Over nearly three centuries, Jesuit, Franciscan, and Dominican missionaries built a network of churches throughout the “new world” of New Spain. Since the early twentieth century, scholars have studied the colonial architecture of southern New Spain, but they have largely ignored the architecture of the north. However, as this book clearly demonstrates, the colonial architecture of Northern New Spain—an area that encompasses most of the southwestern United States and much of northern Mexico—is strikingly beautiful and rich with meaning. After more than two decades of research, both in the field and in archives around the world, Gloria Fraser Giffords has authored the definitive book on this architecture. Giffords has a remarkable eye for detail and for images both grand and diminutive. Because so many of the buildings she examines have been destroyed, she sleuthed through historical records in several countries, and she discovered that the architecture and material culture of northern New Spain reveal the influences of five continents. As she examines objects as large as churches or as small as ornamental ceramic tile she illuminates the sometimes subtle, sometimes striking influences of the religious, social, and artistic traditions of Europe (from the beginning of the Christian era through the nineteenth century), of the Muslim countries ringing the Mediterranean (from the seventh through the fifteenth centuries), and of Northern New Spain’s indigenous peoples (whose art influenced the designs of occupying Europeans). Sanctuaries of Earth, Stone, and Light is a pathbreaking book, featuring 200 stunning photographs and over 300 illustrations ranging from ceremonial garments to detailed floor plans of the churches.

Three hundred years ago San Antonio was founded as a strategic outpost of presidios and missions on the edge of northern New Spain, imposing Spanish political and religious principles on this contested, often hostile region. The city’s many Catholic missions bear architectural witness to the time of their founding, but few have walked these sites without wondering who once lived there and what they saw, valued, and thought. San Antonio 1718 presents a wealth of art that depicts a rich blending of sometimes conflicted cultures -- explorers, colonialists, and indigenous Native Americans -- and places the city’s founding in context. The book is organized into three sections, accompanied by five discussions by internationally recognized scholars with expertise in key aspects of eighteenth-century northern New Spain. The first section, “People and Places,” features art depicting the lives of ordinary people. Such art is rare since most painting and sculpture from this period was made in service to the church, the crown, or wealthy families. They provide compelling insight into how those living in the Spanish Colonies viewed gender, social organization, ethnicity, occupation, dress, home and workplace furnishings, and architecture. Since portraiture was the most popular genre of eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Mexican painting, the second section, “Cycle of Life,” includes a selection of individual and family portraits representing people during different stages of life. The third and largest section is devoted to the church. Throughout the colonial period, Catholic evangelization of New Spain went hand in hand with military, economic, and political expansion. All the major religious orders—the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Jesuits, and the Augustinians—played significant roles in proselytizing indigenous populations of northern New Spain, establishing monasteries and convents to support these efforts. In San Antonio 1718, more than 100 portraits, landscapes, religious paintings, and devotional and secular objects reveal the visual culture that reflected and supported this region’s evolving world view, signaling how New Spain saw itself, its vast colonial and religious ambitions, in an age prior to the emergence of an independent Mexico and, subsequently, the state of Texas.

Towering over deserts, arid scrublands, and dry tropical forests, giant cacti grow throughout the Americas, from the United States to Argentina—often in rough terrain and on barren, parched soils, places inhospitable to people. But as David Yetman shows, many of these tall plants have contributed significantly to human survival. Yetman has been fascinated by columnar cacti for most of his life and now brings years of study and reflection to a wide-ranging and handsomely illustrated book. Drawing on his close association with the Guarijíos, Mayos, and Seris of Mexico—peoples for whom such cacti have been indispensable to survival—he offers surprising evidence of the importance of these plants in human cultures. The Great Cacti reviews the more than one hundred species of columnar cacti, with detailed discussions of some 75 that have been the most beneficial to humans or are most spectacular. Focusing particularly on northwestern Mexico and the southwestern United States, Yetman examines the role of each species in human society, describing how cacti have provided food, shelter, medicine, even religiously significant hallucinogens. Taking readers to the exotic sites where these cacti are found—from sea-level deserts to frigid Andean heights—Yetman shows that the great cacti have facilitated the development of native culture in hostile environments, yielding their products with no tending necessary. Enhanced by over 300 superb color photos, The Great Cacti is both a personal and scientific overview of sahuesos, soberbios, and other towering flora that flourish where few other plants grow—and that foster human life in otherwise impossible places.

Bathed in desert light and shadow, rising up from the earth in improbable, faraway places, stand eight original Spanish missions on Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. Built of stone by Roman Catholic priests and indigenous laborers in the eighteenth century, these stunning missions dominate the landscape around them. Baja California Missions: In the Footsteps of the Padres is a beautiful and informative book about the eight monumental Spanish colonial churches, buildings seldom seen by those familiar with the missions of California, Arizona, and Sonora, Mexico. With gorgeous photographs of the architecture and religious art, and supported by a concise history that outlines the peninsula’s exploration and colonization by Roman Catholic priests, Baja California Missions excels as a book of photography and history. It promises adventure for readers at home, as well as for travelers ready to explore the churches in person. The eight Spanish colonial stone churches of Baja California endure as the only intact originals of 34 missions built by the padres during the peninsula’s colonization. Due to structural renovations and restorations of the artwork undertaken over the last 30 years, the renowned mission churches have become sources of pride to the citizens of Baja California. Travelers are invited to visit at any time, especially during patron saint day celebrations. As a guide, Baja California Missions is fully up to date, with directions for navigating Baja’s paved highways and desert and mountain roads. The mission sites are pinpointed on a topographic roadmap of the peninsula. A church floor plan is provided to accompany a walk-through tour for each church interior. The lovely eighteenth-century oil paintings and wooden statues that grace the church altars are also identified and described

Sabino Canyon, a desert canyon in the American Southwest near Tucson, Arizona, is enjoyed yearly by thousands of city residents as well as visitors from around the world. Picturing Sabino tells the story of the canyon’s transformation from a barely known oasis, miles from a small nineteenth-century town, into an immensely popular recreation area on the edge of a modern metropolis. Covering a century of change, from 1885 to 1985, this work rejoices in the canyon’s natural beauty and also relates the ups and downs of its protection and enjoyment. The story is vividly told through numerous historical photographs, lively anecdotes, and an engaging text, informed by decades of research by David Wentworth Lazaroff. Along the way the reader makes the acquaintance of ordinary picnickers as well as influential citizens who helped to reshape the canyon, while witnessing the canyon’s evolving relationship with its growing urban neighbor. The book will fascinate readers who are already familiar with Sabino Canyon, as well as anyone with an interest in local or regional history, or in historical photography.

In Mexico’s western Sonoran Desert along the Gulf of California is a place made extraordinary by the desert solitude, the dynamic sea, and the people who live there—the Seris. Central to the lives of these people are the sea and its shores. Shells on a Desert Shore describes the Seri knowledge of mollusks and includes names, folklore, history, uses, and much more. Cathy Moser Marlett’s research of several decades, conducted in the Seri language, builds on work begun in 1951 by her parents, Edward and Becky Moser. The language, spoken by fewer than a thousand people today, is considered endangered. Marlett presents what she has learned from Seri consultants over recent decades and also draws from her own childhood experiences while living in a Seri village. The information from the people who had lived as hunter-gatherers provides a window into a lifestyle no longer recalled from personal experience by most Seris today—and perhaps a window into the lives of other peoples who made the Gulf’s shores their home. The book offers a wealth of information about Seri history, as well as species accounts of more than 150 mollusks from the Seri area on the central Gulf coast. Chapters describe how the people ate mollusks or used them medicinally, how the mollusks were named, and how their shells were used. The author provides several hundred detailed drawings and photographs, many of them archival. Shells on a Desert Shore is a fresh, original presentation of a significant part of the Seri way of life. Unique because it is written from the perspective of a participant in the Seri culture, the book will stand as a definitive, irreplaceable work in ethnography, a time capsule of the Seri people and their connection to the sea.

Religion in Sixteenth-Century Mexico explores the development of religion as transferred from Spain to Tenochtitlan. The religious world of both Aztecs and Spanish Catholics at time of encounter was organized through large and small scale community, family, and personal devotions. Devotion expressed through cults was the single most salient aspect in the transfer of Catholicism to New World people. This book highlights the role that ideas such as afterlife, apocalypticism, iconoclasm, Marianism, resistance, and saints played in the emergence of Mexican Catholicism in the sixteenth century. The larger Atlantic world context, as seen in the regions of Iberia, Anahuac, and 'New Spain', or central Mexico from Zacatecas to Oaxaca, is explored in detail. Beginning with an extensive historical essay to contextualize the pre-contact period, the bulk of this volume contains 118 separate keywords each with three comparative essays examining Aztec and Catholic religious practices before and after contact.