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The establishment of here, on the northern frontier of New Spain, solidified the connection between Tucson and a network to the south. Supply lines, family links, transportation routes all faced south from Tucson, to Sonora, Sinaloa and ultimately Mexico City, the viceroyalty’s center.

Arizpe, a small town along the Rio Sonora, was , the colonial region in which Tucson was the furthest north outpost. Beyond Tucson to the north was primarily indigenous land, and peoples such as the Tohono O’odham had their own networks of trade, family and migration, not oriented the same way the colonists were.

Today, of course, Tucson’s transportation network goes all across North America, to the east, west and north as well as south. And Phoenix, to the northwest, is the capital city we report to.

But, in my eyes at least, Tucson has never stopped being a city that faces southward. People’s generational family ties remain, across the border established by the Gadsden Purchase in 1854, and are reinforced as more people migrate north and south despite the hardened international line.

The trade links persist and are . Tucsonans of all backgrounds travel regularly to Mexico and the rest of Latin America. And whether we’re Border Patrol agents, border-rights activists or criminals criss-crossing the line, the border itself remains a magnetic draw to the south.

Tucson is in the USA but not completely of it, even 250 years after the presidio’s founding.

East-west to north-south

Growing up in Minneapolis, I lived in an east-west-oriented society. My family had a typical Anglo family story of ancestors from northern Europe, who migrated and moved west into the American interior. We discovered relatives in England and made close friends in Norway. Europe was just over the horizon to the east, an idea that school history lessons reinforced.

But I gradually turned south. I came to ÃÛÁÄÖ±²¥ in 1995 because I spoke Spanish, having spent more than a year in Mexico, Ecuador, Chile and other Latin American countries. I was able to get a reporting job in Flagstaff because of that. In 1997, I moved to Tucson and was soon assigned to cover border issues, a beat that got little national notice in those days, but that the Star prized.

My plan was to get enough experience to move on quickly from this hot and waterless land and eventually become a foreign correspondent. I applied for my first job away from Tucson about six months after getting here. But over time, I got used to it, then I really settled in. I got married here, had kids here and bought houses here.

All that time, though, the question of why I am in Tucson has occasionally nagged at me — especially on the hot summer days when rain never comes.

I found an answer of sorts just this year, while listening to , a historian and author of He tells the history of the American continents in relationship to each other, not in an east-west orientation between the Americas and Europe as it’s usually told, but in fraternal conversation between north and south, between Anglo and Latin America.

That’s when it occurred to me: I was happy to stay in Tucson because it’s a place that is oriented north-south, the way I had become.

Copper to baseball

I don’t want to exaggerate the point. Of course, people migrate here from all over the United States and the world. Goods get here from all over the globe. And people travel to and from Europe, Asia and Africa. This is the integrated, cosmopolitan world of today.

But the underlying north-south orientation is persistent, from the copper mined here by , to the music made by local artists, to cultural traditions like the annual pilgrimage to Magdalena de Kino, Sonora.

In the early years on my beat, I walked the pilgrimage with a large family group from Tucson who had walked every year since the 1970s. Some started the walk in Tucson, others in Nogales, Sonora. We headed on foot to the Temple of Mary Magdalene, where a statue of San Francisco Xavier lies and walkers arrive as fulfillment of their mandas, or promises. The tradition is perhaps two centuries old and continues despite occasional outbreaks of violence in Sonora.

If you read Patricia Preciado’s book you’ll see familiar themes there, too. People from Hermosillo, Trincheras, Ures and other towns around Sonora wind up in Southern ÃÛÁÄÖ±²¥ for work, usually on ranches, sometimes in mines. They leave family behind and make a new family here as they scrap for a living.

The hardened border has made movement across the 1854 line tougher, but the ties don’t break that easily. And they are often reinforced.

It was a reminder of that when the owners of the Mayos de Navojoa baseball team announced in May that they were moving the team to Tucson to participate in the . After the Mexican Baseball Fiesta in October, the new Tucson team will launch into a season against teams like the Tomateros de Culiacan and the Naranjeros de Hermosillo.

They’re familiar places on old routes that Tucson has faced, known and relied on since the colonial era.