B. Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and the Continuing Allure of 'Gold Glitter' in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands Region
Lawrence D. Taylor - Autumn 2018
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is one of the great novels of the borderlands, a story of greed, corruption, and the land itself fighting back. Lawrence Taylor uses it not as literary criticism but as a historical key, reading Traven's parables of lost mines, gold fever, and doomed partnerships against the actual centuries-long extraction economy of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The gold rush mentality Traven diagnosed in the 1920s, Taylor argues, never really ended, it just changed metals. From colonial silver strikes to Canadian copper multinationals to fracking, the Sierra Madre keeps getting plundered, and the mountain keeps winning in the end. A rare essay that makes scholarship feel like storytelling. relevant.
Pueblo Pottery and the Politics of Regional Identity
Kenneth Dauber - Winter 1990
A pot is never just a pot. In this essay, Kenneth Dauber uses the story of the Indian Arts Fund to show how regional identity is not discovered but constructed, and by whom, and for what purposes. Reformers, modernist artists, archaeologists, and politicians all found in Pueblo pottery a symbol they could use. The Southwest that emerged from their efforts was not neutral; it had winners and losers, centers and peripheries. Dauber's argument, that the identity of a region is always a political act, remains as sharp today as when it was written. The essay appeared in one of the most celebrated issues in the journal's history: the Winter 1990 special issue "Inventing the Southwest: Region as Commodity," born out of a conference the Southwest Center organized that same year. It remains essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the Southwest has been imagined, packaged, and sold.
Constructing a Virtual Wall: Race and Citizenship in U.S.-Mexico Border Policing
Josiah McC. Heyman - Autumn 2008
Border enforcement is often debated as a technical or legal problem. Heyman reframes it as a political and cultural one. Writing in 2008 when drones, biometric cards, and Boeing's billion-dollar "Smart Border Initiative" were making headlines, he dissects the gap between what the virtual wall promises and what it delivers, and asks the harder question: why do we keep building it if it doesn't work? His answer, rooted in the politics of race, citizenship, and symbolic order, has only grown more relevant.
Land, Sky, and People: The Southwest Defined
James W. Byrkit - Autumn 1992
Byrkit’s essay remains one of the most thoughtful attempts to answer a deceptively simple question: what is the Southwest? By bringing together geography, history, and culture, he shows how the region emerges from the dynamic relationship between land and people. More than thirty years after its publication, the essay still offers one of the clearest and most compelling starting points for understanding the Southwest.
It has continually prompted lively discussion. Agree or disagree, it’s a monument.