Oquitoa

Oquitoa, seat of its municipality, is a village of 474 people in the Altar river valley. The name comes from the Piman language and is usually given as white woman, though another reading takes it from hukit'o, meaning next to or nearby. People live from cattle and from fields of alfalfa, beans, corn and fodder, and the center has a quiet little plaza with a wrought-iron bandstand.

Father Kino first mentions San Antonio de Uquetoa on January 19, 1689, and its first priest, Antonio Arias, named it for his patron, Saint Anthony of Padua. For decades it was only an outstation, of Tubutama, Caborca and later Átil. There was no church in 1723, a chapel was going up around 1730, the 1751 revolt damaged it, and when Bishop Antonio de los Reyes visited in 1772 he counted 106 souls and found neither church nor priest's house. Fray Francisco Moyano came over from Átil around 1795, became head of the Pimería Alta missions in 1801, probably moved the mission's seat to Oquitoa, and served until his death in 1818.

The church you see today stands on a rise just west of the village, ringed by the cemetery. It is a single-nave hall with a flat roof on mesquite beams, the Jesuit way of building in this region, and it is the only mission church in the Pimería Alta still holding regular services that keeps that form. The Franciscans refurbished it between 1788 and 1797, probably adding the brick façade with its scalloped doorway and the triumphal arch between nave and sanctuary; the choir loft and two side windows were rebuilt in 1920. Inside are colonial paintings of the life of Christ, survivors of an altarpiece lost to termites, a copper baptismal font and old carved saints. On the Day of the Dead families light candles on every grave and the whole hill glows.