The Whole Damn Cheese: Maggie Smith, Border Legend by Bill Wright (review)

In The Whole Damn Cheese, author and photographer Bill Wright has produced a biography of a woman named Maggie Smith, who claimed strength and patriotism through hard work and endurance in the Big Bend. Using vivid images, both written and photographic, Wright helps inject life into the personal narrative of a woman who survived living in the rural and arid West Texas landscape in the first half of the twentieth century. His purpose is to revive a family history and prevent the life of “a remarkable woman from being lost” (2–3).

Born in 1895 on a ranch outside of Carrizo Springs, Texas, Maggie Smith spent her youth along the Texas–Mexico border, eventually moving to Hot Springs, where she built her reputation, according to Wright. Starting in the 1920s, Smith married twice, had five children, operated a general store, and worked as a midwife, coroner, and justice of the peace. Embodying the self-reliant spirit of people living in remote areas, and lacking formal education, Smith provided care in a variety of ways for the people along the western Rio Grande border. She built special relationships with Mexican families by making sure that everyone received attention and services, from brewing concoctions for treating the intestinal flu that plagued the region in 1942 to the minor surgery of digging fishhooks from her own hand. During Smith’s “life at the Springs” locals regarded her as the “river renegade” (116–117) because she often smuggled goods across the river to provide care for people living in the small town. She stocked her store, cooked meals for the locals, and stood up against officials who tried to regulate her activities.

Wright examines the working-class self-reliance of a woman who departed from traditional gender roles and adapted to necessity. By describing Smith’s role in her remote community, Wright reconstructs the life of women who, of necessity, did not conform to the social expectations of more settled regions. The reader can imagine the strength it took for all women in this landscape to survive day-to-day. Maggie Smith’s life during this period of Texas–Mexico border history comes to embody the ingenuity required to care for others where few modern amenities existed.

An important note, however, is that Wright’s style approaches frontier nostalgia. He uses words like “savage,” “wild,” and “primitive” to describe Native Americans, Mexicans, and the landscape itself. In focusing so tightly on Maggie Smith, an Anglo woman living along the Mexican border, he erases the history of the other people who lived there, using them as props to highlight Smith’s seemingly heroic actions. A conflict between white settlers and Native Americans occurs on land that is “on the edge of civilization,” and the Indigenous people themselves “considered the land their own” (20). Wright does not provide any context of Native American history in the area; instead, he sets white pioneer fortitude in a “hostile environment” where “Indians” often resorted to “savage attempts to protect their territory” (4, 15). He practices the same erasure of Mexican historical figures, rarely naming Mexican men and women who interact with Smith. Many of the stories emphasize how Smith helped “the Mexicans,” but Wright does not examine the reciprocal relationship between Smith and the community in depth.

On the other hand, Wright does utilize archival information to construct a solid, well-researched narrative of Smith’s life. He combines oral histories, local newspaper reports, census data, genealogical records, and secondary materials to establish her story. The book is a quick read and provides interesting background about rural West Texas in the first half of the twentieth century, making it a starting point for deeper research. Although providing, without context, closing opinions from her family about Smith’s lack of prejudice, he still successfully portrays her as a resourceful woman who navigated a full transborder life. In other words, Wright emphasizes that Maggie Smith was...