Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

by Samuel Truett

Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest StudiesIn the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mexicans and Americans joined together to transform the U.S.–Mexico borderlands into a crossroads of modern economic development. This book reveals the forgotten story of their ambitious dreams and their ultimate failure to control this fugitive terrain.
Focusing on a mining region that spilled across the Arizona–Sonora border, this book shows how entrepreneurs, corporations, and statesmen tried to domesticate nature and society within a transnational context. Efforts to tame a “wild” frontier were stymied by labor struggles, social conflict, and revolution. Fugitive Landscapes explores the making and unmaking of the U.S.–Mexico border, telling how ordinary people resisted the domination of empires, nations, and corporations to shape transnational history on their own terms.  By moving beyond traditional national narratives, it offers new lessons for our own border-crossing age.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Westerns

272 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2006

Reviews

[Valeria · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book but omg I should have paid more attention to the industry aspect of this book and it should have been more memorable because I totally blanked during my presentation in class!!!!!

Ugghhh still very frustrated that I read the whole book yet I couldn't remember a single thing when asked to summarize it

[Erica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful book about the Arizona-Sonora copper borderlands, narrating the story of US capitalists' focus on first expanding mining markets in Sonora, then the capitalist consolidation and industrial transformation of that area. Complex and interesting read.

[Jason Dormady · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fine coverage of some contexts and events of the US/Mexico borderlands.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reminder excerpt from analysis for HIST 400
Fugitive Landscapes, by Samuel Truett, is a historical examination of the US-Mexico borderlands through a lens of the appropriation of space and landscapes. The book is structured in chapter-stories that follow the story of one town through its history, then shift to another landscape in the next chapter. The US-Mexico borderlands were constantly shifting in the American perception as well as in reality. Truett calls attention to the idea that borders seem fixed and divisive today, but the history of the US-Mexico border is one of transnational cooperation and development. Modern Americans see distinct nations and states, not connections and gray areas that the borderlands invariably have been throughout history.
Truett argues his case through the examination of border landscapes. He follows the history of Sonora on the western coast of Mexico and north into Arizona from the Spanish and Jesuit colonization and conversion to through its development as a mining and ranching area in the mid-1800s, to its boom and bust in the late 1800s. Then he turns to other areas in the “copper borderlands.” He first defines fugitive landscapes in the prologue: “This is the story of what actually happened. Corporations, states and regional entrepreneurs hoped to domesticate and modernize a fugitive landscape - what they saw as a wild and barbaric frontier - but it continually slipped out of their grasp.”1 He borrows the term from historian Raymond Craib, who wrote Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixation and Fugitive Landscapes, about the Mexican obsession with turning local places into national spaces to implement development, uniformity and political control.2 Towns like Tombstone, Brisee, Douglas, Naco, Agua Prieta and Cananea exemplify the “fugitive landscapes” that American and Mexican governments tried to rein in under the law, the state and the nation. Fugitive landscapes tie together the book and his argument; they are landscapes that defy categorization and norms, rolling through history in cycles of boom and bust, modernization and lawlessness, definition and shades of gray that transcend cultures and borders...

[Andy Villanueva III · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author does a good job of conveying his argument about how the US-Arizona border had its own rules during the formation of the borderlands that separated the United States and Mexico. His version of how labor was manipulated by the Copper Mining companies in the area on both sides of the border is detailed and to the point.

[Mbarron]

I read this book to prepare for an NEH Summer Seminar on the history and ecology of the US/Mexico border. I was intrigued by the thesis--that the borderlands have escaped our varied attempts to subdue/tame them.

[Karl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must reading for all those interested in new ways of thinking about environmental history or the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.