Sonora: The Elusive Site, the Debated Name, and Various Designations

Abstract

A place named Sonora appears in seventeenth and eighteenth century documents and on later maps. Two sources place this site north of the present-day town of Huépac. Other sources place the site south of Huèpac. All of these sources place it on the east side of the Río Sonora, but use various designations. This paper analyzes documentary, cartographic, and geographic evidence and concludes that there were actually two places named Sonora. One was a relatively late Spanish mining settlement south of Huépac, but on the west side of the river, and known today as San Felipe de Jesús. The other place named Sonora was an ancient Ópata settlement called Sonota located at a spring on the east side of the Río Sonora north of Huépac. Correcting misunderstandings, mispronunciations, misspellings, and differences in Spaniards’ native language fluency over a century point to the river, valley, and state being named after this early site.