Diversity, Unwelcome Returns, and the Writing of U.S.–Mexico Borderlands History

This chapter introduces and assesses the roles horses played in the economies and societies of eighteenth-century southeastern Indians. Villagers throughout the region found horses essential in hunting, trade, and war. If the future of borderlands history centers partly on issues of spatial mobility and ambiguities of power, then horses are especially relevant to borderlands scholarship. In the early South, horses facilitated cross-cultural and economic exchanges while undermining the structures of authority for both Indians and whites. A closer look at the interrelationship between Indians, horses, and the environment affords new insights into borderlands history by underscoring how human and animal mobility not only complicated territorial boundaries and cross-cultural interactions but also subtly modified the socioeconomic foundations and ecological landscape of southeastern Indians.

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The Kurds and the territorialization of minorityhood

Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World ◽

10.1386/jciaw_00016_1 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 14 (1) ◽

pp. 13-30

Author(s):

Janet Klein

Keyword(s):

Ottoman Empire ◽

Foreign Intervention ◽

Borderlands History

Drawing on the theoretical underpinnings of Gyanendra Pandey’s work on the construction of minorityhood in India, this article explores how Kurds became a minority in the context of foreign intervention in the Ottoman Empire and how a new discourse surrounding ‘minorities’, citizenship and rights became elements in a wider discourse on modernity, civilization, sovereignty, identity, citizenship and power. This article ultimately traces the minoritization of the Kurds and how Kurds became minoritized after, but along with, Armenians. Of particular interest in the present study is how fresh thinking in the field of borderlands history can help illuminate other angles of the minoritization process, here, namely, its connection to territoriality. Thus, here I add to Pandey’s concept of ‘marked citizenship’ to reflect on what I call ‘marked territoriality’ as the companion feature in the process of making minorities. I also suggest that the case study I explore in this article may help us tweak the periodization of territoriality itself.

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Petra Santa Cruz Stevens and the sexual and racial modalities of property relations in the nineteenth-century Arizona–Sonora borderlands

Cultural Dynamics ◽

10.1177/0921374014543152 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 26 (3) ◽

pp. 347-378

Author(s):

Nicole M Guidotti-Hernández

Keyword(s):

Social History ◽

Social Life ◽

Historical Memory ◽

Santa Cruz ◽

Indian Wars ◽

Property Relations ◽

Political Upheaval ◽

Borderlands History ◽

Arizona Territory ◽

Nation State Formation

The 1890s were a period of tremendous social and political upheaval. The intimate nature of boom-bust economies and the end of the Indian wars influenced US–Mexico borderlands social life, forming the basis of this article. A 23 March 1893 murder-suicide attempt by ex-Congressman Hiram Stevens against his wife Petra Santa Cruz in the Arizona territory sets the stage for how larger socioeconomic shifts in racialized capitalist production influenced historical memory. In particular, analyzing Petra Santa Cruz Stevens’ life history in the context of capitalism provides a window for a reassessment of borderlands history as it is currently practiced, the ways in which material objects account for the affective and social labor of producing legible subjects, the ways in which sexual and racial modalities informed property relations of capital, and finally, a feminist critique of social history and national formation by shifting our attention to how borderlands negotiations of violence and history were, and continue to be, central to US history. I argue that the murder-suicide reordered systems of meaning, serving as a microeconomic index of racial capital and nation-state formation.

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