Editorial

Dear Friends,

Summer deepens across the Sonoran Borderlands. The cicadas rise like a symphony at dusk, monsoon clouds will soon gather with familiar promise, and the desert seems to breathe in slow, fragrant rhythms. This is a season of remembering—of the places that shape us and the stories they quietly hold.

Earlier this year, I returned to Álamos, Sonora, where the stone streets still carry the memory of mule trains and mission bells. In the golden hour light, the smell of carne asada drifted from a plaza vendor’s cart. In that moment, I felt again the deep interweaving of land, memory, and movement—a reminder that the roots of the borderlands stretch well beyond the visible horizon.

In this edition, we explore those roots. You’ll find features on the origin of the name of Arizona, a stranger-than-fiction story on the first Anglo-American resident of the Sonoran Desert, and infographics on the ethnobotany of the region. We also previewed our Basque Borderlands 2026 journey—a cultural homecoming that traces the ancestral echoes of Sonora and Arizona back to the Basque Country of Spain.

At Borderlandia, travel, listening, and place-based storytelling can deepen our understanding of our cross-cultural identity and kinship. The borderlands call us to be stewards of history—and participants in its unfolding.

Greetings to all,

Alex