Fugitive Landscapes – Alyssa Foster

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Samuel Truett artfully illustrates the Arizona-Sonora borderlands that intertwine multiple centuries worth of narratives of southwest American history. In his book, Fugitive Landscapes demonstrates the use of social, political and economic history in order to put the borderlands of the southwest into wider historical setting. Here Truett’s is able to portray the diversity of people that populated the area, migration and moved across the borderlands over the course of three centuries. Unlike David Sim, who did not provide the fullest background context in his book, Truett expertly provides a through historiographical outline of the borderlands into an intersection of economic development. Truett states that the “ultimate goal of this book is to understand how the best-laid plans od states, entrepreneurs, and corporations repeatedly ran aground in fugitive landscapes of subaltern power” (pg. 9). He further states that Historians moving forward in the field need to start reviewing the border first while including both sides of the area for a complete scrutiny. Truett also advocates the importance in examining the people within the borderlands and their drive to live within this complex area.

In agreement with Dave Shanebeck’s post the first half of Fugitive Landscapes was difficult to get through. It was a little stale in its information making it a struggle to get through the beginning. I will be fair and say that I have always had a difficult time in showing interest in the borderlands and Mexican-American histories of the southwest. However, Truett does a nice job in sectioning off his book in order to assist with the flow of information he is trying to provide the readers. Part one of the book illustrates how Mexicans and Americans tried to domesticate Sonora-Arizona lands prior to the rail system years later. This chapter highlights the social relationships that have endured into the present era. Part two of the book shows how Truett explores “how entrepreneurs, corporations, state elites, and ordinary people reorganized the borderlands at the turn of the century” (pg. 9). Part three exhibits the social conflict and revolutionary struggles that made it difficult and impossible to domestic the borderlands.

One section of the book that I found the most interesting was part two of the book where Truett reviews the economic factors that are portrayed in the borderlands. Here Truett reviews the economic history of the southwest borderlands to show how business opportunities pushed the reshaping of the area on an economic and political level. Similar to Slavery’s Capitalism edited by Beckert & Rockman, their book dives into the slavery’s significance in the emergence of American capitalism in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War. Beckert & Rockman also use factors of innovation of entrepreneurship, finance, accounting, management, and political economy to demonstrate the role of slavery in the marketplace. Taking these similar factors that played a role in the nineteenth century, Truett uses them to depict the industrial frontier of the borderlands to show how entrepreneurship and commerce played a role Arizona-Sonora borderlands. In part two, Truett introduces William E. Dodge Jr. who established the Phelps Dodge mining company. This established a transnational cornerstone for copper within Arizona-Sonora borderlands. However the area remained a “fugitive landscape” due to the difficulty and resentment of the native people as well as the resentment of the labor within the borderlands. Truett offered that the “more power corporate and state elites tried to exert over the region… the more it slipped from their grasp” (pg. 130). Samuel Truett pulls a lot of research from the archival sources, periodicals, corporate annual reports, and government documents. In the final pages of his book Truett illustrates how transnational histories at times encompass law, which played an impactful role in the review of the borderlands. It demonstrates how space can be seen as lawless and lawful at the same time.