Border Town: Mexican Hat and the Navajo Nation
Near Mexican Hat, Utah
Mexican Hat sits on the northern edge of the Navajo Nation, and for most of its history that geographic fact has defined what the town is and who comes through it. The Navajo people have lived south of the San Juan River for generations, farming canyon bottomland and herding sheep and goats across land the United States government enclosed within reservation boundaries beginning in the eighteen sixties and expanded several times after that. The San Juan River marked one boundary of that reservation, and Mexican Hat stood just above it.
In the early twentieth century, trading posts in the region, Mexican Hat among them, were the primary points of commercial exchange between the Navajo Nation and the wider economy. A Navajo family would bring in a season's woven wool or a piece of silverwork and receive credit against purchases of flour, coffee, calico, and tools. The traders also held pawn, accepting jewelry as security against debts.
The system kept families dependent on their nearest post, which was by design. The cultural geography of Mexican Hat reflects this border history. The town faces north but serves south.
The people who stop at the gas station and the lodge are often headed into the Navajo Nation or returning from Monument Valley. The river crossing here was a place Navajo families had used for generations, and the town that grew up around it has always been more defined by where it sits than by what it contains.
