Special Collections added the following 12 titles to ASC's holdings during the third quarter of 2024. The list is a sample of purchased and donated publications and while not exhaustive, is meant to highlight recent acquisitions. For a full list of Special Collections titles, please search PRIMO, the library’s catalog.

Cover ArtBodies, Ontology, and Bioarchaeology: Articulating 14th Century Life at Arroyo Hondo Pueblo by Ann M. Palkovich

Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating E99.P9 P268 2024
ISBN: 9783031560224
Publication Date: 2024-05-12
This volume introduces the place of Arroyo Hondo Pueblo in our understanding of Southwestern Archaeology in the Northern Rio Grande. The author discusses the reanalysis of the skeletal and mortuary remains that draws on a half century of research since the original excavations were conducted by the School of American Research from 1970-1974 under the direction of Douglas W. Schwartz.The volume offers a close read of the mortuary evidence at Arroyo Hondo Pueblo and integrates ideas about corn as a central feature of Tewa cosmology with this crop as the paramount dietary staple. The author discusses the health consequences of dry-farming subsistence and present evidence for malnutrition and other dietary issues and finally describes the impact of malnutrition and other maladies on the everyday lives of Arroyo Hondo's villagers. This volume is for readers interested in bioarchaeology, paleopathology, and Southwestern Archaeology.
 

Cover ArtThe Colfax County War: Violence and Corruption in Territorial New Mexico by Corey Recko

Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating F802.C7 R43 2024
ISBN: 9781574419320
Publication Date: 2024-07-22
When New Mexico became part of the United States, the territory contained 295 land grants, the largest of these being the Maxwell Land Grant. The size and boundaries of the grant were disputed, with some believing that much of the land was public domain. Settlers on this land were fought not only by the land grant owners but also by a group of corrupt politicians and lawyers-- known as the Santa Fe Ring (most notably Thomas Catron and Stephen Elkins)--who tried to use the situation for personal profit and land acquisition.  The fight escalated in late 1875 with the assassination of Reverend F. J. Tolby, an outspoken critic of the Santa Fe Ring. In a confession one of the assassins stated that men connected to the ring had paid to have Tolby killed. Outrage, civil unrest, and more murders followed. The town of Cimarron alone was the scene of a lynching, a barroom gunfight in the St. James Hotel involving legendary gunman Clay Allison, and a nighttime murder of a prisoner. For a time the troubles in New Mexico were ignored by the federal government. But in 1878 the murder of John Tunstall set off a wave of violence known as the Lincoln County War. Following that, a letter came to light that appeared to show that the governor of the territory, Samuel B. Axtell, planned a mass execution of critics of the Santa Fe Ring, who he considered to be agitators in the Colfax County troubles.  Finally, officials in Washington took notice and sent Frank W. Angel with orders to investigate the violence, murders, and corruption that plagued the territory. Following his investigation, Angel concluded, "It is seldom that history states more corruption, fraud, mismanagement, plots and murders, than New Mexico, has been the theatre under the administration of Governor Axtell." The actions taken as a result of Angel's investigation wouldn't end the violence in New Mexico, but they did lead to the end of the Colfax County War. 
 

Cover ArtDamming the Gila: The Gila River Indian Community and the San Carlos Irrigation Project, 1900-1942 by David H. DeJong

Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating E99.P6 D444 2024
ISBN: 9780816553266
Publication Date: 2024-06-11
Unraveling a complex web of tension, distrust, and political maneuvering, Damming the Gila continues the story of the Gila River Indian Community's struggle for the restoration of its water rights. This volume continues to chronicle the history of water rights and activities on the Gila River Indian Reservation. Centered on the San Carlos Irrigation Project and Coolidge Dam, it details the history and development of the project, including the Gila Decree and the Winters Doctrine. Embedded in the narrative is the underlying tension between tribal growers on the Gila River Indian Reservation and upstream users. Told in seven chapters, the story underscores the idea that the Gila River Indian Community believed the San Carlos Irrigation Project was first and foremost for their benefit and how the project and the Gila Decree fell short of restoring their water and agricultural economy. Damming the Gila is the third in a trio of important documentary works, beginning with DeJong's Stealing the Gila and followed by Diverting the Gila. It continues the story of the Gila River Indian Community's fight to regain access to their water.
 

Cover ArtFrontera: A Journey Across the US-Mexico Border by Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera; Sergio Chapa

Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating F787 .C43 2024
ISBN: 9780875658537
Publication Date: 2024-03-19
Following the border formed by the Rio Grande and moving cross-country to the Pacific Ocean, Frontera is a lavishly illustrated book that offers a comprehensive examination of the nearly two thousand-mile border shared by the United States and Mexico. The region has a reputation for being a dangerous place, with US Border Patrol and Mexican authorities playing cat and mouse with smugglers and undocumented migrants, and with drug cartels inflicting unspeakable violence on the region. Frontera takes an unblinking look at those dangers, but it goes beyond stereotypes and offers the reader vivid portraits of the beauty and complexity of the area--its history, its contemporary attractions, its rich cultural life. Moving through thirty-eight municipalities on the Mexican side and twenty-four counties in the US, Frontera includes maps, key cities, points of interest, border crossings, festivals, local cuisines, and more, along with analyses of local politics and security issues. Despite its troubles, the US-Mexico border is a beautiful place, the home of welcoming and warm people. It is a land of contrasts--austere landscapes and lush oases, thunderstorms and rainbows in the desert, robust industry and ghost towns, great wealth and aching poverty. Frontera is both a feast for the eyes and an encyclopedic reference that offers readers a clear-eyed perspective on a subject of critical importance to the United States and its southern neighbor.
 

Cover ArtThe Last Philosopher in Texas: Fictions and Superstitions by Daniel Chacón

Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating PS3553.H215 L38 2024
ISBN: 9781558859937
Publication Date: 2024-04-01
Illusion and the possibility of magic coexist with the pain and joy of daily life in these compelling pieces mostly set in the Texas-Mexico border region. In one, a girl desperately wants to know more about her mother, who died when she was four years old. Did she like being a mom? Would she have preferred partying with her friends? When her eccentric aunt says she can teach her how to travel back in time, the girl is skeptical. Is it really possible to visit the past and communicate with the dead? Each story is a celebration of the narrative's power to transport, enlighten and connect the reader to the myriad facets of the human experience. In "Borges and the Chicanx," a Chicano professor's imposter syndrome worsens when he is asked to teach a course on a famed Latin American writer he has never read and whose work he doesn't understand. And in "Sara's Chest of Drawers," a young man's parents insist he go through his dead twin sister's things even though he doesn't think she would want him to--until she sends him a sign from the beyond. Dreams, memories, visions and superstitions permeate this collection of short fiction that blends the ordinary with the extraordinary, making the fantastical feel surprisingly tangible. Considering themes of outsider status and displacement, cultural representation and authenticity, identity and collective memory, award-winning author Daniel Chacón once again crafts troubled characters searching for salvation from sorrows they often cannot even articulate.
 

Cover ArtA Long Tangent: Musings by an Old Man & His Young Dog Hiking Every Day for a Year by M. John Fayhee

Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating GV199.42.N62 F39 2023
ISBN: 9781958870082
Publication Date: 2023-09-06
When M. John Fayhee first arrived in New Mexico’s rugged Gila Country, he was a naive 20-year-old who didn’t know a javelina from an enchilada. Much has changed in the intervening half century. In this meandering memoir, Fayhee, with his loyal dog Casey at his side, takes us through the heart of the Gila – once the stomping ground of Geronimo and Billy the Kid and home to the world’s first legally designated Wilderness Area – as he endeavors to hike every day for a solid year through some of the country’s most remote and challenging terrain. A Long Tangent explores the process of going from wide-eyed young man to crotchety old fart as he comes to terms with his mortality, with the fact that “There are many more trail miles behind me than there are ahead.” More than that, though. This is the story of the bond between a man and his canine companion as it evolves through deep canyons, across bone-dry mesas in ninety-five degree heat and toward the cactus-covered mountains that rise above the desert lands of southwest New Mexico. Along the way, Fayhee reflects upon rattlesnakes, hiking sticks, bears, exploding rocks, mystery mountains, disorientation, poorly worded religious texts, lost pets, marriage, the relationship between hikers and their vehicles, and a past that slips ever further into the rearview mirror.
 

Cover ArtOut of the Sierra: A Story of Rarámuri Resistance by Victoria Blanco

Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating F1221.T25 B57 2024
ISBN: 9781566896535
Publication Date: 2024-06-11
A displaced family charts a path forward in this testament to the power of perseverance and the many forms resistance can take. The Rarámuri people of Chihuahua, Mexico, make up one of the largest Indigenous tribes of North America. Renowned for maintaining their language and cultural traditions in the face of colonization, they have weathered numerous hardships--climate disaster, poverty, cultural erasure--that have only worsened during the twenty-first century. Based on more than a decade of oral history and participatory field work, Out of the Sierra paints a vivid and vital portrait of Rarámuri displacement. When drought leaves the Gutiérrez family with nothing to eat, they are faced with the choice many Rarámuris must make: remain and hope for rain and aid, or leave their sacred homeland behind. Luis, Martina, and their children choose to journey from their home in the Sierra Madre mountains toward a new and uncertain future in a government-funded Indigenous settlement. Victoria Blanco considers Indigenous identity with tenderness and intelligence, demanding recognition and justice for the Rarámuri people as they resist assimilation and uphold traditional knowledge in the face of broken systems. In a narrative of unprecedented access and intimacy, Out of the Sierra offers a groundbreaking testimony to human resilience and the power of community.
 

Cover ArtSpatial and Discursive Violence in the US Southwest by Rosaura Sánchez; Beatrice Pita

Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating PS153.M4 S263 2021
ISBN: 9781478011736
Publication Date: 2021-04-16
In Spatial and Discursive Violence in the US Southwest Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita examine literary representations of settler colonial land enclosure and dispossession in the history of New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma. Sánchez and Pita analyze a range of Chicano/a and Native American novels, films, short stories, and other cultural artifacts from the eighteenth century to the present, showing how Chicano/a works often celebrate an idealized colonial Spanish past as a way to counter stereotypes of Mexican and Indigenous racial and ethnic inferiority. As they demonstrate, these texts often erase the participation of Spanish and Mexican settlers in the dispossession of Indigenous lands. Foregrounding the relationship between literature and settler colonialism, they consider how literary representations of land are manipulated and redefined in ways that point to the changing practices of dispossession. In so doing, Sánchez and Pita prompt critics to reconsider the role of settler colonialism in the deep history of the United States and how spatial and discursive violence are always correlated.
 

Cover ArtTexas Rangers in the Mexican-American War by William Nelson Fox

Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating E415.2.T49 F69 2023
ISBN: 9781467153867
Publication Date: 2023-05-01
For the Texas Rangers, the Mexican-American War was an opportunity for vengeance. When the United States declared war on Mexico in 1846, the Texas Rangers were eager to settle scores with their familiar foe and quickly became the eyes and ears of the US army. Commanded by established legends like Samuel H. Walker, Benjamin McCulloch, and John "Jack" Coffee Hays, Texas Rangers led the American charge at Monterrey and saved General Taylor's army at Buena Vista. However, their depredations on Mexican citizenry were often excessive, and their behavior, along with other volunteers, sparked Mexican resistance. However crucial they were to US victory, it is also indisputable that they earned a reputation for brutality even in a vicious war. Author William Nelson Fox follows these larger than life figures into stories of heroism and villainy at the heart of the Mexican-American War.
 

Cover ArtThin Skin: Essays by Jenn Shapland

Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating PS3619.H356318 T45 2023
ISBN: 9780593317457
Publication Date: 2023-08-15
Examining capitalism's toxic creep into the land, our bodies, and our thinking, this incisive new work is "a visceral exploration" (Katherine May, author of Wintering) from a National Book Award finalist and a powerful literary mind. "A wrenching, loving and trenchant examination of feminism, nuclear weapons production, healthcare, queerness and American life" --Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel For Jenn Shapland, the barrier between herself and the world is porous; she was even diagnosed with extreme dermatologic sensitivity--thin skin. Recognizing how deeply vulnerable we all are to our surroundings, she becomes aware of the impacts our tiniest choices have on people, places, and species far away. She can't stop seeing the ways we are enmeshed and entangled with everyone else on the planet. Despite our attempts to cordon ourselves off from risk, our boundaries are permeable. Weaving together historical research, interviews, and her everyday life in New Mexico, Shapland probes the lines between self and work, human and animal, need and desire. She traces the legacies of nuclear weapons development on Native land, unable to let go of her search for contamination until it bleeds out into her own family's medical history. She questions the toxic myth of white womanhood and the fear of traveling alone that she's been made to feel since girlhood. And she explores her desire to build a creative life as a queer woman, asking whether such a thing as a meaningful life is possible under capitalism. Ceaselessly curious, uncompromisingly intelligent, and urgently seeking, with Thin Skin Shapland builds thrillingly on her genre-defying debut My Autobiography of Carson McCullers ("Gorgeous, symphonic, tender, and brilliant" --Carmen Machado), firmly establishing herself as one of the sharpest essayists of her generation.
 

Cover ArtTrumpism, Mexican America, and the Struggle for Latinx Citizenship by Phillip B. Gonzales (Editor); Renato Rosaldo (Editor); Mary Louise Pratt (Editor)

Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating E184.M5 T785 2021
ISBN: 9780826362841
Publication Date: 2021-10-15
For Latinx people living in the United States, Trumpism represented a new phase in the long-standing struggle to achieve a sense of belonging and full citizenship. Throughout their history in the United States, people of Mexican descent have been made to face the question of how they do or do not belong to the American social fabric and polity. Structural inequality, dispossession, and marginalized citizenship are a foundational story for Mexican Americans, one that entered a new phase under Trumpism. This volume situates this new phase in relation to what went before, and it asks what new political possibilities emerged from this dramatic chapter in our history. What role did anti-Mexicanism and attacks on Latinx people and their communities play in Trump's political rise and presidential practices? Driven by the overwhelming political urgency of the moment, the contributors to this volume seek to frame Trumpism's origins and political effects. Published in Association with School for Advanced Research Press.
 

Cover ArtYou: Poems by Rosa Alcalá

Call Number: Branson Library, Special Collections - Non-circulating PS3601.L34256 Y68 2024
ISBN: 9781566897013
Publication Date: 2024-04-09
From the author of MyOTHER TONGUE comes a new collection of prose poetry exploring the intergenerational inheritance of gendered violence. Rosa Alcalá choreographs language to understand the body as it "gathers itself over time to become whole," recovering the speaker's intuition while unraveling memory to pinpoint the aches, anxieties, and lessons of a woman's survival. Ruminating on daughterhood, mothering, and the body's cumulative wisdom, YOU traces a jagged line through fears and joys both past and present.