Thomas E. Sheridan
The Southwest Center and Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona
The Betrayal of the O'odham: From Landscapes of Community to Landscapes of Fraud in the Upper Santa Cruz River Valley
Drawing upon the work of critical geographers like Henri Lefebvre and David
Harvey, this presentation explores how the O'odham world of the Upper Santa
Cruz River Valley in southern Arizona was circumscribed along axes of both
space and time by Spanish missionaries and settlers and then destroyed by
Mexican and Anglo speculators who trafficked in paper titles. In the process, "land"-- a culturally constructed category as well as a biophysical reality --
was transformed from an extension of community to a factor of production to
fictitious capital bought and sold for its future value as speculative
capitalism strove to produce its own commodified spaces by burying the
landscapes, and communities, of the O'odham of Mission Tumacacori in the
mid-19th century and Mexican and Anglo homesteaders in the early 20th century.
