Our Most-Read Blog Posts of 2017

Despite everything that happened in 2017, it was a great year for University of Texas Press authors on our blog. Here are the 10 most-read posts, spanning topics from gang suppression in El Salvador to Chrissie Hynde, from personal essays to timely commentary by scholars.

We look forward to another year of great reading in 2018!

[ Latin American Studies ]

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The Enduring Appeal of Gang Suppression in El Salvador

On January 16, 2017, El Salvador commemorated the 25th anniversary of the peace settlement that ended the country’s twelve-year civil war. We asked Dr. Sonja Wolf, a CONACYT research fellow with the Drug Policy Program at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, to comment on the 25th anniversary of the Chapultepec Peace Accords. Her book Mano Dura:The Politics of Gang Control in El Salvador examines the policies that undermine human rights while ultimately doing little to address the roots of gang membership. Read the post. →

Eleven Images from Picturing the Proletariat

In the wake of Mexico’s revolution, artists played a fundamental role in constructing a national identity centered on working people and were hailed for their contributions to modern art. John Lear's new book, Picturing the Proletariat: Artists and Labor in Revolutionary Mexico, 1908–1940, examines three aspects of this artistic legacy: the parallel paths of organized labor and artists’ collectives, the relations among these groups and the state, and visual narratives of the worker. We asked Professor Lear to pick a handful of images studied in the book to represent the progression and politics of the Mexican proletariat. Read the post. →

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Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Militarization in the Age of Trump

Mexico’s so-called drug war can be characterized, in some way, as a modern war relating to the control of energy production. In the present context, it is possible to identify groups that seem to have benefited the most from a novel criminal scheme (directly or indirectly) introduced by the Zetas organization, the Mexican government’s reaction to it, and the resulting brutality. We asked Dr. Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, author of Los Zetas Inc.: Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Civil War in Mexico, to comment on the effects of President Trump’s border policy on what she identifies as the beneficiaries of organized crime in Mexico, mainly the US border security/military-industrial complex and corporations. Read the post. →

[ Music ]

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Jessica Hopper and Oliver Wang Join American Music Series Editorial Team

Authors and music critics Jessica Hopper and Oliver Wang have joined David Menconi of the Raleigh News & Observer on the editorial team of the American Music series published by the University of Texas Press. “We are at a particularly ripe time within music culture to interrogate what is American music; we're overdue for an expansion of the canon,” says Hopper. Read the post. →

Music from A Perfectly Good Guitar

When photographer and writer Chuck Holley set out to document guitar players talking about their most prized instruments, he thought he was fairly well-versed in professional guitarists. The playlist he has put together for this blog is all about the lesser-known artists he discovered over the eight years he photographed guitarists with their favorite instruments and listened to their stories for A Perfectly Good Guitar. Read the post. →

A Musical Biography of Chrissie Hynde

Curated by Adam Sobsey, the handful of early Pretenders songs that open this chronologically arranged mix are mainly lesser known cuts that dig some of the overlooked but seminal roots out of Chrissie Hynde’s catalog: clues to her worldview and her personal history. The rest are drawn from the largely unexplored riches of her post-stardom phase, which is nearly three decades old now, a vast trove. Read the post. →

[ American Studies ]

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Making America Confederate Again

In 2008, Euan Hague, Edward H. Sebesta, and Heidi Beirich, published a groundbreaking book, Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction, that described a fringe movement of political activists who promoted an ideology of Confederate nationalism. Given the current state of US politics, Neo-Confederacy is an urgent primer for our new reality. Read the post. →

[ Film, Media and Popular Culture ]

Notions of Genre Soundtrack Playlist

Barry Keith Grant's new edited volume with Malisa Kurtz, Notions of Genre: Writings on Popular Film Before Genre Theory, gathers the most important early writing on film genre and genre films published between 1945 and 1969. In the spirit of appreciating genre film, we asked Barry Keith Grant to curate a playlist of iconic music from genre cinema. Enjoy this fun whirl through movie history through its music. Read the post. →

[ Photography ]

"Rexroth's Strawberries" and the Beauty of IOWA

In the early 1970s, Nancy Rexroth began photographing the rural landscapes, children, white frame houses, and domestic interiors of southeastern Ohio with a plastic toy camera called the Diana. Having discovered the Diana camera while in graduate school in Ohio, Rexroth began experimenting with the looseness and spontaneity of the camera and the images it produced. Read the post. →

[ Texas ]

Birding and Writing with Victor Emanuel

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Victor’s memoir One More Warbler shares his journey from inspired youth to world’s top birder including his biggest adventures, rarest finds, and the people who mentored and encouraged his birding passion along the way. We asked writer, editor, and teacher S. Kirk Walsh to reflect on what Victor taught her. Read the post. →

[ Journals ]

Entry Interview with the New Editors of Texas Studies in Literature and Language

The summer of 2016 saw Douglas Bruster and James Cox step in as the new editorial team of Texas Studies in Literature and Language. In this interview, we speak with them about their scholarly backgrounds and the plans they have for TSLL, a journal of literary criticism published quarterly by the University of Texas Press. Read the post. →

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Birding and Writing with Victor Emanuel

This week, Travis Audubon is sponsoring an exclusive book launch for Victor Emanuel’s new book One More Warbler: A Life with Birds, in partnership with the University of Texas Press. Victor, the founder of the largest avian ecotourism company on earth, will be interviewed by New York Times bestselling author Stephen Harrigan. Former First Lady and birder, book-lover Laura W. Bush will make opening remarks. Find more information here.

Victor’s memoir shares his journey from inspired youth to world’s top birder including his biggest adventures, rarest finds, and the people who mentored and encouraged his birding passion along the way. We asked writer, editor, and teacher S. Kirk Walsh to reflect on what Victor taught her.

Ways of Seeing

By S. Kirk Walsh

Prior to working with Victor Emanuel on One More Warbler, I had gone birding once with my family at Point Pelee, a Canadian national park that narrows into a sharp point of silt and sand on the northern boundary of Lake Erie. Given its location, the park offers a natural

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resting spot for warblers during their annual spring migration. It was an overcast day in early May, and we spotted over 30 species, 10 of them were warblers, including the Blackburnian Warbler and the Tennessee Warbler. Afterward, I wrote a first-person essay about my father, our changing relationship, and the birds for The New York Times. Several years later, this piece inspired my introduction by Jim and Hester Magnuson to Victor, and the job of writing and collaborating with him on One More Warbler.

For almost two years, we met on a regular basis at his house in Travis Heights, recording interviews about his adventures in Texas and around the world, and then I’d return with drafts of chapters that Victor and I would review and edit together. As we moved further into the project, I knew that I needed to go birding with Victor to truly understand his passion and love for birds. Since several chapters mentioned the Bolivar Peninsula and the nearby stretches of Texas Coast, where Victor had experienced his first birding adventures, I suggested that we take a trip to his cottage there.

We agreed on a weekend in November of 2015, and my husband, Michael, joined us. We departed Austin on a Saturday morning in two cars (since Michael and I were planning to stay on for an extra night). For our route, Victor decided on Highway 71 East to Columbus, where we detoured onto back roads, so we could pass through Freeport, where he started his famous Christmas Bird Count in 1957. At lunchtime, we stopped in Eagle Lake near an antiques store and ate our sandwiches on the opened gate of Michael’s pickup. As we ate, Victor looked up and admired the passing cloud formations—wispy brush strokes against the blue sky. “Hmm-hum,” Victor uttered, staring up at the clouds. “Hmmm.” It was what I understood to be a Victor moment, a moment where he is caught in a spell of admiration, the way he appreciates the ordinary and the extraordinary with equal measure and wonder.

American Avocets and other species gather near the North Jetty, Bolivar, at sunset. 
Photo by S. Kirk Walsh

After lunch, I joined Victor in his SUV so he could supply commentary as we drove closer to Lake Jackson and Freeport. Victor had brought a pair of walkie-talkies so we could communicate with Michael as we continued to drive south. Red-tailed hawks and vultures cut wide circles in the sky. The rolling terrain gave way to flat stretches of marshland and fields. An occasional egret waded in a roadside ditch. The sturdy necks of little bluestem bent in the November breeze. Victor showed us the Justin Hurst Wildlife Refuge, a 10,311-acre area west of Freeport and Jones Creek, where he took George Plimpton when they first met and George was reporting on the Freeport Christmas Count for Audubon Magazine in 1973. The landscape is abundant with yaupon, live oaks, and locus trees, which attract a wide variety of birds with its leaf litter and insects. A few minutes later, we drove past Sheriff’s Woods, populated with short scrubby oaks and other native species. It was here that Victor was parked on the afternoon of September 26th, 2003, and, tuned into his car’s radio, heard Peter Matthiessen talking about his memories of his dear friend, George Plimpton, because he had just passed away. “It was a strange coincidence, hearing Peter talk about George, and learning about his death in this spot,” remembered Victor.