Anthropology professor receives writer award

By Margaret McKinney
Highlands University

New Mexico Highlands University cultural anthropology professor Mario Gonzales was honored with the Hispanic Writer Award to attend the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference that started on Sunday and finishes on July, 22.
Named as one of the top ten writers’ conferences in the country, the event is now in its 14th year.

Gonzales, who earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from Washington State University, joined the Highlands University faculty in 2003. His expertise is in U.S. and Mexican immigration and border issues, indigenous peoples of Central and South America, Hispanics of the Southwest, and globalization and the culture of capitalism.

Gonzales earned his master’s degree in anthropology from Highlands and collected folktales in San Miguel County for his thesis.

“What makes anthropology so fascinating to me is that it studies what it means to be human in terms of culture, language, ethnicity, kinship, the arts, religion, politics, food and more,” Gonzales said.

“I tell my students to think of culture as a system of symbols you can use to decipher everything humans do.”

While archaeology is the field of anthropology that studies human history and prehistory through the excavation of sites and the analysis of artifacts, cultural anthropology is the study of living peoples.

As a child, Gonzales worked alongside his grandparents and parents as a farmworker in the Fresno, Calif. area. His grandparents immigrated from Mexico, and he is the first in his family to attend college.

Gonzales said his heritage and experience as a young farmworker influenced his interest in studying indigenous cultures. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Oaxaca, a state in southwestern Mexico known for its high population of indigenous people. 

In the summer of 2006, Gonzales worked in London with an Oxford University colleague on border and labor issues in Palestine and Mexico.