Fugitive Landscapes

The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

Samuel Truett

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9780300135329
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies

In 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.

Samuel Truett is associate professor, Department of History, University of New Mexico.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Hidden Histories
• Part I. Frontier Legacies
• 1 Ghosts of Empires Past
• 2 Borderland Dreams
• Part II. Border Crossings
• 3 Industrial Frontiers
• 4 The Mexican Cornucopia
• 5 Transnational Passages
• Part III. Contested Terrain
• 6 Development and Disorder
• 7 Insurgent Landscapes
• Epilogue: Remapping the Borderlands
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index