Award-Winning Publications

El Colorado Sawmill: A View into 20th-Century Timber Extraction from the Chihuahua Sierra Madre

James S. “Big Jim” Griffith

The Easter Ceremony in Northern Sinaloa

By James S. Griffith; Vol. 32, Number 1, Spring 1990, pp. 36-67

One of the better known aspects of traditional native ceremonialism in northwestern Mexico is the Easter ceremony of the Yaqui and Mayo Indians...

Meeting La Corúa

By James S. Griffitht; Vol. 34, Number 2, Summer 1992, pp. 41-151

July 7, 1983, was a warm day in Northern Sonora. I was with my friend Richard Morales, visiting craftspeople whose work we had previously encountered...

Cover of Journal of the Southwest Summer 2005

Religious Monuments of Sonora's Highways

By James S. Griffitht; Vol. 47, Number 2, Summer 2005, pp. 234-248

It was May 21, 1999, and I was photographing and recording roadside religious art along Mexico's Highway 15 between Santa Ana and Hermosillo in Sonora...

1995

Caminos of San Bernardo

By Howard Scott Gentry

Vol. 35, Number 2, Summer 1995, pp. 131-141

The caminos of Mexico have no beginning and are without end. For, having set out upon a road, one can take up a foot-trail common to pack-beasts and men...

Geography of the Rio Mayo

By Howard Scott Gentry

Vol. 37, Number 2, Summer 1995, pp. 280-293

The Rio Mayo is one of the principal rivers in the state of Sonora, Mexico, originating in the Sierra Madre of western Chihuahua and discharging into the Gulf of California 40 miles north of the boundary between Sonora and Sinaloa. The area of its drainage basin is approximately 6,800 square miles. The boundary of the basin is a ragged line following the mountain divides which separate it from the Rio Yaqui watershed on the north and from the Rio Fuerte watershed on the South...

2003

From Azulejos to Zagutmes: The Islamic Legacy in the Built Environment of Hispano-America

By R. Brooks Jeffery

Vol. 45, Number 1/2, Spring/Summer 2003 pp. 441-461

Prior to the Spanish colonization of the Americas, beginning at the end of the fifteenth century, Spain was completing the final chapters of the Reconquest...

2004

1491: In Search of Native America

By W. George Lovell, Henry F. Dobyns, William M. Denevan, William I. Woods, and Charles C. Mann

Vol. 46, Number 3, Autumn 2004, pp. 441-461

How Latin America is written about in the U.S. media can make for frustrating, infuriating, and at times disheartening reading, especially for any geographer...

2008

Constructing a Virtual Wall

By Josiah McC. Heyman

Vol. 50, Number 3, Autumn 2008, pp. 305-334

The U.S.–Mexico border wall is not just physical—it is also virtual. Virtual in this instance has two meanings, one narrower and one broader...

2012

New Perspectives on Mata Ortiz Pottery Making

By Jim Hills

Vol. 54, Number 1, Spring 2012, pp. 81-158

This paper is an exploration into memory and history, and into how certain stories have evolved while a larger chorus of voices—those that permeated the kitchens, streets, and fields of Mata Ortiz...

2014

Sonoran Adventure: A 1981 Journey

By Bernard L. Fontana

Vol. 56, Number 1, Spring 2014, pp. 183-204

Reading one’s field diary that is more than thirty years old is inevitably a great source of embarrassment. This journal of a three-day trip, one that was neither my first nor last adventure in the same area...