Memories

Writer and naturalist Gregory McNamee has spent decades documenting the Southwest in all its complexity. In this short chapter from his The University of Arizona: A History in 100 Stories (2024), he turns his eye to the Southwest Center itself, where it came from, what it set out to do, and why a region this hard to define needed an institution willing to embrace that difficulty. A compact and affectionate portrait from the outside looking in.

Every institution has a moment of origin: a room, a conversation, a decision... For the Southwest Center, that moment was September 16, 1978, at Mission San Xavier del Bac. This is the letter that called that room together. Signed by University of Arizona President John P. Schaefer, it is a simple invitation to a day-long workshop. It is also, without knowing it yet, the founding document of the next five decades.

Vol. 1, No. 1. The Southwest Center had just opened its doors  (with budget cuts already threatening its first programs), when it sent out this newsletter in early 1987. It announces the birth of the Journal of the Southwest, the first Brown Bag lunch talk, plans for a Jewish archives, and a commitment to cross the border intellectually long before it was fashionable to do so. Everything the Center would become is already here, in embryo, typed on a typewriter and sent through the mail.

The Southwest Center's first seminar series, held in early 1987, was called "A General Introduction to Our Region,"  and it delivered on that promise with a lineup that reads like a who's who of Southwestern scholarship. Bernard Fontana, Thomas Sheridan, Charles Bowden, Barbara Babcok, Jim Griffith... The lectures took place at the Center's new home on Highland Avenue, shared, charmingly, with the Little Chapel of All Nations.