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On March 1, 1966, the voters of Tucson approved the Pueblo Center Redevelopment Project—Arizona’s first major urban renewal project—which targeted the most densely populated eighty acres in the state. For close to one hundred years, tucsonenses had created their own spatial reality in the historical, predominantly Mexican American heart of the city, an area most called “la calle.” Here, amid small retail and service shops, restaurants, and entertainment venues, they openly lived and celebrated their culture. To make way for the Pueblo Center’s new buildings, city officials proceeded to displace la calle’s residents and to demolish their ethnically diverse neighborhoods, which, contends Lydia Otero, challenged the spatial and cultural assumptions of postwar modernity, suburbia, and urban planning.

Otero examines conflicting claims to urban space, place, and history as advanced by two opposing historic preservationist groups: the La Placita Committee and the Tucson Heritage Foundation. Otero gives voice to those who lived in, experienced, or remembered this contested area, and analyzes the historical narratives promoted by Anglo American elites in the service of tourism and cultural dominance.

La Calle explores the forces behind the mass displacement: an unrelenting desire for order, a local economy increasingly dependent on tourism, and the pivotal power of federal housing policies. To understand how urban renewal resulted in the spatial reconfiguration of downtown Tucson, Otero draws on scholarship from a wide range of disciplines: Chicana/o, ethnic, and cultural studies; urban history, sociology, and anthropology; city planning; and cultural and feminist geography.

High above the noise and traffic of metropolitan Phoenix, Native American rock art offers mute testimony that another civilization once thrived in the Arizona desert. In the city's South Mountains, prehispanic peoples pecked thousands of images into the mountains' boulders and outcroppings—images that today's hikers can encounter with every bend in the trail.

Todd Bostwick, an archaeologist who has studied the Hohokam for more than twenty years, and Peter Krocek, a professional photographer with a passion for archaeology, have combed the South Mountains to locate nearly all of the ancient petroglyphs found in the canyons and ridges. Their years of learning the landscape and investigating the ancient designs have resulted in a book that explores this wealth of prehistoric rock art within its natural and cultural contexts, revealing what these carvings might mean, how they got there, and when they were made.

Landscape of the Spirits is the first book to cover these ancient images and is one of the most comprehensive treatments of a rock art location ever published. It conveys the range of different rock art elements and compositions found in the South Mountains—animals, humans, and geometric shapes, as well as celestial and calendrical markings at key sites—through accurate descriptions, drawings, and photographs. Interpretations of the petroglyphs are based on Native American ethnographic accounts and consider the most recent theories concerning shamanism and archaeoastronomy.

Written in a simple and accessible style, Landscape of the Spirits is an indispensable volume for anyone exploring the South Mountains, and for rock art enthusiasts everywhere who wish to broaden their understanding of the prehistoric world. It is both an authoritative overview of these ancient wonders and an unprecedented benchmark in southwestern rock art research at a single geographic location.

From the actions of Europeans in the seventeenth century to the real estate deals of the modern era, people making a living off the land in southern Arizona have been repeatedly robbed of their way of life. History has recorded more than three centuries of speculative failures that never amounted to much but left dispossessed people in their wake. This book seeks to excavate those failures, to examine the new social spaces the schemers struggled to create and the existing social spaces they destroyed.

Landscapes of Fraud explores how the penetration of the evolving capitalist world-system created and destroyed communities in the Upper Santa Cruz Valley of Arizona from the late 1600s to the 1970s. Thomas Sheridan has melded history, anthropology, and critical geography to create a penetrating view of greed and power and their lasting effect on those left powerless.

Sheridan first examines how O’odham culture was fragmented by the arrival of the Spanish, telling how autonomous communities moving across landscapes in seasonal rounds were reduced to a mission world of subordination. Sheridan then considers the fate of the Tumacácori grant and Baca Float No. 3, another land grant. He tells the unbroken story of land fraud from Manuel María Gándara’s purchase of the “abandoned” Tumacácori grant at public auction in 1844 through the bankruptcy of the shady real estate developers who had fraudulently promoted housing projects at Rio Rico during the 1960s and ’70s.

As the Upper Santa Cruz Valley underwent a wrenching transition from a landscape of community to a landscape of fraud, the betrayal of the O’odham became complete when land, that most elemental form of human space, was transformed from a communal resource into a commodity bought and sold for its future value. Today, Mission Tumacácori stands as a romantic icon of the past while the landscapes that supported it lay buried under speculative schemes that continue to haunt our history.

Legal and public policies concerning youth gun violence tend to rely heavily on crime reports, survey data, and statistical methods. Rarely is attention given to the young voices belonging to those who carry high-powered semiautomatic handguns. In Language of the Gun, Bernard E. Harcourt recounts in-depth interviews with youths detained at an all-malecorrectional facility, exploring how they talk about guns and what meanings they ascribe to them in a broader attempt to understand some of the assumptions implicit in current handgun policies. In the process, Harcourt redraws the relationships among empirical research, law, and public policy.

Home to over 150 repeat offenders ranging in age from twelve to seventeen, the Catalina Mountain School is made up of a particular stratum of boys—those who have committed the most offenses but will still be released upon reaching adulthood. In an effort to understand the symbolic and emotional language of guns and gun carrying, Harcourt interviewed dozens of these incarcerated Catalina boys. What do these youths see in guns? What draws them to handguns? Why do some of them carry and others not? For Harcourt, their often surprising answers unveil many of the presuppositions that influence our laws and policies.

The Arizona Tewa are a Pueblo Indian group that migrated around 1700 to First Mesa on the Hopi Reservation and who, while speaking Hopi, have also retained their native language. Paul V. Kroskrity examines this curiosity of language and culture, explaining the various ways in which the Tewa use their linguistic resources to successfully adapt to the Hopi and their environment while retaining their native language and the cultural identity it embodies.

In 1978 convicted murderer Gary Tison escaped from an Arizona prison with the help of his three sons. Over the following two weeks, Tison and his gang roamed the Southwest, murdering six people before confronting police in a bloody shootout near the Mexican border. Next to the Gunfight at the OK Corral, this is the most sensational crime story in Arizona history.

The Devil’s Highway—El Camino del Diablo—crosses hundreds of miles and thousands of years of Arizona and Southwest history. This heritage trail follows a torturous route along the U.S. Mexico border through a lonely landscape of cactus, desert flats, drifting sand dunes, ancient lava flows, and searing summer heat. The most famous waterhole along the way is Tinajas Altas, or High Tanks, a series of natural rock basins that are among the few reliable sources of water in this notoriously parched region.

Now an expert cast of authors describes, narrates, and explains the human and natural history of this special place in a thorough and readable account. Addressing the latest archaeological and historical findings, they reveal why Tinajas Altas was so important and how it related to other waterholes in the arid borderlands. Readers can feel like pioneers, following in the footsteps of early Native Americans, Spanish priests and soldiers, gold seekers and borderland explorers, tourists, and scholars.

Combining authoritative writing with a rich array of more than 180 illustrations and maps as well as detailed appendixes providing up-to-date information on the wildlife and plants that live in the area, Last Water on the Devil’s Highway allows readers to uncover the secrets of this fascinating place, revealing why it still attracts intrepid tourists and campers today.

When David and Courtney Reeder Jones moved into two rooms reached by ladder in a northern Arizona Indian ruin, they had been married only two weeks. Except for the ruin's cement floors, which were originally hardened mud, and skylights instead of smokeholes, the rooms were exactly as they had been 800 years before.

The year was 1938, and the newlyweds had come to Wupatki National Monument as full-time National Park Service caretakers for the ruin. Remote in time and place, their story as described in Courtney's letters will take readers into a dramatic landscape of red rocks, purple volcanoes, and endless blue sky. Here, some 60 years ago, two young people came to terms with their new life together and with their nearly total reliance upon each other and their Navajo neighbors.

"They helped us in any way that a neighbor would, and we helped them as we could," wrote Courtney in her memoirs years later. Vivid and engaging, her letters home spill over with descriptions of their friendship with local Navajo families, their sings and celebrations, and her good luck in being able to be a part of it all.

Letters from Wupatki captures a more innocent era in southwestern archaeology and the history of the National Park Service before the post-war years brought paved roads, expanded park facilities, and ever-increasing crowds of visitors. Courtney's letters to her family and friends reflect all the charm of the earlier time as they convey the sense of rapid transition that came after the war.

Tracking those changes in the development of Wupatki National Monument and the National Park Service, the letters also—and perhaps more important—reveal changes in the Joneses themselves. Of particular interest to anthropologists and historians, their story also gives the general reader captivating glimpses of a partnership between two people who only grew stronger for the struggles they shared together.

Originally a presidio on the frontier of New Spain, Tucson was a Mexican community before the arrival of Anglo settlers. Unlike most cities in California and Texas, Tucson was not initially overwhelmed by Anglo immigrants, so that even until the early 1900s Mexicans made up a majority of the town's population. Indeed, it was through the efforts of Mexican businessmen and politicians that Tucson became a commercial center of the Southwest. Los Tucsonenses celebrates the efforts of these early entrepreneurs as it traces the Mexican community's gradual loss of economic and political power. Drawing on both statistical archives and pioneer reminiscences, Thomas Sheridan has written a history of Tucson's Mexican community that is both rigorous in its factual analysis and passionate in its portrayal of historic personages.

The nature of the Old and New West is fully reflected through dialects, beliefs, occupations, and actions in this collection of thirteen plays with complete stage directions. Set in Arizona, Nevada, and Utah from the mid-1800s to the present day and focusing on veterans, children, prostitutes, priests, the newborn, and newly dead, these one-acts written by playwrights who know the region give voice to those who created and continue to recreate the West. This collection of contemporary plays, written out of love and concern for the region, examines as never before the western myths rooted in the national psyche. The characters battle limits, deny fate, and seek new beginnings. The plays examine symptoms, pose questions, and seek answers about the past and present West.