Since 1980 the John Muir Center at California's University of the Pacific has hosted the John Muir Institute dedicated to promoting the legacy of the famed environmentalist. These essays were papers presented at the John Muir Center's institute in 2001.

This is the story of a remarkable woman whose artistic mission was to relate Mexican cultural history to English-language readers. A world-renowned playwright in the 1930s and best-selling novelist in the 1940s, Josefina Niggli published at a time when Chicana/o literature was not yet recognized as such. Her works revealed Mexico from an insider's point of view, although she found herself struggling with publishers who wanted an American hero pitted against a Mexican villain.

Patterson draws from ancient Mayan mythology, weaving the tale of Hunahpu and Xbalanque, the Hero Twins, and their voyage to Xibabla, the underworld, into his own story in order to provide an analogy of the journey through life and the daily challenges and pitfalls one must overcome. Each of the book's eight chapters are named after the houses of testing in Xibalba and reflect the people, environments, financing, and politics of the different archaeological projects Patterson worked on throughout his career. The resulting story is part Indiana Jones and part analysis of the problems facing modern Mesoamerica between globalization and national patrimony.

Studies of seventeenth-century New Mexico have largely overlooked the soldiers and frontier settlers who formed the backbone of the colony and laid the foundations of European society in a distant outpost of Spain’s North American empire. This book, the final volume in the Coronado Historical Series, recognizes the career of Juan Domínguez de Mendoza, a soldier-colonist who was as instrumental as any governor or friar in shaping Hispano-Indian society in New Mexico. Domínguez de Mendoza served in New Mexico from age thirteen to fifty-eight as a stalwart defender of Spain’s interests during the troubled decades before the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. Because of his successful career, the archives of Mexico and Spain provide extensive information on his activities. The documents translated in this volume reveal more cooperative relations between Spaniards and Pueblo Indians than previously understood.

While much has been written about national history and citizenship, anthropologist Trevor Stack focuses on the history and citizenship of towns and cities. Basing his inquiry on fieldwork in west Mexican towns near Guadalajara, Stack begins by observing that people talked (and wrote) of their towns’ history and not just of Mexico’s.

Key to Stack’s study is the insight that knowing history can give someone public status or authority. It can make someone stand out as a good or eminent citizen. What is it about history that makes this so? What is involved in knowing history and who is good at it? And what do they gain from being eminent citizens, whether of towns or nations?

As well as academic historians, Stack interviewed people from all walks of life—bricklayers, priests, teachers, politicians, peasant farmers, lawyers, and migrants. Resisting the idea that history is intrinsically interesting or valuable—that one simply must know the past in order to understand the present—he explores the very idea of “the past” and asks why it is valued by so many people.

Sklar recalls how his earliest experiences in a remote Mexican clinic helped shape his career as an emergency physician and educator.

Beginning with the social and economic conditions that gave rise to La Sociedad and culminating with its centennial anniversary in 2000, José Rivera examines the SPMDTU as a case study of collective action in the context of a pluralistic American society, rapid social change, and the dynamics of mobilization for cultural survival. Rivera’s study explores the core values that have bonded SPMDTU members across generations and have sustained the organization for more than a century and addresses the question of whether or not La Sociedad will survive in the twenty-first century.

Martín-Rodríguez begins this writing with an examination of the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when the creation of Chicano-owned or controlled publishing enterprises made possible a surge of Chicano/a literature at the national level. He then concentrates on Chicana literature and "engendering" the reader and on linguistic and marketing strategies for a multicultural readership. Finally, Martín-Rodríguez provides a very thorough list of Chicano/a literature which he studied and he recommends for the reader to consider.

Set against the backdrop of the tumultuous late colonial and early republican periods in Quito (1765–1830), this study examines women’s legal, economic, and social status in order to gauge the relationship between the increasingly centralized power of the Bourbon kingship and the local operation of social authority. A gendered reading of judicial documents, legal literatures, and institution discourses reveals that Bourbon attempts to restrict women’s access to legal resources were resisted by a traditional local legal culture based on practices of consultation, negotiation, judicial discretion, and contingency. This customary judicial practice, Black argues, played a fundamental role in limiting gender domination and prevented the full realization of a legal, economic, or social patriarchy in colonial Quito.

 The book presents numerous examples of dynamic designs that are the result of interdisciplinary understanding of place. Taylor includes designer perspectives, forums derived from commentary by outside contributors involved in school planning, and a wealth of photographs of thoughtful and effective solutions to create learning environments from comprehensive design criteria.