JSW RADIO

JSW –Journal of the Southwest– Radio brings together the voices of researchers, educators, activists and community members working to better understand the region’s past and envision possible new futures.  It continues to highlight the special consciousness of place that has characterized Journal of the Southwest for the last three decades.

Episode 16 – Ancestral Geographies: The Indian School

This episode is part of a series exploring the ancestral geographies of what we refer to as the Southwest. Through interviews with Dr. Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert and Rosalie and Patty Talahongva, host Patricia Schwartz had the opportunity to re-learn critical aspects of history and hear from inspiring folks exploring decolonial futures through the telling of Indigenous stories.

The attached show notes have information about the sources that made this episode possible.

Episode 15 – JSW Radio Archive: Travels in the Interior of Mexico, by W.H. Hardy

This second installment of JSW Radio Archive contains a brief excerpt from British lieutenant W. H. Hardy’s epic travelog “Travels in the Interior of Mexico, 1825, 1926, 1827 & 1828.” Harvey was both a keen observer and awfully misinformed, producing important descriptions and maps, but making many errors due to his poor grasp of the Spanish language and the cultural superiority believes and racism of the times. The narration takes us to the port of Guaymas in July 1826, after Hardy’s long, tortuous trip across Sonora and the Yaqui territories.

“Travels in the Interior of Mexico” is a fascinating account of northwest Mexico in a pivotal moment in a young nation’s history. It can be found online as well as in a version published by Rio Grande Press in 1977, which includes an introduction by the late borderlands historian David J. Weber.

Episode 14 – JSW Radio Archive: Dancing for Water, by Stanley Crawford

“Dancing for Water” is written by Stanley Crawford and originally appeared in the autumn 1990 issue of JSW, which was partly focused on water rights in northern New Mexico.
With this audio essay we are launching a new experiment that we’re calling the JSW Radio Archive. For each episode of the archive we will read short essays or excerpts of essays that have appeared in JSW. We’ll also be reading occasionally from other materials that, while not originally published in JSW, we nonetheless think are important for understanding the historical geography of the Southwest and borderlands region, including northern Mexico.

Stanley Crawford is a well-known author of fiction and creative nonfiction. One of his earliest works, Mayordomo, won the Western States Book Award for Creative Nonfiction in 1988. His subsequent book, A Garlic Testament, also won critical acclaim. A with Mayordomo, it is based largely on his own experience as a smallholder farmer and acequia irrigation ditch boss in northern New Mexico.

You can access the autumn 1990 special issue through JSTOR or purchase it in our store.

Episode 13 – Unlawful Entry: Toxic Trespass in American Soils

The third installment of our ongoing series about water in the American West looks at a largely obscured but incredibly pervasive threat to both our natural resources and our general well being —one that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought even further into focus.

Toxic trespass is the non-consensual infiltration of our homes, bodies and bloodstreams by harmful substances and chemicals. Its consequences are experienced disproportionately across the socioeconomic and geographic spectrums, but its legacy affects us all, to an increasing degree.

Patricia Schwartz talks with Dr. Monica Ramirez Andreotta of the University of Arizona about her work in communities near the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund clean-up sites, exploring the history, and failures, of the systems we rely on to protect us from exposure.

Episode 12 – Natalia Mendoza-Rockwell: Conversaciones en el desierto, a political ethnography of drug and human smuggling on the US-Mexico Border

Jeff Banister talks with Dr. Natalia Mendoza-Rockwell about her work documenting the effects of drugs and human smuggling in the communities across the US-Mexico borderlands. A Sonoran native from the town of Altar, Dr. Mendoza-Rockwell is a professor of anthropology at Fordham University, and one of the few scholars analyzing the politics and social geography of smuggling from an ethnographic perspective. Natalia is also a gifted writer with a powerful prose, recently recognized by the prestigious José Revueltas literary prize.

Episode 11 – Reimagining Rivers, with Patricia Schwartz

Rivers have long been the lifeblood of human civilizations. But taken for granted, many of them are bleeding out. Restoration is still possible… but is it a priority? With unexpected optimism, our guests make the compelling case that it should be.

Written, produced, and narrated by Patricia Schwartz, a graduate student in the School of Geography, Development and Environment, University of Arizona. This episode features interviews with stream ecologist Mark Briggs and cultural anthropologist Joaquin Murrieta-Saldivar. Between the two of them, they’ve worked on restoring every river in the western borderlands… including the up-and-coming Santa Cruz.

We hope they might inspire you to learn more about restoration at home and on a city-wide scale, as they have inspired host Patricia Schwartz (a cynical grad student who spends much of her time wallowing in water policy woes).

Episode 10 – Better Monsooner than Later, with Patricia Schwartz

Depending on where you’re standing, summer rains in the desert can mean rejuvenation or destruction (or both). Rapid urbanization has put borderlands cities out of touch with the storm waters that sustain them, an oversight for which they pay dearly in flood damages and eroded soils. What predictions can we make about the future of the monsoon in the Sonoran Desert? What are we doing to make use of the rain and prevent it from sweeping us away? How can storm water management be used to promote environmental justice and urban equity?

Written, produced, and narrated by Patricia Schwartz, a graduate student in the School of Geography, Development and Environment, University of Arizona. Featuring interviews with Dr. Gregg Garfin, University Director of the Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center and Associate Professor/Extension Specialist at the School of Natural Resources and the Environment at the University of Arizona; and Dr. Adriana Zuniga-Teran, Assistant Research Scientist and Professor at the School of Landscape Architecture and Planning and the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona.

Our apologies for any blemishes in audio quality –interviews were recorded online during the Covid-19 era (i.e. from Patricia’s basement).

Episode 9 – Luis Coronado-Guel, bridging US-Mexico academic gaps, Part 2

In the second part of the conversation, Dr. Coronado reflects on and contextualizes the current crisis triggered by the COVID pandemic, commenting on the lack of referents in the last generations and the ascent of populism in America, from South to North.

Episode 8 – Luis Coronado-Guel, bridging US-Mexico academic gaps, Part 1

Episode 7 – Laiken Jordahl’s fight for the borderlands, Part 2

Episode 6 – Laiken Jordahl’s fight for the borderlands, Part 1

Episode 5 – Morning coffee with Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith, Part 2

Second part of our morning coffee with Dr. Rubio, reviewing six decades of research, community activism, and the very history of Mexico and the US. Raquel shares her rich anecdotes from her academic and militant experiences, and her invaluable insights on the present of migrations flows across the Southwest.

Episode 4 – Morning coffee with Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith, Part 1

Episode 3 – In Patagonia, AZ, with David Seibert

Episode 2 – A conversation with Emma Perez, Part 2

Episode 1 – A conversation with Emma Perez, Part 1

Professor Emma Perez is a research social scientist in the Southwest Center and professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. Perez’s first novel, “Gulf Dreams,” was published in 1996 and is considered one of the first Chicana lesbian novels in print. Her second novel, “Forgetting the Alamo, or Blood Memory” (2009) won the Christopher Isherwood Writing Grant (2009) as well as the National Association for Chicana/Chicano Studies Regional Book Award for fiction (2011). She continues to research and write about LGBT Chicanx/Mexicanx in the borderlands through her two latest projects, “The Will to Feel: Decolonial Methods, Queer and Otherwise,” which promises to be a brief study that interrogates the coloniality of feelings. The second project is a dystopic novel, “I, Ben Espinoza,” which probes a colonial global order run by the wealthy one percent.
Recorded at the Southwest Center studio, May 19th, 2019
Hosted by Jeff Banister, produced by Carlos Quintero

Welcome to the JSW Radio Hour, by Jeff Banister