Southwest, The

Southwest, The. Definitions of this region vary, but all include present‐day New Mexico, Arizona, and the El Paso area of western Texas. Until the twentieth century, physical barriers such as the Mojave and Sonoran deserts, the Llano Estacado (Staked Plains), the southern Rocky Mountains, and the Colorado Plateau isolated the area and limited contact with outsiders. A sizeable Hispanic population and a variety of Native American groups also distinguished the region. Although both Arizona and New Mexico are large states geographically, they remain lightly populated by national standards. Climatic extremes often appear forbidding; much of the area gets only about ten inches of rainfall annually. The Southwest's distance from most of the nation's major population centers and its abundance of vacant land have helped to shape regional development.

The Southwest's earliest human inhabitants arrived as big‐game hunters twelve to fifteen thousand years ago. As the large animals became extinct, the people shifted to hunting small game, gathering, and agriculture. Eventually they developed several distinct cultures, the Mogollon, Anasazi, and Hohokam. Between 1200 and 1400, these peoples disappeared. As raiding Athabascan people—called “Apaches” (enemies) by the settled groups—entered the region, more heavily fortified villages or pueblos developed. At the end of the sixteenth century, perhaps forty thousand Indians lived in at least sixty pueblos, most along the Rio Grande.

In 1598, Juan de Oñate led some four hundred Spaniards north into present‐day New Mexico. They brought new diseases, religious disputes, warfare, and destruction to the Indians. During the seventeenth century, Spanish friars and priests strove to discredit native religious beliefs and replace them with Roman Catholicism. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680, centered in present‐day New Mexico and led by a San Juan pueblo Indian, Popé, drove the invaders south to El Paso. The Spanish returned, however, in 1692. In Arizona, Spanish priests founded modest missions, but few other Spaniards came north to deal with the Indians. A mixed‐race culture gradually developed in the eighteenth century, mostly Indian physically, but partly Spanish culturally.

Anglo Americans arrived early in the nineteenth century as part of the Rocky Mountain fur trade. Following the Mexican War, the United States in 1848 annexed most of the region, rounding out the border in 1853 with the Gadsden Purchase. During the next several decades the incoming Anglo Americans and the native peoples, particularly the Apaches, clashed repeatedly. These conflicts ended in 1886 with the surrender and exile of the Apache warrior Geronimo. In 1880 the Southern Pacific Railroad opened the region to easy settlement by easterners. At first gold and silver mining attracted most attention, but the later development of copper mining and smelting had more long‐range impact. Federal programs to speed western economic development began with the 1911 Roosevelt Dam in Arizona and the 1916 Elephant Butte Dam in New Mexico. These projects continued into the 1990s with such undertakings as the Central Arizona Project to bring Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson.

World War II changed the Southwest profoundly. Thousands of military personnel trained there, and many returned with their families after the war to settle permanently. Manhattan Project scientists harnessed atomic power at Alamagordo, New Mexico, during the war, and much of the nation's uranium came from Navajo lands. Both Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the 1964 Republican candidate for president, and Morris Udall, an Arizona Democratic congressman who focused on environmental matters, heightened national awareness of the Southwest. Beginning in the 1960s, high‐technology developments attracted new corporate enterprises with well‐paying jobs, while ever‐growing sunbelt retirement communities drew thousands of older Americans.

The Southwest has figured prominently in American culture. For nearly a century, writers as diverse as Zane Grey, Mary Austin, D.H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, and Tony Hillerman have focused attention on the region. Films and television programs have presented the Southwest as exotic, alluring, and distinctly American. Those depictions stressed open space, natural beauty, and few people, and offered the allure of an imagined virgin frontier. Mabel Dodge (1879–1962) and her circle helped make Santa Fe, New Mexico, a cultural center as early as the 1920s. Subsequently, Georgia O'Keeffe and other artists, along with Native American potters, weavers, and jewelry makers, enhanced the community's reputation as an artistic mecca. Nearby Taos and other pueblos became major tourist attractions.

The Southwest includes more prosaic realities as well, however, such as large‐scale mining, lumbering, ranching, tourism, interstate highways, heavy urbanization, and a substantial federal presence. Still, for many in the United States and abroad, the Southwest remains the land of the Indian pueblos, saguaro cactus, the Grand Canyon, and beautiful sunsets—a uniquely American region.
See also Environmentalism; Hispanic Americans; Indian History and Culture; Indian Wars; Literature, Popular; Livestock Industry; Railroads; Regionalism; Spanish Settlements in North America; West, The.

Bibliography

W. Eugene Hollon , The Southwest: Old and New, 1961.
Edward H. Spicer , Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1962.
Donald W. Meinig , Southwest: Three Peoples in Geographical Change, 1600–1970, 1971.
Lynn I. Perrigo , The American Southwest: Its Peoples and Cultures, 1971.
David J. Weber , Foreigners in Their Native Land: Historical Roots of the Mexican Americans, 1973.
Gerald D. Nash , The American West in the Twentieth Century: A Short History of an Urban Oasis, 1977.

Roger L. Nichols