| Book Review | Law and History Review, 27.2

Book Review

Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Pp. 272. $40.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-3001-1091-3); $22.00 paper (ISBN 978-0-3001-4331-7).

Chris Frazer, Bandit Nation: A History of Outlaws and Cultural Struggle in Mexico, 1810-1920, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Pp. 246. $24.95 (ISBN 978-0-8032-2031-7).

In 1940, an Arizona rancher reflected that in an earlier era "we did not know the exact location of the 'imaginary line' marking the boundary" between the United States and Mexico. "We simply took the most direct method and avoided all unnecessary red tape" (85). Laws mark official borders, but as the rancher knew, borderlands can also operate by unwritten rules. As Samuel Truett shows in his ambitious history of the mountain highlands of southern Arizona and northern Sonora, borderlands people were in constant motion. American expatriate businessmen and their families, Yaqui Indian migrant workers, Chinese truck farmers, and Mormon pioneers all crossed borders with ease. Capital, too, was in motion, and at first glance, Fugitive Landscapes appears to offer a familiar account of "extraction [that] flowed across national borders" (2).

But the real story is more interesting, and more "fugitive," than that. Fugitive Landscapes looks as far back as the sixteenth century, but focuses on the years after the current U.S.-Mexican border was drawn—a period when, as one Mexican observer put it, Americans began to "value dollars more, and dominion less" (56). Dollars, though, would only go where they could find stability and seven percent interest, and the reputedly "lawless" nineteenth-century Sonoran borderlands offered neither. "I am getting heartily sick of all this excitement and risk," wrote one corporate pioneer in the 1880s (67).

A fragile peace depended on informal efforts that included self-protection organizations, private police forces, and the improvisational accords between U.S. prospectors and Indian communities known as "calico treaties" (41). But elites on both sides of the border craved a kind of stability they called "law and order," and Mexican president Porfirio Díaz, who ruled from 1876 to 1911 under the banner "Order and Progress," promised to give it to them. As Truett shows, American ranchers and miners moving into northern Mexico in the late nineteenth century encountered not an empty wilderness, but the legal apparatus of another modernizing state—a cash-strapped regime eager to exploit foreign corporations as tools of statebuilding for its far northern frontier. Customs collectors battled smugglers and gun runners; American miners mastered Mexican corporate law. The Porfirian regime met the corporations more than halfway, building up the rurales, a mounted constabulary force, and rewriting land law to simplify sales. At the same time, Mexican officials collected taxes, employed the rural poor, and passed some of the burdens of policing and development onto the U.S. private sector.

The Porfiriato stabilized Sonora for investors, but it unsettled its residents; some protested in 1902, asking why "Mexicans tolerate to be ... expelled from their own land as if they were foreigners" (136). Resentment turned violent; a strike at Sonora's largest mine in 1906 ushered in a decade of political revolution and social upheaval that targeted the Mexican state, its rurales, and the foreign companies they defended. In Arizona, fears that revolution and disorder would spill northward prompted locals to mark the border "very distinctly with United States flags" (167). American mine owners headed north from Sonora. Mexican refugees did too; fleeing economic uncertainty, and drawn by expanding labor markets north of the border, they ushered in a new age of border crossing.

Samuel Truett draws from an impressive archive to tell this complex history with both gusto and nuance. If at times overwritten (the book would be better without portentous references to "people in motion ... stirring up endless clouds of human sediment that both nurtured and obscured transnational space" [129]), Fugitive Landscapes demonstrates that transnational histories are always stories about law—both the borders between two legal regimes and the legal order of the borderlands itself.

The boundary between law and lawlessness was politically contentious long before the Mexican Revolution, as Chris Frazer argues in his thoughtful and creative Bandit Nation. Mexico itself won independence through guerrilla warfare. Thus, "bandits—and the stories people told about them—were central to imagining and making Mexico" (21). A preoccupation with outlaws and bandits, indeed, was one of the only things that citizens of the new nation shared.

As nineteenth-century Mexican regimes toppled one another, they recruited leading bandits, and the depredations of armies that lived off the land only swelled the bandits' ranks. Corrupt judges, police, and private security guards exacerbated the problem. The stubbornness of banditry belied the new nation's pronouncements of modernity and progress, scaring off foreign investment and calling into question politicians' claims to legitimate authority. Thus, the state suppressed crimes such as highway robbery and kidnapping ever more harshly. By 1836, as executioners dispatched an average of three bandits a week, legislators merely asked that they finish before 9:00 am, lest they interrupt Mexico City's business routines. The effort had devastating long-term consequences for Mexican political culture. "[W]ar on banditry," as Frazer deftly shows, "reinforced an authoritarian and coercive reflex in Mexican statecraft" (21). Bandit Nation offers an eye-opening account of how ordinary crime—and perceptions of it—permeated both cultural sensibilities and constitutional provisions.

Harsh measures and hangings failed to rein in outlaws, and as bandits proliferated, so did representations of them in Mexican culture. Although Frazer gathers fragmentary social historical evidence to illuminate bandits' lives, he is less interested in bandits than in what people thought about them. By the mid-nineteenth century, the bandit was firmly fixed "as a metaphor for Mexican society," both in Mexico and abroad (58). European and North American travelogues defined Mexico by its outlaws, but when overseas writers concluded that banditry was inherent in all Mexicans, the nation's emerging literary class demurred. As Frazer shows, Mexican novels contested this essentialist linkage of criminality and nationhood. In the early years of independence, novelists depicted banditry as a legacy of Spanish colonialism. But a generation later, literary nationalists "turned their critical gaze toward the bottom of the social hierarchy" (99), and their novels increasingly defended the anti-crime exertions of the Porfirian state.

Over time, the emergence of urban crime and labor radicalism in modernizing Mexico made highway robbers seem as antiquated as stagecoaches, and the persistence of bandits came under the scrutiny of the emerging science of criminology. But Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata soon took to their horses, and working-class Mexicans sang of the revolutionaries' exploits in folk corridos, showing that the bandit was clearly no atavism, but a dynamic symbol for a new generation of Mexicans seeking to make sense of their national identity.

In 1836, British traveler Charles Latrobe dismissed Mexico as a land "where law was but imperfectly understood, and still more imperfectly administered" (70). Historical understanding, like legal administration, is an imperfect science, but thanks to the creative transnational insights of Samuel Truett into the law of the border, and the innovative cultural analysis of Chris Frazer of the law of the bandit, Porfirian Mexico and its borderlands now come more closely into view.

Christopher Capozzola

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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