallucinatory, theatrical, minimalist, parodic, cosmic – Herrera employs. His profusion of styles may confound critics who seek to capture the qualities of this quicksilver poet in a circumscribed way. Much of his work appears spontaneous or extemporized, and this may add to the difficulties in developing an effective critical approach to his work. A broader critical focus may afford a perspective on his poetry and how it often relies on affective responses in order to achieve both aesthetic surprise and pleasure – aspects of a showman’s brio – and suggest a transformative moment that invites reflection on the spiritual dimensions of human impermanence – a shaman’s transformative incantation.

His dynamic poetry restlessly seeks to delight and transport the reader as it generates a Chicano performative cultural poetics. Improvisational and even elusively experimental, Herrera’s artistry comes into sharper focus if we consider the manner that it forms a performative cultural poetics. This term is one Herrera employed to describe the work of Latina/o writers and thinkers who for decades have sought to shape new cultural formations. Their work draws from devalued forms of knowledge to help generate a decolonial consciousness. Herrera recognizes those artists and activists who through their artistry and performances have given us, “long lost and abandoned ancestral concepts that we can envision and apply in one way or another, along with a Mexica performative cultural poetics that we have been attempting to build in the U.S.- Mexico borderlands since the Indigenista cultural revolution of the first half of the twentieth century” (“Foreword to the New Edition” xiv). Herrera identifies (and identifies with) a Mexicano-Chicano-Latino cultural performativity as a component of decolonial cultural activism. It is this sense of transformative performance that informs and drives his own restless artistic creation that echoes and evokes and conjures other forms of knowledge.

The present discussion considers the double role of Herrera as poet: as showman, playing aesthetic slights of hand, and as shaman, using language for spiritual and emotional transportation and transformation. The poetry employs linguistic and poetic forms as part of a performance meant primarily to generate an awareness of shared human suffering and, consequently, connection. Poetry makes evident that this suffering often results from long colonial legacies and continuing inequities related to state power, patriarch, and nationalism. As such, it demonstrates a decolonial impetus as it aspires – often employing experimental aesthetic form – to enact a type of cultural, spiritual, and emotional transformation. His vast, eclectic, and restless poetic output generates a performative cultural poetics premised on three central compositional elements: 1) acknowledging and honoring a sense of origin; 2) recognizing the social and even physical materiality of language; and 3) pursuing and encouraging a growth of consciousness. His poetic concerns thus resonate with a reclamation of suppressed knowledges and repressed languages (often associated with Mayan, Mexican, Huichol, and other Meso- American Indigenous practices) to experiment with dialogue and dramatic re-enactments (an association with his early involvement in theater) to invocations of language as a medium for incantatory powers. They all serve to generate an enveloping performativity. Throughout, Herrera serves as a kind of postmodern conjurer. The emphasis on play and performance, on the poet as protean creative force and sideshow entertainer, undergirds much of Herrera’s poetry and asserts his commitment to a Chicano performative cultural poetics.

His poems at times suggest a literal script – indicating setting, actors, and audience – that draws the reader into becoming a creative participant in a poetic enactment generated through the language on the page. As his poetry crosses aesthetic and national and philosophical borders in a variety of ways, it performs a decolonial crossing of signification and positionality – an enactment of a performative cultural poetics – in order to resituate the role of reader in relation to the poem. The poet acts through language to create the poems and, simultaneously, to prompt his readers to conjure themselves into an awareness of greater human connection.

Book Lovers of UA Press: Leigh McDonald

June 13, 2023

Summer is a great time to meet the people at the University of Arizona Press who turn book dreams into reality. We are a small but mighty team.

Today, we feature our Art Director, Leigh McDonald.

Hello Leigh, what do you do for the Press?
I’m the Art Director, working within the Editing, Design, and Production department to produce great books! I am in charge of all the cover designs and interior art for UA Press titles, as well as some of the interior design and typesetting (and I sometimes put my marketing hat on as well).

How long have you been at UAP?
A long time now! I started at UAP in 2006 as the Marketing Assistant and Exhibits manager, after some previous years spent working in commercial publishing as a manuscript editor. After joining the Press, I discovered an untapped passion for book design and production, and worked my way into the Art Director role over the next few years.

What do you like most about working here?
I love working with a small, passionate, engaged team who really care about the books we produce. And I love that we get to learn a little bit about all the amazing scholarship and creativity in the areas we publish—our authors keep us learning and growing as we use our skills to help their work reach its audience. It is always a dynamic job, never boring!

What would people be surprised to learn about your work?
Most of it, probably. I think publishing is one of those fields hidden in plain sight—everyone knows and loves the end product, but the work that goes into creating that great book and getting it into your hands is mostly unseen. One thing people ask me about quite often is the cover design process—who chooses the art and decides on the final version? How does that work? The truth is, projects vary widely and there is no simple answer to that question. I really enjoy the process, though, and work to ensure that every book has a cover that fits the content inside and helps it to reach its widest possible audience.

What is something you like to do in your free time to relax?
My day to day free time is mostly spent with my family enjoying great food, playing games, reading, or practicing capoeira. My greatest and most relaxing joy, though, is when we are able to get out camping in the wilderness and immerse ourselves in the natural world. The Southwest has so many wonderful places to explore and discover–any time I get to focus on getting out there and being present in this incredible environment we share is a gift.

Excerpt from ‘No Place for a Lady’

June 12, 2023

In the first half of the twentieth century, the canyons and mesas of the Southwest beckoned and the burgeoning field of archaeology thrived. In this delightful biography, No Place for a Lady by Shelby Tisdale, we gain insight into a time when there were few women establishing full-time careers in anthropology, archaeology, or museums. Tisdale successfully combines Lambert’s voice from extensive interviews with her own to take us on a thought-provoking journey. Today we offer an excerpt from the Introduction of the book.

A Chance Meeting

I first met Marjorie Ferguson Lambert in 1984 while I was working for the School of American Research, now the School for Advanced Research (SAR), in Santa Fe, New Mexico. As the assistant collections manager at the SAR’s Indian Arts Research Center (IARC), I was periodically asked to transport Marjorie to meetings and “Brown Bag” lectures at the School.  During these travels back and forth between her home and the SAR we would talk about southwest archaeology, and she mentioned her frustration with her failing eyesight and how difficult it was to keep up with her professional reading and writing. On one of these trips, I offered to read archaeological reports and other anthropological publications to her, and we agreed to get together on Wednesday evenings.

I would go over to Marjorie’s apartment after work and she would fix a light dinner or we would go out to eat at one of her favorite restaurants. Afterwards I would read whatever was on her list. I mostly read archaeological reports and book chapters. Marjorie was also fascinated with primates, so we sometimes ventured away from archaeology and anthropology to articles or books on the study of mountain gorillas in Rwanda by Dian Fossey or Jane Goodall’s study on chimpanzees in Tanzania. Marjorie contributed to organizations, such as the Jane Goodall Institute, that focus on the conservation and protection of primates and their habitats throughout the world.

Marjorie and I discussed what was in the reading each evening and sometimes our discussions turned to the issues faced by women in archaeology specifically, and in anthropology and museums in general. It was during these reading sessions that Marjorie started to share her experiences as a young female archaeologist in the 1930s. As these spirited discussions progressed and we got to know each other, we compared my own experiences as a 1980s anthropologist with hers and we both realized that the position of women in anthropology and archaeology had improved little over the years despite the attempts by feminists during the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Fortunately, this has changed as more women entered archaeology and anthropology and started taking on leadership roles at universities and in museums in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.    

Throughout the years Marjorie and I continued to keep in contact with one another and we found that we shared many common interests.  We especially shared a love for the Southwest, its diverse cultures and landscapes, and its deep history. In 1989 I left New Mexico for Tucson, Arizona to study for my doctorate at the University of Arizona. Shortly after I started my studies Nancy Parezo hired me as a graduate research assistant to work on the Hidden Scholars volume that she was editing. This project was an outgrowth of the papers delivered at the Wenner-Gren sponsored “Daughters of the Desert” conference held in Tucson in 1986. The conference was related to a traveling exhibition and publication by the same name organized by Barbara A. Babcock and Nancy J. Parezo.

Nancy and I discussed the women in these two publications at length and I felt that the history of anthropology and archaeology would benefit from more complete biographies on some of these “daughters.” I approached Marjorie about the possibility of writing a biography on her. I proposed it as a cross-generational collaboration, which would be a significant contribution to the intellectual history of women’s roles in southwestern archaeology. There is much to gain from the experiences of others, and for those of us following in a similar path we could benefit from Marjorie’s willingness to share her personal and professional experiences with us.

Ted Fleming Video Interview about Sonoran Desert Journeys

June 8, 2023

The University of Arizona’s Nancy Montoya interviewed Ted Fleming about his book, Sonoran Desert Journeys during the 2023 Tucson Festival of Books. The UA’s Digital Futures Bilingual Studio hosted the interview, and the video is available here.

Fleming describes himself as a “curious naturalist,” beginning with some sketchy snake interactions from his childhood in Detroit. He talks about iconic desert species like the road runner, desert tortoise, saguaro cactus, and their evolutionary history. He also speaks about the plant/animal connection; for example, how birds and bats pollinate plants. Fleming also solves the mystery about why your hummingbird feeder is full in the evening, but empty by the next morning.

In Sonoran Desert Journeys ecologist Fleming discusses two remarkable journeys. First, he offers a brief history of our intellectual and technical journey over the past three centuries to understand the evolution of life on Earth. Next, he applies those techniques on a journey of discovery about the evolution and natural history of some of the Sonoran Desert’s most iconic animals and plants. Fleming details the daily lives of a variety of reptiles, birds, mammals, and plants, describing their basic natural and evolutionary histories and addressing intriguing issues associated with their lifestyles and how they cope with a changing climate. Finally, Fleming discusses the complexity of Sonoran Desert conservation.

LitHub Recommends ‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land

June 7, 2023

LitHub recommends ‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land by Brandy Nālani McDougall as one of “7 New Poetry Collections to Read in June.” Reviewer Rebecca Morgan Frank introduces the collections: “Small presses dominate this early summer list, reminding us that American poetry thrives year-round. Head out to your June gardens, real or imagined­, and start reading.” She says of ‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land: “This is a book of resistance as well as love.”

‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land is a powerful collection of new poems by Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) poet Brandy Nālani McDougall. ‘Āina hānau—or the land of one’s birth—signifies identity through intimate and familial connections to place and creates a profound bond between the people in a community. McDougall’s poems flow seamlessly between ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i and English, forming rhythms and patterns that impress on the reader a deep understanding of the land. Tracing flows from the mountains to the ocean, from the sky to the earth, and from ancestor to mother to child, these poems are rooted in the rich ancestral and contemporary literature of Hawaiʻi —moʻolelo, moʻokūʻauhau, and mele —honoring Hawaiian ʻāina, culture, language, histories, aesthetics, and futures.

Excerpt from ‘Where We Belong’

June 6, 2023

Where We Belong by Daisy Ocampo dispels the harmful myth that Native people are unfit stewards of their sacred places. This work establishes Indigenous preservation practices as sustaining approaches to the caretaking of the land that embody ecological sustainability, spiritual landscapes, and community well-being. The author brings together the history and experiences of the Chemehuevi people and their ties with Mamapukaib, or the Old Woman Mountains in the East Mojave Desert, and the Caxcan people and their relationship with Tlachialoyantepec, or Cerro de las Ventanas, in Zacatecas, Mexico. Below read an excerpt from the Introduction to the book.

This book explores the historic preservation of Indigenous sacred places as sites embedded with their own value systems. Concepts of Indigenous historic preservation emerged out of cultures and are not uniform. Indigenous people in Mexico and the United States understand historic preservation through their own cultural lens, not necessarily that of government officials. This work offers an Indigenous comparative approach of two Public History projects within the field and profession of historic preservation. This research juxtaposes two sets of relationships: the Chemehuevi people and their ties with Mamapukaib (Old Woman Mountains in the Eastern Mojave Desert), and the Caxcan people and their relationship with Tlachialoyantepec (Cerro de las Ventanas in southern Zacatecas). Caxcan and Chemehuevi’s sacred mountains provide an entry point into understanding the importance of creation narratives and sacred sites to Native sovereignty, and how the colonial targeting of sites through nationalist preservation projects rupture Native ties to their land. Caxcan and Chemehuevi cultures contain active preservation practices, which counters colonial accusations that Indigenous people are ill equipped to preserve their respective mountains.

Chemehuevi people are the southern-most group of Nuwuvi or Southern Paiutes whose ancestral homelands extends into the current-day states of Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and California. Contemporary Chemehuevi are enrolled in three different reservations, including the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe located along the western shore of the Colorado River across from Lake Havasu City. In addition, Chemehuevi are enrolled on the Colorado River Indian Tribes along the Colorado River in present-day California and Arizona. Finally, Chemehuevi are enrolled in the Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians located in Coachella Valley of Southern California. On the other hand, Caxcan people’s ancestral homelands extends into the Mexican states of Zacatecas, Jalisco, Durango, and Nayarit although the majority reside in an area known as the Caxcan Region in southern Zacatecas. Today, numerous Chemehuevi and Caxcan people reside outside of their ancestral homelands.

The stories of these two peoples and places in North America inform us about concepts of power and significance of Indigenous sovereignty within the field of Public History, which is closely tied to governmental policies, museums, archives, and agencies involved in historic preservation. Government and educational institutions, often considered to be democratic, steward many collections connected to Native spirituality, including historical documents and cultural items. These sources offer elements of cultural knowledge germane to landscapes, but most often, they are not curated, maintained, and preserved by Indigenous people. The materials relating to the past often emerged from a colonial past and present, which has dominated their use and interpretation without the consent and leadership of Indigenous people. As a result of the colonial past, institutions and agencies continue to undermine Native stewardship of the Indigenous past. Therefore, Public History projects in relationship to and with Native communities must privilege tribal scholars, intellectuals, and members. Indigenous people, sovereignty, and preservation ontologies must be at the center of historic preservation projects. My research into Indigenous historic preservation focuses on two mountain ranges, but the work begins with my family and community.

Novels to Find the Real America

May 31, 2023

“A map of 1,001 novels to show us where to find the real America” includes two books from the UA Press. Find your America by reading the story written by Susan Straight in the Los Angeles Times, or go directly to the Storymap here. UA Press books featured are a collection of short stories and a novel. To discover El Paso and beyond, read The Last Tortilla and Other Stories by Sergio Troncoso. To discover a real Los Angeles neighborhood, read The Book of Want by Daniel A. Olivas.

About The Last Tortilla and Other Stories:

Troncoso’s El Paso is a normal town where common people who happen to be Mexican eat, sleep, fall in love, and undergo epiphanies just like everyone else. His tales are coming-of-age stories from the Mexican-American border, stories of the working class, stories of those coping with the trials of growing old in a rapidly changing society. He also explores New York with vignettes of life in the big city, capturing its loneliness and danger. Troncoso sets aside the polemics about social discomfort sometimes found in contemporary Chicano writing and focuses instead on the moral and intellectual lives of his characters. The twelve stories gathered here form a richly textured tapestry that adds to our understanding of what it is to be human.

About The Book of Want:

When Moses descended Mount Sinai carrying the Ten Commandments, he never could have foreseen how one family in Los Angeles in the early twenty-first century would struggle to live by them. Conchita, a voluptuous, headstrong single woman of a certain age, sees nothing wrong with enjoying the company of handsome—and usually much younger—men . . . that is, until she encounters a widower with unusual gifts and begins to think about what she really wants out of life. A delightful family tapestry woven with the threads of all those whose lives are touched by Conchita, The Book of Want is an enchanting blend of social and magical realism that tells a charming story about what it means to be fully human.

University of Arizona Press Presents Our Fall 2023 Books

May 30, 2023

We have another amazing season ahead of us at the University of Arizona Press. Here’s a preview of our upcoming fall 2023 season with the best the Press has to offer, from a debut novel and Indigenous poetry to space science, saguaros, Latinx studies, Indigenous studies, and the borderlands. Fall books are available for pre-order today! We highlight a few of our forthcoming books here.

Bennu 3-D, Anatomy of an Asteroid, the world’s first complete (and stereoscopic) atlas of an asteroid, is the result of a unique collaboration between OSIRIS-REx mission leader Dante Lauretta and Brian May’s London Stereoscopic Company. Lauretta’s colleagues include Carina Bennett, Kenneth Coles, and Cat Wolner, as well as Brian May and Claudia Manzoni, who became part of the ultimately successful effort to find a safe landing site for sampling. The text details the data collected by the mission so far, and the stereo images have been meticulously created by Manzoni and May from original images collected by the OSIRIS-REx cameras.

Nestled between Texas and Mexico, the city of Laredo was a quaint border town, nurturing cultural ties across the river, attracting occasional tourists, and populated with people living there for generations. In Listening to Laredo, Mehnaaz Momen traces Laredo’s history and evolution through the voices of its people. She examines the changing economic and cultural infrastructure of the city, its interdependence with its sister city across the national boundary, and, above all, the resilience of the community as it adapts to and even challenges the national narrative on the border.

Humans have always been fascinated by the possibility of extraterrestrial life, often wondering if we are alone in the universe. Drawing on Louis Friedman’s fifty years in the field, Alone but Not Lonely looks at the subject of extraterrestrial life, separating knowledge from conjecture, fact from fiction, to draw scientific and technical conclusions that answer this enduring question and examine the possibility of remotely exploring life on other worlds.

Alma García’s debut novel, All That Rises is set in El Paso, Texas. This multiple viewpoint novel is a story of two families—one Mexican American, one Anglo—who find themselves unexpectedly entangled with one another when each of their households separately implode. When the Mexican maid working in both houses begins to suspect that all is not what it seems, she is implicated in the unfolding of a web of mysteries, history, and border politics that forces all concerned to question their own pasts, their understanding of family, and their relationships to a part of the world like no other.

Light As Light is acclaimed poet Simon J. Ortiz’s first collection in twenty years. The poems in this volume are a powerful journey through the poet’s life—both a love letter to the future, and a sentimental, authentic celebration of the past.

Bringing Home the Wild follows a two-decade journey in ecologically guided urban gardening on a four-acre irrigated parcel in Phoenix, Arizona, from the perspective of a retired botanist and her science historian partner. Through humor and a playful use of language, author Juliet C. Stromberg introduces the plants who are feeding the couple, buffering the climate, and elevating their moods. She also acknowledges the animals and fungi who are pollinating the plants and recycling the waste. This work shows all of us the importance of observing, appreciating, and learning from the ecosystems of which we are a part.

In the Arms of Saguaros pictures how nature’s sharpest curves became a symbol of the American West. From the botanical explorers of the nineteenth century to the tourism boosters in our own time, saguaros and their images have fulfilled attention-getting needs and expectations. According to author William L. Bird, Jr., the history of the saguaro’s popular and highly imaginative range points to the current moment in which the saguaro touches us as a global icon in art, fashion, and entertainment.

Chicana Portraits details critical biographies of twelve key Chicana writers, offering an engaging look at their work, contributions to the field, and major achievements. Portraits of the authors are each examined by a noted scholar, who delves deep into the authors’ lives for details that inform their literary, artistic, feminist, and political trajectories and sensibilities. Editor Norma E. Cantú and artist Raquel Valle-Sentíes create a brilliant intersection of visual and literary arts that explores themes of sexism and misogyny, the fragility of life, Chicana agency, and more.

When Language Broke Open, edited by Alan Pelaez Lopez, collects the creative offerings of forty-five queer and trans Black writers of Latin American descent who use poetry, prose, and visual art to illustrate Blackness as a geopolitical experience that is always changing. Telling stories of Black Latinidades, this anthology centers the multifaceted realities of the LGBTQ community. Contributors challenge everything we think we know about gender, sexuality, race, and what it means to experience a livable life.

Woven from the Center presents breathtaking basketry from some of the greatest weavers in the Greater Southwest. Each sandal and mat fragment, each bowl and jar, every water bottle and whimsy is infused with layers of aesthetic, cultural, and historical meanings. In this book, Diane D. Dittemore offers stunning photos and descriptions of woven works from Indigenous communities across the U.S. Southwest and Northwest Mexico.

Open Arizona Offers New Open Access Titles

May 25, 2023

The University of Arizona Press is pleased to announce that a new selection of titles are now available as open access (OA). The titles are available for download or can be read in Open Arizona. These new titles bring our total OA titles available in Open Arizona to 101 items!

Now available as OA:

Persistence of Good Living
For the Indigenous A’uwẽ (Xavante) people in the tropical savannas of Brazil, special forms of intimate and antagonistic social relations, camaraderie, suffering, and engagement with the environment are fundamental aspects of community well-being. In this work, the author transparently presents ethnographic insights from long-term anthropological fieldwork in two A’uwẽ communities, addressing how distinctive constructions of age organization contribute to social well-being in an era of major ecological, economic, and sociocultural change.

Children Crossing Borders
This volume draws attention to the plight of migrant children and their families, illuminating the human and emotional toll that children experience as they crisscross the Americas. Exploring the connections between education, policy, cultural studies, and anthropology, the essays in this volume navigate a space of transnational children’s rights central to Latin American life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Empire of Sand
Empire of Sand is a documentary history of Spanish attempts to convert, control, and ultimately annihilate the Seris. These papers of religious, military, and government officials attest to the Seris’ resilience in the face of numerous Spanish attempts to conquer them and remove them from their lands.

The Stratigraphy and Archaeology of Ventana Cave
Re-issue, with new Preface offering recent insights, of the classic archaeological study which produced valuable findings on Hohokam perishable culture.

About Open Arizona
Open Arizona is a collection of open-access University of Arizona Press titles made available through the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), as well as other sources of support. The scholarship, histories, and approaches in the selected titles emphasize the significance of the southwestern United States in a multitude of disciplines and fields, as well as the fields in which the University of Arizona Press excels in publishing.

David Lazaroff Is Picturing Sabino on TV

May 23, 2023

Picturing Sabino: A Photographic History of a Southwestern Canyon and author David Lazaroff were featured on KGUN-9’s “Absolutely Arizona.” Pat Parris interviewed Lazaroff about the human history of the canyon and showed several historic photos from the book. Lazaroff explained how people traveled to the canyon on horses or in carriages in the 19th century. He also debunked the myth of how Sabino Canyon got it’s name: it’s not from the name of a rancher’s daughter nor the Spanish name for a reddish horse. What is the true story of the canyon’s name? Watch the video here. To see 195 historic photos, and learn more about the myths and legends of Sabino Canyon, read the book!

Sabino Canyon, a desert canyon in the American Southwest near Tucson, Arizona, is enjoyed yearly by thousands of city residents as well as visitors from around the world. Picturing Sabino tells the story of the canyon’s transformation from a barely known oasis, miles from a small nineteenth-century town, into an immensely popular recreation area on the edge of a modern metropolis. Covering a century of change, from 1885 to 1985, this work rejoices in the canyon’s natural beauty and also relates the ups and downs of its protection and enjoyment.

Book Riot Features ‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land

May 19, 2023

‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land by Brandy Nālani McDougall is one of Book Riot’s “10 Essential Poetry Books by AAPI Authors.” Reviewer Connie Pan writes, “I delight in sharing one of my most eagerly awaited poetry titles of 2023. McDougall’s propulsive second collection about Hawai‘i’s culture, Kanaka ‘Ōiwi identity, memory, and parenthood gripped me so.”

‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land is a powerful collection of new poems by Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) poet Brandy Nālani McDougall. ‘Āina hānau—or the land of one’s birth—signifies identity through intimate and familial connections to place and creates a profound bond between the people in a community. McDougall’s poems flow seamlessly between ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i and English, forming rhythms and patterns that impress on the reader a deep understanding of the land. Tracing flows from the mountains to the ocean, from the sky to the earth, and from ancestor to mother to child, these poems are rooted in the rich ancestral and contemporary literature of Hawaiʻi —moʻolelo, moʻokūʻauhau, and mele —honoring Hawaiian ʻāina, culture, language, histories, aesthetics, and futures.

Tim Hernandez and Ana Saldaña Documentary Performance Video

May 18, 2023

Tim Z. Hernandez and Ana Saldaña presented “Searching for the Plane Wreck at Los Gatos: A Documentary Performance” last month, in a program sponsored by the University of Arizona Southwest Center. The full video of their performance is now available using this link. Above photo from the presentation: passengers boarding the plane that crashed in Los Gatos Canyon.

Hernandez took the audience on a journey from California to Mexico and back as he researched and wrote his book, All They Will Call You. Saldaña provided music inspired by Hernandez’s search for families in the United State and Mexico, and she closed the event with a beautiful rendition of the song “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee).”

All They Will Call You is the harrowing account of “the worst airplane disaster in California’s history,” which claimed the lives of thirty-two passengers, including twenty-eight Mexican citizens—farmworkers who were being deported by the U.S. government. Outraged that media reports omitted only the names of the Mexican passengers, American folk icon Woody Guthrie penned a poem that went on to become one of the most important protest songs of the twentieth century, “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee).” It was an attempt to restore the dignity of the anonymous lives whose unidentified remains were buried in an unmarked mass grave in California’s Central Valley. For nearly seven decades, the song’s message would be carried on by the greatest artists of our time, including Pete Seeger, Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, yet the question posed in Guthrie’s lyrics, “Who are these friends all scattered like dry leaves?” would remain unanswered—until now.

Excerpt from Pyrocene Park

May 16, 2023

Its monumental rocks, etched by glaciers during the last Ice Age, have made Yosemite National Park a crown jewel of the national park system and a world-celebrated destination. Yet, more and more, fire rather than ice is shaping this storied landscape.

In the last decade, fire has blasted into public attention. California’s blazes have captured national and global media interest with their drama and urgency. Expand the realm of fire to include the burning of fossil fuels, and the fire story also subsumes climate change. Renowned fire historian Stephen J. Pyne argues that the relationship between fire and humans has become a defining feature of our epoch, and he reveals how Yosemite offers a cameo of how we have replaced an ice age with a fire age: the Pyrocene.

Organized around a backcountry trek to a 50-year experiment in restoring fire, Pyrocene Park by Stephen J. Pyne describes the 150-year history of fire suppression and management that has led us, in part, to where the park is today. But there is more. Yosemite’s fire story is America’s, and the Earth’s, as it shifts from an ice-informed world to a fire-informed one. Pyrocene Park distills that epic story into a sharp miniature.

Flush with people, ideas, fires, and controversy, Pyrocene Park is a compelling and accessible window into the American fire scene and the future it promises. Below read an excerpt from the book.

A trek to the Illilouette began as a thought by Jan van Wagtendonk, evolved into a resolve by the park’s upper administration, advanced to a project under the fire management program, and became a reality on September 13–15, 2021. Behind that undertaking lay the massif of the Sierra Nevada Range, California’s Mediterranean climate, a biota built to burn, humanity’s monopoly over fire, America’s halting history from laissez-faire burning to universal suppression to restoring good fires, Yosemite’s status as an emblem of the wild, the Earth’s hastening spiral from ice to fire, and those ineffable moments when planet and people converge.

The Illilouette Valley—hidden in the aesthetic shadow of Half Dome—is not a destination landscape. No John Muir has rhapsodized over its wild splendor. No Ansel Adams has immortalized it in photographs. No guidebooks identify it as one of Yosemite’s many iconic scenes. It boasts no towering granite domes, no Big Trees, no historical markers, no cult of climbing routes. In a place that overflows with the photogenic and the monumental, it projects no special vision or public voice. It is neither in Yosemite Valley nor along the Range of Light that forms the Sierra Crest. Its trees are Jeffrey pine, lodgepole, and aspen patches, not giant sequoias.

Which makes all the more astonishing that the superintendent, deputy superintendent, chief ranger, wilderness policy and recreation planner, chief of resources management and science, chief of ecological restoration, vegetation ecologist, fire ecologist, wilderness manager, park physical scientist, chief of staff, fire management officer, deputy fire management officer, and fuels battalion chief—most of the governing cadre of the park concerned with Yosemite’s natural endowment—along with two academics planned a three-day trek to the basin on September 13–15, 2021. These are the people who must decide how to manage the park’s natural estate.

That domain has been undergoing a slow, now quickening upheaval that makes Yosemite a microcosm of the Earth. Nearly all Yosemite’s fabled sites were shaped by Pleistocene ice as the planet flickered over the past 2.6 million years into and out of long glacial epochs broken by short bouts of warming. That ice was the most visible feature of a makeover that repeatedly recast the Earth’s lands, seas, and air. At Yosemite it widened and deepened valleys, rounded exposed granite, cached moraine and soils, and scoured routes for runoff that became rivers and waterfalls. Over and again, the ice made its mark, departed, and repeated.

The last interglacial, known as the Holocene, began roughly 12,000 years ago. But something new intervened in the rhythm of returning ice. This time a fire-wielding creature, Homo sapiens, interacted with a progressively fire-receptive world. The cooling stalled, then reversed. It was as though the expected ice age had refracted through a pyric prism and re-emerged as a fire age. Fire replaced ice, fire drove off ice. Visible flames reshaped living landscapes of conifers, shrubs, grasses, and peat, while combustion hidden in machines, burning the fossilized residue of formerly living biomes—call them lithic landscapes—began reforging how humans lived on the land. When the effluent from that industrial-scale firing marinated the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, it perturbed the climate, which reconfigured everything it touched. Local fires massed into a globalized fire age.

Even Yosemite, a monument to ice, is being refashioned by the hastening fires. That is what makes the Illilouette, otherwise so mundane, of interest to park management: it is a place informed by fire. It is where the park sought to test the notion, an amalgam of hope and alarm, that good fires might restore the lost fires and help stave off the bad burns, the feral flames, and the megafires that a blowup fire age threatens. It is where a landscape bequeathed by the Pleistocene has morphed into a Pyrocene.

Lotería Featured in ‘La Treintena’ 2023

May 9, 2023

Urayoán Noel includes Lotería: Nocturnal Sweepstakes, by Elizabeth Torres in his top 30 poetry books for 2023.

In ‘La Trientena’ 2023, 30 (Something) Books of Latinx Poetry, Noel writes, “Latina/o/x poets remain frustratingly marginal to the critical conversation even in the realm of literary studies, to say nothing of our broader field or beyond it. This time around, I was excited to come across a wide range of powerful new work from Central and South American poets, further challenging and complicating the entrenched canons of Latinidad.” The article is part of The Latinx Project at New York University.

Lotería: Nocturnal Sweepstakes is a collection of deeply evocative coming-of-age poems that take the reader on a voyage through the intimate experiences of displacement. Conjuring dreamlike visions of extravagant fruits and rivers animated by the power of divination, these poems follow the speaker from the lash of war’s arrival through an urgent escape and reinvention in a land that saves with maternal instinct but also smothers its children.

Congratulations Elizabeth Torres for making this list!

Excerpt from Indigenous Justice and Gender

May 8, 2023

Indigenous Justice and Gender edited by Marianne O. Nielsen and Karen Jarratt-Snider offers a broad overview of topics pertaining to gender-related health, violence, and healing. Employing a strength-based approach (as opposed to a deficit model), the chapters address the resiliency of Indigenous women and two-spirit people in the face of colonial violence and structural racism.

The book centers the concept of “rematriation”—the concerted effort to place power, peace, and decision making back into the female space, land, body, and sovereignty—as a decolonial practice to combat injustice. Chapters include such topics as reproductive health, diabetes, missing and murdered Indigenous women, Indigenous women in the academy, and Indigenous women and food sovereignty.

As part of the Indigenous Justice series, this book provides an overview of the topic, geared toward undergraduate and graduate classes. Below read an excerpt from the editors’ Introduction to book.

There is, contemporarily, a resurgence of Indigenous voice, Indigenous sovereignty, and Indigenous rights. At the heart of these movements we see, hear, and feel the power of Indigenous womxn (explanation of term to follow). While Indigenous womxn’s agency is not new by any means, the collective acts to dehumanize and marginalize Indigenous womxn through reproductive injustice, patriarchy, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) and much more, has altered the Indigenous female space. While both historical repercussions and contemporary measures continue to commit offenses against the Indigenous female rights to body, land, and sovereignty, Indigenous rematriation is occurring within both rural and urban Indigenous communities and places around the globe. Rematriation is a “spiritually conscious movement led by Indigenous women” and embodies “the act or process of returning the sacred to the Mother” (https:// rematriation.com/). While the term “repatriation” is often utilized when referring to decolonization and the return of stolen items and/or remains to Indigenous communities, the root word “patriation” remains tied to the colonial, patriarchal context.

Rematriation is a concerted effort that places power, peace, and decision-making back into the female space, land, body, and sovereignty. While this book unearths the political, physical, emotional, and spiritual injustices forced upon Indigenous womxn, it more importantly exemplifies the abundance of Indigenous female movements and resilience. Rematriation is a justice movement for not merely Indigenous womxn but their children, communities, lands, health, reproduction, education, and basic human rights. In this book, we focus on the intersectionality of the Indigenous womxn’s experiences and how the interconnected nature of injustices against Indigenous womxn has in turn initiated an abundance of Indigenous people choosing to heal together. Our work is inspired by Indigenous grandmothers and is intentional with the abundant and bright futures of our daughters and granddaughters in mind.

In this book we use the terms American Indian, Native American, Indigenous, and First Nations to represent the original inhabitants of a certain space and land. Whenever possible we refer to people as from their respective Nations, tribes, clans, and communities. Similarly, for this introduction, we utilize the term “womxn” to represent the inclusivity of our LGBTQ+ and two-spirit community members. Because the term is relatively new, readers will notice not all contributing authors use it throughout the volume. We use it for inclusivity, with the intent of helping to de-marginalize those who have experienced marginalization for so long. This book is a concerted effort to personalize the Indigenous womxn’s experience and normalize the sustainable impacts and sovereign efforts Indigenous womxn are making within their respective communities and around the globe. Contemporary injustices geared toward Indigenous womxn are continuing impacts of colonization processes, such as assimilation, forced removal of children to boarding schools, and involuntary sterilization of womxn (Robyn 2018; Torpy 2000; Government Accounting Office 1976, and others) that disrupted the sacredness of Indigenous womxn within their communities.

Rather than focusing on dehumanizing Indigenous womxn through a “deficit” model or approach, we employ a more empowered approach that focuses on the strength and resilience of Indigenous womxn. In contrast, the “deficit” view picks out the perceived pathologies and reinforces the stereotypes and colonially based myths about Indigenous Peoples and their communities. As Coates (2004, 20) describes, the colonizers are on “a death watch” in that they expect Indigenous cultures to succumb to the inevitability of European strength. The deficit model, then, fails to accurately portray the actual situations of Indigenous Peoples. As Coates observed,

peoples as diverse as the Inuit and Maori, Chittagong Hill Tribes and Navajo, Sami and Mohawk have faced and survived the multiple forces of colonization. They changed, adapted, resisted, protested, accommodated, and otherwise responded to a series of efforts to undercut, undermine, and
disrupt their societies. Yet, to a degree that the contemporary rhetoric about colonization does not fully explain, the indigenous peoples remember their central stories and customs, retain centuries-old value systems, and continue to respect and understand the land and resources of their people. To
a much greater degree than most outsiders recognize, long standing family and community relationships remain pivotal in their lives. Even in highly developed industrial countries, indigenous societies are not dead—and in most cases are not even dying.

(Coates 2004, 22)


The deficit model ignores Indigenous Peoples’ strengths and their very survivance. The social justice issues that arise out of colonialism, however, are difficult to discuss without falling into an insidious form of structural racism. Criminologists, sociologists, and other scholars have used this paradigm in conducting research and in teaching students. Social workers, criminal justice personnel, public health workers, and other service providers (many taught by these same academics) also have been making
this error for years, which in turn appears in their reporting, analyses, and acting upon these issues in such ways that reinforce perceptions of Indigenous clients and their communities as “less than.”

Contributors:
Alisse Ali-Joseph
Michèle Companion
Mary Jo Tippeconnic Fox
Brooke de Heer
Lomayumtewa K. Ishii
Karen Jarratt-Snider
Lynn C. Jones
Anne Luna-Gordinier
Kelly McCue
Marianne O. Nielsen
Linda M. Robyn
Melinda S. Smith
Jamie Wilson


NAISA 2023: Recent Books, Conference Discounts, and More!

May 8, 2023

Join us for the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association Conference in Toronto, ON on May 11-13! Stop by our booth to browse our latest Indigenous studies titles and catch up with our Editor-in-Chief, Kristen Buckles! Order our books with the code AZNAISA23 at checkout for a 30% discount with free U.S. shipping. If you have questions about our publishing program, visit this page or contact Kristen at kubuckles@uapress.arizona.edu. If you aren’t able to check out our books in person in Toronto, browse our recent titles below!

This book explains how Indigenous peoples organize their economies for good living by supporting relationships between humans and the natural world. This work argues that creating such relationships is a major alternative to economic models that stress individualism and domination of nature.

O’odham artist Michael Chiago Sr.’s paintings provide a window into the lifeways of the O’odham people. This book offers a rich account of how Tohono O’odham and Akimel O’odham live in the Sonoran Desert now and in the recent past.

We are thrilled that Michael Chiago won a Southwest Book of the Year Award! Check out the great book launch we had for Michael Chiago, in collaboration with Western National Parks Association!

In this book, disappearance of a young Choctaw leads Detective Monique Blue Hawk to investigate a little-known ceremonial dance. As she traces the steps of the missing man, she discovers that the seemingly innocuous Renewal Dance is not what it appears to be. After Monique embarks on a journey that she never thought possible, she learns that the past and future can converge to offer endless possibilities for the present. She must also accept her own destiny of violence and peacekeeping.

Read a brief interview with the author here. Listen to the author speak about her work on Native American Calling here. Are you attending the Tucson Festival of Books this year? Catch Devon Mihesuah and other UA Press authors at signings and on panels!

In Raven’s Echo, Tlingit artist and poet Robert Davis Hoffmann’s poetry grapples with reconstructing a life within Tlingit tradition and history. The destructiveness of colonialism brings a profound darkness to some of the poems in Raven’s Echo, but the collection also explores the possibility of finding spiritual healing in the face of historical and contemporary traumas.

Watch the poet discuss his work here.

This ethnography examines the role of language and embodied behaviors in producing a congregational split in a Catholic parish serving Guatemala’s Q’eqchi’ Maya people. Drawing on a range of methods from linguistic and cultural anthropology, author Eric Hoenes del Pinal 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.

Read field notes from the author here.

Visualizing Genocide engages the often sparse and biased discourses of genocidal violence against Indigenous communities documented in exhibits, archives, and museums. Essayists and artists from a range of disciplines identify how Native knowledge can be effectively incorporated into memory spaces.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

From the early colonial period to the War on Terror, translation practices have facilitated colonialism and resulted in epistemicide, or the destruction of Indigenous and subaltern knowledge. This book discusses translation-as-epistemicide in the Americas and providing accounts of decolonial methods of translation.

Reading the Illegible weaves together the stories of the peoples, places, objects, and media that surrounded the creation of the anonymous Huarochirí Manuscript (c. 1598–1608) to demonstrate how Andean people endowed the European technology of writing with a new social role in the context of a multimedia society.

Critically examining the United States as a settler colonial nation, this literary analysis recenters Oceti Sakowin (historically known to some as the Sioux Nation) women as their tribes’ traditional culture keepers and culture bearers, while offering thoughtful connections between settler colonialism, literature, nationalism, and gender.

Centering historically neglected Indigenous voices as its primary source material, author David Martínez shows how Carlos Montezuma’s correspondence and interactions with his family and their community influenced his advocacy—and how his important work in Arizona specifically motivated his work on a national level.

This deep dive into the coal industry and the Navajo Nation captures a pivotal moment in the history of energy shift and tribal communities. Geographer Andrew Curley spent more than a decade documenting the rise and fall coal, talking with those affected most by the changes—Diné coal workers, environmental activists, and politicians.

Featuring analysis from historical, ethnological, and philosophical perspectives, this volume dissects Indigenous Amazonians’ beliefs about urban imaginaries and their ties to power, alterity, domination, and defiance. Contributors analyze how ambiguous urban imaginaries express a singular view of cosmopolitical relations, how they inform and shape forest-city interactions, and the history of how they came into existence, as well as their influence in present-day migration and urbanization.

This comparative work dispels the harmful myth that Native people are unfit stewards of their sacred places. This work establishes Indigenous preservation practices as sustaining approaches to the caretaking of the land that embody ecological sustainability, spiritual landscapes, and community well-being.

‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land is a powerful collection of new poems by Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) poet Brandy Nālani McDougall. These poems cycle through sacred and personal narratives while exposing and fighting ongoing American imperialism, settler colonialism, militarism, and social and environmental injustice to protect the ʻāina and its people.

We are thrilled that Brandy Nālani McDougall was selected as the new Hawai’i state poet laureate!

Cynthia Guardado Makes Ms. Magazine List

Ms. Magazine’s “Reads for the Rest of Us: The Best Poetry of Last Year” features Cynthia Guardado’s Cenizas. Karla J. Strand celebrated National Poetry Month by providing Ms. readers with a list of new books being published by writers from historically excluded groups. She wrote, “Instead of the usual blurb, I focused my thoughts about each collection into three words.”

Strand’s three words for Cenizas: Descent, grief, portal.

We have a few more words.

Cenizas offers an arresting portrait of a Salvadoran family whose lives have been shaped by the upheavals of global politics. The speaker of these poems—the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants—questions the meaning of homeland as she navigates life in the United States while remaining tethered to El Salvador by the long shadows cast by personal and public history. Cynthia Guardado’s poems give voice to the grief of family trauma, while capturing moments of beauty and tenderness. Maternal figures preside over the verses, guiding the speaker as she searches the ashes of history to tell her family’s story. The spare, narrative style of the poems are filled with depth as the family’s layers come to light.

‘American Scientist’ Publishes Stephen Pyne’s Essay on Pyrocene Park

April 27, 2023

Just in time for the publication of Stephen Pyne’s new book Pyrocene Park, American Scientist has republished the author’s essay on fire in one of America’s most popular national parks.

Pyne writes, “A century-long policy of fire exclusion has transformed Yosemite Valley into a tinderbox that threatens the ancient sequoias of the Mariposa Grove.

“Stand at Glacier Point and you’ll instantly understand why it is one of North America’s iconic overlooks. The great trough of Yosemite Valley in California fills the foreground below and, with almost gravitational pull, carries the eye eastward to the crest line of the Sierra Nevada mountains. With its sheer granite walls, waterfalls that plunge hundreds of meters, and uniquely sculpted stone monoliths (such as El Capitan and Half Dome), words such as monumental hardly do justice to the scene…”

Read the complete essay

***
Organized around a backcountry trek to a 50-year experiment in restoring fire, Pyrocene Park describes the 150-year history of fire suppression and management that has led us, in part, to where the park is today. But there is more. Yosemite’s fire story is America’s, and the Earth’s, as it shifts from an ice-informed world to a fire-informed one. Pyrocene Park distills that epic story into a sharp miniature. Flush with people, ideas, fires, and controversy, Pyrocene Park is a compelling and accessible window into the American fire scene and the future it promises.

Cowboy Up Podcast Interviews Shelby Tisdale

April 24, 2023

Cowboy Up hosts recently interviewed author Shelby Tisdale about her new book, No Place for a Lady, The Life Story of Archaeologist Marjorie F. Lambert.

Dude rancher Russell True and cowboy H. Alan Day interviewed Tisdale in Tucson, Arizona. Listen to the interview here: Breaking Through the Glass (or in This Case, the Dirt!). It’s also available on Apple podcasts.

Marjorie Lambert knew what she loved: archeology, specifically southwestern archeology. But back around 1930, excavation sites were not a place for women. That didn’t deter Marjorie, a trailblazer who, during her illustrious career, worked as a field manager, museum director, curator, professor, and what’s more, married a cowboy who became a dude rancher. When author Shelby Tisdale met Marjorie Lambert and got to know her, she knew that she had to write a biography about this extraordinary woman.

Marjorie Lambert’s first experience leading an excavation was when she taught a summer archaeology and anthropology class in New Mexico. Tisdale explains in the podcast, “They did a fantastic excavation at the Tecalote site. It was an ancestral Pueblo site from 1300 C.E. and a Plains Apache site. She was told by many men that she would never be able to get any men to work for her and she proved them wrong.”

As a graduate student, Tisdale had the opportunity to meet Marjorie Lambert. Lambert was losing her eyesight, so Tisdale volunteered to read to her. “We’d have a little dinner, maybe some wine or a margarita, and I’d sit and read to her,” Tisdale says. “Then our discussions would focus on her life, and what it was like being a woman in the field, and I was just starting my career. So we would compare notes.” A few years later the author asked Lambert is she could write a biography about her, and Lambert agreed. “And 35 years later, I finally finished the book!” says Tisdale.

More about the book:

Through Lambert’s life story we gain new insight into the intricacies and politics involved in the development of archaeology and museums in New Mexico and the greater Southwest. We also learn about the obstacles that young women had to maneuver around in the early years of the development of southwestern archaeology as a profession. Tisdale brings into focus one of the long-neglected voices of women in the intellectual history of anthropology and archaeology and highlights how gender roles played out in the past in determining the career paths of young women. She also highlights what has changed and what has not in the twenty-first century.

Women’s voices have long been absent throughout history, and Marjorie Lambert’s story adds to the growing literature on feminist archaeology.

Five Questions with Poet Elizabeth Torres

April 21, 2023

Lotería: Nocturnal Sweepstakes is a collection of deeply evocative coming-of-age poems that take the reader on a voyage through the intimate experiences of displacement. Conjuring dreamlike visions of extravagant fruits and rivers animated by the power of divination, these poems follow the speaker from the lash of war’s arrival through an urgent escape and reinvention in a land that saves with maternal instinct but also smothers its children. This collection is the winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Ambroggio Prize! Below, read a brief interview with poet Elizabeth Torres.

What inspired you to write this collection?
I’ve always been writing about subjects related to identity, agency and territory… but it is possibly due to the distance, both physically and mentally, caused by being in Denmark (and by time, of course), that I was able to think back and poke at my own story, and disrobe it / see it / relate to it as I do to the stories of other bodies in movement, refugees, migrants, nomads, whom I’ve encountered in my path. 

This book was very much written as a response to the turmoil being faced by families of immigrants, who carry these memories in their blood which cause them to look at their own stories from multiple mirrors… but also as a commentary on the idea of identity, and who really is allowed to belong.

How did the themes of displacement and home shape the poems in this collection?
Home is a relative term. To some, it is found when there is shelter and silence from a dangerous environment, to others it is a physical space that must be guarded from any disturbance. To me it is a fluid idea of recognition and acceptance. A collection of moments that molded me and carry me through uncertainty. In this book I combined poetry, testimonial, fiction and legend to look deep inside my own understanding of “what happened”, threading the waters to my definitions of memory, displacement, and adaptation.

Lotería includes pieces of your artwork. Would you tell us more about how your art and your poetry work together in the collection?
As a multimedia artist, to me everything has more than one dimension. A poem is musical, rhythmic, it is a soundscape on its own, not just confined to paper… and at the same time it is very visual, for it must create firm images that readers can attest to. It is the same with visual art. It must contain poetry, and leave enough room for others to breathe, take breaks, come back, return to. So I like to illustrate my poetry as an organic map of the process. And I like also to continue each investigation from a different angle. Lately I am doing small paintings inspired by the poems, to make my own arcana of these symbols I present in the book… and I recently received a grant in Denmark to make an experimental album based on these poems as well, so the body of work becomes richer, deeper, but really it’s all just poetry.

You translated your own poems in this bilingual collection–what are your thoughts on the poetic process of self-translation?
Translation is another layer of my work, and I think it is a very organic part of the process, in great part because of my dual identity as an American and as a Colombian. I tend to write in both languages, to borrow from each of my voices. In my writings in Spanish I can recognize melancholy, a craving for nurturing and kinship, attachment, blood and ancestral wisdom. In my English, there’s the coming-of-age, the sarcasm, the curiosity of the artist, the cotidianity of the adult. So I can borrow from each voice to give more depth to my poetic characters. In this specific case, since the story is so personal, so intimate… I needed to distance my present self (who mainly speaks English and Danish) and return to the nucleus, to the beginning, the origin which now is also a blurred dream, hence it was clear that it needed to be written in Spanish. And then, by translating to English, I was able to explain to myself what it is I was coming to terms with, what I was celebrating and what I was letting go of, but also to remain somehow removed from the painful/inconvenient/uncomfortable aspects of the story. 

What are you working on now?
Currently I am writing a play about interpretations of democracy in our current times and how these are influenced by AI/technology. It’s a gameshow and it involves an app for the audience to decide the turns of the story, so I have been enjoying the process very much. It premieres in May here in Denmark. 

Additionally I just translated a compilation of Latin American women poets for a book titled “The Witnessing of Days” released this month by Versopolis as part of their Poetry Expo. 

I am also a cultural organizer so I’ve been curating a series of literary events as part of a festival throughout the Nordic region, and last but not least of course, I am writing. I am always writing. Currently I am working on a poetic lexicon about artistic research and the embodiment of knowledge… and adding the finishing touches to a book in Spanish titled Expediciones a la Región furtiva (Expeditions to the Furtive Region), which narrates the voyage of a polar expedition towards oblivion, which comes out this spring in Spain, Mexico and Colombia with Valparaíso Ediciones. 

…I am also working on a novel, which I fondly call my “lucid spectacle of redemption”. 

In the meantime, for the past 13 years I have directed a quarterly arts magazine called Red Door, and I host an arts & culture podcast called Red Transmissions. See? It’s a poetic takeover.

***

Elizabeth Torres (Madam Neverstop) is a poet, multimedia artist, and literary translator. She is the author of more than twenty books of poetry in various languages and has toured more than thirty countries with her work. Torres is director of the arts quarterly publication Red Door Magazine, founder of the Poetic Phonotheque, and host of the Red Transmissions podcast. She resides in Copenhagen, where she is pursuing an MFA in performing arts at Den Danske Scenekunst Skole.

Reyes Ramirez Is New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award Finalist

April 20, 2023

Reyes Ramirez has been named one of the five finalists for the 2023 Young Lions Fiction Award for The Book of Wanderers.

Established in 2001, The New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award is a $10,000 prize awarded each spring to a writer age 35 or younger for a novel or a collection of short stories. Each year, five young fiction writers are selected as finalists by a reading committee of Young Lions members, writers, editors, and librarians. A panel of judges selects the winner.

The winner will be announced at a ceremony and celebration in New York on Thursday, June 15. Reyes Ramirez and his guests will be in attendance. The other finalists are: Fatimah Asghar for When We Were Sisters; Elaine Hsieh Chou for Disorientation; Zain Khalid for Brother Alive; and David Sanchez for All Day Is A Long Time. Part of the ceremony is having celebrities and influencers read an excerpt from each of the five finalists.

Congratulations Reyes!

About the book:

What do a family of luchadores, a teen on the run, a rideshare driver, a lucid dreamer, a migrant worker in space, a mecha soldier, and a zombie-and-neo-Nazi fighter have in common?

Reyes Ramirez’s dynamic short story collection follows new lineages of Mexican and Salvadoran diasporas traversing life in Houston, across borders, and even on Mars. Themes of wandering weave throughout each story, bringing feelings of unease and liberation as characters navigate cultural, physical, and psychological separation and loss from one generation to the next in a tumultuous nation.

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.

Arizona History Convention Recap

Editors, authors, and readers of Arizona history came together at the Arizona History Convention (AHC) in-person sessions on April 15, 2023. AHC also hosted sessions online on April 13 and 14. Check out our photos below from April 15 at the Tempe History Museum. THANK YOU to Heidi Osselaer, Peg Kearney and all the other volunteers who made it a great Convention! In the photo above, Tom Zoellner, Wynne Brown and Gil Storms discuss “The Art of Writing Biography.”

Anabel Galindo, Octaviana Trujillo, Antonia Campoy, and Robert Valenica discuss “Itom Hiak Noki: You Can Find Our Strength in Our Words.”
Elsie Szecsy, Dennis Preisler, Katherine Morrissey and Lorrie McAllister discuss “Re-thinking Geography and History.”
Editor-in-Chief Kristen Buckles talks to Katherine Morrissey, Arizona Crossroads series co-editor.

Excerpt from Foodways of the Ancient Andes

April 18, 2023

Eating is essential for life, but it also embodies social and symbolic dimensions. Foodways of the Ancient Andes, edited by Marta Alfonso-Durruty and Deborah E. Blom,  shows how foods and peoples were mutually transformed in the ancient Andes. Exploring the multiple social, ecological, cultural, and ontological dimensions of food in the Andean past, the contributors of this volume offer diverse theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches that reveal the richness, sophistication, and ingenuity of Andean peoples. Today we offer an excerpt from the introduction of the volume.

A synergistic process of mutual production and transformation characterizes our relationship with food. We skillfully transform our food— cooking, mixing, and modifying ingredients—to enhance its nutrient value and alter its taste (Pollan 2013; Wrangham 2009). Similarly, while foods meet our nutritional needs, cooking and eating embody social and symbolic dimensions that transform our bodies into material (bio)culture (Bourdieu 1984; Douglas 1972; Lèvi-Strauss 1997; Mead 1997; Sofaer 2006). Meals too can be viewed as simultaneously material and discursive phenomena, and the chaînes opératoires of human thoughts, actions, and bodily techniques that go into preparing them are ideal avenues to view the ways in which humans interact with their physical and cultural environments (see Briggs 2018; Cadena and Moreano 2012; Goody 1982; Hastorf 2018; Mauss [1935] 2006; Mintz and Du Bois 2002; Peres and Deter-Wolf 2018). The Andean region’s cultural and environmental diversity provides a unique locale for the study of food (Cuéllar 2013; Klarich 2010; Knudson, Torres-Rouff, and Stojanowski 2015; Turner et al. 2018; Velasco and Tung 2021). Embracing this diversity and the rich ethnohistoric and archaeological record of the region, this volume addresses key sociopolitical and ontological questions about ancient foodways and uses a variety of methods to investigate how foods and peoples were mutually transformed in the ancient Andes.

Archaeologists are left to infer food, diet, and cuisine from material left behind (e.g., food remains, vessels, and tools) and from the chemical signatures of diets incorporated into human and animal bone. We can also draw from ethnographic and ethnohistorical accounts of more recent societies to aid our endeavors to reconstruct behaviors. While we cannot uncritically impose this information onto the past, we can use generalized insights from ethnohistory and ethnography to inform our Transforming Foods in the Ancient Andes Deborah E. Blom, Marta Alfonso-Durruty, and Susan D. deFrance Blom, Alfonso-Durruty, and de France Introduction understandings of ancient Andean social organization and ontologies about the world (e.g., Lozada and Tantaleán 2019; Murra 1975; Swenson and Roddick 2018). To quote Tristan Platt (2016, 199),

The word ‘Andean’ . . . does not deny historical change. . . . On the contrary, it can refer to Andean societies which have been conquered by the Incas, invaded by the Spanish, and incorporated into nation-states, combining threads of continuity and change in their actions and reactions to a constantly transforming context.

It is with these threads of continuity and change in mind that the scholarship included in this volume explores diversity in food, diet, and cuisine across time/space over the longue durée in the ancient Andes. Throughout time, Andean peoples rose to the challenges of climatic and sociopolitical changes that affected their access to resources (see also Juengst et al. 2021; Bruno et al. 2021). The resilient pre-Columbian Andean peoples prioritized, scaled, diversified, and embraced new as well as previously developed subsistence strategies and food resources. When all else failed, in the face of environmental degradation and state collapse that severely impacted their needs, they turned to local resources and enacted the power of their extended families.

April 11, 2023

We were thrilled to see so many authors and volume editors stop by our booth at the Society of American Archaeology meeting in Portland earlier this month. If you weren’t able to stop by, there’s still time to order our archaeology titles. For 30% off and free shipping in the continental U.S. use discount code AZSAA23 at checkout in our website shopping cart. The discount ends 5/5/23.

Author Paul Minnis with his works The Neighbors of Casas Grandes and Famine Foods.
Stephen Acabado, co-author of Indigenous Archaeology in the Philippines, and Allyson Carter, Senior Editor
John G. Douglass with his works The Global Spanish Empire and Forging Communities in Colonial Alta California
Randal H. McGuire, co-editor of The Border and Its Bodies, and Ruth M. Van Dyke, editor of Practicing Materiality
Samuel Duwe, author of Tewa Worlds and co-editor of Continuous Path
Shelby Tisdale, author of the forthcoming work No Place for a Lady
Andrew Turner co-editor of Flower Worlds
Patrick D. Lyons, editor of The Davis Ranch Site
Thomas H. Guderjan, co-editor of The Value of Things
Barbara J. Roth with her new work Households on the Mimbres Horizon
Allyson Carter, senior editor, meets with authors. If you have publishing questions about your archaeology manuscript, email her at acarter@uapress.arizona.edu.

Arizona History Convention 2023: Recent Books, Conference Discounts, and More!

April 11, 2023

Join us for the 2023 Arizona History Convention! This year’s convention will be held online April 13 and 14 and in-person on Saturday, April 15, at the Tempe Community Center, located on the southwest corner of Rural and Southern roads in Tempe, Arizona. Stop by our table to browse our fantastic recent titles, purchase books at a 30% discount, and catch up with press staff! If you aren’t able to make it to the in-person section of the convention, browse our recent titles below and use the code AZHISTCON23 for 30% off plus free U.S. shipping. If you have questions about our publishing program, visit this page or reach out to our Editor-in-Chief, Kristen Buckles, at kbuckles@uapress.arizona.edu.

We are excited to be launching two new series, BorderVisions and Arizona Crossroads, this year! Learn more below.

BorderVisions, edited by Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez and Yvette J. Saavedra, engages the U.S.-Mexico borderlands’ dynamic histories and cultures and expands our understanding of the borderlands beyond a site of geopolitical inquiry. The series conceptualizes borderlands as both a place and a methodology and addresses the constraints of traditional fields, challenging authors to think creatively and critically about the expansive frameworks and possibilities of borderlands studies. 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. This series 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. We seek to foster an intellectual space that envisions and manifests the multitude of perspectives for understanding the borderlands through interdisciplinary humanities and humanistic social sciences scholarship. We are especially interested in books that address the complexities and richness of borderlands experiences at different historical, cultural, and sociopolitical moments.

Watch a recording of the series launch for BorderVisions here.

Arizona Crossroads, edited by Anita Huizar-Hernández, Eric V. Meeks, and Katherine G. Morrissey, is a series in collaboration with the Arizona Historical Society that explores the history of peoples and cultures, events and struggles, ideas and practices in the place we know today as Arizona. 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.

Watch a recording of the series launch for Arizona Crossroads here.

For questions or to submit a proposal to either of these series, please contact Kristen Buckles, kbuckles@uapress.arizona.edu.

A sharp examination of Arizona by a nationally acclaimed writer, Rim to River follows Tom Zoellner on a 790-mile walk across his home state as he explores key elements of Arizona culture, politics, and landscapes. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in learning more about a vibrant and baffling place.

This deep dive into the coal industry and the Navajo Nation captures a pivotal moment in the history of energy shift and tribal communities. Geographer Andrew Curley spent more than a decade documenting the rise and fall coal, talking with those affected most by the changes—Diné coal workers, environmental activists, and politicians.

This history of Sabino Canyon shows like never before why this mountain canyon near Tucson, Arizona, is such a beloved place. With more than two hundred images and engaging text, David Wentworth Lazaroff relays a hundred years of history, revealing how the canyon changed from a little-known oasis into an immensely popular recreation area on the edge of a modern metropolis.

Centering historically neglected Indigenous voices as its primary source material, author David Martínez shows how Carlos Montezuma’s correspondence and interactions with his family and their community influenced his advocacy—and how his important work in Arizona specifically motivated his work on a national level.

World of Our Mothers highlights the largely forgotten stories of forty-five women immigrants in the early twentieth century. Through interviews in Arizona mining towns, Phoenix barrios, and selected areas of California, Texas, and the Midwest, we learn how they negotiated their lives with their circumstances.

WSSA 2023: Recent Books, Conference Discounts, and More!

April 10, 2023

Join us for the 2023 World Social Sciences Assocation meeting in Tempe, Arizona on April 12-15! We will be selling our recent books at a 30% discount, and you can catch up with our Editor-in-Chief, Kristen Buckles! If you aren’t able to attend the conference this year, please take a look at our recent titles below, and use the code AZWSSA23 to order books at a 30% discount with free U.S. shipping through 5/15/2023. If you have questions about our publishing program, visit this page or email Kristen at kbuckles@uapress.arizona.edu.

Accessible and engaging, Latinx Belonging underscores and highlights Latinxs’ continued presence and contributions to everyday life in the United States as they both carve out and defend their place in society.

Sitting at the intersection of border studies, immigration studies, and Latinx studies, this concise volume shows how Central American migrants in transit through Mexico survive the precarious and unpredictable road by forming different types of social ties, developing trust, and engaging in acts of solidarity. The accessible writing and detailed ethnographic narratives of different associations, ties, and groups that migrants form while in transit weave together theory with empirical observations to highlight and humanize the migrant experience.

This volume draws much-needed attention to the plight of migrant children and their families, illuminating the human and emotional toll that children experience as they crisscross the Americas. Exploring the connections between education, policy, cultural studies, and anthropology, the essays in this volume navigate a space of transnational children’s rights central to Latin American life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

Centering historically neglected Indigenous voices as its primary source material, author David Martínez shows how Carlos Montezuma’s correspondence and interactions with his family and their community influenced his advocacy—and how his important work in Arizona specifically motivated his work on a national level.

Border Water places transboundary water management in the frame of the larger binational relationship, offering a comprehensive history of transnational water management between the United States and Mexico. As we move into the next century of transnational water management, this important work offers critical insights into lessons learned and charts a path for the future.

This new book offers a broad overview of topics pertaining to gender-related health, violence, and healing. Employing a strength-based approach (as opposed to a deficit model), the chapters address the resiliency of Indigenous women and two-spirit people in the face of colonial violence and structural racism.

Colonialism has the power to corrupt. This important new work argues that even the early Quakers, who had a belief system rooted in social justice, committed structural and cultural violence against their Indigenous neighbors.

Photos from Picturing Sabino celebration

David Wentworth Lazaroff celebrated the publication of his book, Picturing Sabino: A Photographic History of a Southwestern Canyon, at the Sabino Canyon Visitors Center in Tucson on April 4, 2023. Because Lazaroff founded the Sabino Canyon Volunteer Naturalists (SCVN) when he was an environmental educator in the Canyon, many members of SCVN joined in the celebration including the past and current presidents of the group. Everyone enjoyed Lazaroff’s myth-busting of familiar Sabino Canyon stories, his behind-the-scenes tales of writing and collecting historic photos for this book, and of course, cake.

David Lazaroff (far left) with current and former presidents of Sabino Canyon Volunteer Naturalists
Rugged books holding someone’s place in line for book signing.
Waiting in line to get books signed.
One last question for author David Lazaroff.

Michelle Téllez wins 2023 NACCS Book Award

April 4, 2023

The National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) presented their book award to Michelle Téllez, for her book Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas.

The NACCS selection committee said, “This is a unique contribution to community studies as Téllez tells the story of a community creating a space for survival and opportunities to thrive within the colonial space of two countries. Téllez provides us with how agency is created by women in places like the US-Mexico border.” The author is pictured above holding the poster for her book, with University of Arizona Press Editor-in-Chief Kristen Buckles.

Near Tijuana, Baja California, the autonomous community of Maclovio Rojas demonstrates what is possible for urban place-based political movements. More than a community, Maclovio Rojas is a women-led social movement that works for economic and political autonomy to address issues of health, education, housing, nutrition, and security.

Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas tells the story of the community’s struggle to carve out space for survival and thriving in the shadows of the U.S.-Mexico geopolitical border. This ethnography by Michelle Téllez demonstrates the state’s neglect in providing social services and local infrastructure.

Congratulations Michelle Téllez!

Five Questions with Andrew Curley

April 4, 2023

For almost fifty years, coal dominated the Navajo economy. But in 2019 one of the Navajo Nation’s largest coal plants closed. Carbon Sovereignty offers a deep dive into the complex inner workings of energy shift in the Navajo Nation. Geographer Andrew Curley, a member of the Navajo Nation, examines the history of coal development within the Navajo Nation, including why some Diné supported coal and the consequences of doing so. He explains the Navajo Nation’s strategic choices to use the coal industry to support its sovereignty as a path forward in the face of ongoing colonialism.

What first sparked your interest in telling the story of the coal plant development and closure?

I became interested in the Navajo coal economy when working at Diné College from 2007-2008. At that time, the tribe was trying to build a power plant on the eastern end of the reservation. There was a lot of opposition from grassroots groups to the plant while at the same time the tribal government promoted it. I thought it revealed a tension around coal in the reservation that needed explaining. The politics around coal fell into two camps, either promoting it or opposing it. I wanted to find out more about these ideas and why they developed the way they did around this industry. I was especially interested in the voice of Diné coal workers whose perspective I thought was missing from the conversation. These people had an intimate relation with coal. They also suffered some of the immediate health impacts from the industry. Why did they participate? What did they think about it? How did coal align or not align with traditional values? This was something I was interested in.

Why do some Diné continue to support coal energy?

I think there are a couple of main reasons. The first, it provides revenues for the tribal government. We don’t have a lot of other sources of income and the monies that come from coal and other resources give the tribe opportunities to do things for the people that the federal and state governments don’t provide. Money from coal leases goes directly into the tribal budget and pays for scholarships, salaries, even the maintenance of basic infrastructure. In a place with a harsh environment, these little bits of money go a long way. Coal was originally sold to the Diné people as a first step toward development and modernization. The modernization narrative is intoxicating and easy to sell because it always promises things in the future and never in the present. In the 1960s, coal was promoted as a first step toward industrialization in the reservation, toward future growth and the basis of life that reflects the rapidly developing cities in the west. This future never was realized in the way that it was initially promised. Nevertheless, hundreds of jobs were created in the reservation around coal work. People could afford basic things for their families and extended relatives. The tribal government also got money to tackle important problems within the reservation. Coal did a lot for the tribe. It’s wrong to ignore its positive impact.

What do you mean by “carbon sovereignty”?

It is a kind of sovereignty, or sense of both political authority and sense of self-determination, derived from tribal activities around fossil fuels, particularly coal in this case. Our actions and experience shape how we understand abstract ideas. In the case of the Navajo Nation, tribal experiences around coal helped us to understand how we think about sovereignty. It plays out in not only how we think about development and the exploitation of natural resources, but how we internally guard these activities against outside threats, how we think or rethink the federal government’s so-called ‘trust responsibility’ with tribes and the inequality found in early contracts between the tribe and private companies. In other words, sovereignty as institutional practice in the Navajo Nation reflects the history of coal mining and development over the past 60 years.

What is the role of Diné youth in energy transition?

Diné youth try to redefine and at times challenge these relationships. They want to change the conditions that they inherit, especially if they disagree on some of the major premises, such as the premise that coal is good for the Navajo Nation. I don’t want to paint a broad brush, to say there is even generational agreement on this. Younger people like all generations have varied opinions. But it is especially among younger Diné members where we find greater support for energy transition and different ideas of economic development in the Navajo Nation. There are a lot of factors that contribute to this difference. Some of this difference is attributed to global shifts in energy production and the decline of coal on a national level. But others can be understood as changing socioeconomic conditions for Diné people in particular. The value of low-skilled work is in decline, for better or worse. Today, extensive training and education is required for most kinds of work. Younger Diné generations, including myself, have taken advantage of tribal scholarships – derived from coal revenues – and look for work in very different kinds of industries, like in education, health, business, law, etc. This doesn’t speak for everyone, and there are many Diné youth who’d excel in work that you can get right out of high school and that trains you as you go along. That was the nature of coal work, and unfortunately many of those kinds of jobs are now found far from the reservation.

What is your current research project and/or next book?

I’m interested in the history of water infrastructure, both physical and legal, in the State of Arizona. I’m researching the origins of our water law and trying to understand specifically how tribes were excluded from almost all the water development in the west over the past century. It’s a big project that needs grounding in some ways. But I’m still in an exploratory phase.

***
Andrew Curley is a member of the Navajo Nation and an assistant professor in the School of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of Arizona. He has studied the social, cultural, and political implications of coal mining in the Navajo Nation, and his latest research is on the environmental history of water diversions on the Colorado River and the impact of colonial infrastructures on tribal nations.

Dan Arreola wins 2023 American Association of Geographers Award

April 3, 2023

The American Association of Geographers gave the AAG 2022 Globe Book Award for Public Understanding of Geography to Dan Arreola at their March 2023 annual meeting.  He received the award for Postcards from the Baja California Border.

The AAG award committee wrote, “This form of place study calls attention to how we can see a past through a serial view of places, by the nature of repetition, and the photographing of the same place over and over again. Arreola draws our focus to townscapes, or built landscapes, of four border towns—Tijuana, Mexicali, Tecate, and Algodones—during the first half of the twentieth century. With an emphasis on the tourist’s view of these places, this book creates a vivid picture of what life was like for tourists and residents of these towns in the early and mid-twentieth century.”

At the meeting Arreola also presented, “The Mexican Restaurant in America, A Journey across Time and Place,” as The Historical Geography Specialty Group of the AAG 2023 Distinguished Geography Lecture. Arreola explained how the popularity of Mexican food was driven by a nationwide early twentieth century “tamale craze.” He examined the restaurant as a form of material culture, a venue of cross-cultural contact, an ethnic enterprise, and a culinary business of surprising regional variation.

Congratulations to Dan Arreola on your AAG Award!

SAA 2023: Recent Books, Conference Discounts, and More!

March 28, 2023

Join us for the Society for American Archaeology meeting in Portland, Oregon, on March 29 – April 2! Visit our booth to browse our books and purchase titles at a 30% conference discount, and to talk with our Senior Editor, Allyson Carter, Ph.D. We hope to catch up with you at the conference, but if you’re unable to make it, please browse our latest titles below! Use the code AZSAA23 for 30% off plus free U.S. shipping through 5/5/2023. If you have questions about our publishing program, visit this page or contact Allyson at acarter@uapress.arizona.edu.

Exploring the multiple social, ecological, cultural, and ontological dimensions of food in the Andean past, this book offers a diverse set of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches that reveal the richness, sophistication, and ingenuity of Andean peoples. With forty-six contributors from ten countries, the studies presented in this volume employ new analytical methods, integrating different food data and interdisciplinary research to show how food impacts sociopolitical relationships and ontologies that are otherwise invisible in the archaeological record.

Set in the arid lands of northwestern Mexico, this book foregrounds the knowledge of Indigenous peoples who harvested the desert as bountiful in its material resources and sacred spaces. Author Cynthia Radding uses the tools of history, anthropology, geography, and ecology to re-create the means of defending Indigenous worlds through colonial encounters, the formation of mixed societies, and the direct conflicts over forests, grasslands, streams, and coastal estuaries that sustained wildlife, horticulture, foraging, hunting, fishing, and—after European contact—livestock and extractive industries. She returns in each chapter to the spiritual power of nature and the enduring cultural significance of the worlds that Indigenous communities created and defended.

This book explores variability in Mimbres Mogollon pithouse sites using a case study from La Gila Encantada to further our understanding of the full range of pithouse occupations in the area. Because the site is away from the major river valleys, the data from excavations at the site provides valuable information on the differences in cultural practices that occurred away from the riverine villages, as well as environmental differences, economic practices, and social constructs.

This book illustrates how descendant communities can take control of their history and heritage through active collaboration with archaeologists. Drawing on the Philippine Cordilleran experiences, Indigenous Archaeology in the Philippines discusses how changing historical narratives help empower peoples who are traditionally ignored in national histories.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

This book contextualizes the discovery of a Venus astronomical pattern by a female Mayan astronomer at Chich’en Itza and the discovery’s later adaptation and application at Mayapan. Calculating Brilliance brings different intellectual threads together across time and space, from the Classic to the Postclassic, the colonial period to the twenty-first century to offer a new vision for understanding Mayan astronomy.

This volume explores the complex and nuanced experience of doing community-based research as a graduate student. Contributors from a range of scholarly disciplines share their experiences with Community Based Participatory Research in the arts, humanities, social sciences, public health, and STEM fields.

This monograph summarizes findings from nine seasons of excavation at Barger Gulch Locality B, a Folsom campsite in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Archaeologist Todd A. Surovell explains the spatial organization of the camp and the social organization of the people who lived there.

The multiple vivid colors of scarlet macaws and their ability to mimic human speech are key reasons they were and are significant to the Native peoples of the U.S. Southwest and Mexican Northwest. Although the birds’ natural habitat is the tropical forests of Mexico and Central and South America, they were present at multiple archaeological sites in the region yet absent at the vast majority. In Birds of the Sun, leading experts in southwestern archaeology explore the reasons why.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

Five Questions with David Wentworth Lazaroff

March 27, 2023

Sabino Canyon, a desert canyon in the American Southwest near Tucson, Arizona, is enjoyed yearly by thousands of city residents as well as visitors from around the world. Picturing Sabino: A Photographic History of a Southwestern Canyon tells the story of the canyon’s transformation from a barely known oasis, miles from a small nineteenth-century town, into an immensely popular recreation area on the edge of a modern metropolis. Covering a century of change, from 1885 to 1985, this work rejoices in the canyon’s natural beauty and also relates the ups and downs of its protection and enjoyment.

Picturing Sabino is your third book about Sabino Canyon. How did you become interested in the canyon?

It began in January 1977, when I moved from California to Tucson to take job as Environmental Education Specialist with Coronado National Forest. On my first day at work my new supervisor, Bob Barnacastle, drove me in a Forest Service truck to the end of the road in Upper Sabino Canyon. I knew right away I’d landed somewhere spectacular.

Before long I had an idea for a program in which volunteers would lead children on educational field trips to the canyon. My supervisor and I worked together to make this idea a reality. The volunteers soon added presentations for the general public to their repertoire. Eventually they named themselves the Sabino Canyon Volunteer Naturalists, and they’ve continued to do their good work to this day.

I resolved to learn everything I could about Sabino Canyon both to satisfy my own curiosity and to help provide these volunteers with the background they needed. I found out quickly that the canyon was an inexhaustible source of fascination and discovery. I’ve never stopped learning about it. 

What caused you to focus on Sabino Canyon’s history?

I didn’t, at first. After leaving the Forest Service in 1986, I wanted to share something of what I’d learned about the canyon. The result was Sabino Canyon: The Life of a Southwestern Oasis, published in 1993 by The University of Arizona Press. Although most of the book’s pages were devoted to Sabino Canyon’s natural history, its last and longest chapter was a summary of the canyon’s human history and prehistory.

My research for that chapter convinced me that Sabino Canyon’s past was rich in all kinds of human experience, but that it would take time and effort to bring it more fully to light. As it turned out, I was right on both counts!

How did you uncover previously unpublished stories from Sabino Canyon’s past?

Much of my research involved documentary sources–newspaper articles, private and government correspondence, mining claims, property deeds, articles of incorporation, maps, census records, and the like. Information of this sort can be found in public archives in Arizona, elsewhere in the country, and increasingly, online.

Some of my most interesting research didn’t involve documents, though. Old photographs of visitors to the canyon were invaluable for their intimate views of what people were doing at the canyon, many years ago. What’s more, the backgrounds of these photos could be mined for nuggets of information about changes in the canyon, itself, over the decades. Equally rewarding was meeting and speaking with individuals who had lived through and contributed to Sabino Canyon’s history.

And of course one of the most intriguing sources of information was Sabino Canyon itself. It’s filled with historical treasures, if you know how find and interpret them–abandoned trails, obscure survey marks, poles from an old telephone line, fading targets shot up by military cadets, and many others.

Putting all this together was the challenge. It wasn’t often a matter of recovering stories that others had told long ago, but much more frequently of recognizing and piecing together untold stories from the great mass of disparate information I collected.

Were there any especially memorable moments in your research?

Yes, too many to describe! But here’s one.

As part of my research I often carried a copy of an old photograph into Sabino Canyon to find exactly where it had been taken. As a photographer myself, when I found the place I was looking for I often felt a subtle kinship with the person who had brought a camera there long ago.

One such occasion stands out in my memory. I had come to the canyon with a very old and quite deteriorated photograph. In searching for where it had been taken, I worked my way up a rugged slope covered with dense vegetation. It was tough going. I found the spot, and to my surprise discovered it was only about a yard from where I, myself, had taken a photograph twenty years earlier.

There is no trail to that place. Both I and that long-ago photographer seem to have been looking for the same thing: a long view up the canyon toward the landmark today called Thimble Peak. We had both worked hard to find what we wanted, and we had chosen the same site.

The image made by my predecessor–probably the well-known Tucson photographer, Henry Buehman–became the introductory photograph for Part I of Picturing Sabino. The photo I took appears in a natural-history display in the Sabino Canyon Visitor Center. (You might enjoy taking your book there and comparing the two.)

There are many wonderful historical photographs in Picturing Sabino. Was it difficult to find them?  

I found many of the photographs in public archives, but I also purchased prints online, received permission to reproduce photos from newspapers, and, in a few cases, I was able to borrow prints from generous individuals. I catalogued over fourteen hundred images and chose about two hundred for the book.

Surprisingly, it was much more difficult to find photographs from recent decades than from earlier times. Many of the photos in the book are snapshots taken by ordinary visitors to the canyon, who then mounted prints in family albums or stuffed them into envelopes and shoeboxes. As the decades passed, the photographers or their descendants came to recognize the historical value of these images, and donated them to public archives. Photos from more recent decades are likely still to be in private homes. Not enough time has passed for their owners to think of them as “historical.”

It would be worthwhile for all of us to consider the future value of the everyday photographs in our homes. For those of us still making prints in the digital age, it’s best to label them soon after we take them–before we forget the times, places, and subjects–then keep them safe. (You might be surprised by how many mislabeled prints I came across in my research!) Someday our present will be someone else’s past. Who can say how valuable our photographs may then prove to be?

***

David Wentworth Lazaroff is an independent writer and photographer living in Tucson, Arizona. He became fascinated by Sabino Canyon while working there as an environmental education specialist from 1977 to 1986. He has continued to study the canyon ever since then.

NACCS 2023: Recent Titles, Conference Discounts, and More!

March 27, 2023

Join us for the 2023 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies conference on March 29 – April 2 in Denver, Colorado! Make sure to stop by our table to browse our latest books and to speak with our Editor-in-Chief, Kristen Buckles. If you aren’t able to attend the conference this year, make sure to browse our latest books below and use the code AZNACCS23 for 30% off with free U.S. shipping through 5/5/2023. If you have questions about our publishing program, visit this page or contact Kristen at kbuckles@uapress.arizona.edu.

LGBTQ Politics in Nicaragua provides the previously untold history of the LGBTQ community’s emergence as political actors—from revolutionary guerillas to civil rights activists.

“This comprehensive English-language review of LGBTQ movements in Nicaragua is a welcome addition to the expanding cross-cultural scholarship on the politics of sex and gender diversity.”—CHOICE

Children Crossing Borders draws much-needed attention to the plight of migrant children and their families, illuminating the human and emotional toll that children experience as they crisscross the Americas. Exploring the connections between education, policy, cultural studies, and anthropology, the essays in this volume navigate a space of transnational children’s rights central to Latin American life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

World of Our Mothers highlights the largely forgotten stories of forty-five women immigrants in the early twentieth century. Through interviews in Arizona mining towns, Phoenix barrios, and selected areas of California, Texas, and the Midwest, we learn how they negotiated their lives with their circumstances.

Nuclear Nuevo México recovers the voices and stories that have been lost or ignored in the telling of U.S. nuclear history. By recuperating these narratives, Myrriah Gómez tells a new story of New Mexico, one in which the nuclear history is not separate from the collective colonial history of Nuevo México but instead demonstrates how earlier eras of settler colonialism laid the foundation for nuclear colonialism in New Mexico.

Read an excerpt from the book here, then read a brief interview with the author here.

Accessible and engaging, Latinx Belonging underscores and highlights Latinxs’ continued presence and contributions to everyday life in the United States as they both carve out and defend their place in society.

Gardening at the Margins explores how a group of home gardeners grow food in the Santa Clara Valley to transform their social relationships, heal from past traumas, and improve their health, communities, and environments.

From the early colonial period to the War on Terror, translation practices have facilitated colonialism and resulted in epistemicide, or the destruction of Indigenous and subaltern knowledge. This book discusses translation-as-epistemicide in the Americas and providing accounts of decolonial methods of translation.

This exciting new cultural history documents how Mexican Americans in twentieth-century film, television, and theater surpassed stereotypes, fought for equal opportunity, and subtly transformed the mainstream American imaginary. Through biographical sketches of underappreciated Mexican American actors, this work sheds new light on our national character and reveals the untold story of a multicentered, polycultural America.

Lotería is a collection of deeply evocative coming-of-age poems that take the reader on a voyage through the intimate experiences of displacement. In this bilingual collection, Colombian American poet Elizabeth Torres threads together the stories of family dynamics and the realities of migration with the archetypes of tarot and the traditional Lotería game, used for centuries as an object of divination and entertainment. Through these themes and images, the poems in Lotería narrate intimate moments in the lives and journeys of migrants, refugees, and all who have been forced into metamorphosis in order to reach the other side of the river.

Sitting at the intersection of border studies, immigration studies, and Latinx studies, this concise volume shows how Central American migrants in transit through Mexico survive the precarious and unpredictable road by forming different types of social ties, developing trust, and engaging in acts of solidarity. The accessible writing and detailed ethnographic narratives of different associations, ties, and groups that migrants form while in transit weave together theory with empirical observations to highlight and humanize the migrant experience.

Poet Richard Blanco Receives National Humanities Medal

On March 21, 2023, President Joe Biden awarded the National Humanities Medal to Richard Blanco. Blanco, who delivered his poem “One Today” at President Barack Obama’s second inauguration, is one of 12 people from across the nation chosen to receive the award.

In 2005, University of Arizona Press published Blanco’s Directions to The Beach of the Dead, for which the author received the Beyond Margins Award from the PEN American Center. His latest poetry collection is How to Love a Country.

This week, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo) said of the National Humanities Medal: “The recipients have enriched our world through writing that moves and inspires us; scholarship that enlarges our understanding of the past; and through their dedication to educating, informing, and giving voice to communities and histories often overlooked.” She continued, “I am proud to join President Biden in recognizing these distinguished leaders for their outstanding contributions to our nation’s cultural life.” 

The NEH described Richard Blanco: “An award-winning poet and author, professor and public speaker, and son of Cuban immigrants, Richard Blanco’s powerful storytelling challenges the boundaries of culture, gender, and class while celebrating the promise of our Nation’s highest ideals.”

Congratulations Richard Blanco!

Tom Zoellner Makes News in Arizona

Tom Zoellner made the news in Phoenix over the weekend, in this interview in The Arizona Republic (note: link is for subscribers only). The author of Rim to River: Looking into the Heart of Arizona described his home state as “a marvelous jumble” in the article.

Zoellner said his relationship with Arizona is complicated: “I’ve had a long argument with Arizona. Understanding the beauty of it and the intriguing people that live there, but also lamenting the reckless way that the cities have grown, a kind of thoughtless sense of what really makes a community and of course the dysfunctional politics and the way that we hand the keys over to anyone who comes in with a pile of money and an idea.”

In Southern Arizona, the author shared tales inspired by the Arizona Trail at two events last Friday. He spoke at La Posada in Green Valley at a special outdoor event for La Posada residents and Friends of the Tucson Festival of Books.

In the evening, Zoellner celebrated St. Patrick’s Day at the Triangle L Art Ranch in Oracle, Arizona. After a delicious Irish dinner of corn beef and cabbage, carrots and potatoes, he told stories that didn’t quite make it into the book. He answered readers’ questions and signed books, too.

Zoellner will be speaking at more events this week across Arizona:

Tuesday, March 21, 5:30 p.m at Bright Side Bookshop in Flagstaff

Wednesday, March 22, 6 p.m. at Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix

Thursday, March 23, 11 a.m. at The Madaras Gallery in Tucson

Thursday, March 23, 3 p.m. at Joyner-Green Valley Library in Green Valley

Saturday, March 25, 11:30 a.m. at Arizona Historical Society in Tucson

Cynthia Guardado Featured in L.A. Times

The Los Angeles Times journalist interviewed Salvadoran writers living in Los Angeles. But their photographer had to travel to the Tucson Festival of Books to photograph three authors who were panelists at the annual spring literary gathering. Poet Cynthia Guardado, author of Cenizas, was one of the poets interviewed for March 16, 2023, article, and photographed in Tucson. (In L.A. Times photo above from left to right: Alejandro Varela, Cynthia Guardado, Raquel Gutiérrez.)

Journalist Christopher Soto wrote: “For too long, the American literary industry has discussed El Salvador and its people through the gaze of cultural outsiders. But that has started to change, with an explosion of writing by Salvadorans in the United States — especially those with ties to California.” He chronicles the recent history of literary journals that published Central American Writers in exile.

The war in El Salvador is often present in Guardado’s poems. As Soto wrote, “Her verse mixes family and personal histories, bounces between nations and covers the U.S.-funded civil war in El Salvador, which lasted from 1979 through 1992. At its core is an essential question: How should the generation after a war relate to the violence that has preceded us, and where do we go next?”

In the article, Felix Cruz, a publicist for Random House, referred to the “Salvadoran Renaissance in literature” in the United States. However, in El Salvador today, governmental and societal persecution of writers continues.

Kudos to Cynthia Guardado and other Salvadoran writers for this California media spotlight!

Extended Stay Surges into Spring

Juan Martinez rides the horror winds into spring with another top ten list and revealing interviews.

First on the east coast, The New York Public Library just put Extended Stay, by Juan Martinez, on its list of “10 New Horror Novels That Are Scarier than Scream VI.” NYPL’s Carrie McBride writes, “Whether you’re a Scream completist and already took in the most recent film of the franchise and are looking to keep the frights going, or you’re always looking for the adrenaline rush of a scary, disturbing tale, these ten novels, all published in the last few months, are sure to give you chills and thrills.”

Staying in the city for a moment, Vol 1 Brooklyn’s Tobias Carroll interviewed Martinez about his novel. The author revealed his writing process, changing plots, moving scenes around, and how living in Las Vegas inspired him: “I’m pretty sure we all have some version of Vegas in our heads. That’s all to say, I don’t think I was drawn to Vegas as a setting or a subject, but I couldn’t quite write about anything else after I stopped living there. I wanted to write a little about the weird mix of opportunity and exploitation that’s there if you work the service industry — how you really can make a whole life there, or start up a new one.”

Martinez also liked that his interviewer figured out Extended Stay‘s connection to his previous book, Best Worst American, will you be able to work it out?

In Lit Reactor’s “Exposing Power as Ridiculous: A Conversation between Juan Martinez and Eden Robins,” the Chicago authors find common ground between funny and scary fiction. Asked if writing horror is cathartic, Martinez replied: “Writing a genuinely horrific moment—one that comes out of nowhere and is sick and gross and out there—all of that is super clinical and detached for me. I’m not scaring myself. I’m just trying to set up stuff to scare a reader who shares a lot of my own readerly interests but is (1) imaginary, (2) not me, but (3) also may be a lot like me.” Find out what else he said about resistance and rebellion, navigating trauma in a life that is fundamentally uncontrolled, and what he’s reading right now.

Photos from AWP 2023

We loved seeing many of our authors at the AWP Bookfair University of Arizona Press exhibit booth last week! Poets, novelists, and editors celebrated together. Here are a few photos from Seattle, courtesy of UA Press Assistant Editor Elizabeth Wilder.

Poets Carlos Aguasaco and Elizabeth Torres
Poet Cynthia Guardado
Author Daniel Olivas
Poet Casandra López
Camino del Sol Editor Rigoberto González
Poets Gloria Muñoz and Urayoán Noel
Poet Robert Davis Hoffman
Alma García, author of All That Rises, forthcoming this fall from The University of Arizona Press

Brandy Nālani McDougall Shares Her Vision for Being Hawai’I Poet Laureate

Stephanie Han of Hawai’i Public Radio interviewed Brandy Nālani McDougal about her vision for the next two years as Hawai’i State Poet Laureate.  McDougall–scholar, mother, and aloha ‘āina from Maui–is the first woman selected. She says her daughters inspired her forthcoming book of poetry: ʻĀina Hānau, Birth Land.

In the interview, McDougall reflected on her high school education in “honors English” and the western canon: “Even if the western canon is intended to be more inclusive these days, you really lose out on the chance of teaching the literature of your community and of your students.” She continued, “Students can be exposed to literature that is most relevant to them, then they can see themselves as literary people. Then we can grow an amazing canon of our own in Hawai’i.”

Asked about her plans as poet laureate, McDougall explained that she wants poetry to be a place of healing, and working through trauma. She sees poetry as “reconnecting with ʻĀina, with land, and water, alongside connecting with our own stories.”

Listen to the full interview here.

Photos from University of Arizona Libraries Spring Author Talk with John P. Schaefer

University of Arizona President Emeritus John P. Schaefer celebrated his new book, Desert Jewels, at the University of Arizona Libraries Spring Author Talk on March 6. The UA Libraries hosted the event at the Tucson Botanical Gardens with introductions from University President Robert Robbins, University Dean of Libraries Shan Sutton, and The University of Arizona Press Director Kathryn Conrad.

Cactus flowers are jewels of the desert—they add brilliant pops of color to our arid surroundings. In Desert Jewels, renowned Tucson photographer John P. Schaefer brings the exquisite and unexpected beauty of the cactus flower to the page. Hundreds of close-up photographs of cactus flowers native to the U.S. Southwest and Mexico offer a visual feast of color and texture, nuance and light.

Dean Sutton and President Robbins explain how President Emeritus John Schaefer brought international recognition to the University of Arizona.
President Emeritus and Author John Schaefer tells how his early life inspired his later creativity in photography.
University of Arizona Press Director Kathryn Conrad introduces John Schaefer.
John Schaefer signs Desert Jewels.

Tucson Festival of Books Photos

Our authors enjoyed presenting at the Tucson Festival of Books, March 4-5, 2023, and signing books at our booth! Readers filled the tent each day and walked away with armfuls of books from our 2023 Spring Catalog, as well as best sellers and unique books from previous years.

Senior editor Allyson Carter and Author Tim Hunter
Authors Miguel Montiel and Yvonne de La Torre Montiel chat with readers.
On the right, author Tom Zoellner speaks at a panel sponsored by UA Press at UA Libraries Special Collections.
Author Devon Mihesuah, Publicity Manager Abby Mogollon, Author Gary Paul Nabhan, and UA Press Director Kathryn Conrad.
Author John P. Schaefer and Editorial Assistant Alana Enriquez.
Author Juan Martinez signs his book.

Author Tom Zoellner signs and chats with readers.
A reader chats with a few Mineralogy of Arizona authors: Harvey Jong, Ron Gibbs, and Jan Rasmussen
Poet and Editor Allison Adelle Hedge Coke and Editor Elizabeth Wilder

AWP 2023: Recent Books, Conference Discounts, and More!

March 6, 2023

Join us at the 2023 AWP conference in Seattle, Washington on March 8-11! Make sure to stop by our booth to browse our latest titles, get your books signed by several of our authors, and purchase books at a 30% conference discount and catch up with our Assistant Editor, Elizabeth Wilder, Ph.D. We hope to catch up with you at the conference, but if you can’t make it to Seattle this year, make sure to browse our latest titles below. Use the code AZAWP23 for 30% off with free U.S. shipping through 4/15/2023. If you have questions about our publishing program, visit this page or contact Elizabeth at ewilder@uapress.arizona.edu.

AWP 2023 Book Signings

Thursday, March 9:

1:30 PM – 2:30 PM: Elizabeth Torres signing copies of Lotería.

Friday, March 10:

11:00 AM – 12:00 PM: Gloria Muñoz signing copies of Danzirly.

1:00 PM – 2:00 PM: Jennifer Givhan signing copies of Rosa’s Einstein.

2:00 PM – 3:30 PM: Carlos Aguasaco and Jennifer Rathbun signing copies of Cardinal in My Window with a Mask on Its Beak.

Saturday, March 11:

3:00 PM – 4:00 PM: Cynthia Guardado signing copies of Cenizas.

Cenizas offers an arresting portrait of a Salvadoran family whose lives were shaped by tumultuous global politics. Cynthia Guardado’s poems argue that the Salvadoran Civil War permanently altered the Salvadoran people’s reality by forcing them to become refugees who continue to leave their homeland, even decades after the war.

In Raven’s Echo, Tlingit artist and poet Robert Davis Hoffmann’s poetry grapples with reconstructing a life within Tlingit tradition and history. The destructiveness of colonialism brings a profound darkness to some of the poems in Raven’s Echo, but the collection also explores the possibility of finding spiritual healing in the face of historical and contemporary traumas.

Watch a poetry reading and Q&A with poet Robert Davis Hoffmann here.

Extended Stay is a horror novel about an undocumented brother and sister who end up at a Las Vegas hotel that exploits and consumes anyone who comes into its orbit.

Extended Stay was featured in Book Riot, read more here. Extended Stay was also listed as one of the most anticipated Chicago books of 2023!

In Dance of the Returned, the disappearance of a young Choctaw leads Detective Monique Blue Hawk to investigate a little-known ceremonial dance. As she traces the steps of the missing man, she discovers that the seemingly innocuous Renewal Dance is not what it appears to be. After Monique embarks on a journey that she never thought possible, she learns that the past and future can converge to offer endless possibilities for the present. She must also accept her own destiny of violence and peacekeeping.

Read a brief interview with author Devon A. Mihesuah here. Listen to Devon talk about her new book on Native American Calling here.

Lotería is a collection of deeply evocative coming-of-age poems that take the reader on a voyage through the intimate experiences of displacement. In this bilingual collection, Colombian American poet Elizabeth Torres threads together the stories of family dynamics and the realities of migration with the archetypes of tarot and the traditional Lotería game, used for centuries as an object of divination and entertainment. Through these themes and images, the poems in Lotería narrate intimate moments in the lives and journeys of migrants, refugees, and all who have been forced into metamorphosis in order to reach the other side of the river.

Lotería is the winner of the Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets.

A sharp examination of Arizona by a nationally acclaimed writer, Rim to River follows Tom Zoellner on a 790-mile walk across his home state as he explores key elements of Arizona culture, politics, and landscapes. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in learning more about a vibrant and baffling place.

Tom Zoellner Talks Dirty Deals on Podcasts

Do you want to know the historic bars and restaurants in Arizona where Tom Zoellner says, “dirty deals have gone down”? Listen to the author in conversation with the podcast hosts on Voices of the West.

Tom’s family has lived in Arizona since 1908, and he spent years as a journalist for The Arizona Republic. He knows his way around his home state and tells tales in Rim to River: Looking into the Heart of Arizona.

On the podcast, he says Arizona is not a perfect state:  “I have complicated feelings about Arizona . . . there’s so many fascinating aspects to it. I wanted to capture it in all its imperfections and all its grandeur.”

Zoellner mentions Ho’zho, a spiritual state of being translated from Diné as “balance, getting your insides in tune with the outside.” Zoellner says there isn’t really an adequate English translation of the word. But in conversation with two Diné marathon runners in his book’s first chapter, he comes to a deeper understanding.

Tom will also speak with Tucson radio legend Bill Buckmaster and Tucson Weekly editor Jim Nintzel on the Buckmaster Show, 12 – 1 p.m., March 3, on KVOI AM 1030, in Tucson. Listen online, live or after air date.

The Cowboy Up podcast drops on Saturday, March 11, at high noon. Dude rancher Russell True and cowboy Alan Day will chat with Tom about how the Arizona Trail inspired his essay collection.

Listen whenever and wherever you want and go on the trail with Tom!

Excerpt from We Are the Stars

February 24, 2023

In We Are the Stars, Colonizing and Decolonizing the Oceti Sakowin Literary Tradition, author Sarah Hernandez recovers the literary record of Oceti Sakowin (historically known to some as the Sioux Nation) women, who served as their tribes’ traditional culture keepers and culture bearers. In so doing, it furthers discussions about settler colonialism, literature, nationalism, and gender.

In this book, I contend that replacing Indigenous women with non-Indigenous teachers, preachers, and writers is a conscious and deliberate act of settler-colonial violence that strikes at the very heart of tribal nationhood: women and land. The silencing of Indigenous women and the loss of Indigenous land are inextricably linked. Native feminist scholars Maile Arvine, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill argue that “the management of Indigenous peoples’ gender roles and sexuality was [and still is] . . . key in remaking Indigenous peoples into settler state citizens.”

The United States is founded on the theory and practice of settler colonialism: a continuous and ongoing process of Indigenous erasure that seeks to eliminate tribal nationhood by destroying Indigenous lifeways and replacing them with Western beliefs and values (e.g., matriarchy → patriarchy). Settler colonialism is an invasive process that erases Indigenous people and communities at multiple levels: culturally, linguistically, socially, politically, and legally. Law professor Bethany Ruth Berger emphasizes that the United States not only disempowers Indigenous women culturally and socially, but also politically and legally as well. Over the past one-hundred-plus years, U.S. federal Indian law and policy has “directly diminish[ed] the power and autonomy of women in tribal communities” through a series of legal cases and precedents that replaced Indigenous women “as the head of the family and the cultivator of the land.” Perhaps the most obvious, but certainly not the only, example is the Dawes Allotment Act of 1887, which divided communal tribal lands into individual plots owned by the male heads of household and transferred land from women to men.

Wendy Greyeyes wins Faculty Teaching Award

University of New Mexico Alumni Association gave Wendy Greyeyes their 2023 Faculty Teaching Award. The award recognizes outstanding teaching and service to students.

Wendy S. Greyeyes (Diné) is an Assistant Professor of Native American Studies at The University of New Mexico. She recently published A History of Navajo Education: Disentangling our Sovereign Body (University of Arizona Press, 2022) with a forthcoming anthology, The Yazzie Case: Building a Public Education System for Our Indigenous Future, through the University of New Mexico Press. Greyeyes formerly served as the tribal liaison for the Arizona Governor, a statistician/demographer for the Department of Diné Education, a Chief Implementation Officer for the Bureau of Indian Education, and a research consultant for the Department of Diné Education.

A History of Navajo Nation Education: Disentangling Our Sovereign Body unravels the tangle of federal and state education programs that have been imposed on Navajo people and illuminates the ongoing efforts by tribal communities to transfer state authority over Diné education to the Navajo Nation.

Congratulations Wendy Greyeyes on this award!

Five Questions with Tom Zoellner

February 27, 2023

Tom Zoellner walked across the length of Arizona to come to terms with his home state. But the trip revealed more mountains behind the mountains.

Rim to River is the story of this extraordinary journey through redrock country, down canyons, up mesas, and across desert plains to the obscure valley in Mexico that gave the state its enigmatic name. The trek is interspersed with incisive essays that pick apart the distinctive cultural landscape of Arizona: the wine-colored pinnacles and complex spirituality of Navajoland, the mind-numbing stucco suburbs, desperate border crossings, legislative skullduggery, extreme politics, billion-dollar copper ventures, dehydrating rivers, retirement kingdoms, old-time foodways, ghosts of old wars, honky-tonk dreamers, murder mysteries, and magical Grand Canyon reveries.

What was your reason for writing this book?

Arizona is an easy place to caricature, either as a scenic wonderland or a den of political craziness. It’s both of those to some degree but that is nowhere close to the whole story.

You grew up in Arizona, intimately aware of its landscape. Was there anything that surprised you about the natural world you experienced while on your Arizona Trail journey?

Nobody knows the whole place. There are pockets of Arizona that will always remain tucked away even to those who spend a lifetime here.

You said in one of the essays that a truly great novel about Arizona has not yet been written. Is this still true?

Yes. There have been plenty of very good novels set here, but none that has truly captured the essence of the state. This is a challenge laid before the state’s fiction writers: where is the Great Arizona Novel? Can you write it, please?

Did the lack of water on the Arizona Trail inform your writing about water challenges facing the state of Arizona?

Most definitely. One of the baseline characteristics of Arizona is aridity — it has defined us from the beginning of human settlement here ten thousand years ago. Thanks to hydrology, it’s easy to live in modern Arizona without experiencing it personally. Nearly running out of water creates a sense of elemental urgency. 

What are you working on now?

A nonfiction narrative about the refugee camps of freed enslaved people in the early days of the U.S. Civil War.

***

Tom Zoellner, a fifth-generation Arizonan, is the author of eight nonfiction books, including The Heartless Stone, Uranium, The National Road, and Island on Fire, which won the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Bancroft Prize.

Excerpt from Border Water

February 17, 2023

The international boundary between the United States and Mexico spans more than 1,900 miles. Along much of this international border, water is what separates one country from the other. Border Wate The Politics of U.S.-Mexico Transboundary Water Management, 1945–2015 by Stephen Paul Mumme provides a historical account of the development of governance related to transboundary and border water resources between the United States and Mexico in the last seventy years.

This work examines the phases and pivot points in the development of U.S.-Mexico border water resources and reviews the theoretical approaches and explanation that impart a better understanding of these events. Mumme, a leading expert in water policy and border studies, describes three important periods in the chronology of transboundary water management. First, Mumme examines the 1944 Water Treaty, the establishment of the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) in 1945, and early transborder politics between the two governments. Next, he describes the early 1970s and the rise of environmentalism. In this period, pollution and salinization of the Colorado River Delta come into focus. Mumme shows how new actors, now including environmentalists and municipalities, broadened and strengthened the treaty’s applications in transboundary water management. The third period of transborder interaction described covers the opening and restricting of borders due to NAFTA and then 9/11.

Border Water places transboundary water management in the frame of the larger binational relationship, offering a comprehensive history of transnational water management between the United States and Mexico. As we move into the next century of transnational water management, this important work offers critical insights into lessons learned and charts a path for the future. Below read an excerpt from the book.

Anyone interested in U.S.-Mexico water politics should trace the 1,954-mile international boundary on Google Earth. The observer is immediately struck by the way water literally delineates the boundary in so many places. And not just the 1,200 miles along the Rio Grande from El Paso–Ciudad Juárez to Brownsville-Matamoros and the 24-mile strip between the northerly and southerly international boundaries along the Colorado River. Along the land boundary, the hydraulic divide is evident in many locations, particularly where the boundary bisects sister cities, revealing the vivid contrast of a verdant north juxtaposed against a barren south. It is, in fact, along this 700- mile land boundary where the knowledgeable viewer observes which country prevailed in the allocation of the waters of the upper Rio Grande and the Colorado River, a potent reminder of the historic asymmetry of political and economic power that often influenced and continues to influence decisions affecting the use and management of water resources in the border region.

An accounting of how this hydraulic boundary came to be, how it has been developed, and how it is managed today is partially revealed in several outstanding histories and analyses of water development and politics in the American Southwest. These studies range from various accounts of the Mexican-American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, to the exceptional scholarship on riparian development in the western United States by historians Paul Horgan (1984), Norris Hundley (1966), Frank Waters (1946), Evan Ward (2003), Donald Worster (1985), and Donald Pisani (1992), by diplomat Charles Timm (1941), and by journalists Philip Fradkin Introduction (1981) and Marc Reisner (1986), and to the scholarship on Mexican water development by Adolfo Orive Alba (1970) and Ernesto Enríquez Coyro (1976) and, recently, to a most welcome contribution by Marco Samaniego López (2006). Other more focused or more faceted studies by government officials and diplomats, legal specialists, engineers and hydrologists, ecologists, and social scientists flesh out a picture of binational and regional water politics and institutional development that is essential for comprehending the economic and hydraulic issues in play, the legal frames of the governmental actors in binational water relations, the development of national and international institutions engaged in conflict and cooperation on shared waters, and the political calculus of key governmental and nongovernmental stakeholders in transboundary water management. And yet, as rich and informative as these various works are, and taking into account a trove of scholarly and popular essays related to the topic, the reader is hard pressed to find within a single volume an account of the diplomacy and governance of water along the U.S.-Mexico border between 1945 and the present day.

This study aims to correct this deficiency. Its purpose is to provide a historical account of the development of governance related to transboundary and border water resources after 1945. As a longtime observer of U.S.- Mexico water and environmental relations, however, the author would be remiss in failing to take this opportunity to comment on certain themes in these relations, themes of particular resonance to scholars interested in understanding and strengthening a binational relationship that is today among the most important to which either country is a party. These themes, the manner in which transboundary water management is affected by the larger bilateral relationship, the problems of economic asymmetry and equity and their effect on binational water diplomacy, and the resilience of the binational treaty regime as it affects the sustainable management of shared water resources, are issues that most scholars tackling contemporary problems of binational water management confront directly or indirectly in their work. They are inescapable.

Five Questions with David Martínez

February 17, 2023

Carlos Montezuma is well known as an influential Indigenous figure of the turn of the twentieth century. While some believe he was largely interested only in enabling Indians to assimilate into mainstream white society, Montezuma’s image as a staunch assimilationist changes dramatically when viewed through the lens of his Yavapai relatives at Fort McDowell in Arizona. Through his diligent research and transcription of the letters archived in the Carlos Montezuma Collection at Arizona State University Libraries, David Martínez offers a critical new perspective on Montezuma’s biography and legacy in his new work My Heart Is Bound Up with Them. Today, Martínez answer our five questions, including about what inspired this work and the importance of archives and family histories.

Why did you embark on this work?

In the fall of 2014, Joyce Martin invited me to join her in applying for an Arizona Humanities Council grant. At the time, she was curator for the Labriola National American Indian Data Center at Arizona State University’s Hayden Library. More to the point, she wanted to digitize the Carlos Montezuma Archival Collection and needed help from a humanities scholar. That’s when I entered the picture. Joyce knew about my interest in American Indian intellectual history, the Progressive Era, and Carlos Montezuma. In fact, I had published a paper in a 2013 joint issue of the American Indian Quarterly and Studies in American Indian Literatures, in which I examined the advocacy work that Montezuma did for the Akimel O’odham and Piipaash communities at the Salt and Gila River reservations. Initially, when I agreed to collaborate with Joyce, I thought at most I was going to write a paper for publication in a peer reviewed journal. Little did I know that my interests in the Montezuma Collection would blossom into a full-length book.

Carlos Montezuma’s biography has been well-documented. But this work uncovers a new dimension to his life story. It recovers how his relatives informed his later activism. How did you uncover this story?

What I soon discovered when I delved into the boxes of material that are held in the Montezuma Collection is that there are nearly 120 personal letters, virtually all of which were composed by Montezuma’s relatives at Fort McDowell, and nearly the entirety was handwritten. Only a handful were typed. The letters spanned a roughly twenty-year period, beginning in 1901, and contained a host of topics, from the utterly mundane, such as needing a winter coat or wanting to purchase a trumpet from the Montgomery Ward catalog, to the profound, such as being anxious to organize a trip to Washington, DC, to plead for Yavapai land and water rights. Moreover, what was equally fascinating was the way that Montezuma’s cousins regarded him as a valued community member, who they urgently depended on to negotiate with the Office of Indian Affairs. As in any Indigenous community, one’s kinship relations are of utmost importance, especially when it comes to understanding one’s role and purpose in life. Montezuma found his. These handwritten letters provide a whole new context for comprehending and appreciating Montezuma’s work and legacy as a founding member of the Society of American Indians, the creator of the Wassaja newsletter, as an activist-intellectual, and, above all, as a Yavapai.

What is the importance of archives to this kind of historical recovery work?

What is remarkable about the Montezuma Collection is that everything was literally cast out with the trash. After Montezuma’s wife Marie passed away in 1956, her husband’s papers wound up on the curb. Fortunately, there were people who knew the value of these discarded items and rescued them. Eventually, the papers found their way into four major collections: the Wisconsin Historical Society, the Newberry Library, the University of Arizona, and Arizona State University. As an historically important Indigenous personage, Montezuma’s belongings are a dramatic example of how easily history can wind up on the trash heap, forever lost to posterity. Montezuma’s papers were saved from destruction, but how much of Indigenous history is lost because no one was around to perceive something’s true worth? When my grandfather, Simon Lewis, died in 1999, his papers, along with photographs and other affects, were almost tossed out. Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to ask for them. I’m keeping them now. Collectively, my grandfather’s archives provide a window onto the Gila River Indian Community as a minister at the Gila Crossing First Presbyterian Church, which began in the 1950s. Granted, I have yet to turn these items into an article or book, but the archival record is there when I am finally ready. In the meantime, what is important to know is that Indigenous histories cannot be preserved without a conscientious effort at preserving our own archival records. We should never underestimate our own worth, including the heritage items that we leave to our descendants. Simply relying on mainstream institutions like the National Archives and Library of Congress, or even local historical societies, is not enough. Fortunately, there are many people working in libraries and archives today, many of whom are Indigenous professionals, who are aware of these issues, and are working diligently at increasing awareness and setting an agenda for more digital sovereignty in Indigenous communities. In fact, the current director of the Labriola is Tohono O’odham and, I am proud to say, a former student of mine, Alex Soto.

How does your own family history inform your work as a scholar?

Someday I should write a memoir, so that I can answer this interesting and important question more thoroughly than I can here. With respect to my book on Montezuma, when I think about the work that he did for the Salt and Gila River reservations during the 1910s, I think about the world that my maternal grandparents were born into. My grandfather, Simon Lewis, was born in 1911. My grandmother, Margaret Lewis (née Childs), in 1913. During the 1930s and 1940s, my grandparents worked their allotment in the Gila River Indian Community. According to my mom, Marilyn, and her older siblings, my grandfather was a pretty good farmer. His allotment, like others, was created during Montezuma’s time, when the superintendent for the Pima Agency, with the help of an allotment agent, surveyed the Gila and Salt River reservations. While the Akimel O’odham and Piipaash, who share these two reservations, lost a lot of land because of allotment, what we retained as a community was in large part due to Montezuma’s willingness to work tirelessly at defending his Yavapai people at Fort McDowell (keeping them from being forcibly relocated to Salt River) and, by turns, preempting a land and water rights crisis at Salt and Gila River from getting worse.

What are you working on now?

Now that the Montezuma book is out, making for my fourth major work in the field of American Indian intellectual history, I am finally turning all of my attention to O’odham culture, history, and politics. Specifically, I am working on a history of the Hia-Ced O’odham, which is a small but vibrant part of the O’odham homeland. I am related to them through my maternal grandmother. As for the book-length project that I am researching—tentatively titled Elder Brother’s Forgotten People: How the Hia-Ced O’odham Survived an Epidemic to Claim a Place in Arizona’s Transborder History—it covers the period from 1848-1936. Recently, I completed a 53-page chapter on the 1851 yellow fever epidemic that swept across ancestral Hia-Ced O’odham land in southwestern Arizona, and down toward the Sierra Pinacate, which compelled people to flee from the region to take refuge in Ajo, Quitobaquito, and Sonoyta. Unfortunately, because of the US-Mexico border, the creation of Arizona Territory, and restraints set by US federal Indian policy—most significantly, its reservation system—the Hia-Ced O’odham saw their presence reduced to “extinction”—or so anthropologists and the Indian Bureau assumed. My book is ultimately about Hia-Ced O’odham resilience, as they endured the indignity of being overlooked as the four O’odham reservations were drawn without them. My historical narrative will conclude with the 1936 Papago Tribe (now Tohono O’odham Nation) Constitution, when eleven reservation districts were enumerated, complete with the omission of any reference to the Hia-Ced O’odham. In the end, I hope my work brings the Hia-Ced O’odham all of the recognition they deserve as a discreet part of the O’odham Jeved, the O’odham homeland.

***

David Martínez is professor of American Indian studies at Arizona State University and is enrolled in the Gila River Indian Community.

Photos from We Love the Night Sky celebration

On February 15, Tim Hunter, author of The Sky at Night, spoke at Western National Parks Association, in Oro Valley, Arizona. Fueled by cookies and hot chocolate, participants saw Jupiter and the Galilean moons through telescopes. David Levy, Tim Hunter, and other astronomers pointed out planets, bright stars, and constellations in the sky.

Author Tim Hunter speaks about his book: The Sky at Night: Easy Enjoyment from Your Backyard
Author Tim Hunter explains the planisphere, an analog star chart
We looked at Jupiter from the same telescope as President Obama (POTUS). This telescope went to the White House!
Chuck and Steve from Astronomy Adventures set up Celestron Telescope
Author Tim Hunter signs The Sky at Night
Half moon and star cookies and hot chocolate

Juan Felipe Herrera wins Frost Medal for lifetime achievement

The Poetry Society of America announced that Juan Felipe Herrera is the 2023 recipient of the Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry. Named for Robert Frost, and first given in 1930, the Frost Medal is one of the oldest and most prestigious awards in American poetry.

Herrera served as poet laureate from 2015 to 2017.

Herrera says, “With the poem, I can design a little corner for my families that have passed to live on, and for those brutalized by society to continue and be honored—to generate kindness.” Drawing on disparate sources, from European Modernism to Mesoamerican traditions to popular culture, Herrera creates a poetic voice that is both deeply embedded and wholly original. “Poetry,” he writes, “has gills and spears, spells and corn offerings, saxophones, tambourines and dinner tables—the sky liquid of a Jimi Hendrix guitar.”

The Frost Medal is one of many awards given to Herrera. For example, his poetry collection Half the World in Light: New and Selected Poems, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the PEN/Beyond Margins Award.

Congratulations Juan Felipe!

Excerpt from My Heart is Bound Up with Them

February 9, 2023

Through his diligent research and transcription of the letters archived in the Carlos Montezuma Collection at Arizona State University Libraries, David Martínez offers a critical new perspective on Montezuma’s biography and legacy in My Heart is Bound Up with Them, How Carlos Montezuma Became the Voice of a Generation. During an attempt to force the Fort McDowell Yavapai community off of their traditional homelands north of Phoenix, the Yavapai community members and leaders wrote to Montezuma pleading for help. It was these letters and personal correspondence from his Yavapai cousins George and Charles Dickens, as well as Mike Burns that sparked Montezuma’s desperate but principled desire to liberate his Yavapai family and community—and all Indigenous people—from the clutches of an oppressive Indian Bureau. Below read an excerpt from the book.

Much has been written about this full blood Yavapai because he had an unbelievable life and left an inspiring legacy. Wassaja was not born into a world of peace. In 1866 there was an extermination policy on Indians. His mother gave birth to Wassaja on the ground somewhere in Kewevkepaya (Southeastern Yavapai) country, probably within view of Four Peaks or the Superstition Mountains. For his aboriginal parents, he was the new generation and the continuation of their native race.


Such was how anthropologist Sigrid Khera described the legacy of one of the more extraordinary lives of the Progressive Era struggle for Indian rights. Nearly a century after his death in 1923, the name of Carlos Montezuma still stands prominently in modern American Indian history. For the Fort McDowell Yavapai community, in particular, Montezuma is remembered as a revered ancestor, whose memory is preserved in the names of the Wassaja Memorial Health Center, Wassaja Family Services, and the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation Wassaja Scholarship at Arizona State University. For those outside of the Yavapai community, such as the author of the book in hand, Montezuma is remembered through his corpus of writings, most importantly the political essays that appeared in his self-published newsletter Wassaja. Speaking of which, the scholarship on Montezuma’s work and legacy is possible largely because of the archives (held at the Wisconsin Historical Society, the Newberry Library, Arizona State University, and the University of Arizona) that nearly perished after his death, when Montezuma’s name Introduction A Trunkful of Papers Arrives at ASU fell into relative obscurity. Indeed, at the time of the Red Power movement (1964–1973), which rose to overshadow the Progressive Era, Montezuma was all but forgotten. During this period, Montezuma appeared in books by Edward H. Spicer (1962) and Hazel W. Hertzberg (1971). However, neither volume did much to reaffirm Montezuma’s place in Indian rights history. It was a different story, of course, in Fort McDowell, Camp Verde, and Prescott, where Montezuma’s descendants invoked his name in their battle against the Orme Dam during the 1970s, which pitted them against the Central Arizona Project.


During the early years of the struggle against Orme Dam, specifically in spring 1974, the Arizona Statesman ran a story titled “Seeds of Wounded Knee? Carlos Montezuma Collection, a Timely Acquisition, Boosts Stature of ASU’s Hayden Library.” Wounded Knee in this context referred to the 1973 confrontation between the American Indian Movement and federal forces at the historic site of the 1890 massacre of unarmed Ghost Dance prisoners. As for the Carlos Montezuma Collection, its contents, which were literally contained in a trunk that was nearly lost to posterity, documented the Yavapai activist-intellectual’s battle on behalf of Fort McDowell against the Indian Bureau during the 1910s, when it sought to forcibly remove the “Mohave-Apache” to the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Reservation for the purpose of opening the land to local developers. Six decades after Montezuma’s battle, the “Fort McDowell Mohave Apache Tribe” was opposing the proposed construction of the Orme Dam—a part of the Central Arizona Project—that threatened to flood Yavapai land. Montezuma’s name would be invoked by those fighting to protect Fort McDowell. Could the Montezuma Collection aid in the struggle for justice?

UA Press earns three PubWest design awards

February 8, 2023

Congratulations to The University of Arizona Press Editorial Production and Design team: Amanda Krause, Leigh McDonald, and Sara Thaxton! Because of their amazing creativity and dedication to excellence, the team received three awards for book design at The Publishers Association of the West’s (PubWest) 2023 conference.

UA Press designers dominated the podium in the category of Short Stories/Poetry/Anthologies. Raven’s Echo by Robert David Hoffmann, won gold. Cardinal in My Window with a Mask on Its Beak, by Carlos Aguasaco won silver.

And just in time for the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, the beautiful full-color Mineralogy of Arizona, Fourth Edition, by Raymond W. Grant, Ron Gibbs, Harvey Jong, Jan Rasmussen, and Stanley Keith, won silver in the Reference Book category.

PubWest is a national trade organization of publishers and of associated publishing-related members. The association presents annual design awards for book design, book cover design, and graphic novel design.

Five Questions with Tim Hunter

February 7, 2023

In his new book The Sky at Night avid stargazer and astronomy columnist Tim Hunter covers all the basics—from the Moon, planets, and stars to the history and origins of constellations and selected famous astronomers and events. The book emphasizes naked-eye viewing with an occasional reference to using a pair of binoculars or a small telescope. Hunter encourages beginners to explore the skies while giving them a solid understanding of what they see. Building on his writings for the long-running Sky Spy column, Hunter defines and outlines astronomical terms and how they relate to locating objects in the sky. He weaves in his personal experiences of what he learned about astronomy as a columnist for more than a decade, detailing his mistakes and triumphs to help other would-be astronomers excel in this heavenly hobby. Today, he answers our questions.

What inspired you to write this book?

I am an avid amateur astronomer whose hobby has run amok.  I have always wanted to do an astronomy book but never had good idea or subject matter for such a book until I started writing the weekly “Sky Spy” column for the Arizona Daily Star.  I have written three academic radiology books and was familiar with putting together a book.  After writing Sky Spy columns for ten years, I realized the material in the columns would be ideal for a book on easy observing of the night sky.

You’ve been a columnist about astronomy for more than a decade.  What were the challenges in turning your column into a book?

When I began thinking about turning my columns into a book, I had more than 750 weekly columns that had been published.  There are many books where authors have combined their weekly or monthly columns into a book.  A lot of these are simply thrown together and renamed as a book without any major editing or condensation of the material.  My columns ranged from 250 to 300 words, frequently covering the same topic from year to year like the equinoxes or the solstices.  The columns were often Tucson or Arizona centric and very often date specific describing an astronomical event.

If the book were to have any worth, it could not just be columns thrown together and called a book.  There had to be a consistent whole and most Tucson and Arizona centric material had to be removed as well as most of the date specific material.    

Having to explain a concept to someone else means you must understand it as well.  I have often been chagrined to discover how little I knew about an astronomical topic when I first sat down to write a column about it.  When I finally got done with the column, the column might not be any good, but I sure learned a lot.

I picked important points from the columns and collated them, I hope, into an intelligible whole to be enjoyed by the reader.  I describe what I learned about astronomy and about being a columnist over the years.  I tell about my mistakes and occasional triumphs, advising other would-be astronomy columnists what to emphasize and what to avoid.  This book really is “the adventures of a sometimes astronomy columnist.”

Much of the best material for the Sky Spy columns has come from its readers through questions or complaints.  Constant reader feedback is essential for keeping a column fresh and relevant. 

Traditional newspaper columns are fading from public view due to the challenges facing print media in today’s digital world.  Even so, a blog or digital column needs as much input as possible from interested persons, readers and editors.  The sky is a wonderful draw.  It interests everyone in some fashion.  Put a telescope on a busy corner in the heart of a metropolis.  You will draw a crowd no matter the light pollution or surrounding urban chaos.  It is hard to beat the glory of Saturn’s rings or the craters on the Moon in a small telescope.  The summer Milky Way overhead on a clear night at a dark sky site rivals any digital trick available to the modern movie industry.  A total eclipse of the Sun is such a stunning experience that it has no serious rival in nature. 

What first brought you to astronomy?

I have been an amateur astronomer since 1950 when Miss Wilmore my first-grade teacher showed me a book of the constellations.  I was fascinated by a drawing of Cygnus the Swan and wondered whether I could ever see that in the sky.  That book has been published in the 1920s and did not list Pluto.  When I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, Pluto was a planet.  Today, Pluto is now longer a planet, but that is a story for another time.  It turns out the book I though was outdated when I was in first grade is now back in style.

You advocate naked-eye viewing, and your book discusses objects easily viewed this way.  Why do you like this approach?

The sky is wonderful.  It is to be enjoyed day and night with easy viewing of the night sky the focus of the book.  All one has to do is step outside and look up.  I assume the reader is literate and interested in the sky but not particularly knowledgeable.  It assumes one is not familiar with most of the constellations, but it is hoped the descriptions provided and the directions given are good enough to find one’s way around the sky.  

There are many things you can easily see from your backyard even if you live in the city: the Moon, the planets, bright stars, bright satellites, the Earth’s shadow, conjunctions of the planets and Moon, eclipses, and bright constellation.  At a darker suburban location, you can even see a few star clusters and at least one galaxy with your naked eye.  If you add a good pair of easily held binoculars, you extend your viewing many times further. 

I will have succeeded if you enjoy the sky as much as I do and make friends with the Moon, planets, and stars. 

What are you working on now?

I have an observatory in my front yard in Tucson, the 3towers Observatory, and an observatory out of town near Sonoita, Arizona, the Grasslands Observatory (see: http://www.grasslandsobservatory.com ).  The Grasslands Observatory sits on a high 5000-foot altitude grasslands between distant mountains in all directions.  It has three telescopes that can be controlled remotely from Tucson and are used for astrophotography projects.  An ongoing project is to image all the 370 Barnard Objects in color.  These are regions of dark nebulosity which were first described and photographed in black and white more than 100 years ago by the famous astronomer E. E. Barnard (1857-1923).

***

Tim B. Hunter, MD, MSc, is a professor emeritus in the Department of Medical Imaging at the University of Arizona College of Medicine and has been the author of the Sky Spy column in the Arizona Daily Star for more than fifteen years. He is a co-founder of the International Dark-Sky Association and has received multiple awards for his work addressing light pollution.

Excerpt from Chicano-Chicana Americana

Chicano-Chicana Americana: Pop Culture Pluralism Starring Anthony Quinn, Katy Jurado, Robert Beltran, and Lupe Ontiveros by Anthony Macías is a cultural history of Mexican Americans in film, television, and theater. Through biographical sketches of performers, this work asserts Mexican Americans’ proper place in the national narratives of our collective imaginary. Conveying a multicentered, polycultural America, this book shows us intriguing performers in bit parts who steal the scene and redefine what it means to be American.

Each biographical chapter analyzes an underappreciated actor, revealing their artistic contributions to U.S. common culture. Their long-shot careers tell a tale of players taking action with agency and fighting for screen time and equal opportunity despite disadvantages and differential treatment in Hollywood. These dynamic and complex individuals altered cinematic representations—and audience expectations—by surpassing stereotypes.

The book explores American national character by showing how ethnic Mexicans attained social and cultural status through fair, open competition without a radical realignment of political or economic structures. Their creative achievements demanded dignity and earned respect. Macías argues that these performances demonstrated a pop culture pluralism that subtly changed mainstream America, transforming it from the mythological past of the Wild West to the speculative future of science fiction. Below read an excerpt from the book.

To further contextualize the book’s career retrospectives and explain its theoretical framework, allow me to unpack its title and subtitle.

            Chicano-Chicana

Not all of the people analyzed in this study necessarily self-identify as Chicano or Chicana. Nevertheless, whereas the label Mexican American evokes the 1940s and 1950s, Chicano-Chicana (and, alternately, Chicana-Chicano) is a more flexible term that connotes bilingualism, Mexican cultural connections, a mestizo (mixed-race with Indian ancestry) difference, and a broad range of cultural production and expressive cultural evidence, including art. I see the hyphen in Chicano-Chicana as representing a gender spectrum, thus I also use its combined form, Chican@. For me, the elegant unbroken line of @ symbolizes a wholeness between the Spanish-language o, gendered, and the a, gendered, merged together, encircled as one. This embrace signifies a twenty-first-century vision of unity and parity, holistically connecting, establishing rapport, and cultivating relationships, much like the terms Chicanx and Latinx.

Before the 1960s, some Mexican Americans used the word Chicano as a disparaging term for a poor, recently arrived mestizo migrant worker from Mexico. A new generation of activists, inspired by the civil rights movement and fluent in dual idioms, politicized the word Chicano in order to reject assimilation, identify with their Indigenous heritage, teach Mexican and Mexican American history, promote Spanish-language usage and bilingualism, and convey dissatisfaction with their socioeconomic conditions and political position in postwar America. They began calling each other Chicano and Chicana, as well as carnal and carnala (brother and sister). Through mass mobilization and direct-action protest, militant Chicanos and Chicanas fought for collective community empowerment and political self-determination, resisted institutional neglect and hostility, and exposed the hypocrisy of American liberalism and tokenism. Everyday people took to the streets demanding equal educational opportunities and decrying police brutality and differential treatment in the criminal justice system.

As a political identification, Chicano or Chicana still expresses a socially conscious brown pride, but without the male privilege, sexism, and homophobia of old-school Chicano nationalism. Victor Viesca argues that the 1990s post–Chicano Movement generation’s “Chicana/o sensibility” is “neither assimilationist nor separatist,” and that it welcomes women’s perspectives and leadership while respecting “different sexual orientations.” As Richard Dyer observed, “Having a word for oneself and one’s group, making a politics out of what that word should be, draws attention to and also reproduces one’s marginality, confirms one’s place outside of power and thus outside of the mechanisms of change. Having a word also contains and fixes identity.” Yet “culture is politics, politics is culture,” Dyer also declared. So, “what we are called and what we call ourselves matter, have material and emotional consequences.”

The terms Chicana and Chicano illuminate the nonstigmatized status of acculturated-yet-conscious Mexican Americans who attempt to transcend stereotypes by defining themselves. For example, Richard “Cheech” Marin, an actor and comedian who has long articulated a Chicano point of view, stated, “I’m not Mexican—I’ve never even been to Mexico . . . but I knew I wasn’t white . . . so when I first heard Chicano . . . that’s it, that’s the can-do spirit . . . the rasquache raised to an art form . . . I’m a Chicano . . . this other thing is really good, and I can fit into any culture.” “Rasquache” refers to rasquachismo, which Tomás Ybarra-Frausto theorized as a working-class “Chicano sensibility,” an “attitude” based on an “outsider viewpoint . . . irreverent and impertinent.” It is a resilient “underdog perspective . . . rooted in resourcefulness and adaptability . . . survival and inventiveness.” To be rasquache is to make moves, or “movidas . . . the coping strategies you use to gain time, to make options, to retain hope.” In short, rasquachismo helps “to create a Chicano self-vision of wholeness,” it is “a way of being in the world.”

Michael Chiago Wins Southwest Books of the Year Award

February 2, 2023

We are thrilled to announce that Michael Chiago by Michael Chiago Sr. and Amadeo M. Rea is the winner of a 2023 Southwest Books of the Year Award! Southwest Books of the Year considers titles published during the calendar year that are about Southwest subjects, or are set in the Southwest.

Here’s what one of the judges, Lydia Otero, had to say about the book:

“Self-taught artist Michael Chiago bases his paintings on the O’odham practices he witnessed and his conversations with elders about a past that preceded him. Born in 1946, he grew up on the reservation and started drawing when he was sent away to boarding school. One cannot help but appreciate the intricate details in each painting of the desert people, landscapes, plants and animal life. Reprinted in color, each of his paintings provide a treasure trove of insights into the O’odham people and their lives in the Sonoran Desert. Co-author Amadeo M. Rea incorporates words and phrases from the O’odham language in his descriptions of Chiago’s work that provide additional context and further enhance the visual experience. As an O’odham artist, Chiago’s art offers a rare indigenous perspective that makes this book a must-read for those interested in the history and ethnography of the Sonoran Desert.”—Lydia R. Otero

Congratulations, Michael and Amadeo!

Open Arizona: Twenty Backlist Archaeology Titles Now Available

January 31, 2023

Thanks to a grant from the NEH, we are pleased to announce that we have been able to add twenty backlist titles in archaeology. These titles expand our understandings of the ancient Southwest and demonstrate the University of Arizona’s Press’s long-standing excellence in the field of archaeology.

Here are the new works:

Fish et al / The Marana Community in the Hohokam World

Hargrave / Mexican Macaws

Hinsley & Wilcox / The Southwest in the American Imagination

Huckell / Of Marshes and Maize

Huntley / Ancestral Zuni Glaze-Decorated Pottery

Kintigh / Settlement, Subsistence, and Society in Late Zuni Prehistory

Longacre / Ceramic Ethnoarchaeology

Longacre et al / Multidisciplinary Research at Grasshopper Pueblo, Arizona

Mabry / Canals and Communities

Mathews & Morrison / Lifeways in the Northern Maya Lowlands

Mills & Crown / Ceramic Production in the American Southwest

Nelson / Mimbres during the Twelfth Century

Oliver / Landscapes and Social Transformations on the Northwest Coast

Rocek / Navajo Multi-Household Social Units

Shaw / White Roads of the Yucatán

Snead / Ancestral Landscapes of the Pueblo World

Sullivan & Bayman / Hinterlands and Regional Dynamics in the Ancient Southwest

Varien / Sedentism and Mobility in a Social Landscape

Whalen & Minnis / The Neighbors of Casas Grandes

Zedeño / Sourcing Prehistoric Ceramics at Chodistaas Pueblo, Arizona

AISA 2023: Recent Books, Conference Discounts, and More!

January 30, 2023

Join us at the 24th annual American Indian Studies Association conference in Tempe, Arizona, on February 1-3! Visit our table to browse our recent titles and purchase books at a 30% conference discount, or browse our recent titles below and receive a 30% discount with free U.S. shipping with the code AZAISA23 through 3/5/2023. If you have questions about our publishing program, visit this page.

Postindian Aesthetics is a collection of critical, cutting-edge essays on a new generation of Indigenous writers who are creatively and powerfully contributing to a thriving Indigenous literary canon that is redefining the parameters of Indigenous literary aesthetics.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

Our Fight Has Just Begun illuminates Native voices while exposing how the justice system has largely failed Native American victims and families. This book tells the untold stories of hate crimes committed against Native Americans in the Four Corners region of the United States.

Bennett offers a reference point for understanding contemporary issues of racial violence, underscoring the firm entrenchment of systemic racism. Highly recommended.”— G. R. Campbell, CHOICE

Visualizing Genocide engages the often sparse and biased discourses of genocidal violence against Indigenous communities documented in exhibits, archives, and museums. Essayists and artists from a range of disciplines identify how Native knowledge can be effectively incorporated into memory spaces.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

O’odham artist Michael Chiago Sr.’s paintings provide a window into the lifeways of the O’odham people. This book offers a rich account of how Tohono O’odham and Akimel O’odham live in the Sonoran Desert now and in the recent past.

Read about a book celebration we hosted with Western National Parks Association here.

Carbon Sovereignty is a deep dive into the coal industry and the Navajo Nation captures a pivotal moment in the history of energy shift and tribal communities. Geographer Andrew Curley spent more than a decade documenting the rise and fall coal, talking with those affected most by the changes—Diné coal workers, environmental activists, and politicians.

Trickster Academy is a collection of poems that explore the experience of being Native in Academia—from land acknowledgement statements, to mascots, to the histories of using Native American remains in anthropology. This collection illuminates the shared experiences of Indians across many regions, and all of us who live amongst Tricksters.

On the heels of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Department of Diné Education, this important education history explains how the current Navajo educational system is a complex terrain of power relationships, competing agendas, and jurisdictional battles influenced by colonial pressures and tribal resistance. In providing the historical roots to today’s challenges, Wendy Shelly Greyeyes clears the path and provides a go-to reference to move discussions forward.

Read a brief interview with the author here.

Critically examining the United States as a settler colonial nation, this literary analysis recenters Oceti Sakowin (historically known to some as the Sioux Nation) women as their tribes’ traditional culture keepers and culture bearers, while offering thoughtful connections between settler colonialism, literature, nationalism, and gender.

Centering historically neglected Indigenous voices as its primary source material, author David Martínez shows how Carlos Montezuma’s correspondence and interactions with his family and their community influenced his advocacy—and how his important work in Arizona specifically motivated his work on a national level.

A New Deal for Navajo Weaving provides a history of early to mid-twentieth-century Diné weaving projects by non-Natives who sought to improve the quality and marketability of Diné weaving but in so doing failed to understand the cultural significance of weaving and its role in the lives of Diné women.

Informed by personal experience and offering an inclusive view, Diné Identity in a Twenty-First-Century World showcases the complexity of understanding and the richness of current Diné identities.

Watch a conversation about the book with author Lloyd D. Lee here.

Indigenous Economics explains how Indigenous peoples organize their economies for good living by supporting relationships between humans and the natural world. This work argues that creating such relationships is a major alternative to economic models that stress individualism and domination of nature.

Transforming Diné Education honors the perspectives and voices of Diné educators in culturally relevant education, special education, Diné language revitalization, well-being, tribal sovereignty, self-determination in Diné education, and university-tribal-community partnerships. The contributors offer stories about Diné resilience, resistance, and survival by articulating a Diné-centered pedagogy and politics for future generations.

Extended Stay Featured in Tor.com Can’t Miss Indie Press Speculative Fiction

Tor.com calls Extended Stay by Juan Martinez a “Can’t Miss Indie Press Speculative Fiction for January and February 2023.”

Haunting and visceral, Extended Stay uses the language of body horror and the gothic to comment on the complicated relationship between the Latinx undocumented experience and capitalism, the erasure of those living and working on the margins, the heavy toll exacted by memory, and the queasy permeability of boundaries that separate the waking world from the world of dreams.

“This looks to be both thematically resonant and unsettling in the best possible way,” says Tobias Carroll from Tor.com.

TFOB 2023: Book Signings & Panels with Our Authors

January 26, 2023

Join us for the 2023 Tucson Festival of Books on March 4th and 5th! We will be setting up shop on the University of Arizona campus for a weekend of literary fun. We are thrilled to have a wide variety of our most recent authors presenting on panels and signing books in our booth this year. Take a look at the schedule below to see where you can find University of Arizona Press authors at this year’s festival! We hope you’ll stop by our booth to browse our great titles— which you can purchase for a 25% discount— and to meet our authors and press staff!

Book Signing Schedule

Saturday, March 4:

11:00 AM: Cynthia Guardado, author of Cenizas
12:00 PM: John Schaefer, author of Desert Jewels
2:00 PM: Yvonne de la Torre Montiel and Miguel Montiel, authors of World of Our Mothers
3:00 PM: Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, co-editor of Sing

Sunday, March 5:

10:00 AM: Tim Hunter, author of The Sky at Night
11:00 AM: Tom Zoellner, author of Rim to River
12:00 PM: Ted Fleming, author of Sonoran Desert Journeys
1:00 PM: Devon Mihesuah, author of Dance of the Returned
1:30 PM: Juan Martinez, author of Extended Stay
2:00 PM: Co-Authors of Mineralogy of Arizona, 4th Edition

Saturday, March 4th Panel Schedule

10:00 AM:

Title:Photographing Arizona
Location:UA Library – Special Collections
Date/Time:Saturday, 10:00 am to 11:00 am
Panelists:Virgil Hancock, John Schaefer, Thomas Wiewandt
Moderators:Shan Sutton
Genres:Fine Arts / Photography
Signing Area:Sales & Signing Area – Integrated Learning Center

Description:
Three expert photographers, one of them former UA President John Schaefer, will discuss their craft and the secrets of shooting the perfect picture.

Title:Going Off Grid
Location:Koffler Room 218
Date/Time:Saturday, 10:00 am to 11:00 am
Panelists:Ted Conover, Janet Fogg, Bob West, Tom Zoellner
Moderators:Mary Holden
Genres:Memoir / Essays / Creative Nonfiction
Signing Area:Sales & Signing Area – UA BookStore Tent (on Mall)

Description:
Today we will hear several different perspectives of the American West and our authors’ approach writing their reflections about this iconic part of the United States.

1:00 PM:

Title:Arizona, Up Close and Personal
Location:UA Library – Special Collections
Date/Time:Saturday, 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm
Panelists:Gilbert Storms, Jim Turner, Tom Zoellner
Moderators:Heidi Osselaer
Genres:History / Biography
Signing Area:Sales & Signing Area – Integrated Learning Center

Description:
Gilbert Storms, Jim Turner and Tom Zoellner have studied Arizona for years, each in their very own way. Today they will explore our state’s past and present, and maybe even look into its future a bit!

2:30 PM:

Title:The Meaning of Home
Location:Nuestras Raíces Stage
Date/Time:Saturday, 2:30 pm to 3:30 pm
Panelists:Cynthia Guardado, Alejandro Varela, Javier Zamora
Moderators:Ernesto Portillo Jr.
Genres:Nuestras Raices
Signing Area:Pima County Public Library/Nuestras Raíces/Craft Tent & Signing Area

Description:
These authors share a common bond regarding home and homeland, through their different genres: literary, poetic and memoir.

Title:Workshop: Infusing Humor, Horror, Joy
Location:UA Main Library 254/Main Floor
Date/Time:Saturday, 2:30 pm to 3:30 pm
Panelists:Juan Martinez
Genres:Nuestras Raices
Signing Area:Sales & Signing Area – Integrated Learning Center

Description:
We neglect the importance of affect when working on our drafts. We build characters, we engage imagery and plot and language, but we forget to exploit the comic or horrific possibilities in what we’re building. In this session, we’ll explore how to tune a piece so that it’s funnier, scarier, or sadder.

4:00 PM:

Title:Global Deception
Location:Student Union Tucson Room
Date/Time:Saturday, 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Panelists:Francine Mathews, Devon Mihesuah, Camilla Trinchieri
Moderators:Wanda Morris
Genres:Mystery / Thrillers
Signing Area:Sales & Signing Area – UA BookStore Tent (on Mall)

Description:
It doesn’t matter where you live in the world, there are always mysteries to be solved. Just ask Francine Matthews, Devon Mihesuah and Camilla Trinchieri.

Title:Mundo de Nuestras Madres
Location:Nuestras Raíces Stage
Date/Time:Saturday, 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Panelists:Yvonne de la Torre MontielMiguel Montiel, Luis Alberto Urrea
Moderators:Cristina Ramirez
Genres:Nuestras Raices
Signing Area:Pima County Public Library/Nuestras Raíces/Craft Tent & Signing Area

Description:
Three authors share inspiring stories of the historical journeys of brave and courageous women.

Title:Taking it Outside
Location:National Parks Experience
Date/Time:Saturday, 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Panelists:Susan Lamb, Tom Zoellner
Moderators:Roger Naylor
Genres:Nature / Environment / Outdoor Adventure
Sponsors:Western National Parks Association
Signing Area:Sales & Signing Area – Science City

Description:
Sitting down to tell a tale is only a small part of writing a good book about nature. The real work, and the real fun, is being there. Today, Susan Lamb and Tom Zoellner will explain why hitting the trail is so important to getting to know a place.

Sunday, March 5 Panel Schedule

11:30 AM:

Title:Those Starry Skies
Location:Science City – Main Stage
Date/Time:Sunday, 11:30 am to 12:30 pm
Panelists:Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Tim Hunter
Moderators:Timothy Swindle
Genres:Science / Medicine / Technology
Signing Area:Sales & Signing Area – Science City

Description:
Join authors Lindy Elkins-Tanton and Tim Hunter as they sit down with UArizona’s Space Institute Director Timothy Swindle to discuss what drew them to learning about planets, stars and the vastness of space.

Title:Leaving, Loving, and Returning Home through Poetry
Location:Student Union Kiva
Date/Time:Sunday, 11:30 am to 12:30 pm
Panelists:Cynthia Guardado, José Olivarez, Laura Villareal
Genres:Poetry
Signing Area:Sales & Signing Area – UA Bookstore, Main Floor

Description:
Join poets Laura Villareal, Jose Olivarez and Cynthia Guardado as they explore poetry’s ability to restore a sense of home and heal the traumatic legacies of exile and the domestic violence.

Title:That Got Weird
Location:Student Union Kachina
Date/Time:Sunday, 11:30 am to 12:30 pm
Panelists:Juan Martinez, Ander Monson
Moderators:Matt Bell
Genres:Memoir / Essays / Creative Nonfiction, Sci-Fi / Fantasy / Horror
Signing Area:Sales & Signing Area – UA BookStore Tent (on Mall)

Description:
In this session, Juan Martinez and Ander Monson will chat about finding and deploying horror and science fiction tropes in unexpected places. Moderator Matt Bell is pretty good at that himself!

2:30 PM:

Title:Can Nature Cooperate?
Location:National Parks Experience
Date/Time:Sunday, 2:30 pm to 3:30 pm
Panelists:Stephen Buchmann, Theodore Fleming, Kristin Ohlson
Moderators:Carol Schwalbe
Genres:Nature / Environment / Outdoor Adventure, 2023 Big Read
Sponsors:Western National Parks Association
Signing Area:Sales & Signing Area – National Parks

Description:
Stephen Buchmann, Theodore Flemming and Kristin Ohlson all write about nature, which means they understand exactly how unpredictable nature can be. We ask them, “Can nature cooperate?”

Title:Wait for It, Wait for It …
Location:Student Union Tucson Room
Date/Time:Sunday, 2:30 pm to 3:30 pm
Panelists:Tracy Clark, Sean Doolittle, Devon Mihesuah
Moderators:Terry Shames
Genres:Mystery / Thrillers
Signing Area:Sales & Signing Area – UA BookStore Tent (on Mall)

Description:
Three of our favorite authors — Tracy Clark, Sean Doolittle and Devon Mihesuah — keep us on the edge of our seats until the last page. How do they know when it’s time to reveal whodunit?

4:00 PM:

Title:Que Susto: What a Fright!
Location:Nuestras Raíces Stage
Date/Time:Sunday, 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Panelists:Ramona Emerson, Juan Martinez, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Moderators:Megan Hellwig
Genres:Nuestras Raices
Signing Area:Pima County Public Library/Nuestras Raíces/Craft Tent & Signing Area

Description:
These authors take you on a roller-coaster ride of terror, horror, and fright. Hold on to your seats!

For the full festival schedule, click here.

Bojan Louis Awarded NEA Fellowship in Poetry

Bojan Louis, contributor to The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature, recently received the Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The goal of these fellowships is to encourage the production of new literary work by allowing writers the time and financial means to pursue their craft.

Louis is Diné of the Naakai dine’é, born for the Áshííhí. In addition to teaching at the Institute for American Indian Arts, Louis is an assistant professor in the Creative Writing MFA and American Indian Studies programs at the University of Arizona. He said about the award: “I’m stunned and elated to receive a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. It will enable me to stay put, to say no to extra work, and to be more present with my family and creative work, which have become intertwined.”

Congratulations Bojan Louis!

Extended Stay Makes Vol. 1 Brooklyn’s January 2023 Book Preview

Extended Stay by Juan Martinez was featured in Vol. 1 Brooklyn’s January 2023 Book Preview.

Haunting and visceral, Extended Stay uses the language of body horror and the gothic to comment on the complicated relationship between the Latinx undocumented experience and capitalism, the erasure of those living and working on the margins, the heavy toll exacted by memory, and the queasy permeability of boundaries that separate the waking world from the world of dreams.

“It’s been six years since the release of Juan Martinez’s collection Best Worst American, a book that we quite enjoyed. What’s next for Martinez? Turns out the answer is a novel about an emotionally vampiric sentient hotel that arises in the southwestern U.S. and the people who cross paths with it. And with a concept like that, it’s hard to resist delving in,” said Vol. 1 Brooklyn.

New Books in Geography Podcast Interviews Sarah Milne

Stentor Danielson recently interviewed Sarah Milne, author of Corporate Nature, An Insider’s Ethnography of Global Conservation, on the New Books in Geography podcast.

In 2012, Cambodia’s most prominent environmental activist was brutally murdered in a high-profile conservation area in the Cardamom Mountains. Tragic and terrible, this event magnifies a crisis in humanity’s efforts to save nature: failure of the very tools and systems at hand for advancing global environmental action. Sarah Milne spent more than a decade working for and observing global conservation projects in Cambodia. During this time, she saw how big environmental NGOs can operate rather like corporations. Their core practice involves rolling out appealing and deceptively simple policy ideas, like Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES). Yet, as policy ideas prove hard to implement, NGOs must also carefully curate evidence from the field to give the impression of success and effectiveness.

In Corporate Nature: An Insider’s Ethnography of Global Conservation, Milne delves inside the black box of mainstream global conservation. She reveals how big international NGOs struggle in the face of complexity—especially in settings where corruption and political violence prevail.

Diné Reader Editors Featured on The Academic Life podcast

Esther G. Belin and Jeff Berglund, two of the editors of The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature were recently interviewed by Christina Gessler on The Academic Life podcast.

Esther G. Belin is a Diné multimedia artist and writer, and a faculty mentor in the Low Rez MFA program at the Institute for American Indian She is a second-generation off-reservation Native American resulting from the U.S. federal Indian policies of termination and relocation. Her art and writing reflect the historical trauma from those policies as well as the philosophy of Saah Naagháí Bik’eh Hózho, the worldview of the Navajo people.

Jeff Berglund is the director of the Liberal Studies Program and a professor of English at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he has worked since 1999. Dr. Berglund’s research and teaching focuses on Native American literature, comparative Indigenous film, and U.S. multi-ethnic literature.

About the book:

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.

Article by Miriam Davidson Featured in The Progressive Magazine

January 20, 2023

The Progressive Magazine recently featured an article titled “Another Senseless Death in the ‘Decon- stitutionalized Zone’” by University of Arizona Press author Miriam Davidson. Read a brief excerpt from the article below.

On the Mexican side, the continuation and expansion of the pandemic-era restriction known as Title 42—which calls for the immediate expulsion of refugees and migrants no matter their situation—has left many in dangerous limbo in squalid conditions. Some become so desperate they feel they have no choice but to try to enter the United States “without inspection” by fording the river or crossing the desert.

On the U.S. side, a series of crackdowns on drug and migrant smuggling since the mid-1990s, and especially after 9/11, has led to the creation of what activists call a “deconstitutionalized zone.” They contend the border has become a region where the rights of humans and the environment are routinely ignored in the name of fighting the drug trade and terrorism.

Miriam Davidson

Read the full article here.

Miriam Davidson is the author of The Beloved Border, a potent and timely report on the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Beloved Border Wins 2022 Southwest Book Award

January 19, 2023

We are thrilled to announce that The Beloved Border by Miriam Davidson has been selected to receive a 2022 Southwest Book Award from the Border Regional Library Association!

Since 1971, the Southwest Book Awards have been presented in recognition of outstanding books about the Southwest published each year in any genre and directed toward any audience (scholarly, popular, children).

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.

Congratulations, Miriam!

Extended Stay Featured in Book Riot

Extended Stay by Juan Martinez was featured in the article from Book Riot, “Start Your Year Off Scared: New Horror Coming Out In January,” by Emily Martin.

In a rundown neighborhood in the heart of Las Vegas, the Alicia hotel awakens and beckons to the most vulnerable—those with something to hide.

Haunting and visceral, Extended Stay uses the language of body horror and the gothic to comment on the complicated relationship between the Latinx undocumented experience and capitalism, the erasure of those living and working on the margins, the heavy toll exacted by memory, and the queasy permeability of boundaries that separate the waking world from the world of dreams.

David Lazaroff Photographed Jellyfish in Sabino Creek

The Arizona Daily Star’s #ThisIsTucson reports that Picturing Sabino author David Wentworth Lazaroff photographed tiny jellyfish in Sabino Creek. They are commonly called freshwater jellyfish— their scientific name is Craspedacusta sowerbyi— but technically speaking, they’re not really jellyfish. They look like them, they eat like them, they act like them. But they’re technically part of a different class of organisms.

Picturing Sabino tells the story of the canyon’s transformation from a barely known oasis, miles from a small nineteenth-century town, into an immensely popular recreation area on the edge of a modern metropolis. Covering a century of change, from 1885 to 1985, this work rejoices in the canyon’s natural beauty and also relates the ups and downs of its protection and enjoyment.

The story is vividly told through numerous historical photographs, lively anecdotes, and an engaging text, informed by decades of research by Lazaroff.

In #ThisIsTucson, Lazaroff says of Sabino Canyon: “It has an interesting geology, biology, history— it’s a lot of interesting stuff crammed into just a few miles.” He continues, “That’s the thing talking about jellyfish. You can get wrapped up in the strangeness of these creatures, these brainless creatures that reproduce in strange ways, but then you can forget that they’re beautiful and unexpected, floating around in the water.”

Excerpt from Corporate Nature

January 17, 2023

In Corporate Nature, Sarah Milne delves inside the black box of mainstream global conservation. She reveals how big international NGOs struggle in the face of complexity—especially in settings where corruption and political violence prevail. She uses the case of Conservation International’s work in Cambodia to illustrate how apparently powerful NGOs can stumble in practice: policy ideas are transformed on the ground, while perverse side effects arise, like augmented authoritarian power, illegal logging, and Indigenous dispossession. Below read an excerpt from the book.

October 2002, Cardamom Mountains:
It’s my first trip into the forest, and I am a fresh Aussie volunteer—the kind that is full of hope, and even ambition, about what I might achieve in the year ahead. My job description is unusual, but somehow it chimes with my self made can-do style. Handed down the day before, in a single word, “WHAM.” The directive came from my enigmatic Australian boss, a Vietnam War veteran, and country director for Conservation International (CI) in Cambodia. Not understanding, I looked at him questioningly. “Winning hearts and minds,” he answered, as he handed me a pair of jungle-standard army boots. “We’ve been good at holding the line, keeping the forest intact, but not so good at working with the locals . . . that’s your job, the communities bit.”

With this in mind, I am now being ushered around the field site by my new Cambodian colleagues. Their language is so foreign, I grimace; the surrounding forest is so green that it’s unnatural, even sickly. Meanwhile, my head is full of ideas from Australia—Indigenous rights and self-determination—the language of my central Australian NGO job and desert home of just one week prior. But there are no outback horizons here. The rainforest on either side of the muddy track we’re following seems impenetrable, somehow claustrophobic. I’m also uncomfortable because, in this stage-managed tour of the field, I am being made into the quintessential foreigner. They call me barang—the Khmer word for Frenchman or white person, deriving from colonial times. It’s the only word I understand in the unfamiliar chatter. At least I know when they’re talking about me.

Blindly riding this wave of NGO teamwork, I find myself en route to a prearranged village event, which will involve us—CI—handing out large sacks of rice and parcels of salt to the local Indigenous people. “This is because they are hungry,” I’m told by my translator, “because the conservation project prevents them from doing slash-and-burn farming.” As we arrive at the local temple grounds, I’m horrified to discover a large crowd of villagers waiting for us. Squatting in the hot sun, they stare as we get off our motorbikes and organize our things—cameras, water bottles, sunglasses . . . too much stuff, in front of people who have nothing. This is the first time representatives from CI or any NGO have formally visited this village. Thus, there’s a sense of anticipation and expectation, plus awe at the sight of a foreign woman who is dressed rather like a man. I now feel doubly self-conscious, unbearably hot, and somehow oversized in my Australian outback field gear.

Even though this is the first official public engagement between villagers and the conservation project, it seems that the proceedings are scripted. Dignitaries like the village chief and the local Forestry Administration boss are greeted and thanked, monks arrive to bless the bags of rice piled high at our feet, and villagers applaud on cue. Then, to my alarm, I’m told that I must give a speech. Totally unprepared, I hesitate, but saying no is not an option. Cringing privately, I begin in English, with my translator standing ready beside me: “Hello, everyone, my name is Sarah, I’m here to help you.” As the conservation project’s new communities officer, I have now entered the story. I’m on stage, in what will become an intoxicating role play, one replete with its own offstage dynamics of fear, manipulation, and passion that I cannot yet imagine

***
Sarah Milne is a senior lecturer in environment and development at the Australian National University. She earned her doctorate in geography from the University of Cambridge. Milne is co-author of Conservation and Development in Cambodia: Exploring Frontiers of Change in Nature, State and Society. Milne has combined research and practice for more than twenty years in the fields of community development and nature conservation, mainly in Cambodia.

Lavender Fields Shout-out in Ms. Magazine

Lavender Fields: Black Women Experiencing Fear, Agency, and Hope in the Time of COVID-19 made Ms. Magazine’s January Reads for the Rest of Us. Edited by Julia A. Jordan-Zachery, Lavender Fields uses autoethnography to explore how Black girls and women are living with and through COVID-19. It centers their pain, joys, and imaginations for a more just future as we confront all the inequalities that COVID-19 exposes.

Writes Karla J. Strand, “Black women have been among the hardest hit by COVID-19 and this collection illustrates the devastating ramifications with candor, compassion, heart and hope. By centering the voices, experiences and stories of Black women, Jordan-Zachery ensures they don’t go unheard.”

About the Book
Black women and girls in the United States are among the hardest hit by the pandemic in terms of illnesses, deaths, evictions, and increasing economic inequality. Riffing off Alice Walker’s telling of her search for Zora Neal Hurston, the authors of these essays and reflections offer raw tellings of Black girls’ and women’s experiences written in real time, as some of the contributors battled COVID-19 themselves.

Excerpt from Lavender Fields

January 13, 2023

In Lavender Fields, contributors use autoethnography to explore how Black girls and women are living with and through COVID-19. Essays center their pain, joys, and imaginations for a more just future as we confront all the inequalities that COVID-19 exposes. Today we offer an excerpt from reelaviolette botts-ward from her chapter “#BlackGirlQuarantine Chronicles: On Womanist Artistry, Sisterhood, Survival, and Healing.” Below read the excerpt.

By reelaviolette botts-ward
Kai hands me a large bottle of hand sanitizer from under her denim coat, sneaking me the high-priced liquid substance with the subtlety of a secret, as though making this exchange public could have deadly effects for the both of us. “You sure?” I asked as I hesitated to hold the bottle in my hand as my own. If anything, I thought she might need it more than I. An unhoused Black womxn living at the encampment on the corner, Kai was much more vulnerable to the coronavirus than me. I had told her how I’d just come from scouring every drugstore within a fifty-mile radius of West Oakland and found nothing. The news kept saying keep sanitizer in yo pocket, but where in the world was a girl gon’ get some from?! Kai leaned in close and whispered, “Girl, you see that box inside my tent? I’m good!” She pointed to a large cardboard container with a label that read 50 Piece Sanitizer. “You take this; I know you gon’ need it.”

I was so grateful for her in that moment for having a homegirl neighbor who shows me what sisterhood feels like in the middle of a pandemic. As she wiped down all her possessions with bleach-drenched paper towels, I grabbed a cloth and helped her clean any potential trace of COVID germs from the half-broken wooden dresser. Kai had her quarantine care plan on lock. She let me know that she would be “cleanin’ and carryin’ on” as ritual in this pandemic. The ethic of care she modeled for the fragments of her homespace, precarious to airborne particles and to the unpredictability of fire that travels through wind, does not diminish the brutal fact that she is damn tired of being homeless.

The next week Kai invites me to protest on behalf of Black womxn who live at the encampment. We are demanding that the local motel allow them to stay in vacant rooms since COVID has prevented its normal flow of guests. My sign reads, “Black womxn deserve safe housing in a fuckin pandemic!” The motel refuses, as the owner calls the cops to dissipate the unassuming crowd. They arrive, tell us to go home, and gradually, we do.

I am saddened by the turnout. Nobody came ’cause nobody cared. Unhoused Black folks, and their particular vulnerabilities to the virus, never became central to communal conversations about the layered impacts of this disease. The intersection of race/class/gender/precarity never centered Kai and her needs. The violence of housing insecurity, and the impossibility of shelter in gentrified Oakland, is only exacerbated by this pandemic. The mockery of shelter in place is that Kai, and all my homegirl neighbors who live at the encampment on the corner, wasn’t never even sheltered, to begin with.

***

reelaviolette botts-ward is a doctoral candidate in the African Diaspora Studies program at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research is on Black women’s healing spaces, and she looks at the ways in which embodied, ancestral, spiritual, and creative healing occurs within and beyond the physical landscape of home. Her first book, mourning my inner [black/girl] child, was published with Nomadic Press in 2021. In her role as founder and CEO of #BlackWomxnHealing, she works closely with the California Black Women’s Health Project and Flourish Agenda to provide sister circle-style retreat opportunities for Black women across California.

Reyes Ramirez Featured on NPR’s Houston Matters

January 12, 2023

University of Arizona Press author Reyes Ramirez was featured on NPR’s Houston Matters on December 15, 2022, to talk about his new short story collection The Book of Wanderers, which was recently featured on NPR’s Books We Love list.

Listen to the podcast here.

Reyes Ramirez is a Houstonian of Mexican and Salvadoran descent. Ramirez’s dynamic short story collection, The Book of Wanderers, follows new lineages of Mexican and Salvadoran diasporas traversing life in Houston, across borders, and even on Mars. Themes of wandering weave throughout each story, bringing feelings of unease and liberation as characters navigate cultural, physical, and psychological separation and loss from one generation to the next in a tumultuous nation.

Extended Stay Featured in Most Anticipated Chicago Books

Chicago Review of Books says Extended Stay, by Juan Martinez, is one of the Most Anticipated Chicago Books of 2023! Martinez teaches at Northwestern University, but his novel takes place in Las Vegas.

Haunting and visceral, Extended Stay uses the language of body horror and the gothic to comment on the complicated relationship between the Latinx undocumented experience and capitalism, the erasure of those living and working on the margins, the heavy toll exacted by memory, and the queasy permeability of boundaries that separate the waking world from the world of dreams.

Martinez says, “I walked the length of Las Vegas and interviewed the people who worked and hustled along the way; those interviews very much informed the novel.”

Brandy Nālani McDougall Selected as New Hawai’i State Poet Laureate

January 6, 2023

On January 1, 2023, Brandy Nālani McDougall was selected as the next Hawaiʻi State Poet Laureate as part of the new collaborative initiative between Hawaiʻi Council for the Humanities, State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, and the Hawaiʻi State Public Library System. She will be the second Hawaiʻi State Poet Laureate, succeeding Kealoha (2012-2022). She will be the Hawaiʻi State Poet Laureate from 2023-2025. Her inaugural event will be Friday, January 13, 2022, 6-9 pm at the Hawaiʻi State Art Museum as part of the monthly jazz night, The Vibe.

As part of her term as Hawaiʻi State Poet Laureate, McDougall wants to highlight the ways poetry can heal and bring connection. “Poetry really gave me a place and a way to heal, and right now, as we’re all emerging from a space where we’ve been literally isolated for two years—where we weren’t able to meet as much with other people and have genuine human to human connections, or even human to ‘āina connections, so there’s a real need for that healing in this space and time. I think poetry can be that space for a lot of people. As the Hawaiʻi Poet Laureate, I’d like to be able to share that.”

Born and raised on Maui in the ahupuaʻa of Aʻapueo in Kula, McDougall is the author of the poetry collection, The Salt-Wind, Ka Makani Paʻakai. She is also a teacher and mother. Her second poetry collection, ʻĀina Hānau, Birth Landis inspired by her daughters and is forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press in Summer 2023.

Congratulations, Brandy!

Southwest Symposium 2023: Recent Books, Discounts, and More

January 4, 2023

We are excited to be participating in the 2023 Southwest Symposium in Santa Fe, New Mexico! If you are attending the conference on January 5-7, stop by our table to browse our latest books and speak with our Senior Editor, Allyson Carter, Ph.D. We’re offering a 30% discount with free shipping in the continental U.S. with the code AZSWSYMP23 from now until 2/5/23!

If you aren’t able to make it to the symposium this year, make sure to take a look at our latest books below, and visit this page to learn more about our publishing program.

The recognition of Flower Worlds is one of the most significant breakthroughs in the study of Indigenous spirituality in the Americas. Flower Worlds is the first volume to bring together a diverse range of scholars to create an interdisciplinary understanding of floral realms that extend at least 2,500 years in the past.

Read an excerpt from the book here, and learn more by watching the book trailer here!

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.

We are thrilled that Becoming Hopi won the 2022 SAA Best Scholarly Book Award, a Southwest Book of the Year award, and a Southwest Book Award!

Learn more by watching the book trailer here.

The multiple vivid colors of scarlet macaws and their ability to mimic human speech are key reasons they were and are significant to the Native peoples of the U.S. Southwest and Mexican Northwest. Although the birds’ natural habitat is the tropical forests of Mexico and Central and South America, they were present at multiple archaeological sites in the region yet absent at the vast majority. In Birds of the Sun, leading experts in southwestern archaeology explore the reasons why.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

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.

Watch Paul Minnis and Nancy Turner discuss Famine Foods here, then listen to Minnis on the Foodie Pharmacology podcast 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.

Read field notes from the book’s editors, Paul Minnis and Michael Whalen, here.

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.

Read an excerpt from the book here, then watch a book trailer here!

Oysters in the Land of Cacao delivers a long-overdue presentation of the archaeology, material culture, and regional synthesis on the Formative to Late Classic period societies of the western Chontalpa region (Tabasco, Mexico) through contemporary theory. It offers a significant new understanding of the Mesoamerican Gulf Coast.

Watch a book trailer here!

Pre-order now!

Marjorie Lambert’s life story is intricately entwined in the development of archaeology in the American Southwest. In Shelby Tisdale’s compelling biography, No Place for a Lady, Lambert’s work as an archaeologist, museologist, and museum curator in Santa Fe comes to life and serves as inspiration for today.

Households on the Mimbres Horizon explores variability in Mimbres Mogollon pithouse sites using a case study from La Gila Encantada to further our understanding of the full range of pithouse occupations in the area. Because the site is away from the major river valleys, the data from excavations at the site provides valuable information on the differences in cultural practices that occurred away from the riverine villages, as well as environmental differences, economic practices, and social constructs.

Excerpt From Nuclear Nuevo México

December 19, 2022

In Nuclear Nuevo México, Myrriah Gómez examines the experiences of Nuevomexicanas/os who have been impacted by the nuclear industrial complex, both the weapons industry and the commercial industry. Gómez argues that Los Alamos was created as a racist project that targeted poor and working-class Nuevomexicana/o farming families, along with their Pueblo neighbors, to create a nuclear empire. The resulting imperialism has left a legacy of disease and distress throughout New Mexico that continues today. Below read an excerpt from the book.

On June 20, 2008, my family and I gathered for my cousin Ricky’s funeral. Our large family occupied ten pews in Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe church in Pojoaque, New Mexico. Ricky—the second oldest of fifteen grandchildren—left behind a wife and two daughters. He was a lifelong employee at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he was a victim of at least one nuclear spill that exposed him to radiation. Afterward, he suffered multiple-organ failure over the course of ten years. We buried him exactly one month before his forty-second birthday. When he was dying, Ricky revealed to our family that after one exposure incident, he had walked into the Los Alamos grocery store after work. The grocery store was shut down and decontaminated after his passage, yet no one came to Ricky’s house, or our neighboring houses, to check on our potential exposure with Geiger counters after Ricky came home. His obituary says that he died from an “undisclosed illness,” and the cause of death on his death certificate reads “unknown,” but we know what killed Ricky: Los Alamos.

My cousin Ricky was not the first member of our family whose life was claimed by “the Lab,” as northern New Mexicans call it. On December 23, 1977, my family buried my paternal grandfather, Ramón Gómez Sr., eight years before I was born. My grandpa and three of his four brothers—Pedro Ramón, Tobias, and José Margarito—all worked in Los Alamos at various times. Those four brothers died of cancer. My grandpa cleaned the tools that were used on plutonium and uranium; he died of colon cancer at age seventy-three.1 Their sister, María Felisita (Feliz), never worked at the Lab; she lived to be ninety-two years old. Grandpa Gómez passed away three decades before his grandson Ricky. Both died because of their jobs at Los Alamos.

I grew up in El Rancho, New Mexico, a rural community in the Pojoaque Valley. El Rancho exists within the traditional homelands of the Tewaspeaking peoples of Po’woh’geh Owingeh, known more widely by its colonial name of San Ildefonso Pueblo. Every Sunday morning my family and I attended Catholic Mass inside the pueblo. Every Feast Day (January 23) we shared a meal at my grandmother’s house, and we attended visperas at the pueblo the evening before. It is an Indo-Hispano community by definition and in practice, and it is also a community overshadowed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Lab has brought much pain to many residents of the Pojoaque Valley, including those who work(ed) on the Hill where the Lab is located.

In the 1940s military and scientific personnel chose the Pajarito Plateau to site Project Y (or Site Y) of the secret Manhattan Project, where scientists would develop the atomic bomb. My grandmother’s family and other Nuevomexicanas/os and Tewa people were forcibly dispossessed of their ranches and sacred land on the Pajarito Plateau with inequitable or no compensation. Beginning in the 1940s, Lab personnel directed Valley vecinos to bury contaminated everything in the Los Alamos canyon and nearby along the Rio Grande. The soil and the water that Nuevomexicanas/os once used to irrigate crops is now polluted with toxic chemicals and remnants of nuclear materials. Cancer, thyroid disease, and unexplained organ failure, among other illnesses, now plague our community.

***

Myrriah Gómez is a Nuevomexicana from the Pojoaque Valley. She is an assistant professor in the Honors College at the University of New Mexico.

Craig Santos Perez Receives MLA Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages

December 8, 2022

We are thrilled that the Modern Languages Association is awarding its fourth MLA Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages to Craig Santos Perez, associate professor of English at the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa, for his book Navigating CHamoru Poetry: Indigeneity, Aesthetics, and Decolonization! The prize is awarded for an outstanding scholarly study of Native American literature, culture, or languages written by a member of the association.

The MLA Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, or Languages is one of nineteen awards that will be presented on 6 January 2023, during the association’s annual convention, to be held in San Francisco. The members of the selection committee were Deanna Reder (Simon Fraser Univ.); Robbie Richardson (Princeton Univ.); and Cheryl L. Suzack (Univ. of Toronto), chair. The committee’s citation for the winning book reads:

Craig Santos Perez’s Navigating CHamoru Poetry: Indigeneity, Aesthetics, and Decolonization explores the intricate connections and layered histories represented by CHamoru poetry in its addressing the annexation, militarization, and political loss resulting from colonial expansion on Guam. Perez explores how several generations of CHamoru poets have illuminated CHamoru values of inafa’maolek (interdependence), chenchule’ (reciprocity), mamåhla (shame), and respetu (respect) as part of a continuum of resistance to colonization and global imperialism. A CHamoru poet himself, Perez sensitively explores Indigenous local and transnational aesthetics and provides a decolonial path that centers movement and Indigenous epistemologies in dialogue with other Pacific and Indigenous cultures. Perez’s work, urging us to turn our attention to the ongoing Indigenous struggles against American imperialism in Guam, emerges as a key text in Indigenous studies.

The MLA Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages was established in 2014 and is awarded under the auspices of the Committee on Honors and Awards.

Congratulations, Craig!

Visualizing Genocide: An Excerpt

December 7, 2022

Visualizing Genocide examines how creative arts and memory institutions selectively commemorate or often outright ignore stark histories of colonialism. The essays confront outdated narratives and institutional methods by investigating contemporary artistic and scholarly interventions documenting settler colonialisms including land theft, incarceration, intergenerational trauma, and genocide. The authors offer honest critique, but in so doing they give hopeful and concrete strategies for the future.

Below, read an excerpt from
Visualizing Genocide:

In this volume, we undertake the difficult task of assessing, from Indigenous viewpoints, how histories of colonialism are commemorated in the creative arts and memory institutions—archives and museums. Our unique approach to these weighty issues avoids celebratory appraisals of Indigenous survival alone by examining closely the tools available to engage with the complexities of our collective histories, however contested. In pursuing the topic of visualizing genocide with our invited authors, we are aware that for some, the claim that genocide occurred under the colonial project of imperialism and expansion may be viewed as an extreme measure. Historian Jeffrey Ostler describes the identification of genocide in American Indian history as “contentious,” arguing for an “open-ended approach to the question of genocide that explores several phases and events” to avoid “quarrels about definitions.” While we agree with Ostler that the violence of the colonial project “varied considerably in different times and places according to the goals of particular colonial projects,” the authors included in this volume contribute their essays from the perspective that genocide is an accurate term to describe the imperialism they document through photographs, exhibits, archives, and art.

Our global reach (including essays from artists and writers originating in not only the United States but also Norway, Canada, Australia, and the Caribbean) attempts to identify central themes and tensions as artists and theorists examine responses to assimilation and extermination efforts. Massacres, disease, removals, abrogated treaties, religious intolerance, theft of land, relocation, the kidnapping and forced education of children, and the subsequent social crises of poverty, poor health, and political marginalization form the ground of discussions. Contributors do not seek an easy remedy for the massive upheavals they document, but rather their essays pull the reader into the specific times, places, and tremendously varied strategies of responses employed in an effort to make these truths available. In doing so, they make the “unknowable” accessible and ready for examination, contemplation, and discourse.

In an era characterized by fragmented knowledge, decontextualized sound bites, and instant access, how do we know with certainty the difference between truth and distortion when contemplating past atrocities? While more scholarly literature documenting historically specific events of genocidal processes is emerging, we employ an American Indian studies approach of a multidisciplinary lens—including art history, anthropology, studio arts, and visual culture. Our analysis contends that it is in the open registers of artistic practice and reinterpretation of archival holdings that facts previously considered “unknowable” can be clearly documented.

A primary premise at play in the chapters that follow is that many, if not most, prior assertions of neutrality in the archival records and historical accounts in museum exhibits are, in fact, biased and selective histories. Archivists Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook argue, “Archivists wield enormous power, loathe as many archivists are to admit this and reluctant as many academics are to acknowledge this.” These authors add, “Archival approaches to making records available (or not) . . . create filters that influence perceptions of the records and thus of the past.” Cultural specificity, author voice, and positionality are key factors in telling historical “knowns,” as are social practices such as storytelling, collective arts making, acknowledgment of land, and imaginative reconstructions of the past in performance, poetry, installation, and two- and three-dimensional contemporary arts.

These active interventions in the historic record are essential contributions to genocidal studies. We posit that the erasure and denial of atrocities in the historic record actually aid selective and often sanitized retellings. According to cultural anthropologist Gregory Stanton, denial is the tenth stage of what constitutes genocide globally. Denial is described as the final stage that lasts throughout and always follows genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. The perpetrators of genocide . . . deny that they committed any crimes, blame what happened on the victims . . . During and after genocide, lawyers, diplomats, and others who oppose forceful action often deny that these crimes meet the definition of genocide. They call them euphemisms like “ethnic cleansing” instead. They question whether intent to destroy a group can be proven, ignoring thousands of murders. They overlook deliberate imposition of conditions that destroy part of a group. They claim that only courts can determine whether there has been genocide, demanding “proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” when prevention only requires action based on compelling evidence.

Remembering Richard Shelton

December 1, 2022

Richard Shelton brought Southern Arizona to the world. Again and again, we heard stories of how Going Back to Bisbee touched readers near and far, from the person who moved here from across the country, inspired by the book, to the job candidate from Connecticut who went to their local library to see what the Press had published and discovered this literary gem. He was a brilliant storyteller.

In Crossing the Yard, he chronicled what was perhaps his life’s work—teaching writing in the Arizona State prisons. As publishers, it was incredibly moving to work on this book. It is a testament to the transformative power of writing and our common humanity. As one of his students, facing relocation to another prison, wrote to him, “I am not afraid, dear Richard. I am singing.”

Shelton’s exploration of our common humanity continued in his final work of nonfiction, Nobody Rich or Famous, a quietly profound memoir of his upbringing in Boise, Idaho. Evoking both the beauty of the natural world and the sorrows of poverty, it stands alongside the greatest of contemporary memoirs.

Richard Shelton’s legacy will be detailed by many—and it will take many to document his transformative contributions to the University of Arizona, to literature, and to so many lives. When we remember Dick, however, we will remember him through these books, books that let us know him and that touched us all.

***
Going Back to Bisbee
Crossing The Yard
Nobody Rich or Famous

Read the Remembrance from Ken Lamberton

Field Notes: What’s behind ‘Sonoran Desert Journeys, Ecology and Evolution of Its Iconic Species’ book?

November 28, 2022

By Theodore H. Fleming

I wrote Sonoran Desert Journeys during the covid-19 pandemic, which gave me an empty calendar and lots of time to concentrate on writing – a good example of making lemonade out of lemons? At any rate, it gave me time to explore three topics that have been important in my scientific career: the history of life on Earth, how we have discovered this history, and the natural history and evolution of some of the species living together in the Sonoran Desert.

This book is thus built around two major journeys: (1) our intellectual journal of discovery about how life has evolved on Earth from the time of Carl Linnaeus to the present, and (2) the evolutionary journeys that have resulted in particular reptiles, birds, mammals, and plants living together in this desert.

Here are some of the species that I discuss in this book:

Examples of Sonoran Desert reptiles

A desert tortoise
A western diamondback rattlesnake

Examples of Sonoran Desert birds

A greater roadrunner
A Costa’s hummingbird

More Sonoran Desert birds

Great horned owls
Harris’s hawks

Examples of Sonoran Desert mammals

A lesser long-nosed bat
Round-tailed ground squirrels

An iconic Sonoran Desert plant

A white-winged dove pollinating a saguaro cactus flower
Saguaro cactus flowers

All of these images are based on my photography and photo art.

In addition to describing the ecology and evolutionary history of these species, including their physiological adaptations and how they are likely to cope with a changing climate, I explore evolutionary topics of particular interest to me that are associated with them. Examples of these topics include how an individual’s sex or gender is determined in the desert tortoise; how male diamondback rattlesnakes deal with an operational sex ratio of three adult males to one adult female; how hummingbirds perceive their world; why adult female hawks and owls are always larger than their mates; why Harris’s hawks are social breeders and hunters; the importance of columnar cacti and century plants in the lives of lesser long-nosed bats; the evolution of warning calls in round-tailed ground squirrels; and why the saguaro cactus is considered to be a keystone species in the Sonoran Desert.

I’m also concerned with the conservation status of these and many other Sonoran Desert species so I end the book discussing this topic in considerable detail with particular emphasis on threats posed by invasive species, including Homo sapiens, and climate change. Finally, I highlight Pima County’s Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan as a model of how to use our scientific knowledge to develop a rational plan for preserving this unique habitat and its wildlife.

***
Theodore H. Fleming is a professor emeritus of biology at the University of Miami. He 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 lives in Tucson.

Excerpt: Cornerstone at the Confluence

November 22, 2022

This week marks the one hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Colorado River Compact. “The Compact,” writes Jason Anthony Robison in the introduction to the new volume Cornerstone at the Confluence, “is the cornerstone of a proverbial pyramid—an elaborate body of laws colloquially called the “Law of the River” that governs how human beings use water from the river system dubbed the ‘American Nile.’ ”

Robison is just one of a chorus of expert voices that emerge in this important new book, published this week. Today we offer an excerpt from Robison’s introduction to the work.

The American West is on fire—and, no doubt, it is not alone. 

Not a day has gone by this summer without new media coverage of unrelenting drought, drained reservoirs, record-shattering temperatures, all-consuming forest fires, busted or busting farms, bullets-sweating cities, and so on down the line. Glancing at the U.S. drought monitor, a blood-red octopus hovers over much of the arid region’s heart—the Colorado Plateau and the Great Basin—with elastic tentacles splaying hundreds of miles in every direction. And it’s not as though the news or drought monitor are needed to glean what’s going on. You can feel it—from suffocating afternoon rays trapped by urban heat islands to post-apocalyptic, smoky air jetting up in bomb-like plumbs over the ridgeline (or closer). It all feels smothering and smoldering. Something is off, beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

 The Colorado River Compact’s centennial arrives in this surreal space. No fewer than forty million people have come to rely on the life-giving, prosperity-yielding flows controlled by this document. Signed in the colonial city of Santa Fe, New Mexico, on November 24, 1922, the Compact is the cornerstone of a proverbial pyramid—an elaborate body of laws colloquially called the “Law of the River” that governs how human beings use water from the river system dubbed the “American Nile.”

 History was made with the Compact’s drafting a century ago. Never before had Western states finessed their tense, frequently contentious relationships over coveted interstate rivers via negotiations under the U.S. Constitution’s Compact Clause. Before the Compact’s drafting, the Supreme Court and its “equitable apportionment doctrine” had been the only place to go. The 1922 negotiations changed that game. And the Law of the River has amassed since.

 It’s actually amassing right now, and in ways that will shape the Colorado River Basin and its vast environs for a generation, possibly longer. The Compact’s centennial could not be more serendipitous in timing. In 2000, the most severe drought in recorded history began in the basin. More than two decades later, it’s still here. “Drought” is too tame a word to be clear— “megadrought” or “aridification” better capture what’s happening—but the cause is the same regardless: climate change. Again, you can feel it. What it requires of human relationships with the river system is often difficult for our species. We have to adapt. We, too, have to change. The serendipity lies there. Spurred by the megadrought, new management rules for the river system are being negotiated as the Compact turns a century old—a process that must conclude by 2026. While it does not involve Compact renegotiation in a formal sense, the process nonetheless holds monumental importance for everyone connected to the river system. 

And there have never been more of us, accounting for all of human history, than at the Compact’s centennial. The dependent population of forty million people entails a form of record breaking that parallels the climate related events setting new bars across the Colorado River Basin and the globe. The trends are inseparable. Not only does this population inhabit the 244,000-square-mile basin proper—including cities such as Phoenix, Tucson, and Las Vegas—it stretches into urban centers tens and hundreds of miles away. Witness twenty-first-century Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver, Salt Lake, and Albuquerque. Extensive agricultural areas, too, flourish from the basin’s flows. Imperial Valley and Mexicali Valley irrigators turn the Sonoran Desert green year-round along the U.S.-Mexico border, and they have countless counterparts. And lest we forget those whose ancestors had been in the basin for centuries or millennia—since time immemorial— before the modern cities and farms sprouted: Native peoples. They consist of thirty federally recognized tribes, including the Navajo Nation residing on a 27,413-square-mile reservation slightly larger than West Virginia. 

These people see the Colorado River system through different eyes. If we’re being honest, some don’t see it at all, tapping flows from vast, out-of sight hinterlands for daily use without any sense of where their water comes from. Its origin is a living river system. Whether we’re mindful of that connection or not, it exists, placing us in community—a “basin community” — a character as diverse as the Grand Canyon’s dynamic colors and landforms. There’s no universal vision within this community. Rather, peoples’ wide-ranging reasons for appreciating, enjoying, even loving the river system have broadened considerably since 1922. Our values are plural. That, too, defines the centennial year. 

Cornerstone is anchored in this soil. A body of writing about the Compact would be fitting based on its centennial alone—again, a pathbreaking document, warts and all. As fate would have it, however, this milestone arrives at an epic confluence. Climate change and the ongoing megadrought are the elephant in the room—unprecedented in recorded history and forcing that often anxiety-inducing thing for human beings: change. That applies in full force to negotiations over new management rules for the river system during the next several years. An inflection point of generational significance, these negotiations involve dynamics as challenging as any the basin community has faced. Never before have forty million people depended on the river system. Never before has the Law of the River amassed its existing girth and complexity. And never before has the river system been valued for so many diverse, potentially irreconcilable reasons. In a nutshell, there is the centennial itself, and there is the uncanny confluence of events merging with the centennial. Both considerations point in the same direction. . . . 

The time is ripe for conversations about the Compact and broader Law of the River. 

***

Jason Anthony Robison is a professor of law at the University of Wyoming. Reflecting his deep love of the American West, Professor Robison’s writing and teaching revolve around water, public lands, and Native peoples. He was lead editor of the sesquicentennial volume, Vision and Place: John Wesley Powell and Reimagining the Colorado River Basin, and he authors the long-running treatise, Law of Water Rights and Resources.

Celebrating Tai Edwards and Farina King: Recipients of the Association of University Presses’ StandUP Award

November 21, 2022

University presses are deeply embedded in the communities they serve. This weekend, members of the University of Kansas community gathered to celebrate Tai Edwards and Farina King, recipients of the Association of University Presses‘ StandUP Award, for their powerful advocacy on behalf of the University Press of Kansas.

Edwards and King spoke of community and reciprocity as the principles that compelled them to speak out in support of the University Press of Kansas.

We are grateful to Edwards and King for their advocacy on behalf of university presses. And we are grateful for all the authors we have the privilege of working with.  

Edwards and King spoke about community and reciprocity as the principles that motivated their advocacy efforts.
Interim Faculty Director Mike Haddock with University of Arizona Press Director Kathryn Conrad.
The University Press of Kansas was founded in 1946 and joined the Association of University Presses that same year.
The StandUP Award honors those who through their words and actions have done extraordinary work to support, defend, and celebrate the university press community.

Voluntourism and Multispecies Collaboration wins 2022 Edward M. Bruner Book Award

November 15, 2022

We are thrilled that Voluntourism and Multispecies Collaboration by Keri Vacanti Brondo is the winner of the 2022 Edward M. Bruner Book Award from the Anthropology of Tourism Interest Group! The committee noted: This is a remarkable book that moves beyond the study of human tourism on the island of Utila (Honduras) to examine how other species exhibit/display/articulate alternative values to life and death. By de-centering the experiences of individual voluntourists, she foregrounds collaboration as a basis for conservation while also paying close attention to the neoliberal structure of voluntourism and the intersections of questions of race, gender, and whiteness on the island. The book is extremely well-written, weaving together ethnographic vignettes, local histories, oral narratives, fiction, and social media postings. Dr. Brondo combines a sophisticated theoretical analysis and a detailed review of relevant literature with a well-told story. In sum, this is an excellent book which committee members agree is suitable for both undergraduate and graduate discussions. 

Congratulations, Keri!

American Anthropological Association 2022: Recent Books, Discounts, and More

November 7, 2022

We are thrilled to be attending the annual American Anthropological Association conference in Seattle, Washington this year! Make sure to stop by our booth to browse and buy our latest anthropology titles and speak with our Senior Editor, Allyson Carter, Ph.D. We are offering a 30% discount on all books at the conference, and you can also receive this discount when you order online with the code AZAAA22 at checkout. Enjoy 30% off all titles, plus free shipping in the continental U.S. from now until 12/15/22.

If you aren’t attending AAA 2022 in person, make sure to learn about our latest anthropology titles below. If you have any questions about our publishing program, visit this page, or contact Allyson Carter at acarter@uapress.arizona.edu.

In Corporate Nature, Sarah Milne draws from personal experience to look inside the black box of mainstream conservation NGOs and finds that corporate behavior and technical thinking dominate global efforts to save nature, opening the door to unethical conduct and failure on the ground.

Visualizing Genocide engages the often sparse and biased discourses of genocidal violence against Indigenous communities documented in exhibits, archives, and museums. Essayists and artists from a range of disciplines identify how Native knowledge can be effectively incorporated into memory spaces.

Guarded by Two Jaguars is an ethnography that examines the role of language and embodied behaviors in producing a congregational split in a Catholic parish serving Guatemala’s Q’eqchi’ Maya people. Drawing on a range of methods from linguistic and cultural anthropology, author Eric Hoenes del Pinal 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.

Read field notes from the author here.

Accessible and engaging, Latinx Belonging underscores and highlights Latinxs’ continued presence and contributions to everyday life in the United States as they both carve out and defend their place in society.

Gardening at the Margins tells the remarkable story of a diverse group of neighbors working together to grow food and community in the Santa Clara Valley in California. Based on four years of deeply engaged ethnographic field research via a Participatory Action Research project with the people and ecosystems of La Mesa Verde home garden program, Gabriel R. Valle develops a theory of convivial labor to describe how the acts of care among the diverse gardeners—through growing, preparing, and eating food in one of the most income unequal places in the country—are powerful, complex acts of resistance.

Set in the arid lands of northwestern Mexico, Bountiful Deserts foregrounds the knowledge of Indigenous peoples who harvested the desert as bountiful in its material resources and sacred spaces. Author Cynthia Radding uses the tools of history, anthropology, geography, and ecology to re-create the means of defending Indigenous worlds through colonial encounters, the formation of mixed societies, and the direct conflicts over forests, grasslands, streams, and coastal estuaries that sustained wildlife, horticulture, foraging, hunting, fishing, and—after European contact—livestock and extractive industries. She returns in each chapter to the spiritual power of nature and the enduring cultural significance of the worlds that Indigenous communities created and defended.

Children Crossing Borders draws much-needed attention to the plight of migrant children and their families, illuminating the human and emotional toll that children experience as they crisscross the Americas. Exploring the connections between education, policy, cultural studies, and anthropology, the essays in this volume navigate a space of transnational children’s rights central to Latin American life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

Running After Paradise looks at social-environmental activism in one of the world’s most important and threatened tropical forests—Southern Bahia, Brazil. It explores what it means to be in and of a place through the lenses of history, environment, identity, class, and culture. It uncovers not only what separates people but also what brings them together as they struggle and strive to create their individual and collective paradise.

Pachamama Politics examines how campesinos came to defend their community water sources from gold mining upstream and explains why Ecuador’s “pink tide” government came under fire by Indigenous and environmental rights activists.

Indigenous Archaeology in the Philippines illustrates how descendant communities can take control of their history and heritage through active collaboration with archaeologists. Drawing on the Philippine Cordilleran experiences, Indigenous Archaeology in the Philippines discusses how changing historical narratives help empower peoples who are traditionally ignored in national histories.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

The Community-Based PhD explores the complex and nuanced experience of doing community-based research as a graduate student. Contributors from a range of scholarly disciplines share their experiences with CBPR in the arts, humanities, social sciences, public health, and STEM fields.

The multiple vivid colors of scarlet macaws and their ability to mimic human speech are key reasons they were and are significant to the Native peoples of the U.S. Southwest and Mexican Northwest. Although the birds’ natural habitat is the tropical forests of Mexico and Central and South America, they were present at multiple archaeological sites in the region yet absent at the vast majority. In Birds of the Sun, leading experts in southwestern archaeology explore the reasons why.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

Returning Home Wins 2022 Donald L. Fixico Award

November 3, 2022

We are thrilled to announce that Returning Home, edited by Farina King, Michael P. Taylor, and James R. Swensen is the winner of the 2022 Donald L. Fixico Award from the Western History Association!

The Donald Fixico Book Award recognizes innovative work in the field of American Indian and Canadian First Nations History that centers Indigenous epistemologies and perspectives. The award honors Dr. Fixico’s prolific scholarly legacy and celebrates the vibrant future of the field. Books that address Indigenous history in the United States and Canada are eligible for the award.  

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.

Learn more about the book and watch book trailer videos from the editors here.

Congratulations, Farina, Michael, and James!

Field Notes: Guarded by Two Jaguars

November 1, 2022

In Guarded by Two Jaguars author Eric Hoenes Del Pinal examines the role of language and embodied behaviors in producing a congregational split in a Catholic parish serving Guatemala’s Q’eqchi’ Maya people. Drawing on a range of methods from linguistic and cultural anthropology, author Hoenes del Pinal 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. Today, he’s provided us with field notes and insights into his work.

Xeel

Guests who have been invited to eat at Q’eqchi’-Maya ninq’e  (fiesta or celebration) will always leave with a bag of xeel. Xeel aren’t leftovers in the sense that North Americans usually mean by that term; they are not the remnants of a meal meant to be tucked away at the back of the fridge for later snacking. They are, in fact, typically much more food than one has personally consumed at the celebratory event itself, and they are meant to be shared with one’s family and friends so that they, too, can participate, if only at a distance, in the sacred act of convivial eating.

I share these photos and a few brief comments on them with you as a kind of xeel.  What I’ve chosen to include as the “Field Notes” may not be the main meal of my book, but I hope that these images and the words that accompany will give you a small taste of life in Cobán, Alta Verapaz and share in the generosity with which my Q’eqchi’-Maya interlocutors received me in their homes and churches.

Two Jaguars and a Cross

This is one of four niches along the walkway up to San Felipe. If you look closely at the details of this photo you can see representations of two visions of Catholicism that bookend the story that I tell in this book. Carved just above the opening of the niche are the figures of the two jaguars that legend says stood guard when a miraculous image of Jesus appeared in this hill. Over the years many layers of lime-based whitewash have accumulated over them and now occlude some of their features, but the sooty smoke from the candles lit beneath them ensures that their unmistakable silhouette can still be seen. Behind the niche is a cross commemorating the first anniversary of Las santas misiónes en la Verapaz (The Holy Missions in Verapaz). While some people clearly relish the new opportunities for religious agency that this new, modernizing vision of Catholicism fosters, others worry that it may lead to the loss of the distinctive spiritual sensibility handed down through generations of Q’eqchi’-Maya elders and ancestors. 

Prayer candles on New Years Day

New Year’s Day is undoubtedly the busiest day at San Felipe. Mayas and Ladinos make it a point to come to the church to offer prayers and light candles for prosperity in the coming year. The church’s sacristans take shifts making sure that there is space for the candles and progressively remove rows of pews to accommodate them. Votive candles sometimes explode due to the heat, and so they must also keep a watch out for any unexpected fires. For the next few days, the sacristans will clean out any remainders of wax in the votive cups, wash them out, and sell them as well as any wax remnants back to candle makers. That small influx of cash from that projects as well as the offerings collected that day help sustain the parish during the lean months it experiences after Holy Week. Sometimes they will find a votive cup with an attractive design that is also particularly good shape and will keep it to use as a drinking glass.

Carismáticos at Work

Although there are many reasons that people are first attracted to La Renovación, there is no doubt that the intercessory prayers they offer on behalf of their members is an important benefit of being part of the congregation. The Holy Spirit was perhaps slow to move when I first went to San Felipe in 2004, but in the intervening years its spiritual gifts (dones) have come with more frequency and several individuals are now recognized as particularly efficacious at facilitating all manner of healing through prayer. They offer their expertise both at both the groups semi-weekly prayer meetings and will also travel to people’s homes to help.

Catequistas at Work

Although most San Felipe’s catechists are men, several of the women who serve in that role have emerged as strong community leaders. They work diligently as lay religious leaders and though it can be difficult to balance the demands of home and church, are amongst the most dedicated lay leaders in the parish. Here we see several of San Felipe’s catequistas are taking the Eucharist to be venerated in private homes during Corpus Christi. That feast day is meant to be an opportunity for Catholics to reflect on the mystery of the transubstantiation of the communion host and wine into Jesus’ body and blood. It is also an opportunity to bridge the spaces of home and church and cultivate a sense of intimacy with the divine.    

Friends

No ethnographer can do their job alone. I include this picture in gratitude of the time, energy, and interest that people in Cobán gave to me. Of the six of us in the picture (I am second from the right), only the two at the far ends still live in Cobán. Two of my friends pictured here have passed away, and I fear that Father Augustine may have as well shortly after he returned to his native country. The advent of social media, though, means that I am in regular (if not exactly frequent) contact with others, and we are able to share in each other’s lives at least a little bit from a distance. 

Eric Hoenes del Pinal was born in Guatemala. He has earned a BA from Boston University and a PhD from the University of California, San Diego. He is currently an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is the co-editor (with Kristin Norget and Marc Roscoe Loustau) of Mediating Catholicism: Religion and Media in Global Catholic Imaginaries (Bloomsbury 2022), and his work has appeared in Anthropological Quarterly, Contemporary Religion, and the Journal of Global Catholicism.

All images in the post are are copyrighted. Do no reproduce without permission.

American Studies Association 2022: Recent Books, Discounts, and More

October 31, 2022

We are thrilled to be participating in the annual American Studies Association meeting in New Orleans, LA this year! If you are attending the conference in person, make sure to stop by our booth to browse our latest titles and chat with our Editor-in-Chief, Kristen Buckles! Use the code AZASA22 at checkout to receive 30% off all of our titles, plus free shipping in the continental U.S., through 12/15/22.

If you can’t make it to New Orleans for this year’s meeting, take a look at some of our newest books below. If you have questions about our publishing program, visit this page, or send Kristen a note at kbuckles@uapress.arizona.edu.

Accessible and engaging, Latinx Belonging underscores and highlights Latinxs’ continued presence and contributions to everyday life in the United States as they both carve out and defend their place in society.

World of Our Mothers highlights the largely forgotten stories of forty-five women immigrants in the early twentieth century. Through interviews in Arizona mining towns, Phoenix barrios, and selected areas of California, Texas, and the Midwest, we learn how they negotiated their lives with their circumstances.

In 1981, Chicana feminist intellectuals Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa published what would become a foundational legacy for generations of feminist women of color—the seminal This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. To celebrate and honor this important work, editors gloria j. wilson, Joni B. Acuff, and Amelia M. Kraehe offer new generations A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back.

Read an excerpt from the book here. We’re thrilled that La Bloga featured the book here!

Postindian Aesthetics is a collection of critical, cutting-edge essays on a new generation of Indigenous writers who are creatively and powerfully contributing to a thriving Indigenous literary canon that is redefining the parameters of Indigenous literary aesthetics.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

Latinx Teens examines how Latinx teenagers influence twenty-first-century U.S. popular culture. The book explores the diverse ways that contemporary mainstream film, television, theater, and young adult literature invokes, constructs, and interprets adolescent Latinidad.

Read a brief interview with authors Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera here. We are thrilled that Latinx Teens received an honorable mention for the International Latino Book Awards!

Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century offers an expansive and critical look at contemporary television by and about U.S. Latinx communities. This volume unpacks the negative implications of older representation and celebrates the progress of new representation, all while recognizing that television still has a long way to go.

Watch editor Frederick Luis Aldama (aka Professor Latinx) and Mighty Peter discuss their top 5 Latinx TV shows here, then watch a special conversation series with some of the contributors here.

For the first time, Navigating CHamoru Poetry focuses on Indigenous CHamoru (Chamorro) poetry from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). In this book, poet and scholar Craig Santos Perez navigates the complex relationship between CHamoru poetry, cultural identity, decolonial politics, diasporic migrations, and native aesthetics.

Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas is a book about hope, struggle, and possibility in the context of gendered violences of racial capitalism on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border.

New Books Network interviewed author Michelle Téllez about the book: listen here. We are thrilled that Border Women received an honorable mention for the International Latino Book Awards! We held a fantastic book release event in Tucson for this book, read about it here.

In The Sound of Exclusion, Christopher Chávez critically examines National Public Radio’s professional norms and practices that situate white listeners at the center while relegating Latinx listeners to the periphery. By interrogating industry practices, we might begin to reimagine NPR as a public good that serves the broad and diverse spectrum of the American public.

KUOW NPR’s Soundside host Libby Denkmann interviewed Christopher Chávez about the book: listen here. NiemanLab’s Hanaa’ Tameez also interviewed Chávez about the book: listen here. New Books Network featured the book on their podcast here. Chávez was part of a PubWest event that featured a Q&A with three authors, watch it here. Current shared an excerpt from the book, read it here. The Latinx Project at New York University shared an op-ed from the author, read it here. We are thrilled that The Sound of Exclusion received an honorable mention for the International Latino Book Awards!

Visualizing Genocide engages the often sparse and biased discourses of genocidal violence against Indigenous communities documented in exhibits, archives, and museums. Essayists and artists from a range of disciplines identify how Native knowledge can be effectively incorporated into memory spaces.

Nuclear Nuevo México recovers the voices and stories that have been lost or ignored in the telling of U.S. nuclear history. By recuperating these narratives, Myrriah Gómez tells a new story of New Mexico, one in which the nuclear history is not separate from the collective colonial history of Nuevo México but instead demonstrates how earlier eras of settler colonialism laid the foundation for nuclear colonialism in New Mexico.

Read a brief interview with the author here.

Children Crossing Borders draws much-needed attention to the plight of migrant children and their families, illuminating the human and emotional toll that children experience as they crisscross the Americas. Exploring the connections between education, policy, cultural studies, and anthropology, the essays in this volume navigate a space of transnational children’s rights central to Latin American life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

Colonialism has the power to corrupt. Finding Right Relations argues that even the early Quakers, who had a belief system rooted in social justice, committed structural and cultural violence against their Indigenous neighbors.

Read a brief interview with authors Marianne O. Nielsen and Barbara M. Heather here.

Native American doctoral graduates of American Indian Studies (AIS) at the University of Arizona, the first AIS program in the United States to offer a PhD, gift their stories. In American Indian Studies, Native PhD recipients share their journeys of pursuing and earning the doctorate, and its impact on their lives and communities.

Read an excerpt from the book here, then watch a book celebration for the book here.

Transforming Diné Education honors the perspectives and voices of Diné educators in culturally relevant education, special education, Diné language revitalization, well-being, tribal sovereignty, self-determination in Diné education, and university-tribal-community partnerships. The contributors offer stories about Diné resilience, resistance, and survival by articulating a Diné-centered pedagogy and politics for future generations.

On the heels of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Department of Diné Education, A History of Navajo Nation Education explains how the current Navajo educational system is a complex terrain of power relationships, competing agendas, and jurisdictional battles influenced by colonial pressures and tribal resistance. In providing the historical roots to today’s challenges, Wendy Shelly Greyeyes clears the path and provides a go-to reference to move discussions forward.

Read a brief interview with the author here.

Five Questions with Myrriah Gómez

October 18, 2022

Nuclear Nuevo México recovers the voices and stories that have been lost or ignored in the telling of U.S. nuclear history. By recuperating these narratives, Myrriah Gómez tells a new story of New Mexico, one in which the nuclear history is not separate from the collective colonial history of Nuevo México but instead demonstrates how earlier eras of settler colonialism laid the foundation for nuclear colonialism in New Mexico. Today, Myrriah answers our questions about her new work.

What was your intention in writing this book?

There have been a lot of histories written about the Manhattan Project and Los Alamos, in particular. However, the presence of Nuevomexicanos, or the Spanish-speaking peoples of New Mexico and their descendants, is always an afterthought. The history books like to repeat a line that New Mexicans “gave up their land for the good of the nation,” and that just isn’t true. I originally wanted to write this book to tell the story about the takeover of the Pajarito Plateau, but the deeper I went, the more I realized how Nuevomexicanos across New Mexico have been affected by the nuclear industry. It is difficult to write a contemporary history, especially when things are still evolving, particularly the efforts to amend the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) and the HOLTEC proposal to bring a high-level nuclear waste facility to southern New Mexico, but I needed to get this out there. There was an urgency in this project from the time I began and it may be even more urgent now. I want people to get this book in their hands so that they can assist in some of the efforts that Nuevomexicanos are currently engaged.

People often think they know the story of nuclear New Mexico. But that just isn’t the case. Why has the impact the nuclear program had on Nuevomexicanas/os and Indigenous people been overlooked for so long?

Put simply, New Mexico finds itself in a precarious situation because we are in the federal government’s stranglehold. The number of jobs that the Los Alamos National Laboratory (and Sandia National Laboratory) creates for Nuevomexicanas/os and Indigenous people is undeniable, and people are afraid of what would happen to northern New Mexico, especially, if the Labs “shut down.” I always tell people I am not outright advocating for the Labs to shut down, but they need to stop creating nuclear weapons. Also, Nuevomexicano and Indigenous perspectives have not always been represented accurately even when they have been discussed. For example, the recent WGN show Manhattan portrays both Indigenous people and Nuevomexicanos in a poor light. The only Nuevomexicano who appears in the show is depicted as a rapist. This show aired in the last decade. These racist depictions of our peoples are despicable. I think it has been easy to overlook or incorrectly depict our communities in these ways in part because people have been asking the wrong questions. For a long time, they wanted to know what the scientists were like who the Nuevomexicanas and Indigenous women worked for instead of asking the women about their own work on the Hill. Those themes (colonialism, racism, and others) resonate throughout the examples I discuss in the book.

You grew up in New Mexico, intimately aware of the impacts of the nuclear industrial complex had on everyday people. Was there anything that surprised you in researching this book?

There were many things that surprised me, but the magnitude of people who are sick with cancer and other illnesses associated with radiation exposure as the result of the Trinity test was shocking to me. I took a break from working on this manuscript to work on the Health Impact Assessment project for the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, which we released in February 2017. As we met with people from communities between Socorro and Tularosa, especially, I was saddened and angered by the high incidences of cancer and the total disregard for New Mexicans by the federal government. The fact that RECA has not been amended to include New Mexico downwinders (and others, like people in the Marshall Islands, for example) and that the government has not even issued an apology to the people of New Mexico should be shocking to all Americans.

Another thing that shocked me, in a good way, is the amount of coalitional work that occurs around anti-nuclear issues in New Mexico, across the country, and throughout the world. That is why I dedicate the book to the activists. There is a large network of people doing grassroots organizing, who have dedicated their lives to seeking justice around these issues. I respect and admire these people, many whom know far more about these issues than I do. I have never called myself an activist, but one day I hope I can dedicate all my time to working on these issues and be more than an advocate. Only then would I dare call myself an activist.

How could instructors teaching about colonialism and racism incorporate this work into their classes?

I wrote the introduction to this book to stand on its own, but also, the chapters illustrate the points I lay out in the introduction, especially in terms of settler colonialism and environmental racism. Each individual chapter is a case study of sorts. I also wrote it for a wide audience, meaning that high school teachers could use this in addition to the college professors that I hope will assign it. As I have already mentioned, much of this is contemporary history, meaning that these are ongoing issues and the battles against the nuclear industrial complex are still being fought. I would hope that those reasons alone would encourage instructors to teach this book to try to engage students in community-engaged research or participatory action research. What is the point of reading about all this twenty years from now if you have the chance to engage in what is happening right now to try to make an impact.

What are you working on now?

I am working on a new manuscript on nuclear literature written by and about people of color, tentatively titled Atomic Bomb Culture. This continues some of the testimonio work that I started with this project, only now I’m removing myself as interlocuter to analyze work that has already been published. What I hope to demonstrate is how the “fiction” is actually nonfiction and is modeled after what happened or is ongoing in communities of color affected by the nuclear industrial complex, and anything nonfiction, especially memoir and poetry, reflects intense experiences that remain mostly unfamiliar to the general public.

Vox.com Features Interview with John Fleck

October 14, 2022

Vox.com recently featured Science Be Dammed and an interview with author John Fleck and Benji Jones in their article “How a 100-year-old miscalculation drained the Colorado River”.

“…this was a stunning revelation for me. The very bottom of the river, where it leaves the United States and enters Mexico, used to be this vast delta — wild and wet and full of beavers and marshes and estuaries. But the river now stops at a place called Morelos Dam, on the US-Mexico border. Downstream from the dam there’s a little trickle of water that’s maybe 10 to 15 feet wide, and then it peters out into the sand. Then you just have dry riverbed. That’s because we’ve taken all the water out of the river upstream to use in our cities and farms.”

John Fleck

Read the entire article here.

Western History Association 2022: Discounts, New Books, and More

October 12, 2022

We are thrilled to be participating in the 2022 Western History Association meeting in San Antonio, Texas this week! Make sure to stop by our booth to browse our latest history titles, and meet with our Editor-in-Chief, Kristen Buckles. If you aren’t attending the meeting in person, check out some of our recent history titles below!

Use the code AZWHA22 for 30% off with free continental U.S. shipping through 11/15/22. To learn more about our publishing program, click here.

We are excited to be launching two new series, BorderVisions and Arizona Crossroads, this year! Learn more below.

BorderVisions, edited by Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez and Yvette J. Saavedra, engages the U.S.-Mexico borderlands’ dynamic histories and cultures and expands our understanding of the borderlands beyond a site of geopolitical inquiry. The series conceptualizes borderlands as both a place and a methodology and addresses the constraints of traditional fields, challenging authors to think creatively and critically about the expansive frameworks and possibilities of borderlands studies. 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. This series 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. We seek to foster an intellectual space that envisions and manifests the multitude of perspectives for understanding the borderlands through interdisciplinary humanities and humanistic social sciences scholarship. We are especially interested in books that address the complexities and richness of borderlands experiences at different historical, cultural, and sociopolitical moments.

Watch a recording of the series launch for BorderVisions here.

Arizona Crossroads, edited by Anita Huizar-Hernández, Eric V. Meeks, and Katherine G. Morrissey, is a series in collaboration with the Arizona Historical Society that explores the history of peoples and cultures, events and struggles, ideas and practices in the place we know today as Arizona. 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.

Watch a recording of the series launch for Arizona Crossroads here.

For questions or to submit a proposal to either of these series, please contact Kristen Buckles, kbuckles@uapress.arizona.edu.

On the heels of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Department of Diné Education, A History of Navajo Nation Education explains how the current Navajo educational system is a complex terrain of power relationships, competing agendas, and jurisdictional battles influenced by colonial pressures and tribal resistance. In providing the historical roots to today’s challenges, Wendy Shelly Greyeyes clears the path and provides a go-to reference to move discussions forward.

Read a brief interview with the author here.

A New Deal for Navajo Weaving by Jennifer McLerran provides a history of early to mid-twentieth-century Diné weaving projects by non-Natives who sought to improve the quality and marketability of Diné weaving but in so doing failed to understand the cultural significance of weaving and its role in the lives of Diné women.

The Greater San Rafael Swell by Stephen E. Strom and Jonathan T. Bailey offers the story of how citizens of a small county in the rural West – Emery County, Utah—resolved perhaps the most volatile issue in the region – the future of public lands.

Explore field notes from Jonathan T. Bailey here, and explore field notes from Stephen E. Strom here.

Visualizing Genocide, edited by Yve Chavez and Nancy Marie Mithlo, engages the often sparse and biased discourses of genocidal violence against Indigenous communities documented in exhibits, archives, and museums. Essayists and artists from a range of disciplines identify how Native knowledge can be effectively incorporated into memory spaces.

Nuclear Nuevo México recovers the voices and stories that have been lost or ignored in the telling of U.S. nuclear history. By recuperating these narratives, Myrriah Gómez tells a new story of New Mexico, one in which the nuclear history is not separate from the collective colonial history of Nuevo México but instead demonstrates how earlier eras of settler colonialism laid the foundation for nuclear colonialism in New Mexico.

World of Our Mothers by Miguel Montiel and Yvonne de la Torre Montiel highlights the largely forgotten stories of forty-five women immigrants in the early twentieth century. Through interviews in Arizona mining towns, Phoenix barrios, and selected areas of California, Texas, and the Midwest, we learn how they negotiated their lives with their circumstances.

Set in the arid lands of northwestern Mexico, Bountiful Deserts foregrounds the knowledge of Indigenous peoples who harvested the desert as bountiful in its material resources and sacred spaces. Author Cynthia Radding uses the tools of history, anthropology, geography, and ecology to re-create the means of defending Indigenous worlds through colonial encounters, the formation of mixed societies, and the direct conflicts over forests, grasslands, streams, and coastal estuaries that sustained wildlife, horticulture, foraging, hunting, fishing, and—after European contact—livestock and extractive industries. She returns in each chapter to the spiritual power of nature and the enduring cultural significance of the worlds that Indigenous communities created and defended.

Esther Belin Accepts Before Columbus Foundation’s 2022 American Book Award for The Diné Reader

October 11, 2022

Esther Belin accepted the Before Columbus Foundation’s 2022 American Book Award for The Diné Reader at their virtual awards ceremony on October 9, 2022 on behalf of the editors and contributors to the volume. You can watch her acceptance speech below. Congratulations to all of the editors and contributors to this incredible work!

Devon Mihesuah on Native American Calling

October 10, 2022

Native American Calling (NAC), the live call-in program that offers thought-provoking national conversation about issues specific to Native communities, included author Devon Mihesuah and her newest work Dance of the Returned in their New on the Native Bookshelf feature. In this new detective novel, Mihesuah (Choctaw) puts tribal tradition into a suspenseful contemporary light. The episode also includes conversations with Chelsea Hicks (Wazhazhe) and Tiffany Midge (Hunkpapa Lakota), who discuss their new works.

Mihesuah tells NAC host Shawn Spruce, “I like to create positive role models. As a writer, I have a responsibility to project positivity and strength and accuracy in how Native women really are and can be. So I created Monique Blue Hawke because she’s a problem solver. I’m looking to create someone people say ‘I really like her. I want to be like her!’ “

Listen to the full episode:
https://www.nativeamericacalling.com/friday-october-7-2022-new-on-the-native-bookshelf/#

Watch: Robert Davis Hoffman Discusses and Reads from New Poetry Collection ‘Raven’s Echo’

October 3, 2022

We are thrilled to be joined by Robert Davis Hoffmann for a discussion about and a reading from his new poetry collection, Raven’s Echo.

In Raven’s Echo, Tlingit artist and poet Robert Davis Hoffmann calls on readers to nurture material as well as spiritual life, asking beautiful and brutal questions about our individual positions within the universe and within history. The poems in this collection are brimming with an imaginative array of characters, including the playful yet sometimes disturbing trickster Raven, and offer insights into both traditional and contemporary Native life in southeast Alaska.

Robert Davis Hoffmann imagines the mythical and historical life of his Tlingit people. He addresses historical and cultural loss, confused identity as the result of growing up in two cultures and being half-Native, and ultimately moving toward catharsis and integrity. He now enjoys retirement in Sitka, Alaska, where does his artwork and helps his wife, Kris, with her fantastical garden. His latest work is Village Boy: Poems of Cultural Identity.

Elizabeth Torres wins 2022 Academy of American Poets’ Ambroggio Prize with Lotería: Nocturnal Sweepstakes

September 20, 2022

Elizabeth Torres’s La Lotería: Sorteo Nocturno / The Lottery: Nocturnal Sweepstakes has won the Academy of American Poets’ Ambroggio Prize, which is a $1,000 publication prize given for a book-length poetry manuscript originally written in Spanish and with an English translation. The winning manuscript is published by the University of Arizona Press, a nationally recognized publisher of award-winning works of emerging and established voices in Latinx and Indigenous literature, as well as groundbreaking scholarship in Latinx and Indigenous studies. Established in 2017, the Ambroggio Prize is the only annual award of its kind in the United States that honors American poets whose first language is Spanish. This year’s judge was Raina J. León.

Elizabeth Torres (Madam Neverstop) is a poet, literary translator, and multimedia artist. She is the author of over twenty books of poetry published in Spanish, English, Danish, and German. Her poetry has also been translated into Ukrainian, Serbian, Finnish, and Swedish. She is the founder and director of the arts and culture quarterly publication Red Door Magazine, host of the Red Transmissions Podcast, initiator of the international audio collection Poetic Phonotheque, and coordinator in the Nordic region of the Red Thread network. Her work intertwines poetry, visuals, and soundscapes with language and performance, focusing on the subjects of identity, migration, grief, resilience, environmental awareness, and the representation of neurodivergent, BIPOC, and LGBTQI+ communities. She now resides in Copenhagen, where she is pursuing an MFA in performing arts with a writing specialization at the Danish National School of Performing Arts.

About Torres’s winning manuscript, judge Raina J. León said: “In every beginning, there is a river that entices with its generational wisdom, its own invocations, its own knowledge that what will come is what has been. La Lotería: Sorteo Nocturno alchemizes lotería symbology as vessels for myth, migration, and becoming. What belongs to centuries of play and divination is also seen anew in this text; we learn how even a sound can cause a room to wither. Poems arise from archetypical cards blazon out with new relevance; ‘The Milk’ and ‘The Customs Office’ have as much to say as ‘The Wall,’ as much about chaos and loss as they offer moments when the human experience, its fullness, becomes universal. ‘But how do I tell the builders / I don’t want grey cement / attaching me to the ground?’ This book reminds us that the drums of war continue to beat their fear and devastation into one’s bones even after the body has risen to the sky, leaving runways of scattered articles of life. What we leave behind in hopes of peace! Injustice waits when you land and caws your name in front of its crow ‘collection of panicked deer eyes.’ The game plays on and these poems invite a gamble: read and you just might change your life. The river will be there, at the beginning, and it may become the rain within you.

We are thrilled to be publishing this award-winning collection. Congratulations, Elizabeth!

Ask UP & Ask the University of Arizona Press

September 15, 2022

We’re thrilled to announce that this fall the University of Arizona Press is hosting the Association of University Presses popular site Ask UP. The site is a resource for authors looking to learn more about scholarly publishing, university presses, and the publishing process in general. Hosted each quarter by a different member of the AUP community, the University of Arizona Press looks forward to answering your questions!

In addition to an “Ask A Question” feature, the site also includes resources related to teaching, promotion, copyright and intellectual property, and preparing materials for publication. It also provides links to describe the life cycle of a book, from the perspective of a variety of university presses.

Learn more about Ask Up here.

Excerpt from ‘Children Crossing Borders’

September 13, 2022

In the new work Children Crossing Borders, contributors explore the different meanings of the lives of borderland children in the Americas. This volume draws much-needed attention to the plight of migrant children and their families, illuminating the human and emotional toll that children experience as they crisscross the Americas. Exploring the connections between education, policy, cultural studies, and anthropology, the essays in this volume navigate a space of transnational children’s rights central to Latin American life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Today we offer an excerpt of this important new work:

***
This book on children on the borders in the Americas was planned and structured before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it has been completed and will be published in a changed world, one in which considerations of the health and well-being of children in the Americas have become even more relevant and in which inequalities related to race, citizenship, ethnicity, social class, and gender have become even more intense and unavoidable. In 2020 millions of children in Latin America and the Caribbean suffered poverty, violence, and a lack of adequate health services. Over 154 million children in Latin America and the Caribbean were out of school during 2020. Serious consequences ensued for the most vulnerable, who depended on schools to access food and sanitary services as well
as psychosocial support (UNICEF 2020a). Many have been denied their
minimum needs and rights, such as food and adequate housing. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), owing to the impact of COVID-19, the number of children living in poor households will increase by 21.7 percent, from 71.6 million to 87.1 million children (UNICEF 2020b). At the same time, even those that enjoy relatively better economic positions suffer depression, isolation, and loneliness as rising unemployment, inflation, and the loss of millions of lives take a toll on all families across the Americas. Hate speech, racism, and intolerance have risen, too, amplifying the reverberation of racist and xenophobic discourses online as well as off-line (UN 2019). As a result many children in the Americas have experienced the same physical and psychological instability that migrant children suffer.

Migrants and refugees across the region have been particularly exposed to the virus, as practicing social distancing is challenging for vulnerable communities. At the same time, border closures and increasing xenophobia have left many migrant families and children stranded when they are in need of protection and humanitarian assistance. Just like migrant families, children experiencing this pandemic have lost their sense of security, challenged by economic, political, spatial, or educational instabilities.

This book intends to reflect on children on the borders in the Americas through theoretical as well as empirical perspectives; it seeks to serve as a toolbox for those who work with children on the borders and to point out and challenge ways in which the media, literature, legislation, public policies, and everyday practices construct and deconstruct migrant childhoods. We seek to provide theoretical and practical tools for better understanding the way in which refugee and immigrant children are represented in different kinds of cultural and literary productions. One of our goals is to offer tools to help educators, social workers, policy makers, and advocates accompany
immigrant children in their journeys of self-recognition, their searches for empowerment, and their struggles for rights and citizenship. We examine the way education, legislation, public policies, literature, and culture are potential tools for combating racism, nationalism, sexism, and xenophobia and for providing opportunities for children and their families to become aware of the experience of immigrants and refugees.

A Decolonial Perspective on Migrant Childhoods in the Americas

In this volume we approach migrant childhoods in the Americas through a decolonial perspective—that is, by considering the structure of social and economic inequalities that go back to the history of European imperialism and colonialism, which have shaped the circulation of children throughout the region at least since colonial times (Mignolo 2002; Rabello de Castro 2020). The main implication of this decolonial perspective is that we resist erasing differences between North and South or adhering to a notion of a prototypical (white, Anglo-Saxon, middle-class), definitive model of American or Latin American childhood against which other children would be compared. Our decolonial perspective on childhood migration in the Americas means that we seek to articulate North and South America through the unifying theme of migrant children, looking at children at the crossroads between colonialism and postcolonialism, diversity and oppression, invisibility and othering, and reappraising difference in migrant childhoods in the Americas in structural power relationships.

Our decolonial approach also has strong implications for our political
economy of knowledge production: we incorporate theories and scholarship written in languages other than English and situated in North and South, as we reject essentializing difference and avoid reaffirming preferences, themes, and concepts that already circulate in international knowledge markets. We seek to create an egalitarian, collaborative space in which horizontal political and epistemic relations are possible regarding the international division of scientific labor. Our book strives to create bonds where long-standing structural and imperial divisions between North and South America exist, ones that have separated and interconnected these parts of the world. Thus, we assume the costs of dissenting and producing theory on children from within North and South.

***

Alejandra J. Josiowicz is professora adjunta and Prociencia Fellow (2021–2024) at the Institute of Languages and Literatures of the Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). She earned her MA and PhD from Princeton University and was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the School of Social Sciences of the Getulio Vargas Foundation (CPDOC-FGV) in Brazil. She has published articles, chapters, and a book on childhood studies, children’s literature, and Latin American cultural studies.

Irasema Coronado received her bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of South Florida. She has an MA in Latin American studies and a PhD in political science from the University of Arizona. She is director of the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University and co-author of Fronteras No Mas: Toward Social Justice at the U.S.-Mexico Border and Políticas: Latina Public Officials in Texas.

Arizona Crossroads Series Launch

September 12, 2022

Below, find a recording of the Arizona Crossroads series launch. Arizona Crossroads explores the history of peoples and cultures, events and struggles, ideas and practices in the place we know today as Arizona. 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.

Learn more about Arizona Crossroads here.

Learn more about the Arizona Historical Society here.

Many thanks to David Turpie, Vice President of Education, Exhibitions, and Publications at the Arizona Historical Society; Kristen Buckles, Editor-in-Chief at the University of Arizona Press; and the Arizona Crossroads series editors: Katherine G. Morrissey, Eric V. Meeks, and Anita Huizar-Hernández for joining us for this discussion!

The Diné Reader Receives a 2022 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award

September 8, 2022

We are so thrilled to announce that The Diné Reader has received a 2022 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award!

The American Book Awards were created to provide recognition for outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America’s diverse literary community. The purpose of the awards is to recognize literary excellence without limitations or restrictions. There are no categories, no nominees, and therefore no losers. The award winners range from well-known and established writers to under-recognized authors and first works. There are no quotas for diversity, the winners list simply reflects it as a natural process. The Before Columbus Foundation views American culture as inclusive and has always considered the term “multicultural” to be not a description of various categories, groups, or “special interests,” but rather as the definition of all of American literature. The Awards are not bestowed by an industry organization, but rather are a writers’ award given by other writers.

From Joy Harjo:

The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature opens with the writings of Blackhorse Mitchell whose first novel Miracle Hill was published in 1967. This was the year I first discovered Native writers, as a student at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Blackhorse Mitchell had been a student there, as was Grey Cohoe. There were many Navajo student poets who published in the yearly literature publication funded by Vincent Price specifically highlighting the writing of IAIA students. Navajo literature was and is predominately oral, with classic texts like The Blessing Way that have profoundly influenced American literature, including the Kiowa writer and poet N. Scott Momaday who would be honored with a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for his novel House Made of Dawn. The title is a direct reference from Navajo literature. The Diné Reader confirms the prominent and influential position that Diné writings hold in American letters today.  

This valuable collection holds the poetry, prose, and thoughts of several generations of Diné, or Navajo, writers, with numerous foundational heavy hitters in literature alongside emerging writers and fresh voices. I appreciate seeing Gloria Emerson here. She is one of the contemporary matriarchs of philosophical thought and cultural continuance. She was a force for Navajo language and assisted in language being seen as necessary to cultural flourishing. Nia Francisco was one of the first of the poets that was around in my generation as we came up as poets in New Mexico. The two Navajo Nation poet laureates, Luci Tapahonso and Laura Tohe, feature in this collection. Both were students at the University of New Mexico in the 70’s, a time of Native rights movements and the discussion and implementation of tribal nation sovereignty. Liz Woody was a student at the Institute of American Arts, as it moved from being a Bureau of Indian Affairs high school to a full-fledged arts college. She was honored recently as the State of Oregon’s poet laureate. Rex Lee Jim’s first book was published by Princeton University Press, in Navajo. He has continued as a cultural leader. You will also find so many of the younger generations of poets who have established Native poets as important artists to watch in the larger American culture. They include Esther Belin, Sherwin Bitsui, Orlando White, Bojan Louis, Tacey Atsitty, and Jake Skeets. Many have won major American literary prizes and write bilingually.

Every one of these writers and poets mark a fresh era of thought and becoming.

This anthology proves that Diné writers are at the heart of not just contemporary Native literature but the canon of American literature. These writers are defining their own literature, which means defining the future as they stand as the next generations of literary ancestors. They are being their own cultural critics and are moving away from the generic term of being a Native or Native American writer. This finely edited groundbreaking collection is essentially a statement of sovereignty and proof of continuance of the songs and thoughts of their ancestors. It is destined to become a classic of American and world literature. 
— Joy Harjo, Mvskoke Nation, September 1, 2022

The 2022 American Book Award winners will be formally recognized on Sunday, October 9, 2022, from 2:00–4:30 p.m., online. You can view the ceremony at any of these links:

Zoom: https://sfpl-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_1sjnvBOwSEmOO_tRmBbeyw
Sfpl.org page: https://sfpl.org/events/2022/10/09/celebration-columbus-foundation-43rd-
annual-american-book-award
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsYomnsMdJY

We are sending a huge and sincere congratulations to the editors of The Diné Reader, Esther G. Belin, Jeff Berglund, Connie A. Jacobs, and Anthony K. Webster, as well as all of the contributors within.

Four Questions with Author Devon A. Mihesuah

September 6, 2022
Today marks the publication of Devon A. Mihesuah’s newest release Dance of the Returned. In this newest work, the disappearance of a young Choctaw leads Detective Monique Blue Hawk to investigate a little-known ceremonial dance. As she traces the steps of the missing man, she discovers that the seemingly innocuous Renewal Dance is not what it appears to be. After Monique embarks on a journey that she never thought possible, she learns that the past and future can converge to offer endless possibilities for the present. She must also accept her own destiny of violence and peacekeeping.

To celebrate the new release, we’ve republished our interview with Devon, where she discusses writing life and even gives us a glimpse at Dance of the Returned. Enjoy!

April 20, 2021

In Devon A. Mihesuah’s new novel, The Hatak Witches, readers are introduced to Detective Monique Blue Hawk and her partner Chris Pierson when they are summoned to the Children’s Museum of Science and History in Norman, Oklahoma, where one security guard is dead and another wounded. Her uncle, the spiritual leader Leroy Bear Red Ears, concludes that the stolen remains from the museum are those of Hatak haksi, a witch and the matriarch of the Crow family, a group of shape-shifting Choctaws who plan to reestablish themselves as the powerful creatures they were when the tribe lived in Mississippi.

In a recent review 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. Readers looking for intelligent, diverse supernatural fiction will be captivated.”

Below, Mihesuah answers several questions on writing life and what’s next for Detective Monique Blue Hawk:

You have a wonderful reputation as an Indigenous Studies scholar, what brought you to fiction?

I write and teach about racism, colonization, genocide, boarding schools, repatriation, bias in the academy, stereotypes, violence against Natives, activism, and ethnic fraud. These are heavy topics and any Native in the academy will tell you that we don’t stop thinking about them when the work day is over. We carry around a lot of emotional baggage. I don’t care for downer themes in fiction and I have a hard time watching movies that reenact past horrors. That trauma trope is not entertaining to me. Writing stories is a way to create endings that I want. Writing fiction is also a way to express myself in ways that I can’t in non-fiction. I prefer off-beat, odd stories with strong Native protagonists who could be role models.

Have you ever had any concerns sharing Choctaw culture and cosmology in your fiction?

I first wrote about Choctaw creation stories, witches, shampes, Kowi Anukasha (Little People), and time travel in Roads of My Relations. That was published in 2000 and no one has voiced concerns. I explain in the epilogue of that novel and in Hatak Witches that I never write about real ceremonies and that the entities in my stories are profiled on multiple online sites and even on the Choctaw Nation site. I’ve written a lot about Choctaw culture, foodways, and politics. My great-great-grandfather was murdered in 1884 by men from the rival political party. Many Choctaws don’t want the world to know that we have a complex history of violent intertribal factionalism based on cultural differences, wealth inequities, and religious adherences. They become more upset with the truth telling in my book Choctaw Crime and Punishment: 1884-1907 (2010) than they have with my fiction.

What do you hope your readers get from The Hatak Witches and Detective Blue Hawk?

I try to create inspirational characters. My other novels feature strong females. Monique is traumatized from the death of her brother and frustrated with tribal factionalism. She might be slightly addicted to her beer and has a hair-trigger temper, but she doesn’t wallow around in angst. In two future books she most certainly puts that anger to use. She is proactive and I am hopeful she can serve as a role model.

Can we say this will be an ongoing series? (wink wink, nudge nudge)

Yes! I have completed the next Monique story, Na Yukpa-The Blessed. It picks up a thread in Roads of My Relations and explores the possibilities of Indigenous futurisms. Here is the synopsis:

The disappearance of a young Choctaw leads Detective Monique Blue Hawk to investigate a little-known ceremonial dance. As she traces the steps of the missing man, she discovers that the seemingly innocuous Renewal Dance is not what it seems to be. After Monique embarks on a journey that she never thought possible, she learns that the past and future can converge to offer endless possibilities for the present. And that she must accept her destiny of violence and peacekeeping to become one of the Blessed

NPR’s Books We Love Featured ‘Book of Wanderers’

August 31, 2022

National Public Radio’s Books We Love recently featured Reyes Ramirez‘s The Book of Wanders on its Best Books 2022 list.

On Wanderers:

It’s tempting to describe the tales in this masterful debut collection of short stories as both of and for our current moment. But this painterly illumination of culture, heritage, language and humanity isn’t of the zeitgeist; rather, it tells a profound truth about the many realities constituting Latino/a/Hispanic life in the Americas. Hop on the surrealist bus to understanding that Reyes Ramirez conjures for us, and you’ll hear echoes of Dashiell Hammett, Gabriel García Márquez and Alfonsina Storni. But ultimately, Ramirez’s short story collection is singular, and the real deal.

Read the entire list here.

‘Returning Home’ Finalist for Best Book in Utah History

August 30, 2022

Congratulations to University of Arizona Press author’s Farina Noelani KingMichael P. Taylor, and James R. Swensen for their book Returning Home: Diné Creative Works from the Intermountain Indian School placing as finalist for Best Book in Utah History from the Utah Division of State History and Utah State Historical Society.

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.

This book works to recover the lived experiences of Native American boarding school students through creative works, student interviews, and scholarly collaboration. It shows the complex agency and ability of Indigenous youth to maintain their Diné culture within the colonial spaces that were designed to alienate them from their communities and customs. 

Western National Parks Association Event Celebrated New Book from Michael Chiago

August 29, 2022

Michael Chiago speaking to attendees at the WNPA event about his work as an artist.

On Thursday, August 25, 2022, the Western National Parks Association and the University of Arizona Press co-hosted an event to celebrate the launch of Michael Chiago: O’odham Lifeways Through Art with Tohono O’odham artist Michael Chiago at the WNPA headquarters in Oro Valley, Arizona.

From left to right: Wade C. Sherbrooke, Joanna Johnson, and Michael Chiago.

Joanna Johnson, WNPA operations manager, welcomed the audience of book and art lovers, and introduced Wade C. Sherbrooke, a herpetologist who wrote the book’s forward and helped make it a reality.  Chiago spoke to the audience about his work as an artists, the many experiences he’s had in teaching and traveling, and even recalled his military service in Vietnam.

A full-house at the WNPA,enjoying Michael Chiago talking about his work as an artist.

The book, by Chiago and ethnobiologist Amadeo M. Rea, offers an artistic depiction of O’odham lifeways through the paintings of the internationally acclaimed Chiago. 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.

Terrain.org Features Review of Valerie Martínez’s ‘Count’

August 18, 2022

Literary and arts magazine Terrain.org recently featured a review of Valarie Martínez’s book-length poem Count.

From the review:

Martínez’s brilliance, beyond her lyrical lines, is her querencia, her deep love of people and place, which moves us to a deep longing. Through the poet’s personal narration, science, and mythic story, we also understand even more deeply the drastic impacts of climate change.

… Can we also, in our own disintegrating world, find lasting balance and beauty? Through a powerful poetry both of sorrow and hope, Count helps us believe we can—if we are collective in our response. If we too have a deep love of people and place.

Read the entire review here.

‘Beyond Earth’s Edge’ Co-editor Julies Swarstad Johnson Talks Stars and Poetry with Lowell Observatory

August 16, 2022

The Lowell Observatory’s Star Stuff Podcast recently featured an interview with University of Arizona Press co-editor and poet Julie Swarstad Johnson, who recently served as Lowell Observatory’s Poet in Residence this summer.

Swarstad Johnson is co-editor of Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight, a trailblazing anthology of poetry that spans from the dawn of the space age to the imagined futures of the universe. The anthology offers a fascinating record of both national mindsets and private perspectives as poets grapple with the promise and peril of U.S. space exploration across decades and into the present. Tracing an arc of literary skepticism during the Apollo era and before to a more curious, and even hopeful, stance today, Beyond Earth’s Edge includes diverse perspectives from 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.

Listen to the interview here.

August 12, 2022

EcoTheo Collective recently featured an interview with The Book of Wanderers‘ author Reyes Ramirez on his debut short story collection, Houston, and writing life.

From the interview:

Each story presented its own challenges and joys. The earliest stories were completed about 9 years ago when I was about 23 years old, an incredibly different writer and person than I am now but still holds a spirit of rebellion and passion that I’ve honed a bit more since, I hope. The latest stories were completed about 3 or 4 years ago, before I turned 30, but still a person honing language and narrative. I guess this all to say that the idea of accomplishment has changed so much within the context of this collection that I oscillate between a grand feeling of success for making it this far and utter disgust of what I’d written at such an elementary level in the larger scope of my career. Obviously, the joy wins out or else I wouldn’t be doing this!

Read the entire interview here.

New Lit Hub Series Features Two University of Arizona Press Titles

August 11, 2022

A new Lit Hub series by Diana Arterian features books currently on poet Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta’s night stand, which happens to include two University of Arizona Press titles, Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities co-edited by our Latinx Pop Culture series editors Frederick Luis Aldama and Arturo J. Aldama, and Rewriting the Chicano Movement: New Histories of Mexican American Activism in the Civil Rights Era co-edited by Mario T. García and Ellen McCracken.

On Decolonizing:

Considering the attention Luboviski-Acosta gives to gender in their work, it’s not surprising there are multiple texts that address it directly in their pile. This edited collection considers more specifically the cultural impacts of capitalism in conjunction with Latinx masculinity (what’s been fed to us on television and film for decades, what pops up on social media). Beyond this, however, some of the contributors explore the nourishing and “healing masculinities,” including queer Latinx rodeos, food, music, and more.

On Rewriting:

As the title suggests, this collection of essays attempts to give further nuance to the most powerful civil rights work enacted by Mexican Americans up until that time in the United States. “The essays in this volume broaden traditional views of the Chicano Movement that are too narrow and monolithic,” as the book’s description states. Also known as “El Movimiento,” the Chicano Movement involved thousands of activists fighting for civil rights denied them since the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, and claiming Chicano identity as one of empowerment. The contributors to this collection give insight into the many varied members and methods of activism otherwise left out of the history books.

Read the entire story here.

NYT Magazine Recently Featured ‘Sister Song’ By Casandra López

July 26, 2022

Casandra López‘s poem “Sister Song,” from her collection Brother Bullet published by the University of Arizona Press, was recently featured in New York Times Magazine.

Poet Victoria Chang, who selected the poem, had this to say about the format of “Sister Song”:

The ghazal is a formal poem that has roots in seventh-century Arabia and was often sung by musicians. The poet Agha Shahid Ali introduced the form to America. “Ghazal” literally means “the cry of a gazelle” as it is being chased and about to die. Like many formal poems such as the sonnet, the ghazal, with its restrictions, can paradoxically illuminate and parse difficult emotions. In López’s poem, the emotion is grief — a longing for and memory of a murdered brother. This poem mostly follows the parameters of a ghazal with its repeated end word, “song,” and the inside rhyme of “forever,” “far,” “marred,” etc., as well as the poet’s name or reference to the poet (“Sister”) in the final line. One way this poem breaks the rules is that each couplet doesn’t stand alone as if it were its own poem. Instead, the end of the couplets often bleed into the next stanza, linking the narratives.

Read the entire poem here.

MALCS 2022: Recent Books, Discounts, and More

July 27, 2022

We are thrilled to be participating in the 2022 MALCS Summer Institute! While we can’t make it to the meeting in-person, you’ll be able to find some of our new and recent books on display, our latest catalogs, and special discount slips. Were offering a 30% discount plus free U.S. shipping on all titles when you use the code AZMALCS22 at checkout through 8/31/22.

If you have any questions about our publishing program, visit our proposal guidelines page here, or contact our Editor-in-Chief, Kristen Buckles, at kbuckles@uapress.arizona.edu.

We’re excited to highlight our new series, BorderVisions! 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 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. Read more about the series here, and hear about BorderVisions from series editors Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez and Yvette J. Saavedra in a recorded event here.

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.

We are thrilled that author Aída Hurtado won the AAHHE Distinguished Author Award, and received an honorable mention for the 2020 NWSA Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize. Intersectional Chicana Feminisms also won a bronze medal for the International Latino Book Awards.

Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture traces the development of Chicana/o literature and cultural production from the Spanish colonial period to the present. In doing so, it challenges us to look critically at how we simultaneously embody colonial constructs and challenge their legacies.

Read an excerpt from the book here, then listen to author Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez speak about the book on NPR here.

The Chicana M(other)work Anthology is a call to action for justice within and outside academia. This volume brings together emerging scholarship and testimonios by and about self-identified Chicana and Women of Color mother-scholars, activists, and allies who, using an intersectional lens, center mothering as transformative labor.

Learn more about the collection here.

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.

We are thrilled that author Yvette Saavedra was awarded the 2019 WHA-Huntington Library Martin Ridge Fellowship!

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.

Read an article by the author here.

Challenging stereotypes,  Activist Leaders of San José unearths and makes visible lived experiences of Chicana and Latino activists from San José, California, who made contributions to the cultural and civic life of the city. Through oral histories, we see a portrait of grassroots leadership in the twentieth century.

Watch author Josie Méndez-Negrete and Lorena V. Márquez discuss the book and other topics here. We are thrilled that Josie Méndez-Negrete was chosen as the 2021 NACCS Scholar!

The decolonial approaches found in Writing the Goodlife provide rich examples of mutually respectful relations between humans and nature. Ybarra’s book takes on two of today’s most discussed topics: environmentalism and Latina/o population growth. Ybarra shines a light on long-established traditions of environmental thought that have existed in Mexican American literary history for at least 150 years.

Fleshing the Spirit brings together established and new writers to explore the relationships between the physical body, the spirit and spirituality, and social justice activism. The anthology incorporates different genres of writing—such as poetry, testimonials, critical essays, and historical analysis—and stimulates the reader to engage spirituality in a critical, personal, and creative way.

Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa provides pedagogical applications of Anzaldúa’s noted theories, including la facultad, the path of conocimiento, and autohistoria, among others. This text provides examples, lesson plans, and activities for scholars, professors, teachers, and community members in various disciplines—such as history, composition, literature, speech and debate, and more—and for those interested in teaching the theories of Gloria Anzaldúa.

Watch editors and contributors to the volume discuss the book here.

Silviana Wood’s teatro has elicited tears and laughter from audiences young and old. Barrio Dreams brings together for the first time the plays of Wood, one of Arizona’s foremost playwrights. Wood is acclaimed locally, regionally, and nationally as a playwright, actor, director, and activist.

Author Silviana Wood was featured on New Books Network podcast. You can listen here.

Meditación Fronteriza is 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.

Read a brief interview with the author here, then watch a conversation with her here. We are thrilled that Meditación Fronteriza won the NACCS Tejas Book Award and that it received an honorable mention for the International Latino Book Award!

Mexican Workers and the Making of Arizona expands our understanding of the critical role played by Mexican and Mexican American laborers in making Arizona a prominent and influential state in the Southwest and beyond.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

To offer testimonio is inherently political, a vehicle that counters the hegemony of the state and illuminates the repression and denial of human rights. Claiming Home, Shaping Community offers the testimonios from and about the lives of Mexican-descent people who left rural agricultural valles, specifically the Imperial and the San Joaquín Valleys, to pursue higher education at a University of California campus. Through telling their stories, the contributors seek to empower others on their journeys to and through higher education.

Letras y Limpias is the first book to explore the literary significance of the curandera. It offers critical new insights about how traditional medicine and folk healing underwrite Mexican American literature. Amanda Ellis traces the significance of the curandera and her evolution across a variety of genres written by Mexican American authors such as Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Manuel Munoz, ire’ne lara silva, and more.

Cultura y Corazón is a cultural approach to research that requires a long-term commitment to community-based and engaged research methodologies. This book presents case studies in the fields of education and health that recognize and integrate communities’ values, culture, and funds of knowledge in the research process.

Reclaiming and reconstructing one’s spirituality based on non-Western epistemologies is central to the process of decolonization. Voices from the Ancestors brings 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.

Read brief interviews with the editors here and here.

Through in-depth interviews and focus groups with both Mexicana/o and Chicana/o students, Cynthia Bejarano explores such topics as the creation of distinct styles that reinforce differences between the two groups; the use of language to further distinguish themselves from one another; and social stratification perpetuated by internal colonialism and the “Othering” process. These and other issues are shown to complicate how Latinas/os ethnically identify as Mexicanas/os or Chicanas/os and help explain how they get to this point.

Poem from Raquel Salas Rivera’s ‘x/ex/exis’ Used in Pride Month Event Celebrating Brahms

July 27, 2022

Byron Schenkman and Friends’ Pride Month event, “A Double Portrait: Johannes Brahms & Jonathan Woody”, premiered on June 26. This concert, an intimate, Pride-friendly celebration of Brahms’ music, features two of Jonathan Woody’s works, including the world premiere of ‘nor shape of today’ for voice, viola, and piano set to text by poet Raquel Salas Rivera from his Ambroggio Prize-winner x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación.

Written in the early days of the rise of world-wide fascism and the poet’s gender transition, x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación/poems for the nation accepts the invitation to push poetic and gender imaginaries beyond the bounds set by nation.

From teen dysphoria, to the incarceration of anticolonial activists Oscar López and Nina Droz Franco, to the entanglement of church and state, these poems acknowledge the violence of imposed binaries. For Salas Rivera, the marks Puerto Rican transness in a world that seeks trans death, denial, and erasure. Instead of justifying his existence, he takes up the flag of illegibility and writes an apocalyptic book that screams into an uncertain future, armed with nothing to lose.

For more on the celebration:

Here is the concert:

This is Tucson Summer Reading Challenge Includes Four University of Arizona Press Books

July 25, 2022

Big thanks to the Arizona Daily Star‘s This is Tucson for including four University of Arizona Press books and authors in its summer reading challenge.

Press books featured:

When It Rains: Tohono O’odham and Pima Poetry edited by Ofelia Zepeda, “When it was first released in 1982, ‘When It Rains’ was one of the earliest published literary works in the O’odham language. Speakers from across generations shared poems that showcased the aesthetic of the written word and aimed to spread interest in reading and writing in O’odham. The poems capture brief moments of beauty, the loving bond between family members, and a deep appreciation of Tohono O’odham culture and traditions, as well as reverent feelings about the landscape and wildlife native to the Southwest. A motif of rain and water is woven throughout the poetry in ‘When It Rains,’ tying in the collection’s title to the importance of this life-giving and sustaining resource to the Tohono O’odham people. With the poems in both O’odham and English, the volume serves as an important reminder of the beauty and changeability of the O’odham language.”

The Desert Smells Like Rain: A Naturalist in O’odham Country by Gary Paul Nabhan, “This year marks the book’s 40th anniversary. On Aug. 30, the University of Arizona Press will publish a special 40th anniversary edition of the book, complete with a new introduction by Nabhan dedicated to the O’odham people who changed his life.”

Sowing the Seeds of Change: The Story of the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, by Seth Schindler, “This is the story of a remarkable organization’s sustained, compassionate response to a problem of staggering proportions: there are about 35 million food-insecure people in America today. The numbers are no less shocking in Southern Arizona: one in six residents, and one in four children, are food insecure. How can this be in the richest country in the world? This book explores that paradox and the innovative solutions that one organization has developed to create a healthier, more secure tomorrow for the less fortunate among us. The Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona (CFB) is one of the oldest and most respected food banks in America. It is a widely recognized leader not simply in providing hunger relief but in attacking the root causes of hunger and poverty through community development, education, and advocacy.”

Natural Landmarks of Arizona by David Yetman, “Natural Landmarks of Arizona celebrates the vast geological past of Arizona’s natural monuments through the eyes of a celebrated storyteller who has called Arizona home for most of his life. David Yetman shows us how Arizona’s most iconic landmarks were formed millions of years ago and sheds light on the more recent histories of these landmarks as well. These peaks and ranges offer striking intrusions into the Arizona horizon, giving our southwestern state some of the most memorable views, hikes, climbs and bike rides anywhere in the world. They orient us,  locate us, and they are steadfast through generations.”

To read the entire challenge, go here.

Congratulations to Carmen Giménez on New Position with Graywolf Press

July 21, 2022

Carmen Giménez has been named Graywolf Press’s new executive director and publisher, succeeding Fiona McCrae, who retired after leading the press for 28 years.

Giménez has published three poetry collections with the University of Arizona Press: Bring Down the Little Birds, Milk and Filth, and Odalisque in Pieces.

From Publisher’s Weekly:

Giménez, 51, a queer Latinx poet and editor, holds an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop. She is a professor in the English department at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, where she teaches creative writing in the MFA program.

She was also, until recently, publisher of Noemi Press, which announced on July 5 that Giménez was stepping down 20 years after she and Evan Lavender-Smith founded the press in 2002 with the release of a single chapbook. Noemi’s mission is to promote both emerging voices and established writers with an emphasis on writers from under-represented communities, including women, BIPOC writers, and LGBTQ writers. Noemi Press, a nonprofit organization, now publishes eight books each year in the fiction, nonfiction, drama, and criticism categories. Its authors have been winners of, and finalists for, such awards as the National Book Award, the Whiting Award, the PEN America Literary Awards, and the Lambda Literary Awards.

Graywolf published Giménez’s most recent collection of poetry, Be Recorder, in 2019. Be Recorder was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry, the PEN/Open Book Award, the Audré Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Giménez also is the author of five other collections of poetry, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. Her lyric memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds, won an American Book Award.

Read the entire announcement here.

Farina King and Tai Edwards Receive 2022 AUPresses Stand UP Award

July 19, 2022

At last month’s Association of University Press (AUPresses) annual meeting, historians Farina King and Tai Edwards received the prestigious Stand UP Award for their work in defense of the University Press of Kansas.

The Stand UP Award honors those who through their words and actions have done extraordinary work to support, defend, and celebrate the university press community. The award is intended to recognize advocates who stand up from within the communities that presses work with, speak to, and serve.

King (Diné) is an associate professor of history at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and the author of The Earth Memory Compass: Diné Landscapes and Education in the Twentieth Century (University Press of Kansas, 2018) and coauthor of Returning Home: Diné Creative Works from the Intermountain Indian School (University of Arizona Press, 2021).

Edwards is an associate professor of history and directs the Kansas Studies Institute at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas, and is the author of Osage Women and Empire: Gender and Power (University Press of Kansas, 2018) as well as articles that have appeared in Kansas History and the Journal of American History.

Edwards and King were recognized for their powerful advocacy last year in support of the University Press of Kansas (UPK), a consortial press founded in 1946 and guided by a Board of Trustees comprised of the provosts of its six parent universities. Early in 2021, in light of budgetary impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, this board initiated an independent review to propose direction for UPK’s future, including a consideration of closure. Specialists in Indigenous history who each had published their first books with UPK, Edwards and King sprang into action to advocate in tandem for this imperiled press, successfully rallying others through grassroots efforts and promoting the work of university presses in general.

“By keeping the challenges faced by UPK in national context, these two scholars helped many in our community have valuable conversations on our home campuses about the significance of institutional support for the important work that we do,” said Stand UP Award nominators Kelly Chrisman Jacques, UPK’s managing director, and Kathryn Conrad, director of the University of Arizona Press.

Read the complete announcement.

An Excerpt From ‘Postindian Aesthetics’

July 18, 2022

Postindian Aesthetics: Affirming Indigenous Literary Sovereignty, edited by Debra K. S. Barker, and Connie A. Jacobs, is a collection of critical, cutting-edge essays on Indigenous writers who are creatively and powerfully contributing to a thriving Indigenous literary aesthetic. This book argues for a literary canon that includes Indigenous literature that resists colonizing stereotypes of what has been and often still is expected in art produced by American Indians.

The book’s foreword from Robert Warrior, gets to the heart of Postindian Aesthetics, and the importance of the scholarship and joy from Indigenous literature:

Veterans of those decades of literary and critical work have become adept at admitting that the attention we as scholars have paid to five or six incredibly accomplished and talented contemporary authors can create a misimpression that those five or six writers are the only ones worthy of scholarly attention. In pulling together this book, Barker and Jacobs have provided page after page of engaging examples of some of what we have been missing.


For instance, I have been a big fan of Heid E. Erdrich’s work for a long time but realized in Denise Low’s essay about her poetry that I had never read an article that gives me a deeper understanding of what makes Erdrich’s work so powerful. Low explicates Erdrich’s richly rendered poems in a way that for me became an invitation to be in dialogue with both the critic and the poet, luxuriating in the poet’s love for language and exquisite crafting and also the critical insights that Low educes in her chapter.


Something similar is true of Susan Scarberry-García’s chapter focused on Luci Tapahonso’s poetry. The chapter shows how Tapahonso brings together a deliberate sense of craft, intense quotidian images, spare language, and straightforward, yet often raw, emotion. Scarberry-García focuses on poems Tapahonso has called “traveling songs,” showing the depth, delicacy, and generosity that she argues are hallmarks of the poet’s work. Similar to my response to Bitsui’s book, reading this chapter had me looking for A Breeze Swept Through, my favorite of Tapahonso’s books. Scarberry-García doesn’t write about it, but nonetheless the chapter had me remembering how I had been mesmerized by A Breeze Swept Through when I first read it and returned to it over and over for well over a year. My search for my copy ended with me realizing it is in my campus office, which because of COVID I have barely spent any time in over the past year. The next time I am there, I am going to find it and bring it home to read.
I could go on and on about these essays, but will let you find your own gems among them, and I will hope that you will also find yourself looking for work by the terrific authors featured here when you are done.


Beyond the salutary work these essays do of showing us how much wonderful work by Native authors remains for readers, critics, and students to read, study, and enjoy, I would be remiss not to add something about the important intervention the book makes in addressing what have been some-times contentious arguments in Native literary studies. In a smart and wel-come way, Barker and Jacobs and the other scholars in this book demonstrate that close readings of literary texts that highlight their formal and stylistic qualities and readings that emphasize the social and political contexts from which these texts emerge are not necessarily at odds.


This important aspect of the book is evident, of course, from its title, in which the terms “aesthetic” and “sovereignty” both appear. The editors do more than propose a truce between partisans of these two critical orientations or suggest that the argument has been much ado about not that much. Instead, the authors of these chapters show us how much we as readers and critics of Native writing need to be able to pay attention to their transcendent language and beautiful crafting while also understanding the importance of the particular contexts from which Indigenous literature transcends. The critical essays collected here do an excellent job of showing how sometimes we can learn more about a particular poem, novel, or essay by paying primary attention to the way its author put it together, while other times we won’t be able to understand where it transcends from without some careful contextualization.
To return to where I started, what I admire and appreciate most is that Barker and Jacobs have managed to make this critical intervention while also giving us an entire volume of essays by readers and for readers. So, if you have grown weary of trying to locate yourself within current debates with Indigenous literary studies, run out of explanations for how Indigenous literature works, or have surrounded yourself with stacks of critical, historical, and other academic books and articles and are starting to feel hemmed in, do yourself a favor and keep turning these pages and reading what these scholars have to say. As you go, make some new stacks of books and a list of new books to look for. Most of all, keep reading.

University of Arizona Press Announces New Series: Arizona Crossroads

July 18, 2022

The University of Arizona Press is thrilled to announce Arizona Crossroads, a new series celebrating Arizona’s history in partnership with the Arizona Historical Society. For more info on the series, please visit the series page here.

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, series editors Anita Huizar-Hernández, Eric V. Meeks, and Katherine G. Morrissey, 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.

Series editors:

Anita Huizar-Hernández is Associate Professor of Spanish in the School of International Letters and Cultures at Arizona State University. She is a literary critic whose teaching and research focus on the literatures and cultures of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands with a particular emphasis on the Arizona borderlands. Her book, Forging Arizona: A History of the Peralta Land Grant and Racial Identity in the West (Rutgers 2019), examines a nineteenth-century land grant scheme in which a con artist falsified archives around the world to steal part of the Arizona and New Mexico Territories. Other publications include articles in the Journal of Arizona History, MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States), SAIL (Studies in American Indian Literatures), and English Language Notes. Her current book project investigates the early-twentieth century writings of Mexican Catholic political exiles in the United States. She is also engaged in multiple digital public-facing projects centered in Arizona, including “Reporting on Race and Ethnicity in the Borderlands (1882-1924): A Data-Driven Digital Storytelling Hub” and “DETAINED: Voices from the Migrant Incarceration System.”

Eric V. Meeks is Professor of History at Northern Arizona University. His research and teaching focus primarily on the history of the US-Mexico borderlands and race and ethnicity in North America. His book, Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona, examines how racial classifications and identities of the diverse indigenous, mestizo, and Euro-American residents of Arizona’s borderlands evolved as the region was politically and economically incorporated into the United States. A new updated edition was published by University of Texas Press in 2020. Other publications include articles in the Journal of Arizona History, Western Historical Quarterly, Journal of the Southwest and the Latin American Research Review. His current book project is a history of the US-Mexico borderlands from the late eighteenth century to the present, under contract with Yale University Press in cooperation with the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University.

Katherine G. Morrissey is Department Head and Associate Professor of History at the University of Arizona. Her research and teaching focus on cultural, environmental, borderlands/Southwest and North American West history. Her books include Mental Territories: Mapping the Inland Empire and two co-edited books with the University of Arizona Press, Border Spaces: Visualizing the U.S.-Mexico Frontera, with John-Michael H. Warner and Picturing Arizona: The Photographic Record of the 1930s, with Kirsten Jensen. Publications also include book chapters as well as articles in the Journal of Arizona History, Pacific Historical Review, Global Environment, and Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. Her current book project, Visual Legacies: Reimagining the US/Mexico Borderlands, traces efforts to mark and visually represent the meanings of the border through the long 20th century. She is co-PI for the “Reporting on Race and Ethnicity in the Borderlands (1882-1924)” digital project.

To learn more, register for our virtual series launch on Friday, September 9, 2022, 12:30 p.m. For event info, go here. For questions or to submit a proposal, please contact University of Arizona Press Editor-in-Chief Kristen Buckles, kbuckles@uapress.arizona.edu.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Features ‘Science Be Dammed’

July 15, 2022

On the June 26, 2022 Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River by Eric Kuhn, and John Fleck was featured in a segment on water shortage in the American west.

Science Be Dammed is an alarming reminder of the high stakes in the management—and perils in the mismanagement—of water in the western United States.  It seems deceptively simple: even when clear evidence was available that the Colorado River could not sustain ambitious dreaming and planning by decision-makers throughout the twentieth century, river planners and political operatives irresponsibly made the least sustainable and most dangerous long-term decisions.

Field Notes: Preparing for the Next Hurricane over Mexico’s Sea of Cortéz

July 15, 2022

Baja California’s Coastal Landscapes Revealed by Markes E. Johnson was published in November 2021. Therein, expert geologist and guide Johnson takes us on a dozen rambles through wild coastal landscapes on Mexico’s Gulf of California. Descriptions of storm deposits from the geologic past conclude by showing how the future of the Baja California peninsula and its human inhabitants are linked to the vast Pacific Basin and populations on the opposite shores coping with the same effects of global warming. In this update on his work on storm deposits, the author shares new experiences and new images from fieldwork conducted in June 2022.

By Markes E. Johnson

Whether or not another storm of similar magnitude can be expected to reach these same shores is not in contention, but rather how soon such an event is likely to occur.  The current state of affairs in which we find ourselves living through accelerated global warming was the main reason for writing my book on the region’s coastal landscapes.  In part, the book’s goal was to relate the much smaller Gulf of California to the vast Pacific Ocean basin where major hurricanes are far more prevalent and reach across to Asian shores on the opposite side, where much damage is done to places in the Philippines, mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan.  After my isolation due to the covid-19 pandemic during the last two years, the opportunity arose for me to make my first excursion back to Baja California for a two-week visit in June 2022.  The objective was to proceed directly to the region around San Basilio Bay (subject of Chapter 4 in the book), where a team was assembled to produce a video focused on the area’s most interesting geological features.

I have described the San Basilio area with its ancient Pliocene volcanic islets as one of the best-kept secrets hidden by a remote landscape.  For me, it was like a long-delayed home-coming to finally reach the safe-haven of the Spanish Contessa’s former house overlooking the embayment.  Much of the bay is surrounded by massive cliffs of rhyolite, which emerged from volcanic eruptions roughly four million years ago just as they did at Clam Bay nearby to the north.  Two of the goals for the visit were to include drone footage with the video under production and to affix a set of tags to some of the boulders in the deposit at Clam Bay.  The metal tags are small and unobtrusive (only an inch in diameter) but numbered and cut with a notch to point in an upward direction after attachment to a boulder’s vertical surface.  The drone footage captured not only a spectacular overview of the entire deposit, but hovered overhead as I recorded dialog for the video and then worked with the crew to implant a few tags on selected boulders near the water’s edge.

Clam Bay and its coastal boulder deposit: Located on a normally placid bay a short distance north of the larger San Basilio embayment, the storm deposit at Clam Bay (Ensenada Almeja) forms an arc-shaped pattern that encloses an area of 3.25 acres behind a high wall of loosely piled boulders and cobbles.  The drone image reflects the darker sub-surface extent of the deposit, which borders the source of erosion at the tip of the peninsula (center-right part of the image) and curves off to the far end where a small sandy beach appears (upper-center left part of the image).  The overall shape of the deposit is due to the refraction of storm waves arriving from the east (left) and turning southward into the bay.  The bottom of the image faces to the north.  A 30-foot sailboat anchored in the bay (center-left part of the image) gives a sense of scale to the deposit.

Rocky shoreline at Clam Bay:  The view in this image was captured overhead by the drone as author Markes Johnson (center in blue shirt) is video-taped explaining how strong wave action eroded large boulders from the jointed rhyolitic cliffs at the shore.

Preparations to affix a boulder tag:  Hovering closely overhead, the drone captures action as the author (right) works with team member Norm Christie (left) to prepare epoxy for attachment of a boulder tag.

Big shore boulder:  Taken at ground level, this image shows the author standing next to one of the larger rhyolite boulders in the Clam Bay storm deposit (left).  Based on its dimensions and the relative density of the rock, the boulder is estimated to weigh about four metric tons.

Tag placement:  In this image, the author holds a numbered metal tag with a notch pointing upward against the vertical side of a small rhyolite boulder.  The surface was prepared prior to fixing the tag in place with epoxy. 

More video action:  Ground view with more video action showing the author (right) speaking about the storm deposit at Clam Bay.  A colony of pelicans sat on an offshore rock (upper left) as the only audience in attendance.

The general climate in the American southwest and adjacent Mexico is currently in transition between a La Niña phase and the next episode of El Niño years when hurricanes in the eastern Pacific basin are expected to be more numerous due to excessive heating of surface waters stretching over the equatorial Pacific Ocean.  After the next big storm enters the Sea of Cortéz, Professor Johnson will return to Clam Bay to assess the degree to which a series of tagged boulders have been displaced.  The coastal boulder deposit at Clam Bay is regarded as very young in age due to its unconsolidated nature, meaning that individual rocks are loosely aggregated and not cemented together as a solid conglomerate.  Moreover, it is an unfinished deposit meaning that more erosion is likely to occur in the near future as big storms lash the shoreline.  The coastal landscapes at San Basilio Bay and elsewhere all along the eastern coast of the Baja California peninsula suggest that the El Niño pattern of weather was far more prevalent in the past than today, and that global warming may be returning us to a comparable time of more severe coastal erosion and coastal flooding.  Time will prove the veracity of such a prediction, perhaps sooner than one might guess.

***

Markes E. Johnson is the Charles L. MacMillan Professor of Natural Science, Emeritus, at Williams College (Williamstown, Massachusetts).  He is the author of three books on the geology and ecology of landscapes in Baja California: Discovering the Geology of Baja California (2002); Off-Trail Adventures in Baja California (2014); and most recently Baja California’s Coastal Landscapes Revealed (2021) all published by the University of Arizona Press. His last two books include color plates showing landscapes photographed during various commercial flights between Los Angles and Loreto in Mexico’s Baja California Sur.

20 New OA Titles Featuring Archaeology

July 11, 2022

The University of Arizona Press is thrilled to announce that twenty backlist archaeology books are now available Open Access thanks to a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities. The titles, which include classics as well as some newer works, are available for online reading or downloading from Open Arizona, the press’s OA portal. These works include works by leading archaeologists. Learn more about each title:

Ancestral Landscapes of the Pueblo World
by James E. Snead
This revolutionary study makes an important contribution to landscape archaeology and explains how the Precolumbian Pueblo landscape was formed.

Ancestral Zuni Glaze-Decorated Pottery
by Deborah L. Huntley
This research explores interaction networks among residents of settlement clusters in the Zuni region of westcentral New Mexico during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries AD.

Canals and Communities
by Jonathan B. Mabry
Canals and Communities can serve as a sourcebook for social scientists and development planners investigating the cultural ecology of irrigated agriculture, the ethnology of cooperative social formations, the politics of collective-resource institutions, and the sociology of rural development.

Ceramic Ethnoarchaeology
Edited by William A. Longacre
Drawing on projects undertaken around the world, in the Phillipines, East Africa, Mesoamerica, India, in both traditional and complex societies, the contributors focus on identifying social and behavioral sources of ceramic variation to show how analogical reasoning is fundamental to archaeological interpretation.

Ceramic Production in the American Southwest
Edited by Barbara J. Mills and Patricia L. Crown
This volume covers nearly 1000 years of southwestern prehistory and history, focusing on ceramic production in a number of environmental and economic contexts.

Hinterlands and Regional Dynamics in the Ancient Southwest
Edited by Alan P. Sullivan III and James M. Bayman
This work was the first volume dedicated to understanding the nature of and changes in regional social autonomy, political hegemony, and organizational complexity across the entire prehistoric American Southwest.

Landscapes and Social Transformations on the Northwest Coast
by Jeff Oliver
The Fraser Valley in British Columbia has been viewed historically as a typical setting of Indigenous-white interaction. Jeff Oliver reexamines the social history of this region from pre-contact to the violent upheavals of nineteenth and early twentieth century colonialism.

Lifeways in the Northern Maya Lowlands
Edited by Jennifer P. Mathews and Bethany A. Morrison
This book was the first volume to focus entirely on the northern Maya lowlands, presenting a broad cross-section of research projects in the region by a wide range of scholars.

The Marana Community in the Hohokam World
Edited by Suzanne K. Fish, Paul R. Fish, and John H. Madsen
This account of Classic Period settlement in the Tucson Basin between A.D. 1100 and 1300 was the first comprehensive description of the organization of territory, subsistence, and society in a Hohokam community of an outlying region.

Mexican Macaws
By Lyndon L. Hargrave
The Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona is a peer-reviewed monograph series sponsored by the School of Anthropology. Established in 1959, the series publishes archaeological and ethnographic papers that use contemporary method and theory to investigate problems of anthropological importance in the southwestern United States, Mexico, and related areas.

Mimbres during the Twelfth Century
By Margaret Nelson
While most scholars view abandonment in terms of failed settlements, Margaret Nelson shows that, for the Mimbres, abandonment of individual communities did not necessarily imply abandonment of regions. By examining the economic and social reasons for change among the Mimbres, Nelson reconstructs a process of shifting residence as people spent more time in field camps and gradually transformed them into small hamlets while continuing to farm their old fields.

Multidisciplinary Research at Grasshopper Pueblo, Arizona
By Edited by William A. Longacre, Sally J. Holbrook, and Michael W. Graves
This volume presents the results of research from the University of Arizona’s archaeological field school at Grasshopper Pueblo in Arizona. Contributors considered issues of environmental and climactic change; regional and interregional economics; and subsistence change.

Navajo Multi-Household Social Units
By Thomas R. Rocek
In a rigorous and innovative study, Thomas R. Rocek examines the 150-year-old ethnohistorical and archaeological record of Navajo settlement on Black Mesa in northern Arizona. Rocek’s study not only reveals a rich array of interacting factors that have helped to shape Navajo life during this period but also constructs a valuable case study in archaeological method and theory, certain to be useful to other researchers of nonurban societies.

Neighbors of Casas Grandes
By Michael E. Whalen and Paul E. Minnis
Casas Grandes, or Paquimé, in northwestern Mexico was of one of the few socially complex prehistoric civilizations in North America. Based on more than a decade of surveys, excavations, and field work, the authors provide a comprehensive look at Casas Grandes and its surrounding communities.

Of Marshes and Maize
By Bruce B. Huckell
This work presents archaeological information obtained from small-scale investigations at two deeply buried preceramic sites in Arizona’s Cienega Creek Basin. Its report on excavations at the Donaldson Site and at Los Ojitos offers a thorough description of archaeological features and artifacts, floral and faunal remains, and their geological and chronological contexts.

Sedentism and Mobility in a Social Landscape
By Mark D. Varien
Research on hunting and gathering peoples has given anthropologists a long-standing conceptual framework of sedentism and mobility based on seasonality and ecological constraints. This work challenges that position by arguing that mobility is a socially negotiated activity and that neither mobility nor sedentism can be understood outside of its social context. Drawing on research in the Mesa Verde region that focuses on communities and households, Mark Varien expands the social, spatial, and temporal scales of archaeological analysis to propose a new model for population movement.

Settlement, Subsistence, and Society in Late Zuni Prehistory
By Keith W. Kintigh
Beginning about A.D. 1250, the Zuni area of New Mexico witnessed a massive population aggregation in which the inhabitants of hundreds of widely dispersed villages relocated to a small number of large, architecturally planned pueblos. Over the next century, twenty-seven of these pueblos were constructed, occupied briefly, and then abandoned. Another dramatic settlement shift occurred about A.D. 1400, when the locus of population moved west to the “Cities of Cibola” discovered by Coronado in 1540. Keith W. Kintigh demonstrates how changing agricultural strategies and developing mechanisms of social integration contributed to these population shifts.

Sourcing Prehistoric Ceramics at Chodistaas Pueblo, Arizona
By Maria Zedeño
For decades archaeologists have used pottery to reconstruct the lifeways of ancient populations. It has become increasingly evident, however, that to make inferences about prehistoric economic, social, and political activities through the patterning of ceramic variation, it is necessary to determine the location where the vessels were made. Through detailed analysis of manufacturing technology and design styles as well as the use of modern analytical techniques such as neutron activation analysis, Zedeño here demonstrates a broadly applicable methodology for identifying local and nonlocal ceramics.

The Southwest in the American Imagination
Edited by Curtis M. Hinsley and David R. Wilcox
This work presents a cultural history of the Hemenway Expedition and early anthropology in the American Southwest, told in the voices of its participants and interpreted by contemporary scholars.

White Roads of the Yucatán
By Justine M. Shaw
Presents original field data collected with the Cochuah Regional Archaeological Survey at two ancient Maya sites, Ichmul and Yo’okop. Both centers chose to invest enormous resources in the construction of monumental roadways during a time of social and political turmoil in the Terminal Classic period. Shaw carefully examines why it was at this point—and no other—that the settlements made such a decision.

Latina/o Studies Association 2022: Recent Books, Discounts, and More

July 11, 2022

We are so thrilled to be participating in the 2022 Latina/o Studies Association conference in South Bend, Indiana! Be sure to visit our tables to browse our latest Latinx studies titles and speak with our Editor-in-Chief, Kristen Buckles! If you happen to miss her at the conference, send her a message at kbuckles@uapress.arizona.edu if you have questions about our publishing program.

We are happy to be offering a 30% discount with free U.S. shipping until 8/15/2022. Use the code AZLSA22 at checkout!

Winner of the 2021 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets

Cardinal in My Window with a Mask on Its Beak offers the insightful voice of a first-generation immigrant to the United States in both Spanish and English. The poems, both fantastical and real, create poetic portraits of historical migrants, revealing shocking and necessary insights into humanity while establishing a transatlantic dialogue with the great voices of the Spanish Renaissance.

We are thrilled that Cardinal in My Window with a Mask on Its Beak received an honorable mention for the International Latino Book Awards!

Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century offers an expansive and critical look at contemporary television by and about U.S. Latinx communities. This volume unpacks the negative implications of older representation and celebrates the progress of new representation, all while recognizing that television still has a long way to go.

Watch a special conversation series between the contributors to the book here, then watch editor Frederick Luis Aldama (Professor Latinx) and Mighty Peter talk about their top 5 Latinx TV shows here.

Latinx Teens examines how Latinx teenagers influence twenty-first-century U.S. popular culture. The book explores the diverse ways that contemporary mainstream film, television, theater, and young adult literature invokes, constructs, and interprets adolescent Latinidad.

Read a brief interview with authors Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera here.

We are so thrilled that Latinx Teens received an honorable mention for the International Latino Book Award!

LGBTQ Politics in Nicaragua provides the previously untold history of the LGBTQ community’s emergence as political actors—from revolutionary guerillas to civil rights activists. This is a story of struggle and defeat, progress and joy.

The Book of Wanderers is a dynamic short story collection that shows readers what a family of luchadores, a teen on the run, a rideshare driver, a lucid dreamer, a migrant worker in space, a mecha soldier, and a zombie-and-neo-Nazi fighter can have in common. Reyes Ramirez takes readers on a journey through Houston, across dimensions, and all the way to Mars with riveting stories that unpack what it means to be Latinx in contemporary—and perhaps future—America.

Read a brief interview with the author here!

In 1981, Chicana feminist intellectuals Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa published what would become a foundational legacy for generations of feminist women of color—the seminal This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. To celebrate and honor this important work, editors gloria j. wilson, Joni B. Acuff, and Amelia M. Kraehe offer new generations A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back.

Read an excerpt from the book here!

In The Sound of Exclusion, Christopher Chávez critically examines National Public Radio’s professional norms and practices that situate white listeners at the center while relegating Latinx listeners to the periphery. By interrogating industry practices, we might begin to reimagine NPR as a public good that serves the broad and diverse spectrum of the American public.

Read an excerpt from the book here, then listen to two different interviews with the author here and here. Read an op-ed from the author here, then watch a recorded event that features the book here.

We are thrilled that The Sound of Exclusion received an honorable mention for the International Latino Book Awards!

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 Simón Ventura Trujillo and Vick Quezada discuss the project here. We are thrilled that Land Uprising received an honorable mention for the MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies!

Letras y Limpias is the first book to explore the literary significance of the curandera. It offers critical new insights about how traditional medicine and folk healing underwrite Mexican American literature. Amanda Ellis traces the significance of the curandera and her evolution across a variety of genres written by Mexican American authors such as Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Manuel Munoz, ire’ne lara silva, and more.

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.

Read a brief interview wit Lisa Magaña here, then watch the authors discuss the book here.

Count is a powerful book-length poem that reckons with the heartbreaking reality of climate change. With sections that vary between poetry, science, Indigenous storytelling, numerical measurement, and narration, Valerie Martínez’s new work results in an epic panorama infused with the timely urgency of facing an apocalyptic future.

Read a brief interview with the poet here, then watch a recording of a book celebration event for Count here.

Danzirly is a stunning bilingual poetry collection that considers multigenerational Latinx identities in the rapidly changing United States. Winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Ambroggio Prize, Gloria Muñoz’s collection is an unforgettable reckoning of the grief and beauty that pulses through twenty-first-century America.

Watch the poet read from her collection here!

We are thrilled that Danzirly is the gold-medal winner of the 2021 Florida Book Awards poetry section, and Danzirly also received an honorable mention for the 2021 Foreword INDIES awards!

Transversal takes a groundbreaking, disruptive approach to poetic translation, opening up alternative ways of reading as poems get translated or transcreated into entirely new pieces. In this collection, Urayoán Noel masterfully examines his native Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean as sites of transversal poetics and politics.

Read a brief interview with the poet here, then watch him read from Transversal here and present at New York Public Library’s World Literature Festival here.

We are thrilled that Transversal was on the longlist for the 2022 PEN American Open Book Award, and that it was also chosen by New York Public Library as one of the Best Books of 2021!

Deuda Natal finds the beauty within vulnerability and the dignity amidst precariousness. As one of the most prominent voices in Puerto Rican poetry, Mara Pastor uses the poems in this new bilingual collection to highlight the way that fundamental forms of caring for life—and for language—can create a space of poetic decolonization.

Watch poet Mara Pastor in conversation with Siomara España at International Literature Festival here, then watch the poet read from her collection here.

UNDOCUMENTS is an expansive multi-genre exploration of Greater Mexican documentality that reveals the complicated ways all Latinx peoples, including the author, become objectified within cultures. John-Michael Rivera remixes the Florentine Codex and other documents as he takes an intense look at the anxieties and physical detriments tied to immigration.

Read an excerpt from the book here, then listen to other author read from the book here.

We are thrilled that UNDOCUMENTS won a 2021 Eugene M. Kayden Book Award, and that John-Michael Rivera was awarded by the Carolyn Woodward Pope Endowment for UNDOCUMENTS!

Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture traces the development of Chicana/o literature and cultural production from the Spanish colonial period to the present. In doing so, it challenges us to look critically at how we simultaneously embody colonial constructs and challenge their legacies.

Read an excerpt from the book here, then listen to the author on NPR here. Watch the author, Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, in conversation with other borderlands scholars here, then learn more about her here.

Written in the early days of the rise of world-wide fascism and the poet’s gender transition, x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación/poems for the nation accepts the invitation to push poetic and gender imaginaries beyond the bounds set by nation. For Raquel Salas Rivera, the x marks Puerto Rican transness in a world that seeks trans death, denial, and erasure. Instead of justifying his existence, he takes up the flag of illegibility and writes an apocalyptic book that screams into an uncertain future, armed with nothing to lose.

Read a brief interview with the author here.

We are thrilled that x/ex/exis is a 2022 Lambda Literary Awards finalist!

Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas tells the story of the community’s struggle to carve out space for survival and thriving in the shadows of the U.S.-Mexico geopolitical border. This ethnography by Michelle Téllez demonstrates the state’s neglect in providing social services and local infrastructure. This neglect exacerbates the structural violence endemic to the border region—a continuation of colonial systems of power on the urban, rural, and racialized poor.

We are thrilled that Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas received an honorable mention for the International Latino Book Awards!

Professor Latinx Looks at Problems with Censorship in Comics and Literature

July 5, 2022

In a recent issue of Hispanic Outlook on Education Magazine, Frederick Luis Aldama, aka Professor Latinx, wrote a call to action to preventing the damage caused by the growing censorship of comics and literature.

Aldama is co-editor of the University of Arizona Press’s Latinx Pop Culture series, and is editor of one it’s newest titles, Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century, which offers an expansive and critical look at contemporary television by and about U.S. Latinx communities.

Here’s an excerpt from Aldama’s article on censorship:

As I wrap this up, I remind readers of the urgency of our call to action as Latinx educators and others – librarians, familia, and members of the broader community. Over the last decade or so, I’ve noticed the inching forward of more Latinx fiction and nonfiction in the form of comics and prose, making it to library shelves and K-12 and college classroom desks. Yet, such books are still few and far between, hovering in the low single percentages of the total amount of books published every year. And yet, at 19% of the total US population, we are the majority of historically underrepresented people in this country. The banning of the few Latinx books we have managed to get into our learning and exploring spaces will quickly result in our total absence from these spaces.

So, when librarians and teachers are forced to remove from shelves and desks books like Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, House on Mango Street, Always Running, Bless Me, Ultima, Poet X, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents, and In the Dream House, among many Latinx titles that have been banned in different regions and districts across the land, what becomes cemented in their place is fear, prejudice, rigidity of thought, and the notion of who belongs and who doesn’t.

Let’s follow our common sense and science. Let’s listen to those like Bertrand Russell, who already nearly a century ago in Education and the Good Life, asked adults to be open and honest with youth about all matters, including taboo and stigmatized subjects. Let’s stop thinking of young people as passive absorptive sponges and as snowflakes easily crushed. Let’s stop acting from fear that forecloses possibilities. And let’s start thinking and treating young people as they are: actively engaged and active recreators of the world. That is, let’s act with intelligence, courage, and creativity. Let’s stand with our fellow educators and librarians to continue to open creative spaces that allow all youth to explore and grow fluid, messy, exuberant, complex patterns of thought, behaviors, identities, and experiences that will lead to their innovating in the areas of literature, art, science, and technology.

Read the entire article here.

An Excerpt from ‘A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back’

June 29, 2022

In 1981, Chicana feminist intellectuals Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa published what would become a touchstone work for generations of feminist women of color—the seminal This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. To celebrate and honor this important work, editors gloria j. wilson, Joni B. Acuff, and Amelia M. Kraehe offer new generations A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back.

Here’s an excerpt from the book’s introduction that’s part of a larger Q&A interview the editors did with each other that shares details of the book, and more specifically here, why Love Letters:

AMY So why create a collection of love letters? What is the significance of that framing?

GLORIA Perhaps it’s because I grew up listening to stories my mother told about my father writing so many love letters to her during their courtship! It signifies deep commitment to human-being and living.

AMY gloria, that sounds so intimate.

JONI It’s very intimate. Meaning, it takes more time and effort. When you think about a love letter, you don’t think about somebody typing something out on a computer. You think about a handwritten letter, in cursive. It’s a romanticized representation of something mundane. It is illustrative of how something so simple can be presented in a profound way. Crafting a love letter is time- consuming, it takes effort and intentionality, and it also takes patience. It’s a different kind of energy, meaning that it’s an opportunity to be vulnerable in ways one might not be face-to-face.

AMY The intimacy that’s conveyed and captured in a love letter can, like you said, Joni, be about quotidian happenings, but life’s texture and complexity are contained in the everyday. So much insight can come from sharing the small bits of life. Those bits are passageways to deeper levels of understanding of another person and their condition. They are symbolic spaces for relationship, and those spaces are opportunities to touch or come into the presence of another being.

gloria, you said that your dad wrote love letters to your mom. We now have digital technologies that allow people to engage with each other very quickly all the time through text and social media, but a love letter is a classic form that has existed across time and in different geographic and cultural locations. It is inflected culturally and differently depending upon who is writing and the tradition that they come from, but it endures as a classic form of dialogue. I think that is important here. This book is in conversation, a deep, committed kind of conversation with the original Bridge authors, and with thousands of other folks. If we look at the number of Google citations for This Bridge Called My Back, it is in the thousands, and they keep climbing every day. That is just citations, to say nothing of the incalculable numbers of other readers who thumb the book’s pages each day. So A Love Letter is in conversation not only with the original Bridge writers but also with every-one who is reading that text and, like us, is passionate about theory in the flesh, sensing and making sense through aesthetic forms of philosophy, knowledge, communication, and collectivity. That is exciting to me, and maybe it is only possible through a love letter.

GLORIA Yeah. You know, as I was thinking about this question, I was thinking that one has to be vulnerable. So when I think of a love letter, I think of it as a radical act of care. It’s like humbling yourself to someone else, opening yourself wide and performing an act that is so private and personal. You know, a love letter is not intended for the world to witness, necessarily, although there are examples of public pronouncements of love. In all, it’s intended for the recipient in a very direct manner.

When I think about love letters that I have written, I recall including traces of myself in the form of swatches of fabric from clothing or artwork, with the intent of distilling, suspending, or cementing a memory. In the case of this Love Letter anthology, my desire was to offer an extension of the sentiments tied to the expression of a love letter, and yet I felt the need to share a space and record it collectively and in material form—record it with others for whom the original book has made an impact. In doing this, the question I thought with and attempted to answer was: What opportunity might be created as an acknowledgement of thanks for each of these women, for their work and its impact on my life because it may not be possible to do so in person?

My response was to attempt a collective love letter, as an insistence for radical love for women of color in the wake of forced silences and settlements via colonialisms and imperialisms; it is an aesthetic pronouncement—an outward declaration of gratitude. But in excess of this, to create an archive of collective voice. Moraga and Anzaldúa would refer to the contributors to This Bridge as “women from all kinds of childhood streets,” who speak to past, present, and current conditions of life in and into the afterlives of containment, migration, silencing, diaspora. For the contributors of the original text, This Bridge Called My Back, who are still present in this life and for those who exist with us in the afterlife— this book serves to express that I am thinking about and with them; thinking with their thoughts and sentiments and creative pronouncements, which reveal the conditions of their existence forty years ago. This Love Letter might illuminate traces of what is still occurring and what might emerge as contemporary conditions and our current moment. And that’s what is, in my opinion, the most radical act of care, like we said in the beginning. Like Joni said, it’s something that you put energy into, writing it out.

AMY Along the same lines as This Bridge, a collection like this one can be healing for so many people. Many contributors returned to the idea of bridges and bridging. Can a love letter be a bridge? Here I’m thinking not only of connection but also healing. Love letters heal in ways that may be different from bridges. Bridges enable us to move and transition. They connect one realm to another because they are liminal spaces, in- between spaces. But love letters might do something else. So in that sense, A Love Letter does not seek to replicate This Bridge. It is not an addition to a series or an attempt to replicate the original text. It is intending something different and for a very different moment in time.

***

gloria j. wilson is co-founder and co-director of Racial Justice Studio and an assistant professor in the School of Art at the University of Arizona. Her research centers cultural studies and Black studies engagements with theories of racial formations, anti-racism, and critical arts-based praxis.

Joni B. Acuff is an associate professor in the Department of Arts Administration, Education, and Policy at The Ohio State University. Acuff utilizes frameworks such as critical race theory, critical multiculturalism, Black feminist theory, and Afrofuturism to develop and disseminate pedagogical and curriculum strategies that activate critical race knowledge in art education.

Amelia M. Kraehe is associate vice president for equity in the arts, co-founder and co-director of Racial Justice Studio, and an associate professor in the School of Art at the University of Arizona. She researches and teaches about intersectional anti-racism, the arts, and creative agency. She is co-author of Race and Art Education and co-editor of Pedagogies in the Flesh: Case Studies on the Embodiment of Sociocultural Differences in Education and The Palgrave Handbook on Race and the Arts in Education.

Honorable Mentions for the International Latino Book Awards Include Téllez, Chávez, Boffone, Herrera, Aguasaco, and Rathbun

June 28, 2022

We are thrilled to announce that six University of Arizona Press authors received honorable mentions for the 2022 International Latino Book Awards! These selections are a salute to the wide variety of quality books being created by and about Latinx people, both inside and outside the USA.

Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas by Michelle Téllez and The Sound of Exclusion by Christopher Chávez both received honorable mentions for the Victor Villaseñor Best Latino Focused Nonfiction Book Award!

Latinx Teens by Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera received an honorable mention for the Best Nonfiction – Multi-Author Award!

Cardinal in My Window with a Mask on Its Beak, written by Carlos Aguasaco and translated by Jennifer Rathbun, received an honorable mention for the Best Poetry Book – Multi Author Award!

Congratulations to Michelle, Christopher, Trevor, Cristina, Carlos, and Jennifer!

Andrew Flachs Talks ‘Cultivating Knowledge’ and more on Landscapes Podcast

June 17, 2022

Landscapes with Adam Cato featured a recent interview with University of Arizona Press author Andrew Flacks on his study of the role of seeds on farmer livelihoods in rural India as part of his book, Cultivating Knowledge.

In Cultivating Knowledge Flachs shows how rural farmers come to plant genetically modified or certified organic cotton, sometimes during moments of agrarian crisis. Interweaving ethnographic detail, discussions of ecological knowledge, and deep history, Flachs uncovers the unintended consequences of new technologies, which offer great benefits to some—but at others’ expense. Flachs shows that farmers do not make simple cost-benefit analyses when evaluating new technologies and options. Their evaluation of development is a complex and shifting calculation of social meaning, performance, economics, and personal aspiration. Only by understanding this complicated nexus can we begin to understand sustainable agriculture.

From Landscapes:

An article in Scientific American bringing a science and technology studies lens to Genetically Modified Organisms, provoked louder than normal responses from the pro biotech crowd. What can we learn from the exchange? Dr. Andrew Flachs, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Purdue University, studied the role of seeds on farmer livelihoods in rural India as part of his book, Cultivating Knowledge. We discuss the arguments of the article and its malcontents to try and reach a broader understanding of what this debate is really about.

Listen to the podcast here.

Gloria Muñoz’s ‘Danzirly’ 2021 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Winner

June 16, 2022

We are pleased to announce that Danzirly, the Ambroggio Award-winning poetry collection by Gloria Muñoz, received an honorable mention in 24th annual Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards in the poetry category.

Foreword Reviews, a book review journal focusing on independently published books, recently announced the winners of its INDIES Book of the Year Awards. The INDIES recognize the best books published in 2021 from small, indie, and university presses, as well as self-published authors.

From Foreword on Danzirly:

Danzirly is a stunning bilingual poetry collection that considers multigenerational Latinx identities in the rapidly changing United States. Winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Ambroggio Prize, Gloria Muñoz’s collection is an unforgettable reckoning of the grief and beauty that pulses through twenty-first-century America.

Raquel Salas Rivera’s ‘x/ex/exis’ Poetry Collection a Lambda Literary Finalist

June 13, 2002

We are proud to announce that poet Raquel Salas Rivera‘s collection, x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación/poems, was chosen as a 2022 Lambda Literary Awards finalist.

Salas Rivera’s book was the first Ambroggio Prize winner from the Academy of American Poets, a $1,000 publication award given for a book-length poetry manuscript originally written in Spanish and with and English translation. The winning manuscript is published by the University of Arizona Press. Established in 2017, the Ambroggio Prize is the only annual award of its kind in the United States that honors American poets whose first language is Spanish.

Salas Rivera’s x/ex/exis was a finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards competition in the Transgender Poetry category. The book was written in the early days of the rise of world-wide fascism and the poet’s gender transition. From teen dysphoria, to the incarceration of anticolonial activists Oscar López and Nina Droz Franco, to the entanglement of church and state, these poems acknowledge the violence of imposed binaries. For Salas Rivera, the marks Puerto Rican transness in a world that seeks trans death, denial, and erasure. Instead of justifying his existence, he takes up the flag of illegibility and writes an apocalyptic book that screams into an uncertain future, armed with nothing to lose.

Watch: Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez Delivers Inaugural Bazy Tankersley Southwest Laureate Lecture

June 7, 2022

In April, Arizona State University anthropologist and University of Arizona Press author Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez delivered the Inaugural Bazy Tankersley Southwest Laureate Lecture, “The Southwest Northwest Region, a Political Ecology of Cultures and Hegemonies.” Due to the audience enthusiasm the Southwest Center will schedule a second conversation in September.

Vélez-Ibáñez’s latest book with the Press is Reflections of a Transborder Anthropologist: From Netzahualcóyotl to Aztlán, which takes us on a journey of remembering and rediscovery with the anthropologist as he explores his development as a scholar and in so doing the development of the interdisciplinary fields of transborder and applied anthropology. He shows us his path through anthropology as both a theoretical and an applied anthropologist whose work has strongly influenced borderlands and applied research. Importantly, he explains the underlying, often hidden process that led to his long insistence on making a difference in lives of people of Mexican origin on both sides of the border and to contribute to a “People with Histories.”

If you missed the lecture or want to watch it again, you can catch it here:

New Review of Stephen Pyne’s ‘To the Last Smoke’

June 3, 2022

A recent issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology featured a review of Stephen J. Pyne’s To the Last Smoke: An Anthology.

From the review by Donald A. Falk at the University of Arizona’s School of Natural Resources & the Environment:

Some of the best sections of book are chapters in which fire is seen through the lens of a particular person, including fire managers and scientists, some of them well known and others underappreciated. These sections are refreshing because they center on narrative rather than politics or philosophy.

Pyne’s language is exceptional among writers about wildfire. Describing how the indigenous inhabitants of the Southwest used the increasingly sparse fuels near their settlements, the author writes that “[l]andscape fires thinned, and then shrank into the hearths of kivas and kilns”. In fact, this displacement of fire from landscapes to controlled combustion in human devices is a theme throughout the volume and elsewhere in his writing, a phenomenon he describes as the “pyric transition” in human and Earth history.

There are many poets of place; Stephen Pyne is a poet of process, and his work is required reading for anyone who wants to understand wildland fire in today’s world and into the future. The irony of the title is that there is no last smoke.

UT Austin’s Life & Letters Tells Origin Story of Latinx Pop Culture’s Professor Latinx

May 31, 2022

Life & Letters, the official magazine for University of Texas Austin’s College of Liberal Arts recently published a deep dive into University of Arizona Press author and editor Frederick Luis Aldama.

In “The Pilgrimage of Professor Latinx” Frederick Luis Aldama and the Making of an Academic Superhero,” Emily Nielsen goes from Aldama’s early childhood to his love scholarship, and of course, Latinx pop culture.

Aldama is the co-editor of the Press’s Latinx Pop Culture series. Its most recent title, Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Aldama, argues that Latinx TV is not just television—it’s an entire movement. Digital spaces and streaming platforms today have allowed for Latinx representation on TV that speaks to Latinx people and non-Latinx people alike, bringing rich and varied Latinx cultures into mainstream television and addressing urbanization, immigration, family life, language, politics, gender, sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity.

Here’s an excerpt from the Life & Letters feature:

At the heart of Aldama’s work is the belief that academic scholarship has an essential role to play in the growth and health of the field of Latino comics. It is not just about reading and critiquing the work of writers and artists, but also legitimizing them and their field. This extends beyond comics to other media as well. Film and television, in particular, have been abiding interests. He’s published two books on the Austin-based film director Robert Rodriguez and is currently working on two books on Latinx TV.

“Wherever I can, I try to bring to these spaces the cultural gravitas, or cultural capital, of being a Ph.D. and a professor with an endowed chair,” Aldama said. “The artists don’t necessarily need it to find readers, but it’s like your art being pulled into a space like the Smithsonian. Suddenly more people are going to take it seriously as art, as some- thing carefully crafted to make a difference in the world.”

As a Latino kid growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s, Aldama didn’t often see people like himself in the media he absorbed. “Growing up, we didn’t have a TV at home, so it was at my abuelita’s that we would watch TV,” Aldama said. “We would spend the night on a Friday, and as a treat on Saturday she would let us watch cartoons. I remember very vividly Speedy Gonzales was one of the few representations. I didn’t know at the time how bad that representation was. There’s Slowpoke Rodriguez, his cousin, who seems totally stoned all the time. And Speedy, what is he doing? He’s a master thief.”

To read the entire interview go here.

*Illustration of Aldama in the image of Marvel’s Professor X. By J. Gonzo

Explore New Titles from the University of Arizona Press Fall 2022 Catalog

May 26, 2022

We have another amazing season ahead of us at the University of Arizona Press. Here’s a preview of our upcoming fall 2022 season with the best the Press has to offer, from Indigenous lit, Latinx poetry, to Indigenous studies, anthropology, borderlands, as well as the return of a classic you love. You know the drill. Tuck in.

Detective Monique Blue Hawk returns in Devon A. Mihesuah new novel, Dance of the Returned. The disappearance of a young Choctaw leads Detective Blue Hawk to investigate a little-known ceremonial dance. As she traces the steps of the missing man, she discovers that the seemingly innocuous Renewal Dance is not what it appears to be. After Monique embarks on a journey that she never thought possible, she learns that the past and future can converge to offer endless possibilities for the present. She must also accept her own destiny of violence and peacekeeping.

In Raven’s Echo, Tlingit artist and poet Robert Davis Hoffmann calls on readers to nurture material as well as spiritual life, asking beautiful and brutal questions about our individual positions within the universe and within history. The poems in this collection are brimming with an imaginative array of characters, including the playful yet sometimes disturbing trickster Raven, and offer insights into both traditional and contemporary Native life in southeast Alaska.

Cenizas offers an arresting portrait of a Salvadoran family whose lives have been shaped by the upheavals of global politics. The speaker of these poems—the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants—questions the meaning of homeland as she navigates life in the United States while remaining tethered to El Salvador by the long shadows cast by personal and public history. Cynthia Guardado’s poems give voice to the grief of family trauma, while capturing moments of beauty and tenderness. Maternal figures preside over the verses, guiding the speaker as she searches the ashes of history to tell her family’s story. The spare, narrative style of the poems are filled with depth as the family’s layers come to light.

Published more than forty years ago, The Desert Smells Like Rain: A Naturalist in O’odham Country by Gary Paul Nabhan remains a classic work about nature, how to respect it, and what transplants can learn from the longtime residents of the Sonoran Desert, the Tohono O’odham people. This edition includes a new preface written by the author, in which he reflects on his gratitude for the O’odham people who shared their knowledge with him.

This special rerelease also includes a beautiful new cover by Tohono O’odham artist Michael Chiago, who happens to have a book coming out this spring 2022 season with Press on his work depicting O’odham life and traditions, Michael Chiago: O’odham Lifeways Through Art.

In Sonoran Desert Journeys: Ecology and Evolution of Its Iconic Species ecologist Theodore H. Fleming discusses two remarkable journeys. First, Fleming offers a brief history of our intellectual and technical journey over the past three centuries to understand the evolution of life on Earth. Next, he applies those techniques on a journey of discovery about the evolution and natural history of some of the Sonoran Desert’s most iconic animals and plants. Fleming details the daily lives of a variety of reptiles, birds, mammals, and plants, describing their basic natural and evolutionary histories and addressing intriguing issues associated with their lifestyles and how they cope with a changing climate. Finally, Fleming discusses the complexity of Sonoran Desert conservation.

Animated by this remarkable confluence of events, Cornerstone at the Confluence: Navigating the Colorado River Compact’s Next Century, edited by Jason A. Robison, leverages the centennial year to reflect on the compact and broader “Law of the River” to envision the future. It is a volume inviting dialogue about how the Colorado River system’s flows should be apportioned given climate change, what should be done about environmental issues such as ecosystem restoration and biodiversity protection, and how long-standing issues of water justice facing Native American communities should be addressed. In one form or another, all these topics touch on the concept of “equity” embedded within the compact—a concept that tees up what is perhaps the foundational question confronted by Cornerstone at the Confluence: Who should have a seat at the table of Colorado River governance?

Bountiful Deserts: Sustaining Indigenous Worlds in Northern New Spain foregrounds the knowledge of Indigenous peoples in the arid lands of northwestern Mexico, for whom the desert was anything but barren or empty. Instead, they nurtured and harvested the desert as a bountiful and sacred space. Drawing together historical texts and oral testimonies, archaeology, and natural history, author Cynthia Radding develops the relationships between people and plants and the ways that Indigenous people sustained their worlds before European contact through the changes set in motion by Spanish encounters, highlighting the long process of colonial conflicts and adaptations over more than two centuries. This work reveals the spiritual power of deserts by weaving together the cultural practices of historical peoples and contemporary living communities, centered especially on the Yaqui/Yoeme and Mayo/Yoreme.

What does “development” mean for Indigenous peoples? Indigenous Economics: Sustaining Peoples and Their Lands lays out an alternative path showing that conscious attention to relationships among humans and the natural world creates flourishing social-ecological economies. Economist Ronald L. Trosper draws on examples from North and South America, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Australia to argue that Indigenous worldviews centering care and good relationships provide critical and sustainable economic models in a world under increasing pressure from biodiversity loss and climate change. He explains the structure of relational Indigenous economic theory, providing principles based on his own and others’ work with tribal nations and Indigenous communities. Trosper explains how sustainability is created at every level when relational Indigenous economic theory is applied—micro, meso, and macro.

Visualizing Genocide: Indigenous Interventions in Art, Archives, and Museums, edited by Yve Chavez and Nancy Marie Mithlo, examines how creative arts and memory institutions selectively commemorate or often outright ignore stark histories of colonialism. The essays confront outdated narratives and institutional methods by investigating contemporary artistic and scholarly interventions documenting settler colonialisms including land theft, incarceration, intergenerational trauma, and genocide. Interdisciplinary approaches, including oral histories, exhibition practices, artistic critiques, archival investigations, and public arts, are among the many decolonizing methods incorporated in contemporary curatorial practices.

Contrary to previous works that suppress Nuevomexicana/o presence throughout U.S. nuclear history, Nuclear Nuevo México: Colonialism and the Effects of the Nuclear Industrial Complex on Nuevomexicanos focuses on recovering the voices and stories that have been lost or ignored in the telling of this history. By recuperating these narratives, Myrriah Gómez tells a new story of New Mexico, one in which the nuclear history is not separate from the collective colonial history of Nuevo México but instead demonstrates how earlier eras of settler colonialism laid the foundation for nuclear colonialism in New Mexico.

World of Our Mothers: Mexican Revolution–Era Immigrants and Their Stories by Miguel Montiel and Yvonne de la Torre Montiel, captures the largely forgotten history of courage and heartbreak of forty-five women who immigrated to the United States during the era of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. The book reveals how these women in the early twentieth century reconciled their lives with their circumstances—enduring the violence of the Revolution, experiencing forced labor and lost childhoods, encountering enganchadores (labor contractors), and living in barrios, mining towns, and industrial areas of the Midwest, and what they saw as their primary task: caring for their families.

Edited by Natalia Deeb-Sossa and Jennifer Bickham Mendez, Latinx Belonging: Community Building and Resilience in the United States is anchored in the claim that Latinx people are not defined by their marginalization but should instead be understood as active participants in their communities and contributors to U.S. society. The volume’s overarching analytical approach recognizes the differences, identities, and divisions among people of Latin American origin in the United States, while also attending to the power of mainstream institutions to shape their lives and identities. Contributors to this volume view “belonging” as actively produced through struggle, survival, agency, resilience, and engagement.

Lavender Fields: Black Women Experiencing Fear, Agency, and Hope in the Time of COVID-19, edited by Julia S. Jordan-Zachery, uses autoethnography to explore how Black girls and women are living with and through COVID-19. It centers their pain, joys, and imaginations for a more just future as we confront all the inequalities that COVID-19 exposes. The essays center Black girls and women and their testimonies in hopes of moving them from the margin to the center. With a diversity of voices and ages, this volume taps into the Black feminine interior, that place where Audre Lorde tells us that feelings lie, to access knowledge—generational, past, and contemporary—to explore how Black women navigate COVID-19. Using womanism and spirituality, among other modalities, the authors explore deep feelings, advancing Black feminist theorizing on Black feminist praxis and methodology.

Gardening at the Margins: Convivial Labor, Community, and Resistance tells the remarkable story of a diverse group of neighbors working together to grow food and community in the Santa Clara Valley in California. Based on four years of deeply engaged ethnographic field research via a Participatory Action Research project with the people and ecosystems of La Mesa Verde home garden program, Gabriel R. Valle develops a theory of convivial labor to describe how the acts of care among the diverse gardeners—through growing, preparing, and eating food in one of the most income unequal places in the country—are powerful, complex acts of resistance.

The Americas are witnessing an era of unprecedented human mobility. With their families or unaccompanied, children are part of this immense movement of people. Edited by Alejandra J Josiowicz and Irasema Coronado, Children Crossing Borders: Latin American Migrant Childhoods explores the different meanings of the lives of borderland children in the Americas. It addresses migrant children’s struggle to build a sense of belonging while they confront racism and estrangement on a daily basis. This volume draws much-needed attention to the plight of migrant children and their families, illuminating the human and emotional toll that children experience as they crisscross the Americas. Exploring the connections between education, policy, cultural studies, and anthropology, the essays in this volume navigate a space of transnational children’s rights central to Latin American life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Author Sarah Milne spent more than a decade working for and observing global conservation projects in Cambodia. During this time, she saw how big environmental NGOs can operate rather like corporations. Their core practice involves rolling out appealing and deceptively simple policy ideas, like Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES). Yet, as policy ideas prove hard to implement, NGOs must also carefully curate evidence from the field to give the impression of success and effectiveness. In her new book, Corporate Nature: An Insider’s Ethnography of Global Conservation, Milne delves inside the black box of mainstream global conservation. She reveals how big international NGOs struggle in the face of complexity—especially in settings where corruption and political violence prevail. She uses the case of Conservation International’s work in Cambodia to illustrate how apparently powerful NGOs can stumble in practice: policy ideas are transformed on the ground, while perverse side effects arise, like augmented authoritarian power, illegal logging, and Indigenous dispossession.

In communities in and around Cobán, Guatemala, a small but steadily growing number of members of the Q’eqchi’ Maya Roman Catholic parish of San Felipe began self-identifying as members of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. Their communities dramatically split as mainstream and charismatic Catholic parishioners who had been co-congregants came to view each other as religiously distinct and problematic “others.” In Guarded by Two Jaguars: A Catholic Parish Divided by Language and Faith, 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.

Reading the Illegible: Indigenous Writing and the Limits of Colonial Hegemony in the Andes examines the history of alphabetic writing in early colonial Peru, deconstructing the conventional notion of literacy as a weapon of the colonizer. This book develops the concept of legibility, which allows for an in-depth analysis of coexisting Andean and non-Native media. The book discusses the stories surrounding the creation of the Huarochirí Manuscript (c. 1598–1608), the only surviving book-length text written by Indigenous people in Quechua in the early colonial period. The manuscript has been deemed “untranslatable in all the usual senses,” but scholar Laura Leon Llerena argues that it offers an important window into the meaning of legibility.

In Translation and Epistemicide: Racialization of Languages in the Americas author Joshua Martin Price tracks how through the centuries translation practices have enabled colonialism and resulted in epistemicide, or the destruction of Indigenous and subaltern knowledge. The book gives an account of translation-as-epistemicide in the Americas, drawing on a range of examples from the early colonial period to the War on Terror. The first chapters demonstrate four distinct operations of epistemicide: the commensuration of worlds, the epistemic marginalization of subaltern translators and the knowledge they produce, the criminalization of translators and interpreters, and translation as piracy or extractivism. The second part of the book outlines decolonial translation strategies, including an epistemic posture the author calls “bewilderment.”

Environmental Directions Radio Interviews Markes Johnson

May 26, 2022

Environmental Directions Radio recently featured author Markes Johnson, discussing his newest book Baja California’s Coastal Landscapes Revealed. In the interview, Johnson and host Nancy Pearlman talk about the islands in the Gulf of California, the peninsula itself, and myriad ways that geology reveals change through time.

The program is a long-running environmental radio series, started in 1977. Pearlman has featured leading scientists, activists, and representatives from the business, academic, government, and nonprofit sectors. Since it began, more than 2,300 shows have been produced.

In Baja California’s Coastal Landscapes Revealed Johnson takes us on a dozen rambles through wild coastal landscapes on Mexico’s Gulf of California. Descriptions of storm deposits from the geologic past conclude by showing how the future of the Baja California peninsula and its human inhabitants are linked to the vast Pacific Basin and populations on the opposite shores coping with the same effects of global warming.

Indigenous Archaeology: An Excerpt

May 20, 2022

Indigenous Archaeology in the Philippines highlights how collaborative archaeology and knowledge co-production among the Ifugao, an Indigenous group in the Philippines, contested (and continue to contest) enduring colonial tropes. Stephen B. Acabado and Marlon M. Martin explain how the Ifugao made decisions that benefited them, including formulating strategies by which they took part in the colonial enterprise, exploiting the colonial economic opportunities to strengthen their sociopolitical organization, and co-opting the new economic system. The archaeological record shows that the Ifugao successfully resisted the Spanish conquest and later accommodated American empire building.

This book illustrates how descendant communities can take control of their history and heritage through active collaboration with archaeologists. Drawing on the Philippine Cordilleran experiences, the authors demonstrate how changing historical narratives help empower peoples who are traditionally ignored in national histories. Today, we offer an excerpt from the books preface, which explains how this collaborative archaeology project came together:

This book is a product of more than a decade of collaboration between the Kiangan, Ifugao community and the Ifugao Archaeological Project. What started as a 30-minute meeting in 2011 resulted in a long-term and productive partnership. Although I (Acabado) have been working in Ifugao as early as 2003, it wasn’t until 2011 that I met Marlon Martin, when I brought my students for a field excursion in Ifugao. The Save the Ifugao Terraces Movement (SITMo) arranged our Ifugao visit and hosted us through 3 days of traipsing around the rice terraces. I was then employed at the University of Guam. I recently concluded a field school in San Remigio, Cebu (Central Philippines), and decided to treat the field school participants to a visit to the famed UNESCO-inscribed Rice Terraces, some 1,200 kilometers away. I contacted Jovel Ananayo, a SITMo member and a friend, whom I met at the University of Hawai’i, where we went for graduate school. Jovel hosted us and facilitated the introduction between Marlon and myself.

At this meeting in 2011, I intimated that I would like to return to restart my archaeological work in Ifugao and conveyed my wish to collaborate with the community. Marlon expressed his interest and suggested that we look at the Old Kiyyangan Village as a start. By March 2012, a series of consultations with the descendants of the Old Kiyyangan Village, elders, the local governments, and the community at large had already been conducted. By June 2012, the Ifugao Archaeological Project (IAP) was formally launched. Fast forward to 2020, this collaboration has resulted in about 35 publications, a book, 5 MAs, and 3 upcoming PhDs. In 2017, SITMo, the newly created Kiangan Culture and Arts Council of the Kiangan Local Government, the DEPED, and IAP launched the Ifugao Community Heritage Galleries that soon served as the Ifugao Indigenous Peoples Education Center. The IPED Center now functions as a resource center for Ifugao studies featuring a small library, a weaving center, and three galleries on Ifugao material culture. It also serves as a training center for Indigenous people’s education for teachers, researchers, and other community members. The IAP has come full circle with the community taking control of their history and heritage.

This book is about engaged scholarship and emphasizes the fact that archaeologists need to involve the communities that they work with in the research process. Doing so results in a more meaningful practice that also empowers communities. As a country with a long colonial history, it is still attempting to define its national identity. This has resulted in the maintenance of colonial structures that aim to assimilate various ethnolinguistic groups into being Filipino. By doing so, the history and heritage of marginalized groups who were on the peripheries of the colonial world were neglected.

We thus highlight the Indigenous history of the Ifugao to stress the importance of a nuanced understanding of Philippine Indigenous histories. In this work, we provide counternarratives to nationalized histories that ignore local realities. We are particularly privileged that the community provided their interpretation of the archaeological record, using community stories as a guide to make sense of the archaeological data. Coauthor Marlon Martin, a member of the Ifugao community, weaves these stories into the discussions in the book. The concluding chapter that focuses on making their own history was written by the community, with minor editorial embellishments by the authors.

This work is about Indigenous representation and empowerment. As such, we are indebted to Cordillera trailblazers who have opened the opportunity for us to write about our own culture. We stand on the shoulders of Juan Dait Jr. (1957), Manuel Dulawan (2005), Lourdes Dulawan (2001), Patricia Afable (1989), Albert Bacdayan (1980), June Prill-Brett (1986), Mariano Dumia (1979), Emilio Pagada (2006), Esteban Magannon (1974), and Maximo Garming (1984), to name a few.

We hope that this book spurs meaningful involvement of descendant communities in the study of their own history, particularly in the Philippine setting. Communities on the peripheries of the colony and the state are imagined to be representatives of the past; they are not. So, this book is about Indigenous history, which combines archaeology, ethnography, and community stories.

***

Stephen B. Acabado is an associate professor of anthropology at University of California, Los Angeles. He directs the Bicol and Ifugao Archaeological Projects and co-directs the Taiwan Indigenous Landscape and History Project.

Marlon M. Martin is an Ifugao who heads the nonprofit heritage conservation organization Save the Ifugao Terraces Movement, Inc., a grassroots NGO. Along with Stephen Acabado, he established the first community-led Ifugao Indigenous Peoples Education Center.


Five Questions with Nielsen and Heather on ‘Finding Right Relations’

May 18, 2022

In Finding Right Relations: Quakers, Native Americans, and Settler Colonialism, Marianne O. Nielsen, and Barbara M. Heather explore the contradictory position of the Quakers as both egalitarian, pacifist people, and as settler colonists. This book explores major challenges to Quaker beliefs and resulting relations with American Indians from the mid-seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century. Below, Nielsen and Heather get to a bit of the heart of their new book in five questions:

In your book you set out to shed light on the real history between Quaker settlers and Native Americans. In doing so, you offer the chance to change a modern perspective on Quakers and Friends overall. Was that your intention?

That was not quite our intention. Our focus initially was on peacemaking among Quakers and, because there were strong similarities between Quaker and Indigenous decision-making practices, on whether Penn incorporated any Lenape principles or practices of peacemaking into his form of government. During this period of our research, we came across inconsistences in Penn’s time as Governor of Pennsylvania, such as the limits on his respect for, and understanding of, Indigenous cultural practices related to land use. There were also passages in his documents that were clearly paternalistic in tone. Penn is not documented as objecting to the requirements of Charles II that he Christianize and civilize the Lenape, although he did object vociferously to the suggestion, he needed a militia. In fact, a second thread was Penn’s insistence on having no militia. Rhode Island, which also had a mix of Quaker and non-Quaker settler-colonists, chose to fund a militia but include a right to conscientious objection. We wondered why Penn did not choose this for Pennsylvania, even as he was soliciting non-Quaker and non-pacifist settlers for his province? He failed to address the potential for violence. He needed plenty of settlers to make back the money he spent on negotiations with the Lenape but adding non-pacifists to the list inevitably caused an issue when settler-colonists and Lenape came into conflict.

Our intention therefore shifted to a focus on a broader issue, that of conflicts of faith, especially the Peace testimony and the Testimony to Equality. This Testament emerged as a belief in spiritual equality, i.e. that in the eyes of God all are equal.  We quickly realized that in the eyes of settler-colonists, the Indigenous Peoples were not equal. That allowed many settler-colonists, including Quakers, to cheat and defraud the Lenape, primarily of their lands. When this led to war, the Peace Testimony challenged the Quaker response. Penn had not set up any alternatives to a militia, such as Rhode Island’s law allowing conscientious objection. Quakers lost control of the government and never regained political power.   

Do you find that it is difficult for modern Quakers and others to rectify this history with how they may see themselves today?

On the surface we think many Friends accept that some Quakers have acted badly, whether with good intentions or knowingly to reach their own goals, but in practice we sense that our findings go deeper, bringing out resistance. Quakers have long been known for their aversion to conflict and we wonder if this also is behind their responses. It was painful to confront the reality that Quakers quite often did not live up to their beliefs and even more so to find some Friends protesting our descriptions of that behavior.  

Quakers such as the very active Boulder Colorado Friends Meeting have accomplished much toward reconciliation and reparation, as has the Canadian Friends Service Committee. Sometimes it seems easier to blame all those non-Quakers who do not question their assumptions, and to think of Quakers as behaving better than those others. Academically and personally both sides of this equation are hard to accept. How could a religious sect with such a strong belief in their Truth and such strong Testimonies, especially to Peace and to Spiritual Equality of peoples, commit cultural genocide? We hope that some readers of our book will understand why we became so involved with the contradictions of the Quaker faith and with the practical expressions of it, but also saw the potential of the Testimony to Peace and its corollary, peacekeeping. The cost of harms caused by all forms of colonialism to Indigenous Peoples are untenable. Can peacekeeping contribute to a beginning of reparation and reconciliation? 

The damage all forms of colonialism have cost the Indigenous of this land is often untenable, how can documenting this one area help further change or reconciliation?

Colonialism was and still is all-encompassing and insidious. By documenting this one situation, it may help raise awareness among readers of the continuing impacts such as high Indigenous mortality rates, poverty, and political suppression, and the need for resolutions. Quakers believed themselves to be above colonialism because of their beliefs, but they also fell victim to the greed and arrogance caused by colonial ideologies. They are the seeming exception that wasn’t an exception. By reinterpreting their history and showing the accumulating impacts of colonialism on their beliefs and behavior, we are providing a warning story, but also an example of hopeful change, as many Quakers accept the guilt of their predecessors and are working to further change and promote true reconciliation. Indigenous Peoples are working hard to overcome the impacts of colonization that still affect their communities and citizens, but there are many actions that non-Indigenous individuals, organizations and governments could take to offer reparations and assistance, if such are desired by Indigenous Peoples. We give some examples in this book.

How do you think we begin to put Indigenous knowledge into practice now with climate change and other issues at our heels?

Until the advent of colonialism, Indigenous Peoples world-wide practiced sustainable economies, that recognized that humans are just an interconnected part of creation, and a not very important one at that. Human activities are hurting Mother Earth and if we continue, she may become uninhabitable for us and many of our fellow beings.

Indigenous knowledge is the property of Indigenous Peoples and it is their choice if they wish to share it with non-Indigenous peoples. If they so choose, there is a lot the knowledge-holders could teach us about our role on this planet—how to end exploitation of natural resources, how to rebuild our damaged ecologies, and how to live sustainable lives that help our planet thrive, in other words, to have right relations with all those with whom we share the planet. The question is, will non-Indigenous people, organizations and governments listen and be willing to pay the high short-term costs to put us on the right path?

Ultimately, what do you hope readers, scholars, and others get from this book?

We hope that they will understand that colonialism has not stopped and that it continues to have serious impacts on Indigenous Peoples world-wide. Second, we hope our readers will gain a stronger understanding of colonialism’s impacts on the descendants of settler-colonists, its ability to become part of our lives, our ideologies, and our language – to permeate all that we are, even those whose strong religious faith should mitigate against such beliefs. Finally, we hope they understand that it is possible to counteract these impacts as non-Indigenous people become more aware and take action to assist Indigenous peoples in their efforts, as Indigenous Peoples so choose.

Five Questions on ‘Latinx Teens’ with Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera

May 11, 2022

In Latinx Teens: U.S. Popular Culture on the Page, Stage, and Screen, Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera explore the diverse ways that contemporary mainstream film, television, theater, and young adult literature invokes, constructs, and interprets adolescent Latinidad. Here are five questions from the authors on teen Latinidad, pop culture, and defeating white supremacy:

How is regular Latinidad different from teen Latinidad? Is it as simple as generational or is it more nuanced? 

It’s more nuanced. Teenagers have long been at the forefront of social change. Whether it’s slang, fashion, dance, music, or social media, teenagers set the tone. As they go, we go. Teenagers today have grown up as digital natives. They’ve only lived in a world in which access to social media and technology is a given. While us viejitxs may have had to adapt to digital media, teenagers today feel right at home on any number of platforms. Latinx teens influence intergenerational Latinx communities in much of the same way. Take, for instance, In the Heights’ Nina Rosario who, as a second generation immigrant, forces her parents to accept that her dreams aren’t necessarily their dreams. As someone who grew up in New York City, Nina sees the US (the good, the bad, the ugly) from her parents and, as such, pushes them to expand their preconceived notions of what it’s like to be Puerto Rican in the mainland US. Or, look no further than the ways that teenagers in the US were using TikTok years before most adults joined the app in 2020. While adults dismissed TikTok as “child’s play,” teenagers (many of them Latinx!) were setting the culture, the same culture that adults today engage with and mimic on the app. We see this same phenomenon play out in fictional media. Teens are setting the tone, and it’s up to adults, whether we like it or not, to keep up.

Pop culture has always influenced all teen behaviors, consumer habits, and how teens see themselves in the world. What ways do you think the growing Latinx characters and pop culture icons influence non-Latinx teens?

One of the major points we make in Latinx Teens is that Latinx teen representation is not merely enough to influence mainstream popular culture. We could argue that Latinx teens have always been present in popular culture, but how were they represented? In the twenty-first century, what we see is that Latinx teens are not only pushing for more representation and recognition, but they’re doing it in ways that have major influences on all teens, Latinx or not. For example, even a fictional character like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’s Miles Morales is enormously significant in challenging monolithic understandings of Latinidad that erase Afro-Latinxs. Moreover, his Afro-Latinidad is intrinsic to his superhero qualities; one doesn’t cancel the other out. 

Do you think one benefit will be the creative work of today’s Latinx teens and what they give to future generations? What will that look like?

Absolutely! This creative work has long term, positive benefits. Latinx teen popular culture provides the mirrors and windows, as Rudine Sims Bishop famously argued, for Latinx teens and other teens of color. We can’t underestimate the importance of seeing oneself on TV, film, or in literature. When young people watch Diary of a Future President, for example, it’s entirely possible for this viewing experience to spark their interest in student council, activism, and politics, to take a stand on issues they find relevant. In years to come, we have no doubt Latinx teens will continue to watch series like On My Block because shows like that, we argue, will always be relevant in capturing the lives of Latinx youth and all the messiness, joy, and complexities that come with it. 

How much further do you think we need to go when we will see fuller representation in the pop culture landscape?

Just as Latinx representation at large has room to grow in US popular culture, nuanced depictions of teenage Latinxs merit a deeper dive. One of our goals with Latinx Teens was to showcase the breadth of Latinx identities. The spectrum of Latinidad is expansive, but this isn’t always reflected in popular culture. Where are the intersectional stories about Afro-Latinx, indigenous, queer, disabled, neurodiverse, and/or Spanish-speaking teens? Of course, many of these stories exist (and in our book we made every effort to highlight them), but how many nuanced depictions of Latinx teens exist on Netflix, in Hollywood films, on Broadway, and on the New York Times Best-Seller List? Until these stories are commonplace in US popular culture then there is still work to be done to achieve fuller representation of Latinx teenagers in the pop culture landscape.

Ultimately is pop culture how Latinx teens can be part of defeating white supremacy?

Our book’s conclusion shifts the focus from fictional teens to real-life teens. This wasn’t by chance. We wanted to use this space to highlight just how badass Latinx teenagers can be! Even fictional representations of super cool, critical Latinx teens, like Lucía Acosta from Party of Five, who is an activist and who speaks out against unlawful detainment and deportation of Latinx residents, can bring about change. But this requires those in powerful positions to back these creative productions so they make it to the small and big screens and into our lives. So when we see real life activists like Emma González, we might think of characters like Lucía Acosta, and we’re reminded that there are Lucía Acostas throughout the US who are fighting for their communities and using their voices in admirable ways.  

NAISA 2022: Recent Books, Discounts, and More

May 6, 2022

The NAISA conference shifted to small, local gatherings this year, but we still want to celebrate our new and recent Native American and Indigenous studies books and offer a discount on all of our great titles. From now until 6/30/2022, use the code AZNAISA22 at checkout for 30% off plus free U.S. shipping.

If you have any questions about our publishing program, visit this page, or contact our Editor-in-Chief Kristen Buckles at kbuckles@uapress.arizona.edu.

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.

Watch editors Farina King and Michael P. Taylor talk about the book here, then read an excerpt from the book here.

For the first time, Navigating CHamoru Poetry focuses on Indigenous CHamoru (Chamorro) poetry from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). In this book, poet and scholar Craig Santos Perez navigates the complex relationship between CHamoru poetry, cultural identity, decolonial politics, diasporic migrations, and native aesthetics.

As an Indigenous scholar researching the history and archaeology of his own tribe, Tsim D. Schneider provides a unique and timely contribution to the growing field of Indigenous archaeology, and his book, The Archaeology of Refuge and Recourse, offers a new perspective on the primary role and relevance of Indigenous places and homelands in the study of colonial encounters.

Watch Tsim D. Schneider introduce his new book here, then watch him give a talk on the book here.

The Community-Based PhD explores the complex and nuanced experience of doing community-based research as a graduate student. Contributors from a range of scholarly disciplines share their experiences with CBPR in the arts, humanities, social sciences, public health, and STEM fields.

See the table of contents here.

Postindian Aesthetics is a collection of critical, cutting-edge essays on a new generation of Indigenous writers who are creatively and powerfully contributing to a thriving Indigenous literary canon that is redefining the parameters of Indigenous literary aesthetics.

The works featured are inventive and current, and the writers covered are visionaries. The artists covered include Orlando White, LeAnne Howe, Stephen Graham Jones, Deborah Miranda, Heid E. Erdrich, Sherwin Bitsui, and many others.

O’odham artist Michael Chiago Sr.’s paintings provide a window into the lifeways of the O’odham people. This book offers a rich account of how Tohono O’odham and Akimel O’odham live in the Sonoran Desert now and in the recent past.

Watch a talk from the artist, Michael Chicago Sr., here.

We are partnering with Western National Parks Association to host a book launch event for this book on August 25, 2022! Read more information here.

Trickster Academy is a collection of poems that explore the experience of being Native in Academia—from land acknowledgement statements, to mascots, to the histories of using Native American remains in anthropology. This collection illuminates the shared experiences of Indians across many regions, and all of us who live amongst Tricksters.

“With wry humor moistening the margins of her poems, Jenny Davis showcases how her Indigenous people have become experts in sorrow and seethe.”—Matt Sutherland, Foreword Reviews

On the heels of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Department of Diné Education, this important education history explains how the current Navajo educational system is a complex terrain of power relationships, competing agendas, and jurisdictional battles influenced by colonial pressures and tribal resistance. In providing the historical roots to today’s challenges, A History of Navajo Nation Education by Wendy Shelly Greyeyes clears the path and provides a go-to reference to move discussions forward.

Read a brief interview with the author here.

A New Deal for Navajo Weaving provides a history of early to mid-twentieth-century Diné weaving projects by non-Natives who sought to improve the quality and marketability of Diné weaving but in so doing failed to understand the cultural significance of weaving and its role in the lives of Diné women.

Challenging the distinctions between “old” and “new” media and narratives about the deprecation of orality in favor of inscribed forms, The Maya Art of Speaking Writing draws from Maya concepts of tz’ib’ (recorded knowledge) and tzij, choloj, and ch’owen (orality) to look at expressive work across media and languages.

Centering on the relationship between Quaker colonists and the Lenape people, Finding Right Relations explores the contradictory position of the Quakers as both egalitarian, pacifist people, and as settler colonists. This book explores major challenges to Quaker beliefs and resulting relations with American Indians from the mid-seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century. It shows how the Quakers not only failed to prevent settler colonial violence against American Indians but also perpetuated it.

Transforming Diné Education honors the perspectives and voices of Diné educators in culturally relevant education, special education, Diné language revitalization, well-being, tribal sovereignty, self-determination in Diné education, and university-tribal-community partnerships. The contributors offer stories about Diné resilience, resistance, and survival by articulating a Diné-centered pedagogy and politics for future generations.

Pachamama Politics examines how campesinos came to defend their community water sources from gold mining upstream and explains why Ecuador’s “pink tide” government came under fire by Indigenous and environmental rights activists.

“This is a brilliant ethnography of Indigenous anti-mining movements in Ecuador from an activist-scholar who has spent decades working with social movements and learning from them.”—Nicole Fabricant, author of Mobilizing Bolivia’s Displaced: Indigenous Politics and the Struggle over Land

Sown in Earth Chosen for 2022 Saroyan Prize Shortlist

May 6, 2022

We are thrilled that Sown in Earth by Fred Arroyo was chosen for the nonfiction section of the Stanford Libraries’ shortlist for the tenth William Saroyan International Prize for Writing (Saroyan Prize), a Prize intended to encourage new or emerging writers and honor the Saroyan literary legacy of originality, vitality, and stylistic innovation. The Prize recognizes newly published works of both fiction and non-fiction. Winners and finalists will be announced in late summer or early fall. 

Fred Arroyo

View the entire shortlist here.

The Saroyan Prize is a biennial competition jointly awarded by the Stanford Libraries and the William Saroyan Foundation. It commemorates the life, legacy and intentions of William Saroyan – author, artist, dramatist, composer – and is intended to encourage new or emerging writers, rather than to recognize established literary figures. 

The 2022 Prize engaged over 230 Stanford alumni and friends who participate as readers and judges. “On this tenth anniversary of the Prize, we were thrilled to have a record number of entries submitted by new and emerging writers and evaluated by a dedicated, enthusiastic band of volunteers,” said Vice Provost and Ida M. Green University Librarian Michael Keller.

This year’s distinguished judging panel for fiction consists of award-winning authors Sumbul Ali-Karamali, Richard Holeton, and Elizabeth McKenzie. The non-fiction panel includes Stanford Professor of Comparative Literature, Emeritus John Bender, author and 2016 Saroyan Prize winner Lori Jakiela, and Scott Setrakian Vice Chairman of Foundry.ai, and board member of the William Saroyan Foundation. More information on our judges can be found here.

Sown in Earth

By crafting a written journey through childhood traumas, poverty, and the impact of alcoholism on families, Fred Arroyo clearly outlines how his lived experiences led him to become a writer. Sown in Earth is a shocking yet warm collage of memories that serves 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.

Congratulations, Fred!

Open Access: Four More Press Titles are Now OA

May 4, 2022

The University of Arizona Press is pleased to announce that a new selection of titles in the fields of anthropology, border studies, gender studies, and Latin American Studies are now available as open access (OA). The titles are available either via link on our website or directly through Knowledge Unlatched.

Now available as OA:

Latin American Immigration Ethics
Without eschewing relevant conceptual resources derived from European and Anglo-American philosophies, the essays in this book emphasize Latin American and Latinx philosophies, decolonial and feminist theories, and Indigenous philosophies of Latin America, in the pursuit of an immigration ethics. The contributors explore the moral challenges of immigration that either arise within Latin America, or when Latin Americans and Latina/o/xs migrate to and reside within the United States. Uniquely, some chapters focus on south to south migration. Contributors also examine Latina/o/x experiences in the United States, addressing the lacuna of philosophical writing on migration, maternity, and childhood.

Once Upon the Permafrost
T
his work offers a longitudinal climate ethnography about “knowing” a specific culture and the ecosystem that culture physically and spiritually depends on in the twenty-first-century context of climate change. Through careful integration of contemporary narratives, on-site observations, and document analysis, Susan Alexandra Crate shows how local understandings of change and the vernacular knowledge systems they are founded on provide critical information for interdisciplinary collaboration and effective policy prescriptions.

Gender and Sustainability
Bringing together case studies from Asia and Latin America, this valuable collection adds new knowledge to our understanding of the interplay between local and global processes. Organized broadly by three major issues—forests, water, and fisheries—the scholarship ranges widely: the gender dimensions of the illegal trade in wildlife in Vietnam; women and development issues along the Ganges River; the role of gender in sustainable fishing in the Philippines; women’s inclusion in community forestry in India; gender-based confrontations and resistance in Mexican fisheries; environmentalism and gender in Ecuador; and women’s roles in managing water scarcity in Bolivia and addressing sustainability in shrimp farming in the Mekong Delta.

How “Indians” Think
This book 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.

KUOW NPR Continues ‘Sound of Exclusion’ Conversation in Interview with Christopher Chávez 

May 2, 2022

Christopher Chávez sat down recently with KUOW NPR’s Soundside host Libby Denkmann to discuss his new book, The Sound of Exclusion: NPR and the Latinx Public.

From Soundside:

Chavez explains that as radio grew to become widely used, it immediately went heavily commercial, despite some organizations and universities producing educational content.

“You had a framework of educational radio, these smaller systems that were meant to serve a social good … The 1967 Radio Broadcasting Act was meant to ensure some kind of framework for these stations. They would provide some sort of funding to basically serve a need that commercial radio couldn’t. They would do it through civic discourses, they would serve disenfranchised publics. They were meant to serve as an alternative to the commercial radio system.”

But Professor Chavez notes that, often, the most educated, socially connected, and people with cultural and economic capital have had easy access to the public media system.

“Even today, those are the folks that tend to be overrepresented in political discourses … so you have the people that are living in rural areas, that are poor, that are ethnic minorities, that are often not included in those kinds of civic discourses.”

To listen to the full conversation, go here.

Field Notes: Stephen Strom on the Greater San Rafael Swell

April 29, 2022

The new book The Greater San Rafael Swell showcases the stunning natural beauty of Utah’s red rock country. It also relays the important story of how people worked for more than two decades to develop a shared vision of the future of the Swell and its protection. Today, co-author Stephen Strom shares images from the work along with extended captions.

The Greater San Rafael Swell spans most of Emery County, located in east-central Utah.  

Location of Emery County, Utah – home of the Greater San Rafael Swell

The county is located near the western edge of the Colorado Plateau, the 130,000-square-mile uplift that lies a mile and more above sea level and spans the region between the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and the Great Basin. The plateau’s vividly colored rocks, mesas, canyons, towers, badland hills, and hoodoos compel the eye and move the soul. Millions are drawn to explore its world-renowned national parks and monuments, while others seek solitude and inspiration in the rugged wilderness of red rock country.

On Emery County’s western boundary lies the Wasatch Plateau. At its highest, the plateau stands more than ten thousand feet above sea level. During the winter, it captures moisture from Pacific storms and stores it as snow. Snow melt in spring and summer feeds four major creeks which flow eastward, irrigating the arid Castle Valley, which lies three thousand to four thousand feet below. This gift of water enabled Mormon settlers and their descendants to farm this otherwise arid land and, before that, nourished Native peoples for more than ten millennia.

Cottonwood Creek emerging from the Wasatch Plateau and approaching Castle Valley (aerial image)

Located between the Wasatch Plateau to the west and the San Rafael Swell to the east, Castle Valley is home to 90 percent of the ten thousand citizens of Emery County.

Castle Valley in spring

Just east of Castle Valley lies the Molen Reef, a twenty-five-mile-long shale ridge topped with hardened sandstone. The reef’s strata reveal traces from mollusks, oysters, and now-extinct creatures including ammonites. Thousands of dinosaur bones are scattered across the expanse of its badlands territory.

The reef is rich as well in artifacts: stone working sites, vessels, and rock art left by Indigenous people that preceded European arrival. The region paints a vivid picture of the First Americans, from the plants they used for food, medicine, and religious purposes, to their rock art, habitation sites, stone working sites, burial sites, and granaries.

Molen Reef (aerial image)

To the south of the Molen Reef lie the Mussentuchit Badlands. The landscape in the badlands varies dramatically. On the west, the Limestone Cliffs rise above the slowly undulating Blue Flats. Farther east lie labyrinthine and brightly colored badlands.

Near Mesa Butte in the Limestone Cliffs (aerial image)
Mussentuchit Badlands (aerial image)
Volcanic Dikes, Mussentuchit Badlands

To the east of Castle Valley lies perhaps the best-known area of Emery County, the San Rafael Swell: a kidney-shaped uplift, extending approximately sixty miles from southwest to northeast, and thirty miles across from east to west. At its highest, the swell rises 1,500 feet above Castle Valley.

Perhaps the most prominent feature within this region is the San Rafael Reef, which forms the eastern edge of the Swell. The seventy-five-mile-long reef rises between 800 and 1,500 feet above the desert floor. Its surface reveals tilted layers of sandstone that have been shaped by water and wind into triangular “fins” and jagged peaks.

 
San Rafael Reef (extending from far left of image to the distant horizon top right; aerial image)

Near the geographic center of the swell is the Wedge, a plateau encompassing a sinuous, 1,200-foot-deep gorge, eroded over eons by the San Rafael River and popularly known as the Little Grand Canyon. The view from the Wedge into the gorge reveals layers of multicolored sandstone, the deepest of which dates back 200–250 million years.

The “Wedge”, a deep canyon carved by the San Rafael River (aerial image)

To the east of the Wedge lie a series of peaks that have held tall against the erosive forces of wind and water: Window Blind Peak, Assembly Hall Peak, and the San Rafael Knob are the most prominent. Viewed from a distance, these peaks appeared to early settlers as “castles” towering above the landscape, giving rise to the name Castle Valley.

Assembly Hall Peak (far left). Image is taken looking west toward the “Swinging Bridge” constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps as part of a road building project to link western and eastern Emery County

To the south of the Wedge lie a wealth of canyons: Eagle, Saddle Horse, Devil’s, and Red’s among them. In the 1950s and early 1960s, during the height of the Cold War, output from uranium mines located in and to the south of Red’s Canyon.

Mussentuchit Badlands (aerial image)
Penitentiary Canyon, near Red’s Canyon (aerial image)

Between the San Rafael Reef—the edge of the swell—and the Green River lies the San Rafael Desert, an area of windblown sand plains, the occasional butte, and little vegetation. The Green River, which defines the eastern boundary of Emery County, wends its way through the northern part of the desert after emerging from the Book Cliffs and Desolation Canyon to the north of the eponymous town of Green River.

Wind blown sand patterns, northern San Rafael Desert (aerial image)

North and west of the town of Green River lie Gray and Desolation Canyons. Both Gray Canyon to the south and Desolation to the north are carved into the Book Cliffs, one- to ten-mile-wide bluffs that loom two thousand to four thousand feet above the desert floor, and whose bases comprise lead- to blue-gray Mancos Shale.

Book Cliffs, north of Green River, Utah (aerial image)

***
Stephen E. Strom has spent forty-five years as a research astronomer after receiving undergraduate and graduate degrees in astronomy from Harvard. He began photographing in 1978, after studying silver and non-silver photography and the history of photography at the University of Arizona. His work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and is held in several permanent collections, including the Center for Creative Photography and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. His photography complements poems and essays in five books published by the University of Arizona Press—Secrets from the Center of the World, Sonoita Plain, Tseyi / Deep in the Rock, Earth and Mars: A Reflection, and his most recent book, Voices from Bears Ears: Seeking Common Ground on Sacred Land. He is also the author of Otero Mesa, Earth Forms, Death Valley: Painted Light and Tidal Rhythms, Bears Ears: Views from a Sacred Land, and This Desert Hides Nothing.

LASA 2022: Recent Books, Discounts, and More

April 29, 2022

We are thrilled to be participating in the virtual LASA Congress! This year’s theme is: Polarización socioambiental y rivalidad entre grandes potencias, or Socio-environmental polarization and rivalry between great powers. If you are participating in the virtual congress, we invite you to visit the virtual exhibit hall and explore our latest titles here. We have also compiled our new and recent Latin American Studies books for you to learn more about below.

We are currently offering a 30% discount with free U.S. shipping when you use the code AZLASA22 at checkout. This discount is valid through 6/15/2022.

To learn more about our publishing program, visit this page, or contact our Editor-in-Chief, Kristen Buckles, at kbuckles@uapress.arizona.edu.

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.

Watch the book trailer, featuring editors Miruna Achim, Susan Deans-Smith, and Sandra Rozental, here.

This book contextualizes the discovery of a Venus astronomical pattern by a female Mayan astronomer at Chich’en Itza and the discovery’s later adaptation and application at Mayapan. Calculating Brilliance by Gerardo Aldana brings different intellectual threads together across time and space, from the Classic to the Postclassic, the colonial period to the twenty-first century to offer a new vision for understanding Mayan astronomy.

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’s Postcards from the Baja California Border offers 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 in Postcards 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.

Take a look inside of the book here.

In The Sound of Exclusion, Christopher Chávez critically examines National Public Radio’s professional norms and practices that situate white listeners at the center while relegating Latinx listeners to the periphery. By interrogating industry practices, we might begin to reimagine NPR as a public good that serves the broad and diverse spectrum of the American public.

Read an interview with the author by NiemanLab here, and listen to the New Books Network podcast about the book here. Read an op-ed by the author featured on the Latinx Project here, and an excerpt from the book shared by Current here.

Drug Wars and Covert Netherworlds describes the history of Mexican narco cartels and their regional and organizational trajectories and differences. Covering more than five decades, sociologist James H. Creechan unravels a web of government dependence, legitimate enterprises, and covert connections.

Watch the author talk about his book to Osher Lifelong Learning Institute members here.

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, Miriam Davidson gives us hope that the U.S.-Mexico border could be, and in many ways already is, a model for peaceful coexistence worldwide.

Watch the author talk about her book to Osher Lifelong Learning Institute members here. Read an op-ed by the author in The Progressive here, then read an excerpt from the book here. Read a brief interview with Davidson here.

Winner of the Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets.

Deuda Natal finds the beauty within vulnerability and the dignity amidst precariousness. As one of the most prominent voices in Puerto Rican poetry, Mara Pastor uses the poems in this new bilingual collection to highlight the way that fundamental forms of caring for life—and for language—can create a space of poetic decolonization. This collection was translated by María José Giménez and Anna Rosenwong.

Watch poet Mara Pastor in conversation with Siomara España at the International Literature Festival here. Deuda Natal was featured by Orion Magazine during Latinx Heritage Month! Read about it here.

Latin American Immigration Ethics advances philosophical conversations and debates about immigration by theorizing migration from the Latin American and Latinx context. Following an extended period of near silence on the subject, many social and political philosophers are now treating immigration as a central theme of the discipline. For the first time, this edited volume brings together original works by prominent philosophers writing about immigration ethics from within a Latin American context.

Near Tijuana, Baja California, the autonomous community of Maclovio Rojas demonstrates what is possible for urban place-based political movements. Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas tells the story of the community’s struggle to carve out space for survival and thriving in the shadows of the U.S.-Mexico geopolitical border. This ethnography by Michelle Téllez demonstrates the state’s neglect in providing social services and local infrastructure.

Listen to a New Books Network interview with the author here. We held a wonderful celebration for the book in Tucson, read about it here!

Winnow of the Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets.

Cardinal in My Window with a Mask on Its Beak by Carlos Aguasaco offers the insightful voice of a first-generation immigrant to the United States in both Spanish and English. The poems, both fantastical and real, create poetic portraits of historical migrants, revealing shocking and necessary insights into humanity while establishing a transatlantic dialogue with the great voices of the Spanish Renaissance. This collection was translated by Jennifer Rathbun.

La Bloga highlighted this collection, read about it here.

Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century offers an expansive and critical look at contemporary television by and about U.S. Latinx communities. This volume unpacks the negative implications of older representation and celebrates the progress of new representation, all while recognizing that television still has a long way to go.

Professor Latinx (Frederick Luis Aldama) brought Latinx TV contributors together to celebrate the book in a special video series. Watch it here!

Watch Professor Latinx and Mighty Peter talk about their top five Latinx TV shows here. Aldama was included in a USA Today debate on the use of the word “Latinx”, read more about it here. La Bloga highlighted Latinx TV, read more here.

Latinx Teens by Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera examines how Latinx teenagers influence twenty-first-century U.S. popular culture. The book explores the diverse ways that contemporary mainstream film, television, theater, and young adult literature invokes, constructs, and interprets adolescent Latinidad.

La Bloga highlighted Latinx Teens, read more here.

LGBTQ Politics in Nicaragua by Karen Kampwirth provides the previously untold history of the LGBTQ community’s emergence as political actors—from revolutionary guerillas to civil rights activists.
Karen Kampwirth is a renowned scholar of the Nicaraguan Revolution, who has been writing at the intersection of gender and politics for decades. In this chronological telling of the last fifty years of political history in Nicaragua, Kampwirth deploys a critical new lens: understanding politics from the perspective of the country’s LGBTQ community.

Challenging the distinctions between “old” and “new” media and narratives about the deprecation of orality in favor of inscribed forms, The Maya Art of Speaking Writing by Tiffany D. Creegan Miller draws from Maya concepts of tz’ib’ (recorded knowledge) and tzij, choloj, and ch’owen (orality) to look at expressive work across media and languages.

Running After Paradise by Colleen M. Scanlan-Lyons looks at social-environmental activism in one of the world’s most important and threatened tropical forests—Southern Bahia, Brazil. It explores what it means to be in and of a place through the lenses of history, environment, identity, class, and culture. It uncovers not only what separates people but also what brings them together as they struggle and strive to create their individual and collective paradise.

The book takes an intersectional approach to the study of anti-mining struggles and explains how campesino communities and their allies identified with and redeployed Indigenous cosmologies to defend their water as a life-sustaining entity. Pachamama Politics by Teresa A. Velásquez shows why progressive change requires a shift away from the extractive model of national development to a plurinational defense of community water systems and Indigenous peoples and their autonomy.

Now in Paperback!

Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans by Nathaniel Morris documents how and why the Indigenous Náayari, Wixárika, O’dam, and Mexicanero peoples took part in the Mexican Revolution as they struggled to preserve their cultures, lands, and political autonomy in the face of civil war, bandit raids, and radical political reform. In unpacking the ambiguities that characterize their participation in this tumultuous period, it sheds light on the inner contradictions of the revolution itself.

Watch Nathaniel Morris discuss the book with UCLAmericas here, then read field notes from the book here.
 

Roberto Rodriguez Featured in 5 CALÓ Questions

April 28, 2022

CALÓ News, a groundbreaking news initiative of the Latino Media Collaborative (LMC), featured University of Arizona Press author Roberto Cintli Rodríguez on his work with the Raza Killings Database Project to find a more accurate number on how many Latinos are being killed by law enforcement nationwide.

Rodriguez’s book, Yolqui, a Warrior Summoned from the Spirit World: Testimonios on Violence, describes his own experience one night in March 1979 after a brutal beating at the hands of L.A. County sheriffs. It also includes testimonies from other victims and survivors of police brutality and state-sponsored violence.

From CALÓ News:

When I researched, I went to the 1950s, 1940s and 1930s. You’re talking about mass lynchings, you’re talking about mass deportations of Latinos. All that history most people don’t know. All that land belonged to Mexican peoples or Native peoples. How did they lose it? A lot of it was literally by force. It’s an ugly history for African Americans, Native peoples and Mexicanos. That’s our history. 

So it’s not a recent thing. We’ve all been fighting it and the media in a way is clueless because they think it’s a competition or something new.

Our struggles are not only related, but we’re related to other struggles, too. The connections were already there, the American Indian Movement, the Black Power Movement, the Chicano Movement, and you go back, also in Mexico with the Mexican student movement, the Mexican liberation movements at the time. 

In this country, there’s three groups that have always been under attack. For the longest time, it was indigenous, Black, and Brown people. Now, it’s Asian again. So for me, that is like a natural alliance.

Read the entire interview here.

Watch: Christopher Chávez’s ‘The Sound of Exclusion’ Featured in PubWest Event

April 27, 2022

PubWest recently teamed up with Vancouver, B.C.’s Massy Books for an author reading and Q&A event with three authors focusing on history and biography, especially titles from underrepresented authors. Included was University of Arizona Press author Christopher Chávez and his new book, The Sound of Exclusion: NPR and the Latinx Public.

Food Bank News Shares Story of ‘Sowing the Seeds of Change’

April 26, 2022

A leading newsletter for America’s food banks has shared word of Seth Schindler’s Sowing the Seeds of Change. In an article published by Food Bank News Schindler explains how he came to write about the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona (CFB) and why it was so important to chronicle the history of this important community organization.

“I realized that the story of the CFB was much bigger, more complex and intriguing than I originally thought. I learned about the enormity of the problem of food insecurity in the U.S. and in Arizona, which shocked me; then the surprising massive scale and diversity of the CFB’s operations throughout southern Arizona; and finally its reputation as a national leader and innovator in the food bank movement, admired for its groundbreaking work in attacking the root causes of food insecurity,” says Schindler.

Read the complete article.

Sara Sue Hoklotubbe Featured on OsiyoTV

April 25, 2022

University of Arizona Press author Sara Sue Hoklotubbe was featured on the Cherokee Nation’s OsiyoTV, speaking about her mystery novel series and her process as a writer. About Sara 5and her books, Osiyo TV said this:

Sara Hoklotubbe is a mystery writer whose books earn high praise from readers and critics alike. She aims to dispel myths often written about Natives while staying true to Cherokee culture through her characters. Her protagonist, Sadie Walela, does just that as a sharp Cherokee woman with an eye for solving crimes.

Watch the video below!

Watch: Professor Latinx Brings ‘Latinx TV’ Contributors Together to Celebrate Book in Special Conversation Series

April 19, 2022

Yesterday, Frederick Luis Aldama, aka Professor Latinx, celebrated the launch of Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century with a virtual convo emceed by Ben Lopez, considered a huge champion of diversity, inclusion and belonging in the entertainment and media industries (and happens to be a University of Arizona graduate).

Joining Aldama and Lopez was Cristina Rivera and William “Memo” Nericcio, Latinx TV contributors. The new book, published by the University of Arizona Press and edited by Aldama, brings together leading experts who show how Latinx TV is shaped by historical, social, cultural, regional, and global contexts. Contributors address head on harmful stereotypes in Latinx representation while giving key insights to a positive path forward.

The launch was part of a virtual countdown of conversations between Aldama and Latinx TV contributors posted on the University of Arizona Press’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. Latinx TV is also part of the Press’s Latinx Pop Culture Series, co-edited by Aldama and Arturo J. Aldama. The first chat of the launch series, begn Thursday, April 14 with Mauricio Espinoza and Jim Miranda:

Next on the countdown with Aldama on Friday, April 15 were contributors Irma J. Zamora Fuerte and Carlos Gabriel Kelly González:

Stacey Alex, Mathew Sandoval, and Katlin Sweeny joined Aldama on Monday, April 18 for another Latinx TV convo:

On Tuesday, April 19, followers were given some extra with a bonus convo featuring contributors José Muñoz and Ryan Rashotte before the official launch:

Aldama also got to the heart of the goals and purpose of Latinx TV in an article that came out yesterday in Latinx Spaces:

At the Academy Awards 2022 Ariana DeBose steps up to receive one of those coveted gold statuettes. She invites the audience to celebrate with her as “an openly queer Afrolatina who found strength in life and art.” She opens her arms to everyone who has been forced to “live in those gray spaces.” Audiences around the country let leak tears of joy, celebrating Ariana, LGBTQ+, and Afrolatinx representation. 

We did the same when Afrolatino Jharrel Jerome gave his “te quiero” shout outs to his mamá and papá at the 2019 Emmys. On both occasions, we replenished our wells of hope, thinking that maybe now the Media Industrial Complex would finally pay attention to representation of Latinx peoples in all our richness and complexity.

While optimistic, we remain rightfully weary as we continue to carry the huge weight of our continued skepticism. 

Read the entire article here.

Big thanks to Professor Latinx for bringing these brilliant contributors together to celebrate the book’s publication!

The Space Review on ‘Discovering Mars’

April 19, 2022

Discovering Mars provides a broad history of the Red Planet. The online journal The Space Review recently published a review of the new book:

“Earlier this month, NASA marked the first anniversary of the successful landing of the Perseverance rover on the surface of Mars. Since that landing the rover has explored part of the floor of Jezero Crater, collecting several samples intended to be returned to Earth on future missions, and is heading towards the remains of a river delta. The Ingenuity helicopter, a technology demonstration that NASA planned to fly up to five times last spring just completed its 20th flight, having become an aerial scout for the rover.

Perseverance is the latest in a long line of NASA missions to the planet, which itself in an extension of terrestrial studies of the planet dating back millennia. That long arc of observations of the Red Planet is the subject of Discovering Mars, a thorough history of how our understanding of the planet has changed over time.” Read more.

SAA 2022 Recap!

April 14, 2022

We really enjoyed attending SAA in Chicago this spring! We got to reconnect with so many authors we haven’t seen in years, meet new archaeologists, and talk about our beautiful books with so many scholars. We also had the great honor of attending the award ceremony, where Becoming Hopi was awarded the SAA Scholarly Book Award! We got some great photos of our authors with their books. Take a look below.

Wesley Bernardini with his SAA Scholarly Book Award-winning book, Becoming Hopi!
Paul Minnis posed with ALL of his UA Press books, including his newest book Famine Foods.
Patricia Gilman with her co-edited volume, Birds of the Sun.
Christopher Schwartz with his co-edited volume, Birds of the Sun.
Todd Surovell with his new UA Press book, Barger Gulch.
Alexandra McCleary with a poster of her new UA Press book, The Community-Based PhD.
John Douglass with his co-edited volume, The Global Spanish Empire.
You can’t visit Chicago without snapping a picture of the Bean! (And yes, we know it’s actually called Cloud Gate.)
The views from Lake Michigan are stunning. Thanks, Chicago!

Why Does the Desert Smell Like Rain? New UA Research Suggests the Diverse “Osmocosm” of the Sonoran Desert

April 13, 2022

In the upcoming fall 2022 season, the University of Arizona Press will celebrate the 40th anniversary of Gary Paul Nabhan’s beloved classic, The Desert Smells Like Rain, about nature, how to respect it, and what transplants can learn from the longtime residents of the Sonoran Desert, the Tohono O’odham people. This new edition includes a new introduction by the loved ethnobotonist. In this article below, Nabhan digs into UA research on the smell of the desert, and its goodness.

In the Sonoran Desert of Arizona and Northwest Mexico, many long-time residents claim that with the onset of the summer’s monsoonal rains, a feeling of elation and relief comes as fragrances fill the air in a way that makes it seem as though “the desert smells like rain.”

For decades, geologists, botanists, atmospheric scientists, and ecologists have debated the causes and triggers of this euphoric sensation. Some scientists have focused on fragrances emitted by cryptogamic or biological soil crusts during rains, while other have focused on the terpentine-like smell of the creosote bush known in Sonoran Spanish as hediondilla, ‘the little stinker.” But now two scientists from the University of Arizona have teamed up with an herbalist-author and owner of an herb nursery (the Desert Canyon Farm) in Southern Colorado to propose a novel, but more comprehensive answer:

The Sonoran Desert flora is one of the richest in the world in plants that emit fragrant volatile oils, and many of those fragrances confer stress-reducing health benefits to humans, wildlife, and the plants themselves. What’s more, the biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) that evolved to protect plants from damaging solar radiation, heat waves, drought stress and herbivores may also have protective value for humans as climate change turns the Earth into “Planet Desert.”

Initially, desert scientists focused their attention on an earthy fragrance called petrichor that is emitted from the biological soil crusts by a compound called geosmin. Geosmin underlies the earthy taste of beetroots, with notes like eucalyptus, cinnamon, and cloves and can be detected by the human nose at concentrations as low as 400 parts per trillion. It is secreted from dead microbes in the soil crusts of many different kinds of landscapes but is now known to be emitted only sporadically in Sonoran Desert soils after summer rains.

Ecologists who studied the North American deserts then tried to explain this phenomenon through a “single cause” focus on one of the most common plants in the Mohave, Sonoran and Chihuahuan desert: Larrea tridentata, known in English as the creosote-bush.  Curiously, it emits more than 35 distinct terpenes and other BVOCs, some of which (like trans-caryophyllene) are generated by an endophytic fungus growing “hidden” within the plant’s tissues. With the onset of monsoons, the high density of shrubs forming creosote flats emit terpentine-like fragrances (like isoprene) as potent as any botanical emissions into the atmosphere. Nevertheless, this dominant plant is by no means the only major emitter of BVOCs that give Sonoran Desert habitats their renowned fragrances.

The new research from the Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill has found more than 60 species of 178 native plants in the ancient ironwood-giant cactus forests of the Sonoran Desert which emit fragrant biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) immediately before, during and after rainstorms.  storms.  From these desert species, more than 115 volatile oils have been identified, as high a number as is known from any biogeographic region in the world. In particular, the researchers Gary Nabhan, Eric Dougherty and Tammi Hartung identified more than 60 potent fragrances emitted from the foliage and flowers of desert plants during the monsoonal rainy season of the iconic “Sonoran Desert summer.”

The authors hypothesize that the a “suite” of 15 particular BVOCs emitted from this diversity of desert plants during the monsoons may function synergistically to generate tangible health benefits. Just 5 of these fragrances confer most of the health benefits now amply documented half-way around the world along the “forest bathing” (Shinrin-Roku) trails used by millions of Japanese and Korean dwellers to reduce the stresses of their urban lifestyles.

Many of these BVOCs can be readily absorbed by the human body through inhalation, so that they register within the brain in as little time as 22 seconds. It then takes less than 90 more seconds more for them to be released into the bloodstream. Within a half hours’ time, they may be found present in every cell of the body and reach all the body’s organs. It takes two and a half hours or less for most of therapeutical aerosol inhalation of volatile oils to be metabolized in ways that may potentially affect human health in a more lasting manner.

The fragrant BVOCs from desert plants may in many ways contribute to improving sleep patterns, stabilizing emotional hormones, enhancing digestion, heightening mental clarity, and reducing depression or anxiety. Their accumulation in the atmosphere immediately above desert vegetation can reduce exposure to damaging solar radiation in ways that protect the desert plants themselves, the wildlife which use them as food and shelter, and the humans who dwell among them. As climate change accelerates, regular exposure to these BVOC health benefits may become more important to prevent or mitigate diseases of oxidative stress and other climate maladies in a hotter, drier world.

The lead author, Gary Paul Nabhan of the University of Arizona Southwest Center, has recently been co-designing “desert smells like rain gardens” in public spaces like the Sonoran Desert Inn and Conference Center in Ajo, Arizona; the base of Tumamoc Hill at the University of Arizona Desert Laboratory in downtown Tucson; and the Seri Indian (Comcaac) fishing village of Punta Chueca, Sonora Mexico. These public gardens will not only produce nutritious foods, but offer residents, out-of-town guests, and hikers a powerful opportunity to sense how the desert smells like rain.  Nabhan’s classic natural history book by the same title was first published 40 years ago this spring and will be re-released in a 40th anniversary edition with a new introduction this year by the University of Arizona Press.

Watch: Book Celebration for ‘American Indian Studies: Native PhD Graduates Gift Their Stories’

April 11, 2022

The University of Arizona Press hosted a virtual book celebration on Wednesday, April 6, 2022 with the editors and contributors of American Indian Studies: Native PhD Graduates Gift Their Stories, an important book on the University of Arizona’s American Indian Studies (AIS) doctoral program, the first such program of its kind detailing student stories of endurance and resiliency, hardship and struggle, and accomplishment and success

Joining the editors and contributors was Kristen Buckles, University of Arizona Press editor-in-cheif, and Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert, head of Department of American Indian Studies. The event was a beautiful reunion, full of emotional stories that link each graduate and this PhD program.

Field Notes: Inside the Images of ‘The Greater San Rafael Swell’

April 6, 2022

The new book The Greater San Rafael Swell showcases the stunning natural beauty of Utah’s red rock country. It also relays the important story of how people worked for more than two decades to develop a shared vision of the future of the Swell and its protection. Today, co-author Jonathan Bailey shares images from the work along with extended captions.


1 Aerial of the San Rafael Reef

Guiding the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office over the topography of the Greater San Rafael Swell. The most prominent feature shown during this flight, the San Rafael Reef, forms the eastern and southern boundaries of the true San Rafael Swell. This geological feature was formed as an oceanic plate slid beneath the North American continental crust, dragging the land that would become the San Rafael Swell upward and eastward. While this period of mountain building happened some 60 million years ago, the geology that was uplifted (and consequently carved via wind and water erosion) is much older, dating as far back as 359-323 million years ago in Redwall Limestone. Flight courtesy of Ecoflight.

Greater San Rafael Swell from above
Image copyright Jonathan Bailey

2 Aerial of Hondu Country

 On the coastlines of the supercontinent Pangea, before the continents split and shifted to their present-day positions, the Moenkopi Formation was deposited 252-237 million years ago. The Moenkopi Formation was formed after a great extinction event at the end of the Permian period, resulting in a substantial decline in aquatic and terrestrial biodiversity, and consequently fewer fossiliferous deposits in the Moenkopi Formation. Flight courtesy of Ecoflight.

aerial view of Utah landscape
Image copyright Jonathan Bailey


3 Archaic period petroglyphs

The Archaic period began around 8,000 years ago and lasted until 2500 years ago. People who lived in the Greater San Rafael Swell during this time hunted game animals using a spear throwing instrument known as an atlal and gathered plants that grew in the region’s unique semi-arid desert environments. Some of the Swell’s most iconic rock art is attributed to this period, including both pictographs (painted imagery) and petroglyphs (carved imagery).

ancient petroglyphs
Image copyright Jonathan Bailey

4 Fremont complex petroglyphs

Spanning about AD 300 to AD 1300, the Fremont complex manifests in diverse rock art; use of the bow and arrow; agricultural practices, although perhaps more peripatetic than their Ancestral Pueblo neighbors; ceramics, primarily Emery grayware in the San Rafael Swell; and the preference for wearing moccasins over sandals. As the Fremont were generally more mobile through the heartlands of the Swell, rock art in the region is consequently more widely distributed, particularly in the vicinity of important routes.

ancient petrogphys under starry sky
Image copyright Jonathan Bailey


5 Pediocactus winkleri in the Molen Reef

The Greater San Rafael Swell supports two federally listed endangered cacti species within the Pediocactus genus. These plants are remarkable in that they live almost entirely beneath the ground, rising only to flower and fruit. This poses inherent challenges to managing the species successfully, as the plants may not be visible before the area is deemed compatible with off-highway vehicles, livestock grazing, or oil and gas development. Over the last ten years, myself and Diane Orr, with the backing of the Utah Rock Art Research Association, have successfully safeguarded vast habitats for Pediocactus winkleri and Pediocactus despainii, among other rare and at-risk species. 

flowring cacti
Image copyright Jonathan Bailey


6 Aquilegia flavescens var rubicunda

 Endemic to the Greater San Rafael Swell and environs, the Link Trail columbine is a beautiful member of the Aquilegia genus, often growing in shaded seep springs in Mesa Verde Group sandstones. As a plant that prefers higher elevation environments in ponderosa, spruce-fir, and aspen communities, A. flavescens var rubicunda exemplifies the broad ecotonal shifts through the Greater San Rafael Swell, spanning 4,000 to nearly 11,000 feet in elevation.  

flower
Image copyright Jonathan Bailey

***
Jonathan T. Bailey is a photographer and conservationist who specializes in rock art. His work has contributed to the preservation of areas like the Bears Ears National Monument, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, the Uintah Basin, and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Since 2013, he has partnered with the Utah Rock Art Research Association to record and protect Emery County’s fragile archaeological resources. He is most recently the author of When I Was Red Clay and. His work has appeared in numerous places such as Landscape Photography Magazine, NBC News, Arizona Highways, and High Country News. Originally from Emery County, Utah, he now lives in Tucson, Arizona, with his partner, Aaron.

A Look at Me?: An Overview of My Books Re-released by the University of Arizona Press in 2022

By Hihdruutsi, who is also known as Simon J. Ortiz

The desk on which the laptop I use to write poems and stories and letters sits side by side with a bird kennel that houses two parakeets. Gorgeous feathers color the birds. One is a soft but pronounced green and yellow and gray. The other is mostly gray tinged with a bluish glow and has a long black tail. They talk and sing in chirps and trills almost all the time. We—a poet-writer and two birds—keep good company. They know I’m aware we’re companions. No kidding. And they roll their bright little eyes when I try to “sing and chirp and trill” with them in high airy efforts—sounds of song I surely want them to be!—I somehow make in my throat. We make and keep good company. Like above, no kidding!

The parakeets make me look at myself to some degree, causing me to think about the fact I am an Indigenous (Native) poet and writer. As they swivel beaks and heads to look at me, yes, they make me think. About what? they and you might say. About me. In speculation or wonderment. Yes, in bird perception and language. Hmmm. I mean, perhaps they do. Of course. Parakeet chirps and trills seem to be pondering noises, mixing and intermingling with my thoughts.

A few days ago, I was re-reading a story based on a fourth-grade boyhood memory from my collection of short fiction stories, Men on the Moon. I could almost hear the green and yellow one say, “When he sits at the table, he usually starts tapping away on that contraption on the table. But this time, he is reading.” Actually, I call my table that my laptop sits on a desk. I usually don’t talk directly at her or him, but I do glance at the parakeets more than a time or two in our moments together.

The short story I was reading at the moment is about Kaiser refusing to be drafted into the U.S. army. World War II was going on at the time. The federal government wanted him to gladly serve in the armed forces. But Kaiser was determined not to do so. The parakeets would have understood Kaiser, I think. Why go into the army and be sent off to war? It made sense to me that Kaiser didn’t want no part of any war far, far away in Europe or far, far away in Japan and the South Pacific.

The fiction story was set in the 1940s when I was born into the negative and constrained dynamic of WWII. I, an Indigenous (Native) American like Kaiser, was no stranger to war and conflict since we were still in a real and, at times, constant social-cultural-economic struggle for our existence as Indigenous peoples of the Americas. And we still are, needless to say. It is a struggle for recognition as the original and Indigenous population of the northern and southern American continents; U.S. public rubric was—and still is—provoked usually and simply and openly by racism against us and our stance.

Indigenous peoples of the Americas are, in a sense, like the above mentioned parakeets that are present-day descendants of their parental generations existent in past lifetimes. Perhaps that’s why at times or moments I’ve felt like I’m empowered personally by a cultural awareness that makes me “feel” a shared contextual knowledge and identity that we—the parakeets and me—have between ourselves.

My social-cultural-intellectual awareness is fostered by literature such as the short fiction stories in my aforementioned book, and it is supplemented by poetry that I read and also compose. And I shall now address the presence, function, and personal roles of poetry like those found in Woven Stone, which is a compendium consisting of three of my poetry collections: A Good Journey, Going for the Rain, and Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land.

I have said language use came to me some time after birth, just as it does for all human beings as far as I know. My language experience also comes from mind and body dynamics that I have had. And I have acquired language and knowledge use conceptually from the very act of reading and listening. And, most of all, I believe my work has benefited from the utilization of oral tradition from two languages, namely the Indigenous Keres language that the Aacqu’meh hanoh speak, and the English language from school and other sources.

Language is an essential and obvious part of the conscious and subconscious imprint of our humanity. And we, as human beings, organically and naturally know of language before physical birth, I believe. Abiding awareness of communication is part of an implantation mechanism given us by our creator faculty as an instinct. Or something like it. A remembrance instinct? Or intuition? Who knows? But it’s there within our brain or nervous system or soul or heart, and it is also countered by a powerful and subjective stance spurred or urged mostly by Western academia, science, economy, and art. And language is there for our use to think with, to learn, to feel, to grow, to evolve with, and to be eventually aware of the creative evolution of our lives.

In all of life—this is the origin and home place of poetry. Poetry is at the core of our human existence, purpose, and intention to learn, to explore, to evolve, even to develop beyond ourselves, to appreciate, to question, and to express ourselves and the depth and purpose of our lives. And, yes, in fact, even to strive to be beyond ourselves, never mind the “troubles” that may be caused.

Poetry lives because humanity lives—that is what, in short, I mean to say. I shall also add that poetry and its capacity to go forward is beyond measure. As human beings, we must respectfully value our capacity to live completely as loving human beings with appreciation and gratitude for all of life that we can express. Yes, wholesome, simple, and straightforward as responsible and obligated humans living with each other on Planet Mother Earth. Is that possible to do? Yes. Absolutely and ultimately, I believe it is possible. Yes, I do assert that belief.

I was born and raised within the Aacqu’meh hanoh and its social and cultural tribal community and its linguistic, philosophical, and more or less traditional ways of Indigenous life purpose and intention. When I was born, Indigenous peoples of the twentieth-century era (1901–1999) were living then in the social-cultural-economic conditions of colonization since AD 1492 when America was “discovered.” Literally that means their Indigenous homelands in North, Central, and South America had been settled and taken over by the Spanish, British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, etc.—all of them from Europe.

The arrival and settlement of non-Indigenous peoples from Europe had tremendous impact on Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Things obviously didn’t change overnight or suddenly, but in retrospect, change has felt like it happened traumatically and suddenly. Columbus landed his ships on a small island in the Caribbean in 1492. And then by the 1590s Francisco Coronado led a Spanish expedition of conquistadores to what is now New Mexico. His soldiers sacked and destroyed the Aacqu’meh tribal community, killing many of the inhabitants of Aacqu per orders from Commander Coronado. To some Aacqu’meh hanoh hundreds of years later, those events almost feel resultant of traumatic change yesterday or last week—not in the past, some five hundred years ago.

Today’s Indigenous (Native) American peoples’ need for more education, better health, and sufficient income, plus peace of mind-heart-soul—and their need and quest for authentic, genuine, and sincere recognition of their Indigenous sovereignty—still constantly straddles their present-day lives from the northern Arctic regions to the southern tip of the Americas. To have obtainable and sensible practical goals like that I believe is necessary because they all make practical sense. Today’s world is not a dream; it is a practical reality. In the belief we gain from our experience in all of life, we live our lives as best we can. Sometimes we live well, and other times we do not. Presently, the whole world that Indigenous peoples know as the Planet Mother Earth is bound in a pandemic spurred by the COVID-19 virus. What the eventual outcome will be is not known yet. I compose poetry and write stories by believing in and living in all of life. I shall therefore continue composing in all of life. Wish me well. Thank you.

–Hihdruutsi, who is also known as Simon J. Ortiz

Copyright February 17, 2022 All Rights Reserved

Virtual NACCS 2022: Recent Books, Conference Discounts, and More

March 30, 2022

We are thrilled to be participating in the virtual NACCS annual conference from April 20-23, 2022! This conference will be celebrating 50 years of activist scholarship, and we have some incredible new books from these scholars for you to browse. Use the code AZNACCS22 for 30% off all titles, plus free U.S. shipping, through 5/31/22.

If you have questions about our publishing program, please visit this page, or contact our Editor-in-Chief, Kristen Buckles, at KBuckles@uapress.arizona.edu.

We have an exciting new series at the University of Arizona Press! 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 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. To learn more about the series from editors Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez and Yvette J. Saavedra, watch this video.

We are incredibly honored to announce that two University of Arizona Press books received honorable mentions for the NACCS Book Award this year! Congratulations to Aída Hurtado with Intersectional Chicana Feminisms: Sitios y Lenguas and Lorena V. Márquez with La Gente: Struggles for Empowerment and Community Self-Determination in Sacramento. You can learn more about their books below.

Intersectional Chicana Feminisms provides a much-needed overview of the key theories, thinkers, and activists that have contributed to Chicana feminist thought. Aída Hurtado, a leading Chicana feminist and scholar, traces the origins of Chicanas’ efforts to bring attention to the effects of gender in Chicana and Chicano studies. Highlighting the innovative and pathbreaking methodologies developed within the field of Chicana feminisms—such as testimonio, conocimiento, and autohistoria—this book offers an accessible introduction to Chicana theory, methodology, art, and activism.

La Gente traces the rise of the Chicana/o Movement in Sacramento and the role of everyday people in galvanizing a collective to seek lasting and transformative change during the 1960s and 1970s. In their efforts to be self-determined, la gente contested multiple forms of oppression at school, at work sites, and in their communities. Historian Lorena V. Márquez documents early community interventions to challenge the prevailing notions of desegregation by barrio residents, providing a look at one of the first cases of outright resistance to desegregation efforts by ethnic Mexicans.

New and Recent Books

Weaving together archaeology, mathematics, history, and astronomy, Calculating Brilliance brings to light the discovery by a female Mayan astronomer, which is recorded in the Venus Table of the Dresden Codex. As the book demonstrates, this brilliant discovery reverberated throughout Mayan science. But it has remained obscured to modern eyes.

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’s Postcards from the Baja California Border offers 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 in Postcards 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.

In The Sound of Exclusion, Christopher Chávez critically examines how National Public Radio conceptualizes the Latinx listener, arguing that NPR employs a number of industry practices that secure its position as a white public space while relegating Latinx listeners to the periphery. These practices are tied to a larger cultural logic. Latinx identity is differentiated from national identity, which can be heard through NPR’s cultivation of an idealized dialect, situating whiteness at its center.

Letras y Limpias is the first book to explore the literary significance of the figure of the curandera within Mexican American literature. Amanda Ellis traces the significance of the curandera and her evolution across a variety of genres written by leading Mexican American authors, including Américo Paredes, Rudolfo Anaya, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Manuel Munoz, ire’ne lara silva, and more.

Latin American Immigration Ethics advances philosophical conversations and debates about immigration by theorizing migration from the Latin American and Latinx context. The volume, which includes contributions that explore the moral challenges of immigration that either arise within Latin America, or when Latin Americans and Latina/o/xs migrate to and reside within the United States, is now available Open Access.

Near Tijuana, Baja California, the autonomous community of Maclovio Rojas demonstrates what is possible for urban place-based political movements. More than a community, Maclovio Rojas is a women-led social movement that works for economic and political autonomy to address issues of health, education, housing, nutrition, and security. Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas tells the story of the community’s struggle to carve out space for survival and thriving in the shadows of the U.S.-Mexico geopolitical border.

Cardinal in My Window with a Mask on Its Beak takes readers on a journey through poetic portraits, exploring the lives of passionate social justice advocates and historical migrants such as Ota Benga, Sarah Baartman, Isidro Marcelino Orbés, César Vallejo, and Gertrude Stein, among others. Raw and unapologetic, the poems in this bilingual collection ask readers to question their role in today’s society. The verses press the reader to examine what it means to have social justice in our globalized world, as Carlos Aguasaco confronts how society treats the Other—be that the immigrant, the Indigenous person, or anyone who embodies Otherness.

Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century offers 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 this volume, editor Frederick Luis Aldama brings together leading experts who show how Latinx TV is shaped by historical, social, cultural, regional, and global contexts.

What can Latinx youth contribute to critical conversations on culture, politics, identity, and representation? Latinx Teens answers this question and more by offering an energetic, in-depth look at how Latinx teenagers influence twenty-first-century U.S. popular culture. In this exciting new book, Trevor Boffone and Cristina Herrera explore the diverse ways that contemporary mainstream film, television, theater, and young adult literature invokes, constructs, and interprets adolescent Latinidad. Latinx Teens shows how coming-of-age Latinx representation is performed in mainstream media, and how U.S. audiences consume Latinx characters and stories.

What do a family of luchadores, a teen on the run, a rideshare driver, a lucid dreamer, a migrant worker in space, a mecha soldier, and a zombie-and-neo-Nazi fighter have in common? Reyes Ramirez’s dynamic short story collection follows new lineages of Mexican and Salvadoran diasporas traversing life in Houston, across borders, and even on Mars. In The Book of Wanderers themes of wandering weave throughout each story, bringing feelings of unease and liberation as characters navigate cultural, physical, and psychological separation and loss from one generation to the next in a tumultuous nation.

In 1981, Chicana feminist intellectuals Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa published what would become a touchstone work for generations of feminist women of color—the seminal This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. To celebrate and honor this important work, editors gloria j. wilson, Joni B. Acuff, and Amelia M. Kraehe offer new generations A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back. In A Love Letter, creators illuminate, question, and respond to current politics, progressive struggles, transformations, acts of resistance, and solidarity, while also offering readers a space for renewal and healing. The central theme of the original Bridge is honored, exposing the lived realities of women of color at the intersections of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, advancing those early conversations on what it means to be Third World feminist conscious.

AWP 2022 Recap!

March 30, 2022

We had a truly wonderful time at AWP in Philadelphia, our first in-person conference in a very long time! Getting to spend time with our authors, meet new writers, and talk about our amazing books with conference goers is always the perfect way to spend a week. We got some great photos of our authors with their books. Take a look below.

It was wonderful to see Reyes Ramirez, who held a signing at our booth for his new work, The Book of Wanderers!
We were so happy to see Esther Belin, who is pictured here with The Diné Reader.
We had a great time hosting Carlos Aguasaco and Jennifer Rathbun’s book signing at our booth!
We loved talking to Julie Swarstad Johnson, co-editor of Beyond Earth’s Edge.
It was great to see Casandra López again, author of Brother Bullet.
We were happy to say hello to Carmen Giménez Smith, author of Milk and Filth!
Philadelphia was a gorgeous city for AWP.
If you can’t find us, we’re probably at the bookstore!

Birds of the Sun: An Excerpt

March 30, 2022

Birds of the Sun explores the many aspects of macaws, especially scarlet macaws, that have made them important to Native peoples living in this region for thousands of years. Although macaws have been noted and marveled at through the decades, new syntheses of early excavations, new analytical methods, and new approaches to understanding the past now allow us to explore the significance and distribution of scarlet macaws to a degree that was previously impossible. The expertise offered in this stunning new volume, which includes eight full color pages, will lay the groundwork for future research for years to come. The volume is edited by Christopher W SchwartzStephen Plog, and Patricia A. Gilman, and includes contributions from leading experts in their fields. Enjoy this excerpt from the book’s foreword, which was written by Charmion R. McKusick:

George H. Pepper was the first trained archaeologist to excavate Pueblo Bonito. Little could he have imagined that the macaws he placed in neatly labeled brown paper bags in 1896 would be removed seventy years later for species identification, aging, and illustration of pathologies; and then, fifty years later, they would be reanalyzed using current scientific methods, as part of this study. This examination illustrates the way in which avian studies can contribute to ongoing research. Pepper’s Room 38 macaws were unusual in that they had deeper crania and longer wings than the main body of archaeological macaws, and they appear to have been inbred. The available data suggest that at Chaco Canyon, a special group of humans bred scarlet macaws for some important purpose, over a long period of time.

Although the question of the relationships among Mesoamerica and the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico (SW/NW) has a long history in archaeological research, various studies in the twenty- first century have sought to trace the provenance of objects and materials that originated in Mesoamerica and were acquired and circulated interregionally. The study of scarlet macaws (Ara macao) and, to a lesser extent, military macaws (Ara militaris) and thick- billed parrots (Rhynchopsitta pachyrhyncha; plate 1) has received a particular emphasis due to their multifaceted significance, which stretches throughout the Americas. The presence of living macaws and other parrots in settlements of the SW/NW for months and occasionally years not only requires us to understand the cultural significance of these birds but also allows us to address key questions using new analytical techniques that target skeletal material. Some of these studies employ previously underutilized analytical techniques such as isotopic analyses (Schwartz 2020; Schwartz et al. 2021; Somerville et al. 2010), radiocarbon dating (Gallaga et al. 2018, 2021; George et al. 2018; Watson et al. 2015), and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analysis (Bullock 2007; Bullock and Cooper 2002; George et al. 2018).

New research on macaws is not limited to these types of analyses, however. Others have reviewed the historical issues in SW/NW macaw studies, focusing on key matters such as reassessing the likelihood of macaw breeding at Paquimé and determining the ages at which each macaw from archaeological deposits died (Abramson 1995; Crown 2016; Whalen, this volume). Still other analyses have examined previously gathered collections of macaws and other parrots to identify skeletal pathologies (Fladeboe and Taylor, this volume), clarify frequencies of the macaws and parrots in particular museum collections, and determine whether complete or only partial birds were recovered (e.g., Bishop 2019; Gilman, this volume; Lyons and Crown, this volume; Plog et al., this volume; Schwartz, this volume; Szuter, this volume), or explore the spatial distribution of macaws and parrots within sites relative to other birds and animals (Bishop and Fladd 2018; Plog et al., this volume). This recent spate of complementary research provided the impetus for an Amerind Foundation seminar on macaws and other parrots in April 2019, which in turn has led to the collection of studies presented in the following chapters.

In the archaeological record of the greater Southwest/Noroeste (SW/NW), the presence of macaws and other parrots dates back to at least 600 CE, in the Hohokam area, and to the Ancestral Pueblos in the Mimbres and Chaco regions at least by the tenth century CE (Gilman et al. 2014; Szuter, this volume; Vokes and Gregory 2007:328– 334; Watson et al. 2015). For the protohistoric Pueblos, macaw images are common on kiva murals in the Hopi and Rio Grande regions and on Sikyatki Polychrome by the fourteenth century (Crown 2016; Schaafsma, this volume). Pre- Columbian, historical, and present uses of macaw feathers in Pueblo ritual are profuse (Ladd 1963; Parsons 1939; Tyler 1991). At Hopi, for example, “there is archaeological evidence that parrots were sometimes kept alive by the Hopi for ceremonial purposes. . . . Parrot- bones have also been found in ruined villages of the Hopi not far from their present pueblos. . . . Parrot- feathers are highly prized by the Hopi for the ornamentation of their masks, and in former times were brought from the [O’odham and/or Maricopa] settlements on the Rio Gila and from the northern states of Mexico, where they were obtained by barter” (Fewkes 1900:691– 692, emphasis added). In this connection, sometimes the Hopi Parrot/Macaw Katsina (Kyarkatsina) performs as a huuyan, “bartering,” Katsina (Stephen 1936:282), seemingly encoding the earlier material practice.

The behavioral and genetic characteristics of parrots, including macaws, offer hints as to why human cultures have been so interested in them: “Like humans, parrots as a group have large brains relative to body size, a high density of neurons in the forebrain, advanced cognitive abilities including object permanence and tool use, complex social organization, vocalizations learned through cultural transmission using specialized brain circuits, cooperative problem solving, extended developmental and rearing periods, and exceptional longevity” (Wirthlin et al. 2018:4001). Add the beauty and polychromaticism of their feathers, susceptibility to domestication, and capacity to mimic human speech, and it is no wonder that macaws and parrots— throughout Europe, the Middle East, South and East Asia, and the Americas— have served as symbols, partners, and metonyms of their human “masters” globally: “The Maharajah of Nawanagar had a parrot, one hundred and fifteen years old, which traveled in a Rolls Royce and possessed an international passport; George V’s parrot, Charlotte, used to peruse state and confidential documents over his master’s shoulder. . . . As early as Ctesias, the parrot was praised for its bright plumage and its ability to speak. . . . A fine- looking parrot, wearing a collar and evidently a household pet, still remains on the walls of Pompeii” (Rowland 1978:120–121).

Becoming Hopi Wins the 2022 SAA Scholarly Book Award

March 29, 2022

We are so thrilled to announce that Becoming Hopi, edited by Wesley Bernardini, Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa, Gregson Schachner, and Leigh L. Kuwanwisiwma, is the 2022 SAA Scholarly Book Award winner!

About Becoming Hopi, the SAA award committee wrote the following:

Becoming Hopi shows a masterful interwoven collective work of conventional archaeological data and Hopi traditional knowledge to carefully study the Hopi Mesas of Arizona. In this volume, the voices of the Hopi are integrated with archaeological and ethnographic work conducted over two decades to show an important Indigenous group of the American Southwest with its rich and diverse historical tradition dating back more than 2,000 years. This tradition is deeply rooted in time, and the voices of the Hopi can be heard by scholars and non-experts. In addition, the collaborative effort resulted in a book that can be used by members of the Hopi community to learn about their own past.”

Congratulations to Wesley, Stewart, Gregson, and Leigh!

Danzirly Chosen as 2021 Foreword INDIES Finalist

March 28, 2022

We are so thrilled to announce that Danzirly was chosen as a 2021 Foreword INDIES Finalist in the Poetry category!

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.

Congratulations, Gloria!

Society for Linguistic Anthropology: Recent Books, Discounts, and More

March 28, 2022

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.

Talking Indian won the Beatrice Medicine Award for Best Monograph in American Indian Studies in 2019!

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.

Preparing Native Graduate Students for Success: An Excerpt from American Indian Studies

March 18, 2022

In American Indian Studies, Native graduates of the University of Arizona’s American Indian studies (AIS) doctoral program, the first of its kind, share their personal stories about their educational experiences and how doctoral education has shaped their identities, lives, relationships, and careers. Essayists share the benefits of having an AIS program at a mainstream academic institution—not just for the students enrolled, but also for their communities. American Indian Studies also offers Native students aspiring to a PhD a realistic picture of what it takes. While each student has their own path to walk, these stories provide the gift of encouragement and serve to empower Native students to reach their educational goals, whether it be in an AIS program or other fields of study. Read the excerpt below for a glimpse into the experiences of the essayists.  

The editors asked Native UArizona AIS PhD graduates to write about their educational experiences earning their doctorates using storytelling, a traditional means of passing knowledge and information for Native Peoples. In the resulting chapters, nine Native graduates who hold the highest scholarly degree in the academy from the first AIS program highlight their personal voices and stories, sharing their messages, lessons, and advice as gifts to future American Indian graduate students.

Personal stories of mentorship, networking, relationships, reciprocity, sacrifices, commitment, challenges, and triumphs shape this book. These stories are unique to the individuals, their families, and their communities. Their narratives provide insight into the journeys of American Indian graduate students pursuing advanced degrees and their experiences after earning the degree. We (co-editors) hope that giving voice to the AIS Native doctoral graduates in these stories will inspire future generations of American Indian students to follow in their footsteps—stories that are realistic so Native students are better prepared to succeed.

The personal narratives of struggle and success shared throughout this book help to reduce the invisibility of Native doctoral students and graduates in the larger mainstream dialogue that result from such statistics (Blair 2015; Brayboy et al. 2012; Shotton et al. 2013). While each student has their own path to walk, these stories can also serve to empower others to reach their own educational goals, whether it be in an AIS program or other field of study.

American Indian Studies: Native PhD Graduates Gift Their Stories is a collection of personal narratives from nine Native graduates of the UArizona AIS doctoral program. Here, these alumni tell their own stories of endurance and resiliency, hardship and struggles, and accomplishment and success in their own words. Not only do their perspectives provide insight into the diverse and dynamic experiences of Native doctoral students but they also serve as role models of encouragement for those following in their footsteps. In all ways, they illustrate the extensive benefits of having an AIS program at a mainstream academic institution, not just for the students enrolled but for Native communities as well.

Danzirly Wins Gold in the Florida Book Awards Poetry Section

March 4, 2022

We are so thrilled to announce that Danzirly by  Gloria Muñoz won gold in the 2021 Florida Book Awards poetry section!

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.

Congratulations, Gloria!

2022 Tucson Festival of Books: Panels, Signings, and Discounts

March 2, 2022

The University of Arizona Press is gearing up for the Tucson Festival of Books (TFOB), to be held Saturday, March 12, and Sunday, March 13, on the University of Arizona campus in Tucson, Arizona!

TFOB is a major literary event, regularly drawing more than 400 authors from across the country and more than 135,000 attendees. Panels, readings, and other author activities present a fantastic opportunity to hear from talented authors on a wide range of subjects. Visit the TFOB website and the official panel grid to browse the offerings by participant or genre. There are also plenty of book and food vendors, plus lots of family and entertainment activities.

The Press will have a large booth on the mall, and we’ll be selling a wide selection of books at a discount! Make sure to come visit us at booth 238, across from the Modern Languages building. Below, find a list of author signings we’ll be hosting at our booth throughout the weekend of the festival. Plus, see a list of panels that our authors will be participating in. Staff members are moderating panels, as well. We are thrilled that so many of our authors are participating in this year’s Tucson Festival of Books!

Book Signings on Saturday, March 12:

10:00am to 10:30am: David Yetman signing Natural Landmarks of Arizona
11:00am to 11:30am: Daniel Olivas signing The King of Lighting Fixtures
12:00pm to 12:30pm: Miriam Davidson signing The Beloved Border
1:00pm to 1:30pm: Stephen Pyne signing The Great Ages of Discovery
2:00pm to 2:30pm: Editor and contributors of The Diné Reader
3:00pm to 3:30pm: Carlos Aguasaco signing Cardinal in My Window with a Mask on Its Beak and Gloria Muñoz signing Danzirly

Book Signings on Sunday, March 13:

10:00am to 10:30am: Carolyn Niethammer signing A Desert Feast and Seth Schindler signing Sowing the Seeds of Change
11:00am to 11:30am: Editors and contributors of Becoming Hopi

Panels on Saturday, March 12:

10:00am to 11:00am: The Diné Reader in the Student Union Kiva Room
10:00am to 11:00am: Finding Hope on the Border in the Integrated Learning Center Room 150
11:30am to 12:30pm: Two Views of the Sonoran Desert in the Student Union Tucson Room
11:30am to 12:30pm: Our Climate Counts in the Student Union Kiva Room
11:30am to 12:30pm: Hopi History in the Student Union Santa Rita Room
11:30am to 12:30pm: Reporting from the Homelands on the Nuestras Raíces Stage
1:00pm to 2:00pm: Diné Bizaad is Poetry on the Nuestras Raíces Stage
2:30pm to 3:30pm: Fire! at the Science City Main Stage
2:30pm to 3:30pm: Parables for Our Times at the Integrated Learning Center Room 150

Panels on Sunday, March 13:

10:00am to 11:00am: Exploring Space at the Science City Main Stage
10:00am to 11:00am: Can We Talk About the Border? at the UA Bookstore
11:30am to 12:30pm: Poems from Diné Bikeyah: Navajo Poets and the Land at the Student Union Tucson Room
11:30am to 12:30pm: Arizona Foodways at the Koffler Room 216
11:30am to 12:30pm: Prize-Winning Poets in the Student Union Kiva Room
1:00pm to 2:00pm: Poetry as Protest in the Integrated Learning Center Room 141
1:00pm to 2:00pm: Hopi Voices on Nuestras Raíces Stage
2:30pm to 3:30pm: Our Search for Identity in the Student Union Kiva Room
2:30pm to 3:30pm: To Live and Die en La Ciudad: Chicanx Short Fiction in the Urban Southwest on the Nuestras Raíces Stage

For more details, visit the Festival’s panel grid!

Paul Minnis on the Foodie Pharmacology Podcast

March 2, 2022

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.

Listen to the interview with Paul Minnis.

AISA 2022: New and Recent American Indian Studies Titles, Conference Discounts, and More

February 25, 2022

American Indian Studies Association 22nd Annual Conference is going virtual! The new conference dates are March 3rd and 4th, and you can register for the conference here: https://specialevents.asu.edu/asu-aisa-2022. This year’s theme is Indigenous Survivance and Resilience in the age of COVID-19. We are excited to offer a 30% conference discount with free U.S. shipping on our new and recent American Indian Studies titles with the code AZAISA22 at checkout. This discount is good through 4/1/2022.

If you have any questions about our publishing program, please visit our proposal guidelines here, or contact our Editor-in-Chief, Kristen Buckles, at KBuckles@uapress.arizona.edu.

Our Fight Has Just Begun illuminates Native voices while exposing how the justice system has largely failed Native American victims and families. This book tells the untold stories of hate crimes committed against Native Americans in the Four Corners region of the United States.

While this book looks deeply at multiple generations of unnecessary and ongoing pain and violence, it also recognizes that this is a time of uncertainty and hope. The movement to abolish racial injustice and racially motivated violence has gained fierce momentum. Our Fight Has Just Begun shows that racism, hate speech, and hate crimes are ever present and offers recommendations for racial justice.

In American Indian Studies, Native American doctoral graduates of American Indian Studies (AIS) at the University of Arizona, the first AIS program in the United States to offer a PhD, gift their stories. The Native PhD recipients share their journeys of pursuing and earning the doctorate, and its impact on their lives and communities.

“Native Americans are chronically and severely underrepresented in graduate education in the United States. This collection of autobiographical essays by former Native American doctoral students (all graduates of the University of Arizona’s American Indian Studies program) offers a compelling and poignant portrait of the challenges that Native peoples face on the road to, through, and beyond graduate education. At the same time, the essays affirm the enduring value of Indigenous knowledge and relationships to family and land.”—N. Bruce Duthu, author of Shadow Nations: Tribal Sovereignty and the Limits of Legal Pluralism

On the heels of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Department of Diné Education, A History of Navajo Nation Education is an important education history that explains how the current Navajo educational system is a complex terrain of power relationships, competing agendas, and jurisdictional battles influenced by colonial pressures and tribal resistance. In providing the historical roots to today’s challenges, Wendy Shelly Greyeyes clears the path and provides a go-to reference to move discussions forward.

“Well written and well thought out, this book illustrates what is happening within the Navajo Nation School System. I would strongly recommend this book be added to your personal or professional library.”―Geraldine Garrity, Provost of Diné College

Transforming Diné Education honors the perspectives and voices of Diné educators in culturally relevant education, special education, Diné language revitalization, well-being, tribal sovereignty, self-determination in Diné education, and university-tribal-community partnerships. The contributors offer stories about Diné resilience, resistance, and survival by articulating a Diné-centered pedagogy and politics for future generations.

Transforming Diné Education is a valuable addition to Navajo educational literature. It presents the ideas and experiences of Navajo educators working with Navajo students who believe traditional Navajo values and beliefs have central role to play in improving the lives of Navajo students and decolonizing Navajo education.”—Jon Reyhner, co-author of American Indian Education: A History, Second Edition

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.

Read an excerpt from the book here. Make sure to check out the great book trailer videos from authors Farina King and Michael P. Taylor on the book’s page here!

For the first time, Navigating CHamoru Poetry focuses on Indigenous CHamoru (Chamorro) poetry from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). In this book, poet and scholar Craig Santos Perez navigates the complex relationship between CHamoru poetry, cultural identity, decolonial politics, diasporic migrations, and native aesthetics.

“This book takes the reader on a transoceanic journey, ranging from Guåhan to the heart of the American empire and to the many seas that the poets of the CHamoru diaspora have sailed. Weaving together groundbreaking archival research, subtle literary analysis, and decolonial Indigenous methodologies, Craig Santos Perez demonstrates how CHamoru poets have transformed their experience of cultural colonialism into weapons of resistance. A must-read for everyone invested in fighting for decolonization, demilitarization, and Indigenous sovereignty.”—Anaïs Maurer, author of Oceania First: Climate Warriors and Post-Apocalyptic Nuclear Stories

Learn more about the Critical Issues in Indigenous Studies series here.

The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature is a comprehensive collection of creative works by Diné poets and writers. This anthology is the first of its kind.

“This collection is essential to American literature and should be required for anyone studying American, First Nations, or world literature.”—Joy Harjo, U.S. Poet Laureate

Read an excerpt from the book here, then watch a recording of the virtual book release event for The Diné Reader here. Read the Publisher’s Weekly of this book here, then listen to an interview with editor Esther G. Belin on Native America Calling Radio Program here.

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.

“How did Hopi farmers sustain large, stable communities in an area that previous scientific models predicted could not support a substantial population? How did waves of migration shape Hopi social organization and ritual calendars? Archaeologists, ethnographers, and Hopi cultural specialists worked collaboratively to answer these and other compelling questions.”—Kelley Hays-Gilpin, co-editor of Color in the Ancestral Pueblo Southwest

Make sure to watch the book trailer video on the book’s page here!

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.

Make sure to watch the book trailer video on the book’s page here!

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.

“This is an essential book for everyone who is interested in modern American Indian history. Thomas Maroukis examines how American Indian leaders organized, used their education (sometimes disagreed with each other), and addressed critical issues in Indian Country in the early twentieth century. He convincingly argues that these new activists pushed back against the government and voiced a clear message that Indians had not vanished!”—Donald L. Fixico, author of Indian Resilience and Rebuilding: Indigenous Nations in the Modern American West

Read a brief interview with author Thomas Constantine Maroukis here.

Five Questions with Reyes Ramirez

February 24, 2022

In Reyes Ramirez’s dynamic short story collection’s new lineages of Mexican and Salvadoran diasporas traverse life in Houston, across borders, and even on Mars. Themes of wandering weave throughout each story, bringing feelings of unease and liberation as characters navigate cultural, physical, and psychological separation and loss from one generation to the next in a tumultuous nation. 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.

Here are five questions from Reyes Ramirez on Houston, writing, and, of course, The Book of Wanderers:

Houston is home to The Book of Wanderers. Is there an otherworldly vibe in this Texas city we don’t know about?

Houston is one of the most diverse, if not the most diverse, cities in America; that along with being the fourth largest city in America in the crux of Southern, Southwestern, Western, and Borderlands identities along the Gulf Coast, you encounter some unique things that couldn’t exist anywhere else just by sheer probability, size, and historical precedence. You could drive down a street with a health clinic, an ice cream shop, a nail salon, a video store, a payday loan service, a bar, and a gun store next to each other and across the street have a row of restaurants from different nations, ethnicities, and combinations thereof that would make the United Nations blush. Meanwhile, a car with golden rims the size of a five-year-old child just cut you off and a horse stares at you from its trailer. It’s a blue city in a red state, meaning the person in the Prius you just parked next to blasting a chopped and screwed version of a new pop song, the one with a decal of an anime character and one of those equality bumper stickers, could be strapped with a .38 special revolver so you have to be careful since it’s 96 degrees as a hurricane makes landfall and the potable water you both came for is almost gone. I hope The Book of Wanderers captures as much of that as possible.

What influences do you turn to in your writing?

I love to draw from different sources, whether it be films, books, or personal experience, to inform my writing and individual projects. For example, anime was super influential to me growing up; the story “The Latinx Paradox within Joaquín Salvatierra” is heavily inspired by Gundam Wing and Neon Genesis Evangelion with their mecha suits and the use of young people to pilot them. This, in turn, is mixed with my exploration of scientific research that found Latinxs “live longer than Caucasians,” and my family’s history as being children during war. Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Jean-Luc Goddard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, historical research, and my own experiences cleaning houses and buildings with my mom growing up were some influences on and references for “The Many Lives and Times of Aransa de la Cruz.” Just all the things, really.

The Book of Wanderers and its characters are so cinematic. Is that something you’d like to see happen with these people, creatures and lives—have them on a big or small screen?

Films, TV shows, and video games are pretty important sources for me to draw from since they offer narratives through means unique from literature. For example, I originally saw “Xuxa, La Ultima” as a third-person video game in my head, informing much of the action and scope of the story. I could also see “Xitlali Zaragoza, Curandera” as a TV show where she solves spiritual and supernatural mysteries in each episode a la Yu Yu Hakusho or X-Files. I suppose “The Fates of Maximiliano Mondragón and Yzobeau Ponce Intersect in Acapulco” could be expanded into a noir parody/dramedy film directed by Pedro Almodóvar (I can dream!). But I think I’m too intimidated by the whole movie-making process. 

Do you have a favorite character in The Book of Wanderers that we might see again in another Reyes Ramirez book?

I don’t know if I have a favorite character since I imbue each one with a bit of me, whether it be through lived experiences, insecurities, hopes, or desires. I won’t say which is which, but an example I can give is that most of the characters have a unique and/or dramatic name that kind of mirror mine since I’ve always gotten comments on the peculiarity of my own. Many of the stories are written as snapshots in each character’s life since I wanted my characters to feel like full human beings, that what you’re seeing in each story is a defining moment with reverberations continuing off the page. In fact, there’s a version of ‘The Three Masks of Iturbide Villalobos’ as a 90-page novela! But I definitely see Xuxa in her own novel, traversing zombie-infested wastelands and encountering different communities to learn about, such as a settlement that worships turtles and how’d she be weirded out at first but grow to find it adorable. Or whatever.

What’s your dream for The Book of Wanderers? Do you have one?

To win all the awards and be loved by everyone! But seriously, I hope The Book of Wanderers is enjoyed by those looking for something unique in contemporary fiction, to affirm that there’s no one way to tell a story, that we as a community must continuously reflect on our past and know there’s no singular way to be. For example, the characters in The Book of Wanderers will speak in different ways, some purposefully outside conceptions of how we experience English, Spanish, Spanglish, all of it, because I want to disrupt the status quo of language in America. I hope that the playfulness in The Book of Wanderers with language, narrative, and form inspires someone to write their own ridiculous truths, to cast aside White ideations of ‘proper’ stories and speaking to create a work of their own, an unrestricted extension of their hopes and fears. My dream for The Book of Wanderers is to connect me to you and you to me, reader.

NiemanLab Interviews Christopher Chávez on Future of NPR and ‘Sound of Exclusion’

February 23, 2022

NiemanLab’s Hanaa’ Tameez recently interviewed University of Arizona Press author Christopher Chávez on his new book, Sound of Exclusion: NPR and the Latinx Public.

From the interview:

The American public looks different now. When we look at the world, demographically, we’re changing. We’re becoming much more diverse in really beautiful and interesting ways. There are all kinds of important stories to tell. During my research, I found that some of the policing [over what can be on NPR] comes from executives and broadcast-level producers, news directors who make small choices. But some of the policing comes from audience members themselves. Some people would react negatively when they heard somebody speaking in an accent, for example, or when a lot of time was spent on a Latinx-oriented story.

Consumers are very vocal, and in today’s digital environment, that feedback can be given to institutions immediately. And it can be swift and severe. That often came up and it was really profound in terms of the range of stories in Los Angeles, where I grew up. L.A. is a predominantly Latinx city. The radio station KPCC’s motto is “We speak Angeleno,” but it’s really speaking in English, speaking without an accent, excluding people that are primarily Spanish-dominant, not telling their stories, and just not showing the breadth of the reality that I know there to be in Los Angeles.

Read the entire interview here.

Watch: Susan Crate’s ‘Once Upon the Permafrost’ Featured in Royal Anthropological Institute Event

February 22, 2022

University of Arizona Press author Susan Crate and her new book, Once Upon the Permafrost: Knowing Culture and Climate Change in Siberia, was recently featured in a Royal Anthropological Institute Research Seminar and Book Launch.

Once Upon the Permafrost is a longitudinal climate ethnography about “knowing” a specific culture and the ecosystem that culture physically and spiritually depends on in the twenty-first-century context of climate change. Crate has spent three decades working with Sakha, the Turkic-speaking horse and cattle agropastoralists of northeastern Siberia, Russia. In her new book, she reveals Sakha’s essential relationship with alaas, the foundational permafrost ecosystem of both their subsistence and cultural identity. Sakha know alaas via an Indigenous knowledge system imbued with spiritual qualities. This counters the scientific definition of alaas as geophysical phenomena of limited range. Climate change now threatens alaas due to thawing permafrost, which, entangled with the rural changes of economic globalization, youth out-migration, and language loss, make prescient the issues of ethnic sovereignty and cultural survival.

New Books Network Podcast Features Christopher Chávez on ‘Sound of Exclusion’

February 21, 2022

Susan Liebell of the New Books Network recently interview University of Arizona Press author Christopher Chávez on his new book, The Sound of Exclusion: NPR and the Latinx Public.

How is power enacted in everyday broadcast practices? National Public Radio has a “rhetoric of impartiality” but this obscures the ideological work done by the network.” In The Sound of Exclusion: NPR and the Latinx Public (The University of Arizona Press, 2021), Dr. Christopher Chavez interrogates how NPR determines what it means to be American and what is deemed American news. NPR’s original mandate included engaging listeners in civic discourses and representing the diversity of the nation. Yet Chavez argues that NPR has created a “white public space” that pushes Latinx listeners to the periphery. As a result, NPR promotes the cultural logic that Latinx identity is separate from national identity – hindering Latinx participation in civic discourses. But Chavez maintains that the shared act of listening might facilitate the ways in which Latinx listeners negotiate and resist norms of what it means to belong, also known as sonic citizenship. He writes that through the act of listening, “… those without sustained access to political power might imagine alternative political possibilities in which they are included.”

Listen to the podcast here.

Watch: Miriam Davidson Talks ‘Beloved Border’ with OLLI Members

February 18, 2022

The University of Arizona’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute hosted University of Arizona Press author Miriam Davidson to talk about her new book, Beloved Border: Humanity and Hope in a Contested Land.

Kids in cages, family separations, thousands dying in the desert. Police violence and corruption. Environmental devastation. These are just some of the dramatic stories recounted by veteran journalist Davidson in The Beloved Border. This groundbreaking work of original reporting also gives hope for the future, showing how border people are responding to the challenges with compassion and creativity.

Watch: Professor Latinx and Mighty Peter Talk Top Five Latinx TV Shows

February 16, 2022

We’re so excited about Frederick Luis Aldama‘s latest book debut, Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century, an edited volume that brings together leading experts who show how Latinx TV is shaped by historical, social, cultural, regional, and global contexts. Contributors address head on harmful stereotypes in Latinx representation while giving key insights to a positive path forward.

The final chapter in the book is a fascinating interview with Peter Murrieta by Aldama. Murrieta is described as “one of the most significant of Latinx creators, writers, and producers actively shaping a Brown-ocular twenty- first-century TVLandia. His scroll-long resume includes countless accolades, accomplishments, and awards, including multiple Emmys for Wizards of Waverly Place and an Imagen Award for Mr. Iglesias. He is also the creator of the comic book Rafael Garcia: Henchman. He is a Latinx pop cultural creative without measure.”

Latinx TV, which hits the shelves in April, is part of the University of Arizona Press’s Latinx Pop Culture series, co-edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Arturo J. Aldama.

For a bit of insight, check out this discussion with Mighty Peter (Peter Murrieta) and Professor Latinx (Frederick Luis Aldama) on their respective top 5 Latinx TV picks of all time:

Miriam Davidson’s New Op-Ed in Progressive Calls for Protections of Mexican Journalists

February 15, 2022

The Progressive Magazine recently published a new op-ed by University of Arizona Press author Miriam Davidson, calling for the Mexican government to protect Mexican journalists. Mexico continues to rank as one of the most dangerous countries in the world for the press.

Davidson’s new book, The Beloved Border: Humanity and Hope in a Contested Land, shares the history of sanctuary and argues that this social movement and others that have originated on the border are vanguards of larger global movements against the mistreatment of migrant workers and refugees, police brutality, and other abuses of human and natural rights. She gives concrete examples of positive ways in which border people are promoting local culture and cross-border solidarity through health care, commerce, food, art, and music.

From the op-ed:

Not only is the Mexican government failing to protect journalists, it has been using spyware to monitor their activities, watchdog groups have determined. Some of the surveilled reporters have later turned up dead.

In response to this situation, some Mexican reporters have gone into exile in other countries. A few have applied for asylum in the U.S., though most are denied, even after receiving death threats. 

But there’s only so much they can do. In Mexico, as in the United States, politicians enjoy fomenting public distrust of the press. The media are a suspect class. Yet reporters in both countries perform an essential service in keeping the public informed.

AMLO needs to do more. He must stand up for a free press by putting attention and resources toward actually protecting people, preventing attacks and combatting official corruption. With those words and deeds, he can help end the scourge of journalist murders.

Read the entire op-ed here.

Watch: A Virtual Conversation with BorderVisions Series Editors

February 14, 2022

BorderVisions series editors Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez and Yvette J. Saavedra discussed the new University of Arizona Press series with the Press’s Editor-in-Chief Kristen Buckles during a virtual event on Friday, February 11, 2022.

BorderVisions seeks new projects that engage with the U.S.-Mexico borderlands’ dynamic histories and cultures and expand our understanding of the borderlands beyond a site of geopolitical inquiry. The series conceptualizes borderlands as both a place and a methodology, and addresses the constraints of traditional fields, challenging authors to think creatively and critically about the expansive frameworks and possibilities of borderlands studies.

Learn about the series, and what Fonseca-Chávez and Saavedra are looking for from future authors:

Southwest Books of the Year 2022 Recognize University of Arizona Press Titles

February 11, 2022

Thank you to Pima County Public Library’s Southwest Books of the Year for once again choosing new titles from the University of Arizona Press: The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature, Becoming Hopi: A History, and Natural Landmarks of Arizona.

The Southwest Books of the Year are chosen by a panel of reviewers who examine new books focused on Southwest subjects or by Southwest authors. Pima County Public Library has published Southwest Books of the Year for more than four decades, helping us celebrate the best of literature, nonfiction, and regional books.

From Gregory McNamee on The Diné Reader:

… The editors of this splendid collection of Diné writing proceed in that spirit. Their pages are full of delights and surprises, beginning with excerpts from Blackhorse Mitchell’s Miracle Hill, which appeared a year before N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, the novel credited with starting the modern Native literary renaissance. Many roads here lead to Luci Tapahonso, an inspiration to generations of Diné poets; the editors’ literary genealogies (with Esther Belin citing Nia Francisco as the first Diné writer she read) and interviews with writers lend special value to the collection. The Diné Reader belongs in every collection of Native American letters, and every Native literature deserves an anthology so thoughtful and well constructed.

Bruce Dinges chose Becoming Hopi:

The product of fifteen years of collaborative research among archaeologists, anthropologists, and tribal consultants conducted under the auspices of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, Becoming Hopi describes the dynamic evolution of society and culture from scattered precontact villages to large, complex, stable communities intimately connected to the land. Hopi resiliency, the authors convincingly argue, is a testament to the people’s adaptability to constant change and the expression of a lifeway that is always in the process of becoming. Appendices include site descriptions and maps, clan migration routes, and radiocarbon dates. To their credit, the contributors avoid academic jargon in an effort to make their conclusions accessible to a broad Native and non- Native audience. Fact-filled and lavishly illustrated, this landmark study sets an exemplary standard for future tribal histories.

Gregory McNamee chose Natural Landmarks of Arizona:

Arizona has a lot of mountains—3,928 of them, in fact, with nary a horizon without at least a peak or two. David Yetman, intrepid explorer and host of In the Americas, writes that he came to Arizona as a child from flatland New Jersey and, with brief sojourns here and there, has never left it, at least in part because of his fascination with our state’s geography and geology. In this compendium, he runs the mountainous gamut from Agathla, with its “touch of Mount Doom,” to Yarnell Hill, a good place to scope out the Harquahalas, which harbor the same geological sequence that can be seen in the Grand Canyon and which constitute “perhaps the Sonoran Desert’s most impressively purely desert range.” Geology is a notoriously difficult subject to write about, but Yetman—something of a landmark himself—handles it with skill and flair. Lovers of mountains, whether as things to climb or to behold, will delight in traveling alongside him.

Abalone Mountain Press Podcast on ‘Diné Reader’

February 3, 2022

Abalone Mountain Press Podcast interviewed Esther Belin, co-editor of The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature, published by the University of Arizona Press. Also interviewed were Byron Aspaas, Nia Francisco and Laura Tohe. Together they discussed what it is like growing up on the Navajo Reservation, writing poems in Navajo, and hopes for The Diné Reader.

Listen to the podcast here.

Frederick Aldama to be Inducted in Texas Institute of Letters

February 3, 2022

University of Arizona Press author and editor Frederick Luis Aldama will be inducted in the Texas Institute of Letters (TIL) at the organization’s annual meeting and banquet in El Paso, Texas on April 22-23, 2022. The event will also include the Annual TIL Literary Awards.

Founded in 1936 to celebrate Texas literature and recognize distinctive literary achievement, TIL’s membership consists of the state’s most respected writers–including winners of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, PEN/Faulkner Award, Academy Award, Americas Award, International Latino Book Award, Lambda Literary Award, MacArthur Fellowship, and Guggenheim Fellowship.

Membership is based on ongoing and exceptional literary accomplishment. Aldama is one of 15 new members approved for 2022 fiction and nonfiction authors.

Sergio Troncoso, president of the Texas Institute of Letters states, “The Texas Institute of Letters continues to identify and honor outstanding writers from all literary genres. Our newest members have expanded literary audiences to include diverse voices and readers, and have opened minds with books that reconsider history and scholarship. We are extremely proud of the outstanding work that these writers represent: children’s stories full of empathy and humor, poetry that breaks open the heart to imagine new perspectives, prose that challenges narrative forms and explores
psychological complexities, and publishing that finds and amplifies voices on the margins of society. These fifteen masters of the word include novelists, short-story writers, poets, memoirists, publishers, children’s authors, and scholars.”

Aldama is the author of over forty books, which he has authored, co-authored, and edited, including Long Stories Cut Short: Fictions from the Borderlands and Eisner Award-winner Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics, both published by the University of Arizona Press. Aldama is also co-editor of the University of Arizona Press’s Latinx Pop Culture Series.

In his newest book with the Press, Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century, Aldama brings together leading experts who show how Latinx TV is shaped by historical, social, cultural, regional, and global contexts. Contributors address head on harmful stereotypes in Latinx representation while giving key insights to a positive path forward. TV narratives by and about Latinx people exist across all genres. In this century, we see Latinx people in sitcoms, sci-fi, noir, soap operas, rom-coms, food shows, dramas, action-adventure, and more. Latinx people appear in television across all formats, from quick webisodes, to serialized big-arc narratives, to animation and everything in between. The diverse array of contributors to this volume delve into this rich landscape of Latinx TV from 2000 to today, spanning the ever-widening range of genres and platforms.

Most Anticipated 2022 Latinx Books List Includes Reyes Ramirez’s ‘Book of Wanderers’

February 2, 2022

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.

Esther Belin Talks Poetry and Social Justice on PEN South Africa Podcast

February 1, 2022

Esther G. Belin, co-editor of The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature, was featured in the sixth and final episode of Season Two of The Empty Chair from PEN South Africa.

The conversation included PEN South Africa president Nadia Davids and Toni Giselle Stuart, a South African poet, performer and educator. Her work includes Krotoa-Eva’s Suite in collaboration with filmmaker Kurt Orderson; I Come to My Body as a Question with dotdotdot dance and forgetting. and memory with vangile gantsho & Vusumzi Ngxande.

Belin, a citizen of the Navajo Nation and lives on the Colorado side of the 4 corners region, has two poetry collections, From the Belly of My Beauty, and Of Cartography, all published by the University of Arizona Press.

To learn more about the podcast, Pen South African, and listen to the podcast, visit here.

Latinx Project Shares Op-Ed from Author of ‘Sound of Exclusion’ on NPR

January 31, 2022

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.

Read the entire op-ed here.

Tucson Weekly Honors Big Jim Griffith in Special Issue

January 28, 2022

In “Adios, Big Jim: Saying Goodbye to the Man Who Stirred Tucson’s Melting Pot,” the Tucson Weekly recently honored the life and work of the late University of Arizona Press author James S. Griffith.

Friends and colleagues shared stories, including University of Arizona Press author and editor Noma E. Cantú:

My world would’ve been different had I not been blessed with meeting Jim Griffith. I learned from him; he supported my work; and offered advice when I didn’t even know I needed it. 

One memorable trip across to Sonora began in Nogales, Arizona. I am a border dweller from Texas, but I didn’t know the Arizona-Sonora border and despite having close friends and family in Nogales, I had not ventured south of Nogales until I went with Big Jim. His encyclopedic knowledge of the folklore of the region was almost as rich as his love for the land and the people. On that memorable trip, I met some of the folks he had been working with for decades, learned about particular folk saints from that borderland, like Malverde—he had been working on what would become his book Folk Saints of the Borderlands: Victims, Bandits, and Healers (2003)—and I learned of his penchant for telling tall tales. 

He could sure spin a yarn and only an experienced raconteur would notice the glimmer in his eye that signaled you were in for a treat! Most people believed him until his grin would turn to laughter as the listener figured out Jim had been telling a tall tale. 

At American Folklore Society (AFS) meetings, he would jam with the best of them, deliver brilliant papers with powerful images, and chat with budding folklorists, listening intently and offering sources from his vast knowledge. I remember such a conversation after a paper I delivered on the Texas border saints sometime in the late 1990s or early 2000s.

His and Loma’s home filled with folk objects and books was a welcoming space for many of us and he never tired of sharing his space and his stories. I will miss him at AFS, and on my infrequent visits to Tucson. 

Read the entire tribute here.

Here’s a video by Abraham Cooper with excerpts from his final conversation Jim Griffith on August 12, 2021:

Elizabeth Wilder Named Assistant Editor at University of Arizona Press

January 27, 2022

Elizabeth Wilder was recently named assistant editor in the University of Arizona Press’s Acquisitions Department. Wilder first joined the Press in April 2020 as editorial assistant.

As assistant editor, Wilder oversees the Press’s two award-winning literary series, Camino del Sol and Sun Tracks, the annual Ambroggio Prize, and supports the lists of the University of Arizona Press Editor-in-Chief Kristen Buckles. She holds a PhD in English from Stanford University.

Aldama Included in USA Today Debate on Importance, Growing Use of ‘Latinx’

January 26, 2022

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!”

Read the entire article here.

Five Questions with Wendy Shelly Greyeyes

January 25, 2022

On the heels of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Department of Diné Education, A History of Navajo Nation Education explains how the current Navajo educational system is a complex terrain of power relationships, competing agendas, and jurisdictional battles influenced by colonial pressures and tribal resistance. In providing the historical roots to today’s challenges, Wendy Shelly Greyeyes clears the path and provides a go-to reference to move discussions forward. Today, Dr. Greyeyes answers our questions.

What inspired you to work on this book?

I worked for the Navajo Nation and one of the biggest challenges of my job was explaining what type of educational system is in place. There are many systems operating on the Navajo Nation and it gets confusing for families and for tribal leaders. I felt that a book was necessary to help clarify the history of education and how it has grown. I’ve also been fortunate to have worked with some amazing Navajo educational leaders and through much of the work, I also talk about how the Navajo Nation could unify a system that would be more meaningful for our students and community.

Why is Navajo education at a pivotal moment?

Navajo Nation has discussed the idea of unifying an educational system since the 1970s. We have been at a pivotal moment for nearly fifty years. The next step is getting the approval of the Navajo Nation council for a 638 plan that has been drafted and developed. But presently, the main driver of this movement had a lot of turnover with staffing. So it maybe a few more years before this action takes place.

What is the work that’s happening now for educational sovereignty?

Currently, Navajo Nation has been seeking a superintendent for a long time. They finally have found a leader that will drive this initiative forward, and we are looking forward to what the future holds for the Navajo Nation.

What is the lesson of this book?

I believe we should not be afraid of taking the power back from the federal government and the states that educate our children. We gave the right to educate our children with the treaty of 1868. We have the power and the authority to take it back.

What are you working on now?

I’m finishing up a co-edited book on the Martinez-Yazzie lawsuit, here in New Mexico. We have contributions from some of the great minds focused on Indian education and we hope this book comes out in 2023.

***

Wendy Shelly Greyeyes (Diné) is an assistant professor of Native American studies at the University of New Mexico and a former research consultant with the Department of Diné Education.

Five Questions with Seth Schindler

January 18, 2022

In Southern Arizona, one in six residents, and one in four children, are food insecure. The Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona (CFB) is one of the oldest and most respected food banks in America. It is a widely recognized leader not simply in providing hunger relief but in attacking the root causes of hunger and poverty through community development, education, and advocacy. In Sowing the Seeds of Change author Seth Schindler tells the story of this remarkable organization’s sustained, compassionate response to food insecurity. The success of the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona demonstrates that the war against hunger, however difficult, is winnable. Today, author Seth Schindler answers five questions.

What drew you to the story of the CFB?

I realized that the story of the CFB was much bigger, more complex and intriguing than I originally thought. I learned about the enormity of the problem of food insecurity in the U.S. and in Arizona, which shocked me; then the surprising massive scale and diversity of the CFB’s operations throughout Southern Arizona; and finally its reputation as a national leader and innovator in the food bank movement, admired for its groundbreaking work in attacking the root causes of food insecurity. The zeal of staff, volunteers, and other participants in the CFB’s programs also impressed me. Finally, conversations with Charles “Punch” Woods, the CFB’s leader during the first decades of its evolution into the remarkable organization we know today, inspired me, convincing me that this was an engaging original story that needed to be told.

To my knowledge, there was no book about a food bank in the U.S. I hope that by writing one, I’ve helped illuminate the organizations like CFB that do such critical work!

How did the CFB get started?

The founders’ mission was an ambitious one—to end hunger in Tucson. They believed that the Food Stamp Program was poorly managed, that too many food-insecure people fell through the cracks, and that too much food was going to waste in the city. Mark Homan, Barry Corey, and Dan Duncan sensed that there had to be a more efficient way to distribute food and reach more of the hungry, as well as make better use of salvaged food.

Their strategy was two-fold: to distribute emergency food boxes (a three-day supply of the most basic food staples) through Tucson’s many nonprofits—both welfare and faith-based agencies—already serving the hungry; secondly, to make it as easy for individuals and commercial operators to donate the food as to throw it out.

The CFB began in a tiny primitive warehouse in South Tucson, with one employee, director Dan Duncan, one volunteer, Arnie Salverson, one delivery truck donated by a local business, a few boxes of canned food, and a $7,000 grant from the city. Yet in the first year alone the CFB distributed 10,544 emergency food boxes and 80,000 pounds of salvaged food! This clearly surprised the founders. They initially underestimated the demand for their services. Those in need, they discovered, included not just the homeless and the unemployed, but the underemployed, the working poor struggling to put food on the table for their families.

Today, operating out of its Tucson headquarters, the enormous Punch Woods Multi-Service Center, and its several branches throughout southern Arizona, with the help of thousands of staff and volunteers, and an annual budget exceeding 125 million dollars, the CFB distributes tons of food through 375 partner agencies to 200,000 food-insecure people.

This story of the CFB’s incredible growth to meet an ever-increasing need over the past half century is at the heart of Sowing the Seeds of Change.   

How did your work as an anthropologist shape your research for this book?

Apart from archival research, in-depth interviews with staff, volunteers, donors, clients, and other CFB participants, along with activities that anthropologists call “participant observation” became essential as the book progressed. Getting out into the field to directly study CFB operations, sometimes working along with staff and volunteers, such as at warehouses, pantries, soup kitchens and the CFB’s community farm, put me in touch with what was really happening in their programs. These traditional techniques used by ethnographers helped, I believe, distinguish this book from conventional institutional histories.

Early on I also realized I wanted the book to reach a wide audience, including the CFB’s clients, and to develop a writing style and a book design—incorporating, for example, substantial graphic material—that would more easily help achieve that goal. I would then also take advantage of my experience as a storyteller and in writing about a variety of topics for the general reader.

Perhaps the most important feature of the book, and my biggest breakthrough in developing it, was the decision to include profiles of a diverse group of CFB participants through the years, and not just the organization’s leaders. These reveal their thoughts about their roles, presented in their own words. In recent years, anthropologists have been criticized rightly for not doing this adequately when researching and writing about the people and cultures they study. Sowing the Seeds of Change contains dozens of sidebar quotes from those individuals who have created the CFB’s culture of caring, sharing and innovating, and contributed to the organization’s success. Their voices personalize the story of the organization and help to distinguish the publication by adding a crucial human dimension not typically found in history books.  

What surprised you the most during your research?

I have to say I was shocked by several things I learned in the process of researching this book—many decidedly positive but some alarmingly negative and hard to comprehend. How do you explain, for example, that in the U.S., the richest country in the world, there are over 35 million food-insecure people?

Unfortunately, I never found an easy answer to this paradox. What I did discover, however, is that Tucson is filled with people who care deeply about the plight of the hungry among us, and who help them routinely. In this respect, the passion of CFB staff, volunteers and others in the community, directed at helping the less fortunate, continues to amaze and lift me. 

I also discovered that the CFB today is far more than a hunger-relief organization, a fact that many in Tucson do not know, and one I emphasize in the second half of the book called “It Takes More Than Food.” The mission today is not just to “shorten the food line” but ultimately to eliminate it through education, community development and advocacy. Several hunger-prevention programs have been developed in recent years with this goal in mind, all directed at empowering the poor and breaking the cycle of poverty that is the cause of food insecurity, especially among the most vulnerable groups—children and seniors.

The CFB, for example, has developed its own demonstration/learning garden; classes in cooking and healthy eating for both adults and school children; a community farm with plots for clients, two farmers’ markets, a culinary training program aimed at providing careers for the unemployed and underemployed; and the Gabrielle Giffords Resource Center that offers social services to clients. It has also drastically increased the amount of fresh produce in its food boxes, including ones designed for seniors and to combat diet-related disease.

In 2018, Feeding America—the national organization of food banks—named the CFB “Food Bank of the Year” in recognition of its achievements in attacking the root causes of hunger.

Why are volunteers so essential at the CFB?

Today there are over 6000 volunteers working with the CFB’s staff of about 140. Such a large number is essential because of the CFB’s diverse activities and ever-expanding programming in a very large service area—23,000 square miles. Distributing food to over 200,000 people in several counties is no easy task, but that’s not all the CFB’s volunteers help with. They contribute importantly, for example, at the CFB’s farmers’ markets, Caridad Community Kitchen, Nuestra Tierra Learning Garden, Las Milpitas Community Farm, and in its many food drives, the Ambassador Program and the Produce Rescue Program.      

Volunteers are the heart of most nonprofits, and the CFB is no exception. However, based on what I observed conducting fieldwork, the CFB’s volunteers are a truly exceptional group—highly dedicated and competent. This take on the CFB’s volunteer work force was corroborated by the food bank experts I interviewed who also believe there’s always been something special about the Tucson community and its compassionate residents who work selflessly for the common good. In this respect, it should be pointed out that Tucson and the southern Arizona region generally does have an advantage over most other food banks in the US. The CFB can draw on this area’s very large retirement community of seniors with the leisure time to volunteer.

Nevertheless, I believe that the success of the CFB’s volunteer work force can also be explained in light of the CFB’s legendary, distinctive culture of caring, sharing and innovating, which is contagious. This culture, marked by the spirit of egalitarianism, was first shaped by its charismatic leader, Charles “Punch” Woods who guided the CFB through its most challenging early phase of evolution, and it remains intact and vital today. It doesn’t hurt either that the CFB continues to offer volunteers well-run programs in which to work and a friendly, family-like atmosphere where respect for others, and clients especially, is the name of the game. Finally, the nature of this volunteer work itself–whether in the warehouse, the pantry or the garden –is innately very appealing.

What can be more satisfying than seeing the smiles on the faces of the people you help?       

***                                                                           .

Seth Schindler is an anthropologist and former NEH Research Fellow and Weatherhead Resident Scholar. He has contributed articles to the American Anthropologist and The Encyclopedia of Anthropology, among many others.

‘Once Upon the Permafrost’ Excerpt Printed in Sapiens Magazine

January 14, 2022

Sapiens, an anthropology magazine of the Wenner‑Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, recently published an excerpt from Susan Alexandra Crate‘s new book, Once Upon the Permafrost: Knowing Culture and Climate Change in Siberia.

Crate has spent three decades working with Sakha, the Turkic-speaking horse and cattle agropastoralists of northeastern Siberia, Russia. In her book, she reveals Sakha’s essential relationship with alaas, the foundational permafrost ecosystem of both their subsistence and cultural identity. Sakha know alaas via an Indigenous knowledge system imbued with spiritual qualities. This counters the scientific definition of alaas as geophysical phenomena of limited range. Climate change now threatens alaas due to thawing permafrost, which, entangled with the rural changes of economic globalization, youth out-migration, and language loss, make prescient the issues of ethnic sovereignty and cultural survival.

From the excerpt:

“Our ancestors lived by the alaas, the round fields with forests shaped like an alaaji (small round pancake) with a lake,” Agrafina Vasilyevna Nazarova, a veteran preschool teacher, told me. Agrafina described the alaas as “a small world in and of itself” and a “birthplace” where a person could find fish and game, pasture and hay, and berries—everything needed to live.

These carefully articulated testimonies cast the alaas as an otherworldly place imbued with a lush, abundant, and vibrant nature. Yes, alaas is a physical place, but it is also a sacred vow with the ancestors—an entangled, interdependent set of relationships between human and nonhuman animals, plants, lakes, glades, and spirits.

Sakhas’ identity is founded upon their intimate human-environment relationship with alaas. What are the implications when they lose their alaas?

Across the planet, communities are witnessing the transformation of their significant cultural places, similar to how Sakha are losing alaas. What can forefronting these ways of knowing bring to the table in global climate policy configurations?

Botanist and Indigenous scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer offers her reflections on the matter in Braiding Sweetgrass. She contemplates the “energetic reciprocity” between the complementary colors of purple asters and goldenrod, likening it to the complementarity of Indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge.

As humans, we live interdependently within not only a planetary biosphere but what anthropologist Wade Davis terms the “ethnosphere,” or “the sum total of all the thoughts, dreams, ideals, myths, intuitions, and inspirations brought into being by the imagination since the dawn of consciousness.” Our common future depends not only on ameliorating the biophysical consequences of climate change but also on facilitating multiple cultural transformations, with a greater awareness of how different peoples are affected by and responding to unprecedented change.

We need both the goldenrod and the asters.

Metaphorically speaking, we all live on permafrost. Only by integrating scientific knowledge with Indigenous knowledge and local knowledge can we fully grasp the depth and breadth of our common plight and have any hope of finding our way out of the existential crisis of climate change.

To read the entire excerpt and check out Sapiens, visit here.

Diné Creativity and Identity: An Excerpt from ‘Returning Home’

January 14, 2022

Returning Home features and contextualizes the creative works of Diné 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. Below, read an excerpt from the book.

In the twentieth century, Diné students attended an array of school programs, including (but not exclusively) the program at Intermountain. Returning Home contextualizes the various dynamic forms through which Native American students continued to define their identities in relation to their homelands, urban settings, and new spaces—in this case, at Intermountain. Such forms of Indigenous revitalization and innovation came through ceremony, prayer, music, song, speech, art, dance, and poetry, to name only a few examples and other forms of expression. In an analysis of the media through which boarding school students speak for themselves, this book delves into the intricacies of Indian boarding school experiences. While students faced forces to eradicate, manipulate, and diminish their Diné cultures and identities at the Intermountain boarding school during the late twentieth century, student artists and writers also harnessed their educational experiences for their empowerment and revival as Indigenous youth. By collaborating with Diné communities such as the Navajo Intermountain Alumni Association, and then by centering on student experiences, this book underscores Indigenous living histories that continue to revitalize and affect many Indigenous families and communities.

We seek to bridge different communities and primarily serve Diné Intermountain alumni by “returning home” their creative works and acknowledging their pains and joys lived in colonizing systems of boarding school education. Ho- Chunk scholar Amy Lonetree exemplifies the significance of “shared authority” in Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums, which we have sought to emulate by working with Diné communities, families, and professionals. Lonetree also stresses “speaking the hard truths of colonialism”: “It is time for us communities to acknowledge the painful aspects of our history along with our stories of survivance, so that we can move toward healing, well-being, and true self-determination.” This work pays tribute to Intermountain students’ lives and stories, for their posterity and for all to remember what they endured and created in some of the hardest circumstances that power dynamics and injustices of colonialism set. Because we are trying to reach a spectrum of audiences, including the general public and Diné communities, we pursue a balance that prioritizes the students’ own voices over academic terms, theories, and frameworks. This book is based on our co-curated exhibit, Returning Home: The Art and Poetry of Intermountain Indian School, 1954–1984, which carried home the arts and creative writing of former Intermountain students to the Navajo Nation. The traveling exhibit featured the students’ learning journey and expressions of home, family, school, and global consciousness, paralleling Diné teachings of the seasons of life that align with the Four Sacred Mountains from East, South, West, and North.

‘Discovering Mars’ Explored and Praised

January 8, 2022

Discovering Mars: A History of Observation and Exploration of the Red Planet, by William Sheehan and Jim Bell, was recently featured on the Planetary Society’s Planetary Radio podcast, and reviewed by Leonard David’s Inside Outer Space.

From the Planetary Radio interview:

Mat Kaplan: I already shared what Bill Nye said about the book. Here’s a quote from our friend, Andy Chaikin, the author of the Man in the Moon. “Read and understand why we will never be done with Mars,” which is a short and sweet, I would say. Bill, I think you and I got our first small telescopes in the same mid-’60s year and we both immediately turned them toward the Red Planet. Did that begin your passion for Mars?

Bill Sheehan: Certainly did. I mean, Mars was the main act really back then as in many ways it still lives. So as a kid getting everything I could out of the branch library and all of the books being several years out of date. So the idea that Mars might still be inhabited even by intelligent beings had not completely been exorcized from our imagination. So I was a believer at the time in the canals of Mars and had hoped against hope that that might all pan out. I certainly remember looking at Mars through a small telescope, one of those department store telescopes that everybody pretty much says they’re worthless. But tell that to a kid of about 10 and seeing that little red disc up there, even though it was little bit bigger than a pin’s head, it still was infinitely evocative to the imagination. So, yeah, that was 1965, March 1965. That was the opposition I got started.

Mat Kaplan: Just about the time I got my little department store refractor and that belief, that wanting to believe in the canals of Mars and that we might just find somebody up there to welcome us. That is a theme that runs through this book, how belief sometimes got in the way almost… Well, right from the start of the science, of the actual facts about the planet Mars. Jim, do you also see that thread?

Jim Bell: Yeah, absolutely. And it really starts with Bill taking the historical perspective and part of this book is an update to Bill’s book from ’96, I want to say. Yeah.

Mat Kaplan: ’96. Right. The Planet Mars?

Jim Bell: The Planet Mars. Yeah. A lot has happened since then, of course, on the mission side, but a lot has happened on the historical side as well. Lots of research, lots of new photos and manuscripts uncovered, et cetera. And so yes, that thread of belief winds all the way through the historical side that Bill has researched so expertly and you know, it also runs through the spacecraft side. Right. We wanted to believe that the ALH84001 meteorite was loaded with Martian micro fossils. Some people want to believe there are human faces carved into the rocks of Mars. Right? Some people want to believe that we can do sample return in the next decade. Right? You know? And so yes, there’s scientific facts. Yes, there’s engineering reality, but yes, it’s also a very human endeavor, this exploration of Mars.

To listen to the entire interview, please visit here.

Space journalist Leonard David recently offered this praise and more on Discovering Mars:

“This epic and one-of-a-kind volume is best read with a mind in full-inquisitive mode and why our technologies have provided decade-after-decade of astounding and captivating reveals … and what awaits us.”

Read the entire review here.

La Bloga Highlights Titles from Spring 2022 Catalog

January 7, 2022

Big thanks to Manuel Ramos, author of Angels in the Wind: A Mile-High Noir, and La Bloga for featuring several books from the University of Arizona Press Spring 2022 catalog: The Book of Wanderers, Cardinal in My Window with a Mask on its Beak, A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back, Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century, and Latinx Teens: U.S. Popular Culture on the Page, Stage, and Screen.

Go here to read the post, and more on La Bloga.

Tohono O’odham Poet Ofelia Zepeda Delivers Keynote at Vaquero Awards Ceremony

December 23, 2021

Tohono O’odham poet and University of Arizona linguistics professor Ofelia Zepeda recently delivered the keynote speech at Central Arizona College’s Vaquero Awards, given to college alum who’ve made an impact within the community.

According to the Casa Grande Dispatch, Zepeda read two poems, and shared the value education had on her and her family:

“Sometimes I think that maybe I’m not supposed to be here,” Zepeda said. “I tell myself, ‘You shouldn’t have made it.’ That’s always the type of conflict I have. I’m still in disbelief sometimes. It’s a miracle, I believe in miracles.”

Read the entire story here.

Author Esther G. Belin talks ‘Diné Reader’ on Native America Calling Radio Program

December 22, 2022

Tara Gatewood, producer and host of Native America Calling, recently interviewed Diné multimedia artist and writer Esther G. Belin about The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature.

Belin is one of four editors of this powerful new anthology of Navajo literature with a range of contributors including Shonto Begay, Sherwin Bitsui, Luci Tapahonso, Laura Tohe, and many others.

Listen to the interview here.

Frederick Luis Aldama on MSNBC’s American Voices Talking ‘Marvel’s Voices: Communidades’

December 21, 2021

Frederick Luis Aldama, aka Professor LatinX, recently shared the small-screen with writer Daniel José Older on the MSNBC show American Voices hosted by Alicia Menendez to talk about Marvel Comics’ Marvel’s Voices: Communidades, a one-shot in the groundbreaking Marvel’s Voices series highlighting the cultural richness of Marvel Comics and uplifting new voices in the comic book industry. Communidades turns the spotlight to Latinx heroes and creators from the Marvel Universe

Aldama, author of Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics, the 2018 Eisner Award Winner for Best Scholarly/Academic Work, wrote the issue’s introduction about the history of Latinx heroes and creators in the comic book industry. Older is featured in the issue, revisiting the legacy of Marvel’s first super hero of Latino descent, Hector Ayala aka White Tiger, in an inspiring story rooted in real history.

Aldama is co-editor of the University of Arizona Press Latinx Pop Culture series. The series, which includes Latinx Superheroes among many other award-winning titles, aims to shed light on all aspects of Latinx cultural production and consumption, as well as the Latinx presence globally in popular cultural phenomena in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

https://www.tiktok.com/@professorlatinx0/video/7043531131118947631?is_copy_url=0&is_from_webapp=v1&sender_device=pc&sender_web_id=7043900158992647686
https://www.tiktok.com/@professorlatinx0/video/7043563612245495086?is_copy_url=0&is_from_webapp=v1&sender_device=pc&sender_web_id=7043900158992647686

A Remembrance for Borderlands Folklore Icon James S. “Big Jim” Griffith

December 20, 2021

BY GARY PAUL NABHAN

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.”

At the University of Arizona Press, some of that research translated into three books: Beliefs and Holy Places: A Spiritual Geography of the Pimería Alta; Hecho a Mano: The Traditional Arts of Tucson’s Mexican American Community; and his most recent book published in 2019, Saints, Statues, and Stories: A Folklorist Looks at the Religious Art of Sonora.

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.

Urayoán Noel’s ‘Transversal’ on 2022 PEN Open Book Award Longlist

December 15, 2021

We are thrilled to announce that Urayoán Noel‘s poetry collection, Transversal, has been selected for the Longlist of the 2022 PEN America Open Book Award. Finalists will be announced in early 2022 and the winner will be honored at the 2022 PEN America Literary Awards Ceremony.

“These Longlists are a ‘who’s who’ of the most exceptional writers of our generation and the next,” said Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, senior director of literary programs at PEN America. “Reading their names evokes memories of some of our all-time favorite works that brought us comfort during this strange year.”

Transversal takes a disruptive approach to poetic translation, opening up alternative ways of reading as poems get translated or transcreated into entirely new pieces. Noel masterfully examines his native Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean as sites of transversal poetics and politics. Transversal seeks to disrupt standard English and Spanish, and it celebrates the nonequivalence between languages. Inspired by Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, the collection celebrates Caribbean practices of creolization as maximalist, people-centered, affect-loaded responses to the top-down violence of austerity politics. This groundbreaking, modular approach to poetic translation opens up alternative ways of reading in any language.

The Longlists represent 11 PEN America literary awards. The PEN Open Book Award, formerly the Beyond Margins Awards, invites book submissions by authors of color, published in the United States during the applicable calendar year. The Open Book Award was created by PEN America’s Open Book Committee, a group committed to racial and ethnic diversity within the literary and publishing communities. Works of fiction, literary nonfiction, biography/memoir, poetry, and other works of literary character are strongly preferred.

From Pen America:

In an era of publishing consolidation, more than half (53 percent) of the longlisted titles come from independent and university presses. Almost a quarter come from small independent publishers (12 percent) and university presses (nine percent).

“Our Longlists highlight the groundbreaking and vital work produced by independent publishers, many of which continue to face significant challenges in today’s publishing market,” Shariyf said. “These publishers are often leaders in promoting diverse voices and stories not just along racial and gender lines, but showcasing cultural and geographic diversity, too. The Awards ceremony allows writers and publishers to gather with readers and champions of creative free expression and celebrate the power of storytelling as an inclusive literary community.”

Check out all literary award Longlists, including the Open Book Award, here. You can also read the press release here.

Simón Ventura Trujillo Receives Honorable Mention for MLA Prize for Land Uprising

December 13, 2021

We are thrilled to announce that University of Arizona Press author Simón Ventura Trujillo received an honorable mention for the MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies for his recent book, Land Uprising! The MLA prize committee wrote the following statement about Trujillo’s book:


In Land Uprising: Native Story Power and the Insurgent Horizons of Latinx Indigeneity, Simón Ventura Trujillo both broadens the parameters and reassesses the foundations of Latinx literary and cultural studies. Placing Latinx and Indigenous writers, activists, and scholars into conversation, he critically foregrounds the significance of Latinx indigeneity—a term he carefully distinguishes from Indigenous peoples and from the appropriative indigenismos—in ongoing struggles for land and self-determination. Land Uprising displays impressive breadth and nuance, offers a crucial intervention into the conversation between Latinx and Indigenous studies, and engages seriously with gender, foregrounding the voices and perspectives of feminist scholars in reexamining historical events often remembered through masculine heroes and masculinist ideologies.

Congratulations, Simón!

Current Shares ‘Sound of Exclusion’ Excerpt on How NPR Overlooked Latinx Listeners

December 10, 2021

Current, a nonprofit news organization covering public media in the U.S for professionals in the industry, recently shared an excerpt of Christopher Chávez‘s The Sound of Exclusion: NPR and the Latinx Public.

The Sound of Exclusion examines how National Public Radio conceptualizes the Latinx listener, arguing that NPR employs a number of industry practices that secure its position as a white public space while relegating Latinx listeners to the periphery. These practices are tied to a larger cultural logic. Latinx identity is differentiated from national identity, which can be heard through NPR’s cultivation of an idealized dialect, situating whiteness at its center. Pushing Latinx listeners to the edges of public radio has crucial implications for Latinx participation in civic discourses, as identifying who to include in the “public” audience necessarily involves a process of exclusion.

Here’s part of the excerpt from Current:

When I spoke with NPR’s Bill Siemering about how the network originally conceived of its listener, he affirmed that NPR was initially designed to serve ethnically diverse audiences. However, Siemering’s conception of diversity was centered primarily on Black and Indigenous communities. This orientation came largely from his own professional experiences. Siemering had previously served as general manager of college radio station WBFO-FM in Buffalo. There, he spent his first years at the station learning about the local community, conducting interviews with the African American community, which were used to develop a series called To Be Negro. Siemering also worked with Indigenous communities living at nearby Niagara Falls to produce a series of programs on the Iroquois Confederacy called Nation Within a Nation.

Siemering admitted that Latinxs were not much of a consideration when he wrote his mission statement, stating, “At that time, there wasn’t much awareness about Latinos.” This is to be expected. In 1970, when the network first aired, Latinxs accounted for only 4.5 percent of the total U.S. population.1 But when I asked Siemering how a single network was meant to appeal to the broad spectrum of the nation, he stated that a unifying trait of NPR’s audience is curiosity. “Being curious is very important,” Siemering told me. “That cuts across all divides.”

The notion of curiosity has been a defining characteristic of the NPR audience over the course of its history and is reflected in the marketing materials NPR uses to sell its audiences to corporate underwriters. For example, NPR markets a number of products under its “Curious Listener” series, which educates listeners on how to appreciate music and culture. However, Siemering was firm in his belief that NPR should not consider the economic value of its listeners to be its paramount consideration. When we spoke, he read aloud a sentence in the mission statement that he felt was particularly important: “NPR would not regard its audience as a market.” Yet, this is exactly how the network regards the listener. The research conducted by Audience Research Analysis was designed to cultivate a listening audience that would support the network financially. This strategy has, in turn, informed how NPR conceives of, and pursues, its ideal Latinx listener.

Read the entire excerpt here.

Explore New Titles from the University of Arizona Press Spring 2022 Catalog

December 9, 2021

Here’s a preview of our upcoming Spring 2022 season with the best the University of Arizona Press has to offer, from Latinx poetry, to Indigenous studies, space sciences, as well as the variety of the unique global scholarship the Press has committed to bring to readers worldwide. You know the drill. Tuck in.

Michael Chiago: O’odham Lifeways Through Art, by Michael Chiago Sr., and Amadeo M. Rea, 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. By combining Chiago’s paintings of his lived experiences with Rea’s ethnographic work, this book offers a full, colorful, and powerful picture of O’odham heritage, culture, and language, creating a teaching reference for future generations.

Completely revised and expanded, this fourth edition of Mineralogy of Arizona, Fourth Edition, by Raymond W. GrantRon GibbsHarvey JongJan Rasmussen, and Stanley Keith, covers the 986 minerals found in Arizona, showcased with breathtaking new color photographs throughout the book. The new edition includes more than 200 new species not reported in the third edition and previously unknown in Arizona. Arizona’s rich mineral history is well illustrated by the more than 300 color photographs of minerals, gemstones, and fluorescent minerals that help the reader identify and understand the rich and diverse mineralogy of Arizona. Anyone interested in the mineralogy and geology of the state will find this the most up-to-date compilation of the minerals known to occur in Arizona.

The Greater San Rafael Swell: Honoring Tradition and Preserving Storied Lands, by Stephen E. StromJonathan Bailey, chronicles hopeful stories for our times: how citizens of Emery and three other counties in the rural West worked to resolve perhaps the most volatile issue in the region–the future of public lands. Both their successes and the processes by which they found common ground serve as beacons in today’s uncertain landscape–beacons that can illuminate paths toward rebuilding our shared democracy from the ground up. Authors Strom and Bailey paint a multi-faceted picture of a singular place through photographs, along with descriptions of geology, paleontology, archaeology, history, and dozens of interviews with individuals who devoted more than two decades to developing a shared vision of the future of both the Swell and the County.

Trickster Academy, by Jenny L. Davis, is a collection of poems that explore being Native in Academia—from land acknowledgement statements, to mascots, to the histories of using Native American remains in anthropology. Davis’ collection brings humor and uncomfortable realities together in order to challenge the academy and discuss the experience of being Indigenous in university classrooms and campuses. Organized around the premise of the Trickster Academy—a university space run by, and meant for training, Tricksters—this collection moves between the personal dynamics of a Two-Spirit/queer Indigenous woman in spaces where there are few, if any, others and a Trickster’s critique of those same spaces.

Reyes Ramirez’s The Book of Wanderers is a dynamic short story collection that follows new lineages of Mexican and Salvadoran diasporas traversing life in Houston, across borders, and even on Mars. Themes of wandering weave throughout each story, bringing feelings of unease and liberation as characters navigate cultural, physical, and psychological separation and loss from one generation to the next in a tumultuous nation. 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.

Carlos Aguasaco, a first-generation immigrant to the United States, embraces his transborder/transnational/intercultural identity by building a bridge across time and distance to unite the great voices of the Renaissance with his lyrical poems in his new collection, Cardinal in My Window with a Mask on Its Beak. The collection offers bold and fascinating dialogue with Spanish authors such as Juan Boscán, Francisco de Quevedo, Garcilaso de la Vega, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The poems examine the fundamental liberties inherent to humanity through stunning verse. In a quest for freedom, the poems openly criticize the treatment of immigrants in the United States, drawing poignant parallels with human rights abuses throughout history.

A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back, edited by gloria j wilsonJoni Boyd Acuff, and Amelia M Kraehe, recognizes the challenges faced by women of color in a twenty-first-century world of climate and economic crises, increasing gun violence, and ever-changing social media constructs for women of color. It also retains the clarion call Bridge set in motion, as Moraga wrote: “A theory in the flesh means one where the physical realities of our lives—our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longing—all fuse to create a politic born of necessity.”  The central theme of the original Bridge is honored, exposing the lived realities of women of color at the intersections of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, advancing those early conversations on what it means to be Third World feminist conscious.

Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, argues that Latinx TV is not just television—it’s an entire movement. Digital spaces and streaming platforms today have allowed for Latinx representation on TV that speaks to Latinx people and non-Latinx people alike, bringing rich and varied Latinx cultures into mainstream television and addressing urbanization, immigration, family life, language, politics, gender, sexuality, class, race, and ethnicity. Once heavily underrepresented and harmfully stereotypical, Latinx representation on TV is beginning to give careful nuance to regional, communal, and familial experiences among U.S. Latinx people. This volume unpacks the negative implications of older representation and celebrates the progress of new representation, recognizing that television has come a long way, but there is still a lot of important work to do for truly diverse and inclusive representation.

Latinx Teens: U.S. Popular Culture on the Page, Stage, and Screen, by Trevor Boffone, and Cristina Herrera, answers this question: What can Latinx youth contribute to critical conversations on culture, politics, identity, and representation? This book offers an energetic, in-depth look at how Latinx teenagers influence twenty-first-century U.S. popular culture. Boffone and Herrera explore the diverse ways that contemporary mainstream film, television, theater, and young adult literature invokes, constructs, and interprets adolescent Latinidad. As the first book that specifically examines Latinx adolescence in popular culture, Latinx Teens insists that we must privilege the stories of Latinx teenagers in television, film, theater, and literature to get to the heart of Latinx popular culture. Exploring themes around representation, identity, gender, sexuality, and race, the works explored in this groundbreaking volume reveal that there is no single way to be Latinx, and show how Latinx youth are shaping the narrative of the Latinx experience for a more inclusive future.

A History of Navajo Nation Education: Disentangling Our Sovereign Body, by Wendy Shelly Greyeyes, unravels the tangle of federal and state education programs that have been imposed on Navajo people and illuminates the ongoing efforts by tribal communities to transfer state authority over Diné education to the Navajo Nation. On the heels of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Department of Diné Education, this important education history explains how the current Navajo educational system is a complex terrain of power relationships, competing agendas, and jurisdictional battles influenced by colonial pressures and tribal resistance.

Transforming Diné Education: Innovations in Pedagogy and Practice, edited by Pedro Vallejo, and Vincent Werito, gathers the voices of Diné scholars, educators, and administrators to offer critical insights into contemporary programs that place Diné-centered pedagogy into practice. Bringing together decades of teaching experience, contributors offer perspectives from school- and community-based programs, as well as the tribal, district, and university level. They address special education, language revitalization, wellness, self-determination and sovereignty, and university-tribal-community partnerships.

A New Deal for Navajo Weaving: Reform and Revival of Diné Textiles, by Jennifer McLerran, provides a detailed history of early to mid-twentieth-century Diné weaving projects by non-Natives who sought to improve the quality and marketability of Navajo weaving but in so doing failed to understand the cultural significance of weaving and its role in the lives of Diné women. McLerran details how government officials sought to use these programs to bring the Diné into the national economy; instead, these federal tactics were ineffective because they marginalized Navajo women and ignored the important role weaving plays in the resilience and endurance of wider Diné culture.

Postindian Aesthetics: Affirming Indigenous Literary Sovereignty, edited by Debra K. S. Barker, and Connie A. Jacobs, is a collection of critical, cutting-edge essays on Indigenous writers who are creatively and powerfully contributing to a thriving Indigenous literary aesthetic. This book argues for a literary canon that includes Indigenous literature that resists colonizing stereotypes of what has been and often still is expected in art produced by American Indians. The works featured are inventive and current, and the writers covered are visionaries who are boldly redefining Indigenous literary aesthetics. The artists covered include Orlando White, LeAnne Howe, Stephen Graham Jones, Deborah Miranda, Heid E. Erdrich, Sherwin Bitsui, and many others.

Finding Right Relations: Quakers, Native Americans, and Settler Colonialism, by Marianne O. Nielsen, and Barbara M. Heather, centers on the relationship between Quaker colonists and the Lenape people, exploring the contradictory position of the Quakers as both egalitarian, pacifist people, and as settler colonists. Quakers were one of the early settler colonist groups to invade northeastern North America. William Penn set out to develop a “Holy Experiment,” or utopian colony, in what is now Pennsylvania. Here, he thought, his settler colonists would live in harmony with the Indigenous Lenape and other settler colonists. This book explores major challenges to Quaker beliefs and resulting relations with American Indians from the mid-seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century. It shows how the Quakers not only failed to prevent settler colonial violence against American Indians but also perpetuated it.

Our Fight Has Just Begun: Hate Crimes and Justice in Native America, by Cheryl Redhorse Bennett, is a timely and urgent work. The result of more than a decade of research, it revises history, documents anti-Indianism, and gives voice to victims of racial violence. Navajo scholar Cheryl Redhorse Bennett reveals a lesser-known story of Navajo activism and the courageous organizers that confronted racial injustice and inspired generations. Illuminating largely untold stories of hate crimes committed against Native Americans in the Four Corners region of the United States, this work places these stories within a larger history, connecting historical violence in the United States to present-day hate crimes.

The Community-Based PhD: Complexities and Triumphs of Conducting CBPR, edited by Sonya Atalay, and Alexandra C McCleary, brings together the experiences of PhD students from a range of disciplines discussing CBPR in the arts, humanities, social sciences, public health, and STEM fields. They write honestly about what worked, what didn’t, and what they learned. Essays address the impacts of extended research time frames, why specialized skill sets may be needed to develop community-driven research priorities, the value of effective relationship building with community partners, and how to understand and navigate inter- and intra-community politics.

In American Indian Studies: Native PhD Graduates Gift Their Stories, edited by Mark L. M. BlairMary Jo Tippeconnic Fox, and Kestrel A. Smith, Native PhD graduates share their personal stories about their educational experiences and how doctoral education has shaped their identities, lives, relationships, and careers. This collection of personal narratives from Native graduates of the University of Arizona’s American Indian Studies (AIS) doctoral program, the first such program of its kind, gifts stories of endurance and resiliency, hardship and struggle, and accomplishment and success. It provides insight into the diverse and dynamic experiences of Native graduate students. The narratives address family and kinship, mentorship, and service and giving back. Essayists share the benefits of having an AIS program at a mainstream academic institution—not just for the students enrolled but also for their communities.

The Maya Art of Speaking Writing: Remediating Indigenous Orality in the Digital Age, by Tiffany D. Creegan Miller, challenges the distinctions between “old” and “new” media and narratives about the deprecation of orality in favor of inscribed forms, drawing from Maya concepts of tz’ib’ (recorded knowledge) and tzij, choloj, and ch’owen (orality) to look at expressive work across media and languages. Based on nearly a decade of fieldwork in the Guatemalan highlands, Creegan Miller discusses images that are sonic, pictorial, gestural, and alphabetic. She reveals various forms of creativity and agency that are woven through a rich media landscape in Indigenous Guatemala, as well as Maya diasporas in Mexico and the United States. Miller discusses how technologies of inscription and their mediations are shaped by human editors, translators, communities, and audiences, as well as by voices from the natural world.

Pachamama Politics: Campesino Water Defenders and the Anti-Mining Movement in Andean Ecuador, by Teresa A. Velásquez, provides a rich ethnographic account of the tensions that follow from neoextractivism in the southern Ecuadorian Andes, where campesinos mobilized to defend their community-managed watershed from a proposed gold mine. Positioned as an activist-scholar, Velásquez takes the reader inside the movement—alongside marches, road blockades, and river and high-altitude wetlands—to expose the rifts between social movements and the “pink tide” government. Ecuador became the first country in the world to grant the Pachamama, or Mother Earth, constitutional rights in 2008. This landmark achievement represented a shift to incorporate Indigenous philosophies of Sumak Kawsay or Buen Vivir (to live well) as a framework for social and political change.

LGBTQ Politics in Nicaragua: Revolution, Dictatorship, and Social Movements, by Karen Kampwirth, explores the untold stories of the LGBTQ community of Nicaragua and its role in the recent political history of the country. Kampwirth is a renowned scholar of the Nicaraguan Revolution, who has been writing at the intersection of gender and politics for decades. In this chronological telling of the last fifty years of political history in Nicaragua, Kampwirth deploys a critical new lens: understanding politics from the perspective of the country’s LGBTQ community. Kampwirth details the gay and lesbian guerrillas in the 1960s and 1970s, Nicaragua’s first openly gay television wizard in the 1980s, and the attempts by LGBTQ revolutionaries to create a civil rights movement and the subsequent squashing of that movement by the ruling Sandinista party.

Anthropologist Colleen M. Scanlan Lyons brings the eye of a storyteller to present this complex struggle, weaving in her own challenges of balancing family and fieldwork alongside the stories of the people who live in this dynamic region in Running After Paradise: Hope, Survival, and Activism in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. Southern Bahia is at a crossroads: develop a sustainable, forest-based economy or run the risk of losing the identity and soul of this place forevermore. Through the lives of environmentalists, farmers, quilombolas, and nativos—people who are in and of this place—this book brings alive the people who are grappling with this dilemma. Intertwined tales, friendships, and hope emerge as people both struggle to sustain their lives in a biodiversity hotspot and strive to create their paradise.

Birds of the Sun; Macaws and People in the U.S. Southwest and Mexican Northwest, edited by Christopher W SchwartzStephen Plog, and Patricia A. Gilman, explores the many aspects of macaws, especially scarlet macaws, that have made them important to Native peoples living in this region for thousands of years. Leading experts discuss the significance of these birds, including perspectives from a Zuni author, a cultural anthropologist specializing in historic Pueblo societies, and archaeologists who have studied pre-Hispanic societies in Mesoamerica and the U.S. Southwest and Mexican Northwest. Scarlet macaws are native to tropical forests ranging from the Gulf Coast and southern regions of Mexico to Bolivia, but they are present at numerous archaeological sites in the U.S. Southwest and Mexican Northwest. Although these birds have been noted and marveled at through the decades, new syntheses of early excavations, new analytical methods, and new approaches to understanding the past now allow us to explore the significance and distribution of scarlet macaws to a degree that was previously impossible.

Through the analysis of more than 75,000 pieces of chipped stone, archaeologist Todd A. Surovell is able to provide one of the most detailed looks yet at the lifeways of hunter-gatherers from 12,800 years ago in Barger Gulch: A Folsom Campsite in the Rocky Mountains. At the end of the last Ice Age in a valley bottom in the Rocky Mountains, a group of bison hunters overwintered. The best archaeological sites are those that present problems and inspire research, writes Surovell. From the start, the Folsom site called Barger Gulch Locality B was one of those sites; it was a problem-rich environment. Many Folsom sites are sparse scatters of stone and bone, a reflection of a mobile lifestyle that leaves little archaeological materials. The people at Barger Gulch left behind tens of thousands of pieces of chipped stone; they appeared to have spent quite a bit of time there in comparison to other places they inhabited.

Indigenous Archaeology in the Philippines: Decolonizing Ifugao History, by Stephen Acabado, and Marlon Martin, highlights how collaborative archaeology and knowledge co-production among the Ifugao, an Indigenous group in the Philippines, contested (and continue to contest) enduring colonial tropes. Acabado and Martin explain how the Ifugao made decisions that benefited them, including formulating strategies by which they took part in the colonial enterprise, exploiting the colonial economic opportunities to strengthen their sociopolitical organization, and co-opting the new economic system. The archaeological record shows that the Ifugao successfully resisted the Spanish conquest and later accommodated American empire building.

Keep in touch with us regarding Spring 2022 events, special sales, and author and book news! Sign-up here to receive our newsletters. Happy reading!

Field Notes: Landscape Gems on Mexico’s Sea of Cortéz

December 7, 2021

We recently published Baja California’s Coastal Landscapes Revealed by Markes E. Johnson. In this new work, expert geologist and guide Johnson takes us on a dozen rambles through wild coastal landscapes on Mexico’s Gulf of California. Descriptions of storm deposits from the geologic past conclude by showing how the future of the Baja California peninsula and its human inhabitants are linked to the vast Pacific Basin and populations on the opposite shores coping with the same effects of global warming. Today we share a reflection from the author about his time observing this amazing coastal landscape.

By Markes E. Johnson

Conventional wisdom says that the physical act of making a journey often surpasses the traveler’s aim in reaching a chosen destination. More than 80 years have passed since the celebrated voyage in 1940 to Mexico’s fertile Sea of Cortéz by marine biologist Ed Ricketts (1897-1948) and writer John Steinbeck (1902-1968) aboard the chartered fishing vessel Western Flyer. The resulting narrative published as The Log from the Sea of Cortez become a cult classic much admired for the pair’s holistic view of nature clearly expressed well before the word ecology achieved the common usage it enjoys today.

It has been my good fortune to travel on a regular basis to the islands and peninsular shores bordering the Gulf of California over a span of 30 years, most often as a guide to college students studying geology and biology. During the 1990s, our trips were made overland from San Diego in rented vehicles that entailed long drives on the narrow, winding road of Mexico Highway 1. Later on, the logistics of air travel between Los Angeles and Loreto became more attractive, particularly in light of discounts for group travel. As a teacher, the most important advice offered to my students was to remain observant at all times, even while passing between destinations where studies were planned.  The same can be said for the exceptional opportunities afforded by flights over the Gulf of California, during which I have been known to provide students with a running commentary on the landscapes passing below us under invariably sunny skies.

The most casual of travelers cannot fail to be awed by extraordinary sights as viewed from high above that reveal the bare rocks of a desert landscape juxtaposed against the aquamarine tones of a bountiful sea. To and from Loreto, I find myself glued to the window (left side of the aircraft on south-bound flights and right side on north-bound flights). I am eager to seek out places where I have personal experience or where I know from the published literature that others such as Ricketts and Steinbeck visited and commented on. Much of the attraction is the realization that our knowledge of a landscape grows through a collective process accumulated through generations of explorers, researchers, and students. Many astonishing clues are there to be found in the landscape that inform us about how the Gulf of California was formed and how it evolved through geologic time to become the stupendous physical backdrop it is for such a productive body of water. Several of my favorite localities pop up between the coastal towns of San Felipe in the north and Loreto further south. 

Volcán Prieto: Located near Puertecitos, well south of San Felipe, the volcanic edifice of the extinct Volcán Prieto rises 850 feet above sea level with its central crater marked by a beige dot representing a shallow pond deposit of clay washed from the sides of the crater during rare rain events brought north by subtropical depressions. On the northwest side of the volcano, the equally large Playa Costello Delta emerges from the mouth of Heme Canyon. A large salt flat is reflected in a flat white tone on the volcano’s southeast flank.

Punta Chivato:  Midway between Santa Rosalia and Mulegé, the promontory (or atravasada) of Punta Chivato rises like a “cross piece” thrust eastward into the Gulf of California.  It is the region where my students and I made our first studies in the early 1990s. Red colored volcanic rocks are partially surrounded by beige limestone that define a cluster of islands roughly four million years old during the early flooding of the gulf.  Telltale “Hammer-head Point” as some locals call it (upper right) is formed by a ridge of resistant limestone left in place on one flank of a former island.

Concepción Peninsula: Across from the town of Mulegé, the northwest directed tip of Concepción peninsula comes into sight as the aircraft flies over the 23-mile long Concepción Bay. The 2,362-ft. high Hawks Mountain (Sierra Gavilanes) is the highest peak on the peninsula (lower center). A series of merged alluvial fans (bajadas) spill into the shallows where the bay’s water is turquoises in color. Ricketts and Steinbeck viewed this shore from the Western Flyer on March 28, 1940. Further along at the closed end of the bay, extensive limestone penetrates deep into a labyrinth of inter-connected valleys to show that the peninsula was nearly breached during a higher stand in sea level some 3 million years ago.

Cerro Mencenares: On approach to Loreto, the aircraft starts its descent passing the western flank of the Cerro Mencenares volcanic complex covering an area of 58 square miles. The pattern of eroded valleys that radiate outward from the center of the complex like spokes on a wheel inform that the landscape below was once part of a small shield volcano. Seaward is Punta El Mangle (upper right), where extensive limestone was deposited against the volcano’s outer margin.

Isla Coronados: As the aircraft continues to descend, the lovely “Island of Crowns” comes into sight with its dazzling white beaches and halo of turquoise waters. The island was an active volcano only some 600,000 years ago and the low-lying apron of land extending to the south was part of an extensive lagoon that harbored a large coral reef. Today, the island is part of the protected Loreto Marine Park. The Western Flyer was anchored in the bay on the west side of the island on March 27, 1940.

North end of Isla del Carmen: During the months of November through May, a stiff northerly wind (viento norte) often blows down the axis of the gulf for days at a time. It means that aircraft landing at Loreto usually push farther south over the open Carmen Passage beyond the town before banking through a hair-pin turn to land into the wind on the airport’s tarmac. Spectacular views of Isla del Carmen are on offer during this process. One of the best views so afforded is the salt lagoon on the northeast side of the island (center), where salt was commercially extracted until 1960. The semi-circular embayment at Balandra (lower left) is more accessible to boaters from Loreto and it features the remains of a fossil coral reef that date from a time about 125,000 years ago when sea level was higher than today.

Lagoon at Puerto Escondido: After making the turn to line up with the runway at Loreto, the descending aircraft passes over the inner lagoon at Puerto Escondido. White flecks against a dark blue background are represented by sail boats at safe anchor within the inner lagoon covering an area of 125 acres sheltered by islets and natural breakwaters on its seaward rim. Stopping there on March 25, 1940, Steinbeck wrote that the hidden harbor is a place of magic. “If one wished to design a secret personal bay, one would probably build something very like this little harbor.”

Tabor Canyon: On final approach to the Loreto airport, aircraft descend to an altitude below the crest of the Sierra de la Giganta that form the spectacular backdrop to the coastal plain along this part of the Baja California peninsula.  Steinbeck and Ricketts spent a night camped out with new friends from town who invited the pair to join their hunt for the local mountain sheep (borrego).  None were encountered and Steinbeck was just as glad for that outcome.

Later in life, when John Steinbeck wrote Travels with Charley (1962), he commented that: “People don’t take trips, trips take people. For me, personally, it has rarely been the final destination on a journey to Baja California. Instead, it is about all the experiences on the way. 

***

Markes E. Johnson is the Charles L. MacMillan Professor of Natural Science, Emeritus, at Williams College (Williamstown, Massachusetts).  He is the author of three books on the geology and ecology of landscapes in Baja California: Discovering the Geology of Baja California (2002); Off-Trail Adventures in Baja California (2014); and most recently Baja California’s Coastal Landscapes Revealed (2021) all published by the University of Arizona Press. His last two books include color plates showing landscapes photographed during various commercial flights between Los Angles and Loreto in Mexico’s Baja California Sur.

Watch: Mara Pastor in Conversation with Siomara España at International Literature Festival

December 3, 2021, 2021

Casa Cultural de las Americas’ International Literature Festival featured a conversation with poet Mara Pastor and Ecuadorian poet Siomara España. The organization and its festival brings together diverse voices to celebrate arts of the Americas in the United States and Europe.

Pastor‘s new book with the University of Arizona Press with translators María José Giménez, and Anna Rosenwong, Deuda Natal, is the winner of the 2020 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets. The poems in Deuda Natal propose new ways of understanding as they traverse a thematic landscape of women’s labor, the figure of the nomad and immigrant, and the return from economic exile to confront the catastrophic confluence of disaster and disaster capitalism.

Gustavo Arellano Includes ‘Rewriting the Chicano Movement’ in LA Times Column

December 1, 2021

In his recent Los Angeles Times column, “Mexicans have fought for a better California for 171 years. These books show how,” Gustavo Arellano highlights four books on Chicano and Mexican-American history in California, including Rewriting the Chicano Movement: New Histories of Mexican American Activism in the Civil Rights Era, edited by Mario T. García, and Ellen McCracken.

From Arellano:

The most moving chapter deals with el movimiento in Fresno County during the 1960s and 1970s, where students from rural towns across the Central Valley came to the big city for a college degree only to find a society out of the Deep South.

“What Mexicans encountered [there],” said author Patrick Fontes, “was an area wholly founded by whites for whites — they indeed entered a foreign land.”

But Chicanos persisted, and vowed to return to their hometowns to make them better. Today, the Central Valley is slowly turning politically purple, like grapes ripening on a vine.

Read the entire column here.

Time to Stock Up: December Sale

December 1, 2021

This winter season as we eagerly watch the desert sky for anything wet, the University of Arizona Press is pleased to offer an end-of-year discount to help you stock up for winter reading. December 1 through December 31, 2021 use code AZDEC21 on our website and receive a 40% discount on your order. You’ll also receive free shipping on all orders shipping in the U.S.

New York Public Library Includes ‘Transversal’ in Best Books of 2021 List

November 29, 2021

Urayoán Noel’s Transversal was listed in the New York Public Library’s Best Books of 2021.

Featuring Noel’s bilingual playfulness, intellect, and irreverent political imagination, Transversal contains personal reflections on love, desire, and loss filtered through a queer approach to form, expanding upon Noel’s experiments with self-translation in his celebrated collection Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico. Transversal seeks to disrupt standard English and Spanish, and it celebrates the nonequivalence between languages. Inspired by Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, the collection celebrates Caribbean practices of creolization as maximalist, people-centered, affect-loaded responses to the top-down violence of austerity politics.

To read the entire Best of 2021 list, visit here.

Watch: Tsim Schneider Discusses New Book on Indigenous Peoples of California

November 25, 2021

The University of California, Santa Cruz’s American Indian Resource Center recently celebrated Tsim Schneider’s new book, The Archaeology of Refuge and Recourse: Coast Miwok Resilience and Indigenous Hinterlands in Colonial California, in a virtual event.

Schneider, a member of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He discussed his book and its examination of the critical and ongoing relationships Indigenous peoples maintained to their homelands despite colonization and systematic destruction of their cultural sites. Schneider was joined by Peter A. Nelson and Nick Tipon, fellow citizens of his tribe.

Schneider was also interviewed recently on KSQD, a Santa Cruz community radio station. You can find the interview here.

Watch: Creechan Talks ‘Drug Wars and Covert Netherworlds’ with OLLI Members

November 24, 2021

The University of Arizona’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute recently hosted University of Arizona Press authors James H. Creechan to talk about his new book, Drug Wars and Covert Netherworld: The Transformations of Mexico’s Narco Cartels.

In Drug Wars and Covert Netherworlds, Creechan draws on decades of research to paint a much more nuanced picture of the transformation of Mexico’s narco cartels. A sociologist and criminologist, Creechan details narco cartel history, focusing on the decades since Richard Nixon declared the War on Drugs. With sobering detail, he unravels a web of government dependence, legitimate enterprises, covert connections, and violent infighting.

New Books Network Interviews Michelle Téllez on ‘Border Women’

November 23, 2021

Michelle Téllez was recently interviewed by David-James Gonzales, assistant professor of history at Brigham Young University, on her new book, Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas: Autonomy in the Spaces of Neoliberal Neglect.

Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas tells the story of an autonomous community near Tijuana and its struggle to carve out space for survival and thriving in the shadows of the U.S.-Mexico geopolitical border. Through women’s active participation and leadership, a women’s political subjectivity has emerged—Maclovianas. These border women both contest and invoke their citizenship as they struggle to have their land rights recognized, and they transform traditional political roles into that of agency and responsibility.

Téllez, an associate professor in the Department of Mexican American Studies at the University of Arizona, writes about transnational community formations, Chicana feminism, and gendered migration.

Listen to the interview here.

Got ‘Hatak Witches’? Louise Erdrich Thinks You Should

Nov. 22, 2021

At the end of Louise Erdrich’s newest novel, The Sentence, is a page titled “Totally Biased List of Tookie’s Favorite Books.” Under the subtitle, “Ghost-Managing Book List,” are 15 books, and between Asleep by Banana Yoshimoto, and Beloved, by Tony Morrison is Hatak Witches, by Devon A. Mihesuah.

Author shout outs to one another isn’t unusual, but that doesn’t mean this particular shoutout doesn’t need a bit of celebrating and thanks.

The Hatak Witches, published by the University of Arizona Press, follows Detective Monique Blue Hawk and her partner Chris Pierson into an investigate which begins with a security guard found dead and another wounded at the Children’s Museum of Science and History in Norman, Oklahoma. There are no fingerprints, no footprints, and no obvious means to enter the locked building. Blue Hawk, however, discovers that a portion of an ancient and deformed skeleton has also been stolen from the neglected museum archives. As this thriller unfolds, readers are introduced to Choctaw cosmology with the unexpected appearance and power of the Old Ones who guard the lands of the Choctaw afterlife.

The list of books in Erdrich’s novel isn’t the only nod of appreciation for Hatak Witches. In a recent interview on National Public Radio’s Here and Now, Erdrich refers to Mihesuah’s novel as “a compelling read.” Go here for listen, and head to minute 19:00 for Erdrich’s shoutout.

Thanks for the shoutout and the love! Erdrich, while a celebrate Pulitzer Prize-winning author, is co-owner of Birchbark Books, a Minneapolis-based independent bookstore that supports Indigenous authors and their books. During the pandemic, Birchbark helped us as a sponsor of several of our virtual events celebrating books from our Sun Tracks series, including The Hatak Witches. Thank you for the continued support!

Detective Blue Hawk recently received more adoration in The Arizona Daily Star, which included The Hatak Witches in a list of book recommendations from our friends at the Pima County Public Library of science fiction, fantasy, an horror books by Indigenous authors. Read the list here. An art blog, Sidetracks and Detours also included the book in a list of recommendations of book by Indigenous authors. That list is here.

Watch: Book Launch Event Celebrating ‘Natural Landmarks of Arizona’

November 19, 2021

On Tuesday, November 9, fans of David Yetman and Arizona’s natural beauty gathered together at the MSA Annex for an event to celebrate Yetman’s new book, Natural Landmarks of Arizona, published by the University of Arizona Press.

David Yetman sharing stories during the Nov. 9 event at the MSA Annex

The event, co-sponsored by Why I Love Where I Live, The Southwest Center and the Press, included a book signing, as well as a lifetime of stories from Yetman on the natural landmarks he first saw as a child, and those he explored as a social scientist, author, and host of his Emmy award-winning shows, The Desert Speaks and In the Americas with David Yetman.

Alex Tovar, co-owner of Why I Love Where I Live, welcoming folks to the Nov. 9 event and book signing.

Big thanks to The Southwest Center’s Carlos Quintero Herrera, outreach coordinator, for his assistance promoting and filming the events, and Jeffrey Banister, director, for sharing the publishing history of the organization and introducing Yetman. Additional thanks to Alex Tovar, co-owner of Why I Love Where I Live, for hosting the book signing.

If you didn’t have a chance to attend, please watch this event video from The Southwest Center:

AAA 2021: New and Recent Anthropology Titles, Conference Discounts, and More

November 17, 2021

We are thrilled to be participating in the virtual component of the AAA meeting! We have an incredible selection of new and recent titles that we hope you will enjoy. Use the code AZAAA21 at checkout on our website to receive 40% off all titles, plus free U.S. shipping, through December 30, 2021.

If you have any questions about our publishing program, please read our guidelines here, and feel free to contact our Senior Editor Allyson Carter at ACarter@uapress.arizona.edu.

We put together a video of a few of our recent authors highlighting their new and recent anthropology books. We hope you enjoy the video, and we are looking forward to seeing you all again in the future.

New From the University of Arizona Press

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 coverage is extensive—both for Hopi as well as for wide swaths of the northern Southwest—and each chapter has something new to offer in terms of innovative data collection and interpretation. 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

From the day he was born, Federico Jiménez Caballero was predicted to be a successful man. So, how exactly did a young boy from Tututepec, Oaxaca, become a famous Indigenous jewelry artist and philanthropist in Los Angeles? Federico tells the remarkable story of willpower, curiosity, hard work, and passion coming together to change one man’s life forever.

Watch a recording of a virtual book celebration for Federico here. We’re thrilled that Federico received an honorable mention for the International Latino Book Awards!

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.

Decolonizing “Prehistory” carries readers to the rugged landscapes of the Pacific Northwest to hear how they are known by communities with millennial depth as residents. The book adds breadth with chapters on the Penobscot River People, Maya communities living at tourist destinations Coba and Tulum, and Mammoth Cave. Philip Deloria concludes the book with a reading of his father’s no-holds-barred assertion of flaws in Western science, a position that time has brought closer to anthropologists’ own critiques seen in this volume.”—Alice Beck Kehoe, author of Traveling Prehistoric Seas: Critical Thinking on Ancient Transoceanic Voyages

The recognition of Flower Worlds is one of the most significant breakthroughs in the study of Indigenous spirituality in the Americas. Flower Worlds is the first volume to bring together a diverse range of scholars to create an interdisciplinary understanding of floral realms that extend at least 2,500 years in the past.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

“The authors are coming at Flower World concepts from different directions and perspectives, and these different ideas and perspectives speak together in a way that helps further the conversation. This volume is not about concluding ideas but about continuing the conversation. I was impressed by the multitude of strong voices—both past and present—representing elements of the Flower World. This volume will be of lasting importance in the cross-cultural study of Flower Worlds.”—John G. Douglass, co-editor of The Global Spanish Empire: Five Hundred Years of Place Making and Pluralism

How people eat today is a record of food use through the ages—and not just the decadent, delicious foods but the less glamorous and often life-saving foods from periods of famine as well. In Famine Foods, Paul E. Minnis focuses on the myriad plants that have sustained human populations throughout the course of history, unveiling the those that people have consumed, and often still consume, to avoid starvation. For the first time, this book offers a fascinating overview of famine foods—how they are used, who uses them, and, perhaps most importantly, why they may be critical to sustain human life in the future.

Watch a recording of a virtual book release celebration for Famine Foods here, then read a review of the book on the Savor the Southwest blog here. We’re thrilled that Famine Foods author Paul E. Minnis Receives the Society of Ethnobiology’s 2021 Distinguished Ethnobiologist Award!

In Tourism Geopolitics, contributors show enacted processes such as labor migration, conservation, securitization, nation building, territorial disputes, ethnic cleansing, heritage revitalization, and global health crisis management, among others. These contended societal processes are deployed through tourism development initiatives that mobilize deeply uneven symbolic and material landscapes. The chapters reveal how a range of experiences are implicated in this process: museum visits, walking tours, architectonical evocations of the past, road construction, militarized island imaginations, gendered cultural texts, and official silences. Collectively, the chapters offer ethnographically rich illustrations from around the world that demonstrate the critical nature of tourism in formal geopolitical practices, as well as the geopolitical nature of everyday tourism encounters. This volume is a vital read for critical geographers, anthropologists, and political scientists, as well as scholars of tourism and cultural studies.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

Moveable Gardens explores the ways people make sanctuaries with plants and other traveling companions in the midst of ongoing displacement in today’s world. This volume addresses how the destruction of homelands, fragmentation of habitats, and post-capitalist conditions of modernity are countered by the remembrance of tradition and the migration of seeds, which are embodied in gardening, cooking, and community building.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

Indigenous Women and Violence offers an intimate view of how settler colonialism and other structural forms of power and inequality created accumulated violences in the lives of Indigenous women. The chapters in this book are engaged, feminist, collaborative, and activism focused, conveying powerful messages about the resilience of Indigenous women in the face of violence and systemic oppression.

“Bringing together leading Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, this volume explores the connections between structural, extreme, and everyday violence against Indigenous women across time and borders. It makes important contributions to current debates about gender violence and research methods.”—Rachel Sieder, editor of Demanding Justice and Security: Indigenous Women and Legal Pluralities in Latin America

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.

“This book represents a much-welcome approach to the archaeology of empire. It combines a sophisticated theoretical framework with rigorous archival and archaeological methods to shed valuable new light on the history of Spanish empire building in Peru.”—Craig Cipolla, author of Foreign Objects: Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American Archaeology

Museum Matters traces the emergence, consolidation, and dispersal of this national museum complex by telling the stories of its objects. Objects that have been separated over time are brought back together in this book in order to shed light on the interactions and processes that have forged things into symbols of science, aesthetics, and politics. The contributors to this volume illuminate how collections came into being or ceased to exist over time, or how objects moved in and out of collections and museum spaces. They explore what it means to move things physically and spatially, as well as conceptually and symbolically.

“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

This book contextualizes the discovery of a Venus astronomical pattern by a female Mayan astronomer at Chich’en Itza and the discovery’s later adaptation and application at Mayapan. Calculating Brilliance brings different intellectual threads together across time and space, from the Classic to the Postclassic, the colonial period to the twenty-first century to offer a new vision for understanding Mayan astronomy.

“A truly decolonial work that strips away the Eurocentric presuppositions of a century of Mayan studies scholarship to relate new openings and possibilities in the field. Aldana masterfully crafts a new methodology and approach for understanding the development of a unique Mayan science that weaves together hieroglyphic writing, mathematics, history, and astronomy.”—Roberto D. Hernández, author of Coloniality of the U-S///Mexico Border: Power, Violence, and the Decolonial Imperative

Voluntourism and Multispecies Collaboration is a lively ethnographic exploration of the world of conservation voluntourism and its engagement with marine and terrestrial biodiversity on the Honduran Bay Island of Utila, located in the ecologically critical Mesoamerican Barrier Reef.

Anthropologist Keri Vacanti Brondo provides a pioneering theoretical framework that conceptualizes conservation voluntourism as a green industry. Brondo argues that the volunteer tourism industry is the product of coloniality and capitalism that works to produce and sustain an economy of affect while generating inequalities and dispossession. Readers journey through the mangroves and waters alongside voluntourists, iguanas, whale sharks, turtles, lionfish, and islanders to build valuable research experience in environmental management while engaging in affective labor and multispecies relations of care.

Once Upon the Permafrost is a longitudinal climate ethnography about “knowing” a specific culture and the ecosystem that culture physically and spiritually depends on in the twenty-first-century context of climate change. Through careful integration of contemporary narratives, on-site observations, and document analysis, Susan Alexandra Crate shows how local understandings of change and the vernacular knowledge systems they are founded on provide critical information for interdisciplinary collaboration and effective policy prescriptions.

“The Sakha people of Siberia live far from most of us in a forbidding and changing land of extreme cold and heat, underlain with permafrost. Through many years of research with them, Susan Crate brings to life how the knowledge and narratives of local people, explorers, and scientists reveal the interplay between culture and environment and why, in a profound sense, we all do ‘live on permafrost.’”―Bonnie McCay, author of Oyster Wars and the Public Trust

Naturalizing Inequality discusses the reproduction and legitimization of racial inequality in post-apartheid South Africa. Michela Marcatelli unravels this inequality paradox through an ethnography of water in a rural region of the country. She documents how calls to save nature have only deepened and naturalized inequality.

“This book takes us past generalizations about inequality to delve into the complex realities of the Waterberg. While South Africa is lauded for increasing water access, Marcatelli shows how the government’s prioritization of economic growth means that the apartheid history of unequal access to water is not only perpetuated but legitimated.”—Mary Galvin, University of Johannesburg

As an Indigenous scholar researching the history and archaeology of his own tribe, Tsim D. Schneider 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.


The Archaeology of Refuge and Recourse makes a powerful and convincing case that ‘a sense of place formed the glue for reassembling shattered lives.’ During the colonial era, Coast Miwoks found recourse by traveling across the water and gathering within ancient shell middens, coastal villages, and trading posts, renewing kinship ties and reconnecting with deep traditions along the way. The study offers an innovative and compelling amalgam of theory building, storytelling, and archaeological analysis.”—Martin Gallivan, Department Chair of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary

Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas tells the story of the community’s struggle to carve out space for survival and thriving in the shadows of the U.S.-Mexico geopolitical border. This ethnography by Michelle Téllez demonstrates the state’s neglect in providing social services and local infrastructure. This neglect exacerbates the structural violence endemic to the border region—a continuation of colonial systems of power on the urban, rural, and racialized poor. Téllez shows that in creating the community of Maclovio Rojas, residents have challenged prescriptive notions of nation and belonging. Through women’s active participation and leadership, a women’s political subjectivity has emerged—Maclovianas. These border women both contest and invoke their citizenship as they struggle to have their land rights recognized, and they transform traditional political roles into that of agency and responsibility.

Read about a wonderful local event that celebrated the release of Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas here.

Reflections of a Transborder Anthropologist shows how both Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez and anthropology have changed and formed over a fifty-year period. Throughout, he has worked to understand how people survive and thrive against all odds. Vélez-Ibáñez has been guided by the burning desire to understand inequality, exploitation, and legitimacy, and, most importantly, to provide platforms for the voiceless to narrate their own histories.

We are so thrilled that Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez was honored with the 2020 Franz Boas Award, the inaugural AAHHE Distinguished Scholar Award, as well as the Society for the Anthropology of North America’s 2021 Distinguished Achievement Award in the Critical Study of North America. Congratulations, Carlos!

Language, Coffee, and Migration on an Andean-Amazonian Frontier 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.

Read a Q&A with author Nicholas Q. Emlen here.

Be sure to check out our wonderful open access titles, made available through the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Read more about Open Arizona and browse titles here.

Field Notes: Susan Alexandra Crate Shares Insights on Climate Change and Permafrost

November 15, 2021

Susan Alexandra Crate has conducted ethnographic research with Viliui Sakha communities of northeastern Siberia, Russia since 1991. Her new book, Once upon the Permafrost, is a longitudinal climate ethnography that explains how her collaborators are affected by and adapting to climate change in the context of their extreme climate. Sakha’s Turkic ancestors migrated north to their present home over 500 years ago and adapted a horse and cattle subsistence to a climate that is characterized by a 100 degree Celsius temperature fluctuation (-60 to +40). They did so by holding their cows in barns nine months of the year and harvesting copious amounts of hay for fodder in the brief sweltering summer. Their adaptation is contingent upon their cosmology that ascertains everything in the world has sentience. This historical belief is also the foundation of the Indigenous knowledge system that informs their adaptation.

Today, Crate shares some notes from her time in northeastern Siberia.

Figure 1: Part of Crate’s investigation involved documenting life histories of individuals who had a certain specialty that privileged them a deeper understanding of how climate change was coming into and affecting their extreme environment. One of those life histories focuses on sylgyhyt (horse breeder) Valerian Yegorovich Afanaseyev, seen here with one of his two riding horses. Valerian’s mantra, ‘Snow is horses’ home’ exemplifies how Sakha horses need a specific climate regime that will deliver the right amount of snow and temperature conditions that allow them to ‘graze’ for fodder under the snow throughout the winter. “They are to work and dig. They need 30-40 cm of snow so they don’t freeze. If it is less than that, they can’t work and so they start going from place to place and they get thin. In short, Khaar sylgy jiete (Snow is horses’ home).” Climate change has disrupted that consistent cycle and horses can no longer prosper. Picture: Valerian Yegorovich Afanaseyev with one of his two riding horses May 21, 2019. Photo by author.

Figure 2: “Since 2005 when inhabitants first began talking about how the winters were not as cold, summers not as hot, rain was ‘wrong’, and other aspects I knew were related to climate change, I sought out a natural scientist to collaborate with to bring an understanding of the physical changes into my work. Since that time I have worked with Alexander Fedorov, permafrost scientist at the Melnikov permafrost Institute, Yakutsk. We conducted ‘knowledge exchanges’ in 2010, working in eight communities in the Viliui regions, to solicit local testimonies of change in the environment and appropriate Alexander’s scientific information for community use. We continue to work to this day, proposing other such knowledge exchange activities in other regions and finding ways to educate inhabitants about how the permafrost is thawing and the effects this has and will have on their lives.” Picture: Crate with Alexander (Sasha), during a work session. Notice the permafrost map gracing the wall. Summer 2018. Photo by Kathryn Tuyaara Yegorov-Crate.

Figure 3: “In the winter of 2018, I made a journey with Alexander to present knowledge exchanges with communities in the Central regions of the Sakha Republic. The last time I had been in these regions was fifteen years ago and I was shocked at how the once flat fields were now transformed into a patchwork of thermokarst, the above ground manifestation of the permafrost layer, found 1-3 meters underground, as it thaws. Our work in the two settlements, Khatilii and Siirdaakh, verified how inhabitants were facing similar challenges that my research communities faced on the Viliui. This included not only changes due to thawing permafrost, unpredictable weather patterns and the like, but also how inhabitants were stopping cattle breeding and young people were leaving for the city, a phenomenon I termed, the complexity of change.” Picture: View out the window as we drove to Khatilii. December, 2018. Photo by author.

Figure  4: A buluus is an underground storage area that Sakha have used since they came from the south to their northern homeland. It is nothing more than a tunnel dug down to the permafrost layer with a storage space there for perishables to be kept in the temperate seasons. The entryway typically resembles a small hut due to the need for an insulative structure to maintain the permafrost cool. The inundation of the ground with water, due to increases in precipitation and thaw water from permafrost, has flooded most buluus and rendered them useless. One of several comments on this include, “We have a buluus . . . we put our meat there . . . it is deep– but we have to watch it . . . in some places it holds the freeze and in others it doesn’t . . . we know that the permafrost is thawing . . . we can see it in the buluus! It melts now . . . it is not like before.” However, simultaneously inhabitants also have access to electric freezers, which many consider more convenient. The combination of climate change, economic development, and youth out-migration are interacting drivers of change for inhabitants, which I term ‘the complexity of change.’ Picture: “As I was returning to my host’s house after a day of interviews, I saw the juxtaposition of a long-abandoned buluus entry door against the backdrop of the modern Kutana school building and realized how perfectly it visually captured the complexity of change.” Photo by author.

Figure 5: In addition to climate change, economic transformations and demographic shifts in the rural regions, the relatively recent introduction of hi-speed internet has brought about a cultural shift. As one inhabitant put it, “I want to talk about the change in people, in people’s characters . . . now it is very rare to find receptive and interactive people here, for example, on the village streets–they are hard to find. Before people used to take the time to converse with each other. You would meet someone on the street and stop and talk and know the news from each other . . . now everyone walks along staring at their phone–no one needs anyone anymore . . . there is no interaction now . . . today people only interact over WhatsApp!” Picture: Electronic devices are increasingly present in the hands of very young children in both urban and rural settings. Elgeeii yhyakh at Ugut Kÿöl, 2018. Photo by author.

‘Beyond Earth’s Edge’ Co-Editor Makes Pitch for Space Mission Laureates

November 10, 2021

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.)

To read Cokinos’s entire pitch, visit here.

William Sheehan Talks ‘Discovering Mars’ with OLLI Members

November 9, 2021

In a recent virtual presentation for the University of Arizona’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, Discovering Mars: A History of Observation and Exploration of the Red Planet co-author William Sheehan discussed this new book from the University of Arizona Press that vividly conveys the way our understanding of this other planet has grown from earliest times to the present.

The story is epic in scope — an Iliad or Odyssey for our time, at least so far largely without the folly, greed, lust, and tragedy of those ancient stories. Instead, the narrative of our quest for the Red Planet has showcased some of our species’ most hopeful attributes: curiosity, cooperation, exploration, and the restless drive to understand our place in the larger universe.

Message from Miriam Davidson’s ‘Beloved Border’ Reaches Op-Ed Pages

November 8, 2021

The Progressive Magazine recently published an editorial by Miriam Davidson, author of Beloved Border: Humanity and Hope in a Contested Land, examining the latest statistics on border life and policy with a reminder that the problems can be resolved with “radical rethinking and deep, consistent attention.”

Davidson’s new book, published by the University of Arizona Press, shares the history of sanctuary and argues that this social movement and others that have originated on the border are vanguards of larger global movements against the mistreatment of migrant workers and refugees, police brutality, and other abuses of human and natural rights. Davidson gives concrete examples of positive ways in which border people are promoting local culture and cross-border solidarity through health care, commerce, food, art, and music. While death and suffering continue to occur, the book shows us how the U.S.-Mexico border could be, and in many ways already is, a model for peaceful coexistence worldwide.

Here’s an excerpt from the editorial:

In September, we all saw the pictures of mounted patrolmen maneuvering their horses and long reins in an attempt to corral Haitian migrants along the Texas border. These photos evoked the ugliness of 19th century “slave patrols” in the United States, as well as the enslavement of Haitians under French colonial rule in the 18th century. 

Less well known is that, so far this year, at least 190 sets of human remains have been found in Arizona’s deserts. Forty-three were found in June, the highest one-month total since July 2010. More than half of the remains were discovered within one week of death—16 were located within one day. Migrants have also died while trying to cross the Rio Grande, including a nine-year-old girl in March.

To read the entire editorial, go here. The editorial was picked up by The Miami Herald.

Local Love for ‘Discovering Mars’ on History of the Red Planet

November 2, 2021

Big thanks to the Tucson Weekly for featuring Discovering Mars A History of Observation and Exploration of the Red Planet on a recent cover with an excerpt on the history of the Phoenix mission:

A successful and historic Mars landing occurred during the eventful first decade of the 21st century. NASA’s Discovery program of small, competitively selected missions led by individual scientists was proving to be a success not only in terms of cost-effective science return, but also in terms of innovative ideas captured for new missions. (The program typically attracted around 25– 30 proposals from the planetary science community for each of the four open competitive opportunities that had been announced since 1994.) However, the program presented an additional hurdle for Mars exploration: while Mars missions could be proposed to Discovery, they had to compete with outstanding mission proposals to the rest of the solar system and thus had low odds of success and couldn’t be built into a more strategic component of NASA’s Mars program. G. Scott Hubbard and others thus came up with the idea of creating a low-cost and high-innovation set of missions following the Discovery model, but specifically for NASA’s long-term Mars Exploration Program. The resulting “Mars Scout” program announced its first mission proposal opportunity in 2002. Around 25 proposals were submitted, reinforcing the notion that the community had lots of great Mars-specific mission ideas to pitch to NASA.

Discovering Mars, by William Sheehan and Jim Bell, vividly conveys the way our understanding of this other planet has grown from earliest times to the present. The story is epic in scope—an Iliad or Odyssey for our time, at least so far largely without the folly, greed, lust, and tragedy of those ancient stories. Instead, the narrative of our quest for the Red Planet has showcased some of our species’ most hopeful attributes: curiosity, cooperation, exploration, and the restless drive to understand our place in the larger universe. Sheehan and Bell have written an ambitious first draft of that narrative even as the latest chapters continue to be added both by researchers on Earth and our robotic emissaries on and around Mars, including the latest: the Perseverance rover and its Ingenuity helicopter drone, which set down in Mars’s Jezero Crater in February 2021.

To read the entire excerpt, visit here.

‘Science Be Dammed’ Paperback Continues Important Water Crisis Conversation

October 28, 2021

Now in paperback, Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River has continued to gain attention, especially as communities in Arizona, California, Nevada, and other states across the country wrestle with drought and how to continue to provide water for millions of residents.

On Boston’s WBUR’s On Point, co-author John Fleck reflected on the crisis:

“Being willing to have the hard conversations with communities to say, Look, that water that the Colorado River Compact promised you back in 1922, it just ain’t there. Don’t continue to expect the river to deliver that water to you because it says on a piece of paper that was signed in 1922 that that water is available, that water is not there. And, you know, one of the the truisms for me in Western water is when people have less water, they’ll use less water. We’re really adaptable. We can do that. We’ve got to recognize that.”

Have a listen here.

On Madison, Wisconsin’s community radio station WORT, co-author Eric Kuhn talked about the unprecedented megadrought in the western U.S.

Have a listen here.

Professor Latinx Gets the Marvel Treatment on Comics, Inspiration, and Scholarship

October 27, 2021

In a recent interview on marvel.com, Professor Latinx, aka Frederick Luis Aldama, was asked about his work as a Latinx comic scholar, Latinx super heroes, and of course, Marvel’s Voices: Comunidades.

Here’s a snippet of the interview with the University of Arizona Press author and co-editor of the Latinx Pop Culture series:

Speaking as a historian, who do you cite as the first Latinx hero? For Marvel Comics, Hector Ayala’s White Tiger gets the credit as our first Latino hero.

This is a topic I was just tossing around with my friends and fellow creators, Peter Murrieta [author, comics creator, and TV producer] and Alex Rivera [filmmaker]. The first Latinx Super Hero: Joaquin Murrieta—actually, Peter’s great relative. Not only was he a historically factual Super Hero (think Nat Turner) whose superhuman, epic-dimensioned feats became swiftly transformed into corrido lore, he was the inspiration for Zorro. [Writer] Johnston McCulley distilled and recreated (appropriated?) Murrieta’s super-heroic traits, leading to his quick popularization in early film, comics, and radio.

I do want to put a quick spotlight on White Tiger too, and for a couple of reasons. There was something extraordinary about Bill Mantlo and George Pérez’s Super Hero. He’s not criollo (white) Latinx and of the manor-born like Zorro. White Tiger’s working class. He’s street and book-smart. He’s Brown and Proud, firmly rooted and empowered as an Afro-Latinx Nuyorican.

Read the entire interview here.

University of Arizona Press Launches New Series: BorderVisions

October 26, 2021

The University of Arizona Press is thrilled to announce BorderVisions, a new series centering and celebrating topics reflecting both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border 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. The series conceptualizes borderlands as both a place and a methodology and addresses the constraints of traditional fields challenging authors to think creatively and critically about the expansive frameworks and possibilities of borderlands studies. 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.

The University of Arizona Press, founded in 1959, is the premier publisher of academic, regional, and literary works in the state of Arizona. Headquartered 70 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, the Press centers a variety of borderlands voices through scholarly and literary titles.

Series editors Fonseca-Chávez and Saavedra seek to foster an intellectual space that envisions and manifests the multitude of perspectives for understanding the borderlands through interdisciplinary humanities and humanistic social sciences scholarship. They are especially interested in books that address the complexities and richness of borderlands experiences at different historical, cultural, and socio-political moments.

Fonseca-Chávez, Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and associate professor at Arizona State University, is the author of Colonial Legacies Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture: Looking Through the Kaleidoscope, published by the University of Arizona Press. Saavedra, assistant professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Oregon, is the author of Pasadena Before the Roses: Race, Identity, and Land Use in Southern California, 1771–1890.

Please contact the series editors for a full series description and proposal guidelines, vfonseca@asu.edu, yjs@uoregon.edu

Reclaiming Cultural Heritage in the Borderlands: University of Arizona Press Part of $400,000 NEH Grant

October 25, 2021

The University of Arizona Press is proud and excited to be part of a $400,000 grant awarded by the National Endowment of the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan: Humanities Organizations program, aimed at providing economic relief and recovery for cultural and educational institutions affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The grant represents a cross-institutional collaboration at its best to create Reclaiming Cultural Heritage in the Borderlands, a new project with the Press, the Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry, the Alfie Norville Gem and Mineral Museum, and the Writing Skills Improvement Program.

The goals behind the grant encompass achieving greater support for research that elevates local heritage and historically excluded narratives, expanding public access to cultural spaces and resources, and strengthening academic skills programs for underrepresented student populations. The Press will receive $125,000 from the grant to digitize additional backlist Latinx and Indigenous titles to further accessibility for students and scholars. Ten percent of the newly digitalized titles will be made available for free through Open Arizona, the Press’s open access platform.

“We are grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for enabling us to expand the reach of borderlands studies scholarship, an emphasis of our publishing program for more than sixty years,” said Kathryn Conrad, director of the University of Arizona Press.

The activities of the project under this grant align with the HSI and land-grant missions of the university. In 2018, the University of Arizona was designated as a Hispanic Serving Institution by the U.S. Department of Education. The designation was awarded for the success in the enrollment of Hispanic students and in providing educational opportunities to them. The annual designation is defined by the Higher Education Act as an institution of higher education with an undergraduate student enrollment that is at least 25 percent Hispanic.

A Desert Feast and Rosa’s Einstein Chosen as Finalists for the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards

October 20, 2021

We are thrilled to announce that A Desert Feast by Carolyn Niethammer and Rosa’s Einstein by Jennifer Givhan were chosen as finalists for the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards! A Desert Feast was chosen as a finalist in the History of Arizona category, and Rosa’s Einstein was chosen as a finalist in the Poetry of New Mexico category.

In 2007, the New Mexico Book Co-op launched an awards program for excellence in books, which is now one of the largest and most prestigious programs in the Southwest, attracting entries from across the region as well as from major national presses.

A Desert Feast offers 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.

Using details both from Einstein’s known life and from quantum physics, poet Jennifer Givhan imagines Lieserl, the daughter Albert Einstein and his wife Mileva allegedly gave up for adoption at birth, in a circus-like landscape of childhood trauma and survival, guided by Rosa and her sister Nieve. Rosa’s Einstein is a Latinx retelling of the Brothers Grimm’s Snow-White and Rose-Red, reevaluating border, identity, and immigration narratives through the unlikely amalgamation of physics and fairy tale.

Congratulations, Carolyn and Jennifer!

Intersectional Chicana Feminisms Wins Bronze Medal in the International Latino Book Awards

October 20, 2021

We are thrilled to announce that Intersectional Chicana Feminisms by Aída Hurtado won a bronze medal in the Victor Villaseñor Best Latino Focused Nonfiction Book Award section of the International Latino Book Awards!

Since 1997, Empowering Latino Futures has celebrated literature through its book awards. These awards have grown to become the largest Latino cultural awards in the U.S.

Chicana feminisms are living theory deriving value and purpose by affecting social change. 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 feminist thought.

Aída Hurtado is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of Voicing Chicana Feminisms: Young Women Speak Out on Sexuality and Identity.

Congratulations, Aída!

WHA 2021: New and Recent Western History Titles, Conference Discounts, and More

October 15, 2021

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.

Watch a recording of a book release celebration for The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature here, then read an excerpt from the book here, and read a review from Publisher’s Weekly here.

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 Gila here.

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 Movement here, then read a brief interview with authors Mario T. García and Ellen McCracken here, 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 Magaña here.

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.

Read a brief interview with author Thomas Maroukis here.

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.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

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’s Postcards from the Baja California Border offers 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 in Postcards 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.

Take a look inside the book here.

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.

Read a brief interview about the book with author Miriam Davidson here, then read an excerpt from The Beloved Border here.

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

‘Border Women’ Event Celebrated Michelle Téllez’s Work and Community

October 12, 2021

Hortensia Hernández never got a chance to hold the book, Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas: Autonomy in the Spaces of Neoliberal Neglect, but she knew the book on the community she helped lead and organize would be published in October. In August, Hernández died after a short battle with cancer, and despite her absence she was everywhere during the book celebration on Wednesday, October 8 at EXO Roast Co. in Tucson.

The book’s cover features Hernández’s likeness from a mural in the autonomous community in Baja California. Author Michelle Téllez, standing before friends, colleagues, and book lovers at the event, recalled what Hernández wrote after seeing the cover:

“You stirred my heart. It was sad, bitter, because for years I was persecuted by police and politicians. Without being a criminal, my crime was to seek a dignified life, education, health, sport. But it was worth it, today more than 12,000 inhabitants have benefited, and I am happy that my compañeros and I came out almost triumphant as we await the titles of our property. And thank you, Michel [sic], for you were part of our marginalized and you supported us to get ahead. We love you very much. And this cover moved me, but it also made me reflect and think with satisfaction that it was worth it.”

Much thanks to EXO Roast co-owners Amy and Doug Smith for hosting the event, which featured music from the Son Jarocho Collective.

Téllez, an associate professor in the Department of Mexican American Studies at the University of Arizona, is coeditor of The Chicana M(other)work Anthology, also published by the University of Arizona Press. The anthology weaves together emerging scholarship and testimonios by and about self-identified Chicana and Women of Color mother-scholars, activists, and allies who center mothering as transformative labor through an intersectional lens. 

Border Women tells the story about the autonomous community of Maclovio Rojas near Tijuana, and how it demonstrates what is possible for urban place-based political movements. More than a community, Maclovio Rojas is a women-led social movement that works for economic and political autonomy to address issues of health, education, housing, nutrition, and security. Téllez shows that in creating the community of Maclovio Rojas, residents have challenged prescriptive notions of nation and belonging.

Arizona Daily Star Includes ‘Famine Foods’ in Book Review Roundup

October 12, 2021

The Arizona Daily Star recently featured reviews of books by regional authors, including University of Arizona Press author Paul Minnis and his new book, Famine Foods: Plants We Eat to Survive.

From Helene Woodhams on Famine Foods:

“‘A starving man does not sniff his food.’ Paul E. Minnis, professor emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma, prefaces this volume with an old Ukrainian adage that prepares the reader for an extensive survey of comestibles you hope you’ll never have to eat — but that you probably should be aware of all the same. As Minnis ably demonstrates, the threat of starvation is as close as the next political upheaval, severe water shortage, or climate catastrophe.”

Read all the book reviews here.

Watch: Tsim Schneider Introduces the Archaeology of Refuge and Recourse

October 8, 2021

The Archaeology of Refuge and Recourse explores the dual practices of refuge and recourse among Indigenous peoples of California. From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, Indigenous Coast Miwok communities in California persisted throughout multiple waves of colonial intrusion. But to what ends?

Applying theories of place and landscape, social memory, and mobility to the analysis of six archaeological sites, Tsim D. Schneider argues for a new direction in the archaeology of colonialism. This book offers insight about the critical and ongoing relationships Indigenous people maintained to their homelands despite colonization and systematic destruction of their cultural sites.

Watch Tsim Schneider introduce his new book below.

Tsim D. Schneider is a citizen of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria and an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His archaeological and historical research investigates the lives and decision making of Indigenous peoples contending with colonialism. Schneider is co-editor of Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions: New Perspectives from Archaeology and Ethnohistory, and his research appears in such high-caliber journals as American Anthropologist, American Antiquity, and American Indian Quarterly.

Laura Harjo Wins a 2021 On the Brinck Book Award for Spiral to the Stars

October 7, 2021

We are thrilled to announce that University of Arizona Press author Laura Harjo won a 2021 On the Brinck Book Award!

The jury wanted to emphasize and set the tone for books that share fresh voices and integrated concepts across disciplines. They felt the winning volumes embody the spirit of J.B. Jackson and contributes to knowledge and perspectives across the design disciplines, including architecture, landscape architecture, planning, and urban design. They see these books as a collection that, when read together, can help students, faculty, and practitioners raise the bar of design discourse and open new discussions on ways of viewing and knowing.

Head juror, UNM School of Architecture + Planning (SA+P) Assistant Professor Kathleen Kambic, states: “We see these four volumes signaling an openness within design discourse. Each book deals with broad themes of race, environment, and climate through contestation and integration of existing ideas.” This academic year, the authors will be paired into conversations at UNM SA+P, where they will present their work briefly, and then have the opportunity to discuss each other’s work and take audience questions.

About Spiral to the Stars, the jurors wrote: “Spiral to the Stars, by Laura Harjo, is a remarkable and original volume. It validates indigeneity and contextualizes western thinking within it by bringing additional voices to the forefront. The ontological approaches Harjo proposes are valuable blueprints for community engagement. Harjo shares a concept of radical sovereignty that reveals the value of marginalized communities to those who may not have knowledge of them. It is a powerful and expansive view of the potentials of design. This book will be captivating for students, reinforcing the importance of new types of scholarship. This volume starts with community and grounds itself in the personal experience and accessible writing of Harjo.”

Congratulations, Laura!

Poet Santee Frazier Reads at UMass Visiting Writers Series

October 6, 2021

Poet Santee Frazier opened the University of Massachusetts Amherst visiting writers series, reflecting on his work and reading from his two collections published with the University of Arizona Press—Aurum and Dark Thirty.

From The Massachusetts Daily Collegian:

“As Frazier took the stage, he explained his decision to have his poems projected behind him. While this initially was done to accommodate Zoom events, Frazier explained that it allowed him to preserve the “visual art” of poetry while reading to the crowd.

Frazier reflected on the three distinct aspects that he explores in his writing. Frazier writes poems based on rituals, showcased in his collection Aurumwhereas some poems he finds himself “compelled to write.” Another avenue he seeks to explore is through the recurring character Mangled Creek Bed, the embodiment of Native American struggles and experiences in the Southwestern United States.”

Read more here.

ASU News Profile on Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez

October 5, 2021

ASU News recently featured University of Arizona Press author Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez regarding a $10,000 Whiting Public Engagement Seed Grant she received to jump-start a community engagement project examining how Hispanic communities in northeastern Arizona understand their idea of place focusing on the towns of Concho, St. Johns and Springerville.

Fonseca-Chávez, author of Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture, was recently promoted to tenure and is the associate professor of English and associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at ASU.

From the story:

“Fonseca-Chávez said that while working on the ASU Public History Collaborative grant, 20 to 35 people gathered in Concho to discuss their family’s migrations from New Mexico to Arizona. She said they were invested in righting the origins of their towns, like Concho and St. Johns. Many families, including her own, were sheepherders and moved around looking for water sources, settling eventually in northeastern Arizona. While they recognize that their families came from New Mexico, they have established their own culture and distinctions about their communities, like Concho green chili and St. Johns-style tacos.”

Please go here to read the entire story.

Orion Magazine Poetry Praises for Latinx Heritage Month

September 29, 2021

Orion Magazine’s poetry editor, Camille T. Dungy, featured four University of Arizona Press poetry collections in this month’s issue celebrating Latinx Heritage Month.

At the top of the review list is Urayoán Noel‘s Transversal, from our award-winning Camino del Sol series edited by Rigoberto González.

From Dungy: “That I am writing this mini-review only in English means I will leave out huge parts of what makes Transversal such a wonder and whopper to read. Moving fluidly between English, Spanish, Spanglish, and even more, this book uses language as a tool (read: monkey wrench; read: hammer; read: carabineer clip; read: steam engine; read: love).”

Dungy also reviewed Count by Valerie Martínez and x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación by Raquel Salas Rivera, the first recipient of the Academy of American Poets’ Ambroggio Prize.

Dungy invited other established poets to review other Latinx collections. Gloria Muñoz, author of Danzirly, an Academy of American Poets’ Ambroggio Prize winner, reviewed Mara Pastor‘s Deuda Natal, the most recent Ambroggio Prize recipient.

From Muñoz: “Deuda Natal calls us to carry the environmental disregard and abandon of Puerto Rico and of our entire planet. It is a loss we bundle and hold with care as we look into its face and wonder how and what if and what now? Pastor’s poems are maps to help us make sense of our past and future migrations. Feminism and environmentalism intersect on pages that assess our relationship to nature, materialism, hope, and ourselves as byproducts of history and society.”

To read all the recommendations, head here.

Inside the Book: Postcards from the Baja California Border

September 28, 2021

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’s Postcards from the Baja California Border offers 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 in Postcards 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. With 313 color images, this book creates a vivid picture of what life was like for tourists and residents of these towns in the early and mid-twentieth century. Today, we share a sample of the wonderful postcards pictured in this new work.

Fig. 2.12 Tourist group in front of Magruder’s Photo Shop, Tijuana real photo.

Fig. 2.12 Tourist group in front of Magruder’s Photo Shop, Tijuana real photo. 
Tourist group sans costumes in front of Magruder’s Photo Shop next door to the Big Curio Store in downtown Tijuana. In front of Magruder’s are panels holding sale samples of his real photo postcards. On the verso of some of his postcards, Magruder had ink stamped “Duplicates of this Photo can be had by sending 15c and mentioning Negative Number to—ROY W. MAGRUDER, SAN DIEGO, CAL.” Roy W. Magruder, 1910s.

Fig. 4.6 Greetings from Tijuana Mexico, print postcard.

Fig. 4.6 Greetings from Tijuana Mexico, print postcard. 
 “Greetings from Tijuana, Mexico.” This postcard was published for The Big Curio Store, Lower California Commercial Co., Inc., Tijuana, Mexico by Western Publishing and Novelty Co., no. 123366, Los Angeles, CA, 1920s. The Big Curio Store published additional versions of this postcard printed by Curt Teich, Chicago, IL, in 1935 (5A-H1106) and in 1950 (OC-H961).

Fig. 4.20 Honeymoon couple posed in a Tijuana burro cart, real photo postcard.

Fig. 4.20 Honeymoon couple posed in a Tijuana burro cart, real photo postcard. 
Honeymoon couple posed in a Tijuana burro cart, 1951. So-called burros pintados de cebra (burros painted to look like zebras) became all the rage by the 1950s. The burros were rented to photographers by the Lorenzo Franco family, who maintained the animals in a corral on Callejón Z, an alley off Avenida Revolución.

Fig. 9.24 Residences in Colonia Moderna, Mexicali, real photo postcard.

Fig. 9.24 Residences in Colonia Moderna, Mexicali, real photo postcard. 
Residences in Colonia Moderna. A post–World War II neighborhood in Mexicali, these housescapes mirrored those common to American middle-class suburbs with sidewalks, property setbacks, ornamental landscaping, and modern house plans. México Fotográfico 116, 1950s.

Fig. 10.5 Governors meet on Baja boundary dividing Calexico and Mexicali, real photo postcard.

Fig. 10.5 Governors meet on Baja boundary dividing Calexico and Mexicali, real photo postcard.
William Stephens, Governor of California, and Esteban Cantú, governor of the northern district of Baja California, meet on the boundary line dividing Calexico and Mexicali, June 11, 1918. Photo postcard, 1918.

Fig. 11.9 Palace Cabaret and Cantina, Mexicali, nighttime real photo postcard.

Fig. 11.9 Palace Cabaret and Cantina, Mexicali, nighttime real photo postcard.
Palace Cabaret and Cantina. Nighttime photography became something of a specialty of Mexicali postcard photographers who documented the “White Way” cabarets of the border town. Foto. Iris, 1910s.

***

Daniel D. Arreola is a cultural and historical geographer who specializes in the study of the Mexican American borderlands. He is an emeritus professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University. His most recent book is Postcards from the Chihuahua Border: Revisiting a Pictorial Past, 1900s–1950s.

Watch: Virtual Book Celebration and Reading with Valerie Martínez

September 23, 2021

The University of Arizona Press hosted a virtual book launch and reading on Wednesday, September 22 with poet Valerie Martínez for her book-length poem Count. Martínez was joined by Rigoberto Gonzaléz, University of Arizona Press’ Camino del Sol Series editor.

About Count: Forty-three sections of myth-gathering, flora and fauna, accounts of climate devastation, personal narratives, witnessing, references to works of eco-art, and evocations of children unfold over the course of the book, creating a deeply nuanced image of the current climate crisis. Central to this vital work of ecopoetry is the idea of counting—counting down to the extinction of a species, counting the wonders of the natural world, counting our way back to the balance that is required to save ourselves from climate destruction. Filled with a sense of grief and sorrow for the current state of the planet, Count also offers a glimmering hope that future generations will restore our damaged environment.

Excerpt from Miriam Davidson’s ‘Beloved Border’

September 22, 2021

The Tucson Weekly recently ran a excerpt from University of Arizona Press author Miriam Davidson‘s new book, The Beloved Border: Humanity and Hope in a Contested Land as a cover story. The excerpt features Gary Paul Nabhan, a University of Arizona Press author and ethnobotonist, on looking at the border wall differently.

Here’s a portion of the excerpt:

The Solar Wall

Ethnobotanist, nature writer and sustainable agriculture advocate Gary Nabhan was another Mexican-identified, Anglo border person with a vision for the future. Founder of Native Seeds/SEARCH, Nabhan held the Kellogg Endowed Chair in Food and Water Security for the Borderlands at the University of Arizona Southwest Center. He lived with his wife, a nurse practitioner, on a quiet ranch nestled among the rolling hills outside Patagonia, Arizona. I drove down from Tucson to interview him on a crystal-blue-sky winter morning in February 2018.

Nabhan met me at the highway in his Prius, and I followed him along a winding dirt road, past the Native Seed farm, with a sign that said “Nabhan” in Arabic (he is of Lebanese descent), then up a small hill to a comfortable, light-filled home. The living room overlooked the farm and had a sweeping view of the surrounding mountains. There we talked about the solar wall and other forward-thinking ideas for sustainable border development.

The idea for a solar wall was first proposed by Mexican poet, diplomat and environmental activist Homero Aridjis in response to Trump’s call to build a wall. A friend of Nabhan’s, Aridjis was known for his innovative, problem-solving ideas. He’d founded an organization called the Group of 100 that, among other efforts, helped fight air pollution in Mexico City, create monarch butterfly sanctuaries in Michoacán, and save endangered whales, sea turtles and vaquitas (tiny, nearly extinct porpoises) in the Gulf of California. In a December 2016 Huffington Post article, Aridjis and solar energy advocate James Ramey proposed, instead of a wall, an array of solar collectors on the border that would generate power, provide jobs, and be wildlife friendly and culturally sensitive.

The idea was later picked up in a Wall Street Journal op-ed written by Vasilis Fthenakis, director of the Center for Life Cycle Analysis at Columbia University, and Ken Zweibel, then director of the Solar Institute at George Washington University. They calculated that a string of solar panels built along on the Mexican side could generate two thousand gigawatts of electricity a year, enough to power the entire border region on both sides, while being far less costly and environmentally damaging than a wall.

To read the entire excerpt, visit the Tucson Weekly here.

Five Questions with Miriam Davidson

September 20, 2021

Award-winning journalist Miriam Davidson‘s new book, Beloved Border: Humanity and Hope in a Contested Land, draws on a variety of sources to explain how border issues intersect and how the current situation, while made worse under the Trump administration, is in fact the result of decades of prohibition, crackdowns, and wall building on the border. She also gives concrete examples of positive ways in which border people are promoting local culture and cross-border solidarity through health care, commerce, food, art, and music. While death and suffering continue to occur, The Beloved Border shows us how the U.S.-Mexico border could be, and in many ways already is, a model for peaceful coexistence worldwide.

This sensitive and heartfelt reporting is similar to Davidson’s other books published by the University of Arizona Press, such as Convictions of the Heart: Jim Corbett and the Sanctuary Movement, focused on the philosophy of Jim Corbett and how his beliefs challenged individuals and communities of faith across the country to examine the strength of their commitment to the needs and rights of others. In Lives on the Line: Dispatches from the U.S.-Mexico Border, Davidson tells five true stories to show the real-life effects that the maquiladora boom and the law enforcement crackdown have had on the people of “Ambos (Both) Nogales.”

Here are five questions from Davidson about her work and writing about the borderlands:

Why has the border captured your heart during most of your career as a journalist and author?

My first job out of college was at The Laredo News, in Laredo Texas, and other than a few years in New York City and Los Angeles, I’ve been living near, and writing about, the border ever since. Most of that time I’ve been in Tucson, covering the region as a freelancer for a variety of publications. The border interests me as a subject because, while there is great tragedy and suffering, especially in recent years, there’s also great natural beauty and social activism. There’s so much to write about.

Who do you hope or want to read Beloved Border?

I want this book to be read by as many people as possible! My hope is that it explains border issues and presents solutions in language that is available to all readers.

What advice would you give to young journalists and authors wanting to write about the borderlands?

Be careful! Seriously. Learn Spanish, study history, and seek out alternative voices. Don’t be naïve about the dangers, but don’t let your fear keep you from telling the stories of those who are in much greater danger than you. Also, be prepared for rejection. As I often say, if the world cared about the border, the world wouldn’t be the way it is.

Often, especially for those close to the border, life seems dire and change impossible. However, you note optimism and that change is possible, why?

There is a lot of dynamism on the border, a lot of youthful energy, and young people give me hope. Border people are striving for a better life, and through their struggles, they show that transformation is possible. They’re on the leading edge of some of the most important social movements of our time, from the fights against gun violence, police brutality and ecological destruction to the struggle for dignity and decent treatment of migrants and refugees.

Is there a border story you want to tell next?

I’m interested in researching and writing about ways in which migrants could be legalized and integrated into small towns across America that need agricultural workers. It could be a win for everyone, and a lot of them would probably end up being Republicans! I also hope to keep reporting on day-to-day happenings on the border, and keep trying to call national attention to the region, since it’s not being covered as well as it should be.

Five Questions with Poet Valerie Martínez

September 16, 2021

Count is a powerful book-length poem that reckons with the heartbreaking reality of climate change. Forty-three sections of myth-gathering, flora and fauna, accounts of climate devastation, personal narratives, witnessing, references to works of eco-art, and evocations of children unfold over the course of the book, creating a deeply nuanced image of the current climate crisis. Below, read five questions with poet Valerie Martínez about her new work, Count.

What inspired you to write this collection?

Climate change is one of the issues I follow closely, so an abiding concern and sense of responsibility for the planet–and our own survival– is very important to me. Also, in 2011 or so, I started to be bothered by a daydream/vision that kept coming to me. A young girl (who appears in the poem) standing on a beach, facing the ocean. I saw her from behind, always. The sky was overcast, gray, foreboding. I didn’t know where she came from but she kept visiting me, insistent. Finally, I had a Visiting Professor position at the University of Miami during the 2012-2013 academic year. Traveling back and forth from Florida, water everywhere, to the New Mexico high desert, where I live, sparked and sustained the poem.

In Rigoberto Gonzaléz’s forward to the collection, he writes “She scaffolds story with the language of the scientific community, the knowledge of the land’s Indigenous peoples, and the insights of a socially conscious speaker.” Could you tell us more about your research process for Count, and your process for artfully weaving these different perspectives together?

Since 2005 or so, I have been working in the long poem form. My previous book, Each and Her, is also a book-length work. It, too, weaves in facts as well as lyric fragments, pieces of narrative, and more. That book is about the women of Juárez, among other things, and demanded a level of witnessing that is also present in Count. Because Count attempts to grapple with the now extremely obvious effects of human-made climate change, and the impending disasters we will face if we don’t change our ways, I wanted to weave together many threads–facts about the remarkable characteristics of flora and fauna, stories about “the deluge” from peoples and communities around the world, details about how creatures and plants are trying to adapt to climate change, snippets about the children in my life, stories of water, and more. My “research process” is more about weaving together what I imagine, what I know, what I read in books, magazines, and newspapers, what I see in art, what I watch on TV, and more. My writing desk and files are full of information I’ve gathered over many, many years. Overall, I think I’m interested in how much a poem can “hold.” How much can it “manage”?

One of the lines in Count that deeply resonates with me is, “reality numbed by the force of exhilarating velocity.”, which is in reference to Sigalit Landau’s piece titled Barbed Hula. Could you tell us about the impact that various artworks had on your creation of Count?

As I wrote the book, I became more laser-focused on works of art that address climate change and others that struck me as related. When I’m deep in a book of poetry, everything seems connected to it. While in Paris, long before I started writing Count, I saw Landau’s video at the Centre Pompidou. It came back to me as I was writing. I saw “A Needle Woman,” by Kim Sooja, at the Miami Museum of Art. I had known of Basia Irland’s ice books for a long time. As the poem unfolded, these and others began to weave themselves in. I have a particular interest in contemporary work by artists who are grappling with climate change in the ways that a poem does–less didactically, less directly, and more by association. What I love about good poetry is what I call the “language of indirection.” I believe that we are changed, deeply, when this kind of language alters our consciousness.

In Count, you write “How old are they? How much does it weigh to be 25 years in the world at this fateful witnessing?” Do you have any thoughts on how young people should navigate a world that is being drastically and rapidly shaped by climate change, and how they might be able to advocate for and enact change?

Oh, I think it’s the obligation of my generation, 50’s and older, to bear the brunt of making change. Many younger people are incredibly active and their activism is crucial, but they deserve to know and feel that their elders are doing everything to mitigate what we have wrought on the planet. They are seeing, like we, the more devastating hurricanes and flooding and wildfires and they will feel it more than anyone. They will HAVE to act. But their elders need to dig in and use our expertise and long-lived experience and resources to make things better for them.

What are you working on now?

Actually, nothing much. I have a day job, like most poets (leading a truth, healing, and reconciliation project in the City of Santa Fe, New Mexico) and it occupies much of my time. But I continue to work and travel and read and live and these well themselves in me and eventually lead to new work.

Valerie Martínez is the author of six books of poetry. Her work has been awarded the Larry Levis Prize, a Greenwall Grant from Academy of American Poets, an Arizona Book Award, and received nominations for the Pulitzer Prize, William Carlos William Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, PEN Open Book Award, and Ron Ridenhour Prize, as well as honorable mention in the 2011 International Latino Book Awards. She was the poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico, from 2008 to 2010.

Academy of American Poets Announces Ambroggio Prize 2021 Winner: ‘Cardinal in My Window with a Mask on its Beak’

September 15, 2021

The Academy of American Poets announced today the winner of the Ambroggio Prize 2021, Carlos Aguasaco’s Cardenal en mi ventana con una máscara en el pico / Cardinal in My Window with a Mask on its Beak, translated by Jennifer Rathbun.

The Ambroggio Prize is a $1,000 publication prize given for a book-length poetry manuscript originally written in Spanish and with an English translation. The winning manuscript is published by the University of Arizona Press. Established in 2017, the Ambroggio Prize is the only annual award of its kind in the United States that honors American poets whose first language is Spanish. This year’s judge was Rigoberto González.

From the Academy:

Carlos Aguasaco is the Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies and Chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at the City College of the City University of New York (CUNY). He has edited eleven literary anthologies and published seven books of poems, most recently The New York City Subway Poems (Ashland Poetry Press, 2020). He has also published a short novel and an academic study of Latin America’s prime superhero, El Chapulín Colorado. He is the editor of Transatlantic Gazes: Studies on the Historical Links between Spain and North America (IF-UAH, 2018). Carlos is the founder and director of Artepoetica Press (artepoetica.com). He is also director of The Americas Poetry Festival of New York (poetryny.com) and coordinator of The Americas Film Festival of New York (taffny.com). His poems have been translated into English, French, Portuguese, Romanian, Galician, and Arabic.

Jennifer Rathbun is a Spanish Professor and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Classics at Ball State University. She’s published fourteen books of poetry in translation by Hispanic authors such as Alberto Blanco, Minerva Margarita Villarreal, Fernando Carrera and Juan Armando Rojas Joo; two anthologies of poetry denouncing femicide along the US-Mexico border; and the poetry collection El libro de las traiciones / The Book of Betrayals (Artepoetica Press, 2021). Rathbun completed her Ph.D. at the University of Arizona in Spanish, specializing in contemporary Latin American Literature. She’s a member of The American Literary Translators Association and she’s the Associate Editor of Ashland Poetry Press. 

About Aguasaco’s winning manuscript, judge Rigoberto González said: “Cardenal en mi ventana con una máscara en el pico / Cardinal in My Window with a Mask on its Beak takes the reader on a journey through the surreal and the melancholic, to inventive scenarios like an encounter between Stein and Vallejo going to the movies, to the heartbreaking stories of sideshow attractions where bodies are stripped of their humanity. Yet this book reaches beyond surprising premises and literary inspirations to arrive at a place where the poet also finds wonder in everyday encounters and solace in the sobering knowledge that everything comes to an end, but not before dispelling its magic upon the world: like that red bird mirroring the masked face during the pandemic, like the arresting language of the poet that will eventually succumb to silence. Each poem in this exquisite collection brings a startling (and necessary) revelation about our aches, follies, and mortality, to light.” 

Watch: Mara Pastor Read from New Poetry Collection ‘Deuda Natal’

September 13, 2021

The University of Arizona Press, in partnership with the Academy of American Poets, presented poet Mara Pastor, who read from her new collection, Deuda Natal, in a virtual book celebration on Wednesday, September 9, 2021.

Deuda Natal won the Academy of American Poets’ 2020 Ambroggio Prize, the only annual award of its kind in the United States that honors American poets whose first language is Spanish. The poems in Deuda Natal were translated from Spanish to English by María José Giménez and Anna Rosenwong.

During this virtual book celebration, Pastor, and translators Giménez and Rosenwong, were introduced by Nicole Cecilia Delgado, a poet, translator, and book artist. Pastor read her poems in Spanish, while Giménez and Rosenwong read the same poems in English. Delgado interviewed the poet and translators about the project, and how they delicately worked together to capture the poet’s words, spirit, and motivations.

Deuda Natal finds the beauty within vulnerability and the dignity amidst precariousness. As one of the most prominent voices in Puerto Rican poetry, Pastor uses the poems in this new bilingual collection to highlight the way that fundamental forms of caring for life—and for language—can create a space of poetic decolonization. The poems propose new ways of understanding as they traverse a thematic landscape of women’s labor, the figure of the nomad and immigrant, and the return from economic exile to confront the catastrophic confluence of disaster and disaster capitalism.

John-Michael Rivera Awarded by the Carolyn Woodward Pope Endowment for Undocuments

September 10, 2021

We are thrilled to announce that John-Michael Rivera was awarded by the Carolyn Woodward Pope Endowment for UNDOCUMENTS! This award was established in 1999 to recognize University of Colorado Boulder English Department faculty, and comes with a cash prize for the author.

UNDOCUMENTS is an expansive multi-genre exploration of Greater Mexican documentality that reveals the complicated ways all Latinx peoples, including the author, become objectified within cultures. John-Michael Rivera remixes the Florentine Codex and other documents as he takes an intense look at the anxieties and physical detriments tied to immigration.

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.

Watch: William Sheehan Joins Discussion on Our Love of the Red Planet

September 3, 2021

Mars Furor, a recent virtual event for the Lowell Observatory‘s Pluto Circle donors, featured University of Arizona Press authors William Sheehan, as well as Jennifer Putnam, PhD Student, Birkbeck College, University of London. The two discussed our fascination with the red planet from Schiaparelli and Lowell through the Mars rovers of 2021.

Sheehan’s new book, Discovering Mars, A History of Observation and Exploration of the Red Planet, with co-author Jim Bell, delves in to the history of the study and exploration of Mars.

Discovering Mars vividly conveys the way our understanding of this other planet has grown from earliest times to the present. The story is epic in scope—an Iliad or Odyssey for our time, at least so far largely without the folly, greed, lust, and tragedy of those ancient stories. Instead, the narrative of our quest for the Red Planet has showcased some of our species’ most hopeful attributes: curiosity, cooperation, exploration, and the restless drive to understand our place in the larger universe. Sheehan and Bell have written an ambitious first draft of that narrative even as the latest chapters continue to be added both by researchers on Earth and our robotic emissaries on and around Mars, including the latest: the Perseverance rover and its Ingenuity helicopter drone, which set down in Mars’s Jezero Crater in February 2021.

Podcast Features Sara Sue Hoklotubbe on ‘Betrayal at the Buffalo Ranch’

September 3, 2021

On The Joys of Binge Reading podcast, Jenny Wheeler recently interviewed University of Arizona Press author Sara Sue Hoklotubbe on writing and her book, Betrayal at the Buffalo Ranch, the fourth in Hoklotubbe’s Sadie Walela mystery series.

“She recounts how a book that started out being about how women got a bad rap in banking turned into a bank robbery mystery. And she recalls the day she got stopped at Heathrow for having an American Indian name, believe it or not.”

Listen to the podcast here.

Five Questions with Thomas Maroukis

September 1, 2021

In We Are Not a Vanishing People, historian Thomas Maroukis describes the early twentieth-century roots of modern American Indian protest and activism. He tells the history of Native intellectuals and activists who joined together to establish the Society of American Indians, a group of Indigenous men and women united in the struggle for Indian self-determination. Today we ask the author five questions about his work:

What was the inspiration for this work?
In my Native American course, I cover activism and protest. When discovering that one the first all-Indian activist organization was founded in Columbus, Ohio where I live and teach, I decided to research its origins and subsequently its full history. My early research was to prepare a paper on its on its Columbus origins which I presented at the Ohio Academy of History. I had known about the Society of American Indians (SAI) since I had written The Peyote Road: Religious Freedom and The Native American Church (University of Oklahoma Press, 2010) on the history of peyote and the Native American Church. The use of peyote was controversial and it was one of the issues that led to the demise of the SAI. This added to my interest to pursue the SAI.

One of the interesting details about this work is the role The Ohio State University played. What was it?
In the first decade of the twentieth century The Ohio State University employed sociologist Fayette McKenzie. He wrote a doctoral dissertation on American Indians and began to teach such a course. In 1908 he invited several prominent Native Americans to OSU. They began discussing the need for an all-Indian national organization. Meanwhile several American Indians intellectuals, such as Carlos Montezuma and Charles Eastman, had been discussing such a need for almost a decade. The meeting at OSU was the impetus to establish such an organization. McKenzie was able to get OSU to sponsor the initial conference in 1911. As all went well it was agreed to hold a second conference in 1912: thus, the founding at OSU.

 In order to commemorate the founding, OSU held a three-day centennial conference in 2011, It was titled “Society of American Indian: Centennial Symposium, 1911-2011.” It was attended by hundreds of scholars and activists. The organizers of the conference followed with a volume of essays: “The Society of American Indians and Its Legacies,” 2013. I wrote an essay for the volume: “The Peyote Controversy and the Demise of The Society of American Indians.” This conference inspired me to continue my research on the SAI.

Very little has been written about the SAI. What is the significance of the organization?
It was an organization by Indians for Indians. They were determined to reduce or eliminate federal control over the reservation system so Indians could control their own future.  They fought for U.S. citizenship, challenged the stereotypes of Indians held by the American public, and wanted to demonstrate they were not a “vanishing race.”

They used a variety of strategies to challenge federal control. They protested through lobbying, writing and publicizing their plight. They held annual conferences, published their own journal, wrote books and articles, and spoke all over the country. They fought for quality education for Indian youth. They opposed the federal boarding school system. They helped initiate a century-long tradition of protest and did so without surrendering their cultural heritage.

What surprised you most during your research?
The amount of research material available. They wrote thousands of letters, many published speeches and articles for their journal. There are also many newspapers stories and interviews in the local press in the cities where their conferences were held.

What can today’s activists learn from this history?
As a non-Indian I would not suggest anything for today’s activists. I would recommend buying the book and take from it what may be relevant or not.

***
Thomas Constantine Maroukis is professor emeritus in the Department of History at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio.

Five Questions about ‘Science Be Dammed’ with Eric Kuhn and John Fleck

August 25, 2021

Science Be Dammed is an alarming reminder of the high stakes in the management—and perils in the mismanagement—of water in the western United States.  It seems deceptively simple: even when clear evidence was available that the Colorado River could not sustain ambitious dreaming and planning by decision-makers throughout the twentieth century, river planners and political operatives irresponsibly made the least sustainable and most dangerous long-term decisions.

This month we are releasing Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River in paperback. Today we ask authors Eric Kuhn and John Fleck five questions:

Why did you embark on this project?
We wanted to provide a resource that would contribute to better decision making. In the next few years, the Colorado River basin water managers and other stakeholders will be facing difficult decisions, including renegotiating the river’s fundamental operating rules – questions about who gets water, and how much. We recognized that the river has been legally overallocated for decades. We wanted to understand how this happened–how science was used/misused in the decision-making process and how that misuse of science has become embedded in the river’s governance structure. We believed that with the impacts of climate change adding a new level of deep uncertainty and complexity to an already overused river, it was important to understand how we got here.

This summer we’ve seen record setting drought. For the first time, users on the Colorado River are receiving drought-restricted water. Was this inevitable?
This is a debatable question.  In theory, had basin decision-makers been more curious and more willing to accept the views of the scientists, the legal overallocation of the river could have been avoided. As a practical matter though, the political benefits of ignoring the “inconvenient” science dominated the decision-making process.

Since publication, your book has received a lot of notice. What have you heard from readers since the book was published?
Almost all the feedback and input we’ve received from readers has been positive.  For example, retired USBR Lower Colorado Regional Director Terry Fulp told us that he read the final chapter first, liked our positive tone and message, then went back and read the rest of the book.

Policymakers are making critical decisions about the coming decades of water and the West right now. What do you hope they learn from past?
Seek the active input and perspective of science on all decisions, especially given the expected impacts of climate change on the Colorado River.

Collectively, you have more than 60 years of experience in western water management and reporting. What do you hope decision makers of the future take into account?
Climate change is a game changer. It is adding deep uncertainty to a governance system designed for a variable, but in the long-term a stationary river system. New management approaches will be needed to meet future challenges.

***

Eric Kuhn, recently retired, worked for the Colorado River Water Conservation District from 1981 to 2018, including twenty-two years as general manager. The district is a water utility and policy agency covering most of the Colorado River basin within Colorado.

John Fleck is director of the University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program. He wrote Water Is for Fighting Over and Other Myths About Water in the West.

Multiple UA Press Books Receive Honorable Mentions for International Latino Book Awards

August 25, 2021

We are thrilled to announce that several of our recent titles received an honorable mention for the International Latino Book Awards! Federico by Federico Jiménez Caballero and Shelby Tisdale received an honorable mention in the Best Autobiography category, Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities, edited by Arturo J. Aldama and Frederick Luis Aldama, received an honorable mention in the Best Non-Fiction Multi-Author category, and Activist Leaders of San José by Josie Méndez-Negrete received an honorable mention in the Best History Book category.

The awards ceremony will be held virtually on October 16 and 17, 2021.

Congratulations to Federico, Shelby, Arturo, Frederick, and Josie!

Intersectional Chicana Feminisms Chosen as Finalist for International Latino Book Awards

August 25, 2021

We are thrilled to announce that Intersectional Chicana Feminisms by Aída Hurtado was chosen as a finalist in the Victor Villaseñor Best Latino Focused Nonfiction Book category of the International Latino Book Awards!

The International Latino Book Awards are now by far the largest Latino cultural awards in the USA. The 2021 Finalists for the 23rd Annual International Latino Book Awards are a reflection of the growing quality of books by and about Latinos.

The awards ceremony will be held virtually on October 16 and 17, 2021.

Congratulations, Aída!

Five Things You Need to Know About Poet Raquel Salas Rivera

August 13, 2021

Raquel Salas Rivera, a Puerto Rican poet who writes in Spanish and English, is featured in the University of Arizona Press Fall 2021 catalog with his collection x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación that poet Willie Perdomo deftly describes as poetry “… guided by an almost surreal imagery, [that] teaches us how to write from the silence of captivity with a nuanced bilingualism. The lines in these poems work off Salas Rivera’s beautifully decolonized logic and turn until they ultimately construct a nation of truth or cut you until you bleed into a new body.”

One: Salas Rivera’s x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación is the first recipient of the Academy of American Poets’ Ambroggio Prize, a $1,000 publication prize given for a book-length poetry manuscript originally written in Spanish and with an English translation. Ambroggio Prize winners are now published by the University of Arizona Press. x/ex/exis was selected by Alberto Álvaro Ríos in 2018.

Written in the early days of the rise of world-wide fascism and the poet’s gender transition, x/ex/exis accepts the invitation to push poetic and gender imaginaries beyond the bounds set by nation. From teen dysphoria, to the incarceration of anticolonial activists Oscar López and Nina Droz Franco, to the entanglement of church and state, these poems acknowledge the violence of imposed binaries. For Salas Rivera, the marks Puerto Rican transness in a world that seeks trans death, denial, and erasure. Instead of justifying his existence, he takes up the flag of illegibility and writes an apocalyptic book that screams into an uncertain future, armed with nothing to lose.

Two: Salas Rivera was Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, 2018-2019. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Many people who immigrate to the U.S. have more than one home,” said Rivera a few weeks ago during an interview at the Free Library of Philadelphia, just before jetting off to visit family in Puerto Rico. “They have multiple allegiances. My home is Philadelphia, and my home is Puerto Rico.”

Three: Salas Rivera is part of a collective of Puerto Rican authors and poets with El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña/ The Puerto Rican Literature Project, with the University of Houston’s U.S. Latino Digital Humanities and support from a three-year Mellon Foundation grant. Salas Rivera is currently creating the projects online archive of Puerto Rican literature. Alongside Claire Jiménez, Ricardo Maldonado, Enrique Olivares, and the University of Houston’s USLDH team, he serves as investigator and head of the translation team. The archive is a free, bilingual, user-friendly open access digital portal that users within and outside academia can use to learn about and teach Puerto Rican poetry.

“So often, Puerto Rican poets and writers are forced to share our various knowledges and archive these without the necessary resources, keeping alive precarious traditions, driven by our love of literature and sheer force of will, carving out time where there is none to create, document, and uplift each other. The PRLP is a long overdue post-curational archival project that we can all access, which we hope will aid us in a centuries-long mission to celebrate our literary achievements.”

Four: Besides being named a Poet Laureate, Salas Rivera has an impressive list of awards and grants in his work as a poet. He is also the author of five full-length poetry books besides x/ex/exis. His sixth book, antes que isla es volcán/before island is volcano, is an imaginative leap into Puerto Rico’s decolonial future and is forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2022.

Awards: 2020 Firecracker Award in Poetry Finalist; 2019 Big Other Book Award for Poetry and Translation Finalist; 2020 Pen America Open Book Award Longlist2019 Premio Nuevas Voces del Festival de la Palabra de Puerto Rico; 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry; 2018 National Book Award Longlist: Poetry; 2018 Ambroggio Prize from the Academy of American Poets; 2018-2019 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia; 2010 First and Second Place in the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico’s Literary Contest; y/and 2010 First Place in the University of Puerto Rico’s Queer Festival’s Poetry Contest. 

Grants and fellowships: 2021-2024 Mellon Foundation grant for El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña/ The Puerto Rican Literature Project; 2021 NEA Translation Fellowship; 2019-2021 Writer for the Art for Justice Fund at the University of Arizona Poetry Center; 2020 University of Houston and Arte Publico Press US Latino Digital Humanities USLDH Grant-In-Aid; 2020 Nadya Aisenberg MacDowell Colony Fellowship; 2020 La Impresora Poet in Residency; 2019 Playwright Fellow at the Sundance Institute Playwrights and Composer Retreat; 2019 Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets; 2018-2019 Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts Jazz Residency; 2018 CantoMundo Fellow; y/and 2004 Scholarship to attend Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program.

Five: Salas Rivera’s roots are poetry.

His grandfather Sotero Rivera Avilés was a poet, and with the support of a 2021 NEA Translation Fellowship, he is translating his grandfather’s poetry.

“On April 28, 1933, my grandfather, Sotero Rivera Avilés, was born in Añasco, Puerto Rico. Like most Puerto Rican towns, Añasco was built around the production of sugar cane. Rivera Avilés was the descendant of enslaved sugarcane workers. … Rivera Aviles’ work is extraordinary in its scope. He most often writes within the more traditional lyrical style that was typical of the Guajana Generation. Yet he wrote about being a post-war veteran in a rural Puerto Rican town and the broken promises of Luis Muñoz Marín’s populist modernization projects. He demystified the jíbaro archetype of the naïve, but good-hearted field laborer saved by mass migration to urban centers, such as San Juan and New York. He wrote openly about his disabilities, delved into the seldom described experience of post-war return migration, and left a record of regionalisms from a world that no longer exists. His is some of the only poetry written about Humatas, and the breadth of his work never overshadowed the importance of the life he led before acquiring a formal education.”

Currently, Salas Rivera writes and teaches in Puerto Rico.

OLLI Fall Speaker Series Includes Press Authors for Virtual Book Discussions

August 6, 2021

Big thanks to the University of Arizona’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute for including several University of Arizona Press authors to be part of their Online Fall 2021 Speaker Series to discuss their new books. OLLI is a membership-based program that offers informal and educational community programming for all adults over the age of 50. Go here for more info on membership and programming. The Fall Speaker Series takes place on Mondays, 1 p.m. Pacific Time beginning in September.

University of Arizona Press authors:

November 1 – William Sheehan
Discovering Mars: A History of Observation and Exploration of the Red Planet

November 15 – James H. Creechan
Drug Wars and Covert Netherworlds: The Transformations of Mexico’s Narco Cartels

November 29 – Miriam Davidson
Beloved Border: Humanity and Hope in a Contested Land

December 13 – Seth Schindler
Sowing the Seeds of Change: The Story of the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona

Children of the Dragonfly: The Literature of Boarding Schools

July 26, 2021

By Robert Bensen

The recent discoveries of over 1,000 Indigenous children’s graves near boarding and residential schools are the latest developments in the story of assimilative, arguably genocidal education in the U.S. and Canada.  In poetry, fiction, and memoir, the boarding school experience is represented in Children of the Dragonfly, the first anthology of Indian literature devoted to Indian child education and welfare. The anthology also includes literature on adoption and foster care, when some 35 percent of Indian children were raised in non-Indian settings during the Sixties Scoop in Canada and the U.S. crisis that led to passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978.  Dragonfly is an ancient spirit in the Zuni story that saves two abandoned children and restores them to their people.  That spirit is infused in the literature collected in Children of the Dragonfly.

            Boarding schools were created to assimilate Indian children to the white world, which required the loss of cultural traditions. The literature tells us, however, that children kept their stories and practices as much as they could. U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky” (1994) retells the ancient creation story in the story of Johnny and Lila. Together they endured the rigors and privations of boarding school, but afterward went their separate ways. Johnny joined the army. Lila worked at Dairy Queen and cleaned houses until she entered the story that had been her refuge at school. She married one of the stars and lived in the Sky World, where she was sure “she could find love in a place that did not know the disturbance of death.”  One day, however,

a song climbed up her legs from far away, to the rooms of her heart. Later she would tell Johnny it was the sound of destiny, which is similar to a prayer reaching out to claim her. You can’t ignore these things, she would tell him, and it led her to the place her husband had warned her was too sacred for women. She looked into the forbidden place and leaped.

Lila fell from the sky world into Johnny’s arms in the parking lot of a Safeway store. The poem enacts what boarding school had not destroyed: the strength of survivorship in him, and in her, knowing that the old story she first heard in her mother’s womb would guard and nurture her all her life long.  

            By separating children from their tribe and family, the boarding school created problems in parenting and in inter-generational relations. The anthology includes an excerpt of the 1891 War Department propaganda novel Stiya, ghost-written to discourage Carlisle graduates from returning to their families and tribal ways.  Other fiction by Lee Maracle (“Black Robes”) and Luci Tapahonso (“The Snakeman”) trace generational conflicts and social relations created by removal. Black Bear’s memoir “Who Am I?” portrays the extreme emotional, physical, and spiritual damage to parent-child relations and to identity from boarding school life, and the cost of rebuilding what had been lost.

            Many boarding schools were operated by religious organizations to convert as well as assimilate Native children. E. Pauline Johnson’s 1913 story “As It Was in the Beginning” reveals the hypocrisy beneath the promise that the Black Robe Father made to Esther’s Cree father to “save her from hell” and make of her a “noble woman.”  Esther grows to womanhood in the school of the Black Robe Father, whose nephew falls in love with her and asks his uncle for permission to marry her. The Black Robe is horrified and says that despite her upbringing she “comes of uncertain blood…[and] you can never tell what lurks in a caged animal that has once been wild.” Esther overhears him denying her everything he had promised plus the love of her life because of her race, calling her a “strange snake.”  She thinks,

What were his years of kindness and care now? What did I care for his God, his heaven, his hell? He had robbed me of my native faither, of my parents, of my people, of this last, this life of love that would have made a great, good woman of me. God! how I hated him!

She remembers the arrow-head tipped with snake venom that her mother had given her years before and warned her not to touch. She steals into her beloved’s room when he’s asleep and scratches his wrist twice, like a snake bite. Then she leaves and returns to her family, only to dream nightly her nightmare “of the white man’s hell. Why did they teach me of it, only to fling me into it?”   

            Children were often punished brutally for speaking their Native language, since language is the repository of culture and collective memory. Gordon D. Henry, Jr’s short story “The Prisoner of Haiku” (1992) is at once a horrific and lyrical imagining of a cruel but ultimately unsuccessful repression for The Prisoner’s speaking his language:

Two strong men with the force of God and Jesus who knows what else dragged him outside on a bitter wind-chilled Minnesota day and tied him to an iron post. They left him then without food, without water, through the night. Somehow the men believed the force of the cold, the ice hand of winter would reach out and take the boy by the throat and silence his native language. The other boys heard the punished boy screaming in defiance all night, defending the language, calling wind, calling relatives, singing, so he wouldn’t forget. The screaming went on all night, and in the morning, on a bright, winter day, when the school fathers went out to untie him, the boy could speak no more. When he opened his mouth to try, less than a whisper stirred air. Boys who were close to him then said that though they heard nothing, they felt something: a coolness floated out of his mouth and went directly to their ears to the point where—the boys claimed—their hearing was frozen in time. They felt the breath-held syllables melt in their heads later, in the words of the Anishinaabe language, and still later in Native translations of circumstances and relationships that they never would have thought of without remembering the cold in their ears. Moreover, boys who went to the same boarding school, years later, testified to hearing Native words whirling up with every snow from sundown to sunrise in their winters at that place.

            New revelations about the Boarding School Movement will continue to come to light and add to our factual knowledge. The effects of the schools will also continue to be represented in poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and other imaginative literature by Indigenous writers. The work collected in Children of the Dragonfly is part of that legacy. 

***
Robert Bensen is co-editor of Iroquois Voices, Iroquois Visions: A Celebration of Contemporary Six Nations Arts and has authored numerous essays on Native literature and child custody. He is Professor Emeritus and Director of Writing (1978-2017) at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, where he taught American Indian law and literature.  His poems have been published in six collections and in numerous journals. His work has been recognized with fellowships and awards from the NEA, the NEH, Harvard University, NYSCA, Illinois Arts Council, and others. He is the director of Woodland Arts Editions and of the Seeing Things community workshop at Bright Hill Press and Literary Center.  https://robertbensen.com/

Watch: Borderlands Scholars on Research, Identity, and Life in Virtual Roundtable Discussion

July 22, 2021

On Wednesday, July 22, the University of Arizona Press presented a virtual panel discussion, From the Border: An Open Book Summer Roundtable, on borderlands studies with noted scholars and authors Maurice S. Crandall, Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, and Yvette J. Saavedra.

The panelists reflected on the state of borderland studies today, its importance, their own works, and what “open” borderlands scholarship looks like. The event caps a three-year publishing project from the Press called Open Arizona. Open Arizona is a collection of open-access University of Arizona Press titles made available through the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The scholarship, histories, and approaches in the selected titles emphasize the relevance of the southwestern United States to understanding contemporary American life. Several works in Open Arizona include new original essays by leading scholars, offering contemporary reflections on these once out-of-print works, including some foundational works in Border Studies.

Panelists:

Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez is an assistant professor of English at Arizona State University. Fonseca-Chávez is the author of Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture: Looking Through the Kaleidoscope. She is the author of the essay “Reflections on Reconstructing a Chicano/a Literary Heritage: Hispanic Colonial Literature of the Southwest,” which was published as part of Open Arizona.

Maurice S. Crandall is an assistant professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth. He is the author of These People Have Always Been a Republic: Indigenous Electorates in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1598–1912. He is the author of the essay “Reflections on The Social Organization of the Western Apache and Grenville Goodwin Among the Western Apache: Letters from the Field,” which was published as part of Open Arizona.

Yvette J. Saavedra is an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Oregon. Saavedra is the author of Pasadena Before the Roses: Race, Identity, and Land Use in Southern California, 1771–1890. She is also the author of the essay “Spanish Colonial Tucson: Shifting the Paradigms of Borderlands History,” which was published as part of Open Arizona.

MALCS 2021: Browse Our Latest Chicana and Latina Studies Titles

July 22, 2021

We are excited to be offering a special discount on our new and recent Chicana and Latina studies titles for the MALCS 2021 Summer Institute! The MALCS 2021 Summer Institute’s theme is: Abriendo caminos, abriendo corazones: Renewing Mind, Body, and Spirit in the Time of COVID. Temporarily moving to a virtual format, the MALCS Executive and Coordinating Committees are pleased to bring you a wonderful week of programming meant to bridge the distance by bringing love, healing, and community to you—wherever you are. Fraught with loss, sadness, and worry—exacerbated by continued social injustice, social inequity, and political unrest, the pandemic and its accompanying uncertainties wreaked havoc on our physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing. 

Use the code AZMALCS21 for 40% off all titles, with free U.S. shipping. If you have questions about our publishing program, click here to learn more, or contact our Editor-in-Chief, Kristen Buckles, at kbuckles@uapress.arizona.edu.

Pre-order these titles now!

Letras y Limpias is the first book to explore the literary significance of the curandera. It offers critical new insights about how traditional medicine and folk healing underwrite Mexican American literature. Amanda Ellis traces the significance of the curandera and her evolution across a variety of genres written by Mexican American authors such as Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Manuel Munoz, ire’ne lara silva, and more.

Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas tells the story of the community’s struggle to carve out space for survival and thriving in the shadows of the U.S.-Mexico geopolitical border. This ethnography by Michelle Téllez demonstrates the state’s neglect in providing social services and local infrastructure. Téllez shows that in creating the community of Maclovio Rojas, residents have challenged prescriptive notions of nation and belonging. Through women’s active participation and leadership, a women’s political subjectivity has emerged—Maclovianas. These border women both contest and invoke their citizenship as they struggle to have their land rights recognized, and they transform traditional political roles into that of agency and responsibility.

Currently Available

Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa provides pedagogical applications of Anzaldúa’s noted theories, including la facultad, the path of conocimiento, and autohistoria, among others. This text provides examples, lesson plans, and activities for scholars, professors, teachers, and community members in various disciplines—such as history, composition, literature, speech and debate, and more—and for those interested in teaching the theories of Gloria Anzaldúa.

Watch a recording of a fantastic virtual event celebrating the release of Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa here.

Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture traces the development of Chicana/o literature and cultural production from the Spanish colonial period to the present. In doing so, it challenges us to look critically at how we simultaneously embody colonial constructs and challenge their legacies.

Read an excerpt from the book here, then listen to author Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez discuss topics from the book on NPR here.

Cultura y Corazón is a cultural approach to research that requires a long-term commitment to community-based and engaged research methodologies. This book presents case studies in the fields of education and health that recognize and integrate communities’ values, culture, and funds of knowledge in the research process.

Challenging stereotypes, Activist Leaders of San José unearths and makes visible lived experiences of Chicana and Latino activists from San José, California, who made contributions to the cultural and civic life of the city. Through oral histories, we see a portrait of grassroots leadership in the twentieth century.

 Watch a book release event with author Josie Méndez-Negrete here. Congratulations to Josie for being honored as the 2021 NACCS Scholar!

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.

Congratulations to author Aída Hurtado for winning an AAHHE Distinguished Author Award, and for receiving an honorable mention for the 2020 NWSA Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize!

The Chicana M(other)work Anthology is a call to action for justice within and outside academia. This volume brings together emerging scholarship and testimonios by and about self-identified Chicana and Women of Color mother-scholars, activists, and allies who, using an intersectional lens, center mothering as transformative labor.

Read an excerpt from the book here, and read more about our Feminist Wire Book Series here.

Mexican Workers and the Making of Arizona expands our understanding of the critical role played by Mexican and Mexican American laborers in making Arizona a prominent and influential state in the Southwest and beyond.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

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.

Congratulations to author Yvette Saavedra for winning the 2019  WHA-Huntington Library Martin Ridge Fellowship!

Silviana Wood’s teatro has elicited tears and laughter from audiences young and old. Barrio Dreams brings together for the first time the plays of Wood, one of Arizona’s foremost playwrights. Wood is acclaimed locally, regionally, and nationally as a playwright, actor, director, and activist.

Silviana Wood was featured on the New Books Network Podcast. Listen here. Borderlands Theater honored the lifetime achievements of Silviana Wood through a series of virtual events. Learn more here.

The decolonial approaches found in Writing the Goodlife provide rich examples of mutually respectful relations between humans and nature. Ybarra’s book takes on two of today’s most discussed topics: environmentalism and Latina/o population growth. Ybarra shines a light on long-established traditions of environmental thought that have existed in Mexican American literary history for at least 150 years.

Fleshing the Spirit brings together established and new writers to explore the relationships between the physical body, the spirit and spirituality, and social justice activism. The anthology incorporates different genres of writing—such as poetry, testimonials, critical essays, and historical analysis—and stimulates the reader to engage spirituality in a critical, personal, and creative way.

“A comprehensive collection of feminist spirituality will be incomplete without this volume.”—Publishers Weekly

¿Qué Onda? analyzes the construction of Mexicana/o and Chicana/o identities through a four-year ethnographic study in a representative American high school. It reveals how identity politics impacts young people’s forms of communication and the cultural spaces they occupy in the school setting. By showing how identities are created and directly influenced by the complexities of geopolitics and sociocultural influences, it stresses the largely unexplored divisions among youths whose identities are located along a wide continuum of “Mexicanness.”

Stephen Pyne on Arizona’s Fire Problem in Az Republic

July 12, 2021

In a special opinion piece for the Arizona Republic Stephen Pyne writes that Fires in the West–and the world, for that matter, is not a problem solved with a once-and-done project:

“Places that historically had fire are having more and nastier outbreaks. Places without routine fire are experiencing it. An equal reality is that we need more landscape fire to dampen fuels and enhance ecological integrity. All in all, too much bad fire, too little good.”

Read the Op Ed

***

Stephen J. Pyne is an emeritus professor at Arizona State University. Best known for his research into the history of fire, he is the author of Between Two Fires and To The Last Smoke, along with several other works on fire. He has also written a suite of studies that orbit around the concept of three ages of discovery: The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica; How the Canyon Became Grand; Voyager: Exploration, Space, and the Third Great Age of Discovery; and The Great Ages of Discovery.

Open Arizona: Essays Offer Critique of Spicer and Kessell

July 9, 2021

We are pleased to announce the publication of two important new essays on our open access platform, Open Arizona. The essays bring together leading contemporary scholars to add perspective to formerly out-of-print works that have been republished on the site.

A key component of the Open Arizona project, which was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation to make out-of-print books available as open access, is to add contemporary context to these works, some decades old. The newest essays are by Natasha Varner and Ignacio Martínez. These scholars offer perspectives framed by their expertise in history, Indigenous studies, and border studies. In thoughtful, individual essays, they address the works of Edward Spicer and John Kessell.

Varner’s essay “Social Science as a Tool for Surveillance in World War II Japanese American Concentration Camps,” addresses Spicer’s work Impounded People: Japanese-Americans in the Relocation Centers. The essay examines Spicer’s role during WWII in the community analyst program and his influence on applied anthropology, as well as some of the conundrums that emerged through this work.

Martínez’s essay “The Mission Frontier: A Universal Story of Human Engagement” addresses Kessell’s work Friar’s, Soldiers, and Reformers: Hispanic Arizona and the Sonora MIssion Frontier, 1767-1856. In the essay, Martínez explains why Kessell’s grand narrative of the Sonoran frontier requires updating.

Both essays are puplished open access and freely available.

Understanding Multisensory Realms: An Excerpt from ‘Flower Worlds’

July 2, 2021

Flower Worlds reaches into multisensory realms that extend back at least 2,500 years, offering many different disciplines, perspectives, and collaborations to understand these domains. Today, Flower Worlds are expressed in everyday work and lived experiences, embedded in sacred geographies, and ritually practiced both individually and in communities. This volume stresses the importance of contemporary perspectives and experiences by opening with living traditions before delving into the historical trajectories of Flower Worlds, creating a book that melds scientific and humanistic research and emphasizes Indigenous voices.

Below, read an excerpt from Michael Mathiowetz and Andrew Turner ‘s introduction to the volume.

The identification of flower world as a floral spiritual domain represents one of the most important breakthroughs in the study of Indigenous belief systems in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest. Nearly three decades of scholarship devoted to this topic have demonstrated that while many of the cultures of both regions share in fundamental aspects of these beliefs, there are also key differences among a plurality of flower worlds. Furthermore, as these realms are multisensory and reach back at least 2,500 years, efforts to understand them extend well beyond the capabilities of any particular academic discipline and require the collaboration of scholars and religious specialists who bring a variety of perspectives. Far more than religious movements or cults, flower worlds form vital and dynamic cores of the cosmologies, histories, rituals, and everyday lives of Indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica and the Southwest, past and present.

In her influential 1992 article “The Flower World of Old Uto-Aztecan,” Jane Hill noted prevalent patterns of floral metaphors and chromatic symbolism in the oral canons, particularly songs, of Uto-Aztecan speech communities and their neighbors (including the Zuni and Tzotzil Maya) ranging geographically from Arizona to Chiapas (maps 1, 2). According to Hill, this suite of linguistic metaphors evokes a spirit land or paradise, often a land of the dead, that is “a timeless world, parallel to our own” (Hill 1992:127). She coined the term Flower World to describe the sacred landscapes referenced and invoked in this cross-cultural and cross-historical phenomenon, which includes sea ania of the Yoeme (Yaqui); Tamoanchan, Tlalocan, and the Sun’s Heaven of the Mexica (Aztecs); and Wirikuta of the Wixárika (Huichol). Within this linguistic complex, flowers invoke not only the flower world but a constellation of concepts including song, the human spirit, and vital forces (such as blood and hearts, fire, and often “male strength and spirituality”) (Hill 1992:122). Hill (1992:136– 38) suggested that these concepts originated with an ancestral “Old Uto-Aztecan” speech community that spread from north to south with Uto-Aztecan linguistic expansion, but she also raised the possibility that a “flower world complex” could have originated in Mesoamerica and spread north with maize agriculture.

In 1992 Louise Burkhart also published an article in which she noted similar patterns of floral metaphors in early colonial Nahua Christian literature, especially Fray Bernardino de Sahagún’s Psalmodia christiana (1993 [1583]) and the Cantares mexicanos (Bierhorst 1985). Burkhart points out that the process of conversion to Christianity in postconquest Mexico was also a process of mutual accommodation in which Spanish friars and Nahua interpreters sought parallels between Indigenous conceptions of paradise and the Christian heaven and Eden. Nahua converts aestheticized and translated the otherwise remote heaven and Eden into their own terms as paradise gardens accessible through ritual and song (Burkhart 1992:90). Within this context, Nahua conceptions of flower world not only survived but thrived and in turn modified New World Christianity.

Pursuing questions raised by Hill’s (1992) original study, Kelley Hays-Gilpin and Jane Hill (1999, 2000) expanded on the flower world as a linguistically based phenomenon to encompass material culture by investigating its historical spread into the Southwest through ancient iconographic motifs. The authors associated imagery such as butterflies, flowers, rainbows, and colorful birds with the flower world, noting that evidence is particularly prevalent in the Southwest after A.D. 1300. They add that rather than a cult or religion, flower world “constituted ‘part ideologies’ or a set of symbolic tools that remained available, either separately or in combination, to the ritual practice and thought of Southwestern peoples over a long period of time” (Hays-Gilpin and Hill 1999:16).

Karl Taube (2004) provided the first in-depth study of the flower world in ancient Mesoamerica. Focusing primarily on the Classic Maya, Taube discussed conceptions of breath, jewels, flowers, music, the soul, and a celestial solar paradise, including how these notions place humans in relation to the life- giving environmental forces of wind, rain, and sun that promote agricultural abundance (Taube 2004:91– 93). Through analysis of artwork in relation to ethnographic and ethnohistoric sources, Taube (2004:79– 91) drew attention to Flower Mountain, a place of origin and celestial ascent of the sun and apotheosized ancestors and found parallels in the cosmologies of Teotihuacan, the contemporary Tzutujil Maya (Carlsen and Prechtel 1991) and Hopi, among other cultures. The emergence of the first people, often aided by deities, from a Flower Mountain or Flower Mound, is a central theme in origin stories of Mesoamerica and the American Southwest (Saturno et al. 2005:48– 50; Taube 2010b:111– 18; Taube, this volume). Taube noted the early appearance of flower world imagery among the Middle Formative (900– 400 B.C.) Olmec, exposing the deep roots of flower world concepts in Mesoamerica (Taube 2004:90). In focusing on the Classic Maya, this work also demonstrates that, while strongly prevalent among Uto-Aztecan speakers as Hill (1992) observed, the flower world is not tied to a particular language group.

Building on Hill’s (1992) original recognition and description of the flower world and the foundational works that demonstrated its resilience and flexibility in times of social upheaval (Burkhart 1992), its correlates in visual culture (Hays-Gilpin and Hill 1999), and its antiquity and pervasiveness among the cultures of Mesoamerica (Taube 2004), we continue to refine and add nuance to our understanding of the flower worlds of past and present cultures of Mesoamerica and the American Southwest. Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos (this volume) urges us to consider a plurality of flower worlds, as multiple distinct floral realms coexist within certain traditions and, while sharing important characteristics, the various manifestations of this phenomenon are distinct and culturally and environmentally situated. Since Hill’s (1992) assessment of the geographical range of this phenomenon as extending from Arizona to Chiapas, subsequent studies have recognized its presence at the easternmost boundaries of Mesoamerica. However, while widespread and diverse in representation, flower worlds are not present among all cultures at all times in these regions.

Learn more about the book by watching its book trailer here.

Flower Worlds is a part of our Amerind Studies in Anthropology series. Learn more about the series here.

Devon Mihesuah on Importance of Native Heroes in Fiction

June 25, 2021

In a recent interview with the Lawrence-Journal World, University of Arizona Press author Devon A. Mihesuah talks about her new title, The Hatak Witches, and her writing life.

Mihesuah, the Cora Lee Beers Price Teaching Professor in International Cultural Understanding at the University of Kansas, reflected on her research and fiction:

“You still have to do research for both,” she said. “I’m a staunch believer that Native fiction should be written by Native people. Those are the writers who have lived experiences. They know their community, and they understand their culture. You have to be true to your culture when you write Native fiction. Otherwise the audience that I write to – who are Natives primarily — are going to know if the writer has fabricated something or doesn’t understand some cultural nuance. That’s easy to spot.”

Mihesuah’s novel continues the storyline of Choctaw cosmology and cultural survival that are prominent in her award-winning novel, The Roads of My Relations. In Hatak Witches, a security guard is found dead and another wounded at the Children’s Museum of Science and History in Norman, Oklahoma, Detective Monique Blue Hawk and her partner Chris Pierson are summoned to investigate. They find no fingerprints, no footprints, and no obvious means to enter the locked building. Monique discovers that a portion of an ancient and deformed skeleton had also been stolen from the neglected museum archives. Her uncle, the spiritual leader Leroy Bear Red Ears, concludes that the stolen remains are those of Hatak haksi, a witch and the matriarch of the Crow family, a group of shape-shifting Choctaws who plan to reestablish themselves as the powerful creatures they were when the tribe lived in Mississippi.

Read the full interview here.

Savor the Southwest turns to ‘Famine Foods’ for Answers on Indigenous Survival in the Sonora Desert

June 24, 2021

In the Tucson blog, Savor the Southwest: Forage, Raise, Cook, University of Arizona Press author Carolyn Niethammer asks: When drought led to famine, what did people eat in our desert?

Niethammer’s recent book, A Desert Feast: Celebrating Tucson’s Culinary Heritage, covers more than 4,000 years of food history, from the hunter-gatherers, to the Early Agriculturalists to today’s farmers. However, to answer her question, the celebrated food writer turned to another University of Arizona author Paul Minnis and his recent title, Famine Foods: Plants We Eat to Survive.

In Famine Foods, Minnis focuses on the myriad plants that have sustained human populations throughout the course of history, unveiling those that people have consumed, and often still consume, to avoid starvation. This book offers a fascinating overview of famine foods—how they are used, who uses them, and, perhaps most importantly, why they may be critical to sustain human life in the future.

From Niethammer’s review:

“Another way Native Americans faced food shortages is what Minnis calls “social banking.” In 1939, the town chief of Acoma, a New Mexico Pueblo said, “The people of Zuni are coming. They have no crops. They are coming to work for us. Some day we might have to go to them when our crops are small.” The Tohono O’odham when facing food shortages would sometimes go visit their cousins the Akimel O’odham who had an easier time growing crops with the Gila River water. Because there were no draft animals, it was easier to move the people to the food rather than try to transport large quantities of food.”

Read the full review here.

The Press is Open: Eight More Titles Now Open Access

June 23, 2021

The University of Arizona Press is pleased to announce that a new selection of titles in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, and Indigenous Studies are now available as open access (OA). Thanks to financial support from Knowledge Unlatched, we have been able to move eight titles to OA format. The titles are available either via link on our website or directly through the OAPEN Foundation.

Now Available as OA:

Cultivating Knowledge
Biotechnology, Sustainability, and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India
Andrew Flachs
Anthropologist Andrew Flachs shows how rural farmers come to plant genetically modified or certified organic cotton, sometimes during moments of agrarian crisis. Interweaving ethnographic detail, discussions of ecological knowledge, and deep history, Flachs uncovers the unintended consequences of new technologies, which offer great benefits to some—but at others’ expense. Flachs shows that farmers do not make simple cost-benefit analyses when evaluating new technologies and options. Their evaluation of development is a complex and shifting calculation of social meaning, performance, economics, and personal aspiration. Only by understanding this complicated nexus can we begin to understand sustainable agriculture. Learn more.

Decolonizing “Prehistory”
Deep Time and Indigenous Knowledges in North America
Edited by Gesa Mackenthun and Christen Mucher
This is a critical investigation of the documentation of the American deep past with perspectives from Indigenous traditional knowledges and attention to ongoing systems of intellectual colonialism. Bringing together experts from American studies, archaeology, anthropology, legal studies, history, and literary studies, this interdisciplinary volume offers essential information about the complexity and ambivalence of colonial encounters with Indigenous peoples in North America, and their impact on American scientific discourse. Learn more.

Footprints of Hopi History
Hopihiniwtiput Kukveni’at
Edited by Leigh J. KuwanwisiwmaT. J. Ferguson , and Chip Colwell
Footprints of Hopi History: Hopihiniwtiput Kukveni’at focuses on a powerful historical metaphor that the Hopi people use to comprehend their tangible heritage. The editors and contributors offer fresh and innovative perspectives on Hopi archaeology and history, and demonstrate how one tribe has significantly advanced knowledge about its past through collaboration with archaeologists and cultural anthropologists. Learn more.

The Global Spanish Empire
Five Hundred Years of Place Making and Pluralism
Edited by Christine Beaule and John G. Douglass
The Spanish Empire was a complex web of places and peoples. Through an expansive range of essays that look at Africa, the Americas, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, this volume brings a broad range of regions into conversation. The contributors focus on nuanced, comparative exploration of the processes and practices of creating, maintaining, and transforming cultural place making within pluralistic Spanish colonial communities. Learn more.

The Nature of Spectacle
On Images, Money, and Conserving Capitalism
Jim Igoe
In The Nature of Spectacle, Jim Igoe embarks on multifaceted explorations of how we imagine nature and how nature shapes our imaginations. The book traces spectacular productions of imagined nature across time and space—from African nature tourism to transnational policy events to green consumer appeals in which the push of a virtual button appears to initiate a chain of events resulting in the protection of polar bears in the Arctic or jaguars in the Amazon rainforest. These explorations illuminate the often surprising intersections of consumerism, entertainment, and environmental policy. Learn more.

Moral Ecology of a Forest
The Nature Industry and Maya Post-Conservation
José E. Martínez-Reyes
This book offers an ethnographic account of conservation politics, particularly the conflict between Western conservation and Mayan ontological ecology. The difficult interactions of the Maya of central Quintana Roo, Mexico, for example, or the Mayan communities of the Sain Ka’an Biosphere, demonstrate the clashing interests with Western biodiversity conservation initiatives. The conflicts within the forest of Quintana Roo represent the outcome of nature in this global era, where the forces of land grabbing, conservation promotion and organizations, and capitalism vie for control of forests and land.
Learn more.

Silent Violence
Global Health, Malaria, and Child Survival in Tanzania
Vinay R. Kamat
Silent Violence engages the harsh reality of malaria and its effects on marginalized communities in Tanzania. Vinay R. Kamat presents an ethnographic analysis of the shifting global discourses and practices surrounding malaria control and their impact on the people of Tanzania, especially mothers of children sickened by malaria. Learn more.

Tourism Geopolitics
Assemblages of Infrastructure, Affect, and Imagination
Edited by Mary MostafanezhadMatilde Córdoba AzcárateRoger Norum
In Tourism Geopolitics, contributors show enacted processes such as labor migration, conservation, securitization, nation building, territorial disputes, ethnic cleansing, heritage revitalization, and global health crisis management, among others. These contended societal processes are deployed through tourism development initiatives that mobilize deeply uneven symbolic and material landscapes. The chapters reveal how a range of experiences are implicated in this process: museum visits, walking tours, architectonical evocations of the past, road construction, militarized island imaginations, gendered cultural texts, and official silences. Learn more.

Watch: Urayoán Noel In Conversation at New York Public Library’s World Literature Festival

June 22, 2021

The New York Public Library’s first World Literature Festival included a recent conversation with University of Arizona Press author Urayoán Noel, as well as fellow poet Dunya Mikhail with NYPL librarians Grace Yamada and Leanna Frankland. In the panel discussion, Languages of Poetry, the poets discussed poetry in translation, their writing process, and other poets they look up to.

Noel’s new poetry collection, Transversal, seeks to disrupt standard English and Spanish, and it celebrates the nonequivalence between languages. Inspired by Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, the collection celebrates Caribbean practices of creolization as maximalist, people-centered, affect-loaded responses to the top-down violence of austerity politics. This groundbreaking, modular approach to poetic translation opens up alternative ways of reading in any language.

Cultivating Knowledge Shortlisted for the ICAS Book Prize

June 22, 2021

We are thrilled to announce that University of Arizona Press author Andrew Flachs’ recent title, Cultivating Knowledge, was shortlisted for the International Convention of Asian Scholars’ Book Prize 2021 English- Best Book in the Social Sciences!

In Cultivating Knowledge anthropologist Andrew Flachs shows how rural farmers come to plant genetically modified or certified organic cotton, sometimes during moments of agrarian crisis. Interweaving ethnographic detail, discussions of ecological knowledge, and deep history, Flachs uncovers the unintended consequences of new technologies, which offer great benefits to some—but at others’ expense. Flachs shows that farmers do not make simple cost-benefit analyses when evaluating new technologies and options. Their evaluation of development is a complex and shifting calculation of social meaning, performance, economics, and personal aspiration. Only by understanding this complicated nexus can we begin to understand sustainable agriculture.

Andrew Flachs is an assistant professor of anthropology at Purdue University. Trained as an environmental anthropologist, his research spans sustainable agriculture, food studies, the anthropology of knowledge, and political ecology.

Congratulations, Andrew!

Girl of New Zealand and La Raza Cosmética Honored as Finalists for NAISA’s 2021 Best First Book in Native American and Indigenous Studies Prize

June 21, 2021

We are thrilled to announce that two University of Arizona Press books, Girl of New Zealand by Michelle Erai and La Raza Cosmética by Natasha Varner, were honored as finalists for the 2021 NAISA Best First Book in Native American and Indigenous Studies Prize!

“The committee expresses its deep admiration for the two finalists, Michelle Erai and Natasha Varner, for their outstanding work excavating and analyzing discourses of gender and power in relation to Indigenous women in different contexts.”—NAISA Book Prize Committee

Girl of New Zealand and La Raza Cosmética are both a part of our Critical Issues in Indigenous Studies series. This series anchors intellectual work within an Indigenous framework that reflects Native-centered concerns and objectives. Series titles expand and deepen discussions about Indigenous people beyond nation-state boundaries, and complicate existing notions of Indigenous identity. Learn more here.

Girl of New Zealand presents a nuanced insight into the way violence and colonial attitudes shaped the representation of Māori women and girls. Michelle Erai examines more than thirty images of Māori women alongside the records of early missionaries and settlers in Aotearoa, as well as comments by archivists and librarians, to shed light on how race, gender, and sexuality have been ascribed to particular bodies.

La Raza Cosmética examines postrevolutionary identity construction as a project of settler colonialism that at once appropriated and erased indigeneity. In its critique of Indigenous representation, it also shows how Indigenous women strategically engaged with and resisted these projects as they played out in beauty pageants, films, tourism, art, and other realms of popular culture.

Congratulations, Michelle and Natasha!

Five Questions with Daniel A. Olivas

June 17, 2021

Daniel A. Olivas is the author of nine books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry including two volumes published by the University of Arizona Press: The Book of Want: A Novel (2011), and The King of Lighting Fixtures: Stories (2017). In 2019, Daniel was inspired to write his first full-length play, Waiting for Godínez, which addresses the absurdity and horror of family separation and anti-immigrant government policies. That play was selected for the Playwrights’ Arena’s Summer Reading Series (2020) and The Road Theatre Company’s 12th Annual Summer Playwrights Festival (2021). Waiting for Godínez was also a semi-finalist in the 2021 Blue Ink Play Award sponsored by American Blues Theater.

Now bitten by the playwriting bug, Daniel searched for another project. Last fall, he found it in Circle X Theatre Company’s inaugural Evolving Playwrights Group. In applying for this program, Daniel had proposed adapting his novel, The Book of Want, for the stage. He was eventually informed that he had been selected to be one of the five playwrights for this program. Each playwright was assigned a mentor. Daniel’s mentor was the playwright, Donald Jolly.

After many months of virtual evening workshops, Daniel completed his play and now has a Zoom reading set for June 21, 7:00 p.m. Pacific Time. Directed by Dr. Daphnie Sicre of Loyola Marymount University, the play has a cast of 12 actors playing 18 roles. The virtual event is free, but tickets are required and may be obtained by emailing rsvp@circlextheatre.org to reserve your spot.

Daniel agreed to answer a few questions about adapting his novel for the stage.

What was it like to turn your novel, The Book of Want, into a theater production?

It was both exhilarating and intimidating. I loved the characters in my novel, but the book’s structure was not traditional in form. It consisted of interconnected short stories told in various styles. Also, I don’t have an MFA. I am self-taught when it comes to fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and now playwriting. I had to teach myself what a play looks like. But with one play under my belt, I had the belief that I could do this. And with a lot of help from my mentor, fellow playwrights, the actors, and my director, I transformed my novel into what looks like a real play.

The project paired you with a mentor to create “the play you were scared to write.” What were the challenges for you?

Donald Jolly was my assigned mentor. I was so lucky! Donald is so thoughtful and kind, and also a great playwright. Donald understood my apprehension in writing a play that I knew would entail a tremendous amount of thought and creativity. The toughest part of adapting my novel was “killing my little darlings” all over again. That is, some things work in a novel that don’t work in a play. A novel can be very interior and focused on characters’ thoughts. How do I translate that to the stage so that I don’t have a bunch of talking heads and no action? What did I have to abandon? Also, because I had so many characters in the novel, I simply could not keep all of them in the play. So, I had to take about three dozen characters of the novel and trim that number. I ended up with 18 characters, which is larger than many plays, but it works. And the biggest device I created for the play was to take the novel’s late matriarch, Belén—who appears as a spirit through much of the novel—and turn her into the play’s host, if you will. She introduces the scenes with commentary all while smoking a fat, hand-rolled cigarette and drinking coffee. She really holds the play together.

Your writing is infused with wit, surprises, and humor. Are there differences in how humor is depicted on the page from how it comes to the stage?

My novel—as with most of my writing—is deeply steeped in Chicano culture, especially as centered in the urban setting of Los Angeles. I wanted to keep that spirit in the play. And yes, my novel uses a lot of humor which was actually the easier element to translate into a theatrical piece. But the biggest surprises came in working with the actors as they rehearsed for our June 21st virtual reading. When actual people read the lines and interacted with each other, it was easier to see what made people laugh, and what fell flat. I had such generous, smart actors and a great director who helped refine and shape the humor of my play. I owe them so much for their input and observations.

The Book of Want is a family story that explores what it means to be human. What does that look like on the stage?

Beautiful! My actors are magnificent in their interpretation of the text. They bring my play to life, and it would not be much of anything without them.

What are you working on now?

During the pandemic, I had a chance to review a lot of my past writing, and I decided to pull together many of my favorite stories along with a couple new pieces for a collection I’ve titled, How to Date a Flying Mexican: New and Collected Stories. It will be published by the University of Nevada Press sometime next year. The collection includes stories published in different volumes over the years including in books published by the University of Arizona Press and Bilingual Press. I am very excited about it, and I dedicate that book to my late father, Michael Augustine Olivas, who passed away last September. My father had wanted to be a writer, but he was never published in his lifetime. He was very proud that I became a published author even as I juggled a very busy day job as a government attorney. He was also excited that I started to write plays. I think that a lot of his spirit is in my adaptation of The Book of Want for the stage.

‘Desert Feast’ and ‘A Good Map’ Top Picks for Southwest Books of the Year 2021

June 15, 2021

We are thrilled to announce that Carolyn Niethammer‘s A Desert Feast: Celebrating Tucson’s Culinary Heritage, and and Alberto Álvaro Ríos‘s A Good Map of All Things: A Picaresque Novel were selected as top picks for the Pima County Library’s Southwest Books of the Year 2021.

Gregory McNamee: “Tucson is a food city, boasting, as Carolyn Niethammer writes, the best 23 square miles of Mexican food north of Mexico. It is also the first US venue designated as a City of Gastronomy by the United Nations. Why should that be? Niethammer explains: the honor grows from having a food tradition that extends back thousands of years, making use of hundreds of desert plants, and then adding on to it, like so many ingredients in a good bowl of cocido, elements from many other food traditions and cultures. We can eat food from just about every corner of the world here, and we’ve made it part of an almost inexhaustible culinary lexicon. You’ll want to try Niethammer’s carefully curated recipes—and develop a greener thumb by growing ingredients yourself and a broadened geography by visiting the growers and chefs she highlights. Every Southwestern city—every city, period—needs a book like hers, and it’s Tucson’s good fortune to have this.

From Helene Woodhams: “A small town nestled in the Pimería Alta of northern Mexico is home to folks as warmly engaging as they are idiosyncratic in this delightful novel by award-winning poet and author Alberto Álvaro Ríos. Midway through the 20th century, modern ways have just begun to creep into lives long accustomed to swaying in time to the rhythms of tradition, and as a result the local public science society has few members. Far from mundane, the simplicity of the town’s everyday-ness is rendered exquisite in Ríos’s able hands: love emerges and endures, faith is uncompromising, and a good day is one in which nothing much happens. The characters glide in and out of each other’s orbit, weaving their individual stories into a communal chronicle. The narrative is particularly elegant, marked by a poetic charm that makes this memorable work both a comfort and a joy to read–but this is not surprising, coming as it does from Arizona’s first Poet Laureate.

Carolyn Niethammer’s ‘Desert Feast’ Receives 2021 Independent Publisher Book Award

June 14, 2021

We are thrilled to announce that University of Arizona Press author Carolyn Niethammer‘s recent title, A Desert Feast: Celebrating Tucson’s Culinary Heritage, placed in the 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards with a Silver for Best Regional Non-Fiction in the in the West-Mountain regional category.

A Desert Feast tells the expansive story of Tucson foodways, and why the desert city of Tucson became America’s first UNESCO City of Gastronomy. White Sonora wheat, tepary beans, and criollo cattle steaks make Tucson’s cuisine unique. In A Desert Feast, you’ll see pictures of kids learning to grow food at school, and you’ll meet the farmers, small-scale food entrepreneurs, and chefs who are dedicated to growing and using heritage foods. It’s fair to say, “Tucson tastes like nowhere else.”

Open Arizona Offers Nine More Classic Titles as Open Access

June 14, 2021

Nine new open access titles are now available in Open Arizona, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Selected by an advisory board of scholars and community members, the new additions include Empire of Sand, Friars Soldiers and Reformers, and Impounded Peoples.

The nine new titles round out the collection of books funded by Mellon, bringing the total number of works published in Open Arizona to thirty-two. The project has also published six original essays, which provide contemporary commentary on the once-out-of-print works now re-published in Open Arizona. The essays are also available as Open Access works. Three more essays will be published in July.

The new books include:

Empire of Sand
The Seri Indians and the Struggle for Spanish Sonora, 1645-1803
Thomas E. Sheridan
This is a documentary history of Spanish attempts to convert, control, and ultimately annihilate the Seris. These papers of religious, military, and government officials attest to the Seris’ resilience in the face of numerous Spanish attempts to conquer them and remove them from their lands. Thomas Sheridan’s introduction puts the documents in perspective and clarify their significance. In a superb analysis of contact history, Sheridan shows through these documents that Spaniards and Seris understood one another well, and it was their inability to tolerate each other’s radically different societies and cultures that led to endless conflict. By skillfully weaving the documents into a coherent narrative of Spanish-Seri interaction, he has produced a compelling account of empire and resistance that speaks to anthropologists, historians, and all readers who take heart in stories of resistance to oppression.

Friars, Soldiers, and Reformers
Hispanic Arizona and the Sonora Mission Frontier 1767-1856
John L. Kessell
The Franciscan mission San José de Tumacácori and the perennially undermanned presidio Tubac become John L. Kessell’s windows on the Arizona–Sonora frontier in this colorful documentary history. His fascinating view extends from the Jesuit expulsion to the coming of the U.S. Army. This authoritative chronicle offers an engrossing picture of the continually threatened mission frontier. Reformers championing civil rights for mission Indians time and again challenged the friars’ “tight-fisted paternalistic control” over their wards. Expansionists repeatedly saw their plans dashed. Frairs, Soldiers, and Reformers brings into sharp focus the long, blurry period between Jesuit Sonora and Territorial Arizona.

History of the Triumphs of Our Holy Faith amongst the Most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World
Andrés Pérez de Ribas
Contributors: Daniel T. Reff, Maureen Ahern, and Richard K. Danford
Considered by historian Herbert E. Bolton to be one of the greatest books ever written in the West, Andrés Pérez de Ribas’s history of the Jesuit missions provides unusual insight into Spanish and Indian relations during the colonial period in Northern New Spain. First published in Madrid in 1645, it traces the history of the missions from 1591 to 1643 and includes letters from Jesuit annual reports and other correspondence, much of which has never been found or cataloged in historical archives. Daniel T. Reff, Maureen Ahern, and Richard K. Danford have prepared the first complete, scholarly, and fully annotated edition of this important work in English.

Impounded People
Japanese-Americans in the Relocation Centers
Edward H. Spicer, Asael T. Hansen, Katherine Luomala, and Marvin K. Opler
This final report of the War Relocation Authority, written in 1946 describes the growth and changes in the community life and how attitudes of Japanese-American relocatees and WRA administrators evolved, adjusted, and affected one another on political, social, and psychological levels.

Northern New Spain
A Research Guide
Thomas C. Barnes, Thomas H. Naylor, and Charles W. Polzer
This research guide was first concieved to fulfill multiple needs of the research team of the Documentary Relations of the Southwest (DRSW) project at the Arizona State Museum. In performing research tasks, it became evident that reference material was scattered throughout scores of books and monographs. A single complete source book was simply not available. Hence, the editors of the DRSW project compiled this guide. The territory under study comprises all of northern Mexico in colonial times.

Pedro de Rivera and the Military Regulations for Northern New Spain, 1724-1729
A Documentary History, Volume I, 1570-1700
Edited by Thomas H. Naylor and Charles W. Polzer
Philip V ordered an inspection of the presidios in the northern provinces, which resulted in the reglamento of 1729. The study was done and documented by Pedro de Rivera Villalon. Includes Rivera’s report to the Viceroy of New Spain, the Reglamento of Havana , the inspection, Alvarez Barreiro’s map and descriptions. The documents are presented in their original Spanish and in translation, provide a detailed background by which modern scholars can better assess the status and role of Spain’s military outposts


The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain
A Documentary History, Volume I, 1570-1700
Edited by Thomas H. Naylor and Charles W. Polzer
Reports, orders, journals, and letters of military officials trace frontier history through the Chicimeca War and Peace (1576-1606), early rebellions in the Sierra Madre (1601-1618), mid-century challenges and realignment (1640-1660), and northern rebellions and new presidios (1681-1695).

The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain
A Documentary History, Volume Two, Part One: The Californias and Sinaloa-Sonora, 1700-1765
Edited by Charles W. Polzer and Thomas E. Sheridan
The two-part second volume looks at the Spanish expansion as occurring in four north-south corridors that carried the main components of social and political activity. Divided geographically, materials in this book (part 1) relate to the two westernmost corridors. Covering Sinaloa and Sonora, the mainland of the west coast of New Spain, records in the book reveal how the Sinaloa coastal forces differed from those in the interior and how they were depended upon for protection in the northern expansion, both civil and missionary. Because documents on the presidios in northern New Spain are vast in number and varied in content, these selections are meant to provide for the reader or researcher a framework around which more elaborate studies might be constructed.


The Presidio and Militia on the Northern Frontier of New Spain

A Documentary History, Volume Two, Part Two: The Central Corridor and the Texas Corridor, 1700-1765
Edited by Diana Hadley, Thomas H. Naylor, and Mardith K. Schuetz-Miller
Joining an acclaimed multivolume work funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, this volume stand alone in their translation and publication of a wide variety of documents that describe the Spanish exploration and conquest of what is now the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. The presidial system of northern New Spain’s Central and Texas Corridor was an evolving institution used for exploration, military presence and defense against foreign powers, local militia duty, mission support, personal service, and penal obligations. The new volume, which covers parts of what is now Texas, New Mexico, and Mexico, includes letters, diaries, judicial papers, military reports, and interrogations. Difficult for researchers to access and sometimes to decipher, the records are presented in Spanish and in English translation, annotated and introduced by the volume editors.

NAISA 2021: New & Recent Indigenous Studies Titles

June 9, 2021

Hello, virtual NAISA attendees! We are excited to share our new and recent Indigenous studies titles with you, and we think you’ll enjoy our conference discount as well. From now until July 15, 2021, use the code AZNAISA21 at checkout to receive 40% off all titles, plus free U.S. shipping. We hope to see you all again at a future NAISA conference.

If you have any questions about our publishing program, please visit this page. Alternatively, please contact our Editor-in-Chief, Kristen Buckles, at kbuckles@uapress.arizona.edu or our Senior Editor, Allyson Carter, at acarter@uapress.arizona.edu. If you have questions about course adoptions, please visit this page and/or send an email to shicks@uapress.arizona.edu.

“This collection is essential to American literature and should be required for anyone studying American, First Nations, or world literature.”—Joy Harjo, U.S. Poet Laureate

Watch an incredible book release celebration for The Diné Reader here, which features many of the contributors. Then, read a Publishers Weekly review of the book here, and read an excerpt from the book here.

Becoming Hopi is a comprehensive look at the history of the people of the Hopi Mesas as it has never been told before, and is the product of more than fifteen years of collaboration between tribal and academic scholars.

Watch a book trailer for Becoming Hopi on the book’s web page to learn more.

A Coalition of Lineages by Duane Champagne and Carole Goldberg shows how the experience of the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians is an instructive model for scholars and provides a model for multicultural tribal development that may be of interest to recognized and nonrecognized Indian nations in the United States and elsewhere.

From the day he was born, Federico Jiménez Caballero was predicted to be a successful man. So, how exactly did a young boy from Tututepec, Oaxaca, become a famous Indigenous jewelry artist and philanthropist in Los Angeles? Federico tells the remarkable story of willpower, curiosity, hard work, and passion coming together to change one man’s life forever.

Watch a recorded book release event here, in which Federico recounts many details from his remarkable life.

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.

Carrying the Burden of Peace weaves together stories of Indigenous life, love, eroticism, pain, and joy to map the contours of diverse, empowered, and non-dominant Indigenous masculinities. It is from here that a more balanced world may be pursued.

This book was co-published in collaboration with the University of Regina Press.

A baffling museum murder that appears to be the work of twisted human killers results in an unexpected and violent confrontation with powerful shape-shifters for Choctaw detective Monique Blue Hawk. Blending tribal beliefs and myths into a modern context, The Hatak Witches continues the storyline of Choctaw cosmology and cultural survival that are prominent in Devon A. Mihesuah’s award-winning novel, The Roads of My Relations.

Read a Publisher’s Weekly review of the book here, then read an interview with Devon Mihesuah here. Sign up for the virtual book release event here!

Indigenous Women and Violence offers an intimate view of how settler colonialism and other structural forms of power and inequality created accumulated violences in the lives of Indigenous women. The chapters in this book are engaged, feminist, collaborative, and activism focused, conveying powerful messages about the resilience of Indigenous women in the face of violence and systemic oppression.

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.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

Revitalization Lexicography 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.

Horsefly Dress is a meditation on the experience and beauty of suffering. Rich in the imagery of autumnal foliage, migrating birds, and frozen landscapes, Heather Cahoon’s collection calls forth the sensory experience of grief and metamorphosis. The transformative powers associated with the human experience of loss belong to the past, present, and future, as do the traditional Salish-Pend d’Oreille stories that create the backbone of these intricate poems.

Watch a recorded virtual book release with Heather Cahoon here, then read her interview with Poetry Northwest here, and her interview with us here.

Narrating Nature opens up dialogue that counters traditional conservation narratives. It offers conservation efforts that not only include people as beneficiaries but also demonstrate how they are essential and knowledgeable members of the conservation landscape itself.

Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans documents how and why the Indigenous Náayari, Wixárika, O’dam, and Mexicanero peoples took part in the Mexican Revolution as they struggled to preserve their cultures, lands, and political autonomy in the face of civil war, bandit raids, and radical political reform. In unpacking the ambiguities that characterize their participation in this tumultuous period, it sheds light on the inner contradictions of the revolution itself.

Read Nathaniel Morris’ field notes and see some photos from his research here, then watch Nathaniel Morris discuss the book with UCLAmericas here.

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.

We are so thrilled that Whale Snow won the 2020 AAG Meridian Award! Read an interview with author Chie Sakakibara here.

La Raza Cosmética examines postrevolutionary identity construction as a project of settler colonialism that at once appropriated and erased indigeneity. In its critique of Indigenous representation, it also shows how Indigenous women strategically engaged with and resisted these projects as they played out in beauty pageants, films, tourism, art, and other realms of popular culture.

Read the introduction here.

Spiral to the Stars offers a critical and concrete map for community making that leverages Mvskoke way-finding tools of energy, kinship, knowledge, power, and spaces. It is must-have book for community organizers, radical pedagogists, and anyone wishing to empower and advocate for their community.

If you are attending the virtual NAISA conference, there will be a live roundtable about Spiral to the Stars at 1:00 p.m. EDT.

We are thrilled that Spiral to the Stars won the 2020 Beatrice Medicine Award! Read an excerpt from the book here.

Update from Bears Ears: Summer 2021

June 7, 2021

In 2018 we published the book Voices from Bears Ears by Rebecca Robinson with photographs by Stephen E. Strom. The book captures the passions of the debate that led to the creation of Bears Ears National Monument, a land of unsurpassed natural beauty and deep historical significance. The story of this place reflects the cultural crosscurrents that roil our times: maintaining tradition and culture in the face of change, healing the pain of past injustices, creating shared futures, and protecting and preserving lands for future generations. Today author Rebecca Robinson provides an update.

By Rebecca Robinson

It’s been four years since former President Barack Obama established Bears Ears National Monument, and a new chapter in the ongoing debate over the future of a sacred landscape has begun. Here’s what you need to know about all things Bears Ears as the Biden administration prepares to make key decisions about its future.

Where is Bears Ears?

Bears Ears National Monument is located in southeast Utah, not far from the “four corners” where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona meet. Encompassing 1.35 million acres of public land managed by the federal government, and named for twin buttes visible for 60 miles in every direction, Bears Ears is adjacent to the Navajo Nation and Ute Mountain Ute tribal lands, and contains the ancestral homelands of the Hopi, Zuni, Ute Indian Tribe, and other Pueblo tribes. Their cultural and spiritual connection to the landscape is profound; to them, the land is sacred.

Descendants of Mormon pioneers who were the first Anglo settlers in the region also call Bears Ears country home, and similarly feel a strong spiritual attachment to the land their Heavenly Father called them to settle and steward. 

Why was Bears Ears National Monument established?

The Bears Ears region has long been eyed for protection by conservationists drawn to its natural wonders and archaeologists who view the region as historically significant due to the abundance of Indigenous cultural resources: stone structures, tools, pottery, and petroglyphs documenting more than a millennium of human habitation. 

The region’s Indigenous peoples have always had a strong interest in protecting this land, which they have called home since time immemorial. But it was not until the formation of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition in 2015 that Native American Tribes successfully petitioned a presidential administration to protect their sacred lands. The Coalition’s proposal laid the foundation for the national monument established by Obama in December 2016, just before he was succeeded as President by Donald J. Trump.

Dark Canyon Aerial by Steve Strom

What happened to Bears Ears during the Trump administration?

Following the establishment of Bears Ears, a small but vocal group of local residents (mostly Anglo, many Mormon pioneer descendants) and key members of Utah’s state and Congressional delegation (all Republican) lobbied the Trump administration to reduce or abolish the monument. In their view, Obama’s establishing the monument using the Antiquities Act – an executive order, as opposed to legislation – was a prime example of federal overreach that would devastate the local economy by preventing drilling and mining on monument land. 

Other locals and advocates nationwide applauded Obama’s decision, viewing it as a victory for the Tribes and the environment and an opportunity to invest in an economic future based on outdoor recreation instead of mineral extraction.

The opponents had Trump’s ear, however, and in December 2017, Trump reduced Bears Ears by 85% and reopened lands protected by Obama to extractive industries. Conservation organizations, recreation companies, and Tribes filed multiple lawsuits, claiming a president does not have the right to reduce a monument created by a predecessor. Those suits are still pending in federal court.

Will anything change now that Joseph R. Biden is president?

While on the campaign trail in 2020, Biden pledged to undo Trump’s “assaults on America’s natural treasures,” including reducing Bears Ears. On his first day in office, Biden signed an executive order directing the new Secretary of the Interior to conduct a review of Trump’s monument reductions and recommend actions Biden can take. 

Who is the new Interior Secretary?

In March 2021, the Senate confirmed former New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland (D) to lead the Interior Department. Haaland, who is from the Pueblos of Laguna and Jemez, is the first-ever Indigenous Interior Secretary. 

Her appointment would seem to bode well for Bears Ears. Through her past legislative work and in public statements, she has sent a clear message that she is and will continue to be a strong advocate for Native-led efforts to protect and steward public lands.

Last month, Haaland visited southeast Utah and spoke with residents of communities adjacent to Bears Ears about their thoughts, concerns, and visions for the future of the monument. She is expected to make a recommendation to Biden in the coming months.

The Bears Ears Coalition underscored the significance of Haaland’s appointment:

“Historically, the [Interior Department] has maintained a tumultuous and painful relationship with Native peoples. As such, uplifting an Indigenous Pueblo woman to lead in this role is a monumental moment for Indian Country.”

Bears Ears Aerial by Steve Strom

What about the opposition?

Many of Utah’s Republican state and Congressional leaders oppose undoing Trump’s actions, and even want to pass legislation preventing any future president from using the Antiquities Act to establish national monuments in Utah.  

However, all signs point to the Biden administration restoring and perhaps expanding the original boundaries—and a resounding victory for Bears Ears advocates and Tribes.

Rebecca Robinson is a Portland, Oregon–based writer. Her work has been widely published, and she has received numerous awards for her work in print, radio, and online media.

Cathead Biscuits and the Warmth of Home: An Excerpt from Moveable Gardens

June 4, 2021

Moveable Gardens, edited by Virginia D. Nazarea and Terese Gagnon, highlights itineraries and sanctuaries in an era of massive dislocation, addressing concerns about finding comforting and familiar refuges in the Anthropocene. The worlds of marginalized individuals who live in impoverished rural communities, many Indigenous peoples, and refugees are constantly under threat of fracturing. Yet, in every case, there is resilience and regeneration as these individuals re-create their worlds through the foods, traditions, and plants they carry with them into their new realities.

Below, read an excerpt from contributor Taylor Hosmer’s chapter in Moveable Gardens, titled “The Tale of Cathead Biscuits”.

In most cases, as in my own, southerners never stop to consider why we prefer White Lily over other flours. At first, I staked it all on the traditions and rituals of cross- generational beliefs, but its taste may have even more to do with the cultural, regional, and historical connotations. To be considered a cathead, a biscuit must have a crisp crust and a soft inside. Soft winter wheat has been used to achieve this most desired effect. Since the beginning of the cathead, White Lily has been passed down as the type of flour one uses. Years have passed, and few other flours have found themselves embedded in southern biscuit ideals. Expectations of how a biscuit should look and taste have led to a strict dedication to soft red winter wheat. Ultimately, what may have started off as a regional and historical identity soon ingrained its importance as traditional and cultural markers as well. White Lily has undoubtedly had a role in producing and reproducing southern foodways as a hallmark ingredient that has defined what a biscuit should be.

Without fail the cathead’s taste of place has brought the warmth of my home to me time and time again. In college and far from home, I have often found myself lost in the present moment and at times prone to forgetting connections to my roots. Despite this, no true difficulty presents itself during my efforts to bring forth the warmth of home when I am assisted by a fresh biscuit. That being said, it cannot be just any biscuit. Like champagne, it must meet the requirement to be called a cathead. If it is not a true cathead, it cannot evoke the many rich meanings that are wrapped up inside each bite, and it would not have the power to bring forth the sense of home across hundreds of miles to wherever I might be. A true cathead is, for me, a portable sanctuary in moments such as these. It can transform any reality into the likeness of my home.

With every smell, taste, and texture consumed, memories and feelings present themselves. It is funny to think of a biscuit no larger than a cat’s head as a boundless haven. But it has, without fail, provided a direct link to my home each time I have caught myself drifting away. A central feature in the memories it evokes, the biscuit is vital in the moment of recall. Without it, certain memories may have been forgotten, and feelings may have faded. Instead, it has allowed connections to be made between the people and places associated with it, creating an integrated system of meaning that is steady and at the same time ever changing. Layers of meaning can be added with every new memory made, and even old memories can be altered in light of something newly learned. The cathead biscuit, however, will always be the catalyst for me when I am looking to produce this very particular meaning system.

Cathead biscuits represent a tradition that was a constant throughout my childhood. My brother and I spent every summer roaming the land around Mema’s house, accompanied by the smells and tastes of biscuits. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you could easily claim your fill of biscuit without any true difficulty. Whether we were determined explorers or nature survivalists, we would always give in to our hunger when Mema yelled out “fresh biscuits!” Knapsacks in hand, we would fill them with all sorts of treasures. This, of course, included the delicious golden rounds, which would later be eaten deep inside the woods. We would strike off into the wilderness with our renewed supplies to conduct feasts at our many secret fortresses and hideouts. As children, we associated biscuits with long summer days spent at Mema’s, early morning breakfasts with our cousins, and the knowledge that this food could always fill whatever need we had that day. The biscuit contains within it memories we draw on with each bite taken. In an instant I can travel through space and time to find myself a young child again sitting at my mema’s table. With biscuit in hand, I can close my eyes and hear the laughter of cousins, while the soothing warmth of nostalgia floods my senses. As Sutton explains in his book Remembrance of Repasts (2001), food is so much more than simply a source of energy. Food can be symbolic, and in that symbolism, it can contain countless layers of meaning. Our relationship to the food we eat reflects our cultural beliefs, regional preferences, and socio-economic status, among other things. Most importantly, it can provide us with a link to our past.

***

Taylor Hosmer hails from a small town in southern Georgia. She is an anthropology and geography major at the University of Georgia, with a focus on disaster management. Her ethnobiography takes a new and more personal approach to the history of resilience. Her time spent volunteering at UGArden and William’s Farm, two local community gardens in Athens, Georgia, has taught her that knowing one’s food can have powerful positive impacts from the community level down to each individual.

Paul E. Minnis Receives the Society of Ethnobiology’s 2021 Distinguished Ethnobiologist Award

May 21, 2021

We are thrilled to announce that University of Arizona Press author Paul E. Minnis is the recipient of the 2021 Distinguished Ethnobiologist Award from the Society of Ethnobiology! The Society of Ethnobiology announces its Distinguished Ethnobiologist award to honor an ethnobiologist who has made outstanding contributions to the field of ethnobiology and advancing the goals of the Society. In recognition of these contributions, the recipient will be awarded a lifetime honorary membership to the Society of Ethnobiology.

Paul E. Minnis (PhD, University of Michigan) is a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma, now living in Tucson, Arizona, where he is a visiting scholar in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. He conducts research on the prehispanic ethnobotany and archaeology of the northwest Mexico and the U.S. Southwest. His recent University of Arizona Press books include Famine Foods: Plants We Eat to Survive and The Prehispanic Ethnobotany of Paquimé and Its Neighbors, which he co-authored with Michael E. Whalen.

Congratulations, Paul!

LASA 2021: Explore Our Latest Latin American Studies Titles and Enjoy a Conference Discount

May 24, 2021

We are excited to be participating in the second virtual LASA congress! Below, browse and learn more about our recent Latin American studies titles. Through 6/15/2021, use the code AZLASA21 for 40% off all titles, including free U.S. shipping.

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, or our Senior Editor Allyson Carter at acarter@uapress.arizona.edu.

By the start of the century, nearly one billion international travelers were circulating the globe annually, placing tourism among the worlds’ most ubiquitous geopolitical encounters. While the COVID-19 pandemic brought the industry to a sudden halt, its geopolitical significance remained. With striking clarity, tourism desires and reinvented mobilities revealed the impermanence of Old World orders as new global alliances were forged. Tourism Geopolitics offers a unique and timely intervention into the growing significance of tourism in geopolitical life as well as the intrinsically geopolitical nature of the tourism industry.

Read an excerpt from the book here, and look at the table of contents on the book’s web page.

Indigenous Women and Violence offers an intimate view of how settler colonialism and other structural forms of power and inequality created accumulated violences in the lives of Indigenous women. The chapters in this book are engaged, feminist, collaborative, and activism focused, conveying powerful messages about the resilience of Indigenous women in the face of violence and systemic oppression.

“Bringing together leading Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, this volume explores the connections between structural, extreme, and everyday violence against Indigenous women across time and borders. It makes important contributions to current debates about gender violence and research methods.”—Rachel Sieder, editor of Demanding Justice and Security: Indigenous Women and Legal Pluralities in Latin America

David Barton Bray has spent more than thirty years researching and studying Mexican community forest enterprises (CFEs). In Mexico’s Community Forest Enterprises he shares the scientific evidence for Mexico’s social and environmental achievements and how, in its most successful manifestations, it became a global model for common-property forest management, sustainable social-ecological systems, and climate change mitigation in developing countries.

Mexico’s Community Forest Enterprises is the culmination of a lifetime of research on how community forests in Mexico are successful and why some of them fail. Bray captures the complexity of Mexican forestry in a masterful way. Amidst all the negative news about global deforestation, Bray makes a compelling case for understanding the stories that we don’t get to hear much on the media, the success of common property regimes in Mexican forests can be a source of hope to the future of community forests.”—José E. Martínez-Reyes, author of Moral Ecology of a Forest: The Nature Industry and Maya Post-Conservation

Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans documents how and why the Indigenous Náayari, Wixárika, O’dam, and Mexicanero peoples took part in the Mexican Revolution as they struggled to preserve their cultures, lands, and political autonomy in the face of civil war, bandit raids, and radical political reform. In unpacking the ambiguities that characterize their participation in this tumultuous period, it sheds light on the inner contradictions of the revolution itself.

Read some field notes from author Nathaniel Morris, complete with stunning photographs, here. Then, watch Morris discuss the book in a recorded virtual book launch event here.

Binational Commons focuses on whether the institutions that presently govern the U.S.-Mexico transborder space are effective in providing solutions to difficult binational problems as they manifest themselves in the borderlands. The volume addresses key binational issues and explores where there are strong levels of institutional governance development, where it is failing, how governance mechanisms have evolved over time, and what can be done to improve it to meet the needs of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in the next decades.

 “This excellent book addresses border governance institutions and documents how dynamic events have outgrown institutional capabilities for governance. Exceptional chapters on institutions and governance that address transportation, data generation, planning, energy, health, security, the environment, and other areas of the border reality make this book essential reading for border students, researchers, and practitioners.”—Paul Ganster, author of The U.S.-Mexican Border Today: Conflict and Cooperation in Historical Perspective

La Raza Cosmética examines postrevolutionary identity construction as a project of settler colonialism that at once appropriated and erased indigeneity. In its critique of Indigenous representation, it also shows how Indigenous women strategically engaged with and resisted these projects as they played out in beauty pageants, films, tourism, art, and other realms of popular culture.

Natasha Varner’s book insightfully traces how nationalists used the female Indigenous body to construct settler colonialism in postrevolutionary Mexico. In the process, it creatively bridges Indigenous studies in the United States and Latin America.”—Rick A. López, author of Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans and the State After the Revolution

Read the book’s introduction here.

Taking us on a journey of remembering and rediscovery, anthropologist Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez shares important insights into his development as a scholar and in so doing the development of the interdisciplinary field of transborder anthropology. Reflections of a Transborder Anthropologist shows how both Vélez-Ibáñez and anthropology have changed and formed over a fifty-year period. Throughout, he has worked to understand how people survive and thrive against all odds. Vélez-Ibáñez has been guided by the burning desire to understand inequality, exploitation, and legitimacy, and, most importantly, to provide platforms for the voiceless to narrate their own histories.

We are thrilled that Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez was honored with the 2020 Franz Boas Award, as well as the inaugural AAHHE Distinguished Author Award. Read an excerpt from the book here, then watch a recording of a virtual book launch and discussion here.

Explore New Titles from the University of Arizona Press Fall 2021 Catalog

May 24, 2021

Here’s a preview of our upcoming Fall 2021 season with the best the University of Arizona Press has to offer, from Latinx poetry, to Indigenous studies, space sciences, as well as the variety of the unique global scholarship the Press has committed to bring to readers worldwide. Tuck in.

Discovering Mars: A History of Observation and Exploration of the Red Planet is a timely epichistory from William Sheehan and Jim Bell. This is an ambitious first draft as the latest chapters continue to be added both by researchers on Earth and our robotic emissaries on and around Mars, including the latest: the Perseverance rover and its Ingenuity helicopter drone, which set down in Mars’s Jezero Crater in February 2021.

In The Beloved Border: Humanity and Hope in a Contested Land, Tucson-based writer Miriam Davidson shares the history of sanctuary and argues that this social movement and others that have originated on the border are vanguards of larger global movements against the mistreatment of migrant workers and refugees, police brutality, and other abuses of human and natural rights. She gives concrete examples of positive ways in which border people are promoting local culture and cross-border solidarity through health care, commerce, food, art, and music. While death and suffering continue to occur, The Beloved Border shows us how the U.S.-Mexico border could be, and in many ways already is, a model for peaceful coexistence worldwide.

Water in the desert, or the current decrease in the Colorado River is what makes Eric Kuhn and John Fleck‘s Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River an important history, as well as a needed message for a desert in the midst of climate change. The book returns this season in paperback detailing the clear evidence that the Colorado River could not sustain ambitious dreaming and planning by decision-makers throughout the twentieth century. Those decision makers knew this, yet continued to make the least sustainable decisions.

Count is a powerful book-length poem from Valerie Martínez that reckons with the heartbreaking reality of climate change. Forty-three sections of myth-gathering, flora and fauna, accounts of climate devastation, personal narratives, witnessing, references to works of eco-art, and evocations of children unfold over the course of the book, creating a deeply nuanced image of the current climate crisis. Central to this vital work of ecopoetry is the idea of counting—counting down to the extinction of a species, counting the wonders of the natural world, counting our way back to the balance that is required to save ourselves from climate destruction.

Mara Pastor is one of the most prominent voices in Puerto Rican poetry. Her new collection Deuda Natal translated by María José Giménez and Anna Rosenwong, is the 2020 Ambroggio Prize winner from the Academy of American Poets. Deuda Natal finds the beauty within vulnerability and the dignity amidst precariousness. Pastor uses the poems in this bilingual collection to highlight the way that fundamental forms of caring for life—and for language—can create a space of poetic decolonization. The poems propose new ways of understanding as they traverse a thematic landscape of women’s labor, the figure of the nomad and immigrant, and the return from economic exile to confront the catastrophic confluence of disaster and disaster capitalism.

The poetry collection, x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación by Raquel Salas Rivera, is the 2018 Ambroggio Prize winner. Written in the early days of the rise of world-wide fascism and the poet’s gender transition, x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación accepts the invitation to push poetic and gender imaginaries beyond the bounds set by nation. In today’s post-disaster Puerto Rico and a world shaped by the recurring waves of an ecological apocalypse, Salas Rivera’s words feel visionary, mapping a decolonizing territory, a body, and identity of both soil and heart. For Salas Rivera, the marks Puerto Rican transness in a world that seeks trans death, denial, and erasure. Instead of justifying his existence, he takes up the flag of illegibility and writes an apocalyptic book that screams into an uncertain future, armed with nothing to lose.

If you’re going to turn to anyone to point you to the best of what Arizona has to offer, David Yetman is the perfect authority. In his new book, Natural Landmarks of Arizona, this celebrated storyteller who has called Arizona home for most of his life shows us how Arizona’s most iconic landmarks were formed millions of years ago and sheds light on the more recent histories of these landmarks as well. These peaks and ranges offer striking intrusions into the Arizona horizon, giving our southwestern state some of the most memorable views, hikes, climbs, and bike rides anywhere in the world. They orient us, they locate us, and they are steadfast through generations.

Baja California’s Coastal Landscapes Revealed: Excursions in Geologic Time and Climate Change, expert geologist and guide Markes E. Johnson‘s third installment on the Gulf of California’s coastal setting. This new title reveals a previously unexplored side to the region’s five-million-year story beyond the fossil coral reefs, clam banks, and prolific beds of coralline algae vividly described in his earlier books. Through a dozen new excursions, in Baja California’s Coastal Landscapes Revealed, Johnson returns to these yet wild shores to share his gradual recognition of another side to the region. Looking closely, Johnson shows us how geology not only helps us look backward but also forward toward an uncertain future.

The Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona is one of the oldest and most respected food banks in America. Sowing the Seeds of Change: The Story of the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, by Seth Schindler, tells its story as a widely recognized leader not simply in providing hunger relief but in attacking the root causes of hunger and poverty through community development, education, and advocacy. In 2018, Feeding America—the national organization of food banks—named it “Food Bank of the Year.” The CFB serves as a model for all nonprofits to follow, no matter their mission.

Daniel D. Arreola‘s Postcards from the Baja California Border: Portraying Townscape and Place, 1900s–1950s, offers 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 in Postcards 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

As a network that claims to represent the nation, NPR asserts unique claims about what it means to be American. In The Sound of Exclusion, by Christopher Chávez, critically examines how National Public Radio conceptualizes the Latinx listener, arguing that NPR employs a number of industry practices that secures its position as a white public space while relegating Latinx listeners to the periphery. These practices are tied to a larger cultural logic. Latinx identity is differentiated from national identity, which can be heard through NPR’s cultivation of an idealized dialect, situating whiteness at its center. By interrogating industry practices, we might begin to reimagine NPR as a public good that serves the broad and diverse spectrum of the American public.

Near Tijuana, Baja California, the autonomous community of Maclovio Rojoas demonstrates what is possible for urban place-based political movements. More than a community, Maclovio Rojas is a women-led social movement that works for economic and political autonomy to address issues of health, education, housing, nutrition, and security. In Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas: Autonomy in the Spaces of Neoliberal Neglect, Michelle Téllez‘s tells the story of this community’s struggle to carve out space for survival and thriving in the shadows of the U.S.-Mexico geopolitical border. These border women both contest and invoke their citizenship as they struggle to have their land rights recognized, and they transform traditional political roles into that of agency and responsibility.

In Drug Wars and Covert Netherworlds: The Transformations of Mexico’s Narco Cartels, sociologist and criminologist James H. Creechan draws on decades of research to paint a much more nuanced picture of the transformation of Mexico’s narco cartels. Creechan details narco cartel history, focusing on the decades since Richard Nixon declared the War on Drugs. With sobering detail, Creechan unravels a web of government dependence, legitimate enterprises, covert connections, and violent in-fighting. He details how drug smuggling organizations have grown into powerful criminal mafias with the complicit involvement of powerful figures in civil society to create covert netherworlds.

Latin American Immigration Ethics advances philosophical conversations and debates about immigration by theorizing migration from the Latin American and Latinx context. Edited by Luis Rubén Díaz Cepeda and Amy Reed-Sandoval, the essays in this book emphasize Latin American and Latinx philosophies, decolonial and feminist theories, and Indigenous philosophies of Latin America, in the pursuit of an immigration ethics. The contributors explore the moral challenges of immigration that either arise within Latin America, or when Latin Americans and Latina/o/xs migrate to and reside within the United States. Uniquely, some chapters focus on south to south migration. Contributors also examine Latina/o/x experiences in the United States, addressing the lacuna of philosophical writing on migration, maternity, and childhood.

Returning Home: Diné Creative Works from the Intermountain Indian School features and contextualizes the creative works of Diné 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. Authors Farina Noelani KingMichael P. Taylor, and  James R. Swensen intend to recover the lived experiences of Native American boarding school students through creative works, student interviews, and scholarly collaboration. It shows the complex agency and ability of Indigenous youth to maintain their Diné culture within the colonial spaces that were designed to alienate them from their communities and customs.

Navigating CHamoru Poetry: Indigeneity, Aesthetics, and Decolonization focuses on Indigenous CHamoru (Chamorro) poetry from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). Poet and scholar Craig Santos Perez brings critical attention to a diverse and intergenerational collection of CHamoru poetry and scholarship. Throughout this book, Perez develops an Indigenous literary methodology called “wayreading” to navigate the complex relationship between CHamoru poetry, cultural identity, decolonial politics, diasporic migrations, and native aesthetics. Perez argues that contemporary CHamoru poetry articulates new and innovative forms of indigeneity rooted in CHamoru customary arts and values, while also routed through the profound and traumatic histories of missionization, colonialism, militarism, and ecological imperialism.

Letras y Limpias: Decolonial Medicine and Holistic Healing in Mexican American Literature is the first book to explore the literary significance of the figure of the curandera within Mexican American literature. Amanda V. Ellis traces the significance of the curandera and her evolution across a variety of genres written by leading Mexican American authors, including Américo Paredes, Rudolfo Anaya, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Manuel Munoz, ire’ne lara silva, and more. Letras y Limpias shows how the figure of the curandera offers us ways to heal that have nothing to do with copays or medical professionals refusing care, and everything to do with honoring the beauty and complexity of any, every, and all humans.

To the modern eye, the architects at Chich’en Itza produced some of the most mysterious structures in ancient Mesoamerica. The purpose and cultural influences behind this architecture seem left to conjecture. The people who created and lived around this stunning site may seem even more mercurial. Near the structure known today as the Great Ball Court and within the interior of the Lower Temple of the Jaguar, a mural depicts a female Mayan astronomer called Ilaj K’uk’il Ek’. In Calculating Brilliance: An Intellectual History of Mayan Astronomy at Chich’en Itz, Gerardo Aldana brings to light the discovery by this Mayan astronomer, and critically reframes science in the pre-Columbian world.

Museum Matters: Making and Unmaking Mexico’s National Collections, traces the emergence, consolidation, and dispersal of this national museum complex by telling the stories of its objects. Objects that have been separated over time are brought back together in this book in order to shed light on the interactions and processes that have forged things into symbols of science, aesthetics, and politics. Edited by Miruna AchimSusan Deans-Smith, and Sandra Rozental, contributors to this volume illuminate how collections came into being or ceased to exist over time, or how objects moved in and out of collections and museum spaces. They explore what it means to move things physically and spatially, as well as conceptually and symbolically.

In Once Upon the Permafrost; Knowing Culture and Climate Change in Siberia, author, anthropologist Susan Alexandra Crate, details her three decades working with Sakha, the Turkic-speaking horse and cattle agropastoralists of northeastern Siberia, Russia. Crate reveals Sakha’s essential relationship with alaas, the foundational permafrost ecosystem of both their subsistence and cultural identity. Sakha know alaas via an Indigenous knowledge system imbued with spiritual qualities. This counters the scientific definition of alaas as geophysical phenomena of limited range. Climate change now threatens alaas due to thawing permafrost, which, entangled with the rural changes of economic globalization, youth out-migration, and language loss, make prescient the issues of ethnic sovereignty and cultural survival.

In Voluntourism and Multispecies Collaboration: Life, Death, and Conservation in the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, anthropologist Keri Vacanti Brondo provides a pioneering theoretical framework that conceptualizes conservation voluntourism as a green industry. Brondo argues that the volunteer tourism industry is the product of coloniality and capitalism that works to produce and sustain an economy of affect while generating inequalities and dispossession. Employing a decolonizing methodology based on landscape assemblage theory, Brondo offers “thinking-like-a-mangrove” to attend to alternative worldings in Utila beyond the hegemonic tourist spectacle–dominated world attached to the volunteer tourism industry. Readers journey through the mangroves and waters alongside voluntourists, iguanas, whale sharks, turtles, lionfish, and islanders to build valuable research experience in environmental management while engaging in affective labor and multispecies relations of care.

More than twenty-five years after the end of apartheid, water access remains a striking reminder of racial inequality in South Africa. This book compellingly argues that in the post-apartheid period inequality has not only been continuously reproduced but also legitimized. In Michela Marcatelli‘s Naturalizing Inequality: Water, Race, and Biopolitics in South Africa, Marcatelli unravels this inequality paradox through an ethnography of water in a rural region of the country. The Waterberg Plateau is a space where agriculture, conservation, and extraction coexist and intersect. Marcatelli examines the connections between neoliberalism, race, and the environment by showing that racialized property relations around water and land are still recognized and protected by the post-apartheid state to sustain green growth.

The Archaeology of Refuge and Recourse: Coast Miwok Resilience and Indigenous Hinterlands in Colonial California explores the dual practices of refuge and recourse among Indigenous peoples of California. From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, Indigenous Coast Miwok communities in California persisted throughout multiple waves of colonial intrusion. But to what ends? Applying theories of place and landscape, social memory, and mobility to the analysis of six archaeological sites, Tsim D. Schneider argues for a new direction in the archaeology of colonialism. This book offers insight about the critical and ongoing relationships Indigenous people maintained to their homelands despite colonization and systematic destruction of their cultural sites.

Field Notes: David DeJong Shares Images from the Florence-Casa Grande Project

May 18, 2021

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans assumed the land and water resources of the West were endless. Water was as vital to newcomers to Arizona’s Florence and Casa Grande valleys as it had always been to the Pima Indians, who had been successfully growing crops along the Gila River for generations when the white settlers moved in. In Diverting the Gila: The Pima Indians the Florence-Casa Grande Project, 1916-1928 author David DeJong explores the complex web of tension, distrust, and political maneuvering to divide and divert the scarce waters of the Gila River.

Today the author shares photos and extended captions that help highlight the history in Diverting the Gila.

Courtesy Museum of Casa Grande

New England Grading Machine. In 1912 the Casa Grande Valley Water Users Association (CGVWUA) purchased a New England Grading Machine for the purpose of excavating the channel of the Casa Grande Canal (present-day Florence-Casa Grande Canal). The CGVWUA was formed in 1911 to construct a canal parallel and upstream to the Florence Canal to convey water to the small agricultural town of Casa Grande. The task was daunting and the CGVWUA managed to construct but half of the canal by 1915. The project failed to be completed and the canal was purchased by the United States for $50,000 and incorporated into the new Indian Irrigation Service constructed and operated Florence-Casa Grande Project (FCGP) to convey water to the Gila River Indian Community and non-tribal growers in the Florence-Casa Grande Valley.

Courtesy of Pinal County Historical Museum in Florence

The men of the Florence-Casa Grande Project. The FCGP was authorized in May 1916 but construction did not begin until 1921. In the post-World War One years, the Arizona economy slowed, leaving many people out of work. Local towns encouraged the Indian Service to begin construction as soon as possible to provide employment, but because a landowners’ agreement took time to negotiate, construction was delayed. When work commenced in January 1921, Charles Olberg and his Indian Service engineers hired over 600 employees to construct the diversion dam. Most of the workers were unskilled men earning $2.50 a day while skilled workers were paid $3.00 to $5.00 per day. Nearly all of these men are lost to antiquity but the project they constructed continues to serve its purpose today.

Courtesy of Pinal County Historical Museum in Florence

Entire families lived at the diversion dam site. While most of the men who worked at the Florence diversion dam were single, many brought their families. The construction camp at the diversion dam (present-day Ashurst Hayden Diversion Dam) became a small city, complete with a water and sewer system, a telegram and post office, fire department, dry-goods store and a school. Most of the facilities were simple shade structure or tents, with many of the men sleeping outside under ramadas. The engineers and other skilled workers live in more permanent facilities, including chief engineer Charles Olberg who lived in a three-room cottage on site. Olberg’s wife Eloise was the only death, as she died of a stroke in October 1921.

Courtesy of Pinal County Historical Museum in Florence

Fresno scrapers. Most of the earthwork at the diversion dam was conducted by four-team Fresno scrapers. Men providing their own horses were paid $20 per month. Scores of locals hired out their wagons (paid $10 to $15 per month) and teams to move rock, cement and other supplies brought in by the Arizona Eastern Railroad, seen on the north side of the Gila River. Challenges with moving cement and dynamite from the railhead on the north side of the river to the south side occurred when the river flooded, as it did on July 4, 1921. A pedestrian bridge was constructed over the river for men but supplies from the north side remained stranded until the river flow diminished.

Courtesy of Pinal County Historical Museum in Florence

Intake Gates at the diversion dam. The dam across the river was an East Indian Weir that “floated” on the sandy surface of the riverbed. The nine intake gates (right on photo) were located on the south side of the river and were designed to skim water from the river while allowing sediment to go downstream. The design worked poorly as the front of the intake gates was continually choked with sediment. Construction of the vertical wall leading to the top of the inlet gates and the dam tenders house to the south (left side of photo) was without any safety features. Concrete mixed on the north side of the river was conveyed across the river on a narrow gauge trestle with three-quarter cubic yard cars pulled by “dinkies,” or small Ford motor-powered engines. Amazingly, no one was injured during the pouring of the cement walls.

Courtesy of Pinal County Historical Museum in Florence

Completed Florence (Ashurst-Hayden) Diversion Dam. The diversion dam consists of an upstream articulated slab of concrete 142 feet wide and 396 feet long and two to five feet thick. Then there was the “floating” weir 396 feet across the river with a downstream 70 feet wide by 396 feet long concrete slab and talus rock blanket to protect the structure from eroding. Over six hundred men poured the slab working in three shifts 24-hours a day, completing it in twelve days. A gasoline engine provided the power to operate the hydraulic gates inside the inlet structure at the center of the photo. A small building behind the dam housed the engine and supplies. A dam tender’s house was later constructed on the hill to the right of the engine room.

Courtesy of Keith Dindinger

The Dindinger family. Paul Dindinger was the dam tender at the Florence Diversion Dam. He and his wife Olga resided at the dam until the late 1940s. Grandsons Keith (5) and Lee (1) were born in Florence and grew up around the dam and headworks of the Florence-Casa Grande Canal.  Keith now resides in San Diego and travels to the site regularly. The dam tenders house was abandoned in the early 1980s. It was burned to the ground in 2004. Ashurst-Hayden Diversion Dam was rehabilitated under the authority of the Arizona Water Settlements Act of 2004. While no longer requiring a dam tender on site, the dam is still an integral part of the San Carlos Irrigation Project.

David H. DeJong holds MA and PhD degrees in American Indian policy studies from the University of Arizona. He has published seven books, including Stealing the Gila, as well as dozens of articles about federal Indian policy. DeJong is director of the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project, a construction project funded by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and designed to deliver water—from the Central Arizona Project, the Gila River, and other sources—to the Gila River Indian Reservation.

Mexican Waves Awarded Honorable Mention from LASA’s México Section

May 13, 2021

We are thrilled to announce that historian Sonia Robles‘s book, Mexican Waves: Radio Broadcasting Along Mexico’s Northern Border, 1830-1950, received an honorable mention for the Best Book in the Humanities 2021 award from the Latin American Studies Association’s México section.

Mexican Waves is the fascinating history of how borderlands radio stations shaped the identity of an entire region as they addressed the needs of the local population and fluidly reached across borders to the United States. In so doing, radio stations created a new market of borderlands consumers and worked both within and outside the constraints of Mexican and U.S. laws.

Watch: Paul Minnis with Nancy Turner Discuss ‘Famine Foods’

May 11, 2021

The University of Arizona Press celebrated the launch of Famine Food: Plants We Eat to Survive, by Paul E. Minnis on Wednesday, May 5. Minnis is the author or editor of fourteen books, and is a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma. Now living in Tucson, Arizona, he is a visiting scholar in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. The virtual event included author Nancy Turner, an ethnobotanist and Distinguished Professor Emerita with the School of Environmental Studies, University of Victoria, Canada.

In conversation, Turner asked Minnis about his book, inspirations, his work as an ethnobotonist, and of course, Famine Foods, which includes fourteen short case studies that examine the use of alternative foods in human societies throughout the world, from hunter-gatherers to major nations. When environmental catastrophes, war, corrupt governments, annual hunger seasons, and radical agricultural policies have threatened to starve populations, cultural knowledge and memories of food shortages have been crucial to the survival of millions of people.

Excerpt: Tourism Geopolitics and Assemblages of Infrastructure, Affect, and Imagination

May 4, 2021

By the start of the century, nearly one billion international travelers were circulating the globe annually, placing tourism among the worlds’ most ubiquitous geopolitical encounters. While the COVID-19 pandemic brought the industry to a sudden halt, its geopolitical significance remained. With striking clarity, tourism desires and reinvented mobilities revealed the impermanence of Old World orders as new global alliances were forged. While scholars have critically examined tourism in the contexts of development, cultural change, and environmental crisis, much less attention has been paid to the geopolitical drivers and consequences of the world’s largest industry. In Tourism Geopolitics contributors home in on tourism and its geopolitical entanglements by examining its contemporary affects, imaginaries, and infrastructures. It develops the concept of tourism geopolitics to reveal the growing centrality of tourism in geopolitical life, as well as the geopolitical nature of the tourism encounter. Today we offer a brief excerpt from the introduction:

Introduction by Mary MostafanezhadMatilde Córdoba Azcárate, and Roger Norum

In May 2019, a fire ravaged the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, one of Western civilization’s most iconic cultural symbols and most visited tourist sites. Within a matter of hours, the blaze turned parts of the historic monument into smoking cinders. Exposing cracks in the French capital’s global image as the “City of

Lights,” the fire also threatened to shake the monument’s signification of modernity. Reactions across the globe were immediate and vocal. International headlines accentuated grief and shock over the potential loss of this quintessential Western cultural asset. Commenters described how the fire left “a hole in the heart of Paris” and how “watching Notre Dame burn, the entire world was in pain.” Within a few days, private individuals—primarily French citizens and international celebrities—had donated more than $1 billion to the building’s reconstruction. Many of these donations were made in the name of the “spiritual, cultural, and historical treasure from Paris to the world,” in the words of Salma Hayek.

One year prior to the Notre-Dame fire, the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro, the largest natural history museum in Latin America, also was caught in a blaze. International reactions to the losses incurred in the conflagration and investments in reconstruction were fewer and markedly less enthusiastic than those that accompanied the Notre-Dame case. The fire was described as “an announced tragedy.” Although the loss for cultural heritage has been estimated to be more extensive than at Notre-Dame, the Brazilian building has yet to be restored and the search for remnants of historical objects lost to the blaze continues amid governmental cuts to science and education, not to mention broad national and international neglect. Comparing the aftermath of the two fires, Samuel Breslow notes that “the loss of Latin American cultural heritage simply does not capture the world’s attention the way the loss of Western European cultural heritage does.”5 The disparate reactions of the international community to these two fires reveal the contested geographies and political nature of what counts as heritage, for whom, and how. It also speaks to how tourism mobilizes or precludes the formation of collective and state responses to disaster.

Narratives and institutional actions like those surrounding the burning of emblematic religious, national, and global tourism infrastructures such as the Notre-Dame cathedral are mediated by historically and geographically informed power relations. An investigation into tourism infrastructures and the discourses, representations, and affects that constitute them reveals the geographically uneven socioeconomic terrain upon which cities, buildings, symbols, and affects are made meaningful and circulate; it also underscores how global tourism reifies differences between the Global North and Global South, rich and poor, and culture and nature. A quick glance at the geography of UNESCO-designated world heritage sites reveals just such distinctions. The formation of tourism’s narratives is contingent on myriad power relations that are historically and geographically mediated. Tourism narratives intersect with tourism infrastructures in ways that are subject to symbolic and affective transformation and contestation. In exceptional circumstances, tourism sites such as island archipelagos (see Mimi Sheller, this volume) might become geopolitical experiments of alternative political action. Yet, more often than not, in the aftermath of destruction and crisis, when the window opens for the expression of alternative narratives, hegemonic discourses are reconsolidated in ways that stabilize existing structures of power and geopolitical orders.

Read the Full Introduction

Publisher’s Weekly Reviews ‘The Diné Reader’

April 27, 2021

Publisher’s Weekly, an international news platform for book publishing and bookselling, recently reviewed The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature.

This seminal anthology is unprecedented. It showcases the breadth, depth, and diversity of Diné creative artists and their poetry, fiction, and nonfiction prose. The Diné Reader 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.

From Publisher’s Weekly:

“Navajo artist and writer Esther Belin and her coeditors compile a marvelously comprehensive anthology of Navajo literature, comprising a mix of familiar authors and bright new voices. Readers will come away with a sense of the tremendous diversity in a seemingly small corner of the Native literary world.”

Read the entire review here.

Salvador González: Cuba’s Arts Defender and Believer, Recently Died in Havana

April 27, 2021

In Tom Miller’s Cuba, Hot and Cold, the University of Arizona Press author wrote about Cuban life, but he also included a reverential revival in Afro-Cuban arts, music, and community led by Salvador Gonzalez.

The artist, cultural promoter, and manager of the Callejón de Hamel Community Socio-Cultural Project in the Havana neighborhood of Cayo Hueso, passed away recently in Havana, leaving a remarkable legacy on Cuban culture, essentially in the visual arts and traditional popular culture, to which he was closely linked until his last days, according to TeleSUR. You can read their story on Gonzalez here.

To better understand this Cuban arts defender and believer, read the following excerpt from Miller’s book:

On the Street

No slice of Cuban life is less understood by outsiders than its African-based religions—not its athletic prowess nor its government’s colossal miscalculations nor the power of a machete during the sugar harvest nor its devotion to José Martí. You could visit here for weeks and not encounter Afro-Cuban religion, go home, and be none the wiser. But it’s here, it’s in the air, people wear it on their bodies, you can hear it if you listen, you can see it if you want. It’s even in my family, and I’m not confident I entirely understand it either.

Until recent decades polite society considered Afro-Cuban religions something to dismiss, practiced only by la chusma—the lowest of the low—tucked away out of sight. Gradually, however, the religions surfaced—their music assertive, their rituals open, their societies and deities accessible to all. Brought to the Caribbean by slaves and prac-ticed under cover of Catholicism, these religions now draw domes-tic respectability and worldwide attention. The easiest way to catch a comfortable glimpse of them is on a small side street in Cayo Hueso, a working-class barrio of Centro Habana. On Sundays neighbors start gathering on Callejón de Hamel before noon, joined by habaneros from other parts of town and, now, a considerable turnout of visitors from abroad.

Since 1990 Hamel has grown from an unkempt back alley to a site for impressionistic Afro-Cuban art, music, dance, and drumming. Salvador González deserves credit for this, beginning the transition when he was in his forties with a block-long mural overpowering in theme, presence, and execution. Spinning smoke, water, limbs, eyes, and roots surround feathers, goddesses, and serpents. Yemayá and Ochun, both deities of the Yoruba sect, entwine; others from the Abakuá dominate adjoining segments of the mural. The most recent addition is a thematic paint job on the back sides of the run-down five-story apartment houses that line the callejón, all the way up to the rooftop water tanks hundreds of feet above street level.

The Jovellanos, a musical group from Matanzas, had already begun when I arrived. They played on the sweltering street, shaded beneath corrugated tin. The group’s four drummers could be heard blocks away, and soon the crowd grew to two hundred sweaty onlookers, mesmerized by the full-throttle beat as first the singers chanted Yoruba and other incantations, then danced a wild yet precise ritual whose increasing momentum summoned just the right frenzy. The first number was a soft yambú in which a couple acted out in slow motion a rooster and his hen circling and pecking, lunging and leaning. It was meant to be erotic and provocative, and it was both. Next came a faster rumba with rattling maracas that crescendoed as the dancers acted out a fight, then made up as the woman pushed off the man with a turn of the torso, coyly drawing him under her spell. The conga and the batá drums were the lead instruments, accompanied by rhythmic clatter from gourds, a cowbell, and well-defined non-Western free-form singing.

Next, the guaguancó, sweat-drenched dancers’ hips and groins gyrating in sync inches from each other, moving forward, sideways, backward, arms flailing, bodies slowing, building up again, thrusting, almost brushing each other, then pausing, the dancers impressing each other and the captivated crowd.

It was wonderfully suggestive; you can get hot just writing about it. During a break in the dancing, people strolled the alley reading Salvador’s philosophical graffiti, admiring the elaborate structures he’s built. He has a storefront art gallery and a regular work crew, and on weekdays he paces the street, remote phone in hand. He’s built a crude temple inspired by palo monte, a religion with its roots in the Congo and its branches in the New World. It’s a lean-to made with sticks from the Zapata swampland on Cuba’s south coast, with a lifelike couple seated in front of jungle growth. Salvador stopped to explain his complex composition. “It symbolizes the powerful force of nature,” he said, “the waters of the sea, the strength of the rivers, and the volcanic energy we feel from the land. This temple is alive. Look.” He reached far back into the altar, pulled out a machete, and hacked out eyes, a nose, and a mouth in what obviously was not volcanic rock at all. It was the outer growth of a tree stump, still very much alive with thousands of termites that erupted as Salvador sculpted his work.

As for the turnout, Alba Rodríguez a, hospital janitor who lives around the corner, said she’s been coming to the Sunday rumbas faith-fully ever since they began. “I tell people at work to come, but some of them say no, they’re not interested in this, they don’t like it. For me, it’s tranquilo. Tranquilo.”

The crowd eventually thinned out, carrying with it the energy of the rumba. On their way out they passed an empty herb stand, then one of the many dictums painted on the wall: I can wait longer than you, because I am time itself.

Watch: Book Release Celebration for The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature

April 22, 2021

A book release celebration for The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature featured celebrated Diné poets and writers, as well as a special visit from Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez and First Lady Phefelia Nez.

The online event on Wednesday, April 21, presented by the University of Arizona Press and Birchbark Books, also included the anthology’s editors Esther G. Belin, Jeff Berglund, Connie A. Jacobs, and Anthony Webster. Contributors Sherwin Bitsui, Luci Tapahonso, Laura Tohe, Bojan Louis, Irene Hamilton, Tina Deschenie, Jake Skeets, and Orlando White honored the event reading their work.

The Diné Reader was developed as a way to demonstrate both the power of Diné literary artistry and the persistence of the Navajo people. The volume opens with a foreword by Bitsui, who offers insight into the importance of writing to the Navajo people. The editors then introduce the volume by detailing the literary history of the Diné people, establishing the context for the tremendous diversity of the works that follow, which includes free verse, sestinas, limericks, haiku, prose poems, creative nonfiction, mixed genres, and oral traditions reshaped into the written word.

Please check out the following links to learn more about the work of the contributors:

Of Cartography by Esther Belin https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/of-cartography

Tseyi: Deep in the Rock by Laura Tohe https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/tseyi-deep-in-the-rock

A Radiant Curve by Luci Tapahonso https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/a-radiant-curv

Dissolve by Sherwin Bitsui https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/dissolve-by-sherwin-bitsui/

Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers by Jake Skeets https://milkweed.org/book/eyes-bottle-dark-with-a-mouthful-of-flowers

Currents by Bojan Louis https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781943491117/currents.aspx

LettERRS by Orlando White https://nightboat.org/book/letterrs/

Arizona History Convention 2021: Explore Our New and Recent Titles About Arizona and the Southwest

April 22, 2021

We are thrilled to be participating in the first virtual Arizona History Convention! We are offering 40% off all titles with free U.S. shipping, just use the code AZHISTORY21 at checkout. Below, take a look at our new and recent Arizona and the Southwest titles.

If you have questions about our publishing program, visit our guidelines here, or contact our Editor-in-Chief, Kristen Buckles, at KBuckles@uapress.arizona.edu.

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.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

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.

Make sure to watch the book trailer to learn more about the book from editor Wesley Bernardini.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans assumed the land and water resources of the West were endless. Water was as vital to newcomers to Arizona’s Florence and Casa Grande valleys as it had always been to the Pima Indians, who had been successfully growing crops along the Gila River for generations when the white settlers moved in.

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.

Champagne and 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

Empowered! focuses on the legacy of Latino activism within politics. It raises important arguments about those who stand to profit financially and politically by stoking fear of immigrants and how resilient politicians and grassroots organizers have worked to counteract that fear mongering. Recognizing the long history of disenfranchisement and injustice surrounding minority communities in the United States, this book outlines the struggle to make Arizona a more just and equal place for Latinos to live. 

Watch Empowered! authors Lisa Magaña and César S. Silva discuss the book here, then read an interview with Lisa here.

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.

“This is an essential book for everyone who is interested in modern American Indian history. Thomas Maroukis examines how American Indian leaders organized, used their education (sometimes disagreed with each other), and addressed critical issues in Indian Country in the early twentieth century. He convincingly argues that these new activists pushed back against the government and voiced a clear message that Indians had not vanished!”—Donald L. Fixico, author of Indian Resilience and Rebuilding: Indigenous Nations in the Modern American West

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.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture exposes the ways in which colonialism is expressed in the literary and cultural production of the U.S. Southwest, a region that has experienced at least two distinct colonial periods since the sixteenth century. Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez traces how Spanish colonial texts reflect the motivation for colonial domination. She argues that layers of U.S. colonialism complicate how Chicana/o literary scholars think about Chicana/o literary and cultural production. She brings into view the experiences of Chicana/o communities that have long-standing ties to the U.S. Southwest but whose cultural heritage is tied through colonialism to multiple nations, including Spain, Mexico, and the United States.

Read an excerpt from the book here, then listen to her talk about Southwest colonial history on NPR here.

In The Nature of Desert Nature, one of our best writers on desert places, Gary Paul Nabhan, challenges traditional notions of the desert. Beautiful, reflective, and at times humorous, Nabhan’s extended essay also called “The Nature of Desert Nature” reveals the complexity of what a desert is and can be. He passionately writes about what it is like to visit a desert and what living in a desert looks like when viewed through a new frame, turning age-old notions of the desert on their heads.

Watch editor Gary Paul Nabhan and contributor Francisco Cantú discuss the collection here, then watch the Tumamoc Desert Lab book release here. Read an excerpt from the book that Tucson Weekly featured here!

White Sonora wheat, tepary beans, and criollo cattle steaks make Tucson’s cuisine unique. In A Desert Feast, you’ll see pictures of kids learning to grow food at school, and you’ll meet the farmers, small-scale food entrepreneurs, and chefs who are dedicated to growing and using heritage foods. It’s fair to say, “Tucson tastes like nowhere else.”

We are thrilled that A Desert Feast won a Pubwest Book Design Award, as well as a Southwest Books of the Year Award! Watch author Carolyn Niethammer give an overview of A Desert Feast here, and discuss the book with food writer Andi Berlin here. Then, read an excerpt from the book that Zócalo Magazine featured here.

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.

Make sure to check out the book trailer here, where co-author Don Fowler gives a preview of the book. Then, read an excerpt from the book here.

In Diné Identity in a Twenty-First Century World, Lloyd L. Lee, a citizen of the Navajo Nation and an associate professor of Native American studies, takes up and provides insight on the most essential of human questions: who are we? Finding value and meaning in the Diné way of life has always been a hallmark of Diné studies. Lee’s Diné-centric approach to identity gives the reader a deep appreciation for the Diné way of life. Lee incorporates Diné baa hane’ (Navajo history), Sa’ą́h Naagháí Bik’eh Hózhǫ́ǫ́n (harmony), Diné Bizaad (language), K’é (relations), K’éí (clanship), and Níhi Kéyah (land) to address the melding of past, present, and future that are the hallmarks of the Diné way of life.

Watch Lloyd Lee discuss his new book here.

This anthology offers a unique and sweeping view of the nation’s fire scene by distilling observations on Florida, California, the Northern Rockies, the Great Plains, the Southwest, the Interior West, the Northeast, Alaska, the oak woodlands, and the Pacific Northwest into a single, readable volume. The essays offer a color-commentary companion to the play-by-play narrative offered in Pyne’s Between Two Fires: A Fire History of Contemporary America.

To the Last Smoke is Stephen J. Pyne’s way of “keeping with it to the end,” encompassing the directive from his rookie season as a wildland firefighter to stay with every fire “to the last smoke.”

Read Stephen Pyne’s op-ed in the Los Angeles Times here, then read his piece in the Wall Street Journal here.

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.

We’re thrilled that The Saguaro Cactus received a Southwest Books of the Year Award!

We miss hosting in-person book releases. Take a look at some great photos from this one! Then, read an excerpt from The Saguaro Cactus here.

A Diné History of Navajoland brings 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. Kelley and 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.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

In Saints, Statues, and Stories James S. Griffith shares stories of nearly sixty years of traveling through Sonora. As we have come to expect through these journeys, “Big Jim”—as he is affectionately known by many—offers nothing less than the living traditions of Catholic communities. Themes of saints as agents of protection or community action are common throughout Sonora: a saint coming out of the church to protect the village, a statue having a say in where it resides and paying social calls to other communities, or a beloved image rescued from destruction and then revered on a private altar. A patron saint saves a village from outside attackers in one story—a story that has at least ten parallels in Sonora’s former mission communities. Details may vary, but the general narrative remains the same: when hostile nonbelievers attack the village, the patron saint of the church foils them.

We are thrilled that Saints, Statues, and Stories received a Southwest Books of the Year Award! We threw a fabulous party to celebrate Big Jim’s book, take a look at the photos here. This book was also celebrated at Tucson Meet Yourself!

Listen: Carwil Bjork-James Featured on Media Indigena Podcast

April 20, 2021

University of Arizona Press author Carwil Bjork-James was recently featured on a Media Indigena podcast episode entitled “Bolivia for Beginners.”

Imagine what it would be like to live in a country where roughly half the population is Indigenous, said to be the highest such proportion in all of South America. Imagine too that, for over a decade, your president was himself Indigenous. Well, in Bolivia, that’s been the reality—and a fascinating one at that. A reality we delve into further with a special guest who’s written extensively about the ways in which Indigenous-led social movements have dramatically and fundamentally altered the mainstream political landscape.

Joining host/producer Rick Harp are roundtable regular Brock Pitawanakwat, Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies at York University, and Carwil Bjork-James, author of The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia.

Listen to the podcast here.

Watch: Spatialities of Andean Extractivism with Carwil Bjork-James

April 20, 2021

Recently, University of Arizona Press author Carwil Bjork-James presented a talk on Andean extraction at the American Association of Geographers meeting. Taking the streets of Cochabamba, Sucre, and La Paz as its vantage point, Carwil’s new book The Sovereign Street offers a rare look at political revolution as it happens. It documents a critical period in Latin American history, when 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

“As part of an extended panel on the Corporation on at the American Association of Geographers meeting, I presented the following talk on Concession blocks, spiraling pits, and wily start-ups: Spatialities of Andean extractivism (AAG members only). The talk is a deep dive in the technologies and policies that connect open-pit mining w/ speculative capital, built around Sumitomo Corporation’s San Cristobal mine in Potosí, Bolivia and Bear Creek Mining’s failed Santa Ana silver mine project in Puno, Peru.”— Carwil Bjork-James

Carwil Bjork-James is an assistant professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University. His research, both ethnographic and historical, concerns disruptive protest, grassroots autonomy, state violence, and indigenous collective rights in Bolivia.

Watch: Gloria Muñoz Read from New Poetry Collection

April 16, 2021

The Academy of American Poets and the University of Arizona Press presented a reading and book release celebration with Gloria Muñoz on Wednesday, April 14.

Winner of the Ambroggio Prize, Muñoz read from Danzirly, a striking bilingual poetry collection that fiercely examines the nuances of the American Dream for Latinx people in the United States. The evening included the poet’s father Al Muñoz, who read several of the Spanish versions of the English translations his daughter read.

To say this was a special event is understated, but thrilled to offer this opportunity to watch the poetry magic as often as possible.

Andrew Flachs Receives Honorable Mention for the ISA Global Development Section Book Award

April 15, 2021

We are thrilled to announce that Andrew Flachs received an honorable mention for the International Studies Association Global Development Section Book Award for his recent University of Arizona Press title, Cultivating Knowledge!

“This research addresses key issues in global development: genetic modification, agribusiness, environment destruction, etc.; but it does so from a particular vantage point: how people live global change on the level of the farm field, and how we might assess “rural well-being” from that perspective. The methodology is a political economy of knowledge and thick ethnographic work, examining the role of knowledge in people’s lived experiences and how that knowledge is utilized.”—ISA Global Development Section

Congratulations, Andrew!

Aída Hurtado Wins AAHHE Distinguished Author Award

April 15, 2021

We are thrilled to announce that Aída Hurtado won a 2021 AAHHE Distinguished Author Award for her recent University of Arizona Press book, Intersectional Chicana Feminisms!

“AAHHE is honored to extend to Aída Hurtado our inaugural Distinguished Author Award. AAHHE does so in recognition of your exceptional academic and scholarly contributions to the advancement of Latinos and Latinos in higher education, a set of contributions made exceedingly richer by Intersectional Chicana Feminisms. This ground-breaking work provides in elegant and eloquent fashion an informative discussion of a very important subject, one that you have been addressing over the course of your extraordinary academic career. We are delighted to be able to add our modest recognition and kudos to the host of awards and honors of which you have been a recipient.”—Patricia Arredondo, Chair, AAHHE Board of Directors

Congratulations, Aída!

SAA 2021: Learn About Our New and Recent Archaeology Titles

April 15, 2021

We are thrilled to be participating in the first virtual SAA meeting! We have an incredible selection of new and recent titles that we hope you will enjoy. Use the code AZSAA21 at checkout here on our website to receive 40% off all titles, plus free U.S. shipping.

If you have any questions about our publishing program, please read our guidelines here, and feel free to contact our Senior Editor Allyson Carter at ACarter@uapress.arizona.edu.

We put together a video of a few of our recent authors highlighting their new archaeology books. We hope you enjoy the video, and we are looking forward to seeing you all again in the future.

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.

“How did Hopi farmers sustain large, stable communities in an area that previous scientific models predicted could not support a substantial population? How did waves of migration shape Hopi social organization and ritual calendars? Archaeologists, ethnographers, and Hopi cultural specialists worked collaboratively to answer these and other compelling questions.”—Kelley Hays-Gilpin, co-editor of Color in the Ancestral Pueblo Southwest

From the day he was born, Federico Jiménez Caballero was predicted to be a successful man. As a child growing up in a small rural town in southern Mexico, Federico Jiménez Caballero faced challenges that most of us cannot imagine, let alone overcome. So, how exactly did a young boy from Tututepec, Oaxaca, become a famous Indigenous jewelry artist and philanthropist in Los Angeles? Federico tells the remarkable story of willpower, curiosity, hard work, and passion coming together to change one man’s life forever.

Watch a book release event for Federico here, in which author Federico Jiménez Caballero tells the story of his life alongside editor Shelby Tisdale, and answers questions from the audience.

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. Bringing together experts from American studies, archaeology, anthropology, legal studies, history, and literary studies, this interdisciplinary volume offers essential information about the complexity and ambivalence of colonial encounters with Indigenous peoples in North America, and their impact on American scientific discourse.

Discover more books in, and information about, the Archaeology of Indigenous-Colonial Interactions in the Americas series here.

Flower Worlds reaches into multisensory realms that extend back at least 2,500 years, offering many different disciplines, perspectives, and collaborations to understand these domains. Today, Flower Worlds are expressed in everyday work and lived experiences, embedded in sacred geographies, and ritually practiced both individually and in communities. This volume stresses the importance of contemporary perspectives and experiences by opening with living traditions before delving into the historical trajectories of Flower Worlds, creating a book that melds scientific and humanistic research and emphasizes Indigenous voices.

This book is part of the Amerind Studies in Anthropology series. Amerind Studies in Anthropology is a series that publishes the results of the Amerind Seminars, annual professional symposia hosted by the Amerind Foundation in Dragoon, Arizona, and cosponsored by the Society for American Archaeology.

How people eat today is a record of food use through the ages—and not just the decadent, delicious foods but the less glamorous and often life-saving foods from periods of famine as well. In Famine Foods, Paul E. Minnis focuses on the myriad plants that have sustained human populations throughout the course of history, unveiling the those that people have consumed, and often still consume, to avoid starvation. For the first time, this book offers a fascinating overview of famine foods—how they are used, who uses them, and, perhaps most importantly, why they may be critical to sustain human life in the future.

Join our book release celebration and discussion with Paul Minnis on his new book, Famine Foods: Plants We Eat to Survive on Wednesday, May 5, 2021. This event is free, but requires registration. Register here!

Alluvium and Empire by Parker VanValkenburgh 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.

“This book represents a much-welcome approach to the archaeology of empire. It combines a sophisticated theoretical framework with rigorous archival and archaeological methods to shed valuable new light on the history of Spanish empire building in Peru.”—Craig Cipolla, author of Foreign Objects: Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American Archaeology

Oysters in the Land of Cacao delivers a long-overdue presentation of the archaeology, material culture, and regional synthesis on the Formative to Late Classic period societies of the western Chontalpa region (Tabasco, Mexico) through contemporary theory. It offers a significant new understanding of the Mesoamerican Gulf Coast.

This book is part of our Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona series. The Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona is a peer-reviewed monograph series sponsored by the School of Anthropology. Learn more here.

The Prehispanic Ethnobotany of Paquimé and its Neighbors is the first large-scale investigation of the prehispanic ethnobotany of this important ancient site and its neighbors. The authors examine ethnobotanical relationships during Medio Period, AD 1200–1450, when Paquimé was at its most influential. Based on two decades of archaeological research, this book examines uses of plants for food, farming strategies, wood use, and anthropogenic ecology. The authors show that the relationships between plants and people are complex, interdependent, and reciprocal. This volume documents ethnobotanical relationships and shows their importance to the development of the Paquimé polity.

Explore photographs and field notes from editors Paul Minnis and Michael Whalen‘s excavations of Paquimé’s Site 204 here.

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.

A Marriage Out West provides a detailed insight into the intrigue of the early scramble by federal, state, and private organizations for access to Indigenous archaeological sites (almost universally lacking tribal input or consent) as well an exceptional woman’s personal account of her experiences as a neophyte frontiersperson.”—Thatcher A. Rogers, Albuquerque Archaeological Society Newsletter

Read an excerpt from the book here.

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.

“The volume maps the haphazard development of the colonial Spanish Empire, focusing on how indigenous and enslaved populations carved and crafted their own spaces through persistence and imaginative place-making strategies.”—Mariah F. Wade, author of Missions, Missionaries, and Native Americans: Long-Term Processes and Daily Practices

Watch a conversation about the book with editors Christine Beaule and John Douglass here, then read an interview with the editors here.

Tewa Worlds 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.

… Tewa Worlds … stands out as exemplary in its investigative scope, rich and thought-provoking interpretations, and focus on establishing a deep history from the archaeological and ethnographic record.”—Thatcher A. Rogers, New Mexico Archeological Council

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.

“This book is an exciting and innovative contribution to the history of Yucatán. It challenges us to think carefully about the role of commodities in the production of social relations.”—Elizabeth Terese Newman, author of Biography of a Hacienda: Work and Revolution in Rural Mexico

Read an excerpt from the book here.

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.

“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, offering a model for how scholars of Indigenous histories should think about the connections between the past and the present.”—Ashley Riley Sousa, Middle Tennessee State University

Read an interview with author Lee M. Panich about the book here.

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.

“The editors have offered a fascinating study that will change the way scholars plan and execute community-based research with tribes and tribal people. This volume is a good read and a triumph, offering a model for future research on American Indian people.”—Clifford Trafzer, author of American Indian Medicine Ways

A Diné History of Navajoland brings 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. Kelley and 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.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

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.

Author Gonzalo Lamana was featured on the New Books Network podcast. Listen to it here.

The Border and Its Bodies examines the impact of migration from Central America and México to the United States on the most basic social unit possible: the human body. The increasingly militarized U.S.-México border is an intensely physical place, affecting the bodies of all who encounter it. The essays in this volume explore how crossing becomes embodied in individuals, how that embodiment transcends the crossing of the line, and how it varies depending on subject positions and identity categories, especially race, class, and citizenship.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

Watch: Federico Jiménez Caballero and Shelby Tisdale Discuss New Memoir

April 13, 2021

Author Federico Jiménez Caballero and editor Shelby Tisdale discussed Jiménez Caballero’s new book, Federico: One Man’s Remarkable Journey from Tututepec to L.A., a memoir that documents his intriguing life.

From the day he was born, Jiménez Caballero was predicted to be a successful man. So, how exactly did a young boy from Tututepec, Oaxaca, become a famous Indigenous jewelry artist and philanthropist in Los Angeles? Federico tells the remarkable story of willpower, curiosity, hard work, and passion coming together to change one man’s life forever.

Watch: John-Michael Rivera Read from UNDOCUMENTS

April 12, 2021

Frederick Luis Aldama, University of Arizona Press author and co-editor of the Latinx Pop Culture series, welcomed John-Michael Rivera at a book launch and celebration for his new book, UNDOCUMENTS on Wednesday, March 31.

Rivera, director of the Program for Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Colorado Boulder, read from UNDOCUMENTS, which 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.

UNDOCUMENTS is from the University of Arizona Press’s Latinx Pop Culture series that aims to shed light on all aspects of Latinx cultural production and consumption as well as the Latinx presence globally in popular cultural phenomena in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

NACCS 2021: Explore Our New and Recent Chicana/o/x Studies Titles

April 8, 2021

We are excited to participate in the first virtual NACCS meeting! We have an incredible selection of new and recent titles that we hope you will enjoy. Use the code AZNACCS21 at checkout here on our website to receive 40% off all titles, plus free U.S. shipping.

If you have questions about our publishing program, please view our guidelines here, and don’t hesitate to reach out to our Editor-in-Chief, Kristen Buckles. She can be reached at kbuckles@uapress.arizona.edu.

Congratulations to Josie Méndez-Negrete, 2021 NACCS Scholar!

Challenging stereotypes, Activist Leaders of San José unearths and makes visible lived experiences of Chicana and Latino activists from San José, California, who made contributions to the cultural and civic life of the city. Through oral histories, we see a portrait of grassroots leadership in the twentieth century.

We are thrilled to announce that Josie Méndez-Negrete was chosen as the 2021 NACCS Scholar! “The NACCS Scholar Award is a recognition of work – publications, pedagogical, leadership praxis, and personal commitment, Dr. Méndez-Negrete exemplifies this quality among the professoriate of NACCS.” Read more here.

Watch Josie Méndez-Negrete and Lorena V. Márquez discuss California Chicana/o/x community histories here.

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 book release event with editors Mario T. García and Ellen McCracken here, then read five questions with the editors here. Read an interview about the book from University of California Santa Barbara’s news site, The Current here, then read an excerpt from the book here.

From the day he was born, Federico Jiménez Caballero was predicted to be a successful man. So, how exactly did a young boy from Tututepec, Oaxaca, become a famous Indigenous jewelry artist and philanthropist in Los Angeles? Federico tells the remarkable story of willpower, curiosity, hard work, and passion coming together to change one man’s life forever.

“A remarkable narrative telling of Indigenous origins, transformation in the city, and eventual migration to the United States, Federico by Federico Jiménez Caballero brings life to a unique story beginning in rural Oaxaca and ending in Los Angeles.”—Anna M. Nogar, author of Quill and Cross in the Borderlands: Sor María de Ágreda and the Lady in Blue, 1628 to the Present

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 authors Lisa Magaña and César S. Silva discuss the book and answer questions here, then read an interview with Lisa Magaña here.

“This book is a fascinating historical account of how Latinos in Arizona have faced political disenfranchisement and outright hostility to their rights and even their very presence in the state and their recent mobilization to push back. It is a book that comes to add substantially to our understanding of how the largest minority in the United States, Latinos, is helping to realign politics—in Arizona, the Southwest, and beyond. This book is a text that shows the reader a microcosm of how minorities have had to struggle to expand political rights through history—first African Americans in the South and now Latinos in the Southwest.”—Tony Payan, author of The Three U.S.-Mexico Border Wars: Drugs, Immigration, and Homeland Security

Danzirly is a stunning bilingual poetry collection that considers multigenerational Latinx identities in the rapidly changing United States. Winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Ambroggio Prize, Gloria Muñoz’s collection is an unforgettable reckoning of the grief and beauty that pulses through twenty-first-century America.

Watch a recording of a Tucson Festival of Books virtual book panel with poets Gloria Muñoz and Felicia Zamora here. Sign up for our virtual book release event for Danzirly on April 14 here!

UNDOCUMENTS is an expansive multi-genre exploration of Greater Mexican documentality that reveals the complicated ways all Latinx peoples, including the author, become objectified within cultures. John-Michael Rivera remixes the Florentine Codex and other documents as he takes an intense look at the anxieties and physical detriments tied to immigration.

We are thrilled to announce that UNDOCUMENTS won a 2021 Kayden Book Award! Read more about the award here. Read an excerpt from the book here, then watch a recording of a virtual book release event with John-Michael Rivera and Latinx Pop Culture series editor Frederick Luis Aldama here.

With unity of heart and mind, the creative and the scholarly, Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities opens wide its arms to all non-binary, decolonial masculinities today to grow a stronger, resilient, and more compassionate new generation of Latinxs tomorrow.

Read an interview with the editors, Arturo J. Aldama and Frederick Luis Aldama, here. Then, listen to a New Books Network podcast with Frederick here, and watch a video about Latinx streaming during lockdown here.

Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities bristles with original insights and illuminating takes on an impressive array of expressive culture. A refreshing and pathfinding collection that leaves behind exhausted considerations of Latinx masculinity, the essays collected here focus our attention on the ever-shifting terms of debate concerning racialized genders and sexualities.”—Richard T. Rodríguez, author of Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics

Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa provides pedagogical applications of Anzaldúa’s noted theories, including la facultad, the path of conocimiento, and autohistoria, among others. This text provides examples, lesson plans, and activities for scholars, professors, teachers, and community members in various disciplines—such as history, composition, literature, speech and debate, and more—and for those interested in teaching the theories of Gloria Anzaldúa.

Watch a recording of a book release event with the editors of this volume here, then listen to a 1991 recording of Gloria Anzaldúa reading uncollected and unpublished poems here.

Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture traces the development of Chicana/o literature and cultural production from the Spanish colonial period to the present. In doing so, it challenges us to look critically at how we simultaneously embody colonial constructs and challenge their legacies.

Read an excerpt from the book here, then listen to author Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez talk about the book on NPR here.

Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture does the difficult work of placing pre-Chicano texts such as Jovita González’s Dew on the Thorn in dialogue with later Chicanx, Indigenous, and Chicana texts. Doing so allows Fonseca-Chávez to directly address the politics and power of memory, representation, and canon. Fonseca-Chávez argues that by addressing literary heritages with eyes wide open, we can produce honest critiques of the canon. Only by doing so will we be able to account for the very diverse body that is Chicanx literature. In relation, only by doing so will we be able to form the critical coalitions we need as we move into the twenty-first century.”—Linda Heidenreich, author of “This Land Was Mexican Once”: Histories of Resistance from Northern California

Cultura y Corazón is a cultural approach to research that requires a long-term commitment to community-based and engaged research methodologies. This book presents case studies in the fields of education and health that recognize and integrate communities’ values, culture, and funds of knowledge in the research process.

Cultura y Corazón is a book we have all been waiting for. Deliberate in its descriptions of how to do ethical community engaged participatory research, the authors provide an excellent model for anyone serious about changing the way we work WITH communities of color. This is mandatory reading for researchers who are invested in providing a symbiotic relationship with communities of color and who no longer abide by helicopter culture-vulture approaches in research relationships.”—Sujey Vega, author of Latino Heartland: Of Borders and Belonging in the Midwest

La Gente traces the rise of the Chicana/o Movement in Sacramento and the role of everyday people in galvanizing a collective to seek lasting and transformative change during the 1960s and 1970s. In their efforts to be self-determined, la gente contested multiple forms of oppression at school, at work sites, and in their communities.

Watch a recording of Josie Méndez-Negrete and Lorena V. Márquez discussing California Chicana/o/x community histories here. Watch a recording of an Educators for Anti-Racism interview La Gente author Lorena V. Márquez here. Read an interview with Lorena about the book with the Center for Sacramento History here.

In Alberto Ríos’s new picaresque novel, momentous adventure and quiet connection bring twenty people to life in a small town in northern Mexico. A Good Map of All Things is home to characters whose lives are interwoven but whose stories are their own. Whether your heart belongs to a small town in Mexico or a bustling metropolis, Alberto Ríos has crafted a book overflowing with comfort, humor, warmth, and the familiar embrace of a tightly woven community.

Watch a recording of a Tucson Festival of Books virtual book panel with Lydia Otero and Alberto Álvaro Ríos here, then read an interview with Alberto for High Country News here. We’re thrilled to announce that A Good Map of All Things was chosen as a Southwest Book of the Year!

La Raza Cosmética examines postrevolutionary identity construction as a project of settler colonialism that at once appropriated and erased indigeneity. In its critique of Indigenous representation, it also shows how Indigenous women strategically engaged with and resisted these projects as they played out in beauty pageants, films, tourism, art, and other realms of popular culture.

Natasha Varner’s book insightfully traces how nationalists used the female Indigenous body to construct settler colonialism in postrevolutionary Mexico. In the process, it creatively bridges Indigenous studies in the United States and Latin America.”—Rick A. López, author of Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans and the State After the Revolution

Reflections of a Transborder Anthropologist shows how both Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez and anthropology have changed and formed over a fifty-year period. Throughout, he has worked to understand how people survive and thrive against all odds. Vélez-Ibáñez has been guided by the burning desire to understand inequality, exploitation, and legitimacy, and, most importantly, to provide platforms for the voiceless to narrate their own histories.

We are thrilled that Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez was awarded the inaugural AAHHE Distinguished Author Award! Watch Carlos and his colleagues discuss the book at a virtual book release event here, then read an excerpt from the book here.

Chicana feminisms are living theory deriving value and purpose by affecting social change. 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 feminist thought.

Aída Hurtado, a leading Chicana feminist and scholar, traces the origins of Chicanas’ efforts to bring attention to the effects of gender in Chicana and Chicano studies. Highlighting the innovative and pathbreaking methodologies developed within the field of Chicana feminisms—such as testimonio, conocimiento, and autohistoria—this book offers an accessible introduction to Chicana theory, methodology, art, and activism. Hurtado also looks at the newest developments in the field and the future of Chicana feminisms.

We’re thrilled that Aída Hurtado won an AAHHE Distinguished Author Award, and received an honorable mention for the 2020 NWSA Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize!

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.

“Trujillo explores the ongoing process of insurgent history making by examining an ever-widening array of relevant texts that in their origin and topic spiral out from the New Mexican heartland of the Alianza to encompass kindred indigenous insurgencies as far afield as the Zapatistas of Chiapas in southern Mexico. This is an insightful, complex, and sometimes whimsical musing on land, race, indigeneity, and storytelling.”—P. R. Sullivan, Choice

Watch Simón Trujillo and Vick Quezada Discuss the borderlands of Latinx Indigeneity here.

This timeless volume is 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.

“(Latinx Ciné in the twenty-first century) is a tour-de-force in Latinx-Brown film studies, unswervingly challenging, countering, deconstructing, irrupting and disrupting the conscious and contrived Latinx xenophobic and maligned racism, sexism, classism, and cultural invisibility promoted in the Trump era of political expediency and moral despondency.”—Theodoric Manley, Ethnic and Racial Studies

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.

Reel Latinxs is an invitation to re-think the problematic history of misrepresentations, to evaluate contemporary texts, and to imagine possible future in which Latinx are represented in yet more complex and nuanced ways.”—Manuel G. Aviles-Santiago, The Journal of Arizona History

We’re thrilled to announce that Reel Latinxs won an International Latino Book Award! Watch a video on Latinx streaming during lockdown with author Frederick Luis Aldama here.

Meditación Fronteriza is 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.

“Norma Cantú offers us a prescient and poignant sweep of la fronteriza. These are poems celebrating border life in song, hushed ruminations, elegant verse. Cantú’s offering is one that gives us hope and strength in the midst of difficult times.”—Amelia M. L. Montes  

We’re thrilled that Meditación Fronteriza received an honorable mention for an International Latino Book Award! Watch a reading and discussion with poet Norma Elia Cantú here, and read an interview with Norma here.

Reclaiming and reconstructing one’s spirituality based on non-Western epistemologies is central to the process of decolonization. Voices from the Ancestors brings 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.

“This is an innovative and powerful collection that crosses the border between ­academic and artistic styles. Each contribution works to decolonize the mind and the soul. It is necessary reading for all who are interested in the anti-imperial project.”—Luis D. León, author of The Political Spirituality of Cesar Chavez: Crossing Religious Borders

Latinx Talk interviewed co-editor Lara Medina, you can read it here. Ofrenda Magazine also featured Voices from the Ancestors here.

Yolqui 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.

Yolqui is at once a book of mourning and an ultimatum written against the great silencing, against misleading statistics, and against outright lies designed to keep centuries of genocide in place. This book was written for the white supremacist witching hour: an unholy ritual guided by racist doctrine, blood-drenched law, and police executions. This book is written against corruption and coverups, conquest and canon, the past five hundred years recurring every next day.”—Matt Sedillo, Public Intellectuals

Remember the days of in-person events? Read about the great book release event we planned for Yolqui here, then read an excerpt from the book here.

New in Paperback!

Chicano Communists and the Struggle for Social Justice traces the early roots of the Chicano Movement. It follows the thread of radical activism of the 1930s and 1940s to today, showing the depth of its influence on Mexican Americans struggling to achieve social justice and equality. 

“This well-researched study contributes to the fields of California history, Mexican American history, labor history, and race and ethnic studies. The exploration of radical activism by a Mexican American leader is especially significant.” —Ricardo Romo, author of East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio

Based on more than twenty years of border activism in San Diego–Tijuana and El Paso–Ciudad Juárez, this book 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.

Hernández has produced a stunningly brilliant call to action and an intellectually vibrant interdisciplinary interrogation of the origins, nature, and extent of borderlands violence.”—Choice

Calling the Soul Back considers how Chicanx literary narrative creatively maps vital connections between mind, body, spirit, and soul. Christina Garcia Lopez reveals the healing potential of narratives, showing how they can reposition one’s conscious ways of knowing and how spirituality can incite radical transformation.

“In this important new work, Garcia Lopez unpacks the significance of Chicanx narratives that center embodied knowledge as a route toward understanding the interrelationships among humans and between humans and earth, shedding light on the shape of ‘environmental consciousness’ in contemporary Chicanx narratives.” —Theresa Delgadillo, Latina/o Studies, Ohio State University

Mexican Workers and the Making of Arizona expands our understanding of the critical role played by Mexican and Mexican American laborers in making Arizona a prominent and influential state in the Southwest and beyond.

Read about the Great Copper Strike here.

Mexican Workers and the Making of Arizona presents the paradoxical history where Mexicana and Mexicano workers are recruited and desired as laborers who contribute to the wealth and well-being of key sectors in Arizona’s economy, yet simultaneously are racialized as invaders who negatively impact society. The anthology features the work of women contributors and beautifully illustrates the stories of Mexicans’ resilience and resistance.”—Patricia Zavella, Professor Emerita, Latin American and Latino Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

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.

“Yvette J. Saavedra shows how issues of race and class and gender made and remade local society in Southern California, and how power and politics shaped this region across the long nineteenth century.”—Stephen Pitti, Department of History, Yale University

We are so thrilled that Yvette Saavedra was awarded the WHA-Huntington Library Martin Ridge Fellowship!

The Diné Reader: An Excerpt

April 8, 2021

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.

Below, read an excerpt from Sherwin Bitsui‘s foreword to The Diné Reader.

“I’ve met young Navajo college students attending universities throughout the United States who are surprised to discover that Navajos have been writing books for decades—Blackhorse Mitchell’s Miracle Hill was published decades ago, in 1967. The students, excited about stories and poems that reflect their own experiences, ask for the names of Navajo authors and their book titles with hopes of finding them in their local bookstores and libraries. Such works invoke memories of their families, reservation life, and cultural concerns. They also capture the red rock panoramas of their homeland, where stories and everyday life are perpetually intertwined. Each book contains an entire world and gives voice to Navajo thought and worldview with the utmost care and respect for language and ancestral knowledge.

Navajo poets and writers often refer to Diné bizaad as the source for their written work. Navajo Nation Poet Laureate Laura Tohe writes, “Diné bizaad is medicine for healing, was used as a secret code during World War II by the Navajo Code Talkers, and has blessed me in writing poetry, stories, essays, and now writing librettos for operas. It has grounded me to Navajo spirituality and community.”

Whether Diné bizaad was forcibly repressed at boarding schools, or because a generation of traumatized parents were convinced not to teach their children, these writers rediscover it in their written work. The layers of each line, image, or word carry not only personal story but the entirety of a people’s history and worldview. These stories restore memory and reconnect a people, some of whom have moved beyond the sacred mountains to work and live in distant cities. These stories are doorways opening inward, back into the world that is always home.

This anthology will aid in making known to readers the incredible diversity Navajo literature offers. These poems and stories are as vast and dynamic as the land on which they were imagined and created. The editors of this anthology have presented the works in a format that honors culture. They have provided interviews with the authors and resources for teachers to aid in the teaching of these works, elucidating the cultural context to bring greater depth to the reader’s understanding. Elizabeth Woody, in her interview, gracefully sums up the thesis of this collection: “I write from the core belief the word of our ancestors still reverberates in our present. It is a whisper in the grasses moving in all directions.” With the publication of this book, the whisper has grown louder and cannot be ignored any longer. The songs and memories of our ancestors continue to reverberate in these contemporary stories and poems; they bridge worlds and restore beauty within all things.”

Sherwin Bitsui

Watch: Authors Discuss How Latinos in Arizona Have Transformed Politics

March 26, 2021

Authors Lisa Magaña and César S. Silva discussed their new book, Empowered!: Latinos Transforming Arizona Politics, taking an online audience on a tour of Arizona’s Latino immigrant, political, and organizing history.

The online event on Wednesday, March 24, 2021, further explained how that history eventually transformed Arizona into a more inclusive and progressive state then ever before. During the book launch, past students of Magaña’s shared in-depth details of the organizing work taking place in Maricopa County that especially helped increase registered voters in record-breaking numbers this past election season—turning Arizona from a red to a blue state.

Steve Pyne on Persevering to Mars

March 25, 2021

In a new essay published this week on the History News Network, Steve Pyne explains the link between last months Mars landing by Perseverance and the Great Ages of Discovery, which he details in his new book. Here’s a brief excerpt from the essay:

“There is a lot to marvel at Perseverance’s February 18 landing on Mars, beyond robotic exploration as an extreme sport.  Only half of attempted missions to Mars have succeeded, and the sheer technical audacity that stuck Perseverance’s landing is guaranteed to dazzle. But America’s latest endeavor joins two other missions from civilizations re-emerging as global actors after centuries of exploring quietude. Perhaps more deeply, Perseverance’s first-contact photo, a shadow selfie, raises questions about the very nature of discovery and the character of an explorer.”

Read more

Watch: Urayoán Noel Read From New Poetry Collection Transversal

March 22, 2021

Celebrated poet Urayoán Noel read from his new poetry collection, Transversal, joined by Camino del Sol series editor Rigoberto González in an online event on Wednesday, March 17.

Transversal is part of the critically acclaimed Camino del Sol series, a literary series published by the University of Arizona Press to spotlight poetry, fiction, and essays from both emerging and established voices in Latinx literature.

Noel’s reading took the whole pandemic-era online-reading to a new level. He was powerful, head-spinning, and took the audience on a rollercoaster of translation, politics, and poetics.

TransversalUrayoán Noel’s newest poetry collection, seeks to disrupt standard English and Spanish, and it celebrates the nonequivalence between languages. Inspired by Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, the collection celebrates Caribbean practices of creolization as maximalist, people-centered, affect-loaded responses to the top-down violence of austerity politics. This groundbreaking, modular approach to poetic translation opens up alternative ways of reading in any language.

Society for Applied Anthropology 2021: Discover Recent Titles, Discounts, and More

March 18, 2021

We are excited to be participating in the first ever virtual Society for Applied Anthropology meeting! The SfAA Annual Meeting provides an invaluable opportunity for scholars, practicing social scientists, and students from a variety of disciplines and organizations to discuss their work and brainstorm for the future. It is more than just a conference: it’s a rich place to trade ideas, methods, and practical solutions, as well as enter the lifeworld of other professionals. SfAA members come from a variety of disciplines — anthropology, sociology, economics, business, planning, medicine, nursing, law, and other related social/behavioral sciences.

If you have any questions about our publishing program, please contact ACarter@uapress.arizona.edu, and visit here to learn more. Use the code AZSFAA21 for 40% off all titles, plus free continental U.S. shipping. Check out our most recent applied anthropology titles below!

From the day he was born, Federico Jiménez Caballero was predicted to be a successful man. So, how exactly did a young boy from Tututepec, Oaxaca, become a famous Indigenous jewelry artist and philanthropist in Los Angeles? Federico tells the remarkable story of willpower, curiosity, hard work, and passion coming together to change one man’s life forever.

On Wednesday, April 7, learn about Federico Jiménez Caballero’s remarkable life and work during this online book release celebration and discussion with author Federico Jiménez Caballero and editor Shelby Tisdale. Register here.

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.

Preorder your copy today!

On Wednesday, May 5, Join our book release celebration and discussion with Paul Minnis on his new book, Famine Foods: Plants We Eat to Survive. Register here.

In Tourism Geopolitics, contributors show enacted processes such as labor migration, conservation, securitization, nation building, territorial disputes, ethnic cleansing, heritage revitalization, and global health crisis management, among others. These contended societal processes are deployed through tourism development initiatives that mobilize deeply uneven symbolic and material landscapes. The chapters reveal how a range of experiences are implicated in this process: museum visits, walking tours, architectonical evocations of the past, road construction, militarized island imaginations, gendered cultural texts, and official silences. Collectively, the chapters offer ethnographically rich illustrations from around the world that demonstrate the critical nature of tourism in formal geopolitical practices, as well as the geopolitical nature of everyday tourism encounters. This volume is a vital read for critical geographers, anthropologists, and political scientists, as well as scholars of tourism and cultural studies.

Preorder your copy today!

Moveable Gardens explores the ways people make sanctuaries with plants and other traveling companions in the midst of ongoing displacement in today’s world. This volume addresses how the destruction of homelands, fragmentation of habitats, and post-capitalist conditions of modernity are countered by the remembrance of tradition and the migration of seeds, which are embodied in gardening, cooking, and community building.

Indigenous Women and Violence , edited by Lynn Stephen & Shannon Speed, offers an intimate view of how settler colonialism and other structural forms of power and inequality created accumulated violences in the lives of Indigenous women. The chapters in this book are engaged, feminist, collaborative, and activism focused, conveying powerful messages about the resilience of Indigenous women in the face of violence and systemic oppression.

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. Revitalization Lexicography details both the theoretical and the practical aspects that contributed to the Tunica dictionary in manner compelling to readers from all walks of life.

David Barton Bray has spent more than thirty years researching and studying Mexican community forest enterprises (CFEs). In Mexico’s Community Forest Enterprises he shares the scientific evidence for Mexico’s social and environmental achievements and how, in its most successful manifestations, it became a global model for common-property forest management, sustainable social-ecological systems, and climate change mitigation in developing countries.

Narrating Nature by Mara J. Goldman opens up dialogue that counters traditional conservation narratives by providing space for local Maasai inhabitants to share their ways of knowing and being with nature. It moves beyond standard community conservation narratives that see local people as beneficiaries or contributors to conservation, to demonstrate how they are essential knowledgeable members of the conservation landscape itself.

Cultura y Corazón is a research approach and practice that is rooted in the work of Latinx and Chicanx scholars and intellectuals. The book documents best practices for Community Based and Participatory Action Research (CBPAR), which is both culturally attuned and scientifically demonstrated. This methodology takes a decolonial approach to engaging community members in the research process and integrates critical feminist and indigenous epistemologies.

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.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

What is a beautiful garden to southern Ethiopian farmers? Anchored in the author’s perceptual approach to the people, plants, land, and food, The Edible Gardens of Ethiopia opens a window into the simple beauty and ecological vitality of an ensete garden. Based on prolonged engagement with this “virtuous” plant of southwestern Ethiopia, this book 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.

Read an interview with Chie here.

Taking us on a journey of remembering and rediscovery, anthropologist Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez shares important insights into his development as a scholar and in so doing the development of the interdisciplinary field of transborder anthropology.

Read an excerpt from Reflections of a Transborder Anthropologist here. We are thrilled that Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez was honored with the inaugural AAHHE Distinguished Author Award, as well as the 2020 Franz Boas Award. Recently, we hosted a book release event for Reflections of a Transborder Anthropologist. You can watch a recording of the event here.

The Sovereign Street offers 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.

Listen to author Carwil Bjork-James talk about the book here.

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.

Language, Coffee, and Migration on an Andean-Amazonian Frontier 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.

Mexico and Peru are widely regarded as two great centers of Latin American civilization. In State Formation in the Liberal Era, a diverse group of historians and anthropologists from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Latin America compare how the two countries advanced claims of statehood from the dawning of the age of global liberal capitalism to the onset of the Cold War. Chapters cover themes ranging from foreign banks to road building and labor relations. The introductions serve as an original interpretation of Peru’s and Mexico’s modern histories from a comparative perspective.

Despite its tiny size and seeming marginality to world affairs, the Central American republic of Costa Rica has long been considered an important site for experimentation in cutting-edge environmental policy. From protected area management to ecotourism to payment for environmental services (PES) and beyond, for the past half-century the country has successfully positioned itself at the forefront of novel trends in environmental governance and sustainable development. The Ecolaboratory frames Costa Rica as an “ecolaboratory” and asks what lessons we can learn for the future of environmental governance and sustainable development both within the country and elsewhere.

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.

Excerpt: Strong Hearts and Healing Hands

March 17, 2021

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. In Strong Hearts and Healing Hands historian Clifford E. Trafzer 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.

Today, we offer a brief excerpt from the preface of this important new work:

From 1928 to 1948, field nurses served the Indian people of the Mission Indian Agency on every Indian reservation. Their work with the people ultimately led to the decline of morbidity and mortality among tribal people. Field nurses helped improve Indian health, but they did not do it alone. They could not have been successful without the support and cooperation of Native American leaders, families, communities, and tribes. Indian people allowed field nurses, physicians, and hospital employees into their lives. Indians helped health-care providers fight invisible enemies that were then sickening and killing their people. Indians worked in partnership with field nurses to improve the health of their people because, as tribal elders have testified, it was to their advantage to cooperate with field nurses and other health care providers. At the time, Indian people were dying of illnesses brought to Southern California by settlers, soldiers, and government policy makers. Settlers had introduced infectious diseases among the people. Indians reasoned that newcomers had knowledge about the causation and prevention of “traveling” sickness or infectious diseases that moved indiscriminately from person to person, place to place.

During the 1920s, American Indian students had some knowledge about germs and disease prevention from their boarding-school days. When students returned home from Indian schools, they shared public-health knowledge and practical information about unseen enemies attacking their people. For many years, Southern California Indians had lived with bacterial and viral diseases. Indigenous people had their own medical traditions, but the medicine ways of Native Americans generally did not address serious infectious diseases.

For centuries, Native Americans had learned about health and healing from traditional indigenous nurses who lived in every Indian village and community in Southern California. Indigenous women had learned the art of nursing from their elders and their own practical experiences. Indigenous women were experts (and remain so today) in the use of herbal medicines. They used plant medicines to treat symptoms of infectious diseases, but often could not cure disease caused by pathogens. Some shamans claimed the ability to kill infectious diseases caused by microorganisms. Since the time of creation, every tribe had consulted indigenous nurses to help them maintain physical, mental, and spiritual health. Tribal use of Native nurses made it easier for indigenous people to accept treatment and advice from white nurses—all women—working for the Indian Service.

While indigenous nurses expertly used herbal medicines, tribal shamans cured people of staying sickness that existed only within specific tribal communities. However, neither indigenous nurses nor shamans could consistently address new illnesses caused by viruses and bacteria. As a result, and with time, the first people of Southern California agreed to incorporate Western medicine into their own medicine ways. During the early twentieth century, Southern California Indians gradually used Western medicine and integrated new medicine ways into their cultural circles. Once Western medicine proved effective in preventing and curing illnesses, Indians incorporated new medicine into their lives. They slowly brought Western medicine into their own cultural circles and adopted new ways of healing without abandoning their own medicine ways. In essence, Native Americans gradually chose to incorporate Western medicine into their cultures and use it to their advantage. At the same time, they kept their traditional medicine ways. They used both ways to achieve better health. They continued to consult traditional tribal nurses and shamans, drawing on expertise of traditional and new medicine to benefit their people. This form of integrated medicine has continued to this day through community-based and Native-controlled contemporary Indian health centers located throughout Southern California. However, in the 1920s, the Indians of Southern California were just learning about field nurses and important national changes brought to the Indian Service.

***
Clifford E. Trafzer is Distinguished Professor of History and Rupert Costo Chair in American Indian Affairs at the University of California, Riverside. Since the 1980s, he has researched the history of Southern California Indians, visiting reservations and learning from their people. He served on the California Native American Heritage Commission, Board of Native American Land Conservancy, and University of California President’s Native American Council.

Alberto Ríos on Nogales, the Borderlands, and Joy in High Country News

March 17, 2021

High Country News recently featured an essay by Alberto Álvaro Ríos, author of A Good Map of All Things, published by the University of Arizona Press. A Good Map, Ríos honors his family between the chapters, but the new picaresque novel presents brightly unique characters who love fiercely and nurture those around them in a whimsical yet familiar town in the Pimería Alta

The High Country News essay, “In Nogales, joy endures,” Ríos shares a snapshot of his hometown, Nogales, Arizona, and the true joy that exists on the border.

From the essay:

“In all the talk of the border, that word is used as if it defined this place. But the far greater truth and the more apt word for this place is desert. It was true when I was growing up, and it’s just as true now. We lived in the desert more than, or at least as much as, we lived at the border. Nature was so often louder in its quietude than people giving orders in uniforms, or fences keeping us and the cows from wandering where we weren’t supposed to go. The border made Nogales a major international port of entry, giving us the foundation for produce and tourism, both of which moved through town, but the desert gave us actual place, a geography on which to stand and find a steady footing. For those who live there, the desert, too, has always been a place of scarcity, of sparseness. Making do with what you had was a regular way of life. It was constant invention.”

Read the entire essay here.

Whale Snow Wins the AAG 2020 Meridian Book Award

March 17, 2021

We are thrilled to announce that Whale Snow by Chie Sakakibara is the winner of the AAG 2020 Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography! This award is given for a book written by a geographer that makes an unusually important contribution to advancing the science and art of geography.

“In Whale Snow, Chie Sakakibara pioneers a vision of surviving humankind and kin safely segueing a conjoined path in the future. On the frontier between tundra and ocean, she engaged in the kind of years-long fieldwork that exemplary geographers have pursued for generations in an effort to understand the why of where. Recognizing that whales and whaling remain integral to Inupiat lifeways, despite the onslaught of globalization and climate change, her work explores and elucidates the significance of bowhead whales to the persistence of Inupiaq culture and community.

This book offers a rare, qualified, and yet substantiated optimism to readers around the world. Hers is a vision of “being in a togetherness” that perseveres against myriad adversities on the near horizon, and that can continue to do so far into the future. This research is exemplary in its
sustained commitment to the community. It demonstrates the best of embedded, ethically-driven, and collaborative knowledge production. Those who seek, through their own studies with diverse cultural communities of practice, to overcome – as do the whaling Inupiat of Alaskan North Slope Borough, in unity with their animal kin — the existential threats of our unprecedented and contingent present will be inspired and transformed by reading this book.

In so many ways, Whale Snow epitomizes the essence of geography as an art, science, method, literary practice, and a way of understanding and relating to the world.”— The American Association of Geographers

Chie Sakakibara is an assistant professor of environmental studies at Oberlin College. She was trained in cultural geography, art history, and Indigenous studies. Her work explores human dimensions of global environmental change among Indigenous peoples. Native to Japan, Sakakibara is a proud adoptive member of the Iñupiaq whaling community. Her love of humans and nonhuman animals manifests in her academic work as well as in her life with one human daughter and two canine sons.

Congratulations, Chie!

Francisco X. Alarcón Featured in Latest Poetry Centered Podcast

March 16, 2021

In the season premiere of Poetry Centered, the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s podcast, Francisco Aragón shares poems alive with the vibrancy of a particular voice addressed to a particular audience.

Included in the podcast is Francisco X. Alarcón’s bittersweet homage to a poetic ancestor, “Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón.” The late Alarcón is co-editor of Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice with Odilia Galván Rodríguez, and author of Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation, among others published by the University of Arizona Press.

The podcast also features poems from Thom Gunn, and Denise Levertov, mythic. Aragón concludes the episode with a direct address of his own that challenges Arizona’s SB 1070, “Poem with a Phrase of Isherwood.”

Poetry Centered features curated selections from Voca, the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s online audiovisual archive of more than 1,000 recordings of poets reading their work during visits to the Center between 1963 and today. In each episode, a guest poet introduces three poems from Voca, sharing their insights about the remarkable performances recorded in our archive. Each episode concludes with the guest poet reading a poem of their own.

To listen to this episode and past episodes, please go here.

Flachs Examines Cotton Cultivation in India in Anthro Magazine Sapiens

March 15, 2021

Andrew Flachs, author of Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability, and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India, recently contributed a story for SAPIENS, an online anthropology magazine, edited by Chip Colwell.

Excerpt from the story by Flachs:

“Organic agriculture also offers an agrarian way of life for younger, educated generations in Telangana at a time when many young people have moved away to find work in larger cities, such as Hyderabad and Bangalore, leaving behind or even selling family land. Staff members recruited from farming communities by various organic projects in Telangana have found a way to give back to their agrarian roots while achieving a new form of rural professionalism.

It would be wrong to frame the success of these programs as either the triumph of eco-friendly clothing sales or as evidence of the inherent superiority of certified organic agriculture. Those perspectives miss the crucial efforts of NGOs and organic companies that make it easier to be a small farmer. They also hide the efforts of charismatic, opportunistic, and earnest farmers and rural professionals who take up the local cause.”

SAPIENS began in 2016 with a mission to bring anthropology to the public, and make a difference in how people see themselves and the people around them. An editorially independent magazine of the Wenner‑Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Published in partnership with the University of Chicago Press.

You can read the entire story, and check out SAPIENS here.

UNDOCUMENTS Wins a 2021 Kayden Book Award

March 15, 2021

We are thrilled to announce that UNDOCUMENTS by John-Michael Rivera won a 2021 Eugene M. Kayden Book Award!

The Kayden awards, which are funded from the Eugene M. Kayden endowment, are intended to promote the completion of research and creative work in the arts and humanities, research leading to publication, and the celebration and dissemination of excellent arts and humanities research. The Kayden awards come with funding for the author’s department to organize a symposium, which will involve both the author and experts in the author’s field who will present critiques of the book to which the author will respond. The symposium will be open to the wider academic community and the public.

Employing a broad range of writing genres and scholarly approaches, UNDOCUMENTS catalogs, recovers, and erases documents and images by and about peoples of Greater Mexico from roughly the first colonial moment. This brave and bracing volume organizes and documents ancient New World Mexican peoples from the Florentine Codex (1592) to our current technology-heavy age, wherein modern lawmakers and powerful global figures desire to classify, deport, and erase immigrants and their experiences.

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.

Congratulations, John-Michael!

Missed the Book Fest? TFOB Digital Author Events Remain Online

March 15, 2021

If you missed your favorite University of Arizona Press authors at the Tucson Festival of Books 2021 virtual festival, fear not! All author events remain available on the TFOB website.

Go to the TFOB 2021 Author Presenting Schedule, click on the event title, and then click on “watch broadcast.” You’ll be asked to register, and then directed to the panel.

Big thanks to Tucson Festival of Books organizers for including several University of Arizona Press authors, including Lydia Otero, Alberto Álvaro Ríos, Stephen J. Pyne, and Gloria Muñoz.

Watch: A Conversation with Transborder Anthropologist Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez

March 12, 2021

On Wednesday, March 10, celebrated anthropologist Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez joined Roberto Alvarez, Patricia Zavella, Joe Heyman, and Luis Plascencia in an online event to celebrate Vélez-Ibáñez’s latest book, Reflections of a Transborder Anthropologist: From Netzahualcóyotl to Aztlán.

Vélez-Ibáñez with the other borderlands anthropologists talk about his book and the ever-evolving work of transborder anthropology. Reflections of a Transborder Anthropologist shows how both Vélez-Ibáñez and anthropology have changed and formed over a fifty-year period. Throughout, he has worked to understand how people survive and thrive against all odds. Vélez-Ibáñez has been guided by the burning desire to understand inequality, exploitation, and legitimacy, and, most importantly, to provide platforms for the voiceless to narrate their own histories.

Cuba, Hot and Cold Featured in The Wall Street Journal

March 12, 2021

Tom Miller’s University of Arizona Press book, Cuba, Hot and Cold, was featured in a recent article from The Wall Street Journal: Dreaming of Cuba? Here’s How to Feel Like You’re in Havana Anytime You’d Like.

Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che: A Revolutionary Life, offers four books that reveal a Havana beyond the clichés. One of the books he chose is Miller’s Cuba, Hot and Cold, about which Anderson writes, “If you had to pick one great introduction to Havana, it’d be this slender, readable work. It hits all the touchstones of history, art and literature with a healthy sense of humor—and you can finish it in an hour and a half.”

Read the rest of the article here.

Since his first visit to the island thirty years ago, Miller has shown us the real people of Havana and the countryside, the Castros and their government, and the protesters and their rigor. His first book on Cuba, Trading with the Enemy, brought readers into the “Special Period,” Fidel’s name for the country’s period of economic free fall. Cuba, Hot and Cold brings us up to date, providing intimate and authentic glimpses of day-to-day life.

Tom Miller has been writing about Latin America and the American Southwest for more than four decades. His articles have appeared in outlets including the New York Times, Smithsonian, LIFE, Rolling Stone, and Natural History. He is affiliated with the University of Arizona’s Center for Latin American Studies, and at a 2008 ceremony, the City of Quito proclaimed Miller Un Huésped Ilustre (An Illustrious Guest).

Heather Cahoon Interviewed for Poetry Northwest

March 11, 2021

Horsefly Dress author Heather Cahoon was interviewed for Poetry Northwest by Shriram Sivaramakrishnan. Below, read an excerpt from this thoughtful interview and find a link to read the entire discussion.

Shriram Sivaramakrishnan: I would like to kickstart our discussion with the first thing that caught my attention when I was reading your book: the use of Salish words. In your recent reading for The University of Arizona Press, you spoke about weaving Salish into your poems as an act of reclaiming, among other things, the land. It reminded me of a quote by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (I came across it while reading Maggie Nelson’s Bluets), “words do not look like the things they designate.” In the same reading, you also mentioned that you do not speak Salish. Given that your poems are firmly situated in the realities of the land, its people, and their tradition, how does language inform your creative practice?

Heather Cahoon: My poems are definitely rooted in place and reflective of my personal relationships with the landscape, people, flora, and fauna where I live. In terms of how language, specifically my use of Salish, informs my creative practice, I would start by noting that the level of Salish that appears in Horsefly Dress roughly mirrors my speaking ability. Growing up, everyone learns a handful of words and in college I took Salish from one of our elders but I certainly never came close to being fluent. As a result, my decision to include Salish in my poems was very intentional and serves a sort of dual purpose. On a basic level it connects me to my community and reaffirms those ties but it also calls attention, at least momentarily, to American Indians generally and, by extension, the settler colonial history of America. This is why I say that the use of Salish is an act of reclaiming space, not only as a presence on the physical lands where Salish-speaking people have been living for thousands of years, but the non-physical landscapes as well, including the broader American psyche and the mainstream narratives that have largely omitted tribal people. 

To read the entire interview, click here.

Horsefly Dress is a meditation on the experience and beauty of suffering, questioning its triggers and ultimate purpose through the lens of historical and contemporary interactions and complications of Séliš, Qĺispé, and Christian beliefs. Heather Cahoon’s collection explores dark truths about the world through first-person experiences, as well as the experiences of her family and larger tribal community. As a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, Cahoon crafts poems that recount traditional stories and confront Coyote’s transformation of the world, including his decision to leave certain evils present, such as cruelty, greed, hunger, and death.

Heather Cahoon, PhD, earned her MFA in poetry from the University of Montana, where she was the Richard Hugo Scholar. She has received a Potlatch Fund Native Arts Grant and Montana Arts Council Artist Innovation Award. Her chapbook, Elk Thirst, won the Merriam-Frontier Prize. She is an assistant professor of Native American studies at the University of Montana. She is from the Flathead Reservation and is a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.

Watch: Book Release Celebration for Rewriting the Chicano Movement

March 9, 2021

On Wednesday, March 3, 2021, editors Mario T. García and Ellen McCracken of Rewriting the Chicano Movement: New Histories of Mexican American Activism in the Civil Rights Era, joined contributors Holly Barnet-Sanchez, Jesús Jesse Esparza, Tiffany Jasmín González, Andrea Muñoz, and Michael Anthony Turcios, in an online book launch and discussion.

Together, they explained the essays in the book that cover a range of untold histories albeit important in Chicano Movement history in communities across the country, and further discussed the importance of the Chicano Movement today.

Watch: Stephen J. Pyne Discusses His New Book and Exploration Studies

March 8, 2021

On Thursday, February 25, the University of Arizona Press presented an online event with historian and MacArthur Fellow Stephen J. Pyne to discuss and celebrate his new book, The Great Ages of Discovery: How Western Civilization Learned About a Wider World.

Joining Pyne was event moderator Kevin J. Fernlund, author of William Henry Holmes and the Rediscovery of the American West. Together they discussed Pyne’s inspiration and interest in exploration, history, and how Pyne identifies three great ages of discovery in his fascinating new book.

The first age of discovery ranged from the early 15th to the early 18th century, sketched out the contours of the globe, aligned with the Renaissance, and had for its grandest expression the circumnavigation of the world ocean. The second age launched in the latter half of the 18th century, spanning into the early 20th century, carrying the Enlightenment along with it, pairing especially with settler societies, and had as its prize achievement the crossing of a continent. The third age began after World War II, and, pivoting from Antarctica, pushed into the deep oceans and interplanetary space. Its grand gesture is Voyager’s passage across the solar system. Each age had in common a galvanic rivalry: Spain and Portugal in the first age, Britain and France—followed by others—in the second, and the USSR and USA in the third.

Latinos Transforming Arizona Politics: Five Questions with Lisa Magaña

March 8, 2021

Empowered!: Latinos Transforming Arizona Politics examines Arizona’s recent political history and how it has been shaped and propelled by Latinos. It also provides a distilled reflection of U.S. politics more broadly, where the politics of exclusion and the desire for inclusion are forces of change. Co-authors Lisa Magaña and César S. Silva argue that the state of Arizona is more inclusive and progressive then it has ever been. Draconian immigration policies have plagued Arizona’s political history. Empowered! shows innovative ways that Latinos have fought these policies.

Here, Magaña answers five questions about her new book.

With the elections, this book sure is timely. How does the book help us understand the recent elections in Arizona?

Well, the focus of this book is on Maricopa County or the Phoenix-Metropolitan area. Because it is the most populated area in Arizona, how the county voted is how the election turned out.  This county was seen as a pivotal one in the presidential election, because of recent migration from other states, a growing suburban voting bloc and Latinos coming of age. This county is a great case study for other states that are changing demographically.

Why is it important to note how immigrants have changed our political landscape?

Latinos in Arizona are predominately born in the United States. However, in the Maricopa County there are some fierce immigrant advocates and immigrant political players. In some cases, Latino immigrants, that cannot vote, worked and canvassed in areas and encouraged other Latinos to vote.  I once had a DACA student tell me “we may not be able to vote, but this is what democracy looks like.”  Seeing immigrant activists involved in electoral politics is democracy at its most beautiful and basic form.

For years folks have been talking about Latinos being the Sleeping Giant. Did it take Donald Trump to wake that giant?

Donald Trump did not wake up the Sleeping Giant.  In the case of Arizona, it was one-on-one activism and outreach that got first-time voters to come out and vote. And the Latino and first-time voters in Arizona have been growing. In fact, I think Donald Trump’s anti-immigration agenda did not work in Arizona, as evidenced by his loss.

Organizers and activists have been through so much in Arizona. What have been the biggest challenges?

That is a great question. Not sure what challenges there are that just doesn’t make them stronger and more formidable.

What are your hopes for the book and its readers?

This book is a story about how anti-immigrant rhetoric mobilized Latinos into a dynamic, political force. The demographics are changing. The story in Maricopa County is what is going on in America today.

SCA 2021: Browse Our Latest Books, Discounts, and More

March 4, 2021

We are excited to be participating in the first ever virtual Society for California Archaeology meeting! If you are attending the meeting, make sure to visit our virtual booth and visit the book room to see our latest titles. From March 4 to March 15, 2021, use the code AZSCA21 at checkout on our website to receive 40% off all titles, plus free continental U.S. shipping.

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.

Read an interview with editors Christine Beaule and John Douglass here, then watch a video of the editors discussing the volume here.

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.

Read an interview about the book with Lee Panich here.

The influx of Spanish, Russian, and then American colonists into Alta California between 1769 and 1834 challenged both Native and non-Native people to reimagine communities not only in different places and spaces but also in novel forms and practices. The contributors to Forging Communities in Colonial Alta California draw on archaeological and historical archival sources to analyze the generative processes and nature of communities of belonging in the face of rapid demographic change and perceived or enforced difference.

Listen to editors Kathleen Hull and John Douglass talk about the book on the New Books Network Podcast here.

Spring Into 2021 with a Great Discount on Books!

March 3, 2021

We are excited to kick off Spring 2021 with some incredible new books, and a great sale to match! From March 1, 2021 to March 15, 2021, use the code AZSPRING21 for 40% off ALL titles, plus free shipping in the continental U.S.

The Great Ages of Discovery is a fascinating conceptual framework for understanding the past 600 years of exploration by Western civilization and its relationship to contemporary society. Stephen J. Pyne expertly organizes the vast narrative of Western exploration into three distinctive ages of discovery.

On Saturday, March 6, Stephen Pyne will be presenting at the Tucson Festival of Books! Authors Simon Winchester and Stephen Pyne will discuss how the quest for land, ownership and discovery have shaped the modern world. . Learn more about this panel. You can also watch a book trailer for The Great Ages of Discovery here.

The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature is a comprehensive collection of creative works by Diné poets and writers. This anthology is the first of its kind.

“This collection is essential to American literature and should be required for anyone studying American, First Nations, or world literature.”—Joy Harjo, U.S. Poet Laureate

On Wednesday, April 21, tune into a virtual event with editors Esther G. Belin, Jeff Berglund, Connie A. Jacobs, and contributors to celebrate this ground-breaking anthology. Read more about the event and register here.

A baffling museum murder that appears to be the work of twisted human killers results in an unexpected and violent confrontation with powerful shape-shifters for Choctaw detective Monique Blue Hawk. Blending tribal beliefs and myths into a modern context, The Hatak Witches continues the storyline of Choctaw cosmology and cultural survival that are prominent in Devon A. Mihesuah’s award-winning novel, The Roads of My Relations.

“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. … Readers looking for intelligent, diverse supernatural fiction will be captivated.”—Publisher’s Weekly

Read the entire Publisher’s Weekly review of The Hatak Witches here.

Danzirly is a stunning bilingual poetry collection that considers multigenerational Latinx identities in the rapidly changing United States. Winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Ambroggio Prize, Gloria Muñoz’s collection is an unforgettable reckoning of the grief and beauty that pulses through twenty-first-century America.

On Saturday, March 6, Gloria will be presenting at the Tucson Festival of Books! What does the American Dream look like for Latinx people living in the United States? What does it feel like? Felicia Zamora and Gloria Muñoz explore those questions in their award-winning poetry. They will share their thoughts, and some of their poems, with all of us. Learn more about this panel.

On Wednesday, April 14, Gloria Muñoz will read from her new collection, Danzirly, presented by the American Academy of Poets and the University of Arizona Press. Registration is required. Learn more here.

Transversal takes a groundbreaking, disruptive approach to poetic translation, opening up alternative ways of reading as poems get translated or transcreated into entirely new pieces. In this collection, Urayoán Noel masterfully examines his native Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean as sites of transversal poetics and politics.

Learn more about the collection by reading an interview with Urayoán here. On Wednesday, March 17, celebrated poet Urayoán Noel will read from his new poetry collection, Transversal, joined by Camino del Sol series editor Rigoberto González for an online event. Registration is required. Learn more here.

From the day he was born, Federico Jiménez Caballero was predicted to be a successful man. So, how exactly did a young boy from Tututepec, Oaxaca, become a famous Indigenous jewelry artist and philanthropist in Los Angeles? Federico tells the remarkable story of willpower, curiosity, hard work, and passion coming together to change one man’s life forever.

On Wednesday, April 7, learn about Federico Jiménez Caballero’s remarkable life and work during this online book release celebration and discussion with author Jiménez Caballero and editor Shelby Tisdale. Registration is required. Learn more about the event here.

UNDOCUMENTS is an expansive multi-genre exploration of Greater Mexican documentality that reveals the complicated ways all Latinx peoples, including the author, become objectified within cultures. John-Michael Rivera remixes the Florentine Codex and other documents as he takes an intense look at the anxieties and physical detriments tied to immigration.

Read an excerpt from UNDOCUMENTS here.

On Wednesday, March 31, join a special virtual event to celebrate the book release of UNDOCUMENTS with a reading a discussion with its author John-Michael Rivera. Registration is required. Learn more about the event here.

“Editors Johnson and Cokinos have created a profoundly stirring evocation of the glory and tragedy of spaceflight that lets us better see not only worlds beyond but also ourselves.”—Lee Billings, Scientific American

Mark McLemore, host and producer of Arizona Public Media’s Arizona Spotlight, recently interviewed Christopher Cokinos and Julie Swarstad Johnson, co-editors of Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight. Listen to the interview here. PBS’ The Open Mind featured Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflights co-editors Julie Swarstad Johnson and Christopher Cokinos talking about the new poetry anthology and this celebration of poetics and the space sciences. Watch here.

The poetry anthology was also featured on Planetary Radio, the Planetary Society’s weekly podcast brilliantly hosted by Mat Kaplan. Listen here. Then, watch an incredible event with the editors and some contributors to the volume here! Ready to take your own space poetry journey? Read Swarstad Johnson’s post and writing prompts.

“Ríos’s finely crafted chronicle brings great depth to the vicissitudes of life in a small Mexican village.”—Publishers Weekly

Alberto Álvaro Ríos is presenting at the Tucson Festival of Books on Sunday, March 7! Arizona authors Alberto Álvaro Ríos and Lydia R. Otero will discuss their newest books, both of which explore the power of place and community along the border. Learn more about this panel.

We are thrilled that A Good Map of All Things was chosen as a Southwest Book of the Year! Listen to a KJZZ interview with Alberto Álvaro Ríos here, then read an interview with him here.

“The writings in this collection echo, each in their own ways, the surprising declaration made by contributor Paul Mirocha in ‘Staring at the Walls,’ an essay on Southern Arizona public art: “The desert is succulent—it’s downright juicy out there.”—Kristine Morris, Foreward Reviews

Watch editor Gary Nabhan and contributor Francisco Cantú discuss The Nature of Desert Nature here. The Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill hosted a special online event to celebrate the book release of The Nature of Desert Nature, watch it here. Read an excerpt from the book here.

“Indispensable, Niethammer’s book is fascinating, taking us through the cultural and historical significance from 4,000 years ago at the base of “A” Mountain to the modern-day celebration of artisan growers and chefs who have all been a part of making Tucson a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy. This is not a book to finish in one sitting, but something to be savored along with the book’s many recipes, time and time again.”—Barry Infuso, President, Chefs Association of Southern Arizona

We are thrilled that A Desert Feast was chosen as a Southwest Book of the Year, and it also won a Pubwest Book Design Award! Read an excerpt from the book here, then watch a Tucson Festival of Books virtual event with Carolyn Niethammer and #ThisIsTucson food writer Andi Berlin here. Watch a fun series of videos from people featured in the book here!

“It is such a pleasure to experience so many Old Stories told in and between the lines of Heather Cahoon’s gorgeous poems.”—Chris La Tray, High Country News

Read an interview about Horsefly Dress with poet Heather Cahoon here, then watch a virtual poetry reading with Heather here.

UCSB’s The Current Features ‘Rewriting the Chicano Movement’

March 2, 2021

University of California Santa Barbara’s news site, The Current, published an interview with Rewriting the Chicano Movement: New Histories of Mexican American Activism in the Civil Rights Era‘s co-editor Mario T. García, a UCSB scholar.

In the interview, García expanded on the themes of the book:

“The essays in our book,” García continued, “bring in new historical actors to the movement that had earlier been excluded and, secondly, the book attempts to nationalize the movement in that it made Chicanos and other Latinos for the first time into national political actors and laid the foundation for today’s recognized Latino political power. It is not excluding or downplaying earlier histories of the movement but rather expanding them.”

Please read the entire interview here.

Tickets remain available for our event, Rewriting the Chicano Movement Book Celebration and Discussion. Go here for more information and to register.

Tucson Daily Praises Southern Arizona Books

February 28, 2021

In a round-up of books by Southern Arizona authors or about Southern Arizona, the Arizona Daily Star included two University of Arizona Press books—Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight, and The Arizona Diary of Lily Frémont, 1878–1881.

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 JohnsonChristopher 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.

Read the Star reviews here.

Five Questions with Poet Urayoán Noel

March 1, 2021

Urayoán Noel’s latest collection, Transversal, takes a disruptive approach to poetic translation, opening up alternative ways of reading as poems get translated or transcreated into entirely new pieces. In this collection, Noel masterfully examines his native Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean as sites of transversal poetics and politics. Featuring Noel’s bilingual playfulness, intellect, and irreverent political imagination, Transversal contains personal reflections on love, desire, and loss filtered through a queer approach to form, expanding upon Noel’s experiments with self-translation in his celebrated collection Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico.

Below, read five questions with Urayoán about his latest collection.

What inspired you to write this collection?

There are many ways to answer this question. After the publication of my previous book of poetry, Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico (2015), also with Camino del Sol, I was interested in getting back to a more imbricated lyric politics, beyond that book’s intra-Americanist politics of page as hemisphere. I was also returning to writing in traditional forms such as the sonnet, partly to rethink the performative and experimental, which have defined my work for so long. At the same time, I wanted to continue my walking improvisation poems (“wokitokitekis”) and the poetics of self-translation from Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico and some of my earlier work, so I pushed forward on both and thought of the transversal line as a framing device for what I was doing, departing but connecting. A lot of this was about coping, as it tied into a whole process of mourning (the death of my father, the aftermath of Hurricane María) that on the one hand led me back to my native Puerto Rico and on the other made me commit to digging deeper into my writing practice. Paradoxically, this digging deeper manifested itself as two extremes: the formal poems where I could distill this emotional weight through a formal architecture and the improvisational poems where I could cut loose and let my mind (and walking body) wander and go to places my poet’s ego wouldn’t always let me: to be by turns mawkish and brutal, or funny and dark, sometimes in one breath.

How do you think the act of self-translation impacts the poems in this collection?

In Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico the two languages were often scored as distinct though overlapping hemispheres on the page, and I knew I wanted to do something different here. One thing about hemispheric politics is they tend to privilege the landmass of the Americas as opposed to the islands, the archipelagos, the littorals… the places I come from. I wanted Transversal to be a more defiantly Caribbean book, partly in conversation with the work of Puerto Rican poets such as Raquel Salas Rivera and Nicole Cecilia Delgado, whose work reminds me of poetry’s power to dream of and structure modes of radical community, and partly in conversation with poet-critics like Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant, who map the knowledges of poetry. I had audited a poetry seminar with Glissant in the mid-2000s while working on my PhD at NYU, and I carried with me the memory of his discussion of Césaire with us. Rereading both of them as I was starting to conceptualize Transversal led me to the Glissant passage which would become the book’s epigraph and give it its title. I liked the transversal as a way of thinking of how poetry “knows,” as opposed to verticality of empire (and of the corporate university); I liked that it signified both translation and versification; I liked that it worked in both languages, making the “/” in the previous book moot; and I thought it was a great fit in terms of form, since I had been playing around with arranging both languages on the page in a staggered fashion, so that they were always rubbing up against one another but not presented as linear equivalences. In a sense, this was an attempt to move beyond the “galactic” poetics of Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico, which was partly inspired by the neo-baroque babble/Babel of Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos, and closer to a Caribbean vernacular, to my life under, across, and beyond imperial English and imperial Spanish, seeking a joy in jamming them up and jamming with them that may and need not render across the Americas. I also went back to Gloria Anzaldúa, whose “conocimiento” operates as a kind of self-translation, somewhere between inexactness and depth, and Julia de Burgos, for whom self-translation is linked to the performative construction and dissolution of the self.

Would you tell us more about the bold, experimental choices you make with poetic form in this collection?

I have always been really interested in the translatability of poetic form. One thing that happened between the previous book and Transversal is that I started getting more seriously into literary translation: publishing it, writing about it, judging it. I learned a lot from translating everything from the vanguardist 1920s sonnets of Chilean poet Pablo de Rokha to the 1970s concrete poems of Amanda Berenguer from Uruguay, written under the shadow of dictatorship, and the contemporary translingual work of Guatemalan Garifuna poet Wingston González. In all three cases, I made the innovative form of the originals central to my translation, often translating for form as much as for content, and it emboldened me even more to self-translate with an eye and ear for form, honoring the distinct properties and architectures of each form, whether an English ode, a villanelle, a concrete poem, or a free-form improvisation. There are also quieter, untranslated poems, which I wanted in order for the book to have room to breathe. Then there’s the contrasting fonts for the English and Spanish, which I had played around with in Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico but is done a bit more subtly here, as if to insist less on the theatricality of it all. There’s always a lot of performance in my work, but as I’ve gotten used to self-translating (both ways and across forms) I’m less interested in having it be a statement of some kind and just content to let it be, something a poet like Salas Rivera does beautifully. By doing so, I also want to rethink the experimental as a way to center the reader: the experiment not as intent but as relation, where I figure it out for the page and you, the reader, refigure and configure on your terms. There’s one poem in the book that is all homographs (words that look the same but may mean different things in both languages): it’s actually multiple poems depending on how the reader reads. There’s a fair amount in the book that can work in modular fashion: readers can rearrange stuff to fit their layout. 

Your voice notes poems, as well as other poems in the collection, feel rooted in specific moments. Could you tell us about the importance of place and observation in your work?

As I mentioned, Transversal was meant to be a Caribbean book. It’s ethos and concept are Glissantian, right down to the striking cover image by the artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, who is a great reader of Glissant. The book grew out of my return to the Caribbean, not only Puerto Rico, but also the Dominican Republic, where one of the earliest poems in the book is set, and Cuba, where I began the first draft of what would become the long poem “Periodo Espacial  Spatial Period.” While some poems in the second section are ten or even 15 years years old, the book was conceived and largely written after my move to a waterfront area of the South Bronx in late 2016. Much of the improvisational poetry comes from walking along or around nearby Randalls Island Park, recording myself on video as I improvise, and then transcribing the improvisations with no editing. I noticed that after a while the islands of the Caribbean would blend with Randalls Island and Manhattan in my improvisations, all one sedimented archipelago poetics. This seemed like coming full circle, since the first of these wokitokiteki video improvisations were done while walking on a beach in Puerto Rico in early 2012. Before that, I was doing voice notes transcriptions only, since that’s what my phone at the time could handle: the poem “Unstatements,” composed while I was living and teaching in Albany, New York, is one of these early, voice-only improvisations. At some point, the poetics of statelessness (a word I play around with a lot and that resonates as a Puerto Rican) and the poetics of (un)statement just began to blur, and I went with it, letting poems become voice and movement exercises, become political or theoretical statements or meditations on the state of things (or “no state” of things, to echo the poet Victor Hernández Cruz). As a poet who plays with language a lot, I value how these durational language and walking exercises (a typical wokitokiteki is between 15 and 35 minutes with no pauses in the recording) allow for language to exhaust itself and something else to happen: a stutter, a confession, or just silence and listening to my surroundings, which generates observations or reactions that keep the exercise going. I have even applied this compositional method to conventional poems in the book, such as “Soverano,” written after I participated in the summer 2019 protests in Puerto Rico. A few days after attending the protests I was at the Macondo Writers Workshop in San Antonio studying creative nonfiction, and I wanted a more nonfictional and less conventionally poetic way to tell the story of what I saw at the protests, so I walked around my room and improvised, then transcribed and edited and added as minimally as possible. The result was “Soverano,” something like a prose poem but hopefully conveying a bit of the rawness of the experience of what I saw and felt at the event as I processed it a few days later.

Many of the poems in Transversal are rhythmic and musical, as if they are begging to be performed. Is speaking your poetry aloud a large part of your work?

Music, and the musicality of language in particular, are really important to me and to my sense of what poetry is and does. Poetry does not need to be super rhythmic (it does not need to be anything in particular) but my sense of the musicality of language is tied to how words are haunted by other words and worlds, by wordless sounds, bodies, silences. I have different influences as a performer, from the Puerto Rican décima tradition I grew up with to that of the Nuyorican poets, which I claim and write about in my critical work. I have also worked with bands and more recently incorporated phone apps into my performances: sometimes to create sound textures or loops but other times to create deliberate mistranslations, to generate found poems (anagrams, for instance), or to introduce multiple voices into my work and to complicate the immediacy of the relationship between performer and audience. As a poet and critic, I’m very interested in mediated performance, in how it shapes the politics of empire (as in the previous president) but can also sometimes unsettle them, in how the hyper-mediation and gadget-ification of everything is both a challenge and an opportunity for poetry. Poems for Transversal evolved as I performed them everywhere from the Poesiefestival Berlin and the Toronto Biennial of Art to colleges and community gardens in the South Bronx. I think of these performances as extending the sedimentation of the poems, their symbiotic relationships to the environments that birthed them. In our pandemic context, I have explored different approaches to digital performance that highlight but also push against the screened-ness of our present, whether by highlighting the space between my body and the screen, using my phone and computer simultaneously to create more weirdly stereophonic performances, or reclaiming analog forms such as the postcard. I have also done “live” wokitokiteki improvisations in my backyard over Zoom. Increasingly, all my longer readings and performances include at least a brief component of improvisation, and I anticipate that I will continue doing so for Transversal, partly to underscore that what’s in a book is not the end but just another beginning. 

Okay, I know I said five questions… but I have one more. What are you working on now?

I’m researching the history of Latinx social media, translating two artist books by Nicole Cecilia Delgado, and editing a couple of long poetic sequences, including one based on the sequence of covid-19 (the latter build off two poems in Transversal). I’m also exploring the question of mediated and found language through experiments with media art: I turned one of the anagram poems from Transversal into a series of GIFs currently on display at the Museum of the City of New York as part of its New York Responds exhibition.   

Urayoán Noel is a Puerto Rican poet, performer, translator, and critic living in the Bronx, New York. He has published seven books of poetry and the prize-winning study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam, and he edited and translated Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poetry by Pablo de Rokha, which was a finalist for the National Translation Award. Noel teaches at New York University and at Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas.

Five Questions with Mario T. García and Ellen McCraken on Rewriting the Chicano Movement

February 26, 2021

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 JusticeThe 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 NarrativeThe Life and Writing of Fray Angélico Chávez, and Paratexts and Performance in the Novels of Junot Díaz and Sandra Cisneros.

Publisher’s Weekly Reviews Mihesuah’s Supernatural Mystery ‘Hatak Witches’

February 24, 2021

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

Read the entire review here.

2021 Tucson Festival of Books: Presenting Authors

February 23, 2021

This year’s virtual Tucson Festival of Books promises two days full of interesting and fun conversations with authors from all over the world.

As long-time sponsors of the Festival, we are pleased to be participating in this year’s festivities. Join us March 6 and 7 and see our authors and staff in conversation at the following presentations:

Searching for Poetic Justice
Saturday, March 6 9 a.m.
What does the American Dream look like for Latinx people living in the United States? What does it feel like? Felicia Zamora and Gloria Muñoz explore those questions in their award-winning poetry. Today they will share their thoughts, and some of their poems, with all of us. Danzirly is a stunning bilingual poetry collection that considers multigenerational Latinx identities in the rapidly changing United States. Winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Ambroggio Prize, Muñoz’s collection is an unforgettable reckoning of the grief and beauty that pulses through twenty-first-century America. This panel will be moderated by Savannah Hicks, who is our Exhibits Manager. Learn more about this panel.

Authors in Conversation
Saturday, March 6, 1 p.m.
Authors Simon Winchester and Stephen Pyne discuss how the quest for land, ownership and discovery have shaped the modern world. Steve is the author of our new book The Great Ages of Discovery, which a fascinating conceptual framework for understanding the past 600 years of exploration by Western civilization and its relationship to contemporary society. Learn more about this panel.

It Takes a Pueblo
Sunday, March 7, 1 pm
Arizona authors Alberto Álvaro Ríos and Lydia R. Otero will discuss their newest books, both of which explore the power of place and community along the border. How much is lost when families are dislocated altogether? Living where we do, these are things for all of us to think about. Ríos is the author of A Good Map of All Things, a picaresque novel that describes momentous adventure and quiet connection bring twenty people in a small town in northern Mexico. Otero is the author of La Calle, which examines conflicting claims to urban space, place, and history as advanced by two opposing historic preservationist groups in Tucson. This panel will be moderated by Mari Herreras, who is our Publicity Manager. Learn more about this panel.

Visit tucsonfestivalofbooks.org to see the full schedule and list of participating authors.

Tucson Weekly Features Excerpt from ‘The Nature of Desert Nature’

February 23, 2021

The Tucson Weekly gave a bit of love to The Nature of Desert Nature, edited by Gary Paul Nabhan.

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.

Josie Méndez-Negrete Chosen as 2021 NACCS Scholar

February 23, 2021

We are thrilled to announce that University of Arizona Press author Josie Méndez-Negrete is the 2021 NACCS Scholar!

“The NACCS Scholar Award is a recognition of work – publications, pedagogical, leadership praxis, and personal commitment, Dr. Méndez-Negrete exemplifies this quality among the professoriate of NACCS. Dr. Méndez-Negrete has supported many junior scholars who have benefitted from her tireless work assisting in writing and publishing articles, book chapters, and books.  Dr. Méndez-Negrete earned her accolades and successful transitions in academia with blood, sweat, tears, perspicacity, tenacity and true grit.  As a Professor Emerita she continues to draw on her passion focusing on her press, Conocimientos – where she is publishing women who theorize and tell their stories of struggle and survival.  She continues to support students in their academic pursuits, and her colleagues by example to be best mentors. 

The nomination of Dr. Méndez-Negrete was received from the Northern California Foco with letters of  support from the Midwest, the Pacific Northwest, Southern California, and the Rocky Mountain focos.  While she is a native of northern California she is fully embedded as an activist scholar in Texas.  Her selection as NACCS scholar celebrate her multi-regional contributions which are truly embodied and celebrated as recognition for her life’s work.” —The National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies

Josie Méndez-Negrete is the author of Activist Leaders of San José, which unearths and makes visible lived experiences of Chicana and Latino activists from San José, California, who made contributions to the cultural and civic life of the city. Through oral histories, we see a portrait of grassroots leadership in the twentieth century.

Congratulations, Josie!

Tile Martyrs: An Excerpt from John-Michael Rivera’s ‘UNDOCUMENTS’

February 22, 2021

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.

OLLI Hosts Press Authors in Spring Online Speaker Series

February 19, 2021

Osher Lifelong Learning Institute‘s online spring speaker series includes many University of Arizona Press authors from our spring 2021 catalog. We’re grateful to OLLI-UA for the continued invitation to be part of their noncredit learning program open to all adults over the age of 50.

Remaining spring program featuring University of Arizona Press authors:

February 22, 2021: The Diné Reader: Celebrating the Publication of the First Anthology of Navajo Literature

March 1, 2021: Diverting the Gila: The Pima Indians and the Florence Casa Grande Project, 1916-1928

March 8, 2021: Flower Worlds in the Art and Ideology of Prehispanic and Contemporary Indigenous Societies in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest

March 15, 2021: The Fernandeños: Lineages, Neophytes, Citizens, and Tribe

March 22, 2021: Becoming Hopi: A History

April 12, 2021: From A to Z, The History of Latino Politics in Arizona

More than 1,400 people are part of OLLI-UA in Southern Arizona. Visit here to learn more about an OLLI-UA membership, program registration, and check program changes.

Watch: Daniel Chacón with Fresno Writers Live

February 17, 2021

In case you’ve missed Daniel Chacón reading from his University of Arizona Press book, Kafka in a Skirt: Stories from the Wall, here’s your chance. Chacon read as part of the Fresno Writers Live virtual reading series last year.

In Kafka in a Skirt, Chacón subverts expectation and bends the rules of reality to create stories that are intriguing, hilarious, and deeply rooted in Chicano culture. These stories explore the concept of a wall that reaches beyond our immediate thoughts of a towering physical structure. While Chacón aims to address the partition along the U.S.-Mexico border, he also uses these stories to work through the intangible walls that divide communities and individuals—particularly those who straddle multiple cultures in their daily lives.

Ofrenda Magazine Features ‘Voices from the Ancestors’

February 17, 2021

Lara Medina, co-editor of Voices from the Ancestors: Xicanx and Latinx Spiritual Expressions and Healing Practices, was recently interview by Marcy Carbajal, editor of Ofrenda Magazine, a new multimedia publication that explores Xicanx and Latinx spirituality, Earth wisdoms, and healing arts.

Interview excerpt:

“Over the past 40 years, I have witnessed the reclamation of Indigenous identities and spiritual practices among many Xicanx and Latinx peoples as well as an uplifting of our African ancestries, often referred to as “the third root.” Foundational to these reclamations is the embracement of non-Western epistemologies. We have come to understand our deep interconnectivity with all of humanity as well as plant and animal life and the natural forces of the universe. So we understand that how we live our lives impacts all others and that we must live with a consciousness of balance, reciprocity, respect and gratitude. We must honor the spirits in all life forms and not consider humans to be superior. We must take care of the planet and in turn the planet will take care of us. We must also maintain our relationships with our deceased ancestors (known and unknown) who have walked this earthly journey before us “as death brings another kind of wisdom that they want to share with us.” The ancestors gain the power to continue to guide and protect us.”

Read the entire interview here.

AZPM’s Arizona Spotlight Goes to Space with ‘Beyond Earth’s Edge’

February 17, 2021

Mark McLemore, host and producer of Arizona Public Media’s Arizona Spotlight, recently interviewed Christopher Cokinos and Julie Swarstad Johnson, co-editors of Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight.

Beyond Earth’s Edge is a trailblazing anthology of poetry that vividly captures the violence of blastoff, the wonders seen by Hubble, and the trajectories of exploration to Mars and beyond through a wide array of lyric celebrations, somber meditations, accessible narratives, concrete poems, and new forms of science fiction. Included are diverse perspectives from 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.

Listen to the interview here.

Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez Wins Inaugural AAHHE Distinguished Author Award

February 5, 2021

We are thrilled to announce that University of Arizona Press author Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez is the winner of the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education’s inaugural Distinguished Scholar Award!

AAHHE awards Carlos in recognition of his exceptional academic and scholarly contributions to the advancement of Latinos and Latinos in higher education, which is a set of contributions beautifully documented in Reflections of a Transborder Anthropologist.

“This magnificent tome provides its readers with an informative and comprehensive summation of Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez’s life’s work, which has been and continues to be extraordinary. We are delighted to be able to add our modest recognition and kudos to the host of awards and honors of which Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez has been a recipient.”―Patricia Arredondo, Chair, AAHHE Board of Directors

Congratulations, Carlos!

A Desert Feast Wins a Pubwest Book Design Award

February 2, 2021

We are thrilled to announce that A Desert Feast won a silver award in the Adult Trade Book – Illustrated section of the Pubwest Book Design Awards! PubWest Book Design Awards recognize superior design and outstanding production quality of books throughout North America.

Drawing on thousands of years of foodways, Tucson cuisine blends the influences of Indigenous, Mexican, mission-era Mediterranean, and ranch-style cowboy food traditions. A Desert Feast by Carolyn Niethammer offers a food pilgrimage, where stories and recipes demonstrate why the desert city of Tucson became America’s first UNESCO City of Gastronomy.

Spiral to the Stars Wins 2020 Beatrice Medicine Award

February 2, 2021

We are thrilled to announce that Spiral to the Stars by Laura Harjo is the winner of the 2020 Beatrice Medicine Award for Best Published Monograph! Chosen by the members of the Native American Literature Symposium and the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures boards, this award highlights exceptional work published in the field of Indigenous studies in the year 2019.

“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’s Spiral 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

Congratulations, Laura!

A Desert Feast, A Good Map of All Things, and The Saguaro Cactus Picked as Southwest Books of the Year

February 2, 2021

We are thrilled to announce that A Desert Feast by Carolyn Niethammer and A Good Map of All Things by Alberto Álvaro Ríos were chosen as top picks for the 2021 Southwest Books of the Year! Additionally, The Saguaro Cactus by David Yetman, Alberto Burquez, Kevin Hultine, and Michael Sanderson, was included in Gregory McNamee’s Southwest Books of the Year picks.

Southwest Books of the Year considers titles published during the calendar year that are about Southwest subjects, or are set in the Southwest.

The Southwest Books of the Year panel of reviewers—subject specialists and voracious consumers of Southwest literature all—are pleased to offer up their personal favorite titles of the year, complete with brief reviews to whet your appetite and leave you wanting more. Books selected by two or more panelists become Southwest Books of the Year Top Picks. Their choices are published in our annual publication, Southwest Books of the Year.

Congratulations to our wonderful authors!

Field Notes: The Islanders of Chiloé

January 21, 2021

One of the more culturally distinct regions of South America is the Archipelago of Chiloé, a cluster of more than two dozen islands situated a few miles west of the Patagonian coastline. Residents of Chiloé have long resisted cultural pressures from mainland Chile, often identifying themselves as islanders (Chilotes) first and Chileans second. Anton Daughters first visited the region as an adolescent in the mid 1980s. Returning as an anthropologist two decades later, he was struck by the stark shift that much of the archipelago had undergone. Many families once reliant on rural fishing and farming had become dependent on low-wage jobs in the growing salmon-export industry. His research since 2004 has focused on those changes, emphasizing the impact that large-scale economic transformations can have on the collective identity of island communities. The images below–taken between 2006 and 2018–offer snapshots of some of the people and places in Chiloé chronicled in Memories of Earth and Sea.    

Image 1 – A young man navigates his motor boat between the islands of Llingua and Quinchao in Chiloé. For decades, many islanders relied on small-scale fishing (carried out on motor boats like this one) to supplement farming, shellfish-gathering, and the tending of livestock. The arrival of large-scale aquaculture companies in the 1990s and early 2000s triggered a shift to wage labor, pulling some islanders away from more traditional rural livelihoods and, by extension, their networks of labor reciprocity. Islands like Llingua and Quinchao—whose populations were mostly or entirely rural—were hit especially hard by the changes. While families with motorboats were able to sustain small-scale fishing ventures and fulfill agricultural labor-debts with neighbors, other families were drawn to low-wage jobs and a cash economy that often divorced them of their rural livelihoods and ultimately placed them in more tenuous economic circumstances. (Photo by Anton Daughters)
Image 2 – A fisherman scans the waters off Quinchao Island. The tallest peak in the background is Volcano Michinmahuida, located on the mainland of South America in Pumalín Park, a sector of Patagonia. Fishing boats like these form a mainstay of small-scale, artisanal fishing ventures in Chiloé, even while wild stocks of fish (hake, conger eel, and several varieties of bass) have fluctuated significantly over the years. Chile’s national fishing agency placed a series of bans on the extraction of wild hake (merluza) starting in 2014. A red tide crisis in 2016 dealt a further blow to fishing as a viable livelihood. Today, artisanal fishing is carried out only intermittently throughout the archipelago. (Photo by Anton Daughters)
Image 3 – With help from neighbors, Irene Mansilla tills the earth for the planting and fertilizing of potatoes. Irene and her husband are among 400 or so residents of the island of Llingua. For decades, their primary form of subsistence has been farming, fishing, shellfish-extraction, and the tending of a few scattered livestock on their property. Agricultural work is typically done through reciprocal arrangements with neighbors (mingas). Despite the installation of large salmon farms and processing plants along neighboring islands, the Mansillas have been able to maintain a strategy of diversified rural livelihoods, thanks largely to their ownership of a fishing boat, their association years ago with a local fishing cooperative, and the labor assistance they get from neighbors. Other rural islanders have been less fortunate, finding their subsistence livelihoods nearly impossible to maintain in the face of a growing regional cash economy. (Photo by Anton Daughters)

Image 4 – This view of Llingua Island’s steeple (built in 1912) and southern dock also shows the island of Quinchao in the backdrop. Communities on both islands have experienced significant economic shifts over the last two decades, leaving many families struggling to maintain subsistence farming and fishing and networks of labor assistance with neighbors. (Photo by Anton Daughters)
Image 5 – Danny Leviñanco searches for shellfish on the shores of Quinchao. Danny grew up in a rural household on neighboring Caguach Island. Today she works as a resident schoolteacher on the island of Chuit (population 97). She also assists rural islanders in their efforts to legally resist the expansion of large-scale aquaculture industries into their offshore space. (Photo by Danny Leviñanco)

***

Anton Daughters is an associate professor of anthropology at Truman State University.

Excerpt: ‘Rewriting the Chicano Movement’

January 19, 2020

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 JusticeThe Making of a Mexican American Mayor, and Literature as History. He has won a number of awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Book Trailer: Steve Pyne’s ‘The Great Ages of Discovery’

January 14, 2021

Coming next month, Steve J. Pyne’s newest work The Great Ages of Discovery offers a fascinating conceptual framework for understanding the past 600 years of exploration by Western civilization and its relationship to contemporary society. Pyne expertly organizes the vast narrative of Western exploration into three distinctive ages of discovery. See the new book trailer and look for the book publishing in February!

SHA 2021: Discover Our Recent and Forthcoming Historical Archaeology Titles

January 6, 2021

We are excited to participate in the first virtual Society for Historical Archaeology conference this year! You can visit our virtual exhibitor booth here.

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.

Watch a lecture with the editors, Christine D. Beaule and John G. Douglass, here, and read a Q&A with the editors here.

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 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 the book here. We are thrilled that Smithsonian Magazine chose Sugarcane and Rum for their weekly reading series!

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.

Read a Q & A with author Lee M. Panich here.

Discover our forthcoming historical archaeology titles below.

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.

Explore New Titles from the University of Arizona Press Spring 2021 Catalog

December 23, 2020

Here’s a preview of our upcoming Spring 2021 season with the best the University of Arizona Press has to offer, from Latinx poetry, to Indigenous literature and studies, as well as a variety of the unique global scholarship the Press has committed to bring to readers worldwide. Tuck in.

In The Great Ages of Discovery: How Western Civilization Learned About a Wider World, historian and MacArthur Fellow Stephen J. Pyne identifies three great ages of discovery in his fascinating new book.

“Stephen Pyne charts a new course through the history of exploration, navigating deftly among ruminations, reflections, themes, and concepts. He sees exploration as an intellectual adventure. Readers who accompany him will have a lucid, engaging, and magisterial guide. They can undertake odysseys without leaving their armchairs.”—Felipe Fernández-Armesto, author of Out of Our Minds: What We Think and How We Came to Think It.

The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature is a ground-breaking anthology of Navajo Literature that showcases the breadth, depth, and diversity of Diné creative artists and their poetry, fiction, and nonfiction prose. 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.

The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature is extraordinary. It is the beauty of Diné bizaad from Creation’s horizon—K’é breath, heart, continuance—beyond measure. I advise it be read with and for Humility, Courage, Sustenance, Gratitude—always for the people, community, and land that is the source of Existence.”—Simon J. Ortiz

The Hatak Witches continues the storyline of Choctaw cosmology and cultural survival that are prominent in Devon A. Mihesuah’s award-winning novel, The Roads of My Relations.

In Hatak Witches, Detective Monique Blue Hawk and her partner Chris Pierson arrive to the Children’s Museum of Science and History in Norman, Oklahoma after a security guard is found dead and another wounded. They find no fingerprints, no footprints, and no obvious means to enter the locked building, but stolen is the portion of an ancient and deformed skeleton from the neglected museum archives.

“If you are looking for a journey into modern-day Choctaw spirituality, The Hatak Witches is a trip waiting to be taken.”—Geary Hobson, author of The Last of Ofos

Urayoán Noel‘s new collection, Tranversal, featuring Noel’s bilingual playfulness, intellect, and irreverent political imagination with personal reflections on love, desire, and loss filtered through a queer approach to form, expanding upon Noel’s experiments with self-translation in his celebrated collection Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico. 

“Urayoán understands the importance of his poetry being accessible. He understands that art is for everyone, and so he communicates with everyone. For him, all the dimensions of words are indispensable and therefore phonetics become visible in his stanzas. He respects words not in a professorial way but rather in the same way one respects the standing of an old-school bichote who’s still alive. Language is not a barrier but an imaginary border that serves as a tool to fatten up the arguments of his words. In life one has to move, one has to walk even when there’s a more comfortable way to get somewhere else, to other paths, and if I were to cross over one day, I would do so with this book. The transversal is as necessary as growth.”—Residente, recording artist and filmmaker.

Winner of the Ambroggio Prize from the Academy of American Poets, Danzirly is a striking bilingual poetry collection by Gloria Muñoz, that fiercely examines the nuances of the American Dream for Latinx people in the United States, and powerfully dismantles Latinx stereotypes in poetic form, juxtaposing the promised wonders of a life in America with the harsh realities that immigrants face as they build their lives and raise their families here.

“In this utterly unique bilingual collection, Muñoz brilliantly negotiates two languages and the spaces between them, exploring the ever transient emblem of the American Dream through themes of lineage and loss, cultural and spiritual inheritance, assimilation, and racial and gender inequality.”—Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of How to Love a Country

How did a young boy from Tututepec, Oaxaca, become a famous Indigenous jewelry artist and philanthropist in Los Angeles? In Federico: One Man’s Remarkable Journey from Tututepec to L.A., Federico Jiménez Caballero tells his remarkable story of willpower, curiosity, hard work, and passion that changed his life forever. Edited by Shelby Tisdale.

“A remarkable narrative telling of Indigenous origins, transformation in the city, and eventual migration to the United States, Federico by Federico Jiménez Caballero brings life to a unique story beginning in rural Oaxaca and ending in Los Angeles.”—Anna M. Nogar, author of Quill and Cross in the Borderlands: Sor María de Ágreda and the Lady in Blue, 1628 to the Present

In UNDOCUMENTS, John-Michael Rivera remixes the forms and styles of the first encyclopedia of the New World, the Florentine Codex, in order to tell a modern story of Greater Mexico in our current technology-heavy age, wherein modern lawmakers and powerful global figures desire to classify, deport, and erase immigrants and their experiences.

“A tour de force, UNDOCUMENTS breaks rules and creates new ones. Through deft handling of texts, both theoretical and historical, Rivera offers us a compendium of diverse people and items such as documents, poems, the Florentine Codex, Anzaldúa, Bataille, [and] philosophy, along with objects like el molcajete. Using a true mestizaje of genre and approaches, he cooks up a rich poetic stew that is stimulating, intriguing, and nourishing.”—Norma Elia Cantú, author of Cabañuelas: A Novel

Edited by Mario T. García and Ellen McCracken, Rewriting the Chicano Movement: New Histories of Mexican American Activism in the Civil Rights Era is a collection of powerful new essays on the Chicano Movement that expand and revise our 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.

“Conversation about the Chicano Movement is far from over—in fact, it is continuing and getting reenergized all the time. Here, veteran and rising scholars across a variety of disciplines give us fascinating, multi-sited snapshots of this political moment in American history.”—Lori A. Flores, author of Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement

In Empowered!: Latinos Transforming Arizona Politics, Lisa Magaña and César S. Silva argue that the state of Arizona is more inclusive and progressive then it has ever been. Following in the footsteps of grassroots organizers in California and the southeastern states, Latinos in Arizona have struggled and succeeded to alter the anti-immigrant and racist policies that have been affecting Latinos in the state for many years. Draconian immigration policies have plagued Arizona’s political history. Empowered! shows innovative ways that Latinos have fought these policies.

“This study offers a compelling account of how Latinos in Arizona organized and increased their electoral clout to change the landscape of state politics. Through grassroots networks and dogged determination, Latinos successfully pushed back on anti-immigrant and anti-Latino policies and politicians.”—Christine Marie Sierra, co-author of Contested Transformation: Race, Gender, and Political Leadership in 21st Century America

David H. DeJong‘s Diverting the Gila: The Pima Indians and the Florence-Casa Grande Project, 1916–1928, explores the complex web of tension, distrust, and political maneuvering to divide and divert the scarce waters of the Gila River. Residents of Florence, Casa Grande, and the Pima Reservation fought for vital access to water rights. As was often the case in the West, well-heeled, nontribal political interests manipulated the laws at the expense of the Indigenous community.

“The author provides a detailed study of good intentions, betrayal, and compromise to resolve the use of the Gila River by the Pima and white farmers in central Arizona. It also is the story of greed with an underlying foundation of racism on the part of white landowners against the Pima. In Arizona and the West, water is power—economic, social, and political. Its use is not neutral, and the Pima did not have it.”—R. Douglas Hurt, author of The Green Revolution in the Global South: Science, Politics, and Unintended Consequences

Carrying the Burden of Peace: Reimagining Indigenous Masculinities weaves together stories of Indigenous life, love, eroticism, pain, and joy to map the contours of diverse, empowered, and non-dominant Indigenous masculinities. Author Sam McKegney explores Indigenous literary art for understandings of masculinity that exceed the impoverished inheritance of colonialism.

“I came away from the manuscript convinced of the need for this work, as I find it exemplary of the kind of careful, ethically attentive, and deeply generous scholarship we need more of.”—Daniel Heath Justice, author of Why Indigenous Literatures Matter

Decolonizing “Prehistory”: Deep Time and Indigenous Knowledges in North America combines a critical investigation of the documentation of the American deep past with perspectives from Indigenous traditional knowledges and attention to ongoing systems of intellectual colonialism. Edited by Gesa Mackenthun and Christen MucherDecolonizing “Prehistory” brings together experts from American studies, archaeology, anthropology, legal studies, history, and literary studies, this interdisciplinary volume offers essential information about the complexity and ambivalence of colonial encounters with Indigenous peoples in North America, and their impact on American scientific discourse.

Decolonizing “Prehistory” carries readers to the rugged landscapes of the Pacific Northwest to hear how they are known by communities with millennial depth as residents. The book adds breadth with chapters on the Penobscot River People, Maya communities living at tourist destinations Coba and Tulum, and Mammoth Cave. Philip Deloria concludes the book with a reading of his father’s no-holds-barred assertion of flaws in Western science, a position that time has brought closer to anthropologists’ own critiques seen in this volume.”—Alice Beck Kehoe, author of Traveling Prehistoric Seas: Critical Thinking on Ancient Transoceanic Voyages

Authors Duane Champagne and Carole Goldberg are leading experts in Native sovereignty policies and histories. In A Coalition of Lineages: The Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians, 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

Strong Hearts and Healing Hands: Southern California Indians and Field Nurses, 1920–1950, tells the story of a bold program in public health that began in 1924 in the United States. The Indian Service of the United States hired its first nurses to work among Indians living on reservations. This corps of white women were dedicated to improving Indian health. In 1928, the first field nurses arrived in the Mission Indian Agency of Southern California. These nurses visited homes and schools, providing public health and sanitation information regarding disease causation and prevention. Over time, field nurses and Native people formed a positive working relationship that resulted in the decline of mortality from infectious diseases.

“Clifford Trafzer brings his many years of experience and unique set of knowledge to uncover the understudied role of field nurses from the Progressive Era to the 1950s as they collaborated closely with a multitude of Native Americans in Southern California to promote public health and counter the onslaught of tuberculosis and other Western diseases that afflicted them as a result of being confined to reservations.”—Andrae M. Marak, co-author of At the Border of Empires

In 1911, a group of Native American intellectuals and activists joined together to establish the Society of American Indians (SAI), an organization by Indians for Indians. It was the first such nationwide organization dedicated to reform. In We Are Not a Vanishing People: The Society of American Indians, 1911–1923, Thomas Constantine Maroukis show how this new organization used a strategy of protest and activism that carried into the rest of the twentieth century. Some of the most prominent members included Charles A. Eastman (Dakota), Arthur Parker (Seneca), Carlos Montezuma (Yavapai), Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Sioux), and Sherman Coolidge (Peoria).

“This is an essential book for everyone who is interested in modern American Indian History. Thomas Maroukis examines how American Indian leaders organized, used their education (sometimes disagreed with each other) and addressed critical issues in Indian Country in the early 20th century. He convincingly argues that these new activists pushed back against the government and voiced a clear message that Indians had not vanished!”—Donald L. Fixico, author of Indian Resilience and Rebuilding: Indigenous Nations in the Modern American West

Indigenous Women and Violence: Feminist Activist Research in Heightened States of Injustice offers an intimate view of how settler colonialism and other structural forms of power and inequality created accumulated violences in the lives of Indigenous women. Edited by Lynn Stephen and Shannon Speed, this volume uncovers how these Indigenous women resist violence in Mexico, Central America, and the United States, centering on the topics of femicide, immigration, human rights violations, the criminal justice system, and Indigenous justice.

“Bringing together leading Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, this volume explores the connections between structural, extreme, and everyday violence against Indigenous women across time and borders. It makes important contributions to current debates about gender violence and research methods.”—Rachel Sieder, editor of Demanding Justice and Security: Indigenous Women and Legal Pluralities in Latin America

Tourism Geopolitics: Assemblages of Infrastructure, Affect, and Imagination, edited by Mary MostafanezhadMatilde Córdoba Azcárate, and Roger Norum homes in on tourism and its geopolitical entanglements by examining its contemporary affects, imaginaries, and infrastructures. It develops the concept of tourism geopolitics to reveal the growing centrality of tourism in geopolitical life, as well as the geopolitical nature of the tourism encounter.

This volume is a vital read for critical geographers, anthropologists, and political scientists, as well as scholars of tourism and cultural studies.

In Famine Foods: Plants We Eat to Survive, Paul E. Minnis focuses on the myriad plants that have sustained human populations throughout the course of history, unveiling those that people have consumed, and often still consume, to avoid starvation. For the first time, this book offers a fascinating overview of famine foods—how they are used, who uses them, and, perhaps most importantly, why they may be critical to sustain human life in the future.

“This book represents decades of detailed research by one of North America’s top ethnobiologists. Minnis draws on multiple sources to create this unique compendium of plants that humans have turned to during times of food scarcity. Critically important to peoples of the past, this knowledge may be just as important to future populations.”—Nancy J. Turner, author of Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America

Moveable Gardens: Itineraries and Sanctuaries of Memory, edited by Virginia D. Nazarea and Terese Gagnon, highlights itineraries and sanctuaries in an era of massive dislocation, addressing concerns about finding comforting and familiar refuges in the Anthropocene. The worlds of marginalized individuals who live in impoverished rural communities, many Indigenous peoples, and refugees are constantly under threat of fracturing. Yet, in every case, there is resilience and regeneration as these individuals re-create their worlds through the foods, traditions, and plants they carry with them into their new realities.

“This carefully edited volume, well curated and well integrated, addresses a set of interrelated complexities critical to our current planetary era. United by two thematic threads, itineraries and sanctuaries, the chapters successfully illuminate and detail specific contexts while revealing commonalities across geographies.”—Ann Grodzins Gold, author of Shiptown: Between Rural and Urban North India

Becoming Hopi: A History is a comprehensive look at the history of the people of the Hopi Mesas as it has never been told before. The Hopi Tribe is one of the most intensively studied Indigenous groups in the world. Most popular accounts of Hopi history romanticize Hopi society as “timeless.” The archaeological record and accounts from Hopi people paint a much more dynamic picture, full of migrations, gatherings, and dispersals of people; a search for the center place; and the struggle to reconcile different cultural and religious traditions. Edited by Wesley BernardiniStewart B. KoyiyumptewaGregson Schachner, and Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma, Becoming Hopi weaves together evidence from archaeology, oral tradition, historical records, and ethnography to reconstruct the full story of the Hopi Mesas, rejecting the colonial divide between “prehistory” and “history.”

Becoming Hopi brilliantly combines Hopi and non-Hopi voices in helping to rewrite Hopi history and the process of becoming Hopi. The coverage is extensive—both for Hopi as well as for wide swaths of the northern Southwest—and each chapter has something new to offer in terms of innovative data collection and interpretation. 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

The recognition of Flower Worlds is one of the most significant breakthroughs in the study of Indigenous spirituality in the Americas. These worlds are solar and floral spiritual domains that are widely shared among both pre-Hispanic and contemporary Native cultures in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest. Flower Worlds: Religion, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest is the first volume, edited by Michael Mathiowetz and Andrew Turner, to bring together a diverse range of scholars to create a truly multidisciplinary understanding of Flower Worlds.

“… the authors are coming at Flower World concepts from different directions and perspectives, and these different ideas and perspectives speak together in a way that helps further the conversation. This volume is not about concluding ideas but about continuing the conversation. I was impressed by the multitude of strong voices—both past and present—representing elements of the Flower World. This volume will be of lasting importance in the cross-cultural study of Flower Worlds.”—John G. Douglass, co-editor ofThe Global Spanish Empire: Five Hundred Years of Place Making and Pluralism

Alluvium and Empire: The Archaeology of Colonial Resettlement and Indigenous Persistence on Peru’s North Coast uncovers the stories of Indigenous people who were subject to one of the largest waves of forced resettlement in human history, the Reducción General. In 1569, Spanish administrators attempted to move at least 1.4 million Indigenous people into a series of planned towns called reducciones, with the goal of reshaping their households, communities, and religious practices. However, in northern Peru’s Zaña Valley, this process failed to go as the Spanish had planned. In Alluvium and Empire, author Parker VanValkenburgh explores both the short-term processes and long-term legacies of Indigenous resettlement in this region, drawing particular attention to the formation of complex relationships between Indigenous communities, imperial institutions, and the dynamic environments of Peru’s north coast.

“This book represents a much-welcome approach to the archaeology of empire. It combines a sophisticated theoretical framework with rigorous archival and archaeological methods to shed valuable new light on the history of Spanish empire building in Peru.”—Craig Cipolla, author of Foreign Objects: Rethinking Indigenous Consumption in American Archaeology

The Pluto System After New Horizons, edited by S. Alan SternRichard P. BinzelWilliam M. GrundyJeffrey M. Moore, and Leslie A. Young, seeks to become the benchmark for synthesizing our understanding of the Pluto system. The volume’s lead editor is S. Alan Stern, who also serves as NASA’s New Horizons Principal Investigator; co-editors Richard P. Binzel, William M. Grundy, Jeffrey M. Moore, and Leslie A. Young are all co-investigators on New Horizons. Leading researchers from around the globe have spent the last five years assimilating Pluto system flyby data returned from New Horizons. The chapters in this volume form an enduring foundation for ongoing study and understanding of the Pluto system.

Watch: Tumamoc Desert Lab Book Release Event for ‘The Nature of Desert Nature’

December 21, 2021

The Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill hosted a special online event on December 9, 2020 to celebrate the book release of The Nature of Desert Nature, edited by Gary Nabhan.

In this new collection of essays and more, Nabhan invites a prism of voices—friends, colleagues, and advisors 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.

Introduced by Desert Laboratory Director Ben Wilder, Nabhan was joined by contributors Homero Aridjis, poet and environmental leader; Exequiel Ezcurra, ecologist and science diplomat; and Alison Hawthorne Deming, poet and Regents Professor.

Girl of New Zealand Chosen as a 2020 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

December 18, 2020

We are thrilled to announce that Michelle Erai’s Girl of New Zealand was chosen as a 2020 Choice Outstanding Academic Title!

These outstanding works have been selected for their excellence in scholarship and presentation, the significance of their contribution to the field, and their value as an important treatment of their subject.

Girl of New Zealand presents a nuanced insight into the way violence and colonial attitudes shaped the representation of Māori women and girls. Michelle Erai examines more than thirty images of Māori women alongside the records of early missionaries and settlers in Aotearoa, as well as comments by archivists and librarians, to shed light on how race, gender, and sexuality have been ascribed to particular bodies.

Congratulations, Michelle!

Explore Our Recent Ethnobiology and Ethnobotany Titles

December 17, 2020

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.

See some photographs and field notes from editors Paul Minnis and Michael Whalen here.

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.

Read a Q & A with author Chie Sakakibara here.

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.

Watch editor Gary Nabhan and contributor Francisco Cantú discuss The Nature of Desert Nature here.

A Desert Feast offers 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 Feast here, 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 Rum here. 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 Cactus here. Read about a great book release event we hosted for The Saguaro Cactus, back in the pre-covid days, here.

WSJ: Stephen Pyne on ‘The Year Wildfires in the West Spread Like the Plague’

December 12, 2020

In the 2020 year in review issue of the Wall Street Journal, author Stephen Pyne explains why 2020 brought a better understanding of the causes of wildfires and what needs to be done. He writes:

“Surely the dominant story of 2020 will be the coronavirus pandemic and the economic upheaval and political fallout it caused. But the enduring images of the year may well be of another contagion—the fires that splashed across the globe and the havoc they wrought where humanity’s and nature’s economies met.

The fires seemed everywhere, partly because of extensive media coverage—fires are visually graphic and guaranteed to grab attention. But this wasn’t hype. The fires were real. Many occurred in the usual places—like California, African savannas and Australia—that are built to burn, though this time they came with performance enhancers. Few of such fires were individually unprecedented, but they were so many they swarmed, and they came in serial outbreaks. In their ensemble they qualify as epic.”

Read more

Watch: Nathaniel Morris with UCLAmericas Discusses Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans

December 9, 2020

The UCL Institute of the Americas held a book release celebration for University of Arizona Press author Nathaniel Morris on December 2, 2020.

Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans: Indigenous Communities and the Revolutionary State in Mexico’s Gran Nayar, 1910–1940 is Morris’ first book based on his extensive archival research and years of fieldwork in the rugged and remote Gran Nayar.

Morris shows that the Náayari, Wixárika, O’dam, and Mexicanero peoples were actively involved in the armed phase of the Mexican Revolution. This participation led to serious clashes between an expansionist, “rationalist” revolutionary state and the highly autonomous communities and heterodox cultural and religious practices of the Gran Nayar’s inhabitants.

Field Notes: Nathaniel Morris on Fiestas in the Mountains of Mexico

December 1, 2020

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.

All photos and captions by Nathaniel Morris.

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.

Watch: Gary Nabhan and Francisco Cantú Discuss the Nature of Desert Nature

November 23, 2020

Recently, editor Gary Nabhan, contributor Francisco Cantú, and University of Arizona Press marketing assistant Savannah Hicks came together virtually as part of the Tucson Festival of Books Authors in Conversation series to talk about Nabhan’s new collection, The Nature of Desert Nature.

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.

Watch their discussion below.

powered by Crowdcast

A Look Inside A Marriage Out West

November 23, 2020

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.

Below, read an excerpt from Nancy J. Parezo and Don D. Fowler’s A Marriage Out West.

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.

Zócalo Magazine Shares Excerpt from ‘Desert Feast’

November 18, 2020

Tucson’s Zócalo Magazine recently featured an excerpt from Carolyn Niethammer‘s new book, The Desert Feast: Celebrating Tucson’s Culinary Heritage.

The Desert Feast offers a food pilgrimage, where stories and recipes demonstrate why the desert city of Tucson became America’s first UNESCO City of Gastronomy.

The excerpt tells part of the story of Sonoran wheat and how its introduction forever changed our region’s food landscape:

The easy and quick adoption of spring wheat can be attributed to the fact that it filled an important niche in the food cycle. And, as a new crop, it came without cultural baggage. Corn was traditionally planted and curated through its lifecycle with ceremony and song; wheat, on the other hand, with no such requirements, was easier to grow. We must not overlook the fact, though, that in some mission communities, the local people had no choice but were forced to grow wheat for the padres’ sacramental wafers.

By the mid-eighteenth century, spring wheat had become the major staple crop of the Tucson basin and far beyond. Although it does better with irrigation, in a normal, non-drought year, it could also produce an excellent crop in marginal soils of low fertility and with no water other than winter rainfall. With the abundance of wheat, women began making tortillas from flour instead of corn.

Read the entire excerpt here:

KJZZ Interview with Alberto Álvaro Ríos on ‘A Good Map’

November 17, 2020

If you didn’t have a chance to join in the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing’s recent book celebration for Alberto Álvaro Ríos’s new picaresque novel, A Good Map of All Things, listen to this interview with KJZZ’s Steve Goldstein on creating art during a pandemic and his new book.

A Good Map tells stories of a Mexican town and its unique inhabitants that feel familiar to all who love and live in Arizona-Sonora borderlands.

From the interview:

You know, I think this particular book is about quiet in its own way, and quiet is not an easily told story. You know, loud — everybody turns toward loud, and we’re living in very loud times. Loud is a magnet. Loud, you know, people are drawn to it. Quiet — that’s a much harder sell. And while I use guise or the setting of the mid-20th century, I think really what I’m trying to write is to the quiet, to the dark side of the moon, if you will — you know, equally there, absolutely there. But getting little attention. And what I’m especially trying to, to make a point of is saying that all of the loud around the border. Well, it’s just loud. The 98% of the rest of people’s lives is this quiet, everyday kind of experience. I was on a panel many years ago with Ursula Le Guin, the great science-fiction writer, and she said something that has always stayed with me. She said, “You know, science fiction,” She said. “It’s, it’s 98% regular, everyday. And 2% on Mars.” And what she was trying to say is the 2% on Mars got all the attention, but it wasn’t accurate to the actual way that we live. And I think in this book, I’m trying to get to the depth of the everyday, which is that 98% of how we actually get through life. And the ’50s happens to be  — you know, I was born in the ’50s. That’s when I was growing up. These, the particular adventures, if I can call them that, came from all of the towns that I grew up visiting and spending time in, and that my grandmother and her sisters had been teachers and mercantile workers in these towns. So they were always being talked about and remembered, and they were towns like Rayón and Cucurpe and Ímuris and especially Magdalena, all in the corridor of northern Sonora. And it’s a corridor that’s traditionally been called the Pimería Alta, and it extends from certainly Tucson, you could argue Phoenix — but certainly Tucson all the way to Hermosillo and Guaymas. That corridor, which was a longtime historic trading corridor. That ancientness, that oldness, that old-fashionedness is inherently in the place. And that’s what I’m trying to write to.

Listen here.

‘Beyond Earth’s Edge’ Co-Editor Cokinos Turns to the Moon in Recent Space Writings

November 13, 2020

When Christopher Cokinos isn’t talking about his love of poetry that celebrates spaceflight, the poet and author shares his interest in space sciences.

The co-editor of Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight, Cokinos recently examined NASA’s discovery of water on the moon in Sky News.

From Cokinos:

The discovery suggests a greater distribution of water on the Moon, an environment that astronomers in centuries past thought might have surface water but Apollo-era science suggested was bone dry. Since then, new laboratory techniques have cracked open previously-unstudied Apollo samples and found water molecules. Meanwhile, missions to the Moon over the past three decades found evidence of lunar water ice in permanently shadowed regions of the Moon, clustered around the poles.

Read the entire Sky News post here.

For The Space Review, Cokinos makes an argument for the next NASA lunar mission to head to the moon’s south pole, and not follow in the footsteps of the Apollo missions.

From his report:

In any case, if we can’t get to the pole on Artemis 3, go forward to a new location and don’t return to an Apollo site—not yet. Lunar sustainability can’t indulge in the appearance of expensive nostalgia that could risk turning off shaky public support.

Read the entire Space Review post here.

Rigoberto González Appointed Editor of Award-Winning Camino del Sol Series

November 12, 2020

The University of Arizona Press recently announced Rigoberto González’ editorship of its Camino del Sol Series. The award-winning and critically acclaimed series of poetry, fiction, and essays publishes emerging and established voices in Latinx literature, such as Juan Felipe Herrera, Carmen Giménez Smith, Luis Alberto Urrea, Richard Blanco, Alberto Ríos, Pat Mora, Tim Z. Hernandez, Emmy Pérez, and Francisco X. Alarcón.

González is the author of eighteen books of poetry and prose. His awards include Guggenheim, NEA, NYFA, and USA Rolón fellowships, the PEN/Voelcker Award, the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. A critic-at-large for The LA Times and contributing editor for Poets & Writers Magazine, he is currently Distinguished Professor of English and Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey.

“Camino del Sol has been essential to our Latinx literary legacy. For over 25 years this series has provided a home for the stories and voices that amplify, celebrate, and nuance the diverse experiences of our communities,” González said.

“I owe much of my college literary education to the books published by the University of Arizona Press, and in the same spirit of service to all readers, I am honored to continue its mission to seek out and highlight the remarkable work of both seasoned and promising Latinx writers.”

Kathryn Conrad, director of the University of Arizona Press, said González’ editorship and the caliber of the Camino del Sol advisory board furthers the Press’s mission to center Latinx and Indigenous literary voices.

“The University of Arizona Press is one of the first publishers to spotlight Latinx literary voices. We are honored Rigoberto has joined us to grow and care for this important series.”

Camino del Sol was established in 1994 by writer and poet Ray Gonzalez. The Camino del Sol series advisory board includes Francisco Cantú, Sandra Cisneros, Eduardo C. Corral, Jennine Capó Crucet, Angie Cruz, Natalie Diaz, Aracelis Girmay, Ada Limón, Jaime Manrique, Justin Torres, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Helena María Viramontes.

“With a spectacular Advisory Board composed of this country’s most notable talent in American letters, I expect Camino del Sol will maintain its exceptional reputation and to rise into further prominence by reflecting the growth and changes in our cultural and political landscapes,” González said.

Urayoán Noel‘s forthcoming poetry collection Transversal will be the first book under González’ editorship.

Buzzfeed News Puts ‘A Good Map’ on Books to Read List

November 11, 2020

BuzzFeed News featured A Good Map of All Things, the new novel by Arizona Poet Laureate Alberto Álvaro Ríos on a good reads recommendation list of 15 smaller presses.

From 15 Books From Smaller Presses You Won’t Be Able To Put Down:

A Good Map of All Things by Alberto Álvaro Ríos (University of Arizona Press, out now)

Billed as a “picaresque” novel — a style that typically follows a rogue or antihero and often has some elements of satire — A Good Map is set in the borderlands of Arizona and Sonora. The people in this fictional, small Mexican town are incorrigible gossips, true believers, and utterly charming. This is a book that feels like a classic, with characters who feel like family.

Read the list here.

Aída Hurtado Receives Honorable Mention for the 2020 NWSA Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize

November 10, 2020

We are thrilled to announce that Aída Hurtado received an honorable mention for the 2020 NWSA Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize for her recent University of Arizona Press title, Intersectional Chicana Feminisms!

The 2020 NWSA Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize offers recognition for groundbreaking monographs in women’s studies that make significant multicultural feminist contributions to women of color/transnational scholarship. The prize honors Gloria Anzaldúa, a valued and long-active member of the National Women’s Studies Association.

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.

Aída Hurtado is the Luis Leal Endowed Chair and a professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is co-author of Chicana/o Identity in a Changing U.S. Society and co-author of Beyond Machismo: Intersectional Latino Masculinities.

Congratulations, Aída!

Whale Snow: Five Questions with Author Chie Sakakibara

November 10, 2020

In Whale Snow: Iñupiat, Climate Change, and Multispecies Resilience in Arctic Alaska author Chie Sakakibara uses multispecies ethnography to explore how the relatedness of the Iñupiat of Arctic Alaska and the bowhead whale forms and transforms “the human” through their encounters. Sakakibara shows how people of Arctic Alaska live in the world that intersects with other beings, how these connections came into being, and, most importantly, how such intimate and intense relations help humans survive the challenges of climate change. Today, Chie answers our questions.

The artwork on the cover of your book is stunning. Please tell us more about the artist Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson.

Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson is an Iñupiaq artist and writer who was born and raised on the North Slope of Alaska. She is someone who I heartily admire for her deep commitment to her community through the promotion of Iñupiaq values, aesthetics, and environmentalism. As a dear friend, mentor, and collaborator, Nasuġraq kindly contributed the cover art, X-ray Whale, along with the original frontispiece and three illustrations included in Whale Snow. Her creations eloquently tell many stories, and they often point to a positive reciprocal relationship that goes across the boundary of humans and nonhuman animals, which gets intensified in our times of global climate change. This dynamism is the subject of Whale Snow.  

Nasuġraq calls Anaktuvuk Pass (AKP) home, a beautiful village nestled in the foothills of the Brooks Range, and her days are filled with adventures with her daughter, husband, a small flock of chickens, a variety of types of artistic expression, and writing. She is also known as a groundbreaking Arctic gardening guru, and is the founder of America’s northernmost gardening project called “Gardens in the Arctic,” which has successfully grown fresh produce for her community since 2016. Visit Nasuġraq’s website, Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson: Iñupiaq Artist and Writer, to learn more about her career: https://www.nasugraqhopson.com/.

Portrait of Chie Sakakibara and Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson in Anaktuvuk Pass, Alaska. Photo by Aaron A. Fox.

In the Arctic, climate, culture, and human resilience are connected through bowhead whaling. You write that climate change has disrupted this ancient practice. What are some of the implications of this disruption?

In Whale Snow, I explored how Iñupiat live their values in the midst of pervading modernity in relation to colonial encounters and ongoing social and environmental transformations. Each of their social principles is now threatened by myriad ramifications of climate change. For so many times, on so many occasions, and in so many places, I have witnessed how the joy of getting a whale has worked a miracle to transform human lives, experiences, and relations. At the same time, it suggests the costs of not getting any whales. Without the whales, social tensions rise. Without the whales, the meaning and order the whales bring to sustain the community gets diluted—no whale means no harmony and no assurance of community integrity. When the ocean rises, sea ice deteriorates, and the tundra thaws, the devastation of not having any whales is immeasurable, and at times results in social rupture through violence, alcoholism, substance abuse, depression, and unexpected death, just to name a few. This is why whaling remains the central idiom of Iñupiaq well-being and sovereignty. Whaling maintains social health and solidarity as the foundation of survival. This is why the responsibility of the whalers is so immense.

At this time of further uncertainties for subsistence, the temptation of not observing the community norms gets much closer to the surface of their social fabric. At the same time, however, in the face of heightening anxiety and stress, development of interpersonal and interspecies bonds fosters resilience that ultimately strengthens the people. Such resilience can be invigorated through proactive adaptation to change, which leverages tradition and culture in modernity. This process of adaptation often manifests in a form of multispecies reciprocity in Arctic Alaska, which deeply intertwines the humans with humans, humans with animals, and humans with the environment. In the face of heightening anxiety and stress, development of interpersonal and interspecies bonds creates resilience that ultimately sustains the people.

Aerial View of Utqiaġvik, Alaska – Photo by Chie Sakakibara

Global environmental change is all around us. In this time of ecological transition, why is exploring multispecies relatedness important?

As the COVID-19 pandemic and its interspecies origins underscore, we all live in the Anthropocene, an age in which humans and other animals are forced to live in closer proximity, share viruses, and confront new ones. Interspecies entanglements have increased their significance due to accelerating ecological dilemmas. My Iñupiaq mentors and collaborators taught me the importance of interspecies togetherness, or multispecies solidarity. Togetherness cultivates resilience, the capacity of individuals and communities to adapt, recover, and survive challenges and uncertainties. In this context, as Donna Haraway says, we must make kin as we are not the only important actors, and kin-making is a multispecies affair to cultivate resilience and mitigate vulnerability for survival. The Iñupiaq way of life clearly embodies this philosophy. Whale Snow is a journey to unpack such relations to better comprehend further entanglements between humans and nonhuman others as we are increasingly forced to live together.

Kaleak Crew, successful whaling crew, celebrates the end of whaling season in Utqiaġvik, Alaska. Photo by Flossie Nageak.

You open the acknowledgements by describing a promise you make to a community member to “not disappear” once you completed your fieldwork. Why was this so important?

Academic researchers in Indigenous communities have a fraught relationship with Indigenous communities with data mining, and this history remains inseparable from the legacy of colonialism and colonization. It was this reputation for outsider extraction that my mentor Martha Aiken was afraid of. She had seen how local knowledge and experience were conveniently extracted, simplified, and plugged into the market economy as medicine, books, popular music, and designs, or when they were instantly turned into private property after being detached from their appropriate cultural contexts. Rarely was a plan to benefit the community part of this enterprise. On my first day in her community as a graduate student, Martha asked me to swear that I would commit myself to cultivate a long-term relationship with her and her community before starting to work on my dissertation research. I agreed to make the commitment. Now, many years later, I am still in the process of earning my place. The process of relationship-building has opened many doors to me that would have otherwise stayed closed; it is obvious but not an exaggeration to say that this study could not have been written without community participation and co-authorship. Martha has since passed away, but as a faculty member at Oberlin College, I continue to share her wisdom with my students to educate future generations of scholars—both Indigenous and non-Indigenous—about the importance of social justice, research ethics, community benefit, collaboration, and reciprocity so the future scholars will never disappear. Whale Snow is a token of my humble reciprocity with Martha and the community that adopted me and considered and cared for me as their own. As a partial fulfillment of Martha’s mandate, I wrote this book to offer insights into the depth of Iñupiaq-whale relations, and especially how they intersect with Iñupiaq struggles to achieve cultural sovereignty through the whaling cycle, and in so doing exhibit resilience in the face of unrelenting impacts of global climate change.

What do you hope people take away from your work?

Indigenous vulnerability to climate change has been discussed extensively in the fields of public policy, political science, anthropology, and geography, but comparatively few studies have actually shed light on the ways in which people emotionally invest themselves in their entanglements with animals and environments to nurture resilience. In contrast, Whale Snow shares powerful and positive stories about Indigenous experiences coping with climate change. As climate change increases environmental and cultural uncertainties, it also intensifies Iñupiaq emotions and relatedness with the bowhead whale to seek out cultural activities that strengthen social identities and a politics of Indigenous sovereignty. In this sense, my narrative departs from studies that emphasize human vulnerability and instead serves as an ethnography of hope cultivated and entangled with interspecies relations.

This book lies at the intersection of my personal life and stories of America’s northernmost Indigenous society. My narrative is steeped in a deep long-term relationship between a culturally adopted Japanese woman in the two Iñupiaq villages and her adoptive family members, relatives, mentors, collaborators, colleagues, friends, and acquaintances. This is the story of the people and the bowhead whale, and at the same time, the story of my own life. My fieldwork has become synonymous with my personal growth and fulfillment as an adopted member of whaling crews through participation in everyday life in contemporary rural Alaska. In many different ways and contexts, my adoptive families and kin taught me that the Iñupiaq-whale relationship is a force of innovation and adaptation that now serves as a way to cope with social stress and the unforeseeable future. In other words, this book was germinated in my own process of becoming an Iñupiaq (meaning “a complete person”) through building a relationship with Iñupiat and their nonhuman kin, and I present this book as a humble offering for the people and whales who are connected through emotive bonds, words, stories, and songs that they have so generously bestowed upon me.

Whale Snow Frontispiece – By Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson.

Chie Sakakibara is an assistant professor of environmental studies at Oberlin College. She was trained in cultural geography, art history, and Indigenous studies. Her work explores human dimensions of global environmental change among Indigenous peoples. Native to Japan, Sakakibara is a proud adoptive member of the Iñupiaq whaling community. Her love of humans and nonhuman animals manifests in her academic work as well as in her life with one human daughter and two canine sons.

All royalties accruing from sale of this publication go to the North Slope Borough Iñupiat History, Language, and Culture Commission.

All images in the post are are copyrighted. Do no reproduce without permission.

PBS’ The Open Mind Features ‘Beyond Earth’s Edge’ Co-Editors

November 9, 2020

A recent episode of the PBS’ The Open Mind featured Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflights co-editors Julie Swarstad Johnson and Christopher Cokinos talking about the new poetry anthology and this celebration of poetics and the space sciences.

Hosted by Alexander Heffner, The Open Mind is a series that explores national interests in politics, media, technology, the arts and civic life.

Beyond Earth’s Edge is an anthology that spans from the dawn of the space age to the imagined futures of the universe. The anthology offers a fascinating record of both national mindsets and private perspectives as poets grapple with the promise and peril of U.S. space exploration across decades and into the present.

Radio Survivor Podcast Features ‘Mexican Waves’ Author Sonia Robles

November 6, 2020

Radio Survivor celebrated border radio in a recent podcast with Sonia Robles, author of Mexican Waves: Radio Broadcasting Along Mexico’s Northern Border, 1930-1950.

From the podcast:

Border radio is one of our favorite topics at Radio Survivor and on this week’s episode we dig into the history of radio broadcasting on the northern border of Mexico. Scholar Sonia Robles shares the stories of some of the lesser-known, small broadcasters whose histories are often overshadowed by the wild tales of higher power border blaster stations.

Listen to the interview.

Latinx Talk Interviews ‘Voices from the Ancestors’ Co-editor Lara Medina

November 5, 2020

In a recent interview on Latinx Talk, Lara Medina, co-editor of Voices from the Ancestors: Xicanx and Latinx Spiritual Expressions and Healing Practices, talks about her own spiritual journal and current trends in Latinx studies.

From the interview:

“The knowledges in this book come from deep places in our hearts, bodies, and minds and is intended for personal, familial, and community well-being. The writings reflect wisdom passed on through the oral tradition and lived experiences, research applied to our lives, or from our own intuitive creativity. As we learn from each other in a variety of ways, we have gathered reflections and practices in the form of short essays, poetry, visual art, ritual guidelines, and songs. It is wisdom based on the ancient knowledge received from Indigenous and African ancestors who understood their interconnectedness with one another and all life forms, with nature, and with the sacred cosmic forces. We and the contributors to this volume believe that it is time our cultural capital be documented and shared as we carry medicine in reclaiming ancestral teachings, in rethinking imposed religious beliefs, and in learning from diverse spiritual traditions.”

Read the full interview.

Ready to Take Your Own Space Poetry Journey?

November 4, 2020

What can poetry teach us about science? Inspired by this question five years ago, Julie Swarstad Johnson embarked on a journey that celebrated spaceflight and poetry at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. In September 2016 Swarstad Johnson, a librarian at the renowned poetry center, organized an exhibit aptly titled “The Poetry of Spaceflight.”

That exhibit inspired the new poetry anthology co-edited by Swarstad Johnson and Christopher Cokinos, Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight. Recently, Swarstad Johnson recalled the inspiration for the exhibit and the book on the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s blog 1508. She also provides ideas for writing your own poems inspired by spaceflight.

Read Swarstad Johnson’s post and writing prompts.

Beyond Earth’s Edge Inspires a Celebrity Space Poetry Jam

October 29, 2020

If your deep Start Trek nerdom had you fantasizing about the Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager reading you some Pablo Neruda, you can thank Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight.

The poetry anthology, recently published by the University of Arizona Press, was featured on Planetary Radio, the Planetary Society’s weekly podcast brilliantly hosted by Mat Kaplan.

Beyond’s editors Julie Swarstad Johnson and Christopher Cokinos joined the podcast in what was truly a space-nerd delight with Picardo, of Star Trek: Voyager fame and a Planetary Society board member, reading a Pablo Neruda poem, as well as Bill Nye, Sasha Sagan, astronauts Nicole Stott and Leland Melvin, and others, all reading poems featured in the anthology celebrating poetry and outer space.

Listen to the podcast here, and revel further in the podcast and anthology getting some love from Daily Star Trek News–yes, Beyond Earth’s Edge is on the Federation’s radar! Read about it here. ?

AAA 2020: Browse Our Latest Anthropology Books, Discounts, and More

October 29, 2020

We are excited to be participating in the American Anthropological Association Raising Our Voices 2020 fall event series! As always, we are pleased to offer a conference discount. Use code AZAAA20 to receive 40% off all of our titles, and get free domestic shipping (good through 12/15/2020).

If you are participating in the virtual AAA event series, make sure to visit our virtual exhibit and chat with us. If you have questions about submitting a manuscript for our anthropology list, contact our senior editor Allyson Carter, Ph.D. at acarter@uapress.arizona.edu and view our guidelines here. To learn about requesting exam copies, visit here. We look forward to seeing all of you in person again in the future.

Taking us on a journey of remembering and rediscovery, anthropologist Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez shares important insights into his development as a scholar and in so doing the development of the interdisciplinary field of transborder anthropology.

We are thrilled to announce that Carlos Velez-Ibáñez is the recipient of the American Anthropological Association’s 2020 Franz Boas Award for Exemplary Service to Anthropology! This award is presented annually by the AAA to its members whose careers demonstrate extraordinary achievement that have well served the anthropological profession.

Read an excerpt from Reflections of a Transborder Anthropologist here.

Revitalization Lexicography 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. Patricia M. Anderson details both the theoretical and the practical aspects that contributed to the Tunica dictionary in manner compelling to readers from all walks of life.

David Barton Bray has spent more than thirty years researching and studying Mexican community forest enterprises (CFEs). In Mexico’s Community Forest Enterprises he shares the scientific evidence for Mexico’s social and environmental achievements and how, in its most successful manifestations, it became a global model for common-property forest management, sustainable social-ecological systems, and climate change mitigation in developing countries.

Narrating Nature opens up dialogue that counters traditional conservation narratives. In this book, Mara J. Goldman offers conservation efforts that not only include people as beneficiaries but also demonstrate how they are essential and knowledgeable members of the conservation landscape itself.

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.

Check out some photos and field notes from the project here.

Based on 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.

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.

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 Sovereign Street offers 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.

Listen to author Carwil Bjork-James discuss the topics in this book on the Howard Zinn Bookfair Podcast here.

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.

Watch a virtual Amerind Foundation lecture with editors Christine D. Beaule and John G. Douglass here. Then, read a brief interview with the editors here.

Tewa Worlds 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.

Language, Coffee, and Migration on an Andean-Amazonian Frontier 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.

State Formation in the Liberal Era transforms our understanding of post-colonial Latin America. The volume spans disciplinary and geographic boundaries and offers an insightful look at the tensions between disparate circuits of capital, claims of statehood, and the contested nature of citizenship.

Despite its tiny size and seeming marginality to world affairs, the Central American republic of Costa Rica has long been considered an important site for experimentation in cutting-edge environmental policy. The Ecolaboratory frames Costa Rica as an “ecolaboratory” and asks what lessons we can learn for the future of environmental governance and sustainable development both within the country and elsewhere.

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.

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 the book here.

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. In Indigenous Revolution in Ecuador and Bolivia, 1990-2005, Jeffrey M. Paige’s interviews present the powerful personal experiences and emotional intensity of the revolutionary leadership.

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.

Video: Chicanx Studies Scholars and Teachers Discuss Anzaldúa in the Classroom

October 28, 2020

Editors Margaret Cantú-Sánchez, Candace de León-Zepeda, and Norma Elia Cantú, as well as several contributors of the new book, Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa: Pedagogy and Practice for Our Classrooms and Communities, came together on Thursday, October 22, in an online panel to discuss this volume’s practical and inspiring ways to deploy Anzaldúa’s transformative theories with real and meaningful action.

The event, also livestreamed on the University of Arizona Press Facebook, was not only a celebration of Anzaldúa and scholarship, but brought together an audience of students, community, and other Chicanx Studies scholars. We are grateful to the editors and contributors for sharing their time.

Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa is a pragmatic and inspiring offering of how to apply Anzaldúa’s ideas to the classroom and in the community rather than simply discussing them as theory. The book gathers nineteen essays by scholars, activists, teachers, and professors who share how their first-hand use of Anzaldúa’s theories in their classrooms and community environments.

Watch: Community Histories with Josie Méndez-Negrete and Lorena V. Márquez

October 21, 2020

Authors Josie Méndez-Negrete and Lorena V. Márquez discussed the community and activist histories of San Jose and Sacramento, California as part of a virtual book release celebration on Thrusday, October 15.

La Gente: Struggles for Empowerment and Community Self-Determination in Sacramento by Márquez, traces the rise of the Chicana/o Movement in Sacramento and the role of everyday people in galvanizing a collective to seek lasting and transformative change during the 1960s and 1970s.

Méndez-Negrete’s Activist Leaders of San José: En sus propias voces, narrates how parents—both mothers and fathers—were inspired to work for the rights of their people. Workers’ and education rights were at the core, but they also took on the elimination of at-large elections to open city politics, labor rights, domestic abuse, and health care.

‘Beyond Earth’s Edge’ Co-Editor Celebrates Cosmic Life in LA Times’ Op-Ed

October 20, 2020

Christopher Cokinos, co-editor of Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight, reveled in science’s recent discovered of phospine in the clouds of Venus, a sign that may signal life in a recent Op-Ed published by the Los Angeles Times.

From the op-ed:

“It means that life arose more than once in our backwater solar system. It means that life is common, and its tenacity is cosmic. For me, that puts our struggles in a grand context. Not by way of diminishing the hard work of problem-solving that faces us. Rather, the possibility that swaths of airborne microbes are going about their business in the skies above Venus reminds me that life finds a way. We can find our way too.”

Read the entire op-ed here.

Beyond Earth’s Edge, co-edited by Cokinos and Julie Swarstad Johnson (Editor), Christopher Cokinos, is a trailblazing anthology of poetry that spans from the dawn of the space age to the imagined futures of the universe. The anthology offers a fascinating record of both national mindsets and private perspectives as poets grapple with the promise and peril of U.S. space exploration across decades and into the present.

Watch: Poets, Editors, & Flandrau Celebrate ‘Beyond Earth’s Edge’

October 19, 2020

Under the dome of the Flandrau Science Center‘s planetarium, co-editors Julie Swarstad Johnson and Christopher Cokinos introduced a virtual audience to Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight, a poetry anthology that celebrates spaceflight and vividly captures the violence of blastoff, the wonders seen by Hubble, and the trajectories of exploration to Mars and beyond through a wide array of lyric celebrations, somber meditations, accessible narratives, concrete poems, and new forms of science fiction.

During the virtual event, Swarstad Johnson and Cokinos social distanced aptly in the planetarium, reading sections of the book and explaining their own passions for space. Between their discussions, video clips were shown of contemporary poets.

Poets featured: Frank Paino, Forrest Gander reading his translation of Pablo Neruda, Alyse Bensel, Donna Kane, Dan Beachy-Quick reading a collaboration written with Srikanth Reddy, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Kyle Dargan, Tawahum Justin Bige, and C. S. E. Cooney.

Heartfelt thanks to the team at Flandrau for co-hosting this remarkable event, and to the book’s editors, for sharing their time with us to celebrate the wonders of space—through poetry.

Watch: Educators for Anti-Racism Interview ‘La Gente’ Author

October 16, 2020

University of Arizona Press author Lorena V. Márquez, was recently interviewed by Educators for Anti-Racism about her work and new book La Gente: Struggles for Empowerment and Community Self-Determination in Sacramento.

The grass-roots organization is committed to anti-racist and abolitionist teaching principles with the mission to learn, connect, and contribute. From their website: ‘You can learn by watching videos from our Anti-Racism conference and a soon to come video series of anti-racism conversations. You can connect by discussing the lessons in the comments section, or joining one of the groups listed on our website. You can contribute by sending us anti-racism lessons or resources. Visit us at www.edantiracism.com.”

Márquez’s book La Gente traces the rise of the Chicana/o Movement in Sacramento and the role of everyday people in galvanizing a collective to seek lasting and transformative change during the 1960s and 1970s. In their efforts to be self-determined, la gente contested multiple forms of oppression at school, at work sites, and in their communities.

Cultivate Community with Our Latest Latinx and Chicanx Studies Books

October 13, 2020

At the University of Arizona Press, we have published a wide range of books that celebrate Latinx and Chicanx communities, document community histories, and record the histories and lives of civil rights movements and activists. We want to share our most recent community and activism-focused titles with you, and invite you to use the discount code AZCOMMUNITY20 for 35% off these titles through 11/15/2020.

La Gente traces the rise of the Chicana/o Movement in Sacramento and the role of everyday people in galvanizing a collective to seek lasting and transformative change during the 1960s and 1970s. In their efforts to be self-determined, la gente contested multiple forms of oppression at school, at work sites, and in their communities.

On Thursday, October 15, 2020 join University of Arizona Press authors Josie Méndez-Negrete and Lorena V. Márquez for a virtual discussion on their recent University of Arizona Press books that focus on community and activist histories in San Jose and Sacramento, California. This event is currently full, but watch our website to see a recording of the event in coming days.

Challenging stereotypes, Activist Leaders of San José by Josie Méndez-Negrete book unearths and makes visible lived experiences of Chicana and Latino activists from San José, California, who made contributions to the cultural and civic life of the city. Through oral histories, we see a portrait of grassroots leadership in the twentieth century.

Don’t forget to check out the event mentioned above!

Cultura y Corazón is a cultural approach to research that requires a long-term commitment to community-based and engaged research methodologies. This book presents case studies in the fields of education and health that recognize and integrate communities’ values, culture, and funds of knowledge in the research process.

Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa provides pedagogical applications of Anzaldúa’s noted theories, including la facultad, the path of conocimiento, and autohistoria, among others. This text provides examples, lesson plans, and activities for scholars, professors, teachers, and community members in various disciplines—such as history, composition, literature, speech and debate, and more—and for those interested in teaching the theories of Gloria Anzaldúa.

On Thursday, October 22, 2020 we are hosting an event with the editors of this book! Registration is currently full, but be sure to check back on our website for a recording of the event. Listen to a recording of Gloria reading some of her uncollected and unpublished poems here.

Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture traces the development of Chicana/o literature and cultural production from the Spanish colonial period to the present. In doing so, it challenges us to look critically at how we simultaneously embody colonial constructs and challenge their legacies.

Listen to an NPR interview with author Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez here. Then, read an excerpt from the book here.

With unity of heart and mind, the creative and the scholarly, Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities opens wide its arms to all non-binary, decolonial masculinities today to grow a stronger, resilient, and more compassionate new generation of Latinxs tomorrow.

Listen to Frederick Luis Aldama talk about the book on the New Books Network podcast here, then read an interview with editors Arturo J. Aldama and Frederick Luis Aldama here. On Thursday, October 22, 2020, there will be a virtual book release celebration for Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities. Register here.

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.

“Hurtado once again offers a brilliant analysis of Chicana feminisms that is historically situated and honors the legacies of early Chicana feminists. She advocates for and demonstrates the importance of an intersectional, multidisciplinary, and activist understanding of Chicanas.”—Yvette G. Flores, author of Chicana and Chicano Mental Health: Alma, Mente y Corazón

Reclaiming and reconstructing one’s spirituality based on non-Western epistemologies is central to the process of decolonization. Voices from the Ancestors brings 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.

Watch a recording of an incredible panel with the editors and some of the contributors of this book here.

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 about and view photos from a book release event for Yolqui here, and read about and view photos from a panel that features this author here.

The Chicana M(other)work Anthology is a call to action for justice within and outside academia. This volume brings together emerging scholarship and testimonios by and about self-identified Chicana and Women of Color mother-scholars, activists, and allies who, using an intersectional lens, center mothering as transformative labor.

Read an excerpt from the book here, and read about the Feminist Wire book series here.

Chicano Communists and the Struggle for Social Justice traces the early roots of the Chicano Movement. It follows the thread of radical activism of the 1930s and 1940s to today, showing thedepth of its influence on Mexican Americans struggling to achieve social justice and equality. 

“Buelna’s book adds another layer to our understanding of American communism at mid-century, as well as the labor fight, community, and race.”–R.D. Screws, Choice Reviews

Listen to a book review of Chicano Communists and the Struggle for Social Justice on Buelna News here.

The first of its kind, Community-Based Participatory Research: Testimonios from Chicana/o Studies is a trailblazing collection of personal testimonies that showcase how understandings of community empowerment are incomplete as they have dismissed the variety of ways communities themselves have created social change strategies. In first-person accounts, Chicana/o researchers share their experience doing community-based participatory research (CBPR) praxis to illustrate its complexity and how it might be implemented to create sustainable change and community empowerment.

Food Fight! contributes to urgent discussions around the problems of cultural misappropriation, labeling, identity, and imaging in marketing and dining establishments. Not just about food, restaurants, and coffee, this volume employs a decolonial approach and engaging voice to interrogate ways that mestizo, Indigenous, and Latinx peoples are objectified in mainstream ideology and imaginary. 

“Every essay will fill a reader—millennial mestizo or just plain old Chicano—with joyous smiles at the zingers. Advertencia! This book is not one for idle consumption, it’s not fast food. Paloma Martinez-Cruz dishes up a scholarly dissertation of substantial complexity with a heaping portion of humor, verbal sleight-of-hand, and barely-restrained ire.”—La Bloga

Silviana Wood’s teatro has elicited tears and laughter from audiences young and old. Barrio Dreams brings together for the first time the plays of Wood, one of Arizona’s foremost playwrights. Wood is acclaimed locally, regionally, and nationally as a playwright, actor, director, and activist.

We are excited that the Borderlands Theater in Tucson, Arizona will be hosting two events to honor the lifetime achievements of Silviana Wood. On Saturday, Oct. 17, 7 p.m., there will be a virtual reading of Wood’s play Amor de Hijua, live-streamed on Borderlands Theater’s Facebook and YouTube pages. On Tuesday, Oct. 20 – 6 p.m., A Tribute to Silviana Wood, will be live-streamed on Borderlands Theater’s Facebook and YouTube pages. You can also listen to Silviana Wood on a New Books Network podcast here.

Watch TFOB’s Virtual Event with Carolyn Niethammer & ‘The Desert Feast’

October 12, 2020

Tucson Festival of Books’ virtual series Authors in Conversation, recently featured University of Arizona Press author, Carolyn Niethammer and her new book, The Desert Feast: Celebrating Tucson’s Culinary Heritage.

The Wednesday, October 7 event, moderated by Arizona Daily Star and #ThisIsTucson food writer Andi Berlin, covered topics in Niethammer’s book that tell the story of why Tucson became American’s first UNESCO City of Gastronomy.

A Desert Feast offers a food pilgrimage with color photos, stories and, recipes. You’ll meet the farmers, small-scale food entrepreneurs, and chefs who are dedicated to making Tucson taste like nowhere else.

If you didn’t have a chance to tune in, check out the conversation here.

WHA 2020: Browse Our Latest Books, Discounts, and More

October 9, 2020

We are excited to be participating in the first virtual Western History Association conference! As always, we are pleased to offer a conference discount. Use code AZWHA20 to receive 40% off all titles, and get free shipping.

If you are participating in the virtual WHA, make sure to visit our virtual exhibit and chat with us. If you have questions about submitting a manuscript for our history list, contact our editor-in-chief Kristen Buckles at kbuckles@uapress.arizona.edu and view our guidelines here. To learn about requesting exam copies, visit here. We look forward to seeing all of you in person again in the future.

La Raza Cosmética by Natasha Varner examines postrevolutionary identity construction as a project of settler colonialism that at once appropriated and erased indigeneity. In its critique of Indigenous representation, it also shows how Indigenous women strategically engaged with and resisted these projects as they played out in beauty pageants, films, tourism, art, and other realms of popular culture.

Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture by Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez traces the development of Chicana/o literature and cultural production from the Spanish colonial period to the present. In doing so, it challenges us to look critically at how we simultaneously embody colonial constructs and challenge their legacies.

Listen to the author discuss the topics in this book on an NPR podcast here, then read an excerpt from the book here.

La Gente by Lorena V. Márquez traces the rise of the Chicana/o Movement in Sacramento and the role of everyday people in galvanizing a collective to seek lasting and transformative change during the 1960s and 1970s. In their efforts to be self-determined, la gente contested multiple forms of oppression at school, at work sites, and in their communities.

Watch an interview with the author here, and join the waitlist for an upcoming event featuring the author here.

Informed by personal experience and offering an inclusive view, Diné Identity in a Twenty-First-Century World by Lloyd L. Lee showcases the complexity of understanding and the richness of current Diné identities.

Watch a conversation with Lloyd Lee here.

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.

Learn how to register for a program featuring the authors, Nancy J. Parezo and Don D. Fowler, here.

Challenging stereotypes, Activist Leaders of San José by Josie Méndez-Negrete unearths and makes visible lived experiences of Chicana and Latino activists from San José, California, who made contributions to the cultural and civic life of the city. Through oral histories, we see a portrait of grassroots leadership in the twentieth century.

Join the waitlist for an upcoming event that features this author here.

In North American Borders in Comparative Perspective leading scholars provide a contemporary analysis of how globalization and security imperatives have redefined the shared border regions of the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

Watch an interview with the editors, Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera and Victor Konrad here.

State Formation in the Liberal Era transforms our understanding of post-colonial Latin America. The volume spans disciplinary and geographic boundaries and offers an insightful look at the tensions between disparate circuits of capital, claims of statehood, and the contested nature of citizenship.

This anthology offers a unique and sweeping view of the nation’s fire scene by distilling observations on Florida, California, the Northern Rockies, the Great Plains, the Southwest, the Interior West, the Northeast, Alaska, the oak woodlands, and the Pacific Northwest into a single, readable volume. The essays offer a color-commentary companion to the play-by-play narrative offered in Pyne’s Between Two Fires: A Fire History of Contemporary America.

To the Last Smoke is Stephen J. Pyne’s way of “keeping with it to the end,” encompassing the directive from his rookie season as a wildland firefighter to stay with every fire “to the last smoke.”

Watch Stephen Pyne talk about his To the Last Smoke series here, and read an excerpt from the book here. Then, read Pyne’s recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times here.

Binational Commons focuses on whether the institutions that presently govern the U.S.-Mexico transborder space are effective in providing solutions to difficult binational problems as they manifest themselves in the borderlands. The volume addresses key binational issues and explores where there are strong levels of institutional governance development, where it is failing, how governance mechanisms have evolved over time, and what can be done to improve it to meet the needs of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in the next decades.

Learn how to register for a lecture featuring the editors, Tony Payan and Pamela L. Cruz, here.

Soldiers, Saints, and Shamans by Nathaniel Morris documents how and why the Indigenous Náayari, Wixárika, O’dam, and Mexicanero peoples took part in the Mexican Revolution as they struggled to preserve their cultures, lands, and political autonomy in the face of civil war, bandit raids, and radical political reform. In unpacking the ambiguities that characterize their participation in this tumultuous period, it sheds light on the inner contradictions of the revolution itself.

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.

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.

This volume of the Indigenous Justice series explores the global effects of marginalizing Indigenous law. The essays in Traditional, National, and International Law and Indigenous Communities 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.

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.

Read an interview with the author here.

Horsefly Dress is a meditation on the experience and beauty of suffering. Rich in the imagery of autumnal foliage, migrating birds, and frozen landscapes, Heather Cahoon’s collection calls forth the sensory experience of grief and metamorphosis. The transformative powers associated with the human experience of loss belong to the past, present, and future, as do the traditional Salish-Pend d’Oreille stories that create the backbone of these intricate poems.

Watch a virtual book release recording of Heather here, and read a short interview with her here.

Watch: Heather Cahoon on ‘Horsefly Dress,’ Sovereignty, and Writing Life

October 6, 2020

On Thursday, October 1, Heather Cahoon read from her new collection, Horsefly Dress, during a virtual book release celebration co-hosted by Fact & Fiction Books in Missoula, Montana, Birchbark Books and Native Arts in Minneapolis, and the University of Arizona Press.

In Horsefly Dress, Cahoon weaves together stories in her poems of family and tribal community with those of Coyote and his family, especially Coyote’s daughter, Horsefly Dress, the interactions and shared experiences show the continued relevance of traditional Séliš and Qĺispé culture to contemporary life.

The book release celebration, moderated by Savannah Hicks, University of Arizona Press marketing assistant, ended with a Q&A, asking Cahoon to follow-up on writing life, her poetry, and oral tradition.

Big thanks to co-hosts Fact & Fiction Books, and Birchbark Books and Native Arts. You can still order Horsefly Dress at either independent bookstore—Fact & Fiction and Birchbark.

Borderlands Theater Honors Lifetime Achievements of Silviana Wood

October 5, 2020

Borderlands Theater in Tucson, Arizona will honor dramatist Silviana Wood with two special events. The University of Arizona Press published a collection of Wood’s plays, Barrio Dreams, edited by Norma Elia Cantú and Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz.

On Saturday, Oct. 17, 7 p.m., there will be a virtual reading of Wood’s play Amor de Hijua, live-streamed on Borderlands Theater’s Facebook and YouTube pages.

Amor de Hijua is a drama about four generations in a working class family set in Arizona. When Consuelo’s father dies her mother, Doña Cuquita, rapidly deteriorates turning Consuelo’s world upside down as she is pulled between taking care of her mother and the needs of her own family.

On Tuesday, Oct. 20 – 6 p.m., A Tribute to Silviana Wood, will be live-streamed on Borderlands Theater’s Facebook and YouTube pages.

The tribute features Tucson elders who recount oral histories and discuss the life and achievements of Wood as playwright, performer, and culture bearer, within the context of the Chicano resistance movement in Tucson. 

The event is hosted by Borderlands Theater’s Veronica Conran and features historian and community organizer, Lupe Castillo; community organizers Ramona Grijalva and Annie Lopez; Borderlands Theater founder and Teatro Libertad member, Barclay Goldsmith; Teatro Libertad members, Teresa Jones, Arturo Martinez, and Francisco Medina; Mujeres que Escriben co-founder, Valerina Quintana; and of course, guest of honor, Silviana Wood. 

From Borderlands:

A writer, activist, performer, teacher, single mother, and in many ways, folklorist of the Mexican-American border culture of Southern Arizona, Silviana Wood is the first and only Chicana from Arizona to have a published anthology of her plays. Her mastery of code-switching in the barrio vernacular known as caló – a dynamic mixing of Spanish, English, and Spanglish – can only be compared to the African-American vernacular in the plays of August Wilson. Her wit and word play rivals that of legendary Mexican performers Cantinflas and Tin Tan. Addressing issues of social justice, linguistic marginalization, oppression, class, gender and sexuality, the dramatic works of Silviana Wood resonate as much today as when they were first written and produced.

Blast Off Into Space With Our Books

September 24, 2020

We are the proud publishers of a wide range of space science titles that inspire wonder and allow readers to delve into the universe. With poetry, art, photographs, history, and beyond, our space-centered books are out of this world! Through 11/1/2020, enjoy a 35% discount on all of our space titles when you use the code AZOUTERSPACE20 at checkout.

Beyond Earth’s Edge vividly captures through poetry the violence of blastoff, the wonders seen by Hubble, and the trajectories of exploration to Mars and beyond. The anthology offers a fascinating record of both national mindsets and private perspectives as poets grapple with the promise and peril of U.S. space exploration across decades and into the present.

Attend our virtual book release event for Beyond Earth’s Edge on October 8, 2020 at 7:00 P.M. MST! This free event will be co-hosted by the Flandrau Science Center and Planetarium. Register here!

“Only two of the contributors to this soaring, adroitly curated anthology actually traveled in space, but nothing stops the rest of them from vaulting skyward on a pillar of words, with a potent gravity-assist from their emotions.”—Dava Sobel, author of Galileo’s Daughter and The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars

Planetary Astrobiology represents the combined efforts of more than seventy-five international experts consolidated into twenty chapters and provides an accessible, interdisciplinary gateway for new students and seasoned researchers who wish to learn more about this expanding field. Readers are brought to the frontiers of knowledge in astrobiology via results from the exploration of our own solar system and exoplanetary systems.

Explore other titles in our Space Sciences Series here.

In Gerard P. Kuiper and the Rise of Modern Planetary Science, Derek W. G. Sears describes the life of a man who lived through some of the most dramatic events of the twentieth century and ended up creating a new field of scientific research, planetary science. As NASA and other space agencies explore the solar system, they take with them many of the ideas and concepts first described by Gerard P. Kuiper.

We are so thrilled that Gerard P. Kuiper and the Rise of Modern Planetary Science won a Foreword Indies Award! Read an excerpt from the book here.

In Discovering Pluto, Dale P. Cruikshank and William Sheehan recount the grand story of our unfolding knowledge and exploration of Pluto, its moons, and the outer Solar System. They explain the efforts of scientists, mathematicians, and researchers over the centuries to understand the outer Solar System, leading to the discovery and detailed exploration of Pluto as the premier body in the Kuiper Belt, the so-called third zone of our Solar System.

Read five questions with William Sheehan here, and read the Wall Street Journal review of the book here.

The most outstanding and uniquely curated selection of Mars orbital images ever assembled in one volume. With explanatory captions in twenty-four languages and a gallery of more than 200 images, Mars: The Pristine Beauty of the Red Planet brings a timely and clear look at the work of an active NASA mission.

“For scientists, this book may be a record of Martian geology, history, and even a search for possible future landing sites, while astronomy enthusiasts will find a snapshot of our current scientific understanding of the planet. Dreamers will use it as a tool for a journey through time and space.”—Sky at Night Magazine

Under Desert Skies describes how a small lunar- and planetary-focused laboratory at the University of Arizona forged the field of planetary science at a time when few people studied the solar system. Spanning six decades, the book records the stories of the scientists who, with telescopes and spacecraft, transformed single points of lights into worlds that we can see, touch, study, and compare to Earth.

“A fascinating story of how a small university department became a major powerhouse in our exploration of the solar system, and of how our knowledge of the solar system blossomed with the space age.” —Derek Sears, Space Science and Astrobiology Division, NASA Ames Research Center

Human Spaceflight lays out a new model for the future of humans in space, where robotic technologies extend human presence beyond the solar system. Louis Friedman argues for settlement of Mars, serving as a base for humans to explore the rest of the universe with an expanding arsenal of technology.

“Most books about our future in space are written by dreamers. But Human Spaceflight: From Mars to the Stars is written by an aerospace engineer, Dr. Louis Friedman, who details exactly how exploration needs to unfold if our species is to value it at all.”—Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist, American Museum of Natural History

Earth and Mars relates the life story of two planets, celestial siblings in space. The book is a fusion of art and science, a blend of images and essays celebrating the successful creation of our life-sustaining planet. A collection of simple and profoundly beautiful forms, Earth and Mars provides a context to appreciate the common forces responsible for these haunting shapes as well as the divergent paths that led to an Earth teeming with life-forms, while its sibling, Mars, is seemingly devoid of all life.

Academy of American Poets Announces 2020 Ambroggio Prize Recipient

September 23, 2020

The Academy of American Poets announced today the winners of the 2020 American Poets Prizes, including the Ambroggio Prize.

In May 2020, the Academy and the University of Arizona Press announced a new partnership. Beginning this year, recipients of the Academy of American Poets’ Ambroggio Prize will have their winning manuscript published in Spanish with the English translation by Press. The Ambroggio Prize is a $1,000 publication award given for a book-length poetry manuscript originally written in Spanish with an English translation.

The 2020 Ambroggio Prize recipient is Mara Pastor’s Deuda Natal/Natal Debt, which will be published by the Press in its fall 2021 season. The 2019 Ambroggio Prize recipient, Gloria Muñoz’s Danzirly, will be published by the Press in the spring 2021 season.

From the Academy:

MARA PASTOR‘s Deuda Natal / Natal Debt, co-translated by MARÍA JOSÉ GIMÉNEZ and ANNA ROSENWONG, has won the AMBROGGIO PRIZE, which is a $1,000 publication prize given for a book-length poetry manuscript originally written in Spanish and with an English translation. The winning manuscript is published by the University of Arizona Press, a nationally recognized publisher of award-winning works of emerging and established voices in Latinx and Indigenous literature, as well as groundbreaking scholarship in Latinx and Indigenous studies. Established in 2017, the Ambroggio Prize is the only annual award of its kind in the United States that honors American poets whose first language is Spanish. This year’s judge was Pablo F. Medina.

Mara Pastor is a leading Puerto Rican poet, editor, and scholar. She has authored six full-length poetry books in Spanish as well as the bilingual chapbooks As Though the Wound Had Heard (Cardboard House Press, 2017), translated by María José Giménez, and Children of Another Hour (Argos Books, 2014), translated by Noel Black. Her latest book, Natal Debt, translated by María José Giménez and Anna Rosenwong, was selected for the 2020 Ambroggio Prize and is forthcoming from The University of Arizona Press in 2021. Her work has appeared in journals such as The Puerto Rico Review, The Common, The Offing, Connotation Press, Latin American Literature Today and Seedings. She is an Associate Professor of Spanish at the Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico in Ponce.

María José Giménez is a poet, translator, and editor whose work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Studios at MASS MoCA, the Breadloaf Translators’ Conference, Canada Council for the Arts, and Banff International Literary Translators’ Centre. Assistant translation editor of Anomaly and a former Board member of the American Literary Translators Association, Giménez works between English and Spanish, and from the French, and is the translator of Tilting at Mountains by Edurne Pasaban (Mountaineers Books, 2014), the novel Red, Yellow, Green by Alejandro Saravia (Biblioasis, 2017), and the chapbook As Though The Wound Had Heard  by Mara Pastor (Cardboard House Press, 2017). Her translated and creative work is featured at The Brooklyn Rail, Lunch Ticket, The Common, Prelude, Asymptote, and elsewhere, and in the anthologies Aftermath: Explorations of Loss & Grief (Radix Media, 2018), Cloudburst: An Anthology of Hispanic Canadian Short Stories (University of Ottawa Press, 2013), and Cuentos de nuestra palabra en Canadá: Primera hornada (Editorial nuestra palabra, 2009). Among other awards and honors, Giménez has been named the 2019–2021 Poet Laureate of Easthampton, Massachusetts.

Anna Rosenwong is a translator and editor. Her publications include Rocío Cerón’s Diorama (Phoneme Media, 2014), winner of the Best Translated Book Award, and here the sun’s for real (Autumn Hill Books, 2018), selected translations of José Eugenio Sánchez. She has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, the University of Iowa, and the American Literary Translators Association. Her scholarly and creative work has been featured in such venues as World Literature Today, The Kenyon Review, and Modern Poetry Today.

About Pastor’s winning manuscript, judge Pablo F. Medina said: “Deuda natal es un libro de una sencillez y una profundidad extraordinarias. Busca y (re)busca muchas verdades y las encuentra no en valores absolutos, sino en los quehaceres diarios–el hogar, el amor romántico y maternal, los caminos que dan al mar y el ir y venir de la migración, mundo en que vivimos muchos de nosotros. Deuda natal es un libro para todos los que vienen, los que van y los que permanecen. / Natal Debt is a book of extraordinary simplicity and depth. It searches and (re)searches many truths and finds them, not in absolute values, but in the objects and acts of daily life: the home, romantic and maternal love, the roads that lead to the sea, and the comings and goings of migration, a world many of us inhabit. Natal Debt is a book for everyone, those who come, those who go, and those who stay.”

Read the Academy’s entire announcement here.

We Love the Southwest, Explore it Through Our Books!

September 18, 2020

At the University of Arizona Press, we have a long history of celebrating and adoring the southwest. A truly special region filled with unique flora and fauna, food, and traditions, we want to highlight some of our titles that explore our local Sonoran desert and beyond. Use the code AZSOUTHWEST20 for 35% off the titles mentioned in this post until 9/30/2020!

A Desert Feast offers 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 a video about the book here. Osher Lifelong Learning Institute will feature Carolyn Niethammer as part of their fall speaker series on Monday, September 21, 2020. Other events to watch for include Carolyn’s appearance on the Tucson Festival of Books Authors in Conversation series on October 7, 2020, and a virtual book release event on December 2, 2020. Make sure to register for these events!

Coming soon— preorder now!

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. Gary Paul Nabhan invites a prism of voices—friends, colleagues, and advisors 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. We observe the spines and spears, stings and songs of the desert anew. Unexpected. Surprising. Enchanting. Like the desert itself, each essay offers renewed vocabulary and thoughtful perceptions.

Keep an eye out for these upcoming events! Gary Paul Nabhan and Francisco Cantú will be featured on the Tucson Festival of Books Authors in Conversation series on November 18, 2020, and on December 9, 2020, as part of its ongoing lecture series, the Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill will host a virtual book release celebration for The Nature of Desert Nature, edited by Gary Paul Nabhan. Make sure you register for these events!

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.

The Southwest Center is launching a new event series titled Food for Thought with David Yetman and Chef Janos Wilder. David Yetman will be featured on the program on October 9, 2020. Click here to learn more! Read an excerpt from the book here.

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.

Watch a video about author James “Big Jim” Griffith here, and see some lovely photos we took at our book release party last fall here. We are thrilled that Saints, Statues, and Stories was honored as a Southwest Book of the Year!

Daniel D. Arreola’s Postcards 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.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

Through twenty individual stories, Voices from Bears Ears captures the passions of the debate that led to the creation of Bears Ears National Monument, a land of unsurpassed natural beauty and deep historical significance. The story of this place reflects the cultural crosscurrents that roil our times: maintaining tradition and culture in the face of change, healing the pain of past injustices, creating shared futures, and protecting and preserving lands for future generations.

Published in 1986, Blue Desert was Charles Bowden’s third book-length work and takes place almost entirely in Arizona, revealing Bowden’s growing and intense preoccupation with the state and what it represented as a symbol of America’s “New West.” With a thoughtful new foreword by Francisco Cantú, Blue Desert is a critical piece of Bowden’s oeuvre.

Read about Charles Bowden and Blue Desert in Harper’s Magazine here, and read a brief reflection on Blue Desert here.

When first published in 1987, Frog Mountain Blues documented the creeping sprawl of new development up the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains. Today, that development is fully visible, but Charles Bowden’s prescience to preserve and protect a sacred recreational space remains as vivid as ever. Accompanied by Jack W. Dykinga’s photographs from the original work, this book conveys the natural beauty of the Catalinas and warns readers that this unique wilderness could easily be lost.

“A beautifully written, handsomely illustrated love poem to a mountain range that has the fatal curse of being not merely too awesome in its beauty for its own good but, worse, too accessible to man.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

The Mojave Desert has a rich natural history. Despite being sandwiched between the larger Great Basin and Sonoran Deserts, it has enough mountains, valleys, canyons, and playas for any eager explorer. A Natural History of the Mojave Desert shares how the geology, geography, climate, and organisms, including humans, have shaped and been shaped by this fascinating desert.

Read an excerpt from the book here. We are thrilled that A Natural History of the Mojave Desert was selected as a Southwest Book of the Year!

No Species Is an Island describes the surprising results of Theodore H. Fleming’s eleven-year study of pollination biology in Sonora, Mexico, in the most biologically diverse desert in the world. These discoveries serve as a primer on how to conduct ecological research, and offer important conservation lessons for us all. Fleming offers an insightful look at how field ecologists work, and the often big surprises that come from looking carefully at a natural world where no species stands alone.

Read an excerpt from the book selected by the Arizona Daily Star here.

Between 1900 and the late 1950s, Mexican border towns came of age both as centers of commerce and as tourist destinations. Postcards from the Sonora Border reveals how images—in this case the iconic postcard—shape the way we experience and think about place. Making use of his personal collection of historic images, Daniel D. Arreola captures the evolution of Sonoran border towns, creating a sense of visual “time travel” for the reader. Supported by maps and visual imagery, the author shares the geographical and historical story of five unique border towns—Agua Prieta, Naco, Nogales, Sonoyta, and San Luis Río Colorado.

Excerpt: Reflections from Transborder Anthropologist Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez

September 16, 2020

In his new book Reflections of a Transborder Anthropologist, Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez explores his development as a scholar and in so doing the development of the interdisciplinary fields of transborder and applied anthropology. He shows us his path through anthropology as both a theoretical and an applied anthropologist whose work has strongly influenced borderlands and applied research. Importantly, he explains the underlying, often hidden process that led to his long insistence on making a difference in lives of people of Mexican origin on both sides of the border and to contribute to a “People with Histories.” Today we share an excerpt from this important new book:

We carried into anthropology departments a penchant for looking at our own or culturally equivalent populations. We entered graduate departments despite our unease with most anthropologically oriented works, learned earlier from the pointed critical analysis by Octavio Ignacio Romano-V in his series of articles (1968, 1969a, 1969b). Anthropology had long believed that fieldwork demanded complete divorce from the anthropologist’s own cultural baggage and that an anthropologist must spend at least a year in the field becoming totally absorbed and immersed in the “new” culture and learning the language.

Most of us didn’t need a year to learn the language, we only needed to renew it. We felt for the most part that the global processes since World War II did not allow for the idea of pristine peoples; also, we strongly felt our own discontent with the loss of land, language, and expectations of relations, and with American educational institutions’ strong insistence on replacing the abhorrent identity of “Mexican.” The term was associated basically with impurity of racial mixing, low IQ and great brawn, and a predilection for not delaying gratification, favoring partying, fiestas, and merriment at the expense of education, learning, and planning for the future.

Many of us had observed our parents working two jobs, fighting in wars— with some not returning— and, of those who remained, achieving when they should not have been able to do so. We also observed and participated in thick networks of relatives that could mostly be depended on in times of crisis.

What we read was mostly in opposition to what we knew to be true, and this opposition was certainly congealed in educational institutions where all things allegedly “Mexican” could be driven out. Thus, of this initial generation, most were male, many were veterans and some tried in combat, some were politically practiced, and all were tired of the status quo for too many Mexican-origin populations on both sides of the bifurcation we call the border.

For me, what beckoned was south of the border, and it is there I began my own quest.

Anne García-Romero Featured on New Books Network Podcast

September 15, 2020

University of Arizona Press author Anne García-Romero was featured on a recent episode of the New Books Network podcast for her book, The Fornes Frame.

“In The Fornes Frame: Contemporary Latina Playwrights and the Legacy of Maria Irene Fornes (University of Arizona Press, 2016) playwright and theatre scholar Anne García-Romero traces the career and legacy of Maria Irene Fornes.

Fornes was one of the most significant American playwrights of the twentieth century, and her legacy is evident in the dozens of playwrights she mentored over the course of her long career. García-Romero shows how her unique pedagogy and her example as a successful Latina experimental playwright continue to inspire playwrights like Caridad Svich, Cusi Cram, Elaine Romero, Quiara Alegría Hudes, and Karen Zacarías.”

Listen to the podcast and read more here.

Frederick Luis Aldama Featured on New Books Network Podcast

September 15, 2020

University of Arizona Press author Frederick Luis Aldama was featured on a recent episode of the New Books Network podcast to discuss his new volume, which he co-edited with Arturo J. Aldama, Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities.

“In this episode we sit down with Frederick Luis Aldama, Distinguished University Professor at the Ohio State University and co-editor of Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities (University of Arizona Press), to discuss some of the cutting-edge research in this new edited volume.

This rich collection of work from eighteen contributors approaches the topic of masculinities from a diversity of perspectives and methodologies. With special emphasis on the plurality of Latinx masculinities, the essays reveal the divergent manifestations of masculinity across a broad spectrum including politics, social movements, literature, media, popular culture, personal experience, and other analytical angles. The pernicious effect of stereotypes and toxic Latinx masculinity is laid bare throughout the text in chapters that challenge the derogatory performances and reification of machismo in mainstream U.S. culture and society.”

Listen to the podcast and read more here.

Meditación Fronteriza Receives an International Latino Book Award Honorable Mention

September 14, 2020

We are thrilled that Meditación Fronteriza by Norma Elia Cantú received an honorable mention for the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award section of the International Latino Book Awards!

Meditación Fronteriza is 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.

Norma E. Cantú is a scholar-activist who 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. She has published fiction, poetry, and personal essays in a number of venues.

Reel Latinxs Wins International Latino Book Award

September 14, 2020

We are so thrilled to announce that Reel Latinxs by Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González won first place for the Best Nonfiction- Multi-Author section of the 2020 International Latino Book Awards!

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.

Frederick Luis Aldama is University Distinguished Professor, Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor of English, University Distinguished Scholar, and Alumni Distinguished Teacher at The Ohio State University. He is the 2018 recipient of the Rodica C. Botoman Award for Distinguished Teaching and Mentoring and the Susan M. Hartmann Mentoring and Leadership Award. He is the award-winning author, co-author, and editor of more than forty books.

Christopher González is an associate professor of English and director of the Latinx Cultural Center at Utah State University in Logan, Utah.

Congratulations, Frederick and Christopher!

Think Deeper About Pop Culture with Our Latinx Pop Culture Series

September 11, 2020

This week, we are focusing on books that are part of our Latinx Pop Culture series. Latinx Pop Culture is a new series that aims to shed light on all aspects of Latinx cultural production and consumption as well as the Latinx presence globally in popular cultural phenomena in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Use the code AZLATINX20 at checkout to receive 35% off any of the titles mentioned in this post through 9/20/20!

With unity of heart and mind, the creative and the scholarly, Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities opens wide its arms to all non-binary, decolonial masculinities today to grow a stronger, resilient, and more compassionate new generation of Latinxs tomorrow.

Read a Q&A with the editors of Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities, Arturo J. Aldama and Frederick Luis Aldama, here.

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 Frederick and Christopher here, then watch a video on why Latinx pop culture matters with Frederick Luis Aldama, Christopher González, and Ilan Stavans here. We are thrilled that Reel Latinxs was nominated as a finalist for the International Latino Book Award!

Latinx Ciné in the Twenty-First Century is a timeless volume that offers 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.

“An engaging collection that demonstrates both the advances Latinx filmmaking has made in the 2000s, and the acumen of the scholars who appraise them.”—Ryan Rashotte, author of Narco Cinema

Food Fight! contributes to urgent discussions around the problems of cultural misappropriation, labeling, identity, and imaging in marketing and dining establishments. Not just about food, restaurants, and coffee, this volume employs a decolonial approach and engaging voice to interrogate ways that mestizo, Indigenous, and Latinx peoples are objectified in mainstream ideology and imaginary. 

“Every essay will fill a reader—millennial mestizo or just plain old Chicano—with joyous smiles at the zingers. Advertencia! This book is not one for idle consumption, it’s not fast food. Paloma Martinez-Cruz dishes up a scholarly dissertation of substantial complexity with a heaping portion of humor, verbal sleight-of-hand, and barely-restrained ire.”—La Bloga

Sor Juana: Or, The Persistence of Pop encapsulates the life, times, and legacy of seventeenth-century Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Ilan Stavans provides a biographical and meditative picture of how popular perceptions of her life and work both shape and reflect Latinx culture.

Read an excerpt from Sor Juana here, and watch a video about why Latinx pop culture matters with Ilan Stavans, Frederick Luis Aldama, and Christopher González here.

Interweaving discussions about the ethnic, racial, and linguistic representations of Latinas/os within network television comedies, Isabel Molina-Guzmán‘s Latina’s and Latinos On TV probes published interviews with producers and textual examples from hit programs like Modern Family, The Office, and Scrubs to understand how these prime-time sitcoms communicate difference in the United States.

Read an excerpt from the book here, then watch a video where Isabel Molina-Guzmán and Frederick Luis Aldama talk about Latinx pop culture here.

Latino Placemaking and Planning offers a pathway to define, analyze, and evaluate the role that placemaking can have with respect to Latino communities in the context of contemporary urban planning, policy, and design practices. Jesus J. Lara illustrates the importance of placemaking as a pathway to sustainable urban revitalization.

“Lara’s work on Latino urbanism both contributes to the rapid evolution of the field and strengthens an epistemic community around it. With this book, Lara both meta-analyzes the field and propels it forward.”—Clara Irazábal-Zurita, Director of Latinx and Latin American Studies, University of Missouri–Kansas City

In Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics, the foremost expert on Latinx comics, Frederick Luis Aldama, guides us through the full archive of all the Latinx superheros in comics since the 1940s. Aldama takes us where the superheroes live—the barrios, the hospitals, the school rooms, the farm fields—and he not only shows us a view to the Latinx content, sometimes deeply embedded, but also provokes critical inquiry into the way storytelling formats distill and reconstruct real Latinos/as.

We are very proud that Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics was the 2018 Eisner Award Winner for Best Scholarly/ Academic work, as well as the 2018 International Latino Book Award winner for Best Latino-Focused Non-Fiction Book. To watch Frederick talk about Latinx streaming during the coronavirus lockdown, visit here.

Center for Sacramento History Interviews ‘La Gente’ Author about Community History

September 8, 2020

Lorena V. Márquez, author of La Gente: Struggles for Empowerment and Community Self-Determination in Sacramento, was recently interviewed about her upcoming book by Center for Sacramento History archivist William Villano.

In the interview, Márquez shares how the rise of the Chicana/o Movement in Sacramento brought everyday people together to seek lasting and transformative change during the 1960s and 1970s.

This important work shows that the Chicana/o Movement was not solely limited to a handful of organizations or charismatic leaders. Rather, it encouraged those that were the most marginalized—the working poor, immigrants and/or the undocumented, and the under-educated—to fight for their rights on the premise that they too were contributing and deserving members of society.

Book Riot on Author Marquis Bey and Black Anarchism

September 5, 2020

Book Riot recently talked with University of Arizona Press author Marquis Bey on anarchism, their writing, and essential reads on Black trans anarchism.

Bey’s book with the Press, Them Goon Rules: Fugitive Essays on Radical Black Feminism, is a collection of personal essays on radical feminism, Blackness, nonnormative gender, and more.

From Book Riot:

Marquis Bey is the author of Them Goon Rules, published by the University of Arizona Press in 2019 while they were a doctoral candidate at Cornell University. They have since graduated and now hold the position of Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University. Bey’s new book,  Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchism, was published by AK Press in August of 2020.

Them Goon Rules is a collection of personal essays and critical examinations of Black American life with pieces such as “On Being Called a Thug,” “Scenes of Illegible Shadow Genders,” “Flesh Werq,” and many others. The book is personal, humanizing, and easy to read while having a level of depth that forces the reader to dwell on Bey’s writings days after reading.

To read the Book Riot feature in its entirety, please visit here.

Southwest Center Presents Food for Thought Program with David Yetman and Janos Wilder

September 3, 2020

Hosted by James Beard award-winning chef Janos Wilder and David Yetman, host of the PBS travel/adventure series In the Americas and a University of Arizona Press author, Food for Thought is an interactive, multidisciplinary lecture series.

The series, brings the Southwest Center together with Wilder, The Learning Curve, and the Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, with presentations on topics that define the Sonoran Desert, as well as engaging culinary demonstrations.

  • Gary Nabhan, Sept. 25, Prehistoric Menus are New Again: Ancestral Desert Foods as a Springboard to Our Future
  • Jennifer Jenkins, Oct. 2, Small Town and the Big Screen: The Early History of Tucson in Cinema
  • David Yetman, Oct. 9, Mountains and Saguaros: Why the Plants Love the Hills
  • Emma Pérez, Oct. 16, From Translator to Traitor: La Malinche as a Feminist Icon in the Borderlands
  • Ben Wilder, Oct. 23, Cactus-studded Coasts: Reconnecting to the Gulf of California
  • Robin Reineke, Oct. 30, Documenting the Dead: Forensics, Mourning, and Testimony along the US-Mexico Border

Registration is required. Please go here to register and for more information.

Embrace Indigenous Poetry with Our Recent Sun Tracks Titles

September 2, 2020

Launched in 1971, Sun Tracks was one of the first publishing programs to focus exclusively on the creative works of Native Americans. The series has included more than eighty volumes of poetry, prose, art, and photography by distinguished artists.

This week, we are featuring our recent Sun Tracks titles— a variety of stunning collections by Indigenous poets. Use the code AZSUNTRACKS20 to receive 30% off all Sun Tracks titles through 9/15/2020.

Horsefly Dress is a meditation on the experience and beauty of suffering. Rich in the imagery of autumnal foliage, migrating birds, and frozen landscapes, Heather Cahoon’s collection calls forth the sensory experience of grief and metamorphosis. The transformative powers associated with the human experience of loss belong to the past, present, and future, as do the traditional Séliš and Qĺispé stories that create the backbone of these intricate poems.

Get an in-depth look at Horsefly Dress by reading an interview with poet and scholar Heather Cahoon here.

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, poet and scholar Molly McGlennen has created a timely collection, which contributes beautifully to the important conversation about contemporary urban Native life in North America and globally.

Watch a virtual poetry reading with Molly McGlennen, Casandra López, and Laura Da’ here, then read an interview with McGlennen here, and watch her read a poem from Our Bearings here.

Aurum is 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.

Read an interview with Santee Frazier about Aurum here, and explore his previous collection with us, Dark Thirty, here.

Speaking to both a personal and collective loss, in Brother Bullet Casandra 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.

Watch a virtual poetry reading with Molly McGlennen, Casandra López, and Laura Da’ here, then read a Los Angeles Review of Books interview with López here.

When it was first released in 1982, When It Rains was one of the earliest published literary works in the O’odham language. Speakers from across generations shared poems that showcased the aesthetic of the written word and aimed to spread interest in reading and writing in O’odham. When It Rains is 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.

Read Ofelia Zepeda’s new foreword here.

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.

Watch a virtual poetry reading with Molly McGlennen, Casandra López, and Laura Da’ here, and read an interview with Laura Da’ here.

OLLI Hosts Press Authors in Fall Online Speaker Series

September 1, 2020

Osher Lifelong Learning Institute‘s online fall speaker series includes many University of Arizona Press authors from our fall 2020 catalog. We’re grateful to OLLI-UA for the invitation to be part of their noncredit learning program open to all adults over the age of 50.

Here are the Press authors featured:

Over 1,400 people are part of OLLI-UA in Southern Arizona. Visit here to learn more about an OLLI-UA membership, program registration, and check program changes.

The Global Lives of Indian Cotton: A Digital Storymap by Andrew Flachs

September 3, 2020

Through cotton, farmers, weavers, scientists, and wearers imagine Others across an ancient global commodity chain. It begins with a seed.

Five to ten million years ago, a member of the Malvacea plant family, which includes okra (Abelmoschus esculentus L.) and ornamental hibiscus (Hibiscus rosa-sinensis L.) branched off from its relatives and evolved twisting, waxy hairs along its seed coat. The fibers of this new Gossypium genus may have been intended to enlist birds in dispersing seeds, they may have been a ploy to sail along the wind like dandelions (Taraxacum officinale L.), or the hairs might have acted like an umbrella to keep the rain off the seeds. Yet as cotton continued to evolve, it attracted an unexpected helper drawn to those threads – human beings.

In a project conceived and designed by University of Arizona Press author Andrew Flachs, with contributions from Elizabeth Brite, Maura Finkelstein, Meena Menon, Robert N. Spengler III, the Udaanta Trust, Jonathan Wendel, and Emily A. Wolff, you can learn a wide range of valuable information about global cotton production via an interactive map. This map is best viewed on a computer, and can be found here.

Cultivating Knowledge highlights the agency, creativity, opportunism, and performance of individuals and communities carving out successful lives in a changing agricultural landscape. The practice of sustainable agriculture on the farm—let alone the global challenge of feeding or clothing the world—is a social question, not a technological one. Farmers do not make simple cost-benefit analyses when evaluating new technologies and options. Their choices have dire consequences, sometimes leading to death. Through an ethnography of seeds, Andrew Flachs investigates the human responses to global agrarian change.

Andrew Flachs is an assistant professor of anthropology at Purdue University. Trained as an environmental anthropologist, his research spans sustainable agriculture, food studies, the anthropology of knowledge, and political ecology.

Free e-Book: Download Stephen Pyne’s California through Sept. 4

August 27, 2020

Two months ago as the Bighorn Fire was overtaking the mountains north of Tucson, we offered Stephen J. Pyne’s The Southwest as a free e-Book. Now, as California’s wild lands are on our minds and in our hearts, we are making Pyne’s To the Last Smoke volume on California available for free download from our website.

Since 2015, we have been publishing Pyne’s fire histories, which illuminate the regional and national history of wildfire in the United States.

California explores the ways the region has approached fire management and what sets it apart from other parts of the country. Pyne writes that what makes California’s fire scene unique is how its dramatically distinctive biomes have been yoked to a common system, ultimately committed to suppression, and how its fires burn with a character and on a scale commensurate with the state’s size and political power.

California is part of the multivolume series describing the nation’s fire scene region by region. The volumes in To the Last Smoke serve as an important punctuation point to Pyne’s 50-year career with wildland fire—both as a firefighter and a fire scholar. These unique surveys of regional pyrogeography are Pyne’s way of “keeping with it to the end,” encompassing the directive from his rookie season to stay with every fire “to the last smoke.”

Download here using code AZCA20. Available until 9/4/2020.

Learn more about the book

Time for ‘A Desert Feast’ Video: Niethammer’s New Book Explores Tucson’s Rich Culinary Heritage

August 26, 2020

Desert foods expert Carolyn Niethammer‘s new book celebrates Tucson and the region’s unique food cultures, telling the story of how this desert city became America’s first UNESCO City of Gastronomy.

A Desert Feast: Celebrating Tucson’s Culinary Heritage is a celebration of all that makes our desert community special. Sharing Southwest food traditions and cultures, this book showcases the foodways of a unique city in the Sonoran Desert. It features innovative uses for native desert plants and dishes incorporating ancient agricultural staples.

A Desert Feast comes out Tuesday, September 22, 2020, until then enjoy and share this introduction from Niethammer filmed at Mission Garden:

Stephen Pyne’s Op-Ed in The Los Angeles Times Warns of a Wildfire Contagion

August 25, 2020

Stephen Pyne’s Op-Ed in The Los Angeles Times addresses the current wildfire explosion in California and across the globe in recent times, offering a warning of the very fire-inflicted future ahead of us.

“The big payoff against contagion comes from systemic preparations. Emergency medicine can cope with a coronavirus surge only if other work flattens the curve of infection. Emergency firefighting can cope with outbreaks on the scale of California’s only if we address that fraction of climate, fuels and ignitions that remain within our reach.

We can eliminate obvious points of contact, such as powerline failures during Santa Ana and Diablo winds. We must tend to landscapes with pre-existing conditions — drained by drought, covered in feral fuels, buffeted by high winds — that can push mundane outbreaks toward lethal outcomes. We must promote community fire-wellness programs and practice routine watchfulness to reduce vulnerability.”

Read the entire piece here.

Stephen J. Pyne is an emeritus professor at Arizona State University. He is the author of more than 30 books, mostly on wildland fire and its history but also dealing with the history of places and exploration.

_________________________________

Pyne’s latest volume with the University of Arizona Press is To the Last Smoke, which offers a unique and sweeping view of the nation’s fire scene by distilling observations on Florida, California, the Northern Rockies, the Great Plains, the Southwest, the Interior West, the Northeast, Alaska, the oak woodlands, and the Pacific Northwest into a single, readable volume. The anthology functions as a color-commentary companion to the play-by-play narrative offered in Pyne’s Between Two Fires: A Fire History of Contemporary America. The series is Pyne’s way of “keeping with it to the end,” encompassing the directive from his rookie season to stay with every fire “to the last smoke.”

See the Conversation: Beaule and Douglass Discuss ‘Global Spanish Empire’

August 20, 2020

On August 15, more than 200 peopled tuned in to watch editors Christine Beaule and John G. Douglass discuss their edited volume The Global Spanish Empire: Five Hundred Years of Place Making and Pluralism, a free virtual lecture offered by the Amerind Foundation.

Watch the video.

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.

Viewers of the virtual conversation will learn about several key topics in the book, including the role of place-making in Spanish colonialism, the role of pluralism in the colonial experiment, and gain new understanding of Indigenous-Spanish interactions. Beaule and Douglass also explain how their Amerind Studies in Anthropology series book (published by the University of Arizona Press) came together.

To see upcoming Amerind events, please visit the foundation’s website.

Meditación Fronteriza Nominated as a Finalist for the International Latino Book Award

August 20, 2020

We are thrilled to announce that Meditación Fronteriza by Norma Elia Cantú is a finalist for the International Latino Book Awards Juan Felipe Herrera Poetry Book section! At the Virtual Awards Ceremony on September 12, the first, second, and honorable mention will be announced. The virtual and free program starts with entertainment at 2:30pm Pacific Time and the ceremony begins at 3:00 pm Pacific Time. Visit the International Latino Book Awards website for more details.

“Again, healer, teacher, foremother Norma Cantú stitches together the art of documentation. Here, she weaves together mediations on the literal/spiritual/intellectual/metaphorical borderlands. A gathering of love poems carving a space to grieve and to celebrate, these poems honor the land, the people in it, and women’s bodies in bloom and in decay in all the places we exist and in all our forms—algebra teachers and poets and pecan shellers and lovers. Like the tendrils of a vine, each poem sprouts its own delicate truth.”—Laurie Ann Guerrero

Norma E. Cantú is a scholar-activist who 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. She has published fiction, poetry, and personal essays in a number of venues.

Congratulations on this wonderful news, Norma!

Gloria E. Anzaldúa Reads Uncollected and Unpublished Poems in 1991 Recording

August 14, 2020

We are so thrilled to share a new volume with you, Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa, this season! We thought this reading from Gloria herself was incredible, so we wanted to share it with you. This reading is available thanks to voca, the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s online audiovisual archive of more than 1,000 recordings of poets reading their work during visits to the Center between 1963 and today. Listen here.

Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa—theorist, Chicana, feminist—famously called on scholars to do work that matters. This pronouncement was a rallying call, inspiring scholars across disciplines to become scholar-activists and to channel their intellectual energy and labor toward the betterment of society. Scholars and activists alike have encountered and expanded on these pathbreaking theories and concepts first introduced by Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La frontera and other texts.

Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa is a pragmatic and inspiring offering of how to apply Anzaldúa’s ideas to the classroom and in the community rather than simply discussing them as theory. The book gathers nineteen essays by scholars, activists, teachers, and professors who share how their first-hand use of Anzaldúa’s theories in their classrooms and community environments.

Urayoán Noel Featured on the Poetry Centered Podcast

August 13, 2020

Poetry Centered features curated selections from voca, the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s online audiovisual archive of more than 1,000 recordings of poets reading their work during visits to the Center between 1963 and today. In each episode, a guest poet introduces three poems from voca, sharing their insights about the remarkable performances recorded in our archive. Each episode concludes with the guest poet reading a poem of their own. Our inaugural season includes episodes hosted by Hanif Abdurraqib, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Ada Limón, Urayoán Noel, Maggie Smith, and TC Tolbert.

In this episode, Urayoán Noel introduces recordings of Ai engaging with war through necessary fury (“The Root Eater”), Lehua M. Taitano composing a lifeline to communities living with the legacies of colonialism (“A Love Letter to the Chamoru People in the Twenty-first Century”), Ofelia Zepeda on the untranslatability of song (“Ñeñe’i Ha-ṣa:gid / In the Midst of Songs”), and a fable of radical imagination by Gloria E. Anzaldúa (“Nepantla”). Noel ends the episode with his poem “Molecular Modular,” built around open-ended questions considering virality and modes of community.

Urayoán Noel is the author of Buzzing Hemisphere/ Rumor Hemisférico, a playful and irreverent mash-up of voices and poetic traditions from across the Americas, which imagines an alternative to the monolingualism of the U.S. literary and political landscape, and proposes a geo-neuro-political performance attuned to damaged or marginalized forms of knowledge, perception, and identity. Urayoán Noel has been a fellow of CantoMundo and the Ford Foundation, and he is currently the poetry editor of NACLA Report on the Americas. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Noel lives in the Bronx and is an assistant professor of English and Spanish at New York University.

Keep an eye out on our website for a forthcoming collection from Urayoán Noel!

Fred Arroyo and Daniel Chacón Share Their Work And Writing Life

Aug. 14, 2020

We recently brought authors Fred Arroyo and Daniel Chacón together for an online event that turned into a creative writing and philosophy cocktail. In other words, it was super cool.

Arroyo and Chacón also read excerpts from their recent University of Arizona Press books — Sown in Earth and Kafka in a Skirt.

Arroyo, in Sown in Earth, recounts his youth through beautiful 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. Chacón’s Kafka, his first book with the Press, is a short-story collection set in El Paso and other Latinx-dominant urban spaces disregarding boundaries and transporting readers into a world merely parallel to our own.

We are grateful to the authors for their time.

Bundle Sale: 20% Off Print Books & the E-Book Free

August 13, 2020

Now through the end of the month, we’re offering a bundle sale perfect for stocking up for the semester! We are offering 20% off titles, plus you can add the e-Book free with code AZBUNDLE in our shopping cart.

Every print book is available at 20% off with this code, but unfortunately not all University of Arizona Press books are available in e-Book format. To find out how you can help us digitize more of our backlist, please visit our Support page.

Reel Latinxs Nominated as a Finalist for the International Latino Book Award

August 20, 2020

We are thrilled to announce that Reel Latinxs by Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González is a finalist for the International Latino Book Awards Best Nonfiction— Multi-Author section! At the Virtual Awards Ceremony on September 12, the first, second, and honorable mention will be announced. The virtual and free program starts with entertainment at 2:30pm Pacific Time and the ceremony begins at 3:00 pm Pacific Time. Visit the International Latino Book Awards website for more details.

In Reel Latinxs, Aldama and González blaze new paths through Latinx cultural phenomena that disrupt stereotypes, breathing complexity into real Latinx subjectivities and experiences. In this grand sleuthing sweep of Latinx representation in mainstream TV and film that continues to shape the imagination of U.S. society, these two Latinx pop culture authorities call us all to scholarly action.

Frederick Luis Aldama is University Distinguished Professor, Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor of English, University Distinguished Scholar, and Alumni Distinguished Teacher at The Ohio State University. He is the 2018 recipient of the Rodica C. Botoman Award for Distinguished Teaching and Mentoring and the Susan M. Hartmann Mentoring and Leadership Award. He is the award-winning author, co-author, and editor of more than forty books. He is editor and co-editor of eight academic press book series as well as editor of Latinographix, a trade press series that publishes Latinx graphic fiction and nonfiction.

Christopher González is an associate professor of English and director of the Latinx Cultural Center at Utah State University in Logan, Utah.

Congratulations, Frederick and Christopher!

Alberto Álvaro Ríos Talks Poetry, Fiction, And Border Life In Recent Interview

August 7, 2020

In a recent interview with the SanTan Sun News, Arizona Poet Laureate Alberto Álvaro Ríos talks about poetry, and his new book with the University of Arizona Press:

A Good Map of All Things” has a similar theme and the story takes place just south of the border, in northern Sonora.

“It’s a compendium of all the small towns that I grew up either visiting or hearing about or my great aunts lived in,” he said. “There is no one main character; the town itself is the character. Everybody comes in and they tell their story, creating again their own community. There’s no one way to describe their community. Everybody has their version.”

Rios values the lifelong experience that makes us singular as authors and poets. 

“We each, every one of us as human beings, have an innately particular story to tell,” he said.

Read the entire interview here.

Fonseca-Chávez On NPR Urges Reflection On Southwest Colonial History

August 6, 2020

University of Arizona Press author Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez was recently on NPR affiliate KJZZ discussing the Confederate monument removals and the monuments recently removed in New Mexico of Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate:

… it’s complicated because the issue with the Oñate statues is that they were met with protests from the moment that they were going up. And the larger argument that I make with that is the funding that’s attached to these almost are always people of, you know, people that want to celebrate this legacy. People that are from a different sort of socioeconomic status. Even the statue in El Paso, for example, which is the largest equestrian statue in the world, this was put up after the one that went up in Alcalde, New Mexico, after the one that went up in Albuquerque. And so it’s sort of just interesting to think about, you know, if the argument is that these statues really celebrate our history, how many statues do you want? And are you willing to listen to detractors or folks that feel differently about that history. If you’re not willing to listen to that, but you’re also part of the socioeconomic class that can make it happen, then that’s where sort of the power imbalance happens when you’re really talking about whether or not this is OK.

Fonseca-Chávez’s new book, Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture, exposes the ways in which colonialism is expressed in the literary and cultural production of the U.S. Southwest, a region that has experienced at least two distinct colonial periods since the sixteenth century.

To listen or read the full interview with Fonseca-Chávez, go here.

Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities: Five Questions with Frederick and Arturo Aldama

August 5, 2020

In Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities, eighteen contributors explore how legacies of colonization and capitalist exploitation and oppression have created toxic forms of masculinity that continue to suffocate the lives of Latinx people. And while the authors seek to identify all cultural phenomena that collectively create reductive, destructive, and toxic constructions of masculinity that traffic in misogyny and homophobia, they also uncover the many spaces—such as Xicanx-Indígena languages, resistant food cultures, music performances, and queer Latinx rodeo practices—where Latinx communities can and do exhale healing masculinities.

Below, editors Arturo J. Aldama and Frederick Luis Aldama answer five questions about their new volume.

 What inspired you to create this edited volume?

The short answer: It’s the right moment. Of course, there’s been much important work done already within different critical (street and ivory tower) spaces to trouble, overturn, and break from stagnant, stagnating, straightjacketing behaviors (thought and feeling systems), policies, and cultural imaginaries. In our introduction to the volume, we mention a whole slew of such powerfully transformative creators, writers, and activist-thinkers. Too many to list here.

We are both very inspired and transformed by Xicana, indigenous and women of color feminist thought and queer of color critique so we thought it is important to bring a decolonial gaze into the constructions and performance of Latinx masculinities.

By moment, we mean that there’s today un gran Latinx tsunami pushing up from seafloors with a hereto unimagined potent kinetic energy. Young gen Latinxs creator-scholars are leading the charge, modeling vital and vigorous twenty-first century decolonizing ontological and epistemological practices. It’s more than a moment. It’s a movement. The legion of extraordinary activist creator-scholars that make up Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities are its avantgarde.

What do you think the long-term implications of negative masculine stereotypes in the popular media—from fictional TV shows to political news coverage— are for Latinx youths?

From TV shows like Narcos and Borderforce and films such as Sicario to the Chief Executive Cheeto’s racist, sexist, and hetero-thuggish Tweets, mainstream media continues to give free license to retrograde social and economic policies. Arguably, as never before the mainstream media functions to justify Klansman-like terrorist actions against LGBTQ+ and Brown, Black, and Indigenous communities in this country. The mainstream media filled with images of Latinxs as a Brown horde threat that threatens White civilization justifies the intensification of violence and surveillance within our carceral state.  That results in the curtailing—no, the destruction—of the full flourishing of complex, non-binaristic Latinx thought, feeling, and action systems.  That allow us to be in ways far more expansive than erstwhile concepts of gender and sexuality captured.

This said, and as the work in this volume attests, we’re not sitting around on our hands. We never have. We never will. We’re using our pens as our machetes. We continue to work hard to resist the onslaught of destructive media, wrenching tight tourniquets to stop culturacidal hemorrhages.

The transformative work seen by the scholar-creator activists in this volume are testament to this fact. They not only re-act. They open new spaces for us to inhale multispectrumed identities and exhale multifarious experiences. They clear new affirming paths that invite us to move powerfully forward.

With Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities we hope that millennial Latinx subjects will begin to truly question and decolonize the practices of toxic masculinities and learn to love each other and others without the straitjackets of misogyny and homophobic/transphobic violence(s) perpetuated by the capitalist media congloms.

Do you think the young adult literature, shows, films, podcasts, and music of today are opening the conversation for healthier masculinities, or do you think all of these industries still have a long way to go?

Everywhere we turn, Latinx creators are opening eyes to the resplendent spectrum of liberatory modes that we exist—and can exist. We think readily of queer author Alex Sanchez’s breathtaking coming of age and out Aqualad superhero graphic novel for DC. (See Fred’s “Anatomy of a Panel with Alex Sanchez”.). We think of Latinx-helmed TV shows like the rebooted One Day at a Time, Vida, and Gentefied that variously trouble simplistic and stifling ways of being in terms of language, culture, gender and sexuality. (See Fred’s “Love Victor: Brown Queer Teen Tvlandia Watershed; or Hollywood Brown Flavored Bubblegum”.) We think of the vital new audioscapes created by new gen nonbinary Latinx musicians such as Dominican Latinx Rubby and Afro-Boricua Nitty Scott. It’s in these Latinx-grown cultural spaces that we see the pop happening when it comes to waking the world to the vibrant, multispectrumed non-binary ways that we can and do feel, think and perceive in the world.

Recognizing that many aspects of toxic masculinity are rooted in colonialism, how do you think communities should work toward more Indigenous ways of thinking about and performing gender?

Unfortunately, the colonial legacy is still with us. From generation to generation, we’ve passed down a colonial mentality; we’ve passed down centuries of destructive and restrictive ways of thinking and feeling as colonized peoples. The result: we Latinxs act from fear—a fear that divides us from one another—that atomizes us—and that ultimately destroys our families and communities. It’s hate that we see rear its ugly head when a family member fires pejorative bullets at us like puto, maricón, chavala, puta, crybaby, lloroncito, bitch, pussy, niñita. Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities offers the many different ways we can begin to unlearn this hate and fear. It’s the work of those who have come before us and new gen Latinx scholar-creator activists like those in this volume that can and do show us how to decolonize minds,  bodies—spirits. They can and do invite us to struggle free from those straightjackets of binary and polarized models of existence. They welcome us into new dynamic and multispectrumed modes of existing as genders, sexualities—as expansively loving masculinities.

What are you working on now?

We have our individual projects, of course. Fred’s working on the animation adaptation of his debut kid’s lit book, The Adventures of Chupacabra Charlie and continues his work Latinx-diversifying the otherwise white space of comics studies. As Chair of Ethnic Studies, Arturo is focused on doing outreach to the Latinx community through the funded Latinx history projects and continue work with the lyripeutics project to bring decolonial spoken word and hip hop pedagogy to Latinx and other youth of color who are surviving the school to prison pipeline.

We love working together, not only on editing volumes such as Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities but also the work of shepherding new visions and voices through our Latinx Pop Culture book series with you all, the University of Arizona Press. We have some extraordinary books to look forward to seeing on library bookshelves, classroom desks, and ruffled up in backpacks and back-pockets, so be sure to keep an eye out for them in the future.

Arturo J. Aldama is an associate professor and chair of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and affiliate faculty in Gender and Women’s Studies. He received his doctorate in ethnic studies from University of California, Berkeley, in 1996. He is co-editor of the University of Arizona Press’s series Latinx Pop Culture. He is the author of Disrupting Savagism: Intersecting Chicanalo, Mexican Immigrant and Native American Struggles for Representation and author and curator of Moments in Mexican American History: Racism and Resistance, a forty-panel traveling exhibit on the histories of racism, violence, and activism in Mexican American and Chicanx communities of the Southwest. He is co-editor of numerous volumes, including Comparative lndigeneities of the Américas: Toward a Hemispheric Approach.

Frederick Luis Aldama is University Distinguished Professor, Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor of English, University Distinguished Scholar, and Alumni Distinguished Teacher at The Ohio State University. He is the 2018 recipient of the Rodica C. Botoman Award for Distinguished Teaching and Mentoring and the Susan M. Hartmann Mentoring and Leadership Award. He is the award-winning author, co-author, and editor of more than forty books. In 2018 his Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics won the International Latino Book Award and the Eisner Award for Best Scholarly Work. He is editor and co-editor of eight academic press book series, including Latinx Pop Culture, as well as editor of Latinographix, a trade press series that publishes Latinx graphic fiction and nonfiction. His other University of Arizona Press books include Latinx Ciné in the Twenty-First Century, Long Stories Cut Short, and Reel Latinxs.

‘Divided Peoples’ Author on Border Policy and Its Impacts on Indigenous Communities

July 31, 2020

Christina Leza, author of Divided Peoples: Policy, Activism, and Indigenous Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Border, recently asked in an essay published in Yes!, ‘What is the U.S.-Mexico border to indigenous peoples who have lived there?’ especially during this latest border wall construction.

An excerpt from the essay:

The Indigenous Alliance has long advocated for the development of comprehensive legislation that would address Indigenous border rights at both the Canada-U.S. and U.S.-Mexico borders, and has envisioned summits that include both tribal government and grassroots community leaders. Recent tribal border summits in Tucson, Arizona, organized by the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, the Tohono O’odham Nation, and the National Congress of American Indians are building toward this vision. The Indigenous Alliance has also advocated for the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by U.S. tribal governments on the U.S.-Mexico border to help build a common reference for Indigenous border rights.

While Indigenous leaders work to address issues they face with U.S.-Mexico border policy, Indigenous members must continue to grapple with the everyday impacts of increasing border enforcement, including the growing presence of Border Patrol and surveillance technology on reservation lands, as well as the disruption of their lands by border barrier construction.

Read the entire essay in Yes! here.

Daniel Olivas Pays Tribute to Father of Chicano Literature

July 29, 2020

University of Arizona Press author Daniel Olivas, author of King of Lighting Fixtures and Book of Want, recently paid tribute to Rudolfo Anaya, who passed away on June 28.

In the Fall 2013, Olivas did a two-question interview for the Los Angeles Review of Books. The interview was only in the LARB print edition, and not online. Olivas asked if that could change, and LARB in return asked if Olivas could write an intro.

Here’s an excerpt of the intro:

On June 28, Rudolfo Anaya died in his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The man commonly referred to as the Father of Chicano literature had been suffering from ill health for a while. For many of us who shared in some or all of his cultural touchstones—and who therefore embraced his literature—it felt as though a family member had passed.

Two generations of Latinx writers had been inspired by Anaya to become writers themselves because he proved that our stories matter and could be published and read and appreciated. I can say without a doubt that his trailblazing 1972 novel, Bless Me, Ultima, convinced me to start telling my own stories in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Eleven books and one full-length play later, Rudy still inspires me to write.

Yes, I just called the great writer “Rudy.” And that is because I reached out to him seven years ago to propose a short, email interview for LARB regarding his new novel, The Old Man’s Love Story (University of Oklahoma Press). In response, on June 7, 2013, at 12:14 p.m., he responded with a short email: “Ese, email me questions & thanks. Rudy.”

Read the entire intro, as well as Olivas’s interview with Anaya here.

Buelna News Book Review On Chicano Communists

July 28, 2020

Gabriel Buelna gave some positive attention to Chicano Communists and the Struggle for Social Justice, published by the University of Arizona Press, on his online program, Buelna News. Buelna, a Chicano studies professor in Los Angeles, focuses on Latinos and Latin American issues and interests.

Chicano Communists, by Enrique M. Buelna, follows the thread of radical activism and the depth of its influence on Mexican Americans struggling to achieve social justice and equality.

Q & A with Heather Cahoon Offers Deeper Look at Horsefly Dress

July, 2020

Horsefly Dress is a meditation on the experience and beauty of suffering. Rich in the imagery of autumnal foliage, migrating birds, and frozen landscapes, Heather Cahoon’s collection calls forth the sensory experience of grief and metamorphosis. The transformative powers associated with the human experience of loss belong to the past, present, and future, as do the traditional Salish-Pend d’Oreille stories that create the backbone of these intricate poems.

Below, Heather Cahoon answers a few questions about her beautiful new poetry collection.

The poems in Horsefly Dress are influenced by traditional Séliš and Qĺispé stories. How do you think these stories guide and impact the contemporary lives of Salish-Kalispel peoples?

I think it varies a lot from individual to individual and depends on each person’s exposure—or lack thereof—to the stories.  There are many reasons for the lack of exposure but among the foremost are federal Indian policies of assimilation that were designed to acculturate American Indians.  These policies were very aggressive and included on- and off-reservation boarding schools for Native youth, the banning of sacred spiritual practices, and the forced allotment of reservations, among other collateral outcomes from these policies.  Federal assimilation efforts were obviously never fully successful, however, and many people managed to maintain their traditions to varying degrees.  As a result of both of these sort of countervailing efforts by federal officials and tribal people, American Indians today may have more or less access to their cultural traditions, including their traditional stories.  That said, there are definitely segments of my community whose contemporary lives are very much guided and impacted by our traditional stories.  These stories are hyperlocal and relevant; they are located right here where we live out our daily lives and they continue to have so much to teach us about inhabiting this place and about being human.

Avian symbolism plays a powerful role in this collection. Could you please tell us more about the significance of birds in your work?

Some of the significance is tied to tribal symbolism but most of it, in this collection, is personal.  Whenever I’m out trail walking or hiking there are birds present—you can hear them, you often see them moving about the forest and so much of the time they seem to be just part of the scenery.  But every so often, one steps out of that in a way that penetrates my experience or perception of being the primary observer and suddenly I am aware that I am being perceived by something just as alive and sentient as I am.  Some of these exchanges or interactions are longer and more drawn out while some are very brief.  Each one is unique but they are all so poignant and meaningful that they’ll often make their way into my poems.

The poems in Horsefly Dress are bursting with vivid foliage, animals, and natural elements. What is your process for weaving nature so intimately into your poetry?

My family has spent so much time outdoors in the mountains.  Growing up, my father made a living by hunting and by selling things he could harvest from around our reservation and we often helped him in these endeavors.  He sold Christmas trees, firewood, landscaping stones and even dropped deer and elk antlers, which sometimes he would make into antler lamps and chandeliers.  We also spent time as a family just driving to pretty places for either camping or fishing or just to enjoy the peacefulness and smell of the mountains.  It has been my father’s belief that for whatever ails a person, all they need is to retreat into the mountains in order to become well.  Needless to say, I continue to spend time in the outdoors and the experiences I have with local places, flora and fauna inevitably end up in my poems. 

Dreams are featured prominently in this collection. How do dreams affect your creative process?

I occasionally have dreams that are so vivid and powerful that I think about them off and on for days, sometimes even years, until I understand their meaning.  Interestingly, it’s often the creative process of making them into poems—the act of writing about them in such detail—that helps me fully understand them, to see or hear or decode their messages for me. 

What are you working on now?

I am working on and off on a longer-term project that involves revising and expanding my 2005 poetry chapbook Elk Thirst into a full-length collection.  Besides this, I recently launched and direct the American Indian Governance and Policy Institute at the University of Montana and am working to develop a comprehensive tribal public policy needs assessment for each of the tribal governments located our state.  I can get mentally caught up in my policy research and writing, which is very cerebral, but this state is countered by writing poetry, which brings me back to into the present and helps ground me in a bodily experience of time and place.

Read a poem from Horsefly Dress, included below.

RENDER

May I be worthy 
   of my most embattled moments.
          May I find a way    to render meaning 
from the blood marbled-memories
          cached inside
the carcass of the past. 

© 2020 by Heather Cahoon

Heather Cahoon, PhD, earned her MFA in poetry from the University of Montana, where she was the Richard Hugo Scholar. She has received a Potlatch Fund Native Arts Grant and Montana Arts Council Artist Innovation Award. Her chapbook, Elk Thirst, won the Merriam-Frontier Prize. She is an assistant professor of Native American studies at the University of Montana. She is from the Flathead Reservation and is a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.

Charles Bowden’s Blue Desert Featured in Harper’s Magazine

7/24/2020

In the August 2020 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Wes Enzinna writes an essay on Charles Bowden that praises, criticizes, and recognizes Bowden as a shrewd predictor of the current chaos surrounding the United States borderlands. Below, read an excerpt from the essay which pertains to our book Blue Desert, originally published in 1986 and recently re-released with a new forward by Fransciso Cantú in 2018.

“For all his cynicism, Bowden’s response to this crisis was never a desire to strengthen the border, but rather to destroy it. ‘There aren’t any Mexican stars or American stars,’ he once said in a radio profile, as he hiked with the correspondent through the Buenos Aires wildlife refuge in southern Arizona, a popular route for migrants sneaking into the United States. ‘It’s like a great biological unity with a meat cleaver of law cutting it in half.’ His work was an attempt to heal this cleavage, and to remind us how our hunger, pollution, and violence connected us all, especially in the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts, where nature was a stingy mother and death ruled over everything. ‘We are becoming more and more aware that our civilization destroys the foundations that support it by devouring the earth and the things of the earth,’ he wrote in Blue Desert. ‘But we don’t have the courage to back away, to stop, to restrain ourselves. I know I don’t.’

Like the beasts and criminals he admired, Bowden was a complicated, contradictory creature. He loved dogs, dirt, wine, worms, Cadillacs, cacti. He held backyard parties to watch summer cereus flowers bloom at midnight, and owned scores of guns but was reluctant to shoot them lest they scare the birds. In Most Alarming, a priest named Gary Paul Nabhan reports that the last time he saw Bowden the surly old tough guy was weeping for a cottonwood tree that had died. Bowden’s teeth were falling out. He was poor and owned little more than a laptop, a Le Creuset pot, a sleeping bag, a Honda Fit, and a pair of binoculars. If in life he sometimes failed to be a decent man, in his writing he tried to be a better animal. ‘The whippoorwill’s name reflects the sounds we hear it make,’ he once wrote in a letter to a friend.”

Read the entire essay here.

Published in 1986, Blue Desert was Charles Bowden’s third book-length work and takes place almost entirely in Arizona, revealing Bowden’s growing and intense preoccupation with the state and what it represented as a symbol of America’s “New West.” In a thoughtful new foreword, Francisco Cantú writes, “In Blue Desert, we follow Bowden in the processes of becoming. We see the version of Bowden that he would likely most want us to remember—someone who did their best to be an honest witness, someone who was haunted by modernity and his place in it, someone who grappled with his demons by gazing deeply into the desert.”

Charles Bowden (1945–2014) was the author of many acclaimed books about the American Southwest and U.S.-Mexico border issues. He was a contributing editor for GQ, Harper’s, Esquire, and Mother Jones. His honors include a PEN First Amendment Award and the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.

Diana Negrín on Cracking the Silence on Racism in Mexico

July 23, 2020

Recently author Diana Negrín published a piece in Medium about racism in Mexico. Negrín is the author of Racial Alterity, Wixarika Youth Activism, and the Right to the Mexican City, which examines the legacy of the racial imaginary in Mexico with a focus on the Wixarika (Huichol) Indigenous peoples.

In the piece in Medium, Negrín writes, “A few years back it would have been very difficult to find platforms through which to discuss race and racism in Mexico. When I began sharing my writing and research detailing the contemporary experiences of Indigenous youth as they confronted and challenged structural and everyday forms of discrimination, few people I encountered, beyond the Wixarika university students who collaborated and protagonized my research, seemed interested. Within Mexico, the fact of racism has often been downplayed by the country’s long tradition of centering the mestizo identity as one that is composed of various racial and ethnic lineages. European cultural mannerisms, political economic orders, language, and general world views were to replace or, at the least, hybridize with Indigenous heritages.”

See the complete piece here.

The University of Arizona Press Fall 2020 Catalog

July 21, 2020

Every season with the availability of our new catalog our staff takes a collective moment to reflect proudly and fondly on what we are presenting to you. The Fall 2020 season is no different.

These works are months and even years in the making. They illuminate the commitment, passion, and generosity of our authors, editors, peer reviewers, and above all you, our readers. These books bring new perspectives to our world, looking deeply, hopefully, critically, and thoughtfully.

Essays, history, poetry, ethnography, archaeology, and so much more are showcased in the Fall 2020 Season. It is with great pride we offer you this look at what we will be publishing in coming months!

Browse and enjoy!

Carlos Velez-Ibáñez Honored with the 2020 Franz Boas Award

July 15, 2020

We are thrilled to announce that Carlos Velez-Ibáñez is the recipient of the American Anthropological Association’s 2020 Franz Boas Award for Exemplary Service to Anthropology! This award is presented annually by the AAA to its members whose careers demonstrate extraordinary achievement that have well served the anthropological profession.

Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez is a Regents Professor and the Motorola Presidential Professor of Neighborhood Revitalization in the School of Transborder Studies and a Regents Professor of in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. His numerous honors include the 2004 Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology and the 2003 Bronislaw Malinowski Medal. Vélez-Ibáñez was elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1994 and was named as a corresponding member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences (Miembro Correspondiente de la Academia Mexicana de Ciencias) in 2015, the only American anthropologist so selected.

Carlos is the author of five University of Arizona Press books, including Border Visions, Hegemonies of Language and Their Discontents, An Impossible Living in a Transborder World, and The U.S.-Mexico Transborder Region. His forthcoming book, Reflections of a Transborder Anthropologist, explores Vélez-Ibáñez’s development as a scholar and in so doing the development of the interdisciplinary fields of transborder and applied anthropology.

Congratulations, Carlos!

Explore Our Exciting Space Science Titles

July 9, 2020

For six decades, the University of Arizona Press has published exceptional works in the field of space science. Below, we’ve highlighted some of our recent space science titles.

Under Desert Skies is currently available as our free e-book of the week until 7/16/2020. Use the code AZSKY20 at checkout!

Planetary Astrobiology represents the combined efforts of more than seventy-five international experts consolidated into twenty chapters and provides an accessible, interdisciplinary gateway for new students and seasoned researchers who wish to learn more about this expanding field. Readers are brought to the frontiers of knowledge in astrobiology via results from the exploration of our own solar system and exoplanetary systems.

This book is a part of our incredible Space Science Series.

Enceladus and the Icy Moons of Saturn brings together nearly eighty of the world’s top experts to establish what we currently understand about Saturn’s moons, while building the framework for the highest-priority questions to be addressed through ongoing spacecraft exploration.

This book is also a part of our Space Science Series.

Gerard P. Kuiper and the Rise of Modern Planetary Science describes the life of a man who lived through some of the most dramatic events of the twentieth century and ended up creating a new field of scientific research, planetary science. As NASA and other space agencies explore the solar system, they take with them many of the ideas and concepts first described by Gerard P. Kuiper.

Read an excerpt from Derek W. G. Sears’ book here. We are thrilled to announce that Gerard P. Kuiper and the Rise of Modern Planetary Science won a Foreword Indies Award!

Mars: The Pristine Beauty of the Red Planet is the most outstanding and uniquely curated selection of Mars orbital images ever assembled in one volume. With explanatory captions in twenty-four languages and a gallery of more than 200 images, this distinctive volume brings a timely and clear look at the work of an active NASA mission.

Don’t forget, all e-books are 40% right now with the code AZEBOOK40!

Free E-Book of the Week: Under Desert Skies

July 8, 2020

Since March, we have featured a free e-Book almost every week. For this week’s Free e-Book of the Week, we’re pleased to offer Melissa Sevigny’s Under Desert Skies: How Tucson Mapped the Way to the Moon and Planets for free download.

Under Desert Skies describes how a small lunar- and planetary-focused laboratory at the University of Arizona forged the field of planetary science at a time when few people studied the solar system. Spanning six decades, the book records the stories of the scientists who, with telescopes and spacecraft, transformed single points of lights into worlds that we can see, touch, study, and compare to Earth.

Melissa L. Sevigny grew up in Tucson, Arizona, with a deep love of the geology, ecology, and the clear desert skies of the Southwest. She is a science and technology reporter for KNAU (Arizona Public Radio) in Flagstaff. Minor Planet (15624) Lamberton is named in her honor.

Download Under Desert Skies here using code AZSKY20. Available until 7/16/2020.

“Beyond their awe-inspiring accomplishments, these UA faculty epitomize the ‘inexhaustible sense of wonder’ that Sevigny considers the heart of planetary science.”—The Journal of Arizona History

“Tells the story of how a small corner of Arizona became Earth’s ambassador to space.”—Lunar and Planetary Information Bulletin

Under Desert Skies presents an institutional history of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL) at the University of Arizona in Tucson: a key center for planetary sciences today and throughout its sixty-year history.” —Isis Review

More books about space and science

Need Some Summer Reads? We Got You

July 7, 2020

We recently asked several University of Arizona Press authors to recommend a book from the Press that makes for a good read, and beautiful literature. Enjoy!

Bryan Allen Fierro’s Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul

We may not have baseball this year (fingers still crossed), but we do have Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul. Of course this collection is about more than baseball. Bryan Allen Fierro‘s debut is a series of searing tales set in the barrios of Los Angeles that was rightly recognized as being a testament to all of our shared humanity.

Luis Alberto Urrea, author of In Search of Snow, Wandering Time and Nobody’s Son

Melissa L. Sevigny’s Under Desert Skies: How Tucson Mapped the Way to the Moon and Planets

Summer evenings are for stargazing. And our desert skies make for some of the best seeing anywhere. Just ask any astronomer or backyard telescope enthusiast. You probably know one or two because Tucson is full of them. Chances are you’ve visited Kitt Peak National Observatory or the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter or the Whipple Observatory on Mount Hopkins, just a few of the telescope collections that dot the peaks of our sky islands.

Indeed, Tucson is the astronomy capital of the world. But we also have a long, fascinating history of planetary science. Melissa L. Sevigny’s 2016 book, Under Desert Skies: How Tucson Mapped the Way to the Moon and Planets, tells the stories of how space pioneers like Gerard Kuiper and Ewen Whitaker founded the UA’s Lunar and Planetary Lab (LPL) and made Tucson the epicenter of exploration of our solar system.

Ken Lamberton, author of Chasing Arizona: One Man’s Yearlong Obsession with the Grand Canyon State

Tom Holm’s The Osage Rose

Want to know more about the Tulsa Race Massacre that’s been in the news recently? Tom Holm‘s novel provides a nuanced examination of this event and two others that happened nearly simultaneously: the Osage Oil Murders and Prohibition, through the actions of believable characters. This is the best work in print that addresses these issues which still have consequences nearly a century since they occurred.

Frances Washburn, author of The Red Bird All-Indian Traveling Band

Carmen Giménez Smith’s Milk and Filth

With so little time, I pick cautiously the guests I invite to share my imagination. I want my VIP guests to tingle flesh and zing my body electric. I want them to stop me in my tracks to hear new contrapuntal melodies and to shiver with pleasure as I lick air that wraps anew words and images—actions and thoughts. I want them to peel back that thick glaze coating the surface of my mind. I want them to jumper-cable shock me out of Twitter bubbles and FB echo chambers. I want a lot. Today, I invite Carmen Giménez Smith and her exquisite Milk and Filth to share my soul.

Frederick Luis Aldama, author of Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics

Sara Sue Hoklotubbe’s Sadie Walela Mystery series

I recommend Sara Sue Hoklotubbe‘s award winning Sadie Walela Mystery series. There are precious few Native mystery writers and it is refreshing indeed to read stories authored by writers who know the culture and the territory.

Devon A. Mihesuah, author of The Roads of My Relations

Emmy Pérez’s, With the River on Our Face

Emmy Pérez’s With the River on Our Face, is more than a love letter to the Peoples and ecologies long nourished beyond the cut banks of the Rio Grande. This vital collection is a divining rod. With precise music in her language, Pérez is intentional and patient, and informed. With the River on Our Face is a meditation, border gravity pulling the reader to culturally fertile and voice sustaining, emerald waters. 

Bryan Allen Fierro, author of Dodger Blue Will Fill Your Soul

Six More Open Access Titles Now Available

July 6, 2020

The University of Arizona Press is constantly working toward innovative, forward-thinking ways to connect our scholarship with readers worldwide. We are pleased to announce a new selection of titles in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, border studies, and Latin American studies are now available as open access (OA).

Thanks to financial support from Knowledge Unlatched, we have been able to move an additional six titles to OA format. The titles are available either via link on our website or directly through the OAPEN Foundation.

Now Available as OA:

The Border and Its Bodies
The increasingly militarized U.S.-México border is an intensely physical place, affecting the bodies of all who encounter it. The essays in this volume explore how crossing becomes embodied in individuals on the most basic social unit possible: the human body.
OA Link

Activist Biology
Activist Biology is the story of a group of biologists at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro who joined the drive to renew the Brazilian nation, claiming as their weapon the voice of their fledgling field. It offers a portrait of science as a creative and transformative pathway. This book will intrigue anyone fascinated by environmental history and Latin American political and social life in the 1920s and 1930s.
OA Link

Before Kukulkán
This volume illuminates human lifeways in the northern Maya lowlands prior to the rise of Chichén Itzá. Using bioarchaeology, mortuary archaeology, and culturally sensitive mainstream archaeology, the authors create an in-depth regional understanding while also laying out broader ways of learning about the Maya past.
OA Link

Big Water
Big Water focuses on the uniquely overlapping character of South America’s Triple Frontier. These essays complicate the frontiers and balance the excessive weight previously given to empires, nations, and territorial expansion. Big Water’s transdisciplinary approach provides a new understanding of how space and society have developed throughout Latin America.
OA Link

Challenging the Dichotomy
Challenging the Dichotomy explores how dichotomies regarding heritage dominate the discussions of ethics, practices, and institutions. Contributing authors underscore the challenge to the old paradigms from multiple forces. The case studies and discourses, both ethnographic and archaeological, arise from a wide variety of regional contexts and cultures.
OA Link

Cooperatives, Grassroots Development, and Social Change
Cooperatives, Grassroots Development, and Social Change presents examples from Paraguay, Brazil, and Colombia, examining what is necessary for smallholder agricultural cooperatives to support holistic community-based development in peasant communities. Reporting on successes and failures of these cooperative efforts, the contributors offer analyses and strategies for supporting collective grassroots interests. Illustrating how poverty and inequality affect rural people, they reveal how cooperative organizations can support grassroots development strategies while negotiating local contexts of inequality amid the broader context of international markets and global competition.
OA Link

Kathryn Conrad: ‘Our work is more important than ever’

June 30, 2020

During the Association of University Presses virtual annual meeting in June 2020, Kathryn Conrad, director of the University of Arizona Press, addressed AUPresses members as outgoing president of its board of directors. Conrad assumed presidency in June 2019. Niko Pfund, president of Oxford University Press USA, has assumed the presidency as Conrad remains on the board a past president.

Conrad’s statement reflects on the past challenges unique to this year, as well as the values that provide a roadmap for all academic presses:

In a normal year, I would take this time to tell you about the work of the Association’s Board of Directors and some of its accomplishments. 

But this is not a normal year. 

On March 15, just days after the World Health Organization had declared COVID-19 a pandemic, the AUPresses Board of Directors convened online for its spring meeting. We spent our first hour together sharing the state of our presses and institutions while shutting down our offices to work from home. I think all of us will remember those strange early days and what would become the first of countless virtual meetings. 

At that March meeting, we approved the Association’s Anti-Racism statement, a document developed over 18 months by the Association’s Diversity and Inclusion Task Force, chaired by Gita Manaktala and Larin McLaughlin, and its first Equity, Justice, and Inclusion Committee, chaired by Gita and Brian Halley. 

The statement recognizes the racist and exploitative practices that have shaped our institutions and our presses. It calls on us to confront the systems—the systems to which we belong–that perpetuate bias, inequalities, and white supremacy. 

Ten weeks later, the murder of George Floyd ignited a global movement for Black lives. In the midst of scrutiny of anti-Black racism in every corner of our society, our industry is called out for its inequity through the #PublishingSoWhite and #PublishingPaidMe hashtags and our own university press community is called out for our failure to support inclusion. It is a time of anger, hurt, and overwhelm. And here we are, at our 2020 Annual Meeting, trying to process all of this in a virtual environment that we will likely be stuck in for some time to come. 

The Association’s Annual Meeting has always been a source of inspiration for me. Last year, inspired by Chris Long’s closing plenary session in Detroit on the transformative power of values-based publishing, I led a deeper dive into our Association’s values with members of the board and staff. 

What do we mean when we say we hold Stewardship, Intellectual Freedom, Integrity, and Diversity and Inclusion as the values we strive to uphold?

The mission of AUPresses is to advance the essential role of this global community of publishers whose mission is to ensure academic excellence and cultivate knowledge. Our values are the principles that guide us–our compass. At an historical moment that feels simultaneously riveting and overwhelming, a compass feels like a good thing to have. 

In our work this year, we recommitted to our values, first developed 5 years ago under the leadership of Barbara Kline Pope and Meredith Babb, and we developed common understanding of their meaning in our everyday work. 

We demonstrate Stewardship through our mindful investment in the development and dissemination of scholarship, respecting the fundamental labor of publishing. We amplify authors’ voices as we work to advance and preserve an inclusive scholarly record. 

We embody Intellectual Freedom by promoting the emergence and evaluation of new theories, and by championing the freedom to think, research, publish, and read. These are the pillars of a democratic society. 

We demonstrate Integrity as leaders in peer review best practices and by earning the trust of our authors, our readers, and our institutions. 

We strive for equity, justice, and inclusion in our practices. And we endeavor to represent the breadth of human knowledge and experience as part of our commitment to Diversity and Inclusion.

Guided by our values and by our strategic plan, updated last year under the leadership of Jennifer Crewe, our association has accomplished much this year in support of our goals of Collaboration, Advocacy, Research, Education, 

We established an Open Access task force, led by Erich van Rijn, to help build collaboration among our members around this increasingly important issue, and we have deepened our engagement with the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications. We have redoubled our Advocacy efforts with a new Advocacy Committee, led this year by Meredith Babb, and with the Stand UP Award, a new advocacy award, spearheaded by Greg Britton. We supported the expansion of the Lee and Low Diversity Baseline Survey to consider university presses more fully, and we increased our frequency of gathering of sales data from quarterly to monthly to help members navigate this volatile economic time. We have expanded opportunities for members to connect online to share knowledge and best practices. And we will soon launch a Global Presses Partnership Program, spearheaded by Anthony Cond. This program will bring together university presses in the Global South with AUPresses members to expand the knowledge base of our international university press community through the sharing of experience and practical education across borders.

Much of the work of this Association happens in its committees, made up of volunteers from across our membership. I cannot name them all but I would like to extend my deep thanks to the committee chairs and members for their work this year.

Serving as AUPresses president has afforded me a remarkable opportunity to see what our Association is made of. I have seen the dogged determination of our Central Office staff, led by the ever-ready Peter Berkery, who tends to the myriad concerns of members, both individually and collectively, each day. I have seen the fierce support of our members for one another. I have seen the ingenuity of our marketers, who came together in recent months to support the independent bookstores that support us and to rally for the common cause of scholarship. I have seen our stellar Annual Meeting Program Committee, led by Laurie Matheson, turn on a dime to create a virtual meeting that will give our members actionable ideas, professional growth, and opportunities to meet new colleagues. I have seen a community of publishers that believes our collective efforts are greater than the sum of our parts. 

Our work is more important than ever. Thanks to the many volunteers who conducted the work of our Association this year, and thanks to each and every one of our members for the work that you do every day.

Press Receives Major Grant From the National Endowment for the Humanities

June 29, 2020

The University of Arizona Press announces the receipt of a major National Endowment for the Humanities Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act grant, which provides emergency relief to institutions and organizations working in the humanities. The $90,037 grant provides the Press ongoing support for the publication of humanities scholarship, and acknowledges, in particular, its record publishing books relevant to communities of color.

This CARES Act grant will allow the Press to dramatically increase availability of e-books in Indigenous and Latinx studies, raising the total number of available eBooks to nearly 75 percent of the total list of 1,500 titles in print published by the Press. By making works available for digital delivery, the Press can fulfill its mission regardless of social distancing requirements and help maintain financial viability during the pandemic and beyond.

“We are grateful to the U.S. Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities for providing us with this opportunity to provide this significant scholarship to a larger audience. Since the onset of the pandemic, the circulation of print books radically decreased while the need for eBooks grew,” said Kathryn Conrad, director of the University of Arizona Press.

The Press’s high-profile list in Indigenous and Latinx studies, emphasizes history, comparative religion, literary criticism, media studies, and gender studies. This scholarship is part of our history of publishing books by, about, and for underrepresented communities in the United States, said Conrad.

For the highly competitive NEH CARES grant category, the Humanities Endowment received more than 2,300 eligible applications from cultural organizations requesting more than $370 million in funding for projects between June and December 2020. Approximately 14 percent of the applicants were funded. The Press is one of four organizations in Arizona to receive this funding.

“These new e-book versions of important works in Indigenous and Latinx scholarship will greatly expand the readership of these books at a time when public interest in these topics is rapidly growing,” said Shan Sutton, dean of University Libraries. “NEH support will ensure that the general public has greater access, while also enabling these books to be more easily integrated into online college courses that are increasing as well.”

About the National Endowment for the Humanities Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at neh.gov.

Free E-Book of the Week: Deception on All Accounts from the Sadie Walela Mystery Series

June 25, 2020

Since March, we have featured a free e-Book almost every week. As we look toward the long weekend coming up, what could be better than tucking into a good mystery?  

For this week’s Free e-Book of the Week, we’re pleased to offer the first of Sara Sue Hoklotubbe’s mystery series, Deception on All Accounts for free download. Set against the backdrop of small-town Oklahoma and its Native culture, Deception on All Accounts draws readers into the real lives of contemporary American Indians as it shines a light on violence, corporate corruption, and prejudice in modern America. As Sadie Walela comes to terms with murder, romance, and her hopes for a career, she finds deception on all accounts.

Deception on All Accounts is the first of four books that feature Sadie. Author Sara Sue Hoklotubbe is a Cherokee tribal citizen. She is the winner of a WILLA Literary Award, Trophy Award for Best Fiction Book by Oklahoma Writers’ Federation, a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for best mystery/suspense, and a Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers Award for best mystery.. Read ‘Seven Questions with Sara Sue Hoklotubbe’ to learn more.

Download Deception on All Accounts here using code AZSADIE20. Available until 7/6/2020.

“It’s a pleasure to make the acquaintance of Sadie Walela, a banker in northeastern Oklahoma who is thrust into the role of amateur sleuth after a spate of branch robberies leaves several colleagues dead and her career in critical condition. . . . Hoklotubbe paints a believable picture of Indian-white relations in small-town America and crafts a series protagonist as savvy as she is sweet.”—Booklist

“Evenly paced prose, increasingly suspenseful plotting, and the emergence of a strong heroine characterize this promising first mystery.”—Library Journal

Learn more about the series

Mark Nichter’s ‘Global Health’ Now Available in e-Edition

June 23, 2020

We are pleased to announce that anthropologist Mark Nichter’s book Global Health: Why Cultural Perceptions, Social Representations, and Biopolitics Matter is now available in e-Book format, as well as print.

Since its publication in 2008, Global Health has been a key text for understanding health social science research and what this research can contribute to global health and the study of biopolitics. Nichter is Regents’ Professor Emeritus and Professor of Anthropology, Public Health, and Family Medicine at the University of Arizona.

“Nichter has written an accessible text that is both critical and constructive, an inspiration as well as a lesson plan. It should be required reading for anyone considering the relevance of social science in global health.”–Current Anthropology

The June 19, 2020 issue of the American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology News includes an essay by Regents’ Professor Emeritus Mark Nichter. “Engaging the Pandemic: How One Medical Anthropologist Is Boosting Our Capacity to Understand and Contend with COVID-19” (pp. 3–7) explores the practical collaborations a medical anthropologist can contribute during lockdown. Nichter writes, “COVID-19 provides an opportunity to build alliances and momentum for significant health care reform.”

Gerard P. Kuiper and the Rise of Modern Planetary Science Wins a Foreword Indies Award

June 23, 2020

We are thrilled to announce that Gerard P. Kuiper and the Rise of Modern Planetary Science is the 2019 Bronze Winner of the Science section of the Foreword Indie Book Awards!

Gerard P. Kuiper and the Rise of Modern Planetary Science describes the life of a man who lived through some of the most dramatic events of the twentieth century and ended up creating a new field of scientific research, planetary science. As NASA and other space agencies explore the solar system, they take with them many of the ideas and concepts first described by Gerard P. Kuiper.

Derek W. G. Sears was a professor at the University of Arkansas for thirty years and is now a senior research scientist at NASA. He has published widely on meteorites, lunar samples, asteroids, and the history of planetary science.

Congratulations, Derek!

Environmentally Focused Books to Explore this Summer

June 18, 2020

North of Tucson, the Santa Catalina Mountains have been aggressively burning for more than a week. As of today, the fire has grown to 23,892 acres, and many residents have evacuated their homes. As we watch the smoke billowing up above the mountain range, we thought it would be an appropriate time to turn our attention toward our books that focus on fire, the environment, and human impacts on the planet.

Below, we have a curated collection of environmentally focused books that dive deep into nature, the implications of human activity, and the devastation and renewal that fire can bring.

Use the code AZPLANET20 to receive 40% off with free shipping on any of the titles mentioned in this post! Don’t forget, Stephen Pyne’s The Southwest is available as a free e-book until 6/25/20 with the code AZFIRE20.

This anthology offers a unique and sweeping view of the nation’s fire scene by distilling observations on Florida, California, the Northern Rockies, the Great Plains, the Southwest, the Interior West, the Northeast, Alaska, the oak woodlands, and the Pacific Northwest into a single, readable volume. The essays offer a color-commentary companion to the play-by-play narrative offered in Pyne’s Between Two Fires: A Fire History of Contemporary America.

To the Last Smoke is Stephen J. Pyne’s way of “keeping with it to the end,” encompassing the directive from his rookie season as a wildland firefighter to stay with every fire “to the last smoke.”

Read an excerpt from the book here, and watch a video about the series here.

Through a mixture of journalism, history, and literary imagination, fire expert Stephen J. Pyne provides a lively survey of what makes this region distinctive, moving us beyond the usual conversations of science and policy. Pyne explores the Southwest’s sacred mountains, including the Jemez, Mogollon, Huachucas, and Kaibab; its sky islands, among them the Chiricahuas, Mount Graham, and Tanque Verde; and its famous rims and borders. Together, the essays provide a cross-section of how landscape fire looks in the early years of the 21st century, what is being done to manage it, and how fire connects with other themes of southwestern life and culture.

The Southwest is part of the multivolume series describing the nation’s fire scene region by region. The volumes in To the Last Smoke also cover California, the Northern Rockies, the Great Plains, Florida, and several other critical fire regions. The series serves as an important punctuation point to Pyne’s 50-year career with wildland fire—both as a firefighter and a fire scholar.

Read six questions with Stephen J. Pyne here, then read an article on preparing for the pyrocene here. Use the code AZFIRE20 to get this e-book for free through 6/25/20.

Science Be Dammed is an alarming reminder of the high stakes in the management—and perils in the mismanagement—of water in the western United States. It offers important lessons in the age of climate change and underscores the necessity of seeking out the best science to support the decisions we make.

Watch a recorded virtual book panel with authors Eric Kuhn and John Fleck here.

Cultivating Knowledge highlights the agency, creativity, opportunism, and performance of individuals and communities carving out successful lives in a changing agricultural landscape. The practice of sustainable agriculture on the farm—let alone the global challenge of feeding or clothing the world—is a social question, not a technological one. Farmers do not make simple cost-benefit analyses when evaluating new technologies and options. Their choices have dire consequences, sometimes leading to death. Through an ethnography of seeds, Andrew Flachs investigates the human responses to global agrarian change.

View some field notes from Andrew Flachs’ research here, then watch a lecture on anthropology and agriculture here.

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.

Despite its tiny size and seeming marginality to world affairs, the Central American republic of Costa Rica has long been considered an important site for experimentation in cutting-edge environmental policy. The Ecolaboratory frames Costa Rica as an “ecolaboratory” and asks what lessons we can learn for the future of environmental governance and sustainable development both within the country and elsewhere.

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 book here.

Through twenty individual stories, Voices from Bears Ears captures the passions of the debate that led to the creation of Bears Ears National Monument, a land of unsurpassed natural beauty and deep historical significance. The story of this place reflects the cultural crosscurrents that roil our times: maintaining tradition and culture in the face of change, healing the pain of past injustices, creating shared futures, and protecting and preserving lands for future generations.

Naturalist John Alcock details the aftermath of a devastating wildfire in the lower reaches of Arizona’s Mazatzal Mountains. Documenting for a decade the chaparral landscape left in the wake of the Willow fire, After the Wildfire thrills at the renewal of the region as he hikes in and photographs plants and animals in a once-blackened wildland now teeming with resurgent life.

No Species Is an Island describes the surprising results of Theodore H. Fleming’s eleven-year study of pollination biology in Sonora, Mexico, in the most biologically diverse desert in the world. These discoveries serve as a primer on how to conduct ecological research, and offer important conservation lessons for us all. Fleming offers an insightful look at how field ecologists work, and the often big surprises that come from looking carefully at a natural world where no species stands alone.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

Published in 1986, Blue Desert was Charles Bowden’s third book-length work and takes place almost entirely in Arizona, revealing Bowden’s growing and intense preoccupation with the state and what it represented as a symbol of America’s “New West.” With a thoughtful new foreword by Francisco Cantú, Blue Desert is a critical piece of Bowden’s oeuvre.

Read a short essay on Blue Desert here.

Don’t forget, we are offering 40% off all e-books with the code AZEBOOK40.

‘The Sins of Our Fathers’: An Excerpt from Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez’s Forthcoming Book

June 17, 2020

In New Mexico two statues of Juan de Oñate, sixteenth-century Spanish conquis­tador who founded the first Spanish town in the present-day Southwest at San Juan de los Caballeros, were removed following protests this week. In this excerpt from Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez’s forthcoming book, Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture, we learn that this action follows decades of a contested conversation:

Within the colonial kaleidoscope, everyone sees the pieces differently. There are prisms that reveal a propensity to shut out others. If one’s own privileged history or legacy is at stake, then they choose not to look or acknowledge history beyond their own perspective, for if they validate the existence of oppositional thought, it somehow diminishes their own story. Indigenous histories represent the jagged fragments that, when viewed separately, tell a more complex history that needs to be seen and acknowledged. For Indigenous people, colonization itself is a jagged edge that will never find a solid place within the kaleidoscope. But this same history represents a point of pride for people who hold on to these legacies.

Patricia Marina Trujillo, Corrine Kaa Pedi Povi Sanchez, and Scott Davis (2020) refer to Oñate as a chispa, the flyaway piece of hair that keeps resting on your face. You tuck it back, but you know it’s bound to get loose again and be bothersome. Oñate is a tired, drawn-out character in the story of New Mexico. How do we secure this chispa? And where? National debates in 2017 surrounding Confederate flags and statues in the South and monuments, more generally, suggest museums as potential locations, rather than public spaces as a site of remembrance.26 And Guthrie (2013) reminds us these sites serve as an epicenter for the politics of recognition with ties to how we celebrate multiculturalism, specifically in New Mexico. The white supremacist marches and counterprotests in Charlottesville, Virginia, prompted social media users and KUNM, a public radio station broadcasting from the University of New Mexico’s Oñate Hall (sigh), to return to the topic of Oñate’s legacy in August 2017.

As I finished this chapter, I could not find a way to break away from the controversy surrounding Oñate that was again brought to the forefront via national conversations on Confederate statues. A recent manifestation of resis­tance to this narrative was the renaming of the Oñate Monument Resource and Visitors Center as the Northern Río Grande National Heritage Center, whose vision centers on the economic sustainability of the people of the north­ern Río Grande. This marks a shift from an Oñate-centered space to one that demonstrates an investment in and recognition of the economic structures that were created through centuries of colonial violence in New Mexico and the Southwest. The rededication of this space came to my attention through a Facebook post by Patricia Marina Trujillo on March 2, 2017, where she included a photo showing a new sign posted near the Oñate monument. The sign, a conquistador hat with a line through it, was accompanied by Patricia’s hashtag, #buenobyeoñate. Though the artist was not known at the time of her posting, it marks a pattern of resistance to the Oñate narrative and a desire to move past exhausted, old arguments of former Spanish glory that fail to nuance history.

Just as 1998 prompted new conversations about Oñate’s legacy in light of the four hundredth anniversary of his arrival, so too did more recent events surrounding monuments dedicated to Confederate heroes. In 2017, on the cusp of the Entrada Pageant in Santa Fe for the annual Santa Fe Fiesta held each September, the Oñate statue located in Alcalde, New Mexico, was vandalized with red paint covering the left foot. Painted on a nearby wall were the words “Remember 1680” (Bennett 2017). This act demonstrated a continued lack of interest by some in celebrating pageantry and monuments to Spanish coloni­zation, and a reminder that this conversation may never be silenced.

Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez is an assistant professor of English at Arizona State University. Her work focuses on colonialism, place studies, and the narratives of southwestern U.S. communities. She is co-editor of Spanish Perspectives on Chicano Literature: Literary and Cultural Essays and Querencia: Reflections on the New Mexico Homeland. Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture will be published by the University of Arizona Press in October.

Thinking Like a Burned Mountain: An Excerpt from Stephen J. Pyne’s To the Last Smoke Anthology

June 16, 2020

For more than a week, the Tucson community has watched the Bighorn Fire burn its way across the Santa Catalina Mountains. Many people have been ordered to evacuate their homes as firefighters from surrounding regions fight the blaze. As of today, the fire has burned 14,686 acres with 30 percent containment. 

Since 2015, we’ve published the works of fire historian Stephen J. Pyne, starting with a narrative examination of fire in the United States Between Two Fires: A Fire History of Contemporary America. Next, we published a series of regional fire surveys. This spring, Pyne brought together the best of each regional study into the anthology To the Last Smoke, which offers a unique and sweeping view of the nation’s fire scene and serves as a punctuation mark to the series.

Pyne is an emeritus professor at Arizona State University. He is the author of more than 30 books, mostly on wildland fire and its history but also dealing with the history of places and exploration, including The Ice, How the Canyon Became Grand, and Voyager.

Below, read an excerpt from the “Southwest” section of Pyne’s new anthology:

“On September 18, 1909, a young Aldo Leopold, then a ranger with the U.S. Forest Service, shot two timber wolves in Arizona’s White Mountains. He noted the episode casually in a letter home. But the incident, like embers in an old campfire, glowed in his mind, and in April 1944 he wrote one of his most celebrated meditations, ‘Thinking Like a Mountain’, in which he described standing over the dying she-wolf and watching the ‘fierce green fire’ in her eyes die and wondered if shooting the wolf had helped unhinge the larger landscape. Too much emphasis on safety, he thought, was dangerous. He quoted Thoreau’s dictum, ‘In wildness is the salvation of the world.’

The essays, or more accurately moral epistle, became one of the founding documents of 20th-century American environmentalism. It helped make the wolf the living emblem of the wild, and wolf restoration a measure of ecological enlightenment. About 10 miles of Leopold’s kill site, Mexican gray wolves were reintroduced in 1998. But his insights also helped underwrite a campaign of nature protection that focused on the preservation of pristine lands. Leopold was the architect of America’s first ‘primitive area’, the Gila, located in an adjacent national forest, which subsequently became the inspiration for a National Wilderness Preservation System 40 years later. In 1984 the system acquired the 11,000-acre Bear Wallow Wilderness, about 10 miles as the crow flies southwest from where Leopold shot is wolf. Between them the three sites from a triangle of environmental thinking transformed into action— the deed into an idea, the emblem into a restored species, the wild into a legally gazetted preserve.

A century later a mammoth wildfire boiled out of the Bear Wallow Wilderness, blew over the wolf reintroduction site, and overran Leopold’s vantage point above the Black River. The Wallow fire, kindled by an untended campfire, burned 50 times as much land as the wilderness held. An idealistic green fire met an all-too-real red one.

The contrast almost overflows with symbolism, but two themes seem most useful. One speaks to nature protection, and that preserving the wild is perhaps not just a paradox but an example of a misguided urge toward safety, in this case the security of nature, not unlike Leopold’s shooting a wolf. ‘In those days we never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf.’ Fewer wolves meant more deer, and no wolves meant ‘a hunter’s paradise.’ So, too, it has seemed self-evident that removing the human presence would mean a healthier land, and no people would mean paradise.

The other theme is fire. At the time Leopold killed the green fire, he was also swatting out red ones. Fire control was among the most fundamental of ranger tasks; to ignore fire could be cause for dismissal. Interestingly, posters from the era even equated fire with wolves: the fire wolf running wild through reserves was a ravenous killer that needed to be hunted down and shot. Over time this belief, too, yielded to the realization that fire’s removal, like the wolf’s, could unravel ecosystems. The difference was that fire was renewed annually, if not through human artifice then through lightning (the American Southwest is North America’s epicenter for lightning fire). The spark is always there: if wind and fuel are aligned, fire can spread.

But the deeper story was that the sparks decreased and the fuel was stripped away. Lightning fires were attacked and distinguished at their origin. People quit setting tame fires to substitute for nature’s wild ones. And overgrazing slow-metabolized on a vast scale what fire had formerly fast-burned. Cattle and sheep cleaned out the country’s combustibles. Flame might kindle in the isolated snag; it could not easily spread. Over decades, however, the removal of predatory fire allowed a woody understory to flourish, akin to the metastasizing deer population that blew up after the wolves were extinguished. Both yielded a sick, impoverished landscape.

So a campaign to restore fire ran parallel to that for reinstating wolves. Their histories are oddly symmetrical. The population of neither wolf nor fire has reached its former levels, and the landscape teeters on a metastable ridgeline. The issue is that success requires not merely the presence of wolf and flame but a suitable habitat in which they can thrive. The power of fire resides in the power to propagate, and that sustaining setting was gone. Fire, however, had other properties wolves lacked, notably a capacity not simply to recycle but to transform. A single spark could transmute thousands of acres almost instantaneously.

On Memorial Day weekend, May 2011, flames returned. This time they came as feral fire. It was certainly not a tame fire— not a controlled burn or a prescribed one suitable for wildlands. Neither was it a truly natural fire; it started from a slovenly kept campfire and burned through decades of forests whose structure had been destabilized by logging, of grazing that had destroyed their capacity to carry surface fire, and of doctrines of fire exclusion that had prevented nature’s economy from brokering fuel and flame. The Wallow fire could no more behave as it would have in presettlement times than could a wolf pack dropped into a former hunting site now remade into a Phoenix shopping mall.

Probably fires had burned as widely in the past, but through long seasons in which they crept and swept as the mutable comings and goings of local weather allowed. Undoubtedly, in the past spring winds, underwritten by single-digit humidity, had blown flame through the canopies of mixed-conifer spruce and fir and left landscapes of white ash and sticks. But it is unlikely that earlier times had witnessed a similar combination of size and intensity. The Wallow burn was not what forest officers had in mind when they sought to reintroduce the ecological alchemy of free-burning flame.

© 2020 by The Arizona Board of Regents

If you would like to read more about fire in the Southwest, we are currently offering Stephen J. Pyne’s The Southwest as a free e-book through 6/25/2020. Use the code AZFIRE20 at checkout!

Free E-Book of the Week: Wildfire in the Southwest

June 15, 2020

For more than a week, our community has watched the smoke from the Bighorn Fire float up above the Santa Catalina Mountains, which sit just north of Tucson. As of today, the fire has burned more than 14,000 acres of our beloved Sky Island.

But wildfire has been on the mind of all of us at the Press for several years. Since 2015, we have been publishing the works of fire historian Stephen J. Pyne, who has been illuminating the regional and national history of wildfire in the United States.

For this week’s free e-Book of the Week, we’re drawing attention to Pyne’s To the Last Smoke Series by offering The Southwest for free download from our website. The volume helps to explain the challenges wildland firefighters are facing right now with the Bighorn Fire, and why this is likely to be just one of many burns in the Southwest this summer.

The Southwest is part of the multivolume series describing the nation’s fire scene region by region. The volumes in To the Last Smoke serve as an important punctuation point to Pyne’s 50-year career with wildland fire—both as a firefighter and a fire scholar. These unique surveys of regional pyrogeography are Pyne’s way of “keeping with it to the end,” encompassing the directive from his rookie season to stay with every fire “to the last smoke.”

Download here using code AZFIRE20. Available until 6/25/2020.

“An elegant and informed treatise on the history and evolving nature of wildfire in our arid and rugged landscape.”—Journal of Arizona History

“This is an exceptionally readable work; the analyses of events reflect the interpretation of humans, ecology, and institutions.”—Choice

“An accessible entry point into the kaleidoscopic set of shifting interests that characterize the relationships of fire to the Southwest.”—Southwestern Historical Quarterly

Learn more about the book

Social Justice-Centered Books to Amplify Voices and Educate Allies

June 4, 2020

The University of Arizona Press is committed to publishing the voices and scholarship of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx authors. In a world filled with injustices, racism, and inequalities, we encourage people to read books that will educate them on the experiences and perspectives of people of color, furthering understanding as we move forward. The books included in this post highlight social justice, resistance, and social movements— topics which are crucially important now and always.

Use the code AZJUSTICE20 to get 40% off with free shipping on all of the titles included in this post.

Black Girl Magic Beyond the Hashtag poses the question: how does the #BlackGirlMagic political and cultural movement translate outside of social media? The essays in this volume move us beyond the digital realm and reveals how Black girls and women foster community, counter invisibility, engage in restorative acts, and create spaces for freedom in the face of structural oppression.

Read an excerpt from Black Girl Magic Beyond the Hashtag here.

Marquis Bey’s debut essay collection unsettles normative ways of understanding Blackness, Black feminism, and queerness. Them Goon Rules is an un-rulebook, a long-form essayistic sermon that meditates on how Blackness and nonnormative gender impact and remix everything we claim to know.

Read an excerpt from Them Goon Rules here.

Them Goon Rules is our free e-book of the week from 6/3/2020 to 6/10/2020. Use the code AZBEY20 at checkout.

The Chicana M(other)work Anthology is a call to action for justice within and outside academia. This volume brings together emerging scholarship and testimonios by and about self-identified Chicana and Women of Color mother-scholars, activists, and allies who, using an intersectional lens, center mothering as transformative labor.

Read an excerpt from The Chicana M(other)work Anthology here.

Poetry of Resistance offers a poetic call for tolerance, reflection, reconciliation, and healing. Bringing together more than eighty writers, the anthology powerfully articulates the need for change and the primacy of basic human rights.

Alarcón and co-editor the eco-poet and activist Odilia Galván Rodríguez selected the strongest work from the hundreds of entries to shape this anthology whose communal message—a plea for social change—will remain timeless and resonant.”—NBC News

We are proud to have published this award winning collection.

The Sovereign Street offers 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.

Listen to a podcast interview with author Carwil Bjork-James here.

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. In Indigenous Revolution in Ecuador and Bolivia, 1990-2005, Jeffrey M. Paige’s interviews present the powerful personal experiences and emotional intensity of the revolutionary leadership.

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.

This 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, Yolqui, a Warrior Summoned from the Spirit World is a clarion call to end that violence and those philosophies that permit such violence to flourish.

Read an excerpt from Yolqui, a Warrior Summoned from the Spirit World here.

Chicano Communists and the Struggle for Social Justice traces the early roots of the Chicano Movement. It follows the thread of radical activism of the 1930s and 1940s to today, showing the depth of its influence on Mexican Americans struggling to achieve social justice and equality. 

Don’t forget, all of our e-books are 40% off right now. Use the code AZEBOOK40 at checkout.

AUPresses Statement on Equity and Anti-Racism

June 3, 2020

The Association of University Presses, of which the University of Arizona Press is a member, recently released this statement on equity and anti-racism. This statement was originally proposed and drafted by the organization’s 2017-2018 Diversity & Inclusion Task Force. The Equity, Justice, and Inclusion Committee established in 2019 took the statement through a process of peer review and revision. The AUPresses Board of Directors, of which University of Arizona Press Director Kathryn Conrad currently serves as president, approved the statement in March 2020. 

The Association of University Presses and its members aspire to hold justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion as values that guide our policies, practices, and publications. Upholding these values requires introspection, honesty, and reform of our current practices, the interests they serve, and the people and perspectives they exclude.

Through the work that we publish, university presses have helped to document the histories of institutions in the United States and elsewhere. This scholarship shows that most colleges and universities were built through the exploitation of people of color and established as white and male-only institutions, on land from which indigenous peoples were and continue to be displaced. The racist and exploitative practices that shaped this history remain embedded, even within institutions that work to study and critique that history. Currently, within universities and presses, systems that perpetuate bias, inequalities, and white supremacy go unquestioned and unchecked; in this way, they are perpetuated.

Please go here to read the statement in its entirety.

Free E-Book of the Week: Them Goon Rules

June 3, 2020

For this week’s free e-Book of the Week, we’re drawing attention to our exceptional works in social justice, offering Marquis Bey’s Them Goon Rules for free download from our website.  

A series of essays that reads like a critical memoir, this work queries the function and implications of politicized Blackness, Black feminism, and queerness. Bey binds together his personal experiences with social justice work at the New York–based Audre Lorde Project, growing up in Philly, and rigorous explorations of the iconoclasm of theorists of Black studies and Black feminism. Bey’s voice recalibrates itself, creating a collection that tarries in both academic and nonacademic realms.

Download here using code AZBEY20. Available until 6/10/2020.

“Weaving pop culture, rap, literary analysis, politics, and anger, Bey challenges readers to think of the intersectionality of gender, race, and politics in a different way.”—CHOICE

“Marquis Bey has gifted us with more than a collection of essays about Blackness, feminism, and queerness—it is a tome for and with the ‘ontologically criminalized.’ Bey demonstrates a distinctive radical vulnerability that can only be the result of working in and through a Black queer feminist lens. Unapologetically, this text dances, bends, moves, breaks open and through language—an elaborated nah! There is powerful poetry here asking that we, scholars who believe in freedom, interrogate our own methods and motives again and again. This book is courageous as it dwells, a break in the break. A must-read for any scholar, poet, or (non)human seeking the spectacular possibility of taking flight.” —Kai M. Green, Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Williams College

“Bey challenges those of us who are committed to Black justice to approach every day with the force of revolution. By refiguring Black freedom-making in this way, we are able not only to ‘steal life back’ from a white fickle normativity but also to enwrap that life in the promise of escape.”—Hashim Pipkin, The Opportunity Network

Them Goon Rules is an exciting collection of essays—brimming with insight, inspiration, love, and rage, the book leads readers through an urgent set of questions about the body, identity, race, place, sex, Blackness, subversion, and gender. Offering what Bey at one point calls a ‘fugitive praxis,’ this book believes in transformation and shows us how it is done! Brilliant!”—Jack Halberstam, author of Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Guide to Gender Variance

Learn more about the book

Strong’s Book on Early Whalemen Receives Some New England Love

May 22, 2020

Big thanks to The East Hampton Star and Richard Barons for the review of University of Arizona Press author John A. Strong‘s America’s Early Whalemen: Indian Shore Whalers on Long Island, 1650–1750.

You can read the entire review here.

When Strong began teaching at Long Island University in 1964, he found little mention of the local Indigenous people in history books. The Shinnecocks and the neighboring tribes of Unkechaugs and Montauketts were treated as background figures for the celebratory narrative of the “heroic” English settlers. America’s Early Whalemen highlights the important contributions of Native peoples to colonial America.

From the review:

The world of the South and North Forks’ native people changed forever with the permanent arrival of the English in 1639, when Lion Gardiner bought the island soon to bear his name. But nothing prepared them for the broken floodgate, when in the next year there were two sizable settlements on the East End, in Southold and Southampton. By 1645, a group of Southampton residents decamped farther east to found East Hampton. The rest of Mr. Strong’s book is a look at this clash of cultures.

From reading the town records of Southampton and East Hampton, the author agrees with the historian David Goddard, who realized that Southampton’s Puritan pioneers, led by Edward Howell, John Cooper Sr., Daniel How, and Thomas Halsey, were more interested in improving their economic status than in religious piety. There were disputes about ownership of drift whales, so in 1644 Southampton drew up an ordinance that formed four wards, with 11 persons in each. By lot two of each ward were employed in cutting up the whale, and for their work they would receive a double share. The ordinance goes on to describe who gets the rest of the shares, on down to a resident and his child or servant. Such ordinances changed with new arrivals and departures. The English were in charge, but most of the work force was native.

University of Arizona Press Announces New Partnership With The Academy of American Poets

May 21, 2020

The University of Arizona Press is thrilled to announce a new partnership with the Academy of American Poets.

Beginning in 2020, recipients of the Academy of American Poets’ Ambroggio Prize will have their winning manuscript published in Spanish with the English translation by the University of Arizona Press, a nationally recognized publisher of award-winning works in Latinx and Indigenous literature. The Ambroggio Prize is a $1,000 publication award given for a book-length poetry manuscript originally written in Spanish and with an English translation.

This new partnership is part of the Academy of American Poets’ ongoing commitment to supporting American poets at all stages of their careers, fostering the appreciation of contemporary poetry, and collaborating with other poetry organizations and presses.

“The University of Arizona Press is one of the first publishers to spotlight Latinx literary voices. We are honored to be selected by the Academy of American Poets to publish annually the Ambroggio Prize-winner,” said Kathryn Conrad, director of the University of Arizona Press. “This prize celebrates the voices of many Latinx poets whose first language is Spanish, building on our mission to foreground voices that might otherwise not be heard.”

In addition to the 2020 Ambroggio Prize-winning manuscript, which will be announced in the fall of 2020 and published in the fall of 2021, the University of Arizona Press will publish the 2019 Ambroggio Prize-winning manuscript, Danzsirley/Dawn’s Earlyby Gloria Muñoz in the spring of 2020.

Established in 2017, the Ambroggio Prize is the only annual award of its kind in the United States that honors American poets whose first language is Spanish. It is one of the American Poets Prizes, a collection of eleven major awards given by the Academy of American Poets.

About the Academy of American Poets

The Academy of American Poets is the nation’s leading champion of poets and poetry with supporters in all fifty states. Founded in 1934, the organization produces Poets.org, the world’s largest publicly funded website for poets and poetry; organizes National Poetry Month; publishes the popular Poem-a-Day series and American Poets magazine; provides award-winning resources to K–12 educators, including the Teach This Poem series; administers the American Poets Prizes; hosts an annual series of poetry readings and special events; and coordinates a national Poetry Coalition working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture. Through its prize program, the organization annually awards more funds to individual poets than any other organization, giving a total of $1,250,000 to more than 200 poets at various stages of their careers. This year, in response to the global health crisis, the Academy launched the #ShelterInPoems initiative, inviting members of the public to select poems of comfort and courage from its online collection to share with others on social media. The initiative culminated in the organization’s first-ever virtual reading, which was watched more than 25,000 times by viewers in more than 40 countries around the world. The Academy is also one of seven national organizations that comprise Artist Relief, a multidisciplinary coalition of arts grantmakers and a consortium of foundations working to provide resources and funding to the country’s individual poets, writers, and artists who are impacted by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

About the University of Arizona Press

The University of Arizona Press is nationally recognized for its commitment to publishing the award-winning works of emerging and established voices in Latinx and Indigenous literature, as well as groundbreaking scholarship in Latinx and Indigenous studies. The Camino del Sol series has cultivated an admirable and sizeable list of distinguished contemporary authors, including Richard Blanco, Vicki Vértiz, Juan Felipe Herrera, Carmen Giménez Smith, Francisco X. Alarcon, Emmy Pérez, and Luís Alberto Urrea. The Sun Tracks series focuses exclusively on the creative works of Native American artists, such as Joy Harjo, N. Scott Momaday, Simon J. Ortiz, Casandra López, Santee Frazier, dg nanouk okpik and Luci Tapahonso.

Kafka In A Skirt: ‘Brimming With Verve And Wisdom’

May 21, 2020

Chicanx studies professor, writer and visual artist Maceo Montoyarecently penned a review of University of Arizona Press author Daniel Chacón‘s short story collection, Kafka in a Skirt: Stories from the Wall.

The review, published in the New York Journal of Books, captures Chacón’s literary landscape that pushes Chicanx literature to a bigger and ever-evolving universe.

https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/kafka-skirt-storiesYou can read the entire review here.

Chacón has no qualms about identifying as a Chicano writer. In “The Hidden Order of Things,” he offers us a path to contextualize his work: “This is a work of Chicano literature. Most readers will know that before they buy the book or before they open it, and Chicano literature is one of the fibers of the Latinx literary fabric.”

At the same time, Chacón has created a universe all his own. Beginning with Unending Rooms: Stories (Black Lawrence Press, 2008) and Hotel Juarez: Stories, Rooms, and Loops (Arte Público Press, 2013), Chacón has refused any boundaries on what Chicanx fiction should look like. Yes, he’s interested in identity and his stories explore what it means to straddle cultures, nations, languages—all very Chicanx themes—but he pushes these concepts further, beyond the limiting dichotomy of Mexico and the U.S., Spanish and English, brown and white.

Free E-Book of the Week: Mexico in Verse

May 20, 2020

For this week’s free e-Book of the Week, we’re drawing attention to our exceptional works in Latin American studies by offering Mexico in Verse: A History of Music, Rhyme, and Power for free download from our website.  

Focusing on modern Mexico, from 1840 to the 1980s, this volume examines the cultural venues in which people articulated their understanding of the social, political, and economic change they witnessed taking place during times of tremendous upheaval, such as the Mexican-American War, the Porfiriato, and the Mexican Revolution. The words of diverse peoples—people of the street, of the field, of the cantinas—reveal the development of the modern nation. Editors Neufeld and Matthews have chosen sources so far unexplored, showing the ways that individuals interpreted—whether resisting or reinforcing—official narratives about formative historical moments.

Download from our online shopping cart here. Available until 5/28/2020. Discount code is AZVERSE20.  

“Rich in historical data and thoughts about pursuing alternative interpretations of popular lyrical expressions.”—Choice

Learn more about the book

Mexico in Verse: Contents
Foreword by William H. Beezley
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Mexico in Verse
1. Sister at War: Mexican Women’s Poetry and the U.S.-Mexican War
Christopher Conway

2. The Sly Mockeries of Military Men: Corridos and Poetry as Critical Voice for the Porfirian Army
Stephen Neufeld

3. The Track from Beyond the Grave: Challenges to Porfirian Policymaking in Popular Verse
Michael Matthews

4. “I’m Going to Write You a Letter”: Coplas, Love Letters, and Courtship Literacy
William French

5. Singing for Cristo Rey: Masculinity, Piety, and Dissent in Mexico’s Cristero Rebellion
Stephen J. C. Andes

6. El Niño Proletario: Jesús Sansón Flores and the New Revolutionary Redeemer, 1935–1938
Elena Jackson Albarrán

7. “That Mariachi Band and That Tequila”: Modernity, Identity, and Cultural Politics in Alcohol Songs of the Mexican Golden Age Cinema
Áurea Toxqui

8. Let Us Weep Among the Dust: Recycled Poems of 1968 and Operas of Earthquake
Amanda Ledwon

Conclusion
Contributors
Index

Review of Fred Arroyo’s Sown In Earth in Tennessee’s Chapter 16

May 20, 2020

Fred Arroyo‘s daring and vulnerable, Sown in Earth: Essays of Memory and Belonging, was recently celebrated in a review by Joy Ramirez for Chapter 16.

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.

You can read the entire review here. It also ran in Nashville Scene.

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. 

Check Out Our Recent Latin American Studies Titles

May 20, 2020

We were really excited to participate in the first virtual LASA conference last week! In case you weren’t able to participate in the virtual conference, we wanted to highlight our new Latin American Studies here on our website, and extend our LASA conference discount as well. Use the code AZLASA20 for 40% off all titles listed on 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 or Allyson at KBuckles@uapress.arizona.edu or 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.

Listen to a conversation between Simón Ventura Trujillo and artist Vick Quezada here.

Colonial Cataclysms explores the human and environmental consequences of the global climate event called the Little Ice Age as it played out in central Mexico during the era of Spanish imperialism. It focuses on the great floods, massive soil erosion, and human adaptations to these cataclysms.

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. In Indigenous Revolution in Ecuador and Bolivia, 1990-2005, Jeffrey M. Paige’s interviews present the powerful personal experiences and emotional intensity of the revolutionary leadership.

Reading Popol Wuj offers 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.

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.

Despite its tiny size and seeming marginality to world affairs, the Central American republic of Costa Rica has long been considered an important site for experimentation in cutting-edge environmental policy. The Ecolaboratory frames Costa Rica as an “ecolaboratory” and asks what lessons we can learn for the future of environmental governance and sustainable development both within the country and elsewhere.

State Formation in the Liberal Era transforms our understanding of post-colonial Latin America. The volume spans disciplinary and geographic boundaries and offers an insightful look at the tensions between disparate circuits of capital, claims of statehood, and the contested nature of citizenship.

Language, Coffee, and Migration is an ethnography that 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.

In North American Borders in Comparative Perspective leading scholars provide a contemporary analysis of how globalization and security imperatives have redefined the shared border regions of the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

Watch an interview with Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera and Victor Konrad here.

The Sovereign Street offers 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.

Listen to Carwil Bjork-James talk about the book in a podcast here.

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.

We are thrilled that Smithsonian Magazine selected Sugarcane and Rum for their weekly reading series! Read an excerpt from the book here.

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.

In Transforming Rural Water Governance, Sarah T. Romano explains the bottom-up development and political impact of community-based water and sanitation committees (CAPS) in Nicaragua. Romano traces the evolution of CAPS from rural resource management associations into a national political force through grassroots organizing and strategic alliances.

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.

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.

Read some thoughts on the book by Diana Negrín here.

Reclaiming and reconstructing one’s spirituality based on non-Western epistemologies is central to the process of decolonization. Voices from the Ancestors brings 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.

Read an interview with the editors here, then watch a recorded virtual event for the book here.

Building on the most recent scholarship in borderlands history, The Intimate Frontier is an intellectual and social history that explores the immensely complex web of interpersonal relationships and layers of emotional sophistication inherent among frontier communities.

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 Gonzola Lamana on this podcast.

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.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

Daniel D. Arreola’s Postcards 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.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

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 Christopher and Frederick here, then watch a video discussion here.

Latinx Ciné in the Twenty-First Century is a timeless volume that is 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.

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.

We are so thrilled that Unwriting Maya Literature was awarded an honorable mention for the LASA Mexico Section award this year! Listen to these podcasts about the book.

How did men become the stars of the Mexican intellectual scene? Dude Lit examines the tricks of the trade and reveals that sometimes literary genius rests on privileges that men extend one another and that women permit. Drawing on interviews, archival materials, and critical readings, this provocative book changes the conversation on literature and gendered performance.

We are so excited that Dude Lit was also awarded an honorable mention for the LASA Mexico Section award this year!

Don’t forget that the University of Arizona Press is currently offering 40% off all ebooks with the code AZEBOOK40!

Virtual Panels Connect Authors and Readers

May 19, 2020

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:

Xicanx And Latinx Spiritual Expressions And Healing During COVID-19:

A Conversation With Norma Elia Cantú:

Five Questions with Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera and Victor Konrad:

Mapping Our Hearts: A Virtual Poetry Reading with Three Sun Tracks Poets:

Virtual Book Panel Brings Together Science Be Dammed Authors:

A Conversation With Diné Scholar Lloyd L. Lee:

Additionally, our authors have also shared with us their own content, videos, and podcasts: Simón Trujillo, Andrew Flachs, Stephen Pyne, Frederick Aldama, Ilan Stavans, Christopher González, Isabel Molina-Guzmán, Paul M. Worley, Rita M. Palacios, Carwil Bjork-James, and Molly McGlennen.

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.

Aldama on Latinx Streaming During Lockdown Life

May 18, 2020

Latinx pop culture guru Frederick Luis Aldama, contemplates streaming platforms in his latest on Latinx Spaces.

In “I Want My Incredible Shrinking Screen: Latinx Televisual Storytelling in the Age of Our Planetary Lockdown,” the co-editor of the University of Arizona Press Latinx Pop Culture series, dives into the ever-changing ways of streaming television offerings. You can read the entire essay here.

Today’s streaming platforms, webisodes, and audio-visual narratives created to be consumed on smartphones and laptops constitute also a layer-cake moment. We have all variety of creators making webisodes with story and aesthetics front and center. And, we have those who are creating audio-visual narratives for quick-fix, drop-and-go consumption. Netflix has plenty of these, and, also those that use the streaming platform as, well, disposable gimmick. I think of that Black Mirror episode, “Bandersnatch” where viewers could click-click their laptop, tablet, or lap-top screen on the protagonists everyday decisions to alter the plot outcome. But also we have a vital cross-flow of learning across these differently willfully shaped creative spaces.

In this vital cross-flow of learning and sharing new aesthetics are emerging—as well as co-creating practices. I don’t have to wait a week for another episode of Mr. Iglesias or One Day at a Time. I can binge two, three, four episodes at a time. This also means that the cliffhanger device is no longer needed to keep us interested, freeing writers and showrunners to create bigger story arcs, for instance.

These new nodes of new creation and distribution technologies are birthing a new artform. And, with this renaissance we’re also seeing the rise in visibility of content otherwise relegated to the margins. I think readily of LGBTQ+ narratives such as The F Word, Her StoryThe Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo. 

Of course, these non-network and non-cable spaces have proved a breath of vital air for Latinx storytelling: QUIEROHello College, It’s Me, Lupita!Brujos,and Muy Excitedfeatured in Latinx Spaces (October 17, 2017). Recall that Netflix’s Gentefied begun as the super-edgy YouTube webseries, Gente-fied. It’s in these spaces that we see complex narratives of Latinx identities, experiences, and subjectivities. 

A Conversation With Diné Scholar Lloyd L. Lee

May 15, 2020

University of Arizona Press author Lloyd L. Lee took time on Thursday, May 14, for a live-stream conversation on his work and latest book, Diné Identity in a Twenty-First-Century World.

Lee, an associate professor of Native American studies at the University of New Mexico, is the editor of three books with the Press that are part of a four-book series touching on important topics concerning Diné philosophies, nation-building, and identity.

The first book in the series, Diné Perspectives: Revitalizing and Reclaiming Navajo Thought, addresses questions on being Navajo, contemporary life and traditions, and more. The second book, Navajo Sovereignty: Understandings and Visions of the Diné People, Lee asks fellow Navajo scholars, writers, and community members to envision sovereignty for the Navajo Nation. The third and recent book, Diné Identity in a Twenty-First-Century World, explores the complexity of understanding and the richness of current Diné identities.

During the conversation, Lee shared what he anticipates to be the theme of the fourth book in the series–land and the environment. Many families and communities have experiences and stories on their connection to the land and how they live their life, he said. Similar to the book on sovereignty, Lee hopes to get many perspectives on the land and what the challenges are in a way that reflects the Diné people.

Free E-Book of the Week: Eating the Landscape

May 14, 2020

For this week’s free e-Book of the Week, we’re featuring our commitment to publishing important works in Indigenous studies by offering Eating the Landscape by Enrique Salmón for free download from our website.  

“Eating is not only a political act, it is also a cultural act that reaffirms one’s identity and worldview,” Enrique Salmon writes in Eating the Landscape. Traversing a range of cultures, including the Tohono O’odham of the Sonoran Desert and the Rarámuri of the Sierra Tarahumara, the book is an illuminating journey through the southwest United States and northern Mexico. Salmon weaves his historical and cultural knowledge as a renowned indigenous ethnobotanist with stories American Indian farmers have shared with him to illustrate how traditional indigenous foodways—from the cultivation of crops to the preparation of meals—are rooted in a time-honored understanding of environmental stewardship.

Download from our online shopping cart here. Available until 5/21/2020. Discount code is AZSALMON20.  

“Salmón’s lineage serves as the touchstone for this episodic volume, each chapter of which introduces the reader to a different mode of traditional land stewardship.”—Publishers Weekly

“An intimate geographical and cultural journey.”—AlterNative

Learn more about the book

Read a Q & A with Enrique Salmón

Browse Our Latest Titles in Indigenous Studies

May 13, 2020

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.

Listen to a conversation between Simón Ventura Trujillo and artist Vick Quezada here.

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.

Explore the first volume here.

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.

Read an interview with Molly McGlennen here, then watch her read a poem from Our Bearings here and participate in a recorded virtual poetry event here.

Informed by personal experience and offering an inclusive view, Diné Identity in a Twenty-First-Century World showcases 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.

Read an excerpt from Girl of New Zealand here.

The Sovereign Street offers 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.

Listen to Carwil Bjork-James talk about the book on this podcast.

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.

Read an interview with Christine D. Beaule and John G. Douglass here.

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.

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.

Read a reflection on her book by Diana Negrín here.

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 Navajoland brings 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.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

Aurum is 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.

Read an interview with Santee Frazier here.

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.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

When It Rains is 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.

Read Ofelia Zepeda’s forward to this new edition of When It Rains 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.

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 Bullet Casandra 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 Dialogues presents 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’s Spiral 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

Read an excerpt from the book here.

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 Abiayala provides 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.

Read an interview with Beth Rose here.

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 Health is 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.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

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!

Unwriting Maya Literature and Dude Lit Awarded Honorable Mentions by the LASA Mexico Section

May 11, 2020

We are thrilled to announce that two University of Arizona Press books were awarded honorable mentions for the LASA Mexico Section Libro en Humanities award! Unwriting Maya Literature by Paul M. Worley and Rita M. Palacios and Dude Lit by Emily Hind are the recipients.

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.

How did men become the stars of the Mexican intellectual scene? Dude Lit examines the tricks of the trade and reveals that sometimes literary genius rests on privileges that men extend one another and that women permit. Drawing on interviews, archival materials, and critical readings, this provocative book changes the conversation on literature and gendered performance.

A big congratulations to Paul, Rita, and Emily!

Virtual Book Panel Brings Together Science Be Dammed Authors

April 11, 2020

Eric Kuhn and John Fleck, authors of Science Be Dammed, discussed water management history and the challenges facing the Colorado River during a virtual book panel presented by the University of Arizona Press on Wednesday, May 6, 2020.

This panel, moderated by Ben Wilder, director of the Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill in Tucson, Arizona, delved into the conventional wisdom that the 1922 Colorado River Compact negotiators did the best they could with a limited gauge record. The data they used happened to be during an unusually wet period

Today water managers are struggling to come to terms with the mistakes of the past. Focused on both science and policy, Kuhn and Fleck unravel the tangled web that has constructed the current crisis. With key decisions being made now, including negotiations for rules governing how the Colorado River water will be used after 2026, Science Be Dammed offers a clear-eyed path forward by looking back.

Free E-Book of the Week: A Land Apart

May 6, 2020

For this week’s free e-Book of the Week, we’re featuring our commitment to publishing the history of Arizona and the Southwest by offering a title from our Modern American West series, A Land Apart by historian Flannery Burke.

Winner of the Spur Award for Best Contemporary Nonfiction from the Western Writers of America, A Land Apart is not just a cultural history of the modern Southwest—it is a complete rethinking and recentering of the key players and primary events marking the Southwest in the twentieth century. Historian Flannery Burke emphasizes how indigenous, Hispanic, and other non-white people negotiated their rightful place in the Southwest. Burke masterfully crafts an engaging and accessible history that is for anyone interested in using the past to understand the present and the future of not only the region but the nation as a whole.

Download from our online shopping cart here.  Available until 5/13/2020. Discount code is AZBURKE20.  

“Burke’s book is a timely reminder that Hispanics, Natives, and other nonwhites have shaped the U.S. Southwest in multitudinous ways.”—Choice

A Land Apart is indeed a ‘big book’ worthy of everyone’s attention.”—Southwestern Historical Quarterly

Land Apart: The Southwest and the Nation in the Twentieth Century is a must-read for those fascinated by the region, the significance of story, and the importance of perception by those who live within its boundaries as well as those who choose simply to visit.”—H-Net Reviews

“In this eloquent book, Flannery Burke brings the issue of race to the forefront of the Southwest’s regional identity.”—The Journal of Arizona History

Learn more

Open Arizona: New Essays Discuss Classic Works

May 6, 2020

We are pleased to announce the publication of three important new essays on our open access platform, Open Arizona. The essays bring together leading contemporary scholars to add perspective to formerly out-of-print works that have been republished on the site.

A key component of the Open Arizona project, which was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation to make out-of-print books available as open access, is to add contemporary context to these works, some decades old. The newest essays are by Maurice Crandall, Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, and Yvette J. Saavedra. These scholars offer perspectives framed by their expertise in history, Indigenous studies, border studies, and English, as well as women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. In thoughtful, individual essays, the address the works of Henry Dobyns, Grenville Goodwin, and María Herrera-Sobek.

The Social Organization of the Western Apache by Grenville Goodwin

In this book, Goodwin presents an in-depth historical reconstruction and a detailed ethnographic account of the Western Apache culture based on firsthand observations made over a span of nearly ten years in the field.

This project includes a new essay by Maurice Crandall, a citizen of the Yavapai-Apache Nation of Camp Verde, Arizona. He is a historian of the Indigenous peoples of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and is currently assistant professor of Native American studies at Dartmouth College. Crandall’s essay, “Reflections on The Social Organization of the Western Apache and Grenville Goodwin Among the Western Apache: Letters from the Field” addresses the complexity of a white ethnographer’s relationship to and with the community where he worked.

Crandall is the author of These People Have Always Been a Republic published by The University of North Carolina Press.

Reconstructing a Chicano/a Literary Heritage edited by María Herrera-Sobek

Early literary works written in Spanish in what is today the American Southwest have been largely excluded from the corpus of American literature, yet these documents are the literary antecedents of contemporary Chicano and Chicana writing. This collection of essays establishes the importance of this literary heritage through a critical examination of key texts produced in the Southwest from 1542 to 1848.

This project also includes the new essay “Reflections on Reconstructing a Chicano/a Literary Heritage: Hispanic Colonial Literature of the Southwest” by Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, an assistant professor of English at Arizona State University. She writes, “Perhaps the most salient truth made evident by the collection is that the Spanish conquest left a troubled inheritance on which to build a literary trajectory.”

Fonseca-Chávez is the author of Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture, which is forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press.

Spanish Colonial Tucson by Henry F. Dobyns

This book offers a fascinating account of the ethnic development of early Tucson. Using a variety of methods and sources, Dobyns reveals how Spaniards, mestizos from New Spain, and Native people from many tribes laid the ethnic foundations for the modern city.

This project also includes a new essay by Yvette J. Saavedra, an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Oregon, titled “Spanish Colonial Tucson: Shifting the Paradigms of Borderlands History.” Saavedra writes, “When we review the significance of Dobyns’s work forty-three years after its publication, it becomes clear that his study marked an important shift in the field of borderlands history by further complicating our understanding of how communities develop within the processes of conquest and colonization.”

Saavedra is the author of Pasadena Before the Roses, published by the University of Arizona Press.

Excerpt From Sugarcane and Rum by John Gust and Jennifer Mathews

May 5, 2020

In Sugarcane and Rum: The Bittersweet History of Labor and Life on the Yucatán Peninsula, authors John Gust and Jennifer Mathews tell the story of sugarcane and rum production through the lens of Maya laborers who worked under brutal conditions on small haciendas to harvest sugarcane and produce rum. The book explains how rum continues to impact the Yucatán and the people who have lived there for millennia.

Below, read an excerpt on the Maya of Quintana Roo:

SUGAR AND RUM PRODUCTION ON THE YUCATAN PENINSULA

Sugar and rum production in Yucatan were influenced by two major factors: (1) the long growing cycle that affected when and how much labor was needed, and (2) the social relationship between the owner and working class that influenced where sugar was produced. This chapter explores the interrelationship of these factors through a discussion of how sugar growing moved from the central and southeastern portions of the peninsula to the wilds of the northeastern coast. The final section details the authors’ work investigating the small site of Xuxub and the larger site of San Eusebio near the northeastern coast of Yucatan.

THE WILD NORTH COAST OF QUINTANA ROO

The historical trajectory of the northern coast of Quintana Roo, including the Yalahau region, where the authors’ ongoing archaeological investigations are focused (see map 2), is quite different from the rest of the Yucatan Peninsula. Within the century following contact, European-introduced diseases resulted in a massive population reduction, perhaps as high as 90 percent. The surviving native peoples were concentrated into settlement regions across the peninsula, but Quintana Roo became a bastion for Maya rebelling against the Spanish.2 Because of this unstable social environment, in the mid-1500s only six encomiendas were established in Quintana Roo. These were located at the sites of Kantunilkin, Conil, Cozumel, Ecab, Pole, and Zama (Tulum/Tancah).

In 1546, the Maya of what is today Quintana Roo initiated the “Great Revolt” to protest their treatment by the Spanish. Although this uprising was squelched by 1547, the Spanish still regarded the area as hostile. A combination of low population density and little supervision by the Spanish along the northeastern tip of the peninsula fostered the development of piracy in the area.5 Legends recall pirates hiding their booty along the coast, and by the mid-1600s they began extracting the logwood tree (known locally as palo de tinte or palo tinto) near Ecab. The Spanish virtually abandoned the region to a small population of Maya and pirates by the mid-1600s because of the difficulty of maintaining the area. This lack of attention continued for the next two centuries, making the region a place of escape for those fed up with the colonial and early postcolonial system.

INDEPENDENCE, LAND LOSS, AND REVOLUTION

The previous chapter discussed the failure of the elites to live up to their promises of reform and betterment for Indigenous peoples after the war for Mexican independence. The result was loss of land and the Indigenous populations, including Yucatan’s Maya, being treated as nothing more than cheap labor instead of full participants in efforts to modernize Yucatan and grow its economy. Haciendas continued to expand, and by 1840, hacienda owners were buying up property, virtually land-locking Maya villages and making it impossible for them to sustain themselves, develop infrastructure, or have access to education.

When the Caste War of the Yucatan Peninsula (Guerra de Castas) started in 1847, the rebels began specifically targeting sugar-producing haciendas for destruction. The war raged on for several years, resulting in massive casualty losses of approximately 40 percent on both sides. By 1850, the armies of Yucatan had secured the western part of the peninsula. The Caste War ended with the defeat of the remaining rebels in most of the Mexican Yucatan by the mid-1850s. The exception was in the southeast, where war raged until finally ending in 1901, when the remaining rebels (the cruceros) were defeated by General Ignacio Bravo and his soldiers. Throughout the conflict, many Maya retreated to the remote “uncontrollable wilds” of the east.

The razing of sugar plantations not only devastated some of the Yucatan’s most profitable enterprises, but also led to sugar shortages and curtailed the production of cane alcohol. Those looking to restart production in the 1870s looked to the isolated north coast of Quintana Roo, which had soils suitable for sugarcane. Although the area had once been abandoned to pirates and hostile Maya, the inhabitants of the largest Maya town in the area, known as Kantunilkin, agreed to cease hostilities circa 1855, and instead helped local authorities keep the peace. The region was isolated and lacked infrastructure but was relatively safe and became the best option for sugar production. This region, which includes our study area, still contains historic ruins of several of these sugar operations.

Mapping Our Hearts: A Virtual Poetry Reading with Three Sun Tracks Poets

May 4, 2020

On Wednesday, April 29th, the University of Arizona Press partnered with Birchbark Books for a National Poetry Month event featuring three poets from the University of Arizona Press Sun Tracks series: Molly McGlennen, Casandra López, and Laura Da’.

Molly McGlennen read from her first book with the Press, Our Bearings, a collection of narrative poetry that examines and celebrates Anishinaabe life in modern Minneapolis. Crafted around the four elements—earth, air, water, and fire— the poems are a beautifully layered discourse between landscapes, stories, and the people who inhabit them.

Casandra López, read from her book, Brother Bullet, which speaks to both a personal and collective loss, as López confronts her relationships with violence, grief, guilt, and ultimately, endurance. Revisiting the memory and lasting consequences of her brother’s murder, López traces the course of the bullet—its trajectory, impact, wreckage—in lyrical narrative poems.

Laura Da’, has two books published with the Press, Instruments of True Measure, and Tributaries. Her newest book, Instruments of 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.

Big thanks to Birchbark Books in Minneapolis. Please consider ordering our poets’ books from their website to help support this important independent bookstore. Use this link.

Five Questions with Beaule and Douglass on ‘The Global Spanish Empire’

May 4, 2020

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.

Escape the News with University Press Books

May 1, 2020

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.

Our book picks for this “Escape the News” reading list are Kafka in a Skirt by Daniel Chacón and Ladies of the Canyons by Lesley Poling-Kempes.

“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

Discover more books from this reading list here.

Smithsonian Magazine Selects Sugarcane and Rum for Their Weekly Reading Series

April 30, 2020

We are thrilled that Sugarcane and Rum was selected for the latest installment of Smithsonian magazine’s “Books of the Week” series!

Here’s what Smithsonian had to say about Sugarcane and Rum:

Gust and MathewsSugarcane and Rum looks beyond the Yucatán Peninsula’s reputation as an idyllic getaway spot to expose the harsh conditions faced by its 19th-century Maya laborers.

Hacienda owners implemented punitive economic systems where workers became deeply indebted to their bosses, only to see their freedoms curtailed as a result. At the same time, the authors note, these men and women enjoyed a certain level of autonomy as an indispensable source of labor come harvest time.

‘What this history shows,’ according to the book’s introduction, ‘is that sugarcane and rum are produced on a massive scale to satisfy the consumptive needs of the colonizers, which only compounds its exploitative nature as the products became available to the middle and working class.’

Meilan Solly for Smithsonian magazine

Read the full list of book recommendations here.

Free E-Book of the Week: Buzzing Hemisphere / Rumor Hemisférico

April 28, 2020

For this week’s free e-Book of the Week, we’re wrapping up National Poetry Month by featuring a collection from our award-winning Camino del Sol Series, which spotlights poetry, fiction, and essays from both emerging and established voices in Latinx literature. A work of global urgency that maps across spaces and between and across languages, this week we are pleased to offer Buzzing Hemisphere / Rumor Hemisférico by poet Urayoán Noel as a topical, critical work of poetic artistry.

In Buzzing Hemisphere / Rumor Hemisférico, poet Noel creates a hemispheric poetics that is both broadly geopolitical and intimately neurological. We hear the noise of cities such as New York, San Juan, and São Paulo abuzz with flickering bodies and the rush of vernaculars as untranslatable as the murmur in the Spanish rumor. Oscillating between baroque textuality and vernacular performance, Noel’s bilingual poems experiment with eccentric self-translation, often blurring the line between original and translation as a way to question language hierarchies and allow for translingual experiences.

Download from our online shopping cart here. Available until 5/6/2020. Discount code is AZBUZZ20.  

“Noel succeeds in creating a new kind of compilation, a testament to the limits of genre, and a compelling endeavor for any reader up to the challenge.”—Booklist

“A book of daring, cheeky, trendy Nuyorican poetry.”—Virtual Boricua

“Along with such rigorous structural framework and play, the collection is pleasingly grounded at each turn in a sensibility able to alternate not only between languages but also between personal and social purpose.”—The Volta Blog

Learn more 

Molly McGlennen Reads ‘Ode To Prince’ from Our Bearings

April 27, 2020

University of Arizona Press author Molly McGlennen shared a video she did recently of her reading her poem “Ode To Prince,” a poem she dedicated to the late Minneapolis musician and read to honor the recent four-year anniversary of Prince’s passing.

The poem is in McGlennen’s new collection, Our Bearings, published by the University of Arizona Press.

Emmy Pérez Selected for The Big Texas Read

April 27, 2020

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.”

Rachel Kramer Bussel for Forbes

Read the entire article for Forbes here.

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

Free E-Book of the Week: Prehistory, Personality, and Place

April 22, 2020

In this time to read, we will be featuring one free e-Book each week. This week we’re highlighting our books in archaeology and offering Prehistory, Personality, and Place: Emil W. Haury and the Mogollon Controversy as the free e-Book of the week.

When Emil Haury defined the ancient Mogollon in the 1930s as a culture distinct from their Ancestral Pueblo and Hohokam neighbors, he triggered a major intellectual controversy in the history of southwestern archaeology, centering on whether the Mogollon were truly a different culture or merely a “backwoods variant” of a better-known people. In this book, archaeologists Jefferson Reid and Stephanie Whittlesey tell the story of the remarkable individuals who uncovered the Mogollon culture, fought to validate it, and eventually resolved the controversy.

Download from our online shopping cart here. Available until 4/30/2020. Discount code is AZHAURY20.  

“Archeologists Jefferson Reid and Stephanie Whittlesey ably chronicle this controversy and the personalities who drove it.”—American Archeology

Learn more 

Explore Our Recent Titles in Archaeology

April 22, 2020

We are missing the annual Society for American Archaeology meeting right now, so we are highlighting our recent archaeology titles that would have been displayed front-and-center at the meeting.

Use the code AZARCH20 to get 40% off all University of Arizona Press titles, plus free shipping! The code is valid through 7/11/2020.

Our senior editor, Allyson Carter, Ph.D., acquires in this field. To propose a project, contact her 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 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 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.

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.

Read an interview about the book with Lee Panich here.

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.

Read about the first volume in the series 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.

Read an excerpt from the volume here.

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.

Congratulations to the editors of the book, Samuel Duwe and Robert Preucel, as well as all of the contributors to the volume on winning the Historical Society of New Mexico’s 2020 Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá Award!

In The Davis Ranch Site, the results of Rex Gerald’s 1957 excavations at the Davis Ranch site in southeastern Arizona’s San Pedro River Valley are reported in their entirety for the first time. Annotations to Gerald’s original manuscript and newly written material place Gerald’s work in the context of what is currently known regarding the late thirteenth-century Kayenta diaspora and the relationship between Kayenta immigrants and the Salado phenomenon.

Challenging Colonial Narratives pushes postcolonial thinking in archaeology in socially and politically meaningful directions. Matthew A. Beaudoin calls for more nuanced interpretive frameworks and encourages archaeologists and scholars to focus on the different or similar aspects among sites to explore the nineteenth-century life of contemporaneous Indigenous and settler peoples.

Painting the Skin brings together exciting research on painted skins—human, animal, and vegetal—in Mesoamerica. It offers physicochemical analysis and interdisciplinary understandings of the materiality, uses, and cultural meanings of the colors applied on a multitude of skins, including bodies, codices, and even building “skins.”

The archaeological record of the Northern Rio Grande exhibits the hallmarks of economic development, but Pueblo economies were organized in radically different ways than modern industrialized and capitalist economies. Contributors to Reframing the Northern Rio Grande Pueblo Economy explore the patterns and determinants of economic development in pre-Hispanic Rio Grande Pueblo society, building a platform for more broadly informed research on this critical process.

Don’t forget, the University of Arizona Press is offering 40% off all e-books right now! If you would prefer an e-book instead of a physical copy, 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!

Carwil Bjork-James Talks Social Movements in Bolivia on the Howard Zinn Book Fair Podcast: Books to the Barricades

April 20, 2020

In a new podcast series, Books to the Barricades, Carwil Bjork-James discusses his new book, The Sovereign Street. This podcast series is hosted by the Howard Zinn Book Fair, which is an annual celebration of the people’s history— past, present, and future. Listed to the podcast here.

In the early twenty-first century, Bolivian movements made streets, plazas, and highways into the decisively important spaces for acting politically, rivalling and at times exceeding voting booths and halls of government. The Sovereign Street documents this important period, showing how indigenous-led mass movements reconfigured the politics and racial order of Bolivia from 1999 to 2011.

Taking the streets of Cochabamba, Sucre, and La Paz as its vantage point, The Sovereign Street offers a rare look at political revolution as it happens. It documents a critical period in Latin American history, when 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.

Carwil Bjork-James is an assistant professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University. His research, both ethnographic and historical, concerns disruptive protest, grassroots autonomy, state violence, and indigenous collective rights in Bolivia.

The Continuous Path Wins the Historical Society of New Mexico’s Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá Award

April 20, 2020

We are thrilled to announce that The Continuous Path: Pueblo Movement and the Archaeology of Becoming is the winner of the 2020 Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá Award for an outstanding publication in New Mexico or Southwest borderlands history!

Dennis Reinhartz, President of the Historical Society of New Mexico, said, “Reviewers recognized the book for its significant contributions to scholarship of New Mexico history, archaeology and anthropology. In particular, the emphasis on collaboration between Natives and non-Native scholars in the research and writing was seen as a real strength. The multiple perspectives presented in the texts add tremendous value to the volume as a whole and are recognized to have “the potential to foster understanding between and among Natives and non-Natives alike. … We congratulate you, and all the contributing authors, on this wonderful work.”

The Continuous Path challenges archaeologists to take Pueblo notions of movement seriously by privileging Pueblo concepts of being and becoming in the interpretation of anthropological data. In this volume, archaeologists, anthropologists, and Native community members weave multiple perspectives together to write histories of particular Pueblo peoples. Within these histories are stories of the movements of people, materials, and ideas, as well as the interconnectedness of all as the Pueblo people find, leave, and return to their middle places. What results is an emphasis on historical continuities and the understanding that the same concepts of movement that guided the actions of Pueblo people in the past continue to do so into the present and the future.

Many congratulations to the editors, Samuel Duwe and Robert Preucel, as well as all of the contributors to the volume!

Two Podcasts with the Authors of Unwriting Maya Literature

April 17, 2020

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!

The first podcast is for SECOLAS’s Historias series can be listened to here.

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’s On 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 Literature offers critical praxis for understanding Mesoamerican works that encompass non-Western ways of reading and creating texts.

To learn more, visit Rita’s website and Paul’s website.

We Can All Use Some Daniel Chacón Right Now, You’re Welcome

April 17, 2020

University of Arizona Press author Daniel Chacón was recently interviewed by poet and authors ire’ne lara silva for The Rumpus on Kafka in a Skirt and more:

The characters in Daniel Chacón’s Kafka in a Skirt: Stories from the Wall® live at the intersection of technology and the unfathomable nature of time and existence. It’s not that the rules of physics cease to exist but that we, as readers, are allowed to peer into all of the ways that they’ve never really existed. Unexpectedly tender and inquisitive, these stories explore identity, life on the border, childhood, maturity, creation, and connection.

The interview dives into metaphor and metaphysics, and is a delightful read and window into Chacón’s world as an artist. Find the interview here.

Like many of us, Chacón, a creative writing professor at the University of Texas, El Paso, is home with his family. He’s making the most of this COVID-19 life posting “a new story a day, every day, five days a week throughout the month of April or until this virus passes and we are free to wander again.”

The stories are posted on Chacón’s website: Lockdown Stories During the Quarantine. (Seeing the Elephants), are like The Rumpus interview, another great ride inside Chacón’s writing mind.

Isabel Molina-Guzmán Talks Latinx TV & Pop Culture with Frederick Aldama in a New Video

April 16, 2020

In this new video, Isabel Molina-Guzmán— author of Latinas and Latinos on TV— talks with Latinx Pop Culture series co-editor Frederick Luis Aldama about the significance of Latinx representations in TV and mainstream culture. View their discussion below, or watch it on YouTube here.

Latinas and Latinos on TV provides crucial insights into understanding Latinx representation. Interweaving discussions about the ethnic, racial, and linguistic representations of Latinas/os within network television comedies, Isabel Molina-Guzmán probes published interviews with producers and textual examples from hit programs like Modern Family, The Office, and Scrubs to understand how these primetime sitcoms communicate difference in the United States.

Understanding the complex ways that audiences interpret these programs, Molina-Guzmán situates her analysis within the Obama era, a period when ethnicity and race became increasingly grounded in “hipster racism”, and argues that despite increased inclusion, the feel-good imperative of TV comedies still inevitably leaves racism, sexism, and homophobia uncontested.

Isabel Molina-Guzmán is an associate professor of media and cinema studies and Latina/Latino studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

Los Angeles Review of Books: A Conversation with Casandra López

April 15, 2020

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?

3) What can my work provide to my future kin?

4) How can my work encourage balance and healing?

Read the full interview here.

The Latest in Latinx Studies from the University of Arizona Press

April 15, 2020

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!

Our editor-in-chief, Kristen Buckles, acquires in this field. To propose a project, contact her atKBuckles@uapress.arizona.edu.

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’s Postcards 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.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

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.

Read an interview with the author here.

Meditación Fronteriza is 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.

Read an interview with Daniel Chacón by Tim Z. Hernandez here.

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 Wuj offers 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? In Dude 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 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.

Reclaiming and reconstructing one’s spirituality based on non-Western epistemologies is central to the process of decolonization. Voices from the Ancestors brings 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.

Watch a recording of a live Zoom event with the editors and several contributors of Voices from the Ancestors here, then read an interview with the editors, Lara Medina and Martha R. Gonzales, here.

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.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

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.

Listen to two podcasts about the book here.

New in paperback!

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!

Free E-Book of the Week: Crossing with the Virgin

April 14, 2020

In this time to read, we will be featuring one free e-Book each week. This week we’re highlighting our books about the border and offering Crossing with the Virgin: Stories from the Migrant Trail as the free e-Book of the week.

When it was published exactly ten years ago this week, the book was the first of it’s kind. Not only did it share thirty-nine first-hand accounts of migrants crossing the Arizona desert, it also shared the stories of the Samaritans involved in humanitarian work in the borderlands.

Crossing with the Virgin is not only a window into the migrants’ plight but also a look at the challenges faced by volunteers in sometimes compromising situations—and at their own humanizing process. This is a story that is more poignant than ever as we hear stories of Samaritans all around us.

Download from our online shopping cart here. Available until 4/21/2020. Discount code is AZCROSS20.  

“Trading off chapters, the authors deliver immigrants’ stories calmly and objectively, but their compassionate message is clear, and especially timely. Though difficult to read, this important collection provides vital, humanizing perspective on a divisive issue, with stories that will stick with readers for a long time.”—Publishers Weekly starred review

Learn more 

Michelle Erai’s Girl of New Zealand “Talks Back” to Colonization: An Excerpt

April 13, 2020

Girl of New Zealand presents a nuanced insight into the way violence and colonial attitudes shaped the representation of Māori women and girls. 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.” Erai resurrects Māori women from objectification and locates them firmly within Māori whānau and communities.

Below, read an excerpt from Girl of New Zealand.

Images, steeped with symbols of empire, literally circled the globe, inscribing and reiterating pre-imagined notions of the Native woman. For the Māori woman in particular, her imagined automatic acquiescence began to really take hold in the early days of contact with the whalers and commercial entrepreneurs that soon followed behind the explorers, and only slightly preceded the missionaries. Within about sixty years that imagined acquiescence became the optical alibi for an arm of capitalist primitive accumulation particularly well-suited to South Pacific islands— tourism.

Using “The Souvenir” as a metaphor, it is possible to discern how and why bodies of women are sites of constant scrutiny based on their beauty and how such implications are deeply institutional and directed by expectations derived from power. Celeste Olaquiaga writes, “It is the demiurgic desire for immortality, the secret of creation held in the palm of one hand, the ability to gaze, unfettered, into the unknown otherness of an imprisoned creature that cannot escape its imposed rigor mortis or our voracious demands.” This fetishism of immortality being held within the powers of one’s palm translates into the desire for immortality that is imposed upon the bodies of women. This powerful fetishization that resides within the realms of imagination creates expectations of the feminized body, to fight against the natural paths of nature, and to create a firm utopian imagination that fixes the conditions of living. The bodies of women then also become the site of this fetishization through the commodification of our imaginations. The consequences for Māori women of this performance is a kind of violence that Jasbir Puar identified: “Violence is naturalized as the inexorable and fitting response to nonnormative [or perhaps fetishized] sexuality.”

The use of images to attract a new middle-class traveler began in earnest when in 1901 New Zealand became the first country to dedicate a government department to tourism. In terms of how advertising can help us think about the impact of an advertising image, Margaret Werry argues, “As a nation, Aotearoa New Zealand is a community not so much imagined as imagineered. It is a state production and a participatory drama, the work of culture agents across business, civil society, policy, and entertainment. Index and agent of a broader synergy, tourism is implicated in virtually every industry sector.”

Where this becomes important is in the construction of “taste” for the modern neoliberal citizen subject through tourism and touristic imaging; this had a special impact for Māori in that the “imagineers” suggested Māori culture “might offer the nation what advertising guru Kevin Roberts called a Lovemark, lending the brand distinction, authenticity, and affective charge.”

When Bourdieu draws the connection between how an intellect may be trained to produce “taste”. that a distinction reproduces a classed hierarchy invisibly, he is circling the operations of hegemony. Hegemony relies upon the existence of some state prior to the one that draws distinctions, and that within that state there must be an innocence upon which distinctions can become imprinted. Or hailed. Called into being. And that hailing— learning the violence of the word— replaces innocence. Not with knowledge, but with approved knowledge; not with a vista existing in a native savage state, but a constant reiteration of the conditions of the status quo. I suggest there are two notable sources of images that directly challenge the fixity of that presumed innocence— first, advertising, and second, religious iconography. In these two fields, with their explicit goal of effecting a metamorphosis in the viewer through an image, lie, I think, the imperative to fully consider the impact of colonial optics: of what it means to assume an innocent eye, and therefore the consequences of choosing not to train a knowing eye; also, the transformative possibilities of images consciously employing metamorphoses to “talk back” to colonization.

© 2020 by The Arizona Board of Regents

Michelle Erai was an assistant professor of gender studies at University of California, Los Angeles. She is originally from Whangarei, Aotearoa, and is descended from the tribes of Ngāpuhi and Ngati Porou.

Five Questions with Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera and Victor Konrad

April 13, 2020

According to Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera and Victor Konrad, if ever there was a time to better understand the borders of North America, it’s now during a global pandemic crisis.

The editors of North American Borders in Comparative Perspective, recently published by the University of Arizona Press, said the pandemic has the potential to further change policies and life along both borders. Correra-Cabrera and Konrad, took time from their work, to talk about these growing border issues, their book, and the importance of learning more about both borders, not only our southern borderlands.

In North American Borders in Comparative Perspective, leading experts provide a contemporary analysis of how globalization and security imperatives have redefined the shared border regions of Canada, the United States, and Mexico.

This volume offers a comparative perspective on North American borders and reveals the distinctive nature first of the over-portrayed Mexico-U.S. border and then of the largely overlooked Canada-U.S. border. The perspectives on either border are rarely compared. Essays in this volume bring North American borders into comparative focus; the contributors advance the understanding of borders in a variety of theoretical and empirical contexts pertaining to North America with an intense sharing of knowledge, ideas, and perspectives.

A Conversation With Norma Elia Cantú

April 11, 2020

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.

Xicanx And Latinx Spiritual Expressions And Healing During COVID-19

April 13, 2020

Lara Medina and Martha Gonzales, editors of Voices from the Ancestors: Xicanx and Latinx Spiritual and Healing Practices, published by the University of Arizona Press, were joined by contributors Sandra Pacheco, Marta Lopez-Garza, and Berenice Dimas in a recent online discussion on the book’s themes, wisdom, and importance during this challenging time.

Voices from the Ancestors brings together the reflective writings and spiritual practices of Xicanx, 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.

The editors and contributors want to share these practices from the book that relate to the online discussion on dreaming, one and two; on house blessings; on spiritual limpias; rituals and remedies; and honoring the Four Directions.

More information on Voices editors and contributors:

Berenice Dimas shared information on herbs and wellness practices. Dimas is a queer writer, community-based herbalist, health educator, wellness promotora, and full-spectrum birth doula. Find out more about Berenice’s work by visiting her website and her Instagram pages @hoodherbalism y @brujatip.

Martha R. Gonzales, whose partner is currently battling COVID-19, shared her experience caring for her partner and turning to traditional ways to help him fight the virus and heal. Gonzales was raised in East Los Angeles, earned her bachelor’s degree in philosophy and literature from University of California, Santa Cruz, and her doctorate in literature from University of California, San Diego. She lectures in the Ethnic Studies Department at Glendale Community College, Glendale, California.

Marta López-Garza, shared information on how to do a blessing for a house or sacred space. López-Garza is a professor in gender and women’s studies and Chicana/o studies departments at California State University, Northridge. She co-facilitates Revolutionary Scholars, an organization of formerly incarcerated students and is a cofounder of Civil Discourse and Social Change, a campus-wide initiative combining education, community involvement, and sustained activism. Her scholarship focuses on formerly incarcerated womxn.

Lara Medina (Xicanx) was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, earned an
MA in theology from Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, and a PhD in history from Claremont Graduate University. She is a professor in the Chicana/o Studies Department at California State University, Northridge.

Sandra M. Pacheco is a professor and independent scholar.  Her teaching and research focuses on Chicana/Latina/Indígena feminisms and spirituality. Sandra cofounded Curanderas sin Fronteras, a mobile clinic dedicated to serving the health and well-being of Chican@/Latin@/Indígena communities through the use of curanderismo.

Free E-Book of the Week: Leaving Tulsa

April 8, 2020

In this time to read, we will be featuring one free e-book each week. This week we’re offering a book from our Sun Tracks Series, which focuses on the creative works of Indigenous and Native artists and writers. This week, we’re featuring Leaving Tulsa by Jennifer Elise Foerster, who is also the author of Bright Raft in the Afterweather.

Download from our online shopping cart here. Available until 4/12/2020. Discount code is AZTULSA.  

“For a book that unfurled like a wild, restless road trip, I took great delight in Jennifer Foerster’s Leaving Tulsa. Sensuous, generous, full of beginnings and endings, this map of America flapping in the dark meditates on Foerster’s Muskegee ancestry, the American prairie, the loss of her grandmother’s land, and her shard-like rediscovery in California.”—Tess Taylor, NPR

Book Description: Leaving Tulsa, a book of road elegies and laments, travels from Oklahoma to the edges of the American continent through landscapes at once stark and lush, ancient and apocalyptic. Each poem gives the collection a rich lyrical-dramatic texture. Ultimately, these brave and luminous poems engage and shatter the boundaries of time, self, and continent. Learn more 

Indigenous Persistence in California: Five Questions with Lee Panich

April 7, 2020

Based on fifteen years of archaeological and historical research in the two regions, Narratives of Persistence charts the remarkable persistence of the Ohlone and Paipai alongside a synthesis of Native Californian endurance over the past five centuries. Lee M. Panich draws connections between colonial events and processes of the deeper past and the way the Ohlone and Paipai today understand their own histories and identities, offering a model for how scholars of Indigenous histories may think about the connections between the past and the present.

Below, read an interview with Lee M. Panich about his new book.

What inspired you to embark on this research?

Narratives of Persistence has its origins in my dissertation research in Baja California, back in 2005, for which I conducted an archaeological excavation at the site of Mission Santa Catalina, in the heart of the Paipai reserve of Santa Catarina. The initial idea for my dissertation was to compare the Dominican mission system of Baja California to the contemporaneous Franciscan missions of Alta California. However, Paipai community members quickly convinced me to change my research questions to center on the tribe’s long-term history. They downplayed the importance of the mission, saying in effect, “We’re still here, while the mission is just ruins now.” 

This idea became the central focus of my dissertation and stuck with me when I shifted my research to the San Francisco Bay area about ten years ago. I saw a similar situation with local Ohlone groups, who had persisted in different ways during and after the mission period. Given the variables involved—different Indigenous cultural traditions, different missionary orders, differences between the U.S. and Mexico—I thought the two case studies would make an interesting comparison. I hope readers agree.

Why do the Ohlone people lack popular recognition and official acknowledgement from the U.S. government, even though they share a similar colonial history to the Paipai people?

That’s a great question and one of the key issues I try to address in the book. There are, of course, a lot of reasons for this discrepancy. One reason has to do with differences in how central California and northern Baja California were colonized by the United States and Mexico, respectively. Despite maintaining community cohesion, the Ohlone lost ancestral lands and were demographically outnumbered in the Bay Area shortly after the Gold Rush. The Paipai, in contrast, were able to hold onto portions of the ancestral homelands at the same time that Mexican settlement in the region remained relatively small well into the twentieth century. 

But, for the Ohlone in particular, I think the biggest issue is simply that outsiders have always had essentialized notions of what Native people should be like. This can be seen in the early twentieth century when anthropologists and government officials alike pronounced the Ohlone extinct. The people were still there, but they didn’t fit rigid stereotypes about American Indians. One of the arguments I make in the book is that expectations about authenticity continue to do harm to Native Californian communities today.

A portrait of Inigo, taken in 1860. Inigo was an Ohlone man who joined the missions as a child, rose to the rank of alcalde, and eventually received part of the former mission lands as a grant from the Mexican government in the 1840s. Use of this image is courtesy of the Santa Clara University Archives & Special Collections.

What do you think the biggest lasting changes colonialism brought to the Ohlone and Paipai peoples are? How do those changes manifest today?

Perhaps counterintuitively, people in both communities are quick to acknowledge how their ancestors incorporated aspects of colonial lifeways into their own. For example, Paipai men are well regarded vaqueros, or cowboys, and my hosts in Santa Catarina credited the mission system for teaching their ancestors how to rides horses and drive cattle. Here in the Bay Area, many members of the Ohlone community remain practicing Catholics, another direct legacy of missionization. In both cases, people today are adamant about the fact that their communities have suffered unjustly under different colonial regimes, but they also recognize that the issues are not always black and white.

Certainly, one of the biggest changes has been a long process of social and political coalescence. Prior to colonization, people in both regions were organized into myriad autonomous communities – communities that have come together in various ways over the past 250 years. What I think most people misunderstand about that process is that it was both intentional and shaped by enduring cultural practices. In the missions, for example, Ohlone and Paipai people drew on existing marriage patterns to expand the pool of potential spouses amid devastating population losses. Later, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ohlone and Paipai communities opened their doors to other Native people seeking refuge from violence and exploitation. These changes look dramatic when one compares the situation in 2020 to that in, say, 1780. But when you view it from the perspective of lived experience, the overall picture is one of individuals and families striving for community continuity. That’s the perspective I hope readers take away from the book.

Could you please tell us more about the persistent Indigenous traditions of the Ohlone and Paipai peoples? What do those traditions and traditional ways of knowing look like in contemporary life in California?

There is so much amazing work that is happening across Native California, and especially in the Ohlone and Paipai communities. Here in the Bay Area, for example, you can get a meal of acorn bread and venison at Cafe Ohlone in Berkeley. Run by Vincent Medina (Chochenyo Ohlone) and Louis Trevino (Rumsen Ohlone), the café honors traditional knowledge, serves as a hub for Native cultural events, and simultaneously educates the non-Native public about continued Ohlone presence. There is also an active program of language revitalization. In addition to reintroducing Chochenyo Ohlone language to everyday usage, the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe regularly renames important ancestral sites in order to undo the processes of erasure that have written them out of their homelands for the past two centuries.

South of the border, the Paipai are similarly working to maintain Native languages – there are several spoken in Santa Catarina today, including Paipai and Ko’alh. Paipai artisans are also renowned for their pottery, as Santa Catarina is the only Native Californian community with an unbroken ceramic tradition stretching from precontact times to the present. The potters, nearly all of whom are women, and other Paipai artisans are in high demand at workshops and cultural events throughout northern Baja California and southern California. In fact, many Native artisans from Baja California regularly connect with tribal communities in the United States—ranging from Kumeyaay groups in San Diego County to the Hualapai, Yavapai, and Havasupai in Arizona—to share knowledge and to rekindle connections.

The Paipai community of Santa Catarina in Baja California, taken in 2005. Use of this photo is courtesy of Lee M. Panich.

What are you working on now?

For the past year or so, I’ve been involved in several interrelated projects focused on bringing Ohlone perspectives to a wider audience, particularly at Santa Clara University where I work. Our campus is on the site of Mission Santa Clara, where thousands of Ohlone people lived and labored during the colonial period. To date, their descendants have been largely left out of the public interpretation of the mission and the ways we teach the history of the SCU campus to our students and visitors. 

This is all changing rapidly, and we’ve been working closely with the Bay Area Ohlone community — particularly those groups who trace their ancestry through Mission Santa Clara, including the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe and the Ohlone Indian Tribe. This work is both top-down and bottom-up. We’re working with the University administration, for example, to assess official monuments and markers on our campus and to make sure we do a better job of acknowledging Ohlone history and continued presence. Along with faculty colleagues and undergraduate students, we’re also working with the Ohlone community to build pedagogical resources that instructors here at Santa Clara and elsewhere can use and that feature Ohlone voices and perspectives. The coronavirus situation has obviously put these efforts on the back burner for the time being, but the story of the Ohlone—like that of the Paipai—is one of overcoming obstacles big and small.

Lee M. Panich is an associate professor of anthropology at Santa Clara University, specializing in the archaeology and ethnohistory of colonial California, particularly the Spanish mission system.

Why Latinx Pop Culture Matters: A Video Discussion with Frederick Aldama, Ilan Stavans, and Christopher González

April 6, 2020

In a new video, Reel Latinxs authors Frederick Aldama and Christopher González discuss why Latinx pop culture matters inside and outside of the classroom with Sor Juana author Ilan Stavans. Below, watch their discussion, or view the video on YouTube here.

Don’t forget, Sor Juana is available as a free e-book download until Wednesday, April 8, 2020! Use the code AZJUANA when you check out on our website.

Sor Juana: Or, the Persistence of Pop encapsulates the life, times, and legacy of Sor Juana. In this immersive work, essayist Ilan Stavans provides a biographical and meditative picture of the ways in which popular perceptions of her life and body of work both shape and reflect modern Latinx culture.

Latinx representation in the popular imagination has infuriated and befuddled the Latinx community for decades. These misrepresentations and stereotypes soon became as American as apple pie. But these cardboard cutouts and examples of lazy storytelling could never embody the rich traditions and histories of Latinx peoples. In Reel Latinxs, a grand sleuthing sweep of Latinx representation in mainstream TV and film, pop culture experts Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González call us all to scholarly action.

Celebrate National Poetry Month with the University of Arizona Press

April 3, 2020

Happy National Poetry Month from the University of Arizona Press!

National Poetry Month was launched by the Academy of American Poets in April 1996 to remind the public that poets have an integral role to play in our culture, and that poetry matters. Over the years, it has become the largest literary celebration in the world!

We always look forward to celebrating National Poetry Month because we have so much incredible Indigenous and Latinx poetry to share with the world. We are grateful and proud every month of the year to publish the work of truly phenomenal poets, and we hope you will take this month to dive into some of our poetry collections in the award-winning Sun Tracks and Camino del Sol series from the comfort of your home. Below, find a look our recently published collections, along with a few of our favorite new poems to kick-start the poetry celebration.

Our Bearings is a collection of narrative poetry that examines and celebrates Anishinaabe life in modern Minneapolis. Crafted around the four elements—earth, air, water, and fire— the poems are a beautifully layered discourse between landscapes, stories, and the people who inhabit them. Throughout the collection, McGlennen weaves the natural elements of Minnesota with rich historical commentary and current images of urban Native life. Reverence for wildlife and foliage is pierced by the sharp man-made skylines of Minneapolis while McGlennen reckons with the heavy impact of industrial progress on the souls and everyday lives of individuals.

BEARINGS IV

When we were water
we joined as we needed,
were protected, we knew to come
back around

When we were water
we were patient for rain
and knew its arrival
forecasted by purple sky.

When we were water
days worked in circles
and years concentrically
until we knew our beginnings.

When we were water
we dove and scouted
like loons, swallowed
pebbles by night.

When we were water
we turned into ourselves
leaving behind what was
no longer essential.

When we were water
we turned into ourselves
claimed by heart circles
that have never washed away.

From Our Bearings, by Molly McGlennen. © 2020 by Molly McGlennen. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press.

Click here to read five questions about Our Bearings with Molly McGlennen.

With images that taunt, disturb, and fascinate, Aurum captures the vibrantly original language in Santee Frazier’s first collection, Dark Thirty, while taking on a completely new voice and rhythm. Each poem is vivid and memorable, beckoning to be read again and again as the words lend an enhanced experience each time. Frazier has crafted a wrought-iron collection of poetry that never shies away from a truth that America often attempts to ignore.

ORE BODY

The shine off the streets reflects the coming bustle of dawn, of plastic and bolted steel, neon and industry caught in the asphalt. And as the grass sweats—the groan of machinery echoing off masonry—the dust rises, sewing itself in the fat of trees, shining the faces of men in the ditch under hard hats, shoveling dirt, whose language rolls the tongue of digging. The clank and song of Mimbres, a music hidden in the busting rock and soil. This ritual of sunrise, of shovel, and the gearing mechanisms of progress reminds me of a man in unlaced high-tops finger-painting a wall. Smearing gold into brick. His face shined like gunmetal, and when he sucked the gold from a paper bag, I knew his ritual had something to do with time travel, with brick, before mineral, polygon, the invention of wheel, story of flat, firing of clay. And now making my way through this city whose streets are named by numbers and minerals— the sunlight breaking the haze of dust and exhaust— I realize the oldest thing in this city is thirst.

From Aurum, by Santee Frazier. © 2019 by Santee Frazier. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press.

Click here to dive deeper into Aurum with Santee Frazier.

The poems in Meditación Fronteriza are a celebration of culture, tradition, and creativity that navigates themes of love, solidarity, and political transformation. Written by Norma Elia Cantú, the award-winning author of Canícula, this collection carries the perspective of a powerful force in Chicana literature—and literature worldwide. Deeply personal yet warmly relatable, these poems flow from Spanish to English gracefully. With Gloria Anzaldúa’s foundational work as an inspiration, Meditación Fronteriza unveils unique images that provide nuance and depth to the narrative of the borderlands.

THE WALL
Written on a visit to Nuevo Progreso, Tamaulipas, Méjico, May 15, 2009

No one believed it would happen here
en el Valle
where the birders find such joy
in spotting unique exotic birds.
No one believed they would build it here.
“Just talk,” someone said,
“puro puedo,
Not to worry, they’ll never get the money.”

But the wall went up,
and hardly anyone noticed
the way the land was rent in two
the way the sky
above seemed bluer against the brown metal
jutting up and up
like soldiers saluting a distant god
sentinels silently guarding… what?

Perhaps a way of life
incongruent with their dreams,
a pastiche of broken people
crossing their quotidian desires
from one side to the other.

All legal and safe,
sipping margaritas in el mercado
or shopping at Walmart
living.

Best of both worlds,
a friend tells me. But you gotta be legal to live it.
Not for everyone the fruits of gringolandia.
Not everyone sees the wall.

Walls make good enemies: suspicious, defensive,
fearful, who hide behind a wall
solid as a heart hardened by fear.
Who would’ve believed it would happen here?

From Meditación Fronteriza, by Norma Elia Cantú. © 2019 by Norma Elia Cantú. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press.

Click here to read a brief interview with Norma Elia Cantú.

If you are looking for more ways to celebrate National Poetry Month at home, the Academy of American Poets has compiled a great list here.

Don’t forget, the University of Arizona Press is offering a 40% discount on e-books. Use the code AZEBOOK40 to download some poetry and start reading!

Video: Stephen Pyne on the To the Last Smoke Series

April 2, 2020

Stephen J. Pyne and the University of Arizona Press have just completed an 11 book opus series that explains the fire history of the United States. The series started with Between Two Fires and concludes this month with To the Last Smoke: An Anthology. In between are nine regional looks at localized fire history. Together, Steve has captured the environmental and human history of wildfire in America. In this short video Steve discusses his approach.

Stephen J. Pyne is an emeritus professor at Arizona State University. He is the author of more than 30 books, mostly on wildland fire and its history but also dealing with the history of places and exploration, including The Ice, How the Canyon Became Grand, and Voyager. Most recently, he has surveyed the American fire scene with a narrative, Between Two Fires: A Fire History of Contemporary America, and a suite of regional reconnaissances, To the Last Smoke, all published by the University of Arizona Press.

Free E-Book of the Week: Sor Juana

April 1, 2020

In this time to read, we will be featuring one free e-book each week. This week we’re offering a book from our Latinx Pop Culture Series, which sheds light on all aspects of Latinx cultural production and consumption as well as the Latinx presence globally in popular cultural. This week, we’re featuring Sor Juana: Or, the Persistence of Pop by Ilan Stavans. 

Download from our online shopping cart here. Available until 4/8/2020. Discount code is AZJUANA.  

“Stavans introduces readers to a woman who, in the crucible of Spanish monastic life, forged a poetic idiom for writing verse between the identities of Europe and America.”–Los Angeles Review of Books

Book Description: Sor Juana: Or, The Persistence of Pop encapsulates the life, times, and legacy of seventeenth-century Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Ilan Stavans provides a biographical and meditative picture of how popular perceptions of her life and work both shape and reflect Latinx culture.  Learn more 

 

Gerard P. Kuiper and the Rise of Modern Planetary Science Named a Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award Finalist

March 31, 2020

We are thrilled to announce that Gerard P. Kuiper and the Rise of Planetary Science by Derek W. G. Sears has been chosen as a finalist for the Science category of the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Awards!

More than 2,000 entries spread across 55 genres were submitted for consideration. The list of finalists was determined by Foreword’s editorial team. Winners are now being decided by teams of librarian and bookseller judges from across the country.

Winners in each genre will be announced June 17, 2020 at noon Eastern time.

Congratulations, Derek!

Free E-Book of the Week: Chasing Arizona

March 26, 2020

In this time to read, we will be featuring one free e-book each week. To kick off the series, we’re offering one of our best-selling books from the Tucson Festival of Books, Chasing Arizona by Bisbee local Ken Lamberton

Download from our online shopping cart here. Available until 3/31/2020. Simply use discount code AZChase.

“Ken is not only a master storyteller who spews out lovely sentences at nearly every turn but is an enthusiastic fan of Arizona history. This is quite simply a keeper-enjoyable without being silly, and well-researched without being stuffy.”

–Gary P. Nabhan

Book Description:

It seemed like a simple plan-visit fifty-two places in fifty-two weeks. But for author Ken Lamberton, a forty-five-year veteran of life in the Sonoran Desert, the entertaining results were anything but easy. Chasing Arizona takes readers on a yearlong, twenty-thousand-mile joy ride across Arizona during its centennial, racking up more than two hundred points of interest along the way. This book is an adventure story, a tale of Arizona, and a celebration of what makes the state a great place to visit and live.  

Learn more  

The Press Opens Up Access to Monographs, Textbooks in Response to COVID-19 Crisis

March 25, 2020

In an effort to support instructors and students as they transition to remote learning arrangements in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the University of Arizona Press has opened up access to its digital scholarly monographs, including its widely adopted Latinx Pop Culture Series, Arizona: A History, and titles in its award-winning Sun Tracks Series, a literary series focused on Indigenous artists and authors, through the end of June. The monographs will be open and free to use on Project MUSE and JSTOR.

“This move is in support of instructors, students, and their institutions who have had to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances due to the COVID-19 crisis,” said Kathryn Conrad, director of the University of Arizona Press. “We want to continue to support the scholarly enterprise, as we have done for more than sixty years. This is a way university presses, in this unprecedented time, can connect scholarship and creative expression to students and instructors.”

Through this program, more than six hundred titles will become immediately available on partner platforms. As higher education institutions have quickly transitioned to remote learning, the Press and the University Libraries are working tirelessly to support the international academic community.

“Monographs published by the University of Arizona Press are heavily used in courses around the world on a variety of subjects,” said Shan Sutton, dean of University Libraries. “This shift will ensure that these works continue to positively impact student learning and research. Both the University of Arizona Press, and its parent organization the University of Arizona Libraries, are actively pursuing new strategies to continue our vital roles in teaching and learning in this new environment.”

Andrew Flachs Discusses Anthropology and Agriculture in a New Book Lecture

March 25, 2020

A single seed is more than just the promise of a plant. In rural south India, seeds represent diverging paths toward a sustainable livelihood. Development programs and global agribusiness promote genetically modified seeds and organic certification as a path toward more sustainable cotton production, but these solutions mask a complex web of economic, social, political, and ecological issues that could be as dire as death.

Below, anthropologist and University of Arizona Press author Andrew Flachs discusses topics that are covered in his new book, Cultivating Knowledge.

Andrew Flachs is an assistant professor of anthropology at Purdue University. Trained as an environmental anthropologist, his research spans sustainable agriculture, food studies, the anthropology of knowledge, and political ecology.

Simón Trujillo and Vick Quezada Discuss the Borderlands of Latinx Indigeneity

March 18, 2020

In the first episode of The Latinx Project’s Intervenxions podcast, University of Arizona Press author Simón Trujillo talks with The Latinx Project’s 2020 Artist-in-Residence Vick Quezada for an illuminating dialogue on Latinx indigeneity, representation, sexuality, and the politics of knowledge and activism. Click here to listen to the podcast and read more about the project.

Simón Trujillo is a professor at New York University, and is the author of Land Uprising: Native Story Power and the Insurgent Horizons of Latinx Indigeneity. In his new book, Trujillo reveals uncanny connections between Chicanx, Latinx, Latin American, and Native American and Indigenous studies to grapple with Native land reclamation as the future horizon for Chicanx and Latinx indigeneities.

Brief Video for Our Authors

March 17, 2020

Video text:

Hey everybody this is Abby Mogollón. I’m the marketing manager at the U of A press and we just wanted to let you know that we’re really thinking about all of our authors right now and trying to think of new ways that we can continue to do the good work of helping you share your scholarship and your books with audiences.

Like many of you, we also are getting used to working from home offices and getting used to being in front of digital devices for zoom meetings, and so forth, and we thought we’d make a quick video to show you how easy it is to make something. We really want to encourage you to make short videos. If you’re a poet, record one of your poems. If you are a chapter author, maybe pick out an excerpt and read some of it if you’d like.

Mari, Savannah, and I can send you five questions and you can respond to them, or perhaps instead if your text is for course adoption you can record a short video explaining how you use your work in your teaching.

Just three things to remember when you’re making videos:
1. Hold the camera close.
2. Please speak loudly.
3. And try to have as much light as possible.

We can’t wait to hear from you.

–The University of Arizona Press Marketing Team

Abby Mogollon, amogollon@uapress.arizona.edu
Mari Herreras, mherreras@uapress.arizona.edu
Savannah Hicks, shicks@uapress.arizona.edu

Spicer, Bee, and Whiting Titles Available in Open Arizona

March 11, 2020

We are pleased to announce the availability of three important new contributions to Open Arizona. Selected by an advisory board of scholars and community members, the new additions include Edward H. Spicer’s seminal work Cycles of Conquest; Robert L. Bee’s Crosscurrents Along the Colorado; and Whiting, Weber, and Seaman’s Havasupai Habitat.

Open Arizona is a collection of open-access University of Arizona Press titles made available through the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The scholarship, histories, and approaches in the selected titles emphasize the relevance of the southwestern United States to understanding contemporary American life.

Cycles of Conquest
By Edward Spicer

After more than fifty years, Cycles of Conquest is still one of the best syntheses of more than four centuries of conquest, colonization, and resistance ever published. Thomas E. Sheridan writes in the new foreword commissioned for this special edition that the book is “monumental in scope and magisterial in presentation.”

Crosscurrents Along the Colorado
By Robert L. Bee

This intriguing book, original published in 1981, considers the Quechans as a case history of the frequent discrepancy between benevolently phrased national intention and exploitative local action.

Havasupai Habitat
By A. F. Whiting
Edited by Steven A. Weber and P. David Seaman

Published in 1985, Havasupai Habitat offers a rich ethnography on lifeways of the Havasupai people.

Five Questions with Poet and Scholar Molly McGlennen

March 3, 2020

Our Bearings is a collection of narrative poetry that examines and celebrates Anishinaabe life in Modern Minneapolis. Crafted around the four elements— earth, air, water, and fire— the poems are 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, Molly McGlennen has created a timely collection that contributes to the important conversation about contemporary urban Native life in North America and globally.

Here, Molly answers five questions about her new poetry collection.

What inspired you to write this work?

Our Bearings has not only been part of an ongoing personal project of narrating my experience of growing up in Minnesota, but also part of a long-term creative and scholarly project which was focused on Native American urban experience more broadly. In my first book of poetry, Fried Fish and Flour Biscuits (Salt, 2010) I submit in my preface that “poetry is a form of community-building, a means to locate oneself in relationship to a network of people and places and memories.” In my scholarly monograph, Creative Alliances: The Transnational Design of Indigenous Women’s Poetry (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), I explore how urban Native women demonstrate through their work the ways in which “poetry serves as a direction-finding tool for navigating various forms of (what I call) ‘dislocations’ and reclaiming urban centers as Indigenous territories.” Taken together, the projects are evidence of how I think about the ways Minneapolis, my hometown, has been historicized, shaped, and continually claimed by Indigenous peoples— and how my family’s stories add to that history and present reality. Our Bearings helped me think through what a poetic mapping of this history and reality would look, feel, and sound like: what Nativeness is in the present tense.

How do you think found poetry and poems which are rooted deeply in specific places help document the history of a city or state?

In general, poetry delivers emotional truths and accuracies that maps, written communications, archives— tools of western documentation— rarely convey. Some of the poems in the collection live as poetic documentation of my experience of the city based off of physical “findings” (such as flyers, signs, brochures, etc.). Some are experiential “findings” based upon the many trips back home with my two small children revisiting old (and new) stomping grounds with my family. And, finally, some are poems based upon my experience of working alongside my dad reading through documents archived at the Minnesota Historical Society, which consisted of correspondences and letters between my dad’s great grandparents begging for their children to be returned to them from the Owatoma School for Dependent and Neglected Children. My intention with the poems in Our Bearings was to offer the reader not an alternative history of Minneapolis, or even an alternative mapping of it, but rather to use poetry as a way to seek out stories of sustainability: Poetry as the vehicle to tell and tell again of what is undeniably and crucially Indigenous to this land. My poems are the stories of Native peoples shaping their own future, rather than the ones being acted upon by colonizing ideologies and racist federal laws, policies, and campaigns.

In the preface to this collection, you explain Anishinaabewakiing as an “ecosystem that explicitly includes people, their culture, and history.” Considering the cultural and historical impact of the current generation, what do you think the urban ecosystem of Minneapolis will look like in the future?

I think the ways we imagine the future are based on how we understand the instrument of memory. Poetry can be, in my opinion, one of many decolonizing efforts and materials needed to disarm the hegemony of settler colonial histories and realities. When we lean into specific Indigenous cultural knowledge to better understand a place (a city, a reservation, a suburb, an institution, a country), we harness tremendous power in recalling what has mattered to us, what works for us now, and the tools to safeguard Indigenous futures. I’m not certain what Minneapolis will look like in years to come. I am certain that Indigenous knowledge is crucial to the planet’s future, as the logics of extraction and monoculture almost ensure it’s endpoint.

The poems in this collection range widely in form. In your opinion, what is the relationship between the form and content of a poem? How do you hope the form of your poems impacts your readers?

I feel I was especially attentive to form in this collection. Because of what I understood as both reflective impulses and storied impulses happening as I wrote, I was seeking a way for form to signal and enhance those influences. For the storied poems, I needed the prose poem form to stretch long those narrative lines and to distinguish the edges between story and verse. For the reflective poems, I leaned into lyricism, visuality, and experimentation. Often, I felt as if I was drawing elements of a mental map onto the page, where experience was imagistic and cycles could appear across the pages. I hope the reader can see each poem as a little story of Indigenous Minneapolis, a way to imagine how we connect to it and each other.

What are you working on now?

One of my interests for some time now has been Native women’s visualities: the way narratives are located and found in visual art; artists use of text in their work; and the conversation happening between and among Native women across artistic mediums. There could be a book of poems coming that interacts with the visual storytelling Native women are creating. We shall see!

Below, read a poem from McGlennen’s Our Bearings.

REMAINS IV

She wants to write about basketball in this poem
and #21—always a Timberwolf—
Kevin Garnett.

She wants to say Defensive Player of the Year
and franchise records in this poem.

She wants to be able to just utter the fact
that she was there, finally made it
to the Target Center, for one
of his last nights in the NBA.
She was there.

She wants to just type the word hip-hop
in her poem. Like it is her last poem to write.
Where there are no rules about what she can say
or not say, think or not think.

She wants to speak the names Tall Paul and Chase Manhattan
in her poem, because she's a fan.
Because if she's honest, basketball and hip-hop matter—
sometimes more than poetry.

Wants to shout out
90s R&B.
Mint Condition and Next
and Morris Day.

Wants to just keep listing things. Because
they sound good out loud, like KMOJ 89 dot 9,
and she can imagine saying them out loud—
the way poems are supposed to come into the world.

She just keeps scribbling without
thoughts of editors or colleagues,
about what she ought to type or censor.
Because, when it comes down to it,
she'd rather think about basketball and hip-hop and 90s R&B—
and talk about it too. With someone.
Someone who loves it all the same.

Someone who knows every street she utters in her poems,
and the corners, and every person who's died and who's still living,
every hospital visit and wedding, and giveaway.
Every canoe trip and coffeehouse,
every lake and swamp.

She wants to give these words all away
to that person. Again and again.
And with them, trace and retrace
the designs embossed in her memories,
the fibers that become the maps of home.

Molly McGlennen received her Ph.D. in Native American studies from the University of California, Davis, in 2005, and her MFA in creative writing and English from Mills College in 1998. She is an associate professor of English at Vassar College. She is the author of Fried Fish and Flour Biscuits and Creative Alliances: The Transnational Designs of Indigenous Women’s Poetry. McGlennen’s writing has appeared in Sentence, As/Us, Yellow Medicine Review, and Studies in American Indian Literatures.

Norma E. Cantú Wins the NACCS Tejas Poetry Book Award

March 3, 2020

We are thrilled to announce that Norma E. Cantú is winner of the 2020 NACCS Tejas Poetry Book Award for her recent University of Arizona Press collection, Meditación Fronteriza!

The poems in this collection are a celebration of culture, tradition, and creativity that navigates themes of love, solidarity, and political transformation. Deeply personal yet warmly relatable, these poems flow from Spanish to English gracefully. With Gloria Anzaldúa’s foundational work as an inspiration, Meditación Fronteriza unveils unique images that provide nuance and depth to the narrative of the borderlands.

The awards luncheon is in McAllen, Texas on March 6, 2020 at the South Texas College Pecan Campus Student Union Ballroom, from 12 to 2 p.m.

Congratulations, Norma!

Tom Miller Wins a Best Travel Writing Solas Award

March 3, 2020

We are excited to announce that Tom Miller is the recipient of a Bronze Best Travel Writing Solas Award for an excerpt from the first chapter of his University of Arizona Press book, Cuba, Hot and Cold!

Since his first visit to Cuba thirty years ago, Miller has shown us the real people of Havana and the countryside, the Castros and their government, and the protesters and their rigor.

Congratulations, Tom!

A Deeper Look into Sown in Earth with Fred Arroyo

March 3, 2020

Sown in Earth is a collection of personal memories that speak to the larger experiences of hardworking migratory men. Often forgotten or silenced, these men are honored and remembered in Sown in Earth through the lens of Fred Arroyo‘s memories of his father. By crafting a written journey through childhood traumas, poverty, and the impact of alcoholism on families, Fred Arroyo clearly outlines how his lived experiences led him to become a writer.

Below, Fred has answered a few questions that shed more light on the process and thoughts behind writing Sown in Earth.

This collection of essays is deeply personal and, at times, traumatic. How do you approach and process writing about topics that require you to be vulnerable?

That vulnerability is at the heart of almost everything I write. I can think of no other way to go about it. There is a desire, want, or yearning that drives my writing, and often that has to do with some kind of wound. Hurt. Loss. Psychic wound. In writing Sown in Earth I made a point of not using the word añoranza, which in Spanish relates to yearning, longing, and nostalgia— though it is a difficult word to translate or define in English because it’s much more than these other words or qualities. The longing and yearning of añoranza are tied to a deep need to return to a place. Maybe, in the mind, to be sown in earth. When I write, I don’t set about to approach this añoranza or loss; it is there in the form of mood, an atmosphere of meditation and exploration, a space where I might discover aspects of a vulnerability I would not have realized without writing. As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been looking from the outside in. Given periods of sadness and depression, I am often inhabited by the “blues”, and that’s clearly an essential part of my poetics. What was it that Federico Garcia Lorca said, “I am neither all poet, all man or leaf, but only the pulse of a wound that probes the opposite side.”? You have to be open, without a purpose or agenda when writing about certain memories and situations, if you want to discover the other side of the wound, something new about the memory or situation.

In Sown in Earth, you write “Ever since I discovered things can be beautiful because of the care I take to see them….” Was this a sudden discovery, or a gradual shift in your worldview? How has it impacted your writing?

From the very beginning of my writing, if añoranza or loss existed, lyricism and a sense of beauty existed as well. My lyricism had always been unbridled though, passage after passage, flights that seem to soar without end. This lyricism often got in the way of a “story”, others would say. More to the point is that I have a particular way of looking at the world, and that makes for a different kind of story. The passage quoted in the question came about through a gradual discovery. I started to think of beauty and writing in terms of space, I suppose like sculpture, a library, or a field, about how you have to carefully mold or cultivate a space for beauty. And there was something about where you stood, or from what angle you looked at things. So if you were always walking in a field from one direction that only allowed you to notice certain spaces, but if you found new ways to walk the field, and you were carefully attentive in your looking and listening, you might discover a new grove of birches on the edge of the field, hear a spring, feel the way a meadow rolled towards the fence line. I can recollect that much reading of John Berger and José Ortega y Gasset helped shape my view, but it was also a gradual recognition that a seemingly rural and “poor” life had just as much dignity, honor, and beauty as any painting or sculpture in a museum. Or a book on a library shelf. And it was up to me to figure out how to create a space that allowed that life to exist in a way where others would recognize this life. A space of memory and imagination where others could recognize its dignity and beauty within their own lives.

Would you please discuss the balance between forgiveness and accountability when writing pieces about your childhood and your father?

I suppose I’m beholden to the notation that character is fate. Or in fiction writing, character is everything. I love the notion of energeia, that is, the possibility or potential of story is discovered within a character and the situation. That guides my writing of fiction and nonfiction. I’m the narrator, I’m the sentient being present in the making of the world, and so I do hold the character or situation to a kind of accountability. But not much. I think of people or characters like quicksilver— they have a spontaneity, a wild side, an unpredictability and chaos that’s not easy to control. What’s more important in the writing is the forgiveness. You cannot discover the gift of the past, a person, or a situation if you can’t approach it with openness, vulnerability, and forgiveness. Writing can create or offer islands of repair, as I wrote in Sown in Earth because I loved that phrase by Henry Miller.

I didn’t really think of writing Sown in Earth as a way to create accountability, or to “stop” or “recapture” time. I felt that way because I envision memory as material, and a force, moving through time and space. As a material phenomenon, memory can be held, shaped (parts discarded, parts held close), and re-made given where the material and force— like a creek, a watch, a knife, a name— takes you. I couldn’t have written this book if I didn’t discover how to forgive the past. More urgently: I couldn’t have written the book if I didn’t forgive myself for what I remembered. It was through this forgiveness that I discovered a lost self, peoples and places I might have forgotten, that I discovered sources of life, story, and spirit that could be vividly brought to life on the page. Always in my mind was Ortega y Gasset’s notion that an essay is a meditation, and borrowing from Spinoza, Ortega y Gasset wrote that at the heart of a meditation is amor itellectualis. I like to run from the things having to do with intellect as fast as I can, and yet I kept this feeling close in writing meditations of forgiveness, meditations of love.

In one essay, you write, “…or should I write, in memory, that he’s my uncle by blood?” I think this explores the fallibility of memory in an interesting way. Could you please discuss the role that misremembering, whether subconscious or intentional, plays in writing a memoir? Do you think that memoirs, by default, have unreliable narrators?

Even though I suggested that memory is material, that it has an existence and force that is not simply found in the “past”, my memory is continually shaped by my imagination. Misremembering is present for sure. My memories, for example, are clearly shaped by my becoming a writer, so that the process of writing, the reading of books, words, and passages by writers, shape my memory, shape how I imagine certain memories. That has to create some form of selection and misremembering. And yet, at the same time, each memory in this writing is a glimpse and a seed, an image, scene, event, or experience I can’t deny. Involuntarily, without my doing anything, certain memories speak to me, flash and shudder within, invigorate the five senses, and make me pay attention. I assume everyone has this kind of memory writing within them. Though I have a sense, again, it also has something to do in particular with imagining yourself as a writer— and that’s why I admire the power of memory for writers like Vladimir Nabokov, Jean Rhys, Patrick Modiano, or Anne Michaels. How the language of memory shapes their writing selves. So I’m trying to say that I’m not sure “memoirs, by default, have unreliable narrators.” They exist, for sure. But for me you are striving to be as reliable as a person, irrespective of factual truth, because memory has its own language and emotion that cannot be denied.

In discovering this writing self, I’m often struck by how my best self is present— or, as Kristjana Gunnars proposes, a stranger has entered into my writing room and helped me to discover my writing in ways I am most grateful for. I would say this stranger or best writing self strives for a great amount of reliability because there’s a strong presence of authority and vulnerability in the moment.

What are you working on now?

I wish I knew. On paper I have a half a dozen stories for a collection of short fictions, The Book of Manuels, that I continue to return to, and in these stories various characters named “Manuel” are present, the stories have something to do with manual labor, a manual or a book, and they dramatize the power of sight (as in Immanuel: one with ideals, one who can see), and the conflicts of perception. I envision these stories as also being containers of fictional consciousness meditating on a lack of empathy for the working-class, and how their lives and stories continue to be marginalized— if not erased— from American culture and society. Also, I’ve written some 40 poems that I imagine as becoming a manuscript, Before Birches Blue. I’m still kind of haunted by writing Sown in Earth. I’m taking things slow in terms of writing. I can’t seem to take a break or stop writing, however. Whenever I finish a book, I always seem to mull over how I failed, what I didn’t accomplish, what I might have done better, no matter that when I finished I knew it was my best at the moment. I supposed this is why The Region of Lost Names, Western Avenue and Other Fictions, and Sown in Earth: Essays of Memory and Belonging are in line with each other, create patterns across genres, peoples, and places. Maybe they are all a part of one big book. So I’m finding I have all these new essays to write, and wondering where they will take me, what I might discover, and how they might help me to get the writing right.

Fred Arroyo is the author of Sown in Earth: Essays of Memory and Belonging, Western Avenue and Other Fictions, and The Region of Lost Names: A Novel. A recipient of an Individual Artist Program Grant from the Indiana Arts Commission, Arroyo’s fiction is a part of the Library of Congress series Spotlight on U.S. Hispanic Writers. Arroyo’s writing is also included in Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing and The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Natural World. In the past decade Arroyo has driven considerable miles along the northern border of the United States, particularly in Ontario, Quebec, and the maritime regions, where he’s camped, walked, canoed, and fished in a real and imagined North Country that’s influencing a new collection of short stories and a book of poems. Arroyo is an assistant professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University.

‘The Saguaro’ Celebration Packed El Crisol with Cactus and Book Lovers

February 26 2020

The book release celebration for The Saguaro Cactus: A Natural History, brought together more than 80 people to El Crisol on Sunday, February 23 to hear scholar-authors David YetmanAlberto Búrquez, and Kevin Hultine talk about their research, admiration, and share folklore of the Sonoran Desert’s iconic cactus.

The evening, first in the new Arts and Letters series presented by the University of Arizona Press and hosted by El Crisol, was also co-hosted by The Southwest Center. A live-stream of the author conversation is on the Center’s YouTube channel available here. The Saguaro Cactus is part of a book series published in partnership with the The Southwest Center and the University of Arizona Press that focus on a variety of fields, especially history, anthropology, geography, natural history, ethnobiology, and borderlands studies.

Kristen Buckles, University of Arizona Press editor-in-chief, welcomed guests and authors, explaining the importance of books such as The Saguaro Cactus, and the ongoing relationship with The Southwest Center. Buckles introduced The Southwest Center director, Jeffrey Banister, to talk further and introduce the authors.

Co-authors Hultine and Yetman will be at the University of Arizona Press tent at the Tucson Festival of Books for book signing on Sunday, March 15, 12-12:30 p.m. Books will be available for purchase at the tent. Other upcoming events for The Saguaro Cactus: March 5 at Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix and March 16 at the 2020 Libraries Annual Luncheon in Tucson.

Special thanks to El Crisol owners Amy and Doug Smith for welcoming us and creating a special space for our authors; La Indita restaurant for always going that extra mile for our events; and Carlos Quintero, outreach coordinator with The Southwest Center.

The Saguaro Cactus: A Natural History co-authors Alberto Búrquez, Kevin Hultine, and David Yetman, discuss their research and knowledge of the beloved cactus of our Sonoran Desert.
El Crisol owners Amy and Doug Smith.
Savannah Hicks, University of Arizona Press marketing assistant, ready for all things saguaro at the book celebration event.

An Excerpt From ‘The Saguaro Cactus: A Natural History’

February 17, 2020

This book offers a complete natural history of an enduring and iconic desert plant. Enjoy this excerpt, published by the Tucson Weekly on January 30, and help us celebrate the book and this iconic symbol of our desert.

From “A Saguaro Primer
By David Yetman

The saguaro, with its great size and characteristic shape—its arms stretching heavenward, its silhouette often resembling a human—has become the emblem of the Sonoran Desert of southwestern Arizona. This is rightly so, for it is by far the largest and tallest cactus in the United States and our tallest desert plant as well. In this volume, we present a summary of current information about this, the desert’s most noteworthy plant.

Saguaros occasionally reach 12 meters (40 feet) in height, and individuals over 15 meters (50 feet) tall appear from time to time. The record height is 23 meters (78 feet), a well-known plant of a single stalk growing near Cave Creek, Arizona, which was toppled by winds in 1986. Photos of that plant are elusive, but it was clearly a very tall cactus, perhaps the tallest of any cactus ever recorded. While other cactus species may produce individuals taller than the average saguaro, none has been documented of that stupendous height. In 1907 William Hornaday reported a saguaro between 55 and 60 feet in height. He was leader of a 1907 scientific expedition to Pinacate Volcanic Range in Mexico near the border with southwestern Arizona and was in the company of distinguished researchers. The saguaro’s sole competitor for tallness in the deserts of the United States is the Joshua tree (Yucca brevifolia), a native of the Mohave Desert, a yucca that only rarely reaches 9 meters (30 feet) in height.

Saguaros are among the tallest cacti in terms of average height. They are also among those with the greatest mass. Neobuxbaumia mezcalaensis of southern Mexico, a single-stalked columnar cactus and distant relative of the saguaro, probably reaches greater average height, with individuals reaching in excess of 18 meters (60 feet). Other columnar giants include Pachycereus weberi and Mitrocereus fulviceps of southern Mexico and Pachycereus pringlei, the cardón sahueso of the Sonoran Desert in Baja California and the coastal regions and islands of central Sonora. Pachycereus pringlei and the truly massive P. weberi routinely exceed the mass of the saguaro. While columnar cacti are widespread in South America, none reaches the height or mass of the larger saguaros.

The most famous incident involving cacti of any kind occurred in 1982. The episode featured a saguaro growing near Phoenix, Arizona, and an unfortunate drunk named David Grundman, a hapless chap. Grundman, having imbibed an excess of strong drink, decided to knock over a saguaro with his jeep. He failed, succeeding only in damaging his vehicle. In a fit of rage at the unobliging saguaro, he fired both barrels of a shotgun at its base. The blast weakened the trunk, and the great plant toppled, crushing Grundman beneath. Few observers shed tears over the vandal’s demise. A published ballad commemorates his folly.

Scholar-Authors Bring Hearts and Stories to Special Collections Event

February 7, 2020

Associate Professor Roberto “Dr. Cintli” Rodriguez, author of Yolqui, a Warrior Summoned from the Spirit World: Testimonios on Violence with University of Arizona Press, always dreamed of bringing together fellow colleagues to talk about their work as scholars, and how community matters in their research and authorship.

His dream became reality Wednesday, February 5, with “Documenting Scholarship and Community,” at University Libraries Special Collections. Veronica Reyes, the Katheryne B. Willock Head of Special Collections, noted in her welcome that this particular program came together because of Rodriguez’s efforts when he approached her about hosting a panel with Latinx scholars.

Co-sponsored by Special Collections and the University of Arizona Press’s Open Arizona project, the conversation was guided by moderator Maribel Alvarez, Associate Dean for Community Engagement in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Jim Griffith Chair in Public Folklore with The Southwest Center.

Rodriguez, an associate professor with Mexican American Studies, was joined by the following scholar-authors and editors: Michelle Tellez, an assistant professor and co-editor of The Chicana Motherwork Anthology; Cristina D. Ramirez, an associate professor, author of Mestiza Rhetorics: An Anthology of Mexicana Activism in the Spanish Language Press, 1887-1922, and Program Director for the Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English; and Nolan Cabrera, an associate professor in the Center for the Study of Higher Education and author of White Guys on Campus.

If you didn’t have a chance to attend, you can listen to the panel discussion here.

Miroslava Alejandra opened the event with a song that includes a mother’s prayer for her son, which was published in Roberto Cintli Rodriguez’s new book, Yolqui, a Warrior Summoned from the Spirit World: Testimonios on Violence.
Verónica Reyes-Escudero, the Katheryne B. Willock Head of Special Collections, welcomes more than 80 people who gathered at the event. She shared her connection with Rodriguez and the inspiration for the evening, which was to bring together Latinx scholars to discuss their work.
Kathryn Conrad, University of Arizona Press director, introduced moderator Maribel Alvarez and explained Open Arizona, a collection of open-access University of Arizona Press titles. Michelle Tellez, co-editor of The Chicana Motherwork Anthology, is on the left.
The event attracted more than 80 people, including a large group of students who traveled from Mexico to Tucson to attend “Giving Women in STEM a Voice” at the university.
Cristina D. Ramirez connecting with one of the undergraduate students from Mexico.
Roberto Cintli Rodriguez connecting with students.
Roberto Cintli Rodriguez with Kristen Buckles, University of Arizona Press Editor-in-Chief.
Event panelists and moderator Maribel Alvarez with the undergraduate students from Mexico.

Voices from Bears Ears Chosen as a Finalist for the 2020 Oregon Book Award

February 7, 2020

We are thrilled to announce that Voices from Bears Ears by Rebecca Robinson and Stephen Strom is a finalist for the Frances Fuller Victor Award for General Nonfiction, a section of the 2020 Oregon Book Awards!

Literary Arts‘ Oregon Book Awards program honors the state’s finest accomplishments by Oregon writers who work in genres of poetry, fiction, graphic literature, drama, literary nonfiction, and literature for young readers. In addition to financial support, the program produces the Oregon Book Awards Author Tour to connect local writers and literary organizations in all parts of Oregon. Each year, Oregon Book Awards finalists and winners travel to towns across Oregon for readings, school visits, and free writing workshops.

Through the stories of twenty individuals, and informed by interviews with more than seventy people, Voices from Bears Ears captures the passions of those who fought to protect Bears Ears and those who opposed the monument as a federal “land grab” that threatened to rob them of their economic future. It gives voice to those who have felt silenced, ignored, or disrespected. It shares stories of those who celebrate a growing movement by Indigenous peoples to protect ancestral lands and culture, and those who speak devotedly about their Mormon heritage. What unites these individuals is a reverence for a homeland that defines their cultural and spiritual identity, and therein lies hope for finding common ground.

Portland-based journalist Rebecca Robinson provides context and perspective for understanding the ongoing debate and humanizes the abstract issues at the center of the debate. Interwoven with these stories are photographs of the interviews and the land they consider sacred by photographer Stephen E. Strom. Through word and image, Robinson and Strom allow us to both hear and see the people whose lives are intertwined with this special place.

Congratulations to all of the finalists! The winners will be announced live at the Oregon Book Awards Ceremony on Monday, April 27 at the Portland Center Stage at the Armory.

University Presses Are a Wise Investment for Scholarship and Community

February 5, 2020

Inside Higher Ed featured an opinion piece on the value university presses offer their parent institutions, and how that value uplifts scholarship, and community.

Written by Kathryn Conrad, director of the University of Arizona Press and president of the Association of University Presses, and Jennifer Crewe, associate provost and director of Columbia University Press and the association’s immediate past president, the editorial points out that some institution leaders are unfamiliar with the role their presses play in scholarly publishing, and the important role presses play in advancing the values of their home institutions.

More than 100 North American universities choose to invest in a university press, including nearly 70 percent of leading research institutions and almost 80 percent of Association of American Universities members. Publishing scholarship of the highest quality in an environment driven by mission, and not profit, is an endeavor that top universities heartily endorse. Our daily work as scholarly publishers is firmly grounded in the foundational beliefs and goals of our parent institutions. While the publishing mix of individual university presses may vary, as do our universities’ areas of strength, our purpose is the same: the advancement of knowledge.

Looking back on a year that has included soul-searching at both Stanford University, an elite private institution, and the University of Western Australia, a vital public university, we are reminded that leaders at our home institutions sometimes are unfamiliar with what university presses do or with their own integral role in supporting scholarly publishing. Misunderstanding can lead to hasty or inaccurate judgments. …

Please read the entire op-ed here.

Biennial Southwest Symposium Recap

February 3, 2020

On Friday, January 31st and Saturday, February 1st, University of Arizona Press Senior Editor Allyson Carter attended the 17th Biennial Southwest Symposium in Tempe. The Southwest Symposium organization was founded in 1988 to promote new ideas and new directions in the archaeology of the U.S. Southwest and Mexican Northwest. The theme this year was “Thinking Big: New Approaches to Synthesis and Partnership in the Southwest/Northwest.”

Allyson was thrilled to catch up with many of our authors while she attended the conference, and she was able to snap a few great photos as well.

Stewart Koyiyumptewa, co-editor of Moquis and Kastiilam and contributor to Footprints of Hopi History, and Joel Nichols, contributor to History is in the Land.
Nancy Parezo and Don Fowler, authors of a forthcoming book which will be published in Fall 2020. Nancy Parezo is also co-editor of Paths of Life, and Don Fowler.
We love sharing our archaeology list with scholars and experts!

Our Border Heart: Reflections from Our Authors on ‘American Dirt’

January 31, 2020

As an academic press situated near the Arizona-Mexico border, when a flash point like the American Dirt controversy occurs, it’s hard to ignore voices from the books that line the University of Arizona Press bookshelves.

After all, as some University of Arizona Press authors have explained recently in national interviews and op-eds, university presses have long been home to many Latinx and Indigenous authors of fiction, poetry, and scholarship focused on social justice, anthropology, popular culture, gender studies, and the borderlands.

Chicano author David Bowles, who translated the late beloved Francisco X. Alarcón’s poems in the University of Arizona Press’s 2019 edition of Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation, pointed this out in an NPR interview on Monday, January 27 —that indie and university presses have committed to publishing authors and scholars of color. Bowles offered further analysis in the New York Times.

The University of Arizona Press is not alone in publishing Latinx and Indigenous authors. Other university presses and independent publishers doing similar work: Arte Publico, Bilingual Press, University of Texas Press, University of New Mexico Press, and Cinco Puntos.

In the University of Arizona Press’s sixty years, publishing Latinx and Indigenous authors was purposeful and remains a priority. The Sun Tracks series, which publishes work by Indigenous authors, began in the early 1970’s as a journal and then individual titles. The first book, When it Rains: Tohono Oodham and Pima Poetry was edited by University of Arizona professor and linguist Ofelia Zepeda, a Tohono O’odham poet who remains editor of the series.

Camino del Sol, a series dedicated to Latinx authors, started in 1994, two years before Oprah’s Book Club kicked off. The series, initiated by author Ray Gonzalez, its first editor, has had a number of awards bestowed on its titles: the PEN/Beyond Margins Award to Richard Blanco’s Directions to the Beach of the Dead; Before Columbus Foundation American Book Awards to Diana Garcia’s When Living Was a Labor Camp and Luis Alberto Urrea’s Nobody’s Son; International Latino Book Awards to Pat Mora’s Adobe Odes and Kathleen Alcalá’s The Desert Remembers My Name; the Premio Aztlán literary prize to Sergio Troncoso’s The Last Tortilla; and the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles National Literary Award to Kathleen de Azevedo’s Samba Dreamers. The first National Book Critics Circle Award for a Chicana/o went Juan Felipe Herrera’s Half of the World in Light, also published by the University of Arizona Press.

University of Arizona Press authors who have weighed in on the controversy:

Frederick Luis Aldama, University Distinguished Professor at Ohio State University, is a leading Latinx cultural scholar with three important titles in the University of Arizona Press’s Latinx Pop Culture series. From his January 24 essay Brownface Minstrelsy; or a Defense of Our Freedom in the Art of Latinx Storytelling? on Latinx Spaces:

Wiping windows clean of roadkill, let me focus attention on this point about a non-Mexican or non-Latinx author writing this book. Of course, authors different from her run deep, including D.H. Lawrence, Valle Inclán, Kerouac, Nabokov, Boyle, and Theroux, among many others. Here, however, we return to Sánchez Prado’s point that a non-Mexican author can create fictions about Mexico, if they do the work for it to represent and cohere well. In other words, none of this cutting corners to get away with caca because you know your main audiences will be white and not be Mexican or Latinx.

University of Arizona author Daniel A. Olivas offered further perspective in an opinion piece published recently in The Guardian:

American Dirt is an insult to Latinx writers who have toiled – some of us for decades – to little notice of major publishers and book reviewers, while building a vast collection of breathtaking, authentic literature often published by university and independent presses on shoestring budgets. And while the folks who run Flatiron Books have every right to pay seven figures to buy and publish a book like American Dirt, they have no immunity from bad reviews and valid criticism.

​And that’s why more than ninety Latinx and other writers signed an open letter to Oprah Winfrey asking her to rethink the much-publicized inclusion of American Dirt in her renowned book club. I signed on to this letter with the hope Winfrey will do the right thing.

You can read the letter Olivas refers to here. Another University of Arizona Press author, poet Vickie Vértiz, signed the letter. Her collection, Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut, won the 2018 PEN America Literary Poetry award. Other authors who signed the letter include Luis Alberto Urrea (also a University of Arizona Press author), Wendy C. Ortiz, and Vanessa Angélica Villarreal.

Near the top of the University of Arizona Press website are the words: Books that make a difference, enrich understanding, and inspire curiosity. The exceptional Latinx and Indigenous voices from University of Arizona Press books accomplish that, and guide us through an entire universe, too.

Raymond H. Thompson (1924-2020)

January 31, 2020

Raymond Harris Thompson, Jr., PhD, director emeritus of the Arizona State Museum and a co-founder of the University of Arizona Press died peacefully on January 29 in Tucson, surrounded by family and enveloped in the affection of so many who held him in high esteem. He was 95.

Thompson served the University of Arizona with dedication and distinction for 41 years, from July 1, 1956 to June 30, 1997. For 32 of those years, he served as director of the Arizona State Museum. For the first 16 of those years, he served simultaneously as head of the Department (now School) of Anthropology. In 1980 he was appointed… read the complete appreciation shared by The School of Anthropology and the Arizona State Museum.

How ‘Indians’ Think Author on New Books Podcast

January 21, 2020

New Books Network recently featured Gonzalo Lamana‘s new book, How “Indians” Think: Colonial Indigenous Intellectuals and the Question of Critical Race Theory.

Lamana, a University of Arizona Press author and associate professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages at the University of Pittsburgh, shines light in his book on Indigenous perspectives 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, Lamana argues that Guaman Poma and Garcilaso were the first Indigenous activist intellectuals and that they developed post-racial imaginaries four hundred years ago. Their texts not only highlighted Native peoples’ achievements, denounced injustice, and demanded colonial reform, but they also exposed the emerging Spanish thinking and feeling on race that was at the core of colonial forms of discrimination. These authors aimed to alter the way colonial actors saw each other and, as a result, to change the world in which they lived.

Listen to the podcast here.

Gonzalo Lamana Featured on New Books Network Podcast

January 14, 2020

University of Arizona author Gonzalo Lamana was featured on a recent episode of New Books Network to discuss his new book, How “Indians” Think.

“In his new book, How “Indians” Think: Colonial Indigenous Intellectuals and the Question of Critical Race Theory (University of Arizona Press, 2019), Dr. Gonzalo Lamana carefully investigates the writings of Indigenous intellectuals of the Andean region during Spanish colonialism. By delving into and reinterpreting the work of Guaman Poma de Ayala and Garcilaso de la Vega, Lamana effectively articulates the development of critical race theory from its outset in colonial Latin America. By sharing these centuries old texts, Lamana gives important context to today’s social climate while reinvigorating voices from the past. As Lamana points out, “Indians” lived in an upside down world – a world of lies that Indigenous intellectuals were unable to expose. Through the work of Lamana and others, that lie is finally being exposed.

Gonzalo Lamana is an associate professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. His teaching and research explores themes of subalternity and indigeneity, race and theology, and meaning-making in the colonial period through a comparative, cross-area and time study of colonial and postcolonial dynamics. Some of his previous publications include Domination without Dominance. Inca-Spanish Encounters in Early Colonial Peru and Pensamiento colonial crítico

Listen to the podcast and read more here.

The Motions Beneath Wins the CALACS Book Prize

January 13, 2020

We are excited to announce that The Motions Beneath by Laurent Corbeil is the winner of the 2019 Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies’ (CALACS) Book Prize!

The CALACS Best Book Prize is awarded to the most outstanding book published in 2018 by a member of CALACS who researches Latin America and the Caribbean.

The CALACS Book Prize Committee praised The Motions Beneath by saying, “In this work, Corbeil carried out meticulous archival research to present the micro-interactions of Indigenous migrants who traveled to the mines of San Luís Potosí. While these migrants were motivated by economic needs, Corbeil notes that they interacted in ways– both within and beyond their own communities– that profoundly shaped the city. Corbeil makes creative use of legal records to unearth histories of mobility and the interactions between members of different Indigenous communities that otherwise do not appear in the historical record. Moreover, the book is written lucidly and provides expansive contextualization of colonial Potosí. The Committee congratulates Dr. Corbeil on this fantastic achievement.”

The University of Arizona Press congratulates Laurent Corbeil on this fantastic achievement, as well!

Saints, Statues, and Stories Honored as a Southwest Book of the Year

January 13, 2020

We are thrilled to announce that Saints, Statues, and Stories by James S. “Big Jim” Griffith was selected as a Panelist Pick for two panelists in Pima County Library’s 43rd annual Southwest Books of the Year! Southwest Books of the Year is a highly-anticipated publication that influences readers throughout the Southwest.

Saints, Statues, and Stories was picked by Vicki Ann Duraine, the Programming Librarian for Apache Junction Public Library, and Christine Wald-Hopkins, a former literature and composition instructor who has been a book critic for national, regional, and local newspapers since 1989.

About the book, Christine Wald-Hopkins stated: “Folklorist James S. Griffith, beloved in Southern Arizona for his active promotion of all folk arts and cultures, focuses in this little volume on material he’s gathered in more than fifty years of studying religious art and legend in Sonora, Mexico. With photographs and personal anecdotes, Griffith discusses the introduction of religious art into Sonora, its preservation, its role in the spiritual life of the people, and direct impact of saints in the lives of individuals and the community. Best of all, the voice in Saints, Statues, and Stories is that of a consummate storyteller.”

Congratulations, Big Jim!

January 7, 2020

Travel often evokes strong reactions and engagements. But what of the ethics and politics of this experience? Through critical, personal reflections, the essays in Detours, edited by M. Bianet Castellanos, grapple with the legacies of cultural imperialism that shape travel, research, and writing.

Contemplating the ethics and racial politics of traveling and doing research abroad, the essays in Detours call attention to the power and privilege that permit researchers to enter people’s lives, ask intimate questions, and publish those disclosures. Focusing on Latin America and the Caribbean, they ask, Why this place? What keeps us coming back? And what role do we play in producing narratives of inequality, uneven development, and global spectacle?

Below, read an excerpt from Detours by Misha Klein:

Prior to living in Brazil, I had believed that empirical evidence (“facts”) and personal experience provided people with the ability to appraise their circumstances and a capacity and fierce desire to chart their own path to freedom. Though I had never really thought about it consciously, I also apparently believed that there was some lower limit beyond which human dignity would not allow people to sink, and that they would rise up against their oppressors when that limit was breached.

The first time that I went to Rio de Janeiro all of those assumptions were thrown into turmoil. I accepted the invitation of a student who was taking private English classes with me and who wanted me to accompany her on a visit home. In contrast to the spacial segregation of the poor neighborhoods in the city where I lived, rich and poor in Rio are intertwined, in public space, in private space, and in the very layout of the city, where planned portions of the city displaced the previous residents only to be reoccupied by new poor people building in the newly reconfigured spaces. The self-constructed neighborhoods known as favelas fill the fissures and other empty spaces created by urban development schemes in Rio, rather than being on the outskirts as in Latin America and elsewhere, favelas begin when poor people build fragile structures made of found materials in any available space: under overpasses, along roadways, on steep hillsides, and on the edges of some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Brazil.

I have been asked by Brazilians whether we have favelas in the United States. While we certainly have poor people and poor neighborhoods, the very poor either cannot find housing or cannot afford the rent of public housing or are not well off enough to keep a job or stay in one place. Furthermore, construction regulations make illegal the “auto-construction” that is a defining feature of favelas. Even tent cities or the temporary and visible conglomerations like the “Hoovervilles” of the Great Depression are illegal, though the reasons today usually reference safety codes rather than a recognition of these gatherings as a condemnation of and shameful reflection on politicians in a rich nation. Instead of favelas, we have homeless people, who fall through the cracks instead of filling them.

Toward the end of that first trip to Rio, we drove past Rio’s massive landfill, and I was shocked to see that it was teeming with people evidently scouring the mountain of garbage for reusable and recyclable materials. I realized that abject poverty is not radicalizing or empowering, and that those who must struggle day to day for enough to eat do not have the luxury of planning to overthrow the system. Their dignity is clearly shown in the documentary film Waste Land (2010), about the cooperative of catadores (trash pickers) who live coincidentally at that same municipal landfill and who worked with Brazilian artist Vik Muniz to create beautiful renditions of famous works of art from trash collected by the catadores. Dignity is a state or quality that is quite apart from external conditions.

There is no way to live in such a starkly class-divided social world and not be a participant, not be implicated in it. This is just as true in the United States as it is in Brazil. As a society, we walk past homeless people on the street, forget about Indigenous peoples living in poverty on reservations, avoid certain neighborhoods. We all become numb to the injustices around us, ignoring them so that we can go on about our lives. Seeing the injustices is easier when we step outside of the familiar. When I have returned to Brazil for short stays, I break the rules, disrupting the social fabric in ways that I cannot easily afford to do when I am there for longer periods of time (and often relying on the goodwill of friends and other hosts). I sit in the front seat with taxi drivers and ask about economic changes and consumption patterns rather than sitting in the back, absorbed with my phone and isolated. I chat with the security guards in the apartment buildings of well-heeled friends and engage in discussions about the education system. Inevitably, I get the confused question, “Why are you different?” A quick read of my color, my style of dress, and the circumstances of our encounter puts me in one social category, one that my behavior does not fit. In other words, why do I not stay on my side of the class divide? However, I cannot so easily break these social rules during longer stays because continually confronting or resisting the system is an exhausting endeavor. Breaking with these social norms also causes discomfort or even problems for other people. Of course, those in the working classes are not necessarily eager to get cozy with the privileged classes (of which I am presumed to be a part) and are often uncomfortable with my flouting of the norms. That kind of trust takes time to build. On the other hand, those who are privileged do not appreciate having the comfort of their world disturbed and exposed as flimsy, and they are often quick to chide— or worse.

I learned this lesson when visiting the extended family of my fiancé in the northeastern city of Fortaleza, a region known for “traditional” social rules, rooted in the slave economy and corronelismo, the corrupt and violent boss system that dominated the agricultural Northeast, the legacy of which is still felt today. Theirs was a landholding family, what might be considered “slumlords” in another context. They still lived in a single-family residence, surrounded by a garden and high wall. I counted nine people in their employ, between full- and part-time: a cook, two maids, a chauffeur, a passadeira (a woman whose sole job was to do the ironing), a night guard, a gardener, a manicurist, and a houseboy to whom fell anything that was not covered by the other employees. Between the nine employees, they did not earn even six minimum salaries, nor did they receive any of the common benefits, such as transportation costs, that became required compensation under new labor laws that took effect not long after my visit. The son of the family was being groomed to step into his father’s shoes and was already responsible for making the rounds to collect rent. It was to him that the guard appealed for an income increase. My fiancé and I were not supposed to hear the conversation, but it took place right outside the window of the bedroom where we were sleeping. The guard’s job was to sit up all night in the garden with a loaded weapon, ready to protect the sleeping family. Rather than make his request face to face, he stood outside the son’s window (adjacent to ours) to ask whether we could receive an increase to cover the cost of transportation to and from work. His request was denied. Even more poignant was the situation of the houseboy, a young man from a desperately poor family who lived in what looked like a pile of blankets in a corner of the garage and worked not for a salary but for the cost of his epilepsy medication. Even under these miserable circumstances he was better off than he would have been without the job (as the father of the family explained), if this could really be considered a form of employment as opposed to indentured servitude. Since he picked up the slack around the house, the bulk of the extra work of our stay fell to him, so to thank him we gave him the official jersey of the local Ceará soccer team, of which he was an avid fan. We were roundly chided for this act of reciprocity because, we were told by the family, we had unreasonably raised his expectations. It was a sickening experience. In the face of entrenched systems of unequal power, alliances mean nothing. Friendliness does not put a dent in the system of inequality. The difference between having been to a place and being there is in the depth of understanding. In Portuguese, you do not ask a person whether they have been somewhere. You ask whether they “know” the place, no matter how brief the encounter. A tourist can merely pass through a country and then claim to “know” it. Tourists do not have any obligation to acquire foreknowledge. They do not need to study history, socioeconomic hierarchies, the consequences of uneven development, or the legacy of colonial administrations and repressive regimes. Tourists can admire, and buy, and leave with folkloric or artisanal items and postcard memories, without obligations to maintain relations. Theirs is a form of consumption that includes the possibility of just snacking, of savoring tiny bites, and it also gets reproduced at the local level through tourism performances.

One difference between touring and living someplace for an extended period of time— which involves having responsibilities and obligations, time constraints, and financial considerations— is that when one is touring one can afford to give attention to all sorts of things that people who are going about their daily lives cannot. Tourists in Brazil can engage in what Edward Bruner (2005) calls tourist realism— that is, they can look at poverty (and even take organized tours to visit favelas), be shocked and offended by it (How can people live this way? How can other people ignore it?), and imagine that they have no connection with or responsibilities toward the obvious inequalities. This would seem to be the inverse of the imperialist nostalgia described by Renato Rosaldo (1989): rather than lamenting and longing for a past that one has had a hand in destroying, one may feel a sense of superiority and a self-satisfied clear conscience that comes with imagining that one is not implicated in another’s suffering. However, the only way that this imagining is possible is by deliberately ignoring— being ignorant of— the larger patterns of inequality that are reproduced at the global, national, and regional levels.

Saguaros, Justice, Poetry, and Rum, Spring 2020

December 20, 2019

Every season at the University of Arizona Press has its own unique personality, yet you can always count on the Press publishing Indigenous and Latinx literature you won’t find elsewhere. You’ll find those gems in our Spring 2020 catalog, along with Southwest titles, cutting-edge books on the borderlands, Chicanx, and Indigenous studies; and other important work in anthropology, archaeology, environmental studies, and space science.

Here are several highlights to give you an idea of what Spring 2020 has to offer:

The Saguaro Cactus: A Natural History, by David YetmanAlberto BúrquezKevin Hultine, and Michael Sanderson

The saguaro cactus is an iconic symbol of our region, and this book gets to the heart of that with essays on our ongoing fascination and the plant’s unusual characteristics.

Out in February, paperback.

Sown in Earth: Essays of Memory and Belonging by Fred Arroyo

In this collection of essays, Arroyo shares personal and heart-wrenching memories that speak to the larger experiences of hardworking migratory men, such as Arroyo’s father.

Out in March, paperback.

Our Bearings: Poems by Molly McGlennen

In Our Bearings, McGlennen examines and celebrates Anishinaabe life in modern Minneapolis through this collection of narrative poetry. The narrative poetry of Our Bearings, redefines what it means to be an urban Indian.

Out in March, paperback.

To the Last Smoke: An Anthology by Stephen J. Pyne

In this book, Pyne, considered a leading authority and historian on wildland fire, offers a series of his most recent essays on fire region by region in the United States. Each essay provides a glimpse at how wildland fires differ from state to state, and what some regions are doing right.

Out in April, paperback.

Sugarcane and Rum: The Bittersweet History of Labor and Life on The Yucatán Peninsula by John R. Gust and Jennifer P. Mathews

Gust and Mathews weave together ethnographic interviews and historical archives with archaeological evidence to bring the daily lives of Maya workers into focus. The workers were part of the sugarcane and rum production of the Yucatán .

Out in April, paperback.

Diné Identity in a Twenty-First-Century World by Lloyd L. Lee

This is a distinctive and personal book from Lee, offering his perspective on Diné  identity in the twenty-first century. It is a mixture of traditional, customs, values, behaviors, technologies, worldviews, languages, and lifeways.

Out in May, paperback.

See you in 2020, dear readers.

Science Be Dammed Featured on Phoenix Radio Program Looking at Future of Colorado River

December 19, 2019

KJZZ ‘s Bret Jaspers in Phoenix recently interviewed University of Arizona Press author John Fleck, co-author of Science Be Dammed, on Colorado River mismanagement as part of a larger story on the river’s future. Listen to the interviews here.

“In 1968 when the Central Arizona Project was approved, Arizona knew that there was not sufficient water to keep that canal full year in and year out,” Fleck said. 

He points to testimony from then-Reclamation Commissioner Floyd Dominy, who told a House of Representatives subcommittee that “sooner or later, and mostly sooner, the natural flows of the Colorado River will not be sufficient to meet water demands, either in the lower basin or the upper basin, if these great regions of the Nation are to maintain their established economies and realize their growth potential.”

Fleck said Arizona knew that without augmentation, the water available for CAP canal customers would fluctuate.

“And somehow that was forgotten, and Arizona grew to depend on a full CAP canal every year,” Fleck said.

The river’s structural deficit is about 1.2 million acre feet each year. That’s an annual over commitment of almost four Phoenixes covered in a foot of water. As more users actually use their full allocations, the imbalance contributes to drops in Lakes Mead and Powell, the two main reservoirs. Declines led to the temporary shortage guidelines signed in 2007 and updated this year.

Today’s negotiators are preparing to tackle the structural deficit in a new agreement that will replace the guidelines, which expire in 2026. Fleck said these modern folks adhere much closer to science than their predecessors did.

“We are much better now at accepting rather than ignoring inconvenient science,” he said. “You see serious analytical work being done within the federal agencies even in the midst of the Trump administration’s attitude toward climate change.”

The truth about the river may finally be too powerful to ignore. 

Along with climate change, the deficit is one of the big reasons why Lake Mead has dropped in recent years.

Fixing it could be a big problem for Arizona.

“Unfortunately, Arizona’s facing some of the largest cuts and it really puts Arizona in a political vice,” said Brad Udall, a research scientist at Colorado State University. “You can’t take that much water out of the canal, the entire 1.2 million acre-feet, and do justice to Arizona’s water needs. Yet that’s what the 1968 law says.”

The Embodiment of Risk Along the U.S.-México Line

December 18, 2019

The Border and Its Bodies: The Embodiment of Risk Along the U.S.- México Line, is an important book of borderlands scholarship, but there’s more to this University of Arizona Press book, placed on the Association of University Presses’ reading list during University Press Week last November. The book’s editors Thomas E. Sheridan and Randall H. McGuire, along with its thirteen contributors, have presented a timely presentation on the realities of our border region. This book examines the impact of migration from Central America and México to the United States on the most basic social unit possible: the human body. It explores the terrible toll migration takes on the bodies of migrants—those who cross the border and those who die along the way. The following is an excerpt from contributor Robin Reineke, an assistant research social scientist in anthropology at the University of Arizona’s Southwest Center, and cofounder and executive director of the Colibri Center for Human Rights:

Necroviolence and Postmortem Care Along the U.S.-México Border

By Robin Reineke

In June 2010, the decomposed remains of a man were found by the U.S. Border Patrol on the Tohono O’odham Nation in Arizona. The man was found under a tree, with a backpack containing about $200 in Mexican pesos, a few bus ticket stubs, and a prayer card for Pope Benedict. His body was transported to the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner (PCOME), where forensic investigators, pathologists, and anthropologists began the work of trying to identify him. During their examination, a Honduran identification card was found in the man’s shoes.

Nearly two months passed with no leads on this man’s identity. Then, in August, a woman called to report her brother, Miguel, missing. A volunteer took the missing person’s report. Miguel’s full name matched the name on the Honduran ID card. Miguel also was reported to have a tattoo—a homemade letter M on one of his forearms. Although the external examination, autopsy, and forensic anthropology examination had all been completed, there was no note of a tattoo. To see if there was indeed a tattoo on the body, investigators used infrared photography to photograph the highly decomposed flesh of the arms of the unknown man. The photographs revealed what could not be seen with the human eye—a light, hand-drawn letter M on the right forearm. The unknown remains were identified as Miguel’s.

Miguel had lived and worked in the United States for decades. He was a gardener. In the spring of 2010, he was apprehended by ICE after being pulled over for speeding, and was deported to Honduras. Shortly after, in the summer of that year, Miguel hired a coyote to guide him across the Arizona desert. He was desperate to get back to his family and his job. He attempted the crossing in June, one of the hottest months of the year in the Sonoran Desert, when temperatures regularly reach into the triple digits.

When the volunteer called to notify Miguel’s sister that he had died in the desert from heatstroke, she wept and expressed confusion. “How could someone die just from walking? He was a gardener; he was used to being in the sun. I think someone murdered him,” she said. The volunteer assured her that there were no signs of trauma, and explained that, sadly, hundreds of people die each year attempting to cross the border through Arizona. The volunteer then explained the next steps: the family would need to choose a funeral home, and then have the funeral home contact the medical examiner’s office to arrange to pick up Miguel’s remains.

About a week later, the volunteer got to her desk one morning and noticed that her voicemail box was full—twenty-eight messages. They were all from Miguel’s family, who were distraught, confused, and angry. The family had been calling from the funeral home, where they had just seen Miguel’s remains. They were convinced that they had been deceived about the cause of death, because the body they were looking at was a horrifying sight—a blackened, decomposed, headless corpse whose hands had been cut off. Clearly, they said, Miguel had been murdered.

Although the official manner of death was accidental, not homicide, they were right. Miguel had been murdered by the U.S. federal government, using the Sonoran Desert as a weapon, and his body showed the signs of this violence.

INTRODUCTION

What happened to Miguel and his family was a complicated injustice, with layers of violence occurring along a protracted timeline. First, Miguel had likely been racially profiled by police. He was then deported to a country he hadn’t called home in more than 20 years, which separated him from his small children and his only means of income. Then, in an attempt to get home, Miguel had followed the path created for Latin American workers by decades of U.S. immigration and border policy, which cuts through remote regions of the Sonoran Desert. The desert conditions and arid heat took its toll, and Miguel died from exposure to the elements. His body was not found for several weeks because of the isolated area where he had been traveling. By the time Miguel was found, his body had endured the same brutality of the desert conditions that had killed him.

On arrival to the medical examiner’s office, Miguel’s body was unrecognizable due to decomposition, and would require special examination techniques for there to be any hope of finding his family. During autopsy, his inner organs and brain had been removed for examination. During the forensic anthropology examination, his skull had been detached, along with portions of his pubic bones. His body was so decomposed and desiccated that investigators had to cut off his hands so that his fingers could be rehydrated for fingerprinting. When his family finally saw his remains, they were looking at the effects of violence, but they were also looking at attempts to care for Miguel and his family.

The volunteer who had first taken the missing person report for Miguel, who had then called his sister when his remains were identified, and who had heard the distressed voices of the family when they were looking at what was left of his body, was in some ways ill-equipped to handle the situation. She was young, she was in over her head, and she was scared. That volunteer was me.

At the time, I was a graduate student in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. The same semester I started graduate school, in the fall of 2006, I began interning and volunteering under the guidance of Dr. Bruce Anderson, forensic anthropologist at the PCOME. I was interested in the ways that a cultural anthropologist might be able to support the work of forensic anthropologists, and Dr. Anderson was eager to have my help. At the time, Dr. Anderson was examining about 150 cases per year—far more than any other single forensic anthropologist in the nation, likely in the world. On top of this, he was also managing calls from families of the missing. The families were calling the medical examiner’s office directly because they had nowhere else to go. The standard mechanism for reporting and pursuing the investigation of a missing person in the United States is through law enforcement. However, families of missing migrants generally struggle with this system: because they are afraid to contact police for fear of deportation, they do not live in the United States, or they are turned away by law enforcement officials when they try to file a report for a missing foreign national. So they call the medical examiner’s and coroner’s offices along the border directly. When I approached Bruce in 2006, he suggested that I help him with missing person reports, and with speaking to the families—work he had taken on voluntarily despite being already overwhelmed with the caseload.

Gradually, these volunteer efforts grew into a nonprofit, the Colibri Center for Human Rights, which I cofounded in 2013. My graduate research became focused on the social and scientific process of identifying the remains of migrants who had died attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border into Arizona (Reineke 2016). That summer, when on the phone with Miguel’s family, I had cautioned them against opening the body bag. I explained that viewing his remains would be difficult and that I didn’t want them to remember Miguel that way. But when the body bag containing Miguel’s remains arrived at the funeral home, the family wanted to see him. They needed to confirm that it was indeed Miguel, and to understand for themselves what had happened to him. What they saw was evidence of violence, but not the kind they assumed. There is no good language for the kind of violence Miguel’s body had gone through.

From The Border and Its Bodies: The Embodiment of Risk Along the U.S.- México Line, edited by Thomas E. Sheridan and Randall H. McGuire. ©2019 The Arizona Board of Regents.

Open Arizona: Vélez-Ibáñez Reflects on ‘The Chicanos’ Then and Now

December 16, 2019

We’re thrilled to announce the availability of three more Open Access titles available in Open Arizona. To coincide with this release, we have also made available the new essay, “Ourselves Through the Eyes of an Anthropologist: Then and Now,” by Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez.

In this new essay, Vélez-Ibáñez reflects on the origins of The Chicanos: As We See Ourselves, edited by Arnulfo D. Trejo and published by the University of Arizona Press in 1979. Vélez-Ibáñez reflects on contributing to the work, nearly forty years ago, and how his thinking and scholarship has changed since that time.

When The Chicanos was first published Trejo wrote, “We have come a long way, from the time when the Mexicano silently accepted the stereotype drawn of him by the outsider. Our purpose is not to talk to ourselves, but to open a dialogue among all concerned people.”

In the new essay, Vélez-Ibáñez continues the dialogue, inviting us all to consider a transborder cultural citizenship that is hemispheric, inclusive, and beyond borderlines.

Vélez-Ibáñez is Regents’ Professor in the School of Transborder Studies and School of Human Evolution and Social Change, the Motorola Presidential Professor of Neighborhood Revitalization, and founding director emeritus of the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University.

Also Now Available in Open Arizona

Born a Chief: The Nineteenth Century Hopi Boyhood of Edmund Nequatewa
As told to Alfred F. Whiting and Edited by P. David Seaman

Massacre on the Gila: An Account of the Last Major Battle Between American Indian, with Reflections on the Origin of War
Clifton B. Kroeber and Bernard L. Fontana

Grenville Goddwin Among the Western Apache: Letters from the Field
Edited by Morris E. Opler

Science Be Dammed Gaining Media Attention

December 6, 2019

Even though Science Be Dammed was officially released in late November, buzz about the University of Arizona Press book grew months before its pages were printed. After all, in this age of climate catastrophe and growing discussions around water resources throughout the country, a book about how Colorado River policy makers ignored science in favor of growth offers a glimpse of reality folks often suspected was true. The book also offers a path forward, providing a new way to look at allocation and water policy.

The writers, Eric Kuhn and John Fleck, are also getting in front of new policy makers with their book in hand at regional conferences, meetings, and doing interviews on the book. Both authors bring important experience to share–Kuhn worked for the Colorado River Water District for more than four decades; while Fleck, a longtime journalism covering water, is now an academic with the University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program.

Besides getting on two great seasonal reads lists from Outside Magazine and The Revelator, and doing a handful of radio interviews, here are few examples of recent media coverage for Science Be Dammed:

Naveena Sadasivam from independent news outlet Grist, recently wrote a story with a Q&A interview with Kuhn and Fleck.

In 1916, six years before the Colorado River Compact was signed, Eugene Clyde LaRue, a young hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, concluded that the Colorado River’s supplies were “not sufficient to irrigate all the irrigable lands lying within the basin.” Other hydrologists at the agency and researchers studying the issue came to the same conclusion. Alas, their warnings were not heeded.

I caught up with Fleck and Kuhn to learn why LaRue and others were ignored and what history can teach us about the decisions being made on the river today. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Q. When did you both realize that the conventional wisdom about the framers of Colorado River law using bad data was incorrect? Was there an “aha” moment?

A. Fleck: The “aha” moment for me was when I found the transcripts of LaRue’s 1925 congressional testimony, when he said, as clear as could be, that there’s not enough water for this thing they were trying to do. It erased any doubt I had that the reports were too technical and people didn’t really understand them. He was there testifying before Congress, and they just chose to ignore it. None of the senators followed up. They were clearly choosing to willfully ignore what LaRue was saying.

Kuhn: He wasn’t alone. There was USGS hydrologist Herman Stabler, an engineering professor from the University of Arizona, and a very high-level commission appointed by Congress, headed by a famous Army Corps of Engineers’ lieutenant general, and they came to the same conclusion. The surprise to me was how widespread the information was among the experts at the time. There was never even enough water in the system for what we wanted to do before climate change became an issue.

This week, the Tucson Weekly featured Science Be Dammed on their cover, with an author interviews and an excerpt:

Kuhn and Fleck argue in the book that the greatest failure of river management institutions in the 20th century is a lack of plan B in the face of less water. And of course, there is now less water.

“Climate change and many other factors have basically said that there’s no stationarity in the river; we can’t use the last 100 years to predict what’s going to happen in the next 100 years,” Kuhn said. “Now that every drop of water in the river is used, the cushion is gone. And I think that’s one of the messages: You can’t rely on future generations to fix a mess.”

Even if the compact’s framers hadn’t selected the “rosiest scenario possible,” the Southwest’s current 19-year drought would still cause tightening for the Colorado River’s allocations. This has led to updated rules around water use, such as Arizona’s recently ratified Drought Contingency Plan.

“The Drought Contingency Plan is a band-aid, designed to get us through the next five or 10 years. There needs to be a more sustainable, long-term solution,” Kuhn said. “Those Drought Contingency Plans will give us some breathing room, but what the river will look like in 20 years, I think we’ll look back at our Drought Contingency Plan and say, ‘Those were the good days.'”

Fleck and Kuhn are not without hope, however. Not only is science advancing to offer new methods of water conservation, but the populations of many Southwestern cities are living more sustainably as well. For instance, Tucson’s water demand has continually lowered in the past two decades, despite an increase in population. In 2000, Tucson used 133,000 acre feet of water annually; in 2017, it was 110,000; and 104,000 is projected for 2025.

The True History of Navajoland

December 5, 2019

Authors Klara Kelley and Harris Francis have crafted a sweeping history of the Diné that is foregrounded in oral tradition. The authors share Diné history from pre-Columbian time to the present, using ethnographic interviews in which Navajo people reveal their oral histories on key events such as Athabaskan migrations, trading and trails, Diné clans, the Long Walk of 1864, and the struggle to keep their culture alive under colonizers who brought the railroad, coal mining, trading posts, and, finally, climate change. For Diné readers, A Diné History of Navajoland offers empowering histories and stories of Diné cultural sovereignty. “In short,” the authors say, “it may help you to know how you came to be where— and who— you are.”

Below, read an excerpt from Kelley and Francis’ new book, A Diné History of Navajoland.

Of the 145 allotments in the Chambers Checkerboard townships, 56 are canceled or relinquished, but most allotments of the wealthy Silversmith extended family remain intact. Though many of the allottees were children when the allotment applications were first taken (mainly in 1909), those allottees are now adults. Therefore, the 56 relinquishments and cancellations represent about that many households, an estimated 250-300 people.

For allottees, these miseries come on top of Washindoon’s livestock reduction program. So at the very time when Washindoon is telling the People that the reservation lands can only support half the livestock that people own, it is forcing more families with whatever livestock they can salvage onto those same lands.

In 1998 Diné former residents of the Chambers Checkerboard described the miseries of relinquishment (Kelley and Francis 1998b, condensed from the original Navajo).

Consultant 1 (In English)

My mom was born in 1904. When she was about age six, she and her sister went to school at Saint Michaels. They were raised by their grandmother [father’s mother]. And Father [Anselm] came down here, and my mom said a whole group of people were following him around, asking for allotments. So my great-grandmother [who received an allotment] asked for land for my mom and her sister. But the guy who was interpreting for Father refused my great-grandmother’s request because of the interpreter’s relationship with a certain family. So I blame him for why my mom did not get an allotment. And also, I blame her father— he was working on the railroad at the time, he could have requested land. He had two wives, and he liked the other wife better than my mom’s mother. So he pushed my mom and her sister aside.

Before our family was driven off, one man came around to collect the papers— those were the papers with the Teddy Roosevelt signature and the eagle. He said it was for copying, then they would be returned. But my grandma refused to give up the paper. One time at a chapter meeting [probably 1960s], Little Silversmith spoke there, something about getting land for himself. And my mom got up and accused him of not helping when we were all chased off. She said that white people were driving Little Silversmith out now [he seems to have been in debt and was selling to a Bilagaana rancher], but where was he when white people were driving us out?

My mom told me that we left our chickens, our wagons. She went back with my grandfather to our home to get our things, and saw them dumped like trash. Men formed a posse in Springerville, went through Saint Johns, camped someplace between Saint Johns and Sanders. Early in the morning they attacked Diné families around [the spring near the great-grandmother’s allotment], drove them out at gunpoint.

Then, the site where we moved after we were driven out: my dad dug a hole, and we lived there through the winter. Then he built a hogan north of Sanders. First, we went across the [Puerco] river and tried to settle there, then were told to keep moving north, because that was allotted land, go farther north past where the allotments are. So we kept going and we went on land claimed by [certain relatives].

Consultant 2 (In Navajo)

We had many sheep, horses, and cattle. We’d plow the fields and plant a lot, too. We grew a lot of beans, put them in gunny sacks. Someone, I don’t know if they were Bilagaanas, would buy them from us. We also used to live at another place over the hill with my maternal grandparents. There were several lakes where the livestock were watered. We lived in several places…

We would hear people say that we pay for the land [taxes or railroad lease payments]. And one day we were told to move out toward the railroad [north]. They had been saying this to us for a few years now. There was a man named Big Schoolboy, who went around with the Bilagaanas and told everyone to move out. He said that if we didn’t move, they would take us back to Fort Sumner. They all carried guns. We were afraid they might shoot us all.

This was two years after my mother died that they told us to move. My father had to take care of us children then. So we moved out. We put only a sewing machine and other little things in a wagon and left. We left with our sheep, many horses, the rams, and the cows. We just left with our clothes and went to a place called Graywater [about 10 miles away]. The horses were tired out by that time, but there was no grass, only a pond.

When we got the horses back [after the eviction], they were starved almost to death. There was sand sage, silvery sage, wormwood there. We got only 20 horses back— the others died— and never found the cattle. We took some cows with us when we left, but we left a lot there. The sheep we took, but we lost a lot of them too, some to thirst and starvation. We survived on the sheep but our horses died, even the one we used for the wagons. We barely got water. We had to use bottles. We had a very hard time. Then my maternal grandfather became ill. His kidneys wouldn’t work, so they had to carry him around a lot. I don’t know how many years it was, but he passed away too.

When we left our home, my little sister and I would go back to pick up some of our belongings now and then. We noticed that they [the Bilagaanas] had pushed our wagons off a cliff and they were all smashed up at the bottom. We had a small wagon, a big wagon, different types, also a well down there. They shot it up, too. We don’t know where they took our personal belongings and our clothes or what they did with them. They were all gone.

We barely bought this [current homesite] from a lady [a tract next to her father’s lieu allotment]. They used to live over there at the railroad. We got a wagon too that we used to get water with. She gave us some horses that we traded some sheep for. That’s what we used to get water.

So we came out here. My grandmother was herding them at Graywater [about eight miles away]. We’d run out of water, our only water source was at [a spring away from the homesite]. We’d get water at night, fill the barrel and bring it back. Me, I’d cut logs at Graywater, and I’d bring them back here. That’s how we built a house.

We had no water, but there used to be Bilagaanas who lived around here but they moved out. They used to have windmills here and there, so we asked one to take a windmill out for us. I traded some sheep for it, and they came here and installed a windmill. We settled here permanently after that. We had to herd rams for people, and they would give us a few sheep for it, and eventually we managed to fill our corral again.

People of the Press Round-up

December 2, 2019

Our People of the Press feature is wrapping up. Inspired by the Association of University Presses celebration of the people of AUPresses, we’ve so enjoyed celebrating the people who work behind the scenes to help our authors share their amazing works! Learn more about us:

Kathryn Conrad, Director
“I sometimes joke that my job as Director is to attend meetings and sign my name. But what I love most is finding partnerships with colleagues on campus and in the community.”
Read more

Julia Balestracci, Assistant to the Director and Rights Manager
“I have learned that there is a growing commitment out there in the world at large to showcasing diverse voices and perspectives. Increasingly, based on the requests I receive, I see a move to expand diversity in school curriculum at all levels.”
Read more

Kristen Buckles, Editor-In-Chief
“The old cliché about learning something new everyday is so apt here. It’s the nature of our work: we are all learning about the world we live in (and beyond!) through our daily engagement with the book content.”
Read more

Scott De Herrera, Assistant Editor
“I am responsible for acquiring titles in poetry and fiction for the Press’s two award-winning literary series, Sun Tracks and Camino del Sol. I also work closely with our Senior Editor, Dr. Allyson Carter, to bring in new titles in anthropology, Indigenous studies, archaeology, environmental science, and space science.”
Read more


Stacey Wujcik, Editorial Assistant
“It seems like I’m learning something new all the time. I’m still relatively new to Tucson, and I’ve certainly learned a lot about this region through my work at the Press. My work here also continually reinforces how important it is to read works by authors from different backgrounds who have different experiences and perspectives.”
Read more

Amanda Krause, Editorial, Design, and Production Manager
“I help shepherd books through the Editorial, Design, and Production process, answering author queries; working with freelance copyeditors, proofreaders, and indexers and print vendors; maintaining our house style guide; and managing the schedules for book production to make sure books are published (and reprinted) on time.”
Read more

Leigh McDonald, Art Director and Book Designer
“Everybody loves books, but not many people think about the work that goes into them behind the scenes! Everything you see when you pick up a book, from the choice of paper stock and color to the font, margins, image placement…everything but the content was a decision made by someone like me.”
Learn more

Sara Thaxton, Production Coordinator
“Typesetters think in an entirely different numbering system than most people. We go by picas/points and in multiples of 12s rather than 10s. We’re also probably the least-visible cog in the book publishing machine, but we’re always very proud of every book we create! Also, e-books are harder to make than they look!”
Learn more

Abby Mogollon, Marketing Manager
“So much of book publishing is invisible. It takes a great partnership between the press and the author to spread the word about a book, and a lot of thought and planning is happening behind the scenes.”
Learn more

Mari Herreras, Publicity Manager
“I think I’ve always known this, but see it more clearly now—that there’s more to the story then what’s written in each book published by the Press. Each book comes with the author’s own unique story about their life, their world, their research, and how they decided this one book needed to be published.”
Learn more

Savannah Hicks, Marketing Assistant
“Even though a lot of our presence appears to be digital, I’m happy to say that some of the most meaningful and joyful interactions in publishing still happen face-to-face.”
Learn more





2019 American Anthropological Association Meeting Recap

November 26, 2019

Last week, we attended the American Anthropological Association conference in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. It was a wonderful conference, and we can’t wait for next year’s meeting in St. Louis, Missouri. We were thrilled to catch up with so many of our authors! Below, find some photos we snapped at the conference.

Andrew Flachs posing with his new book, Cultivating Knowledge.
Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez with two of his books, Hegemonies of Language and Their Discontents and The U.S.-Mexico Transborder Region.
Christina Getrich with a poster for her book, Border Brokers, which is now available in paperback!
Bianet Castellanos with her new book, Detours.
Tom Sheridan and Randall McGuire with a poster for their new book, The Border and It’s Bodies.
Anthony Webster with his book, Intimate Grammars.
Jeremy Slack with his University of Arizona Press book, The Shadow of the Wall.
Virginia Nazarea with one of her books, Seeds of Resistance, Seeds of Hope.
University of Arizona Press Senior Editor Allyson Carter with author Tevita Ka’ili.
Jenny Davis with her book, Talking Indian, which is now available in paperback!
Luis Plascencia with his book, Mexican Workers and the Making of Arizona.
Anton Daughters with his new book, Memories of Earth and Sea.
The beautiful view from across the Vancouver Convention Center.

People of the Press: Stacey Wujcik

November 20, 2019

People of the Press is back this week! Inspired by the Association of University Presses celebration of the people of AUPresses, we would also like to celebrate our dedicated publishing professionals throughout our 60th anniversary year.

Today we’re featuring our Editorial Assistant Stacey Wujcik.

Hello Stacey, what do you do for the Press?

As the editorial assistant in the acquisitions department, I help the Press’s acquiring editors send manuscripts out for peer review. I also work with authors to help them finalize and submit their final manuscript files (including images and permissions) to our production team.

How long have you worked at UA Press?

Just over three years.

The University of Arizona Press is committed to helping contribute to an informed society and enlightening readers. What’s one thing you’ve learned from your work?

This question is so hard to answer; because we publish books in many subject areas, it seems like I’m learning something new all the time. I’m still relatively new to Tucson, and I’ve certainly learned a lot about this region through my work at the Press. My work here also continually reinforces how important it is to read works by authors from different backgrounds who have different experiences and perspectives. Each new project is a reminder that there is always more to learn!

What would people be surprised to learn about your work?

I think readers who are unfamiliar with the process of publishing with a university press would be surprised by how rigorous the peer-review process is. Each manuscript we consider for publication is first reviewed by scholars in the author’s field. This is not only a way for the Press to understand the work’s contribution but also an opportunity for the author to get valuable feedback as they complete their manuscript. Peer review is one of the things that differentiates university presses from commercial publishers.

Tucson has a thriving literary and scholarly community. What’s one of your favorite spots to hear authors, find a good book, or just curl up and read?

I like to shop for books at Antigone, and I’m always finding great books at the Pima County Library—I can never leave with just one! My favorite place to read is on my patio with a cup of coffee and my dog nearby.  

Indigenous Inclusion and Change in Urban Mexico

November 19, 2019

In the fall of 2018, popular culture both south and north of the border had all eyes on Mixtec actress Yalitza Aparicio, the star of Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma. Debates raged on a spectrum of issues, from the movie industry’s ongoing whiteness to the fragility of the autobiographical nature of the film, which is based on the director’s own lifelong relationship with Libo Rodríguez, a woman of Indigenous descent who was employed by his family. Accolades for and criticisms of the storyline took many twists and turns in Latinx social media circles and across demographics in Mexico. But missing from sight of much of these debates was the celebratory way in which young Indigenous women were engaging the newfound fame of Yalitza Aparicio. Her multiple magazine covers and photo shoots circulated lovingly across the Facebook accounts of female Wixarika university students. Aparicio’s global platform spurred conversations about decolonizing beauty standards and the need to speak to the lives of Indigenous domestic workers who sustain much of Mexico’s urban fabric. Aparicio’s own trajectory includes being an educator prior to becoming a celebrity; offering another point of identification that Indigenous women students and professionals pointed to in social media. Young Wixarika women read this moment in popular culture from a place of deep identification and joy that the broader public might finally be breaking with stereotypes that fix their bodies, cultures and political practices to othered rural spaces.

Had the constant struggle for recognition finally turned a page?

In my book, Racial Alterity, Wixarika Youth Activism, and the Right to the Mexican City, I survey Mexico’s long history of engagement with race, ethnicity and space. I do so by centering the experiences and praxis of Wixarika university students and young professionals living in the western cities of Guadalajara and Tepic. What is most moving about representing these stories, is that the majority of the Wixarika protagonists of this work have continued to make exceptional strides forward and many have gained visible platforms in local and regional political, educational, and cultural bodies. From directing state human rights commissions to speaking at international conferences, the cohort of university students and professionals who informed this book, seemingly represent the vanguard of coming generations of Indigenous university students. This vanguard has worked to open spaces in university classrooms, tribunals, medical institutions, government, and in the arts and culture. In sum, Wixarika university students and professionals, like their peers from other Indigenous groups, represent both rootedness and heterogeneity in the pathways they are using to transform themselves and their communities.

Photo by Diana Negrin

This apparent ascension and gained visibility has not occurred without numerous and constant struggles. The principal one remains how to challenge racist practices that shape the policies geared toward Indigenous populations and that shape everyday interracial relations both in urban and rural Mexico. The national and global gaze placed on Indigenous peoples and the consumption of folkloric aspects of their cultures remains a central marker of Mexicanness. For Wixarika peoples, this gaze and consumption has boomed in the past twenty years, as they see themselves being a favored ethnic face for both public and private marketing initiatives. Ironically, at the same time that Wixarika aesthetics are celebrated, commissioned and appropriated, the sacred lands that sustain their celebrated ancestral traditions are threatened by transnational corporate interests that include agroindustry, mining, and tourism.

My hope is that this book contributes to the dialogue surrounding how enduring racial imaginaries, stigmas, ambivalences and hostilities are negotiated and contested by young Indigenous peoples who envision themselves as a new vanguard movement for political economic, social and culture transformation. 

Diana Negrín
University of San Francisco
Wixárika Research Center
November 6, 2019

Diana Negrín is a native of Guadalajara, Jalisco, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Negrín received her doctorate from the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley; she is a professor at the University of San Francisco and president of the Board of Directors of the Wixarika Research Center.

Rodriguez Revisits 1979 Incident at Yolqui Book Release Celebration

November 18, 2019

More than sixty people came together in the University of Arizona Bookstore on Thursday, November 7 to listen to Roberto Rodriguez talk about his latest book, Yolqui, a Warrior Summoned from the Spirit World, Testimonios on Violence.

The evening began with music from Miroslava Alejandra accompanied by guitar. Alejandra’s performance included a La Llorona song that incorporated a prayer printed in Yolqui and relayed to Rodriguez by Los Angeles elder Ofelia Esparza. Esparaza also attended the book release celebration, opening the event with a ceremony and prayer.

The prayer in the book, according to Esparza, was recited as a blessing over children during different times state violence worried mother’s hearts–an eternity. Esparza blessed her children reciting this prayer any time they headed out of the house.

Virgin of Guadalupe,
I leave my son in your hands,
The Sleepy Lagoon Case, Zoot Suits, and Fingertips 47
Protect him from the police
and from those who are always looking for
someone to beat on.
My son, be careful.
Do not look at the police.
Do not ever look them in the eye.
If they call out to you
or if they question you
do not respond to them forcefully.
Always obey them.
Dear God, please take care of my son.

Following the prayer, University of Arizona’s Dr. Patrisia Gonzales read the poignant and meaningful forward she wrote for the book:

“As one of you who has helped call back our fires from the traumatic pasts,
I know the resonance of justice: the impulse of the universe is more powerful than violence; in the long arc of time, our spiritual laws are more powerful than oppression. And in that flux of life that gives potential to all is love, love for life, love for each other, love for Great Good, love that makes revolutions around the suffering, so that we may continue—and undo this present of the future. For yolqui, we are not yet a spirit,” Gonzales read.

Roberto Rodriguez with contributors Arianna Martinez, Juvenal Caporale, and Michelle Rascon-Canales.

Joined by three of the 18 contributors to the book, Juvenal Caporale, Michelle Rascon-Canales, and Arianna Martinez, Rodriguez explained the history of this new book while a slideshow of victims of state violence hung above, showing faces like Ruben Salazar and Sandra Bland.

Signing book for students and friends.

Roberto Rodriguez, also called Dr. Cintli by his students and colleagues, has been at the University of Arizona for almost eighteen years. During that time he has stood by students traversing difficult challenges, such as the Mexican American Studies battle between the State and Tucson Unified School District. However, through those years and others, Rodriguez has only talked about what happened to him forty years ago on the periphery of his life–writing articles and stories on state violence against Red, Brown, and Black people and communities, and other social justice issues.

Rarely has he brought up his own experience of being severely beaten by a group of Los Angeles County deputies in retaliation for photographing a vicious beating in East Los Angeles by a different group of deputies. The trauma of that violence has followed him every day since often making it difficult to return to that night, especially in public settings.

To ease the difficulty of the evening and discussion, Tania Pacheco led the crowd in a guided meditation. During the book signing, Rodriguez was surrounded by a group carrying backpacks on their shoulders asking him questions. With pen in his hand, Rodriguez often looked up at the faces around him with a wide smile–his students.

A guided meditation ended the book celebration.

Aloha from ASA 2019

November 13, 2019

On November 7-10, our Editor-in-Chief Kristen Buckles attended the annual American Studies Association meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii! This year’s theme was “Build as We Fight,” which opened up many valuable conversations about colonialism. Below, find some photos of our wonderful authors with their University of Arizona Press books.

Duchess Harris with her new book, Black Girl Magic Beyond the Hashtag.
Marquis Bey with his Feminist Wire Series book Them Goon Rules.
Norma Cantú and Kristen Buckles with Norma’s new poetry collection, Meditación Fronteriza.
Bianet Castellanos with her new book, Detours.
Judy Rohrer and Georgia Kasnetsis Acevedo with Kristen Buckles and her University of Arizona Press book, Staking Claim.

People of the Press: Julia Balestracci

November 12, 2019

People of the Press is back this week! Inspired by the Association of University Presses celebration of the people of AUPresses, we would also like to celebrate our dedicated publishing professionals throughout our 60th anniversary year.

Today we’re featuring our Rights Manager and Assistant to the Director, Julia Balestracci.

Hello Julia, what do you do for the Press?

I’m the Rights Manager and also the Assistant to the Director, Kathryn Conrad.

I handle all permissions and all other sub-rights requests, input and manage author royalties, and draft and manage contracts.  I also do a lot of scheduling and coordinating for Kathryn and the Press as a whole. We are busy!

How long have you worked at UA Press?

It’s hard for me to believe, but I’ve worked at the Press since 2012.

The University of Arizona Press is committed to helping contribute to an informed society and enlightening readers. What’s one thing you’ve learned from your work?

I have learned that there is a growing commitment out there in the world at large to showcasing diverse voices and perspectives. Some of our most oft-licensed material was written by authors with disabilities, marginalized voices, and unique cultural perspectives. Increasingly, based on the requests I receive, I see a move to expand diversity in school curriculum at all levels.

What would people be surprised to learn about your work?

I think that people would be surprised to know the breadth of requests we get for re-use of material from our books. In addition to more standard requests for republication, we get requests for inclusion of author material in podcasts, various websites, radio shows, national newspapers, dissertations, plays, musical compositions, national and international museum exhibitions, public art installations, the ACT and AP tests, and the list goes on. Just this past year alone, our publications in whole or in part have been translated into Spanish, Czech, Mandarin, Korean, Swedish and Norwegian. I feel my work is constantly contextualizing the meaning and deep resonance of our authors’ scholarship in connection with the wider world.

Tucson has a thriving literary and scholarly community. What’s one of your favorite spots to hear authors, find a good book, or just curl up and read?

I’m an avid thrifter and a lover of vintage books (especially children’s books), so I love combing through a book section whenever I’m at one of the many thrifts in town, never knowing what I might come across. One of my all-time favorite finds is a copy of Frog and Toad Are Friends, inscribed and signed by Arnold Lobel, with a hand-drawn sketch of toad! For local bookstores, Antigone can’t be beat. I’m not picky when it comes to finding a spot to curl up and read; with two kids and a busy life full of interruptions, I’ll take any quiet and undisturbed moment I can get, irrespective of location!

People of the Press: Kristen Buckles

November 6, 2019

People of the Press is back this week! Inspired by the Association of University Presses celebration of the people of AUPresses, we would also like to celebrate our dedicated publishing professionals throughout our 60th anniversary year.

Today we’re featuring our Editor-In-Chief Kristen Buckles.

Hello Kristen, what do you do for the Press?

I am the editor-in-chief and an acquisitions editor. This means that I oversee the editorial program while also bringing in book projects. The acquisition areas I work on are history, Latinx studies, Native American and Indigenous studies, border studies, and the Southwest. University of Arizona Press books are largely about the Americas, but many of our titles in Native American and Indigenous studies and anthropology extend to topics across the globe. In the case for our space science list, it’s beyond!

How long have you worked at UA Press?

I have been here for fifteen years. I started in 2004 as the director’s assistant and moved into to the acquisitions department a couple of years after that. The Press is truly a second home for me. I love working here.

The University of Arizona Press is committed to helping contribute to an informed society and enlightening readers. What’s one thing you’ve learned from your work?

The old cliché about learning something new everyday is so apt here. It’s the nature of our work: we are all learning about the world we live in (and beyond!) through our daily engagement with the book content. So going back to the question, specifying one thing would be impossible! In general, though, by working on University of Arizona Press books for the last fifteen years, I would say I am much more aware of the complex history of the Americas and the challenges we face today, particularly in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands where the Press is located. I have also come to really appreciate the value of poetry and creative expression as a means to raise awareness of complex issues. Here are two great examples: Poetry of Resistance and Iep Jaltok.

What would people be surprised to learn about your work?

University presses in general rely heavily on peer review to develop projects and make editorial decisions. Rigorous peer review is foundational to university press publishing, and as such, everything that has a University of Arizona Press imprint has gone through an external peer-review process before acceptance, including our poetry, creative works, and others.

Tucson has a thriving literary and scholarly community. What’s one of your favorite spots to hear authors, find a good book, or just curl up and read?

I love going to readings at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. And every single bookstore in Tucson—from the UA Bookstore to the Barnes and Nobles to Bookman’s, Antigone, and the indies—is my favorite spot to find a good book. Tucson is a place for readers; just come to the Tucson Festival of Books to see! As for my favorite place to curl up and read: a weekend morning at home, smell of coffee in the background, completely quiet except for morning birdsong and a snoring spaniel by my side.

An Excerpt from Yolqui, A Warrior Summoned From the Spirit World by Roberto Cintli Rodriguez

November 5, 2019

In Nahuatl yolqui is the idea of a warrior brought back from the dead. For University of Arizona associate professor Roberto Cinctli Rodríquez, it describes his own experience one night in March 1979 after a brutal beating at the hands of L.A. sheriffs.

In his new University of Arizona Press book, Yolqui, a Warrior Summoned from the Spirit World: Testimonios on Violence, Rodriguez revisits that day and brings forward contributors who offer their own important and timely testimonios on state violence.

Here is an excerpt from the Preface of the book, which goes further on to explain how Rodriguez chose Yolqui as the title of the book:

Sometime close to midnight on March 23, 1979, on Whittier Boulevard and McDonnell Avenue in East Los Angeles, California, I died. On March 24, 1979, at a little past midnight, I willed myself back to life on that cold and bloody intersection.

I did not actually die, but I was killed that night: attacked, then beaten over and over again with riot sticks wielded by at least four members of the Special Enforcement Bureau, an elite tactical unit of the Los Angeles County Sheriff ’s Department, who struck my body and head repeatedly with their sticks until my skull fractured and my blood pooled in the street.

To the average person, that statement may not make any sense; for many years it didn’t make sense to me, either, until one night the explanation came to me in a dream. But it would be many more years before I was able to comprehend its message.

Hopefully, what I write here will explain both the above statements and how I came upon the title Yolqui for my memoir/testimonio.


In the middle of a cornfield in Huitzilac, Morelos, Mexico, I am given aguamiel, the juice of the maguey plant, to drink. That night, presumably, it prompts a dream.

I am hovering above a sprawled body.

Suddenly, I realize that the body is mine.

My spirit and my consciousness are outside of my body.

But how can this be possible? How can I be here, looking down at my own body?

I observe my bloodied body sprawled on the ground below me. I know it is me because those are my pants, my jacket, my hair.

I am not struggling. I am not moving. I am lifeless. A cold realization sets in, but it doesn’t make sense.

If my spirit and my consciousness are outside of my body, what does this mean?

I know I am not awake. This must be a dream. How else could this be happening?

The only other explanation is that I am no longer alive . . . that I am dead. No. This must be a mistake. There must be another explanation. I’m not going anywhere—I’m not ready to go!

At that, I am startled awake. I am in shock, trying to understand what I just saw.

For the past twenty years I’ve not had any dreams nor nightmares; either I
was not dreaming, or I was unable to remember my dreams. Either way, something changed that day in the cornfield, and that night I finally had a dream that I could remember. I was very disturbed by the dream, knowing full well there was meaning attached to it.

In the dream I’d been conscious of observing myself. It was the night of March 23–24, 1979, in East L.A., the night I was assaulted while photographing the brutal beating of a young man on Whittier Boulevard. Once I understood what I was looking at and where I was, my mind forced me to wake up.

That long-ago night resulted in my being arrested and charged with attempting to kill the four deputies who almost took my life. It took nine months to win that trial and another seven years to win the lawsuit I filed against those same deputies and the Los Angeles County Sheriff ’s Department.

Even as I write this, I realize that something else happened to me all those years ago, beyond the constant harassment and death threats, beyond having to live in fear and operating on survival instincts. Something was taken from me that night in 1979: the trauma to my brain and skull also had a long-term impact on my ability to process my thoughts in the dreamworld. I lost the ability to recall my dreams. A psychologist could probably comment about that; I know our ability to dream is a critical part of what makes us human. Dreams permit us to process our thoughts, our emotions, and our experiences, and dreams are what connect us to that other world. That was taken from me that weekend. Many Indigenous healers whom I am close to believe that our dream state is as important, if not more so, as our awakened state, and most view the inability to dream as unhealthy. I am also conscious as I write this that I am providing a psychological portrait of my mind and my spirit some forty years after that night in 1979 in East Los Angeles.

What was the meaning of the dream I had in Huitzilac? At the time, I was unsure, and that was disconcerting. In subsequent days, I internalized the idea that I had died that night in East L.A. Was that a nightmare, or was it a memory of what had happened to me that weekend? Regardless, I realized I had become a spirit walking outside of my body.

Sometime later, when I was living in San Antonio, Texas, I discussed that disturbing dream with a good friend, Enrique Maestas, who is also an Azteca/Mexica danzante. I told him I remembered having had recurring bouts of fear between 1979 and 1986, fear that I was going to be killed. “The dream is nothing to worry about,” Enrique told me.

All warriors have to die.

Okay. I got that. I now understand that I died on March 23, 1979, and on March 24, 1979, I was resuscitated. But why?

So that as warriors, we can come back and fight again.

Perhaps that was the answer I was looking for, though Enrique’s explanation did not sink in right away.


Roberto Cintli Rodríguez is an associate professor in the Department of Mexican American Studies at the University of Arizona. He writes for Truthout’s Public Intellectual Page and is a longtime award-winning journalist, columnist, and author. His first book with the UA Press is Sacred Maíz Is Our Mother: Indigeneity and Belonging in the Americas.

Read. Think. Act.

November 4, 2019

This week, November 3 through 9, is University Press Week. UP Week, as we call it, has its roots in a 1978 proclamation by President Jimmy Carter “in recognition of the impact, both here and abroad, of American university presses on culture and scholarship.” It has grown into a worldwide celebration.

This year our theme for UP Week speaks to the current moment: “Read. Think. Act.” Citizens around the globe are engaging in important debates that will influence vital decision-making in the months ahead. University presses offer the latest peer-reviewed research on issues that affect our present and future. By reading widely about politics, economics, climate science, race relations, and more, we can all better understand these complex issues and appreciate university presses’ important contributions to our world.

UA Press Director Kathryn Conrad

From the University of Arizona Press alone you can find books to better understand the fires raging in California, like Stephen Pyne’s California: A Fire Survey, or to go beyond pundits’ sound bites to explore the very human issue of immigration through books like The Border and Its Bodies.  Science Be Dammed offers a cautionary narrative in the age of climate change about the risks of ignoring scientific research and Yolqui offers a deeply personal meditation on the culture of violence against Red-Black-Brown communities in the United States.

And we are just one of the Association of University Presses’ 151-member presses, which together publish more than 13,000 books each year—books that advance knowledge and encourage thoughtful action. You can learn more about our work as it’s celebrated during University Press Week—and download a copy of our “Read. Think. Act. Reading List”—at universitypressweek.org.

—Kathryn Conrad, UA Press Director

Conrad currently serves as the President of the Association of American University Presses board of directors. Listen to Conrad explain more about UP Week in a podcast interview she did recently with New Books Network:

Yvette Saavedra Awarded the WHA-Huntington Library Martin Ridge Fellowship

October 29, 2019

In recognition of Martin Ridge’s long service to both the Western History Association and The Huntington Library, the WHA-Huntington Library Martin Ridge Fellowship is a one-month research fellowship at The Huntington Library. The 2019 winner of the fellowship is University of Arizona Press author, Yvette Saavedra.

Yvette Saavedra’s recent book, Pasadena Before the Roses, examines a period of 120 years to illustrate the interconnectedness of power, ideas of land use, and the negotiation of identity within multiple colonial moments. By centering the San Gabriel Mission lands as the region’s economic, social, and cultural foundation, she shows how Indigenous, Spanish, Mexican, and American groups each have redefined the meanings of land use to build their homes and their lives. These visions have resulted in competing colonialisms that framed the racial, ethnic, gender, and class hierarchies of their respective societies.

Congratulations, Yvette, on receiving this honor!

Laura Da’ Wins 2019 Washington Book Award

October 29, 2019

Poet Laura Da’ is the winner of the 2019 Washington Book Award poetry category, for her UA Press collection Instruments of the True Measure! The Seattle Review of Books writes, “This year’s list of nominees was the finest in recent memory; the judges must have been under tremendous pressure to select a single winner from each category. It really, truly was an honor just to be nominated this year, because it placed you in company with the best authors this state has to offer.

In Instruments of the True Measure, Da’ 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. Shawnee history informs the collection, and Da’s fascination with uncovering and recovering brings the reader deeper into the narrative of Shawnee homeland.

Below, read an excerpt from an interview with Laura Da’ from the Seattle Review of Books:

“‘I think that I’ve always been well connected in the indigenous poetry community,’ Da’ says, ‘because I started my education at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and there are so many writers who have come out of that school. It’s a tight, small community generally speaking, though it’s incredibly vast in terms of talent and experience.’ She felt a part of that community almost immediately.

But even though she was born and raised in Snoqualmie Valley, and lived most of her life in western Washington, breaking into this city’s poetry community took more work. ‘Seattle is not easy to get in the door, I think, which is really unfortunate,’ Da’ says. She says Seattle’s literary community has a fair share of ‘gatekeepers’ who aren’t especially good at making new voices feel welcome.

But then ‘I was a Jack Straw fellow and a Hugo House fellow and that really helped me,’ Da’ says. What was it about those two programs that worked for her? ‘I met a lot of wonderful writers and good friends. I’m fairy introverted and shy, so usually I need an extrovert to sort of adopt me. And that was the way I found a place in the Seattle poetry community.’

The poets who influence Da’ range widely in terms of style and background. Da’ gushes over poems by Danez Smith, Natalie Diaz, Sherwin Bitsui, and Casandra Lopez. She speaks of Arthur Sze’s ‘respect for the reader and the reader’s ability to handle the ambiguity of the unanswered.’

Da’ is so enthusiastic about Sze’s writing that she doesn’t seem to realize that she could just as easily be describing her own work— these elegant couplets crafted from the smallest and most delicate materials, but which only grow finer with age.

Read the entire interview here.

Congratulations on winning this incredible award, Laura!

People of the Press: Sara Thaxton

October 28, 2019

People of the Press is back this week! Inspired by the Association of University Presses celebration of the people of AUPresses, we would also like to celebrate our dedicated publishing professionals throughout our 60th anniversary year.

Today we’re featuring our production coordinator, Sara Thaxton.

Hello Sara, what do you do for the Press?

Short version: I talk/cry a lot about e-books, and I magically transform Word files from chaos to order.

Long version: I’m the Book Production Coordinator which encompasses several things. I typeset two-thirds of our front-list titles, adapting our template designs to blend well with the cover design. I love working on books with lots of tables! I also assist with all of our backlist reprints and ushering those off to printers. The area other than typesetting I’m most proud of is our e-books: I finagle all of our front-list titles into e-pub format, thanks to our XML-first workflow.

How long have you worked at UA Press?

Two years in August but I’ve been typesetting since 2005!

The University of Arizona Press is committed to helping contribute to an informed society and enlightening readers. What’s one thing you’ve learned from your work?

I’ve learned that there is a wildflower colloquially known as “bog cheetos” (Polygala lutea L., orange milkwort) and that Charles Darwin’s daughter waged a one-woman war on a particularly strange-looking mushroom by wandering the forest with a spear.

What would people be surprised to learn about your work?

Typesetters think in an entirely different numbering system than most people. We go by picas/points and in multiples of 12s rather than 10s. We’re also probably the least-visible cog in the book publishing machine, but we’re always very proud of every book we create! Also, e-books are harder to make than they look!

Tucson has a thriving literary and scholarly community. What’s one of your favorite spots to hear authors, find a good book, or just curl up and read?

When I lived near the north Georgia mountains, I loved being able to sit by the Tallulah River and read during camping trips. I hope to find a similar spot in some of the higher-altitude wilderness surrounding Tucson!

An Excerpt from Postcards from the Chihuahua Border by Daniel D. Arreola

October 23, 2019

In Postcards from the Chihuahua Border, Daniel D. Arreola provides 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 the first half of the twentieth century, when the border towns of Ciudad Juárez, Ojinaga, and Palomas, were framed and made popular through picture postcards. Arreola provides a visual journey through the borderlands neighboring west Texas and New Mexico.

Below, read an excerpt written by Daniel D. Arreola from the introduction of Postcards from the Chihuahua Border.

“Arguably, the Mexico-United States border has been one of the most overlooked places on earth.  We now know, perhaps all too well, that the border is part of political consciousness although not necessarily understood through careful observation or experience and that some want to construct a wall at this boundary where, ironically, one already exists.  Too many of us don’t understand that the borderline itself is a nineteenth-century political agreement while the fence in all its many iterations is a twentieth century phenomenon, or that the first permanent fence along this international boundary between an Arizona town and a Sonora town is just now at this writing a century old.  Even fewer of us recognize the echoes resounding from this borderland that should remind us why the original monuments were planted along the divide without a fence.

Daniel D. Arreola

“The towns of the Chihuahua border, part of the system of cities that dot the Mexican side of the boundary, are the subjects of this book, the third installment in a series of writings about the visual historical geography of these forgotten places.  The purpose of Postcards from the Chihuahua Border as in my previous explorations of the Río Bravo border and the Sonora border is to caste a new eye on an old subject and bring light to a way of seeing the border that has been overlooked.

Looking, it turns out, is not the same as seeing.  We look at the world daily, but seeing the world engages the mind beyond the surficial glance.  In Postcards from the Chihuahua Border, I ask readers to contemplate what geographer Christopher L. Salter said about documents and the geographer’s point of view, to wit, “The cultural landscape—that is, landscape which has been modified and transformed by human action—is the oldest primary document in our possession.” As document, the landscape is worthy of reading, analysis, and understanding.  Unlike a book bound between two covers, the landscape is a leafless palimpsest, a surface partly erased but with relics still visible.  Yet, like a book, a landscape can be read if we ask the right questions. In that spirit, the book you hold in your hands is a kind of testimonial to landscape interpretation but not one limited to written evidence so common to historical investigation.  Rather, the focus of this work is reading and seeing visual representation of landscape as document, especially through the popular postcard both in its photographic and mechanical print forms.

Admittedly, a postcard view of the world is not a common vantage point.  Yet, the postcard is both a literary and visual document that can shed light on cultural understanding.  Anthropologists Patricia Albers and William James suggest that the postcard has largely been overlooked as a document, especially its utility to explore the relationship among photography, ethnicity, and travel.  Their research describes some of the qualitative approaches for using postcards, relates photographic communication in postcards to a wider ideological discourse, and discusses the interplay of ethnic appearance and photographic expression in world tourism. In a similar vein but with enhanced elegance, Rosamond Vaule’s As We Were: American Photographic Postcards, 1905-1930, serves as a model chronicle, informing how postcards are both documentary history and revealing witness to our past lives and places.”

Daniel D. Arreola is a Professor Emeritus in the School of Geographical Science and Urban Planning at Arizona State University. His research focuses on cultural landscapes, place-making, Mexican-American borderlands, and Hispanic/Latino Americans. In 2016 he was presented with the Preston E. James Eminent Latin Americanist Career Award by the Conference of Latin American Geographers.

2019 Western History Association Recap

October 21, 2019

Last week, I attended the Western History Association conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. At this year’s conference, the question framing the Presidential Plenary was, “Does the West matter?” To this, I say yes! The “West” as a region is the rallying call for the best minds in history to gather and present new ideas. And from my perspective from the book room, there was no shortage of dynamic research to be shared at what was the third largest gathering of western historians in the organization’s history.

In the spirit of inclusion and community— “so we can all be together,” in the words of outgoing WHA President Martha A. Sandweiss— this year marked a change in programming, an eschewing of the annual ticketed banquet and opening up the awards ceremony to all. Witnessing the torch-passing from Dr. Sandweiss to new WHA President and longtime University of Arizona Press series editor, David Wrobel, was a highpoint of the conference. Another highpoint: Watching UAP author Yvette Saavedra receive the 2019 WHA Hunting Library Martin Ridge Fellowship. Congratulations, David and Yvette!

Yvette Saavedra with 2019 WHA President Martha Sandweiss. Congratulations to Yvette for receiving the 2019 WHA-Huntington Library Martin Ridge Fellowship.

This year, I had the honor of participating in Thursday morning’s panel on turning a dissertation into a book, organized and chaired by UAP author and series editor, Jeff Shepherd. The panel was fantastic! The room was packed, with a continuous flow of great questions from the audience. It was a joy to have conference-goers swing by the booth throughout the rest of the conference to continue the conversation.

Thank you to all who came to the University of Arizona Press booth this year to browse books and chat about your research. I look forward to seeing everyone in Albuquerque next year!

—Kristen Buckles, Editor in Chief

Flying to sunny Las Vegas for the Western History Association conference, my luck began early in catching a glimpse of the Hoover Dam from 15,000 feet.

Hernandez Interviews Chacón on Kafka in a Skirt

October 18, 2019

Daniel Chacón and Tim Z. Hernandez, both University of Arizona Press authors with titles in the award-winning Camino del Sol series of Latinx poetry and literature, co-host the literary program Words on a Wire on El Paso’s NPR station KTEP. Chacón is a professor of creative writing at the University of Texas, El Paso. Kafka in a Skirt, is Chacón’s first book of short stories with the UA Press. Hernandez spends his time between Fresno and El Paso, where he’s an assistant professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Chacón and Hernandez interview writers and poets regularly for their Words on a Wire series. We thought it would be great to ask Hernandez to turn the interview table a bit. In this interview, Hernandez talks to Chacón about writing, identity, and life:

Hernandez: I’d like to start at the beginning. In one of the first stories that appears in this collection, “The Hidden Order of Things,” you state outright, “This is a work of Chicano Literature.” Why, in this post-millennial reality where it seems many writers of color are trying to steer clear of these labels, is this distinction important to you, and to this specific body of work?

Chacón: In the context of the story I don’t think I am either trying to avoid labels nor am I asserting one. Rather, I am admitting a reality, that no matter what I may want for my book, it will be read by some, perhaps by most, as Chicano and or Latinx literature. In fact, the publisher itself is a Latino literary series, and a very good one. A publisher I deeply respect. And many of the stories in Kafka are specific to the Latinx experience, like the “Fuck Shakespeare” story, or the story “Bien Chicano.” Not all the stories should be classified as Latinx literature, and that’s kind of the idea I’m making fun of. I tell the reader, if you’re reading this book because you’re interested in Chicano literature, then here’s the order you should read the stories. Then I give an alternative Table of Contents to the “official” one. I’m saying this is one of many possibilities on how to read the book.

I think as a Latinx writer, who started out as a Chicano writer, long before the term Latinx was used by anyone, I wanted nothing more than to be read by all people, but immediately my work was put in the category of Chicano literature, whether or not I liked it, whether or not I would’ve chose that label. And I think Latinos are often put in that position. In fact, my collection has been called “magical realism,” which is a term I don’t necessarily embrace, nor have I ever set out to write a magical realist story. However, because I am Latino, and because my work belongs in the category of Chicano literature, if something irrreal happens in my stories, if the reality that I present–and by the way, the reality I live on a daily basis  does not parallel what most people think of as reality–because I’m Latino, it will be labeled magical realism. 

The mystic writer Evelyn Underhill says “Reality is the illusion we share with our neighbors.”  When something happens in my stories that is not concrete, linear reality, I don’t think it’s magical realism at all. I think it’s just another level of reality.

So in that story you’re referring to, “The Secret Order of Things,” I am giving readers suggestions on how to read the book, that is, what order to read the stories, depending on their interests. And I was trying to be funny by suggesting that if all they’re looking for is to read “Chicano literature,” after the list I give them, they don’t have to read the rest of the stories.

Hernandez: You’ve written a total of seven books. Each of them ranging in different topics, settings, characters and situations. Each of them also using a conceptual approach to narrative-making, i.e. loops, wormholes, unending rooms. Kafka in a Skirt is no exception, as it strings together seemingly disparate stories with a few common threads in mind. What is the fascination you have with these concepts? And how does this book differ from the previous books?   

Chacón: I’m not sure it so much as a fascination as it is my reality, that things in my life loop back and forth from the past to the future to the present and even at times into a space-time that I’m not even sure exists in the visible universe.

For example, if I’m walking on the sidewalk and I see a paperclip, and I reach down to grab it, I am not only reaching down in that space-time, but I am also reaching down every single time I have reached down or will reach down, as well as reaching in my mind for imaginary paperclips in the stars. I am invoking the energy of every single time I have/or will have done it. And the source of that energy comes from a fundamental concept that I have about paperclips, how paperclips may hold together the pages of my life, and even though I mean that humorously, there was a time when I was obsessed with paperclips. Perhaps obsessed is too strong of a word, but I was very conscious of paperclips as metaphor. I would walk down the street and notice paperclips, whereas most people wouldn’t, as they would notice things that are filtered through their particular consciousness at that particular time. But each time I encountered a paperclip, it deepened other times I have discussed and or encountered paperclips.

One time at a book festival I was going to give a lecture on parallel universes, the multi-verse, and I had planned on talking about the archetype of paperclips and how it manifests itself in various levels of my sense of reality, and as I approached the building where I was going to give this talk, I opened the door and there on the threshold spread about were about 50 brand new, shiny paperclips. I’m not kidding.

Somehow, somebody had dropped paperclips right there at the entrance, so I scooped them up in my hands, and when I started my talk, I open my hands and I showed them the paper clips, and then I let them fall, sparkling all over the ground. When I explained what I was going to say about paperclips, some people couldn’t believe it. They thought I set it up. But that’s just the way reality is, images loop in and out and deepen the experience of life.

So how could it not be true with the fictional worlds that we create? 

An image can come up in one story, and when that image comes up in another story, it releases the same energy, even if that other story is from an entirely different book. Every image is a wormhole. Wormholes take us to other space-times.

In several of my stories, a tubercular bookseller appears, like in the one called “The And Ne Forhtedon Na.” I don’t know why he continues to appear in my stories, but I know that the image of a bookseller who coughs all over his books is somehow part of the fabric of my reality.

Every collection I have written has a tubercular bookseller, even though the stories are vastly different, and the books different, and I believe each time he appears, he releases energy from the other times he appears, from other stories, from other books, and it creates or helps to contribute to an overall connection in the universe.

As for “how is this book different” from others, I think rather than it being different, it is more of a progression of the other books, a further development of the way I piece together lives.  

I like to think that every book that I write, especially my collection of stories, I get better at it, as I begin to understand what it is I am capable of saying about reality.

Hernandez: The characters in your book are so “normal,” but also really strange in their normalness. I think of the character Bino in your story “F&$% Shakespeare,” who is clearly one example. There is also the vegan couple in “The Barbarians,” who are strange in their own way, because the girlfriend has this highly honed sense of smell and can detect meat odors from miles away. Do you set out to find the “strange” in the normal? Or how do these aspects emerge in your characters?

Chacón: At the risk of quoting The Doors, “people are strange.” I don’t care how normal they appear to the rest of us, people are weird.

Tim, you are a very accomplished man, a responsible father, but you’re weird. You have quirks that I’ve never seen in anybody else.  I remember the late poet Andrés Montoya always exclaimed, at these immense moments of joy about surprises in life, God is weird! And what he meant by that, whether he would articulate it this way or not, is that at times life is so unexpectedly synchronous. You live everydayness and forgot to notice the amazing connectedness of reality. We live these patterns, and it seems like nothing’s going to change, and then suddenly, when we most need it, we find a check in the mail that we didn’t expect, for exactly the amount of money that we needed.

Reality is that way.

God is weird.

And people, metaphorically or literally depending on your perspective, are made in God’s image. And I think that when you have a character and you follow that character’s voice, her language, the weirdness comes out, because it’s what distinguishes them from anybody else. I don’t think you need to seek out weirdness in people, you just need to seek their inner voice, and that will lead you to a much more complex personality than most people might suspect.

But one thing I know for sure, when you are sitting around a table, say a department meeting, say–just as a random example–of the Creative Writing Dept at UTEP, everybody sitting at that table is weird! 

But I don’t think of weird as something negative. I think of weird as a part of our personalities that make us unique.

Hernandez: I know you’ve been interested in Mysticism and angelic systems for some time now, and some of this informs parts of the writing throughout. My question is, How do you feel Mysticism has influenced your work? And, what first turned you on to this particular subject?

Chacón: Every first draft I write is the non-thinking draft.

I don’t seek to write about mysticism. I don’t seek to write about physics. I don’t seek to write about Latinx issues. I just follow the language, or the spirit of the character, and that leads me into the story. But yes, I have been studying mysticism for some time now. And perhaps it effects my writing in how it helps shape how I see reality.

One of the first concepts you will encounter in studying Kabbalah, and this is Kabbalah 101, is that what we experience on a day-to-day basis is only 1% of reality.

99% is beyond some sort of veil, and although most of us get a glimpse beyond that veil, very few can sustain that vision for long, and we return to the banality of everydayness.

One day you could be washing dishes and you look out the window and you see a tree blowing in the wind, a cat curled up on the grass, and you feel the warm, sudsy water on your hands and you feel connected to everything.  You feel a surge of joy or gratitude, and all you’re doing is washing dishes. But the next day, you just have to wash the fricken dishes, and you hate it again. There is no joy.

I study mysticism to understand those higher levels of consciousness that we all experience at one time or another.

I study it because I’m intellectually curious about it. And I know it helps my brain, because studying any new subject creates new neurons.

But then, sometimes, when I’m following language into a story, some mystic concepts may appear, and sometimes I go into them, and other times I don’t, but they are available.

Hernandez: In your story, “The And Ne Forhtedon Na!” you make clear that the gift of desire is desire itself, not the attainment of what is desired. And I feel this can be said about the bulk of your stories in this collection. As a reader, there is a desire to find out where the story is going, because you imbue each story with so much mystery and intrigue, and yet, it really is about the desire itself, isn’t it? Why is this desire factor important to you, enough to base a collection of stories loosely on this concept? 

Chacón: I have a simple equation for character-driven stories:

Basically it means that plot equals character over time, times yearning. Desire is what drives us.

Desire is what gets us up in the morning, that which keeps writers isolated in an empty room for hours and hours, days and years of our lives to write a novel.

Desire, without singularizing it to a particular want, is what makes us human.

On the level of mysticism, the “Source,” the divine, God before image, before we place it on a throne and slap a beard across its face, is pure energy. That energy is desire.  I’m not talking about want. A lot of my characters want things, but beyond the want, is desire, that which makes them human and divine. Desire in us is the same thing that turns the seed into a tree. It makes us want to expand, to grow, to be better, to be the best human being we can be, the best fathers we can be, the best teachers, and of course the best writers.

Hernandez: What can we expect next from you? Will there be more short stories? A novel? Poetry?

Chacón: I’m working on two collections of stories right now, one more suitable for adults and another one, tentatively called Stories for Lucinda, which are stories that I tell my daughter, who at this time is six months old and has become the center of my creative being. 

Saints, Statues, and Stories feted at Tucson Meet Yourself

October 15, 2019

The 46th Tucson Meet Yourself this past weekend was a great way to continue celebrating Saints, Statues, and Stories, a new book by James “Big Jim” Griffith, recently published by the University of Arizona Press. The founder of Tucson Meet Yourself signed copies of his new book to followers eager to read about Griffith’s travels through Sonora, documenting religious art and traditions.

A big thank you to Tucson Meet Yourself for inviting Griffith and providing a space to help promote the book and give readers a chance to talk with the legendary folklorist.

Shortly after the release party at San Xavier Mission del Bac on September 28, Griffith’s book was the featured cover story by Margaret Regan in the October 10th Tucson Weekly. On October 12, another story on Griffith’s new book was published in the Arizona Daily Star by Johanna Eubank.

Keep checking back with us for additional Saints, Statues, and Stories events.

UA Press Authors at the 2019 Texas Book Festival

October 11, 2019

We are excited to announce that several University of Arizona Press authors are participating in the upcoming Texas Book Festival in Austin! On October 26 and 27, over 50,000 book lovers will gather to attend author panels, book signings, cooking demonstrations, and other programs which support learning and literacy. The book festival features 300 authors of the best new books, and while the Texas Book Festival is an important showcase for Texas authors, it also hosts writers from all over the world.

Lara Medina will be participating in the festival and speaking about her new UA Press book, Voices from the Ancestors, which she co-edited with Martha R. Gonzales. This collection offers 85 voices addressing how to live as a spiritually conscious Latinx in these challenging times. The reflections and practices are a return to ancestral wisdoms before colonization and the displacement of Indigenous knowledge. Medina is a professor in Chicana/o Studies at California State University, Northridge.

Norma Elia Cantú will be presenting her new UA Press poetry collection, Meditación Fronteriza, as well as her new novel, Cabañuelas. Norma is co-founder of CantoMundo, a space for Latin@ poets, and belongs to the Macondo Writers workshop. She is also the editor of two book series, and is a Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Trinity University. Meditación Fronteriza unveils unique images that provide nuance and depth to the narrative of the borderlands. The poems are a celebration of culture, tradition, and creativity that navigate themes of love, solidarity, and political transformation.

Odilia Galván Rodríguez, poet-activist, writer, editor, and publisher, is the author of six volumes of poetry. She will be presenting her latest book, The Color of Light, at the Texas Book Festival. Among her publications are the award-winning anthology from UA Press, Poetry of Resistance, co-edited with the late Francisco X. Alarcón.

Sergio Troncoso will be presenting on his latest book, A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son. Among his publications are two UA Press books, From This Wicked Patch of Dust and The Last Tortilla. Sergio has taught at the Yale Writers’ Workshop for many years, and is Vice President of the Texas Institute of Letters.

Jeremy Slack will be participating in the Texas Book Festival with his new book, Deported to Death. Jeremy is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology and Anthropology Department of the University of Texas at El Paso with over 15 years of research along the U.S. Mexico Border. He is co-editor of the UA Press book, The Shadow of the Wall.

The Texas Book Festival is open to the public on Saturday, October 26th from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and on Sunday, October 27th from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. The festival is held in and around the grounds of the State Capitol Building in Austin. If you need more information about how to access the festival, visit here.

Poet Carmen Giménez Smith Is National Book Foundation Finalist

October 9, 2019

The National Book Foundation recently announced the 2019 National Book Award finalists. UA Press author Carmen Giménez Smith is among those selected for poetry.

Giménez Smith’s Be Recorder, published in August by Graywolf Press is the nominated collection. Winners will be announced on Nov. 20.

About Giménez Smith’s last book published with the UA Press, Milk and Filth, a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist:

Giménez Smith’s poetic arsenal includes rapier-sharp wordplay mixed with humor, at times self-deprecating, at others an ironic comment on the postmodern world, all interwoven with imaginative language of unexpected force and surreal beauty. Revealing a long view of gender issues and civil rights, the author presents a clever, comic perspective. Her poems take the reader to unusual places as she uses rhythm, images, and emotion to reveal the narrator’s personality. Deftly blending a variety of tones and styles, Giménez Smith’s poems offer a daring and evocative look at deep cultural issues.

Tucson Shows Up to Celebrate Big Jim’s New Book

The Jarritos were on ice, the pan dulce piled high and not a cloud in the sky as more than 100 people filed into the San Xavier Mission del Bac plaza to celebrate the debut of James “Big Jim” Griffith‘s new book, Saints, Statues, and Stories on Saturday, September 28.

Griffith’s latest from the University of Arizona Press, is a collection of stories on Catholic community traditions from his 60 years of traveling through Sonora. Tradiciones, a local band that performs Andean and Mexican folk music, opened the event and moved many a Griffith fan and friend to dance.

UA Press Director Kathryn Conrad, who welcomed attendees, said the Press is proud to partner with the Southwest Center to publish Griffith’s latest book as part of the Southwest Center series. Thanks also went out to the San Xavier Mission for hosting the event at a location meaningful to Griffith and his wife, Loma Griffith.

Thomas Sheridan and Francisco “Paco” Manzo both spoke about Griffith’s new book and their collaborations with the folklorist. Sheridan, a UA Press author, is a research anthropologist with the Southwest Center. Manzo, whom Griffith acknowledges in the book, emotionally reflected on the trips through Sonora he’s taken with Griffith.

Missed this chance to get Griffith’s book? Griffith will be at the Tucson Meet Yourself store booth on Saturday, October 12, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and Sunday, October 13, from 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. Books will be available for purchase, and Griffith will be there to sign your copy, and maybe, tell you a good saint story.

Photo credit: Mark Corneliussen

Field Notes: Andrew Flachs Shares Insight from India

September 26, 2019

For anthropologist Andrew Flachs, fieldwork in Telanguana, India, was a critical way to understand the complex problems rural farmers face. In his new book Cultivating Knowledge, Flachs investigates how rural farmers come to plant genetically modified or certified organic cotton, sometimes during moments of agrarian crisis. Through months of on-the-ground ethnographic work, Flachs uncovered the unintended consequences of new technologies, which offer great benefits to some—but at others’ expense.

Today we share a few of Flachs’s photos and extended captions from his fieldwork, which offer insight into the stories and methods that have informed his work.

All photos and captions by Andrew Flachs:

Cultivating Knowledge_Image by Andrew Flachs_IMG_1416

IMG_1416:  A young man in Parvathagiri squints through a pesticide mist as he sprays to control for whiteflies in his cotton crop, a pest unaffected by the pesticide genes for which cotton has been genetically modified. It took four hours to spray his seven acres in 100+ degree heat, he spraying and his brother running back and forth to a stream to gather water in which to dilute the pesticide for the mister. Worried that the monsoon rains would wash the pesticide off the cotton, he had hastily bought a cheaper generic brand pesticide from a local shop known to carry expired chemicals. By the end of the day, all three of us had a headache from the heat and the smell of the mist. “It was a waste”, he told me bitterly a few days later. The pesticide had only killed about a third of the insects eating his crop. Concerned about future losses, he ultimately had to travel to a larger town with a better agricultural shop to buy a more powerful pesticide. “What if this one doesn’t work either,” I asked. He shrugged. “I’ll have to get something even stronger,” he answered, stating the obvious (2013).

Cultivating Knowledge_Image by Andrew Flachs_IMG_1438

IMG_1438:  A boy in Jangaon helps his family pick organic cotton after school before the bolls can be damaged, still wearing his school uniform. At harvest, it is imperative to gather and protect the cotton as soon as the lint erupts. Delays risk insect attacks, rain, or molds, all of which distort the fibers and discolor the cotton. Any such blemishes are cause to downgrade the lint at the open-air markets where commodities are sold to brokers. Organic agriculture depends upon ethical marketing campaigns to build trust with buyers in the United States, Europe, and East Asia. The development program that sponsors this farm advertises that they do not make use of child labor, and fundraises for school supplies and infrastructure that keeps students out of farm labor. Yet such distinctions are not completely applicable for many household farms, in which everyone is expected to pitch in for the greater good of the family. It would be technically correct but highly misleading to label this child labor – the children in this photo are simply doing their normal chores (2013).

Cultivating Knowledge_Image by Andrew Flachs_IMG_0340

IMG_0340: Although most of the research for this book took place on cotton farms, I also accompanied farmers to sell their cotton in larger markets. This led me to tour gins and learn more about the processing stage of the commodity chain. Cotton is plucked with seeds intact, and farmers speculate about which brands might have the heaviest seeds and thus fetch the highest prices. At gins, seeds are removed from the cotton lint and pressed into oil cakes that may then be fed to livestock. The lint is swept into piles and then compressed into square bales than can be loaded onto trucks. While much of this work is automated, teams of men run the bale pressers and manage the factory floors while women, often accompanied by young children who are not in school, sweep cotton into piles and use bamboo poles to clear obstructions in the gin. Here, a cotton gin worker and her son rest on cotton lint during a shift break at a gin in Warangal (2014).

Cultivating Knowledge_Image by Andrew Flachs_Field pic

Field pic: To ask questions about how farmers make decisions about their cotton seeds, I used a variety of social science methods: surveys on farm decisions, spatial analysis of farm locations, collection of wild and cultivated plants, participation in and observation of farm life, interviews, and focus groups. Here, a group of farmers compare notes on their cotton seeds with me on the edge of a vegetable and meat market in Hanamkonda. Focus groups like this give people space to debate the nuance of a topic, like which seeds to plant, and explore several possible positions through a conversation.

Andrew Flachs is an assistant professor of anthropology at Purdue University. Trained as an environmental anthropologist, his research spans sustainable agriculture, food studies, the anthropology of knowledge, and political ecology.

Five Questions With Editors of Voices From the Ancestors

September 24, 2019

Central to the process of decolonization may be reclaiming and reconstructing spirituality, centering knowledge that goes back generations when our ancestors were connected to each other, nature and sacred cosmic forces. This exploration is central to Voices From The Ancestors: Xicanx and Latinx Spiritual Expressions and Healing Practices.

In the following Q&A, editors Lara Medina and Martha R. Gonzales, talk to us about why this book is timely, and their hopes and dreams on how it is used in community and the classroom:

Is there something about this time we are living that makes Voices from the Ancestors an important book?

LM: Currently 20 percent of Latinx are unaffiliated with any religious institution, yet there is an increase in the phrase “I am spiritual but not religious.” For Latinx of the baby boomer generation, this departure from institutional religion, particularly Christianity, began during the civil rights era of the ’60s and ’70s when self-determination became an essential component of our liberation. A return to our Indigenous ancestries and their profound spiritual knowledge has continued among later generations and Latinx scholarship now reflects this within the discourse of spiritual decolonization. Many of the issues faced today by Latinx in the U.S.A., such as the violent treatment of refugees at our borders, the mass shootings of Mexican Americans, the murders of transgendered folks, the destruction of our planet, on-going police brutality, and the obstacles being placed upon ethnic studies programs in our universities, require a spiritual response in addition to political responses. As editors of Voices from the Ancestors, we wanted to offer a collection of spiritual reflections and healing practices that Latinx are doing in order to keep themselves strong and grounded as they face the challenges of these current times. These reflections and practices are grounded in an epistemology that understands the relationship and interdependency between all life forms and they offer pathways to return to this Latinx ancestral heritage.             

MG: There are some interesting conversations happening now within academia in the realm of Xicanx/Latinx Studies around identity, cultural appropriation of Indigenous identities to be more specific. Xicanx and Latinx people, people of mixed descent and cultural heritages, have been utilized as the “buffer” between colonial authorities and colonial subjects, between modern state authorities and state subjects deemed a threat to state projects pushing modernizing agendas thereby relegating entire groups of people, if one didn’t fit the image of a “modern” state subject, to the margins of society or zones of death. It has always been expected by the authorities that the mixed heritage subject would identify with state authorities, rather than the subjugated community or communities from which one might be descended. Today, presently, this continues to be the case. We still hear the terms “savages”, “uncivilized”, “barbaric” constantly being used in the media to describe people who don’t fit the image of a “western global subject” in line with neoliberal global policies or agendas. Within the context of the United States the proper Latina or Mexican American subject would be one who identifies predominantly with U.S. state policy both nationally and globally; it could be argued then, that given current U.S. national and global policies, the ideal U.S. Latina or Mexican American subject is therefore one who would betray her own humanity. 

This text aims to intervene by first demonstrating through cultural practices that identity when based only on conceptions of bloodline is first and foremost still today a project of the state meant to create political divisions between communities of people. Second, that culture and our cultural practices, no matter who you are, is really what defines anyone as a part of a community or a person, more so than your bloodline. 

Thirdly, to demonstrate that the narrative of conquest and colonialism must be continually revisited in order to contest the prevailing narrative that a conquest of the Americas or Turtle Island (an Indigenous name for this continent) was complete, that there is nothing left of our ancestors. While it is true that millions of people were destroyed, and hundreds of lifeways and practices eradicated, “speaking” books and knowledges obliterated in fires, many of them perhaps never to return, much has survived over the last five centuries. Survived, and as all cultural forms do, have been transformed in the hands of womxn over time and space. 

If, Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko is correct in her collected essays Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit, then we humans, we as Xicanx/Latinx womxn are not just individual subjects, but as people constitute a part of larger energetic forces operating within the natural world. And what I conclude from her writings, and the wisdom teachings Lara and I were able to bring together in this text, is that the knowledges, which we have retained in our families and communities, those practices that survived and some of which are beginning to thrive, have reemerged into our public spheres over the last fifty years because they have been meant to, because the survival of these practices were in fact mandated and foretold for generations prior to contact. 

In decolonizing our spiritual lives, is there room to keep both practices?

LM: Yes, many practices or traditions if desired. Latinx are people of various ethnicities, bloodlines, and complex histories. Religious traditions historically imposed upon us through colonization have survived among our people because in many ways we expressed them on our own terms when religious officials marginalized our communities. I am thinking here of the rich traditions found within Mexican American Catholic popular religion and Santeria, where Indigenous and African spiritualities and values survived under the guise of Christianity. Today, we have Latinx theologians and scripture scholars whose scholarship interprets Christianity through feminist and liberatory lenses. We are pleased that some of them contributed to Voices from the Ancestors. Many Latinx also choose to practice Buddhism in a way that coexists alongside or integrated into other chosen spiritual paths. In my scholarship, I call this nepantla spirituality, which means to be in the middle of rich cultural/spiritual diversity and respectfully choose what nurtures us spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and physically.

MG: Are you referring to both a decolonial practice and spiritual practice at once? Of course there is. In fact many leading scholars in decolonial studies would argue that you cannot have one without the other, or to put it another way, a decolonial practice gives way for a spiritual practice; an important part of decolonial practice is a transformation of the self and how one self-interprets the world and our role within it, this practice requires constant self-reflection and self-reflection itself can amount to a spiritual practice; self-reflection can lead one to accountability for one’s actions thereby a conscious claiming of one’s own agency and an understanding of prayer or spiritual practice as an intentional and mindful practice as Laura Perez, a contributor to this volume, reminds us. 

Furthermore, for those of us who study history, in ancient settings across the world, the modern differentiations between spirituality, science and/or religion among other subjects we have so neatly categorized, did not exist in the way they do today. The goal in a reconsideration of antiquity, or ancient societies, might be then to try to comprehend how these terms or practices coincided one within the other thereby contributing to a more balanced mode of living within the world and in relation to all of life. 

The book begins with morning prayers and ends with evening prayers, the rest of our lives in between. How do you see readers using this book?

LM: We hope readers will take in the introductions to each chapter that explains our intent in choosing those aspects of our lives. We also hope that readers will be enriched by the teachings held within the essays reflecting the spiritual perspectives and experiences of our contributors. And we hope that readers will be empowered to learn how specific spiritual practices can be conducted for themselves, their families, and groups they are involved in. This book could be used for personal, familial, and/or collective efforts to decolonize Latinx spirituality. We believe it can be used in college classrooms, community groups, and in homes. It is written in language for the general public and all the writings are “from the heart.”

MG: I don’t necessarily view this book as one which a person will sit and read from front to back. But rather as a text which a person may pick up, turn to a section which pertains to them in that very moment, and find a practice for themselves to serve the moment. Or perhaps the reader will feel inspired after reading a selection to look within their own homes/families to “see” if there is something there, has always been something there, a practice, a prayer, a home ritual, which they can recall for themselves.

I do think it is a text the same person can return to over several years when perhaps one part of the book may become more meaningful to that individual than when they first came across the book. These are the best kinds of books, the ones that become like a good friend you always have something to learn from. This is the kind of relationship I hope readers will develop to this text; a long lasting, well-worn relationship. 

In the early life of this book, when you began gathering the practices, essays, and poems, what was the community reaction that made you feel you were heading in the right direction?

LM: The idea was discussed among our professional networks, and we received affirmative responses. When we sent the call out widely the response was exceptional with Latinx across the U.S.A. sending us their contributions. We knew many people desired a text like this.

MG: We received a lot of positive feedback from most of our community. I would say about 95 percent. As someone who enjoys bookstores of all sorts and never having encountered a book such as this by Xicanx/Latinx women, I know this book is arriving at the right time, and I think most of our community feels the same way. We are living during a very interesting and intense moment; a moment which requires a radical shift in consciousness if we are going to survive and thrive as people; as humans. Most of our contributors, if not all, would agree with this statement and one could claim that their submissions to the project are reflective of this understanding.  

Do you have a special dream for this book of how it will be used or who it will touch?

LM: We hope that Latinx across generations will benefit from this book. We include blessings for newborns, teachings for our young ones, puberty or first moon rituals, rituals for our dying and deceased, holistic health care practices, moon meditations, songs, poems, and reflections on how spirituality can be expressed through the arts and our sexualities, and more … We have something for almost everyone! We send it out with the best of intentions, and we give thanks to our ancestors who speak through all of us!

MG: My biggest hope for this book is that it transcends or move between and beyond the artificial and real barriers between communities of people and the halls of academia. Lara and I purposefully set out to create a text meant for as a wide of an audience as possible. Both of us are aware of the power of the written word, we know the interventions that scholarly texts can make, do make and have made, within academia and the importance of these texts in wrestling with and shifting discourses. However, both of us as experienced scholars, Lara with more years than I, intentionally chose to write in a prose or language of the heart, of rhythms that reflect our daily struggles, joys and celebrations; in a prose that can set the stage for a different experience in the classroom and at the same time speak to the hearts of our communities: of our mothers, our grandmothers, aunties because they can read and see themselves in these words which would not be possible without the teachings that have been passed over to us generation after generation in our families, our communities. 

Claudia Leal Featured on New Book Network Podcast

September 23, 2019

University of Arizona author, Claudia Leal, was featured on a recent episode of New Books Network podcast to discuss her new book, Landscapes of Freedom.

Claudia Leal’s Landscapes of Freedom: Building a Postemancipation Society in the Rainforests of Western Colombia (University of Arizona Press, 2018), narrates the unknown history of the transition from slavery to freedom in the Pacific lowlands of Colombia. Not only does Leal centers a region long neglected in histories of Colombia—and more generally in histories of slavery and manumission in Latin America—but she also asks us to use this case to understand the centrality of the environment in any historical account. According to Leal, the particularities of the environment of the Pacific lowlands in Colombia explains the formation of a black peasantry that was able to attain high levels of freedom and autonomy. Here we hear about the importance of rainforests, of minerals, of vegetable ivory, and we learn that through extractive practices black Colombians were able to carve and maintain degrees of freedom perhaps only comparable to the maroons of Surinam.

This history, however, does not start in 1851 with the total abolition of slavery in Colombia, for Leal goes back to the colonial period in order to explain why a political economy of extraction was established in the first place. In fact, Leal tracks how blacks appropriated an environment that originally didn’t belong to them, how they negotiated with whites their access to resources and power, and how even in moments in which mining companies challenged their autonomy, they nonetheless found ways to maintain their hard-won freedom. Paradoxically, even if blacks of the Pacific lowlands fulfilled one of the main values of the republican order of the Colombian national state (freedom!), they were not recognized as contributors to the national project. Quite to the contrary, white elites equated them to an environment deemed unhealthy, and allegedly suitable only for savages. The pacific lowlands, and its recently created cities of Tumaco and Quibdó, were thus built as racialized landscapes; geographies plagued by ideologies of racism and biological determinism. Whites’ project to control and “civilize” the territory was ultimately a failed one, for black culture crept into cities and forests. Eventually, with the advent of the 1991 Colombian constitution, black ethnicity became a part and asset of the nation as Colombia entered the era of multiculturalism.”

Listen to the podcast and read more here.

Oscar J. Martínez is an International Latino Book Award Runner-Up

September 23, 2019

Congratulations to Oscar J. Martínez on winning second place in the History category of the prestigious International Latino Book Awards! The 2019 International Latino Book Awards Ceremony took place on Saturday, September 21st in Los Angeles at the Los Angeles City College. The International Latino Book Awards have grown to be the largest Latino literary and cultural awards in the USA.

The award-winning book, Ciudad Juárez, is a critical historical overview of the legendary border city of Juárez. Martínez explores the economic and social evolution of this famous transnational urban center, emphasizing the city’s deep ties to the United States. In countless ways, the history of Juárez is the history of the entire Mexican northern frontier. Understanding how the city evolved provides a greater appreciation for the formidable challenges faced by Mexican fronterizos and yields vital insights into the functioning of borderland regions around the world.

Oscar J. Martínez is a Regent’s Professor of History at the University of Arizona. He has authored and edited numerous books and many articles, book chapters, and reviews.

A huge congratulations to Oscar!

Celebrating “Big Jim” Griffith

September 19, 2019

In 2015, Aengus Anderson, UA Special Collections’ oral historian and digital media producer, interviewed “Big Jim” Griffith, the founder of Tucson Meet Yourself and former director of the Southwest Folklore Center.

In this interview series, Griffith talks about his life and work in Tucson. It’s not only Tucson Meet Yourself’s 40th anniversary this year, but it’s also a special time for Griffith, with a new book coming out this month. Saints, Statues, and Stories: A Folklorist Looks At The Religious Art of Sonora, Griffith takes us on a different kind of Sonoran geographical tour to roadside shrines, fiestas, saints and miracles.

You can be part of the book celebration on Saturday, Sept. 28, at Mission San Xavier del Bac, 2-4 p.m. for refreshments, music, discussion and a book signing with Big Jim. Event is free, but RSVP appreciated.

AURUM: Insights from Poet Santee Frazier

September 17, 2019

Unflinching and magnetic, the language and structure of Aurum never strays from its dedication to revealing the prominent reality of Native people being marginalized and discarded in the wake of industrial progress. With images that taunt, disturb, and fascinate, Aurum captures the vibrantly original language in Santee Frazier’s first collection, Dark Thirty, while taking on a completely new voice and rhythm. Frazier has crafted a wrought-iron collection of poetry that never shies away from a truth that America often attempts to ignore.

Below, Santee Frazier answers five questions about his second poetry collection.

What inspired you to write this work?

It’s hard to point to anything specific in regards to inspiration. My poems tend to be receptacles for research, lived experiences, and techniques acquired from other poets (mostly dead poets). In this way, poems manifest through ritual and mindfulness. For instance, the final poem of Aurum, “Half-Life”, was written on train rides from the Northeast to the Southwest. On stops along the rails I would write two to three lines. Over a period of 2-3 years the poem took shape, and you can see this process unfold in the form. This is representative of all my poems, but the ritual varies from project to project. I am continuously working in three voices, perhaps more, but there are three in Aurum. I am of the mind that a poet should have many voices, and through those voices different modes of verse making and revision.

Detailed descriptions of food appear frequently in these poems. What is the significance of food in your writing?

I had this idea of using images of food to introduce cultural leanings without exorcizing the figures that populate the poems. In Aurum, the food images or references to culinary knowledge are isolated to a specific milieu. For instance, in “Sun Perch” the image of the Vietnamese dish served to the speaker is elaborate, which contrasts with their experiences with food. This image also introduces the recursive image system that dominates the poem and the larger collection. Going back to contrasts, the references to food in “Half-Life” are basic. The world the speaker experiences is devoid of the vividness represented in “Sun Perch”, “Sanguinaria”, and “Chaac”. The images of corn, beans, and potatoes hold significance to many peoples and cultures indigenous to Turtle Island. (Note, I use the moniker “Turtle Island”, due to the fact that phrases and terms used to describe North America and the indigenous peoples are inaccurate, and were conceived within oppressive political constructs.) In some cultures, corn, beans, and potatoes will be the only food that grows in a prophesied dystopian future. Furthermore, corn, beans, and potatoes represent horticultural knowledge lost to many of us living hand to mouth.

Mangled is a character who appears in Aurum and who also appeared in your collection titled Dark Thirty. Could you tell us about what Mangled represents for you?

The Mangled Creekbed poems work in a serialized form. The character is a container for research in music, pop culture, violence, and oppression in America. Mangled is what I write when I’m not obsessing over another poem or set of poems. I get these long periods of silence where I am reading and taking in lots of information, but not making art. When this happens I revisit Mangled and see if he will give me any new poems. In Dark Thirty my research in the Impalement Arts dominated the poems, in Aurum, my research into the accordion factored into many of the poems. The serialized form allows for verse driven and prosaic poetic modes. Some of these poems can occur in a moment, some longer narratives delve into back story. Mangled’s world also serves as historical context to poems set in a contemporary milieu.

Speaking of Mangled, the title “Mangled & the Accordion” is ascribed to five of the poems in Aurum. What is the significance of repeating this title?

The title is both representative of his anatomy and the structure of the collection. At times the poems have a dense structure, sometimes fragmented while utilizing white space. Similar to the constraints of the accordion. There are certainly allegorical and biblical references. As many Indigenous people create identities rooted in western religious morals and ethics, Mangled suffers on multiple levels. However, he is unaware of the threads of oppression that lord over his life. This mainly harkens back to some of his origin story in Dark Thirty, but in Aurum Mangled attempts to reconcile his history of violence through performance akin to vaudeville.

What are you working on now?

I am working on these small vignettes which I am calling nonfiction, but at times they feel like poems. I have always been so interested in Eduardo Galeano’s nonfictions and histories, specifically, Memory of Fire. I am also a fan of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and by proxy The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell) by Robert Coover. So, I am writing these small pieces of text that take on different prosaic forms. There are no line breaks, but there is attention to sound. I’m hoping to shape some kind of book out of these vignettes, but I write slower and slower these days.

Below, read a poem from Frazier’s Aurum.

TWICE-RUINED

Mangled does not remember the beating outside the tavern,
just that when he woke the air under the rumbling bridge smelt
like hot engine oil, like tire. His twice ruined face inflated, cheeks
and hair crusted with muddy earth, boots spackled with blood.

Crouched near a creek, saw his face wavy in the ripple,
slit eyes buried under swollen flesh. He thought of the knife,
its baptism—flicker of sunlight in the current— blade hidden
behind the rust. As Mangled dipped his face in the water he saw
the creek bed, minnows darting along the moss-covered stones.

From Aurum, by Santee Frazier. © 2019 The Arizona Board of Regents.

Santee Frazier received his BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and his MFA from Syracuse University. Frazier is director of the Institute of American Indian Arts Low Residency MFA Program. He is a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

Celebrating the People of the Press: Mari Herreras

People of the Press is back this week! Inspired by the Association of University Presses celebration of the people of AUPresses, we would also like to celebrate our dedicated publishing professionals throughout our 60th anniversary year.

Today, we’re featuring our Publicity Manager, Mari Herreras.

Hello Mari, what do you do for the Press?

I work as Publicity Manager for the Press with the marketing team crafting publicity campaigns for the fifty or so books published by the Press each year, as well as working on events and social media.

How long have you worked at UA Press?

I’m new. By the time this goes online, it will be my 10th or 11th day. I am beyond grateful to be here, and can honestly say I’ve wanted to work for the UA Press the last five years. The Press has been part of my life since I moved back home in 2007 to take the position as staff writer for the Tucson Weekly. But when I was living in Seattle in the early 1990s, my mother sent me a copy of Patricia Preciado Martin’s Songs My Mother Sang To Me, a collection of oral histories from Mexican-American women who pioneered and were part of Southern Arizona’s history. Talking about this book sometimes makes me cry because it meant so much to me then and now. It was the first time I read a book that reflected my family’s own history and story. That’s one example of the gifts the UA Press gives many of us from Tucson and Southern Arizona.

The University of Arizona Press is committed to helping contribute to an informed society and enlightening readers. What’s one thing you’ve learned from your work?

I think I’ve always known this, but see it more clearly now—that there’s more to the story then what’s written in each book published by the Press. Each book comes with the author’s own unique story about their life, their world, their research, and how they decided this one book needed to be published. That’s the great opportunity I’ve been given in this position—to help tell those stories and reach out to media to inform them of the deeper stories that come with each author.

What would people be surprised to learn about your work?

Oh probably all the details that go into each book. It’s more then just reaching out to scholarly journals and journalists about our new books and their importance. It’s also about the meetings and careful discussions with almost everyone on staff about each books’ unique story, and how we are going to communicate that to booksellers and reviewers. It’s also tracking that work on different software systems and spreadsheets. There’s a lot of love there, but also a lot of computer time.

Tucson has a thriving literary and scholarly community. What’s one of your favorite spots to hear authors, find a good book, or just curl up and read?

When the Tucson Festival of Books first started in 2009, I was invited to participate as a moderator for panels taking place at the Nuestra Raices stage. Over the years, being involved in those panels meant the world to me because that particular venue hosts Latinx writers from throughout the country, as well as local writers directly involved in community work. It’s been an important venue for local writers and book lovers. I’ve been grateful for local poets who’ve worked to create reading spaces, such as Teré Fowler-Chapman, TC Tolbert, and Kristen Nelson. I also don’t think Tucson would have been much of a home for me to return to after being gone for almost twenty years without Antigone Books and the UA Poetry Center.

Holding Up A Mirror: UA Press Celebrates 60 Years

September 13, 2019

From academic scholarship to community scholarship, the University of Arizona Press has grown in ways that reflect the city in which it resides, as well as the people, the skies, and the mountains of Tucson.

Preeminent archaeologist Emil Walter Haury’s quest to convince the University of Arizona to start a publishing program has been described as relentless. After all, it took more than twenty years, so perhaps the professor’s quest should also be described as an example of extreme patience.

In 1937, Haury returned to his alma matter to accept a faculty position in the UA’s Department of Anthropology, where a thriving culture of research and scholarship blossomed among students and professors. Haury felt strongly that the then-existing venues to publish this scholarship were antiquated.

It’s good to have relentlessness and patience on your side, but in Haury’s case it also involved timing. Enter Richard Harvill, whose tenure as University of Arizona’s president is still considered one that fostered immense growth, as well as a distinct collegiality between faculty and the president’s office.

Past reports on the Press paint a Harvill who was notorious for calling different department heads and faculty for no other reason then to check in and chat. These chats, most often after work hours, gained a reputation as being one of the best ways to share information or projects that the university president should know or help with. This, back in the day, was one way things got done. Haury got calls from Harvill often, and the need for a press came up often.

In 1958, Harvill called Haury with good news. He had $6,000 to start the Press without waiting for the new fiscal year. In a New Year’s Eve memo, Haury didn’t hold back. He responded with an outline on staffing and a list of eleven books ready or nearly ready to publish.

… This possible development has been a great encouragement to us, and I hope that the plan as outlined has sufficient merits to be activated. We stand by to answer further questions should they arise …

— Emil W. Haury

At the top of his list was a manuscript from George Webb, the anthropologist’s recollections of his childhood and his Pima Indian heritage during his grandparents’ lives. A Pima Remembers is the first book published by the UA Press in 1959. Webb’s goal was to provide a documented history and culture of his people for younger members of the Pima, now referred to as Akimel Oʼotham. The book remains in print today.

Hundreds of anthropology and archeology titles have continued to be published through the Press, from UA scholars and others throughout the country. The connection to anthropology grew to reflect other areas of critical research and scholarship at the UA, including space and planetary science, border studies, and a new understanding about the environment.

What also grew was a willingness to change, reflect, and share voices that might not otherwise be heard. Sun Tracks began in the 1970s, as a journal written mostly by Native American undergraduate students. Today, Sun Tracks is a ground-breaking and award-winning literary series dedicated to Native American and Indigenous writers.

We have UA linguistics professor and Tohono O’odham poet Ofelia Zepeda to thank for this beloved series. In an O’odham language class taught by Zepeda, she had her students bring in poems and songs to workshop in class. By the end of the year she had this beautiful collection, and Larry Evers, a UA English professor who edited the Sun Tracks journal, thought they needed to be published. The result was When It Rains, the first book published under Sun Tracks. Zepeda now serves as editor of the series, which has published the work of Santee Frazier, Simon Oritz, Joy Harjo, and Jennifer Elise Foerster, and many, many others.

The same can be said of another award-winning series called Camino Del Sol, which focuses on Latinx writers. Launched in 1994, the series is considered a significant vehicle for Latinx literary voices–established and first-time authors. The series includes poetry from Francisco X. Alarcón, fiction from Christine Granados, and nonfiction from Luis Alberto Urrea.

Scholarship has always been at the core of the Press. The staff recognizes the importance of telling stories and sharing the scholarship found in our very own backyard. As Tucson and the region changed, so did the Press, holding a mirror to our community these past 60 years.

Lydia Otero‘s book, La Calle, is a great example of sharing scholarship with community. When the book was released in 2016, the Press held a party at a restaurant in Barrio Hollywood, one of Tucson’s beloved Mexican-American neighborhoods. The restaurant, at capacity, was filled with folks who lived through the experiences detailed in Otero’s book about the politics of the destruction of the heart of Tucson’s Barrio Viejo all in the name of community redevelopment.

There were tears and joy in celebrating Otero’s work. The associate professor in the UA’s Department of Mexican American Studies created a book of immense importance in teaching Latinx history and urbanization that presented detailed research and unique storytelling important to scholars and community.

Kafka in a Skirt Lands on BuzzFeed Book List

September 10, 2019

UA Press author Daniel Chacón’s book, Kafka in a Skirt, made it on a BuzzFeed News list praising 18 books from small publishers:

Chacón goes beyond the US–Mexico border and looks at the walls that divide all of us in this short story collection, the author’s seventh book. He doesn’t mince words about the US’s dangerous foreign policy in Latin America while presenting a nuanced look at life in urban Latinx spaces, where the political and the personal collide.

Read “18 Books From Small Publishers That Deserve Your Attention,” here.

People of the Press: Savannah Hicks

September 9, 2019

People of the Press is back this week! Inspired by the Association of University Presses celebration of the people of AUPresses, we would also like to celebrate our dedicated publishing professionals throughout our 60th anniversary year.

Today, we’re featuring our Marketing Assistant, Savannah Hicks.

What do you do for the Press?

I coordinate our presence at the many academic conferences we attend, as well as make sure that our books have a presence at the conferences we can’t attend. These conferences are very important to our authors and to our acquiring department. We often have pop-up UA Press bookstores at conferences, so I make sure we have the right books for our respective audiences and the necessary means to sell our books to customers. This includes the wonderfully hectic Tucson Festival of Books! When I’m lucky, I get to travel and attend these meetings, which gives me the opportunity to meet our fantastic authors. I also support more general marketing efforts by writing some of our web content, designing program advertisements for the aforementioned meetings, writing promotional copy for a few of our books each season, submitting books for awards, running our Instagram account, and any other marketing adventure that may pop up!

How long have you worked at the UA Press?

I have worked at the Press for a little over a year now.

The University of Arizona Press is committed to helping contribute to an informed society and enlightening readers. What’s one thing you’ve learned from your work?

This is definitely the kind of job where I learn something new almost every day, and I really appreciate that. Until I started coordinating exhibits here, I would have never guessed that there is an academic society and corresponding conference for practically any topic you can imagine!

What would people be surprised to learn about your work?

While we do a lot of work “behind the scenes” in our offices, we also spend time in the community organizing events, attending conferences, greeting loyal and new customers at the book festival, and generally championing our books and our authors in a more socially tangible way. Even though a lot of our presence appears to be digital, I’m happy to say that some of the most meaningful and joyful interactions in publishing still happen face-to-face.

Tucson has a thriving literary and scholarly community. What’s one of your favorite spots to hear authors, find a good book, or just curl up and read?

I love attending poetry readings and literary events at Exo. Antigone and the University of Arizona Poetry Center are also great spaces for the literary community in Tucson. Oh, and those quirky little free library things around town… occasionally they have really great books in them. My favorite place to read is under a tree at Himmel Park in the cooler months, or in a nice cozy café such as Raging Sage when the weather is extreme.

Five Questions with Norma Elia Cantú

September 6, 2019

Norma Elia Cantú‘s new poetry collection, Meditación Fronteriza, is a celebration of culture, tradition, and creativity that navigates themes of love, solidarity, and political transformation. Deeply personal yet warmly relatable, these poems flow from Spanish to English gracefully. With Gloria Anzaldúa’s foundational work as an inspiration, Meditación Fronteriza unveils unique images that provide nuance and depth to the narrative of the borderlands. Written by the award-winning author of Canícula, Cantú has crafted a collection which carries the perspective of a powerful voice in Chicana literature— and literature worldwide.

Below, Norma Cantú answers a few of our questions about her new collection.

What inspired you to write this work?

Meditación Fronteriza is a collection of poems from the last 40 years and many poems were inspired by my life… I was inspired to put the poems into a book by the need to counter the general view that the border is a violent place and to counter the erasure of our culture and our reality by the mainstream.

The speaker of these poems often asks questions. What is the function of posing questions within your poetry?

I believe life is a series of questions that we pose to ourselves and to others. I often teach using questions. I write in search of answers.

Many of the poems in this collection appear in both Spanish and English. Could you tell us a little more about why you chose to translate certain poems, and have others appear solely in English?

Usually the poems that were originally written in Spanish stayed in Spanish without translation; however, I also found that I had already translated some of the poems that were first written in Spanish, so I kept the translations. I also want to honor the Spanish of the borderlands and to keep the language we use, so many poems include both Spanish and English. Translating everything seemed to be a betrayal of sorts to the linguistic spirit of the work.

The poem “Song of the Borderlands” calls for six voices to perform the lines. What do you think the importance of performing poetry out loud is?

Poetry has always been about sound and rhythm about oral delivery, even when it went from oral to written, the essence lies in orality. Spoken word and slam poetry are rooted in this orality. I first recited poetry as a child in a tradition called declamación where one memorizes the poem and declaims it in public. Hence, my love of poetry is intimately linked to my love of hearing the voice and performing poetry out loud. This particular poem was written for my students to perform and it works really well as a performance piece for a class.

What are you working on now?

I am working on a novel called Champú, or Hair Matters. It is set in a beauty shop in Laredo, Texas. I am also working on a collection of poems called Elemental Odes, I am writing poems inspired by the Periodic Table of the Elements. It is challenging but so much fun!

Below, find the poem titled “Border Bullets” from Norma Cantú‘s new UA Press collection, Meditación Fronteriza.

BORDER BULLETS

Rio Grande flows
from the Rockies to the Gulf
holy waters heal the border scar
pecan, nogal, retama sway,
tower o'er mesquites, huisaches
buried treasure brown

fiery gold crown
sun sets over Mexico
death defies life
a packed train speeds by
transports precious cargo
arrives with the moonlight
Norma Cantú and UA Press Editor-In-Chief Kristen Buckles

Norma Elia Cantú is a daughter of the borderlands, a scholar, and a creative writer. She serves as Norine R. and T. Frank Murchison Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Trinity University in San Antonio.

Discussing Brazil and the Landless Movement

September 6, 2019

A satisfying part of our work as scholarly publishers is seeing our authors share their scholarship. Late last month, Anthony Pahnke spoke with the Democratic Socialists of America in Sacramento. He shared the following brief reflection with us. Thanks for sharing your work with us and with the community, Dr. Pahnke:

From Anthony Pahnke: Some years ago, it was the famous Brazilian singer, Tom Jobim, who said that “Brazil is not for beginners.” Today, his words ring true, as the Amazon burns, the country’s–perhaps the world’s–largest corruption scandal occupies the nation’s courts, and Brazil’s far-right President, Jair Bolsonaro, slams the left, and deconstructs the economy. With many of theses issues in mind, we had the opportunity to discuss contemporary Brazilian politics with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in Sacramento, California. I was invited to this event to share what I wrote about in Brazil’s Long Revolution: The Radical Achievements of the Landless Workers Movement and to discuss international solidarity efforts.

The principle focus was the Landless Movement (O Movimiento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra). We had the opportunity to discuss the movement’s history, tactics, and trajectory, while also making the movement’s struggle for agrarian reform relevant in current discussions of political corruption, the rise of the right, and the destruction of the Amazon. 

While the event in Sacramento was a time to talk about the book, it was also a space where a group of about thirty committed activists took the evening to imagine the future. At a time–in Brazil and the United States–many of us struggle to navigate our divisive political times. In Sacramento, we had the chance to think together on the things that Brazil and the U.S. share, and what the MST can contribute to this discussion.

Brazil’s Long Revolution shows how the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement, or MST) positioned itself to take advantage of challenging economic times to improve its members’ lives. Pahnke analyzes the origins and development of the movement, one of the largest and most innovative social movements currently active. Over the last three decades, the MST has mobilized more than a million Brazilians through grassroots initiatives, addressing political and economic inequalities. To learn more about Anthony Pahnke’s work, see his website at: https://anthonypahnke.com/.

Anthony Pahnke at an event at the Arden-Dimick Library in Sacramento.

Aldama and González Unpack Latinx Representation

September 4, 2019

Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González‘ new book, Reel Latinxs, dives into Latinx representation in film and television in the twenty-first century. Latinx representation in the popular imagination has infuriated and befuddled the Latinx community for decades. These misrepresentations and stereotypes soon became as American as apple pie. Not seeing real Latinxs on TV and film reels as kids inspired the authors to dig into the world of mainstream television and film to uncover examples of representation, good and bad. The result: a riveting ride through televisual and celluloid reels that make up mainstream culture.

Today, Frederick Aldama and Christopher González share with us some of the inspiration and thought that helped craft Reel Latinxs.

Frederick Luis Aldama: We both spend a bunch of time thinking, writing, and teaching all varieties of Latinx pop culture, film, and TV. I often get asked, “What shows or films do you recommend watching that get Latinx representation right?”. My reflex answer for recent brown televisual reconstructions: check out the representations of Latinas in Golden Globe awardee, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the playful panoply of Latino-ness represented in East WillyB, and those awesome Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D webisodes that feature Cisco Ramone or Elena “Yo-Yo” Rodriguez. My reflex answer for recent brownings of the silver-screen: Robert Rodriguez’ Alita, Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina’s Coco, and, of course, Bob Persichetti’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. I add to this, that it’s not just the representation that matters, it’s the shaping of the representation, too. That is, we can have Latinxs in front of the camera, but we also need Latinx writers, directors, cinematographers, costume designers, and showrunners.

Christopher González: Those are all great examples, and we may as well confront the specific difficulty when it comes to representation of the Latinx community. Representation is not merely about casting a Latinx actor in a given role. We know that characters— their function within the narrative, their reliance on or avoidance of recognizable tropes or even stereotypes, and their capability of signifying a given community— all highlight why the kind of representation we encounter in film and television is so powerful. And you are correct in pointing to why it’s so crucial to examine the other major contributors to a given instance of representation such as writers, producers, and so forth. The shaping that you are referring to, however, is also something with which audiences must contend. What do you feel are the challenges audiences of these Latinx representations face with these emerging televisual narratives?

Frederick Luis Aldama: Subtlety. Nuance. Knowing the difference between an abuelitas throwing a spoon at us— that would never happen— and a chancla— always happens. If Lalo hadn’t been brought in to consult Disney in the making of Coco, it would have been a big wooden spoon that Mamá Coco would’ve launched at Miguelito. We would have noticed, and likely exhaled our inner Latinx-sigh of disappointment. But subtlety and nuance in other ways. How many times have you seen an East Coast Puerto Rican Latinx family preparing tamales or mole— and not, say, mofongo or lechon asado? A show like Ugly Betty did this in spades. It also cast non-Nuyorican actors to play Nuyoricans, including LA-born, Honduran ancestral Latinx America Ferrera and Cuban Latinx Tony Plana as the papa.

Christopher González: So, a kind of insider knowledge is helpful, then— someone who knows the nuances and subtleties you mention. But we also have to contend with what we might call unconventional Latinx representation. For instance, let’s take the example of the new version of Magnum P.I. (2018-present). Thomas Magnum is an iconic 80’s character that was a career-defining role for Tom Selleck, who is of English ancestry. This new reboot stars Jay Hernandez as Magnum. Thanks to his Hispanic surname and mestizo looks, most reasonable viewers will instantly recognize Jay as Latinx. The writers of the show, however, are much more reserved in expressions of Latinx identity for the character. The question as to whether or not Thomas Magnum, the character, is Latinx is made ambiguous for most of the first season. Hernandez is now playing a role that was conceived of originally as a white man, and it is nothing more than his physical presence in the visual medium of television that signals the possibility that this new version of Thomas Magnum is Latinx. More complicated still is Hernandez’ turn as the voice of Bonnie’s dad in Toy Story 4 (2019). Though he performs the role with no hint of a Spanish accent, Bonnie’s entire family is rendered as olive-skinned, dark-haired, people. I left the theater wondering, along with my family, if Bonnie’s family was Latinx. It was possible, but not confirmable. What I’m suggesting here is that Latinx representation is much more complex of late than it has been for most of the history of television and film.

Frederick Luis Aldama: We could say the same of a lot of Demi Lovato’s roles for Disney, right? As Mitchie Torres in Camp Rock (2008) do we read her last name and the fact that her mom’s a cook (aren’t all our mamas preternaturally good with food?) as Latinx? Gosh, I remember doing that way back when I was a kid. Starved of Latinxs on TV I wish-fulfilled the Addams family as Latinx. I guess what I’m saying, Chris, is that we haven’t arrived yet. We’re still so few and far between on TV and silver screens that I think we need clear, affirming Latinx identifiers. So, yeah, today’s Magnum should be loud-and-proud Latinx.
This brings up another important issue. Do we fault the Latinx actors for playing roles that whitewash a given character’s Latinidad? Do we fault an actor like Zoe Saldana for taking roles that either portray her as African American or Outerworld Alien, and not for roles, say, that would affirm a complex Afrolatinidad? I raise this because of late one of my brilliant PhD students had an Instagram exchange with Saldana. My student wrote this super insightful piece about how the industry itself is at fault for essentializing and simplifying— even alien-afying Saldana. I don’t know if you caught the piece, “Race and Alien Face“? Saldana read it as somehow a critique of her choice of roles played. My student, of course, wrote a heartfelt further explanation: that it was the industry at fault, not Saldana. My point here is that, well, in the end Latinx actors have to play the roles that pay the bills.
I have noticed that as Michael Peña, one of my favorite actors long with Saldana, has become more famous, he’s been either more choosy about his roles, or playing less-than-straight stereotypical Latinx roles. As far as I know, he’s the first Latinx actor to be the protagonist in a mainstream sci-fi flick. I’m thinking of Extinction. And, let’s face it, he steals the show from Paul Rudd in the Ant-Man franchise. And, when he’s playing a Latinx gangbanger, there’s always a wink to the Latinx audience. He knows he’s playing a stereotype, subverting it from within.

Christopher González: I am always very quick to point out that actors (Latinx or otherwise) are professionals who are pursuing their careers to the best of their abilities. We should not fault non-white actors for making business decisions in an industry that has often been inhospitable to them. In one of my current book projects, I uncover how the film industry has deep-rooted insecurities about how Latinx actors could and should appear in speculative films in genres such as Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Horror, and more. Raquel Welch made a business decision to take on her white husband’s surname rather than use her own (Tejada) because she knew that doing so would limit the kinds of roles she would be offered. In the mid-1960s she had to whitewash her own Latinx identity in order to play characters such as Loana the Fair One in One Million Years B.C. and Cora in Fantastic Voyage. Now, over fifty years later, Zoe Saldana has to confront many of the same issues Welch faced. That Saldana took exception to your PhD student’s take reveals to me that Saldana is keenly aware that the roles she plays do matter, and that she perhaps feels frustration over how she is able to express her Latinx identity. But it should stagger us to consider that Saldana has starred in three of the five all-time grossing films at the box office (#1 Avengers: Endgame, #2 Avatar, #5 Avengers: Infinity War), and she still does not have the clout to make more forceful demands concerning the roles she takes. On the other hand, her Marvel co-star, Scarlett Johansson, is the highest-paid female actor in Hollywood, and she has taken roles that effectively whitewash characters. She came under fire recently for saying, and I’m paraphrasing, that as an actor she should be able to play any conceivable role. She later clarified that she was aware of how non-white, non-majority don’t have the same sort of access to roles of their white, cisgendered counterparts. In all of these cases, it is easy to get wrapped up with the actors and their decisions to take certain roles. What we should continue to critique is the system itself that allows these discrepancies in representation to occur. And, of course, we should take note of the opportunities some actors take to discretely subvert the stereotypical material they have been given.

Frederick Luis Aldama: Checking one’s privilege, now there’s a topic— and an urgent need, everywhere. We’ve seen a lot of push from historically underrepresented audiences for folks to check their privilege. We’re seeing the rearing of our collective ugly heads. We’ve had enough. I’m not only thinking of the #HollywoodSoWhite #OscarsSoWhite movements that have led to a lot of studios and television production units to create pipelines for young folks of color to become writers, directors, showrunners, and actors. I also think of the power of the internet as a platform to air our consumption needs and wants. Netflix canned the Latinx reboot of One Day At a Time. And, now after a hailstorm of internet mobilization, it’s back. We still need those boots-on-the-ground watchdogs like the National Hispanic Media Coalition and research centers like USC’s Media, Diversity, & Social Change, of course. However, with social media it seems like the power is really with the people.

Christopher González: Fede, our TV’s and silver-screens have shrunk. Elsewhere you talk about carrying these around in your back pocket, now. Sometimes I think this has emancipated #brownTV and also diminished our presence, representationally and physically.

Frederick Luis Aldama: The two-edged paradox: social media platforms like YouTube as well as spaces like VIMEO offering distribution channels to us Latinxs without deep Hollywood pockets yet the seeming continuation of stereotypical representation. I just watched a good friend, Ernesto Martínez’s short film, La Serenata, on VIMEO. It’s a masterpiece of short filmmaking, telling the much needed story of a Latinx niño telling his parents about his love for another boy. Queer Latinx Roberta Colindrez as the queer Latinx character, Devon, grabs the limelight in I Love Dick— a show made possible with funding from Amazon Prime. And, well, the way that Netflix’s One Day At a Time weaves into its one-familia storyworld the great variety of linguistic, religious, cultural, sexual, gender, class, regional resplendent variations that make up Latinidad is breathtaking. And, I have to say I love how Gabriel Iglesias uses humor to decolonize minds in Mr. Iglesias— an informal reboot of Welcome Back Carter from back in the day. Network TV could do these shows, but it doesn’t and it hasn’t. But then on the flipside, we have an abundance of us as “bad hombres”, not only in the super abundant narco Netflix offerings, but also in platforms like Discovery’s Border Live, where you can literally see ICE officers shake down innocents in real time.

Christopher González: Yes, distribution and availability are certainly enhanced. We can now watch these shows and films on the go, seemingly anywhere. That is the inevitable cost of the miniaturization of the screens we watch. The examples you just listed have benefitted from the almost grassroots efforts of audiences and creators to take more control of what they consume and what they make, even of the behemoth studios of Hollywood are still stuck in cement and antiquated ways of imagining the possibilities of visual storytelling. My sense is that there are many things that make this confluence of time, media, technology, and activism a great opportunity to see such change in how Latinxs are imagined within televisual spaces. There is no magic wand for instantly changing how things have been and where they are now. It takes hard work, bold choices, and the courage to be dogged enough to blaze a new trail. Our book, Reel Latinxs takes inventory of this shifting landscape and reveals what’s at stake for all of us, but particularly Latinxs like you and me who are old enough to see the progress that has been made and take stock of what work remains.

Frederick Luis Aldama: As we wrap this up, I wanted to mention that I’m super optimistic. At Stanford’s Great Books Program this summer, I got to spend time with a young, up-and-coming amazing Latinx actor, Emilio Garcia-Sanchez. He’s not bitter about having to step into the non-Latinx identified jock character, Jason, in Netflix’s The Society. He’s super comfortable with the fact that he brings his Latinidad with him, everywhere. Organically super-savvy about how he plays roles, he’s like a new gen Peña/ Saldana all rolled into one, and without effort. Like so many new gen Latinxs, he’s comfortable in his own skin— his self— as Latinx, y por vida.

Related Titles:


Rosa’s Einstein Reviewed in The Adroit Journal

September 9, 2019

Rosa’s Einstein is a Latinx retelling of the Brother’s Grimm’s Snow-White and Rose-Red, reevaluating border, identity, and immigration narratives through the unlikely amalgamation of physics and fairy tale. Using details both from Einstein’s known life and from quantum physics, Jennifer Givhan crafts a circus-like landscape of childhood trauma and survival.

Below, read an excerpt from a review of Rosa’s Einstein in the Adroit Journal, written by poet and essayist Allison Bird Treacy.

Every culture has traditional stories, and every family has its lore. We depend on these narratives to make meaning, but there are times in our lives when we call on those stories with a greater desperation, particularly when faced with tragedy. This is the state of affairs in Jennifer Givhan’s new poetry collection, Rosa’s Einstein; disaster looms in the air in the form of the atomic bomb, but also in the form of more intimate losses. What’s truly magical about this collection is how Givhan brings the science underlying nuclear technology into the magical world of myth and fairytale. What her approach uncovers is their mutual uncertainty, what Albert Einstein might have called “spooky action at a distance”— a phrase he used to describe that which is real, but unbelievable. In Rosa’s Einstein, what’s imagined is more believable, more present in many ways. than what we name reality.

To enter the strange alchemy of Rosa’s Einstein, we could start in any number of places, but perhaps the most useful place to begin is with Los Alamos, with the Trinity Project and the invention of the atomic bomb. Its violence haunts these pages, and in “Field Trip: Lieserl Blanketed in Fallout, or Nieve,” Rosa, Givhan’s reinvention of Rose Red and Lieserl, Einstein’s missing daughter, venture into the mythos of that day:

At the nuclear museum we watched the Trinity test
the day the sun rose twice:

Nieve appeared in the mushroom cloud
above our rancho.

That's what I called her. I renamed her
Nieve, my Good sister, favored one.

Sometimes, we pretend the extra limbs
are here to comfort us, snow-white

branches growing from our sheets
like snowflake arms in sixfold radial symmetry.

Nothing's so fragile, so perfectly shaped, as melting.

Read more of this review here.

Jennifer Givhan is an NEA Fellowship recipient and author of three previous collections of poetry. She teaches English at Western New Mexico University.

Indian Country Criminal Justice Degree Now at NAU

August 29, 2019

(From reporter Emma Gibson, Arizona Public Media)

Northern Arizona University is rolling out a bachelor’s degree that focuses on criminal justice on tribal lands. The Indian Country Criminal Justice degree will look into the unique laws and institutions on tribal lands. Karen Jarratt-Snider, an associate professor and chair of the applied Indigenous studies department, says her department and the department of criminology and criminal justice created the degree together. She said it will combine existing courses from Indigenous studies, including federal tribal law, criminal jurisdictions and sovereignty, with the criminal justice curriculum…. read more

Karen Jarratt-Snider and Marianne O. Nielsen are the editors of the University of Arizona Press’s Indigenous Justice series, which focuses on issues of social and criminal justice, law, and environmental justice as they impact Indigenous North America (with occasional references to other Indigenous nations).

The series is intended for undergraduate and graduate students of Native American, American Indian, Alaskan Native, and Indigenous peoples’ justice issues; human rights, criminal justice and legal scholars; criminal justice and environmental professionals; and Indigenous community leaders.

Stephen Pyne on Preparing for the Pyrocene

August 29, 2019

With millions of acres burning in the Arctic, Amazon, and between California to the Gran Canaria, fire seems to be everywhere. Stephen Pyne recently posted a thoughtful essay on History News Network, from the George Washington University. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Winter Isn’t Coming. Prepare for the Pyrocene

by Steve Pyne

Millions of acres are burning in the Arctic, thousands of fires blaze in the Amazon, and with seemingly endless flareups in between, from California to Gran Canaria–fire seems everywhere, and everywhere dangerous and destabilizing. With a worsening climate, the fires dappling Earth from the tropics to the tundra appear as the pilot flames of an advancing apocalypse.  To some commentators, so dire, so unprecedented are the forecast changes that they argue we have no language or narrative...read more.

Stephen Pyne is an emeritus professor at Arizona State University. He is the author of more than 30 books, mostly on wildland fire and its history but also dealing with the history of places and exploration, including The Ice, How the Canyon Became Grand, and Voyager. Most recently, he has surveyed the American fire scene with a narrative, Between Two Fires: A Fire History of Contemporary America, and a suite of regional reconnaissances, To the Last Smoke, all published by the University of Arizona Press.

Unearthing Magic: Critical Thoughts on Contemporary Self-Definition

August 22, 2019

In their new UA Press volume, Black Girl Magic Beyond the Hashtag, Julia S. Jordan-Zachery and Duchess Harris have compiled essays which dive deeply into twenty-first century acts of self-definition, especially that of Black femmes, girls, and women. Black Girl Magic Beyond the Hashtag shows how Black girls and women foster community, counter invisibility, engage in restorative acts, and create spaces for freedom. Intersectional and interdisciplinary, the contributions in this volume bridge generations and collectively push the boundaries of Black feminist thought.

Below, read an excerpt written by Julia S. Jordan-Zachery and Duchess Harris from the introduction of Black Girl Magic Beyond the Hashtag.

“Jamila Woods, in her song “Blk Girl Soldier” (2016), sings of BlackGirlMagic. But what does it mean when we, self-identified Black femmes, girls, and women, invoke BlackGirlMagic? The term BlackGirlMagic is used across age, class, education, and other social identity markers. But it begs the question, what is BlackGirlMagic? Why do black femmes, girls, and women feel the need to consider themselves magical? What are we haunted by that is soliciting a response that asserts Black girls and women are magical? What ontological and epistemological questions does BlackGirlMagic pose? How does use of the term magic subvert Western thought that is grounded in positivism, rationalization, and empiricism? These are the questions that serve as the wellspring of this edited collection.

“Since introduced by Thompson in 2013, the term #BlackGirlMagic has been used widely, and it has become part of the lexicon of digital Blackness. To some extent, it has also become commodified (for example, by the selling of T-shirts and other merchandise). While the notion of BlackGirlMagic spreads in cyberspace and other places, the question remains: How is BlackGirlMagic experienced offline? The chapters that comprise this volume address this question. They move us beyond social media’s visual representations by offering analyses of the lived experiences of Black femmes, girls, and women, and how they negotiate the politics of invisibility through intracommunication methodologies in their efforts to arrive at self-definition and self-valuation and restoration. The chapters herein speak to how Black girls and women foster community, counter invisibility, engage in restorative acts, and create spaces for freedom. In essence, they show how Black femmes, girls, and women practice #BlackGirlMagic.

What the collection shows is that the labor required for success is not magical. It is real, and this labor can— and almost always does— exact a cost from those who might appear magical.

“By considering #BlackGirlMagic as an idea and an ideography, we are better positioned to understand how Black femmes, girls, and women perform magic. What the collection shows is that the labor required for success is not magical. It is real, and this labor can— and almost always does—exact a cost from those who might appear magical.

Deploying various qualitative approaches to unmask the essence of Black femmes’, girls’, and women’s perseverance against oppressive structures, the chapters in this volume paint a picture of the magic used by Black femmes, girls, and women. As they fight for recognition, and as they persevere against oppressive structures, the chapters show how the magic displayed in digital spaces such as Twitter is a combination of joy, pain, hope, fulfillment, anger, disillusionment, fatigue, and a commitment to justice and freedom. The term invokes how Black femmes, girls, and women live on the margins while also being insiders. It simultaneously emphasizes cultural specificity and difference, oppression and liberation. In a sense, #BlackGirlMagic is a mixture of the objective and the subjective. Additionally, it is both a discourse and performance. #BlackGirlMagic can be read as a political, cultural, and historical interpretation of Black femmes’, girls’, and women’s lives in relation, directly and indirectly, to Western philosophic thought. If read in this manner, #BlackGirlMagic is a form of resistance. The assertion of #BlackGirlMagic seeks to establish truth, order, and reality as understood from Black femmes’, girls’, and women’s perspectives.

Black girls and women are humans. That’s all we are. And it would be a magical feeling to be treated like human beings— who can’t fly, can’t bounce off the ground, can’t block bullets, who very much can feel pain, who very much can die.

Linda Chavers, 2016

“There is a pressing question that remains: Is #BlackGirlMagic an effective strategy of dissent from the dominant and oppressive structures faced by Black femmes, girls, and women? Some read #BlackGirlMagic as inclusive, as it does not rely on a prototypical Black femme, girl, or woman. But does it address the otherness faced by Black femmes, girls, and women across time and space? If so, how? We need to think through the limitations of #BlackGirlMagic as a cultural and political response to oppression faced by Black femmes, girls, and women. Not all Black women agree with this concept. Linda Chavers, trained at New York University and Harvard, wrote in Elle that Black girls aren’t magical, they are human (2016). Based on this analysis, we have to critically analyze which bodies are allowed to be centered in #BlackGirlMagic and how, for example, class, sexuality, and able-bodiedness influence such. Yes, #BlackGirlMagic serves to create ‘space for women [femmes and girls] of color to create and survive’ (Johnson and Nuñez 2015, 48). But who is allowed into that space? And who is not?T

The various themes that link the chapters that make up this edited volume bring us a little closer to answering these questions. As a collection, the chapters show how Black femmes, girls, and women choose to “gaze back” at neoliberalism and multiple, interlocking structures of oppression.

Julia S. Jordan-Zachery is a professor and chair in the Africana Studies Department at University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on African American women and public policy. Jordan-Zachery currently serves as the president of the Association for Ethnic Studies.

_______________________________________

Duchess Harris is a professor of American studies at Macalester College. She is a scholar of contemporary African American history and political theory. She is the curator of the Duchess Harris Collection, which has more than sixty books written for third through twelfth graders.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Black Girl Magic Beyond the Hashtag belongs to the Feminist Wire Book Series. The Feminist Wire Books: Connecting Feminisms, Race, and Social Justice is a new series from The Feminist Wire (TFW) and the University of Arizona Press that presents a cultural bridge between the digital and printing worlds. These timely, critical books will contribute to feminist scholarship, pedagogy, and praxis in the twenty-first century.

Farid Matuk Featured on Poets.org

August 19, 2019

University of Arizona Press author, Farid Matuk, is today’s featured poet on Poets.org. You can find his featured poem here.

Poem-a-day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today’s poets each weekday morning. This free series reaches 450,000+ readers daily.

Read Matuk’s most recent collection, The Real Horse, to immerse yourself in a text that Cathy Park Hong described as “tender, difficult, wondrous, and wise”.

People of the Press: Kathryn Conrad

August 20, 2019

People of the Press is back this week! Inspired by the Association of University Presses celebration of the people of AUPresses, we would also like to celebrate our dedicated publishing professionals throughout our 60th anniversary year.

Today, we’re featuring our Director, Kathryn Conrad.

What do you do for the Press?

I sometimes joke that my job as Director is to attend meetings and sign my name. But what I love most is finding partnerships with colleagues on campus and in the community.

How long have you worked at the UA Press?

Almost 25 years! So much has changed in that time about the way we disseminate scholarship and connect with readers that it never gets old.

The University of Arizona Press is committed to helping contribute to an informed society and enlightening readers. What’s one thing you’ve learned from your work?

That university press publishing attracts the most talented, dedicated, generous, passionate, community-minded professionals you can imagine.

What would people be surprised to learn about your work?

I think people would be surprised at the amount of labor it takes to make a book. Research has shown that the average cost of publishing and disseminating a high-quality peer-reviewed monograph ranges from $30,000 to $50,000. Most of that is in staff time— and it doesn’t even include the cost of print copies. But I think they would be equally surprised to know that on most days, that work feels like a privilege. We get to share the stories and scholarship of incredibly talented writers and experts and help them have an impact on the world.

Tucson has a thriving literary and scholarly community. What’s one of your favorite spots to hear authors, find a good book, or just curl up and read?

Nothing beats the Tucson Festival of Books for renewing one’s own excitement about books, authors, and this incredible literary community we live in. But for sitting down with a great book, I’ll take the back porch during a Tucson monsoon.

The Real Horse Discussed in West Branch

August 15, 2019

A sustained address to the poet’s daughter, The Real Horse takes its cues from the child’s unapologetic disregard for things as they are, calling forth the adult world as accountable for its flaws and as an occasion for imagining otherwise. Farid Matuk‘s interrogations of form cut a path through the tangle of a daughter’s position as a natural-born female citizen of the “First World” and of the poet’s position as a once-undocumented immigrant of mixed ethnicity. These luminously multifaceted poem sequences cast their lot with the lyric voice, trusting it to hold a space where we might follow the child’s ongoing revolution against the patrimony of selfhood and citizenship.

In the following excerpt, author Hilary Plum and poet Zach Savich dive deeply into The Real Horse, and discuss their thoughts and questions which arise from the text. You can find this review and discussion on West Branch, a thrice-yearly magazine of poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews.

A hero’s pretty feet on her legs white hose skin exposed in sumptuous folds bound as freight on the back of this real horse running into its own outline.”

The questions of authenticity, representation (whose, of whom?), and legibility (to whom? saying what?) are the weighty and beautiful burden of this book, entangled ever with the cruel realities and constructions of race (the phrase “white enough” accumulates in devastating refrain). The couplet quoted above describes the stage actor Adah Menken (1835-1868), whose racial identity was a source of speculation and her own self-invention. Matuk considers her famous role as the “Cossack hero, Ivan Mazeppa”: “Each night on stage she covered her skin, though not her shape, in a pinkish white body stocking to play the culminating scene in which Mazeppa is stripped nude and bound, against a scrolling panorama, to a runaway horse.” There’s a real horse and fake nudity and flamboyantly performed race, of unknown “authenticity”; there’s a fake land in real motion. There are flesh and presence and life in their quickness, elusive amid inescapable representation and discursive force. Performances (Menken’s act; Homelands truest graffiti) may overflow the constraints of their stages, may claim sites of resistance, of “freedom, neither public nor private,” at least for a scrolling moment.

“Where does opposition go after it frames our beautiful camaraderie?” Matuk asks in a letter to his daughter that prefaces the book. “You show me that even if the outlines of our circumstance burn without consequence, we can tend at once to the plain moment and to material things and to the projections they bear.” Both things and the “projections they bear”; both the real horse and its outline. This book forms hope somewhere between reality and representation, in the quick movement of that opposition’s going, the horizon it’s heading toward. Read more.

Poet Farid Matuk

Farid Matuk is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood and The Real Horse. Born in Peru to a Syrian mother and Peruvian father, Matuk lived in the U.S. variously as an undocumented person, a “legal” resident, and a “naturalized” citizen. Matuk’s work has been recognized most recently with a New Works grant from the Headlands Center for the Arts and a Holloway Visiting Professorship at University of California, Berkeley.

Sergio Troncoso on His Family’s El Paso Story

August 7, 2019

Author Sergio Troncoso shared an op-ed on CNN today about his hometown El Paso and his parents’ hometown Juárez, Chihuahua.

(CNN)–I am and always will be the proud son of Mexican immigrants from El Paso. My parents came from Juárez, Chihuahua, to the United States in the 1950’s, newlyweds with on a few dollars in their pickets. In the east side of the neighborhood of Ysleta, they built an adobe house that at first… Read more.

Celebrating the People of the Press: Leigh McDonald

August 6, 2019

People of the Press is back this week! Inspired by the Association of University Presses celebration of the people of AUPresses, we would also like to celebrate our dedicated publishing professionals throughout our 60th anniversary year.

Today, we’re featuring our Art Director, Leigh McDonald.

Hello Leigh, what do you do for the Press?

I am the Art Director for the UA Press. My role includes a wide variety of production and design work, including book cover design, typesetting and interior book design, and art management. I also work with our printers to choose formats and materials and get the books made.

How long have you worked at the UA Press?

A very lucky thirteen years!

The University of Arizona Press is committed to helping contribute to an informed society and enlightening readers. What’s one thing you’ve learned from your work?

One of my favorite things about working at the Press is that I get to learn a little bit about the wide variety of important scholarship we publish. Aside from staying current on the hottest topics in Anthropology or Border Studies, probably the best thing I have learned—and keep learning!—is what’s happening in the art world related to all these different disciplines. Whether I’m being introduced to an up-and-coming young Native painter or rediscovering some fascinating vintage Space art, our books keep me learning every day.

What would people be surprised to learn about your work?

Everybody loves books, but not many people think about the work that goes into them behind the scenes! Everything you see when you pick up a book, from the choice of paper stock and color to the font, margins, image placement…everything but the content was a decision made by someone like me.

Tucson has a thriving literary and scholarly community. What’s one of your favorite spots to hear authors, find a good book, or just curl up and read?

I do most of my book purchasing at either Bookmans or Antigone, but to just curl up and read there’s nothing like enjoying the shade of a tree in a nearby park.

Botany Conference 2019 Roundup

August 2, 2019

This week, we attended the 2019 Botany Conference in Tucson. We had a wonderful time meeting botanists and plant enthusiasts from far and wide, and sharing our books on the Sonoran desert and other regions. We were also thrilled that one of our authors, Stephen Pyne, was the plenary speaker for the conference and spent an evening signing his UA Press books, such as Between Two Fires. Thank you to all of the Botany 2019 attendees for visiting our beautiful desert home and stopping by the UA Press booth to look at our books!

It was great to see Mark E. Fishbein, an editor of Gentry’s Rio Mayo Plants.
Thanks to those of you who came by to get your books signed by Stephen Pyne!

Celebrating the People of the Press: Abby Mogollon

July 24, 2019

People of the Press is back this week! Inspired by the Association of University Presses celebration of the people of AUPresses, we would also like to celebrate our dedicated publishing professionals throughout our 60th anniversary year.

Today, we’re featuring our Marketing Manager, Abby Mogollon.

Hello Abby, what do you do for the Press?

I am the Marketing Manager for the University of Arizona Press. With a three-person marketing team, we have an all-hands-on-deck approach to our marketing and communications. It takes everyone doing their part. I have a wide variety of duties, from guiding our overall marketing strategy to overseeing our website and metadata. I work on book covers and jackets with our designer, coordinate with our sales reps across the country, and much more. All in support of helping our authors share this vital scholarship! My favorite work is when I get to spend time at an exhibit or book festival, hand-selling our books and meeting authors and customers.

How long have you worked at UA Press?

I just reached my tenth anniversary!

The University of Arizona Press is committed to helping contribute to an informed society and enlightening readers. What’s one thing you’ve learned from your work?

I feel like every day I’m learning something new in this job. Whether it’s new ways to market our books or new ways to think about the world, thanks to our author’s scholarship. I feel so lucky to have a job where every day I’m learning something new. Perhaps the one thing I’ve learned is to just keep learning and being ready to change.

What would people be surprised to learn about your work?

So much of book publishing is invisible. It takes a great partnership between the press and the author to spread the word about a book, and a lot of thought and planning is happing behind the scenes. For example, for every review a book receives, there were probably ten or even twenty pitches to outlets. I think people may also be surprised to learn how much thought goes into those quotes on the back of a book. We call them blurbs and think carefully about who we request them from, and the authors who provide blurbs spend a significant amount of time with a work to come up with those two sentences that appear on the back of a book. It’s a real craft. With the advent of digital marketing and metadata, the traditional channels for sharing and publishing information has gotten exponentially more interesting and complex.

Tucson has a thriving literary and scholarly community. What’s one of your favorite spots to hear authors, find a good book, or just curl up and read?

I really love hearing authors talk about their work or present their poetry. I’m incredibly grateful to Antigone Books and the UA Poetry Center for the opportunities they provide to connect authors and audiences. I also love the University of Arizona Bookstore’s selection of books. Whether it’s a preview of authors coming to the Tucson Festival of Books or the new University of Arizona Press books, they are a tremendous asset to our community. For reading, I just love hunkering down on the couch with a book, and my dog Petal curled up next to me. That’s the best kind of afternoon.

Gerard P. Kuiper’s Lunar Contributions

July 16, 2019

In Gerard P. Kuiper and the Rise of Modern Planetary Science, Derek W. G. Sears crafts an in-depth history of some of the twentieth century’s most interesting scientists, from Harold Urey to Carl Sagan, who worked with the father of modern planetary science. Now, as NASA and other space agencies explore the solar system, they take with them many of the ideas and concepts first described by Gerard P. Kuiper. In celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, keep reading for a glimpse into Kuiper and the University of Arizona’s involvement in this exciting period of American history.

“It was the most extraordinary time, one that is hard to imagine many decades later. In 1961, when President John Kennedy made the commitment to land a man on the Moon by 1970, rockets were exploding on the launch pad… Eight years later, highly sophisticated, complex, large, manned spacecraft would touch down on the surface of the Moon within feet of their intended landing site. It took a lot of small steps, a lot of dedication, and a lot of stress to make it happen. Astronauts died in the effort. To Gerard Kuiper and his small group of lunar specialists in Tucson, the task was to produce maps and interpretations of the lunar surface and help with decisions concerning landing sites.”

“America’s decision to land a man on the Moon affected Kuiper in two ways. It led to the construction of a new building in Tucson, eventually to become the Kuiper Space Sciences Building… It also led to a series of robotic missions to the Moon. The science team led by Kuiper, who were amid publishing three atlases of the Moon, would be obvious candidates to participate in these programs.

The American robotic precursors for humans to land on the Moon consisted of three programs. The Ranger program was to be a series of spacecraft that would crash into the Moon and take close-up images as they did. The Lunar Orbiter program was to be a series of spacecraft that would, as their name implied, orbit the Moon and take photographs of the surface. Third, and the most sophisticated of the three programs, was to be the Surveyor program that would consist of robots that landed on the Moon.

Kuiper became involved in the Ranger and Surveyor programs in 1961 when he was asked to serve on committees advising the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, who were managing these programs… In 1961, Rangers 1 and 2 failed on launch. Rangers 3 and 5 missed the Moon. Ranger 4 hit the Moon but failed to return any data. In 1963 the project was reorganized, and Kuiper was asked to be the chief experimenter with a science team of Urey, Shoemaker, Whitaker, and Ray Heacock, a JPL engineer.”

“Four redesigned spacecraft were prepared, each with six TV cameras. At Kuiper’s suggestion, the TV system was tested in mock lunar landscapes at Goldstone Station in the Mojave Desert. Camera operations were carried out by Ralph Baker, who later joined the Optical Sciences Center in Tucson. The science team, especially Whitaker, played an important role in determining the impact sites for Ranger and the approach angles. Ranger 6 was another failure, but Ranger 7 was a spectacular success. It crashed just south of the Copernicus crater in a region now known, at Kuiper’s suggestion, as Mare Cognitum.”

“Kuiper arranged for LPL [Lunar and Planetary Laboratory] to make loose-leaf albums from the Ranger 7 prints, which required a local company, Ray Manley Commercial Photography, to make fifty thousand prints. In the rapid-fire days leading up to the Apollo landings, things moved fast. Ranger 8 hit Mare Tranquilitatis in February 1965, and Ranger 9 crashed near the Alphonsus crater a month later. Both were completely successful.”

“Never had the LPL attracted such attention. With this success came attempts by the NASA centers and JPL to recruit LPL scientists. Whitaker was approached JPL, Kuiper was invited to take a position at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., and both Gehrels and Kuiper were invited to move to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. Kuiper took great pleasure in recounting the details to President Harvill.”

Derek W.G. Sears was a professor at the University of Arkansas for thirty years and is now a senior research scientist at NASA. He has published widely on meteorites, lunar samples, asteroids, and the history of planetary science.

Celebrating the People of the Press: Scott DeHerrera

July 9, 2019

People of the Press is back this week! Inspired by the Association of University Presses celebration of the people of AUPresses, we would also like to celebrate our dedicated publishing professionals throughout our 60th anniversary year.

Today, we’re featuring our Assistant Editor, Scott DeHerrera.

Hi Scott, what you do for the Press?

I am responsible for acquiring titles in poetry and fiction for the Press’s two award-winning literary series, Sun Tracks and Camino del Sol. I also work closely with our Senior Editor, Dr. Allyson Carter, to bring in new titles in anthropology, Indigenous studies, archaeology, environmental science, and space science.

How long have you been working at UA Press?

10 years this June!

The University of Arizona Press is committed to helping contribute to an informed society and enlightening readers. What’s one interesting thing you’ve learned from your work?

In this era of smart phones and social media and technological overload, it’s easy to become jaded and begin to think people no longer have the attention spans required for reading more than 280 characters at a time; however, working in this position has taught me that is indeed not the case – people are reading now more than ever!

What would people be surprised to learn about your work?

I think people would be surprised to know how small our staff is given how many great titles we publish each year.

Tucson has a thriving literary and scholarly community. What’s one of your favorite spots to hear authors, find a good book, or just kick back and read?

Ever since I was a kid, Bookman’s has always been one of my favorite places to spend an afternoon.

Paula López Caballero and Ariadna Acevedo-Rodrigo Featured on New Books Network Podcast

June 27, 2019

University of Arizona authors, Paula López Caballero and Ariadna Acevedo-Rodrigo, were featured on a recent episode of New Books Network podcast do discuss their new book, Beyond Alterity.

“What happens when scholars approach the category of “indigenous” without presupposing its otherness? Edited by Paula López Caballero and Ariadna Acevedo-Rodrigo, Beyond Alterity: Destabilizing the Indigenous Other in Mexico (University of Arizona Press, 2018) is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that take such an approach to studying indigenous communities and the concept of indigeneity. As the editors explain in the podcast, the indigenous subject has been often assumed to be defined by difference, so scholars tend to overlook the existence of practices, ideas, and politics that do not align with preconceived, essentialized ideas about indigenous alterity. This book examines, on the one hand, the range of lived experiences within indigenous communities, and on the other, the ongoing construction of the category of “indigenous.” Its first section uncovers ways in which indigenous communities’ practices and politics were more similar to than distinct from those of their nonindigenous counterparts. In the podcast, Acevedo-Rodrigo discusses her chapter on the role of Spanish-language schools in indigenous towns during the Porfiriato. The second section explores the changing, debated meanings of “the indigenous” in Mexico in various fields of scientific inquiry. López Caballero synthesizes her findings on anthropological debates on what constituted the indigenous in the 1940s. The editors also make reference to the other contributions to this edited volume on topics from property rights to genomic research.”

Listen to the podcast and read more here.

Celebrating the People of the Press: Amanda Krause

June 27, 2019

Inspired by the Association of University Presses celebration of the people of AUPresses, we would also like to celebrate our dedicated publishing professionals throughout our 60th anniversary year!

This week, we’re featuring our Editorial, Design, and Production Manager, Amanda Krause.

What do you do at the Press, Amanda?

I help shepherd books through the Editorial, Design, and Production process, answering author queries; working with freelance copyeditors, proofreaders, and indexers and print vendors; maintaining our house style guide; and managing the schedules for book production to make sure books are published (and reprinted) on time.

How long have you worked at UA Press?

Six and a half years.

The University of Arizona Press is committed to helping contribute to an informed society and enlightening readers. What’s one thing you’ve learned from your work?

I feel like I am constantly absorbing knowledge from our authors and from our location at the University of Arizona Main Library, but perhaps my favorite piece of oddly specific trivia I’ve learned is that “on” is the correct usage when talking about national forests (as in “work on the national forest” rather than “work in the national parks”) — according to our author Ted Catton, this harkens back to the Forest Service’s early days when their primary role was managing grazing lands; you say “on the forest” just as you say “on the range”.

What would people be surprised to learn about your work?

Despite my role in editorial, I actually spend very little of my work day reading — because my role is so focused on project managing and finding and correcting specific errors in the text, I rarely have an opportunity to read our books cover to cover for work (though I do enjoy reading them for fun!).

Tucson has a thriving literary and scholarly community. What’s one of your favorite spots to hear authors, find a good book, or just curl up and read?

I am a huge fan of both Bookman’s and Antigone.

Sale on All Sun Tracks Titles

June 24, 2019

We are so thankful that Joy Harjo’s appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate will bring attention to Native artists. We’ve been publishing Native writers in Sun Tracks for nearly 30 years. We’re offering a 45% discount on all Sun Tracks titles through the end of June. Use discount code SUNTRACKS19 on our website.

Joy Harjo Named U.S. Poet Laureate

June 19, 2019

Joy Harjo (Mvskoke/Creek), an internationally known poet, writer, and musician, was named the 23rd poet laureate by the Library of Congress. The University of Arizona Press is the proud publisher of two books by Harjo:

For a Girl Becoming
With its rich, symbolic artwork and captivating language, For a Girl Becoming is the perfect gift to recognize a birth, graduation, or any other significant moment in a young woman’s life. Not only for children, this lively and touching story speaks to that part in each of us who still stands at the door of becoming.

Part of our award-winning Sun Tracks series, For A Girl Becoming is the winner of several awards. Launched in 1971, Sun Tracks was one of the first publishing programs to focus exclusively on the creative works of Native writers. The series includes more than eighty volumes of poetry, prose, art, and photography by such distinguished artists, including Joy Harjo.

Secrets from the Center of the World
This is Navajo country, a land of mysterious and delicate beauty. “Stephen Strom’s photographs lead you to that place,” writes Joy Harjo. “The camera eye becomes a space you can move through into the powerful landscapes that he photographs. The horizon may shift and change all around you, but underneath it is the heart with which we move.” Harjo’s prose poems accompany these images, interpreting each photograph as a story that evokes the spirit of the Earth. Images and words harmonize to evoke the mysteries of what the Navajo call the center of the world.

Here’s the announcement of Harjo’s appointment on NPR: https://www.npr.org/2019/06/19/733727917/joy-harjo-becomes-the-first-native-american-u-s-poet-laureate

Here’s a link to The University of Arizona’s Poetry Center, where Harjo read from her work in 2016. https://poetry.arizona.edu/blog/vocalisms-2-joy-harjo

Above: Literary legends Allison Hedge Coke and Joy Harjo.

Celebrating UA Press: Past, Present, and Future

June 12, 2019

This week, our university press colleagues are gathering in Detroit for the annual Association of University Presses meeting where they are celebrating publishing successes and learning from each other about the important work of scholarly publishing. Just last week, the University of Arizona Press staff came together for its own celebration and brainstorming session.

Our hard-working staff of eleven put a pause on author meetings, copy editing, e-book making, and marketing to brainstorm and discuss the University of Arizona Press of the future.

It seems like the right moment.

This year marks sixty years of publishing in the Sonoran Desert. We are enjoying looking back and celebrating our growth and evolution into one of the premier scholarly presses in the Southwest. With sixty years of authors, editors, directors, advisory board member, peer reviewers, designers, booksellers, and, best of all, readers, there is so very much to be grateful for and celebrate.

Last week, we gathered in downtown Tucson for a day-long retreat, applying design-thinking practices to reflect and brainstorm around ideas of the UA Press of the future. The entire staff wholly and fully engaged in thoughtful and creative thinking. We asked ourselves provocative “what ifs.” Grounded in our mission to share scholarly communications and research, we proposed possible and even daring solutions that could continue to march that mission forward well into the future.

Every staff member is genuinely committed to continuing our growth and evolution. We are devoted to the legacies left to us by all who have worked for and supported the Press in the past.

After the retreat, our facilitator Shannon Jones wrote, “Watching you work as a dedicated, fun team was inspiring. Thank you for everything you are doing to make the Press such a valuable part of the UA and our community.”

To the University of Arizona Press past, present, and future, we celebrate your spirit, passion, commitment, and sense of community. Onward.

LASA 2019 Recap

June 6, 2019

Thank you to everyone who came by the University of Arizona Press booth to say hello and browse our books at the 2019 Latin American Studies Association in Boston. We loved having the opportunity to catch up with our authors and meet new scholars. To top it all off, the weather in Boston was beautiful all weekend, and there were many sights to see in the city.

UA Press author Emily Hind posing with her new book, Dude Lit.
Frederico Freitas with his UA Press book, Big Water, co-edited with Jacob Blanc.
Maria Teresa de la Piedra stopped by to say hello and pose with her book, Educating Across Borders.
Hannah Burdette came by with her daughter to say hello, and posed with her new book Revealing Rebellion in Abiayala.
Gloria Elizabeth Chacón with her new book, Indigenous Interfaces, co-edited with Jennifer Gómez Menjivar.
Anthony Pahnke visited our booth and posed with his UA Press book, Brazil’s Long Revolution.
It was so nice to see Aída Hernández Castillo at LASA. Here, she poses with her new book, Transcontinental Dialogues, as well as Multiple Injustices.
Many thanks to Ariel Zatarain Tumbaga for stopping by the booth and posing with his book, Yaqui Indigeneity.
It was so wonderful to see Paul M. Worley and Rita M. Palacios. Thanks for posing for a picture with your new book, Unwriting Maya Literature!

Latin American Studies 2019

May 22, 2019

We’re looking forward to seeing our authors and friends later this week in Boston for LASA2019. Please stop by Booth No. BH5 in the book exhibit to browse our latest offerings and receive a 40 percent discount on orders. If you can’t make it to Boston this year, you can still receive that discount now through our shopping cart by using code AZLASA19!

Our newest offerings in Latin American Studies:

Ofelia Zepeda Revisits When it Rains

When it was first published in 1982, When It Rains was one of the earliest published literary works in the O’odham language. Speakers from across generations shared poems that showcased the aesthetic of the written word and aimed to spread interest in reading and writing in O’odham. In a new forward to the volume, Sun Tracks editor Ofelia Zepeda reflects on how meaningful this volume was when it was first published and its continued importance. Below, read Ofelia’s thoughtful new forward to When It Rains.

Nat hab e-ju: g t-taccui?

Has our dream come true? It has been some thirty-six years since this little book, When It Rains / Mat Hekid O Ju, was published. Our dream at the time was to envision a flourishing contemporary literary body for the O’odham language. At that time in history, we had speakers from all generations, and it would have been tremendous to create a contemporary literary base for those speakers. Certainly, the goal for me was to be part of a group that created literature for the sole purposes of sharing the aesthetic of the written word and perpetuating interest in reading and writing O’odham. This is what I was working toward at the time–practicing writing, practicing reading, and, when I could or was asked, teaching other O’odham speakers to do the same. Since that time, we’ve come a long way with regard to printed matter for Indigenous languages; some languages certainly have been more successful than others, though few have expanded into the realm of contemporary literature. Just as it was thirty-six years ago, most printed works in Native languages are still for teaching or other academic purposes, relegating printed Native language to these settings.

But there is something uniquely different about it now. In 1982, when this volume was originally published, the first language of the teachers whose writing appears in this collection was O’odham–and it was the same for many of their students. Though these language teachers were bilingual in O’odham and English, most were not certified teachers but aides for their classrooms. During the 1980s federal law required many reservation schools to provide funding to support students’ efforts to transition from their Native languages to English. They used a bilingual approach, using both the target language (English) and the Native language to support the students’ transition to English fluency.

Today the language landscape for O’odham is very different; there is no longer a need for O’odham bilingual classrooms or the bilingual method of English education. Instead, teachers move from grade to grade and room to room, bringing O’odham language and culture to the O’odham students in the schools. Some of these teachers are fluent speakers of O’odham, some are limited in their ability to speak it, and still others are second-language learners of their language. Over the last thirty-six years–the span of a generation–O’odham has suffered extreme language loss. The 1990s experienced the greatest language shift to English for many Indigenous peoples such as the O’odham. This extreme shift to English and the loss of Native language has created an urgency to write the language down, to document it in all forms of media, to use it daily.

Currently, many Native American languages, like Tohono O’odham and Pima, are fading out of use. There are myriad explanations for this extreme language loss, including contact by dominant groups and other similar historical events, institutionalized religions, and educational systems generally but particularly boarding schools; the total causes are too many and complex to address here in detail. It must be noted, though, that due to both language shift and language loss, the teaching of both the oral and written forms of the O’odham language can be found largely outside the classroom.

Today, many tribes must necessarily move the teaching of their languages outside the schools and into the community. These community-based teaching settings invite multiple generations to come together to learn, maintain, and revive their language. In some of these settings, the language immersion method is used; this method relies on the oral form as the primary method for language transmission, though there are a number of opportunities to create written literature in the immersion setting. But even though it is not in the school, this literature’s primary purpose is to support language learning. Perhaps the best example is the case of Hawaiian language revitalization in which both oral and written language use have been promoted. Hawaiian is an exceptional case because, prior to colonization, the Hawaiian language had a rich history of writing and publication. The contemporary language revitalization movements have reached back to these early documents and have continued to add to all genres of printed literary production. Aside from this unique case, other U.S. Indigenous language revitalization movements have not been as successful in actively producing much new literary material in their languages.

Despite the tremendous changes that have occurred within the O’odham languages represented in this collection, it should be noted that one thing has not changed: that is that native speakers of O’odham, those who are learning it as a second language, and all those in between are all still struck with the beauty of the language and all that it is capable of rendering. As a speaker, poet, linguist, and teacher of the Tohono O’odham language, I am still amazed by the new words and usages that I come across. The language is still so new and beautiful with each discovery we make about it, and that discovery is in how people choose to use the language as it moves and changes through time. A mere thirty-six years has allowed us to witness changes in certain elements of the language–some of it good, and some not as positive. A language is allowed this flexibility to change and move according to modernity and the creativity of the people. It has always been that way.

But the changes of the language–whether good or bad–become irrelevant when O’odham gather and share the spoken words. Today, both in the Tohono O’odham Nation and in the Gila River Indian (Pima) Community, the people come together during the winter season to continue telling the story of the creation of the people that is all around them. These gatherings are typically hosted by museums and cultural centers or other formal organizations. As always, these events are communal, and people gravitate toward them. I believe the people understand the importance of these events, even though they have changed in appearance from the events of our parents’ and grandparents’ times. These storytelling gatherings remind people that the real purpose of language is to perpetuate our oral history, to remind us of our origins–of who we are. Stories are capable of this. This is what I understand to be the power of words, of language. This power that I wrote of thirty-six years ago is still there for the people, and I believe those who are now working at reclaiming spoken O’odham know this power is there in the words and that they are gaining more than just words when they learn to speak O ‘odham–whether it be Tohono O’odham or Pima.

Finally, I must comment on the content of the writing in this collection. The themes and experiences expressed in the writing of these people are still relevant today. While both the Tohono O’odham Nation and the Gila River Indian Community have grown and developed over time, they are still very rural communities with small villages dotting parts of the reservation; children still get bussed for miles to go to school, and their parents spend a couple of hours commuting to work each day. The rural desert environment also is still an important part of both children’s and adults’ lives; therefore, the themes written about thirty-six years ago are still applicable. There are words about the cycle of the seasons, about rain in the desert; there are words about the sacred mountains, and, of course, there are words of grief and loss and happiness. There are words about certain animals and about how to behave around them; many children still know of these rules. Things have changed, but many things remain the same. The pieces in this collection will be meaningful to many still.

It is important that I document here that when this collection was first released, we organized a poetry reading by the contributors of the collection. The reading was held in Sells, Arizona, the Tohono O’odham Nation’s seat of government. As we made preparations for this reading, it was hard to predict what would actually happen. This was the first poetry reading ever held on the reservation. We called on many of the contributors to read their piece, and many obliged. We had an emcee for the program, and the venue was the Tohono O’odham Nation’s tribal council building– the largest meeting place in Sells. It was one of the few places that had auditorium-style seating. We mailed invitations to dignitaries of the nation, school officials, and friends. We were not sure who or if anyone would come. I remember working on this with my friend and professor at the time, Larry Evers, who was then the series editor of Sun Tracks. On the day of the event, we made our way to Sells and set up for the reading. Slowly, people trickled in– adults, young people, elders, children. The auditorium was full. We shared our work, reading to a quiet and respectful audience, and afterward, as is typical with such events in the city, we served refreshments. Visiting with members from the audience and friends, I found out to my amazement that many of the tribe’s businesses had closed for the afternoon so that employees could attend the event and that schools had brought busloads of students. We were overwhelmed by their support– or maybe it was their curiosity about the event. Over time, whenever I speak of this experience, I like to think of this event as one that the people knew was going to be about words, making it so important that they all should be there. Though our reading of contemporary poetry was not a telling of the origins, it was perhaps in some way just as powerful.

This collection captured the voices of a small number of language educators, representing both the Tohono O’odham Nation (at the time known as Papago) and the Pima Indians. These educators all were attending a language institute where I was their instructor. I might mention that the language institute, now known as the American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI), is still very much active at the University of Arizona; it continues to offer courses and training to meet the needs of Native American language teachers, researchers, resource people, and activists. I have been a teacher at AILDI for a long time, and the director for a number of years; during my work at AILDI, I have had the opportunity and honor to work with hundreds of language teachers from across the United States. All of them are special people– but none as special as the group whose writing is in this collection, and by my recollection, this is the first generation of literate O’odham. These educators’ first language was O’odham, and they were trained to read and write in that language. They were our pioneers.

It is poignant to note that some of these educators are no longer with us. I will be saddened to know that the reissuing of this collection will bring the memory of their loved ones to their respective families. I want them to understand that I help bring the memory of their family members with respect and honor. I also want them to understand that their contribution of their ha’icu cegitodag to this collection was truly special. They and their words are remembered here in this work.

Ofelia Zepeda
University of Arizona
July 24, 2018

Ofelia Zepeda is a poet, regents’ professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona, and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for her work in American Indian language education. She is the current editor of Sun Tracks, which was launched in 1971 and is one of the first publishing programs to focus exclusively on the creative works of Native Americans.

Renegotiating Mvskoke Knowledge: Spiral to the Stars

May 14, 2019

All communities are teeming with energy, spirit, and knowledge. In the new book Spiral to the Stars, geographer Laura Harjo taps into and activates this dynamism to discuss Indigenous community planning from a Mvskoke perspective. The book poses questions about what community is, how to reclaim community, and how to embark on the process of envisioning what and where the community can be. Today we’re excited to share Harjo’s thoughts on conceiving a map to build genuine community relationships, knowledge, and power:

We watched television every day at my grandfather’s house, before cable, when there were only four channels: ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS. We watched The Price is Right and Wheel of Fortune. Hosts Bob Barker and Pat Sajak crooned at us while we sat in Grandpa’s HUD home, situated in a Creek housing subdivision, with a gravel-dirt road leading in and out. Their voices droned from his console TV, which looked like a piece of wooden furniture; I only knew a handful of people who had a “fancy” TV like that. With game shows humming in the background and the smell of sliced USDA luncheon meat, commodity Spam, frying in the skillet in the kitchen, Grandpa would tell me medicine stories. Some seemed unfathomable—but I believed them and believe them still. He would start by telling me I needed to be able to take care of myself, before going on to teach me medicine songs and instructing me on contemporary uses of Mvskoke medicine. As times change, our needs change, and I learned from my grandfather that the songs and medicine shift to meet our current needs. One song he taught me was meant to be sung in a pawn shop when you want the proprietor to negotiate in your favor! The song’s purpose wasn’t to unfairly sway interactions but rather to make you heard and understood. Thus Creek values and ways morph into new manifestations and applications. Our ways are not bound to “traditional” use, and I think our relatives would think it was ridiculous if we refused to benefit from our knowledge and lifeways in the current day. The purpose of this story about my grandpa is to demonstrate a renegotiation of knowledge and its use as a tool. Our medicine does not stand still either, and its use is not frozen in time. In this book, I share other Mvskoke stories with a commitment to prioritizing the theories that come from the lived and felt experiences of Mvskoke communities, and practices born out of necessity and love.

The primary argument is that Mvskoke communities have what they need at their disposal; everyday community practices are deep, rich, and meaningful, and have sustained Mvskoke people through many moments and in many places. Community practices are articulated through Mvskoke relationships, knowledge, power, and spatialities. Despite the eliminatory work of the settler state, these Mvskoke practices, like those of other Indigenous and marginalized groups who are targeted by settler colonialism, have managed to fly under the radar undetected. Mvskoke communities have sustained the spaces to dream, imagine, speculate, and activate the wishes of our ancestors, contemporary kin, and future relatives—all in a present temporality, which is Indigenous futurity. Mvskoke futurity carries out a form of Indigenous futurity while honoring the lived experiences and knowledge of the Mvskoke community. Mvskoke experiences, practices, and theories generate four concepts fundamental to Mvskoke futurity: este-cate sovereignty (Indigenous kinship sovereignty); community (and body) knowledge; collective power; and the imagining, constructing, and accessing of Mvskoke spatialities.

Examining Mvskoke community through the lens of futurity enables us to step out of clashes over grievance claims for a moment and speculate about the future that our ancestors desired and that we desire, and about how to create something that our future relatives will want and need. The notion of futurity challenges a conventional reckoning of time and the future, and pushes us to create right now—in the present moment—that which our ancestors, we, and future relatives desire. As community builders, we often ask tactical sets of questions to develop a concrete plan, and then tell people that they are going to have to sit and wait, knowing that conditions will not improve in their time: their dreams will be for someone else. In other words, we tell them “not yet.” We cannot say “not yet.” I am not eschewing a long view of community; I am merely saying that futurity does not have to be limited to a future temporality, in which we have to wait to create and get to the place where we want to be. Indeed, there are a range of ways in which we are already enacting Mvskoke futurity to shift community conditions.

Shifting conditions and community contexts require us to renegotiate Mvskoke lifeways and practices. Sharing the story of my grandpa’s pawn shop song illustrates the ease with which renegotiation of Mvskoke knowledge and practices can occur. Spiral to the Stars recognizes Mvskoke ways of knowing as a legitimate source of power and recognizes that Mvskoke people embody, enact, and share power and knowledge in multiple spatialities. My operating definition of futurity is the enactment of theories and practices that activate our ancestors’ unrealized possibilities, the act of living out the futures we wish for in a contemporary moment, and the creation of the conditions for these futures. This is futurity: it operates in service to our ancestors, contemporary relatives, and future relatives. I employ futurity as an analytical tool throughout the book.

Mvskoke poet, musician, and playwright Joy Harjo’s poem “A Map to the Next World” urges us to think about Mvskoke futurities—the other possible worlds to live in that refuse elimination at the hands of settler colonialism.  In her poem, Harjo takes the reader through the prevailing world conditions and wonders about a map to the next world, offering suggestions of looking inward—the map is written into us. As a Mvskoke person, I consider Harjo’s poem a call to action, a call to conceive of a map to the next world. This is a significant endeavor that requires renegotiating Mvskoke knowledge—something we have always done. This book is just one idea for constructing a map, using futurity as an analytical tool. As an Indigenous mapper and cartographer, I develop way-finding tools that I will unpack in each chapter. I put into action my community knowledge and academic training to imagine tools that communities can use to operationalize their knowledge without requiring so-called experts to identify their areas of genius.


Laura Harjo is a Mvskoke scholar, geographer, planner, and Indigenous methodologist. She is an assistant professor of community and regional planning at the University of New Mexico.

Cover art: Chain of Being by Daniel McCoy Jr.

Open Arizona Expands Open Access Offerings

May 3, 2019

Eight new open access titles are now available in Open Arizona, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Selected by an advisory board of scholars and community members, the new additions include Henry Dobyn’s Spanish Colonial Tucson, Edward H. Spicer’s Pascua, and Arnulfo D. Trejo’s The Chicanos.

Kathryn Conrad, director of the UA Press and lead of the Open Arizona project, says, “We know that these titles were very influential to their fields when they were first published and have continued to be sources of critical and dynamic conversation. We hope that as open access works they continue to contribute to scholarly discourses. We are grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for providing the funding to allow us to make them available again in this new format.”

Open Arizona also includes new original essays by leading scholars, offering contemporary reflections on these once out-of-print works.

In the essay “Deliberate Acts: Peter M. Whiteley’s Hopi Hermeneutics and the ‘Collaborative Road‘” Thomas E. Sheridan contextualizes Whiteley’s continued relevance to ethnology and the importance of collaborative work with Indigenous communities. Sheridan is a Distinguished Outreach Professor at the University of Arizona. He has written or co-edited fifteen books, including Landscapes of Fraud: Mission Tumacácori, the Baca Float, and the Betrayal of the O’odham, which won the Past Presidents’ Gold Award from the Association of Borderlands Studies.

Open Arizona also includes a new essay by Lydia R. Otero titled “Reflecting on Shirley Achor’s Mexican Americans in a Dallas Barrio Forty Years Later.” Otero is the author of La Calle: Spatial Conflicts and Urban Renewal in a Southwest City and is an associate professor in the Department of Mexican American Studies at the University of Arizona. Deep family roots on both sides of the Arizona-Sonora border inspired Otero’s interest in regional history.

In the essay Otero writes, “Ethnic communities surrounding major urban areas across the United States are currently struggling to retain their cultural identity as the forces aligned with gentrification undermine their existence… The inclusion of Mexican Americans in a Dallas Barrio an important addition to the Open Arizona project. It is not only timely but critical.”

Why University Presses are a Good Investment

April 30, 2019

University presses ensure academic excellence and amplification of valuable scholarly research. We are also a good investment. As stewards of the resource investment from our parent institutions, we extend their brands to local and global audiences. Our colleagues Darrin Pratt, director of the University Press of Colorado, and Susan Doerr, assistant director of the University of Minnesota Press, recently wrote about the many ways university presses are a good investment in an article in University Business. Today we offer a brief excerpt:

Universities mobilize tremendous resources in support of a single pursuit: the advancement of research-based knowledge. Their careful stewardship of public and private resources to nurture knowledge yields returns that can be recognized not only on spreadsheets but also in the lives of students and communities.

More than 100 North American universities and colleges choose to invest in a university press—a mission-driven publisher that maintains rigorous standards in identifying, preparing, and delivering scholarly research to local, national, and global audiences. And, as a recent Association of University Presses’ survey indicates, university presses deliver substantially on these investments.

In 2018, the 61 US and Canadian presses that participated in this annual survey reported receiving a collective institutional budget of $32.3 million. From that allocation, the presses generated… read more

More than 100 North American universities and colleges choose to invest in a university press

Farid Matuk Receives Holloway Residency for Poetry

April 25, 2019

Congratulations to poet Farid Matuk, author of collection The Real Horse. He has been named visiting Holloway Professor in Poetry & Poetics at UC Berkeley. Farid will occupy the post in the spring of 2020.

The Holloway Series in Poetry is funded through an Endowment made by Roberta C. Holloway in 1981. Each academic year the Holloway Series honors one distinguished poet with a residency at the University of California, Berkeley. Residents teach a semester-long creative writing workshop, are welcomed in the annual fall faculty poetry reading, and give a featured reading in the Holloway Series.

A sustained address to the poet’s daughter, The Real Horse takes its cues from the child’s unapologetic disregard for things as they are, calling forth the adult world as accountable for its flaws and as an occasion for imagining otherwise. Offering a handbook on the possibilities of the verse line, the collection is precise in its figuring, searching in its intellect, and alert in its music. Farid interrogates the confounding intersections of gender, race, class, and national status not as abstract concepts but as foundational intimacies.

Learn More about the Halloway

SAA 2019 Recap

The 2019 Society for American Archaeology conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico was the highest attended meeting in 84 years. We loved talking with our authors, meeting archaeologists, and selling lots of books! Many, many thanks to everyone who stopped by the University of Arizona Press booth to say hello. Below, find some photos taken at the meeting.

Our Senior Editor, Allyson Carter, with The Life-Giving Stone author Michael T. Searcy.
Patricia A. Gilman with her two most recent UA Press books, New Perspectives on Mimbres Archaeology and Mimbres Life and Society.
It was great to see James M. Skibo, one of the editors of Archaeological Anthropology.
UA Press author Richard J. Chacon with his two edited volumes, Latin American Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence and North American Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence.
Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa, one of the editors of Moquis and Kastiilam.
It’s always a joy to see Paul E. Minnis, author and editor of many UA Press books, including New Lives for Ancient and Extinct Crops, Discovering Paquimé, and Ancient Paquimé and the Casas Grandes World.
Scott E. Ingram with his edited volume, Traditional Arid Lands Agriculture.
Thomas E. Guderjan, editor of The Value of Things.
Barbara J. Roth with her new edited volume, New Perspectives on Mimbres Archaeology.
UA Press author Tsim D. Schneider, editor of Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions.
UA Press Senior Editor Allyson Carter with Eleanor M. King, editor of The Ancient Maya Marketplace.
Matthew A. Beaudoin with his new UA Press book, Challenging Colonial Narratives.
Robert W. Preucel and Samuel Duwe, editors of their new UA Press book The Continuous Path.

New Open Access Titles Now Available

18 April 2019

The University of Arizona Press is constantly working toward innovative, forward-thinking ways to connect our scholarship with readers worldwide. We are pleased to announce a new selection of titles in the fields of anthropology and archaeology are now available as open access (OA). The University of Arizona Press has been a leading publisher in those fields since it was founded by future-thinking members of the University of Arizona’s anthropology department 60 years ago.

Thanks to financial support from Knowledge Unlatched, we have been able to move six titles to OA format. The titles are available either via link on our website or directly through the OAPEN Foundation.

Now Available as OA:

Nature™ Inc.
Edited by Bram Büscher, Wolfram Dressler, and Robert Fletcher
With global wildlife populations and biodiversity riches in peril, it is obvious that innovative methods of addressing our planet’s environmental problems are needed. But is “the market” the answer? Nature™ Inc. brings together cutting-edge research by respected scholars from around the world to analyze how “neoliberal conservation” is reshaping human–nature relations.
OA Link

Foods of Association
Nina L. Etkin
This fascinating book examines the biology and culture of foods and beverages that are consumed in communal settings, with special attention to their health implications. Nina Etkin covers a wealth of topics, exploring human evolutionary history, the Slow Food movement, ritual and ceremonial foods, caffeinated beverages, spices, the street foods of Hawaii and northern Nigeria, and even bottled water. Her work is framed by a biocultural perspective that considers both the physiological implications of consumption and the cultural construction and circulation of foods.
OA Link

Reimagining Marginalized Foods
Edited by Elizabeth Finnis
This volume brings together ethnographically based anthropological analyses of shifting meanings and representations associated with the foods, ingredients, and cooking practices that of marginalized and/or indigenous cultures. Contributors are particularly interested in how these foods intersect with politics, nationhood and governance, identity, authenticity, and conservation.
OA Link

Nature and Antiquities
Edited by Philip L. Kohl, Irina Podgorny, and Stefanie Gänger
Nature and Antiquities analyzes how the study of indigenous peoples was linked to the study of nature and natural sciences. Leading scholars break new ground and entreat archaeologists to acknowledge the importance of ways of knowing in the study of nature in the history of archaeology.
OA Link

Paleonutrition
Mark Q. Sutton, Kristin D. Sobolik, and Jill K. Gardner
The study of paleonutrition provides valuable insights into shifts and changes in human history. This comprehensive book describes the nature of paleonutrition studies, reviews the history of research, discusses methodological issues in the reconstruction of prehistoric diets, presents theoretical frameworks frequently used in research, and showcases examples in which analyses have been successfully conducted on prehistoric individuals, groups, and populations.
OA Link

Women Who Stay Behind
Ruth Trinidad Galván
Women Who Stay Behind examines the social, educational, and cultural resources rural Mexican women employ to creatively survive the conditions created by the migration of loved ones. Using narrative, research, and theory, Ruth Trinidad Galván presents a hopeful picture of what is traditionally viewed as the abject circumstances of poor and working-class people in Mexico who are forced to migrate to survive. 
OA Link

Launching the Feminist Wire Books Series

April 17, 2019

Last Wednesday brought scholars from both sides of the country to the Old Pueblo to celebrate the long-awaited launch of The Feminist Wire Books Series. It was an honor to host series editors Monica Casper and Tamura Lomax, alongside Marquis Bey, Judith Pérez-Torres, Christine Vega, Michelle Téllez, Duchess Harris, and Julia Jordan-Zachery. It was a truly powerful night, culminating in a collective soul-bearing that reaffirmed our own mission to elevate under-supported voices in academia.

If you were unable to join us in person or via the live stream, you can watch the symposium via The Feminist Wire’s Facebook Page.

Tamura Lomax describing how she came to co-found The Feminist Wire, from the “intellectual Wu Tang Clan” to an online community and intellectual home for more than a million activists, scholars, and artists.
Marquis Bey discussing the intellectual history of his debut work in Them Goon Rules.
Co-editors of The Chicana M(other)work Anthology. From left to right: Judith Pérez-Torres, Christine Vega, and Michelle Téllez.
Co-editors of the forthcoming Black Girl Magic Beyond the Hashtag volume Duchess Harris and Julia Jordan-Zachery.

Special thanks to the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, the University Libraries, the Office of the Provost, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Africana Studies Program and the Department of Religious Studies and Classics for their generous support of The Feminist Wire Book Symposium.

April 15, 2019

At this year’s Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies, Rachel Corr was honored with the council’s prestigious Judy Ewell Award for Interwoven: Andean Lives in Colonial Ecuador’s Textile Economy.

The Judy Ewell Award honors the best publication, book or article, on women’s history or written by a woman, that began as a RMCLAS presentation.

Interwoven focuses on the lives of native Andean families in Pelileo, a town dominated by one of Quito’s largest and longest-lasting textile mills. Rachel Corr reveals the strategies used by indigenous people to maintain their families and reconstitute their communities in the face of colonial disruptions.

In the award ceremony, the committee said, “Interwoven is a tactile, resonant work that exposes the ties that bind the global to the local and reveals how the textile economy impacted indigenous families. Most crucially, Corr argues that despite the horrendous conditions that shaped their subjectivity, the “obraje Indians” of Pelileo found ways to forge connections with one another and create a semblance of community. This study will be required reading for all of those interested in indigenous labor, community, and ethnogenesis.”

Rachel Corr is an associate professor of anthropology at the Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Ecuador since 1990. She is the author of Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes.

NACCS 2019 Recap

April 8, 2019

Thank you to the National Association of Chicanas and Chicanos Studies members and NACCS leadership for a fantastic meeting in Albuquerque. We are so grateful for the overwhelming support we received this year! Special thanks goes to Kathryn Blackmer Reyes, Associate Director, for the singular thought and care she invests in creating a welcoming, energetic, and successful exhibit space year after year. Thank you, Kathy! 

Below, find several photos our Editor-in-Chief, Kristen Buckles, took of our authors at the conference.

Yvette Saavedra with her new book, Pasadena Before the Roses.
Roberto Hernández with his UA Press book, Coloniality of the US/Mexico Border.
Gilda L. Ochoa with her book, Latino Los Angeles.
UA Press authors Lara Medina and Enrique Buelna with his new book, Chicano Communists and the Struggle for Social Justice.

We were thrilled to see some of The Chicana Motherwork Anthology editors and contributors. From left to right, Christine Vega, Yvette Martínez-Vu, Judith Pérez-Torres, Michelle Téllez, Gabriella Spears-Rico, Cecilia Caballero, and Nora Cisneros.

Margaret Bruchac Receives Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award

April 4, 2019

Margaret M. Bruchac and her book Savage Kin: Indigenous Informants and American Anthropologists received the prestigious Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award.  The book is the 11th winner of the award, which honors books in Indigenous studies.

Savage Kin restructures readers’ views of relationships between Indigenous informants, such as Gladys Tantaquidgeon, Jesse Cornplanter, and George Hunt, and anthropologists, such as Frank Speck, Arthur C. Parker, William N. Fenton, and Franz Boas. Like other texts focused on this era, it features anthropological luminaries credited with saving material that might otherwise have been lost. Unlike other texts, it highlights the intellectual contributions of unsung Indigenous informants without whom this research could never have taken place.

The book “distinguished itself among an impressive field of Indigenous scholars nominated for this year’s award,” said Labriola Book Award Selection Committee Chair David Martínez.

Established in 2008, the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award celebrates books that focus on topics and issues that are pertinent to Indigenous peoples and nations. Of particular interest are those works written by Indigenous scholars or in which Indigenous persons played a significant role in the creation of the nominated work.

This is the second time a University of Arizona Press title has been honored with the award. In 2012, Daniel Herman was awarded for his work Rim Country Exodus: A Story of Conquest, Renewal, and Race in the Making, which examines the complex, contradictory, and very human relations between Indians, settlers, and Federal agents in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Arizona—a time that included Arizona’s brutal Indian wars.

AWP 2019 Recap!

April 3, 2019

Located in the heart of beautiful Portland, Oregon, the 2019 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference was a huge success! We extend our greatest thanks to all of our authors and supporters of the Press for coming by our booth to say hello, dance, and buy books! We continued our partnership with the Latinx Writers Caucus this year, and many amazing authors affiliated with the Caucus signed books in our booth. Overall, it was an incredible AWP, and we look forward to seeing you all again in San Antonio next year!

Below, find some photos from this year’s AWP conference.

Our Assistant Editor, Scott DeHerrera, with poet Vickie Vértiz.
Poet Jennifer Givhan with poet Ysabel Y. Gonzalez signing their books at the UA Press booth.
Poet Casandra López with her new UA Press book, Brother Bullet.
We’re always happy to see Rigoberto González, thanks for stopping by!
The conference was minutes away from the iconic Portland Old Town sign, the beautiful river, and lots of fantastic local establishments.
Portland was exploding with blooms during the week of the conference.
It was nice to see this sign outside of the beloved Powell’s Books!

Bridging the Print and Digital Publishing Worlds

April 2, 2019

This spring marks the long-anticipated launch of The Feminist Wire Books: Connecting Feminisms, Race, and Social Justice. The series is an innovative collaboration between The Feminist Wire (TFW) and the University of Arizona Press that bridges the digital and print worlds.

The Feminist Wire has long provided an online community and intellectual home for more than a million activists, scholars, and artists.
Building on their mission to “valorize and sustain pro-feminist representations and create alternative frameworks to build a just and equitable society,” the book series provides a platform for longer-format critiques of popular culture, media, and politics from a diversity of perspectives The Feminist Wire followers have come to expect.

“At a time when misinformation and disinformation travel with head-spinning speed, TFW’s short-form books let readers pause,” said University of Arizona Press Director Kathryn Conrad during this year’s University Press Week. “They are provocative conversation starters that call us to think and to act.”

From Indigenous and Latinx studies to current anthropology, the Press has a long history in publishing works that elevate and examine the social and political issues our world faces. As we enter our sixtieth year, this series provides yet another exciting avenue to explore both contemporary and pertinent social justice issues.

“This partnership benefits both parties,” said Tamura Lomax, co-founder of The Feminist Wire. “The UA Press has an established reputation publishing books about race and social justice, thus serving as a strategic and welcoming outlet for books in this series.”

“Not only does it complement the Press’s charge to bring scholarship to readers all over the world, but it is yet another opportunity to engage with the wonderful students and faculty in our campus community,” said Conrad.

With the release of the first two titles within the series, we’re excited to bring the conversation to the University of Arizona campus with The Feminist Wire Books Symposium.

Slated for April 10, the symposium will host series editors Tamura Lomax and Monica Casper for an evening of readings and panel discussions with authors, contributors, and editors.

Marquis Bey will present his debut essay collection, Them Goon Rules, and his work to unsettle normative ways of understanding Blackness, Black feminism, and queerness.

“I’m hoping those who tune in take away a sense of how life persists amid abjection, and how radically recalibrating what we’ve come to know about Blackness and feminism and gender might give us over to a world that is otherwise than this, a world in which we all might finally be able to live,” said Bey, who is currently a PhD candidate in English at Cornell University.

Editors from The Chicana M(other)work Anthology will speak to their work to bring together emerging scholarship and testimonios by and about self-identified Chicana and Women of Color mother-scholars, activists, and allies who center mothering as transformative labor.

“I’m thrilled to have our project be part of this event not only because we get to be in conversation with other brilliant scholars and writers, but also because The Feminist Wire Books series already shows evidence of highlighting intersectional, groundbreaking scholarship and activism that is central to transforming the ways in which we understand knowledge production inside and outside of the academy,” said Michelle Tellez, an editor of The Chicana M(other)work Anthology and assistant professor in the UA Department of Mexican American Studies.

To close out the evening, Julia Jordan-Zachery and Duchess Harris will preview their forthcoming book in the series, Black Girl Magic Beyond the Hashtag, which

Special thanks to the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, the University Libraries, the Office of the Provost, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Africana Studies Program and the Department of Religious Studies and Classics for their generous support of The Feminist Wire Book Symposium.

Join us in celebrating The Feminist Wire Books, Wednesday, April 10 at 5:30 p.m. at the UA Women’s Studies Building (925 N. Tyndall Ave.) or via the livestream and stay tuned for more from the series.

The Tucson Festival of Books: Through an Intern’s Eye

March 20, 2019

By Victoria Elizabeth Wacik

During my brief three and a half years in Tucson, this quirky little town has grown very special to me, and I have become quite fond of the desert, the University of Arizona, and the kindness of the people here. As an avid reader, I had visited the Tucson Festival of Books before, but I had only wandered around the University of Arizona’s Mall aimlessly, with no plan, nor had I looked at any of the events or visiting authors. So with a large camera and University of Arizona Press badge in tow, I set off to truly experience the Tucson Festival of Books. It was hot, and crowded, and I got sunburned the first day (My native Pennsylvanian skin is still adjusting to the desert sun). I went to writing workshops and panels, did mini-science experiments, ate bugs, and submerged myself into the literary world.

The funny thing was that Tucson, and more expansively, the American Southwest, was special to many of the authors, too. Scott Whiteford, editor of Shadow of the Wall: Violence and Migration on the U.S.-Mexico Border (UAP, 2018), told me how Tucson, specifically the University of Arizona, was an interesting place to live in relation to his area of study, as the research for his book was all student-driven. The desert, both Tucson’s Sonora Desert and neighboring Mojave Desert, are special to Lawrence Walker, Rebecca Robinson, and Stephen Strom, all published authors by the University of Arizona Press. They all shared their touching personal stories and love for the deserts in their “Stories from Special Places” panel, discussing encounters with wildlife and natives, which I was lucky enough to be able to attend.

Not only did the Tucson Festival of Books give me the opportunity to speak with scholars and authors, it also allowed me to put faces to the names of authors that I worked with as an intern this year. Being able to speak to these scholars and hear them explain what inspired and motivated their projects, and seeing the excitement in their eyes when they spoke about their work was undoubtedly my favorite part of the Festival. This phenomenon was not uncommon during the weekend, as I observed many with this same expression as they found a particular book, learned something new, participated in an experiment, saw a performance, or found their favorite snack. The Tucson Festival of Books allows us to explore our interests as well as ourselves in a place truly loved by its inhabitants.

Victoria Wacik is an intern in our acquiring department. A senior at the University of Arizona, she is majoring in English with minors in Classics and French. She enjoys embroidery, hiking, and reading. Her poetry will be published in the Punk Lit Press, forthcoming April 2019.

Theorizing M(other)work

March 14, 2019

The Chicana M(other)work Anthology is a call to action for justice within and outside academia. Edited by Cecilia Caballero, Yvette Martínez-Vu, Judith Pérez-Torres, Michelle Téllez, and Christine Vega, with a foreword by Ana Castillo, this volume brings together emerging scholarship and testimonios by and about self-identified Chicana and Women of Color mother-scholars, activists, and allies who, using an intersectional lens, center mothering as transformative labor. Today, we offer a brief excerpt from this innovative new book.

Chicana M(other)work is a concept and project informed by our shared gendered, classed, and racialized experiences as first-generation Chicana scholars from working-class, (im)migrant Mexican families. Through Chicana M(other)work, we provide a framework for collective resistance that makes our various forms of feminized labor visible and promotes collective action, holistic healing, and social justice for Mother-Scholars and Activists of Color, our children, and our communities. Furthermore, rather than understanding Chicana identity as a singular monolith, we view it as ever evolving. Here we use the term “Chicana” conceptually to integrate our varying identitarian positionalities as cisgender mother-scholars who identify as Chicana, Xicana-Indigena, Chicana/x Latina, and Afro-Xicana.

“Chicana M(other)work is not a project of assimilating or diversifying academia; on the contrary, we aim to transform it.”

We are daughters of working-class Mexican migrant parents, and we are Chicana Mother-Scholars to Children of Color born in the United States. We use a Chicana feminist framework (Anzaldua 1987; Delgado Bernal 1998; Garcia 1997; Sandoval 2010; Tellez 2005; Villenas et al. 2006) as our theoretical grounding to explore and challenge white heteropatriarchy as it continuously marginalizes Women of Color in the academic pipeline (Harris and Gonzalez 2013; Solorzano and Yosso 2006). While we self-identify as Chicana Mother-Scholars, however, we do not view our work as restricted to academic or domestic spaces; rather, the concept Mother-Scholar transgresses these spaces. Our work exists in the classrooms, community, with each other, and with our children. We view our care work and mothering, specifically “motherwork” (Collins 1994), as an interwoven political act that responds to multiple forms of oppression experienced by Mothers of Color in the United States.

We borrow the term “motherwork” from Patricia Hill Collins and modify it by embracing the term “other” through the use of parentheses. Chicana M(other)work calls attention to our layered care work from five words into one—Chicana, Mother, Other, Work, Motherwork. We see Chicana M(other)work as being inclusive to Women of Color (trans and cis), nonbinary Parents of Color, other-mothers, and allies because mothering is not confined to biology or normative family structures. We strive to build community within and outside academic institutions, and one way we do this is by mothering others and ourselves (Gumbs 2010; Gumbs, Martens, and Williams 2016). Building on Chicana feminists’ critiques of institutional heteropatriarchal violence in the academy (Castaneda et al. 2014), Chicana M(other)work challenges increasingly corporatized neoliberal institutions by holding spaces accountable through activism when they are not supporting Mothers of Color and working-class families. In these ways, we make it clear that Chicana M(other)work is not a project of assimilating or diversifying academia; on the contrary, we aim to transform it, for instance, by choosing not to hide our children, instead including them within our work for social justice. Furthermore, despite the possibility of our individual upward mobility with our doctoral degrees, we will always remain committed to our poor and working-class origins. As such, Chicana M(other)work is a call to action for justice within and outside academia.

For Patricia Hill Collins (1994, 2000), her theorization of motherwork centers race, class, gender, and other intersectional identities to challenge Western ideologies of mothers’ roles. Collins’s theoretical framework disrupts gender roles and defies the social structures and constructions of work and family as separate spheres for Black women; it acknowledges women’s reproductive labor as work on behalf of the family as a whole rather than to benefit men. Motherwork also goes beyond the survival of the family by recognizing the survival of one’s biological kin, as well as attending to the individual survival, empowerment, and identity of one’s racial and ethnic community to protect the earth for children who are yet to be born. These concepts were instrumental for our own theorization of Chicana M(other)work. As Chicana Mother-Scholars, our concept of Chicana M(other)work is informed by the labor we perform in the neoliberal university model, which exploits our work as doctoral students, contingent faculty, and tenure-line faculty. Although women who are adjunct faculty now compose the new faculty majority in the United States, the difficulties of advancing in PhD programs and then into tenure-track and tenured careers are often framed as individual failings rather than fully recognized as institutional barriers that push Mothers of Color outside academia. In turn, the university is seldom held accountable for the institutional violence and exploitation faced by first-generation, low-income, and working-class Mother-Scholars of Color.

The editors of this volume are part of the grassroots collective, Chicana M(other)work, which offers a blog, podcasts, and original essays in an accessible venue.

About the Editors
Cecilia Caballero is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California
.

Yvette Martínez-Vu is the assistant director of the University of California, Santa Barbara, McNair Scholars Program. She is an interdisciplinary scholar with a PhD in theater and performance studies from University of California, Los Angeles.

Judith Pérez-Torres is an adjunct faculty member at California State University, Fullerton, in the College of Education. She is an interdisciplinary scholar with a PhD in educational leadership and policy from University of Utah.

Michelle Téllez is an assistant professor of Mexican American studies at the University of Arizona. She is an interdisciplinary scholar with a PhD in community studies in education from Claremont Graduate University.

Christine Vega is a PhD candidate in the Social Sciences and Comparative Education Division at the University of California, Los Angles.

Jenny Davis Wins Beatrice Medicine Award

March 12, 2019

Jenny Davis has been named the recipient of the Beatrice Medicine Award for Best Monograph in American Indian Studies from the Native American Literature Symposium for her University of Arizona Press book Talking Indian: Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance.

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.

Jenny L. Davis is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where she is also the director of the Native American and Indigenous Languages (NAIL) Lab and affiliated faculty in the American Indian Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies Departments.

Two University of Arizona Press Titles Named Foreword Book Award Finalists

March 11, 2019

Two University of Arizona Press books were named finalists today in the Foreword Reviews 2018 Indies Book of the Year Awards.

Mark Nelson’s Pushing Our Limits is a finalist in the Ecology & Environment category. One of the eight crew members locked in Biosphere 2 during its first closure experiment, Mark Nelson offers a compelling insider’s view of the dramatic story behind the mini-world. Nelson clears up common misconceptions about the 1991–1993 closure experiment as he presents the goals and results of the experiment and the implications of the project for today’s global environmental challenges and for reconnecting people to a healthy relationship with nature.

Stephen Strom’s Bears Ears: Views from a Sacred Land was named a finalist in the Regional Books category. This book captures the singular beauty of Bears Ears country in all seasons, its textural subtleties portrayed alongside the drama of expansive landscapes and skies, deep canyons, spires, and towering mesas. To photographer Stephen E. Strom’s sensitive eyes, a scrub oak on a hillside or a pattern in windswept sand is as essential to capturing the spirit of the landscape as the region’s most iconic vistas. Years from now, this book may serve as either a celebration of the foresight of visionary leaders or as an elegy for what was lost.

According to a Foreword Reviews press release, more than 2,000 entries spread across 56 genres were submitted for consideration. Finalists were determined by Foreword’s editorial team. Winners are now being decided by a panel of librarian and bookseller judges from across the country.

Winners in each genre—along with Editor’s Choice Prize winners and Foreword’s Independent Publisher of the Year—will be announced June 14, 2019.

A Look Back at the 2019 Tucson Festival of Books

March 8, 2019

An estimated 130,000 book lovers attended this past weekend’s 11th annual Tucson Festival of Books. We’ve been a proud supporter of the festival since its inception, and we’re thrilled to have had more than thirty of our authors participate in panels, readings, and booth signings during this year’s event.

Several of our natural history and environmentally focused authors took the stage with our friends at the Western National Parks pavilion, including Fred Landau, Lawrence Walker, Rebecca Robinson, and Stephen Strom.

Internationally renowned, award-winning essayist Ilan Stavans presented his UA Press Latinx Pop Culture series book Sor Juana at both the Pima County Libraries Nuestra Raices and UA Social and Behavioral Sciences stages.

Mario T. García, who has published more than twenty books on Chicano history, also flew in for the event. He presented his most recent UA Press book The Making of a Mexican American Mayor.

We also had a number of authors with local connections participating, including Michelle Téllez, Scott Whiteford, Anna O’Leary, Maritza Cardenas, Gary Stuart, and Stephen J. Pyne.

Today we look back at some of the highlights of the two-day event:

William Sheehan, coauthor of Discovering Pluto, with University of Arizona Press Senior Editor Allyson Carter.
Scott Whiteford holds up a copy of his co-edited anthology The Shadow of the Wall.
Michelle Téllez presents her co-edited anthology Chicana Motherwork, from The Feminist Wire Books series, next to Maritza Cardenas, who contributed to the U.S. Central Americans volume.
Gary Stuart proudly signs copies of all three of his UA Press titles, including his just released biography of Ernest W. McFarland, Call Him Mac.

Rebecca Robinson and Stephen Strom stopped by the booth before their panel to sign copies of both their Bears Ears National Monument–focused books, Voices from Bears Ears: Seeking Common Ground on Sacred Land and Bears Ears: Views from a Sacred Land.


Pat Mora Spreads “Bookjoy” at TFOB and Annual UA Libraries Luncheon

March 7, 2019

Author, speaker, educator, and literacy advocate Pat Mora had a whirlwind weekend at the Tucson Festival of Books. Her weekend started off with a panel exploring ways to bring the joy of poetry to children, moderated by Tucson’s own Jennifer Flores. Next she joined Tucson poets Logan Philips, Mele Martinez, and Mari Herreras for a community reading of her latest collection, Encantado.

Inspired by Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Mora’s Encantado paints a vivid portrait of a community through its inhabitants’ own diverse voices.

Each poem forms a story that reveals the complex and emotional journeys we take through life. Mora shares the thoughts of Encantado’s residents—the mothers and sisters, brothers and fathers in whom we see slivers of ourselves and our loved ones—and brings us to the heart of what it means to join in a chorus of voices. A community.

Mora was thrilled to partner with Tucson’s own unique poetic voice. “I have always wanted to hear Encantado, the voices performed by a community of poets,” said Mora after the panel.

Before heading back to Santa Fe, Mora was honored to be the keynote speaker for the University of Arizona Libraries’ Annual Luncheon. She read poems from Encantado and spoke to the importance of libraries. She told the audience, “Supporting university libraries is noble work—they are treasure houses.”

Mora has dedicated her life to inspiring readers of all ages. She is the founder of Children’s Day, Book Day/El día de los niños, El día de los libros, an internationally recognized celebration of reading. Through all of her work, Mora promotes creativity, inclusivity, and what she calls, “bookjoy.”

Pat Mora speaks to her lifelong commitment to literacy advocacy and her El día de los niños/El día de los libros (Children’s Day/Book Day) epiphany.
University of Arizona Press Assistant Editor Scott De Herrera, Director Kathryn Conrad, and author and literacy advocate Pat Mora.

Celebrate the 2019 Tucson Festival of Books

February 27, 2019

This weekend, 130,000 book lovers will arrive in the Old Pueblo for the Tucson of Festival of Books. Help us celebrate, no matter where you are!

If you’re in Tucson, please come by booth No. 239 and browse our books, meet our authors, and say hello to our staff!

We’ll be offering 60th Anniversary tote bags for purchases of $60 worth of books or more.

Before These Poems, and After: Francisco X. Alarcón’s Snake Poems

February 21, 2019

The late Francisco X. Alarcón (1954–2016) was an award-winning Chicano poet and educator. He authored fourteen volumes of poetry, published seven books for children through Lee & Low Books, and taught at the University of California, Davis, where he directed the Spanish for Native Speakers Program.

He was a poet who lived beyond borders. His poetry straddled cultures and bridged generations. His words are carried on in the spark he ignited in the great many readers, fellow writers, and dreamers his life touched.

For beloved writer and mentor Francisco X. Alarcón, the collection Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation was a poetic quest to reclaim a birthright. Originally published in 1992, the book propelled Alarcón to the forefront of contemporary Chicano letters.

This spring, the University of Arizona Press is honored to release a special edition of Snake Poems as a tender tribute to Alarcón, who passed away in 2016. This edition includes Nahuatl, Spanish, and English renditions of the 104 poems based on Nahuatl invocations and spells that have survived more than three centuries. The book opens with remembrances and testimonials about Alarcón’s impact as a writer, colleague, activist, and friend from former poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera and poet and activist Odilia Galván Rodríguez, who writes, “This book is another one of those doors that [Francisco] opened and invited us to enter. Here we get to visit a snapshot in time of an ancient place of Nahuatl-speaking ancestors, and Francisco’s poetic response to what he saw through their eyes.”

Today on Francisco X Alarcón’s birthday, we’re pleased to share scholar and renowned poet Alfred Arteaga’s thoughts on the collection and Alarcón’s enduring legacy:

This present collection is something much more than just another new volume by a contemporary poet. For as new as Snake Poems is, it is bound inextricably to the past. It is like the serpent of fire that opens up its mouth to meet its double at the center of the exterior ring of the Sun Stone commonly known as the Aztec calendar. This text by Californian poet Francisco X. Alarcón is an encounter with another test completed in 1629 by one Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, a Catholic parish priest from Atenango, a small town in the present state of Guerrero, Mexico.

The poetry of Snake Poems emerges as an encounter with the Ruiz de Alarcón’s colonial manuscript on Native American beliefs, Tratado de las supersticiones y costumbres gentílicas que hoy viven entre los indios naturales desta Nueva España (Treatise on the Superstitions and Heathen Customs That Today Live Among the Indians Native to This New Spain). Ruiz de Alarcón labored more than ten years compiling, translating, and interpreting the Nahuatl spells and invocations. The only extant copy of the handwritten Tratado is now found in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City.

Ruiz de Alarcón’s Tratado was compiled a hundred years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico and remains one of the most important sources on Native religion beliefs and medicine. Its importance lies in the spells, curing practices, and myths that were transcribed in the original Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. It is this language transcription that allows so much of the original speakers to come to us today, despite the compiler’s insidious intent. Simply stated, Ruiz de Alarcón wrote on a mission for the Christian God, to expose heathen practice among the Indians and to extend the repressive practice of the Spanish Inquisition in Mexico. To gather the raw data for his catalog of practices, the author did not stop short of torturing his informants. Ruiz de Alarcón was admonished for his overzealous interview techniques and yet was able to finish his work undisturbed. Ironically, he was even promoted to ecclesiastical judge because of the extreme zeal of his faith.

What Francisco X. Alarcón has captured from the Tratado in Snake Poems is the spirit of the Indian informants, a sense of Native culture alive, despite efforts to misread and suppress it.

Francisco X. Alarcón’s poems reflect the worldview and belief systems of Indians of Mexico three and a half centuries ago. But clearly, Snake Poems is poetry, not ethnography, and the reflection it casts of the Tratado is nowhere near a mirror image. It is good that this is so. The poems are poems that stand as such, completely on their own. What Francisco X. Alarcón has captured from the Tratado in Snake Poems is the spirit of the Indian informants, a sense of Native culture alive, despite efforts to misread and suppress it.

Commentators on the Tratado frequently mention Ruiz de Alarcón’s poor translation and weak evaluation of some spells in Nahuatl, which seem only guided by his religious prejudice and cultural bias. Francisco X. Alarcón reads through the Tratado, past the surface prepared for the Inquisition, down to the living speakers, whose spells and chants and beliefs are recorded, down to Martín de Luna, Mariana, Domingo Hernández, Magdalena Petronila Xochiquetzal, and other named Indians. And while their words can only come by way of Ruiz de Alarcón, Snake Poems reflects the gaps, the lacunae, the interstices of cultural survival.

All quotations and references that appear in Snake Poems come directly from Ruiz de Alarcón’s Tratado, with five very telling exceptions. There is an invocation by the Mazatec María Sabina and a quote from the New Mexican weaver Agueda Martínez. There are allusions to living poets, to the Chicanos Tino Villanueva and Lucha Corpi and the Nicaraguan poet, priest, and former Sandinista Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal. For Francisco consciousness survives not only in the collective memory but also in the live words of the descendants of the original Indian authors. So, while the poem “Mestizo” celebrates the many strands that meet the hybridize in New World people, the epigraph by Agueda Martínez grounds identity very clearly, “ya que seamos hispanos, mexicanos; somos más indios”: more than Hispanics or Mexicans, we are Indians.

There are 104 Snake Poems, not an arbitrary number but one chosen for its significance in Native thought. The Mesoamerican calendar is based on a fifty-two-year cycle: half of 104. It is as if one cycle was completed with the first translation of Nahuatl thought, Ruiz de Alarcón’s Tratado, and the second cycle occurs now with Snake Poems. The first section of Snake Poems, “Tahui,” contains twenty poems, one for each day of the Mesoamerican month. The final section, “New Day,” contains six poems, alluding to the new era of the Sixth Sun.

The poems are spare in line length and in language. Nothing is wasted; very much is said. On the page, some of the poems appear long and lean like serpents on the desert floor. And there are the illustrations that somehow seem as much at home beside English and Spanish as they do beside Nahuatl. Beside the epigraph of Tino Villanueva’s invocation to Tlacuilo, there is the image of the writer, the speaker, making words. Image and form intertwine with the voices and languages of the past and present: a poetics of ancient oral magic and modern verse. Snake Poems is alive with a simultaneously present and past passion and concern; it brims with the spirit of those who sang despite the fact that their very songs could lead to punishment and death.

Read these poems as expressions of life, as a celebration of the Native heritage of Mestizo America. Some poems uplift and some are humorous, and when taken together, they sing in collective spirit, vigorous, denying death. But then: stop reading, put your ear to the page, and hear the faint yet persistent echoes. I do.

Alfred Arteaga

English Department, University of California, Berkeley


February 20, 2019

A series of essays that reads like a critical memoir, Marquis Bey’s Them Goon Rules queries the function and implications of politicized Blackness, Black feminism, and queerness. Bey binds together his personal experiences with social justice work at the New York–based Audre Lorde Project, growing up in Philly, and rigorous explorations of the iconoclasm of theorists of Black studies and Black feminism. Bey’s voice recalibrates itself playfully on a dime and today we’re excited to share a brief excerpt from this much anticipated debut:

Whence We Are Sent

These people are my access to me; they are my entrance to my own interior life. Which is why the images that float around them—the remains, so to speak . . . surface first, and they surface so vividly and so compellingly that I acknowledge them as my route to a reconstruction of a world, to an exploration of an interior life that was not written and to the revelation of a kind of truth.

—Toni Morrison, “Site of Memory”

I was sent, tell that to history.

—Lorna Goodison, “Nanny”

If I am here, wherever here is, it is because I was sent here by folks who have been putting in work for a minute. I am here with them even if they are not where I am. We collide in a critical intimacy where what I say is only possible because it has been made so by things that they’ve already said. A method for living, of sorts, this intimacy is rugged. This intimacy fissures boundaries imposed, a method that methodically interrogates methodology. Methodological interrogation is the fugitivity I will be speaking about; it is a way of inhabiting the world, a posture of interrogation and refusal, like on some perpetual Nah-type shit; a breaking of the regime that tried to fix us but didn’t know that we arose in the breaking, were made by a breakage that generates the refusal to be broken. A sustenance by way of getting out of the maelstrom of the typical is what I mean. The sustenance is engendered by experimentation, improvisation, unruliness, because their rules stifle what comes in the break of the cut. It’s where we keep finding life lived otherwise, life on the run in inexhaustible exhaustion.

If this running is a political, disruptive act, then here I want to engage that disruption, revel in it, let it flex on ’em with humbled hubris. The life of my mind, my intimate, my private past, is, as any feminist worth their salt will tell you, deeply political. I want to speak from that private, underground place where sinners dwell, where sin as a transgressive act against divine law is what is shared between us; where we keep open secrets of queer conspiracies whispered on underground rooftops; where we use vernacular, words that break free of grammar’s lexical dictates: we fix food instead of cook it, cut instead of turn lights on, so they can’t figure out what we talmbout. Our den of sin, as it were, our promiscuous and shadowy presence, preserves a space for stowaways to be, and choose to be, stowed. This is fugitive coalition, fugitive kinship. This shadowy, stowaway presence, reminiscent of wrecked ships—which is to say, ships we have brought wreck to—is the knowledge and livelihood of fugitivity.

I grew up in Philly and its outskirts, where hip-hop was our unofficial language (Power 99 fm; 100.3 The Beat!), unlaced Timberland boots and Carhartt jackets were our unofficial uniforms, summer mornings were the color of orange juice mixed with fresh blood, and you carried an entire archive of meaning based on which part of Philly you repped. We lived right next to an abandoned house, no porch—like, that shit was just gone—so my cousin Marcus and I would go down into the basement of the house, rummaging around in the subterranean belly of its structure, before we’d get scared and run out. (Well, I got scared.) Unbounded curiosity, we youngbuhls had. To dare to explore without the presumption of conquest, an exploration of the interstices of the indoors with the wilderness-knowledge of the outdoors, is an outlawish and out-of-lawish praxis. And it stretched to our imaginations: we revised video game narratives, yearning for larger worlds. We imagined worlds filled with live Pokémon, with Charizard’s and Mewtwo’s tenacity. We lived loudly in our minds, oozing with vitality while simultaneously surrounded by poverty. We tried to remain afloat, but some of us did not, as they misguidedly say, “make it.” Marcus fell prey to the conditions that middle-fingered our lives from our inception. His thin 6′3″ frame not eradicated, but reduced to being bound indoors with cigarettes and television. Now, more than two decades later, still two years older than me, still funny on the sneak, still with calligraphic handwriting, Marcus rests largely skill-less and jobless after a raucous bout with  drugs—marijuana, cocaine, heroin too—and diagnosed schizophrenia. What happened here, cuz? What stingy alchemy concocted a brew so pungent as to singe your flourishing?

He seemed to have picked up a fate similar to that of so many people we cohabited around. The plight of the Black and poor. But I am awed, truly, at how joyous and dope our lives were despite the fact that we were geographically destined for not only economic but also emotional poverty. I am awed, in other words, at how we still live. We crack jokes in the face of abjection. Like that Christian messiah who did not die, who is said to live perpetually in the all of the world, we have always and already risen, Jesus-like, because the only ones who can feed that many people with such paltry rations are “big mamas.”

It’s like Double Dutch in the streets, making the passing cars wait until you trip up—but you never trip; like laughing at cartoons, your  body and the TV on the floor so the bullets flying inches above you from drive-bys don’t interrupt Spongebob and Patrick’s shenanigans; like cookouts where your niece is telling everyone how beautiful her dark skin is because the sun loved her so, so, soooo much, or where your uncle is acting a fool, talking about how he “still got it” even after his six decades of life. Despite every reason not to, we still smile, we still laugh, we still love, we still Black, y’all. We still. We lived, we sang, we danced, we gleaned textured life from a milieu that said we weren’t supposed to celebrate our own existence. Our joy was, and still is, radical.

We made do with what we did and didn’t have. Imaginative games became not only fun but also life-sustaining. We flourished in the face of abjection, like Nah, we don’t do that over here. And we made do, in the simplest of ways. Like, you wanna play some basketball? Well, you ain’t got no court, but you do have a milk crate, some nails, and a telephone pole. We cut out the bottom of one of those orange milk crates, climbed on somebody’s shoulders, hammered some nails into that jawn, and voilà, basketball in the ’hood. I was forged in this resilient and inventive space.


Marquis Bey is a PhD candidate in English at Cornell University. He has received fellowships from Humanities New York and the Ford Foundation.

But when I wasn’t shooting hoops—or rather, shooting crates—I dwelled in the recesses of my own fraught mind, the “break” in which Black life is situated, where unavoidable subjection meets a radical breakdown. Or a radical boogeydown. I was a precocious kid, but quiet. I preferred to listen—listen for knowledge, for language, for the texture of the in-between space housing the incendiary edges of life.  I’d lay low, though that is not to say that something wasn’t going on. I spoke infrequently, as I understood the consequences of speaking out of turn, “talking back.” In the “old school” from which Mom and Grandma hail, where they plait switches to tear into insolent youngsters, children were meant to be seen, not heard; they were meant to be obedient, to stay in line, which stifled my unchained and unchainable thoughts. But I knew not to invite punishment, the backhand lick, the slap across the face that would catch you off guard, the I wish you would. My laying-low covert ops were a strategy of survival, a way to ensure the continuation of the thoughts they couldn’t stop me from thinking.

Marquis Bey’s debut essay collection unsettles normative ways of understanding Blackness, Black feminism, and queerness. Them Goon Rules is an un-rulebook, a long-form essayistic sermon that meditates on how Blackness and nonnormative gender impact and remix everything we claim to know.


Five Questions with Poet Jennifer Givhan

Quantum Entanglement & Traversing the Desert Circus: Discussing the Vibrant World of Rosa’s Einstein and Poetic Healing

February 15, 2019

Rosa’s Einstein is a Latinx retelling of the Brother’s Grimm’s Snow-White and Rose-Red, reevaluating border, identity, and immigration narratives through the unlikely amalgamation of physics and fairy tale. Jennifer Givhan offered insightful and beautiful responses to a few questions that come to mind when reading her new collection.

What drew you towards including Albert Einstein and his mysterious lost daughter Lieserl as significant figures in this collection?

I’d become obsessed with time travel while breastfeeding my daughter and struggling with postpartum depression in a new landscape— we’d moved from the Southern California desert on the Mexicali border to Albuquerque, New Mexico. I’d set to work on a new novel, Trinity Sight (forthcoming this October, 2019, from Blackstone Publishing), about a Latina anthropologist who falls into an indigenous myth, and I sought ways to coalesce science and faith. I also sought succor for my deep depression and the fear and anxiety it wrought. All of this concurring, I read A Brief History of Time after seeing Stephen Hawking on a David Blaine street magic showcase on television, I watched every episode of Through the Wormhole fanatically, as though it were gospel, as though it could save me (from myself), and I came upon Einstein’s first wife Mileva Maric in a poetry collection by Van Jordan called Quantum Lyrics (it’s gorgeous— you should read it). Absolutely fascinated, I took to the internet and began studying their lives, how Maric helped Einstein out with many of his earliest equations and papers, and how she is not credited anywhere, and discovered that while in school together, she bore his child out of wedlock, and that child virtually disappeared from history as well. She haunted me. The amalgam of mother/daughter relationships, women/girls lost to history— and their haunting power, their intelligence, their creativity, their possibility with them— sent me half-scurrying, half-falling down the poetry hole as Rosa led the way. And I realized, of course, Lieserl (Einstein’s lost daughter) and Nieve (the counterpart sister to Rosa) truly orchestrated the show. Deeper and deeper into the desert circus I went. Along the way, healing, healing.

What inspired you to weave the concepts of physics and fantasy together in Rosa’s Einstein?

They ever-connect for me. The possible and the impossible connected by a thread we’re unraveling, together, as we breathe and write and love our way through our lives. I’ve become enamored of the mathematics that bind us together, and though I am not a mathematician and cannot follow the equations, I’ve had the joy of my life working through the impossible/possible conundrum through language, through poetry, through story. They are one and the same. There is no conundrum. We are all expressions of the selfsame whole. And there is such peace in that, for me.

How did you decide to blend a distinctly Latina experience with a figure of German and Serbian descent?

One of the poems in the collection, “Reinas de STEM,” speaks of the seeming lack of representatives and role models in the sciences for Latinas. Growing up, I never learned about women of color. Especially not in relationship to the sciences. My own father is a scientist, and taught high school Chemistry and Physics all through my childhood. He is of German descent, and now has white hair, a white beard. In many ways, I sought to recreate my own childhood in this collection, with a definitive twist. Latina girls are front and center. We lead the way. Einstein follows us. The next creations, the next discoveries, await us— they are ours for the claiming.

What parallels can be drawn between Rosa and Lieserl that cross the boundaries of culture?

This collection is a lovesong for all precocious girls wandering the deserts, creating ruckuses and circuses and finding love where before there was only pain— for all the lost daughters of time, reclaiming ourselves, singing ourselves, triumphant. This is our hero’s journey.

Did your interest in quantum physics and other scientific concepts precede your decision to craft Rosa’s Einstein, or did it manifest from the work you put into this collection?

It’s quantum entanglement. Though Einstein called it spooky action at a distance and claimed he didn’t believe. My heart believes. Nothing is random. We are all connected. The science saved me as the poetry saves me— and I pray something in Rosa, Nieve, and Lieserl’s journey saves at least one reader. Then we are entangled forever in this ever expanding Universe where I’m determined the final rule is this: love.

Below, find a poem selected from Rosa’s Einstein.

Lieserl’s Yellow
What I'm searching for, Father,
what I'm trying to tell you in my simple way:
you spoke in the language of mathematics
beautifully precise— & I never spoke at all
beyond the sounds babies make for pleasure
but these like soft, round toes or grubby fingers
so full of life—
Remember how I pulled you off the couch
& your head hit the floor when the coal-burning
stove would have killed you?
They say it was your friend Zangger
but it was your little ghost of a girl
you must have known all along for you said:
Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute,
it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour,
it seems like a minute. That's relativity.
It's an act of peace, communicating with the dead—
yellow against yellow.
I've become a periodic
table of elemental disasters
flowering despite the last frost
                   before spring, come too soon. 

Jennifer Givhan is an NEA Fellowship recipient and author of three previous collections of poetry, including Girl with Death Mask. She teaches English at Western New Mexico University.

A Book Lover’s Paradise: The 11th Annual Tucson Festival of Books

We’re nearly three weeks away from Tucson’s largest literary event! The Tucson Festival of Books is one of the largest literary festivals in the country, regularly drawing more than 300 authors from across the U.S. and more than 135,000 attendees.

The University of Arizona Press is proud to have been a part of the Festival since its inception in 2009, and we look forward to continuing to bring diverse voices in literature to the Old Pueblo.

Panels for Everyone

We are thrilled to have more than twenty authors participating in this year’s festival.

Ilan Stavans and Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez will discuss the multi-layered and complex history of the borderlands of North America. They will discuss the Spanish and their on-going influence on our region during the panel “El Norte: Beyond Standard Narratives.”

From the Mojave Desert to Bears Ears, the Southwest contains some of the most special landscapes on the globe. Panelists Rebecca Robinson, Stephen Strom, Lawrence Walker, and Frederick Landau discuss the special places they’ve recorded in their new books, and how photography and storytelling help them and their readers connect with those places in their panel “Stories from Special Places.”

What makes a great moment in history? Is it the people? Or the times in which they live? Authors Gary Stuart, Mario García, Heidi Osselaer have written biographies of politicians who reached great political heights, serving their communities. What propelled them? They will talk about this during their panel “Capturing the Political Zeitgist.”

Three important contemporary voices, Maritza Cardenas, Luis Plascencia, and Anna O’Leary, track Latino identity in the U.S. today across different times, geographies, and generations. These identities range from Mexican workers to Central American immigrants to the emerging Latinx generation. They will discuss this and more during their panel “Contested Latino Identities: Past, Present, and Future.”

Meet Our Authors

Stop by our booth for special discounts, to meet our authors, and to get your University of Arizona Press books signed. Be sure to download the Tucson Festival of Books app and look for us in booth #239!

Saturday, March 2

Scott Whiteford and Ilan Stavans at 11:30–12:00 p.m.

William Sheehan at 12:00–12:30 p.m.

Gary Stuart and Mario García at 12:30–1:00 p.m.

Sunday, March 3

Maritza Cardenas and Michelle Tellez at 10:00–10:30 a.m.

Lawrence Walker and Frederick Landau at 12:00–12:30 p.m.

Rebecca Robinson and Stephen Strom at 12:30–1:00pm

Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez, Luis Plascencia, and Gloria Cuádrez at 1:30–2:00 p.m.

The Tucson Festival of Books is from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., March 2–3, 2019, on the campus of the University of Arizona. See tucsonfestivalofbooks.org for the complete schedule of events.

Pushing Publishing Boundaries, Sharing Open Access Scholarship

February 6, 2019

The University of Arizona Press is pleased to announce the launch of Open Arizona. This new online portal allows the press to bring back out-of-print titles as open access (OA) e-books.

The books available on Open Arizona focus on the histories and experiences of Indigenous and Latino groups in the southwestern United States, foundational areas of the Press’s long publishing history. The first eight projects now available touch on topics that range from the impact of government policy on Indigenous communities to the experiences of Mexican American communities throughout the 20th century.

Open Arizona was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2017 and is a three-year initiative to make available in open access format two dozen critical works of scholarship.

Please join us in celebrating these new OA books:

Deliberate Acts
Peter M. Whiteley

Drawing on oral accounts from Hopi consultants and contemporary documents, Peter M. Whiteley argues that the Oraibi split of 1906 was the result of a conspiracy among Hopi politico-religious leaders, a revolution to overturn the allegedly corrupt Oraibi religious order.

Farmers, Hunters, and Colonists

Edited by Katherine A. Spielmann

Eight contributors discuss early trade relations between Plains and Pueblo farmers, the evolution of interdependence between Plains hunter-gatherers and Pueblo farmers between 1450 and 1700, and the later comanchero trade between Hispanic New Mexicans and the Plains Comanche.

In Defense of La Raza

Francisco E. Balderrama

Mexican communities in the United States faced more than unemployment during the Great Depression. Discrimination against Mexican nationals and similar prejudices against Mexican Americans led the communities to seek help from Mexican consulates, which in most cases rose to their defense.


Life and Labor on the Border

Josiah McC. Heyman

This book traces the development of the urban working class in northern Sonora over the period of a century. Heyman describes what has happened to families over several generations as people have left the countryside to work for American-owned companies in northern Sonora or to cross the border to find other employment.

Mexican Americans in a Dallas Barrio

Shirley Achor

This book vividly describes day-to-day barrio life in Dallas. Achor’s portrayal of the residents challenges stereotypes of traditional Mexican American culture and southwestern barrio life.

Missionaries, Miners, and Indians

Evelyn Hu-Dehart

More than a tale of Yaqui Indian resistance, Missionaries, Miners, and Indians documents the history of the Jesuit missions during a period of encroaching secularization. The Yaqui rebellion of 1740, analyzed here in detail, enabled the Yaqui to work for the mines without repudiating the missions; however, the erosion of the mission system ultimately led to the Jesuits’ expulsion from New Spain.

Reconstructing a Chicano/a Literary Heritage

Edited by María Herrera-Sobek

This collection of essays offers a critical examination of key texts produced in the Southwest from 1542 to 1848. Drawing on research in the archives of southwestern libraries and applying literary theoretical constructs to these centuries-old manuscripts, the contributors demonstrate that these works should be recognized as an integral part of American literature.

Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression

Abraham Hoffman

Discouraged by widespread unemployment and alarmed by anti-Mexican sentiment, nearly five hundred thousand Mexican Americans returned to Mexico between 1929 and 1939. Historian Abraham Hoffman captures the despair of these thousands of people of Mexican descent—including those with U.S. citizenship—who were actively coerced into leaving the country.

Gary Stuart Shares Previously Untold Story of Arizona Political Icon

February 4, 2019

Gary L. Stuart speaks to KVOA prior to taking the podium at “An Evening Celebrating Ernest “Mac” McFarland.

Last week, University of Arizona Press author Gary L. Stuart rendered an intimate portrait of one of Arizona’s most notable politicians, Ernest “Mac” McFarland, at a special event hosted in the University of Arizona Libraries’ Special Collections. The event marked the Tucson release of Stuart’s Call Him Mac: Ernest W. McFarland, the Arizona Years.

A young, ambitious country lawyer, McFarland left an enduring legacy as one of the few men to hold all three of the highest political positions in the state of Arizona. Although much is known about the man’s political legacy, Stuart entertained Tucsonans with a look at the man whose hard-won victories were achieved by a his ability to build real relationships with his constituents, including his rousing victory over the favored incumbent Sen. Henry F. Ashurst.

“If Arizona had a Mount Rushmore, the men on it would be Carl Hayden, Ernest McFarland, Barry Goldwater and John McCain.”

– Gary Stuart quoting Arizona Historian Marshall Trimble

Special thanks to all who took part in the event, including UA President Emeritus Dr. Peter Likins and Tucson lawyer Burton J. Kinerk, as well as John D. Lewis from the McFarland Historical State Park Advisory Committee.

Listen to the full presentation via SoundCloud.


Katherine Morrissey and John-Michael Warner Awarded BRLA Southwest Book Awards

January 18, 2019

Congratulations to Katherine G. Morrissey and John-Michael H. Warner who were named BRLA Southwest Book Award recipients for their University of Arizona Press book Border Spaces: Visualizing the U.S.- Mexico Frontera. Since 1971 the Southwest Book Awards have been presented in recognition of outstanding books about the Southwest published each year in any genre (e.g. fiction, nonfiction, reference) and directed toward any audience (scholarly, popular, children). Original video and audio materials are also considered.

In Border Spaces, Katherine G. Morrissey, John-Michael H. Warner, and other essayists build on the insights of border dwellers, or fronterizos, and draw on two interrelated fields—border art history and border studies. The editors engage in a conversation on the physical landscape of the border and its representations through time, art, and architecture.

 

 

A Conversation with the Editors of New Perspectives on Mimbres Archaeology

January 11, 2019

In the early 1970s, understanding of the Mimbres region as a whole was in its infancy. In the following decades, thanks to dedicated work by enterprising archaeologists and nonprofit organizations, our understanding of the Mimbres region has become more complex, nuanced, and rich. New Perspectives on Mimbres Archaeology brings together these experts in a single volume for the first time. Focusing on the social contexts of people and communities, the role of ritual and ideology in Mimbres society, evidence of continuities and cultural change through time, and the varying impacts of external influences throughout the region— the volume presents recent data on and interpretations of the entire pre-Hispanic sequence of occupation.

Below, editors Barbara J. Roth, Patricia A. Gilman, and Roger Anyon discuss the inspiration for their research, the unfortunate consequences that have accompanied the beautiful Mimbres ceramics, and future directions for understanding Mimbres life and culture.

Why did you embark on this research?

Patricia A. Gilman: This book is a compendium of the most recent research in the Mimbres region of southwestern New Mexico, and we decided that it was time to do such a collection. Also, 2014, when we presented the first drafts of what would become the book chapters at the Society for American Archaeology annual meeting, was the 40th anniversary of the Mimbres Foundation doing archaeological research in the Mimbres Valley. We wanted to honor that and Steven LeBlanc, whose vision started the Mimbres Foundation and its research. Both Roger and I worked for the Mimbres Foundation, as did several other chapter authors.

Roger Anyon: It can probably be said that this research began over 40 years ago when the Mimbres Foundation established a research presence in the Mimbres Valley. Without the pioneering work of Steven LeBlanc and the Mimbres Foundation, the current book would not have been possible. For me, working with this group of talented individuals and pulling together the most recent research on the Mimbres archaeological culture has been a particularly rewarding experience.

Barbara J. Roth: This was a collaborative effort that resulted from many discussions with colleagues working in the Mimbres region about the changes in our interpretations of what had happened through time and the reasons for these changes since the foundational research in the area by the Mimbres Foundation. We were excited to bring together a group of scholars actively doing research in the region to put these new finds and interpretations in context, and we were able to include perspectives from some of the people who had worked on Mimbres Foundation projects (including Gilman and Anyon, two of the co-editors, along with Steve LeBlanc, who started the Mimbres Foundation.)

Why is there so much interest in Mimbres Ceramics?

Patricia A. Gilman: The paintings of people and animals on some Mimbres black-on-white pottery attracts the attention of many archaeologists and non-archaeologists. Unfortunately, the price that such vessels can command has led to the wholesale looting and sometimes the bulldozing of Mimbres sites. Such looting destroys the contexts in which the bowls are embedded, and it is context that allows archaeologists to understand how people lived in the Mimbres Valley in the past. While the paintings on the bowls are beautiful, we want to say things about peoples’ lives.

Roger Anyon: Simply put, Mimbres ceramics are a unique ceramic decorative tradition that illustrates aspects of Mimbres life in ways unlike any other Southwestern ceramics. The designs are intricate, delicate, bold, and strong. It is, however, most unfortunate that Mimbres designs have such vitality and presence to the modern eye, as it is looting for these ceramics that has contributed to the destruction of Mimbres archaeological sites.

Barbara J. Roth: I think it has to do with their artistic beauty. Many of the pots are absolutely exquisite and to think about someone making that kind of artistic design with a yucca brush is awe-inspiring. I think they are attractive to archaeologists for different reasons, primarily what they can tell us about Mimbres society. I have to admit I have been frustrated at times with the focus on ceramics, as in the past (not in the present volume!) this has led to an overemphasis on the role of ceramics in the society. They were clearly important to Mimbres people, but they only represent a small portion of their lifeways, and there are a lot of other data, much of which are discussed in the volume, that help us piece together what life was like in the Mimbres region.

What do you hope will come next in Mimbres archaeology?

Patricia A. Gilman: Current research projects are examining sites and artifacts to the north and west of the Mimbres Valley, and I hope that a better understanding of what makes Mimbres Mimbres will come from these. Another major research project is using Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis to source the pottery to the sites at which it was made. This has been and will continue to be ground-breaking in terms of who was and who was not making pottery and where that pottery ended up. What I hope will come next that no one is apparently doing in a major way is to collate the elements in the paintings of people and animals. That is, do staffs (perhaps staffs of authority?) associate with men, women, or both? With what or whom do specific animals— dogs, macaws, antelopes— associate? Even though we have admired Mimbres painted pottery since the early 1900s, no one has ever done such a study.

Roger Anyon: There is so much research yet to be done in both the field and in existing museum collections. We are just beginning to understand the pre-ceramic period and I see this as a major avenue of future research into the origins of agriculture in southern New Mexico. I also hope that we get a much clearer idea as to how Mimbres pithouse and pueblo society was structured, and how internally and externally driven dynamics caused change. Finally, there is so much to learn about the late periods, after Mimbres ceramics are no longer made, when there is dramatic societal change on many scales.

Barbara J. Roth: I’d like to see a resurgence of research in the area. As I said in a recent grant proposal, we can still fit most of the scholars actively doing fieldwork in the area in a minivan. I’d like to see more student involvement, and I’d like to see researchers start to ask different questions. When the Mimbres Foundation started, archaeology as a discipline was very focused on topics like ecology, land use, subsistence, and climate. These are very important and are crucial to understanding Mimbres society. But through time, there were all kinds of interesting social and ideological things going on, and we have only started to explore them.

In New Perspectives on Mimbres Archaeology, the contributors discuss current knowledge of the people who lived in the Mimbres region of the southwestern United States and how our knowledge has changed since the Mimbres Foundation, directed by Stephen A. LeBlanc, began the first modern archaeological investigations in the region. Many of these authors have spent decades conducting the fieldwork that has allowed for a broader understanding of Mimbres society. Additional contributions include a history of nonprofit archaeology by William H. Doelle and a concluding chapter by Steven A. LeBlanc reflecting on his decades-long work in Mimbres archaeology and outlining important areas for the next wave of research.

 

Southwest Books of the Year 2018

January 7, 2018

We are excited to share that two of our titles were selected by the Southwest Books of the Year Award committee members as Top Books of 2018. Southwest Books of the Year: Best Reading 2018 is published by Pima County Public Library in partnership with the Friends of the Pima County Public Library. This year marks the 42 edition of the annual awards, which started with the Arizona Daily Star and continued by the Library in 2000.

A Natural History of the Mojave Desert by Lawrence Walker and Fredrick Landau was selected from our Spring 2018 catalog by Gregory McNamee.

Gregory McNamee, a longtime Tucsonan, is the author of more than 40 books and more than 6,000 periodical pieces. He is a contributing editor to Kirkus Reviews and to the Encyclopaedia Britannica:

“The Mojave Desert is renowned for its frightful heat, boasting the highest temperature ever reliably recorded on Earth. It’s not much known for anything else, and some geographers even consider the Mojave not an entity unto itself but “a transition zone between its larger neighbors, the Sonoran Desert to the south and the Great Basin Desert to the north.” So write Walker and Landau, scientists at the University of Nevada–Las Vegas, who disprove that assumption with this gracefully spun, richly photographed handbook. They note that the Mojave “contains about 3,000 plant species and about 380 terrestrial vertebrate animal species,” a quarter and a sixth of which, respectively, are found nowhere else. Three million humans also make their homes in the Mojave in places like Victorville, CA, Kingman, AZ, and of course Las Vegas. Readers will be surprised at some of the mysteries of the place—how the creosote bush got to the Mojave from its South American birthplace, for instance, and how birds have adapted to the scorching heat. The book is a desert rat’s delight.”—Gregory McNamee

Pat Mora’s latest poetry collection Encantado, published this fall, was selected by Christine Wald-Hopkins.

This is the fourth Southwest Books of the Year selection panel for longtime educator and occasional essayist Christine Wald-Hopkins. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, she has reviewed books for national and regional publications.

““Encantado”: “adj., enchanted, haunted.” And “rambling (said of a house).” These translations all variously apply to Santa Fe writer Pat Mora’s haunting, rambling, poetic house of many rooms, Encantado. In the tradition of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, Mora has created a fictional Southwestern town—Encantado—and peopled it with characters both living and dead. Each of the poems has a different speaker; each of the speakers has a unique story. Physically and metaphorically, the río, the river, runs through the town and unites the lives. Their lives are humble; their voices unassumingly lyrical. Cobbler Señor Ortega, for example: “I live in languages, Spanish, English—/and shoes, old zapatos, their leather tongues.” And the Japanese physician returned from World War II detention: “Such tears, nightmares, sighs, /and the wood butterflies. I/watch fragile wings swirl, rise. Fly.” Encantado is an affectionate, affecting creation.”—Christine Wald-Hopkins

Congratulations to all the winners! For the complete list, see: https://www.library.pima.gov/browse/genre/local/southwest-books-of-the-year/

Confronting Healthcare Realities: An Excerpt from Global Indigenous Health

December 10, 2019

Global Indigenous Health examines the dramatic impact of colonization on Indigenous peoples’ physical, mental, and emotional health. Building on Indigenous knowledge systems of health and critical decolonial theories, the volume’s contributors explore how Indigenous peoples are responding to both the health crises in their communities and the ways for non-Indigenous people to engage in building positive health outcomes with Indigenous communities. Edited by Robert Henry, Amanda LaVallee, Nancy Van Styvendale, and Robert Alexander Innes, this book raises important considerations for contemporary research in the field of Indigenous health, which is too often done “on” or “for” Indigenous communities rather than within or with these communities. Today we offer an excerpt from the introduction to this important volume:

Prior to colonization, Indigenous peoples had their own political structures, religions, education processes, and concepts of how to live within their territories (King, Smith, and Gracey 2009), which continue today to varying degrees, despite ongoing settler colonial and postcolonial conditions. Indigenous peoples frame their understanding of the world around their relationships with their environments, which, for many, have existed since time immemorial (Kuokkanen 2007; Smith 1999). Globally, Indigenous peoples have a variety of cultural practices, beliefs, customs, languages, and ceremonies that influence their health paradigms. Even during colonial processes designed to eradicate Indigenous cultures, many continued to define health on a continuum of relationships and responsibilities with their environment, families, communities, and ancestors (Burgess et al. 2005; King, Smith, and Gracey 2009; Kuokkanen 2007).

Scholarly discussions of health are often dominated by Western biomedical discourse, which focuses on a cure/disease model. Health, in this model, has been and continues to be typically defined as the “absence of disease or illness” (Rootman and Raeburn 1994). As such, health systems and health research are often viewed through a Western Eurocentric lens, which focuses on healing the body from disease and not on the social and environmental factors that influence an individual’s health (Shah 2003). For example, within the field of epidemiology research, health status is still measured by indicators such as incidence, prevalence, and mortality rates. Through the centering of Western biomedical perspectives and understandings, traditional Indigenous knowledges about health and well-being have been ignored. In other cases, Indigenous knowledges— for example, of medicinal plants or healing practices— have been outright stolen and claimed by Western science (Bala and Gheverghese Joseph 2007).

Western indicators do not directly improve our understanding of how sociopolitical histories shape environmental factors that lead to ill health for Indigenous and other marginalized populations (Singer 2009). In contrast to Western biomedical models focused on the absence of disease as a primary indicator of health, many Indigenous peoples view health, instead, as an interrelated relationship between the mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of the self, as well as the relationship between individuals and their environments (King, Smith, and Gracey 2009; Kuokkanen 2007; Saul 2014). As a 2009 UN report sets forth, Western health practices often tacitly assume and promote a common heritage, belief system, structure, language, and identity based exclusively on Western medicine, which “does not recognize traditional healing techniques such as song and dance, or traditional training methods for medical practitioners, such as dreams, yet these practices are viewed as integral to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illnesses in indigenous health systems” (Cunningham 2009, 175). This ethnocentric bias results in missed opportunities to understand the complexities of health through myriad perspectives and traditional knowledges connected to particular territories and peoples.

Many Indigenous communities have diligently kept their cultures alive by passing on traditional knowledge through arts, ceremonies, and languages. Moreover, they have been protecting and holding onto their lands and territories to sustain themselves as peoples and cultures (Kipuri 2009). Health research frameworks and systems must reflect the interconnectedness and relationships between the individual and family, community, and larger environment, and must recognize how these relationships influence the individual’s mental, physical, and spiritual health. Understanding health in this manner requires acknowledging that illnesses are not just epidemiological concerns identified through Western medicine; rather, health is relational and must be addressed holistically.

The UN states that all peoples have the right to the highest possible standard of physical and mental health. The reality, however, is that for Indigenous peoples globally, this is not the case. Indigenous peoples continue to fight for their right to self-determination and to strengthen themselves politically, economically, socially, and legally, in an effort to promote and protect their human rights (Dorough 2009), as well as their traditions, practices, and knowledges as sovereign Indigenous nations. The chapters within this book are written validations, tributes, protests, acts of resilience, and stories of the success, hope, and survival of Indigenous peoples despite the historical and contemporary harms of colonization.

Global Indigenous Health book coverEdited by Robert Henry, Amanda Lavallee, Nancy Van Styvendale, and Robert Alexander InnesGlobal Indigenous Health is 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. 

 

Stephen Strom’s “Bears Ears” Featured in New York Times

November 30, 2018

Today we were thrilled to see Stephen Strom’s Bears Ears: Views from a Sacred Land featured in the New York Times. The article, authored by the one and only Rick Bass, highlights three volumes of nature photography that “take us back to Earth’s innocent roots.”

Stephen E. Strom’s eloquent “Bears Ears: Views From a Sacred Land” is perhaps a more palatable picture book — if not also in its own way a perverse bummer, another chronicling of territory taken by force. In 2016, President Obama relied on the Antiquities Act of 1906 (signed by Theodore Roosevelt) to set aside 1.35 million acres of public land in southeastern Utah, intending to protect for all time more than 100,000 sacred Native American sites, not to mention a contained landscape upon which the narrative of time has been written more eloquently and indelibly than anywhere else on earth. What Yellowstone is to wildlife, Bears Ears is to geology. However, just half a year later President Trump, in one of his first acts in office (and with characteristic racism), reduced the scope of the protected monument by 85 percent — one of the many illegal executive orders that will remain caught up in courts for years.

Read the full feature by Rick Bass in print or online.

 

 

Everywhere the Earth is Beauty: Reflecting on Bowden’s Blue Desert

November 27, 2018

Originally published in 1986, the University of Arizona Press has reprinted one of the most striking pieces of literature on the Sonoran Desert. With a thoughtfully crafted forward by Francisco Cantú, this new edition of Blue Desert belongs in the hands of desert dwellers and literature connoisseurs far and wide.

Reading Charles Bowden’s Blue Desert paints Southern Arizona more vividly than the human eye, and if you’ve ever spent a night on cold sand beneath a mesquite tree— or foolishly taunted the tightening coil of a rattlesnake— this book is a rush of sensory memory. Beyond his masterful ability to capture the feeling of cactus thorns on tired flesh, or the way old homes crumple just-so in Ajo, Bowden twists his perceptive knife so much deeper into the heart of the Southwest. Broken into three parts— Beasts, Players, and Deserts— Blue Desert delves into topics that feel just as pertinent today as they did in 1986.

Despite his stern narrative voice, Bowden’s love for the land and reverence for the creatures that roam it is overwhelmingly evident throughout all of Blue Desert. Nowhere is this more apparent than the “Beasts” section of the book, in which he writes, “Species are worth saving because a world with less life is less of a world.” Bowden takes us on a tour through delicate bat skeletons picked clean by beetle larvae as their numbers drop drastically, and he outlines the throaty cry of the endangered Sonoran pronghorn as researchers attempt to capture more information on these elusive, threatened animals.

Bowden then takes us into the heart of Ajo, a place which he describes as being “…not of the desert, it just happens to be in a desert.” He chronicles the history of the mining town, and the people who have both thrived and suffered there over the years. His fascination and disgust with desert cities, such as Phoenix and Palm Springs, is summed up in a single thought: “The desert has offered the American people many possibilities, not because they made something of the desert but because it offered a blankness, a clean sheet of map paper where they could live out their lives and not be bothered with other places or concerns.” Throughout Blue Desert, there is a sense that the Southwest both embodies and corrupts the notion of the American Dream. It would be fascinating to hear Bowden’s reflections on these desert empires as we step closer to the end of 2018.

As the book starts to approach a close, we are taken on perhaps the most powerful journey that the pages contain. Bowden decides to walk across the U.S.- Mexico border in Sonora with little food and water, and what he finds is an explosion of wildlife, death, peace, decay, and resilience. Rooting himself in the cruelty of the desert allows for a raw and intensely detailed account of the Sonoran borderlands and what it means to journey across them. Peering out at the desert landscape before him, Bowden makes a beautifully surreal observation that captures the spirit of Blue Desert. “The mountains rise azure, the ocotillo waves blue wands, the creosote whispers by my feet, and everything is awash with a rich, bright blue…I have entered this blue world and I accept it totally. It means peace… The peace works deep into my muscle and my body works harder and harder and yet feels ease. I begin to glide. Ahead Big Pass waits with dark blue jaws… But I glide. I know I glide. Blue.”

Charles Bowden (1945-2014) was the author of many acclaimed books about the American Southwest and U.S.-Mexico border issues. He was a contributing editor for GQ, Harper’s, Esquire, and Mother Jones. His honors include a PEN First Amendment Award and the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.

 

Kathleen Hull and John Douglass Featured on New Books Network Podcast

November 18, 2018

University of Arizona authors Kathleen Hull and John Douglass were featured on a recent episode of New Books Network to discuss their new book, Forging Communities in Colonial Alta California.

“Between 1769 and 1834, an influx of Spanish, Russian, and then American colonists streamed into Alta California seeking new opportunities. Their arrival brought the imposition of foreign beliefs, practices, and constraints on Indigenous peoples.

Edited by Kathleen Hull and John Douglass, Forging Communities in Colonial Alta California (University of Arizona Press, 2018), reorients understandings of this dynamic period, which challenged both Native and non-Native people to reimagine communities not only in different places and spaces but also in novel forms and practices. The contributors draw on archaeological and historical archival sources to analyze the generative processes and nature of communities of belonging in the face of rapid demographic change and perceived or enforced difference. Contributors provide important historical background on the effects that colonialism, missions, and lives lived beyond mission walls had on Indigenous settlement, marriage patterns, trade, and interactions. They also show the agency with which Indigenous peoples make their own decisions as they construct and reconstruct their communities. With nine different case studies and an insightful epilogue, this book offers analyses that can be applied broadly across the Americas, deepening our understanding of colonialism and community.”

Listen to the podcast and read more here.

American Anthropological Association 2018 Meeting Wrap-Up

November 21, 2018

Last week, nearly 5,800 anthropologists gathered in San Jose to discuss a range of critical topics at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting. This year’s theme was “Change in Anthropological Imagination: Resistance, Resilience, and Adaptation.” The conference offered a wonderful opportunity to showcase our most recent titles, visit with authors, and advise scholars about scholarly book publishing and getting their work published with the University of Arizona Press. Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth!

Allyson Carter, UAP Senior Editor; Barbara Meek, author of We Are our Language; Jenny Davis, author of Talking Indian; and Anthony K. Webster, author of Intimate Grammars

 

Georgina Drew, author of River Dialogues

 

Anna M. Babel, author of Between the Andes and the Amazon, and Allyson Carter, UAP Senior Editor

 

Margaret M. Bruchac, author of Savage Kin, which was named the inaugural CMA Book Award Winner at this year’s meeting

 

Chip Colwell, co-editor of Footprints of Hopi History and Anthropologist’s Arrival, and Allyson Carter, UAP Senior Editor

 

Left to right: Piergiorgio Di Giminiani , author of Sentient Lands; Rachel Corr, author of Interwoven; and Allyson Carter, UA Press Senior Editor

 

 

José E. Martínez-Reyes, author of Moral Ecology of a Forest

 

Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez, author of Hegemonies of Language and Their Discontents and co-editor of The U.S.-Mexico Transborder Region

 

Carrie C. Heitman, co-editor of Chaco Revisited

Tom Miller Wins NM-AZ Book Award

November 19, 2018

We’re excited to announce Tom Miller has been named a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award winner for his book  Cuba, Hot and Cold.  In the Travel Book category, Miller shares the honor with Ashley Biggers for her book Eco-Travel New Mexico, from our AUP peers at the University of New Mexico Press.

Since his first visit to the island thirty years ago, Tom Miller has shown us the real people of Havana and the countryside, the Castros and their government, and the protesters and their rigor. His first book on Cuba, Trading with the Enemy, brought readers into the “Special Period,” Fidel’s name for the country’s period of economic free fall. Cuba, Hot and Cold brings us up to date, providing intimate and authentic glimpses of day-to-day life.

 

Turning It Up! University Press Week 2018

November 12, 2018

We’re thrilled to celebrate University Press Week along with our peers in the Association of University Presses. Since 2012, the Association has celebrated University Press Week each year to help tell the story of how university press publishing supports scholarship, culture, and local and global communities. Emphasizing the critical role of university presses in providing a voice for authors, ideas, and communities beyond the scope of mainstream publishing, this year’s theme is #TurnItUP.

“University presses publish authors from around the world and right at home, writing on subjects that are broad, niche, and at every level of inquiry in between,” said AUPresses Executive Director Peter Berkery. “Without university presses, many of these authors or subjects would not be heard in the marketplace of ideas. We’re delighted to make this aspect of our work the focus of UP Week 2018.”

Amplifying scholarship and minority voices has long been a mission of the University of Arizona Press.

Founded in 1959, the University of Arizona Press has been an ardent supporter of the international scholarly conversation in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, environmental science, history, Indigenous studies, Latinx studies, Latin American studies, and the space sciences. We continue to look for new opportunities to bring this scholarship to readers all over the globe. One such example of this is our Open Arizona initiative. Thanks to support from the Mellon Foundation, we’re exploring open access opportunities for foundational texts that document histories and experiences of Indigenous and Latino groups of the southwestern United States. The Open Arizona project will include works that touch on topics such as the impact of government policy on Indigenous communities and the experiences of Mexican American communities throughout the twentieth century.

We’ve supported emerging and established voices in Indigenous and Latinx fiction and poetry through our award-winning literary series for nearly fifty years.

The University of Arizona Press was one of the first publishers to celebrate Native American and Indigenous voices in poetry and fiction through our Sun Tracks series, established in 1971. One of the latest books in that series comes from Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, the first published Marshallese poet.

We were one of the first publishers to support Latinx voices in poetry and fiction through our Camino del Sol series, established in 1997. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera was the inaugural author in the series, and we had the honor of publishing the debut full-length collection from Vickie Vértiz, Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut, which was just named a Pen America Literary Award winner in Poetry.

We’re turning it up this spring with a brand new series.

We’re thrilled to release the first two books from The Feminist Wire Books, a new series from The Feminist Wire (TFW) and the University of Arizona Press that presents a cultural bridge between the digital and printing worlds. Marquis Bey’s debut essay collection unsettles normative ways of understanding Blackness, Black feminism, and queerness. Them Goon Rules is an un-rulebook, a long-form essayistic sermon that meditates on how Blackness and nonnormative gender impact and remix everything we claim to know. The Chicana M(other)work Anthology is a call to action for justice within and outside academia. Using an intersectional lens, this volume brings together emerging scholarship and testimonios by and about self-identified Chicana and Women of Color mother-scholars, activists, and allies who center mothering as transformative labor.

“At a time when misinformation and disinformation travel with head-spinning speed, TFW’s short-form books let readers pause,” said University of Arizona Press Director Kathryn Conrad. “They are provocative conversation starters that call us to think and to act.”

Thank you for celebrating with us this week!

Send us your #UPShelfies or tag us with your favorite University of Arizona Press titles that really #TurnItUP. From all of us at the Press, thank you for your support!

Urban Frontier of Change: An Excerpt from Laurent Corbeil’s The Motions Beneath

November 8, 2018

As Mexico entered the last decade of the sixteenth century, immigration became an important phenomenon in the mining town of San Luis Potosí. Drawn by new jobs, thousands of men, women, and children poured into the valley between 1591 and 1630, coming from more than 130 communities across northern Mesoamerica. The Motions Beneath is a social history of the encounter of these thousands of indigenous peoples representing ten linguistic groups. Using baptism and marriage records, Laurent Corbeil creates a demographic image of the town’s population. He studies two generations of highly mobile individuals, revealing their agency and subjectivity when facing colonial structures of exploitation on a daily basis. Today, we offer an excerpt from this important new work:

The historical literature on the cities of New Spain shows that the disposition of indigenous neighborhoods did not usually follow a blueprint developed and imposed by Spaniards. The ideal of a well planned and grid patterned urban development— as it was appearing in Renaissance Europe— was seldom enforced in urban indigenous neighborhoods. Felipe Castro Gutiérrez describes the general organization of the pueblos y barrios de indios in New Spain in these words: “a labyrinth of small streets, public places hidden on unexpected sites, irregularly designed blocks of houses, and houses disposed according to the resources or to the convenience of each owner, sometimes with ‘false doors’ that permitted people to enter and exit with discretion.”

In the areas of the northern frontier of New Spain where silver deposits abounded, this situation was juxtaposed— and collided— with the chaotic development of mining as a private and uncertain enterprise. In Zacatecas, for example, indigenous migrants established their settlements close to mining operations, in accordance with economic incentives and the availability of resources, but not following any sort of urban planning. A similar contrast between the European chessboard ideal of urban development existed in most of Nueva Vizcaya, and only key social and political institutions, such as the church, the cemetery, and the zócalo (central plaza) existed there. Missions, however, followed a strict pattern of well-demarcated territories assigned to indigenous ethnic groups in a written fundo legal, a royal allotment of land for indios. In theory, the pueblos de indios of San Luis Potosí should have received a fundo legal as well, but their location, a very short distance from the Spanish settlement, suggests that the geographic disposition was rather arbitrary.

Traza, Pueblos, and Barrios of San Luis Potosi, Early Seventeenth Century. Map by Juliana de Souza Ritter, Student Consultant, Davis Library Research Hub, University of Northern Carolina at Chapel-Hill. Inspired by Galvan Arellano, Arquitectura y urbanismo, 173.

 

The major cause behind the apparently disorganized nature of urban development was the fundamental presence of the haciendas de benefico in the regional economy. I will define in greater detail the nature and functions of these sites of production later in this chapter, but suffice it to say for now that Spanish miners established these facilities where the resources allowed for it, rather than where it was best for urban development. Other factors, such as the geography of the land— in San Luis Potosí, the swamp, the lagoon, and the numerous water springs— and the Spaniards’ unfamiliarity with the early modern ideals of urban development were other determining factors. In accordance with this interpretation of urban borderlands, I argue that the development of pueblos y barrios de indios surrounding San Luis Potosí was not planned, but that they were established and evolved according to available resources and to the needs and wills of the population, both Spanish and indigenous. A crucial difference here, however, is that Spanish authorities were quick in recognizing the official nature and government of most indigenous settlements.

The northern frontier was not only characterized by the establishment of human settlements, but also by the arrival and transformation of an economic system. The indigenous population in San Luis Potosí did not only establish itself in the pueblos y barrios de indios. Many of them also lived on work sites run by Spaniards, such as haciendas de beneficios, carboneras (charcoal-making facilities), ranchos, and the like. I recall here that the estimated indigenous population in 1597, according to in-town parish records, was around 2,500 individuals, while the male working population, including the mines, was estimated at 5,000 in 1600 and 6,000 in 1603. That is to say that the laboring population living outside the pueblos y barrios de indios was significant. Indigenous labor was diversified in the nature of the performed tasks, in the degree of knowledge and specialisation, and in the type of relations with the Spanish employers.

 

Laurent Corbeil received his Ph.D. from McGill University and was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has received grants from the UNAM-IIH and the Québec Research Funds—Society and Culture. 

The Origins of Latino Political Power

October 29, 2018

With Election Day approaching, conversations about political representation and social justice have taken on new urgency. But historian Mario T. García reminds us that it was these very topics that propelled Raymond L. Telles to office in 1957, when he was elected the first Mexican American Mayor of El Paso. In The Making of a Mexican American Mayor, García deftly illustrates how Telles’s election marked a turning point in political agency for Latinos. Today, we share an excerpt from the new second edition:

The election of Raymond L. Telles as mayor of El Paso in 1957 was a major breakthrough in the Mexican American quest for political representation and status in the United States. A personal triumph for Telles, his election also symbolized a political victory for the entire Mexican American community of this key southwestern border city. After more than one hundred years of limited and inadequate political participation in local affairs, Mexican Americans concluded in 1957 that the time had come for electing one of their own as mayor of a city numbering almost 250,000 with one half of the population being of Mexican descent. Telles became the first American of Mexican descent to be elected mayor of a major southwestern city in the 20th century. His election and subsequent administration (1957–61) stimulated additional Mexican American electoral initiatives and, more importantly, gave Mexican Americans a growing confidence in themselves as American citizens and as political actors. Hence, the Telles story is part of the larger and ongoing struggle by Mexican Americans to eliminate a legacy of second-class citizenship and to achieve social justice.

The role of Mexican Americans as second-class citizens originated with the conquest of northern Mexico by the United States during the 1840s and in the subsequent labor exploitation of Mexicans in the Southwest. The annexation of this region assumed major economic significance by its integration as a supplier of key industrial raw materials (copper, lead, and silver) as well as agricultural and cattle foodstuffs to feed the industrial armies of the East and Midwest. The railroads penetrated the Southwest and northern Mexico, opening these areas to American capital and technology. In turn, southwestern entrepreneurs induced Mexicans to cross the border and work as cheap unskilled labor beginning in the early twentieth century. Consequently, social relations in the Southwest and in communities such as El Paso took on definite economic characteristics. Mexicans, for the most part, served as manual laborers while Anglos possessed highly skilled jobs as well as managerial, business, and professional occupations. Mexican workers in this exploitative relationship produced much wealth, but received little of it in return.

The labor exploitation of Mexicans supported by racial and cultural discrimination likewise led to their political second- class status. A small number of acculturated and better-off Mexican Americans did participate in early El Paso politics, but as political ward bosses for the Democratic “Ring” that controlled local politics during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most Mexicans possessed no real political representation. Many, of course, prior to the 1930s maintained Mexican citizenship. Still, they contributed to El Paso politics by being paid to vote by unscrupulous Anglo politicians acting through Mexican American intermediaries. Mexicans received slight patronage as city laborers out of this political arrangement, but on the whole their involvement only supported a political system that reinforced their economic oppression. Mexican immigrant workers undergoing a process of proletarianization struggled to protect themselves, but their vulnerable political status as “aliens” and their personal desires to return to Mexico did not lend themselves to long-lasting protest movements.

World War II, however, proved to be a political watershed for Mexican Americans. A new generation— the Mexican American generation—came of age that unalterably refused to accept second-class status and that was prepared to wage protracted struggles for their civil rights. Not immigrants like most of their parents, these mostly first-generation U.S.- born Mexicans achieved slightly improved working- class positions for themselves as a result of greater needs for better-trained workers in a more complex southwestern economy plus increased access to public education. In the process, some began to perceive themselves as an exploited social class. Moreover, a distinct Mexican American lower middle class composed of small businessmen and smaller numbers of professionals also evolved and began to become aware of its own class interest. Changing class characteristics accompanying American economic revival in turn produced growing political and social expectations and aspirations among many younger Mexican Americans. Socialized to American democratic principles through the schools and mass media and patriotically serving in World War II, these Mexican Americans sought to eliminate barriers to full equality with other citizens.

Repulsed by overt forms of social discrimination, Mexican Americans after the war chose to first confront segregation in public facilities such as schools, theaters, swimming pools, restaurants, housing tracts, and access to elective offices. The efforts to force respect for Mexican Americans by pursuing an integrationist strategy involved what Everett Ladd in his study of black politics in the South terms “status goals” as opposed to “welfare goals” intended to obtain material improvements without disturbing race- ethnic divisions. For Mexican Americans, as for many blacks after the war, “status goals” meant abolishing those forms of public discrimination that called attention to their race and ethnic difference.

Consumed by a desire to be treated as full-fledged American citizens, Mexican Americans engaged in the “politics of status.” “The demand for integration . . . ,” Ladd notes, “is essentially the attempt by a group which has been branded inferior in quite literally a thousand ways by white Americans to gain recognition as a truly equal partner in the American democracy.”

Reformist by nature, the “politics of status” did not directly combat the root cause of Mexican American underdevelopment in the Southwest: the need by capital to expand from maintaining most Mexicans as pools of cheap and surplus labor. The altering of this relationship would entail more fundamental struggles, encompassing both sides of the border, than most Mexican American leaders in the post-war era were both ideologically and politically prepared to undertake. They believed that the system was capable of reforming inequities. Nevertheless, the “politics of status,” including the struggle for democratic political rights, marked a forward step in the political evolution of Mexican Americans and a further step in achieving social justice. The rising expectations generated by this movement, as well as its accompanying frustrations, would result in even more challenging efforts by a succeeding generation.

In El Paso, Mexican Americans interpreted status goals predominantly in electoral political terms. Unlike other parts of Texas where Mexicans faced de facto racial discrimination in public facilities, Mexican Americans in the border city did not; they had historically possessed access—if they could afford it— to theaters, restaurants, stores, and other forms of public facilities. Even schools and housing tracts were not strictly segregated in El Paso. The Anglo power structure had early learned that it made little economic sense to exclude Mexicans from public facilities due to their importance as a source of labor and as consumers. Moreover, discrimination against Mexicans would jeopardize El Paso’s relation with Mexico, especially the border city’s role as a labor center and as a wholesale and retail outlet for northern Mexican customers. Not confronting a system of overt public discrimination, Mexican Americans, however, still lagged behind Anglos in jobs, wages, education, and political representation.

“El Paso’s discrimination,” one report on El Paso politics concluded, “is based primarily on the belief, or rationale, that Latins are ‘not qualified’ (primarily because of lack of education) for various jobs.”

In 1950, for example, the Spanish-surnamed population in El Paso composed more than half of the city’s total population. Of these, almost three- quarters of Mexican Americans were born in the United States. Despite their numbers, Mexican Americans constituted only 1.8 percent of high white- collar occupations, only 26.4 percent of low white-collar occupations, and only 11.2 percent of skilled blue- collar ones. Only seven Mexican American lawyers practiced in El Paso. Hence, by midcentury Mexican Americans still formed, despite certain gains, a predominantly working-class population excluded from access to political and economic power. Two El Pasos continued to coexist as they had since the nineteenth century: one more affluent and mostly Anglo in the northern section of the city and the other relatively poor and mostly Mexican “south of the tracks.”

Under such circumstances, Mexican Americans in El Paso—experiencing both poverty and degrees of progress—viewed the attainment of effective political representation as the first step in equalizing their status with Anglos. Not having to struggle, as in other parts of Texas, for the right to integrate public facilities— already achieved in El Paso— Americans of Mexican descent in the border city instead saw their lack of access to electoral offices as the most significant affront to their status as American citizens.

No one from this ethnic group had ever been elected mayor nor served on the city council between 1900 and 1950. Moreover, the existence of a poll tax in Texas added to the political disenfranchisement of many Mexican Americans. After the war, leaders from this community vowed to change this. “The Spanish-speaking group is ripe for organized action and has an endless list of social grievances, many of which date back fifty years,” writer-historian Carey McWilliams wrote of El Paso in 1948 in The Nation. “It has only begun to achieve real political maturity, but leaders are emerging and the day of political reckoning cannot be long deferred.”

This was especially true for the aspiring lower middle class that considered politics not only as an avenue of personal mobility, but more importantly of collective respectability. These Mexican Americans believed that the most symbolic way of acquiring status as full-fledged American citizens was through electoral success, including winning the mayor’s office. At the same time, it should be noted, political representation for many Mexican Americans including Telles was only the first step. Telles personally understood poverty and the class/race divide in El Paso and in other parts of the Southwest.

“Poverty pained him,” his daughter Cynthia Telles stresses. He was committed to achieving social justice at all levels, but believed that it would need to start first by achieving political power in order to be able to try to deal with the larger issues of economic inequality. It is in this context that the political ascendance of Raymond Telles can be appreciated.

Mario T. García is Distinguished Professor of Chicano Studies and History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published more than twenty books on Chicano history and won many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2016 Stetson Kennedy Vox Populi Award from the Oral History Association.

Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez Receives an Honorable Mention from the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists Book Award

 

October 26, 2018

Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez has received an Honorable Mention for his new book, Hegemonies of Language and Their Discontents: The Southwest North American Region Since 1540from the ALLA (Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists) Book Prize Committee for 2018! Dr. Vélez-Ibáñez will be recognized for his accomplishment at the annual AAA meeting this November, as well as the ALLA Business Meeting.

The ALLA Book Award Committee members, Gilberto Ross, Elaine Peña, and Diane Garbow offer this reflection on the important scholarly contribution of Dr. Vélez-Ibáñez’s work: “Velez-Ibáñez’s text underlines the manner in which gender, race, and class emerge out of local and global processes. The book emphasizes that from the Spanish era to the United States invasion, to the new reach of the Mexican state in the Southwest North American Region, languages and their ideological constructs were imposed upon resident populations in complex, ‘hydra-headed’ approaches to the negotiations, accommodations, and resistances. Revolts, hybridities, and other kinds of recalcitrant inventiveness are the result, ‘spiced by spaces and places’ for experimental and discontent ‘translanguaging’. No hegemony is complete, in the best of the Gramscian tradition.”

Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez is Regents’ Professor and the Motorola Presidential Professor of Neighborhood Revitalization in the School of Transborder Studies and a professor of human evolution and social change at Arizona State University. His numerous honors include the 2004 Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology and the 2003 Bronislaw Malinowski Medal. Vélez-Ibáñez was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1994 and was named as a corresponding member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences (Miembro Correspondiente de la Academia Mexicana de Ciencias) in 2015.

Congratulations, Carlos!

Tim Z. Hernandez Honored with Leal Award

October 26, 2018

Last evening, Tim Z. Hernández received this year’s Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature. The Leal Award is named in honor of Luis Leal, a professor emeritus of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UC Santa Barbara, who was internationally recognized as a leading scholar of Chicano and Latino literature. Previous recipients of the award include Norma Cantú, Francisco Jiménez, Demetria Martínez, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Graciela Limón, Pat Mora, Alejandro Morales, Helena Maria Viramontes, Oscar Hijuelos, Rudolfo Anaya, Denise Chávez, Hector Tobar, John Rechy and Reyna Grande.

“Tim Hernández is one of the most exciting and innovative new literary voices linking history and fiction to the Chicano/a experience,” said Mario T. García, professor of Chicana and Chicano studies and of history at UC Santa Barbara, and the organizer of the annual Leal Award.

Tim Z. Hernandez was born and raised in California’s San Joaquin Valley. An award-winning poet, novelist, and performer, he is the recipient of the American Book Award for poetry, the Colorado Book Award for poetry, the Premio Aztlán Literary Prize for fiction, and the International Latino Book Award for historical fiction. His books and research have been featured in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, CNN, Public Radio International, and National Public Radio. His most recent book, All They Will Call You,  is the harrowing account of “the worst airplane disaster in California’s history,” which claimed the lives of thirty-two passengers, including twenty-eight Mexican citizens—farmworkers who were being deported by the U.S. government.

Western History Association 2018 Conference Recap

October 23, 2018

San Antonio’s rainy weather in no way dampened the spirit of the 58th Annual Western History Association Conference in Texas last week. The conference’s distinctive location on the San Antonio River Walk, a stone’s throw from the Alamo, fueled fascinating discussions on the city’s unique environment, history, and urban landscape. As usual, the exhibit hall was the hub of activity for conference goers, a lively locale for celebrating books.

What a joy to have two foundational Chicano historians, Mario García and Ignacio García, in the UA Press booth discussing Mario’s new book, The Making of a Mexican American Mayor: Raymond L. Telles of El PasoIt was also wonderful to see Katherine Morrissey, co-editor of Border Spaces: Visualizing the U.S.-Mexico Frontera, as well as many other UA Press authors, including Yvette Saavedra, Flannery Burke, Dick Etulain, Phylis Martinelli, and Jeff Shepherd.

A warm congratulations goes to UA Press authors Cliff Trafzer for receiving the American Indian Lifetime Achievement Award and to this year’s WHA President, Donald Fixico. Thanks to everyone who visited the University of Arizona Press booth this year; we look forward to seeing you all again next year in Las Vegas!–Kristen Buckles

The Making of a Mexican American Mayor author Mario García with White But Not Equal author Ignacio García
The Making of a Mexican American Mayor” author Mario García with “White But Not Equal” author Ignacio García

 

Border Spaces co-editor Katherine Morrissey
Border Spaces” co-editor Katherine Morrissey

 

The Alamo in San Antonio, Texas
The Alamo in San Antonio, Texas

 

The San Antonio Riverwalk
The San Antonio River Walk

 

Unlocking the Hidden Histories of Power: México Beyond 1968

October 5, 2018

Fifty years ago this week, as Mexico came to represent the first Latin American country to host the Olympics in 1968, a massive student movement revealed the country’s political instability and state of control and repression. On October 2, 1968, government soldiers opened fire on a peaceful demonstration, killing more than a hundred in the plaza of Tlatelolco. Today Jaime M. Pensado and Enrique C. Ochoa talk about the impetus for their book México Beyond 1968: Revolutionaries, Radicals, and Repression During the Global Sixties and Subversive Seventies and their collaborative work to root the telling of México’s history within a broader Mexican public:

México Beyond 1968: Revolutionaries, Radicals, and Repression During the Global Sixties and Subversive Seventies emerges from our long collaboration together. Since the late 1990s when Jaime was an undergraduate and graduate student at California State University, Los Angeles, we developed a close working relationship that was built on a mutual passion for learning, social justice, and the history of greater Mexico. Enrique was born and raised in Los Angeles, the largest metropolitan area of Mexicanas/os outside of Mexico City, and Jaime migrated to the same city in the mid-1980s. We connected in our belief in the importance of studying and teaching Mexican history in a society (the United States) with a significant Mexican and Latinx population that has been publicly denied a full understanding of the deep history of Mexico in the United States. The process of colonialism and coloniality as it plays out in the U.S. academy erases knowledge systems and the deep histories and ways of knowing that communities have. We see it as our goal to unlock the hidden histories of power to understand how power works, the structures of inequality, and the long history of resistance. For us, this must be done through a broad collaboration that challenges the conservative, elitist, and assimilationist structures of the academy. One important step in this process has been to work to foster the expansion of Mexican/Latinx scholars in the writing of history.

The study of Mexican history in the United States, like the field of Latin American studies, has its roots in U.S. hetero-patriarchal colonial and capitalist domination. Therefore, it has been dominated by white scholars with little contact with Mexican or Latinx communities in the United States, and this has been reinforced by the nation-state focus of the study of history. When Enrique was a graduate student in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the United States, there was only one Mexican American historian of modern Mexico, Ramón Eduardo Ruíz (UC San Diego), teaching at a Research 1 university. While affirmative action and diversity programs have made some inroads since then, as this volume attests, such programs are still woefully inadequate. Instead, given the crisis in higher education funding, we argue that, using the logic of meritocracy and reduced funding, programs in the United States have been complicit in further restricting working-class students of color.

It is in this spirit that in October 2016 we brought together at the University of Notre Dame an intimate group of critical scholars who have been researching Mexican authoritarianism and state violence, as well as social and guerrilla movements, and who seek to intervene in political debate by engaging a broader public and by working with communities with long histories of resistance. Nearly all of the contributors have deep roots in broader Mexico, including communities in the United States. By centering the scholarship of Mexican, Chicanx, and Latinx scholars, we underscore that how we do history is just as important as what we do. We know that those who write history shape the narrative and that narrative has power. We have gathered together a passionate group of scholars for whom the production of knowledge is representative of power, and herein lies the second reason why we have employed the term “México” in the title. The authors bring to the center the work of Mexican scholars who have published in Spanish. All too often, the history of Mexico published in the United States and Europe marginalizes Mexican scholars or buries their arguments in the footnotes. Mexico, student movements, revolutionary organizing, and state repression are not just academic areas of interest for several of the authors here. For them, these topics and events are personal, and they have shaped their lives.

Jaime M. Pensado is an associate professor of history and director of the Mexico Working Group (MWG) at the University of Notre Dame.

Enrique C. Ochoa is a professor of Latin American studies and history at California State University, Los Angeles.

 

New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards 2018 Finalists Announced

October 2, 2018

The New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards 2018 Finalists were announced late last week and we’re pleased to share that six UA Press titles were honored:

Mimbres Life and Society by Patricia Gilman and Steven LeBlanc (Anthropology/Archaeology)

Betrayal at the Buffalo Ranch by Sara Sue Hoklotubbe (Fiction – Cozy Mystery)

Border Spaces edited by Katherine Morrissey and John-Michael H. Warner (History Book)

No Species is an Island by Theodore Fleming (Nature/Environment Book)

Pushing Our Limits by Mark Nelson (Nature/Environment Book)

Cuba, Hot and Cold by Tom Miller (Travel Book)

The New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards are organized by The New Mexico Book Co-Oop, a not-for-profit organization serving authors and publishers. View the full list of finalists. Winners will be announced at the awards ceremony and banquet on November 16, at the Tanoan Country Club in Albuquerque.

Congratulations to all of the finalists!

 

Vickie Vértiz honored with PEN America Literary Award

September 27, 2018

Today PEN America announced the winners of the 2018 PEN America Literary Awards—Los Angeles. We are excited to share that Vicki Vértiz is the 2018 Poetry award winner for her 2017 collection, Palm Frond with its Throat Cut!

The PEN America Literary Awards are juried by panels of esteemed, award-winning writers, editors, booksellers, and critics. This year’s award winners will be honored at the 2018 LitFest Gala on November 2nd at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, CA.

Vickie’s striking collection uses both humor and sincerity to capture moments in time. Brutally honest, playful, and rhythmically rich, Vértiz’s poetry shows how history, oppression, and resistance don’t just refer to big events or movements. Rather, these things play out in the intimate and everyday spaces of family, sex, and community. Vértiz’s poems ask us to see Los Angeles—and all the cities like it—as they always have been: an America of code-switching and reinvention, of lyric and fight.

A graduate of Williams College, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of California Riverside, Vickie Vértiz is a writer from Bell Gardens, California. A Macondo Fellow and seven-time VONA participant, Vickie has also been a Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference scholar, a Lucille Clifton Scholar at the Community of Writers, and a Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellow. Vickie is a social justice advocate who has given lectures and readings in France, Japan, Mexico City, and throughout the United States. She currently resides in Los Angeles.

Since 1963, the PEN America Literary Awards have honored many of the most outstanding voices in literature across diverse genres, including fiction, poetry, science writing, essays, sports writing, biography, children’s literature, and drama. To learn more about Pen America, the PEN America Literacy Awards, and the judges and other fantastic winners, visit the Pen America website.

An enormous congratulations to you, Vickie!

 

 

Six Questions with Stephen J. Pyne

The author of more than 30 books, Stephen J. Pyne is known for his expert works on landscape fire and histories of place. His writing is thoughtful, informative, occasionally humorous, and above all well-crafted and engaging. MacArthur, Fulbright, and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships are just some of the many honors Pyne has received for his writing and scholarship. Pyne has been a professor at Arizona State University since 1985 where, among other things, he has taught nonfiction writing to graduate students. His new book, Style and Story, is for anyone who wishes to craft nonfiction texts that do more than simply relay facts and arguments.  With abundant examples, the book shares pragmatic guidance on how to create powerful, engaging texts by employing suitable literary tools and strategies. Pyne recently answered six questions about his work:

Why did you decide to write this book?

In 2009 I published Voice and Vision to accompany a graduate writing class I developed—it looked at writing issues that most caught my fancy. Over the years I realized that I needed to address a lot of other topics as well. Style and Story is the result. Each book can stand alone, but they are intended to complement one another.

What are three hallmarks of great nonfiction that you look for in your reading and writing?

For me the best nonfiction is one that invites me into an imagined world—not a fictional world of invented facts and characters, but one that nonetheless absorbs me into a state of ‘willing suspension of disbelief.’  The style adds something beyond the particular sources or data. Most fundamentally, it sparks in me a sense that I’d like to write something similar. Often, somewhere, I’ll try to do just that.

What is the biggest mistake new nonfiction writers make?

I think the best nonfiction begins with voice. Get your voice right and a lot of other good things follow.  The students that struggle the most are trying to write in a voice that isn’t theirs, and the course becomes a literary detox project. They can’t concentrate on art and craft until they know who is speaking and why.  Then they can focus on the how.

Who are the nonfiction writers you looked to when you started your nonfiction writing career? Who do you admire now?

When I worked on the North Rim, the Coconino County bookmobile would roll in once a month and that was my only source of reading materials apart from subscription magazines.  There were a lot of regional books, which introduced me to Wallace Stegner, which is where I realized nonfiction could be literature. In fact I thought he was best when he played against type—when he, who thought of himself as a novelist, wrote nonfiction, especially history and biography.

I’m pretty much an omnivore when it comes to reading.  Mostly, I read to learn rather than for pleasure —reading as part of my research. When I read to improve my writing, I tend to read John McPhee (for openings and transitions), Joan Didion (for profiles), Simon Schama (for big narrative), and Tom Wolfe (for humor). All of them are even older than I am, so my sense of style continues to be a shade behind contemporary taste.

The book expands on your previous guide, Voice and Vision. What are the new topics you cover?

Openings and closings, which matter particularly if you are writing narrative; settings, technical material, short and long narration, and varieties of nonfiction humor. Academics in particular have humor beaten out of them, yet it can be very effective when done right (it’s hard to do). I also include some thoughts on writing as a discipline, on how to read as a writer, and on the challenges to nonfiction posed by fiction. I don’t care to have the borders between the two blurred. If you want to tweak stuff as you would in fiction, then write fiction. Nonfiction has rules.

But it does not have an aesthetic as fiction does. It could, it just doesn’t. When nonfiction crosses the border into fiction, I don’t regard it as an excess of literary imagination but as a failure of imagination. A good writer will find a way to play by the rules.

Also, on the recommendation of readers, I include a roster of writing exercises.

What are you working on now?

I’m writing a short book – an idea book and synthesis – called The Great Ages of Discovery that will provide an interpretive framework for thinking about the last 600 years of geographic exploration by Western civilization.  It’s a concept I’ve used in several other books but have never isolated and treated fully in its own right.

Then back to fire. For some time I’ve wanted to do a fire history of Mexico. And I’ve had my sights on a book that would survey concisely the fire histories of South America, Africa, and Asia, maybe modeled on To the Last Smoke.

I try to have some long-term projects, though I find new prompts appear and are fun to pursue.  I never thought, for example, I would write books about writing.  Now I’ve written two.  I’d also like to consider another biography, and maybe try some sustained humorous or at least satirical writing, but all this is probably more than I can realistically manage.

Stephen J. Pyne is a Regents’ Professor in the Human Dimensions Faculty of the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. He is the author of many successful books, mostly on wildland fire and its history, but also dealing with the history of places and exploration.

Exploring Instruments of the True Measure with Laura Da’

September 18, 2018

Laura Da’s new poetry collection, Instruments of the True Measure, moves its reader deeper into the narrative of Shawnee homeland. This collection proves how truly entwined the words poets craft and their personal experiences are. Laura Da’ spoke with us about her inspiration for these poems, as well as how an unexpected turn in her life led to a new form of poetic energy.

“Writing the poems and essays for Instruments of the True Measure started as a natural continuation of the poetic obsessions that have always motivated my work: history, identity, alienation, family, and place,” she says. “As such, this book has direct connections to my first book, Tributaries. Seeking to learn more about my Shawnee ancestors by way of their movements across the land, I became very taken with multiple American histories of surveying, geography, and cartography. I was struck with the ways forms of measurement became such a crucial and destructive tool of colonialism. This became a foundational element of the book.”

“About mid-way through my work on this book, I swerved. Out of the blue, I fell very ill in 2015 and ended up on dialysis until I received a transplant in 2018. I can track the change in my voice and style clearly from a more muted, objectivist tone to a more searing and lyrical connection between the traumas of the present and the past. There is a juxtaposition between my established process of obsessive research leading to image and narrative driven poems with a raw new poetic engagement with personal pain, fear, and sense of exile. I dig in with these poems and I see this book now as an artifact of my own desire to survive and mark my own place here.”

Below, find the poem titled “The Point of Beginnings” from Laura Da’s collection. This poem opens Instruments of the True Measure with themes of birth and the power of the natural world placed within the definition of geodaesia, rendering them inseparable concepts in the context of the poem. Carrying the weight of American history, this poem launches a collection that is deeply concerned with  Shawnee lives and the forced removal and frontier violence which they endured.

 

THE POINT OF BEGINNINGS 

Geodaesia: The art of surveying and measuring—
footpath stamped and deer path trampled.

Wily agents of creation
foliated under great pressure;

white-banded rock embedded
in absolute time’s alluvial fan.

The first creeping
act of range

is the infant’s change of heart
from open to closed

upon the initial intake of breath.
Thence with the meanders of the river. 

 

Laura Da’ is a poet and a public school teacher. A lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest, Da’ studied creative writing at the University of Washington and The Institute of American Indian Arts. She is Eastern Shawnee. Her first book, Tributaries, won a 2016 American Book Award. In 2015, Da’ was a Made at Hugo House Fellow and a Jack Straw Fellow. She lives near Seattle with her husband and son.

 

Five Questions with Indian Land Rights Scholar Beth Rose Middleton Manning

Upstream: Trust Lands and Power on the Feather River by Beth Rose Middleton Manning documents the significance of the Allotment Era to a long and ongoing history of cultural and community disruption. It details Indigenous resistance to both hydropower and disruptive conservation efforts. With a focus on northeastern California, this new book highlights points of intervention to increase justice for Indigenous peoples in contemporary natural resource policy making. Today Middleton Manning answers five questions.

What inspired you to embark on this project?
Generally—a lifetime of love of the land coupled with a deep commitment to justice. More specifically—my work with the Maidu Culture and Development Group (MCDG) beginning in 2001, and later the Maidu Summit Consortium and Conservancy beginning in 2004. Mentors and friends in the Maidu community took the time to take me around their country, welcome me to their ceremonies, gatherings, meetings, and events, and talk with me about struggles to access and protect their homelands.

Back in about 2002, MCDG board member Lorena Gorbet showed me a map she had made documenting the status of the lands under hydroelectric projects in the Maidu homeland. Many of these lands were former Indian allotment lands. I began assisting with the project to find out how, specifically, these lands transferred out of Maidu hands. I traveled to local, regional, state, private, and federal archives containing Bureau of Indian Affairs and Bureau of Land Management (then, General Land Office) records, and found documentation of over 600 allotments in Plumas and Lassen counties. Some of the files contained more details, including extensive correspondence about the land, and photos of the lands. I was deeply moved by the stories of Maidu and other Indigenous (Pit River, Paiute, Washoe) resistance and ingenuity in the face of oppressive paternalism by the Indian Agents and greed by the corporate developers. Outside of this research and conversations with community members, I had not learned about this struggle before, or about the role of allotment lands in the seizure and development of rural California. It seemed almost as if history was repeating itself in the early 2000s with the utility company settlement and recommended divestiture of some of these headwaters lands in Maidu country. Lands around or near the reservoirs and other hydroelectric operations were recommended for conservation but Maidu allotment history and contemporary Maidu presence and care for the land were not mentioned in the settlement or process. As members of the Maidu community advocated for the return of these areas of the Maidu homeland, I was able to provide supportive information on specific histories of Maidu lands seized for timber or hydro development and now targeted for conservation, to support their return to Maidu ownership.

This book has been called a must-read for wilderness advocates. Why do you hope they’ll read it?
The history of post-contact land use and management is deeply intertwined with institutionalized racism, sexism, and other forms of exclusion. One must look deeply at the history of land use planning, and how it reverberates into the present day, so as not to perpetuate institutionalized injustices. Locking lands up in industry can be similar to locking lands up for conservation or wilderness preservation if Indigenous peoples are excluded. Indigenous peoples must be leaders and partners in land planning and land stewardship. The work to protect land must correspond to the work to bring justice to the ways Indigenous people are being and have been treated, in terms of exclusion from planning and jurisdiction within their own homelands. This leads to better projects as well as to building “a future of justice“ as my friend Farrell Cunningham (yatam) wrote in the Maidu Summit Land Management Plan for Tasmam Koyom/ Humbug Valley.

You point out that during your course work for your PhD in Environmental Science Policy and Management you weren’t required to take any Native Studies courses. Why is this problematic?
Every inch of the world is an Indigenous homeland. That means that every place has sacred sites, food growing or gathering sites, burials, medicinal gathering sites, and other important places. It also means that there is a tradition of knowledge of specific places and the species found there. By not highlighting Indigenous homelands and Indigenous stewardship in the study of environmental science, policy, and management, we are disregarding millennia of Indigenous scientific knowledge and practice, and perpetuating a colonial process that disregards Indigenous knowledge, Indigenous struggle, Indigenous survivance, and Indigenous leadership in land and water planning and stewardship.

Where do you hope the conversation among conservationists and tribal communities goes next?
I would like to see more equitable collaborations between Indigenous people and conservation entities, with deferral to Native expertise, joint leadership or deferral to Native leadership, fair compensation to Indigenous partners, revenue sharing in grants and agreements, and collaborative planning.

What are you working on now?
I am working with a colleague on an article on tribal participation in the carbon market, with a focus on the experience of one Native nation in California that has really opened the door for increased Indigenous participation and leadership in cap-and-trade projects. While the carbon market may be seen negatively as a form of commodification of ecosystem services, tribes are creatively using cap-and-trade systems to achieve tribal goals, within a framework of protecting and reacquiring homelands. This is particularly important in California with the statewide mandatory cap-and-trade system, which includes the participation of two Native nations in California, and other nations in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, New Mexico, Maine, and Arizona. I am also interested in other tribal-led applications of environmental policy, legal, and financial tools, such as tribes’ creative use of new market tax credits (NMTCs) to buy back traditional lands. While they are more often used for low-income housing projects, NMTCs have been used by at least one tribe in California to facilitate a land purchase. I also continue to be interested in Native-led conservation initiatives, especially Native land trusts, and use of conservation easements and land trust structures by tribes in California and beyond.

I also recently received a small Diversity Innovation grant to develop an area of teaching on the Indigenous Caribbean. The Department of Native American Studies at UC Davis has a unique hemispheric perspective, but there is currently no teaching on the Caribbean. My paternal family is from the Caribbean, and I have done some work on conservation of cultural heritage sites with Garifuna organizations in St. Vincent. I will be working with an incoming graduate student with interests in Indigenous and African relationships in the Caribbean to develop a course on the Indigenous Caribbean, with a focus on contemporary politics and land stewardship.

I also have a project with a senior graduate student in NAS working on the implementation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) between the University of California (both the central Office of the President and individual campuses) and Native nations in California.

Finally, I am engaged in two regional collaborations with climate scientists throughout CA and the greater southwest. I hope to collaboratively develop research and implementation projects that foreground tribal collaboration and tribal leadership in climate change analysis, adaptation, and mitigation.

Beth Rose Middleton Manning is an associate professor of Native American studies at the University of California, Davis. Her first book, Trust in the Land: New Directions in Tribal Conservation, focused on Native applications of conservation easements.

 

 

 

Our 2018 International Latino Book Awards Winners

September 10, 2018 — The 2018 International Latino Book Awards Ceremony took place on Saturday, September 8th in Los Angeles, California. Over the last 20 years the International Latino Book Awards has grown to become the largest Latino literary and cultural awards in the USA. Winners have been from across the USA and at least 17 countries in Latin America, Spain, and a dozen countries elsewhere. Latino Literacy Now has developed a series of important partnerships with organizations like the California State University, Dominguez Hills; Las Comadres de las Americas; REFORMA, the National Association to Promote Library and Information Services to Latinos; Libros Publishing; and Scholastic. Over the years, over 2,400 authors and publishers have been honored for their work by the International Latino Book Awards. We are thrilled to announce the winning books and authors from our Press below!

Frederick Luis Aldama’s Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics is the first place winner of the Best Latino-Focused Nonfiction Book award. As the foremost expert on Latinx comics, Aldama uses Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics as a way to guide us through the full archive of all the Latinx superheroes in comics since the 1940’s. Thoroughly entertaining but seriously undertaken, Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics allows us to truly see how superhero comic book storyworlds are willfully created in ways that make new our perception, thoughts, and feelings. Alongside writing award-winning books, Frederick Luis Aldama is an Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor at the Ohio State University, and he is the founder and director of the Latino and Latina American Space for Enrichment Research, a mentoring and research hub for Latinos in grade nine through college.

Belinda Linn Rincón’s Bodies at War: Genealogies of Militarism in Chicano Literature and Culture is the second place winner of the Best Women’s Issues Book award. This book examines the rise of neoliberal militarism from the early 1970’s to the present, charting its impact on democratic practices, economic policies, notions of citizenship, race relations, and gender norms by focusing on how these changes affect the Chicana/o community and, more specifically, on how neoliberal militarism shapes and is shaped by Chicana bodies. Through Chicana art, activism, and writing, Rincón offers a visionary foundation for an antiwar feminist politic. Belinda Linn Rincón is an assistant professor of Latin American and Latina/o studies and English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. She is also the co-founder and co-organizer of the Biennial U.S. Latina/o Literary Theory and Criticism Conference.

U.S. Central Americans: Reconstructing Memories, Struggles, and Communities of Resistance, edited by Karina Oliva Alvarado, Alicia Ivonne Estrada, and Ester E. Hernández, is the first place winner of the Best Nonfiction Multi-Author award. This book explores the shared yet distinctive experiences, histories, and cultures of 1.5 and second-generation Central Americans in the United States. This is the first book to articulate the rich and dynamic cultures, stories, and historical communities of Central American communities in the United States. Contributors to this anthology— often writing from their own experiences as members of this community— articulate U.S. Central Americans’ unique identities as they also explore the contradictions found within this multivocal group. Karina Olivia Alvarado is a lecturer in the Chicana and Chicano Studies Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Alicia Ivonne Estrada is an associate professor of Chicana/o Studies at California State University, Northridge. Ester E. Hernández is a professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o studies at California State University, Los Angeles. She has also served on the executive boards of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles and Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social.

Taking home second place in the Best Nonfiction Multi-Author award category is Word Images: New Perspectives on Canícula and Other Works by Norma Elia Cantú, edited by Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs. This book is a collection of critical essays that unveil Norma Elia Cantú’s contribution as a folklorist, writer, scholar, and teacher for the first time. Word Images unites two valuable ways to view and use Cantú’s work, with the first part comprising essays that individually examine Cantú’s oeuvre through critical analysis and the second part dedicated to ideas and techniques to improve the use of this literature by teachers and professors. Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs is a professor of modern languages and women and gender studies at Seattle University, where she is also the director for the Center for the Study of Justice in Society.

 

An enormous congratulations to all of our winners!

Margaret Bruchac Awarded the Inaugural CMA Book Award

September 6, 2018

We’re pleased to announce Margaret Bruchac has been awarded the inaugural Council for Museum Anthropology Book Prize for her work Savage Kin: Indigenous Informants and American AnthropologistsThe Council for Museum Anthropology (CMA), a section of the American Anthropological Association, recognizes innovative and influential contributions to the field of museum anthropology. The Council for Museum Anthropology Book Award was created to recognize and promote excellence in museum anthropology. The award is awarded biennially to a scholar within the field of museum anthropology for a solo, co- or multi-authored book published up to two years prior to the award date.

As part of this year’s AAA Annual Meeting, the 2018 CMA Book Prize will be awarded to Margaret Bruchac, with honorable mention awarded to Laura Peers and Alison Brown for their book Visiting with the Ancestors (2016).

According to the award’s committee members, “Savage Kin is an insightful examination of the previously hidden histories of Native interlocutors who helped to facilitate and make anthropological knowledge about Native North American communities possible. Using ‘restorative methodologies’ to examine a vast array of archival and museum collections, Bruchac raises important issues about the history of bicultural relationships that inform anthropology, the possibilities and value of archives and museum collections for research, and the sociology of knowledge production. This book will we feel not only push the discipline to rethink our received disciplinary histories but will also encourage other scholars to take more seriously the complicated legacies within archival and museum collections.”

Margaret Bruchac is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, where her areas of specialization include NAGPRA and repatriation, indigenous archaeologies, museum anthropology, and Native American studies. She is the author of numerous book chapters and academic articles, as well as prose, plays, and poetry for a variety of regional historical and folklife centers. Bruchac has received awards from the American Philosophical Society and Ford Foundation, and was given the Aesop Award from the American Folklore Society in 2006.

On winning the inaugural CNA Book Prize, Bruchac said,  “It seems so poetic to have my critical analyses of museums in the past recognized by museum scholars in the present! Serendipitously, this award also coincides with the resolution of several key repatriation cases I was working on. So, the good work continues, as I turn to focus on reconnecting other lost objects and stories.”

Part of our Native Peoples of the Americas series, Savage Kin restructures readers’ views of relationships between Indigenous informants, such as Gladys Tantaquidgeon, Jesse Cornplanter, and George Hunt, and anthropologists, such as Frank Speck, Arthur C. Parker, William N. Fenton, and Franz Boas. Like other texts focused on this era, it features anthropological luminaries credited with saving material that might otherwise have been lost. Unlike other texts, it highlights the intellectual contributions of unsung Indigenous informants without whom this research could never have taken place.

 

 

Pondering Poetry with Pat Mora

September 5th, 2018

Encantado  is a poetry collection which weaves a myriad community of individuals together through detailed windows into their lives. Inspired by the real and imagined stories around her, Mora brings us to the heart of what it means to be a chorus of voices together.

About her writing process, Mora says, “When I give an idea or scene or emotion quiet and time, a draft of a poem can emerge from a place inside. I’m both listening and pondering. All my grandparents were born in Mexico as was my dad. That fact is part of my inheritance, my wealth, but I write as a human ultimately to share with my fellow humans.”

Below is one of the poems and personalities in Pat Mora’s forthcoming collection. Both playful and profound, “Gilberto” examines themes of aging while capturing the nostalgia of a youthful past. A sense of reverence for the changes that passing time imparts on individuals envelops the poem, creating a space where resistance and acceptance beautifully coincide.

 

GILBERTO

 

Grace now, my scruffy canine compañeros.

We old dogs must show the way.

We savor mornings and day-old bread

in ways young pups don’t understand.

 

When I was a boy, I’d climb

at dawn to an arroyo

that tasted of mint,

water so clear and cold

it hurt my teeth, so sweet

I’d laugh out loud.

I was a mountain lion,

eyes red, body sleek, lean, agile,

poised to pounce,

gnaw impatiently on life.

 

Now my ankles and knees

teach me to taste my days,

slowly. I make pronouncements

only you heed, but

I still burn, shake my fists,

consoled by my own voice.

 

Pat Mora is an award-winning author of poetry, nonfiction, and children’s books. Her previous books of poetry include Agua Santa: Holy WaterAdobe Odes, and Aunt Carmen’s Book of Practical Saints. Among her awards are Honorary Doctorates from North Carolina State University and SUNY Buffalo, Honorary Membership in the American Library Association, and she was a recipient and judge of a Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Mora is the founder of Children’s Day, Book Day, El día de los niños, El día de los libros.  A former teacher, university administrator, museum director, and consultant, Mora is a popular speaker who promotes creativity, inclusivity, and bookjoy. She’s the mother of three adult children, and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

 

An Irreplaceable Loss: The National Museum and Nation Building in Brazil

September 4, 2018

Following the devastating fire that tore through Rio de Janeiro’s 200-year-old National Museum this weekend, we remember how a group of biology scholars joined the drive to renew the Brazilian nation, claiming as their weapon the voice of their fledgling field. Without discarding scientific rigor, they embraced biology as a creed and activism as a conviction—and achieved success in their bid to influence public policy in environmental protection and the rational use of natural resources. The following is excerpted from Regina Horta Duarte’s Activist Biology: The National Museum, Politics, and Nation Building in Brazil.

The National Museum
In the 1920s and 1930s, the scientists who worked at this institute in Rio de Janeiro hoped to transform it into a hub that would radiate knowledge to the farthest reaches of Brazil. During those years, the museum staff devoted itself tirelessly to re-creating the National Museum and staking claim to a new role for it. They couldn’t begin to imagine television or satellite dishes, but they trusted in print, movies and radio, exhibits, and educational methodology as efficacious methods for disseminating the new knowledge and new practices that they were convinced would transform Brazil.

The National Museum already had a long history behind it by then. King Dom João VI of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarves had founded it in 1818. His court had fled Lisbon shortly before the city was invaded by Napoleon’s troops in 1808, and once settled safe and sound in Brazil, Dom João VI did his best to prepare Rio de Janeiro for its new status as the political and administrative center of the kingdom, a process that transported the seat of the European empire to the heart of the old Portuguese colony. The Royal Museum—as it was then known—emulated Old World museums by gathering collections representative of the entire globe. But the spotlight was on the Portuguese Empire, spread across the European, African, Asian, and South American continents. From its founding on, the museum played a decisive role in the development of natural history in Brazil.

The establishment of the museum figured into a broader nineteenth century trend around the world to set up natural history museums as “cathedrals to science.” By 1910, there were some two thousand museums of its kind. In Latin America, natural history museums enabled exchanges between naturalists while connecting different points of the globe. In cities like Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Santiago do Chile, Montevideo, Bogotá, and Caracas, new institutions continued to open their doors throughout the nineteenth century, most always concomitant with processes of achieving independence and nation building. They were home to enlightened elites who combined their experience as locals with intellectual training in Europe, but they were also frequented by foreign naturalists eager to research the flora and fauna of South America. National governments wanted to undertake inventories of “their” nature and would often hire teams of foreigners to lend impetus to natural history.

The daily routine at nineteenth-century museums in Latin America reflected the challenges specific to the continent’s historical context. Foreign scientific expeditions often took everything they gathered back to Europe, leaving nothing to the institutes that had welcomed and aided them, much to the discontent of local science communities. The piecemeal nature of local collections left Latin American naturalists at a tremendous disadvantage vis-à-vis their foreign peers, whose institutes boasted enviable collections. Latin American museums also had to cope with periodic political turmoil, which occasioned wild fluctuations in government funding and other support. As Nancy Stepan has said, a great deal of progress came thanks to the individual efforts of naturalists in the absence of any collective, institutionalized, stable climate. Teaching institutions emphasized a liberal arts education in a framework where there was no real way to train researchers in scientific work. There was a paucity of equipment and bibliographic material, scientists enjoyed little prestige, and agricultural and industrial modernization was not yet hardy enough to provide new sources of support for science.

Teachers leading students on a class trip to the National Museum, 1930s. Revista de Educação Pública 8:33–40 (1951–52): 51. Courtesy of Fundação Biblioteca Nacional.

Many aspects of the history of these museums give nuance to the traditional view that naturalists working in Latin America were members of cloistered scientific communities. Over the course of the nineteenth century, while Brazil’s National Museum was becoming a place for public exhibits, it was also making room for new fields of knowledge in its various departments—like paleontology, anthropology, comparative anatomy and zoology, botany, mineralogy, geology, and archaeology—reflecting the institution’s attention to research and its tendency to develop specialized fields. From 1876 to 1893, during what was known as “the golden age of the National Museum,” the institution saw substantial changes under the direction of the naturalist Ladislau Netto. Its collections grew through exchange programs with European and Latin American counterparts and thanks to national expeditions financed by the imperial government. The old monarchical tradition of handpicking personnel by appointment was replaced by the requirement that new hires take qualifying exams on scientific topics. Foreigners like Charles Hartt, Fritz Müller, Hermann Von Ihering, Emílio Goeldi, Carl Schwacke, and Orville Derby were recruited and had plenty of opportunity for the rewarding exchange of experience and knowledge with Brazilian scholars. The establishment of a laboratory for experimental physiology and the launching of a science journal in 1876 (Arquivos do Museu Nacional ) energized the museum and cleared the path for its naturalist members to advance in their professionalization. The institute’s collaboration with the Brazilian presence at universal exhibitions was also important. The country wanted to make a place for itself on the world market and to be counted as a civilization in the tropics. It was not just its commercial interests that were at stake; so too were the exchange of scientific and technological know-how and interaction between the National Museum and foreign science institutes. No less important was the organization of Brazil’s National Anthropological Exposition in 1892, where the exhibiting of hundreds of ethnographic objects fed the lively contemporary debate on race, people, and the Brazilian nation.

Like other museums in Latin America—for example, the Argentina Museum of Natural Sciences (now the Bernardino Rivadávia Museum of Natural History), in Buenos Aires, headed by Hermann Burmeister—Brazil’s National Museum experienced such profound changes during these years that it was almost like starting over. As naturalists reclassified nature, as knowledge grew more specialized, and as scientists and observers began relating to collections in new ways, these collections underwent extensive reorganization. In pursuing this new vision, the museum entered into the wider debate about “national being” and introduced a state “optic”—to use Andermann’s term—of the items on display, thereby transforming a tour of the museum into a civics lesson.

In 1889, the army, with the backing of the agro-exporting elites, toppled the monarchy, and Brazil became a republic. As much as civilian republican groups had hopes for a new democratic order, the institutions of the fledgling republic were predominantly individualist and liberal in nature, and most citizens were denied their political rights, since illiterates were prohibited from voting. Although slavery had been abolished under the monarchy, in 1888, the early decades of the republic witnessed no advances in civil and political rights; instead, it was an era of “exclusionary liberalism,” or “oligarchical liberalism,” marked by political accords between powerful elites, underwritten by fraudulent elections. The Constitution of 1891 delegated broad fiscal and administrative autonomy to the states and territories, benefiting the chief commodity-producing states, like coffee-rich São Paulo and the rubber centers of Pará and Amazonas. Under the influence of some republican sectors, the nation’s charter also bore the imprint of positivism, translated into a complete separation of church and state and the absence of any official religion. The republic would recognize marriages, births, and burials as civil processes, and religious teaching would no longer be mandatory in schools.

Boy Scouts on a visit to the National Museum, December 1927. Série Documental Museu Nacional. Courtesy of Arquivo Múcio Leão, Academia Brasileira de Letras.

In the early years of the republic, the museum faced several hurdles. The new government abolished the post of traveling naturalist and demanded the daily physical presence of all researchers. In practical terms, this meant naturalists could not make research trips and instead had to stay in their offices. Some of the top staff left, Fritz Müller among them. A number of wealthier states, like São Paulo and Pará, opened their own natural history museums and managed to attract naturalists like Goeldi and Von Ihering. The federal government itself established applied research institutes, which became the country’s first centers for biological research, such as the Oswaldo Cruz Institute in Rio de Janeiro and the Butantan Institute in São Paulo. Shortly after the Proclamation of the Republic, the National Museum saw its prestige enter a period of steady decline, while other centers began their ascent, offering bigger budgets and additional amenities that could attract the most eminent researchers—a status quo that was not to change until the late 1920s.

The 1920s indeed brought change to Brazil. World War I had ended, as had the optimism of the Belle Époque. The coffee glut and the demise of the Amazon rubber boom in the face of stiff competition from Southeast Asia spelled economic hardship. Anarchist and communist union movements were on the rise, alongside conservative Catholic movements. Modern Art Week, an arts festival held in São Paulo in February 1922, signaled artistic restlessness. Young military officers joined the armed movement known as tenentismo, while the Prestes Column engaged in guerrilla warfare and cangaceiro bandits ran rampant in Northeast Brazil. In 1922, this turmoil was reined in by a government imposed state of siege; the press was censored, and the various movements that opposed the oligarchical Republican project were repressed.

From September 1922 through July 1923, the city of Rio de Janeiro was the site of the International Exhibition in Celebration of the Centennial of Independence. Organized by the federal government, which built sumptuous pavilions for the event, the exhibition was intended to convey an image of progress and national union. The government had designed the show in hopes of garnering legitimacy at a difficult time, but by instigating reflections on Brazil’s past, present, and future at a moment of serious political crisis, the commemoration in fact seeded unease. Visitors grew more aware of conflict and social tension because the exhibition triggered concern about national construction and about Brazil’s place in world civilization. What, after all, was being celebrated? What brand of independence? What kind of nation? What kind of Brazilian people? What type of republic? The exhibition may to some extent have been a paean to the ruling order, but it also awoke society’s latent expectations and desire for change. As Hoffenberg has noted, “Exhibitions were meaningful events for participants struggling with the social, political, and economic dilemmas and opportunities of their era.”

From the very dawn of the twentieth century, countless intellectuals had criticized the reigning oligarchical regime, holding it accountable for the highhandedness of local authorities and the fact that people had been left to fend for themselves. More voices entered the debate about the roadblocks to nation building. Attention became focused on the vastness of the Brazilian land, on its people trapped in misery, illiteracy, and disease, and on the wholly irrational destruction of its natural riches. The prevailing political and economic liberalism was called into question, decried as excessive, and critiqued for motivating selfishness, while centralization of power was posited as an alternative raised above individual interests. Solutions were proposed for a political and institutional system that demanded more than the mere consensus of the elites and that would transform Brazil’s near nomadic population—until then rebuked as inferior—into healthy, educated, and hard-working people, indispensable to the building of a nation. These intellectuals urged society to adopt new attitudes  toward nature; Brazilians needed to learn about their country’s flora and fauna, its water resources and landscapes—and learn to value them—while the state had to effectively regulate environmental protection areas and national parks and exercise control over the exploration of natural resources throughout the national territory. Based on an authoritarianism characterized by voluntarism and an obsession with education, they believed that if the Brazilian people, in its most genuine expression, could be brought onto the stage through suitable measures, the result would be the emergence of a popular culture duly civilized through learned knowledge and superior reasoning—to wit, “authentic” nationality.

From 1926 to 1935, the National Museum regained momentum under the leadership of Edgard Roquette-Pinto. The institute modeled itself as a prime space for educational intervention and for the coordination of pedagogical projects for the people of Brazil, as well as a place where knowledge was produced. It introduced and enforced a bold and experimental multimedia project. As urban life and consumption became increasingly sophisticated in the city of Rio de Janeiro, where the museum was headquartered, its staff members embraced the era’s new means of communication, optimistic that new technologies would allow them to span the chasms yawning between them and Brazil’s ordinary men and women, lost in the vastness of their country.

The National Museum was home to a collaborative effort that drew researchers from an array of fields; they engaged in surprisingly varied initiatives that were not confined to the premises of the museum but reached into other institutional and social domains. Staff members like Roquette-Pinto, Alberto Sampaio, and Cândido de Mello Leitão organized public exhibits unprecedented in the history of the institution. They threw themselves into the Biblioteca Pedagógica (Educational Library) editorial project, headed by Fernando Azevedo, and particularly into its Brasiliana Collection, whose ultimate purpose was “to reveal Brazil for Brazilians.” They launched the journal Revista Nacional de Educação, a forum for science communication aimed at the broader public, whose circulation reached 15,000. They set up a radio station specializing in educational programming and ventured into cinema and the production of educational films. They organized notable events like the First Brazilian Congress for the Protection of Nature, in 1934. They led prolific scientific lives, participating in cultural exchange and attending international congresses. They helped make public policy, including the draft bill for the Game and Fish Code, which lay behind the law decreed by President Getúlio Vargas on January 2, 1934. They joined science associations and other civil society organizations. In fulfilling their “pedagogical mission,” the museum staff relied on a range of media, including print, photography, exhibits, movies, and radio programs. Its scientists also maintained close relations with the ruling powers and with other spaces that generated knowledge. Throughout their experiences, these men of science worked and thought collectively, constructing knowledge through frank dialogue. Moreover, they worked to accrue the technical expertise essential to the practical realization of these manifold projects.

The organizational heart of the activities and exhibits at the National Museum was certainly “the Brazilian nation,” and the burgeoning of biology as a fully established discipline figured largely in this work. Although the field had existed in Europe since the mid-nineteenth century, it was only in the early twentieth that biology laid down roots in Brazil. The troublesome presence of sick, ignorant, rebellious people was a quantitative and qualitative problem begging for a solution, and biology, as a “master of life,” was capable of addressing these ills. It lent itself to a variety of nationalistic practices fashioned within an authoritarian, salvationist political culture.

In the eyes of the museum staff, the field of natural history could describe and name things but could not address the full complexity of life, so it was unable to confront the challenges of Brazilians in distress. Biology, on the other hand, was a decisive form of knowledge, which supported scientific medicine and was based on scientific laboratory practices in the fields of physical anthropology, entomology (especially as applied to agriculture), eugenics, the theories of evolution and genetics, and even phytogeography, zoogeography, and ecology.

At a time when biology was taking shape as a field of its own, separate from (but not better than) natural history, the National Museum endeavored to renew its practices and present itself as an institution in step with the changing world of science. Some of its members also belonged to the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, founded in 1916, which valued specialized experts more than wise generalists, and they worked hard to earn esteem as scientists from specific fields. Yet in its practices, the museum displayed a dynamic and contradictory tendency: although many of its members wanted very much to become specialized scientists, their work with different media formats and with science communication took place in an atmosphere of blurred boundaries between the disciplines.

While striving to make a name for themselves in scientific circles, these scientists also sought government backing for their projects. Most importantly, they wanted themselves and their institute to play an active part in public policy making, and in this way their scientific activities constituted veritable political strategies.

Regina Horta Duarte is a professor of history at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil. She is the author of several books, including Noites Circenses: Espetáculos de circo e teatro em Minas Gerais no século XIX and História e Natureza. She is a founding member of the Sociedad Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Historia Ambiental, and she was the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Historia Ambiental Latinoamericana y Caribeña.

In Activist Biology, Duarte explores the careers of three of these scientists as they leveraged biology as a strategy for change. Devoted to educational initiatives, they organized exhibits, promoted educational film and radio, wrote books, published science communication magazines, fostered school museums, and authored textbooks for young people. Their approach was transdisciplinary, and their reliance on multimedia formats was pioneering. Capturing a crucial period in Brazil’s history, this portrait of science as a creative and potentially transformative pathway will intrigue anyone fascinated by environmental history, museums, and the history of science. Duarte skillfully shows how Brazilian science furthered global scientific knowledge in ways that are relevant now more than ever.

 

 

On the Great Arizona Copper Strike, 1983-1986

August 31, 2018

During the 1983-86 copper miners’ strike against Phelps-Dodge, Anna Ochoa O’Leary served as one of the presidents of the Morenci Miner’s Women’s Auxiliary, an organization of women historically dedicated to support efforts of striking copper miners. She resigned that position when the strike ended and resumed her studies at the University of Arizona, where she is now an Associate Professor, the Head of Mexican American Studies, and Co-Director of the Binational Migration Institute. Today we share an excerpt from her contributions to the forthcoming volume Mexican Workers and the Making of Arizona:

ON THE MORNING OF AUGUST 19, 1983, sleepy residents of the sister cities of Clifton and Morenci in southeastern Arizona awoke to a strange pulsation: a miles-long convoy of armored tanks, vehicles, and Huey helicopters, fully equipped with armed soldiers and SWAT teams, making its way up the mountain road to its new front line: the gates of the company facilities. The drama unleashed by Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt to quash the Phelps Dodge copper strike at the Morenci mine was impressive even when the century-long struggle by workers to achieve better working conditions in Arizona’s copper industry is considered.

Writing about these events over thirty-four years later is challenging enough without writing about a personally tumultuous time for many, risking reopening many wounds. The strike virtually ripped families apart, mine included, having one brother on strike and another a strikebreaker. The scars left by the emotional wounds still haunt many today. The strike was also economically catastrophic. It is unpleasant to remember, yet I harbor some pride in doing so that I, too, like many striking families, suffered the indignity of being caught without enough money to buy a gallon of milk, and to suspect that it would only be a matter of time before economic necessity would uproot us from the life we knew to face uncertainties elsewhere. I am certain that among many striking families were children who could not understand their parents’ decision to participate in the strike, denying them stability and security.

A Brief Background to the Great Arizona Copper Strike

Arizona’s history is inextricably linked to copper mining, and mining is inextricably linked to the state’s geography and the geology of copper-ore deposits. There is no shortage of scholarship on this history. Early period mining was done on an individual basis, usually by prospectors who searched for surface mineral outcroppings, where they could be assured a high return for a low investment of time and money and little technology. In these early cases, the mine worker was likely to also be the mine owner. As bonanza–type vein deposits became depleted, mining became more capital and labor intensive. Together with the lack of technology to make extraction of copper deposits more efficient, the self-financing of mining operations by individuals became less profitable over time.

The Industrial Revolution stands out as a turning point in terms of the scale of production in the copper mining industry. The growing demand for copper followed the expansion of telegraph communication and, later, the electrical power needs of American industries and households. In turn, these would drive the technological innovations that would make the extraction of copper from low-grade ore possible and profitable. New ways of organizing production for greater efficiency also paved the way for how copper-producing companies would consolidate their power in the modern era. Wealthy European and East Coast investors began to buy out the small claims of individual prospectors. It is in this way that Arizona copper mining companies, such as the Phelps Dodge Corporation, came to control the natural resources needed for production (land, timber, and water) and, ultimately, amass great power and wealth. By the 1920s six companies were producing 56 percent of all the copper being produced in Arizona.

To be sure, the geographic isolation of most mining operations provided both disadvantages and advantages. The sister cities of Clifton and Morenci are geographically isolated in the rugged mountainous area of eastern Arizona, about 115 miles northeast from the nearest metropolitan city, Tucson, Arizona. With the lack of a diversified economic base that large population centers provide, the livelihood of families in these two small towns were largely dependent on the mine, as they continue to be today. Moreover, the skills acquired in mining production are not those that are easily transferred to other economic sectors. With greater consolidation and vertical integration, companies such as Phelps Dodge were able to exert greater control of its workers.

Arizona’s copper companies maintained their control of operations in several ways. They exerted power over labor directly, using intimidation, threats, and physical force and violence against workers to exploit them as much as possible. A famous example from history comes from the 1917 Bisbee Deportation, where Phelps Dodge, with the help of local law enforcement agents, rounded up presumed strikers and strike organizers and “deported” them to a remote location near Columbus, New Mexico. However, copper companies in Arizona also exerted their power indirectly, such as by influencing politicians and lawmakers to pass laws that were favorable to the industry. Such laws allowed companies to exploit natural resources and undermine competitors and unions.

Consequently, Arizona’s history is also pockmarked by acts of resistance by workers against mining companies, which many times resulted in turbulent labor strikes. In addition, while not all the striking miners were Mexican, Mexican laborers made up the largest percentage of the workforce. Several of these disputes are historically notable. In 1903 Mexican miners instigated a strike in Clifton over wage discrepancy. Benton-Cohen notes that this strike was primarily organized by Mexican workers. In 1906 a strike in the Mexican town of Cananea was primarily directed at the American-owned Green Copper Company. The strike deserves mention because although it was on Mexican territory, the workers were both American and Mexican, and it was quelled by the use of armed Arizona Rangers, who entered Mexico in support of an American mining operation.

During World War I, a series of strikes were organized in mining towns across Arizona (Clifton, Morenci, Ray, Globe, Miami, Jerome, and Bisbee), targeting the most wealthy and powerful companies in Arizona, including Phelps Dodge. During this time, workers had been drawn ideologically and politically to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW; also known as the Wobblies). A mine strike in Jerome organized by the IWW in May 1917 ended with strikers and union organizers, accused of being foreigners and subversives, being rounded up by armed agents of the mine owners and shipped by railroad cattle cars to Kingman, after being threatened with death if they returned to Jerome. Similar events took place in Bisbee, Arizona, in 1917.

During this rash of strikes across Arizona, copper companies were riding the wave of patriotism of the time and were able to violently suppress strikes with impunity. American labor leader Frank Little was lynched during this time. Violations of basic workers’ rights were so egregious that President Woodrow Wilson ordered an investigation of Arizona’s copper companies.

Consistent with this history, Chicago attorney Jonathan Rosenblum’s analysis of the 1983 copper strike demonstrates its national implications. In 1983 Phelps Dodge became a case study for defeating “union power buildup.” Ten years before the strike, Wharton School professor Herbert Northrup had developed a playbook, Operating during Strikes, containing strategies, which, if followed, were predicted to undermine strike actions. These included the contracting of tour buses to transport scabs to worksites en masse, reimbursing strikebreakers for any extra costs associated with strike activity, threatening strikers with the loss of their jobs with outside replacements, permanently replacing striking workers with nonunion workers, and cutting off medical benefits to strikers. All of these strategies were implemented in the 1983 strike. Scabs were bussed in from outside of Clifton and Morenci. Medical benefits were cut off. Letters were sent to strikers, threatening them that they would lose their jobs if they did not return to work at once. An open letter to John Bolles, manager of Phelps Dodge operations in Morenci, published in the Copper Era in July 1983, was written by an infuriated striker, Paul M. López, who accused Bolles and the company of “scare tactics” and intimidation to get strikers to cross the picket line. Following the Wharton playbook, the cost to implement the tactics was irrelevant. Rosenblum reports that the company lost $100 million in operations and claimed another $100 million in write-offs in 1984. Stockholders lost $220 million, or $92,000 per striker, demonstrating that Phelps Dodge’s refusal to settle with the thirteen striking unions went beyond efforts to save on the cost of wages. Even so, nothing was left to chance. Phelps Dodge also had the support of the state. Undercover agents with the Arizona State Criminal Intelligence Systems Agency (ACISA) infiltrated every union in the Clifton and Morenci mining district early in the strike, bugging nearly one out of every two meetings and monitoring the rest with informers. The history of Arizona’s copper mining industry is in this way a story of the collective efforts of workers, equipped only with time-tested ideologies and cultural practices designed to fulfill obligations to each other, resisted against all odds.

The End of Collective Bargaining and the 1983 Strike

Employees at Phelps Dodge Corp’s Morenci mine were greeted by yelling strikers and their supporters on on Aug. 9, 1983. The company announced a 24-hour shutdown of the plant later in the day in a compromise with striking employees. Women on the picket line. Photo by Mari Schaefer, 1983. Courtesy of Ricky Wiley, Arizona Daily Star.

 

To preempt the high cost of labor management conflicts, the major copper companies in Arizona and their labor unions historically relied on collective bargaining.  Collective bargaining was a long-established practice in which every three years the big five Arizona copper mining companies negotiated with all of Arizona’s unions at the same time. As part of the collective bargaining practice, every three years since 1968 there had been short (six-to eight-week) strikes, which offered a measurement of economic stability. In fact, mining families often planned vacations around these work stoppages.

However, a series of events would contribute to the demise of collective bargaining. The demand for copper significantly declined with the end of the Vietnam War. Mining had also become highly vulnerable to world market prices and competition.5 The World Bank increased its loans to copper-producing Third World nations whose lower production costs were possible with lower wages and lax environmental laws, and copper from these nations flooded the market. In 1980 the price of copper fell from a high of $1.27 per pound to $0.83 per pound. Phelps Dodge began to reduce some of its mining operations to cut operating costs. In April 1982, with the price of copper falling to $0.69 per pound, Phelps Dodge suspended all mining, milling, and smelting operations, and laid off most of its workers. In October 1982, more than half of the workforce was recalled and limited production resumed, while many waited to return to work.

In 1980 President Ronald Reagan sought economic relief for the nation through neoliberal policies. The worldwide recession had brought some of the highest unemployment rates in the nation’s history, and a surplus of workers. Reagan’s policies centered on reducing governmental regulations as a cost-saving strategy for industries to stimulate hiring. In 1981 Reagan’s also took a hardline stance against the air-traffic controllers union, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) resulting in its decertification. This signaled to U.S. industries that the climate was ripe for ridding themselves of costly regulations and worker protections negotiated by unions over the years. A major casualty of these economic and political shifts was the loss of good-paying blue-collar jobs, which had been made largely possible through years of hard-fought negotiations by unions.

However, what remained imperceptible to the casual observer was that Phelps Dodge, with its extremely conservative views, had shown early signs of breaking from this collective bargaining pattern. Phelps Dodge had been openly critical of the largest of the Arizona copper companies, Kennecott, for its more liberal stance in bargaining with the unions. During their negotiations in the spring of 1983, Kennecott took its usual lead in negotiating a contract with its workers. The other companies—Magma, Inspiration, and ASARCO—pressured to enter into similar agreements with their workers out of fear of losing money, fell in line. However, Phelps Dodge, emboldened by one of the “harshest cost-benefit calculus possible,” held out. Not only did it refuse to agree to the basic terms as the other companies, it asked for additional concessions from its unions and an end to all side agreements dating back to the 1950s.

What followed was a strike by now-isolated thirteen union locals at the Morenci mine, and union workers in Ajo. Events climaxed on August 8, 1983, after Phelps Dodge reopened the mine with replacement scab labor, and thousands of strikers in Morenci blocked the gates to the mine.8 Reportedly to avert violence, Governor Babbitt traveled to Clifton and Morenci to force parties to the table to negotiate. A ten-day cooling-off period was agreed upon, during which time Phelps Dodge was to suspend operations. The workers were encouraged, and it was not until the morning of August 19 that they realized that they had been betrayed. The ten-day period had been used to organize the military intervention by way of 350 National Guard troops and 425 Arizona Department of Public Safety (DPS) troopers, who made their way up the hill in a convoy on that day. They set up camp outside the company gate while a team of 160 SWAT sharpshooters were also positioned in the hills outside the gates. Supporting this intervention was a restraining order signed by Judge John L. Claborne, which made it impossible for strikers to set up a picket line at the company gate.

Six months later, union negotiators again sat across from company officials to offer concessions only to find that Phelps Dodge had increased its demands. By this time, it was clear that it was more than a patterned agreement process that the company wanted to end. The strike’s conclusion in 1986 bore this out: It marked the defeat of thirteen union locals made up of over 2,400 workers. Rosenblum documents that at the peak of the labor dispute, about 4,250 residents, about half of whom were of Mexican descent, inhabited the incorporated town of Clifton. Another 2,300 lived four miles north in Phelps Dodge-owned housing. The end of the labor dispute also brought about the near collapse of the communities that surrounded the most profitable copper-producing company in the nation, with $110 million in profits in 1980, and the end of an era.

Anna Ochoa O’Leary is an Associate Professor, Head of Mexican American Studies, and Co-Director of the Binational Migration Institute at the University of Arizona. She received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Arizona. Her dissertation research, supported by a National Science Foundation dissertation improvement award, examined how Mexican-origin households invested in the education of its members, and women in particular. Dr. O’Leary’s current research focuses on immigration policy, the U.S.-Mexico border, gender issues, and the culture and urban politics of Mexican American and Mexican-origin populations in the United States.

Forthcoming this fall, Mexican Workers and the Making of Arizona expands our understanding of the critical role played by Mexican and Mexican American laborers in making Arizona a prominent and influential state in the Southwest and beyond.

 

Mark Nelson wins Independent Publisher’s Evergreen Medal

August 27, 2018

We’re thrilled to announce that Mark Nelson has been honored with an Independent Publisher Living Now Evergreen Medal for his book Pushing Our Limits: Insights from Biosphere 2.

One of the eight crew members locked in Biosphere 2 during its first closure experiment, Mark Nelson offers a compelling insider’s view of the dramatic story behind the mini-world. His book is a fresh examination of Biosphere 2, the world’s first man-made mini-world, twenty-five years after its first closure experiment. Exploring the project’s implications for today’s global environmental challenges, Pushing Our Limits offers a pathway for reconnecting people to a healthy relationship with nature.

Conducted annually, the Independent Publisher Book Awards honor the year’s best independently published titles from around the world and their Living Now Award Evergreen Medals commemorate world-changing books for “their contributions to positive global change.”

 

 

The Final Scream: An Excerpt from Ilan Stavans’ Sor Juana

August 21, 2018

A sixteenth-century Mexican nun, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, has become one of the most rebellious and lasting icons in modern times, on par with Mahatma Gandhi, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and Nelson Mandela. Referenced in ranchera, tejana, and hip-hop lyrics, and celebrated in popular art as a guerrillera with rifle and bullet belts, Sor Juana has become ubiquitous. In anticipation of the release of his forthcoming book, Sor Juana: Or, the Persistence of Pop, we’re excited to share a brief excerpt from Ilan Stavans’ meditations on the legacy of this celebrated feminist icon. 

Eko, “Primero Sueño Series,” 1

She shows up as a guerrillera, with rifle and bullet belts. Or replaces the screamer in Edvard Munch’s famous expressionist painting of 1910. She dances in heaven with Marc Chagall’s ethereal characters. Stands next to the Beatles and other added luminaries in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Wears a shoulder tattoo. Is the protagonist of a telenovela. Or a 1993 opera. The target of countless homages by literati such as Gabriela Mistral, Amado Nervo, Xavier Villaurrutia, and José Lezama Lima. A play mounted by the Royal Shakespeare Company, staged in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2012. A Halloween cus­tom. And an animated TV series.

Even more frequently, she is paid tribute to in ranchera, tejano, and hip-hop lyrics. Is on a stamp. And, between 1988 and 1992, on the $1,000 peso bill, which was pushed out by inflation, becoming the $200 peso note, also with her semblance. She is a doll. A piñata. Drops by in high heels. Is on T-shirts. On expensive watches. Chillin’ next to an open book. And, frequently, chatting on her iPhone.

The conduits keep multiplying: statues, Lotería cards, key chains, recipe books, coffee mugs, Día de los Muertos costumes . . . Along with Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Evita Perón, she is ubiquitous.

Teresa Villegas, “Sor Juana: Lotería” (2000)

Ironically, Juana de Asbaje—alias Sor Juana de la Cruz—died in anonymity. Her grave was unmarked for almost three hundred years, until the 1970s, when the Convent of Santa Paula of the Order of San Jerónimo, where she spent her last years, underwent renova­tion and her remains were purportedly identified. It was a symbolic moment, since she was firmly grounded in the pantheon of Mexican icons. A few years later, Octavio Paz would publish a landmark—if controversial—biography, Sor Juana: Or, The Traps of Faith (1982), portraying her as a key intellectual figure in the journey of Latin America toward modernity, which in his view “is still an unhealed wound.”

Even with the honorific “the Tenth Muse,” it would surely sur­prise her to come across the iconographic machine she has nur­tured. In the land of “bad hombres,” she is a rabble-rouser. A vocal one. Virginia Woolf once said: “The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their ano­nymity.” The truth is, after her death nothing related to Sor Juana is anonymous.

In poor health and besieged by the merciless campaign of intimidation her supe­riors were orchestrating, she drafted her uneasy lines meticulously, as if aware that she was signing her own death sentence. She was forty-three.

Jim Reed, “Sor Juana’s Heart” (2009)

Until a few months earlier, her star had shone bright and high. Time and again she had challenged the male-dominated intellectual milieu, emerging triumphant to the applause of one viceregal court after another. While she was occasionally confronted by a prioress, cautioned by her confessor against sacrilegious misconduct, and rep­rimanded by a representative of the archbishop of Mexico, Francisco Aguiar y Seijas, her position in the Convent of Santa Paula was secure. And her reputation as the premier Baroque poet in New Spain, as Mexico was known in the seventeenth century, reached far beyond—from Quito to Lima, from the Philippines to the Iberian Peninsula.

But now, sequestered in her convent cell, she was alone and lonely. As she drafted her response, dated March 1, 1691, she knew her fate was no longer in her hands. The delicate balance that she had successfully maintained most of her adult life had finally col­lapsed. Envy and resentment surrounded her. So she made sure her double message was unclouded. She confessed her “insignificance” as a woman, her “vile nature,” her “unworthiness.” She did so mainly because she wished “no quarrel with the Holy Office, for I am igno­rant, and I tremble that I may express some proposition that will cause offense or twist the true meaning of some scripture.” However, she seized the occasion to denounce openly the repressive, misog­ynistic atmosphere that surrounded her and the criticism that had targeted her as a poet.

While she wrote it as a private letter, she had reason to believe it would become a civic affront, and so she let herself go. Sick, anxious, persecuted by visible ghosts, Sor Juana allowed herself un último gri­to—a final scream, a shriek of desperation—promising afterward to lose herself forever in the passive piety forced by the Catholic Church on scores of anonymous nuns.

Ilan Stavans at his Amherst home.

Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin ­American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. An internationally renowned, award-­winning essayist and translator and the recipient of many honors, his recent books include Quixote, Borges, the Jew, and I Love My Selfie.

An Excerpt from Fire Survey of California by Stephen J. Pyne

August 10, 2018

In the To The Last Smoke series Stephen J. Pyne describes the nation’s fire scene region by region. Today we offer an excerpt from California: A Fire Survey. Pyne is a historian in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. He is the author of many successful books, mostly on wildland fire and its history, but also dealing with the history of places and exploration.

Conflagrating California
By Stephen J. Pyne

California burns, and frequently conflagrates. The coastal sage and shrublands burn. The mountain-encrusting chaparral burns. The montane woodlands burn. The conifer-clad Sierra Nevada burns. The patchy forests of isolated Sierra basins; the oak savannas, on hillsides turning golden in summer; the seasonal wetlands and tules; the rain-shadowed deserts, after watering by El Niño cloudbursts; the thick forests of the rumpled Coast Range; the steppe grasslands of the Modoc lava fields; sequoia, exotic brome, chamise, sugar pine—all burn according to local rhythms of wetting and drying. The roll call of combustible plants and places goes on and on. An estimated 54 percent of California ecosystems are fire dependent, and most of the rest are fire adapted. Only the most parched of Mojave deserts, stony summits, perennial wetlands, and fog-sodden patches of the coast are spared. Not only do fires burn everywhere, but they can persist for weeks and can, from time to time, erupt into massive busts or savage outbursts. Fires can burn something every year. Fire season, so the saying goes, lasts 13 months. Like earthquakes, California experiences a constant background of tremors occasionally broken by a Big One.

This is not news. Anyone even casually familiar with California knows it burns, whether those fires be conflagrating chamise or gas-combusting autos. In fact, most of the United States burns, or can burn, or has burned historically, and virtually every California fire regime resembles those nearby. The northern Coast Ranges and Cascades burn like those in Oregon. The Central Valley is a larger, drier version of the Willamette. The Sierra Nevada looms like a gargantuan Sky Island, the lithic anchor for the Basin Range. The Mojave Desert laps into the Great Basin and Sonoran Deserts. California’s shrublands are Arizona’s on steroids. Each biota, in brief, has an echo elsewhere. Northern California has lightning fire busts; so do the Cascades. Southern California has extensive burns; so does central Nevada. California slams disparate regimes together; so do most west-ern states. Eastern and western Washington, or northern and southern Idaho, have as little in common as the California’s postmodern pastiche.

Rather, what makes California’s fire scene distinctive is how its dramatically distinctive biomes have been yoked to a common system and how its fires burn with a character and on a scale commensurate with the state’s size and political power. California has not only a ferocity of flame but a cultural intensity that few places can match. In the early years Northern California commanded the scene; after World War II, South-ern California; but the state as a whole has a concentrated firepower without parallel elsewhere. Northern California beat back the challenge from light-burning by devising systematic fire protection: Southern California dampened the movement to restore fire by pushing fire management into an urban fire-service model. In the pyrogeography of America, California is the great disturbance in the Force. In ways unmatched by any other region it has projected its presence—its fires and fire practices—throughout the country.

The reasons involve more than bigness alone. In some years Alaska has immense fires, some the size of northeastern states, yet they do not upend national policies. Texas holds more land, and in recent years has been overrun by fires larger in area than those that sweep California, yet those flames have not bonded with a national agenda. New York has a similarly split geography between concentrated metropolis and rural countryside, with the “forever wild” Adirondacks as a wilderness backdrop, yet it remains invisible on the national fire scene. By contrast, California’s fires are instantly and hugely broadcast, they infect national institutions, they have repeatedly defined the discourse of fire’s history. No other state has so shaped the American way of fire.

Along with Texas and Alaska, it has long behaved as a state-nation. The issue is more than size: Nevada is large, but until recently it grew as an appendage to California; its fire busts pass through the national consciousness with no more effect than wind gusts over a salt playa. The state-nations, by contrast, have unusual political histories, land owner-ship patterns, and creation stories that make them exceptional. Texas was a latent nation for nearly 10 years, although effectively a protectorate of the United States; and when it entered the union, it did not surrender its unpatented lands. A large place with a small population, it never developed adequate institutions, relied on “big men” (large landowners or cattle or oil barons) to run society, and evolved a lively folk culture. Alaska was a territory for 90 years, geographically and politically isolated from the rest of the country, and when it was admitted, it was able to negotiate a division of lands and retain many federal subsidies not available elsewhere. Like Texas a high culture never took root and it had a distinctive origins myth. Unsurprisingly, both voice secessionist tendencies during times of stress. Texas tends to view the United States as France does the European Union, as a means to amplify and project Texas values. Alaska sees the United States as a source of economic subsidy, often behaving more like a country bonded under a commonwealth than like one of the 50 states.

California shares their size, political isolation, and sense of separate selfhood. It began—almost—as a separate country during the Bear Flag republic; by agreeing to accept existing Mexican land grants with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, it carved out the choicest lands and created a pattern of large landowners; with the gold rush it has an origins myth founded on a peculiar dynamic of untrammeled individualism and in its early moments of unfettered exploitation. Unlike Alaska it has a fully functioning economy, although one sharply subsidized. Unlike Texas it has never confused size with significance. It has been independent but never secessionist. Unlike Texas, too, it has a bond to high culture; from its onset it has attracted an urban and intellectual society, rich in literature, painting, and later film, which it has reshaped and broadcast back across the country. And unlike Texas it has not exploited the national scene to magnify California sensibilities, but has seen itself as coalescing and shaping a national story, and even an international one. California’s is, paradoxically, a cosmopolitan parochialism. All this is reflected in the character of its fires.

California is, in Wallace Stegner’s oft-repeated remark, like the rest of America only more so. Today, nearly one in nine Americans lives in California; the California economy is the eighth largest in the world; and depending on perspective California either anchors or weighs down national trends. The California fire scene boasts commensurate dimensions. Southern California holds one of the three dominant wildland fire cultures in the United States; it commands 50 percent of the national fire budget, and an inordinate fraction of the nation’s fuels management funds; it claims most fireline fatalities, 35 percent; it has one of two national fire research labs and one of two fire equipment development facilities. Of the 11 coordination centers that make up the national fire dispatching system, two lie wholly within California. That profound distortion is also historical: California was where the debate between fire fighting and fire lighting as alternative national policies was fought out, where systematic fire planning was first devised, where presuppression schemes achieved their most grandiloquent expression, where air attack and the interregional hotshot crew emerged, and where the modern organizational structure for fire—the incident command system—was hammered out before going national, and then global. The California model proved portable in ways the Florida model or the Great Plains model never did.

California is indeed like the rest of the country only more so.

Stephen J. Pyne is a historian in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. He is the author of more than twenty-five books, including The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica, How the Canyon Became Grand: A Short History, and Voyager: Exploration, Space, and the Third Great Age of Discovery. He is also the author of Between Two Fires: A Fire History of Contemporary America, published by the University of Arizona Press.

Frederick Luis Aldama’s Latinx Superheros in Mainstream Comics takes home Eisner

July 23, 2018

At this year’s Comic-Con International, Frederick Luis Aldama’s Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics took home the prestigious Eisner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work.

The Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, considered the “Oscars” of the comic book industry, are handed out each year in a gala ceremony at Comic-Con International: San Diego. Named for renowned cartoonist Will Eisner (creator of “The Spirit” and pioneer of the graphic novels), the Awards are given out in more than two-dozen categories covering the best publications and creators of the previous year.

The foremost expert on Latinx comics, Frederick Luis Aldama guides us through the full archive of all the Latinx superheros in comics since the 1940s in the award winning book. As part of our Latinx Pop Culture series, Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics takes us where the superheroes live—the barrios, the hospitals, the school rooms, the farm fields—and he not only shows us a view to the Latinx content, sometimes deeply embedded, but also provokes critical inquiry into the way storytelling formats distill and reconstruct real Latinos/as.

In the media blitz following the award ceremony, Aldama took the time to discuss the award and his scholarship with Comicosity‘s Chris Hernandez, who “has been a comic book fan since his first pair of Superman Underroos”:

Chris Hernandez: First of all, congratulations on your Eisner Award for Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics! What was your reaction when you found out you had won?

Frederick Luis Aldama: Chris, when they read out the nominated scholars and their respective books, my ears went into silence mode, my eyes turned downward, and my brain found a cushion to ready for disappointment.  Then they announced it. Disbelief. Elation. Confusion.

I really mean this. I wasn’t prepared at all for it. I knew my competition, including 4-time Eisner nominee and brilliant colleague at OSU, Jared Gardner, so I went to the ceremony to celebrate the triumphs of others, including friend, co-creator, and co-founder of SÕLCON: Brown & Black Comics Expo, John Jennings who picked up an Eisner with his copilot, Damian Duffy for Kindred.  To attend the Eisner Awards Ceremony, I walked off the convention floor in my jeans, T-shirt–and with absolutely nothing prepared for an acceptance. Everyone else was dressed to the nines and had eloquent speeches tucked in their back pockets.

I dedicated the award to all the comics creators (in the room and beyond) who get it right, to my students who carry the comics scholarly torch forward, and to my mamá who died young of cancer from all those pesticides they drop in strawberry fields across California.

I had to catch the last plane out that night so unfortunately, I couldn’t stay for the after party—when the real fun was to be had. And, I asked if they could send me the Eisner Award trophy. I didn’t want problems with TSA at the airport. Four days later and my head’s still spinning!

Read the full interview here.

LSA 2018 Recap

July 19, 2018

This past weekend we attended the Latinx Studies Association’s Biennial Conference in Washington D.C., where approximately 550 registered attendees came together to support and promote Latinx research. Some highlights included a panel featuring UA Press authors Norma Cantú and Urayoán Noel. Our anthology Poetry of Resistance was also highlighted as a key book representing the new era of Chicano activism. It was a pleasure to see long time UA Press supporter Francisco Aragón curate an evening of poetry readings, which included Blas Falconer and Urayoán Noel.

The panels at this year’s conference were incredibly well attended and emphasized Latinx from Central America and the Caribbean, as well as Latinx in the Midwest. Our Editor-in-Chief Kristen Buckles participated in two panels herself, including one on Latinx publishing and another designed to help junior scholars revise their dissertations.

Thank you to all who stopped by the Press’s booth to say hello and support the scholarship we so proudly publish!

Urayoán Noel showing off his poetry collection “Buzzing Hemispheres”

Belinda Linn Rincón proudly displays her book “Bodies at War”

Norma Cantú and UA Press Editor-In-Chief Kristen Buckles

Five Questions with Archaeologists Timothy A. Kohler and Michael E. Smith

In the new volume Ten Thousand Years of Inequality archaeologists Timothy A. Kohler and Michael E. Smith, along with other leading archaeologists, provide analysis of ten millennia of wealth disparities in the ancient world. Today, they answer our questions about the nature and implications of wealth disparity in the distant past.

Why did you embark on this project?

Timothy A. Kohler

TK: I have a habit—not sure if it’s good or bad—of reading as widely as I can, including lots of things that are outside of archaeology. That’s brought me into contact with books like The Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker (2006) and Ian Morris’ 2010 book Why the West Rules—For Now. Over the years I’ve also had interesting contacts with a number of economists, most of whom I met through the Santa Fe Institute: people like Sam Bowles, John Miller, and Brian Arthur. All this gave me motivation to study wealth inequality (and the wider problem of how wealth gets created). Then at some point I ran across Mike Smith’s 2014 publication with good ideas about how we can measure abstract quantities like wealth in the archaeological record, even without texts. That provided a method. When I want to understand a new measure I try applying it to a dataset set I know well, so I decided to see what would happen if I looked at wealth inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient in the archaeological record of the Dolores Archaeological Project, which I was lucky enough to be involved in from 1979–1985. The result was a short report in Current Anthropology in 2016. By that point Mike and I started collaborating.

Michael E. Smith

MS: I have been interested for a long time in the nature of social inequality in ancient cities and state-level societies. This goes back to my undergraduate senior honors thesis, which asked the question of whether houses of different wealth or status levels at Teotihuacan could be distinguished on the basis of their artifacts. Most of the fieldwork throughout my career has been addressed—at least in part—at issues of wealth variation within and between Aztec settlements. I experimented with using the Gini coefficient in a 1992 publication, and then let it drop for a while. In 2012 I revisited my earlier work and added some new cases and published a paper (2014) on wealth inequality at Aztec sites (the paper Tim mentions). Then in about 2013 Tim and I had a short meeting with Sam Bowles at the Santa Fe Institute. Sam is a leading economist on the issue of social inequality in society today. He was branching out to study inequality in the past, using the Gini coefficient, and he encouraged Tim and me to do more work on the topic. We decided to see who else was working along these lines, and we organized a symposium at the 2016 SAA meetings on ancient inequality. That led to an advanced seminar at the Amerind Foundation, which was the basis of our book.

When we say “ancient wealth,” what do we mean?

MS: “Wealth” refers to valuable resources, both the possession of such resources and access to them.  Today inequality is measured in money: both income and total wealth. Most ancient societies did not have money (or if they did, we have little information on the wealth of most individuals), but a variety of material remains do reflect the wealth of individual households. Of the various such remains (e.g., portable artifacts, burial goods), the strongest measure of household wealth is the size of the house.

TK: We’ve both been influenced by an important series of papers (with a large number of co-authors) that came out in Current Anthropology in 2010 on “Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and Inequality in Premodern Societies.” These papers identified three main types of wealth: embodied (for example, number of offspring), relational (for example, number of trade partners or allies), and material (for example, acres of fields, size of herds). One reason we settled on house size as our preferred measure (other than the fact that it can be measured for many sites) is that it seems to integrate aspects of all these dimensions.

How do archaeologists describe and measure who is wealthy and who is not?

TK: Over the years archaeologists have tried a number of different measures. Some of these (for example, the costs embedded in the materials found in the house or in its associated trash) probably work fairly well but most of them are also subject to various “formation processes.” For example, some houses get cleaned out before they are abandoned, whereas others are accidentally burned with all their materials inside. In some sites, it is straightforward to associate extramural trash with a specific house, in others it is nearly impossible. One reason we settled on house size is that it relatively immune to such confounding factors.

MS: In order to be consistent in comparing the wealth measures from different regions and time periods, we mostly limited our consideration to the sizes of houses. Several chapter authors touched on other measures of wealth at their sites, but all contributed house size measurements. Our basic assumption (borne out by a number of ethnographies) is that wealthier people live in larger houses. While this is not an absolute statement, it does work well in many cases where we know the house sizes and have independent measures of wealth. This justifies our reliance on house size.

Since publication, your book has received a lot of notice, including an article for the public in Smithsonian Magazine. Why do you think this concept is so interesting to people right now?

MS: Wealth inequality is hot topic today, both among economists and other social sciences, and by the press and the public. The level of wealth concentration in the U.S. is now much higher than it has ever been in the past. A variety of social problems seem to flow from pronounced wealth inequality in a society. The fact that we were able to present data in inequality in the past – using a measure that other scholars understand and use all the time (the Gini coefficient) – helps make our work more attractive to a wider audience.

TK: I think there’s a widespread feeling, at least in the U.S., that even though unemployment has been declining for a number of years, most people aren’t making the same sort of economic progress that was widespread from the 1950s through the 1970s. It is also widely understood that Gini indices computed on total wealth were also a lot lower (indicating more equitable distribution) than now. It’s easy enough to put these two facts together. That naturally makes people interested in what causes concentration of wealth, and whether there have long-term trends that help us understand its consequences.

What are you working on now?

TK: The data we published in the book are a nice start, but there are many regions (most of Africa and all of South America, for example) that were not represented. I’m working with a group (that includes Mike) to start a project to fill in these data gaps, and also to make more progress on the causes of changes in wealth concentration in different regions, and through time.

MS: In addition to participating in Tim’s project that continues our work on ancient inequality, I am working on Teotihuacan. I recently took over as Director of the ASU Teotihuacan Archaeological Laboratory, and I am completing some of the unfinished analyses, of the influential Teotihuacan Mapping Project. I am also writing a book on early cities that will be called something like “Urban Life in the Distant Past: Archaeology and Comparative Urbanism,” and I am involved with several interdisciplinary research projects on cities.

Timothy A. Kohler is Regents professor of anthropology at Washington State University. His most recent book, edited with Mark D. Varien, is Emergence and Collapse of Early Villages: Models of Central Mesa Verde Archaeology.

Michael E. Smith is a professor of archaeology at Arizona State University. His latest book is the prize-winning At Home with the Aztecs: An Archaeologist Uncovers Their Daily Life.

Five Questions with Planetary Science Historian William Sheehan

June 19, 2018

In Discovering Pluto historian William Sheehan along with his co-writer Dale P. Cruikshank uncover the behind-the-scenes history of the enigmatic and much discussed icy orb at the edge of our solar system. Today, William answers our questions about the outer Solar System.

William Sheehan and Alan Stern at Lowell Observatory, June 2018

Why do you think Pluto has so captured the public imagination since it was first identified by Clyde Tombaugh in the 1930s?

From times immemorial, there were five planets—wanderers—tracing movements across the starry background of the night sky. After the Copernican revolution, the Earth of course became a planet, like the others traveling around the Sun, but still Saturn marked the outer boundary of the Solar System, and the stars were at unfathomable distances beyond. This ancient picture changed in 1781, when William Herschel discovered Uranus. Suddenly the scale of the Solar System had doubled, and within a few short years other astronomers began to discover new planets, as they were then called; these were the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. Inspired either by the discovery of Uranus itself or by the first asteroids, Keats wrote the stirring lines,

“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken.”

Uranus began after a few years to wander inexplicably off course, and this led two mathematical investigators—John Couch Adams in England and Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier in France—to use the discrepancies in its movements to calculate the position of an unseen planet beyond—Neptune—whose optical discovery was made on the basis of these calculations in Berlin in September 1846. This was seen at the time as the greatest achievement of Newtonian celestial mechanics—the discovery of a planet, “with the stroke of a pen.” Adams and Le Verrier were duly enshrined in the pantheon of astronomical greats. Few developments in astronomy were awarded greater accolades than this, literal discovery of a new world.

Le Verrier himself thought that there might be another planet inside the orbit of Mercury, and even gave it a name, Vulcan; it does not exist, and never did—the movements for which its existence was invoked were explained by Einstein on the basis of the General Theory of Relativity in 1915. However, Uranus continued, apparently, to be wandering off course, even after Neptune was entered into the equations. Several astronomers, of whom Percival Lowell was the most celebrated, developed an elaborate program to track down another putative planet—Planet X—which might be indicating its presence as Neptune had done for Adams and Le Verrier. Lowell was an extraordinarily colorful and interesting figure, who is best remembered for founding the Southwest’s (and Arizona’s) first major observatory in Flagstaff, and for his exciting and provocative theories about the canals of Mars, which won over the general public (and inspired science fiction writers like Wells and Burroughs) but were harshly criticized by many professional astronomers. Lowell’s motivations in searching (secretively for the most part) for “X” were complex, and included the hope that recapitulating the great feat of Adams and Le Verrier would restore his prestige in the eyes of other astronomers. Unfortunately, Planet X was undiscovered when he died in November 1916.

The story of how later the search was resurrected at his observatory, how a self-taught farm boy from Kansas (Clyde Tombaugh) was hired to carry out the mind-numbing and backbreaking work of searching for it on photographic plates exposed in all weather under the stars, and how Clyde found a planet that at first was hailed as the incarnation of the icy planet of Percival’s dreams in 1930 provided the perfect coda to the story of frustrated ambition redeemed by faith and hard work. The planet was also the first discovered by an American, and came just as the Great Depression—and the rise of Fascism in Europe—were getting underway, so that the world, and Americans in particular, were in need of “good news.” In the end, Pluto proved to be a most peculiar planet, and was shown—rather definitively by Dale Cruikshank and David Morrison who in 1976 discovered the presence of methane ice on the surface—to be smaller than the Earth’s moon, and has now been seen as a kind of dual object—planetary in some ways, including rotundity and having an active (if extraordinarily odd) geology, but also the largest of the Kuiper Belt Objects which roam the outer Solar System.

What was the most surprising thing you uncovered during your research for Discovering Pluto?

The most surprising thing was what the New Horizons probe found when it passed by Pluto in July 2015. Most people, including me, had probably expected a cold and inert world, not perhaps unlike that the celebrated British astronomy writer Patrick Moore had invoked in 1955, “Beyond all doubt, Pluto is the loneliest and most isolated world in the Solar System—cut off from its fellows, plunged in everlasting dusk, silent, barren, and touched with the chill of death.” Far from it; instead, areas of Pluto show evidence of quite recent geological activity, with changing “land” forms that consist of exotic ices—including recently, methane ice dunes in Sputnik Planitia. It is also exciting to see—on an actual body in the Solar System—examples of the behavior of these ices that has already been elucidated in the laboratory.

You have written many books about planetary science, including Planet Mars. What keeps you coming back to writing these histories?

I have been fortunate in having been born just before Sputnik went into orbit around the Earth, and being consciously aware as the first spacecraft set out for the Moon and planets. I acquired my first small telescope in the mid-1960s, at a time when visual observations by amateur astronomers were still often better than the most detailed photographs by professional astronomers at the great observatories, and when it still seemed that amateurs might contribute usefully to their study. When I started out, Mariner 4 had not yet passed by Mars (July 1965, fifty years to the day before New Horizons made its Pluto flyby!), and it was still possible—just—to believe in Percival Lowell’s canals of Mars! Mariner 4—which showed there were craters on Mars—brought what seemed at the time to be a Great Disillusionment; almost like finding out (and I was at that age, just ten or so) that Santa Claus didn’t exist.

Robert Burnham, Jr, who wrote the Celestial Handbook series, and used the Pluto telescope for the proper motion study at Lowell Observatory in the 1960s, was a mentor, and encouraged me to look at Comet Ikeya-Seki in October 1965—it remains the most spectacular comet I have ever seen. This shows how important an interest of a professional can be in encouraging a young person. After a number of years, I was invited (in the summer of 1982) to Lowell as a guest investigator with a somewhat tentative project of trying to understand how observers like Lowell could have seen canals on Mars when obviously there are no canals. Art Hoag was the director then, and Bill Hoyt, who had written the landmark book Lowell and Mars published by University of Arizona Press, was in-residence historian. While there—and coming into contact with the observing books of Lowell and his associates, and seeing how their visions of canals gradually unfolded and became elaborated over time—and also observing directly through the Clark telescope they had used, I had a flash of insight—I was in the NAU library at the time; I remember it as if it were yesterday–that the key aspect no one had recognized was that because of fluctuating seeing the canals were seen only in brief intervals of a fraction of a second or so. All the observers of the canals—including Clyde Tombaugh, who graciously corresponded with me on his experiences—described this. Thus the phenomena of the canals could be related to experimental psychology. I had always been drawn to interdisciplinary work—this has become the fashion now but at the time represented an aspiration that was more honored in the breach than the observance, simply because the various disciplines had become so developed and complex that it was difficult for anyone to master them at the same time. In any case, I came away from Lowell with the thesis of a book—Planets and Perception—which I drafted during the summer of 1983, while living in a small town in southern Minnesota, just across from the Iowa border, with no resources more than those I brought with me and the Carnegie library with a six-foot shelf of books on astronomy, physics, and math. In retrospect, I think I was crazy to tackle such an ambitious project more or less alone and unaided; had I been in a graduate program, I might have worked for ten years on it, but I finished the draft in several months and then—put it away in a desk drawer as I began my medical studies.

Eventually, I got around to submitting it—and did so only to one publisher, the University of Arizona Press. Though they quailed a bit at the cross-disciplinary nature of the thing—and had to send it out to three academic reviewers, two astronomers and one psychologist!—they graciously accepted it. It was published thirty years ago in November, and I didn’t know what to expect. I was in my internship then. In January, I got a good review from Richard Baum in the Journal of the British Astronomical Association, which I remember reading in the on-call room, and thought that I was lucky to get that. By early May, I was at morning rounds on the psych service the VA in Minneapolis; the attending physician, Charlie Dean, who subscribed to Nature, rather casually congratulated me on the review the book had received in Nature by the renowned historian of science, Albert Van Helden. I was over the Moon. Of course, the book had many faults which I see only too clearly now—how could it not?—but proved to be quite seminal in its small way, and I will always be grateful to the University of Arizona Press for taking a chance with an unknown scholar and a very experimental piece of work and believing in it.

But to get back to your question, this book has defined my lifelong career interest—and until recently, when I retired, I have been both a practicing psychiatrist, interested in the brain and the way we “know,” and a historian of astronomy—and have found the history of Solar System studies during this period of time to be perhaps the most important thing we as a species have done. It has been our Parthenon, our Cathedrals. Obviously there are a lot of writers who understand this, and have devoted themselves to the documentation of this wonderful era, including many of the scientists who have been in the forefront of research (like Dale Cruikshank, my co-author of Discovering Pluto). But I think my background in psychiatry has given me a somewhat unique perspective on the human angle of this story, and that story—the exploration of the Solar System—is, after all, passionately and irreducibly a human story, whose grandeur and magnificence far exceeds the explorations (and too often bloody) conquests of previous eras. It collectively represents some of the best aspects of human nature, Something, I would add, that we desperately need to affirm and reaffirm at the present time, when it is too easy to be disillusioned about our species in light of some of its more unsavory aspects. These are things that keep drawing me back to this subject.

With the New Horizons space probe back in action after a 6-month break, what do you think will be the next chapter in Pluto’s history?

We are looking forward to New Horizons’ close approach to another KBO, MU69, which most of us expect to show only an ancient battered landscape. But as with Pluto, we are foolish not to expect to be pleasantly surprised, and perhaps we will discover fresh patches of surface exposed by a recent collision with another KBO, in which case we may have an opportunity to see deeper into the interior where so much of the early history of the Solar System lies hidden.

What are you working on now?

I have been working on a series of books on each of the planets for Reaktion Press in Great Britain—so far I have finished Jupiter and Mercury, and am on to Saturn. I am also working on a book on Mars with Jim Bell for the University of Arizona Press, who is the PI on the camera system for the 2020 Mars rover (and sample return mission). As with the Pluto book written with Dale, I will be covering mostly the historical backgrounds, in this case how we came to know Mars (including our long tendency to see it as the image of the Earth, or even of Arizona!), while Jim will take over the torch and bring to it his unrivaled knowledge of the spacecraft era. I always prefer, by the way, if possible, to work in collaboration, as it not only provides an opportunity for me to greatly extend the range of my own knowledge but also is as much more enjoyable for the shared companionship.

William Sheehan is a historian of astronomy and psychiatrist. His many books include Planets and Perception, Worlds in the Sky, and The Planet Mars, also published by the University of Arizona Press.  Asteroid No. 16037 was named in his honor.

Latinas/os, Hipster Racism, and Post-Racial TV

June 14, 2018

Interweaving discussions about the ethnic, racial, and linguistic representations of Latinas/os within network television comedies, Isabel Molina-Guzmán’s Latinas and Latinos on TV: Colorblind Comedy in the Post-racial Network Era probes published interviews with producers and textual examples from hit programs like Modern Family, The Office, and Scrubs to understand how these prime-time sitcoms communicate difference in the United States. Understanding the complex ways that audiences interpret these programs, Molina-Guzmán situates her analysis within the Obama era, a period when ethnicity and race became increasingly grounded in “hipster racism,” and argues that despite increased inclusion, the feel-good imperative of TV comedies still inevitably leaves racism, sexism, and homophobia uncontested:

Colorblind Humor

Given the imperative to avoid controversy and broadcast programming able to attract the largest audience possible, the social and political context in which post-racial era comedy airs is central to understanding the role of colorblind ideology. For example, the first season of The Office was created, produced, and broadcasted at the peak of post–September 11th ethnic and racial tensions toward immigrants. Indeed, two months after “Diversity Day” aired, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the “Sensenbrenner Bill,” H. R. 4437, a bill targeting the U.S.–Mexico border and Mexican immigration as potential sites of terror. In this context, Carell’s deadpan delivery and Oscar’s angry but muted response potentially reinforce the show’s colorblind humor, a type of comedy that depends on audiences’ agreement, or at least familiarity, with the national anti-immigrant discourse and the white heteronormative values of the show. The network’s censorship decisions in this episode further illustrate the social boundaries of racial humor.

By the logic of the network’s censors, it is permissible to air comedy grounded in racist views about Mexicans, but it is not acceptable to equate racism with sexual aberrance and class on the air. Within the story arc of the series, Carell’s character is never demoted and rarely disciplined for his socially inappropriate and legally questionable actions.

The episode illustrates Doane’s (2014) observation that colorblind ideology in U.S. popular culture depends on the ability to see skin color and understand socially appropriate behavior even as audiences ignore the significance of color, race, or ethnicity to U.S. political and cultural life. As “Diversity Day” illustrates, the joke depends on Oscar’s ethnic identity as a Mexican American. The only two supporting characters originally written into the pilot were Kevin and African American office mate Stanley Hudson (Leslie David Baker). Although Nuñez is Afro-Cuban, the writers specifically developed his character as Mexican American. It may be reasonably concluded that the writers saw the actor’s and character’s ethnic identity as central to the production of the show. In another episode considered central to the development and success of the series, the character of Oscar, whom the writers decided to depict as a gay man after season 1, is accidentally outed by Michael (“The Gay Witch Hunt” 2006).

Colorblind humor is particularly effective for network television because it shifts social responsibility from the text and its production to the audience and its reception of the text. It is not the executives’ or producers’ problem, after all, if the biases of mainstream white audiences shape how they read the text. Yet, as Kristen Warner  (2015) notes, colorblind ideology in U.S. popular culture depends on the everyday invisibility of white privilege, even as ethnic and racial inequalities persist. Changes in the writing of Michael’s character from the first season to the third further contribute to the erasure of whiteness and white male privilege. Throughout the first three seasons, the rudeness and more explicitly racial and ethnic prejudices of Michael’s character made him more culpable and less likeable to audiences. As the series progressed, Carell’s depiction of Michael softened, eventually giving way to a more sympathetic, well-meaning character who through no fault of his own is an ingénue when it comes to ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual difference. Michael’s character is, as Warner describes, the result of white prejudice as “rare and aberrational rather than systemic and ingrained” (8). Michael’s character becomes the symbol of implicit individual bias rather than the racist production of white privilege. By the end of the series, it is the character’s ridiculous behavior (and not his status as a white heterosexual man) that is the primary source of laughter. The success of The Office’s comedy depends on the mainstreaming of colorblind ideology on entertainment TV.

Hipster Racism

Post-racial-era TV comedy is characterized by the absence of the laugh track and the colorblind approach to ethnic and racial difference that provide the setup for the comedy of hipster racism, a colorblind form of comedy that depends on racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual differences. Hipster racism reinforces the colorblind values even as the characters’ differences are increasingly central to the production of laughter. The colorblind values of contemporary comedies together with the use of hipster racism make it possible for audiences to hold contradictory readings of television scripts, interpretations that release audiences of white guilt or social discomfort yet create a contested space of visibility and subversive pleasure for audiences of color (Doane 2014).

Returning to “Diversity Day” as an example, the ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual humor in The Office almost exclusively revolves around Michael’s socially inappropriate behavior and beliefs and the ensemble’s improvised responses or lack of responses to Michael’s prejudicial assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality. The focus on Michael’s individual ethnic, racial, and sexual transgressions is one of the main adaptations the U.S. writers of The Office made to the original British comedy. Throughout the series, the writers position Carell’s character in opposition to his unwilling antagonist,  the socially conscious human resource officer Toby Flenderson (Paul Lieberstein, a writer on the show). In the series, Lieberstein’s subdued and apathetic Toby is routinely called in to legally intercede with regard to the racist, sexist, and/or homophobic behavior of Carell’s emotionally exaggerated Michael. In the series narrative, the hostile work climate created by Carell’s character is never depicted as the institutional result of white patriarchal culture and heteronormative privilege, but rather as another joke to illustrate the individual flaws of Michael Scott, the self-centered boss.

The comedic writing that surrounded Carell’s character points to a key characteristic of the post-racial TV era: the normalizing of hipster racism. A central component of the normalization of hipster racism is the development of sympathetic yet socially flawed white lead characters. Using racism as a form of comedy is not a new convention. As Angela Kinsey, who played Angela on the show, recognized of “Diversity Day”: “Whenever I read our scripts, there were so many that we did that were part of the cringe humor. I think Archie Bunker did that on All in the Family, which is a super old call-back because I’m an old lady [laughs]. But one of your lead characters is inappropriate, you get to call them out on their crap. Say, ‘No, that’s wrong, dude!’” (Burns and Schildhause 2015b). Evoking All in the Family as a referent is interesting because communication research on the program documented the way audiences read the show as both a critique of racism and as an affirmation of racist views (Wilson, Gutiérrez, and Chao 2013). The primary difference is that while the laugh track on All in the Family (1971–79) directly cued audiences to when it was socially acceptable to laugh, post-racial era comedies do not provide any explicit cues. In The Office there are no such explicit cues, and Michael’s character is rarely explicitly called out for his assumptions. Indeed, most of the time his transgressions are met with silence and stares of disbelief by the characters.

Instead, the use of racism, sexism, and homophobia as humor in post-racial era comedies depends on a more ambiguous set of codes to signal socially appropriate laughter. For example, the humor around the famously improvised kiss between Carell and Nuñez is dependent on the actors’ physical performance, audiences’ familiarity with the narrative and character history of the show, prior knowledge of the relationship between the characters, and their own experiences and ability to relate to the characters in the scene (see figure 2). In the season 3 episode “Gay Witch Hunt,” Michael is unaware of Oscar’s sexual identity until Toby disciplines him for using the word “faggy.” The next scene cuts to Michael’s confessional interview: “I would have never called him that if I knew. You know. You don’t call retarded people retards. It’s bad taste. You call your friends retards when they are acting retarded. And I consider Oscar a friend.” The creative decision to depict the show’s lead character as equating gay people to people who are developmentally delayed is an example of the normalization of hipster racism.

Carell’s emotionally sincere delivery of the potentially offensive monologue effectively produces sympathy for Michael. Where some audience members might cringe at the comedic use of the socially charged term “faggy,” others might welcome the term as a critique of progressive demands for “political correctness.” Published interviews with the show’s creators, writers, and actors make clear their awareness of the social boundaries around diversity and inclusion. For audiences familiar with gray-and white-collar workplace policies regarding sexual harassment and discrimination, Carell’s performance pokes satiric fun of the institutional privileging of multiculturalism. At the same time, the effectiveness of hipster racism depends on a shared agreement that the white lead character’s flaws are socially innocent and not institutionally and intentionally systemic. Doing so reaffirms television comedy’s commonsense logic of colorblindness as it reduces racism, sexism, and homophobia to individual pathology rather than the effect of systemic and structural inequalities.

Hipster racism in a workplace comedy provides the producers increased agency to portray socially unacceptable and legally actionable behaviors and language, and it is that cultural transgression that produces the humor. The production of hipster racism depends on scripting potentially controversial or politically risky moments of humor, such as having Michael apologize to Oscar for calling him “faggy” in front of his fellow office workers, thereby outing the socially conservative Oscar. The editing and nonverbal performances of the ensemble cast reinforce the transgressions. First, the camera cuts from Carell to observe the religious and socially conservative Angela sanitizing her hands as she glares at Oscar. Then the camera pans to Oscar’s silent response of disgust and disbelief. In published interviews on the improvisational nature of The Office, Nuñez points to the above scene as an effective example of the ensemble’s collaborations around socially inappropriate comedy. For the socially conscious humor embedded in the nonverbal interactions between the actors in this scene to work, it depends on some audiences’ familiarity with homophobic stereotypes of gay men as diseased and homosexuality as physically infectious. In this reception context, Angela’s display of prejudiced ignorance is the butt of the joke. But it is the silence that also produces hipster racism, or in this instance hipster homophobia. The writers’ decision to make the interaction nonverbal enhances the comic ambiguity necessary to produce hipster racism or in this case hipster homophobia. In the episode’s concluding interview, Oscar reveals that he was more amused than offended by Michael’s public apology and that he filed a grievance against Michael for which he was compensated with paid leave. The scripting of the episode and the way that Nuñez’s character ultimately benefits from being the target of homophobia further justifies post-racial values by shifting the social burden of prejudice and discrimination to the individual and highlighting the ways the system benefits and protects minorities.

Colorblind comedy produces a marketable interpretative ambiguity through contradictions in the show’s writing and character development. Indeed, part of NBC’s investment in The Office was the program’s ability to bring in a young, highly educated audience, similar in profile to the Scrubs audience but consistently larger. Such an audience might not care about or be concerned with contemporary social norms and mores, but these audiences are at least aware of socially appropriate behavior and contemporary identity politics. It must also be recognized that audiences of post-racial era comedies are not likely to identify as white supremacists, because white supremacist audiences do not generally watch mainstream television programming (King 2014). Rather, audiences of post-racial era comedies are the type that understand hipster humor is socially inappropriate and see themselves as socially conscious, even though they may also be equally uncomfortable with changes in sexual culture, ethnic and racial demographics, and the ever-shifting terrain of identity politics in the United States. Much the way All in the Family did for its audience, post-racial era comedies allow white audiences to laugh at or even sympathize with racist, sexist, or homophobic language and behavior as these are normalized as the result of individuals’ inability to adjust to the “new” mores of a more socially conscious culture.

Isabel Molina-Guzmán is an associate professor of media and cinema studies and Latina/Latino studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Latinas and Latinos on TV: Colorblind Comedy in the Post-racial Network Era was published this spring through our Latinx Pop Culture Series.

June 7, 2018

We are excited to share the news that four University of Arizona Press titles are finalists for the Twentieth Annual International Latino Book Awards:

Bodies at War: Genealogies of Militarism in Chicana Literature and Culture by Belinda Linn Rincón (Best Women’s Issues Book)

Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics by Frederick Luis Aldama (Best Latino-Focused Nonfiction Book)

U.S. Central Americans: Reconstructing Memories, Struggles, and Communities of Resistance, edited by Karina O. Alvarado, Alicia Ivonne Estrada, and Ester E. Hernández (Best Nonfiction, Multi-Author)

Word Images: New Perspectives on Canícula and Other Works by Norma Elia Cantú, edited by Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs (Best Nonfiction, Multi-Author)

The International Latino Book Awards are produced by Latino Literacy Now, a nonprofit organization co-founded in 1997 by Edward James Olmos and Kirk Whisler. A full list of finalists is available here. Winners will be announced at the awards ceremony on September 8, 2018, in Los Angeles.

Congratulations to all of the finalists!

Publishers Weekly spotlights Farid Matuk’s The Real Horse

June 5, 2018

This week brings with it a thoughtful review of Farid Matuk’s sophomore full-length poetry collection, The Real Horse from Publishers Weekly:

Matuk (This Isa Nice Neighborhood) addresses his daughter in his second collection, a lyrical interrogation of Western notions of gender, race, and manifest destiny, as well as the dubious authority of parenthood in a turbulent political landscape where “the sky behaves itself/ with just enough war over us.”… Matuk conveys how Western ideology informs the father’s concern for how a daughter will “bear power’s projections,” and tender paternal observations provide humorous respite from moments of violence: “like if parenting is a thing are you childing us who gave you a face.” Matuk presents parental awareness as a sensory informational superhighway, “a picking at the earth’s curved surface and all laid on it.” Read the full review.

 

 

Native American and Indigenous Studies Association 2018 Meeting Recap

May 24, 2018

Last weekend we attended the tenth annual meeting of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), the largest scholarly organization devoted to Indigenous issues, communities, and research. Indigenous studies is a key area for the University of Arizona Press, and we’ve been attending this meeting since its inception. It’s exciting to see how attendance has grown, and we appreciate the opportunity to meet scholars from around the world and learn more about important issues in Indigenous studies.

This year’s meeting in downtown Los Angeles had a fantastic turnout and a roster of fascinating panels. As always, we were delighted to see UAP authors and other friends of the Press. Thanks to all who stopped by and to the organizers for a great conference!

Red Medicine author Patrisia Gonzales and UAP Editor-in-Chief Kristen Buckles

Natasha Varner and The Learned Ones author Kelly S. McDonough

Yaqui Indigeneity author Ariel Zatarain Tumbaga

 

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, editor of the poetry anthology “Sing

Talking Indian author Jenny L. Davis

Lloyd L. Lee, editor of “Navajo Sovereignty and “Diné Perspectives

Marking Indigeneity author Tevita O. Ka‘ili

Martha Few Featured on New Books Network Podcast

May 18, 2018

University of Arizona author Martha Few was featured on a recent episode of New Books Network to discuss her new book, For All of Humanity.

“Professor Martha Few’s For All Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala (University of Arizona Press, 2015)describes the implementation of public health reforms in late eighteenth-century Guatemala and the diverse ways that indigenous communities engaged and resisted these programs.  Contrary to expectations, colonists were often ahead of administrators in Spain in adopting new medical methods, such as inoculating patients against smallpox.  But bringing these to rural communities, some with a significant degree of autonomy, required adaptation and compromise; and if resistance was stiff, medical officers reacted with the persecution of indigenous practices in ways that mirrored the church’s anti-idolatry purges.  By bringing Guatemala and its native residents into the networks of Atlantic medicine in the eighteenth century, For All Humanity illuminates the plurality of medical cultures that interacted in the production of the Enlightenment.

Martha Few is Professor of Latin American History and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University.”

Listen to the podcast and read more here.

Crime and Social Justice in Indian Country Spotlighted by Publishers Weekly

May 17, 2018

Addressing legal issues, human rights issues, and tribal sovereignty as they relate to Indigenous criminal and social justice, Northern Arizona University’s Marianne O. Nielsen and Karen Jarratt-Snider argue that the American criminal and social justice system neglects American Indians, who have a unique political and legal status given that their justice issues “are rooted in colonialism.” Their edited volume, Crime and Social Justice in Indian Country analyzes issues such as Indigenous identity, the Indian Child Welfare Act, stalking, American Indian collegiate athletes, sterilization, violence, gambling and crime, and juvenile justice. Recently, Publishers Weekly spotlighted the volume’s “passion and purpose”:

The essays from the eight Native American contributors to this anthology of works about the challenges facing those living in “Indian Country” consider a broad range of topics, including the criminal justice system’s treatment of Native Americans, misperceptions among non-Natives that a connection exists between Native gaming and crime, and the systemic sterilization of Native American women as late as the 1960s and ’70s. Several examine the consequences of the legal stipulation that Native Americans who are not enrolled in tribes or whose tribes are not recognized by the federal government do not have the same rights and protections as those enrolled in federally recognized tribes, which include the denial of sovereignty over tribal matters. Still others examine ways forward for Native American communities faced with difficult cultural issues; for example, successful strategies for countering violence against women and ensuring placement of orphaned Native children with other members of the same tribe. Read the full review.

Adventures in Open Access

May 22, 2018
By Kathryn Conrad

Innovation is one of our core values at the University of Arizona Press. This means tackling some of the toughest problems in scholarly publishing, be it alone, with our colleagues at the University of Arizona Libraries, or with colleagues around the world.

Kathryn Conrad, UA Press Director

No problem is tougher than finding business models that maintain the high standards of monograph publishing that are the hallmark of university presses while increasing access to content. The average cost of publishing a high-quality digital-only monograph ranges from $28,747 to $39,892, depending on what is included in the calculation, according to research published in The Costs of Publishing Monographs. How can we cover these costs while reducing or even eliminating costs for readers?

The University of Arizona Press is committed to improving access. We seek external funding for every book we publish to keep prices as reasonable as we can, and up to two thirds of the books we publish each year receive some form of external support. Meanwhile, with the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation we are building a platform for open monograph publishing at the University of Arizona. Under the Open Arizona project, we will make some two dozen currently out-of-print Latinx and Indigenous studies titles available as free ebooks as part of the larger Humanities Open Book Program, jointly sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project will not only allow us to make previously inaccessible content available for free, it allows us to experiment with and refine new workflows for open-access publishing.

We are also proud to be participating in the fifth pledging round of Knowledge Unlatched (KU). Knowledge Unlatched is a global crowdfunding initiative supported by more than 500 libraries. Its aim is to make Open Access for books and journals sustainable in all disciplines of science and research. It helps libraries to shift their budgets from traditional acquisition patterns to supporting OA on a larger scale. Six press titles have been chosen for KU Select 2018.

“KU only works because publishers like the University of Arizona Press submit excellent content that appeals to researchers and librarians worldwide,” says Dr. Sven Fund, KU’s managing director. “We are glad to see strong usage of the open content funded in prior rounds, and we are glad to see a lot of sympathy and support for our work worldwide.”

Libraries can pledge their support for Knowledge Unlatched and the University of Arizona Press’s titles between now and the end of November 2018 at the KU Select site. Look for more information about Open Arizona this fall. Together, these are just some of the innovations we’re making to continue to connect scholarship and creative expression to readers worldwide.

 

Discovering Pluto Featured in Wall Street Journal

May 14, 2018

As part of the weekend’s Wall Street Journal Bookshelf News, renowned science journalist and book reviewer Marcia Bartusiak highlighted two of the season’s important new books on the New Horizons project, the first mission to the Pluto System and the Kuiper Belt, including William Sheehan and Dale Cruikshank’s UA Press title Discovering Pluto:

While “Chasing New Horizons” is largely focused on the origin and development of the mission itself, “Discovering Pluto,” by Dale P. Cruikshank and William Sheehan, offers the backstory of the explorations of our solar system’s most remote regions. I came to think of the books as a flight of wins: “Chasing New Horizon’s” is the starter, nimble and refreshing, with “Discovering Pluto” offering deeper tones, scientific details that can be savored more slowly. Read the full review.

All They Will Call You is 2018–2019 Book in Common

May 10, 2018

We are thrilled to share the news that Tim Z. Hernandez’s documentary novel All They Will Call You has been selected as the California State University, Chico and Butte College Book in Common for the 2018–2019 academic year.

The Book in Common is “a shared community read, designed to promote discussion and understanding of important issues facing the broader community. It is chosen each year by a group of CSU, Chico and Butte College faculty and staff and members of the local community. As in past years, CSU, Chico, Butte College, the City of Chico, and Butte County will sponsor panel discussions, lectures, and other public events to celebrate and promote the Book in Common.”

In the announcement, California State University, Chico President Gayle Hutchinson said, “We are committed to the Book in Common and to using a shared reading experience not only to educate ourselves on important subjects, but also to bring us together as a community to engage in conversations about issues of our time. Tim Hernandez’s compelling book serves these purposes beautifully, exploring the subjects of immigration, identity, and disenfranchisement through the exploration of 1948 tragedy.” Butte College President Samia Yaqub said the book’s “themes of immigration and labor . . . still resonate deeply in California,” adding, “This is a book that speaks to our time and place.”

We at the Press are tremendously honored by this recognition. Congratulations, Tim!

Q & A with Ariel Zatarain Tumbaga

May 8, 2018

Born in Sonora, Mexico, Ariel Zatarain Tumbaga is a scholar of Mexican and Chicana/o Indigenous literature and culture. He has a PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California Los Angeles. His book Yaqui Indigeneity: Epistemology, Diaspora, and the Construction of Yoeme Identity , published in March, is the first book-length study of the representation of the Yaqui nation in literature. Last month Ariel sat down with Ed Battistella and the blog Literary Ashland for a Q & A about his work:

Ed Battistella: Congratulations on your book. Can you tell our readers a bit about it? What fascinates you about Yoeme Identity and the trope of the Yaqui warrior?

Ariel Zatarain Tumbaga: Thank you Ed. Yaqui Indigeneity: Epistemology, Diaspora, and the Construction of Yoeme Identity is a study of the representation of the Yoeme (or Yaqui) indigenous nation in Mexican and Chicana/o (Mexican American) literatures. In it, I study Native depictions with an emphasis on Yaqui history and culture. Until now, there has not been a book length study on this community’s representation in literature, despite their historical and political importance in Mexico, and their presence in the United States. Yaqui Indigeneity is also unique in that it looks to Yoeme history, cosmology, and traditional ceremonies (oral tradition known as etehoi and dance) as a basis for its literary analysis. Finally, it identifies a group of authors that I call Chicana/o-Yaqui writers, who are the sons and daughters of the Yoeme diaspora, often a direct result of… see the complete Q & A.

One Last Time: Signing Off As the UA Press Marketing Intern

May 2, 2018

You’ve probably not seen me, but chances are pretty great that you’ve come across some of my work this spring. My name is Nathaniel Barry, and I’m writing this as one of my final duties for the Marketing internship at the University of Arizona Press. As an English major, I plan to go into the field of Advertising and Public Relations, creating copy for professional ballet and theatre companies across the United States.

I remember, once, not getting hired for a certain marketing internship because my knowledge of literature was, quoted directly, “very Eurocentric.” While I understood what that statement literally meant, I had a hard time figuring out the communicative implications of it. Can I be blamed for my exposure—or lack thereof—to minority authors? After all, I’ve been reading exactly what my teachers have assigned, so what’s the fault?

The fault, indeed, was in my choice, conscious or not, to avoid expanding my horizons. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) estimates that just over 800,000 books are published across the world each year; I’m lucky if I read maybe fifteen of them. I made the decision this semester to change that fault, and start my marketing career with a publishing house that was already in the mindset I wanted to embrace.

The University of Arizona Press works diligently to vocalize underrepresented authors from all backgrounds. They are the premier publisher for scholarly work from the fields of anthropology, archaeology, environmental science, history, Indigenous studies, Latinx studies, Latin American studies, and space studies in the state of Arizona. In just one semester, I’ve worked with around thirty authors, each differing in needs surrounding their upcoming titles. I’ve arranged press opportunities, reviewed course adoptions, solicited book reviews, and have been secretly updating the UA Press Instagram page!

More than anything, I’ve been cultivating experiences with authors. I’ve been listening to their stories, reading their books (or at least snippets), and figuring out what works best for them as writers. I could say that’s just the “customer service” in me, but everyone at the Press carries this attitude. I’ve always viewed marketing in a certain sort of way: marketing isn’t about selling the consumer something, it’s about developing a relationship that makes the consumer want to buy. It’s kind of like when your best friend buys you a coffee.

Or when your grandmother cooks you dinner even though you ate an hour ago.

The Press is like a family—that’s more what I’m trying to get at. During my internship, I’ve felt needed, useful, and like I’ve made a difference in the lives of those recently-published authors, whether it was their first book or their twelfth. What I’ve truly loved most about working with the Press is the experience it’s provided me and the people that I’ve met along the way.

And when I reflect on this past spring with the University of Arizona Press, that’s what stands out the most: listening to the experiences of these underrepresented authors, and sharing in the culture they’ve spent their entire lives cultivating.

 

One last time,

Nathaniel Barry

 

Thinking about a career in publishing? University of Arizona Press interns are exposed to the many facets of book publishing, including insight into how manuscript projects are submitted, reviewed, and selected for publication; the process of editing, designing, and producing a book; and the various aspects involved with marketing and advertising new titles. Visit our internship program page for more information on opportunities to get involved.

 

Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez Receives Inaugural Saber es Poder-IME Academic Excellence Award

April 30, 2018

Last week the University of Arizona’s Department of Mexican American Studies (MAS) celebrated their inaugural presentation of the Saber es Poder-IME Academic Excellence Award in Mexican American Studies.  The new award recognizes the world’s leading scholars who have dedicated their careers to advancing the interdisciplinary field of Mexican American Studies.

This year’s recipient, Dr. Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez, is the author of four books published by the University of Arizona Press. In his introduction to the award, UA College of Social and Behavioral Sciences Dean John Paul (JP) Jones III said, “Dr. Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez [is] a legend in the field of Mexican American Studies, which he helped to establish. He has had a remarkable career distinguished by both a passion to break orthodox academic boundaries and to produce scholarship that enhances the lives of the less privileged.”

More than 150 scholars and community members came together for the lively event. Congratulations to Carlos on this much-deserved recognition!

Tom Sheridan, Alva Torres, and Lydia Otero.

 

Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith and Curtis Acosta.

 

 

Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez receives his award.

 

 

 

Weegee Whiteford and Scott Whiteford.

 

UAP titles on display.

 

 

Society for American Archaeology 2018 Meeting Recap

April 18, 2018

The Society for American Archaeology’s eighty-third annual meeting brought more than 5,000 archaeologists from across the Americas and around the globe to Washington, D.C. In keeping with the location, several panels delved into critical topics around legislation and its effects on archaeologists. Panels on Bears Ears, the Antiquities Act, colonialism, heritage programs, collaborative archaeology, and much more infused the meeting with energy and conversation.

Several authors stopped by our booth to say hello and showcase their work to their colleagues. The meeting was fantastic, and we can’t wait to see everyone in Albuquerque for SAA 2019!

T.J. Ferguson, co-editor of Footprints of Hopi History.

 

UA Press Senior Editor Allyson Carter and Deb Nichols, co-editor of Rethinking the Aztec Economy.

 

Matt Peeples with his new book, Connected Communities.

 

Kathy Arthur with her new book, The Lives of Stone Tools.

 

Clay Mathers, co-editor of Native and Spanish New Worlds.

 

Allyson Carter and Pat Gilman, co-author of Mimbres Life and Society.

 

John Douglass, co-editor of the forthcoming Forging Communities in Colonial Alta California, with Allyson Carter.

 

Emma Britton with Steve LeBlanc, co-author of Mimbres Life and Society.

 

Scott Ingram, co-editor of Traditional Arid Lands Agriculture, and Allyson Carter.

 

Michael Waters, author of Principles of Geoarchaeology.

 

Chip Colwell, co-editor of Footprints of Hopi History.

 

Paul Minnis, co-editor of Discovering Paquimé, and Lisa LeCount, co-editor of Classic Maya Provincial Politics.

 

Michael Searcy with his book The Life-Giving Stone.

 

Lee Panich, co-editor of Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions.

2017 James Fisher Prize News

April 9, 2018

We are pleased to announce that Georgina Drew’s River Dialogues: Hindu Faith and the Political Ecology of Dams on the Sacred Ganga received an honorable mention in the inaugural 2017 James Fisher Prize for First Books on the Himalayan Region, conferred by the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies (ANHS).

The Fisher Prize Fisher Prize honors books that contribute an innovative and lucid written account of Himalayan studies research. In the words of the prize committee, “River Dialogues uses ethnographic methods of journalistic realism to explore the ongoing debate over the Ganga river’s natural and constructed future. A remarkable book, River Dialogues examines how women in particular protest the building of hydroelectric dams on the sacred river and the private industries and government efforts to build them in Uttarakhand, an officially designated conservation zone.”

ANHS is the oldest academic organization devoted to the study of the Himalaya in the United States. Congratulations to all of the honorees!

A Way Forward in the Mojave Desert

March 30, 2018

Lawrence R. Walker and Frederick H. Landau are plant ecologists who have 65 years between them living in the Mojave Desert. Together, they co-wrote A Natural History of the Mojave Desert. Today, they share what they see as the future for the desert they love, and why they embarked on writing the book.

Protected areas are marked with lines on a map. However, many disruptions, whether natural or anthropogenic in origin, are unaffected by boundaries. The construction of roads or solar power plants might be stopped by a fence, but the spread of droughts, fires, or climate change is not. Invasive plant and animal species could, theoretically, be controlled at boundaries, but in practice the invasion front is usually too diffuse to monitor closely. In addition, species ranges are now shifting with climate change, further complicating designations on a map. Therefore, natural resource protection must be addressed at regional and broader spatial scales. Further, such protection is most successful when it represents an integrated response from multiple groups. Government and nongovernment agencies, scientists, managers, residents, and visitors all have a vital role in the creation of a best-case scenario for the future of the Mojave Desert. Government leads public discussions and then sets policy; nongovernment groups act as watchdogs for the development and implementation of policy; scientists ask questions, conduct research, and supply knowledge to guide policy choices; managers integrate many demands into practical approaches; residents lobby for permanent, balanced compromises between resource use and abuse; and visitors support wise management choices when they pay to visit natural areas. Finally, educators inform about process, decisions, and policy and lead the promulgation of values to the next generation.

Desert wash. Photo by Frederick Landau.

The future of the natural resources of the Mojave Desert is hard to predict. Certainly, challenges lie ahead as the region likely becomes hotter and drier but possibly sees more frequent summer rains. Depending on their intensity and duration, these monsoonal rains might lead to increased erosion. Organisms that can move rapidly enough will move, north or to higher elevations, for example. Focused mostly on our own needs, humans will also adapt to the future. We have technological tools that will help us improve water extraction and conservation. We have social tools that will help us reconfigure our societies around a hotter, drier climate. But what we hope will also be utilized are the ecological tools that natural systems provide. Our human creations are often based on natural models: dam construction and consequences from beavers; flight mechanics and efficiencies from birds; cooling techniques from colonial insects and leaf anatomy. It is our hope that we can also take the lessons of our senses, our aesthetic appreciation of the Mojave Desert to help mold a livable, inspiring future for ourselves. Finally, we hope that the future that we help shape keeps as many as possible of the myriad desert organisms and their ecosystems intact.

In A Natural History of the Mojave Desert we attempted to convey our enthusiasm about the natural history of the Mojave Desert. We hope that we succeeded. We used the writing process as an excuse to reexamine our relationship with our environs, visiting old haunts and discovering many new ones. What follows are some final musings, including our hope that you begin or continue your own personal exploration of this remarkable Desert.

Death Valley dunes near Stovepipe Wells. Photo by Cindy Phillips.

We traveled the edges of the desert, trying to sort out where to draw a boundary line. We asked people at those amorphous edges: “Do you live in the Mojave Desert?” We got lots of interesting answers, reinforcing our original belief that such edges are mostly artificial human constructs. But just like so much in ecology and natural history, what cannot be easily delineated or defined still has a distinct reality. That reality is shaped by geology, geography, climate, and organisms, including humans. On big spatial scales, the collisions of crustal plates shaped our mountains in long, linear, north-south rows. Wetter climates in the past filled the basins between the mountain ranges with vast lakes interconnected by rivers. All of those lakes eventually dried up and are now salt flats. Three of the rivers that are fed from wetter uplands outside the Mojave Desert still flow. The largest, the mighty Colorado River, has been damned to create three new lakes or reservoirs that impact aquatic and terrestrial organisms and many human activities in the region. The Mojave River is dammed near its source and rarely reaches its onetime outlet, Soda Lake. The Amargosa River, as intermittent as it is, still supports a national hotspot of biodiversity, Ash Meadows.

These deserts are vast open spaces, mostly unobstructed by buildings or even trees. At night, the stars are pinpricks of silver light, pulling us to muse on what lies beyond. By day, we are presented with the gentle pastels of the surrounding environments: the coral-colored hills, the dark, tear-stained streaks of desert varnish, the red sands of eroded Aztec sandstone, and the striking black of rugged basalt. The Mojave Desert is a spare place. The land will not support the people, animals, and plants that other lands can. But it is a place where one can breathe deeply, and be unhurried and inquisitive. As Joseph Wood Krutch has written, deserts are a place where one kind of scarcity is compatible with, and maybe necessary for, another kind of plenty.

Our book mentions many of our observations and joys while exploring the Mojave Desert and we will continue our adventures into the future. But now we urge you to step away from your computer and explore. Take a water bottle and your own curiosity and, whether it is your first or one hundredth time on this terrain, parts of the Mojave Desert will open up to you as if for the first time. We hope that you go out and experience the peaceful satisfaction that comes from a walk in the desert.

Author photo by Elizabeth Powell.

Lawrence R. Walker is a professor of plant ecology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is the (co)author or (co)editor of nine previous books, including The Biology of Disturbed Habitats. Frederick H. Landau is a research associate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Walker and Landau have twenty-five years of scientific collaboration that includes projects in Nevada, New Zealand, and Puerto Rico. They both enjoy hiking and back-road adventures throughout the Mojave Desert.

 

Cover photo courtesy Cindy Phillips

Five Questions with Poet Jennifer Elise Foerster

March 28, 2018

In her dazzling new collection Bright Raft in the Afterweather, Jennifer Elise Foerster confronts humanity’s dangerous ecological imbalance, immersing readers in a narrative of disorientation and reintegration. She recently answered five questions from her editor Scott De Herrera about her work:

Photo Courtesy Richard Blue Cloud Castaneda

A number of recurring figures from your previous work continue to inhabit the poems throughout this collection. How do their journeys compare to yours as a writer? 

I appreciate that you ask about the journeys of these figures, as to me they are quite their own figures. Sometimes their journeys are a silhouette of mine; other times they diverge into places I can’t see. Magdalena appeared under many guises in the first book – the woman in the blue dress by the gas station, a reflection of myself in the mirror, birds . . . I’m not sure where she is now, still hovering in mirages, I think. She is what is almost visible. Hoktvlwv was present in the first book, but I didn’t meet her until I reached the coastline, when I moved to San Francisco from New Mexico in 2005. The second book developed from that edge of the continent, even though I wrote it while living in Colorado over the past three years. The poems and figures usually form themselves after I have encountered them—they are like the afterweather, I suppose, of a journey.

You employ a vocabulary and diction that reveals an intimate knowledge of science and the environment. In what ways did this inform your use of imagery as you rendered the worlds occupied by each character?

I wish I had a clearer knowledge of science and the environment—this is one of my goals, in fact. I’d like to take some classes in geology, astronomy, physics, and ecology. I feel my sense about the environment is only intuitive, and there is so much to learn. The imagery of these poems arrived out of my sense of the environment. If I were a painter, I would paint natural landscapes, atmospheres . . . I’m just not as compelled by the visible world of human-made things, including how we appear as people. I think this translates into why I write what I write. The characters of the poems are suffused by their ecologies and energy systems, including those systems we can’t see.

One of the issues you confront is that of ecological imbalance and the health of the planet. How can poetry contribute to the broader discussion surrounding climate change and humanity’s impact on the Earth?

This is something I think about all the time. I am haunted by the worry that poetry is not, right now, effective enough. This may be a version of my own sense of inadequacy in effecting broader healing. But I do deeply believe that poetry has the potential to transform us if we embrace it in our society as a way of seeing and comprehending. The poem can innovate language to expand the possibility of comprehension, to reorganize the perception of the known and imaginary. Poetry it is, I believe, the only word-based language that can transform us in this way, that can reveal the invisible landscapes, histories, and stories that we’ve forgotten, that we need to remember in order to continue. When I say “transform” I’m talking about healing, which naturally involves ecological balance. Despite my worries, I am still writing poetry, and will continue to, because I believe in its possibility. Poetry is especially needed in this country, which has written over and attempted the erasures of the continent’s long-standing dynamic cultures, peoples, and ecosystems. We must insist on poetry as part of our conversations and educational systems. I don’t know the most effective way to do it, but this is the work I’m committed to.

Can you tell us the story behind the visual “word hurricanes” at the opening of each section?

These four visual pieces (I like that you call them “word hurricanes!”) are from a book I made called “Of.” About two years ago I reviewed all of my unpublished poems (many of which became poems in this book), and realized I had a concerning habit. I counted hundreds of “of” constructions through the poems! To break this habit, I thought I’d exhaust it, so I made up a method of reorganizing all of these constructions, and used Excel, a printer/scanner, and scissors to make a book of these “hurricanes.” I have only an original version of this book – since I made each page manually there isn’t any digital evidence of its process. Preserving a few of these pieces in Bright Raft felt like a way to acknowledge the book’s swirling origins. Also, the pieces feel like weather—the way words transmute in our processing of patterns.

What topics or trends in literature excite you the most as a poet?

I’m excited about cross-genre work coming out, especially the poem-essay.

Jennifer Elise Foerster is an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts, received her MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and is a PhD candidate in English and Creative Writing at the University of Denver. Foerster is the recipient of a 2017 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, Foerster is the author of one previous book of poems, Leaving Tulsa.

Community of Latinx Writers Key Highlight of AWP 2018

March 19, 2018

AWP, or the Association of Writers & Writing Programs if you’re not into the whole brevity thing, is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to foster literary achievement and advance the art of writing as an essential component of education and stewardship. Each year more than 10,000 writers, students, educators, editors, and publishers gather in attendance at AWP’s annual conference to immerse themselves in the larger writing community, networking with fellow authors and industry insiders.

This year’s meeting found us in Tampa. For four days the local convention center, pleasantly situated along the Hillsborough River at the southwest edge of Tampa’s downtown district, was overrun with writers, its labyrinth of walkways, meeting rooms, and common areas monopolized entirely by the conference. Likewise, attendees filled their agendas to capacity, spending each day engaged in a myriad of presentations, panels, focused discussions, and readings.

Jennifer Elise Foerster and colleagues stop by the booth to proudly pose with a poster of her most recent collection.

Beyond the multitude of scheduled events outlined in the conference program, perhaps the biggest attraction at AWP is the bookfair. Held in an astonishingly vast assembly hall large enough to rival your local supercenter, the bookfair is a marketplace comprised of more than 800 exhibitors from literary presses and journals, universities, creative writing programs, and other related organizations. It is here attendees assemble in droves, drifting from one booth to the next until something, or someone, piques their interest. Everyone knows this is the spot. The place to be. It’s where friends and colleagues alike congregate between panels, where you can run into your favorite author, where discounted books can be bought on the cheap (a small mercy to the many students in attendance), and where you just might find the future publisher of your manuscript. In other words, the bookfair provides the optimal setting for The University of Arizona Press to interact with readers and writers through a shared passion for books.

Literary legends Allison Hedge Coke and Joy Harjo.

As an exhibitor at AWP and other similar conferences, our primary aim is, of course, to meet with current and prospective authors, and to showcase a modest suite of relevant new and notable titles. But beyond just the sales and networking opportunities, easily the best thing about attending these meetings is getting to witness from the ground floor all the positive energy and enthusiasm surrounding the books we publish. I think for many of us working in this industry, it’s easy to become so entrenched in the day-to-day workload, always looking forward, moving from one project to the next, that we often forget to take a step back and reflect on everything that brought us here. So being able to see a reader’s excitement as they eagerly browse through the booth, or catch a momentary glimpse of unbridled pride on an author’s face when they show their book off to a friend, or hear firsthand about the extraordinary impact one of our titles has had on someone, is a beautiful reminder to pause every once in a while and appreciate the work we’ve done and its value to the community.

Speaking of communities, though the Press typically flies solo at these meetings, this year we deviated from that tradition by partnering with the Latinx Writers Caucus in a shared booth. This collaboration was the result of several conversations I’d had with writer and poet Ruben Quesada at last year’s meeting. As we discussed our work, trading insights and comparing notes on the various efforts our organizations make to connect with the community, it became abundantly clear how similar our missions really are. The Caucus and Press both strive to shine a spotlight on Latinx writers and provide a platform for their words to be heard. We work with many of the same authors, scholars, educators, and publishing professionals, and we both share a profound respect and admiration for the unprecedented richness and depth of talent within the Latinx community. Put simply, we’re part of the same family. So when presented with the option of working in unity at AWP this year, it seemed only natural that we take advantage of the opportunity.

Vanessa Angelica Villarreal and Urayoán Noel.

To say the endeavor was a success would be an understatement. Not a minute went by, it seemed, our booth wasn’t bursting with writers, poets, and ardent readers. Some of the Press’s many wonderful authors and friends dropped by to catch up or say hello, including Rigoberto González, Allison Hedge Coke, Emmy Pérez, Jennifer Foerster, Urayoán Noel, Sergio Troncoso, and Francisco Aragón, to name a few. Every day was met with a full schedule of book signings organized by members from the Latinx Writers Caucus, featuring a host of remarkable writers such as Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Claudia Castro Luna, Rita Maria Martinez, Ariel Francisco, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, and Javier Zamora. The excitement concentrated around the booth was contagious; I couldn’t help but watch as it permeated throughout the bookfair, drawing more and more people in all the time.

Another particularly noteworthy detail captured my attention over the course of the meeting, an unmistakable sense of closeness within this community, evidenced in how its members connect with one another, share experiences and exchange ideas, and elevate each other’s work through a collective voice. I think that’s one of the defining features that makes this community special. So many of the authors emerging from what is a relatively small corner of the market continue to have a profound influence on the broader readership, and the need for their works is undeniable. The Press is tremendously proud to be part of this community, and we remain forever grateful for all their encouragement and support. Thank you especially, Alexandra Lytton Regalado, Suzi F. Garcia, and Ruben Quesada, for sharing the love, and for working with us to make AWP 2018 such a great success. I look forward to seeing how far we’ve come the next time our paths cross again.

 

Cheers,

Scott DeHerrera
Associate Editor, University of Arizona Press

Karina Oliva Alvarado Featured on New Books Network Podcast

March 16, 2018

University of Arizona author Karina O. Alvarado was featured on a recent episode of New Books Network to discuss her new edited volume, U.S. Central Americans.

“In U.S. Central Americans: Reconstructing Memories, Struggles, and Communities of Resistance (University of Arizona Press, 2017) editors Karina O. Alvarado, Alicia Ivonne Estrada, and Ester E. Hernandez have produced the first anthology to focus on the scholarship and experiences of 1.5 and second -generation Central American migrants to the United States. Consisting of nine interdisciplinary essays, the volume challenges and complicates the ever-budding field of Latina/o Studies by disrupting chronologies, theories, and narratives that fail to account for the diverse experiences of isthmian migrants. Analyzing oral history, cultural celebrations, literature, art, and the use of public space, the contributors explore the intersecting themes of memory, culture, struggle, and resistance, while giving voice to Central American migrants (primarily from the Northern Triangle—Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) as essential actors in the history and future of the Americas. Addressing the erasure and assumed silence of central-americanos within both the U.S. nation-state and U.S. Latinidad, this timely and trailblazing anthology challenges scholars and educators to reconsider the attention paid to the experiences and subjectivities of migrantes de Guatemala, Belice, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, y Panama.”

Listen to the podcast and read more here.

Mark Nelson Shares Personal Experience of Biosphere 2 Experiment at Annual UA Libraries’ Luncheon

March 16, 2018

One of the eight crew members locked in Biosphere 2 during its first closure experiment, UA Press author Mark Nelson had an active visit to Tucson this past weekend. He participated in two panels at the Tucson Festival of Books as well as multiple signings across the University of Arizona campus, and was a crowd favorite following his appearance on the cover of last week’s Tucson Weekly.

One of the many highlights of his trip was presenting his new book Pushing Our Limits as part of the University of Arizona Libraries’ annual luncheon at the Arizona Inn the Monday following the festival. Nelson offered luncheon attendees a rare and compelling insider’s view of the dramatic story behind the mini-world and cleared up a few common misconceptions about the 1991–1993 closure experiment. Today we look back at some of the highlights of that talk:

 

University of Arizona Libraries Dean Shan Sutton and UA Libraries Annual Luncheon keynote speaker Mark Nelson.

Sutton provides luncheon attendees with an update on the state of the libraries and previews exciting upcoming projects before introducing Mark Nelson.

A display of Mark Nelson’s Pushing Our Limits: Insights from Biosphere 2 provided by our friends at the University of Arizona Bookstores.

From left to right: UA Press Director Kathryn Conrad, Mark Nelson, and UA Press Senior Editor Allyson Carter.

Nelson presents the goals and results of the Biosphere 2 experiment and the project’s implications for today’s global environmental challenges.

To close, Nelson stressed the importance of reconnecting people to a healthy relationship with nature.

Photos courtesy Aengus Anderson

March 14, 2018

An estimated 130,000 book lovers attended this weekend’s 10th annual Tucson Festival of Books. It was a very busy weekend for the Press, with more than twenty of our authors participating in panels, readings, and booth signings. Today we look back at some of the highlights of the two-day event:

 

A display of just a few of our Nature & Science titles, including the festival favorite and thirteen pound space science photography book Mars: The Pristine Beauty of the Red Planet.

UA Press authors Chip Colwell and T.J. Ferguson kick of our rolling booth signings early Saturday morning with a discussion of their most recent edited volume Footprints of Hopi History: Hopihiniwtiput Kukveni’at.

Representing Camino del Sol at the festival, authors Daniel Olivas, Frederick Aldama, and Vickie Vértiz take a moment to pose for photographers on the Pima County Libraries Nuestra Raices stage.

Latino literature’s most prominent new wave authors, Daniel Olivas and Vickie Vertiz discuss writing borderland poetry.

With an estimated 130,000 festival attendees, there was a constant flow of book lovers perusing UA Press titles in our booth off of the UA’s main mall.

Two prolific Latino literary greats, Frederick Aldama and Luis Alberto Urrea, discuss Latinx representation in popular culture at their booth signing Saturday afternoon.

Luis Alberto Urrea takes a moment to chat with fans before rushing off to his second panel of the day.

Mark Nelson, one of the eight-person crew for the first two-year closure experiment in Biosphere 2, teases UA Press publicity manager Rose Brandt at his booth signing Saturday afternoon.

UA Press author Mark Nelson discusses wastewater recycling and his new book Pushing Our Limits: Insights from Biosphere 2 at his booth signing.

Playwright and performance artist Virginia Grise joins UA Press poet Vickie Vertiz for a dynamic discussion on resistance and survival, both on the personal, day-to-day, level and in a broader sense as individuals situated within systems and cultures of oppression.

Our dedicated roving photographers, UA Press interns Nate Berry and Ally Purcell, take a break in the Press booth Saturday afternoon.

The Press’s Sara Sue Hoklotubbe discusses writing a strong sense of place in her Sadie Walela Mystery series with authors Cara Black and Katayoun Medhat.

Vickie Vertiz’s reads from her new collection Palm Frond with its Throat Cut.

After returning to Tucson following this year’s AWP conference in Florida, poet Farid Matuk took the time to sign copies of his latest collection The Real Horse at the UA Press booth.

Cuba’s leading export to Tucson has been Tom Miller, the longtime Cubanista whose latest book from UA Press is Cuba, Hot and Cold. Tom reads from his work at a panel honoring his prolific career.

Despite the threat of rain, festival goers stop to browse UA Press titles late Saturday afternoon.

UA Press authors Daniel Olivas and Sara Sue Hoklotubbe joke with fans at their booth signing Sunday afternoon.

The Tents are Up and the Countdown Begins!

March 1, 2018

The tents are up and we’re eagerly putting the final touches together for what is sure to be a Tucson Festival of Books for the record books. In the last decade, the Tucson Festival of Books has become one of the city’s most anticipated events. With over 400 authors and an estimated 130,000 attendees, the Festival symbolizes the importance of togetherness and community, facilitated through books and the shared love of reading.

The University of Arizona Press is proud to have been a part of the Festival since its inception in 2009 and we look forward to continuing to bring diverse voices in literature to the Old Pueblo. We are thrilled to have more than twenty authors participating in this year’s Festival.

Taking the stage with our friends at Nuetra Raíces will be Frederick Luis Aldama, who will discuss Latinx Superheroes; award-winning Daniel Olivas will discuss craft and his latest short story collection The King of Lighting Fixtures; and Vickie Vértiz is slated to give a reading of her latest poems from Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut.  Sara Sue Hoklotubbe returns to the Festival again to celebrate her new Sadie Walela mystery, Betrayal at the Buffalo Ranch. We’ll have a number of authors with local connections, too, including Mark Nelson, Tom Miller, Oscar J. Martínez, and Farid Matuk. Many will be presenting at panels and signing books.

Be sure to visit us in booth #242 for special discounts and author signings!

Author Signing Schedule

Saturday, March 10

Chip Colwell & T.J. Ferguson at 11:00-11:30am

Luis Alberto Urrea & Frederick Luis Aldama at 12:00 -12:30pm

Mark Nelson at 12:30-1:00pm

Oscar J. Martinez at 1:00-1:30pm

Flannery Burke & Robert Houston at 1:30-2:00pm

 

Sunday, March 11

Alfred McEwen, Ari Espinoza, & Candice Hansen-Koharcheck at 10:00-10:30am

Vickie Vértiz at 10:30-11:00am

Sara Sue Hoklotubbe  & Daniel A. Olivas at 12:00 -12:30pm

Theodore H. Fleming & Kim Kanoa Duffek at 1:00-1:30pm

Farid Matuk at 1:30-2:00pm               

Revealing the Very Real Human Impact of Deportation Policies

February 21, 2018

Mass deportation is currently at the forefront of political discourse in the United States. Edited by Jeremy Slack, Daniel E. Martínez, and Scott Whiteford with photographs by Murphy Woodhouse, The Shadow of the Wall underscores the unintended social consequences of increased border enforcement, immigrant criminalization, and deportation along the U.S.-Mexico border. Today we feature an excerpt from the book’s introduction, in which the editors explain their work to reveal the real impact that mass removal to Mexico has on people’s lives:

Requests for $30 billion in additional border and immigration enforcement spending under the Hoeven-Corker amendment to Senate Bill 744 of 2013, Donald Trump’s absurd call for a “wall” along the nearly two-thousand-mile southwestern border, and an additional fifteen thousand immigration agents are mainstays of today’s political debates. However, because the United States already spends more than $18 billion per year on border and immigration enforcement (Associated Press 2013), it is important to examine more closely what this spending entails. Calls for more enforcement are rarely, if ever, followed by a critical understanding of what is actually being spent and what it is doing to the border. Because of this, a more progressive response—one that asserts the border is already secure—is almost as problematic in that it gives carte blanche to continue the activities currently occurring in the name of border enforcement as if they are successful. The very policies and practices taking place along the border have produced unheard-of levels of violence, higher death rates, and a mass incarceration machine that has been criminalizing migrants and locking up asylum seekers in for-profit prisons that lobby for increased enforcement and harsher penalties.

The implementation of the Consequence Delivery System (CDS) in 2011, a program designed to guide agents into delivering punishment based on the level of offenses committed by migrants, is an appropriate lens through which to view contemporary border and immigration enforcement. The CDS generates escalating punishments for those with more apprehensions in the hopes that they will not return. While it is important to note that the dangers of the physical geography of the border are certainly still an important part of the strategic plan, the CDS is a significant shift in policy. The strategy has changed. The “Gatekeeper Era,” characterized by the “prevention through deterrence” strategy in the 1990s and early 2000s, was predicated on a general deterrence strategy. Instead of relying solely on physical barriers, the extreme temperatures, long walks, and other natural hazards of the desert and river to deter migrants, the U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) now wields the full force of the carceral state against migrants.

Deportees being dropped off at night at the Nogales port of entry. Photo by Murphy Woodhouse

It is hard to assert that the main goal of the CDS is the prevention of would-be migrants in Mexico who may be contemplating a journey. Rather, the focus on an individual punishment, designated by special rubrics given to agents, makes it obvious that the goal is preventing repeat migration. Thus, the CDS is in many ways an actuarial approach to immigration enforcement; it cites the prevention of future “crimes” (i.e., unauthorized migration) as rationale for increasingly severe punishments for a select subpopulation—those with strong social ties and place attachment to the United States who are the most likely to be repeat border crossers. This has significant implications for people who have put down roots in the United States. As interior enforcement has ramped up significantly since the establishment of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2002, a greater number of people have been removed despite having spent years living in the United States and now have few options other than to return to their families in the United States. While some scholars have noted negative migration flows in Mexican sending regions for the first time and have begun to discuss the end of mass labor migration to the United States (Durand 2013), we argue that many deportees do not return to their cities of origin. Rather, many stay near the border and attempt to return to their lives and families in the United States. In many ways, interior immigration enforcement and deportation have themselves become the new drivers of unauthorized Mexican migration to the United States.

Not all deportations are created equally. Disentangling these differences is essential for engaging with current debates in policy and advocacy. We must dispel notions that border enforcement is simply the product of agents patrolling select areas of the border zone. When we discuss the immense costs of enforcement, it includes the various types of immigration checkpoints, mass trial programs such as Operation Streamline, arrangements with local and state law enforcement, incarceration in immigration detention as well as federal prison, and the myriad private agencies tasked with transporting, detaining, and processing migrants.

The complicated processes of apprehension, processing, detention, deportation, and criminalization as well as extensive ties to family in the United States and a deep resolve to return despite the involved costs, hardship, and pain typify the contemporary migrant experience.

Deportees leaving the Juan Bosco shelter in Nogales, Sonora. Photo by Murphy Woodhouse

Through postdeportation surveys, interviews, and ethnographic work along the U.S.-Mexico border, we chronicle the lived experiences of people who have gone through this escalated, punishment-focused immigration enforcement apparatus. We examine the specific components of border enforcement and their effects on people who no longer call Mexico their home, concluding that those with extensive ties to the United States are highly determined to return. We have produced novel data about what it is like to cross the border in the post-Gatekeeper, DHS era of enforcement. The CDS approach is predicated on an increasingly punitive approach to immigration enforcement that has also played a part in fomenting violence in Mexico. The border zones where almost half a million Mexicans are deported each year have experienced tremendous violence. Migrants often interact and witness this violence on another level, as they frequently cross the border side by side with drug traffickers and are often the victims of kidnapping, robbery, or extortion during their journeys and upon return to Mexico. We explore how the relationships between organized crime and the state exacerbate the violence migrants experience on both sides of the border during migration, deportation, and the subsequent trauma of separation from one’s family.

The Shadow of the Wall is an attempt to bring everyone in, to understand the big picture of who is being removed from the United States and what this is causing, not only for the individuals themselves but also for their families in the United States and Mexico.

Jeremy Slack is an assistant professor of geography in the Sociology and Anthropology Department at the University of Texas at El Paso. Daniel E. Martínez is an assistant professor in the School of Sociology at the University of Arizona. Scott Whiteford is the director of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Mexico Initiative and a professor emeritus at the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona. Murphy Woodhouse is the Pima County reporter and Road Runner columnist for the Arizona Daily Star.

February 15, 2018

In his new collection The Real Horse: Poems, Farid Matuk offers a thought provoking collection about the meanings of self and citizen. He recently answered five questions from his editor Scott De Herrera about his work:

What inspired you to write this work?
There’s no such thing as a good man, or a good American. In this work I at least crystalized that for myself, and tried to situate that as a ground floor from which to reach, in future works, toward goodness as such, a non-moralistic force I very much believe in.

How does your upbringing as an immigrant influence your approach to poetry?
I’m not only an immigrant but I’m also from long lines of immigrants, some who came from Syria to the highlands of Peru to California, and from others who came from the Aymara people of the Andean altiplano, surviving and changing through the Incan and Spanish conquests and subsequent mestizaje, and who recently migrated down to the urban capital of Lima. Those layers of displacement have left me not with a rich intersection of cultural and linguistic heritages but with a shallowness. That’s okay, because I still have language, body, and spirit. I try to make that intersection my home in art.

What value do you see in poetry as a form of expression over other creative formats?
I’m with the poet Alice Notley, who wrote in her poem “I, the People,”: “And we are the masters/ of hearing & saying/ at the double edge of body &/ breath.” I walk away from her word “masters,” though, mostly because I believe that when we do our work at the “double edge of body &/ breath” we don’t own or control anything but instead make ourselves available and porous to ghosts, landscapes, and to those others bearing their “double edges” among us.

What is the biggest challenge you see today for poets?
We’re a varied lot, and so are our challenges. Maybe the perennial and shared challenge is to stay close on the heels of our betters (across all genre and media) so as to deepen into the particulars of our own questions and of our own art. As for “today,” social media helps by creating access, visibility, and community for folks kept out by old systems, and social media hurts when it distracts us with our own ubiquity and keeps us from asking, Access to what?

What are you working on now?

I have a couple of manuscripts drafted out, but I’m searching for new angles of approach so I can get back into them. One is a book-length verse project and the other is a hybrid prose and verse work of scholarship, or of reading. While I search for ways to enliven those manuscripts, I’m helping out with some translations from Spanish of the outsider Peruvian poetry group, Kloaka, and I’m reading a draft of a text that chronicles Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar’s journey accompanying Syrian refugees across the Mediterranean and into Europe. Hopefully, I can be useful to Khaled as he works out how to use that text in future installations and multi-media works. More broadly, I’m reading works written by folks outside the U.S.A., trying to hack a way out of our big bad provincialism.

Born in Peru to a Syrian mother and Peruvian father, Farid Matuk immigrated to California at the age of six and was undocumented until the age of thirteen. The recipient of an Alumni New Works grant from the Headlands Center for the Arts, Matuk is an assistant professor of English at the University of Arizona.

Post-Border Visions by Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez

February 9, 2018

In 1996, anthropologist Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez published Border Visions: Mexican Cultures of the Southwest United States with the University of Arizona Press. The book was hailed as a comprehensive guide to border culture, distilling historical, sociological, and anthropological perspectives. It has been taught in courses across the country. Today, the author reflects on the book’s publication and what’s changed since its publication.

Carlos Velez-Ibanez
School Director & Regents Professor
School of Transborder Studies
Arizona State University

It has been twenty-two years since Border Visions was published and the U.S.-Mexico transborder region has suffered through many changes. Since then, my own work has changed significantly. Fundamentally, I understand now that my previous work generally cut off at that bifurcation we call the border. Border Visions began much more broadly in telling the narrative of the south-to-north movements from the pre-Hispanic eras to the nineteenth century, and then I conveniently strayed only north. Part of it, I think, emerged from an almost desperate desire to tell a narrative alternative to those previously composed about this population north of the line. My model had been the works of Eric. R. Wolf and others like Richard N. Adams, books investigating big ideas over big areas. Few scholars had applied a similar scope to the Southwest North American region, with the notable exception of James Diego Vigil in From Indians to Chicanos. In my own book, I also expanded into the areas of art and literature, as well as social science and history.

It seems that Border Visions has had resonance over the last twenty-two years, and it can still stand for that period and in part for today. However, it stopped at the border for the most part, even though most of the narratives and many of the experiences that I knew to be true were in fact transborder—culturally, linguistically, socially, and certainly economically. These include seeing my father come home one day saddened and shattered by being told to “go back to Mexico” when he asked for a raise in the automobile garage in which he had worked for many years, even though he had attended Roskruge Junior High and worked as a Western Union delivery boy as a kid in Tucson, Arizona. Or the countless stories of the Mexican Revolution that my mother told, including the tales of revolutionary young men dying of wounds in her home’s courtyard as her mother tried to staunch their wounds with pillowcases and bedsheets. This occurred while an explosive bullet to the stomach was killing her father, fighting on the opposite side. The narratives of multiple crossings went on and on: I was practically born on the dividing line between the two Nogaleses when my pregnant mother, my father, and my sister were returning to Tucson after visiting relatives in Magdalena, Sonora. Birth pains began a few miles from the borderline, and we barely made it to St. Joseph’s Hospital, where I was born. It was said that my bassinet was placed by the hospital window, which was next to the cyclone fence dividing Sonora from Arizona, allegedly with my feet facing south and my head facing north.

So culturally, linguistically, economically, politically, and ecologically, I had not written Border Visions with what my early birth, almost between borders, taught me, nor did I reflect on growing up in the reality of the transborder region. I had paid insufficient attention to the enormous growth of the maquiladoras and the persistent and telling migration north during the 1970s, even though it was obviously present. New populations of Mexicans were moving from central and southern Mexican states into my old Tucson neighborhood, and the neighborhood changed from bilingual to monolingual Spanish-speaking. In 1985, I returned to the area and stopped by a local supermarket where I had worked as a teenager. Now its shelves were filled with Mexican brands, piñatas hung from the ceiling, and Spanish flowed through the aisles. I had been the only one of ten or twelve cashiers who spoke Spanish; those numbers were now reversed.

Yet in the schools, the old, oppressive practices of monolingualism remain to this day. Teachers no longer punished children for speaking Spanish with “swats” to their rear ends, but there are more pernicious and supposedly “beneficial” techniques, such as the extensive use of tests and “immersion” to rid children of their invaluable linguistic and cultural resources. Coupled with an Arizona legislature determined to upend the demographic changes created by a transborder economy, the population once again faced many of the same educational circumstances that structured the way in which children learned, even though the pedagogies of “immersion” are known to be faulty, theoretically and methodologically. This is true to this day in many states and especially Arizona.

I tried to make up for this inattentiveness since I had not adequately told the transborder narrative. So relatively recently I did so in three other books: An Impossible Living in a Transborder World (2010), Hegemonies of Language and their Discontents (2017), and The U.S.-Mexico Transborder Region (2017) with Josiah Heyman. The first is an economically oriented work that crosscuts the border bifurcation and lays out a sound theoretical platform from which to understand the movements and adaptations of Mexican populations moving north. The second book focuses on language policies filtered through the Spanish empire, the Mexican Republic, and the United States. It focuses on the impacts and responses to the imposition of language on populations inhabiting the “Southwest North American Region,” which is the ecological setting over which languages were impressed as one of the central means of reducing or eliminating the cultural underpinnings of Indigenous- and later Mexican-origin populations. The third book is a strong theoretically and methodologically informed collaboration of new and exciting young scholars who have experienced, researched, and lived in the region and who have nailed down the sources, processes, and structures of the asymmetry and inequality of the region.

These complete a kind of triangle of works in English that makes up for the limitations of Border Visions, without which they would not have been developed. Yet even these were not sufficient in reality to fix the transborder narrative, because these were all in English. So I began to publish works in Spanish like Visiones de acá y de allá (2015) and a number of others with Mexican colleagues, and in so doing I have tried to cement a level of scholarship that is effectively transborder. Colleagues from the north and south of the bifurcation are equal partners in an otherwise asymmetrical economic and political region.

Thus what began as a venture into a limited arena of scholarship north of the bifurcation emerged over the past twenty-two years as much more complete ecological, economic, political, cultural, linguistic, and social narrative of the Southwest North American Region.

Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez is Regents’ Professor in the School of Transborder Studies and the School of   Human Evolution and Social change and the Motorola Presidential Professor of Neighborhood Revitalization at Arizona State University. His numerous honors include the 2004 Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology and the 2003 Bronislaw Malinowski Medal. Vélez-Ibáñez was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1994 and was named as a Corresponding member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences (Miembro Correspondiente de la Academia Mexicana de Ciencias) in 2015.

Mural, The Last Supper (José Antonio Burciaga at Casa Zapata, Stanford University) photo courtesy Gozamos, shared via creative commons license.

Five Questions with Border Scholar Oscar J. Martínez

February 6, 2018

Oscar J. Martínez’s forthcoming book Ciudad Juárez: Saga of a Legendary Border City provides a rich and nuanced portrait of a complex border city. He will be a featured author at this year’s Tucson Festival of Books, discussing Juárez’s history as a Spanish frontier outpost and the city’s current border issues. Before the festival, we sat down with him to discuss his inspiration:

You spent some of your childhood in Ciudad Juárez. Were you aware of the dichotomy between El Paso and Juárez when you were growing up?

Crossing the border frequently made me highly aware of the differences in the levels of development of the two cities. I was struck by the presence of high‐rise buildings in El Paso and their complete absence in Juárez, the differing traffic patterns in the two cities, and the ubiquitous poor colonias in Juárez versus the sprawling middle-class neighborhoods in El Paso.

What sparked your interest in border studies and history and inspired you to study and write about it?

While in graduate school, I did research on Mexican cross‐border migration patterns. This made me aware of the importance of border cities as gateways to the United States. But I learned that migration was only one aspect of the all-important relationship between the Mexican border cities and the neighboring country. There were larger issues to consider, especially economic, social, and cultural linkages. By then I knew that the best way to understand the nature of cities, regions, or countries is through a historical lens.

How has Juárez changed in the forty years since your previous book on the city, Border Boom Town?

Several dramatic changes took place in Juárez during the last four decades. The local population exploded as a result of a great expansion of the export‐oriented assembly manufacturing industry (maquiladoras), the city became a major drug trafficking center and a headquarters for a prominent drug cartel, and drug related crime skyrocketed, making Juárez one of the world’s most dangerous urban centers. The violence destroyed the city’s famed tourist industry and dependence on the United States deepened considerably.

What effects do you foresee the current administration and proposed border wall may have on the city?

The prospect that the Trump administration may terminate NAFTA or change it significantly has created great concern and uncertainty in Juárez because the city is extremely dependent on the U.S. economy. Trump’s “wall” is not much of a concern because El Paso is already walled off from Juárez.

What do you hope readers will take away from your new book?

My hope is that readers will develop a greater understanding of the unique nature of the U.S.‐Mexico border region, the monumental challenges faced by Mexican border cities, and the role that the U.S. economy has played in shaping the destiny of communities like Juárez.

Oscar J. Martínez is a Regents’ Professor of History at the University of Arizona. He has authored and edited numerous books and many articles, book chapters, and reviews.

 

Photos Courtesy Oscar J. Martínez

ICYMI: Southwest Books of the Year 2017

February 2, 2018

In case you missed it: we are very pleased to announce that two University of Arizona Press titles received special recognition in the Southwest Books of the Year 2017, sponsored by the Pima County Public Library (PCPL). Here’s what Bill Broyles, a research associate at the University of Arizona’s Southwest Center, says about his selections:

After the Wildfire: Ten Years of Recovery from the Willow Fire, by John Alcock

How does a mountain restore itself following a raging forest fire? Where the Willow Fire burned thousands of acres in the Mazatzal Mountains of central Arizona in 2004, John Alcock invites us along as he monitors and records the serial return of lupine and damselflies, grasshoppers and garter snakes, oak and elk. With the practiced eye of a college professor, he stops to examine a squad of caterpillars feeding together on one branch and wonders whether they have a toxic defense against hungry birds or if they find safety in numbers. He points out that barrel cacti secrete nectar sugar for ants, so they will guard against cactus-eating insects. We see Centris bees wrestling over females. Each fascinating chapter reveals how life regains its foothold on the scorched slopes. Faced with fire and changing climate, Alcock consoles us to take a hike ‘somewhere, anywhere’ and appreciate the forest as it evolves.”

A Land Apart: The Southwest and the Nation in the Twentieth Century, by Flannery Burke

“When friends from afar come to visit our Southwest, what should we show them? Scenic places, certainly, but what about the culture? Navajo rugs or jewelry? The UFO site in New Mexico? Low-rider cars on the streets of Tucson? Dams and campuses, museums and missions? And how did all of these pieces become our Southwest, anyway? For example, tourism brought jobs to some of the hottest and driest places, but that bringing also required constructing stories, sometimes mythical, about those places. In A Land Apart, cultural historian Flannery Burke explains how the Southwest became the Southwest and why Arizona and New Mexico seem so different. She dissects the reasons that the defense industry boomed here, delves into bedeviling problems like water rights, explores the influences of Native Nation and Mexican cultures, and weaves literature and arts into a satisfying discussion of the fascinating history behind those landmarks and highlights of our culture.”

Southwest Books of the Year is the PCPL’s guide to the best books of the year with a southwestern setting or subject. The panelists are subject specialists and voracious consumers of Southwest literature.View the complete list of selections and enjoy the thumbnail reviews here. Congratulations to all of the honorees!

10th Annual Tucson Festival of Books

February 1, 2018

The University of Arizona Press is gearing up for the tenth anniversary of the Tucson Festival of Books (TFOB), to be held Saturday, March 10, and Sunday, March 11, on the University of Arizona campus in Tucson, Arizona!

TFOB is a major literary event, regularly drawing more than 400 authors from across the country and more than 135,000 attendees. Panels, readings, and other author activities present a fantastic opportunity to hear from talented authors on a wide range of subjects. Visit the TFOB website and browse the offerings by participant or genre, then create a personalized schedule. There are plenty of family and entertainment activities, including a free concert on Saturday night by the star-studded Rock Bottom Remainders, the self-proclaimed “hard-listening” band.

The UA Press will have a large booth on the mall with a wide selection of books for sale at great discounts and signings by our authors. Stay tuned for more information!

Choice 2017 Outstanding Academic Titles

January 30, 2018

We are delighted to announce that two University of Arizona Press titles have been selected as 2017 Outstanding Academic Titles by Choice magazine:

Mars: The Pristine Beauty of the Red Planet, by Alfred S. McEwen, Candice Hansen-Koharcheck, and Ari Espinoza

“Splendidly illustrated. . . . Every picture puzzles and delights.”—Choice

Starving for Justice: Hunger Strikes, Spectacular Speech, and the Struggle for Dignity, by Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval

“The author bases his book on historical archival and oral interviews, making it original and organic. This is the first scholarship that investigates the Chicana/o studies social movements of the 1990s, and [it] is a major contribution for future scholarly development of this critical subject.”—Choice

Choice confers their Outstanding Academic Titles to award “outstanding works for their excellence in presentation and scholarship, the significance of their contribution to the field, their originality and value as an essential treatment of their subject, and significance in building undergraduate collections.”

January 29, 2018

On a clear, cold January morning in 1948, a plane reportedly carrying thirty-two passengers caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon. The engine exploded, the left wing ripped apart from the fuselage, and more than a hundred witnesses watched as the airship spiraled out of control and crashed on the edge of the Diablo Valley.

All aboard were lost to the flames, including the flight crew and twenty-eight Mexican nationals, many of them bracero workers returning home. National media only reported the names of the white pilots, stewardess, and immigration officer. The others were simply listed as “deportees.” Their remains were buried in a mass unmarked grave.

They would remain anonymous for the next seven decades.

Inspired by Woody Guthrie’s protest song “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee),” author Tim Z. Hernandez set out to right this wrong. Hernandez, the son of migrant farmworkers and a professor at the University of Texas El Paso, embarked on a six-year search to identify the “deportees,” fund a memorial gravestone, locate the victims’ families, and give voice to their stories in his book All They Will Call You

This weekend marked the seventieth anniversary of the tragedy. Hernandez commemorated the lives lost in the plane wreck at Los Gatos Canyon with a public gathering at the victims’ last resting place at Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno, California.

The memorial service began with a sage blessing and a moment of silence, followed by music from Hernandez and Lance Canales. The family of deceased passengers were the guests of honor. 

On Monday, January 29, the California State Senate convened to formally recognize the seventieth anniversary of the plane wreck at Los Gatos Canyon and Hernandez’s work. The event was an effort led by Senator William Monning and Senator Ben Hueso, with support of the California Latino Legislative Caucus. In the seven decades since the tragedy, never has the incident been officially acknowledged or recognized by any governmental agency, until now.

Tim Z. Hernandez was born and raised in California’s San Joaquin Valley. An award-winning poet, novelist, and performer, he is a recipient of the American Book Award for poetry, the Colorado Book Award for poetry, the Premio Aztlán Literary Prize for fiction, and the International Latino Book Award for historical fiction. His books and research have been featured in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, CNN, Public Radio International, and National Public Radio. He continues to perform and speak across the United States and internationally, but he divides his time between Fresno and El Paso, where he is an assistant professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Texas, El Paso.

 

 

 

 

 

 

January 23, 2018

We are delighted to announce that two University of Arizona Press titles have been honored with Southwest Book Awards, sponsored by the Border Regional Library Association (BRLA):

A Land Apart: The Southwest and the Nation in the Twentieth Century, by Flannery Burke

A Land Apart is not just a cultural history of the modern Southwest—it is a complete rethinking and recentering of the key players and primary events marking the Southwest in the twentieth century. Historian Flannery Burke emphasizes policy over politicians, communities over individuals, and stories over simple narratives.

Navajo Sovereignty: Understanding and Visions of the Dine People, edited by Lloyd L. Lee

Navajo Sovereignty discusses Western law’s view of Diné sovereignty, research, activism, creativity, and community, and Navajo sovereignty in traditional education. Above all, Lloyd L. Lee and the contributing scholars and community members call for the rethinking of Navajo sovereignty in a way more rooted in Navajo beliefs, culture, and values.

Since 1971 the Southwest Book Awards have been presented in recognition of outstanding books about the Southwest published in any genre and directed toward any audience. To see the complete list of award recipients, please visit the BRLA website. Congratulations to all of the winners!

January 17, 2018

Discrimination is rampant, and working conditions are poor. Safety, pay, and class-war all threaten the future of one of the highest producing copper mines in the United States. Workers are pitted against owners, as the rich receive their keep and leave the bees to fend for the mighty Copper Queen Mine. This may sound like a recurrent story, and it is! For the town of Bisbee, Arizona, it’s actually a centennial of truths reenacted every July.

Such is the basis of Robert Greene’s new documentary film, Bisbee ’17, premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah:

It’s 2017 in Bisbee, Arizona, an old copper-mining town just miles from the Mexican border. The town’s close-knit community prepares to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Bisbee’s darkest hour: the infamous Bisbee Deportation of 1917, during which 1,200 striking miners were violently taken from their homes, banished to the middle of the desert, and left to die.

Townspeople confront this violent, misunderstood past by staging dramatic recreations of the escalating strike. These dramatized scenes are based on subjective versions of the story and “directed,” in a sense, by residents with conflicting views of the event. Deeply personal segments torn from family history build toward a massive restaging of the deportation itself on the exact day of its 100th anniversary.

Filmmaker Robert Greene confronts the current political predicaments of immigration, unionization, environmental damage, and corporate corruption with direct, haunting messages about solidarity and struggle. With consummate skill and his signature penchant for bending the boundaries of documentary, Greene artfully stirs up the ghosts of our past as a cautionary tale that speaks to our present.

But this isn’t the first time Bisbee’s secret has been told. In 1999, the Press re-released Robert Houston’s  Bisbee ’17, for which the new film takes its name. Houston, a novelist and professor emeritus in creative writing at the University of Arizona, vividly re-creates a West of miners and copper magnates, bindlestiffs and scissorbills, army officers, private detectives, and determined revolutionaries in his historical fiction novel.

The protagonists in a bitter strike: the Wobblies (the IWW), the toughest union in the history of the West; and Harry Wheeler, the last of the two-gun sheriffs. In this class-war western, they face each other down in the streets of Bisbee, pitting a general strike against the largest posse ever assembled.

Against this backdrop runs the story of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, strike organizer from the East, caught between the worlds of her ex-husband—the Bisbee strike leader—and her new lover, an Italian anarchist from New York. As the tumultuous weeks of the strike unfold, she struggles to sort out what she really feels about both of them, and about the West itself.

 

Southwest Symposium 2018 Recap

January 9, 2018

The 16th Biennial Southwest Symposium was held in Denver, Colorado, this past weekend and celebrated the theme “Pushing Boundaries.” The symposium explored the formation and meaning of Bears Ears National Monument, new research in chronology and chronometry, Plains-Pueblo interactions, and new developments in museum archaeology and collections-based research.

UAP Senior Editor Allyson Carter was on the ground at the conference, manning the booth, meeting with authors, and presenting a joint publishing workshop. “It was a good conference,” she was pleased say, “the sessions were great, the papers were high-quality, everything was organized very well.”

A number of our authors were in attendance and made a special point of stopping by our booth to browse new titles and pose with their books:

From left to right: Authors Patricia Gilman, Michael Searcy, and Paul Minnis.

Matthew Peeples holding a copy of his forthcoming book for the first time.

 

What Have I Gotten Myself Into? Insights from Biosphere 2

January 4, 2018

Mark Nelson, one of the eight crew members locked in Biosphere 2 during its first closure experiment, offers a compelling insider’s view of the dramatic story behind the mini-world.  In his forthcoming book Pushing Our Limits: Insights from Biosphere 2, Nelson clears up common misconceptions as he presents the goals and results of the experiment and the project’s implications for today’s global environmental challenges.

On a winter night in January 1993, by opening a doorway we experienced a stunning physiological revival. We left a world with an oxygen level around 14 percent; equivalent to being on a 15,000-foot-tall mountain. In fact, we were at a 3,900-foot elevation in southern Arizona. Oxygen had been slowly disappearing for sixteen months. No one knew where it had gone. We were slowly climbing a mountain but going nowhere. Mission Control had pumped oxygen into a chamber on the other side of the door. Our atmosphere suddenly contained 26 percent, which was 5 percent higher than Earth’s air. In minutes, we felt decades younger. For the first time in many months, I heard the sound of running feet.

So many strange, disturbing, marvelous, powerful, and profound experiences unfolded during our two years as “biospherians.” The eight of us felt extraordinarily lucky to be the initial crew to live inside a miniature biosphere. We had to learn how to be its first natives.

Biosphere 1 (B1) is our Earth’s biosphere. Biosphere 2 was a three-acre world. B1 houses the global ecosystem, which includes all life. B1 is our planet’s life support system. Biosphere 2 was built to study how biospheres work, creating a laboratory for global ecological processes, to help ecology become an experimental science. It could also provide baseline information to design long-term life support systems for space.

The facility included people, farming, and technology. Earth’s biosphere has supported life for four billion years. Only quite recently have billions of people and modern industries been added. Living in Biosphere 2 might give new perspectives on whether—and how—harmony can be forged between humans and the global biosphere. Our two-year experiment began on September 26, 1991. We’d have two seasonal cycles to study how Biosphere 2 functioned. For comparison, a human spaceflight to explore Mars would also take two years. No one knew if we could stay inside for two years; so many things could go wrong. The facility was optimistically designed for a one-hundred-year operation.

The biospherian crew on closure day entering the front airlock, September 1991.

The first closure experiment was the “shake-down” mission; a trial run to find flaws, bugs, what we had to correct or change. We were also determined to collect as much data and to do as much research in collaboration with outside scientists as possible.

The odds, even from project insiders, heavily favored an early exit. Too many challenges—known and unknown—could end the experiment early. Some thought we wouldn’t even last three months. The world record in a closed ecological system was six months set by two-person crews at a Siberian research institute. Their basement facility powered by artificial lights was the size of a small apartment, their only companions were food crops. Our own sunshiny world contained a rainforest and a coral reef in a towering structure with seventy-five-foot-tall roofs. Every day we were able to stay alive inside, we would amass reams of research data.

We entered an untested facility in almost totally uncharted territory.

We included small chunks of Earth’s diversity inside the biosphere; bonsai rainforest, tropical grassland (savanna), desert, mangrove marsh, and coral reef ocean co-existed under one roof. Some of the world’s top ecologists and most innovative engineers worked to make this possible; no one knew how these biomes would develop. Ours was cutting-edge science, the greatest experiment in ecological self-organization ever conducted. To maintain biodiversity, we biospherians would intervene when we could. Our fog desert decided to go its own way and transformed during the experiment; maintaining the others took hard work and ingenuity, the coral reef in particular, was a nail-biter to the end.

In our nearly airtight world, we would experience the highs and lows of living intimately with seven other people. Outside politics and power struggles polarized and exacerbated in-fighting, though we entered as the best of friends and colleagues. I wouldn’t permit a bitter “To the traitors” as toastmaster at a Sunday night dinner where we enjoyed a precious bottle of home-brewed banana wine. There were no fistfights, but one crew member complained years later that she had been spit at. Twice. But we continued working unselfishly with one another. Whenever we feasted, partied, or enjoyed a rare delicacy like a cup of coffee from rainforest trees, tensions magically melted away. We’d relax and enjoy a temporary truce from group tensions. We acted mindfully in Biosphere 2, understanding that its teeming life was keeping us alive and healthy. We took care of her needs with tender loving care. She was our third lung and lifeboat. Some of us thought Biosphere 2 was the ninth biospherian.

Fish-eye lens photo of the Biosphere 2 farm. Photo by Abigail Alling, Biosphere 2, 1991-1993.

Eight Americans and Europeans suddenly became subsistence farmers. We lived off the land, eating what we grew, though we farmed in a high-tech, $150 million facility. Our small farm exceeded organic standards. We used nothing that might pollute our air, water, soils, or crops. We recycled our water and soil nutrients. Even our sewage was treated and recycled. We cared for our farm animals with affection, but they were slaughtered as needed. Our diet consisted primarily of fruits, grains, and vegetables.

We experienced hunger throughout the two years and plates were always licked clean. Almost all of us became much better cooks. Peer pressure for delicious food was a great motivator. I and many others ate our roasted peanuts whole, shell and all; we would eat anything to fill the stomach void. We were guinea pigs, the first humans extensively studied on an “undernourished but not malnourished” diet. This paralleled the pioneering research of Biosphere 2’s in-house doctor, who claimed a person could live 120 years on a calorie-restricted diet.

Periodically, project managers reminded us we were volunteers; the airlocks were unlocked, and we could leave anytime we’d had enough or if there were health dangers.

For safety, we had our resident doctor and a team of specialists on call at the nearby University of Arizona College of Medicine, and a fully equipped medical facility and analytic laboratory were inside the biosphere. Automated systems could detect potentially toxic substances in our air and water. We started with a biosphere as clean and unpolluted as possible. Chemical deodorants and cleaning supplies weren’t allowed because our world was so ensitive to pollution. Even a small fire would mean evacuating, so we didn’t light candles, even on a birthday cake. At winter parties, a monitor played a video of a wood-burning fireplace—we felt warmer sitting near it.

Though we didn’t intend it, the toes of dominant analytic, small-scale science were seriously stepped on. The reductionist approach seeks to analyze everything at the micro level, each variable being tested separately.  Biosphere 2 used both analytic and holistic science approaches. The project violated unspoken taboos. Include humans and our technologies in the experiment? Heresy! We knew one thing for certain: Biosphere 2 would ignite plenty of controversy.

Systems ecologists and veterans of NASA’s Apollo Project 1960s glory days were allies from the beginning. To achieve the goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, NASA abandoned component-by- component testing and went to “all-up systems testing.” We followed a similar strategy to create this complex miniworld; it couldn’t be done piece by piece like Lego.

The six years from project conception until completion were exciting. Scientists, engineers, and hundreds of construction workers were very motivated. They were making history, doing the near impossible. Some doubted at every stage whether Biosphere 2 could be built, operated, or used for advancing human knowledge. Who were these mavericks behind the project?

Despite many world-class scientists and institutions consulting, the whole endeavor was way too ambitious, too daring. Even some friends and colleagues of the project thought it was fifty years ahead of its time.

Biosphere 2 was radical and revolutionary—a challenge to “business as usual.” The entire “technosphere” had one overarching goal: serve and protect life. Our engineers had to design technology to make waves, rain, winds; they had to control climate and mimic geological processes. And they had to use machinery and equipment that wouldn’t poison and pollute. Life ruled. Technology knew its place and obeyed and served, a radical notion. What would happen if we did that everywhere?

The engineering goal was about 1 percent per month air exchange (leakage) from the biosphere. That’s thousands of times tighter than the most tightly sealed buildings and homes, far tighter than even the International Space Station. But, if this air-tightness was achieved we might wind up with a horrific “sick building syndrome” from a buildup of trace gases. We needed a way to ensure that those trace gases didn’t build up in a structure with two acres of farm and wilderness areas, hundreds of pumps, motors, and other equipment, and miles of piping. Our solution was to use our farm soil and plants as a biofilter to clean the air. We hoped it would work.

Carbon dioxide was called the tiger of Biosphere 2. We continually monitored its levels in our atmosphere since it could destroy our world, and it would be difficult to keep the levels from rising too high. Every cycle goes hundreds to thousands of times faster than normal in a tightly sealed, small, and life-packed miniature biosphere. Our ocean and atmosphere were tiny compared to Earth’s; we had entered a time machine. Would all the life inside Biosphere 2—with us humans doing everything we could to help—be  sufficient to prevent a runaway rise in carbon dioxide, our tiny version of climate change? If CO2 levels got too high, our coral reef might die, all the plants (including our food crops) might slow their growth, and our health might be directly threatened.

By closing the airlock behind us and starting our two-year experiment, we pushed the limits and stepped into the unknown. It would be a roller coaster, with despair and sadness and euphoria and achievement. Every day, we worked to keep Biosphere 2—and ourselves—alive and healthy. For the eight of us, it was a profoundly personal and life-changing journey.

The author carrying fodder, sorghum stems after a grain harvest. Photo by Abigail Alling, Biosphere 2, 1991-1993.

Dr. Mark Nelson was a member of the eight-person “biospherian” crew for the first two-year closure experiment. He is a founding director and the chairman of the Institute of Ecotechnics and has worked for decades in closed ecological system research, ecological engineering, the restoration of damaged ecosystems, desert agriculture and orchardry, and wastewater recycling. He is the author of The Wastewater Gardener: Preserving the Planet One Flush at a Time and co-author of Space Biospheres and Life Under Glass: The Inside Story of Biosphere 2.

Silviana Wood Featured on New Books Network Podcast

January 1, 2018

University of Arizona Press author Silviana Wood was featured on a recent episode of the New Books Network podcast to discuss her book, Barrio Dreams.

“Silviana Wood is a legend of Chicano theater. Through her involvement with Teatro Libertad, Teatro Chicano, and El Teatro Nacional de Atzlán she has created plays where working class Chicanos are center stage. Despite her insistence that she is ‘a storyteller, not an activist,’ her plays reflect her deep connection to the Movimiento Chicano. They are also funny, imaginative, and heartbreaking, sometimes all in the same scene. Her book Barrio Dreams collects five of her plays.”

Listen to the podcast and read more here.

Seven Questions with Mystery Writer Sara Sue Hoklotubbe

December 20, 2017

In just a few short months, Sara Sue Hoklotubbe’s latest mystery Betrayal at the Buffalo Ranch hits bookstores. The fourth book in the Sadie Walela Mystery Series draws Sadie deeper and deeper into danger. When Angus Clyborn’s Buffalo Ranch opens in Cherokee Country, murder, thievery, and a missing white buffalo calf take Sadie Walela and her wolfdog on a dangerous and wild ride.

In anticipation of the book’s release, we were excited to chat with Sara about what drew her to mystery novels and to get her thoughts on the lack of Native American representation in mystery writing. 

What advice would you give any aspiring mystery novel writers?

To read, first, and then write, write, write, with a passion. Write what you’d like to read. Don’t try to copy or emulate other writers; create your own voice and tell your own stories. Chances are, if you like what you write, other people will, too.

What drew you to writing mystery novels?

I spent twenty‐one years working in the banking business and had very little time for reading. But when I discovered Tony Hillerman’s mysteries, that all changed. I loved how he wrote mysteries and wove in Navajo and Hopi culture. Even though Tony was non‐Indian, he wrote with such accuracy and respect for Indians that the Navajo Nation gave him their blessing. That’s when I decided I wanted to write mysteries about my people – the Cherokee.

Why do you think there is so little Native American representation in mystery writing?

I think it is simply a case of numbers. Native Americans, who once totally populated this country, have sadly been reduced to about two percent of the population. And, while there are many Native authors, they write in diverse categories from fiction and non‐fiction, both current and historical, to screenplays and poetry. When you boil it down, there’s only a few of us writing mysteries.

You draw upon your upbringing in Oklahoma for your setting. What are the differences between the Cherokee Nation you grew up in and the one you describe in your novels?

It is very much the same. I like to write in a current day setting rather than historical, because I want to dispel some of the myths of what life is like in the Cherokee Nation today. We do not live in teepees. Never did, never will. Cherokees are ranchers, police officers, lawyers, small‐business owners, bankers, business people, writers, and anything else you can think of. I try to describe a real life setting in my books.

Which of your characters do you identify with the most?

Probably Sadie. We both think we can save the world, are quick to speak our mind, and hand out our own kind of justice. Sadie is a good and honest person, and I’d like to think I am, too, even though I’m quick to point out that Sadie is not me. I would be naïve to think most of the other characters I write about don’t have a sliver of my personality in there somewhere.

Is there more in store for Sadie Walela?

I hope so. I’m waiting for her to come to me in a dream and tell me what’s next. We’ll see.

What book are you currently reading?

I recently read Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann and Anne Hillerman’s Song of the Lion. I’m currently reading Winter’s Child by Margaret Coel. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil de Grasse Tyson is next on my list to read.

Cover photo: The American Bison by Adam Cocke

Capturing the Singular Beauty of Bears Ears Country

December 15, 2017

Rebecca Robinson is a freelance journalist who has spent decades exploring the landscapes of Bears Ears country. Today she speaks to the singular beauty of the region captured by photographer Stephen E. Strom in his forthcoming book Bears Ears: Views from a Sacred Land.

Should an eighth wonder of the world ever be proclaimed, a strong case could be made for the landscape of southeastern Utah, a region so striking it has become a visual shorthand for the wild majesty of the American West. Visitors to Utah’s portion of the Four Corners region find themselves mesmerized by its endless ridges, buttes, spires, natural bridges, and exquisite canyons—each one, like a sandstone fingerprint, completely unique. The vivid vermillion hues that define the region’s red-rock country are complemented by softer, cream-colored layers and the subtle green of sagebrush, whose ubiquity and resilience testify to stubborn survival in a harsh land. This vast terrain bears scars as well: of explosive emergence and tectonic shifts that shaped Earth into otherworldly formations of stark cinder cones, rainbow bentonite hills, and impossibly steep anticlines. These landmarks, formed millions of years ago, painted and sculpted by water and wind, provide a visible record of deep time.

Evidence of the prehistoric abounds in the region. Fossils of plant and marine life, along with those of early amphibians and mammals, inspire awe in visitors and scholars alike. The stories of eons past, preserved within the layered landscape, illuminate how life on the Colorado Plateau—of which Bears Ears is a part—evolved and adapted to the land’s slow march northward from the equator as it endured radical shifts in climate and inundations by oceans and inland seas. Today’s rich and diverse assemblage of plant and animal life is as fragile as it is tenacious. Each patch of lichen, herd of mule deer, and field of sagebrush plays a vital role in a delicately balanced ecosystem in which Nature’s rhythms must be respected to ensure their survival.

Talk to people who know and love this landscape, and you’ll quickly discover that it’s impossible for them to describe a favorite canyon, trail, or vista without a touch of reverence. Sometimes they will point, tracing the path of a raptor or the meanders of a river. Some will subconsciously place their hands over their heart, an unspoken expression of deep love for a land that lives within them—and, in some cases, changed them forever.

This land of rugged beauty and rich history is Bears Ears, a new national monument declared by President Barack Obama on December 28, 2016. Named for twin buttes visible for sixty miles in all directions, Bears Ears National Monument protects an area spanning 1,350,000 acres—more than 2,000 square miles; larger than the state of Delaware.

The movement to protect Bears Ears is the product of a unique moment in time, the result of an unprecedented effort by Native American tribes and a powerful endorsement of tribal sovereignty by a receptive U.S. President. At the same time, it is yet another chapter in America’s long history of conflicts over how best to protect and steward public lands. Similar debates predate it, and similar struggles will succeed it. Taken together, these debates and attempts to resolve them speak to the ongoing search for common ground in deeply divided communities. But therein lies a sense of hope for the future: Polarized as each group is, they collectively express the same belief that the land is everything and not just a place to live in, explore, or make a living. The land is a source of strength, renewal, and identity to all who call Bears Ears country home. Natives and Anglos in San Juan County, regardless of their spiritual beliefs or world view, have used the same words to explain their connection to Bears Ears: “The land is who we are.”

What both the land and people of Bears Ears country yearn for is healing: between the tribes and the federal government; among the region’s tribes who share histories of bitter conflict; among the tribes and residents of San Juan County—Native and Anglo, Mormon and non-Mormon, staunch supporters and steadfast opponents of the national monument; and of the land, protecting an eighth wonder of the world from efforts to exploit its riches for private financial gain.

In many ways, San Juan County’s challenge to find common ground and common purpose mirror those of the nation as a whole. True healing can only be achieved through collective listening, respect, compassion, and leadership and acknowledging that past wounds—including military action—inflicted by the federal government on both Native Americans and the Mormon people are many and, in some cases, shared. The future will depend on the courage of all to speak truths, to commit to hear and respect all voices, and to seek mutual understanding that will allow citizens to create a just and sustainable future that benefits all.

In Bears Ears: Views from a Sacred Land Stephen E. Strom’s photographs capture the singular beauty of Bears Ears country in all seasons, its textural subtleties portrayed alongside the drama of expansive landscapes and skies, deep canyons, mystifying spires, and towering mesas. To Strom’s alert and sensitive eyes, a scrub oak on a hillside or a pattern in windswept sand is as essential to capturing the spirit of the landscape as the region’s most iconic vistas. In seeing red-rock country through his lens, viewers can begin to discover the rich beauty, remarkable diversity, seductive power, and disarming complexity that embody Bears Ears National Monument’s sacred lands.

Years from now, these images may serve as either a celebration of the foresight of visionary leaders, from President Teddy Roosevelt’s original vision of national monuments for America to the recent vision of tribal leaders and President Obama, or, should President Trump and his allies rescind the Bears Ears National Monument declaration, as an elegy for what was lost—for the tribes and for future generations of Americans.

 

 

Rebecca Robinson was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and makes her home in Portland, Oregon. Her journalism work has been widely published and broadcast in numerous print, online, and radio outlets, and she has received awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Alliance for Women in Media, and the Associated Press.

Through twenty individual stories, her forthcoming book Voices from Bears Ears: Seeking Common Ground on Sacred Land (Fall 2018) captures the passions of the debate that led to the creation of Bears Ears National Monument, a land of unsurpassed natural beauty and deep historical significance. She continues to capture the passions of those on opposing sides of the Bears Ears battle with weekly online updates.

Stephen E. Strom was born in New York City. After receiving his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard University, he spent forty-five years as a distinguished research astronomer. He began photographing in 1978, and his work has been exhibited widely throughout the U.S. and is in the permanent collections of the Center for Creative Photography and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others.

 

Photos courtesy Stephen E. Strom

AAA 2017 Recap

December 13, 2017

Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.! We always love meeting our authors face-to-face, and a few folks were kind enough to allow us to take their photos in the booth:

Michelle A. Lelièvre and Jennifer P. Mathews

Virginia D. Nazarea and UAP senior editor Allyson Carter

Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez and Josiah Heyman

Jim Igoe and Georgina Drew

Anthony K. Webster and Paul V. Kroskrity

We look forward to seeing you all next year in San Jose!

On Archaeology and Social Identities in the Ancient Past

December 12, 2017

Archaeologist Matthew A. Peeples has spent more than a decade working at sites across the Southwest. In his forthcoming book Connected Communities, Peeples looks to comparative social sciences and contemporary social movements to understand how social identities formed and changed in the ancient past. Today, he shares with us the inspiration behind his new book.

“Who were the people who lived here?”

I often hear this question when I give site tours for the public or conduct fieldwork in places where locals might pay a visit. It is a question that probably sounds simple and straightforward to the person asking it.

To an archaeologist like me who has spent a lot of time thinking about how social groups form and change, this question opens the door to all kinds of complexity. If I suspect that my visitor is looking for a quick answer—or if we have a looming project deadline—I may give her the short and way-too-simple version. This usually means providing the typical archaeological cultural or regional designation (“they were Ancestral Pueblo people” or “they were Hohokam people” or “they were the ancestors of people living at Zuni today”). If I am feeling a bit more inspired—or looking for an opportunity to have a longer conversation in the shade—I may go into the particular social and demographic histories, describing archaeological evidence for migration streams or material evidence for how the nature and scale of families, communities, or larger social groups changed through time.

In my experience, the long answer to this deceptively simple question resonates quite well with members of the public and archaeologists alike, provided that I can find a clear and compelling way to describe interesting patterns and processes in the data.

In an effort to come up with better ways of explaining the complexities inherent in social group identities, how they change, and how we study that process archaeologically, I have often found it useful to rely on analogy with contemporary events and institutions. Most people living in the world of nation-states and borders have a good sense of what it means to have multiple and nested identities. When I turn the tables and ask my inquisitive visitors “who are you?” I find that they seldom stop at one or two labels and often rattle off quite a few. These might include their nationality, state/territory/city/neighborhood of residence or birth, ethnic heritage, familial ties, religion, occupation, or many other designations. Importantly, some of these designations are based on their own direct relationships, while others link them to groups much larger than they could ever hope to know personally.

In the United States, where I do my research, most people are well acquainted with the metaphor of the “American melting pot”—the romanticized notion of how the diverse populations that make up the nation came to represent a coherent whole—and they probably also have some notion of the diversity of people living in the United States through its ethnic neighborhoods and the waves of immigration that shaped such places.

Such contemporary examples make it much easier to explain how archaeologists document similar migration streams, identify socially diverse communities or enclaves, and track the ways people marked or masked differences in the past. We see archaeological evidence of the same historical processes that drive the formation, maintenance, or dissolution of social groups in the world today. Identity is a complicated tapestry for us, and there is no compelling reason to believe it was less so in the past.

Conversations with the public like these brought me to the research for my book Connected Communities. Since I first started studying archaeology, I have been interested in understanding how people form very large social groups, especially those that are so large that they include people who will probably never meet. Searching for analogues and new perspectives on such large-scale social groups, I turned to a body of literature focused on nationalism, ethnic identity, and the drivers of social change in the contemporary world. This work suggests that the formation of social groups and the process of social change are intrinsically linked, and, importantly, researchers working from this perspective have developed tools and theoretical frameworks for exploring such relationships (i.e., social network analysis). The more I read, the more the underlying processes and mechanisms at work felt familiar to me as an archaeologist studying social change at regional scales in the ancient Southwest.

At the same time, and somewhat to my dismay, I found that researchers working within this paradigm from a contemporary perspective often made assumptions about the supposed absence of certain kinds of identities and interactions in premodern societies that are, to my mind, unfounded. Still, I considered that the methods and models used to untangle the complicated web of identities in the contemporary world might have some utility for exploring social groups in the more distant past through archaeological evidence.

Might such models push us toward new and interesting revelations about identity and social change in the past? Could archaeologists contribute to the broader debate in the social sciences by expanding the scope of such frameworks to kinds of societies that have not yet been considered or by using new kinds of evidence? I hope to take the first steps toward addressing these important questions in my work.

Matthew A. Peeples is an assistant professor of anthropology and the research director of the Center for Archaeology and Society in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University.

Poetry Magazine: The Unsung Passion of Ray Gonzalez

December 8, 2017

This month, Poetry Magazine featured a touching guest post from Roy G. Guzmán, who took the opportunity to celebrate the immense literary contributions and impact of Camino del Sol poet Ray Gonzalez:

Through Gonzalez’s poetry I’ve discovered the various syntaxes that run through my own linguistic DNA. Through him I’ve discovered how to deploy my metaphors and when to reveal my silences (“Beware the silence stronger than the voice,” he writes in “Beware the Silence,” included in Human Crying Daisies (2003)). Like his personality—measured, as if ticking like a clock, and with an appetite for tactful wit—Gonzalez’s poem-tellers can be shy but, when allowed to speak, can verbalize truths with the swiftness of a lizard. In “What Lesson?” for instance, the speaker asks, “What were the questions our mothers asked? Who did they make love to before our fathers arrived with newspapers and torn wills and deeds?” Gonzalez has the associative skill and patience of James Wright, and that gift of surprise you find in Russell Edson’s best work. He knows when to walk into a poem and when to walk away, leaving everything around haunted.

Read the full feature on Poetry Magazine.

Library Legends Honor for Ofelia Zepeda

December 6, 2017

Clockwise: Shan Sutton, Ofelia Zepeda, along with previous honorees, John P. Schaefer, Helen Schaefer, and James S. Griffith

The University of Arizona Libraries named poet, scholar, and Sun Tracks Series Editor Ofelia Zepeda this year’s Library Legend. The Libraries feted Zepeda with a dinner at the Arizona Inn last month, where friends and colleagues gathered to recognize Zepeda’s lifetime contributions to letters, learning, and libraries.

Shan Sutton, Dean of Libraries, said of Zepeda, “When I think of Ofelia Zepeda, I am most impressed with her ability to transcend time. She seems to blend past and present seamlessly, summoning historical Tohono O’odham wisdom to provide context for her astute observations of life today.”

Among her many honors, Zepeda is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, and she is the author of two acclaimed collections of poetry and a guide to Tohono O’odham grammar, proudly published by the University of Arizona Press.

From left: Kathryn Conrad, Ofelia Zepeda, and Felipe Molina

Kathryn Conrad, Director of the University of the Arizona Press, said, “I am awed and gratified by Ofelia’s vision to preserve language and culture through bilingual literature, poetry, stories and songs. For her deft leadership, her sound editorial judgement and her ability to see into the future, we owe Ofelia a deep debt of gratitude. Ofelia, thank you.”

Previous Library Legend honorees include University of Arizona Press authors and supporters Bernard L. “Bunny” Fontana, Jim Griffiths, and John and Helen Schaefer.

For this year’s event, Zepeda read her poem “The Way to Leave your Illness,” which shares the poet’s recognition and gratitude for the important and healing work of libraries and learning.

From left: Karen Frances-Begay, Ofelia Zepeda, Regina Siquieros, and Bernard Siquieros

The Way to Leave Your Illness
By Ofelia Zepeda

If you have an illness that won’t go away,
take a journey.
When you get there, leave it.
Place it on a rock; throw it into moving water;
bury it. Throw it into the wind.
Let it go.
Leave it there for others.
She had been sick for many days.

From left: Kristen Buckles and Katherine G. Morrissey

In her frustration she remembered
what her grandmother used to say,
“Take it far away and leave it there.”
She walked to the other end of campus
toward the library.
In her mind she left the discomfort, ache, pain, there.
She walked back, comforted,
knowing she didn’t bring it back with her.
Her illness is now hidden in the stacks.
Perhaps it is temporarily in periodicals.
Or archived in Special Collections.
or perhaps in fiction, no longer real.

From Where Clouds are Formed copyright 2008 Ofelia Zepeda

Books from the Sun Tracks series, which launched in 1972. Ofelia Zepeda has served as series editor since 1992.

 

Tucson Weekly: A Conversation with Tucson Author Tom Miller

December 4, 2017

In case you missed it, an excerpt from Tom Miller’s Cuba, Hot and Cold donned the cover of the Tucson Weekly this past week. The feature story was accompanied by a Q&A between Tucson Weekly Managing Editor Jim Nintzel and Tom Miller, in which nothing was off the table. The two discussed how the CIA recruited Miller for a spy, his work in the underground press, and being subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury for some of his work:

Cuba, Hot and Coldis an intimate look at Cuba and the people who live there. What do you hope people take away from this book?

When the U.S. and Cuba finally came to their senses and established this sort of detante, everybody said: “I gotta get there. I gotta get there before it changes. What I want them to take from the book is: You don’t have to get there before it changes. It’s gonna keep changing for the next five, 10, 20, 30 years. When people say they want to get there before it changes, they’re really saying they want to get there before McDonald’s gets there. But the changes have already taken place, and they’re going to continue to take place. I think that people who are so eager to get there are making a mistake. They can take their time and read up on it and enjoy it when they go.

You’ve been traveling to Cuba for 30 years now—what first drew you there?

It was partly political and partly journalistic. The journalistic part was that Cuba was and still is the best story in the Americas. And also political: I was part of the anti-war movement, and we would read underground newspapers not just from around the United States, but we would read Gramma, which was the communist party newspaper in Cuba. It was a terrible newspaper. It still is; it is an awful newspaper. But it tells you what is going on there. It tells you who is in charge and what their politics are. And in the anti-war movement, there was always a spot for Cuba at the table. It was at the far end of the table, but there was a spot for Cuba at the table. And because of the taboo, because of the embargo, it became more and more tempting to go.

Read the full feature Q&A and an excerpt of the book on the Tucson Weekly.

Kirkus: Betrayal at the Buffalo Ranch

November 28, 2017

We’re nearly three months out from the much-anticipated release of Sara Sue Hoklotubbe’s fourth book in the Sadie Walela Mystery Series, Betrayal at the Buffalo Ranch. This morning, Kirkus released their review, which is set to hit newsstands December 15, 2017:

Arrogance and greed add up to a powerful motive for murder.

Travel agent Sadie Walela, who lives on a small country property with Sonny, her wolfdog, returns from a funeral to find her boyfriend, Deputy Lance Smith, at the scene of a nearby murder. The dead man, who was killed by a handmade arrow, is said to have been acquainted with ranch owner Angus Clyborn, but Clyborn, a newcomer, denies knowing him. An animal rights group is picketing Clyborn’s Buffalo Ranch, which is stocked with tame buffalo, elk, and other animals he intends to charge big bucks for rich trophy hunters to shoot. After Sadie witnesses the birth of a white buffalo calf on Clyborn’s property, she knows trouble is on the way should word get out a sacred animal was born there.

Read the full review online on Kirkus.

Richard Shelton Honored by 2017 NM–AZ Book Awards

November 21, 2017

Authors, book lovers, and publishers from Arizona and New Mexico gathered last week to celebrate the 2017 winners of the New Mexico–Arizona Book Awards. We’re thrilled to announce that Richard Shelton won the Best Biography – Arizona Subject award for his book Nobody Rich or Famous.

In this book, Shelton crafts a tale of poverty and its attendant sorrows: alcoholism, neglect, and abuse. But the tenacity of the human spirit shines through. This is an epic tale of Steinbeckian proportions, but it is not fiction. This is memoir in its finest tradition, illuminating today’s cultural chasm between the haves and have-nots. In the author’s words, Nobody Rich or Famous is “the story of a family and how it got that way.”

2017 marks the twelfth consecutive year of the New Mexico–Arizona Book Awards, which are sponsored by the New Mexico Book Co-op. To see the complete list of honorees, please visit the organization’s website. Congratulations to all the winners!

 

 

Frederick Aldama Featured at American Book Review Reading Series

November 20, 2017

Frederick Aldama reads from his flash fiction collection Long Stories Cut Short.

This past week, Frederick Luis Aldama had the pleasure of taking part in the American Book Review’s Reading Series, hosted by the University of Houston-Victoria.

Aldama’s visit included a public reading and discussion of his short fiction collection Long Stories Cut Short, a roundtable discussion with UHV faculty and students, and a week-long residency on the campus.

 

New York Times: Already My Lips Were Luminous

November 19, 2017

Terrance Hayes, current poetry editor for New York Times Magazine, selected Vickie Vértiz’s poem “Already My Lips Were Luminous” from her debut poetry collection Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut for the featured poem in this Sunday’s issue.

“I do not know the language of that place” underscores this poem’s striking balance of ambiguity and mystery. Much is said in the white spaces, caesuras, breaks. The unpunctuated five lines of the first stanza unspool suggestively creepily. The hands in car guts have a visceral intensity. The halting final couplet prompts a pause, a silence, a reread.

Read the full feature on the New York Times.

High Country News: Map of Language Charted by Diné Philosophy

November 13, 2017

High Country News caught up with Esther Belin just outside of her office at the Peaceful Spirit Treatment Center on the Southern Ute Reservation to discuss her latest book Of Cartography:

Her new book, Of Cartography, is framed by the four cardinal directions and their symbolism in Navajo history. It digs into the cultural and physical representation of Navajo language, how landscape shapes identity and what it means to be Indian.

Her poems try to capture the rhythm and storytelling intrinsic to the Diné language. “I wanted to investigate whether there was a Navajo meter or diction, and how that voice could come out,” she says. “It’s not just a collection of poems squeezed together. This was about pairing identity politics with Navajo philosophy, which is all very orderly, and then telling my story through the structure.”

Read the full feature interview on High Country News.

Celebrating Tom Miller and Cuba, Hot and Cold

November 13, 2017

Tom Miller recounts the day he accompanied Mariel Hemingway along the so-called “Hemingway trail.”

Recently, we had the pleasure of hosting a special celebration in honor of travel writer Tom Miller and the release of his latest book Cuba, Hot and Cold.

The event capped off University Press Week and was the latest in a series of collaborations with the University of Arizona Libraries’ Special Collections, who holds Tom Miller’s papers in their archives.

UA Libraries Dean Shan Sutton stresses the importance of the work University Presses publish.

Nearly a hundred members of the Tucson community came out for the occasion and were treated to touching tributes from Miller’s long-time friends, James Reel and Eliana Rivero, as well as a taste of Cuban music from pianist Liudvik Luis Cutiño Cruz.

A brilliant raconteur and expert on Cuba, Miller was full of enthralling behind-the-scenes stories, including a humorous tale of the day Havana cops accused him of distributing copies of the United Nations Human Rights Declaration of 1948.

Thanks to the University of Arizona Libraries team, we’re proud to provide a full video of the event below.

Photos courtesy Tim Fuller

High Country News: In Line at the Great Wall

November 13, 2017

Author, poet, and Angeleno, Daniel A. Olivas is known for his provocative prose and cleverly crafted characters. Recently, High Country News featured an excerpt from his short story “In Line at the Great Wall,”  from his collection The King of Lighting Fixtures. In this story, Olivas imagines a future where anti-immigrant sentiment is enshrined in a border wall:

Rogelio stood in the long line that snaked from the detention center’s barracks to the lookout point at the other end of the compound. He shifted from foot to foot, the heat making him perspire and feel lightheaded. He was a smart boy — one of the best students in Ms. Becerra’s fifth-grade class — so he figured that even though the cool winter weather still made San Diego’s evenings chilly enough to need a sweater, the lack of circulation combined with the body heat of thousands of children conspired to make the detention center’s air heavy and almost suffocating.

Read “The Great Wall” in its entirety on High Country News.

Arizona Daily Star: Tom Miller Shows Us a Side of Cuba Tourists Rarely See

November 12, 2017

Following the release event for Tom Miller’s Cuba, Hot and Cold, the Arizona Daily Star honored the Tucson travel writer by running an excerpt of his piece “Cubana Be, Cubana Bop:”

Tucsonan Tom Miller first visited Cuba 30 years ago. He has returned often, writing about a Cuba most don’t get to see. His books include “Trading with the Enemy” and “Revenge of the Saguaro.” This is an excerpt from his latest, “Cuba, Hot and Cold:”

José Martí, leader of Cuba’s nineteenth-century independence movement, is said to have had a voice that sounded like an oboe. Perhaps that’s why the country has so many oboe players. I took oboe lessons in Havana when I lived there in the early 1990s and wrote about them at the time. I was hoping to improve my mediocre oboe skills acquired during junior high school, and frankly, I wanted to show readers that contemporary music in Cuba was more than just salsa and reggaeton. I succeeded with the latter, but far less with improving my ability. I even had trouble with the ducks in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. And so I put my oboe on the top shelf in my Arizona office where it gathered desert dust. I’d glance up at it now and then with a sense of forlorn pride, reassuring myself that I owned a quality instrument that I once played with some gusto.

Read the full excerpt on the Arizona Daily Star.

University Press Week 2017

November 6, 2017

This week we celebrate University Press Week and the importance of scholarship alongside our peers in the Association of American University Presses.

Since 2012, the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) has celebrated University Press Week each year to help tell the story of how university press publishing supports scholarship, culture, and both local and global communities.

In today’s political climate—where “fake news” and “alternate facts” are believed by so many people—valuing expertise and knowledge can feel like a radical act.

University presses not only believe in facts and knowledge, but traffic in them daily, publishing approximately 14,000 books and more than 1,100 journals each year, read by people around the globe.

One of our greatest partners in this venture have been independent bookstores. For the past three years, we have been proud to collaborate with the University of Arizona Bookstores, Antigone Books, and Changing Hands, who have graciously built UP Week displays to showcase the diversity and far-reaching impact of our publishing program.

To all of our readers, reviewers, authors, contributors, and partners, thank you for celebrating with us and your continued dedication to promoting smart, fun, and valuable books that contribute to our rich reading community.#ReadUP

Shelf Awareness: The King of Lighting Fixtures

October 24, 2017

This morning, we were thrilled to see Daniel Olivas’s latest fiction collection The King of Lighting Fixtures reviewed by Shelf Awareness, who declared it, “a potpourri of formats and styles.” Shelf Awareness for Readers appears Tuesdays and Fridays and helps readers discover the 25 best books of the week, as chosen by booksellers, librarians and other industry experts:

In a helter-skelter cornucopia of voices and formats, the stories of Daniel Olivas’s King of Lighting Fixtures are set on the streets of Los Angeles, focusing on characters as diverse as the city. The collection cements his place in the magical realism tradition of García Márquez and Urrea, and showcases his skills as a master stylist and self-aware observer of life’s little vignettes. Grandson of Mexican immigrants, converted Jew in the Reformed tradition, Olivas (The Book of Want; Things We Do Not Talk About) works as a lawyer in the California Department of Justice and works miracles on the page. “He will have to call it ‘fiction’ otherwise he will be rejected by the publishing industry as a lunatic,” as Olivas writes of a character in “The Three Mornings of José Antonio Rincón” who wakes in different bodies on three consecutive days.

Read the full review on Shelf Awareness.

Frederick Luis Aldama in conversation with Daniel Olivas

October 21, 2017

This week,  Frederick Luis Aldama and Daniel Olivas, two of our very own Camino del Sol authors, came together to discuss matters of content and form in writing fictional borderlands. The conversation between the two prolific writers was the cover feature on Latin@ Literatures.

Established in the summer of 2016, Latin@ Literatures is an online source for contemporary discussion on Latina/o literature and culture seeking to provide a space for philosophical engagement in topics dealing with Latina/o culture.

An expert on Latinx popular culture, Frederick Luis Aldama is the author, co-author, and editor of twenty-nine books, including Long Stories Cut Short and, most recently, Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. Aldama interviewed Olivas about the power of the written word in Latinx communities and his new collection of short stories The King of Lighting Fixtures:

FLA: Daniel, you are author and editor of numerous books and now you have a near simultaneous publication of your book of poetry, Crossing the Border (Pact Press) and a book of short fiction, The King of Lighting Fixtures (Camino del Sol). You are also a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books and work as a lawyer for the California Department of Justice in the Public Rights Division. What’s your secret?

DO: I don’t golf. And I’m a compulsive writer and editor. Perhaps it’s a disease.

FLA: You also edit La Bloga.

DO: Ah, but I share blogging duties with about a dozen wonderful writers.

FLA: While you studied literature at Stanford, you are largely self-taught as a creative writer.

DO: I refused to take creative writing classes while in college because I thought it’d be a frivolous thing to do. Little did I know that I’d embark on a writing career in middle age. But I’m happy I took the route I did. I enjoy being a lawyer, especially in serving the people of California.

Read the full Q&A feature on Latin@ Literatures.

Ohio State Professor Hopes to Inspire Diversity in Comic Movies

October 20, 2017

Bringing pop culture into the classroom, Frederick Luis Aldama, or as he has become known “Professor LatinX,” recently caught the attention of ABC’s Columbus news affiliate WSYX/WTTE. Camera crews joined Aldama at Ohio State University to see how he incorporates comic books into his curriculum and discuss his new book Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics.

An Ohio State professor is designing a class around comic books.

While doing that, Frederick Luis Aldama is looking at why one demographic seems under-represented when the books are made into movies.

His latest book, “LatinX Superheroes in Mainstream Comics” explores the absence of Latino characters in comic book movies.

Watch the interview on Columbus, Ohio’s ABC 6.

Daniel A. Olivas Speaks with LA Times’s Agatha French

A second-generation Angeleno, Daniel Olivas practices law with the California Department of Justice in addition to being a prolific writer, book critic, and avid supporter of the Latinx literary community. Recently he talked with Agatha French, staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, about straddling two professions and his new book The King of Lighting Fixtures.

Daniel A. Olivas’ latest collection of short stories, “The King of Lighting Fixtures,” (University of Arizona Press, $16.95) opens with a character settling into his office at the Public Rights Division of the California Department of Justice. It’s a detail from which readers can expect a certain level of authenticity: Olivas, in addition to being the author of nine books, is an attorney there. (Public access to Malibu’s Carbon Beach? Olivas is, in part, to thank.)

“The King of Lighting Fixtures,” includes flash fiction, speculative fiction, magical realism and more traditional stories; what unites the work is a sense of place. Olivas is an L.A. writer, and he roots his work in L.A.

I spoke to Olivas over the phone about straddling two professions; being a longtime contributor to La Bloga, a website that showcases Latina/Latino literature and culture; and writing the final, dystopian story of his book.

Read the full Q&A feature in the Los Angeles Times.

Will the California Forest Fires Change Anything?

October 16, 2017

As we’ve all been consumed by the startling wildfires in California, the UA Press’s resident forest fire expert Stephen Pyne has been the man on-call for reporters on the ground. The author of the definitive history of American wildfires and the Press’s To The Last Smoke series, a multivolume series describing the nation’s fire scene region by region, Pyne provides a historical and administrative context for the devastation in California in a recent editorial picked up by Newsweek.

The fires that have blitzed across Napa-Sonoma have a claim on the rest of us because they are tragic, because they will require emergency assistance, and because what happens in California tends not to stay in California.

Most of California is built to burn: it has fires to match its mountains.

Unsurprisingly, fire protection as a formal program came early—a Board of Forestry in 1885; national forests in the 1890s; national parks in the Sierra Nevada under administration by the U.S. Cavalry.

In 1905 the U.S. Forest Service assumed control over the national forests and California passed a Forest Protection Act, leading to an ad hoc condominium that fused into a formal alliance with the 1911 Weeks Act.

Read Pyne’s full feature in Newsweek.

Esther Belin on Her Long-Awaited Second Collection

October 12, 2017

In anticipation for her upcoming book launch event at Maria’s Bookshop, Esther Belin sat down with The Durango Herald‘s Arts Editor Katie Chicklinkski-Cahill to discuss her sophomore poetry collection Of Cartography.

For Bayfield writer and artist Esther Belin, her new book of poems, Of Cartography, was a long time coming.

Belin, whose 1999 book From the Belly of My Beauty won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, will be reading from and talking about her new book on Thursday at Maria’s Bookshop, 960 Main Ave.

Q: Tell me about Of Cartography – how long did it take to write?

A: I wrote it a long time ago. It took about seven years to edit. (Laughs) And part of it was just honestly finding the time: I have four kids and for me, it was primarily my focus, and I was working, so it was really hard to figure that out. It was … probably last summer is when I just took the time and said, “I need to finish this.”

Read the full Q&A feature on The Durango Herald.

The Future of Poetry is Brown and Queer

October 6, 2017

Following the release of the new collection Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut, Vickie Vértiz sat down with Bitch Media’s Director of Community Soraya Membreno  and fellow poet Vanessa Angélica Villarreal to discuss “the resistance inherent in telling the stories of queer, Brown, working class women of color.”

Despite what National Hispanic Heritage Month would have you think, Latinx writers exist year-round! And despite what headlines like “Poetry is going extinct, government data show,” predict, this is a moment of poetic renaissance and poets of color are paving the way.

Vickie Vértiz’s Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut, which came out this September from the University of Arizona Press, sidesteps the glare of Hollywood to center the lives of the Brown working class in southeast Los Angeles. Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut is an offering; to a people, to a city—but it is also an irreverent reclaiming of land and home for those who have always been here.

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal’s Beast Meridian, also out this September from Noemi Press, is a haunting, a heartbreak. Beast Meridian turns trauma into astounding mythology, pushing through loss and erasure to find what it means to be a woman, to be lost, to find yourself anyway.

These collections wrecked me, leaving me weeping in public while I thumb through them at the laundromat or while waiting in line at the grocery store. But they have also made me feel fiercely proud of our stories, our histories. These are the books that have reflected and articulated a vision of Latinx identity I had never seen in literature, and that frankly, I never thought I would see. Their impact cannot be overstated.

Read the full feature Q&A on Bitch Media.

October 6, 2017

As part of Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 – October 15), Latinx literary champion and nationally recognized book critic Rigoberto González puts together a list of exceptional Latinx authors of note for NBC News. This year’s list includes two of our very own: Daniel Olivas’s The King of Lighting Fixtures and Vickie Vértiz’s Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut.

The finalists for the National Book Awards were just announced, and it is a thrill to see the names of two Latinx authors: Chicana writer Erika L. Sánchez’s I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, a finalist in the Young People’s Literature category, and Cuban American writer Carmen María Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, in the Fiction category. And congratulations to Peruvian American writer Daniel Alarcón’s The King is Always Above the People, who was in the longlist for fiction.

The awards ceremony takes place November 15 in New York City, and we wish Sánchez and Machado much luck.

It’s Latino Heritage Month, and to celebrate this, below is a list of Latinx writers worth noting for their exceptional storytelling and poetry. These dozen books were recently published by small and independent presses.

Read the full list on NBC News.

Peter Goin Honored by International Photography Association

October 4, 2017

Peter Goin received an Honorable Mention from the 2017 International Photography Awards for A New Form of Beauty in the category of Professional: Book, Nature. The International Photography Awards aim to salute the achievements of the world’s finest photographers, to discover new and emerging talent, and to promote the appreciation of photography.

In A New Form of Beauty photographer Peter Goin and writer Peter Friederici tackle science from the viewpoint of art, creating a lyrical exploration in words and photographs, setting Glen Canyon and Lake Powell as the quintessential example of the challenges of perceiving place in a new era of radical change. Through evocative photography and extensive reporting, the two document their visits to the canyon country over a span of many years. By motorboat and kayak, they have ventured into remote corners of the once-huge reservoir to pursue profound questions: What is this place? How do we see it? What will it become?

 

 

September 30, 2017

Forthcoming this October, No Species Is an Island describes the surprising results of Theodore H. Fleming’s eleven-year study of pollination biology in Sonora, Mexico, in the most biologically diverse desert in the world. These discoveries serve as a primer on how to conduct ecological research, and offer important conservation lessons for us all. Fleming offers an insightful look at how field ecologists work, and the often big surprises that come from looking carefully at a natural world where no species stands alone.

In anticipation of the book’s release event at Tucson’s Tohono Chul Park, the Arizona Daily Star ran an excerpt of Ted Fleming’s No Species Is an Island:

The most biologically diverse desert in the world, the Sonoran Desert hosts four species of columnar cacti which, along with their pollinators, have been the subject of an 11-year study by Dr. Theodore Fleming. “No Species Is an Island” describes his surprising results, including the ability of organ pipe cactus to produce fruit with another species’ pollen and the highly specialized moth-cactus pollination system of the senita. With illustrations by Kim Kanoa Duffek, Fleming’s book offers an insightful look at how field ecologists work and at the often big surprises that come from looking carefully at a natural world where no species stands alone.

Read the full excerpt on the Arizona Daily Star.

18 Best Poetry Books to Read Right Now

September 29, 2017

Signature, a place for “making well-read sense of the world,” highlighted Emmy Pérez’s With the River On Our Face in their fall poetry roundup, which is curated by critic Lorraine Berry.

Emmy Perez sings the borderlands between America and Mexico, a contested land where identity and nationality are under constant surveillance. Her poetry forces the reader to feel the persons who live in those lands. In poems that follow the currents of the Rio Grande, she re-immerses readers in the waters where we all developed, fills our senses with the scent of blooming roses, of burning mesquite, and crashes us into the barriers erected to prevent the development of cross-border relationships. Reading Perez ignites the desire to experience the heat and the sere landscape, and generates anger at the destruction of all that flourishes there.

Read the full list of fall poetry titles on Signature.

Deadly Prison Break that Terrorized Arizona is Subject of New Movie

September 24, 2017

In anticipation of the Hollywood release of the movie adaptation of James Clarke’s The Last Rampage, the Arizona Daily Star revisited Gary Tison’s 1978 prison break and the book that chronicled the two week’s of terror that ensued.

“Gary Tison, his three sons and his cellmate, Randy Greenawalt, walked out of Arizona State Prison in Florence on July 30, 1978, without a shot being fired.

At first it was an embarrassment to the state, then it became a nightmare.

While on the run, the Tison Gang, as they became known in the papers, murdered six people — a husband and wife and their infant son, a teen-age girl and a young honeymooning couple.”

So begins the New York Times’ 1988 review of “Last Rampage: The Escape of Gary Tison,” published nearly 30 years ago by the Houghton Mifflin Co. The University of Arizona Press has published the paperback edition of James W. Clarke’s “The Last Rampage” since 1999.

Clarke’s book is now the basis for a new movie.

On Friday, “Last Rampage: A True Crime Story,” was released in select theaters nationwide, in addition to On Demand and Digital HD. Its Tucson release has not yet been scheduled.

 Read the full feature on the Arizona Daily Star.

Ted Catton Honored with 2017 Forest History Society Award

September 21, 2017

Ted Catton’s American Indians and National Forests is the winner of the 2017 Forest History Society’s Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Book Award. The prize “rewards superior scholarship in forest and conservation history” and goes to “an author who has exhibited fresh insight into a topic and whose narrative analysis is clear, inventive, and thought-provoking.”

American Indians and National Forests shows how tribal nations and the U.S. Forest Service have dealt with important changes in forest ownership and forest use. Author Theodore Catton expertly covers two centuries of interplay to offer the first-ever look at the changing relationships between these two important groups of forest stewards.

August 30, 2017

As part of their forthcoming September/October issue, Foreword Reviews celebrates Daniel Olivas’s latest collection of short stories The King of Lighting Fixtures saying:

Olivas’s bold insistence on leaving a few seams visible, a few threads frayed—even on pulling the rug away entirely—makes the book resound as a fascinating exploration of both the art of storytelling and the ways in which fiction echoes the messiness of life.

Read the full review on Foreword Reviews.

Five Questions with Travel Writer Tom Miller

September 19, 2017

We’re gearing up to celebrate the release of Tom Miller’s latest work Cuba, Hot and Cold, which takes readers on an intimate journey from Havana to the places you seldom find in guidebooks. We recently sat down with Miller to get his thoughts on Cuba’s future in a post-embargo era and his advice for aspiring travel writers.

How did you get your start as a writer, and, more specifically, a travel writer?

Photo By Jay Rochlin

I started writing for a number of reasons. First, I had no marketable skills, an admirable quality for beginning writers. I became active in the anti-war movement – we’re talking late 1960s, during our war against Vietnam – and saw a niche for myself. The anti-war groups had horrendous propaganda. I remember very distinctly looking at a poster for an anti-war rally and saying, “I can do better than that.”  “Be my guest,” said one of the activists as he pulled a rickety chair out – all chairs in the anti-war movement were rickety – and dramatically placed it at a table with a typewriter.  So began my start as a writer.

As a travel writer, I began by default. I had written a book about life along the 2,000 mile U.S.-Mexico border. When On the Border came out from Harper & Row, reviewers always referred to it as travel writing. I didn’t call myself a travel writer. I was anointed one.

You’ve been traveling to Cuba for more than 30 years, what keeps bringing you back?

Habit. Family. Continuity. Discovery.  There’s always something new.

In your introduction, you touch on a few run-ins with the CIA and jokingly dedicate the book to the readers, their neighbors, and the CIA for their repeated attempts to turn you informant. What has been your most nerve-wracking encounter with government agencies?

Actually, none. Even when Cuban state security had me in custody, I thought to myself, well, at least I can get a good story out of this.

With more and more Americans traveling to Cuba, how might the island change? 

Worst case scenario: “Six Flags Over Cuba”

Best case scenario: “Cubana Be, Cubana Bop”

What advice do you have for aspiring travel writers?

Forget the travel part and specialize in a place or medical field or language or sports or athletes or crafts or chemistry or education or soil conservation or song lyrics. Just remember: always have a subtext.

What’s on your nightstand right now? (What are you currently reading?)

I’m rereading The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder, a book he began during his tenure in Douglas, Arizona in the early 1960s. When the novel came out in 1967 it was a grand commercial and critical success – all but forgotten now.

Tom Miller will celebrate the release of his new book Cuba, Hot and Cold on November 9, 2017, as part of the Association of American University Press’s National “University Press Week.” Find out more about the event here.

Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval on Starving for Justice

September 18, 2017

In the 1990s, students at UCLA, UCSB, and Stanford University went on hunger strikes to demand the establishment and expansion of Chicana/o studies departments. They also had even broader aspirations—to obtain dignity and justice for all people. These students spoke eloquently, making their bodies and concerns visible.

Breathing life into these students’ spectacular sacrifice and activism, Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval talks about his new book Starving For Justice: Hunger Strikes, Spectacular Speech, and the Struggle for Dignity in a cover interview with Rorotoko, an online home for “cutting-edge intellectual interviews.”

In a nutshell

Starving for Justice examines three hunger strikes that took place in the 1990s on university campuses. Twenty years ago, Chicana/o, Latina/o students at UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and Stanford stopped eating. Anti-immigrant measures like Proposition 187, mass incarceration, rising racial and economic inequality, globalization, budget cuts, and higher tuition costs morally outraged many. Having exhausted all other mechanisms for redressing their grievances, they embraced César Chávez’s perhaps mostly widely-known and controversial tactic for creating social change—the fast or “hunger strike.”

Read the full feature on Rorotoko.

International Latino Book Awards 2017

September 11, 2017

We’re pleased to announce two University of Arizona Press books were honored at this weekend’s International Latino Book Awards, which over the last 19 years has grown to become the largest Latino literary and cultural awards program in the United States.

Migrant Deaths in the Arizona Desert: La vida no vale nada took home First Place in the category of Best Nonfiction Multi-Author. The book addresses the tragic results of government policies on immigration and asks why migrants are dying on our border? The authors constitute a multidisciplinary group reflecting on the issues of death, migration, and policy.

Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice, edited by the late Francisco X. Alarcón and Odilia Galván Rodriguez, secured First Place in the category of Best Poetry Book Multi-Author. The edited anthology offers a poetic call for tolerance, reflection, reconciliation, and healing. Bringing together more than eighty writers, the collection powerfully articulates the need for change and the primacy of basic human rights.

National Parks Dinner Party, The Great Southwest, and Utah’s Craziest Bike Ride

August 19, 2017

Historian Flannery Burke’s A Land Apart takes readers to the Southwest’s top tourist attractions to find out how they got there, to listen to the debates of Native people as they sought to establish independence for themselves in the modern United States, and to ponder the significance of the U.S.-Mexico border. Burke emphasizes policy over politicians, communities over individuals, and stories over simple narratives.

Burke discussed how Arizona and New Mexico came to embody what we now think of as “The Great Southwest” with travel icon Rick Steves, appearing on his radio show with fellow authors Terry Tempest Williams and Christopher Solomon.

Listen to the conversation on Travels with Rick Steves.

Poetry Beyond the Basics: Twelve New Collections Offer Fresh Perspective on the Human Experience

August 4, 2017

Right out of the gate, Vickie Vértiz’s Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut is getting big attention, just this week landing a spot in Library Journal‘s fall poetry feature Poetry Beyond the Basics: Twelve New Collections Offer Fresh Perspective on the Human Experience.

“Come closer, chula / There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.” These beckoning lines, ending a poem set on a city bus, capture the intimacy and disturbing undercurrent that typify Vértiz’s fine second collection (after Swallows). Vértiz portrays her Los Angeles neighborhood with verve and what might be described as fond anger. We see poverty (“the death stench in our water in our jobs”) and fractured families. In one poem, “Dad’s paychecks couldn’t feed two houses,” which explains why the pet rabbits end up as soup, and elsewhere a postcard from pops says, “I wish you were here, mija / Come on, don’t get all feelings on me / I may be drunk / But at least I’m home.” The uncle delivering an unexpected kiss, teenagers in tight black jeans, the “pleyboy” boyfriend who proved “a hard climb / A home to mispronounce” (“Fuck that, said my brother, There’s other fools to love”), a mother and brother signifying “ten thousand truck miles (“Why won’t / their coughs go away?”)—these make up a chamber opera that Vértiz vivifies with jangle and sparkle.

Read the full feature on Library Journal.

 

Gregory McNamee Featured on New Books Network Podcast

May 23, 2012

University of Arizona author Gregory McNamee was featured on a recent episode of New Books Network Podcast to discuss the book he edited, The Only One Living to Tell.

“Late in 1872, as the United States sought to clear the newly incorporated Southwest of its indigenous inhabitants, a company under Capt. James Burns came upon an encampment of Kwevkepayas (a branch of Yavapais) sheltering in the shadow of rock overhang above the Salt River Canyon. The soldiers wasted no time on the formalities of battle. They rained down fire, bullets ricocheting from the roof the cave, felling the refugees below. They even pushed down boulders. None survived.

Well, almost none. A few days prior, the advancing soldiers had come across a young boy of eight or nine looking for a missing horse. “They made a rush for me,” Hoomothya would later write. “They pulled me over rocks and bushes. The men didn’t care whether I got hurt or not.” But unlike Burns’ Kwevkepaya siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandfather, the invaders did not kill him. In fact, the man responsible for his family’s extermination would adopt the young Hoomothya as something between a son and a servant, renaming him Mike Burns.

Over a century later, the prolific writer and editor Gregory McNamee has brought us Burns’ remarkable story. In The Only One Living to Tell: The Autobiography of a Yavapai Indian (University of Arizona Press, 2012), Burns recounts his survival of the massacre, his time as a scout for the U.S. military on the campaign against Geronimo, his education n white schools, and eventual reconnection with his Yavapai community. “Mike Burns lived in two worlds,” McNamee tell us, “and he was at home in neither.” But his intelligence, humor and compassion illuminates both in profound and unexpected ways.”

Listen to the podcast and read more here.

Erica Prussing Featured on New Books Network Podcast

November 15, 2011

University of Arizona author, Erica Prussing, was featured on a recent episode of New Books Network podcast to discuss her new book, White Man’s Water.

“For the past half century, Alcoholics Anonymous and its 12-step recovery program has been the dominant method for treating alcohol abuse in the United States. Reservation communities have been no exception. But as Erica Prussing vividly describes in her new book, White Man’s Water: The Politics of Sobriety in a Native American Community (University of Arizona Press, 2011), a one-size-fits-all approach to treatment does not, in fact, fit all.

An assistant professor of anthropology and community and behavior health at the University of Iowa, Prussing lived for three years on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana, working with community organizations, building long-lasting relationships, and gathering testimonies of alcohols’ often disruptive impacts on the lives of many Northern Cheyenne. While many young women have embraced the 12-step program, others – particularly of the older generation – find its moral assumptions foreign and unhelpful. What emerges from Prussing’s account is not a reductive and totalizing “Cheyenne culture” but rather a complex negotiation of tradition, community, and recovery in the face of persistent colonial challenges. This nuance and attention to detail makes Prussing’s call for indigenous self-determination in health care all the more powerful.”

Listen to the podcast and read more here.

William Beezley Featured on New Books Network Podcast

July 31, 2008

University of Arizona author William Beezley was featured on a recent episode of New Books Network to discuss his new book, Mexican National Identity.

“The question of how we come to understand who we are–nationality-wise–is a thorny one. In a widely-read book, Benedict Anderson said we got nationality, inter alia, by reading about it in books. William Beezley‘s got a different, though complementary, thesis regarding Mexicans of the 19th century: they were shown nationality in things like puppet shows. That’s right. Puppet shows. In his excellent Mexican National Identity. Memory, Innuendo and Popular Culture (University of Arizona Press, 2008) he explores how Mexicans were taught Mexican nationality through a variety of popular performances, games, carnivals, holidays, and household items. “Taught” might be a little too strong, as the point of each of these folk enterprises was, well, enterprise and entertainment. In any event, Mexican nationality seems to have came from the bottom up, not the top down. Seems about right to me. I learned I was American by reading a comic book called ‘Sergeant Rock.’”

Listen to the podcast and read more here.

For Authors

The University of Arizona Press publishes the work of leading scholars from around the globe. Learn more about submitting a proposal, preparing your final manuscript, and publication.

Inquire

Requests

The University of Arizona Press is proud to share our books with readers, booksellers, media, librarians, scholars, and instructors. Join our email Newsletter. Request reprint licenses, information on subsidiary rights and translations, accessibility files, review copies, and desk and exam copies.

Request

Support the Press

Support a premier publisher of academic, regional, and literary works. We are committed to sharing past, present, and future works that reflect the special strengths of the University of Arizona and support its land-grant mission.

Give