THE OTHER SOUTHWEST --a meaningless phrase until you look into the pages of the book titled The Other Southwest. Authored by Bernard L. Fontana, Edmond J.B. Faubert and Barney T. Burns published by the Heard Museum in 1977 the meaning of the phrase can best be understood by reading a few pages from the introduction-----
      " 'The Southwest!' That idea has almost mystic aura for those of us who live in what we have come to think of as the Southwestern heartland. The Southwest! It is Hopi mesas and the snow-capped San Francisco peaks. It is the Rio Grande wandering down from northern New Mexico and Santa Fe past Cochiti and Santa Domingo and San Felipe. It is the picturesque cowboy and hard rock miner.
     But our images are as new as our memories are short. That cowboy's chaps and lariat, like the very words themselves, came from Extremadura and La Mancha via Nueva Espana. The miner with his pick, shovel, sluice box, and simple means of separating metal from ores was using methods taught in mining colleges in Mexico in the 16th century. Rio Grande means 'Great river;' Santo Domingo is Spanish for Saint Dominic;' and Santa Fe is the 'Holy faith.' The Hopi mesas, like the nearby 'Saint Francis' Peaks, until very recent times were not in the Southwest, but in the Northwest-- northwestern New Spain.
     It has been only a little more than a hundred years, first with the Treaty of Guatelupe Hidalgo in 1848 and again with the Gadsden Purchase in 1854, that what was once Northwestern Mexico became divided to create what is now the southwestern United States. It is this recently that we who reside north of the International Boundry have evolved a conception of 'Southwest' which obscures underlying historical, geographic, and cultural realities -- realities which date back many thousands of years. The entire region from northern Sinaloa and southern Chihuahua to southern Utah and Colorado is characterized by a single climatic phenomenon: aridity. There are mountains and plateaus, high deserts and low deserts. The evergreen forests are sparse and their undergrowth even more so. The deserts and foothills are bedecked with thorn-covered trees, shrubs, and cacti. The Colorado River wears down the plateau to form a Grand Canyon just as the Rio Urique knifes into the Sierra Madre to open a Barranca del Cobre.
      So it is, too, that Vasquez de Coronado and Juan de Onate and Eusebio Kino and Francisco Garces, from 1539 to the mid-19th century, are a part of our common history and heritage. The religion of New Spain as well as Spanish traditions in art and architecture, Spanish language, and Spanish people themselves, as these have grown and changed through the character of Mexico, have become permanent attributes of what we think of as being 'Southwest.'
     Nowhere, however, does the provincialism of our modern concept of 'Southwest' become more apparent than when we come to consider the American Indian peoples who inhabit this great expanse. The nativities of Taos and San Ildefonso and Jemez, all in New Mexico, speak langauges ultimately related to those spoken by Mayos on the Rio Fuerte in northern Sinaloa. All are Aztec-Tanoan tongues.
     The Chiricahua Apaches, famed for leaders as Cochise and Geronimo, were as much at home in the northern reaches of Mexico's Sierra Madre as they were in the mountains of eastern Arizona and western New Mexico. And most surprising of all, perhaps, just as the Pima and Papago people of southern Arizona call themselves o'odham, so do the Southern Tepehuan people living in southern Durango. The language which is known to us as 'Piman' is spoken by the Lower Pimas of Sonora and Chihuahua, the Northern Tepehuanes of southwestern Chihuahua, the Southern Tepehuanes of Durango and Zacatecas, and, if there are any living today, the Tepecanos of northern Jalisco. It appears that the Pimas and Papagos, whom we think of as Indians of the Southwest, represent merely the northern fraction of a group of people more properly conceived of as 'Indians of the Northwest,' northwestern Mexico.
     So it is that, from the perspective of North Americans the Mexican northwest is, indeed, our other southwest." (Quoted from The Other Southwest - Indian Arts and Crafts of Northwestern Mexico - Published in 1977 by the Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona)
    
     The authors proceed to identify those indians who live in "our other Southwest". They are the Tarahumara, Warihio, Yaqui, Mayo, Lower Pima, Northern Tepehuan, Southern Tepehuan, and Seri. We will be most interested in the arts and crafts of the Yaquis and Mayos, and to a lesser degree the Tarahumara and Seri for reasons which will become more evident as we proceed. But first let us talk more about the people.