In This Issue

For all of us involved in the production, dissemination, teaching, and appraisal of culture broadly writ, 2021 was not the return to normal that we had desired. The world still struggles with major health issues among other problems that challenge us daily. Volume 25 of this journal is a testament to the dedication to the advancement of knowledge under difficult circumstances.

The main section of the journal contains five essays. They deploy the wide variety of critical approaches to cultural phenomena that characterize our discipline offering analyses of new topics and reinterpretations of some that have received more scrutiny. Treatments of how real spaces and places mediate cultural creation is now a critical horizon that many in our field embrace. Most of these studies have concentrated, with good reason, on urban spaces. The special section for this issue, organized and edited by Jorge González del Pozo works against that trend. It provides a fascinating series of essays that look at how the treatment of rural spaces has evolved in Spanish cinema. "The interview" that Daniela Flesler, Melissa Gartner and Noel Tarantino conducted with the Spanish novelist José Manuel Fajardo, illuminates the author's works and the creative process that resides behind them. Moreover, it underscores the symbiosis between teaching and research that resides at the core of what we do as members of the academy and which has always been of fundamental interest to the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies.

Eva Karene Romero has curated the artwork for this issue and written the short introduction to the artist's work. Nuria Morgado continues to assemble our book review section. Thanks to both for their continued commitment to this publication. They along with the members of the editorial board and those who work in other editorial capacities have insured that the journal has been able to continue to function though these difficult times. My sincerest thanks to Assistant Editor Romy Cerón Canché and Managing Editor Agustín Cuadrado for their efforts to assure that we have been able to publish these last two issues.

All of us who work on this publication remained humbled that it has been able to flourish for so many years because of your involvement as readers or contributors. We hope to remain what we have aspired to be from the journal's inception, a destination for restive spirits, young and not so young, who need a home for scholarship that tears at and redefines disciplinary boundaries.