Patagonia Mountains the Sonoran town of San Lazaro. The old mining camps and ghost towns of Mowry, Washington Camp, Harshaw, and Duquesne are located in the Patagonia Mountains. Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, are in the valley to the southwest of the mountain range. The San Rafael Valley and Canelo Hills are to the east of the Patagonia Mountains. The connected Santa Rita, Patagonia, and Sierra San Antonio ranges are part of the Madrean Sky Islands ecoregion, the sky island mountain ranges region on the north of the Sierra Madre Occidental, the major cordillera and mountain ecoregion of central-western and northwestern Mexico.
Name of Mexico Name of Mexico The name of Mexico has several hypotheses that entail the origin, history, and use of the name "Mexico", which dates back to 14th century Mesoamerica. The Nahuatl word "Mexico" means "place of the Mexica" but the ethnonym "Mexicatl" itself is of unknown etymology. An alternate possibility is that the name may come from the word "mexixin", a cress that grew in the swamplands of Lake Texcoco. It was an edible grass that the Aztecs or Mexica survived on as they settled where today lies México City. The country México did not name its capital after itself, as