Books

White Sonoran Wheat: An Excerpt from Carolyn Niethammer’s New Book A Desert Feast

November 13, 2020 | Zocalo Staff

The local-food movement is built on flavor, nutrition, and freshness. But it is also built on story and a sense of place. The word “heritage” feeds our longing for a feeling of rootedness. White Sonoran wheat has a great story, and that has led to its charisma. Throughout the country, though, grains have been slower to join the lineup of reintroduced foods than other heritage seeds because unlike a vegetable like a squash, which can be picked and eaten quickly, wheat involves additional processing to become food.

The introduction of spring wheat (also called winter wheat) by the Spanish missionaries in the 1690s was a most welcome addition to the food cycle of local native people. We can assume that the Spanish brought several kinds of wheat seeds, but it was the spring wheat that adapted to local conditions best and made the most impact. By March, the Tohono O’odham granaries of stored foods, such as mesquite, were empty, and the early populations were getting hungry, awaiting the plants that would be available later in the spring. But the various varieties of wheat we now call White Sonora and Pima Club could be planted in the fall or winter in our mild climate and take advantage of the winter rains. Some of the crop was harvested green in the spring, just when the people needed food the most. They prepared the grain by roasting it over coals. The rest was ripe by May, having by then turned into golden fields.

At first the wheat crop didn’t produce as well as the native corn, but over the next hundred years the farmers learned how to grow it more successfully, and the White Sonora and Pima Club wheat yielded twice as much food as did the fields planted with corn.

The easy and quick adoption of spring wheat can be attributed to the fact that it filled an important niche in the food cycle. And, as a new crop, it came without cultural baggage. Corn was traditionally planted and curated through its lifecycle with ceremony and song; wheat, on the other hand, with no such requirements, was easier to grow. We must not overlook the fact, though, that in some mission communities, the local people had no choice but were forced to grow wheat for the padres’ sacramental wafers.

By the mid-eighteenth century, spring wheat had become the major staple crop of the Tucson basin and far beyond. Although it does better with irrigation, in a normal, non-drought year, it could also produce an excellent crop in marginal soils of low fertility and with no water other than winter rainfall. With the abundance of wheat, women began making tortillas from flour instead of corn.

The 1920s and 1930s were the beginning of the Green Revolution, which advocated increasing grain yields through the application of copious amounts of water and high nitrogen fertilizer. White Sonora wheat did not thrive under those conditions. Mill technology also changed, making it more difficult to grind the soft, powdery wheat berries, which tended to absorb water.

The market also changed. Soft wheat varieties like White Sonora are used for crackers, cookies, biscuits, and pie crusts. Bakeries were producing more bread, and what they wanted was the hard-red wheat. As a result, the soft heritage wheats fell out of favor. Then came the closing of many flour mills in Sonora due to a multitude of economic factors. It was a downward spiral, because without a means to get their grain ground, more farmers quit growing it.

In 2012, Native Seeds/SEARCH, a Tucson nonprofit seed bank specializing in arid-land heritage seeds, was awarded a two-year grant from the USDA’s Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program to reintroduce into sustained production two heritage grains with historical presence and good potential for adaptation in the arid Southwest: White Sonora wheat and Chapalote flint corn.

Today the heritage wheats, both White Sonoran and Pima Club, are making a strong comeback due to their sweet flavor, disease resistance, and drought tolerance. Their low gluten content makes them a good choice for people with gluten sensitivity. Specialty bakers advertise breads made with local heritage wheats, and local brewers use them as an ingredient in beer. It’s a welcome rediscovery of a food with a complex and once almost forgotten history.

Carolyn Niethammer’s A Desert Feast (University of Arizona Press, 2020) is available online and at local booksellers.

An Excerpt from Tucsonan Lydia Millet’s New Novel

June 1, 2020 | Zocalo Staff

A Children’s Bible

Lydia Millet has lived in Tucson since 1999, a year before her second novel, George Bush, Dark Prince of Love, appeared. In the years since, while working as a writer and editor for the Center for Biological Diversity, she has published 16 more books of fiction for young and adult readers. Of her latest, A Children’s Bible (Norton, $25.95), Washington Post books editor Ron Charles writes, “I swear on a stack of copies that it’s a blistering little classic: ‘Lord of the Flies’ for a generation of young people left to fend for themselves on their parents’ rapidly warming planet.” Alternately dark and comic, it’s told from the point of view of a young woman who grows to maturity in a time that, like our own, is full of threats and terrors—but also great beauty. Copies of the book are available at Antigone Books (411 N. Fourth Ave.); call 792-3715 to reserve your copy for curbside pickup. Evoking a world of missing things that is all too recognizable, here’s a glimpse inside the covers. —Editor

By late winter all the vegetables we ate were coming from the hydroponic nursery and the indoor garden in the basement (what used to be the squash court). Fresh produce could no longer be ordered online—no refrigerated trucks were running, at least not for the average rich person in our neck of the woods—so we had to eat what we grew.

We didn’t have fruit, of course. We’d planted apple trees, but it’d be years before they were fruit-bearing: that planting was a Hail Mary. No citrus at all, and we missed our orange juice and lemonade. The parents missed their slices of lime.

And we had dry and canned goods, a trove far more extensive than the one in the silo. We had made sure of that.

When the day’s work was done we got into the habit of preparing dinner for everyone, with the help of some mothers whose highest-rated skills were cooking. We’d all sit around in the vast sunken living room of fake Italy, with its wall of glass that opened onto the patio and the pool. We held our plates on our laps, eating and talking about the things we missed. The peasant mother was allowed to recite a blessing. Nondenominational.

She’d turned out to be no one’s mother at all. All she had was the cat. But I still thought of her as the peasant one.

Then we’d go through our missings. That was what my little brother called them. We figured it was healthy, for the parents especially, not to try to deny the fact of what had been lost but to acknowledge it.

Someone would mention a colleague or an ex, a grandparent or a bicycle or a neighborhood or a store. A beach or a town or a movie. Someone would say “ice cream” and someone else would say “ice-cream sandwiches, Neapolitan,” and we’d riff on it, go down a list of favorite ice-cream novelties that couldn’t be had anymore for love or money.

“Bars,” a parent would say, and they’d rhyme off the bars they’d been to, the dive bars, the Irish bars, the cantinas. The hotel bars, the bars with jukeboxes, the bars with pool tables or views of parks and rivers. The bars that revolved. The bars at the top of glittering skyscrapers far away. In the once-great cities of the world.Excerpted from A Children’s Bible: A Novel by Lydia Millet. Copyright © 2020 by Lydia Millet. Published with permission of W. W. Norton. All rights reserved.

Zócalo Magazine – January 2020

January 3, 2020 | Zocalo Staff

Famed Filmmaker John Waters Brings His Christmas Cheer to Tucson

December 3, 2019 | Gregory McNamee

(Photo: John Waters, by Greg Gorman)

“Merry Christmas? How about an angry Christmas?” So says John Waters, filmmaker, raconteur, writer, traveler, and bibliophile, who’s on his way to Tucson to deliver what he describes as “70 minutes of me talking about politics, culture, and everything that has to do with Christmas. How do you go back home when it’s a civil war out there? Some families are very tense, knocking over the Christmas tree—just like what happened in Female Trouble, only about Trump and not cha-cha.”

Waters is no stranger to Tucson, though it’s been a few years since he was last here. He’ll be presenting his show A John Waters Christmas at the Rialto Theatre on December 9 at 8:00 pm, fast on the heels of his new book Mr. Know-It-All (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Always on the go, always in an airplane bound somewhere far away from his hometown of Baltimore, he writes there, “Sometimes I feel like a low-rent Oscar Wilde touring the coal-mining towns of America as he did in the 1880s.” One of those coal-mining towns is ours, just one of 16 to which Waters will bring his Christmas cheer over a period of three weeks. Tucson figures early in the tour because, Waters notes after years of hard experience on the road, you want to do your shows in cities where the weather is likely to be rotten last—and that means the final stop is Chicago. But, no matter how clement the weather here, Waters isn’t likely to notice. “I go from the airport to the hotel to the theater to the hotel to the airport,” he says. “I’m almost never found in real life.”

The book is vintage Waters, a blend of his hallmark sardonic humor with reflections on his work as a filmmaker and guerrilla fighter in the culture wars. On one page he’s taking on Pope Francis, writing that when he becomes the first man to get pregnant, then he’ll be worth listening to on what women should do with their bodies: “Not until he’s given birth to a female transgender Christ child of a different color will we indulge him with a little queer mercy of our own.” On another he’s dissing Madonna for stealing Blondie’s shtick, though not without good cause: Dare rest for a minute on your laurels in show biz, and someone will come along to make it theirs. And on the matter of religion, ever a Christmas-worthy topic, he throws his lot in with the nonbelievers, though in no organized way: Put them in a room, and atheists will drink too much, he says. “Plus atheists dress badly, too. It’s unfortunate, but they are a dreary lot.”

The best parts of the book are his recollections of making his films, of which he names the little-seen Cecil B. Demented as his favorite. “I guess all directors have a soft spot for one of their films that did the worst at the box office,” he notes. Even Serial Mom had its difficulties, he allows, while films like Cry-Baby and Hairspray have entered the mainstream, if improbably, while the films that earned him the sobriquet “The King of Puke” have been enshrined as cult classics, plate-licking, scratch-and-sniff horrors, and all. On the mainstream front, he’s even become a spokesperson for Nike, which, he says, is “ludicrous and ironic.”

But, notes Waters, there are only so many theaters out there and only so many bookings, so in order to keep an act alive, you have to keep putting out new material. “This is a whole new show,” he says, talking with Zócalo a few weeks before the curtain goes up. “I’ve written about three-quarters of it, and I haven’t learned a bit of it yet. But it’s all new stuff—I try not to put anything in the show from the book, since if you’ve bought the book you already know it. I try hard to give you your money’s worth.” Angry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Zócalo Magazine – December 2019

December 3, 2019 | Zocalo Staff

Zocalo Magazine – May 2019

May 6, 2019 | Zocalo Staff

Zócalo Magazine – June 2018

June 2, 2018 | Zocalo Staff

¡Viva Casa Libre!

January 5, 2017 | Jamie Manser

Selah Saterstrom reading at a recent Fair Weather Reading Series event.
Photo courtesy Kristen Nelson

“This is a place that has always catered to people’s passions,” explains Kristen Nelson, cofounder and current, but soon-to-be previous, executive director of literary arts nonprofit Casa Libre en la Solana.

“It’s a place where people with a passion, idea or concept could say, ‘Hey, I want to do this,’ and Casa Libre would say, ‘Yes, how can we help you?’”

Nelson makes it clear that the writing center she’s helmed for over 13 years is not closing its doors; it is going forward full steam ahead and actively searching for a new leader to carry the organization’s mission, spirit and “have the agency to create what they want with this place and incorporate what they are passionate about, what they care about.”

It’s a chilly Friday night in December, but Nelson and I stay warm under a propane heater. We’re sitting, bundled up, in the breezeway of her 1898 commercial adobe property on Fourth Avenue that shares the same name as the literary organization. Wine and snacks are being enjoyed in relaxed camaraderie because – full disclosure – Nelson and I have been professional colleagues and friends for many years. She reflects on Casa Libre’s history (inextricable from her own), what informed its creation, evolution and what the nonprofit is looking for in its new executive director when Nelson steps down on June 30, 2017.

Incorporated in July 2003, Casa Libre has operated as a connection point for the Tucson writing community for close to 14 years, offering an event space for readings, salons, book releases, workshops, fundraisers – and certainly some hell raisers – to serve groups traditionally not supported by mainstream writing outlets.

“We have tailored our vision and our mission specifically to writers of color, female writers, LGBTQIA writers, and emerging

An example of a kite made as part of “Made for Flight,” a youth project started by T.C. Tolbert at Casa Libre to commemorate the lives of murdered transgender people with kite building and poetry writing.
Photo courtesy Kristen Nelson

writers and other underserved groups,” the 38-year-old elucidates. “In the last two years, the board of directors and I recognized how important it was to have that as a stated mission and say, ‘This is why we’re here, this is your place.’ And everyone is welcome to come and be a part of that and enjoy those voices, but we want to serve these voices.”

As a queer female, Nelson is one of those voices. She shares her experiences as a youth in a multiracial neighborhood in Mount Vernon, New York and how that taught her to embrace and celebrate different perspectives. Her racially diverse community, where Nelson was in the white minority, was comprised of socially conscious families engaged in activism and connected to the larger world.

“When I was growing up, my mom got involved in this program called CISV, Children’s International Summer Villages, and we had international students live in our home for months at a time. I learned about different cultures all over the world – Costa Rica, Guatemala, Portugal, France, Spain, Taiwan, Egypt, Greece. I grew up with this sense that the United States is not centric; we are part of a world community.

“And then I just started paying attention. I recognized that I was queer somewhere around 16-years-old. I grew up in a family that was incredibly loving and supportive of who I am, they always have been – regardless of sexual identity, regardless of career path – and really believed in the concept that you can do anything you want to do.”

As Nelson navigated college and met other queer individuals and people of different races, she recognized the privilege she had even as she was personally experiencing discrimination.

“I saw my own challenges in terms of publishing, in terms of sharing my work, getting my voice heard. From my own personal experience and paying attention to other voices that were trans voices, paying attention to people of color’s voices, international voices and how much harder so many underserved groups in the world have it. I recognized that I would never be imprisoned for writing a poem and what a privilege that was. Growing up in an activist, socially conscious, super, super liberal family helped. And that taught me to pay attention, and from there, that grew.”

While at the University of Tampa – as a junior with only three semesters left on her scholarship – Nelson knew she had to change her major from marine biology to English. “I feel like college taught me to pursue my passions, it was really then that I started to identify as a writer,” Nelson shares. She jumped right into the field with a summer internship at The Village Voice in 1999, worked as a journalist post-graduation at The Rivertowns Enterprise and then 9/11 happened.

Nelson describes New York City as being in chaos and how her sources were calling to describe the violence happening against Muslims and people who were presumed to be Muslim, articles she knew were important to write. But her publisher refused to print those stories, saying the charged topics were too political.

“I thought, ‘This isn’t why I am a journalist. I’m a journalist to tell the truth, I’m a journalist to report.’ I took that really seriously. When I left New York, I was jaded after that experience and decided I wanted to work in a different field. I wound up, because of my science background, getting a job (eight months after arriving in Tucson) at what is now UA’s Institute of the Environment.”

It was the idea of starting Casa Libre with her then-partner that brought the two of them to Tucson in April 2003. The couple had envisioned an organization that would serve as both a community center and a space to host writers’ residencies – which is exactly what they did.

She explains that they were “looking for a fresh start in a place that had a vibrant queer community, a vibrant arts community, and a sense of opportunity about it. The literary community here was already so rad. Kore Press had been around for 10 years already; the Poetry Center was thriving and raising money to build their new building at the time. Spork Press, Chax Press, POG, Tucson Poetry Festival, all of these organizations really embraced Casa Libre. When I started to meet the folks running those organizations, they were excited to collaborate and support something new. In particular at the time, the Poetry Center and Kore Press – Lisa Bowden was such a huge supporter of Casa Libre from the beginning – so it felt like there were these big sisters and brothers and siblings that were out there going, ‘Come on, you can do this here.’ I felt really engaged from the beginning. It turned from a concept, a dream and a website within a year to an organization.”

Weekend writing residency led by Rebecca Brown, left; also pictured are Frankie Rollins (center), T.C. Tolbert (background) and Lisa O’Neill (far right).
Photo courtesy Kristen Nelson

Casa Libre’s writer residency program worked for several years, during a period when Nelson was able to secure scholarships through private donations for the winning grantees. When the Great Recession hit in late 2008, the private funding streams dried up and Nelson turned the short-term writers’ residencies into long-term artist live/work spaces over a period of two years.

Throughout Casa Libre’s existence, it has continually strived to adapt to the changing needs of Tucson’s community by hosting meetings to discuss the organization’s role in serving the writing populace. “If you want to know how to better serve your community,” says Nelson. “Ask your community. There’s no mystery there.”

Lisa Bowden, Kore Press’ publisher/cofounder and a longtime collaborator with Nelson, describes Casa Libre as being “a vital center in the community for the literary arts, for discussion and exchange of ideas. An incredible, glowing, magnificent force.” Bowden also shares that partnerships between Kore Press and Casa Libre have included various community projects, activism workshops for youth, along with holding other writing workshops in Casa’s library.

There’s been a bevy of programs Casa Libre has hosted over the years. Nelson easily rattles off a short list – The Writers Studio, The Edge: Emerging Writers, Stjukshon: An Indigenous Reading Series, Kore Press’ First Book winners.

Left to right: Logan Phillips, Kristen Nelson and Roger Bonair-Agard after Logan and Roger’s reading at Casa Libre’s Fair Weather Reading Series.
Photo courtesy Kristen Nelson

“This is also where, after Maggie Golston’s downtown book shop Biblio closed down, Maggie contacted us and said, ‘Hey, I need a place for WIP (Writers In Progress, a UA MFA curated reading series) to be,’ and we housed WIP for eight to nine years.

“There was a need for Casa Libre because we were able to be a central kind of organizing unit for a bunch of different projects. I always pictured us as an octopus, where we had this central head but there were all these tentacles and each of those tentacles were organized by a person or community group. Those are the niches we filled.”

There comes a time for any writer who has worked hard on community projects for years to get to the point where they need to get back to focusing on writing. That time has come for Kristen Nelson. During her almost 14-year tenure at the helm of Casa Libre, she has been a renovator, maintenance person and landlord for her property. She went and got an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College, worked as an adjunct professor at Pima Community College for four years and currently is the program coordinator at UA’s Institute for LGBT Studies.

“That’s my trajectory of professional history, but that whole time, running Casa Libre. And for nine of the 14 years that I’ve run this place, it was unpaid, and that’s not something I want to pass on to the new executive director. Which is why I am not taking a salary this year, we’re fundraising, and we’re getting money in the bank so no one will be in that position again.”

As we circle back to chat about Casa Libre’s upcoming events – the Fair Weather Reading Series, happening mostly monthly January through May – Nelson lights up and says, “T.C. Tolbert, we haven’t talked at all about T.C.!” She shares that Tolbert was the organization’s assistant director for seven years, who started and ran the Trickhouse events with Noah Saterstrom.

“I started the Fair Weather Reading Series about two years ago, so that was the time T.C. decided to step down as the assistant director to pursue other professional opportunities, with so much love. That was when I started envisioning leaving Casa Libre myself because my best friend and collaborator claimed that opportunity for himself and I thought, ‘Oh wait, wait, and now you’re writing more?’ But I knew that I couldn’t hand over this octopus unpaid to somebody.”

Nelson and her board are in full fundraising mode, she says they are about 40% to their goal and is confident they will reach it by July 1, 2017.

Casa Libre’s outside courtyard.
Photo courtesy Kristen Nelson

Board president Sara Wolfe Vaughan says she is “excited to see what the future holds both for Casa Libre and for Kristen. I’m truly elated that Kristen will have more time to devote to her own art. It’s something she so deserves and we need her work out in the world, maybe now more than ever. Tucson has no shortage of talented artists and I can’t wait to meet our candidates.”

Reflecting on what they are looking for in a new leader, Nelson shares that they’d “really like somebody who has some experience running events, particularly in the nonprofit world and also someone who has development experience. Someone who has the skills to continue it forward in a new way.”

To donate, visit CasaLibre.org/donate.html. The Fair Weather Reading Series is Jan. 17, 7 p.m. A $5 donation gains entrance at 228 N. 4th Ave. to hear from Garnette Cadogan, Jordan Flaherty and Yanara Friedland. Learn more at CasaLibre.org/events.html. Check out Nelson’s writings and sundries at KristenENelson.com.

December 2015

December 3, 2015 | Zocalo Staff

Holiday Gift Guide and a look back at 2015. Read the digital edition here.

Breaking the Silence

August 25, 2015 | Jamie Manser

Cristina Devereaux Ramírez Photo courtesy UA Press

Cristina Devereaux Ramírez’s Feminist Recovery Project

Cristina Devereaux Ramírez speaks with verve and passion when she talks about the Mexican women journalists she covers in her recently-released UA Press book. Her eyes flash with light and fire. This passion is good, and required. It’s important and time-consuming research that Ramírez is conducting, saving and sharing.

“All of these women were doing something absolutely unheard of at that time (late 19th, early 20th century); for women to write, not just write stories or poetry, but to be writing their opinions and putting them out there!”

She enthusiastically continues: “Women were trying to take back the discursive power, to frame themselves and who they are. Not just at that present moment, but historically as well.”

The book is “Occupying Our Space: The Mestiza Rhetorics of Mexican Women Journalists and Activists, 1875-1942.” Its launch at UA’s Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry Show & Tell event on Wednesday, Sept. 2 will feature Ramírez sharing a multimedia presentation on two of the women in her book and sharing her incredible journey of research.

In “Occupying Our Space,” Ramírez asks the reader to “reconsider the traditional voices, languages, and geographical settings of the rhetorical tradition. It challenges and crosses linguistic, cultural, gendered, and political borders. This book project explores Mexican women’s voices that have been lost, forgotten, or buried in archives and sidestepped for too long in the pages of history.”

While the writing style is rooted in academia – it evolved from Ramírez’s Ph.D. dissertation – it is inspiring in its recovery of Mestiza feminist, rhetorical history centered in the women’s intense struggle to gain full Mexican citizenship rights and make their voices heard. Women were not granted national suffrage in Mexico until 1947; it wasn’t until 1953 that women were given the legal right to run for political office.

Ramírez provides historical background that allows readers to comprehend the societal context and conditions in which these women were writing. Without it, we’d miss the importance of their work. We would not fully understand how dire the circumstances were for women and indigenous groups and how dangerous it was for them to speak out. Through this background, we can fully appreciate the women’s vanguard role in trying to establish gender and cultural equality in Mexico. Ramírez’s research gives a solid case for including Mestiza voices in the rhetorical canon.

The women Ramírez includes are Laureana Wright de Kleinhaus, Las Mujeres de Zitácuaro, Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza, and Hermila Galindo. The chapters are comprised of condensed biographical histories and are capped by examples of their writings, presented in the original Spanish with an ensuing English translation.

As Ramírez scribes, “the histories of these women are divergent, yet parallel. They form a pathway in the history of women’s writing from the early discourse of Wright de Kleinhaus in 1887 to that of Las Mujeres de Zitácuaro in 1900. On this trajectory, the writings of Las Mujeres de Zitácuaro served as a bridge to the more radical voices of Gutiérrez de Mendoza and Galindo, who were writing before and during the Mexican Revolution. Persistent and undaunted, each woman claimed the right to a discursive puesto (space/place) in the Mexican public sphere, which had yet to recognize them.”

In order to further situate the Mestiza rhetors in historical and cultural context Ramírez examines Malintzin in chapter one. She was the Nahua “mother at the center of this racial and national identity.” Malintzin was sold into slavery by her mother after her father died; she was subsequently given to the Spaniards by the Yokot’an after Cortes’ troops defeated the Yokot’an in what is now the Mexican state of Tabasco.

Ramírez writes that “for three years (approximately 1519 to 1521), before she took the role of mother of a new Mestizo race, Malintzin stood and spoke at the center of negotiations and conversations between two empires caught in a contact zone.”

“She was a double threat,” Ramírez states with a confident shrug and smile, “because she was the intellectual, linguistic bridge between these empires, between these two men, Moctezuma and Hernán Cortés. They had to go through a woman. How scary and possibly demeaning is that to them? She was called ‘the traitor’ to put her back in her patriarchal place. And so, that’s why I use her as the theoretical base because these women are reclaiming her historical space. Of speaking, and speaking out, in society.”

“Image of Laureana Wright de Kleinhaus as it appeared in the 1910 publication of her book ‘Mujeres Notables Mexicanas’.” Photo caption from “Occupying Our Space,” page 61.
Image courtesy Cristina Devereaux Ramírez

In chapter two, we learn about Laureana Wright de Kleinhaus, a woman of the elite class and a prolific writer in the late 19^th century who started the journal Las Hijas [Violetas] del Anáhuac. Also and significantly, Wright de Kleinhaus captured the biographies of over 100 “Mexican women for her book ‘Mujeres Notables Mexicanas’.”

“As an intellectual who read and listened to the history of her homeland,” Ramírez writes, “she recognized that the greatest injustice leveled against indigenous women was their systematic erasure from history.”

“Over 100 years ago, Laureana was doing this history,” Ramírez says with spirited energy. “You can hear the same resonance of what she was saying; feminist historians are saying it now! ‘Where are these histories?’ She was very pioneering at that time. She was a scholar, a historian, a philosopher and a poet. She was amazing. I’m really surprised more people don’t know about Laureana.”

The feminist protests of Las Mujeres de Zitácuaro (MZ) are covered in chapter three where Ramírez writes that the “progressive Presbyterian movement” involved “activists at the forefront of Mexican civic philosophies, which would later be adopted as secular educational values centered on individual, modernist and open public education for men and women.” Further, the MZ’s written protests claimed “their agency as political beings through the nation’s sacred calling for women: motherhood. The women did not eschew their maternal role but, rather, embraced it.”

Chapter four features a riveting overview of Juana Belén Gutiérrez de Mendoza. She “appeared on the Mexican journalistic scene to claim her own rhetorical puesto of protest with her dissident newspaper Vesper: Justicia y Libertad,” writes Ramírez.

“Gutiérrez de Mendoza’s mocking, grassroots, and angry tone soared off the page, affecting and arousing the emotions of those who read her newspaper. Her writings gained such a level of attention that they earned her several incarcerations, forced her into exile in the United States, and prompted the seizure of her printing press several times throughout her life. Her writing also garnered the respect of other revolutionary journalists, activists, and generals throughout Mexico. Her writing career spanned forty-five years (1897-1942) and was punctuated by great social upheavals and movements.”

This woman’s life deserves to be covered by a film or a play, says Ramírez. “She’s the bad ass, she’s the revolutionary. You could absolutely do a film on a woman who was thrown in jail, accused of being a lesbian, went into exile, took on presidents, and was a prolific writer. There’s a story!”

“Masthead of Hermila Galindo’s women’s magazine ‘La Mujer Moderna,’ dedicated to women and women’s issues.” Photo caption from “Occupying Our Space,” page 166. Image courtesy Cristina Devereaux Ramírez

Hermila Galindo, who Ramírez covers in chapter five, is notable for her role in politics as the presidential spokeswoman for Venustiano Carranza between 1914 and 1920. Galindo was afforded the opportunity to bring “the concept of feminism to a much larger audience in Mexico and Latin America.”

“She was given the podium, literally, by Carranza,” Ramírez explains. “He sponsored her, he sponsored La Mujer Moderna, she was able to publish that and he sent her all over Mexico speaking; she went to Cuba. She’s amazing.

“Carranza had Hermila Galindo on his roll, and we see – right after his assassination – (that) she becomes quiet. That’s how it goes in Mexico. If you’re on the side of president that gets assassinated, your gig is up. So she stopped writing, she disappeared.”

Ramírez is intimately knowledgeable about these women; it has been ten years of researching, traveling and writing to get to the publishing of “Occupying Our Space.” This book is a powerful liberation of buried Mestiza feminist, rhetorical history which could have easily been further entombed by the years. Reading these women’s words and chewing on the revolutionary language is extremely satisfying.

If you are riveted by protest voices speaking out for social justice to break the bonds of oppression, this book is for you.

Cristina Devereaux Ramírez celebrates the release of “Occupying Our Space” with a multimedia presentation for the UA’s Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry’s free Show & Tell event on Wednesday, Sept. 2. It happens Downtown at Playground Bar & Lounge, 278 E. Congress St. and starts at 6 p.m. Event details are at Confluencenter.arizona.edu. Information about the book is available at UAPress.arizona.edu. Ramírez’s website is CristinaDRamirez.com.