A Typology of Arizona Communities

IT is difficult to understand a community fully without looking at its relationship to the socio-economic milieu in which it is situated. A community does not exist as an isolate. There is always a certain amount of interaction between individual communities to form what might be called a larger or a regional community. With this in mind, the author, in connection with his study of an Arizona Mormon village, proposed to examine the relationship of such a community to the broader picture. It was found that it presented an interesting problem in the interplay of geography and economics upon the development of the region. This task is best accomplished by the development of a typology to include all of the communities in the area. In this case the area selected is that of the State of Arizona. It will be recognized that this is an arbitrary boundary. The political boundaries of the state do not coincide with that of the cultural area. Many of the types of communities that will be pointed out can be found throughout the larger general area called the Southwest. A conflict exists in the use of Southwest as a regional designation. There are two Southwests. One is composed of the plains areas of Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas and, possibly, parts of adjoining states. The United States Census calls this the West South Central Area. Sometimes it is called the Old Southwest. The second is the desert-mountain-plateau area of Arizona surrounded by western New Mexico and parts of adjoining California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and should include northern Sonora and Chihuahua. Arizona is a state of small towns and villages. According to the 1946 edition of the Rand McNally Road Atlas only eighteen of the nearly three hundred towns in Arizona have a population greater than 2500. Of these, ten are larger than 5000 and only two, Phoenix and Tucson, have a population of over 10,000. (The population figures used in this paper are generally those of 1940, and no attempt has been made to evaluate recent changes of the last few years.) A second characteristic of Arizona communities is that of physical isolation. For the most part the state consists of large expanses inhabited only by isolated ranches and homesteads. Only in scattered localities that possess valuable natural resources have single or small groups of communities been established. These favorable localities are usually blessed either with mineral deposits or water for irrigation. Thirdly, since the individual communities have grown up

Archaeology · Geography · Political science · Sociology · Typology · American Environmental and Regional History · Archaeology and Natural History

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  D W Meinig•Annals of the Association of…•1965

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  Open Access•Evon Z Vogt•American Anthropologist•1955

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