Field Notes: Excavations of Paquimé’s Site 204

Posted on October 22, 2020November 18, 2020 by Abby Mogollon

October 22, 2020

By Paul Minnis and Michael Whalen

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

All images in the post are copyright the authors.

University Press Week: Read. Think. Act.

Posted on October 7, 2019October 7, 2019 by Mari Herreras

October 7, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read. Think. Act.

Kathryn Conrad Begins Term as President of AUPresses

Posted on June 26, 2019June 27, 2019 by Abby Mogollon

June 26, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the 2019-2020 AUPresses Board of Directors

Kathryn Conrad, the 69th president, is the 16th woman to serve in that role.
Conrad is the first University of Arizona Press director to serve as President. (See complete list: http://www.aupresses.org/about-aaup/board-of-directors/past-presidents)

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.

Excerpt from “El Fin del Mundo”

Posted on October 1, 2024September 25, 2024 by Cameron Louie

October 1, 2024

In a remote desert corner of Sonora, Mexico, the site of El Fin del Mundo offers the first recorded evidence of Paleoindian interactions with gomphotheres, an extinct species related to elephants.

El Fin del Mundo: A Clovis Site in Sonora, Mexico editors Vance Holliday, Guadalupe Sánchez, and Ismael Sánchez-Morales bring together the work of 14 contributors that present and synthesize the archaeological, geological, paleontological, and paleoenvironmental records of this important Clovis site.

Below. read an excerpt from Chapter 1 by Vance T. Holliday, Guadalupe Sánchez, Ismael Sánchez-Morales, and Edmund P. Gaines.

The Clovis occupation of North America is the oldest generally accepted and well documented archaeological assemblage on the continent, dating to ~13,000 cal yr B.P. (Meltzer 2021). The distinctive Clovis points have been reported from throughout most of the lower 48 United States, parts of Canada, as well as Mexico, throughout Central America, and possibly in Venezuela (Smith. Smallwood, and DeWitt 2015; Pearson 2017). Clovis is classically associated with mammoth, although only about 12 firm Clovis/mammoth associations are known (Grayson and Meltzer, 2015). Associations of Clovis and other late Pleistocene megafauna are more rare, consisting of mastodon and bison (Grayson and Meltzer 2015). In this volume we provide a full report on the site of El Fin del Mundo, the first documented Clovis association with gomphothere (Cuvieronius). The site is in Sonora, Mexico (Figure 1.1), making it the northernmost dated late Pleistocene gomphothere and the youngest in North America. It is the first documented intact, buried Clovis site outside of the United States and the first in situ Paleoindian site identified in northwestern Mexico. The site also includes a Clovis activity area on the “upland” surface (described in Chapter 2) that rises gradually from the area with the buried features. In addition, a paleontological bonebed below the Clovis level includes a rare association of mastodon, mammoth, and Cuvieronius sp. The site also provides a paleoenvironmental record rare for the region spanning the Late Glacial Maximum (LGM), Bølling-Allerød Chron, Younger Dryas Chron, and the early Holocene. These archaeological, geological, paleontological, and paleoenvironmental records are presented and synthesized here.

…

In June 1997, during a visit to the municipal museum in Carbó, Sonora, north of Hermosillo, Guadalupe Sánchez and Vance Haynes observed an unfossilized mammoth femur and rib. The bones were recovered more than 30 years earlier on a remote ranch in the municipio of Pitiquito. The owner, Gustavo Placencia, invited the group to his ranch. They had to decline his generous offer due to the time (four hours one way) involved and lack of access to a suitable field vehicle required in the rainy season. The principal objective of the Spring, 2007 field season of the Proyecto was to visit all the known localities in northern Sonora where Paleoindian artifacts and/or remains of late Pleistocene megafauna were reported. A priority on this list was the remote ranch in the municipio of Pitiquito.

On February 5, 2007, Guadalupe Sánchez, along with Edmund Gaines and Alberto “Beto” Peña, led by Alejandro “Jano” Valdez, the ranch cowboy, visited the locality that produced the bones on display in the Carbó museum. The exposure was an “island” of sediment in the middle of an arroyo system. Two bone layers were observed, exposed in the profiles around the island (Figure 1.2). The size of the bone and presence of tusk fragments (Figure 1.3) indicated that both layers contained the remains of Pleistocene megafauna. The first artifact found was a yellow chert uniface (#45980) that had recently fallen from the exposed upper bone layer, confirming that the bonebed was archaeological. Shortly thereafter, a large rhyolite Clovis-style biface (#46021) was discovered about 3 meters from the island exposure, followed by discovery of the middle portion of a quartz crystal biface (#46022) next to the north wall exposure (Chapter 4). The team knew they had found a potentially important archaeological and paleontological site and named it “El Fin del Mundo” (the end of the world) on the basis of a comment made when the team first arrived at the site. On a return trip two days later, a complete Clovis point of white chert (#46023; Figure 1.4) was found about 28 meters to the south of the island, confirming the team’s suspicions that they had a new Paleoindian site.

…

When necessary, fossil material recovered via excavation was stabilized using a 1:10 mixture of Resistol™ (akin to Elmer’s glue) and water. This was applied with either a paintbrush or an aerated sprayer along with ample water to ensure maximum penetration of the bone. In some cases, however, identifiable elements were removed without adding this material to keep them free from contamination that would affect radiocarbon analysis.

In some cases, the remains were encased in polyurethane foam to remove them in sound condition. This was accomplished by first applying wet tissue entirely around the bone surface. As the tissue dried it formed a protective casing that prevented the foam from sticking to the bones and facilitated removal in the laboratory. The remains were then encased in polyurethane foam that forms a 10- to 20-cm thick hardened jacket that holds them together and protects them during removal. Cardinal direction, unit number, and grid coordinate information were recorded on the polyurethane casing prior to removal. When possible, individual elements were jacketed separately. It was, however, necessary to group large concentrations of multiple bones together in a single polyurethane jacket.

Stephen J. Pyne Gives Keynote Address on Fire to Geological Society of American Meeting

Posted on September 30, 2024September 30, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

September 30, 2024

Stephen J. Pyne, author of Five Suns: A Fire History of Mexico and more than 40 other books about fire, gave the keynote address at a fire-themed session at the Geological Society of America (GSA) annual meeting on September 23, 2024. GSA previewed his address in this Youtube interview with him, “How Our Relationship with Fire Has Changed Through Time with Dr. Stephen Pyne.”

Pyne is a fire historian, urban farmer, and emeritus professor at Arizona State University. He spent 15 seasons with the North Rim Longshots, a fire crew at Grand Canyon National Park.

During the interview, Dr. Rachel Phillips, a GSA Science Communication Fellow, asked Pyne to explain more about the evolution of fire. He replied: “Fire is a shape shifter, I mean, fire is a reaction. It’s not a substance like earth, air, or water. It can assume many forms but it’s fundamentally a substance. Fire takes its character from its context so it synthesizes, it integrates its surroundings and as those surroundings change, fire changes. So, as oxygen levels on Earth change, fire changes. As plants and animals evolve and rearrange and organize terrestrial landscapes, fire assumes forms appropriate to those landscapes and those conditions.”

About Five Suns:

Narrating Mexico’s evolution of fire through five eras, historian Stephen J. Pyne describes the pre-human, pre-Hispanic, colonial, industrializing (1880–1980), and contemporary (1980–2015) fire biography of this diverse and dynamic country. Creatively deploying the Aztec New Fire Ceremony and the “five suns” that it birthed, Pyne addresses the question, “Why does fire appear in Mexico the way it does?” Five Suns tells the saga through a pyric prism.

Mexico has become one of the top ten “firepowers” in the world today through its fire suppression capabilities, fire research, and industrial combustion, but also by those continuing customary practices that have become increasingly significant to a world that suffers too much combustion and too little fire.

Western Literature Association 2024: Discounts, New Books, and More

Posted on September 30, 2024September 12, 2024 by Cameron Louie

September 30, 2024

We hope to see you at the 2024 Western Literature Association meeting here in Tucson this week! We’ll have a vibrant selection of new and featured Indigenous, Latinx, and Southwestern literature titles available for sale at our table.

If you can’t attend this year, or if you need an extra copy of a book you discover at our table, we’re extending a special offer to everyone: use AZWLA24 for 35% off all titles until October 20, 2024.

We’re also excited to be hosting the BorderVisions series editors at our table on Friday, October 4th, 10-11 a.m. Stop by to learn about the most recent book in this series—or share your projects-in-progress about the U.S.-Mexico borderlands with the editors!

New & Featured Titles

A haunting, an obsession, a calling: Tim Z. Hernandez has been searching for people his whole life. Now, in this highly anticipated memoir following his acclaimed documentary novel, All They Will Call You, Hernandez takes us along on an investigative odyssey through personal and collective history to uncover the surprising conjunctions that bind our stories together. They Call You Back is the true chronicle of one man’s obsession to restore dignity to an undignified chapter in America’s past, while at the same time making a case for why we must heal our personal wounds if we are ever to heal our political ones.

Set in one of Tucson’s first tamal and tortilla factories, The Molino is a hybrid memoir that reckons with one family’s loss of home, food, and faith. Weaving together history, culture, and Mexican food traditions, Melani Martinez shares the story of her family’s life and work in the heart of their downtown eatery, El Rapido. With clear eyes and warm humor, Martinez documents the work required to prepare food for others, and explores the heartbreaking aftermath of gentrification that forces the multigenerational family business to close its doors. A must-read for foodies, history lovers, and anyone searching for spiritual truth in the desert, this is a story of belonging and transformation in the borderlands.

Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States takes readers on a journey through the history of the rise of undocumented youth social movements in the United States in the twenty-first century. The book follows the documentation trail of undocumented youth activists spanning over two decades of organizing. Each chapter carefully analyzes key organizing strategies used by undocumented youth to produce direct forms of activism that expose and critique repressive forms of state control and violence. This inquiry is particularly generative in relation to how immigrant bodies are erased, contained, and imagined as “aliens” or “illegal.” Rafael A Martínez, an undocu-scholar, intricately weaves his lived experience into this deeply insightful exploration.

Renae Watchman‘s insightful volume delves into land-based Diné and Dene imaginaries as embodied in stories—oral, literary, and visual. Like the dynamism and kinetic facets of hózhǫ́,* Restoring Relations Through Stories takes us through many landscapes, places, and sites. Watchman introduces the book with an overview of stories that bring Tsé Bitʼaʼí, or Shiprock Peak, the sentinel located in what is currently the state of New Mexico, to life. The book then introduces the dynamic field of Indigenous film through a close analysis of two distinct Diné-directed feature-length films, and ends by introducing Dene literatures.

Elegiac and powerful, Ancient Light uses lyric, narrative, and concrete poems to give voice to some of the most pressing ecological and social issues of our time. With vision and resilience, Kimberly Blaeser’s poetry layers together past, present, and futures. The collection invites readers to see with a new intimacy the worlds they inhabit. Blaeser brings readers to the brink, immerses them in the darkest regions of the Anthropocene, in the dangerous fallacies of capitalism, and then seeds hope. Ultimately, as the poems enact survivance, they reclaim Indigenous stories and lifeways.

Featured Series

We are excited to be adding new titles to our BorderVisions, Sun Tracks, and Camino del Sol series!

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

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

Five Questions with Melani Martinez

Posted on September 26, 2024September 26, 2024 by maryreynolds

September 26, 2024

This month author Melani Martinez publishes The Molino, a hybrid memoir that reckons with one family’s loss of home, food, and faith. Weaving together history, culture, and Mexican food traditions, Martinez shares the story of her family’s life and work in the heart of their downtown eatery, El Rapido. Opened by Martinez’s great-grandfather, Aurelio Perez, in 1933, El Rapido served tamales and burritos to residents and visitors to Tucson’s historic Barrio Presidio for nearly seventy years. For the family, the factory that bound them together was known for the giant corn grinder churning behind the scenes—the molino. With clear eyes and warm humor, Martinez documents the work required to prepare food for others, and explores the heartbreaking aftermath of gentrification that forces the multigenerational family business to close its doors. Today, Melani answers five questions:

What sparked your interest in publishing the story of your family and your family’s business?

I wanted my family, and families like mine, to be represented in published stories of American experiences. The Mexican-American community and communities from Tucson and the Borderlands have incredible stories, but they are not shared or platformed as much as they could be for many readers and listeners who care about these stories. I knew El Rapido, our family business, mattered to this community. I believed El Rapido’s stories should be published for Tucson. My personal stories that also make up the memoir may be new for this audience, but I hope they resonate.

How has your relationship with the molino changed over time?

I think about the molino in three different ways: the grinding machine itself, the name my family gave to our place of work, and my reflective writing on the memories of this work with my family. In all three ways, the molino is all about process. It is sometimes a representative of the past, but for me it is more often a symbol of how things are constantly changing. I’ve written about the tension I felt with the molino and how I experienced a fear of it, a desire to get away from it. Putting these ideas in writing has helped me see that it is not something I can just walk away from—it never was. But I am not afraid of the machine anymore. I’m able to mourn the loss of the place where we lived and worked. I feel like I can more authentically celebrate the molino now.

What was the connection between El Rapido and México?

It seems like a tamalería / tortillería would have a pretty clear connection to México, but I’m not sure if it was always clear for me and my brother growing up as workers at El Rapido. This disconnect was often tied to language—even though we used some Spanish vocabulary regularly and listened to Mexican music everyday at El Rapido, we didn’t learn to speak the language fluently and struggled to communicate with our co-workers as well as customers and familiar people in our own community. As third generation, we were very isolated from México. Even though we were part of Tucson and Sonoran culture, we didn’t know quite how to connect to the land, the people, and the culture of a place just 70 miles south of us. In terms of our sense of place, El Rapido was one of the only ways we would experience a microcosm of this big idea that was “México.” El Rapido let us taste something, hear something, and through iconic images that were all around us to also see something that told the story of México for us. It wasn’t the same story that we learned in school. It wasn’t the same story on television or in the movies. It might have been a little fuzzy and vague sometimes, but it was our most compelling artifact. If we needed any proof of our ancestry and ties to México, El Rapido was a definite “X” on the map we could point to.

Why did you decide to use the sometimes controversial figure of “El Pensamiento” to tell your story?

I had been writing the memoir for over a decade before El Pensamiento was named in the manuscript. I knew the storefront mural was very important to my family, especially my father, but I had only written this idea with plenty of space between me and the image of “The Sleep Mexican.” I knew it was a complex and powerful image but I didn’t know how to address it confidently. Once I started to imagine the house itself as a character in the story, I realized that I had been missing the voice of an incredibly important El Rapido figure (the mural image) and I wanted to know where he really came from. Searching for “Sleepy’s” origin story made his character come alive for me. I realized his name (El Pensamiento) and then I could hear his voice. He is a narrator in the story because he reveals truth, especially as mijita (me as the primary narrator) struggles to articulate truth to herself. He is also a vessel for compassionately sharing the faith traditions and christian doctrines that have been rejected, resisted, or misunderstood. In this way, he serves as a typology of Christ for mijita. He speaks multiple languages, including the love languages recorded in scripture. His message and his likeness will always be controversial, but full of wisdom for those who listen to his words.

What project are you working on now?

At the University of Arizona, I teach Borderlands writing courses for first-year students and I’ve been working on a Department of Education grant initiative called Project ADELANTE. The Borderlands classroom is some rich territory for dreaming up new and creative ideas! This year, I hope to participate, alongside my students, in various Borderlands genres including corridos, testimonios, fotonovelas, and more.

****

About the Author
Melani “Mele” Martinez is a senior lecturer at the University of Arizona, where she teaches writing courses. She earned a BA in creative writing at the University of Arizona and an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College. Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, Bacopa Literary Review, BorderLore, Bearings Online Journal,Telling Tongues: A Latin Anthology on Language Experiences, and Contemporary Chicanx Writers Anthology. Her family has lived in the Sonoran Desert for at least nine generations

Texas Standard Radio Interviews Cynthia Bejarano and Maria Cristina Morales

Posted on September 23, 2024September 26, 2024 by maryreynolds

September 23, 2024

Texas Standard Radio’s Kristen Cabrera interviewed the editors of Frontera Madre(hood): Brown Mothers Challenging Oppression and Transborder Violence at the U.S.-Mexico Border last week. The book has thirty contributors who all write about the experience of being a mother and care-taking on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Editors Cynthia Bejarano and Maria Cristina Morales spoke about how their own family experience led to the collection of essays on mothering. Bejarano explained the new and disturbing vibe at El Paso’s Thanksgiving parade:

We started taking our families in 2014 when our kids were quite young. And from year to year we started to notice the parade route itself was still the same, but the participants had changed. There seemed to be an overwhelming presence of policing units, of the military, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Border Patrol and several junior exploration programs where we saw young young kids—the adolescent age and even younger—who were kind of marching in unison as they were wearing whatever uniform they were representing. And so that kind of it caught our attention.

Morales expanded on her life in the borderlands:

I grew up in El Paso, she grew up in Anthony, New Mexico. So we have experienced what it’s like being in the margins—not only the geographical margins, but the margins in terms of social class immigration status. I am a second generation Mexican, so my parents came from Juárez and then my upbringing was really on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. I was born in the El Paso side, but I very much had relatives and social events and activities on the Mexican side of the border. And so I grew up with this very rich, bicultural experience, and it’s something that really shaped the way that I look at the world.

Listen to the Texas Standard Radio interview here or read the transcript.

About the book:

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

Thirty contributors discuss their lived experiences, research, or community work challenging multiple layers of oppression, including militarization of the border, border security propaganda, feminicides, drug war and colonial violence, grieving and loss of a child, challenges and forms of resistance by Indigenous mothers, working mothers in maquiladoras, queer mothering, academia and motherhood, and institutional barriers by government systems to access affordable health care and environmental justice.

Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month with These New Books

Posted on September 18, 2024August 27, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

September 18, 2024

Celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month with new books from the University of Arizona Press! Celebrated annually from September 15 to October 15, the month aims to recognize “the histories, cultures and contributions of American citizens whose ancestors came from Spain, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America” (learn more at the National Hispanic Heritage Month website). The theme for 2024 is “Pioneers of Change: Shaping the Future Together.”

Each of the books below takes the reader on a journey of personal and shared history, highlighting our authors’ diverse experiences and recognizing the impact of Hispanic culture on our country.

A haunting, an obsession, a calling: Tim Z. Hernandez has been searching for people his whole life. Now, in this highly anticipated memoir, he takes us along on an investigative odyssey through personal and collective history to uncover the surprising conjunctions that bind our stories together. In They Call You Back, Hernandez continues his search for the 1948 Los Gatos Canyon plane crash victims while also turning the lens on himself and his ancestral past, revealing the tumultuous and deeply intimate experiences that have fueled his investigations—a lifelong journey haunted by memory, addiction, generational trauma, and the spirit world. They Call You Back is the true chronicle of one man’s obsession to restore dignity to an undignified chapter in America’s past, while at the same time making a case for why we must heal our personal wounds if we are ever to heal our political ones.

Set in one of Tucson’s first tamal and tortilla factories, The Molino is a hybrid memoir that reckons with one family’s loss of home, food, and faith. Weaving together history, culture, and Mexican food traditions, Melani Martinez shares the story of her family’s life and work in the heart of their downtown eatery, El Rapido. Opened by Martinez’s great-grandfather, Aurelio Perez, in 1933, El Rapido served tamales and burritos to residents and visitors to Tucson’s historic Barrio Presidio for nearly seventy years. For the family, the factory that bound them together was known for the giant corn grinder churning behind the scenes—the molino. With clear eyes and warm humor, Martinez documents the work required to prepare food for others, and explores the heartbreaking aftermath of gentrification that forces the multigenerational family business to close its doors.

The first English-language collection of Latina/x caregiving testimonios, this volume gives voice to diverse Chicana/x and Latina/x caregiving experiences. Bringing together thirteen first-person accounts, these testimonios speak to the tragic flaws in our health-care system and the woefully undervalued labor of providing care to family and community. Testimonios of Care gives voice to those who often are voiceless in histories of caregiving and is guided by Chicana and Latina feminist principles, which include solidarity between women of color, empathy, willingness to challenge the patriarchal medical health-care systems, questioning traditional gender roles and idealization of familia, and caring for self while caring for loved ones and community. The book is edited by Natalia Deeb-Sossa, Yvette G. Flores, and Angie Chabram

The topic of mothers and mothering transcends all spaces, from popular culture to intellectual thought and critique. This collection of essays, edited by Cynthia Bejarano and Maria Cristina Morales, bridges both methodological and theoretical frameworks to explore forms of mothering that challenge hegemonic understandings of parenting and traditional notions of Latinx womxnhood. It articulates the collective experiences of Latinx, Black, and Indigenous mothering from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. In Frontera Madre(hood), thirty contributors discuss their lived experiences, research, or community work challenging multiple layers of oppression, including militarization of the border, border security propaganda, feminicides, drug war and colonial violence, grieving and loss of a child, challenges and forms of resistance by Indigenous mothers, working mothers in maquiladoras, queer mothering, academia and motherhood, and institutional barriers by government systems to access affordable health care and environmental justice.

Working in community is critical to several fields. Working en comunidad, edited by Elena Foulis, Stacey Alex, and Glenn A. Martínez, focuses on service-learning and Latina/o/e communities within a variety of institutional contexts. It provides a practical framework grounded in theoretical approaches that center Latina/o/e experiences as foundational to understanding how to prepare students to work in the community and en comunidad. The volume tackles three major themes: ethical approaches to working with Latina/o/e communities within language courses and beyond; preparing Latina/o/e students for working with their own communities in different environments; and ensuring equitable practices and building relationships that are mutually beneficial for students and community members.

Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States takes readers on a journey through the history of the rise of undocumented youth social movements in the United States in the twenty-first century. Author Rafael A Martínez follows the documentation trail of undocumented youth activists spanning over two decades of organizing. Each chapter carefully analyzes key organizing strategies used by undocumented youth to produce direct forms of activism that expose and critique repressive forms of state control and violence. This inquiry is particularly generative in relation to how immigrant bodies are erased, contained, and imagined as “aliens” or “illegal.”

“Pioneers of Change” photo credit in lead image: Mariana I. Purcell Rivera, Puerto Rican artist and architecture student at the Pontifical Catholic University of Puerto Rico

Five Questions with Tim Z. Hernandez

Posted on September 16, 2024September 16, 2024 by Abby Mogollon

September 16, 2024

This month author Tim Z. Hernandez published They Call You Back, a memoir about the investigations that have shaped the greater part of the author’s life. He takes us along on an investigative odyssey through personal and collective history to uncover the surprising conjunctions that bind our stories together. Hernandez continues his search for the plane crash victims while also turning the lens on himself and his ancestral past, revealing the tumultuous and deeply intimate experiences that have fueled his investigations—a lifelong journey haunted by memory, addiction, generational trauma, and the spirit world. Today, Tim answers five (plus bonus) questions:

In some ways, this memoir is a continuation of All They Will Call You, which documents your work to find the families of the twenty-eight Mexicans who were killed in the 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos Canyon. In this new book, you describe your ongoing work tracking down the plane crash victims. Can you give us a peek at what you’ve uncovered since ATWCY was published in 2017?

Since the publication of ATWCY in 2017, I’ve located seven more families and was able to highlight some of them in this new book. But other exciting things have happened since then too. For instance, in 2018 the California State Senate formally recognized the accident and the families on the Senate floor. That was an exciting closure for the families who were there with me that day.

This work is about so much more than ATWCY. How have your searches for the victims intersected with your own life?

I wouldn’t necessarily say they “intersected” with my life, but in my pursuit to find these families I found myself having to grapple with some of my own family’s past, our history, the ups and downs. It was as if looking for their families I came to discover my own, and that’s what I tried to capture in this book.

You have several events this Fall, including one later this month at the Los Gatos Plane Crash Memorial. Why is it so important to present this story in public spaces with the community?

I feel like it’s important for the families so that they can finally receive some long overdue closure for what happened to their relative seven decades ago. But also, it’s a story that contains a lot of power—compassion, empathy, and a message of interconnection—so it’s only beneficial to the larger community if we share it far and wide.

We are probably biased, but we love the cover! How did it come together?

Haha! Yes, I love it too, VERY much! That’s the genius of University of Arizona Press cover designer Leigh McDonald! I knew I wanted the cover to reflect my own personal journey in some way while at the same time conveying it was still very much based on the historic Los Gatos plane crash. So I sent her a few photos of me looking “contemplative” and suggested there be an airplane in the sky somewhere distant. Leigh found a Douglas DC-3 photo and placed it in the sky, but it’s also slightly offset from my eye line, which is intentional because I didn’t want it to appear like it’s in the same space with me, but rather that it just also happens to exist in some parallel world. But then Leigh added the texture and just some really special nuances that brought the whole thing together. I’ve worked with her on past covers before too, and she’s always a pleasure to work with, but I have to say, this time she really hit it out of the park!

In addition to community collaborations, you are also collaborating with musicians. What has that been like?

Yes, I’ve always collaborated with musicians over the last 25 years of my writing career. Music is my second love after writing. For this book I actually co-wrote a song with one of my favorite indie folk-musicians, Ted Nunes, and he recorded it. It’s titled “They Call You Back” and as suspected it’s based on the book and my journey. I think music is always a good vehicle for stories and poems, and I try and bring that aspect to my performances as well. I want the work to always be engaging and entertaining, as much as educational. And music just helps with that.

We can’t help it. We have one more question. What’s next?

Haha! I’d like to keep some of the mystery, but I’ll just say that I’m working on a fictional novel for this next one. And it’s about an issue that is a concern to us all, but because of the approach I’m taking I’m really having to use my “dark tools” to write it. It’s unlike anything I’ve written before. It requires me to enter a very cynical state of mind to write it, which is not at all how I operate. Whereas the subjects of my books and poems are usually about interconnections and compassion, this one is very much about division and what happens when one goes down a twisted path that one can’t return from. Fiction feels like a nice break for the time being.

****

About the Author
Tim Z. Hernandez is an award-winning author, research scholar, and performer. His books include fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and he is the recipient of numerous awards, including the American Book Award. His work has been featured in international media, and in 2018 he was recognized by the California Senate for his work locating the victims of the 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos, which is chronicled in his book, All They Will Call You. Hernandez is an associate professor in the University of Texas at El Paso’s Bilingual Creative Writing program.

Five Questions with Elena Foulis

Posted on September 10, 2024September 3, 2024 by Cameron Louie

September 10, 2024

Focusing on service-learning and Latina/o/e communities within a variety of institutional contexts, Working en comunidad: Service-Learning and Community Engagement with U.S. Latinas/os/es provides a practical framework grounded in theoretical approaches that center Latina/o/e experiences as foundational to understanding how to prepare students to work in the community and en comunidad.

We recently had a chance to interview editor and author Elena Foulis about the book, asking about the origin of the project, the concept of comunidad, and the benefits of service-learning.

Your work, and the work of the contributors in this book, provides a guide to service-learning that is both ethical and reciprocal. How did you come to see that there was a need for this kind of guide?

As a growing population, there is an increased interest to interact and learn about Latina/o/e communities, yet it typically tends to be brief, during a semester, or rather extractive, whether this is intentional or not. In the past two decades, more and more academic programs across the U.S. want to work with Latina/o/e communities, and as someone that identifies as part of this community and who has engaged with these communities with my students for over a decade, I wanted to offer a set of best practices to understand how to work with and in community with such a complex and diverse group.

Comunidad is a central, unifying concept for this book. How did you and the other editors formulate this idea?

When we (all of us editors and authors in this book) think of service-learning, we think of comunidad— there is no other ethical way to do this. Service-learning is reciprocal, mutually beneficial, and should lead to sustainable practices. Seeing communities as integral, long-term collaborators requires that we spend time with each other to develop a respectful and trusting relationship. This is what comunidad is all about! A coming together to build unity and work together to build a better future for us and the generations that come after us.

In Chapter 1, you lay out the importance of cultural humility and empathy as part of the pedagogical preparation for service-learning. You employ the wonderful phrase “listening to understand.” Can you talk about what that means, or what it looks like?

As scholars and students, we can think that our textbook or academic knowledge about a community makes us experts of their issues, but we are not. We have an educated understanding that is true and necessary, but we must be humble in our approach to working with communities outside of our institutions. Communities understand their needs and the structural systems that have prevented them from accessing resources, so our job is to listen. As a Latina, I don’t have all the answers about my own community, because we have different experiences, so we must teach ourselves and our students to listen to their concerns and to the solutions that work best for them. In this interaction, our book knowledge takes a back seat, and we become “vulnerable observers,” as anthropologist Ruth Behar puts it.

What are some of the benefits or changes you’ve seen among students, educators, and community members who participate in the kind of service-learning this book advocates for?

Well, students never forget these classes. It is often the only service-learning class they’ve ever taken, so I regularly hear back from them to tell me what they are doing or how the class led them into non-profit work, law, education, and medical school because they want to continue to work—within their chosen professions—in the community. There really is much care among community organizations, students and educators, and those who are served by the organizations. I get to see real changes, joy, and empathy for all involved in this work. Just this year, I heard about how much my students are having a positive impact working with an organization that serves adult learners. They often asked when students would be back, because they’d had such a great rapport with them.

What are you working on now?

I am working on a monograph on oral history with Latina/o/e communities. I developed my passion for service-learning and oral history almost at the same time. The tentative title is Embodied Encounters: Bilingual Oral History Archives of Latina/o/e Experiences. I also have several articles coming out on Latina/o/e digital humanities, translanguaging and trauma-informed oral history.

Elena Foulis is an assistant professor and program director of Spanish Language Studies at Texas A&M University–San Antonio. She has directed the oral history project Oral Narratives of Latin@s in Ohio since 2014. Foulis’s research explores Latina/o/e voices through oral history and performance, identity and place, ethnography, and family. She has more than ten years of experience in service-learning pedagogy.

Sergio Troncoso Selected for Texas Literary Hall of Fame

Posted on September 9, 2024September 4, 2024 by maryreynolds

September 9, 2024

Sergio Troncoso, author of The Last Tortilla & Other Stories and From This Wicked Patch of Dust, has been selected to be inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame. The Texas Christian University Mary Couts Burnett Library, in partnership with the TCU AddRan College of Liberal Arts and TCU Press, announced their selection for induction into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame. The authors will be honored at the official induction ceremony on October 29, 2024.

Other authors honored this year are: Tracy Daugherty, Molly Ivins, Stephen Graham Jones, Cormac McCarthy, Jan Seale, and Cynthia Leitich Smith.

The Texas Literary Hall of Fame was established to celebrate and encourage the state’s rich literary heritage by honoring its foremost authors, whose original writing reflects enduring cultural relevance and artistic creativity. The Texas Literary Hall of Fame honors inductees every two years.

Congratulations Sergio!

About The Last Tortilla & Other Stories

Writing in a straightforward, light-handed style reminiscent of Grace Paley and Raymond Carver, Sergio Troncoso spins charming tales that reflect his experiences in two worlds. 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.

About From this Wicked Patch of Dust

In the border shantytown of Ysleta, Mexican immigrants Pilar and Cuauhtémoc Martínez strive to teach their four children to forsake the drugs and gangs of their neighborhood. The family’s hardscrabble origins are just the beginning of this sweeping novel. Spanning four decades, this is a story of a family’s struggle to become American and yet not be pulled apart by a maelstrom of cultural forces.

September 5, 2024

Forging a Sustainable Southwest: The Power of Collaborative Conservation introduces readers to four conservation efforts that provide insight into how diverse groups of citizens have worked collaboratively to develop visions for land use that harmonized sometimes conflicting ecological, economic, cultural, and community needs. The book contains 153 color images. We interviewed author Stephen E. Strom to learn more about his research and photography for this book. All photos by Stephen E. Strom unless noted otherwise.

aerial view of southern Arizona hills with green grass and trees

Grasslands adjacent to Sonoita Creek in Arizona

Why did you write this book?

The rapid growth of the West continues to fragment landscapes, threaten watersheds, and undermine the complex interactions among plants, animals, and people, disrupting the natural functions and equilibria of ecosystems. In the 170 years since gold was found in Sutter’s Creek, more than 165,000 square miles of the West’s “wide open spaces” have been lost to development: an area larger than that of the entire state of California.

The consequent loss and fragmentation of open space has undermined the health of forests, grasslands, and watersheds, with resulting detrimental effects on wildlife, species diversity, and water supply. Ecosystems that could otherwise store carbon have been lost or disrupted, and the unquantifiable values of scenic beauty and solitude have been diminished. Climate change threatens to exacerbate the magnitude of these threats and to compress the time available for ecosystems to restore balance and function.

The urgent need to address the challenges posed by the rapid and continuing growth of the West motivated me to explore a number of pressing questions: What lands do we need to conserve or protect in order to foster functioning ecosystems? How do we conserve them? Is it possible to restore some of the damage already inflicted on lands and water? And how do we meet the goals of both sustainable land stewardship and economic vitality in a context where cities, suburbs, and exurbs continue to grow in response to increasing population?

To gain insight into how these questions might best be answered, I spent the better part of three years listening to individuals whose interests and expertise span a broad range of interests and ideologies—ranchers, developers, conservationists, ecologists, representatives from government agencies and NGOs, along with citizen activists. Their message: achieving critical conservation and land stewardship goals will require an all-hands approach involving broad public participation in shaping strategic plans to steward and protect landscapes on scales of hundreds of thousands of acres, and to address the economic, cultural and spiritual needs of citizens who live among and adjacent to these lands.

Pronghorn

Forging a Sustainable Southwest describes four large-landscape conservation efforts, each of which provides an example of how to integrate human and environmental needs on regional scales, and to as well create a positive social context for long-term cooperation among multiple stakeholders.

As Matthew McKinney, Lynn Scarlett, and Daniel Kemmis suggest, forming such collaborative efforts to address large-landscape conservation challenges “might well result in a healing of not only ecosystems, but also related human systems. As traditionally adversarial conservation, community, and economic interests search for common ground, one arena of shared interest is a growing recognition that unscarred landscapes, clean water, fresh air, and a rich biodiversity based on healthy ecosystems, are becoming the best economic engine available to many local communities. Perhaps even more appealing is the prospect that, in the course of working hard to discover and claim that common ground, the people who inhabit those ecosystems will have contributed to the strengthening of their civic culture, and to expanding their capacity to address the next set of challenges.”

Catalina State Park, Arizona (photo credit: Catalina State Park)

How do organizations get people from across the political spectrum to work together to preserve large landscapes?

In Forging a Sustainable Southwest, The Nature Conservancy’s Peter Warren reflects on his experiences in working with groups committed to large-landscape conservation efforts:

To come up with a cohesive conservation approach to something on the scale of one hundred thousand acres, or five hundred thousand acres, or a million acres . . . requires collaboration among different landowners and land managers. I’ve come to view successful collaborations as team problem-solving, troubleshooting, brain-storming efforts based on shared experience.

To develop successful conservation strategies across a large area with multiple landowners—public, private and Tribal—requires ongoing collaborative efforts in which people share a common vision for the future. Most successful conservation efforts start out locally, where individuals motivated by attachment to and passion for a place initiate conversation about the effects of land use on their future. Efforts that endure are those that include individuals with diverse interests—from large-scale landowners and ranchers to the business community and entrepreneurs in the region, other advocates for conservation, and community members who care about the place.

The groups and individuals that shepherded the four successful conservation efforts described in Forging a Sustainable Southwest share the following attributes: recognizing and respecting cultural and ideological differences; understanding with compassion the fears of individuals about their future; taking the time to build relationships and trust; and finding a way to harmonize economic, cultural and conservation goals.

Mountain spring in southern Arizona

Pygmy owl and long-nosed bat

Do you know of other collaborations outside of the southwest that are working toward similar goals?

Efforts to work collaboratively to effect large-landscape conservation have grown significantly over the past twenty years. The Four Forest Restoration Initiative and the Wyoming Landscape Initiative represent two notable examples that demonstrate the effectiveness of collaborative conservation in developing strategies for stewarding and protecting lands in regions facing very different environmental and political challenges.

The Four Forest Restoration Initiative (4FRI) is a restoration initiative for 2.4 million acres of ponderosa pine forestland along the Mogollon Rim in Arizona encompassing four national forests: Apache, Coconino, Tonto, and Kaibab. The principal goals of the program are to restore forest ecosystems so that they are more resilient to naturally and human- caused fires; increase the diversity of plants; protect springs and streams; and promote industries that depend on wood products to the benefit of local economies. The collaboration involves local, county, and state governments, representatives from industrial and environmental communities, as well as other stakeholders.

4FRI has successfully implemented large-scale forest thinning operations to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires. The Initiative has also significantly improved habitat conditions for wildlife species, enhanced the health of watersheds, and provided economic benefits to local communities through job creation and the promotion of sustainable forest industries.

Rain in the mountains next to Animas Valley, New Mexico

The Wyoming Landscape Conservation Initiative (WLCI) is a partnership including representatives from the BLM, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, Natural Resources Conservation Service, Wyoming Department of Agriculture, Wyoming Game and Fish Department, six county commissions, eleven conservation districts, and industry and landholders. Its dual goals are to conserve and enhance fish and wildlife habitat at landscape scale using science-based programs, and to support responsible energy, mineral, and other development.

WCLI has been successful in developing conservation agreements with ranchers and private landowners, which have helped to preserve open rangelands and to maintain traditional land uses like grazing. By working together with local communities, these agreements have conserved critical habitats for wildlife, such as sage-grouse, mule deer, and pronghorn, while allowing ranchers to maintain viable operations.

Furthermore, WCLI efforts have helped to restore riparian areas across Wyoming—vital for maintaining healthy watersheds and provide essential habitats for fish, birds, and other wildlife. The restoration work includes planting native vegetation, reducing erosion, and improving water quality, benefiting both the environment and local communities.

The initiative has also worked with energy companies to minimize the impacts of oil, gas, and wind energy projects on sensitive landscapes and wildlife habitats.

Chiricahua leopard frog and Swainson’s hawk

What are the challenges of photographing large landscapes, fitting so many square miles into the frame, and how did you overcome them?

I envisioned photographs playing a pivotal role in conveying why the regions discussed in Forging a Sustainable Southwest merit a mix of protection, sustainable stewardship and in some cases restoration. To document the wide range of landscapes discussed in the book, required capturing them from a variety of perspectives. For more intimate evocations, I used a DSLR camera, while aerial images obtained from drones and light aircraft flying from heights of 400 to 4,000 feet above the ground enabled me to capture the sweeping expanses (up to 60 miles in all directions) of the area’s grasslands, forests, riparian areas and watersheds.

Capturing the beauty inherent in these landscapes presented a new challenge for me, as much of my previous work (Death Valley: Painted Light; Voices from Bears Ears: Seeking Common Ground on Sacred Land; Bears Ears: Views from a Sacred Land; and The Greater San Rafael Swell: Honoring Tradition and Preserving Storied Lands) focused on interpreting dramatically different landscapes dominated by deep intricate canyons, majestic buttes, colorful badlands and windswept deserts.

Cienega Ranch, Arizona

What project are you working on now?

I’m currently gathering ground- and aerial-based photographs to complement The Northwest in Transition: Envisioning the future of the Columbia River Basin, a book currently in preparation by journalist and author Rebecca Robinson. To quote Rebecca: “The book aims to capture a pivotal moment when a confluence of events has inspired an urgent search for solutions to a decades-long debate over energy, economic development, and tribal treaty rights in the Columbia River Basin, a 258,000-square-mile region encompassing parts of seven U.S. states and southern British Columbia, Canada.” Robinson is the author of Voices from Bears Ears: Seeking Common Ground for which I provided images of landscapes throughout the Bears Ears National Monument in southeast Utah.

***
Stephen E. Strom has spent forty-five years as a research astronomer after receiving undergraduate and graduate degrees in astronomy from Harvard. He began photographing in 1978, after studying the history of photography and silver and nonsilver photography at the University of Arizona.

2024 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award Finalists

Posted on September 4, 2024September 3, 2024 by Cameron Louie

September 4, 2024

We are happy to announce that five of our books have been named as finalists for the 2024 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards!

The New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards are given annually by the New Mexico Book Co-op. Their mission is “to showcase local books, authors, presses, and related professionals; to promote literacy; and to raise public awareness of quality books produced [in New Mexico and Arizona].”

See the full list of finalists at this link.

About the books:

Anthropology/Archaeology Finalist

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

Biography (Arizona Subject) Finalist

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

Biography (Arizona Subject), Biography (Other), & History (Arizona) Finalist

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, authors Miguel Montiel and Yvonne de la Torre Montiel show us how these women negotiated their lives with their circumstances.

Nature/Environment Finalist

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

paperback book cover of Rim to River with photograph of storm on top of desert mountain

Nonfiction (General) & Travel Finalist

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.

Congratulations to all our authors!

Excerpt from “Healing Like Our Ancestors”

Posted on August 29, 2024July 2, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

August 29, 2024

Healing Like Our Ancestors: The Nahua Titiçih, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Central Mexico, 1535-1660, by Edward Anthony Polanco, offers a provocative new perspective the examines sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Nahua healers in central Mexico and how their practices have been misconstrued and misunderstood in colonial records.

Early colonial Spanish settlers defined, assessed, and admonished Nahua titiçih (healing specialists) and tiçiyotl (healing knowledge) in the process of building a society in Mexico that mirrored Iberia. Nevertheless, Nahua survivance (intergenerational knowledge transfer) has allowed communities to heal like their ancestors through changes and adaptations. Polanco draws from diverse colonial primary sources, largely in Spanish and Nahuatl (the Nahua ancestral language), to explore how Spanish settlers framed titiçih, their knowledge, and their practices within a Western complex. Polanco argues for the usage of Indigenous terms when discussing Indigenous concepts and arms the reader with the Nahuatl words to discuss central Mexican Nahua healing. In particular, this book emphasizes the importance of women as titiçih and highlights their work as creators and keepers of knowledge. These vital Nahua perspectives of healing—and how they differed from the settler narrative—will guide community members as well as scholars and students of the history of science, Latin America, and Indigenous studies. Read an excerpt from the book’s introduction below.

“From the Peruvian Andes to the French court, the potato’s voyages”—thus reads the title of a sign explaining how the potato made its way to Spain. In July 2022, I had the privilege of visiting the Real Jardín Botánico (Royal Botanical Garden) in Madrid. I had read about the garden in books and was curious about its contents. When I asked a garden employee where I could see plants indigenous to the Americas, she informed me that the gardeners had dispersed them throughout the grounds and that the garden’s sections were not organized by geographic location. I immediately looked for corn (Zea mays) and tobacco (Nicotiana sp.), which I was surprised to find growing next to each other in the huerta, or orchard, section. There, like thousands of visitors every year, I was also able to see squash, beans, potatoes, sunflowers, tomatoes, and peppers. Though many of the plants in the orchard are native to Turtle Island (what is now called North America) and Abya Yala (what is now called Central and South America), there was no such descriptor or recognition. I then moved on to the medicinal section, which contained only two plants from Abya Yala, huevo de gallo (Salpichroa origanifolia) and epazote (Dysphania ambrosioides).

In the entire botanical garden, the only placard I found that explained an “American” plant was a sign for what Spaniards call the patata, or the papa in Quechua and Latin American Spanish (potato in English). Most of the text about the potato revolved around its European “discovery” in the Americas and the untapped knowledge about its nutritional attributes, unknown to Europeans until the eighteenth century. One short sentence explained that papas had been domesticated in the Chilean and Peruvian Andes eight thousand years ago. The placard made no mention of the Native cultures that had cultivated (and continue to cultivate) the root, nor did it explain the cultural significance of the papa in what is today known as South America.

This situation embodies the erasure of Native knowledge and culture that occurs with the extraction of native plants. The Real Jardín Botánico presents corn, tomatoes, beans, squash, and tobacco as plants with no Native history or culture. Though this is largely true for many of the plants in the garden irrespective of their origin, it is particularly troubling when the plants were extracted from other parts of world through colonial ventures. In the case of the papa, it appears as a once exotic plant that Europeans haphazardly dominated with their culinary and economic control. The botanical garden’s thousands of visitors could be learning about the vibrant, complex, and diverse knowledge and goods that Native people have willingly and unwillingly provided Spain and its once global empire. Visitors could also learn the importance of native plants in their Native contexts, their uses, and their indigenous names. For instance, corn is originally from Mesoamerica, and it is important to many Native communities throughout Turtle Island and Abya Yala for sustenance, healing, and as a relative. Tobacco, similarly, is a spiritual medicine, and the aromatic plant enjoys therapeutic uses as well.

Before Columbus arrived in the Western Hemisphere, Native peoples throughout Turtle Island and Abya Yala knew about corn and tobacco and grew it. Jesuit priest and settler Francisco Clavijero noted in the late eighteenth century that to Nahuas in Mexico tlaolli (corn kernels) were one of the most important food items, like wheat to Europe and rice to Asia. Nahuas had diverse types of corn that were nutritious and often eaten as “bread” (i.e., tortillas) made by women, and atolli (atole, a corn-based beverage), which had medicinal properties. Nahuas in the sixteenth century often gave cocoxqueh (sick people) atolli to nurse them back to health. Cintli (the entire corn plant) forms a core component of Indigenous foods from Mesoamerica, including tortillas, tamales, and atoles.

Moreover, many Native communities attributed special powers and reverence to tobacco. The Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas reported in the sixteenth century that the Taíno people in what is now the Dominican Republic and Haiti smoked leaves resembling lettuce, which they dried and rolled into the shape of a musket (the musket was called a tabaco). The leaves functioned as a corporal sedative, and Taínos also used them to suppress hunger and fatigue. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés further recorded sixteenth-century ceremonial uses of tabaco among the Taíno, who employed the leaves to gain unknown information. Las Casas reported that in what is now Mexico, the Tlaxcalteca used tobacco (piçiyetl in sixteenth-century Central Mexican Nahuatl and iatl in modern variants of Nahuatl) to tranquilize snakes and that it also boasted many medicinal properties, though he did not expand on them. By the 1570s, the physician Francisco Hernández had learned of a number of health benefits to be gained from smoking the dry leaves: tobacco was a great expectorant, cured asthma and difficulties breathing, was good for women having irregularities with their uterus, fortified the mind, caused drowsiness, and calmed pain. Fresh leaves were good for digestion and cured empacho (abdominal bloating and pain). Nahua specialists also used piçiyetl as an entheogen—a substance to release a nonhuman life force within. For example, healers used piçiyetl and other entheogens to communicate with nonhuman forces and to diagnose and prognosticate illnesses and injuries. Thus, it seems that tobacco might have been better suited to the Real Jardín Botánico’s medicinal section.

Effacing or obfuscating the names and knowledge of indigenous plants is part of the colonial game. Now operated by the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, the Real Jardín Botánico could use its privilege and status to acknowledge the Indigenous names of native plants when making use of plants, technologies, and knowledge acquired from Indigenous peoples.

Renée Dotson Receives Award for Outstanding Contributions to Planetary Science

Posted on August 27, 2024August 21, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

August 27, 2024

We are thrilled to share the news that Renée Dotson has been selected to receive the 2024 Harold Masursky Award by the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Science!

For more than 20 years, Dotson has served as the Production Editor for the University of Arizona Press’s Space Science Series. She lead in the editing of 15 separate volumes of the series on a wide variety of topics, from planets to comets. These books have served as definitive and critical references for planetary scientists worldwide ranging from graduate students and post-docs to leading researchers exploring new frontiers in planetary science.

Pictured above with photo of Dotson is the next book in the series, Comets III, publishing soon. Her most recent book with UA Press is The Pluto System After New Horizons.

Congratulations to Renée on this incredible achievement!

Brandy Nālani McDougall Wins Elliot Cades Award

Posted on August 23, 2024August 21, 2024 by Cameron Louie

August 23, 2024

We are thrilled to share the news that Brandy Nālani McDougall has received the 2024 Elliot Cades Award, the most prestigious literary honor in Hawai’i!

As the Maui News reports, “The Cades Awards, given annually since 1988, were created by Charlotte and J. Russell Cades in memory of his brother, Elliot, a teacher and lover of literature. The awards come with a substantial cash prize for the recipients.”

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

She is the author of Aina Hanau / Birth Land, a collection of poetry, and Finding Meaning: Kaona and Contemporary Hawaiian Literature.

Congratulations to Brandy on this incredible achievement!

Behind the Scenes at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory

Posted on August 21, 2024August 22, 2024 by Cameron Louie

August 22, 2024

The University of Arizona Press staff recently had the opportunity to visit Carina A. Bennett and Cat W.V. Wolner, two of the five authors of Bennu 3-D: Anatomy of an Asteroid, at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in the Gerard P. Kuiper Space Sciences Building! Below, you can see photos from the tour, including a map of the asteroid Bennu’s surface, a close-up look at some of the sample collected from Bennu, and the powerful microscopes used to analyze and image the sample.

A major highlight of the tour was seeing a vial of sample collected from the Bennu asteroid. Bennett and Wolner revealed that, among many surprises, researchers have discovered that the asteroid is more like a “rubble pile” held together by microgravity and loose cohesion, rather than a solid rock.

Bennu, named for the ancient Egyptian phoenix, was the chosen destination of OSIRIS-REx, NASA’s premier mission of asteroid exploration, launched in 2016. In 2020 the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft successfully landed on the surface of Bennu and collected pristine asteroid material for delivery to Earth in September 2023.

Like a map of the planet Earth, the asteroid Bennu is depicted here in stunning high resolution. Author Carina A. Bennett explains how it took around 2,500 individual images to create this massive picture.

Bennett explains how the OSIRIS-REx team selected a location to collect a sample from the asteroid.

Below, members of the Press admire commemorative posters designed by Heather Roper, celebrating milestones of the OSIRIS-REx mission.

Our staff was also delighted to find not one, but two Guinness World Record certificates hanging in the halls of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory offices!

And finally, the tour concluded with a visit to the basement where we saw some extremely powerful microscopes. This equipment is stored below ground level to avoid vibrations, which is of utmost importance when analyzing images as small as 100 nanometers—far, far smaller than the width of a human hair.

The microscope operator shows where the sample is mounted

Thanks for coming along with us on this virtual version of the tour! If all of these pictures have inspired you with a sense of wonder about the mysteries of the cosmos, check out our incredible list of space science books!

Header image photo credit: Leigh McDonald

Excerpt from “Kidnapped to the Underworld”

Posted on August 14, 2024August 19, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

August 14, 2024

Víctor Montejo’s Kidnapped to the Underworld recounts the near-death experience of his grandfather, Antonyo Mekel Lawuxh (Antonio Esteban), who fell gravely ill in Guatemala in the late 1920s but survived to tell his family and community what he had witnessed of the afterlife.

Narrated from Antonio’s perspective, the reader follows along on a journey to the Maya underworld of Xibalba, accompanied by two spirit guides. Antonio traverses Xibalba’s levels of heaven and hell, encountering instructive scenes of punishment and reward: in one chapter, conquistadors are perpetually submerged in a pool of their victims’ blood; in another, the souls of animal abusers are forever unable to cross a crocodile-infested river. Infused with memory, the author illustrates Guatemala’s unique religious syncretism, exploring conceptions of heaven and hell shared between Catholicism and Indigenous Maya spirituality. In the tradition of both the Popol Vuh and the Divine Comedy, Montejo’s narrative challenges easy categorization—this is a work of family history, religious testimony, political allegory, and sacred literature. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

It was already late as I was coming back from working in the milpa that day. Though I knew the way to my pueblo very well, I suddenly found myself lost in the thick woods, unsure where I was going. The solitude took my heart prisoner, and I grew sad thinking that no one accompanied me on that grim and desolate path. Oh, how terrible is solitude! I walked and walked with no one to give me directions or point the correct way home. Time passed, bit by bit, and I began to lose hope. Father Sun was dying, and night darkened the peaks of the far-off mountains.

The birds in the forest started flying like crazy, their melodious trills bidding farewell to the melancholy afternoon. Everything seemed to be falling asleep under the looming black cloak of night. Only my constant and hurried steps broke that sepulchral silence, and from time to time I whistled, hoping it could help me escape the overpowering fear. Thousands of thoughts pecked at my brain like a crazed woodpecker, forcing me to reflect on my past life. And so, pensive and sweaty, I gave myself over into an uncontainable soliloquy.

My thoughts took wing, flying to the infinite, forgetting my poor body that walked fatigued within that shadow of chilling monotony. Soon something called powerfully to my attention, shaking me from my meditations. It was a bird of many-colored feathers that hopped in the middle of the path, not a bit disturbed by my presence. Oh, how beautiful was that bird!

I approached cautiously, hoping to catch it, but just when my hands almost had it, the bird would jump nimbly from the ground, making me fail each time. I took off my hat in hopes of using it to catch the bird, but again it scurried away from my clumsy hands. Ah, I didn’t want to let that most beautiful and strangely colored fowl get away, but my efforts kept proving futile.

Before my eyes the bird arose and flew to a small branch, nearly within my reach. I jumped as high as I could, but I couldn’t grasp it because it flew to a higher branch. Now very desperate, I picked up a round stone and rashly threw it. In vain! The bird had flown higher, to a ceiba branch. Frantically, I hurled a second stone, but the extraordinary bird kept ascending and going further away. Meanwhile, I was dying from the intense desire to contemplate and caress it between my hands. I kept throwing my hopeless stones, but the colorful bird continued until it was lost in the topmost canopy of the enormous ceiba.

It was as if that multicolored bird had guided me to the highest elevations, toward a higher goal that I would have to reach, but which would require much more effort. Saddened by my failure, I sat down, sweaty, at the foot of that tree without even caring about the time passing by. I felt so sad, as if I had just lost the most valuable treasure, or as one who loses part of their own being.

Weariness finally took me over, and I decided to lie down on the ground and rest. But as I was doing that, my head started spinning like I was drunk. Then the earth seemed to move dizzily from under my feet, and I collapsed on the ground, losing consciousness.

Suddenly I was in great danger, as I somehow found myself attached to the roots and vines growing on the wall of a great abyss.

Poor me! There I was, clinging helplessly to the rock like a climber stuck on that vertical wall. I had managed to reach the middle of the abyss when I began to lose strength and give up. From below, I heard the frightening rumble of a prodigious river running precipitously through gigantic rocks. Over my head rose the vertical side of the ravine, impossible to climb.

I couldn’t even take another step, I was stuck, holding onto those fragile roots to keep from falling into the precipice. One false step meant certain death. Who could save me if there was no one with me? To whom could I scream? Where could I direct my voice if no one could hear me? Never in my life have I felt so alone and wretched as I found myself in those moments. But I had one hope; and therefore, I made a great effort to maintain my balance. More than anything, I had the desire to keep living and return to my pueblo with my family.

There I was, fighting desperately against the death that was stalking me, when I was amazed to see a ball of fire come falling from the sky to strike my trembling chest. That unbelievable light strengthened my body and infused me with tremendous valor. In this way I felt myself a man full of bravery and with new hopes to keep living. Then, with utmost care I began the dangerous ascent, holding tightly to those tenuous roots in the vertical wall of that overwhelming precipice. Great was my astonishment when I found I had reached the top of the abyss and could finally move unscathed from that immense danger.

I don’t know how I happened to expose my life to the middle of that great precipice, nor did I see the benevolent hand that rescued me from such horrible risk, placing me on the most accessible path.

Tired and dazed, I lay down at the foot of some old guava trees. The afternoon continued on its sad way, grey and unforgettable, and the clouds rolled apart and back together, forming strange figures that found no exit from the sky. There was sun, but it was a pale sun whose rays brought no heat.

There I stayed, quietly contemplating the grey and nebulous sky. I was so engrossed that I failed to dodge the droppings a damned vulture left on my head. At that precise moment also a husky-voiced owl began to sing, sometimes sounding like the cackle of the very devil, laughing at my lamentable situation. That owl was the messenger of the lords from beyond, and its song sounded to me like the funeral chimes that tolled when they buried someone in my pueblo.

Author Toolbox: Prepare for Publication Day

Posted on August 8, 2024August 7, 2024 by maryreynolds

August 8, 2024

Your publisher has years of expertise in publicizing your book to targeted audiences, whether they are scholars or general readers. But your publisher values your expertise too! Authors are their own best publicists. You know more about your book, your research, your process, and your readers than anyone else. In our second installment of the “Author Toolbox” series, we offer a behind the scenes look at how the University of Arizona Press tells the world about your book, and the author’s role in publicity.

Author Questionnaire

Preparing for publication begins long before your book even goes to the printer. The University of Arizona Press, and most other publishers, provide an Author Questionnaire for you to fill out to help provide feedback to the Press’s marketing department. At our Press, this is part of our final manuscript submission process. We ask authors to help us identify key review outlets books for review and press releases. It is very important that authors answer these questions. If you know an editor at a specific journal or publication, let us know so we may contact that person directly. In addition, provide information so that we may notify your institution as well as your alma mater so the book can be publicized through the alumni magazine or online channels.

Author Self-Promotion

Some authors enjoy talking about themselves, their research, and writing; others do not. Maybe you fall somewhere in the middle. Fear not! There are easy ways to market your book through venues you use every day. First, include your book in your email signature, “Author of [book title here], forthcoming [publication date] from the University of Arizona Press.” As soon as your book is listed in our catalog and on our website, you can link to the book’s webpage from your email signature line. Second, update your bio online—on your personal website, on your institution’s website—to include the title of your book and publication date. Third, if you write articles for newspapers or magazines, make sure the title of your book is in your author bio and link if possible. For example, author Tom Zoellner wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times, and linked his book Rim to River in his bio at the end (see screenshot below).

Book Launch

Your colleagues, friends, and family want to celebrate with you, so plan a book launch! There are many places to hold a book launch party: your academic department, your local bookstore, your backyard, your favorite cafe or brewpub. Send invitations far and wide. If your event is open to the public, create a flyer to post around campus and around town. Post your book launch in online campus and community calendars. Choose a place that fits the tone of your book and your personality. Refreshments create a festive atmosphere, and maybe you want to add music—create your own playlist, hire musicians or a DJ. Photos below are from Alma García’s All That Rises book launch for her debut novel at Secret Garden Books in Seattle.

At the event, schedule a time to read from your book and tell people why the topic of your book is important, or what first inspired you to write it. Make sure there are books available for sale and a place for you to sign books. You may order books using your author discount, and sell directly to people at your launch. Ask your academic department for support in organizing, or ask your friends and family to help out. People want to share in your success, so bring them along for the ride.

Keep the Momentum Going

Before your book is published, ask your colleagues at other universities if they would like to host you as a campus speaker. Perhaps they can fund your travel to their university, or perhaps it is a place that is a simple train ride or car drive from where you live. The more places you speak about your book, the more it is advertised on flyers, email lists, and local newspapers. Keep your book title on the digital and traditional media airwaves by organizing events in the months after your book is published.

Social Media

Book publicity starts long before your book’s publication date. As you prepare your manuscript and as you move through the copy-editing process, you can share the process on social media. Use the social media platform where you already have a presence and where you already connect with family, friends, and colleagues. There is no need to start another social media account. Give people updates on your writing and make them feel part of your progress: “Happily writing draft of chapter 4 of my book,” “Great news! Just finished writing the conclusion of my book,” “This week, I’m excited to work with the copyeditor to fine-tune my book,” or “Summer is here and I have time to finish my book edits.” Include the title of your book, and the specific names of chapters. Be sure to include images: a view of your workspace, a view out your window, a picture of your feline or canine assistant, photos of places or people from when you researched your book, or images from your book. As soon as your cover is finalized, you can post a “cover reveal.” Check out the cover reveal example below from Diego Báez on his Instagram for his book, Yaguareté White. This format is simple and works for any other social media with image and text.

When you receive your advance copies of the book, create an “unboxing” social media post or post a picture of yourself proudly holding your book in your hands. If you want to make a video, check out tools like Canva or Adobe Express that are user friendly and have free versions. Be creative and have fun! If you remind people once a month or so that you’re writing a book, it increases the likelihood that they will purchase your book on publication day.

Links to Current Events and Special Months

The University of Arizona Press will promote your book during the special months to which it relates. For example, we will promote our new Chicano/a/x books during National Hispanic Heritage Month, September 15-October 15, 2024. We promote books during Women’s History Month, Black History Month, and other months too. Perhaps your book deals with issues along the U.S.-Mexico Border, and border issues are often in the news. You can pitch an opinion piece to your local or even a national newspaper like the New York Times or Washington Post. For example, Mehnaaz Momen, author of Listening to Laredo, wrote an opinion piece for the L.A. Times (see screenshot below). Be sure to include the title of your book in your bio.

The University of Arizona Press Website and Social Media

As you schedule events, be sure to let us know. For every event that is open to the public, we will create an event post, and share it via our social media channels. Let us know your social media handles so we can tag you in our posts. We also share some events in our monthly newsletter that reaches about 4,000 people.

We are teammates in the marathon of promoting your book. Just as you provide the names of journals or mainstream media where your book should be reviewed to the publicity team at the University of Arizona Press, we will support your promotion efforts to celebrate your book on publication day and in the months following publication.

Arizona Road Trip!

Posted on July 31, 2024July 15, 2024 by maryreynolds

July 30, 2024

Summer means road trip! Here are a few University of Arizona Press titles to inspire you to explore the beautiful state of Arizona. Start with a trip closest to the University of Arizona and Tucson at Sabino Canyon, quench your thirst with Arizona adult beverages, admire the towering geology of the Grand Canyon State, then finish with a hike on the Arizona Trail. For the last one, stick to higher elevations to stay cool. Even if it’s too hot to drive, tag along with these authors for a journey that is virtual the old-fashioned way: in the pages of a great book.

book cover for Picturing Sabino with historic black and white photos of 2 women by Sabino Creek and tram on a bridge

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 David Wentworth Lazaroff.

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. Author Tom Zoellner’s 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, dehydrating rivers, retirement kingdoms, old-time foodways, honky-tonk dreamers, and magical Grand Canyon reveries.

book cover for Brewing Arizona with photograph of glasses of beer

Since 1864, the state’s breweries have had a history as colorful as the state. With an eye like a historian, the good taste of a connoisseur, and the tenacity of a dedicated collector, author Ed Sipos serves up beer history with gusto. Brewing Arizona is the first book of Arizona beer. It includes every brewery known to have operated in the state, from the first to the latest, from crude brews to craft brews, from mass beer to microbrews. This eye-opening chronicle is encyclopedic in scope but smooth in its delivery. Like a fine beer, the contents are deep and rich, with a little froth on top.

book cover for Natural Landmarks of Arizona with photo of butte in desert landscape with blue sky

Whether you have climbed these peaks many times, enjoy seeing them from your car window, or simply want to learn more about southwestern geology and history, reading Natural Landmarks of Arizona is a fascinating way to learn about the ancient and recent history of beloved places such as Cathedral Rock, Granite Dells, Kitt Peak, and many others. With David Yetman as your guide, you can tuck this book into your glove box and hit the road with profound new knowledge about the towering natural monuments that define our beautiful Arizona landscapes.

Author Toolbox: Getting the Most out of Conferences

Posted on July 24, 2024July 15, 2024 by Cameron Louie

We’re excited to be kicking off a new series called “Author Toolbox,” a collection of insider tips and tricks for both aspiring and established authors. Through this series, we hope to demystify parts of the university press world and share lessons learned from our work with the incredible authors who form the foundation of the University of Arizona Press.

First up in this series are some suggestions to help authors optimize their limited time at a professional conference. Read on, and then go pitch that book!

Why attend conferences?

Conferences are a way to stay up-to-date on academic trends, and they provide dedicated time for networking and collaboration. Conferences are also an essential moment to connect with publishers and fellow authors. That goes for both seasoned academics who have published extensively in their discipline and first-time authors promoting a new book that may be an important step toward academic advancement.

For many of our authors, conferences are also a valuable chance to promote a new or forthcoming book. Depending on a book’s publication date, authors will sometimes bring promotional fliers with a discount code so that anyone interested can pre-order the book, or they will work with their publisher to arrange book signings. In the photo below, for example, you can see University of Arizona Press authors signing books for admiring fans—and sometimes, signing books for other authors!

Juan Martinez draws customized creatures as he signs books for attendees at the 2024 Association of Writers & Writing Programs.

Authors Rita Urquijo-Ruiz and Yvette J. Saavedra signing books for each other at the 2024 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies conference in San Francisco.

Navigating the exhibit hall

As Rebecca Knight writes, “Conferences are exhausting, and can be especially so if you’re not an extrovert.” This is true nowhere more than conference exhibit halls. But before you skip your visit, remember that some of the most important networking happens here: the exhibit hall is the “public square” of the conference, part social gathering, part workday meeting. The mood is casual and people are ready to chat, unencumbered by the usual demands of the office and classroom.

Inside the Kansas City Convention Center, attendees gather on their way up to the AWP bookfair.

Before you commit to visiting every booth, it’s worth taking a moment to find the exhibit hall map and prioritize which publishers you want to meet. You can also usually find a list of exhibitors in the conference program. Doing some reconnaissance in advance will save you precious time and energy. Which leads us to the next point…

Know your potential publisher

Being familiar with a university press’s publishing program before you talk to editors can be a big advantage. For example, we always appreciate when fiction and poetry authors who visit our booth at the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference are already familiar with our Camino del Sol and Sun Tracks series, highlighting Latinx and Indigenous literature, respectively. An author who is familiar with some of our titles in either series will probably have a decent idea about whether their work is a good fit for our Press.

Before a conference, check prospective publishers’ websites and take a quick glance at their current catalog or recently published titles in your field. Do you recognize any of the authors’ names? Do you like the design of the covers? Do you notice any bestsellers or books people in your network are talking about on social media? If the answer to any of these is yes, it may be a sign that you’re on the right track.

Talking with exhibitors and pitching your book

Once you stop at a publisher’s booth and strike up a conversation, it’s wise to take a moment to do proper introductions before launching into a book pitch. A good exhibit interaction might follow these steps: explain your academic role and affiliation, ask what the person you’re talking to does at the press (acquiring? marketing? editing? production?), and then ask if an acquiring editor has time to hear about a book project that might be a good fit for their list.

Don’t feel weird about asking to talk with an editor—it’s a big part of the reason they’re attending! Acquiring editors typically use conferences to find (and compete for) the most compelling new books in their fields. They want to know about your project! But set reasonable expectations: editors have packed schedules and won’t have time to read a whole chapter from your manuscript (this is where having a good two-minute pitch ready comes in handy), and you’re not going to leave with a contract in hand. If an editor is truly interested, they may ask to exchange information, to meet again later during the conference, or to receive a draft of your project proposal. You might just get a link to their website or a business card. If your project isn’t a great fit, they might politely redirect you to another publisher at a booth nearby.

Find the University of Arizona Press at an upcoming conference

Keep an eye on our events page to see the most updated list of conferences we plan to attend each year!

Do you have some conference wisdom you’d like to share? Things you wish you’d known when you first started attending the conferences of your professional organizations? Whether it’s at WHA, ASA, AAA, or WLA 2024 right here in Tucson, we hope you’ll stop by our table and tell us about it. And if you have a book project in the works, we’d love to hear about it!

A Closer Look at Nahuatl Symbolism on our Covers

Posted on July 16, 2024July 17, 2024 by maryreynolds

July 16, 2024

Paging through our Spring 2024 and Fall 2024 catalogs, you will see a variety of modern and historic Nahuatl images. Several covers include an image known as a glyph representing communication: a circular swirl, like a breath of air, often placed near the mouths of human figures. This glyph is even visible just outside the University of Arizona Press offices in a newly installed art piece.

In Indigenous Science and Technology: Nahuas and the World Around Them, editor Kelly McDonough writes that the Nahuatl language was spoken throughout Mexico and much of Central America before Spanish colonization, and more than 2.5 million people speak Nahuatl today. The root “nahua” means “audible, intelligible, clear.” (Karttunen, Frances 1992, An analytical dictionary of Nahuatl. Norman: University of Oklahoma Pres, 156–157).

Writing that Matters: A Handbook for Chicanx and Latinx Studies by L Heidenreich and Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz emphasizes practice: how to research and write a Chicanx or Latinx history paper; how to research and write a Chicanx or Latinx literature or cultural studies essay; and how to conduct interviews, frame pláticas, and conduct oral histories. The authors offer an alternative to handbooks written with white, Eurocentric frameworks and/or from a white, Eurocentric lens. To emphasize the Chicanx and Latinx focus, the book is illustrated with images by Anel Flores using Nahuatl, a language that predates European contact. Flores used the Nahuatl glyph for communication illustrating a conversation between two people. It is a circular swirl, like a breath of air. Flores also created versions of the glyph for the front cover art; UA Press Art Director Leigh McDonald incorporated the glyph into the final cover design:

Founded in 1997, Mujeres de Maiz (MdM) is an Indigenous Xicana–led spiritual artivist organization and movement by and for women and feminists of color. Chronicling its quarter-century-long herstory, Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento: Spiritual Artivism, Healing Justice, and Feminist Praxis weaves together diverse stories with attention to their larger sociopolitical contexts. The book crosses conventional genre boundaries through the inclusion of poetry, visual art, testimonios, and essays. Editors Amber Rose González, Felicia ‘Fe’ Montes, and Nadia Zepeda selected a painting by Margaret Alarcón for their cover, with the Nahuatl communication glyph at the center:

Kelly S. McDonough reveals how Nahuas have explored, understood, and explained the world around them in pre-invasion, colonial, and contemporary time periods in Indigenous Science and Technology: Nahuas and the World Around Them. In this work, she address Nahua understanding of plants and animals, medicine and ways of healing, water and water control, alphabetic writing, and cartography. Interludes between the chapters offer short biographical sketches and interviews with contemporary Nahua scientists, artists, historians, and writers, accompanied by their photos. The book also includes more than twenty full-color images from sources like the Florentine Codex, a 16th-century ethnographic research study in Mesoamerica by the Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. The cover features illustrations of Nahuatl glyphs from the Florentine Codex:

book cover for Indigenous science and technology

page from florentine codex with drawing of a bird and text

Edward Anthony Polanco, author of Healing Like Our Ancestors: The Nahua Tiçitl, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Central Mexico, 1535–1660, requested Nahua art on the cover of his book. Historian Polanco draws from diverse colonial primary sources, largely in Spanish and Nahuatl, to explore how Spanish settlers framed titiçih (healing specialists), tiçiyotl (healing knowledge), and their practices within a Western complex. Polanco argues for the usage of Indigenous terms when discussing Indigenous concepts and arms the reader with the Nahuatl words to discuss central Mexican Nahua healing. In particular, this book emphasizes the importance of women as titiçih and highlights their work as creators and keepers of knowledge. The author commissioned the cover art from an artist in the Nahua community in Panchimalco, El Salvador. In the painting, the Nahuatl communication glyph emanates from two women’s mouths. This book will be published in Fall 2024:

Modern Nahua painting of two women sitting on a rug, with healing happening and Nahuatl communication symbol coming from their mouths

Finally new art installed in our central staircase in the Main University of Arizona Libraries last year reminds the University of Arizona Press staff about the importance of communication. Located on the same floor as the UA Press office, “Desert Dwellers, 2023” by Carlos Valenzuela and Jennifer Dwyer is one of four mosaics. The prickly pear cactus has the Nahuatl glyph for communication on its pads and fruits, perhaps showing that the desert plants and animals communicate with each other and with us:

mosaic image of sonoran desert plants and animals with nahua communication symbol on prickly pear cactus pads

Excerpt from “Accompaniment with Im/migrant Communities”

Posted on July 12, 2024May 14, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

July 12, 2024

Accompaniment with Im/migrant Communities edited by Kristine E. Yarris and Whitney L. Duncan, brings together the experiences and voices of anthropologists whose engaged work with im/migrant communities pushes the boundaries of ethnography toward a feminist, care-based, decolonial mode of ethnographic engagement called “accompaniment.”

Accompaniment as anthropological research and praxis troubles the boundaries of researcher-participant, scholar-activist, and academic-community to explicitly address issues of power, inequality, and the broader social purpose of the work. More than two dozen contributors show how accompaniment is not merely a mode of knowledge production but an ethical commitment that calls researchers to action in solidarity with those whose lives we seek to understand. The volume stands as a collective conversation about possibilities for caring and decolonial forms of ethnographic engagement with im/migrant communities. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

This edited volume brings together anthropologists whose engaged work with im/migrant communities pushes the boundaries of ethnography toward a mode of engagement inspired by feminist care ethics, decolonial methodologies, and Latin American activist traditions of acompañamiento, or accompaniment. Collectively, this volume contributes to applied anthropological scholarship by challenging prescribed boundaries and dichotomies, such as researcher-participant, scholar-activist, and academic-community member. In so doing, the chapters collected here unsettle received ways of doing anthropology and explicitly address issues of power, positionality, inequity, and the broader social purpose of our work. We also situate this work within a longer trajectory of applied, engaged, and activist anthropological research and within contemporary decolonial and feminist critiques of anthropology, which seek to redress historical inequities within the discipline and beyond. Drawing together an array of anthropologists working with im/migrant communities in various research settings and experimenting with different modes of doing and writing ethnography, the volume represents a collective conversation about possibilities—both epistemic and empirical—for caring, decolonial forms of ethnographic engagement.

Many of the authors featured in these pages originally came together in the fall of 2016, at the American Anthropological Association (AAA) meetings in Minneapolis. There, we attempted to gather our collective
responses to the rise of a xenophobic, racist, and white supremacist political moment in the United States, which culminated in the election of the forty-fifth president. Reeling in the wake of the presidential election, we organized a late-breaking AAA session to talk and strategize about how best to support our im/migrant research participants, students, friends, family members, and communities experiencing overt and rhetorical attacks on their safety, health, wellbeing, and very existence. From this initial encounter, we established the Anthropological Action Network for Immigrants and Refugees (AANIR), an informal collective of engaged anthropologists working with immigrant communities. AANIR has continued to meet regularly since our 2016 founding, acting as a space of solidarity, information-sharing, inspiration, and organization. We have shared strategies for creating sanctuary campuses and advocating for policy change; we have offered webinar series; we have organized conference sessions; we have collectively drafted op-eds, policy papers, and position statements together. In the process, we’ve offered and received care, community, and encouragement. In these ways, AANIR itself has served as a space of accompaniment that helps inspire this volume.

We are mindful of the historical specificity and the collegial solidarity that has given rise to and sustained the ethnographic engagements detailed here. At the same time, of course, troubling xenophobic, racist, and anti-immigrant tendencies have deep roots in the United States, just as efforts to build a more welcoming and inclusive society and polity also have longstanding roots in social movements for civil rights and immigrant justice in this country and beyond. Though we represent a variety of training backgrounds and perspectives, as U.S.-based anthropologists our work collectively responds to and addresses present sociopolitical conditions: entrenched inequality, heightened xenophobia, unbridled white nationalism, and the challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, with its disparate impacts on marginalized and impoverished communities. We have invited all volume contributors to reflect on how the current political and historical moment has inspired and shaped our scholarship and relationships as engaged anthropologists working with im/migrant communities.

The central questions guiding this volume are: How do we understand and enact accompaniment with im/migrant communities? What does accompaniment offer our engaged anthropological work—as research modality, as practical engagement, and as a collaborative option for thinking and writing together and with our interlocutors? While we situate our approach to accompaniment historically within related theoretical concepts and methodologies, we do not intend to provide a definitive account or to foreclose avenues for thinking about accompaniment. Indeed, one commonality across the work of the authors in this volume is our willingness to engage with the uncertainties and discomfort that our shifting subjectivities as anthropologists accompanying im/ migrant communities require. We seek to draw forward these tensions, describing how and why our roles may shift from scholar to social worker, observer to friend, witness to advocate. Across the chapters, then—as contributors describe fighting deportations, engaging in social protest, writing reports and editorials, developing immigrant-friendly programs, advocating for inclusive health and social policies, and fostering systems of support for migrants—accompaniment acts as a grounding force, a being-with and standing alongside, a form of care that shifts us away from received ways of doing ethnography into more unsettled but productive spaces of possibility for solidarity and social justice.

Cool Off with Desert River Reading

Posted on July 10, 2024May 14, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

July 10, 2024

Desert rivers weave through arid landscapes, providing oases of resilience and adaptation in some of our harshest environments. Shimmering lifelines, such as the Colorado River and the Gila River, teem with life and serve the communities that depend on them. However, this is only made possible through protective measures that defend against looming threats. Questionable water distribution policies and lower water flows threaten plant and animal habitats, and may reduce water for industrial, agricultural, and residential use. Now more than ever, it is imperative that restoration and preservation efforts are implemented to ensure the desert ecosystem and communities continue to thrive. Cool off this summer with some of our books that feature desert rivers listed below.

Unraveling a complex web of tension, distrust, and political maneuvering, Damming the Gila continues the story of the Gila River Indian Community’s struggle for the restoration of its water rights. This volume chronicles the history of water rights and activities on the Gila River Indian Reservation. Centered on the San Carlos Irrigation Project and Coolidge Dam, it details the history and development of the project, including the Gila Decree and the Winters Doctrine. Embedded in the narrative is the underlying tension between tribal growers on the Gila River Indian Reservation and upstream users. Told in seven chapters, the story underscores the idea that the Gila River Indian Community believed the San Carlos Irrigation Project was first and foremost for their benefit and how the project and the Gila Decree fell short of restoring their water and agricultural economy.

Our rivers are in crisis and the need for river restoration has never been more urgent. Water security and biodiversity indices for all of the world’s major rivers have declined due to pollution, diversions, impoundments, fragmented flows, introduced and invasive species, and many other abuses. Developing successful restoration responses are essential. Renewing Our Rivers addresses this need head on with examples of how to design and implement stream-corridor restoration projects. Based on the experiences of seasoned professionals, Renewing Our Rivers provides stream restoration practitioners the main steps to develop successful and viable stream restoration projects that last. Ecologists, geomorphologists, and hydrologists from dryland regions of Australia, Mexico, and the United States share case studies and key lessons learned for successful restoration and renewal of our most vital resource.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans assumed the land and water resources of the West were endless. Water was as vital to newcomers to Arizona’s Florence and Casa Grande valleys as it had always been to the Pima Indians, who had been successfully growing crops along the Gila River for generations when the white settlers moved in. Diverting the Gila explores the complex web of tension, distrust, and political maneuvering to divide and divert the scarce waters of the Gila River. Residents of Florence, Casa Grande, and the Pima Reservation fought for vital access to water rights. Into this political foray stepped Arizona’s freshman congressman Carl Hayden, who not only united the farming communities but also used Pima water deprivation to the advantage of Florence-Casa Grande and Upper Gila Valley growers. The result was the federal Florence-Casa Grande Project that, as legislated, was intended to benefit Pima growers on the Gila River Indian Reservation first and foremost. As was often the case in the West, well-heeled, nontribal political interests manipulated the laws at the expense of the Indigenous community.

No fewer than forty million people have come to rely on the Colorado River system in modern times—a river system immersed in an unprecedented, unrelenting megadrought for more than two decades. Attempting to navigate this “new normal,” policymakers are in the midst of negotiating new management rules for the river system, a process coinciding with the compact’s centennial that must be completed by 2026. Animated by this remarkable confluence of events, Cornerstone at the Confluence leverages the centennial year to reflect on the compact and broader “Law of the River” to envision the future. It is a volume inviting dialogue about how the Colorado River system’s flows should be apportioned given climate change, what should be done about environmental issues such as ecosystem restoration and biodiversity protection, and how long-standing issues of water justice facing Native American communities should be addressed.

Sarah Hernandez Wins 2024 NAISA First Book Award

Posted on July 3, 2024July 1, 2024 by Cameron Louie

July 3, 2024

We are thrilled to share the news that Sarah Hernandez’s We Are the Stars: Colonizing and Decolonizing the Oceti Sakowin Literary Tradition has been selected for the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association’s (NAISA) 2024 Best First Book Award!

Hernandez’s book recovers the literary record of Oceti Sakowin (historically known to some as the Sioux Nation) women, who served as their tribes’ traditional culture keepers and culture bearers. In so doing, it furthers discussions about settler colonialism, literature, nationalism, and gender.

Read an excerpt from the book where Hernandez makes the case, invoking Native feminist scholars Maile Arvine, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill, that “the United States is founded on the theory and practice of settler colonialism: a continuous and ongoing process of Indigenous erasure…”

This is the latest achievement for a book that has already received significant national recognition: In 2023, Hernandez represented South Dakota at the National Book Festival in Washington, DC.

We Are the Stars is part of the University of Arizona Press’ Critical Issues in Indigenous Studies Series, which anchors intellectual work within an Indigenous framework that reflects Native-centered concerns and objectives.

Congratulations to Sarah on this incredible achievement!

July 1, 2024

Miranda Melcher of New Books Network podcast interviewed Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo, author of Growing Up in the Gutter: Diaspora and Comics. In the interview, Quintana-Vallejo offers many examples of what happens in the gutter, the margins between the story panels in graphic novels and comics. For example, he explains a specific subtext in one author’s illustration style. In The Best We Could Do, author Thi Bui chose a particular color to convey their message:

“In using orange in order to represent that wound, that trauma, that she has to carry as a child into adulthood, the author and illustrator is kind of leveraging something that we might think is decorative in order to convey so much meaning.”

Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo, in Comics and Graphic Novels on New Books Network

Listen the full podcast here.

Quintana-Vallejo is an assistant professor at Rhode Island College. He is the author of Children of Globalization: Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels in Germany, England, and the United States. He studies migration and diasporas in narratives about youth development in the context of globalized and de facto multicultural societies. His essays have appeared in Literary Geographies, Norteamérica, the North Meridian Review, and Chasqui, and in several edited volumes. He grew up in Mexico City.

About Growing Up in the Gutter:

Growing Up in the Gutter offers new understandings of contemporary graphic coming-of-age narratives by looking at the genre’s growth in stories by and for young BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and diasporic readers. Through a careful examination of the genre, Quintana-Vallejo analyzes the complex identity formation of first- and subsequent-generation migrant protagonists in globalized rural and urban environments and dissects the implications that these diasporic formative processes have for a growing and popular genre.

Five Questions with David H. DeJong

Posted on June 26, 2024August 13, 2024 by Cameron Louie

June 26, 2024

We recently had a chance to interview author David H. DeJong about the book, asking about the origin of the project, the lessons we should learn from this history, and what’s next in DeJong’s water chronicles.

What first sparked your interest in the story of the Gila River and the San Carlos Irrigation Project?

I was 16 years old when I first traveled through what was once the “breadbasket” of the Gila River Indian Community. Being from an agricultural background, I was struck by how many acres of land were lying fallow. It was apparent to me that many thousands of acres had once been irrigated but were now lying abandoned. I resolved then that I would seek to answer why so much land on the reservation had gone out of production. I later learned the San Carlos Irrigation Project was intended to restore the agricultural economy of the Community, but as with so many federal promises, it failed to do so. I have now spent over 40 years researching and learning the why of this failure.

This is the third volume in your chronicle of the history of water rights on the Gila River Indian Reservation, spanning nearly 100 years. Did you always plan for this series to have three parts?

Damming the Gila follows Stealing the Gila (2009) and Diverting the Gila (2021). It will be followed by Fighting for the Gila and Restoring the Gila. I always envisioned a two-volume history that would cover the history of Akimel O’otham agriculture through the 1940s. Once I joined the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project in 2001, I realized there was much more to the story than two volumes could contain. After the Gila River series is completed in 2030, I plan to shift my focus to the Pee Posh (Maricopa) and the story of their struggle to secure rights to Salt River water. I also have several federal-Indian policy books in the works.

Damming the Gila shifts focus toward the Coolidge Dam and its failed promise to benefit the Gila River Indian Community. Was it politics, lack of foresight, or something else entirely that made this project flop?

Coolidge Dam and the San Carlos Irrigation Project (SCIP) were hailed in the 1920s and early 1930s as “the savior of the Pima.” Coolidge Dam was the central component of the SCIP as it regulated flows and stored water for future needs. It was also first and foremost for the “benefit of the Pima Indians of the Gila River Indian Reservation.” Ever the master politician, Carl Hayden sold Congress on the SCIP based on the legal and moral claims of the Akimel O’otham, but he then employed a distributive policy to spread the benefits of the irrigation project to include non-Indian growers. These non-tribal growers were politically well-heeled and, as voting constituents, had the ear of Hayden who was not beholden to the Akimel O’otham since they could neither vote prior to 1924, nor exercised much political authority. In the end, it was politics and continued upstream diversions and groundwater pumping that deprived the Community of the benefits of the SCIP.

What lessons should policymakers be taking from this chapter of the Gila River’s history as water becomes an increasingly limited resource in Arizona and the Southwest?

While they had been extraordinary growers prior to upstream diversions, the Akimel O’otham were completely marginalized from the discussions related to the SCIP and the Gila Decree. Pinal County and Arizona political leaders largely ignored the voice of the Akimel O’otham, with the result that there was never any buy-in for the project by the Community since they believed the project and decree deprived them of their rights. Add to this the reality that Akimel O’otham lacked the financial resources to put their water to use—individual tribal growers were assigned uneconomical 10-acre allotments at Gila River and the land could not be mortgaged, combined with the continued theft of their water by Upper Valley growers—left Community growers in a difficult position. The lesson is that policy makers must include a seat at the table of decision making for tribal nations when making decisions that affect all Arizonans.

What are you working on now?

I am currently working on the fourth volume of the Gila River series: Fighting for the Gila. This volume will cover the Community’s legal battles beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1950s and 1960s Indian Claims Commission, the U.S. Court of Claims, and the enforcement of the Gila Decree in federal district court. It will then transition to the Arizona Gila River general stream adjudication. All of these legal engagements culminated in the Arizona Water Settlements Act of 2004. The battle against unlawful diversions and water uses, however, continues today as the Community seeks to enforce the decree and provisions of the water settlement act.

David H. DeJong holds MA and PhD degrees in American Indian policy studies from the University of Arizona. He has published seven books, including Stealing the Gila, as well as dozens of articles about federal Indian policy. DeJong is director of the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project, a construction project funded by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and designed to deliver water—from the Central Arizona Project, the Gila River, and other sources—to the Gila River Indian Reservation.

June 24, 2024

Diné geographer Andrew Curley, author of Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation, discusses “The Colorado River and the Colonial Blindspot” as part of the “Natural History for a World in Crisis” series. This panel discussion, moderated by Beka Economopoulos, is the first in the year-long series produced by the The Natural History Museum. Curley is joined by Teresa Montoya (Diné), Traci Brynne Voyles, and Erika M. Bsumek, to explore the impact of colonial intrusions and challenge the audience into seeing “colonial blindspots” in the water crisis.

“We tend to focus on this issue of climate change, when really there’s never been enough water for settler designs. And each time there’s a new infrastructure built onto the river’s tributaries, it’s satisfying a temporary problem that is quickly overwhelmed by more and more settlers. It’s the nature of settler colonialism in the region.”

Andrew Curley, in The Colorado River and the Colonial Blindspot

Watch or read the transcript of the full video here. This link also includes an additional video: “Rethinking the Water Paradigm with Andrew Curley.”

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.

About Carbon Sovereignty:

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

Excerpt from “Indigenous Health and Justice”

Posted on June 18, 2024May 9, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

June 18, 2024

Colonial oppression, systemic racism, discrimination, and poor access to a wide range of resources detract from Indigenous health and contribute to continuing health inequities and injustices. These factors have led to structural inadequacies that contribute to circular challenges such as chronic underfunding, understaffing, and culturally insensitive health-care provision. Nevertheless, Indigenous Peoples are working actively to end such legacies.

In Indigenous Health and Justice, edited by Karen Jarratt-Snider and Marianne O. Nielsen, contributors demonstrate how Indigenous Peoples, individuals, and communities create their own solutions. Chapters focus on both the challenges created by the legacy of settler colonialism and the solutions, strengths, and resilience of Indigenous Peoples and communities in responding to these challenges. It introduces a range of examples, such as the ways in which communities use traditional knowledge and foodways to address health disparities. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter “Indigenous Peoples’ Involvement in the U.S. Justice System, Trends, Health Impacts, and Health Disparities” below.

To more fully grasp the significance of strides made in recent decades to introduce Indigenous cultural and spiritual practices into correctional facilities, these practices must be understood within the context of colonialism. The Indigenous experience with settler-colonial states through systemic means of oppression is a long one. Countries such as the United States, Canada, and Australia have historically passed and upheld national and state or provincial laws aimed at dismantling Indigenous cultural identities and traditions through religious suppression—instituting bans on practices and rites expressive of Indigenous spirituality, obstructing access to sacred sites, and outlawing possession of ceremonial objects such as peyote and sacred pipes (Irwin 2006).

Attempting to simplify Indigenous religious beliefs and practices for generalizable consumption is a daunting and nearly impossible task. Generally, most Indigenous Peoples around the world view their everyday cultural ways of being and living as being spiritually purposeful and significant. Hence, culture and spirituality (or religious practice) are inextricably connected because one structures the other. Unlike Euro-Western notions of religion, which impose a separation between God and the world we exist in, Indigenous spirituality and religious orientations see a Creator or multiple sacred deities as a part of the world. This difference in the perception of religion and the human relationship to the “holy” is but one aspect of the Othering process employed by Westerners to cast Indigenous Peoples as primitive, ahistorical, unsophisticated, uncivilized, unstable, and savage nonhumans. This was a means to justify colonial tactics of genocide (e.g., subjugation of Indigenous Peoples, atrocious acts of violence, removal from homelands, and cultural assimilation) that were employed in order to lay claim to Indigenous land and natural resources for the establishment of settler-colonial expansion, wealth, and prosperity (Nielsen and Robyn 2019).

Indigenous individuals have only been granted U.S. citizenship within the last century through the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which also conferred the right to vote. After that, it took another half century before all Native citizens were afforded protection of the right to practice their religious, spiritual, and cultural beliefs, with the 1978 passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA). Between 1993 and 2000, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) were passed to increase these protections. Regarding RFRA and RLUIPA, a guidance document produced by the Native American Rights Fund (2016) and intended for Indigenous people in correctional facilities explains, “Both statutes prevent the government from substantially burdening [an inmate’s] religious practice unless it has a compelling reason to do so in [the inmate’s] particular case,” and that prisons may only burden or hinder religious practices if they have “no other, less restrictive alternatives available.” Admittedly, this is a very condensed presentation of some of the historical strides made by the U.S. government to suppress and then protect and preserve Indigenous traditional religious beliefs and practices, but this contextual information is pertinent for understanding the advances made from the 1960s forward.

The 1960s and 1970s marked a social movement in the United States that was pushing for the right of Indigenous individuals who were incarcerated to exercise their Native religious practices. In the early 1960s, Clyde Bellecourt, an Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) man, met a young Anishinaabe spiritual leader named Eddie Benton-Banai when they were both serving time in Minnesota’s Stillwater prison (Reha 2001). Bellecourt and Benton-Banai, known for their founding roles in the American Indian Movement, formed the American Indian Folklore Group while incarcerated, to help incarcerated Indigenous people heal by learning about Native history, epistemologies, culture, and spirituality through pan-Indian frameworks (Tighe 2014). Tighe (2014, 5) describes this effort as a “model for Indian cultural renaissance within prisons.” Bellecourt affirms that ceremonies are an integral component of the healing process that can support individuals involved in the criminal justice system to make positive changes in their lives, and credits how establishing a spiritual base in his own life helped him to overcome his battle with alcoholism (Reha 2001).

With the aid of the Native American Rights Fund, one of the oldest and largest legal organizations committed to defending the legal rights of Indigenous people and nations, Indigenous individuals incarcerated in Nebraska won a federal court consent decree in Wolff v. McDonnell (1974), which allowed them to practice their religious and cultural beliefs in prison. This opened the way in Nebraska for sweat lodges to be conducted, Native clubs and spiritual collectives to be formed, and elders to serve as spiritual advisors and cultural-based counselors inside correctional facilities (Irwin 2006). Irwin (2006, 42) notes that the consent decree “established an important precedent for native prisoners in other states.”

Traction on this issue continued to grow in other parts of the United States during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Incarcerated Indigenous people were increasingly bringing suits against prison administrators for denying their rights to religious freedom. In the Southwest, the Navajo Nation appointed a Navajo spiritual advisor who eventually was conducting ceremonies in nineteen prisons throughout the region (Echo-Hawk 1996). Incarcerated Indigenous women formed a spiritual organization within a Montana state prison in the early 1990s and perceived their unification as threatening to prison staff (Ross 1998). As a way of weakening the close bonds formed through the organization, the women felt staff strategically targeted Indigenous women who were labeled as “troublemakers” and then written up for “trumped-up charges” (Ross 1998, 243) which resulted in their transfer to a maximum-security facility. White women incarcerated in prison interviewed by Ross also noticed the same pattern, identifying it as “prejudiced” practice (265). At that time, Indigenous women made up 25 percent of the prison population while making up 6 percent of the Montana state population. In addition to the institutional discrimination experienced by incarcerated Indigenous women, Ross (278) notes the direct racist remarks about “Indians” and “Indian culture” made by prison staff and incarcerated white individuals to her and incarcerated Indigenous individual. By the time RFRA was passed in 1993, a large number of successful suits were being filed by Indigenous individuals incarcerated in prison, who were protesting infringement of their religious and spiritual needs and advocating for the right to bring traditional tobacco pipe and sweat lodge ceremonies into the prison complex (Irwin 2006).

Octavio Quintanilla wins 2024 Ambroggio Prize for “Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours”

Posted on June 13, 2024June 13, 2024 by maryreynolds

June 13, 2024

The Academy of American Poets has announced that Las Horas Impossibles | The Impossible Hours, written by Octavio Quintanilla and co-translated by Quintanilla and Natalia Treviño, was selected by Norma Cantú as the winner of the 2024 Ambroggio Prize, which is given annually for a book-length poetry manuscript originally written in Spanish and with an English translation. The winners receive $1,000 and publication by the University of Arizona Press, a nationally recognized publisher of emerging and established voices in Latinx and Indigenous literature. Previous winners include Mara Pastor, with translators María José Giménez and Anna Rosenwong; Margarita Pintado Burgos, with translator Alejandra Quintana Arocho; and Elizabeth Torres.

Cantú commented on the collection: “If this were a meal the various courses would delight my senses. With alacrity and wit the poet pokes and jokes at life and the elements that make human existence a conundrum. The inclusion of computer generated design-poems adds to the impact of the volume. The translator more than ably renders the original Spanish poems into an equally moving English, often opting for the unexpected translation.”

Octavio Quintanilla

Octavio Quintanilla is the author of the poetry collections If I Go Missing (Slough Press, 2014) and The Book of Wounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press, 2024). He is the founder and director of the literature and arts festival VersoFrontera; publisher of Alabrava Press; and former poet laureate of San Antonio, Texas. His visual poems Frontextos have been published and exhibited widely. He teaches literature and creative writing at Our Lady of the Lake University.

Born in Mexico, Natalia Treviño is the author of the poetry collection Lavando La Dirty Laundry (Mongrel Empire Press, 2014) and the chapbook VirginX (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Her awards include the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, the Wendy Barker Creative Writing Award, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the Menada Literary Award from Macedonia, and the San Antonio Artist Foundation Literary Prize. She is a professor of English at Northwest Vista College.

The 2025 Ambroggio Prize will be judged by Giannina Braschi and will be open for submissions from June 15, 2024, to September 15, 2024.

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

***

About the Academy of American Poets

Founded in 1934, the Academy of American Poets is a leading champion of poets and poetry with supporters across the United States and beyond. The organization annually awards $1.3+ million to more than two hundred poets at various stages of their careers through its prize program, which includes the Poet Laureate Fellowships. The organization also produces Poets.org, the world’s largest publicly funded website for poets and poetry; established and organizes National Poetry Month each April; publishes the popular Poem-a-Day series and American Poets magazine; provides free resources to K–12 educators, including the award-winning weekly Teach This Poem series; hosts an annual series of poetry readings and special events; and coordinates a national Poetry Coalition that promotes the value poets bring to our culture. To learn more about the Academy of American Poets, including its staff, its Board of Directors, and its Board of Chancellors, visit: https://poets.org.

Five Questions with Elizabeth Villalobos

Posted on June 11, 2024June 4, 2024 by Abby Mogollon

June 11, 2024

Focusing on both Mexico’s northern and southern borders, Border Killers uses Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics and various theories of masculinity to argue that contemporary Mexico is home to a form of necropolitical masculinity that has flourished in the neoliberal era and made the exercise of death both profitable and necessary for the functioning of Mexico’s state-cartel-corporate governance matrix. Today, author Elizabeth Villalobos answers questions about the work:

Your work engages with Mexican cultural production to better understand the violence along Mexico’s borders, both north and south. How did you come to this project?

The northern border of Mexico has always had primacy over the southern border in many ways, and there are many academic studies that have been done on the northern limits of the country as a geographical, political, social, economic, and cultural space. It was important for me to focus my research on this area because I grew up on the northern border, but at the same time, it seemed necessary to include the context of the southern border because of the lack of critical studies that examine the literature, theater, and film of both borders. I’ve always felt close to the south, where my father lives. In fact, this project originated even further south in Argentina, where I did research on human rights in the context of detention centers for the torture and extermination of about thirty thousand people in the last dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. I was able to interview survivors from these concentration camps, and one of them challenged me, saying, “What are you doing here when Mexico has its own killers?” That conversation set me off on the last twenty years of investigation of killers in Mexican cultural production.

You demonstrate how border violence was and is often misrepresented, dismissed, and sensationalized by popular Mexican news media. Therefore, one must turn to creative work to get a fuller understanding of the underlying forces resulting in violence. What are some of the works you discuss?

The book advances a theory of works that I call “interstitial narratives,” many created by artists born in the 1970s. Such narratives investigate the impact of neoliberalism in the Mexican border milieu with a distinctive approach to violence. These works are unlike the famous and much-studied narcocorridos and narcocinema that lionize the violence specialists of narcotrafficking cartels and replicate the iconography of narcoculture. In addition, they vary from la nota roja [blood-soaked journalism] that reproduces gory death ad infinitum in the news and media. Rather, my book argues that interstitial works have different aesthetic and ideological commitments. These works decenter cartels, place violence off stage or off the page, and are characterized by five qualities or topical concerns: refusal; spectrality; the flattening of cultural hierarchies; the failure of the state and its national imaginaries; and mass production in a neoliberal global order.

Some of the most well-known works from the eight cultural narratives that I discuss in my book in prose, theater, and film are the noir detective novel Partitura para mujer muerta by Vicente Alfonso, the play Ánima sola by Alejandro Román, and the documentary film La libertad del diablo by Everardo González.

This study is grounded in Achille Mbembe’s theorization of necropolitics, the idea that states profit by inflicting death on the many, including their own citizens. How are creative works demonstrating the real-world impacts of this idea in the borderlands?

These creative works abstain from graphic displays of violence to instead examine necropolitics and its connections with past forms of oppression. The interstitial narratives discussed in Border Killers tell us about the tragedies of workers in contemporary Mexico’s neoliberalism, in spheres such as maquiladoras, narcotrafficking, human trafficking, criminal gangs, the military, the police, and the sicariato [hired assassins]. While many scholarly works explore the perspectives of victims in Mexico’s cultural production, my book is one of a smaller number that investigate the perspective of the perpetrators, who are revealed to be victimizers and, in a sense, victims as well, trapped within collapsing possibilities for bettering their lives.

Your work underscores the important and sobering contributions of the arts in critiquing and drawing attention to violence and its impact on lives in the borderlands. What do you see as hopeful in this kind of work?

Art that is critical of the impact of neoliberalism in Mexico is devastating, but it is necessary to identify and reflect on the systems of violence that affect daily life in border areas. These works allow us to recognize the humanity of both victims and perpetrators and demystify the idea that assassins are merely monsters. We must face the reality that murderers are human beings who commit terrible acts but also have stories that deserve to be told and are capable of experiencing all the feelings of any other human being. So, this work is hopeful in that it allows us to see art as a weapon that can disarm the official and popularized discourses in the media about murderers, masculinity, and violence in Mexico and its borderlands.

What are you working on now?

At the moment, I’m working on a comparative study of documentary theater and film about life after the implementation of necropolitics in Argentina and Mexico. Writing Border Killers was a reaffirmation for me that one of my main interests in researching violence and human rights is in analyzing the different ways in which people are able to affirm life after being deeply affected by the terrifying conditions of extremely violent regimes. There is an increasing number of creative works in this vein that require wider dissemination and research within and outside of academia.

I’m also working on another project investigating the cultural semiotics of visual images of the transborder U.S.-Mexican space in photography, painting, graphic design, sculpture, and installation works by artists that integrate an interdisciplinary perspective about migration, ecocriticism, gender, and human rights.

***

Elizabeth Villalobos is an assistant professor of Spanish literature at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a scholar of Latin American literature and contemporary cultural production of Mexico and its border regions. She has conducted research on border studies and human rights in Mexico, Argentina, and Germany. Her research focuses on the intersections of gender, neoliberalism, and violence represented in prose, theater, and cinema of Mexico’s northern and southern border regions.

Association of University Presses Gives Design Honor to The University of Arizona Press

Posted on June 7, 2024June 7, 2024 by maryreynolds

June 7, 2024

The Association of University Presses (AUPresses) selected the hard cover version of Rim to River: Looking Into the Heart of Arizona by Tom Zoellner, to be part of the 2024 Book Jacket and Journal Show. Leigh McDonald, Art Director and Book Designer at The University of Arizona Press, designed the cover and the interior of the book. Porter McDonald created the cover illustration and interior illustrations. This book was honored in the category for 2024 Trade Typographic Selections. The full book jacket is pictured above.

The 2024 Book, Jacket and Journal Show will be on display at the AUPresses Annual Meeting in Montreal, June 11-14. The show will then be on tour for the next year, hosted by university presses in the United States and Canada. The University of Arizona Press will host the show; however, the date has not been finalized.

Victor Mingovits, one of the judges, said, “While some books immediately caught our eye and made the short list, others sparked lively discussions. We were particularly drawn to those designs that revealed their brilliance over time, prompting us to reconsider what makes a design truly successful. These unexpected gems left a lasting impression, drawing us back for more as their unique design unfolded with each reading.”

AUPresses advances the essential role of a global community of publishers whose mission is to ensure academic excellence and cultivate knowledge. The Association envisions a world that values the many ways that scholarship enriches societies, institutions, and individuals.

Five Questions with Kelly McDonough

Posted on June 3, 2024May 31, 2024 by Abby Mogollon

June 3, 2024

In Mexico today, the terms “Indigenous” and “science and technology” are rarely paired together. When they are, the latter tend to be framed as unrecoverable or irreparably damaged pre-Hispanic traditions⁠, relics confined to a static past. In Indigenous Science and Technology, Kelly McDonough works against such erroneous and racialized discourses with a focus on Nahua environmental engagements and relationalities, systems of communication, and cultural preservation and revitalization. Attention to these overlooked or obscured knowledges provides a better understanding of Nahua culture, past and present, as well as the entangled local and global histories in which they were—and are—vital actors. Today, we ask five questions of scholar Kelly McDonough:

This is a book about how Nahuas—native⁠ speakers of Nahuatl, the common language of the Aztec Empire and of more than 2.5 million Indigenous people today—have explored, understood, and explained the world around them in pre-invasion, colonial, and contemporary time periods. What started you on this work?

Thanks for asking! The project is a natural extension of my earlier work on Nahua intellectual history – I wanted to continue getting at what Nahua intellectual life was and is. I wanted to keep poking holes in the widely circulating myth that Nahua intellectual life was rich only prior to the Spanish invasion in the sixteenth century when it rapidly deteriorated. I definitely knew that “science” was a topic I wanted to dig into deeper when I was talking (ranting) to a colleague, and I said, “it drives me crazy when people say that Indigenous people do not have science!”

I’ve learned that most times when I say “it drives me crazy that…” (at least related to my work) it is likely an area of research I will enjoy and will feel worthwhile. Related to science, I wanted to draw attention to the many Nahua technological innovations I have seen in the archives and in person to disrupt another erroneous myth about “lack of technology” that still circulates today.

This is a deep dive into Nahua theoretical and practical inquiry related to the environment, as well as the dynamic networks in which Nahuas create, build upon, and share knowledges, practices, tools, and objects to meet social, political, and economic needs. What are some of your approaches to this research?

I took cues from lots of smart people from a variety of disciplines and fields to approach and think about Nahua science and tech. I ended up drawing a lot and creating multimedia diagrams on the walls to try to understand scholarship along with Nahua theories, networks, and layers of needs and interests all together in such a way that I could even attempt to write about them. But most importantly, I have had lengthy, ongoing conversations with Nahua friends and colleagues who are deeply concerned about how Nahua youth are barraged with messaging in mainstream educational settings and general discourses that tells them that only non-Indigenous people are thinkers and inventors.

You included what we called “interludes” between the chapters of short biographical sketches and interviews with contemporary Nahua scientists, artists, historians, and writers, accompanied by their photos. Why was this critical to this work?

The book would have been impossible without these individuals, their families, and communities; they have been wonderful, patient teachers who have guided and encouraged me. For example, Flor Hernández spent a full day showing me how backstrap weaving, from dying of yarns to the dance of the warp and weft is, in her words, physics. Baruc Martínez Díaz took me to work at his chinampa (raised lakebed garden), and talked for hours about all of the relationships among plants, animals, humans, and geographic features that inhabited the chinampas. And I was absolutely struck by how Abraham de la Cruz Martínez talked about his laboratory at work and his laboratory in the corn field. I also wanted to include their words and photographs to hammer on the idea that Nahua brilliance is still in action, not stuck in a static past. The interludes or “interruptions” are also meant to avoid any notion of a lineal, chronological march toward “progress.”

What advice would you offer to up-and-coming scholars embarking on their own projects?

We all have such different temperaments and work styles, so I’ll just say that for me it was time well spent talking to people and reading about workflows and practices related to the craft of writing. I have a tried-and-true system for dealing with everything from naming conventions of files to how I take notes (I subject my poor graduate students to a 5-page description of said system every year). But some people would hate that – it really is about finding what works best for you. It has also been immensely helpful to have a writing partner. I’ve been working with the same person since 2016. We don’t do anything elaborate, we just check in on most days on Slack and share a sentence or two about our plan for our writing session(s) that day. For me, the accountability is good, the articulation of reasonable and measurable writing goals is practical, and the ability to share doubts, irritations, breakthroughs, small victories, and ugly first drafts as they come along indispensable.

What are you working on now?

My next monograph deals with 400 years of Indigenous justice in the town of Cholula in the state of Puebla, Mexico. My team has been digitizing the town’s judicial archive, once thought to have burned in the Mexican Revolution, for five years. Cholula was one of nine “Indian Cities” in colonial Mexico, which meant they had a unique juridical personality and relationship to the king of Spain. This archive gives an unprecedented view of what that mean in day-to-day practice during the colonial period, but also transitions when, for example, Mexico became independent from Spain or during the Porfirian dictatorship at the end of the twentieth century. I’m really interested in how Nahuas interpreted the changing laws, how they influenced the implementation of new ones, and how they used evolving notions of “justice” (or not) to their benefit.

Before jumping into that project, I have two smaller ones right now: one is an oral history project with Nahua women in the diaspora (within Mexico and beyond) and the other is an article that was meant to be a chapter in the book, but I didn’t get to it in time. For now, it is called “Sky Stories:” it is about how Nahuas have explained and related to what is understood to be in or part of the sky – clouds, planets, sun, moon, stars, meteors, ancestors, gods, and so on.

***

Kelly S. McDonough is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Program in Native American and Indigenous Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. She is also the author of The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico.

MALCS Summer Institute 2024

Posted on May 31, 2024June 10, 2024 by Cameron Louie

The University of Arizona Press is proud to be a MALCS 2024 sponsor! We’re offering a special discount on all of our books for MALCS attendees. Use AZMALCS24 on our website or for call-in orders to get 35% off all our books from 6/23/24 to 7/25/24.

In their own words, Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS) “is a volunteer professional organization for self-identified Chicana, Latina, Native American / indígena mujeres and gender non-conforming academics, students, and activists.”

For the last 40 years, MALCS has hosted a summer institute bringing together this vital group to engage “feminist intersectionality, social justice, empowerment, and healing.” For their 41st year, MALCS is in Oaxaca, México, and the theme is “De Aquí y de Allá: Reclaiming Our Indigenous Lineages and Serving Future Generations.” The institute will be held June 24-27, 2024.

Below, read about some of our recent and forthcoming titles in Latinx Studies, Indigenous Studies, Gender & Women’s Studies, Border Studies, and more.

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

Have you ever wanted a writing and research manual that centered Chicanx and Latinx scholarship? Writing that Matters does just that. While it includes a brief history of the roots of the fields of Chicanx literature and history, L Heidenreich and Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz emphasize practice: how to research and write a Chicanx or Latinx history paper; how to research and write a Chicanx or Latinx literature or cultural studies essay; and how to conduct interviews, frame pláticas, and conduct oral histories. It also includes a brief chapter on nomenclature and a grammar guide. Each chapter includes questions for discussion, and all examples from across the subfields are from noted Chicanx and Latinx scholars.

The topic of mothers and mothering transcends all spaces, from popular culture to intellectual thought and critique. In Frontera Madre(hood): Brown Mothers Challenging Oppression and Transborder Violence at the U.S.-Mexico Border, editors Cynthia Bejarano and Maria Cristina Morales collect essays from thirty contributors that bridge both methodological and theoretical frameworks to explore forms of mothering that challenge hegemonic understandings of parenting and traditional notions of Latinx womxnhood. It articulates the collective experiences of Latinx, Black, and Indigenous mothering from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Edited by Norma Elia Cantú, Chicana Portraits: Critical Biographies of Twelve Chicana Writers pairs portraits with critical biographies of twelve key Chicana writers, offering an engaging look at their work, contributions to the field, and major achievements. Arranged chronologically by birth order of the authors, the book can be read cover to cover for a genealogical overview, or scholars and general readers can easily jump in at any point and read about an individual author, regardless of the chronology.

May 29, 2024

Mark Brodie of KJZZ public radio in Phoenix interviewed Stephen J. Pyne, author of Pyrocene Park: A Journey Into the Fire History of Yosemite National Park. Pyne says that the Yosemite fire story is a story of good fire that was lost, but has now been partly restored. He believes that the restoration of good fire should inform fire management on other federal lands.

“It’s not just the ecological deterioration that results when fire is removed. I mean, fire is a broad spectrum ecological catalyst. It does a lot of things. We’re still learning about all the things that it does. But it’s also a case of if you don’t burn it, stuff keeps building up, combustibles accumulate and the fires that you do get will be uncontrollable. So it, you’re removing your choice, your ability to choose what fires you want and what you don’t.”

Listen or read the full interview here.
Stephen Pyne, KJZZ interview

Pyne is a fire historian, urban farmer, and emeritus professor at Arizona State University. He spent fifteen seasons with the North Rim Longshots, a fire crew at Grand Canyon National Park. Out of those seasons emerged a scholarly interest in the history and management of fire and he has written over thirty books. His most recent book is Five Suns: A Fire History of Mexico (2024).

About Pyrocene Park:

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. Renowned fire historian 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.

“Mujeres de Maiz” Editors Featured on Imagine Otherwise podcast

Posted on May 28, 2024May 28, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

May 28, 2024

Imagine Otherwise podcast host Cathy Hannabach interviewed Amber Rose González, Felicia Montes, and Nadia Zepeda, editors of Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento: Spiritual Artivism, Healing Justice, and Feminist Praxis. In the conversation, Amber, Felicia, and Nadia share their journey with the Mujeres de Maiz organization and the collective liberation the group is building. Traversing poetry, performance, zines, healing ceremonies, visual art, autoethnography, and a plethora of other mediums, these scholars demonstrate the power of collaboration and intersectional solidarity. They explore how the Mujeres de Maiz book publishing process builds on their longstanding practices of making publishing more accessible and collaborative, embodying the political and ethical commitments found across their art and activism as well.

And so I think that’s the beauty of Mujeres de Maiz. It allows us to practice the relationships that we want to see. It allows us to live in our full beingness. It allows us to undo some of the harmful ideologies and harmful ways of being that we’ve inherited. I think we’re working toward it by living it and providing opportunities for other people and inviting them into that.
Amber Rose González, Imagine Otherwise podcast

Listen to the full episode here.

About the book:

Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento: Spiritual Artivism, Healing Justice, and Feminist Praxis‘ political-ethical-spiritual commitments, cultural production, and everyday practices are informed by Indigenous and transnational feminist of color artistic, ceremonial, activist, and intellectual legacies. Contributors fuse stories of celebration, love, and spirit-work with an incisive critique of interlocking oppressions, both intimate and structural, encouraging movement toward “a world where many worlds fit.”

The multidisciplinary, intergenerational, and critical-creative nature of the project coupled with the unique subject matter makes the book a must-have for high school and college students, activist-scholars, artists, community organizers, and others invested in social justice and liberation.

Five Questions with Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo

Posted on May 23, 2024 by Abby Mogollon

May 23, 2024

Growing Up in the Gutter: Diaspora & Comics is the first book-length exploration of contemporary graphic coming-of-age narratives written in the context of diasporic and immigrant communities in the United States by and for young, BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and diasporic readers. The book analyzes the complex identity formation of first- and subsequent-generation diasporic protagonists in globalized rural and urban environments and dissects the implications that marginalized formative processes have for the genre in its graphic version. Today, author Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo answers our questions:

What were some of your favorite books growing up?

I’m a 90’s kid, so I loved Harry Potter. It’s atrocious that one needs to follow up that statement with the necessary: but I hate what J.K. has done with her fame to hurt the people I love and my friends. But before all the bigotry went down, my 11-year-old self loved HP. And fiction belongs to the reader anyway. Ron Weasley was my first crush. As a queer, bullied kid, I dreamed of getting a letter and what amounts to an 11-inch, phoenix-feather-cored weapon to bludgeon the world into a kinder place.

Despite how different our worlds were—I grew up in Mexico City—HP did for me what coming-of-age novels have done for many, for centuries. It saved me. It enabled me to escape, to figure out how to grow up, to find my (fictional) people. I grew up with them, alongside them.

I loved the books that explained me to me.

I loved Looking For Alaska because it explained to me why my friend in high school didn’t want to live anymore. I loved Demian because it showed me the world outside and because it ends with the first gay kiss I ever imagined; the idea of boys kissing was unintelligible. I loved Aura because it was so creepy, and it talked directly to me. I loved A Hundred Years of Solitude because it was sweaty and erotic—which blew away my young mind.

I’m so lucky I got to read a lot of different things.

Why do you think the coming-of-age (COA) construction resonates so strongly?

Because we’re all growing up all the time!

There is nobody, big or small, who is not constantly negotiating who they are and what their place in the world is. I agree with Stuart Hall that identity is always a process, always in flux. We know that instinctively about ourselves, whether we meet the flux with resistance, patience, or joy.

We want to see others in flux. We want to know how other people are building themselves, we want to see our struggles mirrored. More than mere pleasure (although infinitely important), seeing how others grow and negotiate what it means to be an adult is necessary. We need these stories like we need to rebel against our parents, like we need to love whom we love, like we need to fight, explore, and try. Coming-of-age stories are for me, the best antidote to despair.

And collectively, we recognize the value of young people finding those admirable and heroic role models. Why else do we insist our kids read To Kill a Mockingbird if we don’t want them to learn compassion from Scout, or The Diary of a Young Girl to learn bravery from Anne? Or, for that matter, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass or Beloved if we don’t want them to fight tooth and nail against injustice?

These stories enable us to ponder who we want to be—individually and collectively!

How do you hope students, scholars, and instructors use this work?

GUITG is a flexible text. The language is welcoming for students without previous knowledge of either the coming-of-age genre or comix. Even if you have never read any theory about either, this book is designed to be accessible and fun.

Yet, if you are already a fan, you’ll find new connections to issues of identity, diaspora, queerness, and immigration that you’ll hopefully find inspiring.

Go to the index or list of works cited to get an idea of the extensive literature on comix produced in the last few years.

I’ve had stimulating conversations with instructors who want to use graphic media to engage in “difficult” conversations with students (about race, class, the gender gap, etc.) but don’t know where to begin. GUITG aims to answer that question by putting theory to work: providing examples of close readings and illustrations of visual analysis.

Use it as a textbook for an upper level seminar. Use individual chapters to explore how comix address gender, performativity, queerness-as-magic, police brutality, diaspora, and national identity.

I truly hope scholars use it, abuse it, and destroy it. It should make Bildungsroman scholars (particularly those who think it’s an exclusively European genre) very uncomfortable.

What graphic COA narratives are you looking forward to reading next?

I’m currently teaching an undergrad graphic COA narratives class! We’re reading Persepolis, Genderqueer, The Low Low Woods, and American Born Chinese through the lens of growing up and negotiating adulthood. Re-reading these with students is reading them for the first time, finding new connections because of their particular curiosities.

Personally, I am very curious about comix and graphic media produced and distributed in places that have not traditionally been associated with the medium. In other words, I really want to know what is going on with comix in non-American and non-Japanese markets. I am not sure yet where this will take me.

What is your next writing project?

I am working on an edited volume titled The Post-Bildungsroman: Coming of Age at the Margins to fully dismantle the notion that the genre should be European or a project of a white, middle-class, able-bodied, heteronormative Enlightenment. I want to open the genre to study underrepresented and previously non-canonical voices that either engage with the likes of Charles Dickens and James Joyce or who completely disregard them. I hope this will be a launching point for studies about graphic media, videogames, manga, and other productions that challenge preconceived notions of the Bildungsroman.

Additionally, I am working on personal essays. To provide an example of what I’m thinking, I am very curious about how we can engage with young heterosexual men to prevent them from sympathizing with alt-right and/or neo-fascist ideologies and mindlessly consuming their podcasts, books, and shows.

***
Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo (@ric_writes_books) is an assistant professor at Rhode Island College. He is the author of Children of Globalization: Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels in Germany, England, and the United States. He studies migration and diasporas in narratives about youth development in the context of globalized and de facto multicultural societies. His essays have appeared in Literary Geographies, Norteamérica, the North Meridian Review, and Chasqui, and in several edited volumes. He grew up in Mexico City.

Space Science Collection Now Open Access

Posted on May 15, 2024May 15, 2024 by Abby Mogollon

May 15, 2024

The University of Arizona Press is thrilled to offer a new collection on our open access (OA) platform Open Arizona, featuring fourteen works from The University of Arizona Space Science Series.

The Space Science collection makes available again the work of leaders in their fields, including Richard P. Binzel, Tom Gehrels, Mildred Shapley Matthews, and many others. These works provide an important archive of a pivotal time in several emerging fields connected to astronomy and the space sciences. The books were originally published between 1976 and 2000.

Since 1974, the University of Arizona Press has published exceptional works in the field of space science. The volumes in The University of Arizona Space Science Series bring together the world’s top experts, who lay out their foundational research on current understandings, while also building frameworks for the highest-priority questions for the future. Since 2000, books in the Space Science Series have been produced in collaboration with the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas.

About each title:

Asteroids
Originally published in 1979, this is a comprehensive source and textbook on asteroids by 70 authors covering exploration, composition, evolution, and the interrelations with other small solar system bodies. It also includes an extensive file of all known asteroid parameters including magnitudes, colors, proper elements and compositional types.

Asteroids II
This sourcebook brings together our knowledge about asteroids based on a gather during the week of March 8-11, 1988 with more than 160 scientists from 14 countries who gathered in Tucson for the Asteroids II conference. Asteroids II offered a fresh treatment intended to stand on its own as a complete description of the understanding of the field at the time. It was first published in December 1989. The work showcases a large international collaboration, a sign of an active and growing discipline.

Jupiter
When Jupiter was first published in August, 1976, editor T. Gehrels wrote, “we may never do a better book.” Summarizing the research and data following the first flyby of Jupiter in December 1973, this work brings together the knowledge of the best scientists in the fields at the time of it’s publication. The work covers the origin of Jupiter, origin and structure of its satellites, models of Jupiter, comparison of those models, and much more.

Meteorites and the Early Solar System
First published in November 1988, this work provided a coherent narrative about the known understandings of meteorites and the early solar system. From the original publication, “Although the Earth was formed, together with the other planets, at the birth of the solar system, geological activity has since erased all but a hint of the processes that accompanied its formation. If we wish to explore the processes that occurred in the earliest solar system, and the nature of the environment in which they took place, we must turn to the record contained in more primitive material. This book provides a synthesis of what has been learned so far about the earliest stages of solar system history through the study of meteorites, and what, given our current level of understanding, remains to be learned.”

Planetary Rings
At the time of its publication, the editors wrote, “it is our hope that this book will become out-of-date quickly, that new observations and theoretical connections will continue to revolutionize our knowledge of planetary rings.” Published in 1985, Planetary Rings brought together scientists from a variety of disciplines to the study of planetary rings to provide a textbook for graduate students and researchers in related fields. It introduced newcomers to the subject and addressed issues at the forefront of ring research at the time.

Planetary Satellites
Published in 1977, this source book on natural satellites brings together thirty-four distinguished contributors from various fields of satellite astronomy to offer a thorough examination of Orbits and Dynamical Evolution.

Protostars and Planets
Originally published in 1979, at the time of it’s publication this work was a unique source book on star formation and the origin of planetary systems from some 35 distinguished authors. Topics include the formation of stars from the cloudy to the stellar to the planetary state. Special emphasis on stars believed capable of producing planets. This foundational work sought to define a new discipline and set the course for the University of Arizona Space Science series.

Protostars and Planets II
Based on meetings held in Tucson, Arizona in 1984, this volume brought up-to-date recent advances and research on the cosmogony of stars and planets. This book presents the written thoughts of the principle speakers (and their colleagues) from the 1984 meeting. It continues work started in 1978 to investigate the problems of star formation and the formation of the solar system.

Protostars and Planets III
Previous Space Science Series volumes Protostars and Planets (1978) and Protostars and Planets II (1985) were among the most timely offerings of this illustrious collection of technical works. Protostars and Planets III continues to address fundamental questions concerning the formation of stars and planetary systems in general and of our solar system in particular. Drawing from advances in observational, experimental, and theoretical research, it summarizes our understanding of these processes and addresses major open questions and research issues. Among the more notable subjects covered in the more than three dozen chapters are the collapse of clouds and the formation and evolution of stars and disks; nucleosynthesis and star formation; the occurrence and properties of disks around young stars; T Tauri stars and their accretion disks; gaseous accretion and the formation of the giant planets; comets and the origin of the Solar-System; and the long-term dynamical evolution and stability of the solar system.

Protostars and Planets IV
This title, out of print in 2008, is now available open access. Both a textbook and a status report for every facet of research into the formation of stars and planets, Protostars and Planets IV brings together 167 authors who report on the most significant advances in the field since the publication of the previous volume in 1993. Protostars and Planets IV reflects improvements in observational techniques and the availability of new facilities such as the Infrared Space Observatory, the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope, and the 10-m Keck telescopes. It include chapters describing the discoveries of extrasolar planets, brown dwarfs, and Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt objects, and the first to include high-resolution optical and near-infrared images of protoplanetary disks.

Resources of Near-Earth Space
Originally published in 1993, this work is available again. From the original publication,”A base on the Moon, an expedition to Mars. . . . Some time in the near future, for scientific or cultural reasons, humanity will likely decide to pursue one of these fantastic ventures in space. How can we increase the scope and reduce the cost of these ambitious activities? The parts of the solar system that are most accessible from Earth—the Moon, the near-Earth asteroids, Mars and its moons—are rich in materials of great potential value to humanity. Resources of Near-Earth Space explores the possibilities both of utilizing these materials to produce propellants, structural metals, refractories, life-support fluids, and other materials on site to reduce the costs of space exploration, and of providing a source of materials and energy for our own planet that would not be environmentally destructive to Earth.”

Satellites of Jupiter
Originally published in 1982, here is the description from the original publication: “The findings of Voyager have brought Jupiter’s moons out from the shadows. Now as much of interest to geologists as to astronomers, these satellites are brought under closer scrutiny by more than 50 international authorities in this volume. Included is research on thermal evolution, surface composition, cratering time scales, and other subjects; but also key chapters focusing on the satellite Io’s volcanic eruptions, thermodynamics, phase composition and more. These 24 contributions constitute a reference that will stand as the decade’s definitive work on Jupiter’s satellites and a springboard to further hypotheses.”

Saturn
Originally published in 1984, here is the description from the original publication: “The Saturn system is the most complex in the solar system, and this book is to summarize it all: the planet, rings, satellites, the magnetospheres, and the interaction with the interplanetary medium. The effective date of the material is approximately November 1983.”

The Galaxy and the Solar System
Originally published in 1986, this work came out of a conference held in Tucson, Arizona in January 1985 which explored the influence of the Galaxy on the solar system. The meeting was the first get-together of the galactic and solar system scientific communities. At the time, the conversations covered new and sometimes controversial topics. This work presented the latest research and stimulated new research and ideas.

Author Mike Anastario on “Agents of Change” Podcast

Posted on May 13, 2024May 6, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

May 13, 2024

The Agents of Change in Environmental Justice podcast interviewed Mike Anastario, co-author of Kneeling Before Corn: Recuperating More-than-Human Intimacies on the Salvadoran Milpa. The book’s co-authors are Elena Salamanca and Elizabeth Hawkins. Anastario talks about their ethnographic research with corn farmers in El Salvador and how this evolved from focusing on the relationship between plants and people, to the impact of agrichemicals on the environment and human health. Listen to the podcast on Environmental Health News.

About the book:

Kneeling Before Corn focuses on the intimate relations that develop between plants and humans in the milpas of the northern rural region of El Salvador. It explores the ways in which more-than-human intimacies travel away from and return to the milpa through human networks. Collective and multivocal, this work reflects independent lines of investigation and multiple conversations between co-authors—all of whom have lived in El Salvador for extended periods of time. Throughout the six chapters, the co-authors invite readers to consider more-than-human intimacies by rethinking, experimenting with, and developing new ways of documenting, analyzing, and knowing the intimacies that form between humans and the plants that they cultivate, conserve, long for, and eat. This book offers an innovative account of rural El Salvador in the twenty-first century.

New OA Titles: The Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition

Posted on May 8, 2024May 6, 2024 by Abby Mogollon

May 8, 2024

The University of Arizona Press is thrilled to feature a new collection on our open access platform Open Arizona, featuring new and previously published works on the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition.

In the fall of 1886, Boston philanthropist Mary Tileston Hemenway sponsored an archaeological expedition to the American Southwest. Directed by anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing, the Hemenway Expedition sought to trace the ancestors of the Zuñis with an eye toward establishing a museum for the study of American Indians. In the third year of fieldwork, Hemenway’s overseeing board fired Cushing based on doubts concerning his physical health and mental stability, and much of the expedition’s work went unpublished. Today, however, it is recognized as a critical base for research for southwestern archaeology.

The volumes in this collection examine the expedition through the diaries and writings of those who participated. These books are part of the Southwest Center Series, an ongoing partnership between the University of Arizona Press and the Southwest Center, which is a research unit of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences of the University of Arizona.

The titles in this new featured collection are available for online reading or downloading from Open Arizona, the press’s OA portal. Learn more about each title:

On a Trail of Southwest Discovery
Edited by Curtis M. Hinsley and David R. Wilcox, print publication April 2024
This final volume examines the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition, directed by Frank Hamilton Cushing, through the diaries of two participants who fell in love on the expedition: the field secretary, Fred Hodge—who became a major figure in early twentieth-century anthropology—and the expedition artist, Margaret Magill. Divided into three parts, the book’s first two sections chronicle the field operations of the expedition, while the third part describes the anthropological career of Hodge after the end of the expedition.

The Lost Itinerary of Frank Hamilton Cushing
Edited by Curtis M. Hinsley and David R. Wilcox, print publication May 2002
This second installment of a multivolume work on the Hemenway Expedition focuses on a report written by Cushing—at the request of the expedition’s board of directors—to serve as vindication for the expedition, the worst personal and professional failure of his life. Reconstructed between 1891 and 1893 by Cushing from field notes, diaries, jottings, and memories, it provides an account of the origins and early months of the expedition. Hidden in several archives for a century, the Itinerary is assembled and presented here for the first time.

The Southwest in the American Imagination
Edited by Curtis M. Hinsley and David R. Wilcox, print publication May 1996
This work is the first installment of this multivolume work, which 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.

***
About the authors
Curtis M. Hinsley is Regents’ Professor Emeritus of history at Northern Arizona University. He has written widely on American cultural history and the history of American anthropology.

David R. Wilcox was a senior research archaeologist and special assistant to the deputy director at the Museum of Northern Arizona.

Stephen Pyne Warns about the Pyrocene in Scientific American

Posted on May 6, 2024May 30, 2024 by maryreynolds

May 6, 2024

Stephen J. Pyne explains our present and future in “We Are Living in the Pyrocene—At Our Peril,” in the May 2024 issue of Scientific American.

Pyne reviews three cycles of fire on the Earth. “First fire” is nature’s fire, where for millions of years, lightning was the overwhelming source of ignition. By the 1880s in the United States, humans were responsible for the vast majority of burning. Indigenous people used fire for hunting, foraging, and general land maintenance. As Pyne explains, “Newcomers, too, had a fire heritage that they hauled across the Atlantic, one embedded in agriculture and pastoralism.” These human-handled fires are the “second fire,” used to make a landscape more inhabitable for people. By the end of the 19th century, the industrial revolution and the transition to combustion fire to power machinery marked “third fire.” Third fire burns fossil fuel and dominates Earth today. At the same time, humans tried to control “first fire,” wildland fires caused by lightning strikes. But, Pyne argues, “We have too little good fire. Restoring fire is tricky.”

Pyne writes in Scientific American:

Today we live in a fire age in which ancient prophecies of worlds destroyed and renewed by fire have become contemporary realities, even for people living in modern cities. In the summer of 2023 millions of residents of New York City and other metropolises saw dark-orange daytime skies thick with smoke palls from Canadian wildfires— and breathed in the effluent. Mythology has morphed into ecology.

Read the complete article here.

Pyne is a fire historian, urban farmer, and emeritus professor at Arizona State University. He spent fifteen seasons with the North Rim Longshots, a fire crew at Grand Canyon National Park. Out of those seasons emerged a scholarly interest in the history and management of fire and he has written over thirty books. His two most recent books are Five Suns: A Fire History of Mexico (2024) and Pyrocene Park (2023).

About Five Suns: A Fire History of Mexico:

A climate defined by wet and dry seasons, a mostly mountainous terrain, a biota prone to disturbances, a human geography characterized by a diversity of peoples all of whom rely on burning in one form or another: Mexico has ideal circumstances for fire, and those fires provide a unique perspective on its complex history. Narrating Mexico’s evolution of fire through five eras, Pyne describes the pre-human, pre-Hispanic, colonial, industrializing (1880–1980), and contemporary (1980–2015) fire biography of this diverse and dynamic country.

About Pyrocene Park:

May 2, 2024

Last week was the 2024 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies conference in San Francisco. Thank you to the authors, editors, contributors, and new friends who spent time at our booth. Check out the photos and feel the vibe.

If you weren’t able to visit us at the conference, there’s still time to order the books we had on display. Get 35% off with discount code AZNACCS24 at checkout until 5/25/24.

Thanks to everyone who came by to say hello, browse books, and talk with us at the conference!

Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento panel features editors Amber Rose González, Felicia ‘Fe’ Montes, Nadia Zepeda, and several contributors to the book.

Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz, co-author with L Heidenreich of Writing That Matters, shows off her new copies of Pasadena Before the Roses and La Plonqui.

Mary Reynolds, publicity manager at the University of Arizona Press, joins authors Michelle Téllez and Rafael Martínez. Michelle holds her book, Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas. Rafael holds flyer for our BorderVisions series; his book Illegalized will be the first in this series in October 2024!

Left photo: Mexican American Studies represent! with associate professor Michelle Téllez and program coordinator Lucia Echeverria Madera. Right photo: Authors Rita Urquijo-Ruiz and Yvette Saavedra sign books for each other.

L Heidenreich and Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz prepare to sign Writing That Matters: A Handbook for Chicanx and Latinx Studies.

La Plonqui fans flank editor Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez.

Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento editors and a future mujer de maiz.

Authors and editors signing books and one dog named Quilla, who wishes she could read all of our books!

Five Questions with Stephen J. Pyne about ‘Five Suns’

Posted on April 29, 2024April 29, 2024 by Abby Mogollon

April 29, 2024

Narrating Mexico’s evolution of fire through five eras—pre-human, Indigenous, colonial, industrializing (1880–1980), and contemporary (1980–2015)—Stephen J. Pyne’s newest work Five Suns offers a comprehensive fire history of Mexico. Today, the author answers five questions about this work.

What do the five suns of the title stand for?
Every 52 years the Aztecs celebrated the ceremony of the New Fire to ensure that a new sun would arrive to replace the extinction of the old. All fires everywhere would be extinguished, and at midnight a new fire would be kindled on a sacrificial victim atop the Cerro de Estrella, then distributed throughout the countryside. In Aztec history, five New Fires had birthed five new suns. I use the ceremony to organize the five eras of Mexican fire history, each of which had a characteristic fire that diffused throughout the land.

Almost everywhere in Mexico fire is possible, and most everywhere inevitable. What makes Mexico so combustible?
Mexico has plenty to burn—the annual cycle of wet and dry seasons guarantees that stuff can grow and then be readied to combust. It has ample ignition—lightning is abundant, and humans use fire deliberately and accidentally with hardly a pause. All this makes fire a constant in most of the country, though the regimes of burning change with land use, the ebb and flow of climate, the coming and going of species and peoples, and the reorganizations of the countryside. Over the last century, Mexico has used its vast reservoirs of oil to convert a significant fraction of that burning into the combustion of fossil fuels, with both national and global consequences.

Why do you write that Mexico has become one of the top ten “firepowers” in the world?
Since colonial times, officials distrusted and condemned burning, even though most Mexican agriculture, which was the basis for the bulk of Mexican societies, required fire at some point, and though the authorities were mostly incapable of ending the fires they loathed and criminalized. In the 1980s, links developed to the United States fire community that helped to revolutionize Mexico’s capacity to manage fire, to study it scientifically, and to upgrade policies to embrace a more ecological and holistic conception of fire’s management. By 2020 Mexico’s capabilities ranked it among the ten most robust nations on the planet for engaging with fire.

What makes Mexico’s approach to fire management so unique?
Mexico’s history is not unique. Its colonial experience was pretty much typical throughout the European imperium. By the 1970s, however, led by the U.S. and Australia, a vision of fire exclusion—which was a bad idea and never successfully implemented for long—was replaced by a conception of integrated fire management, which sought to move fire protection beyond emergency responses and to promote fire’s active management, not least through the use of deliberate burning. Mexico’s long heritage of fire and the persistence of traditional uses, once they were recognized as potentially good practices, has given it a strength that countries without that kind of inheritance lack. Instead of dragging Mexico backwards, much of its traditional fire lore could help it leap into the future.

What are you working on now?
Pyrocene Park, published by the University of Arizona Press in 2023, narrated a fire history of Yosemite National Park, which can be imagined as a story of good fire lost and partially restored. I wanted a complementary book that would look at the problems with bad fire, that is, trying to manage damaging fires with very little environmental or social space to maneuver. The Tonto National Forest—two of whose signature peaks I can see outside my window—offers a marvelous study in the complexity of contemporary fire programs. I’m using the 2021 Telegraph fire as an organizing device.
***

Stephen J. Pyne is a fire historian, urban farmer, and emeritus professor at Arizona State University. He spent 15 seasons with the North Rim Longshots, a fire crew at Grand Canyon National Park. Out of those seasons emerged a scholarly interest in the history and management of fire, with major surveys for America, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Europe (including Russia), and the Earth. From that career, Pyne has developed the notion of a Pyrocene, a human-driven fire age.

April 26, 2024

Last week was the 2024 Society for American Archaeology conference in New Orleans, Louisiana! We want to thank the many authors, editors, contributors, and new friends who spent time at our booth. Check out the photos below to get a glimpse of this wonderful gathering.

If you weren’t able to visit us at the conference, there’s still time to order the books we had on display. Get 35% off with discount code AZSAA24 at checkout until 5/19/24.

Our booth in the exhibit hall at the New Orleans Marriott Hotel, located just outside the French Quarter.

Senior Editor Allyson Carter with Nancy Parezo (A Marriage Out West) and Shelby Tisdale (No Place for a Lady)

Diane Z. Chase, Adrian S.Z. Chase, and Arlen F. Chase, editors of Ancient Mesoamerican Population History

Craig N. Cipolla, editor of Foreign Objects

Samuel Duwe, author of Tewa Worlds, beside his son, the youngest conference attendee at SAA!

Michael E. Whalen, co-editor of Discovering Paquimé

Michael R. Waters, author of Principles of Geoarchaeology

Thomas H. Guderjan, co-editor of Construction of Maya Space

Lee Panich, author of Narratives of Persistence

Donna M. Glowacki, author of Living and Leaving

Thanks to everyone who came by to say hello, browse books, and talk with us at the conference!

Writing Westward Podcast Interviews Andrew Curley

Posted on April 25, 2024April 15, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

April 25, 2024

Writing Westward podcast host, Brenden W. Rensink, interviewed Andrew Curley, author of Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation. Curley is a member of the Navajo Nation and an assistant professor in the School of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of Arizona.

During the interview, Curley said:

If we think about coal as not just an existential environmental question, but as a commodity that’s produced, what do we find through that analytical entry point? That’s where we find the consumers of this, the utilities and their constituents–ratepayers or state corporate commissions–all those entities and people who structure and limit what is possible, even in terms of energy production for tribes.

Listen to the full interview here.

About the book:

For almost fifty years, coal dominated the Navajo economy. But in 2019 one of the Navajo Nation’s largest coal plants closed.

John P. Schaefer to Bring “Desert Jewels” to Downtown Tucson

Posted on April 23, 2024April 24, 2024 by maryreynolds

April 23, 2024

The Southern Arizona Heritage & Visitor Center will host renowned Tucson photographer, author, and University of Arizona President Emeritus John P. Schaefer for a book signing. He will sign his book, Desert Jewels: Cactus Flowers of the Southwest and Mexico on May 14, at 11 a.m., at the Visitor Center in the Historic Pima County Courthouse, 115 N Church Ave., in downtown Tucson.

Cactus flowers are jewels of the desert—they add brilliant pops of color to our arid surroundings. In Desert Jewels, photographer 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.

These stunning photographs allow us to appreciate the spectacular range of color and form cactus flowers have to offer. The book offers a glimpse into Schaefer’s process for capturing these elusive desert gems. His beautiful photographs were featured as a book of stamps issued by the U.S. Postal Service.

About the author
John P. Schaefer had an active twenty-one-year career in teaching and research at the University of Arizona. A conservationist and avid birdwatcher, he helped organize the Tucson Audubon Society and founded the Nature Conservancy in Arizona. In addition to his academic and conservation work, Dr. Schaefer is a skilled photographer and author of several books on photography, including A Desert Illuminated: Cactus Flowers of the Sonoran Desert. He and Ansel Adams founded the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in 1975.

April 22, 2024

We had a great time at the 2024 Latinx Studies Association’s Annual Meeting in Tempe, Arizona, last week. Sincerest thanks to everyone who visited our table!

If you weren’t able to visit us at the bookfair, there’s still time to order the books we had on display. Get 35% off with discount code AZLSA24 at checkout until 5/18/24.

Check out the photos of the event below!

Co-editors Jesús Rosales and Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez with their work La Plonqui: The Literary Life and Work of Margarita Cota-Cárdenas, along with forthcoming author Rafael A Martínez, author of Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States.

Author Michelle Téllez with her books Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas
Autonomy in the Spaces of Neoliberal Neglect and The Chicana Motherwork Anthology.

Co-editors Natalia Deeb-Sossa and Jennifer Bickham Mendez with their book Latinx Belonging: Community Building and Resilience in the United States.

Co-editors Nadia Zepeda and Amber Rose González sign copies of their book Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento: Spiritual Artivism, Healing Justice, and Feminist Praxis.

Lisa Magaña, author of Empowered!: Latinos Transforming Arizona Politics, and Editor-in-Chief Kristen Buckles

Author and series editor Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez and Editor-in-Chief Kristen Buckles discuss the new series BorderVisions during a panel on publishing.

2024 NACCS Conference: Signings, Discounts, and New Books

Posted on April 22, 2024April 19, 2024 by Cameron Louie

April 22, 2024

We are thrilled to be attending the 2024 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Conference in San Francisco, California this week! From April 24 to 27, find our table at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square to purchase books and meet our authors in-person.

We’re also thrilled to have a number of University of Arizona Press authors signing books at our table this year! Take a look at the schedule below to find out where and when you can meet them and get your books signed. You can also meet Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez and Yvette J. Saavedra, the editors of our BorderVisions series, on Thursday, 4/25 from 3:00-3:30 PM.

Finally, we’ll be selling a curated selection of our new, featured, and popular Chicana/o/x Studies and Latina/o/x Studies titles at a special conference discount of 35%. If you can’t attend this year, or if you need an extra copy of a book you discover at our table, we’ve got you covered: enter AZNACCS24 at checkout on our website for 35% off all titles through 5/25/24.

Book Signing Schedule

Thursday, April 25

10:30-11:30 AM: Michelle Téllez, author of Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas

1:00-2:00 PM: L Heidenreich and Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz, authors of Writing that Matters

2:00-3:00 PM: Amber Rose González, Felicia ‘Fe’ Montes, and Nadia Zepeda, editors of Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento: Spiritual Artivism, Healing Justice, and Feminist Praxis

Friday, April 26

9:30-10:30 AM: Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, co-editor of La Plonqui: The Literary Life and Work of Margarita Cota-Cárdenas

New & Featured Chicano/a/x and Latina/o/x Studies Titles

Founded in 1997, Mujeres de Maiz (MdM) is an Indigenous Xicana–led spiritual artivist organization and movement by and for women and feminists of color. Chronicling its quarter-century-long herstory, Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento weaves together diverse stories with attention to their larger sociopolitical contexts. The book crosses conventional genre boundaries through the inclusion of poetry, visual art, testimonios, and essays. The multidisciplinary, intergenerational, and critical-creative nature of the project coupled with the unique subject matter makes the book a must-have for high school and college students, activist-scholars, artists, community organizers, and others invested in social justice and liberation.

Growing Up in the Gutter offers new understandings of contemporary graphic coming-of-age narratives by looking at the genre’s growth in stories by and for young BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and diasporic readers. Through a careful examination of the genre, Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo analyzes the complex identity formation of first- and subsequent-generation migrant protagonists in globalized rural and urban environments and dissects the implications that these diasporic formative processes have for a growing and popular genre.

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

In Indigenous Science and Technology:
Nahuas and the World Around Them, author Kelly S. McDonough addresses Nahua understanding of plants and animals, medicine and ways of healing, water and water control, alphabetic writing, and cartography. Interludes between the chapters offer short biographical sketches and interviews with contemporary Nahua scientists, artists, historians, and writers, accompanied by their photos. The book also includes more than twenty full-color images from sources including the Florentine Codex, a sixteenth-century collaboration between Indigenous and Spanish scholars considered the most comprehensive extant source on the pre-Hispanic and early colonial Aztec (Mexica) world.

Featured Series

BorderVisions engages the U.S.-Mexico borderlands’ dynamic histories and cultures and expands our understanding of the borderlands beyond a site of geopolitical inquiry. The series conceptualizes borderlands as both a place and a methodology and addresses the constraints of traditional fields, challenging authors to think creatively and critically about the expansive frameworks and possibilities of borderlands studies.

The Feminist Wire Books: Connecting Feminisms, Race, and Social Justice is a new series from The Feminist Wire (TFW) and the University of Arizona Press that presents a cultural bridge between the digital and printing worlds. These timely, critical books will contribute to feminist scholarship, pedagogy, and praxis in the twenty-first century.

Latinx Pop Culture is a new series that aims to shed light on all aspects of Latinx cultural production and consumption as well as the Latinx presence globally in popular cultural phenomena in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

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

Arizona Crossroads explores the history of peoples and cultures, events and struggles, ideas and practices in the place we know today as Arizona.

Are you an author or editor? Do you have a project that would be a great fit for The University of Arizona Press? For questions or to submit a proposal to any of these series, please contact Editor-In-Chief Kristen Buckles at KBuckles@uapress.arizona.edu.

Excerpt from “Restoring Relations Through Stories”

Posted on April 19, 2024May 6, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

April 19, 2024

This insightful volume delves into land-based Diné and Dene imaginaries as embodied in stories—oral, literary, and visual. Like the dynamism and kinetic facets of hózhǫ́,* Restoring Relations Through Stories takes us through many landscapes, places, and sites. Renae Watchman introduces the book with an overview of stories that bring Tsé Bitʼaʼí, or Shiprock Peak, the sentinel located in what is currently the state of New Mexico, to life. The book then introduces the dynamic field of Indigenous film through a close analysis of two distinct Diné-directed feature-length films, and ends by introducing Dene literatures.

While the Diné (those from the four sacred mountains in Dinétah in the southwestern United States) are not now politically and economically cohesive with the Dene (who are in Denendeh in Canada), they are ancestral and linguistic relatives. In this book, Watchman turns to literary and visual texts to explore how relations are restored through stories, showing how literary linkages from land-based stories affirm Diné and Dene kinship. She explores the power of story to forge ancestral and kinship ties between the Diné and Dene across time and space through re-storying of relations. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

Per Diné protocol, I open with a decolonial Diné approach, “kodóó hózhǫ́ dooleeł,” translated as “it begins in beauty” or “in beauty it begins.” Situated in northwest New Mexico, within the four sacred mountains, Tsé Bit’a’í means “Winged Rock,” “Rock with Wings,” or “Wings of Rock,” but is called Shiprock Peak (or just Shiprock). Tsé Bit’a’í is located on the outskirts of a reservation town formerly known in Diné bizaad (the Navajo language) as Naat’áanii Nééz (“tall leader”), but it is now called Shiprock too. The town is a flourishing reservation metropolis on the northern edge of the great Diné Nation, which spans the states of Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. Locals are primarily Diné. Historian Jennifer Nez Denetdale explains, “We call ourselves the Diné or The People. We also name ourselves Náhookah Diné (Earth Surface People) and Bilá’ ashdla’ (FiveFingered Ones).” Shiprock (the town) prides itself as the “Naashjizhii’ Capital of the World.” Naashjizhii’ is dried steamed corn. This designation of Diné culinary pride is featured on the cover of every issue of the annually published Shiprock Magazine, edited by Eugene B. Joe. The magazine is organized by the Shiprock Historical Society (est. 2010), whose aim is to preserve “the cultural significance of the town, the annual Northern Navajo fair and the historical growth of the community.”

Existence, presence, being, and places are reliant on names, but whose version of a place-name, whose toponym, matters? Shiprock is an English name that eclipses two distinct Navajo names: one a landmark, Tsé Bit’a’í; and the other a nearby reservation community, Naat’áanii Nééz. In N. Scott Momaday’s The Names: A Memoir (1976), he makes a grave error. He refers to “Shiprock, which is called in Navajo Naat’aaniineez [sic] (literally ‘tall chief’; the town takes its name from the great monolith that stands nearby in an arid reach of the San Juan Basin). The name Shiprock, like other Anglicizations in this region, seems incongruous enough, but from certain points of view—and from the air, especially—the massive rock Naat’aaniineez resembles very closely a ship at sea.” The tendency for settlers to claim and name lands that they are unfamiliar with is not surprising; however, Momaday lived in Shiprock from 1936 to 1943. That he would retell a settler’s account of the anglicization of Tsé Bit’a’í is surprising. This demonstrates the prominence of settler narratives eclipsing Indigenous ones. Furthermore, Momaday misunderstands the meaning of Naat’áanii Nééz, which does not literally mean “tall chief.” It literally means “tall leader” or “tall one who speaks.” In the context of Shiprock, the town’s name meant “tall boss,” to describe the height of William Taylor Shelton (1869–1944), who in 1903 was assigned as superintendent for the San Juan Indian Agency by “President Theodore Roosevelt to go to New Mexico and establish the Shiprock Reservation for the Navaho [sic].” Momaday also attributes the wrong Navajo name to the pinnacle and does not acknowledge the Diné name Tsé Bit’a’í. Even more troubling is that he completely ignores the traditional Diné stories about Tsé Bit’a’í and privileges an “incongruous” colonial version. In 1860, prior to the Navajo Long Walk to Fort Sumner, Captain J. F. McComb called Tsé Bit’a’í “The Needle.” The Needle was replaced by the English name Ship Rock (two words) in 1870 because non-Navajo settlers believed that it resembled a nineteenth-century “full-rigged sailing schooner.” This renaming reflects an unimaginative and nonsensical nautical nomenclature that further stripped Tsé Bit’a’í of her origin stories. Place naming, and naming in general, is significant to Diné and other Indigenous Peoples. A narrative of “place links present with past and our personal self with kinship groups. . . . Our knowledges cannot be universalized because they arise from our experience with our places. This is why name-place stories matter: they are repositories of science, they tell of relationships, they reveal history, and they hold our identity.” Margaret Kovach’s observations are relevant to Tsé Bit’a’í and the stories of her presence.

Georges Erasmus is Dene, or Tłįchǫ (Dogrib), from Behchokǫ̀ (which means “Big Knife” and replaced the town’s former name, Rae-Edzo) in the Northwest Territories. He advocated for restoration of Dene place-names and turned to Dene literary autonomy: “We made our own history. Our actions were based on our understanding of the world. With the coming of the Europeans, our experience as a people changed. We experienced relationships in which we were made to feel inferior. . . . They began to define our world for us. They began to define us as well. Even physically, our communities and our landmarks were named in terms foreign to our understanding. We were no longer the actors—we were being acted upon. We were no longer naming the world—we were being named.” This instance of Tsé Bit’a’í’s place-name is a case in point. This act of replacing and renaming our storied places interrupted the process of becoming hózhǫ́, affecting communities on both sides of the Medicine Line. If recognized at all, our stories have been dismissed as quaint storytelling and mythologizing. In thinking about Tsé Bit’a’í, my maternal family’s hometown mother, I am grappling with how the regenerative hane’ responds as a corrective.

2024 LSA Conference: Signings, Discounts, and New Books

Posted on April 16, 2024April 10, 2024 by Cameron Louie

April 16, 2024

We are thrilled to be attending the 2024 Latina/o/x Studies Association conference in Tempe this week! From April 17 to 20, find our table in the LSA Plaza, “a dynamic space to get together with long-time friends and colleagues—and find new ones—over coffee and conversation.” Navigation help and additional details are available on the LSA website.

We’re also thrilled to have some University of Arizona Press authors signing books at our table this year! Take a look at the schedule below to find out where and when you can meet our authors and get your books signed.

Finally, we’ll be selling a curated selection of our new, featured, and popular Latinx studies titles at a special conference discount of 35%. If you can’t attend this year, or if you need an extra copy of a book you discover at our table, we’ve got you covered: enter AZLSA24 at checkout on our website for 35% off all titles through 5/18/24.

Book Signing Schedule

New & Featured Latinx Studies Titles

Founded in 1997, Mujeres de Maiz (MdM) is an Indigenous Xicana–led spiritual artivist organization and movement by and for women and feminists of color. Chronicling its quarter-century-long herstory, Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento weaves together diverse stories with attention to their larger sociopolitical contexts. The book crosses conventional genre boundaries through the inclusion of poetry, visual art, testimonios, and essays. The multidisciplinary, intergenerational, and critical-creative nature of the project coupled with the unique subject matter makes the book a must-have for high school and college students, activist-scholars, artists, community organizers, and others invested in social justice and liberation.

While there is a long history of state violence toward immigrants in the United States, the essayists in this interdisciplinary collection tackle head-on the impacts of the Trump administration. This volume provides a well-argued look at the Trump era. Insightful contributions delve into the impact of Donald Trump’s rhetoric and policies on migrants detained and returned, immigrant children separated from their parents and placed in detention centers, and migrant women subjected to sexual and reproductive abuses, among other timely topics. The chapter authors document a long list in what the book calls “Trump’s Reign of Terror.” Resistance and Abolition in the Borderlands is an essential reader for those wishing to understand the extent of the damage caused by the Trump era and its impact on Latinx people.

Growing Up in the Gutter offers new understandings of contemporary graphic coming-of-age narratives by looking at the genre’s growth in stories by and for young BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and diasporic readers. Through a careful examination of the genre, Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo analyzes the complex identity formation of first- and subsequent-generation migrant protagonists in globalized rural and urban environments and dissects the implications that these diasporic formative processes have for a growing and popular genre.

Featured Series

Arizona Crossroads explores the history of peoples and cultures, events and struggles, ideas and practices in the place we know today as Arizona.

2024 SAA Conference: Discounts, New Books, and More

Posted on April 15, 2024April 15, 2024 by Cameron Louie

April 15, 2024

We are thrilled to be attending the 89th annual meeting annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology this week in New Orleans! On April 17-21, find us at booth #203 and 205 to browse the University of Arizona Press’ latest archaeology titles and meet with Senior Editor Allyson Carter.

If you can’t attend this year, or if you need an extra copy of a book you discover at our booth, we’ve got you covered: use AZSAA24 for 35% off all titles.

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

New Archaeology and Anthropology Titles

El Fin del Mundo describes a remote desert corner of Sonora, Mexico where the first evidence of Paleoindian interactions with gomphotheres, an extinct species related to elephants, has been recorded. This site is the northernmost dated late Pleistocene gomphothere and the youngest in North America. It is the first documented intact buried Clovis site outside of the United States, the first in situ Paleoindian site in northwestern Mexico, and the first documented evidence of Clovis gomphothere hunting in North America. This volume also describes a paleontological bone bed below the Clovis level, which includes a rare association of mastodon, mammoth, and gomphothere.

The Spanish conquest of Peru was motivated by the quest for precious metals, a search that resulted in the discovery of massive silver deposits in what is now southern Bolivia. The enormous flow of specie into the world economy is usually attributed to the Spanish imposition of a forced labor system on the Indigenous population as well as the introduction of European technology. This narrative omits the role played by thousands of independent miners, often working illegally, who at different points in history generated up to 30 percent of the silver produced in the region. In Silver “Thieves,” Tin Barons, and Conquistadors, Mary Van Buren examines the long-term history of these workers, the technology they used, and their relationship to successive large-scale mining.

In the Mimbres Valley of southwestern New Mexico, archaeologists have been working for decades to meticulously excavate archaeological sites. Expanding beyond studies that focus on a single pueblo, Ancient Communities in the Mimbres Valley represents the final report on the excavations of the Mimbres Foundation. It brings together data from a range of pithouse and pueblo sites of different sizes and histories in diverse locations—to refine the current understandings of Mimbres region archaeology in the context of the Greater Southwest.

Focused on the coast near Puerto Peñasco, Sonora, Mexico, Coastal Foragers of the Gran Desierto examines the diverse groups occupying the coast for salt, abundant food sources, and shells for ornament manufacturing. The archaeological patterns demonstrated by the data gathered lead to the conclusion that, since ancient times, this coastal landscape was not a marginal zone but rather an important source of food and trade goods, and a pilgrimage destination that influenced broad and diverse communities across the Sonoran Desert and beyond.

Including research from both highland central Mexico and the tropical lowlands of the Maya and Olmec areas, Ancient Mesoamerican Population History reexamines the demography in ancient Mesoamerica. Contributors present methods for determining population estimates, field methods for settlement pattern studies to obtain demographic data, and new technologies such as LiDAR (light detecting and ranging) that have expanded views of the ground in forested areas. Contributions to this book provide a view of ancient landscape use and modification that was not possible in the twentieth century. This important new work provides new understandings of Mesoamerican urbanism, development, and changes over time.

Featured Series

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. Selected volumes in the series are now open-access titles available through the University of Arizona Campus Repository.

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

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

Native Peoples of the Americas is an ambitious series whose scope ranges from North to South America and includes Middle America and the Caribbean. Each volume takes unique methodological approaches—archaeological, ethnographic, ecological, and/or ethno-historical—to frame cultural regions. Volumes cover select theoretical approaches that link regions, such as Native responses to conquest and the imposition of authority, environmental degradation, loss of Native lands, and the appropriation of Native knowledge and cosmologies. These books illuminate the strategies that Native Peoples have employed to maintain both their autonomies and identities. The series encourages the participation of Native, well-established, and emerging scholars as authors, contributors, and editors for the books.

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

Arizona KJZZ Interviews Anthony Macías

Posted on April 12, 2024April 5, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

April 12, 2024

Anthony Macías was interviewed by Arizona’s KJZZ radio station about his book Chicano-Chicana Americana. Macías is a scholar of twentieth-century cultural history and a professor in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California, Riverside. Read the full interview here.

In the interview, Macías said, “These bit part actors that steal their scenes and manage to carve out some kind of success. I try to convey to a general audience the cultural studies notion that that representation matters, that how you see people and how you perceive them, impacts the way that you treat them and and their chances for upper mobility in the American dream.”

About the book:

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

Excerpt from “We Stay the Same”

Posted on April 11, 2024March 22, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

April 11, 2024

On a remote island in the South Pacific, the Lavongai have consistently struggled to obtain development through logging and commercial agriculture. Yet many Lavongai still long to move beyond the grind of subsistence work that has seemingly defined their lives on New Hanover, Papua New Guinea, for generations.

Following a long history of smaller-scale and largely unsuccessful resource development efforts, New Hanover became the site of three multinational-controlled special agricultural and business leases (SABLs) that combined to cover over 75 percent of the island for ninety-nine-year lease terms. These agroforestry projects were part of a national effort to encourage “sustainable” rural development by tapping into the growing global demand for agricultural lands and crops like oil palm and biofuels. They were supposed to succeed where the smaller-scale projects of the past had failed. Unfortunately, these SABLs resulted in significant forest loss and livelihood degradation, while doing little to promote the type of economic development that many Lavongai had been hoping for.

It is within this context that Jason Roberts’ “We Stay the Same” grounds questions of hope for transformative economic change within Lavongai assessments of the inequitable relationships between global processes of resource development and the local lives that have become increasingly defined by the necessities and failures of these processes. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

New Hanover (Lavongai) is a relatively small, remote volcanic island located within New Ireland Province (NIP), Papua New Guinea (PNG). The island is 119,140 hectares in size, with a mountainous interior that can reach up to 1,000 m above sea level (Kaiku and Kaiku 2008). It is home to approximately 31,882 people, collectively called the Lavongai (PNG NSO 2021), who speak an indigenous language, Tungak, as well as one of the national languages of PNG—Tok Pisin. “Mipela stap olsem” is a Tok Pisin phrase that means “we live like this,” “we are like this,” or “we stay the same.” It is a phrase that I heard often during my time on New Hanover, normally when people would discuss issues related to economic development, or more likely, the lack of sustained development or positive material change on the island. In this way, the phrase was often used as an implicit critique of a subsistence lifestyle that many Lavongai presented as having existed relatively unchanged since time immemorial. At the same time, “mipela stap olsem” was also a critique of the structural forces that allowed some groups to achieve tremendous prosperity while others were seemingly destined for hardship and toil. While the Lavongai were only too familiar with the comparative affluence that outsiders like me enjoyed by mere circumstance of birth, they were also painfully aware that their own lives remained directly tied to the ground and the necessities of subsistence.

The Lavongai are, and always have been, self-sufficient. They make their living as shifting horticulturalists, producing a variety of food crops including staples such as taro (kirak), sweet potato (“kau”), banana (ur), cassava (“tapiok”), sago (ngavia), and greens (banga). People raise money for other necessities like salt, clothes, medicine, and school fees through the smallscale trade of cash crops like betelnut (vua) and mustard (sia), as well as surplus food crops. The work required to “find money,” therefore, is normally a difficult and slow task. Moving away from the rigors of subsistence living toward the anticipated prosperity of consumer-capitalist lifestyles has been, and continues to be, a prime objective for many Lavongai. Unfortunately, like other politically and economically marginal peoples throughout the world, their options for achieving development within the global market have been slim and poorly supported by successive colonial and national governments (Billings 2002; Tauvasa 1968/1969). Historically, what integration New Hanover has achieved within the global economy has been limited to the intermittent production and export of primary products such as copra, timber, and seafood.

In 2007, however, New Hanover became the site of three large-scale, multinational-controlled special agricultural and business leases (SABLs) that combined to cover approximately 79 percent of the island, for ninety-nine-year lease periods. These SABLs, like SABLs throughout PNG, were supposed to develop commercially viable agricultural plantations through the conversion of forested lands and the broad simplification of communal land tenure structures (95% of PNG’s land base), thought necessary to facilitate private investment (Filer 2011, 2012). SABL expansion throughout the country was part of a larger effort to promote national development and rural economic integration by combining the historically important logging and commercial agricultural industries in a way that would tap into the growing global demand for agricultural lands and crops like oil palm and biofuels (GoPNG 2011). These joint public-private development projects offered the Lavongai the opportunity to exchange timber and land rights for promises of fair-market timber royalties, commercial agricultural development, employment and job training, infrastructure improvements, and enhanced social service provisioning. As the New Ireland provincial administrator suggested above, this opportunity initially proved appealing for many Lavongai—particularly those in positions of decision-making power. People on the island had long been hoping for development to deliver these promises. SABLs seemed to offer a real path toward sustained global economic integration, as well as the social recognition that tends to go along with this integration. These projects appeared capable of succeeding where the smaller-scale, typically state-led projects of the past had failed.

As Abraham, a local landowner director in charge of representing the interests of his lineage group at Sulava village, as well as those of other Lavongai living within the 56,592-hectare Central New Hanover Limited SABL explained:

“The big motivation for making this [SABL] agreement was to improve life for the people of the island. Because we [PNG] got independence in 1975, and so far, there hasn’t been one good change for all of us who live here [on New Hanover]. We haven’t gotten one good service. From the time of the ancestors until now, we’ve stayed the same. There’s been no true development to come here because our government doesn’t work for us. New Hanover is a place where government has no mark. Our politicians only come around here at the time of elections. They make big talk with lots of big promises. Then we mark their names on the ballot and they go back [to town], and that’s where they stay. They forget about us—all of us who live out in the villages, out in the bush. They don’t work to create development for us like they say they will. All the government money that is supposed to be used for these things; it never turns out well. So, that’s why we finally decided that we must try to find a different road [to development]. That’s why we decided to bring the private sector to the island. We wanted the Company [Tutuman Development / Joinland Logging] to bring money, infrastructure, agriculture, and the savvy to help us develop.”

2024 NOAZ Book Festival: Discounts, New Books, and More

Posted on April 8, 2024March 22, 2024 by Cameron Louie

April 13, 2024

We are thrilled to be attending the 2024 Northern Arizona Book Festival (NOAZBF) in Flagstaff, AZ this week! On April 13, find our table in Heritage Square where we’ll have the University of Arizona Press’ latest Indigenous literature titles on sale for 35% off.

If you can’t attend this year, or if you need an extra copy of a book you discover at our table, we’ve got you covered: use AZNOAZ24 for 35% off all titles.

If you’re at the festival, don’t miss Assistant Editor Elizabeth Wilder, who is on an Indigenous Publishing Panel happening at 1:00 PM at the Theatrikos Theatre Company, 11 W Cherry Ave. See the full schedule of events for more details.

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

New Indigenous Literature Titles

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

Elegiac and powerful, Ancient Light uses lyric, narrative, and concrete poems to give voice to some of the most pressing ecological and social issues of our time. With vision and resilience, Kimberly Blaeser’s poetry layers together past, present, and futures. Against a backdrop of pandemic loss and injustice, MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women), hidden graves at Native American boarding schools, and destructive environmental practices, Blaeser’s innovative poems trace pathways of kinship, healing, and renewal. With an Anishinaabe sensibility, her words and images invoke an ancient belonging and voice the deep relatedness she experiences in her familiar watery regions of Minnesota.

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.

Featured Series

For questions or to submit a proposal to this series, please contact Assistant Editor, Elizabeth Wilder, at EWilder@uapress.arizona.edu.

LA Times Festival of Books Features Pelaez Lopez and Báez

Posted on April 3, 2024March 18, 2024 by maryreynolds

April 3, 2024

Editor Alan Pelaez Lopez and Poet Diego Báez will be at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Sunday, April 21. Pelaez Lopez, editor of When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent, will speak on “Everything Latinidad: Challenging the Myth of the Monolith.” They will speak on the Latinidad Stage, 4:00 – 4:40 p.m. Báez will read from his latest collection, Yaguareté White, on the Poetry Stage, 2:20 – 2:40 p.m. All festival events take place on the University of Southern California campus.

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books began in 1996 with a simple goal: to bring together the people who create books with the people who love to read them. The festival was an immediate success and has evolved to include live bands, poetry readings, film screenings and artists creating their work on-site. All outdoor events, including those with Pelaez Lopez and Báez, are free to attend. Indoor panels require a small fee for advance reservations. Discover all the 2024 Festival participants.

Congratulations to Alan and Diego!

About When Language Broke Open:

By exploring themes of memory, care, and futurity, these contributions expand understandings of Blackness in Latin America, the Caribbean, and their U.S.-based diasporas.

About Yaguareté White:

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

Kamat’s “In a Wounded Land” Available on Open Arizona

Posted on April 2, 2024April 2, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

April 2, 2024

We’re excited to announce that Vinay R. Kamat’s In a Wounded Land: Conservation, Extraction, and Human Well-Being in Coastal Tanzania has just been published and is simultaneously available on Open Arizona! Open Arizona is a portal of open-access titles from the University of Arizona Press. We are adding new content to the site monthly. Please check back frequently to see our latest offerings!

About the book:

Focusing on the human element of marine conservation and the extractive industry in Tanzania, this volume illuminates what happens when impoverished people living in underdeveloped regions of Africa are suddenly subjected to state-directed conservation and natural resource extraction projects. Drawing on ethnographically rich case studies and vignettes, the book documents the impacts of these projects on local populations and their responses to these projects over a ten-year period.

April 1, 2024

We had a great time at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology in Santa Fe, New Mexico last week! Sincerest thanks to everyone who visited our table.

If you weren’t able to visit us at the bookfair, there’s still time to order the books we had on display. Get 35% off with discount code AZANTH24 at checkout until 4/26/24.

Check out the photos of the event below!

Senior Editor Allyson Carter at our table with new and recent anthropology titles.

Shelby Tisdale, author of *No Place for a Lady*

Colleen M. Scanlan Lyons, author of *Running After Paradise*

Whitney L. Duncan, author of *Accompaniment with Im/migrant Communities* with Allyson Carter

Thanks to everyone who came by to say hello, browse books, and talk with us at the conference!

CALÓ News Interviews Amber Rose González, Felicia ‘Fe’ Montes, and Nadia Zepeda

Posted on March 28, 2024March 22, 2024 by maryreynolds

March 28, 2024

In advance of the April 7 Los Angeles book launch party for Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento: Spiritual Artivism, Healing Justice, and Feminist Praxis, Denise Florez of CALÓ News interviewed editors Amber Rose González, Felicia ‘Fe’ Montes, and Nadia Zepeda.

In the article, Fe Montes said, “We see art as a tool for education, empowerment and transformation. And so we could educate about a holiday or community event or historical event in a poem.” She further explained that Mujeres de Maiz will also hold poetry processions in the streets, in an auto repair store or a nail salon. She said: “We walk along the south side of César Chávez Boulevard and do that. So bringing it to not only the cultural centers, but literally to the people or to high school assemblies in the schools.”

Nadia Zepeda said, “I really see the importance of documenting our movements and documenting the work that has been done in Los Angeles and surrounding cities. I came to the work around wellness and connections to ancestral indigenous knowledge.”

Read the full interview here.

About the book:

MdM’s political-ethical-spiritual commitments, cultural production, and everyday practices are informed by Indigenous and transnational feminist of color artistic, ceremonial, activist, and intellectual legacies. Contributors fuse stories of celebration, love, and spirit-work with an incisive critique of interlocking oppressions, both intimate and structural, encouraging movement toward “a world where many worlds fit.”

Five Questions for L Heidenreich and Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz

Posted on March 26, 2024March 28, 2024 by maryreynolds

March 26, 2024

Have you ever wanted a writing and research manual that centered Chicanx and Latinx scholarship? Writing that Matters: A Handbook for Chicanx and Latinx Studies does just that. While it includes a brief history of the roots of the fields of Chicanx literature and history, Writing that Matters emphasizes practice: how to research and write a Chicanx or Latinx history paper; how to research and write a Chicanx or Latinx literature or cultural studies essay; and how to conduct interviews, frame pláticas, and conduct oral histories.

How did you first come up with the idea for this book?

When teaching writing, whether in literature or history classes, we were both frustrated with a lack of resources for teaching from a Chicanx or from a Latinx base of knowledge. Most handbooks are written with white, Eurocentric frameworks and/or from a white, Eurocentric lens. Using the supposedly generic writing and research manuals was alienating for us when we were students. As professors, we found ourselves altering assignments and reworking prompts so that our students would connect with them and see themselves and our communities represented.

In our early careers, we both kept hoping for a handbook in our respective fields. As senior scholars, we realized we were the generation that needed to do this—that we could create our own handbook. Aside from our writing materials, we were fortunate to know an incredible artist, Anel Flores, who could create images and a book cover to help inspire our students. At the Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS), the organization where we first workshopped our ideas, many of our colleagues and friends who teach writing gave us their unanimous endorsement; therefore, we crafted the handbook we had needed all along.

What do you mean in the book when you say: “Research is Me-search?”

This is an expression that Dr. Urquijo Ruiz learned while at the University of California, San Diego, and that she shared with Dr. Heidenreich. Of course, we use it because it rings true with us and we have found that it rings true with our students. To say that “research is me-search” is to say that the best work we do tends to come from a connection within us. When we allow ourselves to be inspired, to do work that matters to us, that resonates with our life experiences and those of our multiple communities, then we have the energy to do great work. We teach our classes, we encourage students to seek out questions that resonate deeply within themselves. We have worked to make sure that our handbook takes a similar approach.

How will students use this book to crush the patriarchy?

Words, research, and a solid argument are all tools that can be wielded to create fissures in the structures that create inequality in our lives and the world around us. The handbook is structured to help students develop their tool sets so that they have strong research, writing, and rhetoric skills with which to challenge multiple systems of inequality—systems constructed by, and constitutive, of patriarchy and heteronormativity.

What are the challenges that Chicanx and Latinx students face when interviewing family members or others in search of oral history, pláticas and testimonios?

Wow, there are many challenges; so here are just a couple of them. On a very basic level, it can be hard to find a quiet place to hold the interview. Our homes are busy places. So, we encourage students to take advantage of library rooms – both public libraries and campus libraries, which are much quieter. On a deeper level, because of the ways in which sexism and racism function in society, many of our family members experienced difficult, if not traumatic experiences either in coming to the U.S., or here in the U.S. itself. This is why, even when interviewing family members, it is important for students try to have a preliminary meeting where they can discuss their goals with the interviewee and let their family member ask them questions about the process. Of course, it is always critical to make sure family members know they can skip questions, take a break, or just change their mind about doing the interview. The wonderful thing about interviewing family members is that the family gains a narrative of their own history that they can keep and share with present and future generations.

What are you both working on now?

L Heidenreich: I am working on a book about women religious (Catholic sisters) and the United Farm Worker movement. Not much has been written about the women of the movement, and since women religious were a strong influence on my formative years, I wanted to start the project there: excavating the work of Catholic sisters and the Union. Of course, women of the UFW, in general, are grossly under-researched and so the project will not be exclusively about the sisters. My m.o. is to draft a mini proposal, produce a couple articles or book chapters, and then draft a book proposal proper.

Because I started the project right as the Covid pandemic began, I had to start with online and print sources. So, the first article wound up being about Dolores Huerta and a 2009 speech she gave at the Twenty-first National Conference on LGBT Equality. That was published in Catholic Women’s Rhetoric in the United States (Lexington, 2022). Huerta is an inspiring figure and being able to do that work during the pandemic kept me grounded and hopeful. I now have a broader article coming out in U.S. Catholic Historian (Summer, 2024) titled “Saintly Protest: Women Religious, Religious Women, and the Early United Farm Worker Movement.” That brings me to “two”; and so now it is time for me to sit down and draft the book proposal–which makes it all very real.

Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz: I am currently enjoying my work as a culturally and linguistically sensitive translator of children’s books (from English to Spanish). Because my siblings and I were raised in Sonora, Mexico, in an environment that lacked basic needs, books (except for textbooks) were rarely present when we were growing up. I want to change that for the new generations of children in my family and in my communities in general. Thus far, I have translated six picture books for ages K-5^th grade, and I translated one novel in verse from Dr. Carmen Tafolla, the first Texas Poet Laureate, titled Warrior Girl / Guerrera. The novel is about a pre-teen Chicanita from San Antonio, Texas, raised in a mix-status family, who is proud of her Mexican and Chicanx heritages.

On the research side: we just finished the last edits for our book Latinidad and Film: Queer and Feminist Cinema in the Americas (Palgrave Macmillan, July 2024) that I co-authored with my dear colleagues-friends Drs. Dania Abreu-Torres and Rosana Blanco-Cano. On the creative side: I continue to work on my memoir and I’m proud that my piece “First Visit” was published in the anthology Somewhere We Are Human: Authentic Voices on Migration, Survival, and New Beginnings, co-edited by Reyna Grande and Sonia Guiñansaca (HiperVia, 2023).
***
L Heidenreich is a professor of history at Washington State University. They are the author of “This Land Was Mexican Once”: Histories of Resistance from Northern California and Nepantla2: Transgender Mestiz@ Histories in Times of Global Shift. Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz is a Mexicana/Chicana fronteriza queer educator, translator, writer, activist, and performer from Sonora, Mexico, and southern California. She is a professor of Spanish as well as Chicanx studies, queer studies, and global Latinx studies at Trinity University.

2024 SfAA Conference: Discounts, New Books, and More

Posted on March 22, 2024March 18, 2024 by Cameron Louie

March 25, 2024

We are thrilled to be attending the 2024 Society for Applied Anthropology annual meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico this week! From March 26-30, find our table to browse the University of Arizona Press’ latest anthropology titles and meet with editor Allyson Carter.

If you can’t attend this year, or if you need an extra copy of a book you discover at our booth, we’ve got you covered: use AZANTH24 for 35% off all titles.

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

New Anthropology Titles

Editors Kristin Elizabeth Yarris and Whitney L. Duncan bring together the experiences and voices of anthropologists whose engaged work with im/migrant communities pushes the boundaries of ethnography toward a feminist, care-based, decolonial mode of ethnographic engagement called “accompaniment.” More than two dozen contributors show how accompaniment is not merely a mode of knowledge production but an ethical commitment that calls researchers to action in solidarity with those whose lives we seek to understand. The volume stands as a collective conversation about possibilities for caring and decolonial forms of ethnographic engagement with im/migrant communities.

Focusing on the human element of marine conservation and the extractive industry in Tanzania, Vinay R. Kamat illuminates what happens when impoverished people living in underdeveloped regions of Africa are suddenly subjected to state-directed conservation and natural resource extraction projects, implemented in their landscapes of subsistence. In a Wounded Land draws on ethnographically rich case studies and vignettes collected over a ten-year period in several coastal villages on Tanzania’s southeastern border with Mozambique.

We Stay the Same grounds questions of hope for transformative economic change within Lavongai assessments of the inequitable relationships between global processes of resource development and the local lives that have become increasingly defined by the necessities and failures of these processes. Written in a clear and relatable style for students, Jason Roberts combines ethnographic and ecological research to show how the Lavongai continue to survive and make meaningful lives in a situation where their own hopes for a better future have often been used against them as a mechanism of a more distantly profitable dispossession.

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

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

Featured Series

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

biodiversity in small spaces is a series that provides short, to-the-point books that re-examine the conservation of biodiversity in small places and focus on the interplay of memory, identity, and affect in determining what matters, and thus what stays, thereby shaping the fabric of biodiversity in the present and, ultimately, the future. The authors will cover, in an accessible way, the range of marginalities, subjectivities, and chronologies, from indigenous farmers nurturing, defending, or repatriating their traditional crop varieties to college towns re-embedding food production and consumption into the social fabric of their communities.

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

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

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

Manuela L. Picq Wins Outstanding Activist Scholar Award

Posted on March 20, 2024March 14, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

March 20, 2024

Manuela L. Picq is the 2024 Outstanding Activist Scholar Awardee from the International Political Economy section of the International Studies Association. She joins an extraordinary list of past recipients that includes Angela Davis, Naomi Klein, Walden Bello, and David Graeber.

A celebratory reception will take place on Thursday, April 4, 12:30 p.m., Imperial A, Hilton Union Square, at the International Studies Association Annual Convention in San Francisco. After the reception, there will be a panel discussing Picq’s scholarship; the panel features Hasmet Uluorta, Markus Thiel, Robin Broad and Arlene Tickner. Finally, Picq will give a talk titled “When Our Bodies Stand With Our Ideas.”

About Vernacular Sovereignties: Indigenous Women Challenging World Politics:

Indigenous women are rarely accounted for in world politics. Imagined as passive subjects at the margins of political decision-making, they often epitomize the antithesis of international relations. Yet from their positions of marginality they are shaping sovereignty.

In Vernacular Sovereignties, Manuela Lavinas Picq shows that Indigenous women have long been dynamic political actors who have partaken in international politics and have shaped state practices carrying different forms of resistance. Her research on Ecuador shows that although Kichwa women face overlapping oppressions from socioeconomic exclusions to sexual violence, they are achieving rights unparalleled in the world.

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

Posted on March 18, 2024March 18, 2024 by maryreynolds

March 18, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 13, 2024

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

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

Here are just a few highlights from the weekend:

Bennu 3-D author Carina A. Bennett, Catherine W.V. Wolner, and Dante S. Lauretta signing copies of their book.

University of Arizona Press staff Elizabeth Wilder, Cameron Louie, Leigh McDonald, and Anissa Suazo get ready for the day.

Melissa L. Sevigny, Shelby Tisdale, and Marie Buck before their panel on the National Parks stage.

Carolyn Niethammer and staff member Leigh McDonald visit in our booth.

Daisy Ocampo and Simon Ortiz sign books in our booth.

Reyes Ramirez and Tim Z. Hernandez signing books before their panels.

Ricardo Báez, Diego Báez, and Sara Báez during Diego’s signing in our tent.

William L. Bird Jr. and staff member Kristen Buckles near our booth.

Diane Dittemore and staff member Alana Enriquez during Diane’s signing in our booth.

A. Thomas Cole and Shelby Tisdale sign copies of their books in our booth.

Stephen J. Pyne and Tom Zoellner in our booth.

Excerpt from “Central American Counterpoetics”

Posted on March 12, 2024February 28, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

March 12, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpt from “Resistance and Abolition in the Borderlands”

Posted on March 7, 2024February 28, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

March 7, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpt from “The Space Age Generation”

Posted on March 5, 2024February 29, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

March 5, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on March 4, 2024March 4, 2024 by Cameron Louie

March 4, 2024

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

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

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

Saturday, March 9

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, March 10

Yaguareté White book cover. Man wearing jaguar hat.

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

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

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

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

For the full festival schedule, click here.

Author Ken Lamberton Wins Fellowship

Posted on March 1, 2024March 4, 2024 by maryreynolds

March 1, 2024

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

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

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

Congratulations Ken!

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

About the books:

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

William L. Bird, Jr. on New Books Network

Posted on February 29, 2024February 21, 2024 by maryreynolds

February 29, 2024

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

About the book:

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

De Los Angeles Features “When Language Broke Open”

Posted on February 28, 2024February 21, 2024 by maryreynolds

February 28, 2024

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

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

Read the full article here.

About the book:

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

Diego Báez Interview in Chicago Review of Books

Posted on February 26, 2024February 21, 2024 by maryreynolds

February 26, 2024

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

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

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

Read the complete interview here.

About the book:

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

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

February 23, 2024

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

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

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

“Yaguareté White” Playlist

Posted on February 21, 2024February 23, 2024 by maryreynolds

February 21, 2024

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

Báez introduces his musical influences:

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

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

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

About the book:

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

Five Questions for A. Thomas Cole

Posted on February 20, 2024February 26, 2024 by Abby Mogollon

February 20, 2024

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

Why did you write this book?

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

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

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

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

What do you want to accomplish with the book?

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

What is your biggest worry?

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

What is the most important sentence in the book?

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

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

Posted on February 19, 2024February 13, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

February 19, 2024

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

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

Read the Essay

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

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

***

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

February 16, 2024

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

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

Check out the photos of the event below!

Inside the Kansas City Convention Center, attendees gather on their way up to the bookfair.

Our booth at the bookfair was a perfect spot to host authors, meet new friends, and share our books.

Juan Martinez signs copies of *Extended Stay*.

Juan Martinez draws customized creatures as he signs books for AWP attendees.

Assistant Editor, Elizabeth Wilder (left) and Kim Blaeser (right) with her book, *Ancient Light,* at the Indigenous Nations Poets booth.

Author Diego Báez shows off *Yaguareté White*, his debut collection of poems.

Author Margarita Pintado Burgos signs copies of *Ojo en Celo / Eye in Heat*, winner of the 2023 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets.

Authors Sergio Troncoso (left) and Alma García (right) display their books.

Author Alma García signs copies of her debut novel, *All That Rises.*

Author Reyes Ramirez signs copies of *The Book of Wanderers*.

Authors Reyes Ramirez (left) and Diego Báez (right) swap books!

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

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

Excerpt from “Border Economies”

Posted on February 15, 2024 by Riley Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesús Rosales featured on Arizona Public Media

Posted on February 14, 2024February 12, 2024 by maryreynolds

February 14, 2024

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

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

About the book:

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

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

UA Press Wins Three PubWest Design Awards

Posted on February 12, 2024 by maryreynolds

February 12, 2024

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

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

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

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

TFOB 2024: Book Signings & Panels with Our Authors

Posted on February 8, 2024February 9, 2024 by Cameron Louie

February 8, 2024

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

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

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

Book Signing Schedule

Saturday, March 9

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, March 10

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

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

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

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

Panel Schedule – Saturday, March 9th

10:00 AM

Title:	Intersections of Verse y Voz
Location:	Nuestras Raíces Stage
Date/Time:	Saturday, 10:00 am to 11:00 am
Panelists:	Mari Herreras, Simon Ortiz, Brandon Som
Moderators:	Melo Dominguez
Genres:	Nuestras Raices, Poetry
Signing Area:	Pima County Public Library/Nuestras Raíces/Craft Tent & Signing Area
Description:	Discover the work of these poets with Southwestern roots who explore the intersection of language, identity, and place in their writing.

Title:	Unearthing Legacies
Location:	WNPA Stage
Date/Time:	Saturday, 10:00 am to 11:00 am
Panelists:	Melissa Sevigny, Shelby Tisdale
Moderators:	Marie Buck
Genres:	Nature / Environment
Signing Area:	Sales & Signing Area – National Parks
Description:	Embark on a captivating journey as you hear the authors tell two remarkable stories. Discover the trailblazing life of Marjorie Ferguson Lambert, a pioneer in southwestern archaeology, and then brace yourself for the daring 1938 expedition of botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter as they braved the treacherous Colorado River. Learn about these untold adventures and resilience of these women that helped shape the American West.

Title:	The Wonders of Bennu
Location:	Science City – Main Stage
Date/Time:	Saturday, 10:00 am to 11:00 am
Panelists:	Carina Bennett, Dante Lauretta, Cat Wolner
Moderators:	Jennifer Casteix
Genres:	Science / Medicine / Technology
Signing Area:	Sales & Signing Area – Science City
Description:	The authors of “Bennu 3-D” share the story of OSIRIS-REx and Bennu through vivid descriptions and extraordinary photos. Listeners and readers of the book will feel like they are right there exploring along with the scientists.

11:30 AM

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

1:00 PM

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

2:30

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

4:00 PM

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

Panel Schedule – Sunday, March 10

10:00 AM

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

11:30 AM

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

1:00 PM

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

2:30 PM

Title:	Iconic Southwest Poets in Conversation
Location:	Student Union Kiva
Date/Time:	Sunday, 2:30 pm – 3:30 pm
Panelists:	Simon Ortiz, Ofelia Zepeda
Moderators:	Paola Valenzuela
Genres:	Poetry
Signing Area:	Sales & Signing Area – UA Bookstore, Main Floor
Description:	Iconic Indigenous poets Simon J. Ortiz and Ofelia Zepeda discuss their poetic journeys.

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

4:00 PM

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

For the full festival schedule, click here.

2024 AWP Conference: Discounts, New Books, and More

Posted on February 5, 2024January 31, 2024 by Cameron Louie

February 5, 2024

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

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

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

New & Featured Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction Titles

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

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

Elegiac and powerful, Ancient Light uses lyric, narrative, and concrete poems to give voice to some of the most pressing ecological and social issues of our time. With vision and resilience, Kimberly Blaeser’s poetry layers together past, present, and futures. Against a backdrop of pandemic loss and injustice, MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women), hidden graves at Native American boarding schools, and destructive environmental practices, Blaeser’s innovative poems trace pathways of kinship, healing, and renewal. With an Anishinaabe sensibility, her words and images invoke an ancient belonging and voice the deep relatedness she experiences in her familiar watery regions of Minnesota.

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

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

Featured Series

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

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

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

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

Posted on February 1, 2024 by Cameron Louie

February 1, 2024

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

Enjoy the photos below for a recap of the event:

Simon J. Ortiz introducing himself in Keres and English at the University of Arizona Library’s Special Collections Reading Room.

Author Simon J. Ortiz reading from his first book in 20 years, *Light as Light* (University of Arizona Press, 2024)

Simon Ortiz and Ofelia Zepeda in conversation about poetry, place, the power of language, Indigenous literature, and sovereignty. As Ortiz observed during the discussion, “More language, more knowledge.”

Simon Ortiz and Ofelia Zepeda answering questions (and receiving praise) from the audience.

Simon Ortiz signing copies of *Light as Light* for Tucson community members.

A long line of patient attendees waited to get their books signed and meet the authors. In the background are materials from the Special Collections exhibit, “Sanctuary: Who Belongs Here? The Search for Homeland on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1848 to Today,” on exhibit until August 9, 2024.

About the book:

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

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

2023 Southwest Book Award Winners

Posted on January 25, 2024 by Cameron Louie

January 24, 2024

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

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

About the books:

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

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

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

Congratulations, Myrriah and Tom!

Five Questions for Margarita Pintado Burgos

Posted on January 23, 2024December 18, 2023 by Cameron Louie

January 23, 2024

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

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

What inspired you to write this collection?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are you working on now?

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

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

2024 Southwest Books of the Year

Posted on January 19, 2024January 18, 2024 by Cameron Louie

January 18, 2024

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

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

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

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

Southwest Book of the Year – Top 10

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

Other University of Arizona Press Southwest Book of the Year Picks

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congratulations to all!

Five Questions for Diego Báez

Posted on January 18, 2024January 5, 2024 by Cameron Louie

January 18, 2024

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

What inspired you to write this collection?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are you working on now?

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

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

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

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

Five Questions for Kimberly Blaeser

Posted on January 11, 2024January 8, 2024 by maryreynolds

January 11, 2024

Ancient Light by Kimberly Blaeser uses lyric, narrative, and concrete poems to give voice to some of the most pressing ecological and social issues of our time. With vision and resilience, Kimberly Blaeser’s poetry layers together past, present, and futures. Against a backdrop of pandemic loss and injustice, MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women), hidden graves at Native American boarding schools, and destructive environmental practices, Blaeser’s innovative poems trace pathways of kinship, healing, and renewal. They celebrate the solace of natural spaces through sense-laden geo-poetry and picto-poems.

What inspired you to write this collection?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is your next book or creative project?

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

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

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

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

January 9, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diane (on ladder) with former Curator of Collections, Jan Bell, in old basket storeroom, c. 1980. Photographer, Helga Teiwes.

A very pregnant Diane (left) discussing basket she is purchasing for ASM with trading post operator Joyce Montgomery at Peridot Trading Post, San Carlos Apache Reservation, Arizona, February 23, 1985. Photographer, Helga Teiwes. (ASM 64897) . (Daughter Anna was born May 18, 1985!).

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

Diane with San Carlos Apache basketry matriarch Cecilia Henry, learning about her weaving techniques, April 18-19, 1990. Photographer, Helga Teiwes (ASM c-20843).

Diane discussing basketry materials and techniques with Katherine Brown, San Carlos Apache Reservation, Arizona. April 18-19, 1990. Photographer, Helga Teiwes (ASM 84090).

Diane taking a close look at a basketry *tus*, or water bottle, prior to its being coated with piñon pitch to make it water tight, with Minnie Narcisco, Cibecue, Ft. Apache Reservation, Arizona, May 16-17, 1984. Photographer, Helga Teiwes (ASM 64817).

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

First basketry publication in Winter 1986 *American Indian Art Magazine.*

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

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

Cover photo of Western Apache or Yavapai jar with eccentric mark (upper left), American Indian Art Magazine (Vol. 23, no. 2, Spring 1998) in which *Eccentric Marks on Western Apache Coiled Basketry* article appeared.

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

Winter is Poetry Season!

Posted on December 19, 2023December 19, 2023 by maryreynolds

December 18, 2023

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

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

Kimberly Blaeser, former Wisconsin Poet Laureate and founding director of In-Na-Po, Indigenous Nations Poets, is a writer, photographer, and scholar. In her new collection, Ancient Light, she uses uses lyric, narrative, and concrete poems to give voice to some of the most pressing ecological and social issues of our time. Blaeser’s innovative poems trace pathways of kinship, healing, and renewal. They celebrate the solace of natural spaces through sense-laden geo-poetry and picto-poems.

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

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

Excerpt from “Ordinary Injustice”

Posted on December 12, 2023November 8, 2023 by Riley Brown

December 12, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

Esther Belin Named Durango’s Poet Laureate

Posted on December 7, 2023 by maryreynolds

December 7, 2023

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

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

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

Congratulations Esther!

Five Questions for Alan Pelaez Lopez

Posted on December 5, 2023September 12, 2023 by maryreynolds

December 5, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is your next book or creative project?

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

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

Open Arizona Adds 26 New Titles

Posted on November 30, 2023November 29, 2023 by Abby Mogollon

November 30, 2023

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

Now available:

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

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

Decolonizing “Prehistory”
Decolonizing “Prehistory” critically examines and challenges the paradoxical role that modern historical-archaeological scholarship plays in adding legitimacy to, but also delegitimizing, contemporary colonialist practices. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this volume empowers Indigenous voices and offers a nuanced understanding of the American deep past.

Transcontinental Dialogues
Transcontinental Dialogues presents innovative discussion, argument, and insight into the interactions between anthropologists and social researchers—both Indigenous and allies—as they negotiate together the terrain of the imposition of ongoing colonialism over Indigenous lives across three countries. The essays explore how scholars can recalibrate their moral, political, and intellectual actions to meet the obligations flowing from the decolonial alliances.

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

See the complete collection of new and recently added titles.

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

Alma García Featured on Texas Standard News Show

Posted on November 29, 2023 by Riley Brown

November 29, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the book:

Excerpt from “Hottest of the Hotspots”

Posted on November 21, 2023November 8, 2023 by Riley Brown

November 21, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

November 20, 2023

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

Check out the photos of the event below!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on November 18, 2023October 24, 2023 by Riley Brown

November 18, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

Excerpt from “From the Skin”

Posted on November 15, 2023October 23, 2023 by Riley Brown

November 15, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on November 14, 2023November 13, 2023 by maryreynolds

November 14, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on November 13, 2023November 3, 2023 by Cameron Louie

November 13, 2023

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

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

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

New & Featured Anthropology Titles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Featured Series

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

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

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

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

Elizabeth Henson Essay in “The Brooklyn Rail”

Posted on November 10, 2023November 7, 2023 by maryreynolds

November 10, 2023

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

She writes:

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

Read the entire essay here.

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

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

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

Excerpt from “Ready Player Juan”

Posted on November 8, 2023November 6, 2023 by Riley Brown

November 8, 2023

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

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

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

Photos from Alma García’s Book Launch in Seattle

Posted on November 8, 2023November 6, 2023 by maryreynolds

November 8, 2023

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

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

Nov. 10: Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio

Nov. 11: Texas Book Festival in Austin

Nov. 14 Búho Books in Brownsville

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

Nov. 17 Bookworks in Albuquerque

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

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

About the book:

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

Posted on November 7, 2023November 6, 2023 by Abby Mogollon

November 7, 2023

By David Martínez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anthony Macías on Latinopia Cinema

Posted on November 3, 2023October 31, 2023 by maryreynolds

November 3, 2023

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

About Chicano-Chicana Americana:

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

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

When Language Broke Open Makes #SpeakUp List

Posted on November 2, 2023October 11, 2023 by Riley Brown

November 2, 2023

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

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

November 2, 2023

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

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

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

Co-Editor Elise Boxer with her new book!

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

Author Nancy Marie Mithlo speaks with Kristen Buckles.

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

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

Posted on November 1, 2023November 29, 2023 by Riley Brown

November 1, 2023

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

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

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

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

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