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

This is prophetic history at its best. Samuel Truett deftly brings us back to a moment at the end of the nineteenth century when the industrial reorganization of the borderlands was just a "fragile dream" (p. 5). In taking us on this journey to a remote part of the Arizona-Sonora borderlands, he reveals a hidden transnational history of industrial development that has been obscured by nation state-centered histories of the region. This portrait of the "contingency and messiness of transnational relations" serves as a grim warning to the neoliberal architects of NAFTA that market reforms and industrial development "have rarely turned out as planned" (pp. 6-7).

The main action in the book happens in the late nineteenth century, an era of renewed transnational capitalist interest in the region that blossomed when railroads connected Arizona and Sonora in the early 1880s, and copper deposits were discovered on both sides of the border. Frequent wars in Mexico in the nineteenth century and continuing Apache attacks had interrupted earlier efforts at Mexican mining in Sonora, leaving mines idle and abandoned. As mining boomed in southern Arizona, the natural resources that fueled the smelters and the towns (water and timber) were depleted, leading U.S. mining entrepreneurs to look South to a new frontier. By telling this story of industrial mining from both the Mexican and U.S. sides, Truett shows how Mexican capitalists and politicians were eager to collaborate with U.S. capitalists to exploit this frontier region in order to gain revenues for the state and tame a wild landscape.

One of the most fascinating sections of the book reinterprets a violent strike at Cananea's copper mine in 1906 through a transnational frame. Histories of the Mexican revolution have emphasized the extent to which the deputizing of the Arizona Rangers and other U.S. citizens to put down the Cananea rebellion inflamed Mexicans' anti-Yankee nationalism and weakened the regime of Porfirio Díaz. What Truett adds to this well-known episode is an understanding of the off-stage collaborations between Mexican and U.S. authorities. For example, when Emilio Kosterlitzky, a Russian Mexican officer in the Mexican army and police, arrived in Cananea during the strike, he hid his collaborations with U.S. authorities by ostentatiously ordering the gun-toting U.S. vigilantes to board the train and return to the border. Behind the scenes, Kosterlitzky posed for a photograph with the leader of the Arizona Rangers, and he ultimately imposed martial law on the town, putting down the strike and serving Greene's interests. Kosterlitzky's role in the suppression of the Cananea strike exemplifies the kind of veiled collaborations that have existed for more than one hundred years across the U.S.-Mexico border, whether to pursue Apaches, outlaws, or to put down strikes.

Truett notes that the transnational linkages that had linked mining in Arizona and Sonora faded by end of the twentieth century with the Mexican government taking over the Cananea mine in 1971 and Bisbee being converted into a simulacrum of a "western" ghost town for white U.S. tourists. However, he also reminds us that this stretch of land now serves as one of the most heavily trafficked routes for workers seeking to find their own fugitive dreams in the United States. Even though Truett emphasizes the lack of control that capitalists and politicians seem to have over the borderlands, one could argue that the cyclical process of construction and destruction is itself part of capitalism's magic. That Mexican entrepreneurs have developed a theme park devoted to the U.S.-Mexico border experience where actors playing border patrol agents try to capture tourists acting like undocumented migrants testifies to the capitalists' ability to commodify even the most fugitive of landscapes. And yet the fact that some of the Mexican tourists turn out to be prospective migrants, using the theme park as a...