Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (review)

A former colleague once told me he thought Borderlands history was dead. If there are others who share that notion, Samuel Truett’s book Fugitive Landscapes shows just how wrong they are. In fact, Fugitive Landscapes should be seen as a model of Borderlands, transnational, mining, and environmental history all under one cover with useful helpings of corporate, labor, economic, indigenous, immigration, and agricultural history thrown in. In other words, Fugitive Landscapes tells the complete story of the copper borderlands of southern Arizona and northern Sonora (although stating that region in the book’s subtitle would have been more useful than just the “U.S.-Mexico Borderlands” in general). Truett also explores some interesting facets of the mining industry in the Sonoran-Chihuahuan state borderlands of northern Mexico. The entire region was a “binational terrain of entrepreneurial alliance” and an emerging borderlands of modernity where no longer was the “modern world consumed by its frontier past” (86, 175).

There were many changes that occurred with the development of this alliance. There were transnational transformations and dependencies, especially with the transfer of mining technologies and capital. There were overlapping frontiers with the interactions of various groups of Native (especially Apache and Yaqui) and newcomer (Spanish, Mexican, American, and Chinese immigrants) who moved into the region for ranching, farming, mining, and support services—interactions that occur when “frontiers become borderlands” (78). And there were environmental changes in the region with to the development of mines and the resources (wood and food) that they required. All are part of Truett’s study here, a study of a “landscape of attraction that flowed across natural borders” (2). He states it best when he writes that the mines “remade a formerly isolated region at the ragged edges of states and markets into an industrial crossroads fed by circuits of capital, labor, and transnational collaboration that extended deep into both nations” (4). Future researchers may want to extend this analysis even deeper by contrasting the contemporaneous development of transnational copper mines in Chile—outside the regional scope of this study.

To research and unravel the many angles of this “forgotten history” of the copper borderlands required multi-archival sleuthing using national, state, and corporate sources, and utilizing a variety of special collections. But it may have aided the story to include more from what Mexican historians have written, especially on the colonial history of the region. On the Arizona side, missing is analysis of what statehood in 1912 meant for the mining industry and the Native and immigrant people in the borderlands, especially as there was so much mining activity in that time period. Statehood came right when the Mexican Revolution was raging south of the border, and Truett treats the Revolution’s implications on the Borderlands very thoroughly. Converting all this type of research from its original dissertation to this much-anticipated and lyrically written book made for an ideal thesis conversion. Add in the excellent illustrations, photos, and maps, and Fugitive Landscapes should be a required addition to any historians’ or geographers’ courses on the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands. It will be adopted for mine.