Day of the Dead, Photographs by Denis Defibaugh, Text by Ward S. Albro

The people of Oaxaca, Mexico, believe the souls of the dead, the antepasados, return every year for a twenty-four-hour visit. They are welcomed into their former homes with gaily decorated altars and offerings of food and gifts. Then they are escorted back to their resting places in the cemeteries. In recent years, Dia de los Muertos has become widely known not only throughout Mexico but also in the United States, drawing tourists in large numbers. Since 1993, photographer Denis Defibaugh and author Ward Albro have visited the festivals, both in Oaxaca City and in the smaller villages, where customs marking this passage have evolved over generations. They have been welcomed into people's homes and have taken part in the public festivals. In this beautiful book, Defibaugh's photography catches the essence of the people and their celebration, while Albro's text supplies background understanding of the beliefs and practices of the observance. The Day of the Dead book expresses the joy, sorrow, and ritual of the many public celebrations of the festival. Defibaugh's quiet, subtle perceptions distinguish his photographic vision. His approach is to perceive, compose, and capture all the visual elements and fit the analogous body language and facial expressions into his images. Albro's illuminating personal essay introduces the Muertos culture of the people of Oaxaca. DENIS DEFIBAUGH is professor of photography in the Rochester Institute of Technology's School of Photographic Arts and Sciences. His work Family Ties do not Die, The Day of the Dead in Oaxaca, Mexico, has produced three solo exhibitions in Texas and numerous shows in San Francisco, Miami, Rochester, Buffalo, and Montana. His documentary and travel photographs earned a Fulbright Travel/Study Grant to Mexico in 1993. WARD ALBRO is professor emeritus at Texas A&M University-Kingsville and founder of Tierra del Sol: Mexico Programs and Services, which organizes historical-cultural tours of Mexico. He lives in Castroville, Texas, and teaches at the University of Texas-San Antonio and the Texas A&M System Center-San Antonio.

 

Dividing Western Waters: Mark Wilmer and Arizona v. California, by Jack L. August, Jr.

The Scopes Monkey Trial, the Sacco and Vanzetti case, Brown v. the Board of Education, and even subsequent televised high profile murder trials pale in comparison to Arizona v. California, argues author Jack August in Dividing Western Waters, August's look at Arizona's Herculean legal and political battle for an equitable share of the Colorado River. To this day Arizona v. California is still influential. By the time Mark Wilmer settled in the Salt River Valley in the early 1930s, he realized that four basic commodities made possible civilization in the arid West: land, air, sunshine, and water. For Arizona, the seminal water case, Arizona v. California, the longest Supreme Court case in American history (1952-1963), constituted an important step in the construction of the Central Arizona Project (CAP), a plan crucial for the development of Arizona's economic livelihood. The unique qualities of water framed Wilmer's role in the history of the arid Southwest and defined his towering professional career. Wilmer's analysis of the Supreme Court case caused him to change legal tactics and, in so doing, he changed the course of the history of the American West. JACK L. AUGUST, JR., is executive director at the Arizona Historical Foundation at Arizona State University, where he teaches graduate courses in water policy and management. He is a former Fulbright scholar and National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellow. A Pulitzer Prize nominee, Dr. August has written books and articles on twentieth century western political and environmental history, including Vision in the Desert: Carl Hayden and Hydropolitics in the American Southwest (TCU Press, 1999) and Senator Dennis DeConcini: From the Center of the Aisle (University of Arizona Press, 2006).

 

Going to Texas: Five Centuries of Texas Maps, the Center for Texas Studies

This volume illustrates the history of the Lone Star State through color plates of sixty-four historic Texas maps from the Marty and Yana Davis Map Collection, Sul Ross University, Alpine, and includes ten original essays written by noted historians. Going to Texas is a catalog that will accompany the exhibition of the Davis Map Collection to ten museums throughout the Southwest over a period of two years. It will begin in Dallas at the Hall of State with the Dallas Historical Society and conclude at the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth.
The maps range from the earliest sixteenth-century maps of New Spain to early settlement, the republic and statehood, and into the twenty-first century. These objects are not only historical documents but also served to promote settlement or another aspect of Texas, to chart transport lines, and for the military. The earliest maps demonstrate cartography as an art that only centuries later evolved into a science.
The accompanying essays cover the Spanish exploration, the Louisiana Purchase and the Texas borderlands, empresario settlement, the Republic of Texas, the Trans-Pecos, statehood and the Confederacy, the end of the nineteenth century, the Mexican wars, and Texas in the twentieth century. They provide the historical context in which the maps should be viewed.
The maps are presented not only as historical artifacts but also as representations of culture, art, politics, and the great trends of industrialization and westward expansion. They reflect much of the American movement toward Manifest Destiny and the creation of the myths of “The West.” The collection serves not only to illustrate Texas history but also American and European cultures over the centuries. Both the map collector and the amateur will benefit from reading this catalog.
THE CENTER FOR TEXAS STUDIES at TCU is designed to celebrate all that makes Texas distinctive. It is housed in AddRan College of Humanities and Social Sciences, where various disciplines and programs can act in concert to foster and nurture the essence of Texas. History is, of course, central, but Texas literature, anthropology, ethnography, politics, religions, philosophy, and design and textiles all represent elements that are a part of the mosaic of Texas.

Moving Serafina, by Bob Cherry

Late in life, Clayton Elliot faces long-deferred, hard choices. Circumstances force him to bury his recently deceased wife, Adelita, in the little West Texas border town of Solitario instead of next to their three-year old daughter on their hardpan ranch. To pay for Adelita's cancer treatments, Clayton sold this marginal ranchland to water developers. By reuniting Serafina with her mother in Solitario, Clayton hopes to assuage his guilt about her death twenty-five years earlier. However, whether Clayton moves Serafina immediately or ignores the contracted deadline, either act will trigger drilling into the aquifer for water. His lifelong friends are vehemently opposed to drilling. When a young Mexican woman mysteriously enters his life, Clayton must delay his efforts to move Serafina and surreptitiously help this woman who has illegally crossed into Texas. This decision also raises the ire of Clayton's friends. Throughout the novel, Clayton struggles with both the internal and external borders of his life. And the eccentric characters of Solitario find they, too, must confront their own geographical, psychological, and racial boundaries. BOB CHERRY is an award-winning novelist and poet. His fourth novel, Little Rains, set in the Big Bend country of Texas, was a runner-up for the TCU Texas Book Award. It was also a finalist for the Mountain and Plains Booksellers Association Adult Fiction Award and was listed by the Denver Post as one of ten notable books for 2003. Cherry writes from his ranch near Cody, Wyoming. He returns frequently to West Texas.

A Students' Treasury of Texas Poetry, Billy Hill, Editor

Designed to enhance high school students' appreciation of the rich variety of Texas poetry, A Students' Treasury of Texas Poetry contains poems from the earliest beginnings of Texas, including work by Sam Houston and Mirabeau B. Lamar, to contemporary poets like Naomi Shihab Nye, Larry McMurtry, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Jas. Mardis, and Carmen Tafolla. Hill groups the poems in categories, setting out the history of Texas from pre-history in poems like Larry D. Thomas' "Caddoan Indian Mound" or Alan Birkelbach's "Coronado Points," to a chronicle of Texas counties in such poems as "Haiku: Hands shading my eyes," by Michael Moore, or "The Poet Gets Drowsy on the Road," by Frederick Turner. Texas poets examine the variety of family life in poems such as Red Steagall's "The Memories in Grandmother's Trunk," or "Mi Tía Sofía" by Carmen Tafolla, or "Growing Up near Escondido Canyon," by Walt McDonald. Even the weather and Texas' varied creatures are fodder for the poet's speculation, and Hill includes "Good-bye Summer" by Jas. Mardis, and "Summer Begins Outside Dalhart, Texas," by Mary Vanek, as well as "Mr. Bloomer's Birds" by William D. Barney and "A Mockingbird," by Boyce House. The final chapter features attempts by poets to define the mysterious state that is Texas and includes "litany: blood in the soil/texas (an excerpt)" by Sharon Bridforth, "Our Texas Economy" by Chuck Taylor, among others. BILLY BOB HILL is a graduate of Southern Methodist University with an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Texas. Hill has taught at several area colleges and universities and is responsible for several excellent short fiction antholigies and a number of other books by Texas writers. In 2002 he published Texas in Poetry 2 with TCU Press.

The Orphans' Nine Commandments, by William R. Holman

When Roger Bechan was six, his mother packed his suitcase and told him they were going to Oklahoma City to visit an uncle. Instead, she took him to the Oklahoma Society for the Friendless, where he began a long journey through three orphanages and several foster homes. With all the color of the 1930s, this is a story of survival within an impersonal child-care system, a story filled with vivid characters, pathos and surprising humor, and the tenacity of a young boy who longs for a normal home and can't understand why his mother abandoned him or who his father is. No wonder he and his orphan friends omit the tenth commandment--to "honor your father and mother." As a teenager, the boy finds a home with a supportive couple in a small Oklahoma oil town. Roger Bechan becomes William Holman, who obtains degrees from two universities, marries and raises three sons, and becomes the youngest director of the San Francisco Public Library and an award-winning book designer. Late in life, he discovers the identity of his father--and a new family. WILLIAM HOLMAN served as head librarian, Pan American University; director of the Rosenberg library in Galveston; head of the San Antonio Public Library, director of the San Francisco Library, and professor, the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas. He is a mentor for the Orphan Foundation of America and has represented the group on national television. Mr. Holman and his wife, Barbara, publish under the imprint, "Roger Beacham, Publisher" and have produced such books as Harold Billings' Texas Beast Fables and This Bitterly Beautiful Land: A Texas Commonplace Book, considered by many the most beautiful book ever published in Texas. His avocations are golf, book collecting, and racing sailboats. The Holmans live in Austin.

 

El Paso in Pictures, Text by Frank Mangan

Beginning with drawings and woodcuts depicting the days before photography, this book follows the story of life at the Pass of the North, documenting change as El Paso took shape and grew from a dirt-street frontier town into a modern city in the 1970s. Each era is fascinating, from the arrival of the conquistadores, through the coming of the railroad in the 1880s, the turn of the century with the establishment of more businesses and the move toward permanent residences, the Mexican Revolution, the war years, the rapid changes of the fifties and, finally, the sophistication of the seventies. Many of the photographs, especially those of the Mexican Revolution, are extremely rare and had not been public before the 1971 publication of El Paso in Pictures. First published by The Mangan Press/El Paso. FRANK MANGAN is a native El Pasoan, who worked for many years in advertising and public relations for the El Paso Natural Gas Company. A "Sunday painter," who is at home with the graphic arts, he not only wrote the text for this book but did the design. He and his wife, Judy, until recently ran Mangan Books, a company that specialized in books about El Paso. The company has now closed. The Mangans still make their home in El Paso.

Grace and Gumption: Stories of Fort Worth Women, Katie Sherrod, Editor

Women's stories often get lost because so much of women's history resides in private places such as diaries, family scrapbooks, family letters, or papers stored in boxes in family attics. Women often are hard to find, and once found, can be hard to track over time as they change their names when they get married. And sometimes they marry more than once, which increases the challenge. This was what fourteen Fort Worth women took on when they agreed to write a chapter each on the history of women in their city. From pioneer women to the movers and shakers of the mid-twentieth century, Grace and Gumption explores the lives and careers of the prominent and not-so prominent alike, uncovering a fascinating web of connection for readers to see just how bustling Fort Worth was shaped by the distaff side. Early in the process of planning the book, certain parameters were needed: from choosing the themes or categories of women's endeavors to deciding where to draw the line for inclusion. To avoid problems of inclusion and omission, the contributors agreed that they would only write about women who are deceased. Developing the categories to assign was difficult, because you can't pigeonhole women. Women always have been multi-taskers and many were relevant to more than one chapter because their talents and contributions reached in many directions. Over the course of a summer, contributors met at monthly gatherings to discuss their progress. Meetings often concluded with authors bargaining with one another over who “got” which multitalented woman. The goal was not an encyclopedia, but to gather as many women's stories as possible out of the attics and into a public place, to provide snapshots of women's contributions that others may one day enlarge upon. In the process contributors learned a whole lot about the growth of a city and became a small and close-knit community. The result---a labor of love by women for women. KATIE SHERROD is an independent writer, producer and commentator based in Fort Worth, Texas. She has won several awards in newspaper, radio and TV, including the Dallas Press Club Award for her 2001 PBS documentary Freedman's Cemetery Memorial: A Place of Healing, narrated by Alfre Woodard, and the Exceptional Media Merit Award from the National Women's Political Caucus. She was inducted into the Texas Women's Hall of Fame in 1987 for outstanding contributions in the field of communications, named one of Fort Worth's Outstanding Women in 1988 and Texas Woman of the Year in 1989.