Fugitive Landscapes

Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest StudiesIn the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mexicans and Americans joined together to transform the U.S.–Mexico borderlands into a crossroads of modern economic development. This book reveals the forgotten story of their ambitious dreams and their ultimate failure to control this fugitive terrain. Focusing on a mining region that spilled across the Arizona–Sonora border, this book shows how entrepreneurs, corporations, and statesmen tried to domesticate nature and society within a transnational context. Efforts to tame a “wild” frontier were stymied by labor struggles, social conflict, and revolution. Fugitive Landscapes explores the making and unmaking of the U.S.–Mexico border, telling how ordinary people resisted the domination of empires, nations, and corporations to shape transnational history on their own terms. By moving beyond traditional national narratives, it offers new lessons for our own border-crossing age.

Analyzes spatial history of 19th and early 20th century Mexico, particularly political uses of mapping and surveying, to demonstrate multiple ways that space can be negotiated in the service of local or national agendas.

Line in the Sand details the dramatic transformation of the western U.S.-Mexico border from its creation at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848 to the emergence of the modern boundary line in the first decades of the twentieth century. In this sweeping narrative, Rachel St. John explores how this boundary changed from a mere line on a map to a clearly marked and heavily regulated divide between the United States and Mexico. Focusing on the desert border to the west of the Rio Grande, this book explains the origins of the modern border and places the line at the center of a transnational history of expanding capitalism and state power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moving across local, regional, and national scales, St. John shows how government officials, Native American raiders, ranchers, railroad builders, miners, investors, immigrants, and smugglers contributed to the rise of state power on the border and developed strategies to navigate the increasingly regulated landscape. Over the border's history, the U.S. and Mexican states gradually developed an expanding array of official laws, ad hoc arrangements, government agents, and physical barriers that did not close the line, but made it a flexible barrier that restricted the movement of some people, goods, and animals without impeding others. By the 1930s, their efforts had created the foundations of the modern border control apparatus. Drawing on extensive research in U.S. and Mexican archives, Line in the Sand weaves together a transnational history of how an undistinguished strip of land became the significant and symbolic space of state power and national definition that we know today.

During the early seventeenth century, Kisama emerged in West Central Africa (present-day Angola) as communities and an identity for those fleeing expanding states and the violence of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The fugitives mounted effective resistance to European colonialism despite—or because of—the absence of centralized authority or a common language. In Fugitive Modernities Jessica A. Krug offers a continent- and century-spanning narrative exploring Kisama's intellectual, political, and social histories. Those who became Kisama forged a transnational reputation for resistance, and by refusing to organize their society around warrior identities, they created viable social and political lives beyond the bounds of states and the ruthless market economy of slavery. Krug follows the idea of Kisama to the Americas, where fugitives in the New Kingdom of Grenada (present-day Colombia) and Brazil used it as a means of articulating politics in fugitive slave communities. By tracing the movement of African ideas, rather than African bodies, Krug models new methods for grappling with politics and the past, while showing how the history of Kisama and its legacy as a global symbol of resistance that has evaded state capture offers essential lessons for those working to build new and just societies.

In Colonial Survey and Native Landscapes in Rural South Africa, 1850 - 1913, Lindsay Frederick Braun explores the technical processes and struggles surrounding the creation and maintenance of boundaries and spaces in South Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The precision of surveyors and other colonial technicians lent these enterprises an illusion of irreproachable objectivity and authority, even though the reality was far messier. Using a wide range of archival and printed materials from survey departments, repositories, and libraries, the author presents two distinct episodes of struggle over lands and livelihoods, one from the Eastern Cape and one from the former northern Transvaal. These cases expose the contingencies, contests, and negotiations that fundamentally shaped these changing South African landscapes.

The World of the American West is an innovative collection of original essays that brings the world of the American West to life, and conveys the distinctiveness of this diverse, constantly changing region. Twenty scholars incorporate the freshest research in the field to take the history of the American West out of its timeworn "Cowboys and Indians" stereotype right up into the major issues being discussed today, from water rights to the presence of the defense industry. Other topics covered in this heavily illustrated, highly accessible volume include the effects of leisure and tourism, western women, politics and politicians, Native Americans in the twentieth century, and of course, oil. With insight both informative and unexpected, The World of the American West offers perspectives on the latest developments affecting the modern American West, providing essential reading for all scholars and students of the field so that they may better understand the vibrant history of this globally significant, ever-evolving region of North America.

Making a Modern U.S. West surveys the history of the U.S. West from 1898 to 1940, centering what is often relegated to the margins in histories of the region—the flows of people, capital, and ideas across borders.

On July 12, 1917, in the mining town of Bisbee Arizona, twelve hundred striking miners and their supporters were rounded up by forces organized by the town sheriff and the mining companies, marched through the town, parked in the town’s baseball field, and then put in boxcars and shipped into the New Mexican desert. The deportees were largely members or supporters of the radical IWW labor union and mostly foreign-born. The roundup and deportation was part of a xenophobic and anti-radical campaign being carried out by bosses and the government throughout the country in the early days of US participation in World War I. The mine owners then took control of the town and patrols prevented any union miners from even entering it. This little-known story is a shocking and fascinating one on its own, but the sentiments exploited and exposed in Bisbee in 1917 speak to America today.