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The
Purpose of the Southwest Center of the University of Arizona is to
work toward a definition, to illuminate and to present the character,
of the Greater Southwest: the heartland of Arizona, New Mexico, Sonora,
and Chihuahua, and its peripheries. The region has for millennia been
a crossroads of cultures, languages, customs, and ideas. Its diverse
ethnic groups and societies, past and present, lend the Southwest
a distinct regional identity, shaped by the land itself.
It
was in recognition of that special character that the Southwest Center
was first conceived at a conference held at San Xavier del Bac Mission,
outside Tucson, in 1978, when then-president John Schaefer and field
historian Bernard L. Fontana, among others, first proposed that an
institution devoted to regional studies be founded at the University
of Arizona. Eight years later, their vision was realized with the
formal establishment of the Southwest Center.
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