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 rooms3b. 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. pendant4h. 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 Neighborsis 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.
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.”
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.
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
Kathryn Conrad, the 69th president, is the 16th woman to serve in that role.
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.
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 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.
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.
“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 Storiesby 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.
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 Wildfollows 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.
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.
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.
‘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 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.
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 historianStephen 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 byStephen 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.
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!
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
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.
InRaven’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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Landis 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.
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.
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…”
*** 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Border Waterplaces 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.
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 NaturalistsRugged books holding someone’s place in line for book signing.Waiting in line to get books signed.One last question for author David Lazaroff.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In 2005, University of Arizona Press published Blanco’sDirections 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.”
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.
Tom Zoellner speaks on La Posada patioTom Zoellner speaks at Triangle L Art Ranch dinner
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:
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!
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.
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 TorresPoet Cynthia GuardadoAuthor Daniel OlivasPoet Casandra LópezCamino del Sol Editor Rigoberto GonzálezPoets Gloria Muñoz and Urayoán NoelPoet Robert Davis HoffmanAlma García, author of All That Rises, forthcoming this fall from The University of Arizona PressTranslator Jennifer Rathbun and Poet Carlos AgusacoPoet Gloria MuñozPoet Elizabeth Torres
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.”
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.Desert Jewels bookLiterary Spring centerpiecesEnjoying dinner in the garden
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 HunterAuthors 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 RasmussenPoet and Editor Allison Adelle Hedge Coke and Editor Elizabeth Wilder
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.
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.
InRaven’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.
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. Mihesuahhere. 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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
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 Mummeprovides 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 Waterplaces 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.
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.
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 BackyardAuthor Tim Hunter explains the planisphere, an analog star chartWe 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 TelescopeAuthor Tim Hunter signs The Sky at NightHalf moon and star cookies and hot chocolate
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 heavenlyhobby. 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 ArizonaDaily 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.
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.”
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Worldshowcases 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.
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.
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!
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.
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 Montiel, Miguel 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.
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!
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.”
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.
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.
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.
The Progressive Magazinerecently 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.
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.
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.
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.”
In Corporate Nature, Sarah Milnedelves 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: Black Women Experiencing Fear, Agency, and Hope in the Time of COVID-19made 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.
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 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.
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.”
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 Land, is inspired by her daughters and is forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press in Summer 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!
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.
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 Foodshere, 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.
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.
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 Horizonexplores 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 tortoiseA western diamondback rattlesnake
Examples of Sonoran Desert birds
A greater roadrunnerA Costa’s hummingbird
More Sonoran Desert birds
Great horned owlsHarris’s hawks
Examples of Sonoran Desert mammals
A lesser long-nosed batRound-tailed ground squirrels
An iconic Sonoran Desert plant
A white-winged dove pollinating a saguaro cactus flowerSaguaro 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Politicsexamines 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.
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.
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.
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 Lassantas 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.
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.
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.
Latinx TV in the Twenty-First Centuryoffers 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 Genocideengages 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.
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.
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.
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.
Nuclear Nuevo Méxicorecovers 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 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 accepted the Before Columbus Foundation’s 2022 American Book Award for TheDiné 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!
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!’ “
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’s La Lotería: Sorteo Nocturno / The Lottery: Nocturnal Sweepstakeshas 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 DoorMagazine, 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!
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.
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.
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 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 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:
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.
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.
Congratulations to University of Arizona Press author’s Farina Noelani King, Michael 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The decolonial approaches found in Writing the Goodlifeprovide 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 Fronterizais 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.
Mexican Workers and the Making of Arizonaexpands 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.
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 Ancestorsbrings 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.
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 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.
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.”
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Cardinal in My Window with a Mask on Its Beakoffers 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.
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 Wanderersis 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Magañahere, 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 Counthere.
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 Transversalhere and present at New York Public Library’s World Literature Festival here.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 generationsA 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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:
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.
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.”
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 Nuevomexicanosfocuses 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 Storiesby 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 Childhoodsexplores 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.” InGuarded 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 recently featured author Markes Johnson, discussing his newest bookBaja 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 in the Philippineshighlights 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.
The University of Arizona Press
