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Book Review
| Landscapes of Fraud: Mission Tumacácori, the Baca Float, and the Betrayal of the O'Odham. By Thomas E. Sheridan. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006. xi + 303 pp. Illustrations, maps, glossary, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00.)
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Thomas E. Sheridan, noted environmental historian of the borderlands region of Arizona and Sonora and its many peoples, has, in Landscapes of Fraud, advanced our knowledge about the ways in which capitalism impacts human beings' interactions with and understanding of the environment. More specifically, through an examination of a series of fraudulent land grants he describes in lucid details the ways in which outside speculators repeatedly swindled the peoples who settled and developed the Upper Santa Cruz Valley in present-day southern Arizona out of the fruits of their labor. Sheridan's interests in the subject are two-fold. First, he took part in fighting the continued urban sprawl into the suburbs and exurbs of Tucson (perhaps only temporarily successfully), noting ironically but truthfully that many of the people making up today's environmental and anti-sprawl movement moved into the suburbs hoping that the bulldozers would "stop at the end of their street" (p. 234). Second, he wanted to analyze the ways in which "capital flows and relations of power" impacted the environment and the ways in which everyday people interact with it. |
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