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Fleeing the social and political turmoil spawned by the Mexican Revolution, massive numbers of Mexican immigrants entered the southwestern United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. But instead of finding refuge, many encountered harsh, anti-Mexican attitudes and violence from an Anglo population frightened by the influx of foreigners and angered by anti-American sentiments in Mexico.

This book examines the response of Mexican immigrants to Anglo American prejudice and violence early in the twentieth century. Drawing on archival sources from both sides of the border, Arturo Rosales traces the rise of "México Lindo" nationalism and the efforts of Mexican consuls to help poor Mexican immigrants defend themselves against abuses and flagrant civil rights violations by Anglo citizens, police, and the U.S. judicial system. This research illuminates a dark era in which civilian and police brutality, prejudice in the courtroom, and disproportionate arrest, conviction, and capital punishment rates too often characterized justice for Mexican Americans.

An essential reflection on the haunting legacy of the transatlantic slave trade from award-winning French filmmaker and writer Fabienne Kanor.

A century and a half after the passage of the last known slave ship, the hold—in which captives were imprisoned together under inhuman conditions—still haunts collective memory, particularly that of Afro-descendant artists, thinkers, and writers. With The Poetics of the Hold, scholar, writer, and filmmaker Fabienne Kanor offers a series of meditations on the transatlantic slave trade and on how the experience of the Middle Passage has been represented in modern culture of the United States, Francophone Africa, and the French West Indies.

In this important book, Kanor draws from a multitude of sources—history, literature, art, philosophy, the Négritude tradition, and Caribbean thinkers—to take readers on a journey from colonial archives to public spaces, museums, and other places of commemoration. Throughout, the image of the hold serves as a spectral monument, the traumatic reverberations of which can be felt in both the texts Kanor examines and in her own writing. While archives, logbooks, and sea reports provide information about slave ships, the stories of the slaves themselves too often remain shrouded in silence. This powerful and poetic book seeks to rectify that amnesia and to wrestle with these neglected histories and their afterlives.

Detailed and rife with social and cultural implications, Poetry and Violence is a compelling commentary on violence as both human experience and communicative action.

Poets as Public Scholars is a multimedia project that interrogates how poet-scholars use digital platforms to expand access and visibility for underrepresented voices, but also to critique the commodification, extraction, and erasure practices embedded in neoliberal literary circulation. Framed by two core questions—how poets teach public scholarship through networked media, and how to support underrepresented poets without reinforcing market-driven erasure—the collection offers videos for student and public engagement, essays for scholarly audiences, and discussion questions for classroom use.

Structured around seven video dialogues and seven critical essays, the book features contributions from poet-scholars including Camea Davis, A.D. Carson, Tyrone Williams, Patrick Milian, Stevi Costa, Cameron Awkward-Rich, and Woogee Bae. Each chapter examines the material and affective economies that shape poetic production and reception, while proposing alternative, community-rooted infrastructures for literary and cultural labor. Designed for layered audiences, the video interviews model public-facing discourse, while the companion essays situate the work within critical conversations in literature, cultural theory, and media studies. With included discussion questions by Dr. Molly Ubbesen (University of Minnesota Rochester) and open access availability, Poets as Public Scholars functions as both a teaching tool and a theoretical intervention for scholars and educators seeking to integrate anti-racist, anti-capitalist approaches to literary and digital humanities pedagogy.

University of Utah Anthropological Papers No. 133

Point of Pines Pueblo has long been the center of theoretical debates in southwestern archaeology, yet detailed descriptions of the site have been lacking. Located on the San Carlos Apache Reservation in central Arizona, this large Mountain Mogollon village (about 800 rooms) dates from AD 1200 to 1400. For the first 100 years of occupation it was a multiethnic community and is often referenced in discussions of aggregation, community organization, migration, and ethnic interaction. In Point of Pines Pueblo Tammy Stone details the architectural structures and cultural materials at the site, providing a body of information never before published.

From 1947 to 1960, Point of Pines Pueblo was excavated by the University of Arizona field school under the direction of Emil Haury. Data from that work were housed at the Arizona State Museum Archives. Stone draws from those original excavation notes to present detailed descriptions of each architectural structure and extramural feature along with information on the associated artifacts, dated dendrochronology samples, and ethnobotanical samples unearthed at the site. A rich source of raw data, this book will serve as a valuable resource for years to come. 

Biological warfare is a menacing twenty-first-century issue, but its origins extend to antiquity. While the recorded use of toxins in warfare in some ancient populations is rarely disputed (the use of arsenical smoke in China, which dates to at least 1000 BC, for example) the use of "poison arrows" and other deadly substances by Native American groups has been fraught with contradiction. At last revealing clear documentation to support these theories, anthropologist David Jones transforms the realm of ethnobotany in Poison Arrows.

Examining evidence within the few extant descriptive accounts of Native American warfare, along with grooved arrowheads and clues from botanical knowledge, Jones builds a solid case to indicate widespread and very effective use of many types of toxins. He argues that various groups applied them to not only warfare but also to hunting, and even as an early form of insect extermination. Culling extensive ethnological, historical, and archaeological data, Jones provides a thoroughly comprehensive survey of the use of ethnobotanical and entomological compounds applied in wide-ranging ways, including homicide and suicide. Although many narratives from the contact period in North America deny such uses, Jones now offers conclusive documentation to prove otherwise.

A groundbreaking study of a subject that has been long overlooked, Poison Arrows imparts an extraordinary new perspective to the history of warfare, weaponry, and deadly human ingenuity.

Poker is an extraordinary worldwide phenomenon with major social, cultural, and political implications, and Poker: The Parody of Capitalism investigates the game of poker as a cultural expression of significance not unlike art, literature, film, or music. Tracing the history of poker and comparing the evolution of the game to the development of capitalism, Ole Bjerg complicates prevalent notions of “casino capitalism” and correspondingly facile and simplistic comparisons of late capitalism and poker. By employing Slavoj Žižek’s threefold distinction between imaginary-symbolic-real as a philosophical framework to analyze poker and to understand the basic strategies of the game, Bjerg explores the structural characteristics of poker in relation to other games, making a clear distinction between poker and other gambling games of pure chance such as roulette and craps. With its combination of social theory and empirical research, Poker offers an engaging exploration of a cultural trend.

"Poker is a theoretically sophisticated, highly original and innovative treatment of a contemporary social phenomenon, and contributes greatly to our understanding of the nature of contemporary capitalism."
—Charles Livingstone, Monash University Australia

Policing Space is a fascinating firsthand account of how the Los Angeles Police Department attempts to control its vast, heterogeneous territory. As such, the book offers a rare, ground-level look at the relationship between the control of space and the exercise of power.

This book reflects a conscious attempt to follow the general model of Martin Heidegger’s Zollikon Seminars, in which Heidegger engaged psychiatrists and psychologists in a sustained dialogue aimed at developing their critical awareness of the unexamined philosophical foundations informing their everyday clinical practice. Wender draws on Heidegger to argue that “praxis is poetry” and from this standpoint interprets all social action as intentional creation (or “poiesis”), which by its very nature is intrinsically meaningful. Using an interpretive framework that he calls a “phenomenological aesthetics of encounter,” Wender takes up a number of case studies of police-citizen encounters, including cases of domestic violence, contacts with juveniles, drug-related situations, instances of mental and emotional crisis, and death.

Shows how policing shaped the trajectory of public housing in Chicago and paved the way for its eradication and privatization. 

Public housing should be a great public good, providing an essential basic need for people with lower incomes. Unfortunately, in the United States, policymakers turned their backs on public housing early on. Intended to be a utopia for the working poor, public housing in many cities became characterized by racial isolation, extreme poverty, and infrastructural breakdown, all of which left residents vulnerable to crime. State abandonment had one major exception, however: policing. In Policing the Project, geographer Madeleine Hamlin details how police played an important role in Chicago’s public housing from its origins in 1937 to the eve of its demolition at the turn of the millennium. 

Based on archival data as well as extensive interviews with former residents and police officers, Hamlin describes the progressive institutional entanglement of public housing and policing as it unfurled over the course of the twentieth century. Policing the Project transcends mere description of how policing impacted everyday life for public housing residents, instead considering how policing shaped the institution of public housing as a whole. Hamlin argues that policing conditioned public housing’s downfall: draining housing budgets while exacerbating rather than mitigating crime and violence. Thus, policing played an important role in shaping the dramatic transformation of Chicago’s housing landscape, which entailed widespread privatization and the displacement of tens of thousands of Black Chicagoans.