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 of the country is the "United Mexican States" (), since it is a federation of thirty-two states. The official name was first used in the Constitution of 1824, and was retained in the constitutions of 1857 and 1917. Informally, "Mexico" is used along with "Mexican Republic" ("República Mexicana"). On 22 November 2012, outgoing Mexican President Felipe Calderón proposed changing the official name of the country to "México". Anahuac (meaning land surrounded by water) was the name in Nahuatl given to what is now Mexico during Pre-Hispanic times. When the Spanish conquistadors besieged México-Tenochtitlan in 1521, it was almost completely destroyed.