Araçatuba began on 2 December 1908 as a work camp on the Estrada de Ferro Noroeste do Brasil, the railway being driven northwest across São Paulo toward the Mato Grosso frontier. Its name is Tupi: arasá, the araçá fruit, plus tyba, an abundance of, so the place was known for its thickets of Psidium cattleianum long before any surveyor arrived. Camps like this usually disappeared once the rail head moved on. This one did not. It became a municipality on 8 December 1921, and by then the settlers were arriving in numbers, Italians and Japanese and Spaniards and Portuguese, taking up land the railway had made reachable. The line also brought sickness. Epidemics of cutaneous leishmaniasis broke out along the Noroeste during its construction in 1907 and 1908, spreading with the deforestation that opened the route.

Three crops built the city in sequence. Coffee ran from roughly 1910 into the 1930s, on the same speculative wave that pushed plantations across the whole interior of São Paulo. Cotton took over from the 1930s into the 1950s. Then came the cattle, and with them the square. The transition was less a collapse than a reallocation: land that had been worked intensively by hand was turned to pasture, which needs far fewer people and far more space. That is the shape of the northwest today, and it is why the arroba mattered so much here. Araçatuba was the point where the herds of three states met a railhead, and where the men who owned them could look each other in the face.

The modern city holds about 208,000 people across 1,167 square kilometres, sitting at roughly 390 metres near the Tietê River and the Ribeirão Baguaçu, some 530 kilometres from the state capital. Cattle no longer dominate the ledger. Services account for just under 80 percent of local GDP, industry for about 19 percent, and primary production for under 2 percent, a distribution that describes a regional hub rather than a farm town. Araçatuba anchors a microregion of eight municipalities spread over 5,365 square kilometres, and it has become the university centre for the northwest of the state. The Brazil-Bolivia gas pipeline crosses here, and the Tietê-Paraná waterway gives the city a barge connection to the interior. Expô Araçatuba, held annually, is among the largest agricultural fairs in the country, which is the old economy showing through the new one.

In 1997 researchers recorded Lutzomyia longipalpis, the sandfly that transmits visceral leishmaniasis, in an urban area of São Paulo state for the first time. The place was Araçatuba. An outbreak followed at the end of the decade, affecting dogs heavily and people too, and it forced a rethink of a disease that had been filed away as rural and remote. The lesson public health researchers drew was blunt: old assumptions do not survive rapid social change. A city that grows outward into pasture and scrub, with dogs in every yard and vegetation at the edge of every new subdivision, builds the conditions the parasite needs. Control programmes in Araçatuba have been studied ever since as a template for what urban leishmaniasis looks like and how hard it is to reverse.

One statistic captures how Araçatuba actually moves: motorcycles and scooters make up 37 percent of the city's registered vehicles, well above the Brazilian average of 27 percent. It is flat, warm and spread out, and a bike is the sensible answer. The SP-300, the Marechal Cândido Rondon highway, and the SP-463 carry the road traffic; Dario Guarita Airport (SBAU) handles the flights. On the northern edge, the Tietê draws people out of town on weekends to the yacht club and the jet skis, a river that was a barrier when the railway crews arrived and is now a recreation ground. The football is provided by Associação Esportiva Araçatuba, latest in a line of clubs stretching back to the railway workers' Clube Atlético Ferroviário.