The Silver City Range in southwest New Mexico contains Proterozoic basement rocks that are overlain by a sequence of Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Paleogene strata. These rocks are folded in a broad, NW-SE-trending, eastfacing monocline that lies structurally above an east-directed thrust fault. The youngest rocks folded in the Silver City monocline are similar to other late Eocene and early Oligocene volcanic rocks of the Mogollon-Datil volcanic fi eld; an ash-fl ow tuff near the bottom of the volcanic sequence gives an 40 Ar/ 39 Ar age on sanidine of 34.9 0.4 Ma (2), and another tuff near the top of the section contains zircons that yield a weighted 206 Pb/ 238 U age of 34.6 0.6 Ma (2). We interpret similar structures in the Little Burro Mountains, Lone Mountain, and Bayard area, immediately east and west of the Silver City monocline, to all be genetically related to a system of basement-involved thrust faults. Modeling of these structures from the Mangas Valley in the southwest to the Mimbres Valley in the northeast, suggests ~17% total shortening. We conclude that Laramide shortening was active in southwest New Mexico generally, and the Silver City region in particular, from the Cretaceous until the earliest phase of Mogollon-Datil volcanism beginning at ~37 Ma, during which time the earliest extension in the southern Rio Grande rift was initiated. The fi nal stage of Laramide shortening, recorded in the Silver City monocline, took place during a lull of volcanism (and extension) from ~31.5 to ~29.3 Ma. We explain the contemporaneity of shortening, signifi cant ignimbrite eruptions, and crustal extension as the consequence of intermittent slab breakoff and renewed underthrusting of the downgoing Farallon plate.