University Of Arizona Press

Explores how a combination of complex geology, varied geography, and changing climate has given rise to intriguing flora and faunain the Mojave Desert - including almost 3,000 plant species and about 380 terrestrial vertebrate animal species. Of these, one quarter of the plants and one sixth of the animals are endemic.

Celebrating more than forty years of creative writing by Chicana author Margarita Cota-Cárdenas, this volume includes critical essays, reflections, interviews, and previously unpublished writing by the author herself to document the lifelong craft and legacy of a pioneering writer in the field.

This volume's essays analyze her work's themes of Chicana identity, the Chicanx movement, and the sociopolitical climate of Arizona and the larger U.S.-Mexico border region, as well as issues of gender, sexuality, and identity related to the Chicanx experience over time.
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Mapping Wonderlands explores popular, illustrated maps of Arizona as a tourism destination, investigating the relationship between landscapes, visual culture, and narratives of place. These aesthetically appealing maps offer tourists an Arizona landscape at once historical and imaginary--just as their makers intended.

Nationality in Latin America has long been entwined with questions of racial identity. Just as American-born colonial elites grounded their struggle for independence from Spain and Portugal in the history of Amerindian resistance, constructions of nationality were based on the notion of the fusion of populations heterogeneous in culture, race, and language. But this rhetorical celebration of difference was framed by a real-life pressure to assimilate into cultures always defined by Iberian American elites. In "Mestizo Nations," Juan De Castro explores the construction of nationality in Latin American and Chicano literature and thought during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Focusing on the discourse of "mestizaje"--which proposes the creation of a homogenous culture out of American Indian, black, and Iberian elements--he examines a selection of texts that represent the entire history and regional landscape of Latin American culture in its Western, indigenous, and neo-African traditions from Independence to the present. Through them, he delineates some of the ambiguities and contradictions that have beset this discourse. Among texts considered are the Indianist novel "Iracema" by the nineteenth-century Brazilian author JosA(c) de Alencar; the "Tradiciones peruanas," Peruvian Ricardo Palma's fictionalizations of national difference; and historical and sociological essays by the Peruvian Marxist JosA(c) Carlos MariAtegui and the Brazilian intellectual Gilberto Freyre. And because questions raised by this discourse are equally relevant to postmodern concerns with national and transnational heterogeneity, De Castro also analyzes such recent examples as the Cuban dance band Los VanVan's use of Afrocentric lyrics; Richard Rodriguez's interpretations of North American reality; and points of contact and divergence between JosA(c) MarA-a Arguedas's novel "The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below" and writings of Gloria AnzaldAa and Julia Kristeva. By updating the concept of mestizaje as a critical tool for analyzing literary text and cultural trends--incorporating not only race, culture, and nationality but also gender, language, and politics--De Castro shows the implications of this Latin American discursive tradition for current critical debates in cultural and area studies. Mestizo Nations contains important insights for all Latin Americanists as a tool for understanding racial relations and cultural hybridization, creating not only an important commentary on Latin America but also a critique of American life in the age of multiculturalism.

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist Milk and Filth is a collection of forty-two poems exploring issues of gender, equality, sexuality and the artist-as-thinker in modern culture. Deftly blending a variety of tones, styles, and structure, Giménez Smith's poems evocatively explores deep cultural issues.