Recent debates about the future of academia have focused primarily on teaching the STEM subjects. This is certainly a valuable call for action, but it also threatens to ignore the significant contributions of the humanities and other fields. This article presents a workable alternative by way of looking at more technical writings by 18th-century German Jesuit missionaries in Sonora (today Mexico and Arizona), which invites a critical analysis of the data provided by those authors about the natural environment and the social conditions and also a thorough examination of "literary" texts at the same time from a humanistic perspective. Those narratives also serve as meaningful documents for all German students in the Southwest because they indicate the importance of the German language for the study of the local history going back almost two hundred years.