Postcards from the Sonora Border is the second installment in Daniel D. Arreola's four-book project about the visual history of towns along Mexico's northern border during the early twentieth century (the first volume, Postcards from the Río Bravo Border, having been published in 2013). Postcards from the Sonora Border reconstructs the urban environment of five Sonoran cities and towns through the medium of the vintage historic postcard, thousands of which, in this case, are in the author's personal possession. What results from this venture is a stunning re-creation of place and built environment in northern Sonora during the oftentimes tumultuous but always interesting first half of the twentieth century.
Arreola opens with a general discussion of Sonoran border towns, noting that the communities under consideration have been equally shaped by the particularities of Sonoran history and their shared propinquity to the international border line. The author writes that “the...
