Yaqui Indigeneity

Examines representations of the transborder Yaqui people as interpreted through the writing of Spanish, Mexican, and Chicana/o authors--Provided by publisher.

Thomas J. Lyon Book Award from the Western Literature Association A Planetary Lens delves into the history of the photo-book, the materiality of the photographic image on the page, and the cultural significance of landscape to reassess the value of print, to locate the sites where stories resonate, and to listen to western women's voices. From foundational California photographers Anne Brigman and Alma Lavenson to contemporary Native poets and writers Leslie Marmon Silko and Joy Harjo, women artists have used photographs to generate stories and to map routes across time and place. A Planetary Lens illuminates the richness and theoretical sophistication of such composite texts. Looking beyond the ideologies of wilderness, migration, and progress that have shaped settler and popular conceptions of the region, A Planetary Lens shows how many artists gather and assemble images and texts to reimagine landscape, identity, and history in the U.S. West. Based on extensive research into the production, publication, and circulation of women's photo-texts, A Planetary Lens offers a fresh perspective on the entangled and gendered histories of western American photography and literature and new models for envisioning regional relations.

Mariano Azuela (Mexico, 1873–1952) was a medical doctor by profession, recipient of Mexico’s Premio Nacional de Literatura (1949), a distinguished member of El Colegio Nacional and, by mid-century, one of Mexico’s leading novelists and literary critics. The author of novels, novellas, plays, biographies, and literary criticism, Azuela served as field doctor under Francisco Villa during the Mexican Revolution and, after Villa’s military defeats in 1915, published Los de abajo (The Underdogs, 1915) while in exile in El Paso, Texas. This book of essays commemorates the first centenary of Los de abajo, and traces its impact on twentieth-century autobiographies, memoirs and, more specifically, on the Novel of the Mexican Revolution. Equestrian Rebels: Critical Perspectives on Mariano Azuela and the Novel of the Mexican Revolution includes a full-length introduction and nineteen essays by leading international scholars who study Azuela and other novelists of the Mexican Revolution – such as Martín Luis Guzmán, Nellie Campobello and, among others, José Rubén Romero – from current, yet contrasting and innovative theoretical perspectives. Especially written for this volume, these critical essays are grouped into five sections that separately probe and analyze Azuela’s realism and contemporary affinities with photography; Azuela’s literary criticism; centennial studies on Los de abajo; critical approaches to other novels by Azuela; three independent analyses of Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho (1931); and a concluding section on literary representations of Mexican colonialism and revolution in the narratives of Juan Rulfo (El llano en llamas), Carlos Fuentes (Gringo viejo), and David Toscana (El último lector). This book will be of importance to scholars, teachers, students, and the general reader interested in topics related to the literary, cultural, and political forces and conflicts that led to the transformation of Mexico into a modern nation.

Set in the arid lands of northwestern Mexico, this book foregrounds the knowledge of Indigenous peoples who harvested the desert as bountiful in its material resources and sacred spaces. Author Cynthia Radding uses the tools of history, anthropology, geography, and ecology to re-create the means of defending Indigenous worlds through colonial encounters, the formation of mixed societies, and the direct conflicts over forests, grasslands, streams, and coastal estuaries that sustained wildlife, horticulture, foraging, hunting, fishing, and--after European contact--livestock and extractive industries. She returns in each chapter to the spiritual power of nature and the enduring cultural significance of the worlds that Indigenous communities created and defended.

The years between Oklahoma statehood in 1907 and the 1971 reemergence of the Cherokee Nation are often seen as an intellectual, political, and literary “dark age” in Cherokee history. In Stoking the Fire, Kirby Brown brings to light a rich array of writing that counters this view. A critical reading of the work of several twentieth-century Cherokee writers, this book reveals the complicated ways their writings reimagined, enacted, and bore witness to Cherokee nationhood in the absence of a functioning Cherokee state. Historian Rachel Caroline Eaton (1869–1938), novelist John Milton Oskison (1874–1947), educator Ruth Muskrat Bronson (1897–1982), and playwright Rollie Lynn Riggs (1899–1954) are among the writers Brown considers within the Cherokee national and transnational contexts that informed their lives and work. Facing the devastating effects on Cherokee communities of allotment and assimilation policies that ultimately dissolved the Cherokee government, these writers turned to tribal histories and biographies, novels and plays, and editorials and public addresses as alternative sites for resistance, critique, and the ongoing cultivation of Cherokee nationhood. Stoking the Fire shows how these writers—through fiction, drama, historiography, or Cherokee diplomacy—inscribed a Cherokee national presence in the twentieth century within popular and academic discourses that have often understood the “Indian nation” as a contradiction in terms. Avoiding the pitfalls of both assimilationist resignation and accommodationist ambivalence, Stoking the Fire recovers this period as a rich archive of Cherokee national memory. More broadly, the book expands how we think today about Indigenous nationhood and identity, our relationships with writers and texts from previous eras, and the paradigms that shape the fields of American Indian and Indigenous studies.

In this wide-ranging anthology, scholars offer diverse perspectives on ethnomusicology in dialogue with critical Indigenous studies. This volume is a collaboration between Indigenous and settler scholars from both Canada and the United States. The contributors explore the intersections between music, modernity, and Indigeneity in essays addressing topics that range from hip-hop to powwow, and television soundtracks of Native Classical and experimental music. Working from the shared premise that multiple modernities exist for Indigenous peoples, the authors seek to understand contemporary musical expression from Native perspectives and to decolonize the study of Native American/First Nations music. The essays coalesce around four main themes: innovative technology, identity formation and self-representation, political activism, and translocal musical exchange. Related topics include cosmopolitanism, hybridity, alliance studies, code-switching, and ontologies of sound. Featuring the work of both established and emerging scholars, the collection demonstrates the centrality of music in communicating the complex, diverse lived experience of Indigenous North Americans in the twenty-first century.

2023 de la Torre Bueno® First Book Award, Dance Studies Association The impact of folkloric dance and performance on Mexican cultural politics and national identity. The years between 1910 and 1940 were formative for Mexico, with the ouster of Porfirio Díaz, the subsequent revolution, and the creation of the new state. Amid the upheaval, Mexican dance emerged as a key arena of contestation regarding what it meant to be Mexican. Through an analysis of written, photographic, choreographic, and cinematographic renderings of a festive Mexico, Choreographing Mexico examines how bodies in motion both performed and critiqued the nation. Manuel Cuellar details the integration of Indigenous and regional dance styles into centennial celebrations, civic festivals, and popular films. Much of the time, this was a top-down affair, with cultural elites seeking to legitimate a hegemonic national character by incorporating traces of indigeneity. Yet dancers also used their moving bodies to challenge the official image of a Mexico full of manly vigor and free from racial and ethnic divisions. At home and abroad, dancers made nuanced articulations of female, Indigenous, Black, and even queer renditions of the nation. Cuellar reminds us of the ongoing political significance of movement and embodied experience, as folklórico maintains an important and still-contested place in Mexican and Mexican American identity today.

A necessary reconceptualization of Latinx identity, literature, and politics In Latinx Revolutionary Horizons, Renee Hudson theorizes a liberatory latinidad that is not yet here and conceptualizes a hemispheric project in which contemporary Latinx authors return to earlier moments of revolution. Rather than viewing Latinx as solely a category of identification, she argues for an expansive, historicized sense of the term that illuminates its political potential. Claiming the “x” in Latinx as marking the suspension and tension between how Latin American descended people identify and the future politics the “x” points us toward, Hudson contends that latinidad can signal a politics grounded in shared struggles and histories rather than merely a mode of identification. In this way, Latinx Revolutionary Horizons reads against current calls for cancelling latinidad based on its presumed anti-Black and anti-Indigenous framework. Instead, she examines the not-yet-here of latinidad to investigate the connection between the revolutionary history of the Americas and the creation of new genres in the hemisphere, from conversion narratives and dictator novels to neoslave narratives and testimonios. By comparing colonialisms, she charts a revolutionary genealogy across a range of movements such as the Mexican Revolution, the Filipino People Power Revolution, resistance to Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and the Cuban Revolution. In pairing nineteenth-century authors alongside contemporary Latinx ones, Hudson examines a longer genealogy of Latinx resistance while expanding its literary canon, from the works of José Rizal and Martin Delany to those of Julia Alvarez, Jessica Hagedorn, and Leslie Marmon Silko. In imagining a truly transnational latinidad, Latinx Revolutionary Horizons thus rewrites our understanding of the nationalist formations that continue to characterize Latinx Studies.