Pueblo in the context of "American Southwest"

The Southwestern United States, also known as the American Southwest or simply the Southwest, is a geographic and cultural region of the United States that includes Arizona and New Mexico, along with adjacent portions of California, Colorado, Nevada, Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah. The largest cities by metropolitan area are Phoenix, Las Vegas, El Paso, Albuquerque, and Tucson. Before 1848, in the historical region of Santa Fe de Nuevo México as well as parts of Alta California and Coahuila y Tejas, settlement was almost non-existent outside of New Mexico's pueblos and Spanish or Mexican municipalities. Much of the area had been a part of New Spain and Mexico until the United States acquired the area through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and the smaller Gadsden Purchase in 1854.

While the region's boundaries are not officially defined, there have been attempts to do so. One such definition is from the Mojave Desert in California in the west (117° west longitude) to Carlsbad, New Mexico, in the east (104° west longitude); another says that it extends from the Mexico–United States border in the south to the southern areas of Colorado, Utah, and Nevada in the north (39° north latitude). In another definition, the core Southwestern U.S. includes only the states of Arizona and New Mexico; others focus on the land within the old Spanish and Mexican borders of the Nuevo México Province or the later American New Mexico Territory.

Ohkay Owingeh (Tewa: Ohkay Ówîngeh, pronounced [ʔòhkèː ʔówîŋgè]), known by its Spanish name as San Juan Pueblo from 1598 to 2005, is a pueblo in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico. For statistical purposes, the United States Census Bureau has defined that community as a census-designated place (CDP). Ohkay Owingeh is also the federally recognized tribe of Pueblo people inhabiting the town.

San Jose, officially the City of San José (/ˌsæn hoʊˈzeɪ, -ˈseɪ/ SAN hoh-ZAY, -⁠SAY; Spanish: [saŋ xoˈse]), is a cultural, commercial, and political center within the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley. With a city population of 997,368 and a metropolitan area population of 1.95 million, it is the most populous city in both the Bay Area and Northern California and the 12th-most populous in the United States. Located in the center of the Santa Clara Valley on the southern shore of San Francisco Bay, San Jose covers an area of 179.97 sq mi (466.1 km) and is the county seat of Santa Clara County.

Before the arrival of the Spanish, the area around San Jose was long inhabited by the Tamien nation of the Ohlone people. San Jose was founded on November 29, 1777, as the Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe, the first city founded in the Californias. It became a part of Mexico in 1821 after the Mexican War of Independence. Following the U.S. Conquest of California during the Mexican–American War, the territory was ceded to the United States in 1848. After California achieved statehood two years later, San Jose served as the state's first capital. San Jose experienced an economic boom after World War II, with a rapid population growth and aggressive annexation of nearby communities in the 1950s and 1960s. The rapid growth of the technology industry in Silicon Valley further accelerated the city's transition from an agricultural center to an urbanized metropolitan area, prompting Mayor Tom McEnery to adopt San Jose's current motto, "Capital of Silicon Valley", in 1988. Results of the 1990 U.S. census indicated that San Jose had surpassed San Francisco in population. By the early 2000s, San Jose was California's fastest-growing economy.

The Pueblo peoples or Puebloans are Native Americans in the Southwestern United States who share common agricultural, material, and religious practices. Among the currently inhabited pueblos, Taos, San Ildefonso, Acoma, Zuni, and Hopi are some of the most commonly known. Pueblo people speak languages from four different language families, and each pueblo is further divided culturally by kinship systems and agricultural practices, although all cultivate varieties of corn (maize).

Pueblo peoples have lived in the American Southwest for millennia and descend from the Ancestral Pueblo peoples. The term Anasazi is sometimes used to refer to Ancestral Puebloan. "Anasazi" is a Navajo adoption of a Ute term that translates to Ancient Enemy or Primitive Enemy, but was used by them to mean something like "barbarian" or "savage", hence the modern Pueblo peoples' rejection of it (see exonym).

Chaco Culture National Historical Park is a United States National Historical Park in the American Southwest hosting a large concentration of pre-Columbian indigenous ruins of pueblos. The park is located in northwestern New Mexico, between Albuquerque and Farmington, in a remote canyon cut by the Chaco Wash. Containing the most sweeping collection of ancient ruins north of Mexico, the park preserves one of the most important cultural and historical areas in the United States.

Between AD 900 and 1150, Chaco Canyon was a major cultural center for the Ancestral Puebloans. Chacoans quarried sandstone blocks and hauled timber from great distances, assembling fifteen major complexes that remained the largest buildings ever built in North America until the 19th century. Evidence of archaeoastronomy at Chaco has been proposed, with the "Sun Dagger" petroglyph at Fajada Butte a popular example. Many Chacoan buildings may have been aligned to capture the solar and lunar cycles, requiring generations of astronomical observations and centuries of skillfully coordinated construction. Climate change is thought to have led to the emigration of Chacoans and the eventual abandonment of the canyon, beginning with a fifty-year drought commencing in 1130.

El Camino Real (Spanish; literally The Royal Road, sometimes translated as The King's Highway) is a 600-mile (965-kilometer) commemorative route connecting the 21 Spanish missions in California (formerly the region Alta California in the Spanish Empire) from Mission San Diego de Alcalá in San Diego to Mission San Francisco Solano in Sonoma, along with a number of sub-missions, four presidios, and three pueblos. The route is historically associated with a network of royal roads (caminos reales) used by inhabitants of New Spain. The modern commemorative route in the U.S. state of California is named after these roads, and is officially defined in the California Streets and Highways Code to run along various roads from Interstate 5 at the Mexican border to State Route 12 in Sonoma.

During the period of Spanish rule, there was no single road constructed by the Spanish to connect the missions, with most of the network of royal roads following historic Native American trading routes. These various caminos reales covered much of what is today California, but with no single special route designated to link the missions. The name was revived in the American era in connection with the boosterism associated with the Mission Revival movement of the early 20th century. Streets throughout California bear the "El Camino Real" name. The route has been continually upgraded and is decorated with commemorative bell markers.