One of the glaring gaps in Southwestern historiography has been the lack of a modern scholarly interpretation of the Spanish and Mexican presence in Arizona. Hubert Howe Bancroft\u27s History of the North Mexican States and Texas and John F. Bannon\u27s The Spanish Borderlands Frontier, 1513-1821 have been the best sources for the study of pre-American Arizona, but these works treat the history of this region as a subtopic of a larger story. With the publication of Hispanic Arizona, scholars now have a thorough, detailed and scholarly study that is entirely devoted to the history of northern Sonora and southern Arizona
