After laying dormant for four years, the "Voices of the Southwest" series is back.
The UNM Press invited five of its authors to give talks relating to their recent publications, spanning topics in evolution, immigration, medicine, archaeology and the writing process.
89.9 KUNM broadcasts the weekly talks each Saturday afterward.
"Mostly, academic presses are very gray - not much rambunctiousness," Los Angeles author Sam Quinones said. "Book covers look bland. There's not a lot of thought of how to make them exciting while still maintaining the mission of what an academic press should be. That's definitely the opposite of New Mexico. If you look through the catalog, it reminds me of walking through a Mexican village. All these different colors are everywhere, always kind of bursting out at you."
Quinones is the second speaker in the series of five. He will talk about Mexican immigration and his book Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream.
He will speak at the National Hispanic Cultural Center at 1701 Fourth Street S.W. on Wednesday at 7 p.m.
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Quinones wrote true stories of successes and tragedies in immigrants' lives.
"It's like the United States is this huge self-realization class," Quinones said. "That is why it's a disaster for Mexico. These people are worth a lot. Mexico is bleeding to death at the border. They send back 25 billion dollars a year."
The stories are so interesting that he didn't need to lace them up with literary flair.
He said that in Mexico, there are many ghost towns full of new, beautiful houses.
Immigrants living in the States send back money to hire workers to build the houses in hopes of returning one day.
But they never return because their resentment of how they were treated wears away at their roots that tied them to Mexico, and they've tasted a new life, he said.
"If I'm fascinated by the story, other people will be too," he said. "The writing is about pruning relentlessly and making sure no words are excessive, and that, I think, gives people this idea that they're blazing through the book. The first draft, as Hemingway said, is shit. And no one, I don't believe, has ever written a good first draft. Each of these stories represents years of research and writing."
Anthropologist Anne Weaver, who wrote The Voyage of the Beetle, kicked off the series last week with a talk on evolution. She said it's a provocative topic right now, because we're in the middle of a resurgence of anti-evolutionists. She said fundamentalist movements in the 1920s and mid-'60s suppressed evolution in textbooks.
"So it wasn't provocative, because nobody really gave it much thought," she said. "In the '50s when Sputnik went up there was a huge push to put science back in the world. We were falling behind in science, so people started looking around and said, 'What's going on in science?' and they said, 'Wow, we're not even teaching evolution? So it took another ten years at least to just get topics into textbooks."
She said there seems to be a 30-year cycle of strong fundamentalist reaction to teaching evolution that is rearing its head again now.
The three consecutive Wednesdays after Quinones' talk will feature, in order, Dr. David Sklar on emergency medicine in rural Mexico; Harvard historian of religion David Carrasco on a rediscovery of an ancient Mexican manuscript explaining post-conquest native society; and professor David Stuart - the series' founder - on his writing experiences. Each talk begins at 7 p.m. every Wednesday through Oct. 1.
