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

Farming across Borders argues for a transnational agricultural history of the North American West. This insightful collection of essays edited by Sterling Evans (University of Oklahoma) offers a detailed blueprint for thinking and writing about agriculture in global, transnational ways, exploring how “the presence of political boundaries, environments, agro-ecosystems, people and migrations and commodity development interact here in . . . the North American West” (xv).

Sterling Evans, Kristin Hoganson, and Laura Hooton begin by surveying the agricultural connections across the American West. Evans explores how American and Canadian prairies have long been farming borderlands of dependency: “Great Plains farmers depended upon Yucatecan fibers for binder twine, and Yucatecan henequen and sisal growers depended almost entirely on the North American grain industry’s market for their fiber” (1). Beyond twine, Hoganson addresses the converging socioeconomic and environmental “middle ground” of cattle production in the twentieth century. She also argues that cattle, one of the strongest and most persistent historical strands to uncover the American West’s “transborder webs,” represent the tensions: “when mid-western farmers looked to the north, they saw few threats to their security . . . [but] to the south . . . lay a gulf—in economic competitive-ness, in human relationship, and in the quality of stock” (53). Hooton concludes with an exploration of race, migration, and social change in the early twentieth century with the African American agricultural colony “Little Liberia” in Baja California. All three contributors establish a strong transnational framework for sub-sequent chapters to explore these complexities.

In parts 2 and 3, Joshua MacFadyen, Tim Bowman, Todd Meyers, and Sterling Evans each profile how commodity histories connected, remade, and undercut North American settlement in all its forms. Each essay offers an important ways for scholars to take a transnational view that includes environments, technologies, and cultural boosterism through their commodity histories, not just the economic chains. Contributors Peter Morris, Andrew Dunlop, and Alicia Dewy all examine the different ways that transnational agriculture made and remade western places. Through numerous primary sources and innovative digital history approaches such as geographic information system (GIS) research, the authors show how western borderlands (North and South) became viewed as ideal ranchlands and croplands, but also how ranching and farming across boundaries “was a complex endeavor entailing many economic, environmental, technological, political, and cultural changes” (168).

Parts 4, 5, and 6 include case-study essays. Contributors John Weber, Sonia Hernández, Tisa M. Anders, Rosa Elia Cobos, and Matt Caire-Pérez all explore the United States–Mexico relationship of transnational agricultural industrialization—labor, environment, migration, and farmer organizations in places such as Texas, California, and Nebraska. Paige Raibmon and Jason McCollom reveal how these forces emerged and remade labor in the US-Canadian borderlands. Thomas Isern and Suzzanne Kelley offer an intriguing look at how the history of migrant labor connected to customized harvesting in the post–World War II era, underscoring how small-grain agriculture “is both regional and cosmopolitan” (371).

The final section discusses perhaps the most fraught natural resource in the North American West: water. Anthony Carlson’s and Stephen Mumme’s essays investigate tense, sometimes violent histories around water in the transnational West and the long push for sustainable solutions. Evans concludes with how the history of this porous agricultural border-lands helps illuminate contemporary political tensions and free trade debates. The new, transnational markets of the twentieth century offers an economic development that “knits Mexico and the United States together and carry them as progressive partners into a modern future” in remarkably similar ways to relationships a century before, but it also creates a dependency between North American neighbors on “the performance of the US economy, and on an export-dependent scenario, in place of focusing on local or regional trade with long-term economic development . . . [and] a dependency on imported grain and food” (437).

Farming without Borders is a...