University Of Arizona Press: 461 books
The Desert Smells Like Rain
A Naturalist in O'odham Country
Language: English
Release Date: October 1, 2016
Longtime residents of the Sonoran Desert, the Tohono O'odham people have spent centuries living off the land—a land that most modern citizens of southern Arizona consider totally inhospitable. Ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan has lived with the Tohono O'odham, long known as the Papagos, observing the delicate...
Dry River
Stories of Life, Death, and Redemption on the Santa Cruz
Language: English
Release Date: March 15, 2011
Poet and writer Alison Deming once noted, “In the desert, one finds the way by tracing the aftermath of water . . . ”
Here, Ken Lamberton finds his way through a lifetime of exploring southern Arizona’s Santa Cruz River. This river—dry, still, and silent one moment, a thundering torrent...
Songs My Mother Sang to Me
An Oral History of Mexican American Women
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2016
Motivated by a love of her Mexican American heritage, Patricia Preciado Martin set out to document the lives and memories of the women of her mother's and grandmother's eras; for while the role of women in Southwest has begun to be chronicled, that of Hispanic women largely remains obscure. In Songs...
Border Oasis
Water and the Political Ecology of the Colorado River Delta, 1940–1975
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2016
The environmental history of the Colorado River delta during the past century is one of the most important—and most neglected—stories of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. Thanks to entrepreneurs such as William E. Smythe, the surrounding desert in Arizona, California, Sonora, and Baja California has...
Trails to Tiburón
The 1894 and 1895 Field Diaries of W J McGee
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2016
When William John McGee set out from Washington, D.C., for the Sonoran Desert in 1894, he was inspired by a passion for adventure as much as a thirst for knowledge. McGee lived in an era when discovery was made through travel rather than study, and reputations were forged by going where no outsiders...
Pachucas and Pachucos in Tucson
Situated Border Lives
Language: English
Release Date: October 19, 2015
When the Zoot Suit Riots ignited in Los Angeles in 1943, they quickly became headline news across the country. At their center was a series of attacks by U.S. Marines and sailors on young Mexican American men who dressed in distinctive suits and called themselves pachucos. The media of the day portrayed...
by Charles Bowden
Language: English
Release Date: October 2, 2018
Language: English
Release Date: October 2, 2018
Published in 1986, Blue Desert was Charles Bowden’s third book-length work and takes place almost entirely in Arizona, revealing Bowden’s growing and intense preoccupation with the state and what it represented as a symbol of America’s “New West.”
Bowden presents a view of the Southwest...
Critical Indigenous Studies
Engagements in First World Locations
Language: English
Release Date: September 20, 2016
With increasing speed, the emerging discipline of critical Indigenous studies is expanding and demarcating its territory from Indigenous studies through the work of a new generation of Indigenous scholars. Critical Indigenous Studies makes an important contribution to this expansion, disrupting the...
Grasshopper Pueblo
A Story of Archaeology and Ancient Life
Language: English
Release Date: November 1, 2015
Located in the mountains of east-central Arizona, Grasshopper Pueblo is a prehistoric ruin that has been excavated and interpreted more thoroughly than most sites in the Southwest: more than 100 rooms have been unearthed here, and artifacts of remarkable quantity and quality have been discovered....
Sonoita Plain
Views from a Southwestern Grassland
Language: English
Release Date: December 1, 2016
Far to the south of Arizona’s sprawling metropolises, a rolling savanna of grass, oak, and mesquite rises above the surrounding deserts. The Sonoita Plain is a basin of a thousand square miles bracketed by mountains, a land once the domain of cowboys that is now more and more the focus of exurban...
After the Wildfire
Ten Years of Recovery from the Willow Fire
Language: English
Release Date: February 28, 2017
Swallowtail butterflies frolic on the wind. Vireos and rock wrens sing their hearts out by the recovering creek. Spiders and other predators chase their next meal. Through it all, John Alcock observes, records, and delights in what he sees. In a once-burnt area, life resurges. Plants whose seeds and...
Last Water on the Devil's Highway
A Cultural and Natural History of Tinajas Altas
Language: English
Release Date: February 20, 2014
The Devil’s Highway—El Camino del Diablo—crosses hundreds of miles and thousands of years of Arizona and Southwest history. This heritage trail follows a torturous route along the U.S. Mexico border through a lonely landscape of cactus, desert flats, drifting sand dunes, ancient lava flows,...
Of Earth and Little Rain
The Papago Indians
Language: English
Release Date: September 1, 2015
“This text reveals [Fontana’s] interaction with his [Tohono O’odham] neighbors and how geography and climate define life and culture in this piece of dry land. Fontana’s words introduce the reader to people and provide an excellent overview of tribal history, but no notice of this book can...
by Scott Thybony
Language: English
Release Date: September 1, 2015
Language: English
Release Date: September 1, 2015
In Navajo country, where the land is thick with legends and forgotten histories, a writer sets out to find a place that no longer exists except on a few old maps: Burntwater. The story opens when two friends get stuck in a remote pocket of the desert as a winter storm moves in. They are taking a wandering...