I A cache of primary sources and photographs about Spanish Discalced Carmelite parishes assembled in a decade of public history exhibits at the Arizona Historical Society have revealed a world within a world, a window in time describing Mexican America in Arizona during early statehood.  In these literary and visual narratives, actors and audiences distinguished by gender, generation, occupation, and spirituality played out dramas of Mexican American identity formation in a geo-historical region called Gadsden Arizona. In this geo-spiritual homeland also named Aztlan, a migrant nation connected by memory and experience to Mexico engaged public ritual to demonstrate the epic scale and thematic complexity of early twentieth-century border culture. In this work, Gadsden Arizona represents the most recent frontier acquisition in the United States, the final state of the continental Union, a continuation of modern Mexico, an internal Orient named Aztlan.This first generation of Carmelite priests in southern Arizona returned to Iberia to replace fallen comrades during the Spanish Civil War. Thereafter, their imprint became a template upon which later generations of community leaders traced their cultural objectives. Almost a century after their arrival, the record of their presence represents a breakthrough in public history about regional Mexican American culture.