In The Fornes Frame: Contemporary Latina Playwrights and the Legacy of Maria Irene Fornes (University of Arizona Press, 2016) playwright and theatre scholar Anne García-Romero traces the career and legacy of Maria Irene Fornes.

Fornes was one of the most significant American playwrights of the twentieth century, and her legacy is evident in the dozens of playwrights she mentored over the course of her long career. García-Romero shows how her unique pedagogy and her example as a successful Latina experimental playwright continue to inspire playwrights like Caridad Svich, Cusi Cram, Elaine Romero, Quiara Alegría Hudes, and Karen Zacarías.

Anne García-Romero is a playwright and theatre studies scholar.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at [email protected].

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Silviana Wood is a legend of Chicano theatre. Through her involvement with Teatro Libertad, Teatro Chicano, and El Teatro Nacional de Atzlán she has created plays where working class Chicanos are center stage. Despite her insistence that she is “a storyteller, not an activist,” her plays reflect her deep connection to the Movimiento Chicano. They are also funny, imaginative, and heartbreaking, sometimes all in the same scene. Her book Barrio Dreams (University of Arizona Press 2016) collects five of her plays.

Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at [email protected].

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Growing Up in the Gutter: Diaspora and Comics (U Arizona Press, 2024) by Dr. Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo offers new understandings of contemporary graphic coming-of-age narratives by looking at the genre’s growth in stories by and for young BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and diasporic readers. Through a careful examination of the genre, Dr. Quintana-Vallejo analyses the complex identity formation of first- and subsequent-generation migrant protagonists in globalised rural and urban environments and dissects the implications that these diasporic formative processes have for a growing and popular genre.

While the most traditional iteration of the bildungsroman—the coming-of-age story—follows middle-class male heroes who forge their identities in a process of complex introspection, contemporary graphic coming-of-age narratives represent formative processes that fit into, resist, or even disregard narratives of socialisation under capitalism, of citizenship, and of nationhood.

Dr. Quintana-Vallejo delves into several important themes: how the coming-of-age genre can be used to study adulthood, how displacement and international or global heritage are fundamental experiences, how multi-diasporic approaches foreground lived experiences, and how queerness opens narratives of development to the study of adulthood as fundamentally diverse and nonconforming to social norms. Dr. Quintana-Vallejo shows how openness enables belonging among chosen families and, perhaps most importantly, freedom to disidentify. And, finally, how contemporary authors writing for the instruction of BIPOC children (and children otherwise affected by diaspora and displacement) use the didactic power of the coming-of-age genre, combined with the hybrid language of graphic narratives, to teach difficult topics in accessible ways.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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How is Yosemite National Park a microcosm for our warming, fire-driven, world? 

Arizona State University emeritus professor Stephen Pyne answers that question in Pyrocene Park: A Journey Into the Fire History of Yosemite National Park (U Arizona Press, 2023). Pyne frames the fire history of Yosemite National Park around a three day hike he and a team of researchers took into the park's backcountry as part of a program examining the effects of changing fire regimes over the last several decades. 

In the process, Pyne explains how and why the human abolition - and reignition - of fires in the park have had dramatic effects on a place which is 95% wilderness. People, Pyne argues, have a strange relationship with fire, at once keeping the elemental process at arm's length while simultaneously being intertwined culturally and even physically with fire and its effects. As fires grow and the planet warms, Pyne asks readers to consider Yosemite as both a warning about the dangers of misunderstanding fire, and an example of how to respect fire as the ecological necessity it has always been.

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Professor Martha Few’s For All Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala (University of Arizona Press, 2015) describes the implementation of public health reforms in late eighteenth-century Guatemala and the diverse ways that indigenous communities engaged and resisted these programs.  Contrary to expectations, colonists were often ahead of administrators in Spain in adopting new medical methods, such as inoculating patients against smallpox.  But bringing these to rural communities, some with a significant degree of autonomy, required adaptation and compromise; and if resistance was stiff, medical officers reacted with the persecution of indigenous practices in ways that mirrored the church’s anti-idolatry purges.  By bringing Guatemala and its native residents into the networks of Atlantic medicine in the eighteenth century, For All Humanity illuminates the plurality of medical cultures that interacted in the production of the Enlightenment.

Martha Few is Professor of Latin American History and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University.

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An essential—and monumental—member of the Sonoran Desert ecosystem, the saguaro cactus has become the quintessential icon of the American West.

In the Arms of Saguaros: Iconography of the Giant Cactus (U Arizona Press, 2023) shows how, from the botanical explorers of the nineteenth century to the tourism boosters in our own time, saguaros and their images have fulfilled attention-getting needs and expectations. Through text and lavish images, this work explores the saguaro’s growth into a western icon from the early days of the American railroad to the years bracketing World War II, when Sun Belt boosterism hit its zenith and proponents of tourism succeed in moving the saguaro to the center of the promotional frame.

This book explores how the growth of tourism brought the saguaro to ever-larger audiences through the proliferation of western-themed imagery on the American roadside. The history of the saguaro’s popular and highly imaginative range points to the current moment in which the saguaro touches us as a global icon in art, fashion, and entertainment.

William L. Bird, Jr. is Curator Emeritus of the National Museum of American History–Smithsonian Institution. He is the author of several books and curator of exhibits, including American Television from the Fair to the Family, 1939-1989; Vote: The Machinery of Democracy; Paint by Number: Accounting for Taste in the 1950s; Holidays on Display; America's Doll House: The Miniature World of Faith Bradford; and Souvenir Nation: Relics, Keepsakes and Curios from the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers and articles on G. K. Chesterton and John Ford, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X.

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

Rim to River: Looking Into the Heart of Arizona (U Arizona Press, 2023) is the story of this extraordinary journey through redrock country, down canyons, up mesas, and across desert plains to the obscure valley in Mexico that gave the state its enigmatic name. The trek is interspersed with incisive essays that pick apart the distinctive cultural landscape of Arizona: the wine-colored pinnacles and complex spirituality of Navajoland, the mind-numbing stucco suburbs, desperate border crossings, legislative skullduggery, extreme politics, billion-dollar copper ventures, dehydrating rivers, retirement kingdoms, old-time foodways, ghosts of old wars, honky-tonk dreamers, murder mysteries, and magical Grand Canyon reveries.

In Rim to River, Zoellner does for Arizona what Larry McMurtry did for Texas in In a Narrow Grave and what Wallace Stegner did for Utah in Mormon Country: paint an enduring portrait of a misunderstood American state. An indictment, a love letter, and a homecoming story all at once.

Tom Zoellner is an American author and journalist. His book Island on Fire: The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for the best nonfiction book of 2020 and was a finalist for the Bancroft Prize and the California Book Award. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The American Scholar, The Oxford American, Time, Foreign Policy, Men’s Health, Slate, Scientific American, Audubon, Sierra, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Texas Observer, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. Tom is a former staff writer for The Arizona Republic and the San Francisco Chronicle, and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Lannan Foundation. He teaches at Chapman University and Dartmouth College.

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics (Twitter @15MinFilm).

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Near Tijuana, Baja California, the autonomous community of Maclovio Rojas demonstrates what is possible for urban place-based political movements. More than a community, Maclovio Rojas is a women-led social movement that works for economic and political autonomy to address issues of health, education, housing, nutrition, and security.

Border Women and the Community of Maclovio Rojas: Autonomy in the Spaces of Neoliberal Neglect (U Arizona Press, 2021) tells the story of the community’s struggle to carve out space for survival and thriving in the shadows of the U.S.-Mexico geopolitical border. This ethnography by Michelle Téllez demonstrates the state’s neglect in providing social services and local infrastructure. This neglect exacerbates the structural violence endemic to the border region—a continuation of colonial systems of power on the urban, rural, and racialized poor. Téllez shows that in creating the community of Maclovio Rojas, residents have challenged prescriptive notions of nation and belonging. Through women’s active participation and leadership, a women’s political subjectivity has emerged—Maclovianas. These border women both contest and invoke their citizenship as they struggle to have their land rights recognized, and they transform traditional political roles into that of agency and responsibility.

This book highlights the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as a space of resistance, conviviality, agency, and creative community building where transformative politics can take place. It shows hope, struggle, and possibility in the context of gendered violences of racial capitalism on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border.

David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements.

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An early wave of research helped make visible the complex dynamics of sexuality and gender norms in Latino life, but a new generation of scholars is bringing renewed energy and curiosity to this field of inquiry. In this episode we sit down with Frederick Luis Aldama, Distinguished University Professor at the Ohio State University and co-editor of Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities (University of Arizona Press), to discuss some of the cutting-edge research in this new edited volume.

This rich collection of work from eighteen contributors approaches the topic of masculinities from a diversity of perspectives and methodologies. With special emphasis on the plurality of Latinx masculinities, the essays reveal the divergent manifestations of masculinity across a broad spectrum including politics, social movements, literature, media, popular culture, personal experience, and other analytical angles. The pernicious effect of stereotypes and toxic Latinx masculinity is laid bare throughout the text in chapters that challenge the derogatory performances and reification of machismo in mainstream U.S. culture and society.

At the same time, other essays look to how Latinx masculinities are being reclaimed and remade. Rejecting the inherited legacy of colonial thinking and heteronormative labels, authors outline the creation of new masculinities, new ways of being and coexisting. In this way, Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities shows that masculinities are not simply violent and traumatic, but also healing and affirming.

Jaime Sánchez, Jr. is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University and a scholar of U.S. politics and Latino studies. He is currently writing an institutional history of the Democratic National Committee and partisan coalition politics in the twentieth century. You can follow him on Twitter @Jaime_SanchezJr.

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In The Chicana M(other)work Anthology: Porque Sin Madres No Hay Revolucion (University of Arizona Press, 2019) editors Cecilia Caballero, Yvette Martinez-Vu, Judith Perez-Torres, Michelle Tellez, and Christine Vega, bring together a diverse collective of Women of Color Mother-Scholars to end the silence experienced by Mothers of Color in academia. In this expansive collection of research, testimonios, and essays, the authors share the networks, tools, and strategies created by working-class Women of Color as they confront and overcome societal and institutional barriers to pursuing higher education and advancing in the professorate. Chicana M(other)work, the editors explain, is “care work that includes the care provided in homes, classrooms, communities, and selves.” As such, this labor permeates and informs the praxis performed by Mothers of Color in their overlapping spheres of influence. As part of the larger Chicana M(other)work Project, which includes managing a website, blog, podcast, and engaging in grassroots activism, this anthology serves as a rallying call and platform for Mothers of Color seeking to transform communities, universities, and societal institutions from the bottom-up.

David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, the development of multi-ethnic/racial cities, and the evolution of Latina/o identity and politics. His research centers on the relationship between Latina/o politics and the metropolitan development of Orange County, CA throughout the 20th century. You may follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD.

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