Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the PEN/Beyond Margins Award

For nearly four decades, Juan Felipe Herrera has documented his experience as a Chicano in the United States and Latin America through stunning, memorable poetry that is both personal and universal in its impact, themes, and approach. Often political, never fainthearted, his career has been marked by tremendous virtuosity and a unique sensibility for uncovering the unknown and the unexpected. Through a variety of stages and transformations, Herrera has evolved more than almost any other Chicano poet, always re-inventing himself into a more mature and seasoned voice.

Now, in this unprecedented collection, we encounter the trajectory of this highly innovative and original writer, bringing the full scope of his singular vision into view. Beginning with early material from A Certain Man, the volume moves through thirteen of Herrera’s collections into new, previously unpublished work. Serious scholars and readers alike will now have available to them a representative set of glimpses into his production as well as his origins and personal development. The ultimate value of bringing together such a collection, however, is that it will allow us to better understand and appreciate the complexity of what this major American poet is all about.

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.

The desert country along the Columbia River is one of the West’s least-known desert places—one that most people don’t even drive through unless they are unusually curious travelers. The Hanford Reach is the last free stretch of the river between the McNary and Priest Rapids Dams, a place boasting a varied landscape of floodplains, wetlands, deserts, orchards—and nuclear reactors. This is not a place that people think to visit. Known primarily for hosting the country’s most toxic nuclear outpost, it is public land that barely exists in public consciousness. But because the Reach has been posted off-limits by the military since 1943, this book offers readers a little-seen glimpse into what the Pacific Northwest’s arid east was like before the postwar boom. Susan Zwinger has kayaked the Columbia through Hanford Reach with scientists and activists who are helping to restore it, and in this book she outlines the geographical extent of the Reach, reviews its history, and takes readers through the terrain by foot, on road, and on the river. Here is a land of dark lava flows and basalt cliffs interspersed throughout subtle, pale shrub-steppe, a table of aridity cut through by one of the country’s most prodigious rivers. Zwinger’s sparkling text, enhanced by Skip Smith’s striking photos, captures the subtleties of the contrasting vistas, just as it makes clear the depth of the radioactive poisoning within the soil and wildlife. We have only just begun to unfold the land’s treasures—petroglyphs, ancient village sites, new species, and geological wonders—and in 2000, President Clinton protected 560 square miles of land as the Hanford Reach National Monument. This book celebrates what is preserved in that buffer zone at the dawn of a new era of environmental responsibility.

Winner of the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology

The ritual complexes of the Ehing, a farming people of southern Senegal, embody an elaborate set of prohibitions on social behavior and prescribe the general rules of Ehing social organization. Power is distributed and maintained in Ehing culture by the concept of Odieng (“hatchet”), which as a spirit acts upon human beings much as an ax does upon a tree, falling from above to punish its victims for transgression. Marc R. Schloss’s ethnography of the Ehing is a study of the meaning of Odieng’s power, explaining why its rules are so essential to the Ehing way of life.

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.

These sixteen stories—ten of which have not been previously published—represent the work of one of the most influential Native American writers of the twentieth century—held by many to be the most important Native Americans to write fiction before N. Scott Momaday. Birgit Hans's introductory essay provides a brief biography of McNickle, sets the stories in the context of his better known work, and provides insights into their literary significance. Together, they constitute a collection essential to an adequate understanding of McNickle and of the development of Native American fiction.

CONTENTS

The Reservation
Hard Riding
En roulant ma boule, roulant...
Meat for God
Snowfall
Train Time
Montana
The Hawk Is Hungry
Debt of Gratitude
Newcomers
Man's Work
Going to School
The City
Manhattan Wedlock
Let the War Be Fought
In the Alien Corn
Six Beautiful in Paris
The Silver Locket

In 1993, the U.S. Department of Defense declassified information dealing with frequent explosions in the upper atmosphere caused by meteoric impact. It is estimated that impacts have occurred of a magnitude equivalent to the atomic bomb detonated at Hiroshima. Not all such space voyagers meet their end in the atmosphere, however; huge craters attest to the bombardment of earth over millions of years, and a major impact may have resulted in the extinction of dinosaurs. An impact in Siberia near the beginning of this century proves that such events are not confined to geologic time. Hazards Due to Comets and Asteroids marks a significant step in the attempt to come to grips with the threats posed by such phenomena. It brings together more than one hundred scientists from around the world, who draw on observational and theoretical research to focus on the technical problems related to all aspects of dealing with these hazards: searching for and identifying hazardous comets and asteroids; describing their statistics and characteristics; intercepting and altering the orbits of dangerous objects; and applying existent technologies—rocket boosters, rendezvous and soft-landing techniques, instrumentation—to such missions. The book considers defensive options for diverting or disrupting an approaching body, including solar sails, kinetic-energy impacts, nuclear explosives, robotic mass drivers, and various propulsion systems. A cataclysmic impact posing a threat to life on Earth is a possibility that tomorrow's technology is capable of averting. This book examines in depth the reality of the threat and proposes practical measures that can be initiated now should we ever need to deal with it.

Disenchanted with biomedicine and dismayed by its cost, increasing numbers of people are seeking alternative therapies such as the healing plants discussed in this book. Plant medicine is a billion-dollar business: health food stores, small yerberias, and even giant grocery store chains carry hundreds of medicinal herbs. By one estimate, up to one-third of the U.S. population uses alternative medicine—generally in addition to conventional therapy and commonly without telling their doctors. The heart of this volume is a complete description of 100 plants commonly used today, often for the same purposes reported by chroniclers of the Aztecs or eighteenth-century European explorers. Information for each plant includes botanical and common plant names, history, contemporary uses, a description of how the plant is prepared and administered, and brief phytochemical data. Discussions of folk efficacy and folk properties—beliefs in how and why the herb heals—help to explain the continued use of each plant into the present day. Are any of these plants dangerous, and do any of them really work? Where did they come from, and where are they available now? How can health-care practitioners gain the confidence of their patients to learn whether they are using alternative medicines for specific illnesses, symptoms, or injuries? Perhaps most intriguing, which of these plants might be waiting to take the place of known antibiotics as pathological organisms become increasingly resistant to modern miracle drugs? Answers to these and other questions will pique the interest of general readers and will be an invaluable resource for health-care providers—especially nurses and other primary-care providers, who often must find an interface between biomedical and more traditional therapies. For all readers, the book opens a window into many ethnic cultures of the region—Mexican American communities, desert Pima, coastal Seri, and others. Here is the fascinating saga of how their healing plants from prehistoric times melded with Old World herbs brought by the Europeans to create the unique pharmacopoeia available today here and in other parts of the world. Plants included:
Acacia (Cassie, Acacia)
Achillea (Yarrow)
Agastache (Giant Hyssop)
Agave (Century Plant)
Allium (Garlic, Onion)
Aloe (Aloe)
Ambrosia (Ragweed)
Anemopsis (Yerba Mansa)
Arctostaphylos (Bearberry, Uva Ursi)
Argemone (Prickly Poppy)
Aristolochia (Bithwort, Snakeroot)
Arracacia (Arracacha)
Artemisia (Wormwood, Mugwort, Western Mugwort, Sagebrush)
Asclepias (Milkweed)
Baccharis (Desert Broom, Seep Willow)
Bocconia (Tree Celandine)
Buddleia (Butterfly Bush)
Bursera (Elephant Tree)
Caesalpinia (Mexican Bird-of-Paradise)
Cannabis (Marijuana)
Capsicum (Chili)
Carnegiea (Saguaro)
Casimiroa (Zapote)
Cassia (Senna)
Cereus (Cactus)
Chenopodium (Goosefoot, Wormseed)
Citrus (Lemon, Lime, Orange)
Datura (Jimson Weed)
Ephedra (Mormon Tea)
Equisetum (Horsetail)
Eryngium (Eryngo, Button Snakeroot)
Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus)
Euphorbia (Spurge)
Eysenhardtia (Kidneywood)
Gnaphalium (Everlasting, Cudweed)
Guaiacum (Lignum Vitae)
Guazuma (Guazuma)
Gutierrezia (Turpentine Bush)
Haematoxylon (Logwood)
Haplopappus (Jimmyweed)
Heterotheca (Telegraph Plant, Falso Arnica)
Hintonia (Copalqu¡n)
Ibervillea (Coyote Melon)
Jacquinia (Jacquinia)
Jatropha (Limberbush)
Juniperus (Juniper)
Karwinskia (Coffeeberry)
Kohleria (Tree Gloxinia)
Krameria (Ratany)
Lantana (Lantana)
Larrea (Creosote Bush, Greasewood)
Ligusticum (Lovage)
Lippia (Oregano)
Lysiloma (Featherbush)
Malva (Mallow)
Mammillaria (Pincushion Cactus)
Mascagnia (Mascagnia)
Matricaria (Chamomile)
Mentha (Mint)
Nicotiana (Tobacco)
Ocimum (Basil)
Opuntia (Cholla, Prickly Pear)
Perezia (Perezia)
Persea (Avocado)
Phaseolus (Bean)
Phoradendron, Stru

Arts as intimate as a piece of needlework or a home altar. Arts as visible as decorative iron, murals, and low riders. Through such arts, members of Tucson's Mexican American community contribute much of the cultural flavor that defines the city to its residents and to the outside world. Now Tucson folklorist Jim Griffith celebrates these public and private artistic expressions and invites us to meet the people who create them.

• Josefina Lizárraga learned to make paper flowers as a girl in her native state of Nayarit, Mexico, and ensures that this delicate art is not lost.
• Ornamental blacksmith William Flores runs the oldest blacksmithing business in town, a living link with an earlier Tucson.
• Ramona Franco's family has maintained an elaborate altar to Our Lady of Guadalupe for three generations.
• Signmaker Paul Lira, responsible for many of Tucson's most interesting signs, brings to his work a thoroughly mexicano sense of aesthetics and humor.
• Muralists David Tineo and Luis Mena proclaim Mexican cultural identity in their work and carry on a tradition that has blossomed in the last twenty years.

Featuring a foreword by Tucson author Patricia Preciado Martin and a spectacular gallery of photographs, many by Pulitzer prize-winning photographer José Galvez, this remarkable book offers a close-up view of a community rich with tradition and diverse artistic expression. Hecho a Mano is a piñata bursting with unexpected treasures that will inspire and inform anyone with an interest in folk art or Mexican American culture.

Spanish and English have fought a centuries-long battle for linguistic dominance in the Southwest North American Region. Covering the time period of 1540 to the present, Hegemonies of Language and Their Discontents provides a deep and broad understanding of the contradictory methods of establishing language supremacy in this U.S.-Mexico transborder region and the manner in which those affected have responded and acted, often in dissatisfaction and at times with inventive adaptations.

Well-regarded author Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez details the linguistic and cultural processes used by penetrating imperial and national states. He argues that these impositions have been not linear but hydra-headed, complex and contradictory, sometimes accommodated and sometimes forcefully imposed. Such impositions have created discontent resulting in physical and linguistic revolts, translanguage versions, and multilayered capacities of use and misuse of imposed languages—even the invention of community-created trilingual dictionaries.

Vélez-Ibáñez gives particular attention to both sides of the border, explaining the consequences of the fragile splitting of the area through geopolitical border formation. He illustrates the many ways those discontents have manifested in linguistic, cultural, educational, political, and legal forms.

From revolt to revitalization, from silent objection to expressive defiance, people in the Southwest North American Region have developed arcs of discontent from the Spanish colonial period to the present. These narratives are supported by multiple sources, including original Spanish colonial documents and new and original ethnographic studies of performance rituals like the matachines of New Mexico. This unique work discusses the most recent neurobiological studies of bilingualism and their implications for cognitive development and language as it spans multiple disciplines. Finally, it provides the most important models for dual language development and their integration to the "Funds of Knowledge" concept as creative contemporary discontents with monolingual approaches.

Farmers and gardeners have long appreciated a wide variety of plants and have nurtured them for meals, healing, and exchange. But diversity too often has been surrendered to monocultures of fields and spirits, predisposing much of modern agriculture to uniformity and, consequently, vulnerability. Today it is primarily at the individual level—such as growing and saving a strange old bean variety or a curious-looking gourd—that any lasting conservation actually takes place.

As scientists grapple with the erosion of genetic diversity of crops and their wild relatives, old-timey farmers and gardeners continue to save, propagate, and pass on folk varieties and heirloom seeds. Virginia Nazarea focuses on the role of these seedsavers in the perpetuation of diversity. She thoughtfully examines the framework of scientific conservation and argues for the merits of everyday conservation—one that is beyond programmatic design. Whether considering small-scale rice and sweet potato farmers in the Philippines or participants in the Southern Seed Legacy and Introduced Germplasm from Vietnam in the American South, she explores roads not necessarily less traveled but certainly less recognized in the conservation of biodiversity.

Through characters and stories that offer a wealth of insights about human nature and society, Heirloom Seeds and Their Keepers helps readers more fully understand why biodiversity persists when there are so many pressures for it not to. The key, Nazarea explains, is in the sovereign spaces seedsavers inhabit and create, where memories counter a culture of forgetting and abandonment engendered by modernity. A book about theory as much as practice, it profiles these individuals, who march to their own beat in a world where diversity is increasingly devalued as the predictability of mass production becomes the norm.

Heirloom Seeds and Their Keepers offers a much-needed, scientifically researched perspective on the contribution of seedsaving that illustrates its critical significance to the preservation of both cultural knowledge and crop diversity around the world. It opens new conversations between anthropology and biology, and between researchers and practitioners, as it honors conservation as a way of life.

The American West has taken on a rich and evocative array of regional identities since the late nineteenth century. Wilderness wonderland, Hispanic borderland, homesteader’s frontier, cattle kingdom, urban dynamo, Native American homeland. Hell of a Vision explores the evolution of these diverse identities during the twentieth century, revealing how Western regionalism has been defined by generations of people seeking to understand the West’s vast landscapes and varied cultures.

Focusing on the American West from the 1890s up to the present, Dorman provides us with a wide-ranging view of the impact of regionalist ideas in pop culture and diverse fields such as geography, land-use planning, anthropology, journalism, and environmental policy-making.

Going well beyond the realm of literature, Dorman broadens the discussion by examining a unique mix of texts. He looks at major novelists such as Cather, Steinbeck, and Stegner, as well as leading Native American writers. But he also analyzes a variety of nonliterary sources in his book, such as government reports, planning documents, and environmental impact studies.

Hell of a Vision is a compelling journey through the modern history of the American West—a key region in the nation of regions known as the United States.

Fire is special. Even among the ancient elements, fire is different because it alone is a reaction. It synthesizes its surroundings; it takes its character from its context. It varies by place, by culture, and by time. It has no single expression. There is no single way to understand it.

In this collection of essays, historian and renowned fire expert Stephen J. Pyne offers his reflections on national and global wildland fire management. Pyne distills the long saga of fire on Earth and its role in underwriting an Anthropocene that might equally be called a Pyrocene.

Presented through a mixture of journalism, history, and literary imagination, Here and There moves the discussion of fire beyond the usual formations of science and policy within a national narrative to one of thoughtful interpretation, analysis, and commentary. Centered on the unique complexities of fire management in a global world, Here and There offers a punctuation point to our understanding of wildfire.

Included in this volume:

• How fire policy has changed within the United States
• How policy in the United States differs from that in other countries
• The history of one of the most famous fire paintings of all time
• Suggested next steps for the future of fire research

The ancient Maya of the southern Yucatán peninsula remain a mystery to many scholars attempting to explain early complex societies. Their dispersed settlement patterns and land-use techniques suggest a decentralized and less coordinated use of resources than is seen in other regions. Yet the Maya managed a complex political economy based on structured landscaping, and over several generations they significantly altered their environment. In recent years the Three Rivers region of Belize and Guatemala has been the site of some of the most intensive archaeological research in the Maya lowlands, providing a wealth of regional data. This volume brings together articles reporting on findings and interpretations of the Programme for Belize Archaeological Project that range over a 10- to 12-year period and that shed new light on how ecology, economy, and political order developed in the ancient past. The contributors explore the applicability of heterarchical models to the Three Rivers region, emphasizing the role of economic interdependency and political cooperation in the development of ancient Maya statecraft. As their findings reflect, this region appears to support a model of resource-specialized communities that affected the region's political and economic development and complexity from the Preclassic through the Late Classic periods. The articles explore the levels of interdependency among the large sites in the region and present a variety of data that emphasize both the engineered landscape and the complex agricultural signatures and ecological indicators left by the Maya. This geographic region captures in microcosm both ecological and cultural differences found in the greater Maya Lowlands. The heterarchical model presented here regarding resource-specialized communities and the interpretations of regional diversity in this area represent a breakthrough in research for the region and will prompt new debate in Maya studies.

"Here is a book that I can strongly recommend for a variety of reasons. It is well written, it is scholarly, but its greatest appeal lies in the posing of an important question and in the offering of a satisfying (to this reviewer, at least) answer."—Journal of Historical Geography

"This is an intriguing and stimulating study of historical differences in the indigenous historiography of parts of Asia, the Middle East, and Europe."—American Anthropologist.

High Country Summers considers the emergence of the “summer home” in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains as both an architectural and a cultural phenomenon. It offers a welcome new perspective on an often-overlooked dwelling and lifestyle. Writing with affection and insight, Melanie Shellenbarger shows that Colorado’s early summer homes were not only enjoyed by the privileged and wealthy but crossed boundaries of class, race, and gender. They offered their inhabitants recreational and leisure experiences as well as opportunities for individual re-invention—and they helped shape both the cultural landscapes of the American West and our ideas about it.

Shellenbarger focuses on four areas along the Front Range: Rocky Mountain National Park and its easterly gateway town, Estes Park; “recreation residences” in lands managed by the US Forest Service; Lincoln Hills, one of only a few African-American summer home resorts in the United States; and the foothills west of Denver that drew Front Range urbanites, including Denver’s social elite. From cottages to manor houses, the summer dwellings she examines were home to governors and government clerks; extended families and single women; business magnates and Methodist ministers; African-American building contractors and innkeepers; shop owners and tradespeople. By returning annually, Shellenbarger shows, they created communities characterized by distinctive forms of kinship.

High Country Summers goes beyond history and architecture to examine the importance of these early summer homes as meaningful sanctuaries in the lives of their owners and residents. These homes, which embody both the dwelling (the house itself) and dwelling (the act of summering there), resonate across time and place, harkening back to ancient villas and forward to the present day.

Hinterlands and Regional Dynamics in the Ancient Southwest is the first volume dedicated to understanding the nature of and changes in regional social autonomy, political hegemony, and organizational complexity across the entire prehistoric American Southwest. With geographic coverage extending from the Great Plains to the Colorado River, and from Mesa Verde to the international border, the volume’s ten case studies synthesize research that enhances our understanding of the ancient Southwest’s highly variable demographic, land use, and economic histories. For this volume, “hinterlands” are those areas whose archaeological records do not disclose the ceramic, architectural, and network evidence that initially led to the establishment of the Hohokam, Chaco, and Casas Grandes regional systems. Employing a variety of perspectives, such as the cultural landscapes approach, heterarchy, and the common-pool resource model, as well as technical methods, such as petrographic and stylistic-attribute analyses, the volume’s contributors explore variation in hinterland identities, subsistence ecology, and sociopolitical organization as regional systems expanded and contracted between the 9th and 14th centuries AD. The hinterlands of the prehistoric Southwest were home to a substantial number of people and were often used as resource catchments by the inhabitants of regional systems. Importantly, hinterlands also influenced developments of nearby regional systems, under whose footprint they managed to retain considerable autonomy. By considering the dynamics between hinterlands and regional systems, the volume reveals unappreciated aspects of the ancient Southwest’s peoples and their lives, thereby deepening our awareness of the region’s rich and complicated cultural past.

The history of the American West has usually been seen from the perspective of American expansion. Drawing on previously unexplored primary sources, James E. Officer has now produced a major work that traces the Hispanic roots of southern Arizona and northern Sonora—one which presents the Spanish and Mexican rather than Anglo point of view. Officer records the Hispanic presence from the earliest efforts at colonization on Spain’s northwestern frontier through the Spanish and Mexican years of rule, thus providing a unique reference on Southwestern history.
 
The heart of the work centers on the early nineteenth century. It explores subjects such as the constant threat posed by hostile Apaches, government intrigue and revolution in Sonora and the provincias internas, and patterns of land ownership in villages such as Tucson and Tubac. Also covered are the origins of land grants in present-day southern Arizona and the invasion of southern Arizona by American “49ers” as seen from the Mexican point of view. Officer traces kinship ties of several elite families who ruled the frontier province over many generations—men and women whose descendants remain influential in Sonora and Arizona today.

A new ethnic identity is being constructed in the United States: the Hispanic nation. Overcoming age-old racial, regional, and political differences, Americans of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and other Spanish-language origins are beginning to imagine themselves as a single ethnic community-which by the turn of the century may become the United States' largest and most influential minority.

The historic architecture and settlements of the Zuni Indian Tribe in western New Mexico provide an unusual opportunity to investigate social change. In this monograph, the development of historic Zuni society is analyzed by delineating systematic links between the structure of Zuni society and the structure of architectural forms that the Zuni people built to facilitate their activities. Ferguson shows how the structure of open space within Zuni settlements was linked to defense. As long as the Zunis were subject to attack by Spaniards or Navajos, they built settlements that were difficult for outsiders to get into or move around in. As the need for defense waned, settlements became more open and accessible. He also shows how the internal spaces of traditional Zuni houses are oriented around the activities of the women--matriarchs of their families and clans. Federal housing projects tended to spatially isolate the activities of women from interaction with the rest of the household, thus instituting unexpected social change.

Historic Zuni Architecture and Society utilizes an interdisciplinary approach, analyzing archaeological data using method, theory, and techniques from the fields of architecture, planning, and ethnology. Archaeologists will find in the book an innovative application of space syntax to archaeological problems, and cultural anthropologists and others interested in the history of the Zuni Indians will value its observations about changes that are currently taking place in Zuni social organization.

One of the great documents of colonial Mexico, the Codex Chimalpopoca chronicles the rise of Aztec civilization and preserves the mythology on which it was based. Its two complementary texts, Annals of Cuauhtitlan and Legend of the Suns, record the pre-Cortésian history of the Valley of Mexico together with firsthand versions of that region's myths.

Of particular interest are the stories of the hero-god Quetzalcoatl, for which the Chimalpopoca is the premier source. John Bierhorst's work is the first major scholarship on the Codex Chimalpopoca in more than forty years. His is the first edition in English and the first in any language to include the complete text of the Legend of the Suns. The precise, readable translation not only contributes to the study of Aztec history and literature but also makes the codex an indispensable reference for Aztec cultural topics, including land tenure, statecraft, the role of women, the tribute system, warfare, and human sacrifice.

Arizona’s San Pedro Valley is a natural corridor through which generations of native peoples have traveled for more than 12,000 years, and today many tribes consider it to be part of their ancestral homeland. This book explores the multiple cultural meanings, historical interpretations, and cosmological values of this extraordinary region by combining archaeological and historical sources with the ethnographic perspectives of four contemporary tribes: Tohono O’odham, Hopi, Zuni, and San Carlos Apache.

Previous research in the San Pedro Valley has focused on scientific archaeology and documentary history, with a conspicuous absence of indigenous voices, yet Native Americans maintain oral traditions that provide an anthropological context for interpreting the history and archaeology of the valley. The San Pedro Ethnohistory Project was designed to redress this situation by visiting archaeological sites, studying museum collections, and interviewing tribal members to collect traditional histories. The information it gathered is arrayed in this book along with archaeological and documentary data to interpret the histories of Native American occupation of the San Pedro Valley.

This work provides an example of the kind of interdisciplinary and politically conscious work made possible when Native Americans and archaeologists collaborate to study the past. As a methodological case study, it clearly articulates how scholars can work with Native American stakeholders to move beyond confrontations over who “owns” the past, yielding a more nuanced, multilayered, and relevant archaeology.

In the annals of western history, the Lincoln County War stands out as a complex and tragic event in which lives were lost, fortunes destroyed, and peaceful citizens transformed into lonely, exiled outlaws. A classic reference work on the era of Billy the Kid, this fast-moving account brings new meaning to the war and to those individuals who became its victims.

Considered by historian Herbert E. Bolton to be one of the greatest books ever written in the West, Andrés Pérez de Ribas's history of the Jesuit missions provides unusual insight into Spanish and Indian relations during the colonial period in Northern New Spain. First published in Madrid in 1645, it traces the history of the missions from 1591 to 1643 and includes letters from Jesuit annual reports and other correspondence, much of which has never been found or cataloged in historical archives. Daniel T. Reff, Maureen Ahern, and Richard K. Danford have now prepared the first complete, scholarly, and fully annotated edition of this important work in English.

Pérez de Ribas was the first permanent missionary to the Ahome, Zuaque, and Yaqui Indians. After fifteen years on the mission frontier he was recalled to Mexico City, where he held various posts, including Jesuit Provincial. Addressed to novitiates ignorant of the challenges they would face in the field, his Historia was a virtual textbook on missionary work in the New World. Also written to encourage ongoing support of the Jesuit missions, it reflected the author's deep grasp of what rhetorically soothed and moved Church and Crown officials.

Perhaps of greatest interest to the modern reader are Pérez de Ribas's often detailed comments on indigenous beliefs and practices. These firsthand observations provide a rich resource of ethnographic and historical data concerning everything from native subsistence, settlement patterns, and myths to the dynamics of Jesuit-Indian relations. The many cases of conversion that Pérez de Ribas describes are especially rich in ethnographic data, clarifying the values and beliefs from which the Indians were "rescued."

History of the Triumphs is a primary document of great importance, made more valuable here by an exceptionally fluid translation and painstaking annotations. It will be a standard reference for all engaged in research on New Spain and a captivating read for anyone interested in this chapter of American history.

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.

"It's in the nature of things that whole worlds disappear," writes the poet Robert Hass in the foreword to Jimmye Hillman's insightful memoir. "Their vanishings, more often than not, go unrecorded or pass into myth, just as they slip from the memory of the living."

To ensure that the world of Jimmye Hillman's childhood in Greene County, Mississippi during the Great Depression doesn't slip away, he has gathered together accounts of his family and the other people of Old Washington village. There are humorous stories of hog hunting and heart-wrenching tales of poverty set against a rural backdrop shaded by the local social, religious, and political climate of the time. Jimmye and his family were subsistence farmers out of bare-bones necessity, decades before discussions about sustainability made such practices laudable.

More than just childhood memories and a family saga, though, this book serves as a snapshot of the natural, historical, and linguistic details of the time and place. It is a remarkable record of Southern life. Observations loaded with detail uncover broader themes of work, family loyalty, and the politics of changing times. 

Hillman, now eighty-eight, went on to a distinguished career as an economist specializing in agriculture. He realizes the importance of his story as an example of the cultural history of the Deep South but allows readers to discover the significance on their own by witnessing the lives of a colorful cast of characters. Hogs, Mules, and Yellow Dogs is unique, a blend of humor and reflection, wisdom and sympathy—but it's also a hard-nosed look at the realities of living on a dirt farm in a vanished world.
 

"For a calculated 1,400 years, Snaketown was a viable village, but unlike so many tells in the Near East, the people remained the same while their culture changed. The smoothly graded typological sequences for most attributes suggest to me that the ethnic identity of the inhabitants was not interrupted, that they were one and the same people experiencing normal internal evolutionary cultural modifications with occasional boosts of features and ideas newly arrived from the outside." —Emil W. Haury

 

"The author has written a well-documented book on the Navajo concept of personality. . . . Holy Wind gives life, movement, thought, speech, and behavior and links the Navajo soul to the immanent powers of the universe. . . . A valuable case study." —Journal of Psychology & Theology

"An admirable volume . . . it illustrates how much we can learn about the importance of poetry as a fundamental activity by investigating the traditions of what should be acknowledged as the New World's unique classical past." —New Scholar

"This book is a fascinating analysis of what obviously is a central dimension in the traditional Navajo awareness of life." —New Mexico Historical Review

A first-generation Latino born in Chicago, Rane Arroyo is a leading poeta puertorriqueño and playwright whose readership transcends his ethnicity. In Home Movies of Narcissus, his fourth collection of poetry, he writes more deliberately and with greater assurance of his search for identity—both cultural/racial and gender/sexual—and his discovery of it within family and community.

Using sophisticated language to inspect life from barrio childhood to cosmopolitan manhood, Arroyo explores themes of gay strength and alienation, linked to his experiences as both a Puerto Rican and an intellectual. Through a variety of approaches, he examines a major recurrent Latino paradox: the need to write about Latino issues while being criticized for being too self-centered.

Sometimes reserved, sometimes passionate, Arroyo writes with humor and a remarkable quickness of association, moving with a grace that makes seamless use of speech ranging from the formal to the vernacular. Taking in love and sexuality, world literature and history, and the exile's heritage of a shifting geography of identity, he invokes remarkable imagery with language that is economical, fresh, and mischievous. Some of Arroyo's poems take an autobiographical approach and show how poets have both the luxury and necessity of speaking for those in their lives.

Others create personas that take in the American experience from a variety of viewpoints—including gays, who are often marginalized by the larger Latino community. "The Ponce de León Poems" pit the poet against a ghost who seeks to direct his writing, while a final section, "The Black Moon Poems," deals with the many sleepless nights that Arroyo has spent struggling with questions over the worth of his art and whether he has betrayed those he loves by writing-or not writing-about them. "In his home movies," he writes, "Narcissus is both the seen and the seer." As Arroyo's insightful words demonstrate, the writer must come to value his own image but not fall in love with it, for it will change, age, and, if he is fortunate, finally grow wise. As readers will discover in Home Movies of Narcissus, Rane Arroyo has seen past the mirror and charted a new territory of self-discovery.

What has nourished native peoples on this continent since time immemorial, say the editors of this volume, are wellsprings of creativity. "Down at the source," Havasupai singer Dan Hanna assures us, "a spring will always be there." The creative wellspring of American Indian culture is well represented in this anthology, a compilation of stories, songs, poems, and other writings taken from twenty-five years of Sun Tracks: An American Literary Series. Editors Larry Evers and Ofelia Zepeda have gathered the contributions of nineteen Native Americans in compiling this collection.

Some are stories from oral traditions, others are autobiographical writings, and some are songs or poems. But all are contemporary, and all have as a unifying element a strong central theme in Native American writing: home places. Some of the contributors define the home place as a center of established values, while others speak of its cultural or physical geography. Healing powers are often found at home places. Home is a place to defend against those who would reduce it to insignificance, a place to reclaim, or a place reclaimed but not yet realized.

One writer recalls a home that must be pulled from deep beneath the waters of the Columbia River. By listening to these stories of home places, the reader can gain a new appreciation of the contemporary verbal expressions of Native American communities. Home Places, note the editors, "asks you to listen to Native American signers, storytellers, and writers, and in this way to celebrate the wellsprings of creativity that continue to flow from the home places in Native America."

In a chilling scene in the film Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood as the gunman stands over a wounded Gene Hackman, the sheriff, aiming a rifle at his head. "I don't deserve this, to die like this," says Hackman. Eastwood replies, "Deserve's got nothing to do with it," cocks his rifle, and fires point blank at his helpless victim.

This scenario dramatically brings home to the viewer what historians have long debated and hundreds of other films and books suggest: the turn-of-the-century West was a violent time and place. Ranchers, miners, deputy sheriffs, teenagers and old men, occasionally even housewives and mothers found themselves at the business end of a shotgun or a .38 revolver. Yet, since western historians tend to portray violence as essentially episodic--frontier gunfights, range wars, vigilante movements, and the like--solid data has been hard to come by.

As a beginning point for actually measuring lethal violence and assessing the administration of justice, here at last is a detailed and well-documented study of homicide in the American West. Comparing data from representative areas--Douglas County, Nebraska; Las Animas County, Colorado; and Gila County, Arizona--this book reveals a level of violence far greater than many historians have believed, even surpassing eastern cities like New York and Boston.

Clashing cultures and transient populations, a boomtown mentality, easy availability of alcohol and firearms: these and many other factors come under scrutiny as catalysts in the violence that permeated the region. By comparing homicide data, including coroner's inquests, indictments, plea bargains, and sentences across both racial and regional lines, the book also offers persuasive evidence that criminal justice systems of the Old West were weighted heavily in favor of defendants who were white and against those who were African American, Native American, or Mexican.

Packed with information, this is a book for students and scholars of western history, social history, criminology, and justice studies. Western history buffs will be captivated by colorful anecdotes about the real West, where guns could and did blaze over anything from love trysts to vendettas to too much foam on the beer. From whatever perspective, all readers are sure to find here a well-constructed framework for understanding the West as it was and for interpreting the region as it moves into the future.

Beginning sometime in the thirteenth century, people from the Hopi Mesas established a cluster of villages to the south along the Little Colorado River. They were attracted by the river’s resources and the region’s ideal conditions for growing cotton. By the late 1300s, these Homol’ovi villages were the center of a robust trade in cotton among many clusters of villages near or on the southern Colorado Plateau and were involved in the beginning of the katsina religion among Hopi people.

Charles Adams has directed fifteen years of research at these sites for the Arizona State Museum, including excavations in five of the seven primary Homol'ovi villages and in other villages predating them. Through this research he concludes that the founders of these settlements were Hopis who sought to protect their territory from migrating groups elsewhere in the Pueblo world. This book summarizes that research and broadens our understanding of the relationship of Homol'ovi to ancient and modern Hopi people.

Each Homol'ovi village had a unique history of establishment, growth, sociopolitical organization, length of occupation, and abandonment; and although the villages shared much in the way of material culture, their size and configuration were tremendously varied. By comparing Homol'ovi research to information from projects on other settlements in the area, Adams has been able to reconstruct a provocative history of the Homol'ovi cluster that includes relationships among the individual villages and their relationships to nearby clusters. He shows that social organization within villages is apparent by the number and variety of ritual structures, while political organization among villages is indicated by the need for cooperation to share water for irrigation and by the exchange of such materials as pottery, obsidian, and ground stone.

Adams advances several important theories about why Homol'ovi was founded where and when it was, who its founders were, and the importance of cotton in making Homol'ovi an important center of trade in the 1300s. He also considers why Pueblo settlements suddenly became so large, addressing theoretical issues pertaining to multiple settlements and the rise of enormous villages containing more than 1,000 rooms.

Homol'ovi is a rich work of synthesis and interpretation that will be important for anyone with an interest in Southwest archaeology, Arizona history, or Hopi culture. By considering the settlement trajectory of an entire cluster of sites, it will also prove valuable to archaeologists worldwide.

Homol'ovi II is a fourteenth-century, ancestral Hopi pueblo with over 700 rooms. Although known by archaeologists since 1896, no systematic excavations were conducted at the pueblo until 1984. This report summarizes the findings of the excavations by the Arizona State Museum of five rooms and an outside activity area, which now form the core of the interpretive program for Homolovi Ruins State Park. The significant findings reported here are that the excavated deposits date between A.D. 1340 and 1400; that nearly all the decorated ceramics during this period were imported from villages on the Hopi Mesas; that cotton was a principal crop which probably formed the basis of Homol'ovi II's participation in regional exchange; that chipped stone was a totally expedient technology in contrast to ground stone which was becoming more diverse; and that the katsina cult was probably present or developing at Homol'ovi II. These findings from the basis for future excavations that should broaden our knowledge of the developments taking place in fourteenth-century Pueblo society connecting the people whom archaeologists term the Anasazi with those calling themselves Hopi.

Hoover Dam was constructed during one of the most depressed economic climates in American history, in a remote desert canyon where temperatures ranged from single to triple digits. In order to visually document the project, the Bureau of Reclamation assigned employee Ben Glaha to photograph all aspects of the dam's construction. Glaha's photographs were used in press releases, periodicals, books, pamphlets, and slide shows to demonstrate that the dam was structurally sound and that government funds were being used wisely.

Hoover Dam: The Photographs of Ben Glaha is the first detailed examination of Glaha's images of the project, some of which have never before been published. Glaha photographed every aspect of the construction process—from details of how the dam was assembled to the overall progress as the dam rose from the bottom of the dry riverbed. Glaha not only provided the Bureau with the photographs it required, he also employed his own artistic abilities to produce images of the dam that were exhibited in museums and galleries as works of art. Because Glaha was able to create a selection of Hoover Dam photographs worthy of exhibition, he was unique among government documentary photographers.

Art historian Barbara Vilander's text places Glaha's efforts within the historical context of western landscape exploration and development and reveals how his particular qualifications led to his selection as the project photographer. Vilander then examines the many publications and venues in which the Bureau used Glaha's photographs to create support for the project. She also discusses how Glaha was recognized in his own era as an influential artist and teacher, and compares his work with that of other contemporary landscape photographers addressing western water management.

Glaha's Hoover Dam images were widely published, although in accordance with Bureau policy he was not usually given personal credit and therefore his name remains largely unknown. Vilander's book corrects that oversight by giving Glaha the technical and artistic credit he is due within the context of one of the most ambitious projects in American history.

"With the inborn wisdom that has guided them for so long through so many obstacles, Hopi men and women perpetuate their proven rituals, strongly encouraging those who attempt to neglect or disrespect their obligations to uphold them. One of these obligations is to respect the flora and fauna of our planet. The Hopi closeness to the Earth is represented in all the arts of all three mesas, whether in clay or natural fibers. What clay is to a potter's hands, natural fibers are to a basket weaver." —from the Introduction

Rising dramatically from the desert floor, Arizona's windswept mesas have been home to the Hopis for hundreds of years. A people known for protecting their privacy, these Native Americans also have a long and less known tradition of weaving baskets and plaques. Generations of Hopi weavers have passed down knowledge of techniques and materials from the plant world around them, from mother to daughter, granddaughter, or niece.

This book is filled with photographs and detailed descriptions of their beautiful baskets—the one art, above all others, that creates the strongest social bonds in Hopi life. In these pages, weavers open their lives to the outside world as a means of sharing an art form especially demanding of time and talent. The reader learns how plant materials are gathered in canyons and creek bottoms, close to home and far away. The long, painstaking process of preparation and dying is followed step by step. Then, using techniques of coiled, plaited, or wicker basketry, the weaving begins.

Underlying the stories of baskets and their weavers is a rare glimpse of what is called "the Hopi Way," a life philosophy that has strengthened and sustained the Hopi people through centuries of change. Many other glimpses of the Hopi world are also shared by author and photographer Helga Teiwes, who was warmly invited into the homes of her collaborators. Their permission and the permission of the Cultural Preservation Office of the Hopi Tribe gave her access to people and information seldom available to outsiders.

Teiwes was also granted access to some of the ceremonial observances where baskets are preeminent. Woven in brilliant reds, greens, and yellows as well as black and white, Hopi weavings, then, not only are an arresting art form but also are highly symbolic of what is most important in Hopi life. In the women's basket dance, for example, woven plaques commemorate and honor the Earth and the perpetuation of life. Other plaques play a role in the complicated web of Hopi social obligation and reciprocity.

Living in a landscape of almost surreal form and color, Hopi weavers are carrying on one of the oldest arts traditions in the world. Their stories in Hopi Basket Weaving will appeal to collectors, artists and craftspeople, and anyone with an interest in Native American studies, especially Native American arts. For the traveler or general reader, the book is an invitation to enter a little-known world and to learn more about an art form steeped in meaning and stunning in its beauty.

More than one hundred authentic recipes center around Hopi staples of beans, corn, wheat, chilies, meat, gourds, and native greens and fruits.

The dramatic split of the Hopi community of Orayvi in 1906 had lasting consequences not only for the people of Third Mesa but also for the very buildings around which they centered their lives. This book examines architectural and other effects of that split, using architectural change as a framework with which to understand social and cultural processes at prehistoric Southwestern pueblos. Catherine Cameron examines architectural change at Orayvi from 1871 to 1948, a period of great demographic and social upheaval.

Her study is unique in its use of historic photographs to document and understand abandonment processes and apply that knowledge to prehistoric sites. Photos taken by tourists, missionaries, and early anthropologists during the late nineteenth century portray original structures, while later photos show how Orayvi buildings changed over a period of almost eighty years. Census data relating to house size and household configuration shed additional light on social change in the pueblo.

Examining change at Orayvi afforded an opportunity to study the architectural effects of an event that must have happened many times in the past--the partial abandonment of a pueblo--by tracing the effects of sudden population decline on puebloan architecture. Cameron's work provides clues to how and why villages were abandoned and re-established repeatedly in the prehistoric Southwest as it offers a unique window on the relationship between Pueblo houses and the living people who occupied them.

As contemporary Native Americans assert the legacy of their ancestors, there is increasing debate among archaeologists over the methods and theories used to reconstruct prehistoric identity and the movement of social groups. This is especially problematic with respect to the emergence of southwestern tribes, which involved shifting populations and identities over the course of more than a thousand years.

Wesley Bernardini now draws on an unconventional source, Hopi traditional knowledge, to show how hypotheses that are developed from oral tradition can stimulate new and productive ways to think about the archaeological record. Focusing on insights that oral tradition has to offer about general processes of prehistoric migration and identity formation, he describes how each Hopi clan acquired its particular identity from the experiences it accumulated on its unique migration pathway. This pattern of “serial migration” by small social groups often saw the formation of villages by clans that briefly came together and then moved off again independently, producing considerable social diversity both within and among villages.

Using Anderson Mesa and Homol’ovi as case studies, Bernardini presents architectural and demographic data suggesting that the fourteenth century occupation of these regions was characterized by population flux and diversity consistent with the serial migration model. He offers an analysis of rock art motifs—focusing on those used as clan symbols—to evaluate the diversity of group identities, then presents a compositional analysis of Jeddito Yellow Ware pottery to evaluate the diversity of these groups’ eventual migration destinations.

Evidence supporting serial migration greatly complicates existing notions of links between ancient and modern social groups, with important implications for the implementation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Bernardini’s work clearly demonstrates that studies of cultural affiliation must take into account the fluid nature of population movements and identity in the prehistoric landscape. It takes a decisive step toward better understanding the major demographic change that occurred on the Colorado Plateau from 1275 to 1400 and presents a strategy for improving the reconstruction of cultural identity in the past.

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.

Combining poetic language and the traditions of magic realism to paint a vivid portrait of her family, Pat Mora’s House of Houses is an unconventional memoir that reads as if every member, death notwithstanding, is in one room talking, laughing, and crying. In a salute to the Day of the Dead, the story begins with a visit to the cemetery in which all of her deceased relatives come alive to share stories of the family, literally bringing the food to their own funerals. From there the book covers a year in the life of her clan, revealing the personalities and events that Mora herself so desperately yearns to know and understand.

"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

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.

Viola Cordova was the first Native American woman to receive a PhD in philosophy. Even as she became an expert on canonical works of traditional Western philosophy, she devoted herself to defining a Native American philosophy. Although she passed away before she could complete her life’s work, some of her colleagues have organized her pioneering contributions into this provocative book.

In three parts, Cordova sets out a complete Native American philosophy. First she explains her own understanding of the nature of reality itself—the origins of the world, the relation of matter and spirit, the nature of time, and the roles of culture and language in understanding all of these. She then turns to our role as residents of the Earth, arguing that we become human as we deepen our relation to our people and to our places, and as we understand the responsibilities that grow from those relationships. In the final section, she calls for a new reverence in a world where there is no distinction between the sacred and the mundane.

Cordova clearly contrasts Native American beliefs with the traditions of the Enlightenment and Christianized Europeans (what she calls “Euroman” philosophy). By doing so, she leads her readers into a deeper understanding of both traditions and encourages us to question any view that claims a singular truth. From these essays—which are lucid, insightful, frequently funny, and occasionally angry—we receive a powerful new vision of how we can live with respect, reciprocity, and joy.

Let go your keys, let go your gun, let go your good pen and your rings, let your wolf mask go and kiss goodbye your goddess figurine.

With this invocation, María Meléndez beckons us on a journey—an exotic expedition through life’s mysteries in search of the finer strands of experience. In a Latina voice laced with a naturalist’s sense of wonder, she weaves bold images reflecting a world threaded by unseen wounds, now laid before us with an unflinching love of life and an exquisite precision of language. Adopting multiple guises—field researcher, laboring mother, grief-stricken lover—Meléndez casts aside stereotypes and expectations to forge a new language steeped in life and landscape. Whether meditating on a controlled prairie burn or contemplating the turquoise cheek of a fathead minnow, she weaves words and memories into a rich tapestry that resonates with sensual detail and magnifies her sense of maternal wildness, urging us to “Love as much as you / can, don’t throw your heart / away to just one god.” In her paean to the Aztec deity Tonacacihuatl, mother of the gods, Meléndez muses that “How many spirits she’s twin to, and how long she’ll last in this world, / are secrets stashed in the rattle / of corn ears, in the coils / of venomous snakes.”

Through stunning images and stark realism, her poems embrace motherhood and vocation, love and grief, land and life, to bring new meaning to the natural world and how we experience it.

The myth of Texas origin often begins at the Alamo. This story is based on ideology rather than on truth, yet ideology is the foundation for the U.S. American cultural memory that underwrites official history. The Alamo, as a narrative of national progress, supports the heroic acts that have created the “Lone Star State,” a unified front of U.S. American liberty in the face of Mexican oppression.

How Myth Became History explores the formation of national, ethnic, racial, and class identities in the Texas borderlands. Examining Mexican, Mexican American, and Anglo Texan narratives as competing representations of the period spanning the Texas Declaration of Independence to the Mexican Revolution, John E. Dean traces the creation and development of border subjects and histories. Dean uses history, historical fiction, postcolonial theory, and U.S.-Mexico border theory to disrupt “official” Euro-American histories.

Dean argues that the Texas-Mexico borderlands complicate national, ethnic, and racial differences. He makes this clear in his discussion of the Mexican Revolution, when many Mexican Americans who saw themselves as Mexicans fought for competing revolutionary factions in Mexico, while others who saw themselves as U.S. Americans tried to distance themselves from Mexico altogether.

Analyzing literary representations of the border, How Myth Became History emphasizes the heterogeneity of border communities and foregrounds narratives that have often been occluded, such as Mexican-Indio histories. The border, according to Dean, still represents a contested geographical entity that destabilizes ethnic and racial groups. Border dynamics provide critical insight into the vexed status of the contemporary Texas-Mexico divide and point to broader implications for national and transnational identity.

There’s no denying it, media culture has ushered in a new era of visibility for gays in America. Yet somehow the gay Latino doesn’t fit into this sound-bite identity and usually isn’t included in national media images. Rane Arroyo offers a corrective. Known primarily as a poet and playwright representing the gay Latino community, Arroyo has also been publishing prose throughout his career and now gathers into this book a storm of writing that has been gaining strength, drop by drop, for more than ten years.

How to Name a Hurricane collects short stories and other fictions depicting Latino drag queens and leather men, religious sinners and happy atheists, working class heroes and cyberspace vaqueros—a parade of characters that invites readers to consider whether one is more authentic a gay Latino than another. Whereas actual hurricanes are given names, the gays given voice in this collection must name themselves—and these narratives in turn reveal something of the "I" of Hurricane Rane. Whether portraying a family gathering as Brideshead Revisited with a mambo soundtrack, recounting the relationship of transvestite Louie/Lois and her bisexual Superman, or bemoaning "feeling as unsexy as an old bean burrito in a 7-11 microwave," Arroyo tracks the heartbeat of his characters through a shimmering palette of styles. Here are monologues, a story in verse, and other experimental forms appropriate to experimental lives—all affirming the basic human rights to dignity, equality, love, and even silliness.

When the AIDS epidemic first hit, many Latino families destroyed any remembrances of their gay and bisexual sons that might betray their pasts to la familia or el pueblo. Arroyo’s writings return the ghosts of those sons to the families, bars, dance clubs, and neighborhoods where they belong. By penetrating to the I’s of narrative hurricanes, these stories honor the survivors of our ongoing cultural storms.

More than twenty years after its publication in 1991, Leslie Marmon Silko’s monumental novel Almanac of the Dead continues to disconcert, move, provoke, and outrage readers. In a work that is overtly and often uncomfortably political, Silko’s overflowing cast of characters includes representatives from a range of cultures and communities who are united by common experiences of dispossession, disenfranchisement, exploitation, and poverty. Clearly, Silko’s depiction of a social uprising that draws together the indigenous People’s Army of the Americas and the American Army of the Homeless triggered—and was designed to trigger—a range of reactions among readers and critics alike.
 
Howling for Justice actively engages with both the literary achievements and the politics of Silko’s text. It brings together essays by international scholars reacting to the novel while keeping in mind its larger concern with issues of social justice, both local and transnational. Aiming both to refocus critical attention and open the book to a broader array of readers, this collection offers fresh perspectives on its transnational vision, on its sociocultural, historical, and political ambitions, and on its continued relevance in the twenty-first century. The essays examine and explain some of the key points that readers and critics have identified as confusing, problematic, and divisive. Together, they offer new ways to approach and appreciate the text.
 
The book concludes with a new, never-before-published interview in which Silko reflects on the twenty years since the novel’s publication and relates the concerns of Almanac to her current work.

The indigenous people of the Amazon Basin known as the Huaorani are one of the world’s most intriguing peoples. The community of just under four thousand in Ecuador has been known to the public primarily for their historical identity as a violent society. But Laura Rival reveals the Huaorani in all their humanity and creativity through a longitudinal ethnography, bringing a deeper perspective beyond the stereotype.

Rival’s intimate knowledge of Huaorani culture spans twenty-five years. Here in a collection of broad-ranging essays, she offers a fascinating and provocative study. The first section, “Among Forest Beings,” shows that the Huaorani have long adapted to life in the tropical rain forest with minimal reliance on horticulture, yet have developed a complex relationship with plants. In “In the Longhouse,” the second section, Rival focuses on the intimate relations that create human persons and enact kinship relations. She also discusses women’s lives and perspectives. The third section, “In the Midst of Enemies,” considers how Huaorani society fits in larger political and economic contexts, illustrating how native values shape their encounters with oil companies, the state, and other external forces. Rival carefully analyzes insider/outsider dialectics wherein Huaorani people re-create meaningful and valued worlds in the face of alien projects, such as petroleum development, carbon trading, or intercultural education.

Capitalizing on the author’s decades-long study and interactions in the community, Huaorani Transformations in Twenty-First-Century Ecuador brings new insights to the Huaorani’s unique way of relating to humans, to other-than-humans, and to the forest landscape they have inhabited for centuries.

Best known for their ritual use of peyote, the Huichol people of west-central Mexico carried much of their original belief system into the twentieth century unadulterated by the influence of Christian missionaries. Among the Huichol, reciting myths and performing rituals pleases the ancestors and helps maintain a world in which abundant subsistence and good health are assured.

This volume is a collection of myths recorded by Robert Zingg in 1934 in the village of Tuxpan and is the most comprehensive record of Huichol mythology ever published. Zingg was the first professional anthropologist to study the Huichol, and his generosity toward them and political advocacy on their behalf allowed him to overcome tribal sanctions against divulging secrets to outsiders. He is fondly remembered today by some Huichols who were children when he lived among them. Zingg recognized that the alternation between dry and wet seasons pervades Huichol myth and ritual as it does their subsistence activities, and his arrangement of the texts sheds much light on Huichol tradition. The volume contains both aboriginal myths that attest to the abiding Huichol obligation to serve ancestors who control nature and its processes, and Christian-inspired myths that document the traumatic effect that silver mining and Franciscan missions had on Huichol society.

First published in 1998 in a Spanish-language edition, Huichol Mythology is presented here for the first time in English, with more than 40 original photographs by Zingg accompanying the text. For this volume, the editors provide a meticulous historical account of Huichol society from about 200 A.D. through the colonial era, enabling readers to fully grasp the significance of the myths free of the sensationalized interpretations found in popular accounts of the Huichol. Zingg’s compilation is a landmark work, indispensable to the study of mythology, Mexican Indians, and comparative religion.

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.

Amid mounting concern over modern environmental degradation, archaeologists around the world are demonstrating the long history of such processes and the way they have shaped current landscapes. A growing body of evidence shows how humans have modified their environment for millennia, and contemporary problems cannot be understood without an adequate sense of this ecological past and the role of humans in it. The Wadi al-Hasa, a large canyon draining the Transjordan Plateau into the Dead Sea, has been the location of repeated cycles of settlement and land use for thousands of years.

This book focuses on changing land-use patterns and their relationship to socio-political organization. Using a combination of archaeological and environmental data, Brett Hill examines the human ecology of agriculture and pastoralism from the beginnings of domestication through the rise and collapse of complex societies. Models of land use often consider political complexity as an important factor affecting mismanagement. Together with GIS erosion modeling and settlement pattern analysis, Hill evaluates the archaeological, historical, and environmental record spanning the Holocene to show how land use was affected by the rise of centralized authority. Yet populations in the Hasa maintained the ability to resist authority and return to a nomadic life when it became advantageous. This process emphasizes the power of local groups to pursue alternative strategies when their interests diverged from those of elites, creating a dynamic that reshapes the landscape each generation.

Hill’s analysis contributes significantly to our understanding of the history of human ecology in the southern Levant, wherein current debates are complicated by research at different scales and by a lack of consensus on the importance of localized phenomena. It not only complements existing research but also seeks to refine models of processes in human ecology to demonstrate the effect of political organization on land mismanagement.

Threats to biodiversity, food shortages, urban sprawl . . . lessons for environmental problems that confront us today may well be found in the past. The archaeological record contains hundreds of situations in which societies developed long-term sustainable relationships with their environments—and thousands in which the relationships were destructive. Charles Redman demonstrates that much can be learned from an improved understanding of peoples who, through seemingly rational decisions, degraded their environments and threatened their own survival. By discussing archaeological case studies from around the world—from the deforestation of the Mayan lowlands to soil erosion in ancient Greece to the almost total depletion of resources on Easter Island—Redman reveals the long-range coevolution of culture and environment and clearly shows the impact that ancient peoples had on their world. These case studies focus on four themes: habitat transformation and animal extinctions, agricultural practices, urban growth, and the forces that accompany complex society. They show that humankind's commitment to agriculture has had cultural consequences that have conditioned our perception of the environment and reveal that societies before European contact did not necessarily live the utopian existences that have been popularly supposed. Whereas most books on this topic tend to treat human societies as mere reactors to environmental stimuli, Redman's volume shows them to be active participants in complex and evolving ecological relationships. Human Impact on Ancient Environments demonstrates how archaeological research can provide unique insights into the nature of human stewardship of the Earth and can permanently alter the way we think about humans and the environment.

Much political oratory has been devoted to safeguarding America’s boundary with Mexico, but policies that militarize the border and criminalize immigrants have overshadowed the region’s widespread violence against women, the increase in crossing deaths, and the lingering poverty that spurs people to set out on dangerous northward treks. This book addresses those concerns by focusing on gender-based violence, security, and human rights from the perspective of women who live with both violence and poverty.

From the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, scholars from both sides of the 2,000-mile border reflect expertise in disciplines ranging from international relations to criminal justice, conveying a more complex picture of the region than that presented in other studies.

Initial chapters offer an overview of routine sexual assaults on women migrants, the harassment of Central American immigrants at the hands of authorities and residents, corruption and counterfeiting along the border, and near-death experiences of border crossers. Subsequent chapters then connect analysis with solutions in the form of institutional change, social movement activism, policy reform, and the spread of international norms that respect human rights as well as good governance.

These chapters show how all facets of the border situation—globalization, NAFTA, economic inequality, organized crime, political corruption, rampant patriarchy—promote gendered violence and other expressions of hyper-masculinity. They also show that U.S. immigration policy exacerbates the problems of border violence—in marked contrast to the border policies of European countries.

By focusing on women’s everyday experiences in order to understand human security issues, these contributions offer broad-based alternative approaches and solutions that address everyday violence and inattention to public safety, inequalities, poverty, and human rights. And by presenting a social and democratic international feminist framework to address these issues, they offer the opportunity to transform today’s security debate in constructive ways.

Mars, the red planet named for the god of war, a mysterious dust-ridden place, is most like Earth in its climate and seasons. Of all the possible destinations in space to travel, Mars is the most likely for humans to reach. According to esteemed scientist Louis Friedman, it may be the only destination outside the moon to ever see human footprints.

Far from diminishing our future in space, Human Spaceflight lays out a provocative future for human space travel. The noted aerospace engineer and scientist says that human space exploration will continue well into the future, but space travel by humans will stop at Mars. Instead, nanotechnology, space sails, robotics, biomolecular engineering, and artificial intelligence will provide the vehicles of the future for an exciting evolution not just of space travel but of humankind.

Friedman has worked with agencies around the globe on space exploration projects to extend human presence beyond Mars and beyond the solar system. He writes that once we accept Mars as the only viable destination for humans, our space program on planet Earth can become more exciting and more relevant. Mars, he writes, will take hundreds, even thousands, of years to settle. During that time, humans and all our supporting technologies will evolve, allowing our minds to be present throughout the universe while our bodies stay home on Earth and Mars.

The remains of hunter-gatherer groups are the most commonly discovered archaeological resources in the world, and their study constitutes much of the archaeological research done in North America. In spite of paradigm-shifting discoveries elsewhere in the world that may indicate that hunter-gatherer societies were more complex than simple remnants of a prehistoric past, North American archaeology by and large hasn’t embraced these theories, instead maintaining its general neoevolutionary track. This book will change that.

Combining the latest empirical studies of archaeological practice with the latest conceptual tools of anthropological and historical theory, this volume seeks to set a new course for hunter-gatherer archaeology by organizing the chapters around three themes. The first section offers diverse views of the role of human agency, challenging the premise that hunter-gatherer societies were bound by their interactions with the natural world. The second section considers how society and culture are constituted. Chapters in the final section take the long view of the historical process, examining how cultural diversity arises out of interaction and the continuity of ritual practices.

A closing commentary by H. Martin Wobst underscores the promise of an archaeology of foragers that does not associate foraging with any particular ideology or social structure but instead invites inquiry into counterintuitive alternatives. Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology as Historical Process seeks to blur the divisions between prehistory and history, between primitive and modern, and between hunter-gatherers and people in other societies. Because it offers alternatives to the dominant discourse and contributes to the agenda of hunter-gatherer research, this book will be of interest to anyone involved in the study of foraging peoples.

“In Mexico,” writes Ilan Stavans in the introduction to this provocative new collection on Mexican culture and politics, “[the essay] is embraced as passionately as a sport.” While the American essay may be personal and confessional or erudite and academic, it is presumed to be truthful. By contrast, the Mexican essay pushes the boundaries between fact and fiction as writers seek to make their opinions heard—in literary journals, in newspapers, and even on cereal boxes. “What is real and what isn’t in a Mexican essay, only God knows,” concludes Stavans. In Hurricanes and Carnivals, Lee Gutkind, a pioneer in the teaching of creative nonfiction, brings together fifteen essays by Mexican, Mexican American, and Latin American writers that push the boundaries of style and form, showing that navigating “truth” is anything but clear-cut. Although creative nonfiction is widely thought to be an American art form, this collection proves otherwise. By blending fact and fiction, story and fantasy, history and mythology, these writers and others push the bounds of the essay to present a vision of Mexico rarely seen from this side of the border. Addressing topics that include immigration, politics, ecology, violence, family, and sexuality, they take literary license on a whirlwind adventure. C. M. Mayo shows us Mexico City as seen through the eyes of her pug, Picadou; Juan Villoro examines modern Mexico through the lens of demography; Homero Aridjis uses the plight of nesting sea turtles to document a slowly changing Mexican attitude toward natural resources; and Sam Quinones documents the decline of beauty-queen addiction in Mazatlán and tells us about the flower festivals where, according to lore, only two things matter: hurricanes and carnivals. For readers interested in a literary view of contemporary Mexico, as well as students of the creative nonfiction genre, this volume is essential

Photographer and filmmaker Victor Masayesva, Jr., was raised in the Hopi village of Hotevilla and was educated at the Horace Mann School in New York, Princeton University, and the University of Arizona. His immersion in photographic experimentation embraces a projection of stories and symbols, natural objects, and locations both at Hopi and worldwide. His work has been exhibited internationally, and he is perhaps best known for his feature-length film Imagining Indians. For Masayesva, photography is a discipline that he approaches in a manner similar to the way that he was taught about himself and his clan identity. As he navigates his personal associations with Hopi subject matter in varied investigations of biology, ecology, humanity, history, planetary energy, places remembered, and musings on things broken and whole, he has created an extraordinary visual cosmography. In this compilation of his photographic journey, Masayesva presents some of the most important and vibrant images of that visual quest and reflects on them in provocative essays.