This volume focuses on how powerful people of the ancient, historical, and contemporary periods in the Maya world used features such as walls, roads, rails, and symbolic boundaries to control those without power—and how the powerless pushed back.

Our Hidden Landscapes introduces people to eastern North America’s Indigenous ceremonial stone landscapes (CSLs)—sacred sites whose principal identifying characteristics are built stone structures that cluster within specific physical landscapes. This volume presents these often unrecognized sites as significant cultural landscapes in need of protection and preservation. Chapters from Indigenous community members, archaeologists, and anthropologists provide a variety of approaches for better understanding, protecting, and preserving these important sacred spaces.

This anthology of essays offers Diné perspectives on the experiences, observations, and examinations of their homeland. Together, the contributors thoughtfully illustrate the complex state of nihikéyah, “our land,” as viewed by Diné people.

In the Arms of Saguaros pictures how nature’s sharpest curves became a symbol of the American West. 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.

Bringing Home the Wild follows a two-decade journey in ecologically guided urban gardening on a four-acre irrigated parcel in Phoenix, Arizona, from the perspective of a retired botanist and her science historian partner. Through humor and a playful use of language, the book not only introduces the plants who are feeding them, buffering the climate, and elevating their moods but also acknowledges the animals and fungi who are pollinating the plants and recycling the waste. This work shows all of us the importance of observing, appreciating, and learning from the ecosystems of which we are a part.

Two neighboring families in El Paso, Texas, have plunged into a harrowing week. Rose Marie DuPre has abandoned her family. Across the street, Jerry Gonzalez and his family struggle with the sudden arrival of a difficult, long-lost sister. Even Lourdes, the Mexican maid who works in both houses, finds herself entangled in secrets, lies, and border politics that blur every boundary between them. All That Rises asks what it means to belong—to a family and to the world beyond.

This innovative collection details critical biographies of twelve key Chicana writers, offering an engaging look at their work, contributions to the field, and major achievements. Portraits of the authors are each examined by a noted scholar, who delves deep into the authors’ lives for details that inform their literary, artistic, feminist, and political trajectories and sensibilities. What results is a brilliant intersection of visual and literary arts that explores themes of sexism and misogyny, the fragility of life, Chicana agency, and more.

Spanning from the early nineteenth century to today, this intellectual history examines the work of Latino writers who explored the major philosophic and political themes of their day, including the meaning and implementation of democracy, their democratic and cultural rights under U.S. dominion, their growing sense of nationhood, and the challenges of slavery and disenfranchisement of women in a democratic republic that had yet to realize its ideals.

Mexico’s Valleys of Cuicatlán and Tehuacán provides an accessible overview of an extraordinary region of Central Mexico. Through firsthand experience and engaging prose, the authors provide a synthesis of the environment, plants, and peoples of the valleys, showing their importance and influence as Mesoamerican arteries for environmental and cultural interchange through Mexico.

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.
 

Increasing numbers of Indigenous peoples are living in cities, yet the vast majority of studies focus solely on rural Indigenous populations. This is the first book to look at urban Indigenous peoples globally and present the urban Indigenous experience—not as the exception but as the norm. Dismissing the false idea that indigeneity is only “authentic” when it is practiced in remote rural areas, these wide-ranging essays show that a vigorous, vibrant, and meaningful indigeneity can be created in urban spaces too and offers perspectives and tools to understand a contemporary Indigenous urban reality.

Despite its tiny size and seeming marginality to world affairs, the Central American republic of Costa Rica has long been considered an important site for experimentation in cutting-edge environmental policy. This book frames Costa Rica as an “ecolaboratory” and asks what lessons we can learn for the future of environmental governance and sustainable development both within the country and elsewhere.