Fugitive Landscapes – Dave Shanebeck

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Samuel Truett beautifully weaves a borderland narrative across multiple centuries of southwest American history. By using a mosaic of social, political, and economic history, Truett attempted to place the borderlands of the southwest into a broader historical context that took into account the diversity of people that populated, migrated, and shifted through the area throughout the three centuries. Truett’s central argument is that the borderlands are not divided as neatly and cleanly as modern Americans or historians would like. Often, historians want a clean story that changes as people shift and identities solidify. However, Truett offers nothing of the sort in Fugitive Landscapes. The borderlands of the southwest were defined by not just “cross-border networks of corporate power” but something in which “ordinary people emerged from the shadows of state and corporate control to reshape the borderlands on their own terms.” (9) Truett argues that it was not the corporations, governments, or institutions that controlled borderland identity, but rather everyday people who were attempting to live in a truly frontier society that never closed but persisted. Their dreams of the future and hopes for a new life never died, but were constantly challenged, reshaped, and forged again.

Even though the first half of Truett’s work is somewhat dull and stale, Truett set the stage for the power of his work in chapters five through seven. It is not that the first part or even the first few chapters were not necessary as Truett was clearly setting the stage for how the frontier mentality of the colonial and nineteenth century borderlands established a connection to borderlands of the twentieth century. This is only a slight critique due to the fact that I personally found chapter 4, “The Mexican Cornucopia,” rather slow. It holds a significant part in explaining the corporate power plays that shifted towards Mexico’s northern border.

While Diana, queenlove35 and I struggled with Pekka Hamalainen descriptions of the southwest borderlands in Comanche Empire, I did not have that same feeling throughout Samuel Truett’s borderland history. Much of this is due to the fact that Truett was only attempting to argue that the agency of borderland history lies with the everyday people who transported themselves in and through the various centuries and locations of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. He did not attempt to provide a more significant agency to one group or another; instead, Truett focused upon the cornucopia or people and agents–Apache, Mexican miners, white settlers, or even major corporations–that made up a truly diverse and constantly shifting area. While we were left questioning the definition of empire and power of the Comanche people in Comanche Empire, I felt satisfied by Truett’s concluding chapters and epilogue that nicely painted a picture of the region that felt as wild and undefinable today as it was two hundred years ago. No matter how hard outside forces attempted to exert power or authority over the borderland area, it kept its frontier identity and continued to be a place of dreams–albeit rarely fully realized–and people who continue to persist.