Journal of the Southwest Radio

The 2023 edition of Tucson Meet Yourself honored the Corrido and one of its most prominent researchers and writers, Dr. Celestino Fernandez. He was interviewed by Dr. Estevan Azcona, musicologist and associated research scientist at the Southwest Center, as local corridistas played some of his compositions. “Running tales” inspired by real events, Corridos amplify voices often muffled by dominant culture. A composer of over 50 corridos, Fernandez recently released Corridos de Celestino, a double album featuring corridos on immigration, the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and the massacre of 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, among other events.

Gabriel Dozal discusses his debut collection, The Border Simulator, where the U.S.-Mexico border is redefined as a place of invention; crossing it becomes a matter of simulation. The poems accompany Primitivo, who attempts to cross the border, an imaginary boundary that becomes more real and challenging as his journey progresses; and his sister, Primitiva, who lives an alternate, static life as an exploited migrant worker in la fabrica. He chats with Taylor about the experience of writing and living the borderlands, and shares the process of translating the work, completed by Natasha Tiniacos. Gabriel is a writer and educator from El Paso, Texas. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Arizona and he is a poetry editor for DIAGRAM. His work appears in Poetry Magazine, The Iowa Review, Guernica, The Brooklyn Rail, The Literary Review, The Volta, and elsewhere.

Dr. Bellante is a geographer whose research and teaching focus on food justice, food systems, and global environmental change. Bellante lived and worked in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas for six years before returning to the U.S. to pursue master’s and doctoral degrees in human-environmental geography. Her research centered on small-scale Chiapas corn farmers struggling with a changing climate and neoliberal economic policies. Dr. Bellante teaches several undergraduate courses, from an introduction to critical food studies to food justice, ethics and activism. She also co-leads the university’s Food Systems Research Lab with Dr. Gigi Owen, staff scientist with Climate Assessment for the Southwest.

Tara Plath is a PhD student in the Film & Media Studies Department at UC Santa Barbara. She holds an MA in Research Architecture from Goldsmiths, University of London and a BFA in Sculpture and BA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is an interdisciplinary practice-based researcher whose ongoing research uses mapping and open-source investigation techniques to challenge state violence, surveillance, and militarization at the US southwest border in Arizona. In a conversation following the end of Title 42, Tara and Taylor discuss the compounding crises of disappearance and death in the Sonoran Desert; border militarization and the weaponization of humanitarian aid as part of Border Patrol’s long-term strategy of Prevention Through Deterrence. Plath’s transdisciplinary research and activism helps us better visualize the devastating effects of the occupation of Indigenous land throughout the Sonoran Desert and beyond, while offering methods and platforms for transborder solidarity.

Dr. Nicolás Pineda Pablos is a researcher in El Colegio de Sonora, Hermosillo. He has a doctorate in public policy and community planning from the University of Texas at Austin and wrote his dissertation on Mexican urban water policy. Since that time, he has continued to focus on water issues across Mexico, from the northern border states to the Yucatán Peninsula. Pineda is indeed one of Mexico’s foremost experts on urban water, with numerous publications, several of which are the result of long-term collaborations with researchers at the University of Arizona. In this interview, Dr. Pineda reflects on the current state of water in Sonora’s capital, Hermosillo, a desert city that, much like Tucson, is faced with profound challenges, not least of which are a swiftly warming and drying environment, ongoing drought, and the threat of ever-more more powerful storms.

The School Garden Workshop (SGW) is an immensely impactful program in the University of Arizona and Tucson Unified School District communities… as well as throughout the city of Tucson and greater southern Arizona region. School gardens can be powerful educational tools. SGW enables teachers to tap into their students’ energy and curiosity through integrating active, hands-on lessons in conventional academic subjects, like math, science, and language arts. Equally important as conventional and practice-based learning spaces, school gardens foster cooperation, autonomy, and social justice. In this conversation, we hear more from Moses and Carly about SGW and some of the myriad ways the gardens affect the next generation of learners. Hosted by Taylor Miller; post-production and edition by Carlos Quintero

Dr. Marcela Vásquez-León is the Director of the Center for Latin American Studies and Professor of Anthropology in the School of Anthropology, University of Arizona. She has conducted research and outreach for over two decades with smallholder agricultural and fishing communities throughout Latin America and the U.S. Southwest. Her focus includes collective organization, common property resources, and rural development. In this episode of the JSW Radio Podcast, we speak with Dr. Vásquez-León about the impact of efforts to protect the endangered vaquita marina on fishing communities in Mexico’s upper Gulf of California. Scientists and international non-profit organizations, working in tandem with the Mexican government, have invested significant intellectual, financial, and human resources in the upper gulf and on the vaquita. Vásquez-León argues, however, that their efforts have resulted in the near total collapse of what was once a robust fisheries economy and, thus far, have produced few demonstrable successes. Her analysis of the situation, based on years of work with local fishing communities, points to the disparities and injustices that so often result from conservation programs that focus on protecting a single species without considering the deeply entangled “natures” and “cultures” that such efforts both affect and produce. Ultimately, it is not an argument against protecting ecologies and environments but rather a push for a view and approach that considers relationships between human and non-human worlds.

Dr. Tom Sheridan is a research cultural anthropologist in the Southwest Center and professor in the University of Arizona School of Anthropology. Sheridan has been a longtime student of ranching and ranch lands in southern Arizona, which led him, starting in the 1990s, to participate in the development of Pima County’s Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan, the SDCP, one of the most innovative and successful county-led conservation efforts in the United States. Tom is currently researching and writing a book on the SDCP, including on the larger land-use and conservation dynamics shaping the region starting in the late 20th century, a convergence of forces that led to the successful development and implementation of the Plan. This interview with Dr. Sheridan is the second installment of our two-part series focused on conservation in Southern Arizona. The first was with Brian Powell, who now serves as a Pima County Parks Superintendent with Pima County’s Natural Resource, Parks and Recreation department, and who for several years was pivotal to developing the county’s biological monitoring program.

Brian Powell, currently a Parks Superintendent with Pima County’s Natural Resource, Parks and Recreation department, has spent the past two decades working to understand and protect biodiversity in the Sonoran Desert of Southern Arizona. In 2007, he was tapped by Maeveen Behan to develop a biological monitoring program for Pima County. In this interview, Powell describes efforts leading to the county’s innovative approach to preserving open space, starting in the late 1990s – the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan. This was a time of fast-paced housing development, particularly on Tucson’s northwest side, and environmentalists were pushing for stronger controls on growth. This interview is the first in a two-part series focusing on conservation in Southern Arizona.

Última entrega de una serie de tres lecturas bilingües extraídas del número de otoño de 2004 del Journal of the Southwest, un número especial que incluía la traducción del libro Entre Yoris y Guarijíos: Crónicas sobre el quehacer Antropológico, escrito por la doctora María Teresa Valdivia Dounce, investigadora y profesora del Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. A finales de los 70, Valdivia viajó con un equipo de médicos, agrónomos y trabajadores sociales del Instituto Nacional Indigenista para mejorar las condiciones de vida del pueblo Guarijío en la Sierra Madre Occidental. El libro es un registro auntobiográfico del trabajo de Valdivia apoyando a los Guarijíos en su lucha por la tierra contra los rancheros y agricultores no indígenas ("Yoris"), y es a la vez una meditada reflexión sobre el trabajo de campo en la antropología. La versión en español es leída por la Doctora Jéssica Retis, profesora de periodismo en la Universidad de Arizona.