Racial Divide, Labor War Examined in Borderlands - Georgetown College

“Are you an American, or are you not?” This was the question Sheriff Harry Wheeler of Cochise County, Ariz., used to choose his targets in the Bisbee Deportation of 1917, one of the most notable vigilante actions carried out on U.S. soil. It is also the question Katherine Benton-Cohen addresses in her new book, “Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands” (Harvard University Press, April 2009).

The Georgetown assistant professor takes a look at Cochise County’s provocative history, which ties a seemingly remote corner of the country to one of America’s central concerns: the historical creation of racial boundaries. Benton-Cohen explores the changing meanings of race in America through the microcosm of southeastern Arizona’s mine and ranch country.

“This book relies on the conviction that ideas about race and nation cannot be disentangled from the ways people think about class, gender and family,” Benton-Cohen writes. “This is a claim that many scholars have made, yet it has proven exceedingly difficult to write about these dynamic and often slippery concepts simultaneously.

The history and study of racial differences in the United States largely has been mapped along lines of black and white, the professor says, but the racial divide is far more complex.

“Latino, Asian, Native American and white experiences with race have become common topics of scholarly investigation,” says Benton-Cohen. “And, as many scholars have shown, the category of ‘American’ is so bound up with whiteness as to be extricable only with great effort and epic social movements, and even then perhaps not completely redeemable from its race specific roots.”