Smack in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert an urban landscape emerges. The Rio Grande, or Río Bravo to those in Mexico, trickles through, designating their two countries: to the north El Paso, Texas, and to the south, Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. They have separate names; however, it is impossible to consider one without the other.
Derek Xavier Garcia’s work is living and active. Not only does he interview members of the community for his dissertation and future book, he engages with them, bringing history to life in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.
So far, two SAR Resident Scholar Fellows have won the National Book Award: Tiya Miles in 2021 for her book All that She Carried: the Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake and Ned Blackhawk in 2023 for The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. Recently, they took a moment from their very busy schedules to share a little about their residency experiences at SAR, how they impacted their lives, and also a few words about how they influenced each other.
In 1996, the Resident Scholar Program at the School for Advanced Research (SAR) did something it had not done before and hasn’t since. Three sibling scholars shared the Katrin H. Lamon fellowship: Rina Swentzell, Tessie Naranjo, and Tito Naranjo from Santa Clara Pueblo.
There’s one couple who essentially “book-end” the scholars in that group from 1973 and to the 2000s: Barbara and Dennis Tedlock. They were poet scholars. Both taught poetry in addition to anthropology. Both wrote their own poetry and participated in literary readings. Their mission was to “expand and alter the ways in which anthropologists conduct and communicate their work,” expressed in just that way in the preface to the first issue of the American Anthropologist, which they edited as a husband and wife team from 1994-1998.
Finding and fostering a place for scholars to live, study, and write in community was the dream of Douglas Schwartz. When he visited the School of American Research (SAR) in the fall of 1966 as “program consultant,” Schwartz was so sure he would remain in his tenured anthropology position at the University of Kentucky…
