front cover of I Don't Cry, But I Remember
I Don't Cry, But I Remember
A Mexican Immigrant's Story of Endurance
Joyce Lackie
University of Arizona Press, 2012

When Viviana Salguero came to the United States in 1946, she spoke very little English, had never learned to read or write, and had no job skills besides housework or field labor. She worked eighteen-hour days and lived outdoors as often as not. And yet she raised twelve children, shielding them from her abusive husband when she dared, and shared in both the tragedies and accomplishments of her family. Through it all, Viviana never lost her love for Mexico or her gratitude to the United States for what would eventually become a better life. Though her story is unique, Viviana Salguero could be the mother, grandmother, or great-grandmother of immigrants anywhere, struggling with barriers of gender, education, language, and poverty.

In I Don't Cry, But I Remember, Joyce Lackie shares with us an intimate portrait of Viviana's life. Based on hours of recorded conversations, Lackie skillfully translates the interviews into an engaging, revealing narrative that details the migrant experience from a woman's point of view and fills a gap in our history by examining the role of women of color in the American Southwest. The book presents Vivana's life not only as a chronicle of endurance, but as a tale of everyday resistance. What she lacks in social confidence, political strength, and economic stability, she makes up for in dignity, faith, and wisdom.

Like all good oral history, Salguero's accounts and Lackie's analyses contribute to our understanding of the past by exposing the inconsistencies and contradictions in our remembrances. This book will appeal to ethnographers, oral historians, students and scholars of Chicana studies and women's studies, as well as general readers interested in the lives of immigrant women.

[more]

front cover of Mexican Melodrama
Mexican Melodrama
Film and Nation from the Golden Age to the New Wave
Elena Lahr-Vivaz
University of Arizona Press, 2016
In Mexican Melodrama, Elena Lahr-Vivaz explores the compelling ways that new-wave Mexican directors use the tropes and themes of Golden Age films to denounce the excesses of a nation characterized as a fragmented and fictitious construct. Analyzing big hits and quiet successes of both Golden Age and new-wave cinema, the author offers in each chapter a comparative reading of films from the two eras, considering, for instance, Amores perros (Love’s a Bitch, Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000) alongside Nosotros los pobres (We the Poor, Ismael Rodríguez, 1947). Through such readings, Lahr-Vivaz examines how new-wave directors draw from a previous generation to produce meaning in the present.

Mexico’s Golden Age of film—the period from the 1930s to the 1950s—is considered “golden” due to both the prestige of the era’s stars and the critical and popular success of the films released. Golden Age directors often turned to the tropes of melodrama and allegory to offer spectators an image of an idealized Mexico and to spur the formation of a spectatorship united through shared tears and laughter. In contrast, Lahr-Vivaz demonstrates that new-wave directors of the 1990s and 2000s use the melodramatic mode to present a vision of fragmentation and to open a space for critical resistance. In so doing, new-wave directors highlight the limitations rather than the possibilities of a unified spectatorship, and point to the need for spectators to assume a critical stance in the face of the exigencies of the present.

Written in an accessible style, Mexican Melodrama offers a timely comparative analysis of critically acclaimed films that will serve as key referents in discussions of Mexican cinema for years to come.
[more]

front cover of How “Indians” Think
How “Indians” Think
Colonial Indigenous Intellectuals and the Question of Critical Race Theory
Gonzalo Lamana
University of Arizona Press, 2019
The conquest and colonization of the Americas marked the beginning of a social, economic, and cultural change of global scale. Most of what we know about how colonial actors understood and theorized this complex historical transformation comes from Spanish sources. This makes the few texts penned by Indigenous intellectuals in colonial times so important: they allow us to see how some of those who inhabited the colonial world in a disadvantaged position thought and felt about it.
 
This book shines light on Indigenous perspectives through a novel interpretation of the works of the two most important Amerindian intellectuals in the Andes, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala and Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca. Building on but also departing from the predominant scholarly position that views Indigenous-Spanish relations as the clash of two distinct cultures, Gonzalo Lamana argues that Guaman Poma and Garcilaso were the first Indigenous activist intellectuals and that they developed post-racial imaginaries four hundred years ago. Their texts not only highlighted Native peoples’ achievements, denounced injustice, and demanded colonial reform, but they also exposed the emerging Spanish thinking and feeling on race that was at the core of colonial forms of discrimination. These authors aimed to alter the way colonial actors saw each other and, as a result, to change the world in which they lived.
[more]

front cover of Beyond Desert Walls
Beyond Desert Walls
Essays from Prison
Ken Lamberton
University of Arizona Press, 2005
“From the upper bunk where I write, a narrow window allows me a southern exposure of the desert beyond this prison. Saguaro cacti, residents here long before this rude concrete pueblo, fill the upper part of my frame. If I could open the window and reach out across the razed ground, sand traps, and shining perimeter fence, I might touch their fluted sides, their glaucous and waxen skins.”
 
For some people, even prison cannot shut out the natural world.

A teacher and family man incarcerated in Arizona State Prison—the result of a transgression that would cost him a dozen years of his life—Ken Lamberton can see beyond his desert walls. In essays that focus on the natural history of the region and on his own personal experiences with desert places, the author of the Burroughs Medal-winning book Wilderness and Razor Wire takes readers along as he revisits the Southwest he knew when he was free, and as he makes an inner journey toward self-awareness. Whether considering the seemingly eternal cacti or the desolate beauty of the Pinacate, he draws on sharp powers of observation to re-create what lies beyond his six-by-eight cell and to contemplate the thoughts that haunt his mind as tenaciously as the kissing bugs that haunt his sleep.

Ranging from prehistoric ruins on the Colorado Plateau to the shores of the Sea of Cortez, these writings were begun before Wilderness and Razor Wire and serve as a prequel to it. They seamlessly interweave natural and personal history as Lamberton explores caves, canyons, and dry ponds, evoking the mysteries and rhythms of desert life that elude even the most careful observers. He offers new ways of thinking about how we relate to the natural world, and about the links between those relationships and the ones we forge with other people. With the assurance of a gifted writer, he seeks to make sense of his own place in life, crafting words to come to terms with an insanity of his own making, to look inside himself and understand his passions and flaws.

Whether considering rattlesnakes of the hellish summer desert or the fellow inmates of his own personal hell, Lamberton finds meaningful connections—to his crime and his place, to the people who remained in his life and those who didn’t. But what he reveals in Beyond Desert Walls ultimately arises from language itself: a deep, and perhaps even frightening, understanding of a singular human nature.
[more]

front cover of Chasing Arizona
Chasing Arizona
One Man’s Yearlong Obsession with the Grand Canyon State
Ken Lamberton
University of Arizona Press, 2015
It seemed like a simple plan—visit fifty-two places in fifty-two weeks. But for author Ken Lamberton, a forty-five-year veteran of life in the Sonoran Desert, the entertaining results were anything but easy. In Chasing Arizona, Lamberton takes readers on a yearlong, twenty-thousand-mile joyride across Arizona during its centennial, racking up more than two hundred points of interest along the way.
 
Lamberton chases the four corners of Arizona, attempts every county, every reservation, and every national monument and state park, from the smallest community to the largest city. He drives his Kia Rio through the longest tunnels and across the highest suspension bridges, hikes the hottest deserts, and climbs the tallest mountain, all while visiting the people, places, and treasures that make Arizona great.
 
In the vivid, lyrical, often humorous prose the author is known for, each destination weaves together stories of history, nature, and people, along with entertaining side adventures and excursions. Maps and forty-four of the author’s detailed pencil drawings illustrate the journey.
 
Chasing Arizona is unlike any book of its kind. It is an adventure story, a tale of Arizona, a road-warrior narrative. It is a quest to see and experience as much of Arizona as possible. Through intimate portrayals of people and place, readers deeply experience the Grand Canyon State and at the same time celebrate what makes Arizona a wonderful place to visit and live.
[more]

front cover of Dry River
Dry River
Stories of Life, Death, and Redemption on the Santa Cruz
Ken Lamberton
University of Arizona Press, 2011
Poet and writer Alison Deming once noted, “In the desert, one finds the way by tracing the aftermath of water . . . ”

Here, Ken Lamberton finds his way through a lifetime of exploring southern Arizona’s Santa Cruz River. This river—dry, still, and silent one moment, a thundering torrent of mud the next—serves as a reflection of the desert around it: a hint of water on parched sand, a path to redemption across a thirsty landscape.

With his latest book, 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. These people each have their own stories of the river and its effect on their lives, and their narratives add immeasurable richness and depth to Lamberton’s own astute observations and picturesque descriptions.

Unlike books that detail only the Santa Cruz’s decline, Dry River offers a more balanced, at times even optimistic, view of the river that ignites hope for reclamation and offers a call to action rather than indulging in despair and resignation. At once a fascinating cultural history lesson and an important reminder that learning from the past can help us fix what we have damaged, Dry River is both a story about the amazing complexity of this troubled desert waterway and a celebration of one man’s lifelong journey with the people and places touched by it.
[more]

front cover of Time of Grace
Time of Grace
Thoughts on Nature, Family, and the Politics of Crime and Punishment
Ken Lamberton
University of Arizona Press, 2007
“I hole up in my own cozy cubicle and write, considering ways to make the approaching Thanksgiving holiday not just another day in this place. In prison, hope faces east; time is measured in wake-ups.”

Time of Grace is a remarkable book, written with great eloquence by a former science teacher who was incarcerated for twelve years for his sexual liaison with a teenage student. Far more than a “prison memoir,” it 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. Throughout, Ken Lamberton reflects on human relations as they mimic and defy those of the natural world, whose rhythms calibrate Lamberton’s days and years behind bars. He writes with candor about his life, while observing desert flora and fauna with the insight and enthusiasm of a professional naturalist.

While he studies a tarantula digging her way out of the packed earth and observes Mexican freetail bats sailing into the evening sky, Lamberton ruminates on his crime and on the wrenching effects it has had on his wife and three daughters. He writes of his connections with his fellow inmates—some of whom he teaches in prison classes—and with the guards who control them, sometimes with inexplicable cruelty. And he unflinchingly describes a prison system that has gone horribly wrong—a system entrapped in a self-created web of secrecy, fear, and lies.

This is the final book of Lamberton’s trilogy about the twelve years he spent in prison. Readers of his earlier books will savor this last volume. Those who are only now discovering Lamberton’s distinctive voice—part poet, part scientist, part teacher, and always deeply, achingly human—will feel as if they are making a new friend.

Gripping, sobering, and beautifully written, Lamberton’s memoir is an unforgettable exploration of crime, punishment, and the power of the human spirit.
[more]

front cover of Chiricahua Mountains
Chiricahua Mountains
Bridging the Borders of Wildness
Ken Lamberton
University of Arizona Press, 2003
For many, these mountains represent the Apache stronghold of Geronimo. For others, they are a birdwatcher's paradise. But the Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona are more than this. They are a classic "sky island" of the desert, a rich storehouse of biologic diversity. On a journey undertaken in search of a pair of rare short-tailed hawks, Ken Lamberton takes readers on an excursion through these mountains, from their riparian canyons to their highest peaks. The Chiricahuas comprise the largest single range in southern Arizona, crisscrossed by more than 300 miles of trails. Lamberton is your guide along these trails, and his knowledge of the mountains and their natural history makes him a perfect hiking companion while Jeff Garton's stunning photographs enrich your visit.

Lamberton shares insights about the geology, habitats, and diversity of wildlife in a place of such isolation that species must either adapt or become extinct. The Chiricahuas are one link in a chain of mountains connecting the Rockies to the Sierra Madre Occidental in Mexico, and some Madrean species reach the northernmost extension of their ranges here: birds like sulphur-bellied flycatchers, mammals like jaguarundis, and trees like the Apache pine. But this is not an untraveled wilderness. We learn why the Chiricahuas are so popular with birders, who flock to these mountains from around the world in the hopes of spotting some of the nearly four hundred avian species found here. We also learn something of the Chiricahua's rich human culture, from Apache warriors to European settlers.

Gracing the text are more than a dozen black-and-white photographs by Jeff Garton that offer views of the Chiricahuas different from those usually found in tourist brochures: landscapes and riparian settings, rock formations and plant studies that give readers a lasting impression of the beauty and tranquility of this wilderness. Together words and images convey an intimate view of one of the Southwest's most exotic locations—stronghold, paradise, and everlasting island in the vast and rolling desert.
[more]

front cover of Mission San Xavier del Bac
Mission San Xavier del Bac
A Guide to Its Iconography
Yvonne Lange
University of Arizona Press, 2004
Unique among mission churches of the northern borderlands of colonial Mexico for its ornate architecture and rich iconography, San Xavier del Bac south of Tucson is a pilgrimage destination for countless devotees and tourists. Passing through the façade entry to stand in the nave, one is dazzled by the transept and sanctuary altarpieces of sculpture niches and baroque pilasters, as well as the expanse of the frescoed ceiling.

This book is the first study of the iconography at San Xavier since its restoration in the 1990s by an international team of professional conservators. It expands our understanding of the numerous Catholic images and emblems of San Xavier through a close analysis of the newly revealed iconographic elements and an interpretation of the significance of their placement. It also proposes that the selection of specific religious themes and their locations was determined by an unfamiliar convention based on a tree-like design, in which the founder of a religious Order appears as the root and followers above in later branchings—an inversion of the more familiar top-to-bottom hierarchy.

Historians Lange and Ahlborn identify all the saintly images and religious elements that adorn San Xavier and suggest how and why they are so arranged. They examine the sculptures and paintings of the church from the façade throughout the cruciform interior in order to determine the organizational concepts that underlie their placement. They note that the selection of images in this Franciscan mission follows traditional Roman Catholic practice for decorating churches in order to instruct novices and reinforce the teaching of conversion in a pictographic catechism of Church doctrine. In short, the book is a dictionary of religious personages and symbols that will help the visitor identify the biblical stories and people portrayed, as well as associated signs and symbols. Entries include a description of the subject, its location, appropriate cross-references, and a bibliography. Recent illustrations by photographer Helga Teiwes and a floor plan facilitate the location of images by visitors.

A handsome, large-format book featuring more than one hundred photographs and supporting line illustrations, Lange and Ahlborn’s work confirms the significance of San Xavier’s iconography for art historians, students of religion, and visitors alike. It is both an incomparable guide and valuable reference source for the famed mission’s magnificent artistic heritage.
[more]

front cover of Mary Austin
Mary Austin
Song of a Maverick
Esther F. Lanigan
University of Arizona Press, 1997
"This book seamlessly combines biography and criticism. [Lanigan] adeptly analyzes Austin's life...and also offers insightful analyses of Austin's writing. Like other females of her period, she received too little recognition for her original prose style and social critiques. Thanks to Song of a Maverick, we hear Mary Austin's voice more clearly and appreciatively." —Carol J. Singley in American Literature

"[Lanigan] provides illuminating sociological background and lucidly marshals the existing biolgraphical data." —Choice

"Mary Hunter Austin was a well-known and respected author and activitst in her lifetime but is little known in ours. In this excellent biography...[Lanigan] chose to focus on a few central relationships in Austin's life, to explore in some depth a few central texts, and to understand the interior life of her subject. She has done a splendid job." —Ann J. Lane in the Journal of American History
[more]

front cover of Latino Placemaking and Planning
Latino Placemaking and Planning
Cultural Resilience and Strategies for Reurbanization
Jesus J. Lara
University of Arizona Press, 2018
Latinos are currently the second-largest ethnic group demographically within the United States. By the year 2050 they are projected to number nearly 133 million, or approximately one third of the country’s total population. As the urban component of this population increases, the need for resources to support it will generate new cultural and economic stresses.
 
Latino Placemaking and Planning offers a pathway to define, analyze, and evaluate the role that placemaking can have with respect to Latino communities in the context of contemporary urban planning, policy, and design practices. Using strategically selected case studies, Jesus J. Lara examines how Latinos contribute to the phenomenon of urban revitalization through the (re)appropriation of physical space for their own use and the consequent transformation of what were previously economically downtrodden areas into vibrant commercial and residential centers.
 
The book examines the formation of urban cultures and reurbanization strategies from the perspective of Latino urbanism and is divided into four key sections, which address (1) emerging new urban geographies; (2) the power of place and neighborhood selection; (3) Latino urbanism case studies; and (4) lessons and recommendations for “reurbanizing” the city. Latino Placemaking and Planning illustrates the importance of placemaking for Latino communities and provides accessible strategies for planners, students, and activists to sustainable urban revitalization.
[more]

front cover of Shameful Victory
Shameful Victory
The Los Angeles Dodgers, the Red Scare, and the Hidden History of Chavez Ravine
John H. M. Laslett
University of Arizona Press, 2015
On May 8, 1959, the evening news shocked Los Angeles residents, who saw LA County sheriffs carrying a Mexican American woman from her home in Chavez Ravine not far from downtown. Immediately afterward, the house was bulldozed to the ground. This violent act was the last step in the forced eviction of 3,500 families from the unique hilltop barrio that in 1962 became the home of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

John H. M. Laslett offers a new interpretation of the Chavez Ravine tragedy, paying special attention to the early history of the barrio, the reform of Los Angeles's destructive urban renewal policies, and the influence of the evictions on the collective memory of the Mexican American community.

In addition to examining the political decisions made by power brokers at city hall, Shameful Victory argues that the tragedy exerted a much greater influence on the history of the Los Angeles civil rights movement than has hitherto been appreciated. The author also sheds fresh light on how the community grew, on the experience of individual home owners who were evicted from the barrio, and on the influence that the event had on the development of recent Chicano/a popular music, drama, and literature.
[more]

front cover of The Power of Kiowa Song
The Power of Kiowa Song
A Collaborative Ethnography
Luke E. Lassiter
University of Arizona Press, 1998
Many Kiowas believe that song is a gift from God. Its power, argues Luke E. Lassiter, rests in the many ways that community members hear, understand, and feel it: "Song has power. As I begin to understand what this means for my mentors, I am just beginning to understand what this means in my life. They are not just singers. They are vehicles for something greater than all of us. Indeed, I now understand that I am not just a singer. But . . . I will sing until I die." As a boy, Lassiter had an early fascination with pow wows. This interest eventually went from a hobby to a passion. As Lassiter made Kiowa friends who taught him to sing and traveled the pow wow circuit, serving many times as a head singer, he began to investigate and write about the pow wow as an experiential encounter with song. The Power of Kiowa Song shows how song is interpreted, created, and used by individuals, how it is negotiated through the context of an event, and how it emerges as a powerfully unique and specific public expression. The Power of Kiowa Song presents a collaborative, community-wide dialogue about the experience of song. Using conversations with Kiowa friends as a frame, Lassiter seeks to describe the entire experience of song rather than to analyze it solely from a distance. Lassiter's Kiowa consultants were extremely active in the writing of the book, re-explaining concepts that seemed difficult to grasp and discussing the organization and content of the work. In a text that is engaging and easily read, Lassiter has combined experiential narrative with ethnological theory to create a new form of collaborative ethnography that makes anthropology accessible to everyone. This book is designed for anyone interested in Native American studies or anthropology, and it also serves as a resource written by and for the Kiowa themselves.

Hear the Power of Kiowa Song
[more]

front cover of Calexico
Calexico
True Lives of the Borderlands
Peter Laufer
University of Arizona Press, 2011
These days everyone has something to say (or declaim!) about the U.S.–Mexico border. Whether it’s immigration, resource management, educational policy, or drugs, the borderlands are either the epicenter or the emblem of a current crisis facing the nation. At a time when the region has been co-opted for every possible rhetorical use, what endures is a resilient and vibrant local culture that resists easy characterization. For an honest picture of life on the border, what remains is to listen to voices that are too often drowned out: the people who actually live and work there, who make their homes and livings amid a confluence of cultures and loyalties. For many of these people, the border is less a hyphenated place than a meeting place, a merging. This aspect of the border is epitomized in the names of two cities that straddle the line: Calexico and Mexicali.

A “sleepy crossroads that exists at a global flashpoint,” Calexico serves as the reference point for veteran journalist Peter Laufer’s chronicle of day-to-day life on the border. This wide-ranging, interview-driven book finds Laufer and travel companion/photographer on a weeklong road trip through the Imperial Valley and other border locales, engaging in earnest and revealing conversations with the people they meet along the way. Laufer talks to secretaries and politicians, restaurateurs and salsa dancers, poets and real estate agents about the issues that matter to them the most.

What draws them to border towns? How do they feel about border security and the fences that may someday run through their backyards? Is “English-only” a realistic policy? Why have some towns flourished and others declined? What does it mean to be Mexican or American in such a place? Waitress Bonnie Peterson banters with customers in Spanish and English. Mayor Lewis Pacheco laments the role that globalization has played in his city’s labor market. Some of their anecdotes are humorous, others grim. Moreover, not everyone agrees. But this very diversity is part of the fabric of the borderlands, and these stories demand to be heard.
[more]

front cover of Bennu 3-D
Bennu 3-D
Anatomy of an Asteroid
Dante S. Lauretta
University of Arizona Press, 2023
Bennu, named for the ancient Egyptian phoenix, was the chosen destination of OSIRIS-REx, NASA’s premier mission of asteroid exploration, launched in 2016. Study of the asteroid is important in safeguarding the future of planet Earth, but Bennu is also a time capsule from the dawn of our Solar System, holding secrets over four-and-a-half billion years old about the origin of life and Earth as a habitable planet.

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. Scientific studies of the samples, along with data collected during the rendezvous, promise to help find answers to some of humanity’s deepest questions: Where did we come from? What is our destiny in space?

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

front cover of Meteorites and the Early Solar System II
Meteorites and the Early Solar System II
Dante S. Lauretta
University of Arizona Press, 2006
They range in size from microscopic particles to masses of many tons. The geologic diversity of asteroids and other rocky bodies of the solar system are displayed in the enormous variety of textures and mineralogies observed in meteorites. The composition, chemistry, and mineralogy of primitive meteorites collectively provide evidence for a wide variety of chemical and physical processes. This book synthesizes our current understanding of the early solar system, summarizing information about processes that occurred before its formation. It will be valuable as a textbook for graduate education in planetary science and as a reference for meteoriticists and researchers in allied fields worldwide.
[more]

front cover of Our Hidden Landscapes
Our Hidden Landscapes
Indigenous Stone Ceremonial Sites in Eastern North America
Lucianne Lavin
University of Arizona Press, 2023
Challenging traditional and long-standing understandings, this volume provides an important new lens for interpreting stone structures that had previously been attributed to settler colonialism. Instead, the contributors to this volume argue that these locations are sacred Indigenous sites.

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

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

This work enables archaeologists, historians, conservationists, foresters, and members of the general public to recognize these important ritual sites.

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

front cover of Picturing Sabino
Picturing Sabino
A Photographic History of a Southwestern Canyon
David Wentworth Lazaroff
University of Arizona Press, 2023
Sabino Canyon, a desert canyon in the American Southwest near Tucson, Arizona, is enjoyed yearly by thousands of city residents as well as visitors from around the world. Picturing Sabino 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. Along the way the reader makes the acquaintance of ordinary picnickers as well as influential citizens who helped to reshape the canyon, while witnessing the canyon’s evolving relationship with its growing urban neighbor. The book will fascinate readers who are already familiar with Sabino Canyon, as well as anyone with an interest in local or regional history, or in historical photography.
[more]

front cover of Sabino Canyon
Sabino Canyon
The Life of a Southwestern Oasis
David Wentworth Lazaroff
University of Arizona Press, 1993
Nestled in the Santa Catalina Mountains near Tucson, Arizona, Sabino Canyon demonstrates the beauty and resiliency of life in what many would assume to be a most inhospitable place. For thousands of visitors each year, this oasis in the Sonoran Desert offers the opportunity to experience biodiversity in action.

David Lazaroff has called on years of studying, photographing, and educating people about Sabino Canyon to produce this clearly written and beautifully illustrated book. Focusing on the importance of Sabino Creek both to plants and animals and to human recreation, he tracks the ebb and flow of canyon life through the year and tells how people have sought to utilize the canyon through history. First-time visitors to Sabino Canyon will find their experience enriched through Lazaroff's insights into plants, animals, and geology, while those who regularly frequent Sabino's trails or pools can become better informed about its fragile desert and riparian habitats.

For anyone curious about life in a genuine Southwestern oasis, this book captures the beauty and uniqueness of a natural treasure-house located in a bustling city's back yard.
[more]

front cover of Landscapes of Freedom
Landscapes of Freedom
Building a Postemancipation Society in the Rainforests of Western Colombia
Claudia Leal
University of Arizona Press
2019 Winner, Colombia Section, Michael Jiménez Prize, Latin American Studies Association

After emancipation in 1851, the African descendants living in the extra-humid rainforests of the Pacific coast of Colombia attained levels of autonomy hardly equaled anywhere else in the Americas. This autonomy rested on their access to a diverse environment—including small strips of fertile soils, mines, forests, rivers, and wetlands—that contributed to their subsistence and allowed them to procure gold, platinum, rubber, and vegetable ivory for export.

Afro-Colombian slave labor had produced the largest share of gold in the colony of New Granada. After the abolishment of slavery, some free people left the mining areas and settled elsewhere along the coast, making this the largest area of Latin America in which black people predominate into the present day. However, this economy and society, which lived off the extraction of natural resources, was presided over by a very small white commercial elite living in the region’s ports, where they sought to create an urban environment that would shelter them from the jungle.

Landscapes of Freedom reconstructs a nonplantation postemancipation trajectory that sheds light on how environmental conditions and management influenced the experience of freedom. It also points at the problematic associations between autonomy and marginality that have shaped the history of Afro-America. By focusing on racialized landscapes, Leal offers a nuanced and important approach to understanding the history of Latin America.
[more]

front cover of Classic Maya Provincial Politics
Classic Maya Provincial Politics
Xunantunich and Its Hinterlands
Lisa J. LeCount
University of Arizona Press, 2010
Most treatments of large Classic Maya sites such as Caracol and Tikal regard Maya political organization as highly centralized. Because investigations have focused on civic buildings and elite palaces, however, a critical part of the picture of Classic Maya political organization has been missing.

The contributors to this volume chart the rise and fall of the Classic Maya center of Xunantunich, paying special attention to its changing relationships with the communities that comprised its hinterlands. They examine how the changing relationships between Xunantunich and the larger kingdom of Naranjo affected the local population, the location of their farms and houses, and the range of economic and subsistence activities in which both elites and commoners engaged. They also examine the ways common people seized opportunities and met challenges offered by a changing political landscape.

The rich archaeological data in this book show that incorporating subject communities and people—and keeping them incorporated—was an on-going challenge to ancient Maya rulers. Until now, archaeologists have lacked integrated regional data and a fine-grained chronology in which to document short-term shifts in site occupations, subsistence strategies, and other important practices of the daily life of the Maya. This book provides a revised picture of Maya politics—one of different ways of governing and alliance formation among dominant centers, provincial polities, and hinterland communities.
[more]

front cover of Diné Identity in a Twenty-First-Century World
Diné Identity in a Twenty-First-Century World
Lloyd L. Lee
University of Arizona Press, 2020

Diné identity in the twenty-first century is distinctive and personal. It is a mixture of traditions, customs, values, behaviors, technologies, worldviews, languages, and lifeways. It is a holistic experience. Diné identity is analogous to Diné weaving: like weaving, Diné identity intertwines all of life’s elements together.

In this important new book, Lloyd L. Lee, a citizen of the Navajo Nation and an associate professor of Native American studies, takes up and provides insight on the most essential of human questions: who are we? Finding value and meaning in the Diné way of life has always been a hallmark of Diné studies. Lee’s Diné-centric approach to identity gives the reader a deep appreciation for the Diné way of life. Lee incorporates Diné baa hane’ (Navajo history), Sa’ą́h Naagháí Bik’eh Hózhǫ́ǫ́n (harmony), Diné Bizaad (language), K’é (relations), K’éí (clanship), and Níhi Kéyah (land) to address the melding of past, present, and future that are the hallmarks of the Diné way of life.

This study, informed by personal experience, offers an inclusive view of identity that is encompassing of cultural and historical diversity. To illustrate this, Lee shares a spectrum of Diné insights on what it means to be human. Diné Identity in a Twenty-First-Century World opens a productive conversation on the complexity of understanding and the richness of current Diné identities.

[more]

front cover of Nihikéyah
Nihikéyah
Navajo Homeland
Lloyd L. Lee
University of Arizona Press, 2023
This anthology of essays offers perspectives of the Navajo homeland, nihikéyah, highlighting Diné examinations and understandings of the land.

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

The authors come from a variety of backgrounds and use multiple approaches to discuss Diné history in the U.S. Southwest, as well as forward-looking examinations of the Navajo Nation.
Together, the essays shed new light on Diné homeland and the challenges to the Navajo homeland and its peoples.

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

front cover of Diné Perspectives
Diné Perspectives
Revitalizing and Reclaiming Navajo Thought
Lloyd L. Lee
University of Arizona Press, 2014
What does it mean to be a Navajo (Diné) person today? What does it mean to “respect tradition”? How can a contemporary life be informed by the traditions of the past? These are the kinds of questions addressed by contributors to this unusual and pathbreaking book.
 
All of the contributors are coming to personal terms with a phrase that underpins the matrix of Diné culture: Sa’ah Naagháí Bik’eh Hózhóón. Often referred to simply as SNBH, the phrase can be translated in many ways but is generally understood to mean “one’s journey of striving to live a long, harmonious life.” The book offers a variety of perspectives of Diné men and women on the Diné cultural paradigm that is embedded in SNBH. Their writings represent embodied knowledge grounded in a way of knowing that connects thought, speech, experience, history, tradition, and land. Some of the contributors are scholars. Some are Diné who are fighting for justice and prosperity for the Navajo Nation. Some are poets and artists. They are united in working to preserve both intellectual and cultural sovereignty for Diné peoples. And their contributions exemplify how Indigenous peoples are creatively applying tools of decolonization and critical research to re-create Indigenous thought and culture in a present day that rarely resembles the days of their ancestors.
 
More than 300,000 people self-identify as Diné today. Every one must grapple with how to make a life that acknowledges Sa’ah Naagháí Bik’eh Hózhóón. Diné Perspectives is unique in bringing such personal journeys to the public eye.
[more]

front cover of Navajo Sovereignty
Navajo Sovereignty
Understandings and Visions of the Diné People
Lloyd L. Lee
University of Arizona Press, 2017

The last few decades have given rise to an electrifying movement of Native American activism, scholarship, and creative work challenging five hundred years of U.S. colonization of Native lands. Indigenous communities are envisioning and building their nations and are making decolonial strides toward regaining power from colonial forces.

The Navajo Nation is among the many Native nations in the United States pushing back. In this new book, Diné author Lloyd L. Lee asks fellow Navajo scholars, writers, and community members to envision sovereignty for the Navajo Nation. He asks, (1) what is Navajo sovereignty, (2) how do various Navajo institutions exercise sovereignty, (3) what challenges does Navajo sovereignty face in the coming generations, and (4) how did individual Diné envision sovereignty?

Contributors expand from the questions Lee lays before them to touch on how Navajo sovereignty is understood in Western law, how various institutions of the Navajo Nation exercise sovereignty, what challenges it faces in coming generations, and how individual Diné envision power, authority, and autonomy for the people.

A companion to Diné Perspectives: Revitalizing and Reclaiming Navajo Thought, each chapter offers the contributors’ individual perspectives. The book, which is organized into four parts, discusses Western law’s view of Diné sovereignty, research, activism, creativity, and community, and Navajo sovereignty in traditional education. Above all, Lee and the contributing scholars and community members call for the rethinking of Navajo sovereignty in a way more rooted in Navajo beliefs, culture, and values.

Contributors:

Raymond D. Austin

Bidtah N. Becker

Manley A. Begay, Jr.

Avery Denny

Larry W. Emerson

Colleen Gorman

Michelle L. Hale

Michael Lerma

Leola Tsinnajinnie

[more]

front cover of Walking the Land, Feeding the Fire
Walking the Land, Feeding the Fire
Knowledge and Stewardship Among the Tlicho Dene
Allice Legat
University of Arizona Press, 2012

In the Dene worldview, relationships form the foundation of a distinct way of knowing. For the Tlicho Dene, indigenous peoples of Canada's Northwest Territories, as stories from the past unfold as experiences in the present, so unfolds a philosophy for the future. Walking the Land, Feeding the Fire vividly shows how—through stories and relationships with all beings—Tlicho knowledge is produced and rooted in the land.

Tlicho-speaking people are part of the more widespread Athapaskan-speaking community, which spans the western sub-arctic and includes pockets in British Columbia, Alberta, California, and Arizona. Anthropologist Allice Legat undertook this work at the request of Tlicho Dene community elders, who wanted to provide younger Tlicho with narratives that originated in the past but provide a way of thinking through current critical land-use issues. Legat illustrates that, for the Tlicho Dene, being knowledgeable and being of the land are one and the same.

Walking the Land, Feeding the Fire marks the beginning of a new era of understanding, drawing both connections to and unique aspects of ways of knowing among other Dene peoples, such as the Western Apache. As Keith Basso did with his studies among the Western Apache in earlier decades, Legat sets a new standard for research by presenting Dene perceptions of the environment and the personal truths of the storytellers without forcing them into scientific or public-policy frameworks. Legat approaches her work as a community partner—providing a powerful methodology that will impact the way research is conducted for decades to come—and provides unique insights and understandings available only through traditional knowledge.


[more]

front cover of Mimbres Archaeology of the Upper Gila, New Mexico
Mimbres Archaeology of the Upper Gila, New Mexico
Stephen H. Lekson
University of Arizona Press, 1990
This reappraisal of archaeology conducted at the Saige-McFarland site presents for the first time a substantial body of comparative data from a Mimbres period site in the Gila drainage. Lekson offers a new and controversial interpretation of the Mimbres sequence, reintroducing the concept of the Mangas phase first proposed by the Gila Pueblo investigations of the 1930s and demonstrating a more gradual shift from pithouse to pueblo occupance than has been suggested previously.
[more]

front cover of Salado Archaeology of the Upper Gila, New Mexico
Salado Archaeology of the Upper Gila, New Mexico
Stephen H. Lekson
University of Arizona Press, 2002
Salado is an enigma of the past. One of the most spectacular cultures of the ancient Southwest, its brilliant polychrome pottery has been subjected to varied interpretations, from religious cult to artistic horizon. Stephen Lekson now uses data from two Salado sites—a large pueblo and a small farmstead—to clarify long-standing misconceptions about this culture. By combining analysis of the large whole-vessel collection at Dutch Ruin with the scientific excavation of Villareal II, a picture of Salado emerges that enables Lekson to evaluate previous competing theories and propose that Salado represents a major fourteenth-century migration of Pueblo peoples into the Chihuahuan deserts. Lekson demonstrates that late, short-lived Salado farmsteads—difficult to identify archaeologically in areas with larger Mimbres concentrations—coexisted with larger Salado towns, and he argues that Salado in the Upper Gila region appears as a substantial in-migration of Mogollon Uplands populations into what was a vacant river valley. Throughout the fourteenth century, Salado communities in the Upper Gila were integrated into the larger Salado horizon and were closely connected to Casas Grandes, as indicated by the export of serpentine to the city of Paquimé and the occurrence of Casas Grandes pottery at Upper Gila Salado sites. The book includes illustrations of 71 vessels from Dutch Ruin plus a full-color frontispiece. Through analysis of these two sites, Lekson has taken a large step toward clearing up the mystery of Salado. His work will be welcomed by all who study the movements of peoples in the prehispanic Southwest.
[more]

front cover of Unsettling Mobility
Unsettling Mobility
Mediating Mi’kmaw Sovereignty in Post-contact Nova Scotia
Michelle Lelièvre
University of Arizona Press, 2017

Since contact, attempts by institutions such as the British Crown and the Catholic Church to assimilate indigenous peoples have served to mark those people as “Other” than the settler majority. In Unsettling Mobility, Michelle A. Lelièvre examines how mobility has complicated, disrupted, and—at times—served this contradiction at the core of the settler colonial project.

Drawing on archaeological, ethnographic, and archival fieldwork conducted with the Pictou Landing First Nation—one of thirteen Mi’kmaw communities in Nova Scotia—Lelièvre argues that, for the British Crown and the Catholic Church, mobility has been required not only for the settlement of the colony but also for the management and conversion of the Mi’kmaq. For the Mi’kmaq, their continued mobility has served as a demonstration of sovereignty over their ancestral lands and waters despite the encroachment of European settlers.

Unsettling Mobility demonstrates the need for an anthropological theory of mobility that considers not only how people move from one place to another but also the values associated with such movements, and the sensual perceptions experienced by moving subjects. Unsettling Mobility argues that anthropologists, indigenous scholars, and policy makers must imagine settlement beyond sedentism. Rather, both mobile and sedentary practices, the narratives associated with those practices, and the embodied experiences of them contribute to how people make places—in other words, to how they settle.

Unsettling Mobility arrives at a moment when indigenous peoples in North America are increasingly using movement as a form of protest in ways that not only assert their political subjectivity but also remake the nature of that subjectivity.

[more]

front cover of Life in the Hothouse
Life in the Hothouse
How a Living Planet Survives Climate Change
Melanie Lenart
University of Arizona Press, 2010
In this insightful, compelling, and highly readable work, Melanie Lenart, an award-winning journalist and science writer who holds a PhD in Natural Resources and Global Change, examines global warming with the trained eye of a professional scientist. And she presents the science in a clear, straightforward manner. Why does the planet’s warming produce stronger hurricanes, rising seas, and larger floods? Simple, says Lenart. The Earth is just doing what comes naturally. Just as humans produce sweat to cool off on a hot day, the planet produces hurricanes, floods, wetlands, and forests to cool itself off.

Life in the Hothouse incorporates Lenart’s extensive knowledge of climate science—including the latest research in climate change—and the most current scientific theories, including Gaia theory, which holds that the Earth has some degree of climate control “built in.” As Lenart points out, scientists have been documenting stronger hurricanes and larger floods for many years. There is a good reason for this, she notes. Hurricanes help cool the ocean surface and clear the air of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas responsible for global warming. From the perspective of Gaia theory, these responses are helping to slow the ongoing global warming and Lenart expounds upon this in a clear and understandable fashion.

There is hope, Lenart writes. If we help sustain Earth's natural defense systems, including wetlands and forests, perhaps Mother Earth will no longer need to rely as much on the cooling effects of what we call "natural disasters"—many of which carry a human fingerprint. At a minimum, she argues, these systems can help us survive the heat.
[more]

front cover of Reading the Illegible
Reading the Illegible
Indigenous Writing and the Limits of Colonial Hegemony in the Andes
Laura Leon Llerena
University of Arizona Press, 2023
Reading the Illegible examines the history of alphabetic writing in early colonial Peru, deconstructing the conventional notion of literacy as a weapon of the colonizer. This book develops the concept of legibility, which allows for an in-depth analysis of coexisting Andean and non-Native media. The book discusses the stories surrounding the creation of the Huarochirí Manuscript (c. 1598–1608), the only surviving book-length text written by Indigenous people in Quechua in the early colonial period. The manuscript has been deemed “untranslatable in all the usual senses,” but scholar Laura Leon Llerena argues that it offers an important window into the meaning of legibility.

The concept of legibility allows us to reconsider this unique manuscript within the intertwined histories of literacy, knowledge, and colonialism. Reading the Illegible shows that the anonymous author(s) of the Huarochirí Manuscript, along with two contemporaneous Andean-authored texts by Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, rewrote the history of writing and the notion of Christianity by deploying the colonizers’ technology of alphabetic writing.

Reading the Illegible weaves together the story of the peoples, places, objects, and media that surrounded the creation of the anonymous Huarochirí Manuscript to demonstrate how Andean people endowed the European technology of writing with a new social role in the context of a multimedia society.
[more]

front cover of Havana and Other Missing Fathers
Havana and Other Missing Fathers
Mia Leonin
University of Arizona Press, 2009
Mia Leonin spent the first sixteen years of her life believing her father was dead. All she knew of the man came through stories told by her mother. At times he had been a surgeon, at others a psychiatrist. In truth, he had been a fantasy.

Shortly after her sixteenth birthday, Leonin learned from her mother that her father, a Cuban exile, was very much alive and living in Florida. Her attempts to contact him, however, were thwarted until four years later, when she left home in search of her roots.

She meets her father, but trying to discover the truth behind him proves to be a more daunting task. Her journey takes her to Miami, Colombia, and Cuba, and her search for cultural identity leads her to create memories, friendships, and romances. She finds moments of connection and redemption, ending up in Havana not as a cultural tourist but as an illegitimate daughter of Cuba looking for validation. What she discovers is an island bereft of fathers and brimming with paternalism. As she becomes entangled with two different men, she descends further into the Havana of poverty, humiliation, and despair, as well as the ever-inventive city that is as passionate as it is contradictory.

Insightful, imaginative, and often poetic, Havana and Other Missing Fathers is Mia Leonin’s recollection of this journey and her longing to learn more about her origins. In the end, she must learn to accept the answers she discovers as well as the questions that remain.
[more]

front cover of Protostars and Planets III
Protostars and Planets III
Eugene Levy
University of Arizona Press, 1993
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 III reflects the enormous progress made in understanding star and planet formation as a result of new observational capabilities and cooperative research among scientists from diverse fields.
[more]

front cover of Hand Trembling, Frenzy Witchcraft, and Moth Madness
Hand Trembling, Frenzy Witchcraft, and Moth Madness
A Study of Navajo Seizure Disorders
Jerrold E. Levy
University of Arizona Press, 1987
According to traditional Navajo belief, seizures are the result of sibling incest, sexual witchcraft, or possession by a supernatural spirit—associations that have kept such disorders from being known outside Navajo families. This new study is concerned with discovering why the Navajos have accorded seizures such importance and determining their meaning in the larger context of Navajo culture. The book is based on a 14-year study of some 40 Navajo patients and on an epidemiological survey among the Navajos and among three Pueblo tribes.
[more]

front cover of Iron Horse Imperialism
Iron Horse Imperialism
The Southern Pacific of Mexico, 1880-1951
Daniel Lewis
University of Arizona Press, 2008
The Southern Pacific of Mexico was a U.S.–owned railroad that operated between 1898 and 1951, running from the Sonoran town of Nogales, just across the border from Arizona, to the city of Guadalajara, stopping at several northwestern cities and port towns along the way. Owned by the Southern Pacific Company, which operated a highly profitable railroad system north of the border, the SP de Mex transported millions of passengers as well as millions of tons of freight over the years, both within Mexico and across its northern border. However, as Daniel Lewis discloses in this thoroughly researched investigation of the railroad, it rarely turned a profit. So why, Lewis wonders, did a savvy, money-minded U.S. corporation continue to operate the railroad until it was nationalized by the Mexican government more than a half-century after it was constructed? Iron Horse Imperialism reveals that the relationship between the Mexican government and the Southern Pacific Company was a complex one, complicated by Mexico’s defeat by U.S. forces in the mid-nineteenth century and by SP’s failure to understand that it was conducting business in a country whose leaders were ambivalent about its presence. Lewis contends that SP executives, urged on by the media of the day, operated with a reflexive imperialism that kept the company committed to the railroad long after it ceased to make business sense. Incorporating information discovered in both Mexican and American archives, some of which was previously unavailable to researchers, this comprehensive book deftly describes the complicated, decades-long dance between oblivious U.S. entrepreneurs and wary Mexican officials. It is a fascinating story.
[more]

front cover of Resources of Near-Earth Space
Resources of Near-Earth Space
John S. Lewis
University of Arizona Press, 1993
Originally published in 1993
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.This volume summarizes the present state of the art in attempts to realize these possibilities: identifying the resources, mining and processing, transportation, and economics. As a broad survey of a rapidly evolving field, it is intended as a technical introduction to the use of nonterrestrial materials for scientists, engineers, and industrial and governmental project managers who seek to make space more accessible.
[more]

front cover of Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles
Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles
A Transnational Perspective, 1890-1940
Stephanie Lewthwaite
University of Arizona Press, 2009
Beginning near the end of the nineteenth century, a generation of reformers set their sights on the growing Mexican community in Los Angeles. Experimenting with a variety of policies on health, housing, education, and labor, these reformers—settlement workers, educationalists, Americanizers, government officials, and employers—attempted to transform the Mexican community with a variety of distinct and often competing agendas.

In Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles, Stephanie Lewthwaite presents evidence from a myriad of sources that these varied agendas of reform consistently supported the creation of racial, ethnic, and cultural differences across Los Angeles. Reformers simultaneously promoted acculturation and racialization, creating a “landscape of difference” that significantly shaped the place and status of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans from the Progressive era through the New Deal.

The book journeys across the urban, suburban, and rural spaces of Greater Los Angeles as it moves through time and examines the rural–urban migration of Mexicans on both a local and a transnational scale. Part 1 traverses the world of Progressive reform in urban Los Angeles, exploring the link between the region’s territorial and industrial expansion, early campaigns for social and housing reform, and the emergence of a first-generation Mexican immigrant population. Part 2 documents the shift from official Americanization and assimilation toward nativism and exclusion. Here Lewthwaite examines competing cultures of reform and the challenges to assimilation from Mexican nationalists and American nativists. Part 3 analyzes reform during the New Deal, which spawned the active resistance of second-generation Mexican Americans.

Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles achieves a full, broad, and nuanced account of the various—and often contradictory—efforts to reform the Mexican population of Los Angeles. With a transnational approach grounded in historical context, this book will appeal to students of history, cultural studies, and literary studies
[more]

front cover of Divided Peoples
Divided Peoples
Policy, Activism, and Indigenous Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Border
Christina Leza
University of Arizona Press, 2019
The border region of the Sonoran Desert, which spans southern Arizona in the United States and northern Sonora, Mexico, has attracted national and international attention. But what is less discussed in national discourses is the impact of current border policies on the Native peoples of the region. There are twenty-six tribal nations recognized by the U.S. federal government in the southern border region and approximately eight groups of Indigenous peoples in the United States with historical ties to Mexico—the Yaqui, the O’odham, the Cocopah, the Kumeyaay, the Pai, the Apaches, the Tiwa (Tigua), and the Kickapoo.

Divided Peoples addresses the impact border policies have on traditional lands and the peoples who live there—whether environmental degradation, border patrol harassment, or the disruption of traditional ceremonies. Anthropologist Christina Leza shows how such policies affect the traditional cultural survival of Indigenous peoples along the border. The author examines local interpretations and uses of international rights tools by Native activists, counterdiscourse on the U.S.-Mexico border, and challenges faced by Indigenous border activists when communicating their issues to a broader public.

Through ethnographic research with grassroots Indigenous activists in the region, the author reveals several layers of division—the division of Indigenous peoples by the physical U.S.-Mexico border, the divisions that exist between Indigenous perspectives and mainstream U.S. perspectives regarding the border, and the traditionalist/nontraditionalist split among Indigenous nations within the United States. Divided Peoples asks us to consider the possibilities for challenging settler colonialism both in sociopolitical movements and in scholarship about Indigenous peoples and lands.
[more]

front cover of Revolt
Revolt
An Archaeological History of Pueblo Resistance and Revitalization in 17th Century New Mexico
Matthew Liebmann
University of Arizona Press, 2014

Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.

The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 is the most renowned colonial uprisings in the history of the American Southwest. Traditional text-based accounts tend to focus on the revolt and the Spaniards' reconquest in 1692—completely skipping over the years of indigenous independence that occurred in between. Revolt boldly breaks out of this mold and examines the aftermath of the uprising in colonial New Mexico, focusing on the radical changes it instigated in Pueblo culture and society.

In addition to being the first book-length history of the revolt that incorporates archaeological evidence as a primary source of data, this volume is one of a kind in its attempt to put these events into the larger context of Native American cultural revitalization. Despite the fact that the only surviving records of the revolt were written by Spanish witnesses and contain certain biases, author Matthew Liebmann finds unique ways to bring a fresh perspective to Revolt.

Most notably, he uses his hands-on experience at Ancestral Pueblo archaeological sites—four Pueblo villages constructed between 1680 and 1696 in the Jemez province of New Mexico—to provide an understanding of this period that other treatments have yet to accomplish. By analyzing ceramics, architecture, and rock art of the Pueblo Revolt era, he sheds new light on a period often portrayed as one of unvarying degradation and dissention among Pueblos. A compelling read, Revolt's "blood-and-thunder" story successfully ties together archaeology, history, and ethnohistory to add a new dimension to this uprising and its aftermath.

[more]

front cover of Huichol Territory and the Mexican Nation
Huichol Territory and the Mexican Nation
Indigenous Ritual, Land Conflict, and Sovereignty Claims
Paul M. Liffman
University of Arizona Press, 2011
The Huichol (Wixarika) people claim a vast expanse of Mexico’s western Sierra Madre and northern highlands as a territory called kiekari, which includes parts of the states of Nayarit, Jalisco, Durango, Zacatecas, and San Luis Potosí. This territory forms the heart of their economic and spiritual lives. But indigenous land struggle is a central fact of Mexican history, and in this fascinating new work Paul Liffman expands our understanding of it. Drawing on contemporary anthropological theory, he explains how Huichols assert their sovereign rights to collectively own the 1,500 square miles they inhabit and to practice rituals across the 35,000 square miles where their access is challenged. Liffman places current access claims in historical perspective, tracing Huichol communities’ long-term efforts to redress the inequitable access to land and other resources that their neighbors and the state have imposed on them.

Liffman writes that “the cultural grounds for territorial claims were what the people I wanted to study wanted me to work on.” Based on six years of collaboration with a land-rights organization, interviews, and participant observation in meetings, ceremonies, and extended stays on remote rancherías, Huichol Territory and the Mexican Nation analyzes the sites where people define Huichol territory. The book’s innovative structure echoes Huichols’ own approach to knowledge and examines the nation and state, not just the community. Liffman’s local, regional, and national perspective informs every chapter and expands the toolkit for researchers working with indigenous communities. By describing Huichols’ ceremonially based placemaking to build a theory of “historical territoriality,” he raises provocative questions about what “place” means for native peoples worldwide.
[more]

front cover of A New American Family
A New American Family
A Love Story
Peter Likins
University of Arizona Press, 2011
By most accounts Pete Likins has had a successful life. But his personal accomplishments are only the backdrop for the real story—the story of his family, whose trials and triumphs hold lessons for many American families in the 21st century.

This poignant but ultimately empowering memoir tells the story of Peter Likins, his wife Patricia, and the six children they adopted in the 1960s, building a family beset by challenges that ultimately strengthened all bonds. With issues such as inter-racial adoption, mental illness, drug addiction, unwed pregnancy, and homosexuality entwined in their lives, the Likins’ tale isn’t just a family memoir—it’s a story of the American experience, a memoir with a message. With circumstances of race, age, and health making all of their children virtually unadoptable by 1960s standards, Pat and Pete never strayed from the belief that loyalty and love could build a strong family.

Both Pete and Pat have served as teachers. and Pete’s long academic career—holding positions as a professor, dean, provost, and then president—illuminates more than just his personal success. Pete’s professional attainments produce a context for his family story, wherein high achievements in educational, athletic, and financial terms coexist with the joys and sorrows of this exceptional family.

A frank, open account of the difficulties his family faced, this is a brave story, told with unflinching honesty and remarkable compassion. A New American Family is a wonderful narrative of the genesis of a family and a journey to the deepest parts of a father’s heart.
[more]

front cover of Remedies for a New West
Remedies for a New West
Healing Landscapes, Histories, and Cultures
Patricia Nelson Limerick
University of Arizona Press, 2009
This wide-ranging collection of essays is intended to provoke both thought and action. The pieces collected here explore a variety of issues facing the American West—disappearing Native American languages, deteriorating air quality, suburban sprawl, species loss, grassland degradation, and many others—and suggest steps toward “healing.” More than “dealing with” or “solving,” according to the editors, healing addresses not just symptoms but their underlying causes, offering not just a temporary cure but a permanent one.

The signs of illness and trauma can seem omnipresent in today’s West: land and soil disrupted from mining, overgrazing, logging, and farming; wildlife habitat reduced and fragmented; native societies disturbed and threatened; open space diminished by cities and suburbs; wilderness destroyed by roads and recreation-seekers. But as these essays suggest, the “treatment program” for healing the West has many healthful side effects. Engaging in the kinds of projects suggested by contributors is therapeutic not only for the environment but for participants as well. Restoration, repair, and recovery can counter symptoms of despair with concentrated doses of promise and possibility.

The more “lesions” the West has, this book suggests, the more opportunities there are for westerners to revive and ultimately cure the ailing patient they have helped to create. The very idea of restoring the West to health, contributors and editors contend, unleashes our imaginations, sharpens our minds, and gives meaning to the ways we choose to live our lives. At the same time, acknowledging the profound difficulties of the work that lies ahead immunizes us against our own arrogance as we set about the task of healing the West.
[more]

front cover of
Richard E. Lingenfelter
University of Arizona Press, 1978

front cover of The Chinese of Early Tucson
The Chinese of Early Tucson
Historic Archaeology from the Tucson Urban Renewal Project
Florence C. Lister
University of Arizona Press, 1989
Focuses on an ethnographic collection gathered from a complex of Chinese dwellings, the importance of which lies in its size, diversity, good condition, and observable continuity of materials known from earlier periods of Chinese occupation in Tucson.
[more]

front cover of Sixteenth Century Maiolica Pottery in the Valley of Mexico
Sixteenth Century Maiolica Pottery in the Valley of Mexico
Florence C. Lister
University of Arizona Press, 1982
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.
[more]

front cover of The Secret Powers of Naming
The Secret Powers of Naming
Sara Littlecrow-Russell
University of Arizona Press, 2006
Sara Littlecrow-Russell’s style emerges from the ancient and sacred tradition of storytelling, where legends were told not just to entertain, but to teach and, if necessary, to discipline. The power of the storyteller is the power of naming, to establish a relationship, a connection, and a sense of meaning. A name is both a bequest and a burden. Each of the poems in this collection is, in essence, a naming ritual. Sharply, energetically, and always provocatively, these poems name uncomfortable moments, complex emotions, and sudden, often wryly humorous realizations.

As Littlecrow-Russell explores how names imposed by outsiders both collide and merge with the identities that Natives create for themselves, these poems decisively counter the images of Indians as colorful dancers, stoic saints, and defeated warriors. These verses are not constructed of beautiful images, nor are they stories of redemption. Instead, Littlecrow-Russell offers stark and honest witness to urban and reservation life at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In short snaps of honed lyric and voice, she tackles topics ranging from family, love, and spirituality, to welfare, addiction, and the thorny politics of tribal identity. Her work displays tremendous bitterness and anger, but there is also dignity, humor, and plenty of irony.

Candid and compelling, this collection brings fluent verse and human face to the commonly misrepresented experiences of Native Americans.
[more]

front cover of A House of My Own
A House of My Own
Social Organization in the Squatter Settlements of Lima, Peru
Susan Lobo
University of Arizona Press, 1982
"A fairly comprehensive monograph, highly suitable for classroom use, that offers a wide range of information fit into traditional anthropological categories. . . . an interesting study of cultural integrity and pattern in a setting of what appears to be complex sociopolitical chaos." —American Anthropologist

"Whether or not one accepts Susan Lobo's optimistic analysis, her ability to translate the apparent chaos of shanty-town lives into such neat patterns and to help outsiders view life as the inhabitants do are important contributions." —Inter-American Review of Bibliography

"An extremely competent ethnography, simple and straightforward." —Anthropos

"A pleasure to read, a mine of information which will be useful in teaching students to formulate their own hypotheses." —International Journal of Urban & Regional Research

"Very well written and provides a great wealth of the liveliest sort of ethnographic detail." —Latin American Research Review

"Lobo's study of two squatter settlements in Lima provides a solid, well-written, detailed, traditional ethnography of poor families in a Third World urban setting." —Hispanic American Historical Review

"This well-written account . . . has a lot of heart and feeling for the human face of the urban poor." —International Migration Review
[more]

front cover of Urban Voices
Urban Voices
The Bay Area American Indian Community
Susan Lobo
University of Arizona Press, 2002
California has always been America's promised land—for American Indians as much as anyone. In the 1950s, Native people from all over the United States moved to the San Francisco Bay Area as part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs Relocation Program. Oakland was a major destination of this program, and once there, Indian people arriving from rural and reservation areas had to adjust to urban living. They did it by creating a cooperative, multi-tribal community—not a geographic community, but rather a network of people linked by shared experiences and understandings. The Intertribal Friendship House in Oakland became a sanctuary during times of upheaval in people's lives and the heart of a vibrant American Indian community. As one long-time resident observes, "The Wednesday Night Dinner at the Friendship House was a must if you wanted to know what was happening among Native people." One of the oldest urban Indian organizations in the country, it continues to serve as a gathering place for newcomers as well as for the descendants of families who arrived half a century ago. This album of essays, photographs, stories, and art chronicles some of the people and events that have played—and continue to play—a role in the lives of Native families in the Bay Area Indian community over the past seventy years. Based on years of work by more than ninety individuals who have participated in the Bay Area Indian community and assembled by the Community History Project at the Intertribal Friendship House, it traces the community's changes from before and during the relocation period through the building of community institutions. It then offers insight into American Indian activism of the 1960s and '70s—including the occupation of Alcatraz—and shows how the Indian community continues to be created and re-created for future generations. Together, these perspectives weave a richly textured portrait that offers an extraordinary inside view of American Indian urban life. Through oral histories, written pieces prepared especially for this book, graphic images, and even news clippings, Urban Voices collects a bundle of memories that hold deep and rich meaning for those who are a part of the Bay Area Indian community—accounts that will be familiar to Indian people living in cities throughout the United States. And through this collection, non-Indians can gain a better understanding of Indian people in America today. "If anything this book is expressive of, it is the insistence that Native people will be who they are as Indians living in urban communities, Natives thriving as cultural people strong in Indian ethnicity, and Natives helping each other socially, spiritually, economically, and politically no matter what. I lived in the Bay Area in 1975-79 and 1986-87, and I was always struck by the Native (many people do say 'American Indian' emphatically!) community and its cultural identity that has always insisted on being second to none. Yes, indeed this book is a dynamic, living document and tribute to the Oakland Indian community as well as to the Bay Area Indian community as a whole." —Simon J. Ortiz "When my family arrived in San Francisco in 1957, the people at the original San Francisco Indian Center helped us adjust to urban living. Many years later, I moved to Oakland and the Intertribal Friendship House became my sanctuary during a tumultuous time in my life. The Intertribal Friendship House was more than an organization. It was the heart of a vibrant tribal community. When we returned to our Oklahoma homelands twenty years later, we took incredible memories of the many people in the Bay Area who helped shape our values and beliefs, some of whom are included in this book." —Wilma Mankiller, former Principal Chief, Cherokee Nation
[more]

front cover of Discovering North American Rock Art
Discovering North American Rock Art
Lawrence L. Loendorf
University of Arizona Press, 2005
From the high plains of Canada to caves in the southeastern United States, images etched into and painted on stone by ancient Native Americans have aroused in observers the desire to understand their origins and meanings. Rock paintings and engravings can be found in nearly every state and province, and each region has its own distinctive story of discovery and evolving investigation of the rock art record. Rock art in the twenty-first century enjoys a large and growing popularity fueled by scholarly research and public interest alike. This book explores the history of rock art research in North America and is the only volume in the past twenty-five years to provide coverage of the subject on a continental scale. Written by contributors active in rock art research, it examines sites that provide a cross-section of regions and topics and complements existing books on rock art by offering new information, insights, and approaches to research. The first part of the volume explores different regional approaches to the study of rock art, including a set of varied responses to a single site as well as an overview of broader regional research investigations. It tells how Writing-on-Stone in southern Alberta, Canada, reflects changing thought about rock art from the 1870s to today; it describes the role of avocational archaeologists in the Mississippi Valley, where rock art styles differ on each side of the river; it explores discoveries in southwestern mountains and southeastern caves; and it integrates the investigation of cupules along Georgia’s Yellow River into a full study of a site and its context. The book also compares the differences between rock art research in the United States and France: from the outset, rock art was of only marginal interest to most U.S. archaeologists, while French prehistorians considered cave art an integral part of archaeological research. The book’s second part is concerned with working with the images today and includes coverage of gender interests, government sponsorship, the role of amateurs in research, and chronometric studies. Much has changed in our understanding of rock art since Cotton Mather first wrote in 1714 of a strange inscription on a Massachusetts boulder, and the cutting-edge contributions in this volume tell us much about both the ancient place of these enduring images and their modern meanings. Discovering North American Rock Art distills today’s most authoritative knowledge of the field and is an essential volume for both specialists and hobbyists.
[more]

front cover of Aconcagua
Aconcagua
The Invention of Mountaineering on America’s Highest Peak
Joy Logan
University of Arizona Press, 2011
Aconcagua is the highest mountain in the Americas and the tallest mountain in the world outside of the Himalayas. Located in the Andes Mountains of Argentina, near the city of Mendoza, Aconcagua has been luring European mountain climbers since 1883, when a German ge-ologist nearly reached the mountain’s summit. (A Swiss climber finally made the ascent in 1897.) In this fascinating book, Joy Logan explores the many impacts of mountaineering’s “discovery” of Aconcagua including its effect on how local indigenous history is understood. The consequences still resonate today, as the region has become a magnet for “adventure travelers,” with about 7,000 climbers and trekkers from all over the world visiting each year.

Having done fieldwork on Aconcagua for six years, Logan offers keen insights into how the invention of mountaineering in the nineteenth century—and adventure tourism a century later—have both shaped and been shaped by local and global cultural narratives. She examines the roles and functions of mountain guides, especially in regard to notions of gender and nation; re-reads the mountaineering stories forged by explorers, scientists, tourism officials, and the gear industry; and considers the distinctions between foreign and Argentine climbers (some of whom are celebrities in their own right).

In Logan’s revealing analysis, Aconcagua is emblematic of the tensions produced by modernity, nation-building, tourism development, and re-ethnification. The evolution of mountain climbing on Aconcagua registers seismic shifts in attitudes toward adventure, the national, and the global. With an eye for detail and a flair for description, Logan invites her readers onto the mountain and into the lives it supports.
[more]

front cover of Fighting Sprawl and City Hall
Fighting Sprawl and City Hall
Resistance to Urban Growth in the Southwest
Michael F. Logan
University of Arizona Press, 1995
The line is drawn in cities of the American West: on one side, chambers of commerce, developers, and civic boosters advocating economic growth; on the other, environmentalists and concerned citizens who want to limit what they see as urban sprawl. While this conflict is usually considered to have its origins in the rise of environmental activism during the late 1960s, opposition to urban growth in the Southwest began as early as the economic boom that followed World War II. Evidence of this resistance abounds, but it has been largely ignored by both western and urban historians.

Fighting Sprawl and City Hall now sets the record straight, tracing the roots of antigrowth activism in two southwestern cities, Tucson and Albuquerque, where urbanization proceeded in the face of constant protest. Logan tells how each of these cities witnessed multifaceted opposition to post-war urbanization and a rise in political activism during the 1950s. For each city, he describes the efforts by civic boosters and local government to promote development, showing how these booster-government alliances differed in effectiveness; tells how middle-class Anglos first voiced opposition to annexations and zoning reforms through standard forms of political protest such as referendums and petitions; then documents the shift to ethnic resistance as Hispanics opposed urban renewal plans that targeted barrios. Environmentalism, he reveals, was a relative latecomer to the political arena and became a focal point for otherwise disparate forms of resistance.

Logan's study enables readers to understand not only these similarities in urban activism but also important differences; for example, Tucson provides the stronger example of resistance based on valuation of the physical environment, while Albuquerque better demonstrates anti-annexation politics. For each locale, it offers a testament to grass-roots activism that will be of interest to historians as well as to citizens of its subject cities.
[more]

front cover of The Lessening Stream
The Lessening Stream
An Environmental History of the Santa Cruz River
Michael F. Logan
University of Arizona Press, 2002
Newcomers to Tucson know the Santa Cruz River as a dry bed that can become a rampaging flood after heavy rains. Yet until the late nineteenth century, the Santa Cruz was an active watercourse that served the region’s agricultural needs—until a burgeoning industrial society began to tap the river’s underground flow. The Lessening Stream reviews the changing human use of the Santa Cruz River and its aquifer from the earliest human presence in the valley to today. Michael Logan examines the social, cultural, and political history of the Santa Cruz Valley while interpreting the implications of various cultures' impacts on the river and speculating about the future of water in the region. Logan traces river history through three eras—archaic, modern, and postmodern—to capture the human history of the river from early Native American farmers through Spanish missionaries to Anglo settlers. He shows how humans first diverted its surface flow, then learned to pump its aquifer, and today fail to fully understand the river's place in the urban environment. By telling the story of the meandering river—from its origin in southern Arizona through Mexico and the Tucson Basin to its terminus in farmland near Phoenix—Logan links developments throughout the river valley so that a more complete picture of the river's history emerges. He also contemplates the future of the Santa Cruz by confronting the serious problems posed by groundwater pumping in Tucson and addressing the effects of the Central Arizona Project on the river valley. Skillfully interweaving history with hydrology, geology, archaeology, and anthropology, The Lessening Stream makes an important contribution to the environmental history of southern Arizona. It reminds us that, because water will always be the focus for human activity in the desert, we desperately need a more complete understanding of its place in our lives.
[more]

front cover of Juan Felipe Herrera
Juan Felipe Herrera
Migrant, Activist, Poet Laureate
Francisco A. Lomelí
University of Arizona Press, 2023

For the first time, this book presents the distinguished, prolific, and highly experimental writer Juan Felipe Herrera. This wide-ranging collection of essays by leading experts offers critical approaches on Herrera, who transcends ethnic and mainstream poetics. It expertly demonstrates Herrera’s versatility, resourcefulness, innovations, and infinite creativity.

As a poet Herrera has had an enormous impact within and beyond Chicano poetics. He embodies much of the advancements and innovations found in American and Latin American poetry from the early l970s to the present. His writings have no limits or boundaries, indulging in the quotidian as well as the overarching topics of his era at different periods of his life. Both Herrera and his work are far from being unidimensional. His poetics are eclectic, incessantly diverse, transnational, unorthodox, and distinctive.

Reading Herrera is an act of having to rearrange your perceptions about things, events, historical or intra-historical happenings, and people. The essays in this work delve deeply into Juan Felipe Herrera’s oeuvre and provide critical perspectives on his body of work. They include discussion of Chicanx indigeneity, social justice, environmental imaginaries, Herrera’s knack for challenging theory and poetics, transborder experiences, transgeneric constructions, and children’s and young adult literature.

This book includes an extensive interview with the poet and a voluminous bibliography on everything by, about, and on the author. The chapters in this book offer a deep dive into the life and work of an internationally beloved poet who, along with serving as the poet laureate of California and the U.S. poet laureate, creates work that fosters a deep understanding of and appreciation for people’s humanity.

Contributors
Trevor Boffone
Marina Bernardo-Flórez
Manuel de Jesús Hernández-G.
Whitney DeVos
Michael Dowdy
Osiris Aníbal Gómez
Carmen González Ramos
Cristina Herrera
María Herrera-Sobek
Francisco A. Lomelí
Tom Lutz
Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez
Marzia Milazzo
Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger
Rafael Pérez-Torres
Renato Rosaldo
Donaldo W. Urioste
Luis Alberto Urrea
Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez

[more]

front cover of Archaeology As Anthropology
Archaeology As Anthropology
A Case Study
William A. Longacre
University of Arizona Press, 1970
This paper is important in the rapidly increasing preoccupation of American archeologists with the basic theories of their discipline. . . . An excellent example of how basic descriptive data can be used.—American Anthropologist
[more]

front cover of Ceramic Ethnoarchaeology
Ceramic Ethnoarchaeology
William A. Longacre
University of Arizona Press, 1991
Ethnoarchaeology, the study of material culture in a living society by archaeologists, facilitates the extraction of information from prehistoric materials as well. Studies of contemporary pottery-making were initiated in the southwestern United States toward the end of the nineteenth century, then abandoned as a result of changes in archaeological theory. Now a resurgence in ethnoarchaeology over the past twenty-five years offers a new set of directions for the discipline. This volume presents the results of such work with pottery, a class of materials that occurs abundantly in many archaeological sites.

Drawing on projects undertaken around the world, in the Phillipines, East Africa, Mesoamerica, India, in both traditional and complex societies, the contributors focus on identifying social and behavioral sources of ceramic variation to show how analogical reasoning is fundamental to archaeological interpretation. As the number of pottery-making societies declines, opportunities for such research must be seized. By bringing together a variety of ceramic ethnoarchaeological analyses, this volume offers the profession a much-needed touchstone on method and theory for the study of pottery-making among living peoples.
[more]

front cover of Multidisciplinary Research at Grasshopper Pueblo, Arizona
Multidisciplinary Research at Grasshopper Pueblo, Arizona
William A. Longacre
University of Arizona Press, 1982
“For the past twenty years the University of Arizona’s archaeological field school has been conducting research focused on Grasshopper Pueblo, a large, fourteenth-century Western Anasazi site, located below the Mogollon Rim, on the Fort Apache Reservation, in Arizona. . . . Research questions pursued at Grasshopper involve explicating the founding, growth, and abandonment of the site within the context of three broad areas of causality. These are environmental and climactic change; regional and interregional economics, especially trade; and subsistence change, including agricultural intensification. The papers in this volume . . . are presented as specialized contributions to this work.”—Journal of Anthropological Research
 
Contributors:
 
Larry D. Agenbroad
Eric J. Arnould
Walter H. Birkby
Vorsila L. Bohrer
Jeffrey S. Dean
Michael W. Graves
Sally J. Holbrook
Gerald K. Kelso
William A. Longacre
Charmion R. McKusick
J. Jefferson Reid
John W. Olsen
Stanley J. Olsen
William Reynolds
William J. Robinson
Izumi Shimada
Stephanie M. Whittlesey
David R. Wilcox
[more]

front cover of Snapping Lines
Snapping Lines
Jack Lopez
University of Arizona Press, 2001
A construction worker takes up with the pregnant daughter of an acquaintance and finds he doesn't control the relationship as much as he thinks he does . . .

A couple searches for a lost dog along the beach because the dog is more important than their relationship . . .

A drunken man picks up a girl hitchhiker and remembers what it once felt like to have feelings for someone else . . .


What does it mean to be male in a world in which old borders no longer exist? How can a man have a relationship if he doesn't even know who he is—and what better way to find out than by committing to a woman? Snapping Lines brings familiar and new stories together in a collection that explores the lives of loners searching for love. Jack Lopez writes about people who have adopted a stoical indifference to a world in which they always seem to find themselves on the losing end. These stories explore Latino male identity and the forces that shape it: friends, family, and lovers; culture, place, and relationships. They focus on men—often working men in the building trades—who construct their lives through their work and live in perpetual limbo because they don't know who they are. Men who stumble onto the relationships they need almost by accident. Men who try to control their relationships but fail.

Written in spare, electric language and energized by memorable scenes, these stories enlighten as much as they entertain. When you have read Snapping Lines, you will come to see the faces of strangers in new and familiar ways.
[more]

front cover of House of Grace, House of Blood
House of Grace, House of Blood
Poems
Denise Low
University of Arizona Press, 2024
Intertwining a lyrical voice with historical texts, poet Denise Low brings fresh urgency to the Gnadenhutten Massacre. In 1782, a renegade Pennsylvania militia killed ninety-six pacificist Christian Delawares (Lenapes) in Ohio. Those who escaped, including Indigenous eyewitnesses, relayed their accounts of the atrocity. Like Layli Longsoldier’s Whereas and Simon Ortiz’s from Sand Creek, Low delves into a critical incident of Indigenous peoples’ experiences. Readers will explore with the poet how trauma persists through hundreds of years, and how these peoples have survived and flourished in the subsequent generations.

In a personal poetic treatment of documents, oral tradition, and images, the author embodies the contradictions she unravels. From a haunting first-person perspective, Low’s formally inventive archival poetry combines prose and lyric, interweaving verse with historical voices in a dialogue with the source material. Each poem builds into a larger narrative on American genocide, the ways in which human loss corresponds to ecological destruction, and how intimate knowledge of the past can enact healing.

Ultimately, these poems not only reconstruct an important historical event, but they also put pressure on the gaps, silences, and violence of the archive. Low asks readers to question not only what is remembered, but how history is remembered—and who is forgotten from it. Reflecting on the injustice of the massacre, the Shawnee leader Tecumseh lamented that though “the Americans murdered all the men, women, and children, even as they prayed to Jesus . . . no American ever was punished, not one.” These poems challenge this attempted erasure.
 
 
[more]

front cover of The Vertebrates of Arizona
The Vertebrates of Arizona
With Major Section on Arizona Habitats
Charles H. Lowe
University of Arizona Press, 1964
“This compact book summarizes the distribution of all of the Recent species of vertebrates of Arizona. The introductory Part 1, “Arizona landscapes and habitats,” by Lowe, is an instructive and detailed ecological discussion of the diversified topography, climate, and flora of the state, illustrated with numerous excellent photographs.”—The Auk

“An impressive volume . . . a valuable reference for professional biologists, students, and others interested in the native fauna of Arizona and its distribution there.”—Science
[more]

front cover of Intrepid Explorer
Intrepid Explorer
The Autobiography of the World's Best Mine Finder
J. David Lowell
University of Arizona Press, 2014
When seven-year-old Dave Lowell was camped out at his father’s mine in the hills of southern Arizona in 1935, he knew he had found his calling. “Life couldn’t get any better than this,” he recalls. “I didn’t know what science was, but wisps of scientific thought were already working into my plan.” So began the legendary career of the engineer, geologist, explorer, and international businessman whose life is recounted in his own words in this captivating book.

An Arizona native with family roots in territorial times, Lowell grew from modest beginnings on a ranch near Nogales to become a major world figure in the fields of minerals, mining, and economic geology. He has personally discovered more copper than anyone in history and has developed multibillion-dollar gold and copper mines that have changed the economies of nations. And although he has consulted for corporations in the field of mining, he has largely operated as an independent agent and explorer, the architect of his own path and success.

His life’s story unfolds in four stages: his early education in his field, on-the-job learning at sites in the United States and Mexico, development of exploration strategies, and finally, the launch of his own enterprises and companies. Recurring themes in Lowell’s life include the strict personal, ethical, and tactical policies he requires of his colleagues; his devotion to his family; and his distaste for being away from the field in a corporate office, even to this day. The magnitude of Lowell’s overall success is evident in his list of mine discoveries, as well as in his scientific achievements and the enormous respect his friends and colleagues have had for him throughout his lengthy career, which he continues to zealously pursue.
[more]

front cover of Prehistoric Households at Turkey Creek Pueblo, Arizona
Prehistoric Households at Turkey Creek Pueblo, Arizona
Julie C. Lowell
University of Arizona Press, 1991
Excavations at Turkey Creek Pueblo, a large thirteenth-century ruin in the Point of Pines region boasting approximately 335 rooms.
[more]

front cover of Petrified Forest National Park
Petrified Forest National Park
A Wilderness Bound in Time
George M. Lubick
University of Arizona Press, 1996
Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon—a few American national parks enjoy amusement-park status, eclipsing many other beautiful and significant parks due to their heavy political support and spectacular sights. Visitors to Petrified Forest National Park in northeastern Arizona can escape from the litter, snack bars, and crowds of the recreational parks to a 200-million-year-old ecosystem locked in stone. Enhanced by the unrivaled, colorful beauty of the adjacent Painted Desert, Petrified Forest National Park has captivated visitors since the area was discovered by early explorers. The history of the huge fossilized forest parallels that of Arizona. It was discovered and looted by adventurers and largely ignored by the government until President Theodore Roosevelt made it a national monument in 1906. The forest's location along Route 66 brought a large number of visitors during the time it enjoyed only monument status, but lack of funding for protection allowed much damage and theft of fossilized wood.

Petrified Forest National Park: A Wilderness Bound in Time speeds the reader on an ancient ecological journey, from the time of dinosaurs to the discovery of their Triassic fossils and on through a century of political maneuvering to create a place for the forest in American history. George Lubick describes how a dedicated few understood the environmental importance as well as the unique beauty of the park's Triassic Chinle Formation and the Painted Desert. Nearly a million people "visit the Triassic" annually; this environmental history of the ancient forest is important for those who know the park as well as those interested in natural America. Petrified Forest National Park is one of the few complete histories of any national park, a well-told, balanced treatment of the environmental, political, and historical factors that shape America's natural history.
[more]

front cover of Night Sky, Morning Star
Night Sky, Morning Star
Evelina Zuni Lucero
University of Arizona Press, 2000

At the Indian artisans show in Santa Clara Pueblo, Cecelia Bluespruce sits with her wares in the middle of a row of booths—a good place to catch buyers. She is a successful Native American artist, a sculptor and potter of renown. But Cecelia is in the middle of something deeper than an art show, for she has become trapped by dreams and shadows of her past.

Night Sky, Morning Star is a story of remembrance and reconciliation in one Native American family separated by time and chance. Cecelia’s grown son, Jude, now wants to learn about the father he has never known. Political activist Julian Morning Star, imprisoned twenty years for a crime he did not commit, is unaware that his son even exists. Troubled by dreams, lies, and denial of the past, Cecelia is guided toward wholeness by family and friends who have their own pasts to confront.

This compelling novel plunges readers into the hubbub of the Indian arts market and into the grim reality of prison life. Evelina Zuni Lucero introduces us to experiences we may find unfamiliar: diverse Native American traditions, life on a BIA Indian agency compound, the making of an Indian activist. But she also reintroduces us to two things we all live for: the power of story and the power of love.

Night Sky, Morning Star is the fiction winner of the 1999 First Book Awards competition of the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas.
 

[more]

front cover of Precolumbian Water Management
Precolumbian Water Management
Ideology, Ritual, and Power
Lisa J. Lucero
University of Arizona Press, 2006
Among ancient Mesoamerican and Southwestern peoples, water was as essential as maize for sustenance and was a driving force in the development of complex society. Control of water shaped the political, economic, and religious landscape of the ancient Americas, yet it is often overlooked in Precolumbian studies. Now one volume offers the latest thinking on water systems and their place within the ancient physical and mental language of the region.

Precolumbian Water Management examines water management from both economic and symbolic perspectives. Water management facilities, settlement patterns, shrines, and water-related imagery associated with civic-ceremonial and residential architecture provide evidence that water systems pervade all aspects of ancient society. Through analysis of such data, the contributors seek to combine an understanding of imagery and the religious aspects of water with its functional components, thereby presenting a unified perspective of how water was conceived, used, and represented in ancient greater Mesoamerica. The collection boasts broad chronological and geographical coverage—from the irrigation networks of Teotihuacan to the use of ritual water technology at Casas Grandes—that shows how procurement and storage systems were adapted to local conditions.

The articles consider the mechanisms that were used to build upon the sacredness of water to enhance political authority through time and space and show that water was not merely an essential natural resource but an important spiritual one as well, and that its manipulation was socially far more complex than might appear at first glance. As these papers reveal, an understanding of materials associated with water can contribute much to the ways that archaeologists study ancient cultural systems. Precolumbian Water Management underscores the importance of water management research and the need to include it in archaeological projects of all types.
[more]

front cover of The Navajo Hunter Tradition
The Navajo Hunter Tradition
Karl W. Luckert
University of Arizona Press, 1975
New approach to the study of myths relating to the origin of the Navajos. Based on extensive fieldwork and research, including Navajo hunter informants and unpublished manuscripts of Father Berard Haile. Part 1: The Navajo Tradition, Perspectives and History; Part II: Navajo Hunter Mythology—A Collection of Texts; Part III: The Navajo Hunter Tradition: An Interpretation.
[more]

front cover of Minorities in Phoenix
Minorities in Phoenix
A Profile of Mexican American, Chinese American, and African American Communities, 1860-1992
Bradford Luckingham
University of Arizona Press, 1994
Phoenix is the largest city in the Southwest and one of the largest urban centers in the country, yet less has been published about its minority populations than those of other major metropolitan areas. Bradford Luckingham has now written a straightforward narrative history of Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans, and African Americans in Phoenix from the 1860s to the present, tracing their struggles against segregation and discrimination and emphasizing the active roles they have played in shaping their own destinies.

Settled in the mid-nineteenth century by Anglo and Mexican pioneers, Phoenix emerged as an Anglo-dominated society that presented formidable obstacles to minorities seeking access to jobs, education, housing, and public services. It was not until World War II and the subsequent economic boom and civil rights era that opportunities began to open up. Drawing on a variety of sources, from newspaper files to statistical data to oral accounts, Luckingham profiles the general history of each community, revealing the problems it has faced and the progress it has made. His overview of the public life of these three ethnic groups shows not only how they survived, but how they contributed to the evolution of one of America's fastest-growing cities.
[more]

front cover of Phoenix
Phoenix
The History of a Southwestern Metropolis
Bradford Luckingham
University of Arizona Press, 1989
More than half of all Arizonans live in Phoenix, the center of one of the most urbanized states in the nation. This history of the Sunbelt metropolis traces its growth from its founding in 1867 to its present status as one of the ten largest cities in the United States. Drawing on a wide variety of archival materials, oral accounts, promotional literature, and urban historical studies, Bradford Luckingham presents an urban biography of a thriving city that for more than a century has been an oasis of civilization in the desert Southwest. First homesteaded by pioneers bent on seeing a new agricultural empire rise phoenix-like from ancient Hohokam Indian irrigation ditches and farming settlements, Phoenix became an agricultural oasis in the desert during the late 1800s. With the coming of the railroads and the transfer of the territorial capital to Phoenix, local boosters were already proclaiming it the new commercial center of Arizona. As the city also came to be recognized as a health and tourist mecca, thanks to its favorable climate, the concept of "the good life" became the centerpiece of the city's promotional efforts. Luckingham follows these trends through rapid expansion, the Depression, and the postwar boom years, and shows how economic growth and quality of life have come into conflict in recent times.
[more]

front cover of A Quiet Victory for Latino Rights
A Quiet Victory for Latino Rights
FDR and the Controversy Over "Whiteness"
Patrick D. Lukens
University of Arizona Press

In 1935 a federal court judge handed down a ruling that could have been disastrous for Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and all Latinos in the United States. However, in an unprecedented move, the Roosevelt administration wielded the power of "administrative law" to neutralize the decision and thereby dealt a severe blow to the nativist movement. A Quiet Victory for Latino Rights recounts this important but little-known story.

To the dismay of some nativist groups, the Immigration Act of 1924, which limited the number of immigrants who could be admitted annually, did not apply to immigrants from Latin America. In response to nativist legal maneuverings, the 1935 decision said that the act could be applied to Mexican immigrants. That decision, which ruled that the Mexican petitioners were not "free white person[s]," might have paved the road to segregation for all Latinos.

The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), founded in 1929, had worked to sensitize the Roosevelt administration to the tenuous position of Latinos in the United States. Advised by LULAC, the Mexican government, and the US State Department, the administration used its authority under administrative law to have all Mexican immigrants—and Mexican Americans—classified as "white." It implemented the policy when the federal judiciary "acquiesced" to the New Deal, which in effect prevented further rulings.

In recounting this story, complete with colorful characters and unlikely bedfellows, Patrick D. Lukens adds a significant chapter to the racial history of the United States. 

[more]

front cover of Letters from the Southwest
Letters from the Southwest
Charles Lummis
University of Arizona Press

In the fall of 1884, journalist Charles Lummis set out on foot from Ohio to California on assignment for the Los Angeles Times. The reports he mailed ahead to that newspaper were later refashioned for the book A Tramp Across the Continent, a work that helped to establish Lummis as the most active promoter of Southwestern culture who ever lived.

Lummis wrote another set of letters during his journey, however, which he sent back to Ohio for publication by the Chillicothe Leader. Although these letters contain basically the same narrative as those sent to Los Angeles and later found in A Tramp, the Ohio letters more closely reflect the author’s thoughts and observations while on the journey. In fact, a comparison of the two drafts indicates that Lummis spent considerable effort removing spontaneous details from the Ohio letters in favor or a more commercial, self-promoting, and politic reporting for the California paper.

The twenty-four Ohio letters, assembled here by James W. Byrkit, offer a far more candid look at the Southwest than Lummis was later to bring to print, as well as greater insight into the author’s own personality. Byrkit’s introductory essay provides the background for Lummis’s career, compares the three bodies of work relating to the trek, and offers an account of Lummis’s transformation from chronicler to promoter.

[more]

front cover of Some Strange Corners of Our Country
Some Strange Corners of Our Country
Charles Lummis
University of Arizona Press, 1989
Lummis's prose portraits of the Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, Montezuma Castle, and other sites reflect the author's knowledge of Southwest anthropology and history.
[more]

front cover of Tribal Policing
Tribal Policing
Asserting Sovereignty, Seeking Justice
Eileen Luna-Firebaugh
University of Arizona Press, 2007
What does it mean to be a tribal police officer? What are the complexities of that role? And how do tribal communities, tribal police departments, and other law enforcement agencies collaborate to address the alarmingly high rate of violent crime in Indian country?

Author Eileen Luna-Firebaugh answers these and other questions in this well-documented text about tribal government and law enforcement in America. Based on extensive research with tribal police departments conducted over a period of eight years, Tribal Policing reveals the complicated role of police officials in Indian country and the innovative methods they are developing to address crime within their borders and to advance tribal sovereignty in the United States.

Tribal police departments face many challenges, such as heightened crime rates, a lack of resources (working patrol vehicles, 911 systems, access to police radios), and vast patrol areas. Luna-Firebaugh demonstrates that tribal officers see themselves as members of the tribal community and that tribal law enforcement is a complex balance of tribal position and authority within the community. Among other topics, Luna-Firebaugh analyzes the structure of tribal law enforcement and the ways it differs from mainstream policing; the role of women, tribal members, and others who comprise tribal law enforcement personnel; tribal jails and corrections; police training; and the legal, political, cultural, and historical issues that affect American Indian tribal policing.

This informative text addresses the scarcity of published material regarding tribal law enforcement and will be a welcome addition to courses in criminal justice, the administration of justice, law enforcement, and Native American studies.
[more]

front cover of Where the Wind Blows Us
Where the Wind Blows Us
Practicing Critical Community Archaeology in the Canadian North
Natasha Lyons
University of Arizona Press, 2013
Where the Wind Blows Us unites critical practice with a community-based approach to archaeology. Author Natasha Lyons describes an inclusive archaeology that rests on a flexible but rigorous approach to research design and demonstrates a responsible, ethical practice. She traces the rise and application of community archaeologies, develops a wide-ranging set of methods for community practice, and maps out a “localized critical theory” that is suited to the needs of local and descendant communities as they pursue self-defined heritage goals. Localized critical theory aims to decenter the focus on global processes of capitalism in favor of the local processes of community dynamics. Where the Wind Blows Us emphasizes the role of individuals and the relationships they share with communities of the past and present.
 
Lyons offers an extended case study of her work with the Inuvialuit community of the Canadian Western Arctic. She documents the development of this longstanding research relationship and presents both the theoretical and practical products of the work to date. Integrating knowledge drawn from archaeology, ethnography, oral history, and community interviews, Lyons utilizes a multivocal approach that actively listens to Inuvialuit speak about their rich and textured history.
 
The overall significance of this volume lies in outlining a method of practicing archaeology that embraces local ways of knowing with a critically constructed and evolving methodology that is responsive to community needs. It will serve as a handbook to mine for elements of critical practice, a model of community-based archaeology, and a useful set of concepts and examples for classroom study.
[more]

front cover of Ancestral Hopi Migrations
Ancestral Hopi Migrations
Patrick D. Lyons
University of Arizona Press, 2003
Southwestern archaeologists have long speculated about the scale and impact of ancient population movements. In Ancestral Hopi Migrations, Patrick Lyons infers the movement of large numbers of people from the Kayenta and Tusayan regions of northern Arizona to every major river valley in Arizona, parts of New Mexico, and northern Mexico. Building upon earlier studies, Lyons uses chemical sourcing of ceramics and analyses of painted pottery designs to distinguish among traces of exchange, emulation, and migration. He demonstrates strong similarities among the pottery traditions of the Kayenta region, the Hopi Mesas, and the Homol'ovi villages, near Winslow, Arizona. Architectural evidence marshaled by Lyons corroborates his conclusion that the inhabitants of Homol'ovi were immigrants from the north. Placing the Homol'ovi case study in a larger context, Lyons synthesizes evidence of northern immigrants recovered from sites dating between A.D. 1250 and 1450. His data support Patricia Crown's contention that the movement of these groups is linked to the origin of the Salado polychromes and further indicate that these immigrants and their descendants were responsible for the production of Roosevelt Red Ware throughout much of the Greater Southwest. Offering an innovative juxtaposition of anthropological data bearing on Hopi migrations and oral accounts of the tribe's origin and history, Lyons highlights the many points of agreement between these two bodies of knowledge. Lyons argues that appreciating the scale of population movement that characterized the late prehistoric period is prerequisite to understanding regional phenomena such as Salado and to illuminating the connections between tribal peoples of the Southwest and their ancestors.
[more]

front cover of Beyond Alterity
Beyond Alterity
Destabilizing the Indigenous Other in Mexico
Paula López Caballero
University of Arizona Press, 2018
The concept of “indigenous” has been entwined with notions of exoticism and alterity throughout Mexico’s history. In Beyond Alterity, authors from across disciplines question the persistent association between indigenous people and radical difference, and demonstrate that alterity is often the product of specific political contexts.

Although previous studies have usually focused on the most visible ­aspects of differences—cosmovision, language, customs, resistance—the contributors to this volume show that emphasizing difference prevents researchers from seeing all the social phenomena where alterity is not obvious. Those phenomena are equally or even more constitutive of social life and include property relations (especially individual or private ones), participation in national projects, and the use of national languages.

The category of “indigenous” has commonly been used as if it were an objective term referring to an already given social subject. Beyond Alterity shows how this usage overlooks the fact that the social markers of differentiation (language, race or ethnic group, phenotype) are historical and therefore unstable. In opposition to any reification of geographical, cultural, or social boundaries, this volume shows that people who (self-)identify as indigenous share a multitude of practices with the rest of society and that the association between indigenous identification and alterity is the product of a specific political history.

Beyond Alterity is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding indigenous identity, race, and Mexican history and politics.
 
Contributors
 
Ariadna Acevedo-Rodrigo
Laura Cházaro
Michael T. Ducey
Paul K. Eiss
José Luis Escalona-Victoria
Vivette García Deister
Peter Guardino
Emilio Kourí
Paula López Caballero
Elsie Rockwell
Diana Lynn Schwartz
Gabriela Torres-Mazuera
[more]

front cover of Dragons in the Land of the Condor
Dragons in the Land of the Condor
Writing Tusán in Peru
Ignacio López-Calvo
University of Arizona Press, 2014
Building on his 2013 study on Nikkei cultural production in Peru, in Dragons in the Land of the Condor Ignacio López-Calvo studies the influence of a Chinese ethnic background in the writing of several twentieth- and twenty-first-century Sino-Peruvian authors.

While authors like Siu Kam Wen and Julia Wong often rely on their Chinese cultural heritage for inspiration, many others, like Pedro Zulen, Mario Wong, and Julio Villanueva Chang, choose other sources of inspiration and identification. López-Calvo studies the different strategies used by these writers to claim either their belonging in the Peruvian national project or their difference as a minority ethnic group within Peru. Whether defending the rights of indigenous Peruvians, revealing the intricacies of a life of self-exploitation among Chinese shopkeepers, exploring their identitarian dilemmas, or re-creating—beyond racial memory—life under the political violence in Lima of the 1980s, these authors provide their community with a voice and a collective agency, while concomitantly repositioning contemporary Peruvian culture as transnational.

López-Calvo bridges from his earlier study of Peruvian Nikkei’s testimonials and literature and raises this question: why are Chinese Peruvian authors seemingly more disconnected from their Asian heritage than Japanese Peruvian authors from theirs? The author argues that the Chinese arrival in Peru half a century earlier influenced a stronger identification with the criollo world. Yet he argues that this situation may soon be changing as the new geopolitical and economic influence of the People’s Republic of China in the world, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, affects the way Chinese and Sino–Latin American communities and their cultures are produced and perceived.
[more]

front cover of The Affinity of the Eye
The Affinity of the Eye
Writing Nikkei in Peru
Ignacio López-Calvo
University of Arizona Press, 2013

In The Affinity of the Eye: Writing Nikkei in Peru, Ignacio López-Calvo rises above the political emergence of the Fujimori phenomenon and uses politics and literature to provide one of the first comprehensive looks at how the Japanese assimilated and inserted themselves into Peruvian culture. Through contemporary writers’ testimonies, essays, fiction, and poetry, López-Calvo constructs an account of the cultural formation of Japanese migrant communities. With deftly sensitive interviews and comments, he portrays the difficulties of being a Japanese Peruvian. Despite a few notable examples, Asian Peruvians have been excluded from a sense of belonging or national identity in Peru, which provides López-Calvo with the opportunity to record what the community says about their own cultural production. In so doing, López-Calvo challenges fixed notions of Japanese Peruvian identity.

The Affinity of the Eye scrutinizes authors such as José Watanabe, Fernando Iwasaki, Augusto Higa, Doris Moromisato, and Carlos Yushimito, discussing their literature and their connections to the past, present, and future. Whether these authors push against or accept what it means to be Japanese Peruvians, they enrich the images and feelings of that experience. Through a close reading of literary and cultural productions, López-Calvo’s analysis challenges and reframes the parameters of being Nikkei in Peru.

Covering both Japanese issues in Peru and Peruvian issues in Japan, the book is more than a compendium of stories, characters, and titles. It proves the fluid, enriching, and ongoing relationship that exists between Peru and Japan.

[more]

front cover of Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction
Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction
The Cultural Production of Social Anxiety
Ignacio López-Calvo
University of Arizona Press, 2014
Los Angeles has long been a place where cultures clash and reshape. The city has a growing number of Latina/o authors and filmmakers who are remapping and reclaiming it through ongoing symbolic appropriation. In this illuminating book, Ignacio López-Calvo foregrounds the emotional experiences of authors, implicit authors, narrators, characters, and readers in order to demonstrate that the evolution of the imaging of Los Angeles in Latino cultural production is closely related to the politics of spatial location. This spatial-temporal approach, he writes, reveals significant social anxieties, repressed rage, and deep racial guilt.

Latino Los Angeles in Film and Fiction sets out to reconfigure the scope of Latino literary and cultural studies. Integrating histories of different regions and nations, the book sets the interplay of unresolved contradictions in this particular metropolitan area. The novelists studied here stem from multiple areas, including the U.S. Southwest, Guatemala, and Chile. The study also incorporates non-Latino writers who have contributed to the Latino culture of the city.

The first chapter examines Latino cultural production from an ecocritical perspective on urban interethnic relations. Chapter 2 concentrates on the representation of daily life in the barrio and the marginalization of Latino urban youth. The third chapter explores the space of women and how female characters expand their area of operations from the domestic space to the public space of both the barrio and the city.

A much-needed contribution to the fields of urban theory, race critical theory, Chicana/o–Latina/o studies, and Los Angeles writing and film, López-Calvo offers multiple theoretical perspectives—including urban theory, ecocriticism, ethnic studies, gender studies, and cultural studies— contextualized with notions of transnationalism and post-nationalism.
[more]

front cover of Brother Bullet
Brother Bullet
Poems
Casandra López
University of Arizona Press, 2019
Speaking to both a personal and collective loss, in Brother Bullet Casandra López confronts her relationships with violence, grief, guilt, and ultimately, endurance. Revisiting the memory and lasting consequences of her brother’s murder, López traces the course of the bullet—its trajectory, impact, wreckage—in lyrical narrative poems that are haunting and raw with emotion, yet tender and alive in revelations of light.

Drawing on migratory experiences, López transports the reader to the Inland Empire, Baja California, New Mexico, and Arizona to create a frame for memory, filled with imagery, through the cyclical but changing essence of sorrow. This is paralleled with surrounding environments, our sense of belonging—on her family’s porch, or in her grandfather’s orange grove, or in the darkest desert. López’s landscapes are geographical markers and borders, connecting shared experiences and memories.

Brother Bullet tugs and pulls, drawing us into a consciousness—a story—we all bear.
[more]

front cover of The Darling
The Darling
Lorraine M. López
University of Arizona Press, 2015
Latina bibliophile Caridad falls out of love again and again, with much help from Anton Chekhov, Gustave Flaubert, Theodore Dreiser, D. H. Lawrence, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Hardy, and other deceased white men of letters. Raised in a household of women, she rejects examples of womanhood offered by her long-suffering mother, her caustic eldest sister Felicia, and her pliant and sentimental middle sister Esperanza. Instead Caridad, a compulsive reader, educates herself about love and what it means to be a sentient and intelligent woman by reading classic literature written by men, and supplements this with life lessons gleaned from her relationships.

Though set in Los Angeles from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, the narrative reinscribes Anton Chekhov’s short story, “The Darling,” first published in 1899. Like Chekhov’s protagonist, Caridad engages in various relationships in her search for love and fulfillment. Rather than absorbing beliefs held by the men in her life, as does Chekhov’s heroine, Caridad instead draws on her lovers’ resources in attempting to improve and educate herself. Apart from Chekhov, various authors of classic literature further guide Caridad’s quest to find herself and to find love, inspiring her longing for love, while also enabling her to disentangle herself from unsatisfying to disastrous relationships by encouraging her to strive for an ideal.

In a moment of clarity, Caridad compares herself to a trapeze artist near the top of a striped tent as she flies from one man to the next, expecting to be caught and held until she is ready to leap again. Flying, she wonders—or is she falling?
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter