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Huépac Revisited: Cultural Remapping of a Sonoran Townscape Daniel D. Arreola, William E. Doolittle, Lindsey Sutton, Arianna Fernandez, John Finn, Claire Smith, and Casey Allen Huépac is on no railway and has only the road, the old camino real. By the site of Huépac passed explorer, conqueror, and missionary. Huépac, itself, was a Jesuit mission foundation. Now the occasional passage of an automobile gives only limited contact with the outside world, and Huépac remains a rather remote agricultural village, depending chiefly upon its own fields and grazing lands. —Huépac: an agricultural Village of Sonora, Mexico, 284 So recounts geographer Leslie Hewes, who visited the Sonoran village in 1931. Small, remote, and largely self-sufficient, Huépac was typical of many towns of La Serrana, Sonora’s eastern uplands and valleys that were the frontier of colonial settlement in this northwestern corner of historic New Spain, now Mexico (Dunbier 1968: 126–31; West 1993: 1). Today, Huépac remains one of a handful of pueblos that dot the fertile Sonora River valley, north and east of the capital city, Hermosillo, and south and east of the historic mining town of Cananea near the border with the United States. While Huépac persists as a tranquil village compared to Sonora’s thriving western desert cities, it is not exactly Daniel d. arreola is professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University. William e. Doolittle is the Erich W. Zimmermann Regents’ Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin. lindsey Sutton is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University . arianna fernandez is an M.A. candidate in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University. John finn is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University. claire Smith is a Ph.D. student in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. casey D. allen is assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, Denver. Journal of the Southwest 51, 2 (Summer 2009):137–164 138 ✜ Journal of the Southwest the isolated and self-sustaining village described by Hewes some threequarters of a century ago. In this essay, we reassess Huépac by comparing its geographical past to its twenty-first-century present. Our objective is to remap Huépac in order to understand the relationship among landscape, place, and change through time. What can changes in the townscape—the human-built landscape—of this nearly four-century-old community tell us about social and economic transformations in small towns across Sonora? How can physical remapping inform a cultural understanding of place? In some ways, Huépac, like other small towns of Sonora, has been forgotten in the rush to learn about bustling border towns and provincial centers in the region (Arreola and Curtis 1993; Méndez Sáinz (1993, 1997). Nevertheless, geographical studies of small towns in Mexico provide some context for this research and the approach used in the present analysis. In addition to Hewes (1935), for example, geographers Samuel Dicken (1935), Ronald Ives (1950), and Dan Stanislawski (1950) have reported about Mexican small towns. Dicken studied the village of Galeana in the Sierra Madre Oriental of Nuevo León, Ives crafted a portrait of Sonoyta as a Sonoran border oasis, and Stanislawski analyzed a series of towns in Michoacán. For our present restudy of Huépac, we extended Stanislawski’s ideas about townscape. In his study, it was asserted that eleven towns in Michoacán have distinct geographical anatomies and specific landscape personalities. Stanislawski devised a method for assessing whether a town was Hispanic or Indian based on an examination of difference in townscape. In Huépac we use townscape as a measure of change over time, and then explore what those physical changes might suggest about cultural change in small-town Sonora. We borrow from two previous studies of Huépac: Hewes’ 1931 survey and map published in 1935, and William Doolittle’s first...

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