American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The Valley of the Sun is a large basin in which two major Sonoran Desert water systems, the Salt and Gila rivers, combine, enabling large-scale human settlement in central Arizona. The agricultural potential of this natural resource has sustained a stable population base since prehistoric times. Today it is home to a number of small cities that comprise the Phoenix metropolitan urban sprawl and more than half of the residents of the state of Arizona. Located at the far eastern foot of South Mountain, the southern natural boundary of the Valley, is Guadalupe, an urban anomaly that seems strangely juxtaposed in this widely spread, low density urban landscape fashioned by the advent of the automobile culture. Founded by Yaqui refugees from Sonora just after the turn of the century, the small one-square-mile desert settlement was not much more than a refugee camp, an innocuous cluster of extremely humble dwellings on the lightly populated Valley’s periphery. This was about to change. Just two years Guadalupe came into being, the small but significant city of Phoenix became the capital of the new state of Arizona. The peripheral location was also symbolic of the Yaquis’ lack of cultural and social integration in their new homeland. As the twentieth century progressed, so did the urban sprawl, eventually threatening to envelop Guadalupe, as would the social and cultural pressures of the dominant society.