John C. Finn

Huêpac revisited: Cultural remapping of a Sonoran townscape

So recounts geographer Leslie Hewes, who visited the Sonoran village in 1931. Small, remote, and largely self-sufficient, Huépac was typical of many towns of La Serrana, Sonora’s eastern uplands and valleys that were the frontier of colonial settlement in this northwestern corner of historic New Spain, now Mexico (Dunbier 1968: 126–31; West 1993: 1). Today, Huépac remains one of a handful of pueblos that dot the fertile Sonora River valley, north and east of the capital city, Hermosillo, and south and east of the historic mining town of Cananea near the border with the United States. While Huépac persists as a tranquil village compared to Sonora’s thriving western desert cities, it is not exactly

Cuban Kitchens: Spaces of Food and Life in Cuba

In this photo essay I present eleven portraits of Cubans, mostly women but some men, in their kitchens. After all, kitchens are intimate spaces; they are the home’s place of sustenance, of life. But kitchens are also the physical spaces where each of us, through the act of preparing and eating food, is enmeshed in a web of much broader social, economic, and political forces. Through the daily routine of buying groceries, preparing and cooking food, and sitting down to eat, we consume and metabolize the end result of all kinds of political, economic, cultural, and environmental processes far beyond our immediate reach. The photographs are preceded by a short essay in which I frame the images in terms of gender and kitchen spaces, food security, and the very specific rural–urban dynamics present in contemporary Cuba, and the intersection of race and food.

Writing, Performing, & Representing Place: Mississippi's Hill Country

One of the things that first drew me into the discipline of geography was this seeming obsession with place. There are so many articles, chapters, and books penned by geographers that I’ve read over the years that convey the complexity, nuance, multiplicity, and contradictions of places. I think of Marsh’s (1987) study of the anthracite coal towns of Pennsylvania, where attachment to the land and landscape seemed to run in inverse proportion to the economic reality of exactly those who seem to have such a magnetic attachment to the place: “The land remains, and people remain in it. Dozens of neat grey towns sit separated by piles of broken black rock— abandoned mine dumps and strip mines. The unstable mounds and brushy fields of this lunar landscape seem useless except to be mined again for the coal still deeper in the ground. . . . Yet the people remaining in these towns . . . have a powerful sense of belonging just where they are” (337). Soon after came Basso’s (1996) impressive body of work on the Western Apache, Price’s (2004) meditation on landscapes of belonging and exclusion in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, and Yetman’s (1996) “intimate geography” of Sonora, Mexico. The list could go on. Every geographer undoubtedly has favorites—those writers and writings that we try to channel and emulate as we practice the craft of understanding, capturing, and conveying a sense of place.

History Written in Stone: Gender and the Naturalizing Power of Monuments in Southeastern Virginia

Statues, monuments, and memorials are part of the way that we celebrate our country’s history. They are physical embodiments of local and national history cemented into the landscape. It is important to remember, however, that landscapes are not neutral; history inscribed in the landscape most often reflects those with the power to inscribe, and thus they naturalize their experience into that landscape. In the particular case of Hampton Roads, Virginia, a strong gender bias lurks in the monumental landscape. Through an analysis of all statues representing people in the Hampton Roads region, we found that the vast majority of statues celebrate powerful male leaders. Conversely, women are almost entirely absent from public art, and where they are present, they are portrayed as dainty, passive, and secondary. Based on our analysis, we argue that these monuments and statues constitute a gendered and gendering representational practice, which through the landscape, naturalize men into Virginia’s history, and minimize, misrepresent, or even erase the significance of women in the state’s past.

Mediated Geographies Across Arizona: Learning Literacy Skills Through Filmmaking

This chapter explores the project Mediated Geographies: Critical Pedagogy and Geographic Education, which combined the geography departments from the three Universities in Arizona (Northern Arizona State University, Arizona State University, and the University of Arizona). In the pedagogical project we encouraged students to both critically evaluate the vast amount of visual information in their daily lives and become literate in technologies related to digital media. Our four goals were as follows: (1) create a series of integrated geography courses across three universities; (2) have students work in groups on semester-long projects to produce digital video documentaries or multi-media photo essays; (3) use learner-centered education principles combined with critical pedagogy to enhance geographic media literacy within the courses; and (4) have students communicate what they learned to fellow students in a formal, conference setting. Elsewhere, we examine how critical pedagogy and learner-centered education strategies were used to engage students in these projects and how students communicated what they learned in a conference setting (Lukinbeal et al. 2007). In this paper we first review the student documentaries that were created and offer web links to these productions, before turning to our assessment of students’ geographic media literacy skills. We conclude by noting the problems, difficulties, and successes of our project and by making suggestions on how to better assess and implement geographic media literacy skills in pedagogic practice.