At the dawn of the twentieth century, the US-Mexico border was home to some of the largest and most technologically advanced industrial copper mines. This despite being geographically, culturally, and financially far-removed from traditional urban centers of power. Mining the Borderlands argues that this was only possible because of the emergence of mining engineers—a distinct technocratic class of professionals who connected capital, labor, and expertise. Mining engineers moved easily between remote mining camps and the upscale parlors of east coast investors. Working as labor managers and technical experts, they were involved in the daily negotiations, which brought private US capital to the southwestern border. The success of the massive capital-intensive mining ventures in the region depended on their ability to construct different networks, serving as intermediaries to groups that rarely coincided. Grossman argues that this didn’t just lead to bigger and more efficient mines, but served as part of the ongoing project of American territorial and economic expansion. By integrating the history of technical expertise into the history of the transnational mining industry, this in-depth look at borderlands mining explains how American economic hegemony was established in a border region peripheral to the federal governments of both Washington, D.C. and Mexico City.

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

An original novel set in the universe of the award-winning video game! The Borderlands cannot be conquered! Mordecai and Daphne have gotten themselves in a tough spot near the highly dangerous town of Gunsight, one of the most remote outposts on the planet Pan­dora, out in the boonies of the boonies of the Borderlands. Daphne has been taken prisoner by Jasper, a local warlord who controls the area around Gunsight . . . except for that other settlement, the former mining town Tumessa. There’s some kind of big secret operation going on in Tumessa—another warlord, a particularly mutated Psycho named Reamus, is somehow making money. And he’s been relent­lessly raiding Gunsight and kidnapping Jasper’s people. Jasper may be scum, but he needs those people for raids on other towns, so it all has to balance out. Mordecai needs to negotiate for Daphne’s release, but now the only way he’ll ever see her alive again is to kill his way into Tumessa, find out what’s going on there, and report back to Jasper—only then will Mordecai get a paycheck and the girl. Mordecai doesn’t want the job, but he is pretty devoted to Daphne . . . and somehow, he just might be able to turn this entire mess to his advantage. . .

The images of migrants and refugees arriving in precarious boats on the shores of southern Europe, and of the makeshift camps that have sprung up in Lesbos, Lampedusa, Calais and elsewhere, have become familiar sights on television screens around the world. But what do we know about the border places – these liminal zones between countries and continents – that have become the focus of so much attention and anxiety today, and what do we know about the individuals who occupy these places? In this timely book, anthropologist Michel Agier addresses these questions and examines the character of the borderlands that emerge on the margins of nation-states. Drawing on his ethnographic fieldwork, he shows that borders, far from disappearing, have acquired a new kind of centrality in our societies, becoming reference points for the growing numbers of people who do not find a place in the countries they wish to reach. They have become the site for a new kind of subject, the border dweller, who is both 'inside' and 'outside', enclosed on the one hand and excluded on the other, and who is obliged to learn, under harsh conditions, the ways of the world and of other people. In this respect, the lives of migrants, even in the uncertainties or dangers of the borderlands, tell us something about the condition in which everyone is increasingly living today, a 'cosmopolitan condition' in which the experience of the unfamiliar is more common and the relation between self and other is in constant renewal.

For decades, American hungers sustained Tijuana. In this scientific detective story, a public health expert reveals what happens when a border city's lifeline is brutally severed. Despite its reputation as a carnival of vice, Tijuana was, until recently, no more or less violent than neighboring San Diego, its sister city across the border wall. But then something changed. Over the past ten years, Mexico's third-largest city became one of the world's most dangerous. Tijuana's murder rate skyrocketed and produced a staggering number of female victims. Hundreds of women are now found dead in the city each year, or bound and mutilated along the highway that lines the Baja coast. When Dan Werb began to study these murders in 2013, rather than viewing them in isolation, he discovered that they could only be understood as one symptom among many. Environmental toxins, drug overdoses, HIV transmission: all were killing women at overwhelming rates. As an epidemiologist, trained to track epidemics by mining data, Werb sensed the presence of a deeper contagion targeting Tijuana's women. Not a virus, but some awful wrong buried in the city's social order, cutting down its most vulnerable inhabitants from multiple directions. Werb's search for the ultimate causes of Tijuana's femicide casts new light on immigration, human trafficking, addiction, and the true cost of American empire-building. It leads Werb all the way from factory slums to drug dens to the corridors of police corruption, as he follows a thread that ultimately leads to a surprising turn back over the border, looking northward. “City of Omens is a compelling and disturbing tour of a border world that outsiders rarely see - and simultaneously, a clear guide to a field of public health that offers an essential framework for understanding how both ideas and diseases can spread.” -- MAIA SZALAVITZ, author of Unbroken Brain “Dan Werb combines his expertise as a trained epidemiologist with his keen discernment as an investigative journalist to depict what happens when poverty, human desperation, and unfathomable greed at the highest levels of a society mix with imperial ambition and a criminally ill-conceived policy towards drug use. It is a riveting and heartbreaking story, told with eloquence and compassion.” -- GABOR MATÉ, MD, bestselling author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction “City of Omens is an urgent and needed account of a desperate problem. The perils that Mexico's women face haunt the conscience of a nation.” -- ALFREDO CORCHADO, author of Homelands and Midnight in Mexico

This collaborative multi-authored volume integrates interdisciplinary approaches to ethnic, imperial, and national borderlands in the Iberian World (16th to early 19th centuries). It illustrates the historical processes that produced borderlands in the Americas and connected them to global circuits of exchange and migration in the early modern world. The book offers a balanced state-of-the-art educational tool representing innovative research for teaching and scholarship. Its geographical scope encompasses imperial borderlands in what today is northern Mexico and southern United States; the greater Caribbean basin, including cross-imperial borderlands among the island archipelagos and Central America; the greater Paraguayan river basin, including the Gran Chaco, lowland Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia; the Amazonian borderlands; the grasslands and steppes of southern Argentina and Chile; and Iberian trade and religious networks connecting the Americas to Africa and Asia. The volume is structured around the following broad themes: environmental change and humanly crafted landscapes; the role of indigenous allies in the Spanish and Portuguese military expeditions; negotiations of power across imperial lines and indigenous chiefdoms; the parallel development of subsistence and commercial economies across terrestrial and maritime trade routes; labor and the corridors of forced and free migration that led to changing social and ethnic identities; histories of science and cartography; Christian missions, music, and visual arts; gender and sexuality, emphasizing distinct roles and experiences documented for men and women in the borderlands. While centered in the colonial era, it is framed by pre-contact Mesoamerican borderlands and nineteenth-century national developments for those regions where the continuity of inter-ethnic relations and economic networks between the colonial and national periods is particularly salient, like the central Andes, lowland Bolivia, central Brazil, and the Mapuche/Pehuenche captaincies in South America. All the contributors are highly recognized scholars, representing different disciplines and academic traditions in North America, Latin America and Europe.

In so doing, Calderon revises the view that Mexican workers were careless and difficult to work with and documents their struggle for recognition and union organization."--BOOK JACKET.