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

Arizona and Sonora have been intricately linked for centuries—well before they were divided by an international boundary and well beyond the establishment of the United States and Mexico boundary. Samuel Truett’s Fugitive Landscapes aims to bring these “forgotten” borderlands to the fore by explaining how the borderlands were able to sustain “transnational circuits of migration, extraction and human exchange, even as they divided peoples and places.”[1] He explains this phenomenon by studying the local peoples, Mexicans and Americans, who shaped these ties through the copper mining industry.

One of the overarching themes in Fugitive Landscapes is the influence of migration on the copper borderlands. Spanish explorers encountered these borderlands in the sixteenth-century and recognized early on that, as a mining country, the region had enormous potential. However, as time progressed it began clear to mining elites that the workers “were just as hard to control as nature” because they frequently moved from one bonanza to the next.[2] When workers were not moving on to a more profitable mine, they were often fleeing from the dangers and violence of the Apache Indians. The constant movement of people “allowed residents to survive at the uneven fringes of state power” because they were so difficult to pin down.[3]

The United States became more interested in the copper borderlands following the 1849 gold rush. Truett argues that it was at this point that the United States “began to see Mexico as Humboldt had fixed it in the European mind: a land of lost mines and forgotten treasure.”[4]  The Gadsden Purchase of 1853-4 meant that there was now a “firm” boundary between the two countries but for the border people who lived and worked in Sonora and Arizona, this boundary remained imaginary. By the 1860s the opportunities for U.S. commercial growth in the copper borderlands was “beginning to replace their appetite for territory” . . . because, you know, they had already taken enough of Mexico.[5]

The following two decades were marked by the expansion of the railroad, which led to a rapid transformation of the borderlands. While the Sonora Railroad stabilized the commercial space by tying down the mining communities—at least semi-permanently—to a rail station, it also resulted in new fugitive landscapes. Border entrepreneurs became a part of a “shadowy web” of peoples that hauled contraband such as flour, tobacco and silver, back and forth across the international border.  These people new the landscape better than any outside national corporation who might try and control them. They migrated between “spaces that corporate and state elites could see—smelters and mines, company towns, corporate reports, censuses—and “subterranean” spaces of ethnicity, culture and family: regions of refuge from the official gaze.”[6]

As the borderlands drew in large corporations with new technologies in the twentieth century they continued to be plagued by the same difficulties that were experienced in the sixteenth century. The border people were used to reorganizing space on their own accord and continued to do so despite attempts by both countries to pin them down. Truett states, “[t]hese human webs kept the borderlands in motion, even as states and corporations bent their collective will to lashing this fugitive terrain to the managerial foundations of modern America.”[7] The people of the copper borderlands had altered the border space to suit their own ends previously and they would continue doing so regardless of corporate impositions. Truett concludes, “[n]either nations nor transnational capital, by themselves, can fully contain or explain the past. Local conditions matter as much as state and corporate power in shaping borderlands history.”[8]

While I have only touched on what I consider the most significant (or interesting) theme of Fugitive Landscapes, Truett’s study is far more complex. He weaves elements of mining, economics, transnational relations, and the environment into an impressive story about people who are too often overlooked or downplayed. It is just as much a history about copper mining and industry in Arizona and Sonora as it is about the people who inhabited these spaces. This is a must read for those interested in borderlands or the development of U.S.-Mexican relations.