American anthropologist, photographer and historian
Anita Álvarez de Williams (born 1931) is an American anthropologist, photographer and historian Mexicali-based expert on the Cocopah who wrote the first full-length synthesis of archaeological and ethnographic information on the Baja California peninsula.
Her work has been of great importance to understand the past of Baja California and the borderlands area. She has published "The Cocopah People" (1974), "Travelers among the Cucapa" (1975), and "Primeros pobladores de la Baja California. Introducción a la antropología de la península" (1975), among several books and academic journals both in Mexico and the United States. Her books and articles described natural resource utilization and environmental management, material culture, idea systems, and indigenous history. 
Álvarez founded Mexicali’s University Museum and she was director of the Baja California office of the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI). She was known for collected and synthesized information on Cocopa ethnohistory and ethnography. 
In her publications, Álvarez also narrated how the Colorado River has been dammed, detoured, disputed, and contaminated along its entire course so that it no longer reaches its original destination into the Gulf of California. She concludes by stressing the need everyone has for Colorado river to be conserved and allowed to flow through its delta once again. 