The Southwestern United States, also known as the American Southwest or simply the Southwest, is a geographic and cultural region of the United States that includes Arizona and New Mexico, along with adjacent portions of California, Colorado, Nevada, Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah. The largest cities by metropolitan area are Phoenix, Las Vegas, El Paso, Albuquerque, and Tucson. Before 1848, in the historical region of Santa Fe de Nuevo México as well as parts of Alta California and Coahuila y Tejas, settlement was almost non-existent outside of Nuevo México's Pueblos and Spanish or Mexican municipalities. Much of the area had been a part of New Spain and Mexico until the United States acquired the area through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and the smaller Gadsden Purchase in 1854.
The Western United States is one of the four census regions defined by the United States Census Bureau.
The Pimería Alta was an area of the 18th century Sonora y Sinaloa Province in the Viceroyalty of New Spain, that encompassed parts of what are today southern Arizona in the United States and northern Sonora in Mexico.
Carl Ortwin Sauer was an American geographer. Sauer was a professor of geography at the University of California at Berkeley from 1923 until becoming professor emeritus in 1957. He has been called "the dean of American historical geography" and he was instrumental in the early development of the geography graduate school at Berkeley. One of his best known works was Agricultural Origins and Dispersals (1952). In 1927, Carl Sauer wrote the article "Recent Developments in Cultural Geography", which considered how cultural landscapes are made up of "the forms superimposed on the physical landscape".
Mogollon culture is an archaeological culture of Native American peoples from Southern New Mexico and Arizona, Northern Sonora and Chihuahua, and Western Texas. The northern part of this region is Oasisamerica, while the southern span of the Mogollon culture is known as Aridoamerica.
The Opata are an Indigenous people in Mexico. Opata territory, the "Opatería" in Spanish, encompasses the mountainous northeast and central part of the state of Sonora, extending to near the border with the United States. Historically, they included several subtribes, including the Eudeve, Teguima, and Jova peoples.
Oasisamerica is a cultural region of Indigenous peoples in North America. Their precontact cultures were predominantly agrarian, in contrast with neighboring tribes to the south in Aridoamerica. The region spans parts of Northwestern Mexico and Southwestern United States and can include most of Arizona and New Mexico; southern parts of Utah and Colorado; and northern parts of Sonora and Chihuahua. During some historical periods, it might have included parts of California and Texas as well.
The Arizona–Texas League was a Class D level American minor league baseball league that existed for nine seasons, from 1931–32, 1937–41, 1947–50 and 1952-54. In 1951, the Arizona-Texas loop merged with the Sunset League to form the Southwest International League. However, the Arizona and Texas clubs played only that one season (1951) in the new circuit before seceding and reforming the A-TL in 1952. From 1928 to 1930, it was known as the Arizona State League.
Karl W. Butzer was a German-born American geographer, ecologist, and archaeologist. He received two degrees at McGill University, Montreal: the B.Sc. (hons) in Mathematics in 1954 and later his master's degree in Meteorology and Geography. Afterwards in the 1950s he returned to Germany to the University of Bonn to obtain a doctorate in physical geography. He obtained a master's degree in Meteorology and Geography from McGill University and a doctorate in physical geography from the University of Bonn in Germany.
The Sobaipuri were one of many indigenous groups occupying Sonora and what is now Arizona at the time Europeans first entered the American Southwest. They were a Piman or O'odham group who occupied southern Arizona and northern Sonora in the 15th–19th centuries. They were a subgroup of the O'odham or Pima, surviving members of which include the residents of San Xavier del Bac which is now part of the Tohono O'odham Nation and the Akimel O'odham.
Billie Lee Turner II is an American geographer and human-environmental scientist, member of the National Academy of Sciences and other honorary institutions. Prominent among the third generation of the Berkeley School of Latin Americanist Geography and cultural ecological research, he has been a leader in bridging this work with the Chicago School of natural hazards and risk research. In August 2008, he took a position as the first Gilbert F. White Chair in Environment and Society at Arizona State University, where he is affiliated with the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning and the School of Sustainability. In November 2015, he was named a Regent’s Professor, the highest faculty honor that can be bestowed by Arizona State University.
Terry G. Jordan-Bychkov was a professor at the Department of Geography and the Environment at University of Texas at Austin and a specialist in the cultural and historical geography of the United States. He authored several influential scholarly books and articles and a widely adopted introductory textbook. Jordan-Bychkov served as president of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) in 1987 and 1988.
Vance T. Holliday is a professor in the School of Anthropology and the department of Geosciences as well as an adjunct professor in the department of Geography at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Andrew Sluyter is an American social scientist who currently teaches as a professor in the Geography and Anthropology Department of the Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. His interests are the environmental history and historical, cultural, and political ecology of the colonization of the Americas. He has made various contributions to the theorization of colonialism and landscape, the critique of neo-environmental determinism, to understanding pre-colonial and colonial agriculture and environmental change in Mexico, to revealing African contributions to establishing cattle ranching in the Americas, and to the historical geographies of Hispanics and Latinos in New Orleans. With the publication of Black Ranching Frontiers: African Cattle Herders of the Atlantic World, 1500–1900 and a 2012–13 Digital Innovation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, he has joined a growing number of scholars from multiple disciplines working from the perspective of Atlantic History and using the tools of the Digital Humanities. His latest book, Hispanic and Latino New Orleans: Immigration and Identity since the Eighteenth Century, co-authored with Case Watkins, James Chaney, and Annie M. Gibson, was awarded the 2015 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize by the American Association of Geographers.
The Berkeley School of Latin Americanist Geography was founded by the American geographer Carl O. Sauer. Sauer was a professor of geography at the University of California at Berkeley from 1923 until becoming professor emeritus in 1957 and was instrumental in the early development of the geography graduate program at Berkeley and the discipline of geography in the United States. Each generation of this research school has pursued new theoretical and methodological approaches, but their study of the peoples and places of Latin America and the Caribbean has remained the common denominator since the early 20th century. Carl O. Sauer himself did not develop a particular interest in Latin America before 1925, when Oskar Schmieder, a German geographer, disciple of Alfred Hettner, and expert in Latin American regional geography, arrived at Berkeley, coming from Córdoba, Argentina, to work as an associate professor. Obviously, his interest awoke during Schmieder's presence between 1925 and 1930. After Schmieder's departure in 1930, Carl O. Sauer began to offer seminars on the regional geography of Latin America.
The agricultural practices of the Native Americans inhabiting the American Southwest, which includes the states of Arizona and New Mexico plus portions of surrounding states and neighboring Mexico, are influenced by the low levels of precipitation in the region. Irrigation and several techniques of water harvesting and conservation were essential for successful agriculture. To take advantage of limited water, the southwestern Native Americans utilized irrigation canals, terraces (trincheras), rock mulches, and floodplain cultivation. Success in agriculture enabled some Native Americans to live in communities which numbered in the thousands as compared to their former lives as hunter-gatherers in which their bands numbered only a few dozen.
David Albert Yetman is an American academic expert on Sonora, Mexico, and an Emmy Award-winning media presenter on the world's deserts. He is a research social scientist at the University of Arizona.
Janice Jones Monk was an Australian-American feminist geographer and researcher in the South West United States, and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Arizona School of Geography, Development and Environment.
Thomas E. Sheridan is an anthropologist of Sonora, Mexico and the history and culture of Arizona and the Southwest. He was selected a Distinguished Outreach Professor at the University of Arizona, and has been affiliated with the Department of Anthropology and the Southwest Center since 2003.
Dale R. Lightfoot is an American geographer, academic and researcher. He is Professor Emeritus of Geography and a former Fulbright Program Advisor at Oklahoma State University.
