PUBLICATIONS
October 2002 Issue
The Geographical Review
October 2002, Vol. 92 (4), pp. 555-581
REVISITING THE TOPIA ROAD: WALKING IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF WEST AND PARSONS
JOHNATHAN WALKER and JONATHAN LEIB
Keywords: landscape change, Mexico, James J. Parsons, photography, Sierra Madre Occidental, Robert C. West.
[View the abstract in Adobe pdf format]
ABSTRACT:
In 1940, Berkeley graduate-student geographers Robert West and James Parsons traveled to
Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental to retrace the Topia Road, colonial Mexico’s main trans-Sierran trail linking
isolated mountain mining hamlets with the Pacific Coast and the world beyond, a journey chronicled in a 1941
Geographical Review article. Almost sixty years later, we chronicle our attempt to retrace West and Parsons’s
route. Based on field observations, interviews with local informants, replication of Parsons’s photographs,
and his field notes, we document landscape change in what West and Parsons referred to as some of the most
isolated settlements in Mexico. We assess changes in the still-remote communities along the route in terms of
three influences: mining, migration, and drug trafficking.
Keywords: landscape change, Mexico, James J. Parsons, photography, Sierra Madre Occidental, Robert C. West.
[View the abstract in Adobe pdf format]
ABSTRACT:
In 1940, Berkeley graduate-student geographers Robert West and James Parsons traveled to Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental to retrace the Topia Road, colonial Mexico’s main trans-Sierran trail linking isolated mountain mining hamlets with the Pacific Coast and the world beyond, a journey chronicled in a 1941 Geographical Review article. Almost sixty years later, we chronicle our attempt to retrace West and Parsons’s route. Based on field observations, interviews with local informants, replication of Parsons’s photographs, and his field notes, we document landscape change in what West and Parsons referred to as some of the most isolated settlements in Mexico. We assess changes in the still-remote communities along the route in terms of three influences: mining, migration, and drug trafficking.