Sonoyta

Sonoyta is the seat of General Plutarco Elías Calles municipality in north-western Sonora, built right up against the international line opposite Lukeville, Arizona. It counted 11,440 people in the 2020 census and sits about 390 meters up in the Altar Desert. The town makes its living as a junction. Federal Highway 2, which follows the border from Mexicali to Caborca, runs through the middle, and Highway 8 starts here for the coast, so nearly everyone driving down from Arizona to the beach passes its small shops, markets and gas stations.

The name comes from a spring at the foot of Loma Alta that the Tohono O'odham, also called Pápagos, knew as Ṣon Oidag, roughly "base of the water". O'odham bands ranged over the Pinacate, Quitovac and Sonoyta when Jesuit missionaries turned the spring into a mission settlement in the 1690s under the name San Marcelo, and a group of Sobaipuri Pima settled there too. Eusebio Francisco Kino came through in October 1698 and noted it as a fine site for a large town. The German Jesuit Enrique Ruhen arrived in 1751 and was killed that November in the Pima Revolt, a day after Tomás Tello died at Caborca. Nothing of the old mission survives; a replica stands in its memory.

Mines were found nearby in 1836. Sonoyta was a municipality of the Altar district at times in the 19th century, later fell under Caborca and, from 1952, under Puerto Peñasco, until the present municipality was created in August 1989. Cross-border import and export trade thrived until Mexican customs rules changed, and from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s many families left for other cities. On the US side, Lukeville lies entirely inside Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Sonora keeps no daylight saving time, so clocks match Arizona's all year.