Fugitive Landscapes Response

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Like dshanebeck and suzanna.melendez, I was immediately struck by the similarities between Samuel Truett’s Fugitive Landscapes and Pekka Hämäläinen’s Comanche Empire. This was especially evident to me in the first section of Fugitive Landscapes. While this section was mostly comprised of background information, the ways in which it described migration patterns within the borderlands were very similar to the first chapters of Comanche Empire that detailed the rise and movement of the Comanches. Truett’s major aim in writing his book was to “understand how the best-laid plans…repeatedly ran aground in fugitive landscapes of subaltern power” (9), which seems nearly identical to Hämäläinen’s push to demonstrate Comanche agency.

Related to this, I appreciate that despite the subtitle “the forgotten history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands,” Truett paid a surprising amount of attention to Native Americans throughout the text. He brought up American and Mexican relations with Apaches in the Sonora area, giving them equal importance to the main focus of American-Mexican relations. At one point, he even wrote “as tense as border relations between Anglos and Mexicans were, more unsettling was the decay of the fragile Anglo-Apache peace.” (47)

Another reason the first section of Truett’s book was particularly effective, was the amount of background information he provided. A common critique our class leveled against last week’s A Union Forever was the lack of attention paid to background information that would have contributed to a better understanding of the topics Sim discussed. Truett, in contrast, did a very effective job of this. The first two chapters recount initial colonial conquests of Mexico, taking place centuries before the main time frame (focused on in the remaining two sections of the book) of the 19th century. In doing this, Truett is able to do something important that gives added importance to his work. He is able to portray the U.S./Mexico borderlands as a “meeting place of two opposing narratives: the history of Spanish and Mexican decline and a prophecy of U.S. expansion.” (15) This makes the argument of the book more compelling than if Truett had chosen to jump into the narrative after the United States had already begun its push toward Manifest Destiny, because it helps to explain exactly why the borderlands became a place of “subaltern power” (9) in the first place. This gives strength to an argument he highlights in the conclusion: seemingly small or unimportant people and places can still impact history. (184)

Overall, Fugitive Landscapes is an impressive work. Although Comanche Empire already exposed us to borderlands history, Truett’s work puts a spin on it that differentiates his work from Hämäläinen’s. While Hämäläinen’s goal in writing seemed to be limited to proving Comanche agency and power, using borderlands history as a tool, Truett makes the argument that the borderlands have been completely erased from historical memory, and aims to “reconstitute the historical tissue that connects the U.S. and Mexican past.” (9) Although this seems like an impossibly large task, I think Truett did a commendable job of supporting these ideas.