Beloved Land ─ An Oral History of Mexican Americans in Southern Arizona

Patricia Preciado Martin is a native Arizonan and a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Arizona. She is the author of two other collections of oral history, Images and Conversations: Mexican Americans Recall a Southwestern Past (winner of the Virginia McCormick Scully Award for the best history by a Chicano/a or a Native American) and Songs My Mother Sang to Me: An Oral History of Mexican American Women, and three collections of her widely anthologized short stories: Days of Plenty, Days of Want; El Milagro and Other Stories; and Amor Eterno: Eleven Lessons of Love (recipient of the Border Regional Library Association Southwest Book Award for fiction). Martin is active on the speakers’ circuit both regionally and nationally and has received the Arizona Humanities Council Distinguished Public Scholar Award of Excellence. She met Jim, her husband of forty years, while serving in the Peace Corps in Central America. They live in Tucson.

For more than thirty-five years native Arizonan José Galvez has used black-and-white photography to document Mexican American culture. He majored in journalism at the University of Arizona and upon graduation became a staff photographer for the Arizona Daily Star. In 1984, while at the Los Angeles Times, he led a photography staff that along with a team of reporters won a Pulitzer Prize in Community Service for a series on the Latino experience in southern California. Galvez’s photographs have been exhibited in countless museums and galleries, including the Smithsonian. His first book, Vatos, was published in 2000. Today, he continues to document Mexican American communities across the United States, portraying his heritage in a realistic and positive fashion.