Chicana Spiritual Activism: Making Change, Making Soul (U Arizona Press, 2026) explores the profound impact of spiritual activism within the Chicana feminist movement in Texas. It illuminates how a cohort of Texas Chicanas embraced spiritual activism in pursuit of social change during the movement and into the present day.

The book draws on an array of qualitative methodologies—including interviews, autoethnography, testimonio, pláticas, and archival analysis—to develop what the author formulates as “methodologies of the spirit.” Focusing on the lived experiences, histories, and spiritual activism of sixteen Chicanas/Tejanas, Sendejo shows how these trailblazing women confronted the enduring impacts and repercussions of colonial legacies in Texas through their involvement in movement initiatives such as electoral politics through Mujeres Por La Raza, the cultural arts movement, developing Chicana feminist thought, and the establishment of bilingual education and Chicana/o studies programs.

The activists highlighted in the book include well-known figures such as Santa Barraza, Norma E. Cantú, Rosie Castro, Martha P. Cotera, Inés Hernández-Ávila, and others. Through their work, these activists emerged as architects of their own healing and transformation. Simultaneously, they opened avenues for others to embark on similar journeys reshaping religious practices and unearthing and disseminating spiritual, feminist, and ancestral knowledges.

This interview was conducted by Mary Reynolds, publicity manager for The University of Arizona Press. Her book, The Quake That Drained the Desert, investigates the 1887 borderlands earthquake that forever changed surface water and groundwater in Arizona and Sonora, Mexico.

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How does an independent press survive by publishing the books the Big Five overlook? Amherst College professor and Spanglish scholar Ilan Stavans joins Sarah Russo to talk about Restless Books, the press he founded to champion immigrant writers, literature in translation, and the books that live between languages. Ilan shares the origin of Restless Books (including the investor who told him to take a finance course first), the creation of the Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature, and why he considers Spanglish one of the great creative forces in American English. Ilan and Sarah dig into the practical side of publishing in translation: finding the right translator, editing hybrid-language manuscripts, and navigating the politics around a single project. Ilan also offers advice for immigrant and early-career writers, and makes the case that small presses are doing some of the most important work in publishing today.

For more information on Ilan and Restless Books, please visit the website.

Books mentioned in this episode[1] :

“People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much,” by Sofi Stambo

“A Nation Wrestles with God: American Prophets, Philosophers, and Firebrands,” edited by Ilan Stavans

“The People’s Tongue,” edited by Ilan Stavans

“Cecil the Lion Had to Die,” by Olena Stiazhkina, translated by Dominique Hoffmann

“Daniel and Ismail,” by Juan Pablo Iglesias and illustrated by Alex Peris

“Fictional Translations,” by Ilan Stavans

Also mentioned: Don Quixote, Frankenstein, and The Odyssey

Key Moments

2:02 - How a Midlife Crisis Turned Into a Publishing House 📚
Ilan's candid story of the investor who told him to take a finance course before he'd give him a dime.

5:31 - The $10,000 Bet That Became an 11-Year Literary Prize 🏆
How the Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature grew from a scrappy idea into a career-launching institution.

8:16 - Editing a 100-Voice Anthology on Faith in America ✝️
The Lilly Endowment project that brought Obama, Du Bois, Sontag, Ginsberg, Dickenson, Rushdie, and many others into one book.

11:15 - Why Spanglish Isn't a "Broken" Language 🗣️
Ilan on the creative, mestizo identity behind Spanglish, and why he believes there's no single version of it.

19:52 - The Trilingual Children's Book That Took 3 Years to Publish 🌍
Finding an Arabic and a Hebrew translator willing to share a byline was "sheer torture."

24:09 - His Best Advice for Immigrant and First-Time Writers ✍️
Why Ilan refuses to call anyone's English "broken," and what he tells writers drowning in drafts.

[1]not sure if you want to mention the classics he cites at the end: Don Quixote, Frankenstein, and The Odyssey (we sort of have a lot here already)

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Los Angeles in the late nineteenth century was bustling with the rise of industrialization, but the growing labor force that propelled it, mostly consisting of Mexican and Chinese men, was met with exclusion policies and deportation campaigns. Nevertheless, Chinese and Mexican women, children, and men built vibrant residential and business districts—until they were all but eradicated in the 1930s. In her compelling and textured history, Urban Borderlands: Multiracial Histories and Gendered Borders in Los Angeles, Dr. Isabela Seong Leong Quintana unearths the entwined stories of Chinatown and Sonoratown through the everyday lives of their residents.

In this conversation, we talk about the significance of comparative Latinx and Asian American Studies, the importance of spatial analysis in urban history, and the methodological challenges of locating Mexican and Chinese women and children in the archives.

Dr. Quintana is an Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine, with affiliations in Culture & Theory and Chicané/Latiné Studies. Her work explores the interconnected histories of Asian Americans and Chicanés/Latinés, centering women and children within U.S. borderlands and recovering unarchived voices. Quintana also co-directs The Five Chinatowns Project at the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, a community-based research initiative documenting Chinese American Los Angeles through oral histories, archival creation, and youth mentorship. She is the author of Urban Borderlands: Multiracial Histories and Gendered Borders in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2026).

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Border Afterlives: Migrant Deaths, Forensic Investigations, and the Politics of Haunting (University of Arizona Press, 2026) begins with the undocumented individuals who die crossing the U.S.-Mexico border—deaths that are both preventable and politically produced. Moving between the practical and the philosophical, forensic anthropologist and author Gabriella Soto asks what it means to care for the dead and what society owes to those who die in its name. Through the lens of haunting, she explores how the dead continue to shape the living, not as objects of horror but as moral agents whose presence demands justice. Centered primarily in Arizona and South Texas, Border Afterlives offers a border-scale comparative account of forensic practices, critiques the limits of “best practices” in under-resourced systems, and calls for a re-imagining of forensic humanitarianism grounded in reciprocity and dignity, beyond human rights. This is a book that insists on remembering the dead.

In this conversation, we discuss the difficult interplay between federal immigration policy and local practices of death care on the border, the implications of policies that cause increased death tolls, the politics of humanitarian immigration reform, and, finally, how allowing ourselves to be haunted by the slow mass casualties of the border can and should inspire us to act.

Gabriella Soto is a contemporary archaeologist who examines the material world to understand pressing social issues. Integrating ethnographic methods, GIS technology, and archival research, she specializes in migration materialities, focusing on Latinx migration and security at the US-Mexico border. Her work analyzes the material footprints of transit, forensic death investigations, and security and humanitarian infrastructure. An ACLS fellow whose work has also been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Soto is a research affiliate at the Binational Migration Institute and holds faculty affiliations at Arizona State University’s School of Transborder Studies, School of Interdisciplinary Forensics, and the Latinx Oral History Lab. Her research has appeared in American Anthropologist and Political Geography, and her article on migrant material culture won the American Anthropological Association’s Gordon R. Willey Paper Prize. Dr. Soto is the author of Border Afterlives: Migrant Deaths, Forensic Investigations, and the Politics of Haunting (University of Arizona Press, 2026).

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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick sits down with Dr. Nelson Flores to discuss his 2024 book entitled Becoming the System: A Raciolinguistic Genealogy of Bilingual Education in the Post-Civil Rights Era, published by Oxford University Press.

In his book, Dr. Flores examines the ways that institutionalizing bilingual education in the post-Civil Rights Era in the United States has served to maintain rather than challenge racial hierarchies. He and Brynn discuss the lasting legacies of this institutionalization within neoliberal ideologies for Spanish-English bilingual education in the United States from the post WWII era to today.

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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In her latest book, Sanctuary People: Faith Based Organizing in Latina/o Communities (NYU Press, 2024), Dr. Gina Perez explores sanctuary practices in Ohio, locating them in broader local and national efforts to provide refuge and care in the face of the challenges facing Latina/o communities in a moment of increased surveillance, migrant detention, displacement, and economic and social marginalization. Pérez argues for a conceptualization of sanctuary that is capacious, placing support of Puerto Ricans displaced in the wake of Hurricane Maria within the broader practices of sanctuary and expanding our understandings of the movement that addresses the precarious conditions of Latinas/os beyond migration status.
Based on four years of ethnographic research and interviews at the local, state, and national levels, Sanctuary People offers a compelling exploration of the ways in which faith communities are creating new activist strategies and enacting new forms of solidarity, working within the sometimes conflicting ideological space between religion and activism to answer the call of justice and live their faith.

Dr. Gina Perez is a cultural anthropologist and chair of the Department of Comparative American Studies at Oberlin College. She is the author of two award-winning books—The Near Northwest Side Story: Gender, Migration and Puerto Rican Families (2004, University of California Press) and Citizen, Student, Soldier: Latina/o Youth, JROTC and the American Dream (2015, New York University Press). Pérez's research interests include Latinas/os, youth, militarism, gender, migration, urban ethnography, and faith-based organizing. Her new project focuses on sanctuary movements and multiethnic faith-based organizing among Latina/o communities in Ohio.

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Decades before Miami became Havana USA, a wave of leftist, radical, working-class women and men from prerevolutionary Cuba crossed the Florida Straits, made Ybor City the global capital of the Cuban cigar industry, and established the foundation of latinidad in the Sunshine State. Located on the eastern edge of Tampa, Ybor City was a neighborhood of cigar workers and Caribbean revolutionaries who sought refuge against the shifting tides of international political turmoil during the early half of the twentieth century.
In Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), Historian Sarah McNamara tells the story of immigrant and U.S.-born Latinas/os who organized strikes, marched against fascism, and criticized U.S. foreign policy. While many members of the immigrant generation maintained their dedication to progressive ideals for years to come, those who came of age in the wake of World War II distanced themselves from leftist politics amidst the Red Scare and the wrecking ball of urban renewal. This portrait of the political shifts that defined Ybor City highlights the underexplored role of women’s leadership within movements for social and economic justice as it illustrates how people, places, and politics become who and what they are.

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Independent historian Michael Staudenmaier joins Michael Stauch to discuss his new book about “becoming Puerto Rican” in Chicago. Staudenmaier’s book, White, Black, Brown: Becoming Puerto Rican in Chicago (University of North Carolina Press, 2026), describes how generations of Puerto Rican organizers and activists, facing persistent exploitation, discrimination, and marginalization in the postwar United States, drew on competing versions of nationalism to challenge the racial order in one of America’s most segregated cities.

Highlights include:

• A description of the historical process of “becoming Puerto Rican” as a racial project;
• How class differences between activists and ordinary Puerto Ricans shaped distinct experiences of “becoming Puerto Rican”;
• How the gendered experience of migration led one woman to collaborate with the FBI;
• The effect of the 1966 Division Street Riot on Puerto Rican identity;
• The rise of “panethnic Latinidad” and its possible futures.

Michael Staudenmaier is an independent historian and serves on the Board of Directors of Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos Puerto Rican High School in Chicago.

Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.

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