The ghosts of frontiers past: making and unmaking space in the borderlands.

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)