Everyday Monsoons, or the Structural Ecology of Desert Washes and Other Gaps

Black, Mexican, Indigenous histories of race, empire, and cotton in the Sonoran Desert are told through the author's move to Tucson, AZ (and through its desert washes) in January 2002, the driest month to-date in the Sonoran Desert in 1,500 years. This is the first chapter of a historically minded book-length reflection on environments and empire moving between the Mexican Pacific and the American Southwest.

Jayson Maurice Porter was born in Maryland like his great-grandmother Winona Amanda Spencer Lee (1909-2012), who worked family farm land on the Eastern Shore until the early 2000s. His research specializes in environmental politics, science and technology studies, food systems, and racial ecologies in Mexico and the Americas. He is also an editorial board member of the North American Congress for Latin America (NACLA) and Plant Perspectives: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Outside of academia, he loves to connect with other black environmental educators, write creative non-fiction stories, and design environmental-literacy curricula for broader audiences of all ages. Jayson Porter is a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the History Department at UMD, College Park and a Voss Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.