Meet the Incoming ALRS Students of Fall 2021

Rebecca Renteria 

Rebecca’s work lives at the intersection of the physical and social sciences. Her focus is on US-Mexico borderlands archaeology and ethnohistories through the lens of waterways and foodways in order to elucidate the mechanisms of current day inequities in public health, with an emphasis on diabetes in Indigenous and Indigenous-descended communities in this region. Diabetes is considered a public health crisis and disproportionately affects marginalized communities across the world. Previous archaeological work on the topic has focused on past foodways in comparison to recent diets or has used destructive processes that are not viable in the United States. However, this work has not yet addressed the systemic issues related to public health, rooted in colonial processes, that impact our communities today. In contrast to past research, her focus will be on a transitional period during which the impact of colonialism reshaped our traditional relationships with land and food. By deconstructing colonialism processes she hopes to approach solutions to the diabetes epidemic through the application of culturally relevant methods.

Rebecca chose the Arid Lands Resource Sciences GIDP for her PhD studies because of the opportunity to merge many disciplines to address health disparities in marginalized communities. She received her BS and MA degrees in anthropology (emphasis in archaeology), and the opportunity to integrate this academic foundation with the disciplines of American Indian Studies, Mexican American Studies, and Public Health will allow for the practical application of theory and collaboration with descended communities.

Natasha Riccio

Natasha intends to focus her graduate research on the relationships between Indigenous cultivation practices, plant reproductive strategies, and genetic diversity of populations of Agave murpheyi, a domesticate agave that was cultivated by the Hohokam through innovative methods of arid-land farming. She is intrigued by the evolutionary relationship between agave and humans, and seeks to better understand this co-evolution by investigating A. murpheyi’s adaptations to regional environment as well as possible selective pressures from Indigenous agriculturalists. She also plans to explore the ways in which the reproductive strategy of A. murpheyi influences genetic diversity, and subsequently the species’ resiliency to climate stressors and disease.

She sees the ALRS program as a way to provide an unparalleled opportunity to pursue this research from a transdisciplinary approach and with a strong regional focus. Agave itself represents a plant with such a deeply embedded history of human connection, and it cannot be thoroughly studied through the lens of one single discipline. Her studies and research will weave together the fields of conservation, ecology, archaeology, ethnobotany, genetics, and arid land agriculture. In addition, she intends for her research on Agave murpheyi to be applied to current efforts to revitalize the cultivation of native desert-adapted food crops to improve future agriculture in arid lands.