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Article Excerpt
Many Americans imagine the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as a land that time forgot, a wild, unsettled place where "renegades" and "bandits" such as Geronimo and Pancho Villa have simply given way to newer barbarians: mercenary narcotraficantes, immigrant desperadoes, and camouflaged vigilantes. "What we call the border," writes best-selling author Robert Kaplan, has always been a "wild, unstable swath of desert," marked by a dearth of political, military, and social control. The border is the "21st century frontier," agrees Susan Zakin, referring to clashes between the "hunters and the hunted"--that is, armed ranchers hunting undocumented immigrants--along the Arizona-Sonora border. Unlike Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier, these writers propose that the borderlands never closed. Instead, they remain haunted by the ghosts of frontiers past. (1)
Such portrayals hardly seem surprising when we consider what the borderlands divide. The American West and the Mexican North are both famous in popular thought for their frontier legacies of danger and desire, lawlessness and liberation, violence and virtue. Even Robert Kaplan's "unstable swath of desert" evokes the limits of culture and authority that we tend to associate with frontiers, whether in Zane Grey's Southwest, the Mexican wastelands of The Wild Bunch, or even the distant plant of Tatooine. And from a linguistic point of view, at least, this is also unsurprising: The word desert derives from the Latin verb de-serere, or "to sever connection with," and what, if not severed ties to the body politic, make the frontier what it is? (2) And yet frontiers are also about forging new ties and bringing order to disorder. On the frontier, the wild becomes tame, borderlands become bounded, and the story reaches a conclusion, usually ending with a finished nation. So how do we make sense of a history that appears to resist this closure? How do we tell the story of a space that seems chronically unmade? (3)
No less important, how do we tell this story in a critical fashion--in a way that does not simply reaffirm fears, desires, and mythologies? After all, stories of borderland disorder and dislocation often orient larger national fables about the virtues of order and integration, telling us what we must strive to overcome as citizens. This was a powerful topos in many cinematic westerns, and it lives on in such recent border films as Stephen Soderberg's Traffic (2000) and Ron Howard's The Missing (2003). Yet if we peel back the skin of myth and rhetoric, what kind of connective tissue do we find below the surface? What, beyond ideology, links the U.S.-Mexico borderlands to the Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. frontier pasts? To what extent did frontier relations live on in the borderlands, even after U.S. and Mexican mapmakers tried to pin the frontier in place after 1854? Or to put it another way, what is the significance of the frontier to borderlands history?
In this essay, I would like to propose a few modest starting points for engaging these larger questions by looking at the transition from colonial frontier to transnational borderlands in Arizona and Sonora. (4) Before the United States annexed northern Mexico in 1848 (and in 1854 with the Gadsden Purchase), this was a contested terrain of empires, nations, and native communities. It was a frontier in Silvio R. Duncan Baretta and John Markoff's sense of the word: a land where nobody exercised "an enduring monopoly on violence." (25) It was also a meeting place of cultures, whose relationships could hardly be reduced to a single line, but what made it a frontier was its relationship to the colonial and early national state. It was the state's effort to articulate its authority vis-a-vis what lay beyond its margins--and the tenuous, uneven, and incomplete nature of this colonial project--that made the frontier a unique locus of social struggle and identity formation. The inability of the nation-state and its citizens to fully incorporate and domesticate this space endured after it became a transnational crossroads in the mid-nineteenth century. It was their ongoing lack of control--their failure, in a sense, to bring closure to previous frontier relationships--that haunted newcomers most.
COLONIAL GEOGRAPHIES
Spanish adventurers had visited Sonora as early as the 1530s, but it was the Jesuit order that brought this land to the doorstep of empire. Crossing north along the Pacific coast from what is today Sinaloa, missionaries established their first missions among the Mayo Indians of southern Sonora in 1614, then moved north to the Yaqui, Pima, and Opata settlements of the Yaqui and Sonora Rivers and their highland tributaries. By the 1650s, Jesuits had created a chain of mission cabeceras and visitas reaching to the northern edges of Opata territory, just south of the present Arizona border. These pioneers paved the way for migrations of mining entrepreneurs, merchants, and ranchers, who doubled as fighters when Indians defied their intrusions. As resistance to empire mounted over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the colonial state supplemented these local militias with presidios, or self-supporting frontier garrisons, which eventually formed a cordon along the frontier. Not unlike Jesuits, presidio soldiers and militiamen were at a demographic disadvantage, and relied on a mixture of persuasion, conversion, and limited force to maintain control of the Spanish periphery. (6)
All of these colonial actors--missionaries, miners, ranchers, and soldiers--took native spaces and attempted to transform them into places of their own. For Jesuits, the incorporation of human space was intimately bound to the incorporation of nature. In order to attract converts and maintain the mission economy, Jesuits sought to transform Sonora's highland river valleys into a productive landscape of pastures and fields. Their success depended in large part on the animals and plants they brought with them. Old World diseases devastated native groups, making them vulnerable to military, religious, and economic conquest, whereas new crops and domestic animals provided a range of economic opportunities for survivors. To transform nature, however, missionaries also had to transform social relations--among other things imposing colonial labor discipline on converts who worked to support the mission community and produce surpluses for sale. From the value extracted from nature and labor, the missionaries purchased cotton and linen to clothe and pay the Indian converts, and acquired the vestments, candle wax, and utensils to sustain the mission church and its ceremonies. (7)
The distance between these religious landscapes and the administrative, military, and economic centers of empire--combined with a native propensity to pick and choose from the "new world" of Spanish America--limited the missionaries' ability to transform natural and social space as they wished. Pima and Opata farmers incorporated Old World crops into their daily rounds, for instance, but not always in ways that the Jesuits judged fitting for Christian farmers. "No one knows how to plow a regular furrow," grumbled one missionary. "Sonora could have a superabundance of ... produce if the inhabitants would diligently engage in agriculture. But they are much too lazy for such labor." This complaint, which reflected an Enlightenment obsession with order, also betrayed a poor appreciation for local wisdom, which privileged diversity and flexibility over what most Jesuits saw as efficiency. From the native perspective, too much labor for farming might mean not enough for hunting and gathering, which were also important for staying alive from one season to the next. Native norms also inflected the incorporation of Old World animals. Some natives saw horses and cattle as threats to their fields, and took a while to accept them, whereas others--the Tohono O'odham and Apache, for instance--added them to the list of animals that might be hunted by traditional means. (8)
The missionaries' efforts to transform frontier space not only were stymied by what they considered barbaric customs, but were also thwarted by nature. "When brooks dry up or are exhausted and the plantations can no longer be watered, everything wilts," noted Jesuit Philipp Segesser, who also remembered the wet year when the Yaqui River rose so high that it "destroyed entire mission villages." Sometimes natural disorder followed in the wake of social disorder. Not long after Pima rebels killed a colleague, Segesser took over his abandoned mission, which he found "reclaimed" by nature. Mesquite and wild shrubs had invaded the garden, the orchard had withered due to lack of irrigation, and "everything had been devastated by ants." Jesuits were also forced to contend with that most fickle of colonial allies, Old World disease. The arrival of measles is the "harvest of Heaven," claimed one frustrated father: "By it populated villages are suddenly reduced. Indians fear it very much and great effort is required to keep them together, for they flee and try to hide in the woods." (9)
Like most environmental obstacles that the Jesuits described, this was ultimately a problem of spatial control. Beyond mission borders, insisted Father Ignaz Pfefferkorn, "the absence of both order and a civilized existence was the rule," whereas those Indians who stayed on mission lands "were so improved in their customs that they retain almost nothing of their former aspect than their brown skin." Missionaries usually saw mission boundaries as borderlands dividing the wild from the tame, the pure from the corrupt. Horses and cattle that wandered from the mission's pastures "became wild and timid in the wilderness," joining the same conceptual geography as "barbarous" Indians whose lives were, in Pfefferkorn's words, "more like those of animals than of reasoning human beings." There was also the constant danger of losing native converts to lay Spaniards--notably miners--who gave them "every freedom and permitted them the most shameful excesses." If it were not for the "evil examples of these godless men," Pfefferkorn noted, "Christianity would have been just as flourishing in Sonora as it was in Paraguay and in all other places to which the Spaniards did not have free access." (10)
Spanish mining entrepreneurs seemed to have greater success in realizing their dreams of social and environmental control. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the search for mineral wealth had fueled migrations north along the Sierra Madre into what is now Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua. By the 1630s, miners were spilling into Sonora from the cast and south, and by the end of the century, silver camps had sprung up all across the Pima and Opata homelands, offering a highland counterpart to the river-based Jesuit landscape. As Spaniards, Indians, and mestizos flocked to the camps to sell their labor, the demand for food, clothing, and housing placed a new economic value on nearby river valleys and grasslands. Lands previously tied to Opata and Pima seasonal rounds were incorporated into Spanish pastures and fields to feed the growing mining population, often with the assistance of native peones and vaqueros. Mining and satellite rural communities also pulled undomesticated spaces into colonial markets. All across Sonora, wild plants and animals supplemented agro-pastoral production, whereas oak, pine, and mesquite forests entered the expanding web of ranching, farming, and mining communities as building materials and fuel. (11)
These networks of consumption were often small scale and local, linking mining reales to the nearby countryside. Livestock raisers who supplied the everyday staples of beef and butter also produced tallow for candles burned underground. "Herein lies the principal profit to be derived from cattle raising in Sonora," explained Ignaz Pfefferkorn. Another ranching product was rawhide for the bags used to carry ore (and water, when mines flooded) to the surface. Woodcutters, for their part, hauled timber from nearby mountainsides to build the machinery for the stamp mills and to shore up large mines with timbers. By far the most important use of wood was to make charcoal for smelting, which in Sonora led to the denudation of the forests around the mines. Meanwhile, lead mines provided reagents for the reduction of silver; locally bred mules generated power for the arrastras, or ore-grinding mills; and salt and copper (gathered from the Sonora river deltas and mined in its highlands, respectively) were employed as additional reagents if ores required the additional step of amalgamation. (12)
Other demands of the mining landscape could not have been met without long-distance trade networks, south to Guadalajara and southeast across the Sierra Madre to the regional entrepot of Parral, Nueva Vizcaya. Along colonial roads, merchants shipped sheepskin bellows for the smelting furnaces, quicksilver to extract silver in the arrastras, and the various iron tools--picks, hammers, and crowbars--used in the mines. All had to be imported to Sonora at great cost. Paths leading from the outside world to Sonora's mines were also conduits for such luxury items as wine, olive oil, tobacco, pottery, silks, and tailored clothing, goods that were generally produced thousands of miles from the frontier. Frontier merchants, most of them from the crossroads of Parral, controlled this overland traffic. They were responsible not only for purchasing and selling goods, but also for freighting silver south to Mexico City. Since Sonora, like most frontiers, was cash poor, these merchants also doubled as bankers, making loans to prospectors and other mining entrepreneurs. Their special access to outside markets and investment capital gave them a control over frontier space that their neighbors rarely matched. (13)
Yet as with missionaries, this control was anything but complete. Even the most prosperous reales could be abandoned in days if surface deposits ran out, shafts became flooded, or a bonanza elsewhere lured workers away. And the job of freighting goods, silver, and equipment across Sonora's highlands was fraught with difficulty. "There are no freight wagons," Philipp Segesser wrote. "Rivers are not navigable, and roads are so narrow, rough, and steep in many places that one dreads looking down the precipices." Pack trains were under constant threat of Apache attack, who had begun to increase their raids and attacks during the seventeenth century. Like Spaniards, Apaches were expanding into Opata and Pima territory, and their incorporation of Spanish horses and weapons helped make them formidable adversaries in the contest for space. Moreover, as mining boomed, giving rise to new populations of domestic animals on the roads and in the pastures, Apaches found it increasingly profitable to raid their competitors for these sources of nourishment and power. In this way they wove colonial spaces of production and trade into their own subsistence rounds. (14)
Colonial ranchers encountered many of the same profits and pitfalls that miners faced. Jesuits were the first stock raisers, but soon lay ranchers and their herds began to claim lands between the missions, especially after mining took off in the late seventeenth century. Indeed, miners and mining-town merchants established many of these ranches, using proceeds from one source of natural wealth to generate another. By the eighteenth century, herds of cattle, horses, and mules--some as large as twelve thousand head--ranged as far north as the present-day border. Yet natural abundance did not guarantee control over nature. "Wild mountain cats" often attacked livestock, Philipp Segesser noted, and since entrepreneurs preferred to use gunpowder to extract silver rather than to kill predators, "these harmful beasts of prey multiply unhindered." Ranchlands were often devastated by wildfires--some natural, others set by Pimas and Apaches to drive game. Domestic animals also wandered beyond their owners' control, a control that diminished spatially during times of Apache-Spanish conflict. In places, cattle "can no longer be rounded up, much less confined in a corral," wrote Ignaz Pfefferkorn; likewise, Spanish horses at the edges of Spanish settlement often became "so wild and timid in the wilderness that they immediately take flight when they but catch sight of a human being." (15)
Indeed, as with missionaries, the failure of livestock raisers to domesticate nature was part of a greater problem of controlling colonial space. As time passed by, ranchers increasingly expressed this problem in terms of their powerlessness in the face of Apache raiding. This had become a particularly irksome issue, Pfefferkorn noted, by the 1760s. "Nothing is safe from these 'birds of prey,'" he noted, "except that which wanders around wild on the hills and in the bushes and does not let itself be run off." Horses were perhaps most at risk because they were taken both as mounts and for their meat, which by all accounts Apaches preferred to beef. As a result of Indian raids, ranching was increasingly limited to lands adjacent to the presidios, missions, and villages. Ranches that had extended for miles in the early eighteenth century became a distant memory by century's end. "Only those areas which are in sight of villages are tilled and planted," Pfefferkorn wrote. "So the largest and best part of this beautiful and extremely fertile country lies uncultivated and deserted because of the fear of the barbarians." (16)
It was this threat of "barbarians" that most clearly motivated the Spanish crown to impose its formal authority over Sonora and to envision this northern province as an imperial frontier--that is, as a line dividing the state from the stateless "forces of nature" lurking at its northern gates. (17) This effort gave rise to yet another colonial space, focused around military conquest and expressed most formally...
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