The University of Arizona Press
Date: Tuesday, August 12, 2025
Time: 12 p.m., MST
Where: Arizona Historical Society virtual event
Cynthia Radding, author of Bountiful Deserts: Sustaining Indigenous Worlds in Northern New Spain, will speak on “Spiritual Geographies and Imperial Borderlands in the Sonoran Desert,” as part of the Arizona Historical Society’s summer history talks. This summer, the series focuses on the Spanish period in Arizona. The event is free, but donations are welcome at registration. Register here for this virtual event.
About the book:
Bountiful Deserts foregrounds the knowledge of Indigenous peoples in the arid lands of northwestern Mexico, for whom the desert was anything but barren or empty. Instead, they nurtured and harvested the desert as a bountiful and sacred space. Drawing together historical texts and oral testimonies, archaeology, and natural history, author Cynthia Radding develops the relationships between people and plants and the ways that Indigenous people sustained their worlds before European contact through the changes set in motion by Spanish encounters, highlighting the long process of colonial conflicts and adaptations over more than two centuries. This work reveals the spiritual power of deserts by weaving together the cultural practices of historical peoples and contemporary living communities, centered especially on the Yaqui/Yoeme and Mayo/Yoreme.
