Peoples of a Sonoran Desert Oasis: Recovering the Lost History and Culture of Quitobaquito

Jared Orsi offers an engaging history of Quitobaquito (or A'al Vaipia among the O'odham), an oasis located in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument along the Arizona-Sonora border. In a narrative rich with primary text material, he illuminates the natural, oral, and written histories of the oasis from its first human inhabitation in approximately 10,000 BCE to the present, concentrating on the oasis's importance to the Hia C'ed O'odham and the guardianship of the National Park Service (NPS) since 1937. With four of its six content chapters focusing on the NPS's relationship with human activities at the site, the book layers juxtapositions of human landscapes with the NPS's early mandate to preserve “an imaginary moment at which [Quitobaquito] had no inhabitants” and subsequent undertakings that, especially since the 1990s, have led to a more inclusive vision of caretaking (13).Orsi begins with the Sonoran Desert's first peoples, including the Hohokam, the ancestors of the Hia C'ed O'odham and their O'odham relatives. As illustrated through oral history and the archaeological record, the O'odham embrace worldviews predicated upon change and the necessity of adaptation. Landscapes are unstable, and as a result, subsistence strategies include agriculture, hunting and gathering, and, especially for the Hia C'ed O'odham, mobility. Spanish colonialism brought an opposing worldview to the region. Settlers sought to establish permanent homes, farms, and ranches and to impose their lifeways upon Indigenous peoples. Through the end of the Spanish period, the O'odham continued to adapt to change, and Quitobaquito evolved into a multiethnic settlement where farmers grew European crops and Spaniards and O'odham traded their goods. Intermarriage deepened multiethnic relationships, and O'odham seasonal movements persisted. But by 1850, Mexican independence and the US occupation of the region were signaling more radical changes at an increasing pace. The international border, railways, and visions of large-scale commercial agriculture transformed the landscape in ways that constrained the O'odham and eventually brought twentieth-century scientific ideas of resource management to Quitobaquito.The middle chapters detail the early struggle of the NPS to preserve the oasis by excluding human history and its later efforts to reverse and update that mission into a more inclusive and multidimensional one. Threading the theme of exclusion from the first era of settler colonialism through the establishment of the national monument in 1937, Orsi historicizes the NPS's attempt “to remake Quitobaquito into a bordered, peopleless pleasure ground where visitors could study and enjoy land fixed in time and preserved unchanging” (59). He tells the story of José Juan Orozco, whose family continued to ranch and farm in the oasis after other Hia C'ed O'odham had abandoned it. Although Orozco's son fought to remain on the homestead after his father's death, the NPS declined to renew the family grazing permit and in 1962 bulldozed their seventy-five-year-old residence and fig and pomegranate orchard. Meanwhile, legal and sociopolitical changes during the 1960s and 1970s set the stage for an about-face, and the park turned from its commitment to freezing time and protecting a peopleless landscape to managing a dynamic ecological, historical, and recreational space. In an effort to institutionalize the change in its vision, in 1994 the NPS nominated the oasis to the National Register of Historic Places, proposing to honor the human history it had erased. However, pressures ranging from endangered species protection to international border policies brought new tensions among stakeholders including the O'odham and impeded progress toward more inclusive management processes.In his final two chapters, Orsi thoughtfully interprets Quitobaquito through the lens of contemporary issues such as climate change, immigration, and decolonization projects. The NPS has engaged with the Tohono O'odham nation and individual Hia C'ed O'odham on projects relevant to the O'odham and their cultural sovereignty. More broadly, the founding of the International Sonoran Desert Alliance in 1993 actualized the involvement of trinational (American, Mexican, and Indigenous) decision-making in the stewardship of natural and cultural history. Orsi concludes with recommendations aimed at advancing ad hoc cooperative efforts into commitments embedded in the NPS's institutional structure. Replanting the orchard with rare and heirloom varieties provides one example.With its lively prose, maps, and illustrations, Peoples of a Sonoran Desert Oasis should appeal to a wide audience of readers interested in the Southwest, national parks, border history, Native American history, and ecological and historic preservation. Orsi provides a place-based history that also tells a larger story and contributes to the study of America's relationship with parklands and “wild” spaces.