Farming across Borders: A Transnational History of the North American West ed. by Sterling Evans (review)

The momentum of vigorous, far-reaching inquiries tends toward hyper-specialization, whose antidote has long been known to be the cross pollination of multidisciplinary studies that connect diverse fields of knowledge. In his edited Farming across Borders, University of Oklahoma historian Sterling Evans pursues this aim by bringing together the latest scholarship in the broad fields of economics (including globalism, commerce, and labour), social history, gender and minority studies, the plant and animal sciences, geography, environmental studies, hydrology, religious studies, and sustainability. He succeeds with help from nineteen scholars from several disciplines who authored or coauthored all chapters except one and seven, which Evans penned in addition to authoring the acknowledgments, introduction, and afterword. No chapter is isolated from the others because Evans subsumes them under the six broad headings that unify the volume. In the afterword, Evans uses the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta), enacted in 1994, to inform and contextualize connections among Canada, the United States, and Mexico forged and illuminated by the contributors in their chapters.

The foregoing prepares the soil, to employ an agricultural metaphor, for planting and subsequent harvest of insights, multidisciplinary connections, and probing historical, economic, social, scientific, geographical, and environmental analyses. The result is a book about much more than farming, an unsurprising finding given that every worthwhile endeavour leading to publication yields more than might be inferred from the contents. Farming across Borders' sweeping coverage should attract readers from various occupations and walks of life. Scholars from many fields will want to read it as will the busy layperson seeking to understand the complexity of a modern world often atomized by journalists and other media that want to entice a specific demographic to populate their cul-de-sac. Atomization derives from capitalism's competitive impulses that force specialization in the way that natural selection evolves species to fit niches.

Evans and contributors push back against fragmentation and balkanization to deliver layers of meaning that unite rather than partition. The book cannot be exhausted in this review, though much can be learned from reading just a few pages in one or more chapters. The four in Part II: Commodity Histories in the Borderlands provide a good vantage point for appreciating the volume's comprehensiveness. Part II historicizes a crop or crop complex: flax, citrus fruits, chile (alternatively chili or chilli) peppers, and tomatoes in order from chapters four through seven.

Chapter five, "Colonizing the Borderlands: Citriculture and Boosterism in Texas's Lower Rio Grande Valley, 1910–1930" is a concrete example of the book's breadth. Chapter author and West Texas A&M University historian Tim Bowman chose an apt genus (Citrus) because through their histories, citrus fruits allow readers to see connections among the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities given that these hesperidia have linked Old and New World in economic, scientific, and cultural terms since the fifteenth century. Readers should note that not all citrus fruits sink roots deep into the past because the grapefruit (Citrus x paradisi) does not enter history until 1750, when a Welsh cleric referenced it as a Barbadian product. This late citation derives from the fact that Barbados had no continuous European settlement until 1627. On the island, the grapefruit originated as a sport—an organism arising from a mutation—probably from hybridization between pomelo (Citrus maxima) and sweet orange (Citrus sinensis). This occurrence must have been uncommon because citrus flowers normally self-pollinate. The scientific name Citrus x paradisi denotes a hybrid origin.

At the outset, Bowman uses the 1904 completion of the St. Louis, Brownsville, and Mexico Railway to link the United States and Mexico. As symbol, Texas, once part of Mexico and now within the United States, advances this aim. The story is both local in examining the history of four Texas' counties and transnational in joining the economic histories of Mexico and the United States. As noted earlier, the...