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When we think of the American Southwest during the turn of the century, we think of cowboys and Indians, desperados, cattle rustlers, and crusty old prospectors yelling “there be gold in deem hills.” We also conjure images of the harsh and unforgiving covered with saguaro cactuses and sun belch bones of the unlucky travelers who never made it to their destinations whether they are man or beast which are accompanied by abandoned buildings marking long forgotten spots of commerce and vice. However, beyond the desolate landscapes were gunfights, gambling, and profiteering accrued lays a hidden history that many never know as both the sands of the desert and time have covered. Fortunately, one scholar by the name of Dr.Samuel Truett a historian of U.S.-Mexico and continental North American borderlands, with associated interests in environmental history, histories of empires and indigenous peoples, and comparative histories of frontiers and borderlands in global context at the University of New Mexico Seeks to provide a window into the complex history of life and death in borderlands between the U.S. and Mexico.
In his book Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Truett argues that most Americans have forgotten transitional histories not only because they have trusted maps of the nation, but also because they have succumbed to the siren song of the state. Much like their precursors they still see the borderlands as the land that time for forgot, palaces where bandits and outlaws have given way to new barbarians such as immigrant desperados and drug traffickers (pg. 15). As such, he suggests finding new ways of moving U.S. and Mexican history onto a larger American stage and giving dreamers today a sense of the contingency and messiness of transitional relations with the ultimate goal of enabling the reader to understand the best laid plans of states, entrepreneurs, and corporations repeatedly ran aground in fugitive landscapes of subaltern power (pgs. 6, 9). By using personal accounts, photos, physical and vernacular maps, and the addition of local advertisement and periodicals, Truett establishes the notion that within this landscape of greed, gunfights, and bandits networks of corporate and state powers supported equally powerful shadow pathways oriented around the local lives of Mexican smelter workers, Yaqui miners, Chinese farmers, U.S. colonist, and others. These human webs kept the borderlands in motion, even if states and corporations bent their collective will lashing the harsh and fugitive terrain to the managerial foundations of modern America (pg. 103). As such, I completely agree with Alyssa’s comment when she stated that Truett expertly provides a through historiographical outline of the borderlands into an intersection of economic development. As result the reader, gets a complex view of life in the borderlands in which for a time the actual border between the U.S. and Mexico was at one point unfenced and nature trumped artificial distinctions in which animals crossed borders and natural customs prevailed over artificial laws of the state (pg. 85). However, the upheaval caused by the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) resulted in Americans to articulate the differences between Mexicans and Americans in which they imagined themselves as persisting frontier heroes held the against the barbaric Mexicans (pg. 176).
The strengthens of Truett’s book can be compare to Dian Nuygen’s comments in her post on Pekka Hämäläinen’s Comanche Empire in which he has the ability captured the fundamental nature of the Comanche Empire from its notable beginnings as a small tribe of hunter-gatherers to its portrayal as a potential threat to Europeans, Americans, and other Native societies alike made for a compelling read. So too does Truett tell a compelling story about the Apache and Yaquis tribes who dictated the terms of their relationship to the colonial world whose history is not known to many outside those who study Native American cultures. In addition, Truett’s shares some similarities to Dr. Stephanie M.H. Camp’s Closer to Freedom Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, in which she argued that by doing simply things like being truant for work, going to parties, and making their own alcohol they proved they are their own masters. Truett’s argues that their mobility and resistance led pathways that resembled roads taken by Mexicans and Opatas but were harder for outsiders to pin down and used technology of development to resist capital and state power in another, which is often forgotten or never told in history books (pgs. 118-19). However, the most interesting thing about Truett’s book is the introduction and development of technology into the borderlands, which sought to transform the inhospitable environment to the valuable sites of industry, commerce, and household dwellings. However, by having these connections to the outside made possible to railroads, telegraphs, and telephones mining camps became towns and cities but in process of finding better way to harvest valuable minerals and metals they resulted in turmoil and mines running dry. This forced people whether they are Mexican, Americans, Chinese, or native tribes to leave for better pastures leaving behind communities that were forgotten by time.