Our general summer institute schedule balances classroom seminars with field study tours. The field study tours, guided by scholars and experts, move the classroom into the outdoors and into historic locales beyond the university. Our plan is to engage us all as active partners in the learning process, through our physical immersion in the regional environments as well as through our intellectual discussions of readings, documents and ideas in the field. We intend to model ways to extend the intellectual reach of undergraduate humanities courses.

The immersion experience, on the field study tours in particular, does make for a full schedule. Mindful of the travel demands, we have included optional excursions, so that you may determine your own needs. The preliminary detailed schedule, which includes all readings and recommended texts, is posted on this summer institute website but let me give you a shorter overview here.

Week One
The first week of the Summer Institute is devoted to situating the participants in place, time and approach. Our orientation to the Sonoran Desert environment will occur at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, the world-renown outdoor natural history museum, through seminars and walking tours. We’ll engage the historical context in seminars with both University of Arizona faculty (Oscar Martinez, Katherine Morrissey, Thomas Sheridan) and visiting scholars (Cynthia Radding, Samuel Truett). Dr. Radding (Wandering Peoples: Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico) will share her work on native peoples in the Spanish borderlands. Dr. Martinez (Border People: Life and Society in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands), Dr. Truett (Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands), and Dr. Sheridan (Where the Dove Calls) will introduce borderlands and environmental history. We will demonstrate our approach in a daylong field study tour of Spanish colonial missions with the archeologists Barnet Pavao-Zuckerman (UA), Jupiter Martinez (Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Hermosillo, Sonora) and Jesus Garcia (Arizona Sonora Desert Museum). Through seminars in the UA Special Collections, Center for Creative Photography, and Arizona State Museum, we’ll introduce participants to available textual and visual resources from which they will be able to draw for their own research or curriculum projects. And a special seminar on the uses of photographic evidence, with a particular focus on repeat photography led by photographer Mark Klett (ASU) and plant ecologist Raymond Turner (UA), will offer interpretive tools for reading visual evidence of environmental and cultural change in the borderlands.

Week Two
After this introductory week at the University of Arizona, we’ll spend the Institute’s middle two weeks in the field, locating ourselves in three interrelated ecological regions that stretch across the border—the arid valley grasslands with centuries-old ranching cultures; the forested mountain ranges of the Chiricahuas with their legacy of mixed 19th-century land use and 20th-century federally-managed multiple use; and the urban and industrial mining landscapes that link Sonora and Arizona. As we move through space, we’ll also move chronologically through time. In these historically rich locales, we will focus on the ways in which these landscapes changed during the 19th and 20th centuries.

The field study tour begins in southwestern New Mexico at two adjacent ranches, the Armendaris and the Ladder, ideal locations for examining the links between history and ecology in the borderlands. The historical owners of the Armendaris and Ladder ranches managed them well, permitting an illuminating measure of environmental change. Ranch managers Thomas Waddell and Steve Dobrott, wildlife biologists Joe Truett and Harley Shaw, as well as historians Diana Hadley, Marsha Weisiger, and J.C. Mutchler will be our guides as we explore the effects of 19th-century human activities, such as ranching, guano mining, settlement and scientific management. While in residence we will also pay particular attention to the questions raised by the restoration of habitats and species, including prairie dogs, peregrine falcons, Bolson tortoises, Mexican gray wolves, and bison.

For the remainder of the Institute’s second week, we’ll head to the Chiricahua Mountains just north of the international border and stay at the American Museum of Natural History’s Southwestern Research Station. In seminars and field study tours we will compare the diverse peoples—Apache, Anglo and Mexican settlers, soldiers, and federal agency managers—who have historically engaged each other and the environment from the 19th into the 20th century. Principal faculty Dr. Paul Hirt will coordinate the activities in this segment of the tour. We will be joined by Apache scholar Dale Curtis Miles and environmental historians Stephen Pyne and Diana Hadley.

photo by Dan Arreola

Week Three
In the third week of the Institute, we will return to the grasslands environment as we travel south to historic San Bernardino Ranch along the New Mexico/Sonora border. We will use this bifurcated site to explore the local use of the border as refuge over time: for Chiricahua Apaches during the Indian wars; for Mormons escaping anti-polygamy laws of the 1880s; for Chinese laborers eluding immigration border agents in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; for smugglers, soldiers and refugees of the Mexican Revolution; for Mexican ranchers seeking to avoid the imposition of restrictions on their cattle. Principal faculty Dr. Weisiger and Dr. Truett, along with award-winning Cuenca Los Ojos Foundation director Valer Austin, will lead the seminars at this site. Staying south of the U.S. border—first, on the adjacent San Bernardino and Las Anitas ranches and next, in the border city of Agua Prieta— we will compare a series of landscapes: the Sonoran historic ranching landscape with that of the New Mexican ranches, and the collectively-owned Sonoran ejidos with rural and suburban spaces.

Douglas, Arizona, will be our headquarters as we focus on the urban and copper mining industrial landscapes that dominated the border region in the 20th century. Dr. Katherine Morrissey and Dr. Samuel Truett will draw upon their own research as we explore the political, environmental and cultural histories of the linked mining communities of Cananea, Sonora; Bisbee and Douglas, Arizona. We expect to be joined by a Cananea local historian in Sonora, where we will emphasize the early 20th-century turmoil of the Mexican Revolution as well as environmental impacts resulting from legal alterations in the Mexican land distribution (ejidal) system through the 20th century. Our final day of the field study tour will be the 4th of July, a day on which participants will be able to observe and partake in the diverse rites of nationalism celebrated in two culturally distinctive border towns: Bisbee and Douglas, Arizona.

Week Four
The fourth and final week of the Institute brings us back to Tucson, where we will connect the past to the present and develop individual projects to extend the reach of the institute. In morning seminars, University of Arizona faculty from different disciplinary perspectives will discuss contemporary collaborative U.S. and Mexico borderlands projects that draw upon and address the legacies of our border environmental history. The faculty and their focus areas are: Dr. Cecilia Rosales, Division of Community, Environment and Policy, College of Public Health (public health), Dr. Robert Varady, Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy (water), Dr. Diane Austin, Bureau of Applied Anthropology (urban pollution).

In the afternoons you will have time to work on your own research or curriculum projects. We have arranged for time and space, along with skilled specialists, at several UA research facilities to help facilitate your own research and technology needs: Special Collections (Veronica Reyes), Center for Creative Photography (Cass Fey), and Arizona State Museum (Diana Hadley).These final projects may take any form, and we encourage you to consider ways to integrate the summer institute materials and themes into your existing undergraduate courses. You will have access to digitization equipment in order to create computer-ready materials from Special Collections and the Arizona State Museum. Participants will present their projects during the final days of the institute and, once completed, make them available for the Summer Institute website. On Friday the project director, principal faculty and participants will join in a roundtable discussion to assess the achievements of the summer institute.

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