Publishing the Southwest: An Editorial Farewell

After 34 years, with this (Spring 2020) issue, I am retiring as editor of Journal of the Southwest.

When historian Jack Carroll started Arizona and the West in 1959, he suggested the journal would “burn its own cigarettes,” which it continued to do under Harwood Hinton (1963–1986). Under my editorship since 1986, I have similarly endeavored to follow an innovative path. In 1987, we renamed and refocused the journal. As Journal of the Southwest we began publishing a distinctive regional quarterly attuned to multidisciplinary studies of the American Southwest, the Mexican Northwest, and the borderlands.

Over the years, there have been many intellectuals and scholars who have made major contributions to JSW, indeed, too numerous to name them all. I had the good fortune to publish Bernard L. (Bunny) Fontana, Helen Ingram, Bill Broyles, Bruce Dinges, Tom Sheridan, David Yetman, Charles Bowden, Tom McGuire, Celestino Fernández, Raymond Thompson, Alberto Búrquez, Francisco (“Paco”) Manzo Taylor, Julian Hayden, James (“Big Jim”) Griffith, David Weber, Elizabeth A. H. John, James Officer, Rev. Kieran McCarty, Lawrence Clark Powell, Barbara Babcock, Marta Weigle, Alan Ferg, and Nancy Parezo; Sylvia Rodríguez, JPS Brown, and Curtis Hinsley; David Burckhalter, Susan Deeds, and Gary Nabhan. Also, Martin Padget, Diana Hadley, Helga Teiwes, Stephen Cox, and Nieves Zedeño; Gwyneth Harrington and Mary Beck Moser, Eva Antonia Wilbur-Cruce, Emil Haury, Ned and Rosamond Spicer, Donald Bahr, Miki Maaso, Felipe Molina, Larry Evers; Nicolás Pineda Pablos, Stephen Mumme, Jim Hills, Thomas Bowen, Greg McNamee, Joaquin Murrieta, and Bob Vint. Many of these close colleagues are no longer with us.

We introduced special thematic issues, among many: “Dry Borders” (Bill Broyles and Richard Felger, eds.), “The Southwest Defined” (James Byrkit), “Mata Ortiz Pottery” (Jim Hills), Larry Evers and Felipe Molina’s “Hiakim: The Yaqui Homeland,” and “Seri Hands,” a collaborative grouping of essays and a photo portfolio; also special issues on “The Vikita Ceremony of the Papago” (Julian Hayden and others), “Chinese Sojourners in Territorial Prescott” (Florence Lister and Robert Lister), and southwestern anthropologists Edward (Ned) Spicer and Emil Haury. In recent years, we published a festschrift double issue “Ways of Knowing: Helen Ingram and Water Scholarship” (Margaret Wilder, ed.); one on Agnese Nelms Haury (Bill Broyles and Rein Vanderpot, eds.); and one on Charles Bowden, whose writing shaped our understanding of the southwestern environment and the borderlands (Bill Broyles and Bruce Dinges, eds.). In addition to the journal, I started two Southwest Center book series, at the University of Arizona Press (UAP) and the University of New Mexico Press (acquiring editor Larry Ball), to bring out important books with our imprint, and enjoyed a fruitful relationship with both presses, especially with directors Stephen Cox, Christine Szuter, and Kathryn Conrad at UAP.

Along the way, associate editor Jeff Banister and I introduced some innovations to the journal, including full-color photos and individually designed covers, with the assistance of Bill Benoit early on and later Christine Hubbard, and hand-drawn maps and illustrations by Don Bufkin and Paul Mirocha. Alene Randklev capably handles typesetting. We have relied on Jim Wigginton and Becky Wigginton-Colon at West Press for fine production of the journal, and on Debra Makay for excellent copyediting.

We published pieces bilingually in Spanish, Yaqui, and O’odham (with English), and we printed extra copies to share within the communities. We transitioned the journal from a fully print format to a hybrid online and print format, successfully weathering a challenging period and creating a digital legacy (on JSTOR and Project MUSE) of JSW stretching back to 1959. In the effort to move online, the support of the Southwestern Foundation for Education and Historical Preservation, then led by Dianne Bret Harte, was crucial to our success.

In the first few years, W. David Laird, then director of libraries and Southwest bookman extraordinaire, provided office space on the third floor of the Main Library at the University of Arizona. Randi Kisiel, director, and Constance Bryden have been our gracious landlords at the Little Chapel of All Nations for about 30 years. In the early years, Rita Arnett and Adela Hice provided administrative support...