Rita Magdaleno was born near Dachau shortly after World War II to a German mother and a Mexican American GI. Her family moved to Arizona in 1947, and Rita was raised with her father's traditions—but she remains at heart a child of two cultures.
This poetic memoir, recalling Magdaleno's return to the land of her birth, is an intertwining of personal and public history, bridging continents and cultures in search of family secrets. Her poems recall a mother "Marlene Dietrich pretty, / her smoky voice / & those wide Aryan / eyes that promised / never to lie," a war bride who named her child after a Hollywood movie star even before casting eyes on America. They also offer a new, intimate view of the war—and of today's reunified Germany—and show that the consequences of events played out half a century ago continue to resonate with the children of that era.
Magdaleno navigates currents of emotion that would drown less capable poets. With patience, courage, and abiding love, she draws on memories of mother and motherland to show us that healing can come in many forms.
From 1914 to 1934 the US government sent Native American girls to work as domestic servants in the homes of white families. Matrons and Maids tells this forgotten history through the eyes of the women who facilitated their placements. During those two decades, “outing matrons” oversaw and managed the employment of young Indian women. In Tucson, Arizona, the matrons acted as intermediaries between the Indian and white communities and between the local Tucson community and the national administration, the Office of Indian Affairs.
Based on federal archival records, Matrons and Maids offers an original and detailed account of government practices and efforts to regulate American Indian women. Haskins demonstrates that the outing system was clearly about regulating cross-cultural interactions, and she highlights the roles played by white women in this history. As she compellingly argues, we cannot fully engage with cross-cultural histories without examining the complex involvement of white women as active, if ambivalent, agents of colonization.
Including stories of the entwined experiences of Indigenous and non-Indigenous women that range from the heart-warming to the heart-breaking, Matrons and Maids presents a unique perspective on the history of Indian policy and the significance of “women’s work.”
Thornton Price, one of the defense attorneys, now tells how Farmer and Small became cannon fodder in this war to reclaim Arizona’s prisons from rival gangs. These gangs—the Aryan Brotherhood, the Mau Maus, and the Mexican Mafia—were suspected of committing more than a dozen murders over the previous two years, motivating politicians to crack down after the violence could no longer be ignored or contained. To reconstruct the case, Price reviewed 16,000 pages of court records and conducted interviews with key participants to piece together an insider’s account of the crime and the politics behind its investigation. Prison murders should be easy to solve, but investigators quickly learned that the convicts’ code of silence makes these cases often impossible to win in court.
Price focuses on the special problems posed by prison crime by getting inside the skins of men like murderer Terry "Crazy" Farmer and William "Red Dog" Howard, one of the Florence Eleven and a founder of the Aryan Brotherhood. He also presents the perspectives of state investigators and reveals how they calculated to pit black witnesses against white killers until one black would break the code of silence and provoke feuding within the Brotherhood.
Murder Unpunished tells how society’s most outrageous criminals ran the prison through gang violence as outside the walls Arizona struggled to outgrow its Wild West past. Like few other books, it reveals how prisons incubate predatory criminals and gangs, and it exposes the unique difficulties of prosecuting prison crimes. It is a gripping account that cuts to the heart of our penal system and a cautionary tale for citizens who prefer to keep prisons out of sight, out of mind.
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