These are the great endeavors of these barbarians, whose main objective is to steal. --Domingo Elizondo, 1768 1 If you wish my young men to stop raiding Texas, perhaps you should move Texas to where they cannot find it. --Ten Bears, 1872 2 Five days later he rode at night into a small crossroads pueblo nameless to him and he sat the horse in the crossroads and by the light of a full moon read the names of towns burned into crateslats with a hot iron and nailed to a post. San Jerónimo. Los Pintos. La Rosita. At the bottom a board with the arrow pointed the other way that said La Encantada. He leaned and spat. He looked toward the darkness in the west. The hell with it, he said. I aint leavin my horse down here. --Cormac McCarthy, 1992 3 "There!" the man cried. "Ladrón! Get him!" --Kathleen Alcalá, 1997 4 [End Page 23] This essay explores the valley between two horizons of historical comprehension in the Río Grande borderlands of the United States and Mexico: the empirical and the imaginative. Neither mutually exclusive nor necessarily antagonistic, these two points of reference exist in most historical production, yet their capacities to enlighten are more often segregated within genres and disciplines than allowed to range freely across a narrative landscape. In the following pages I lay a mosaic of empiricism and imagination in the quest for a deeper field of focus. Doing so requires a rotation of historical standpoints to cut across cultural terrain, disciplinary research methods, and approaches to narrating the past. Toward the empirical horizon I set out to explain the relationship among captive-and-livestock raids, political economies, and inter-ethnic community formation throughout the vast region across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Put simply, capitalist development in the borderlands flowered with the active participation and resistance of local peoples, indigenous and Euro-colonial, whose violent and creative pastoral economies presaged the American livestock economy of the later nineteenth century. Traversing national histories and "ethnic" boundaries, this narrative recasts the region as a space of enduring social subversion and invention. Toward the more distant and evocative horizon of literary imagination I ask how history produced at the popular level, both orally and textually, has in some ways anticipated and outstripped scholarly explanation. Again, and in the most simple of terms, these transitional borderlands societies contained a potential for beauty and horror better captured in the words of village cuentistas and modern novelists than those of conventional historians. In the valley between these two horizons lie silences and whispers, tellings of the past muted either by barrenness of forage or hobbled imaginations. I work from the position that one broad principle uniting western and non-western notions of "history" is the "debatability" of its representation, whether in the form of everyday discourse, ritual performance or scholarly writing. I argue that borderlands fiction and vernacular history embody similar aspects of debatability and deserve equal consideration as sites of historical production. What follows, then, is an effort to spur a conversation among producers of history--professional historians, stewards of community memory, and writers of fiction--in the interests of unifying a landscape-as-lived and a landscape-as-imagined. 5 [End Page 24] * * * Francisco "el Cumanche" was plastering his house in the waning shade of late morning when I arrived. A light breeze silvered the cottonwoods flanking la acequia madre as he laid down his trowel and wiped adobe-damp palms on his coveralls. "Women's work," he chuckled. Coffee and smokes provided a break. "Yes, me and my boys dance 'los comanches.' In times past, for la fiesta de San Pablo, January 25. But that was lost to economics. Now we come out New Year's Day, in Talpa, and Llano Quemado. We sing the songs, pasiados, traveling songs, chants for traveling...
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 47 citations exist upstream.