Ciudad Obregón
— — a grid city the desert agreed to.
Not only on a wall.
“A flat city laid out on a grid in the wheat country south of Hermosillo. The streets run long and straight, the sky goes a long way, and the farms outside town turn green for a few months a year when the water comes down from the Oviáchic dam. Ciudad Obregón is younger than most Mexican cities its size — it was a railhead a hundred years ago and a city of three hundred thousand now. The Yaqui River runs nearby, and the wheat that built the place is still the thing the place is about.
Ciudad Obregón, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Ciudad Obregón is the seat of Cajeme municipality in the southern part of Sonora, about 525 kilometres south of the United States border at Nogales. The city sits on the broad alluvial plain of the Yaqui Valley, near the Yaqui River, and is the agricultural and commercial centre of the state's second-largest metropolitan area. Founded in 1927 along the line of the Southern Pacific Railroad and named for the Sonoran general and Mexican president Álvaro Obregón, it grew quickly once irrigation from the Álvaro Obregón Dam, completed in 1952, opened the valley to large-scale wheat farming.
The year here is a wheat year. Planting runs through November and December, harvest comes in late April and May, and the green of the irrigated valley is brief and intense before the summer dry returns. The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, CIMMYT, has run trial fields outside Ciudad Obregón for decades — Norman Borlaug worked the Yaqui Valley plots through the 1940s and 1950s, and the wheat varieties he developed there reshaped agriculture across South Asia. The valley is still one of the most productive wheat regions in Mexico.
The climate is hot desert, BWh in the Köppen system. Summer highs run above 40°C through June and July, winter days are warm and dry, and rainfall is sparse and concentrated in a short late-summer monsoon. Most of the water that makes the valley productive does not fall on the city — it comes down through canals from the Álvaro Obregón reservoir on the Yaqui River, about sixty kilometres north. The light is the flat, long-shadowed light of a low desert basin.