Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail

Rosa Maria Bezerra Nieto

View the recipients of the 2023 National Park Service Excellence in Interpretation Awards, which recognize outstanding contributions to the practice of interpretation and education by NPS employees.

Among the earliest non-indigenous residents of California were hundreds of people of African background who descended from enslaved peoples taken to Mexico during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These Afro-Latine shaped the character of California much as Puritans shaped the character of New England.

The Anza Trail Cultural History Park is a case study for making cultural history accessible using universal design principles. The park is a youth-designed space for people of all ages and abilities serves as a public park as well as an outdoor classroom for the Arizona School for the Deaf and the Blind. Features of the park include a plaza lined with native plants and an accessible pathway with interactive, accessible exhibits.

Across the US, changes in water availability are altering which plants grow where. These changes are evident at a broad scale. But not all areas experience the same climate in the same way, even within the boundaries of a single national park. A new dataset gives park managers a valuable tool for understanding why vegetation has changed and how it might change in the future under different climate-change scenarios.

The Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail enters the US at Nogales, Arizona, beginning a 1200-mile stretch of historic trail through the deserts and mountains of Arizona and California. However, the origins of Anza expedition of 1775-76 are in Sonora, Mexico. The people on this historic journey were recruited from the mining towns and farmlands of Sonora and Sinaloa. Anza Trail staff had the opportunity to trace the trail in Mexico with host country partners.

The corrido is a traditional Mexican song style that has evolved over the past 200 years in northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. Corridos are all about storytelling. They tell of battle victories (and loses), individuals taking on the establishment, the lives of great or notorious people, and – perhaps the most ancient type of story in human history – the epic journey. Learn about this enduring tradition and listen to a corrido about the Anza Expedition of 1776

Eight women were pregnant during the nine-month Anza colonizing expedition of 1775-76. Many of them gave birth in route. Manuela Ygnacia López Peñuelas tragically died after giving birth to a healthy baby. Women's reproduction was crucial to the Spanish empire's successful conquest of Alta California. With little choice in the matter, these women faced extreme hardship in hopes of making a better home in a new land at the expense of Indigenous homes and lifeways.

María Feliciana Arballo, a 25-year-old widow of Afro-Latina descent with two small children, was one of about forty women in the Anza expedition when it began its colonizing journey from Sonora, Mexico to Alta California (upper California) in 1775.