Containment and Commitment
In fulfilling the course of shaping the boundary of the two Americas, the era has been richly seasoned with periodic exercises that speak of an undying faith in the ever fictional frontier on the part of Hispanics as well as Anglos. While a mutual hegemony of sorts has been only partially realized, the border itself as a going concern can no longer tolerate intrusions by visionaries of independent republics who inspire followings, whether through hopes of personal aggrandizement or the idea of shared political beliefs.
The long expansive mobility of the ancient borderlands has changed, though never so wholly nor as abruptly as what once might have seemed a logical consequence of the finally established boundary. Nonetheless, the continuum of activities within the realm of the fictional frontier that encompasses the border itself will proliferate, engendering a shift not so much in kind as in degree.
Dreams of a third republic along the Rio Grande or west of the Sierra Madre will rest in peace. Grandiose visions of empire centering around the Gulf of California will wither away. They will become as evanescent as the unrealistic goal of Confederates to create a postwar version of the Old South below the Great River--Terrell's "foolish dream of exiles in a foreign land." All was to prove as gossamer as the equally audacious proposals for acquiring yet further American territory by outright purchase of Baja California itself.
While efforts to secure an American port on the Gulf of California turned out to be as futile as attempts to turn the Colorado into a river of commerce, just as have those on the lower Rio Grande, its vital flow has been harnessed. Exploitation of its rich alluvial soil has ushered in the triumphant birth of the nation's winter garden. A desert has been made to bear fruit, relinquishing the bounty of agricultural wealth right within The Palm of God's Hand.
The riches of California have been tapped as well, conjoined with the earlier windfall from the Wild Horse Desert to form the underpinning vital to the rapid rise of the western cattle culture. For a while such heady successes seemed sufficient, even if in the minds of many it still was never quite enough in broaching the outer limits of a still largely putative border.
Although filibustering episodes that had begun with the French adventurers in Upper California would be continued with even more patently freebooting enterprises by Americans, those, too, would prove ephemeral. Yet if they were ambitions that were quickly arrested they would be manifested in other ways. American financial might would reach ever farther south, attuned to the rise of immense holdings by Americans in a variety of fields, in land and cattle companies, in mining, oil and railroads, even in idealistic communes of Christian socialists and Mormons. Eventually the vast border country itself would reverberate with the excesses and overflow in cultural drift and change occasioned by the Mexican Revolution.
Coming to grips with the border has entailed a lengthy and painful process, a movement reaching ever westward from Escandón's pioneer colony on the lower reaches of the Rio Grande. Coming to grips with the fictional frontier itself will take much longer.
Like an endless tide the westering spirit has rolled on. Eventually, not even the dedicated pamphleteering of a Flores Magón could cause more than a ripple on its surface, culminating in inspired if unrealistic attempts by Mexican dissidents in the new American California to crusade against further intrusions into their former homeland.
What was to change, in substance, was the amplification of the facile notion of the fictional frontier which has reached westward originally from Florida, following the expulsion of the early Spaniards by the creation of the Georgia Colony under the able leadership of General James Edward Oglethorpe. The Straits of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico themselves ultimately would comprise a natural boundary.
To the west, however, although the border had become institutionalized, there still would be ways of contravening it. If it no longer serves as a point of departure for individual exploitation, the fictional frontier itself is still operative as a habit of mind. It is merely dormant for the while.
Decades of post-revolutionary change in Mexico coupled with an ensuing mood of isolationism on the part of the United States would turn attention away from the border. Such inattentiveness would be further bolstered by the imbroglio occasioned by World War I and the reasonably good times of the 1920s, the latter to be swiftly erased by the long hard years of the Great Depression and the epochal struggles of most all nations in the engulfment of the Second World War.
But with the outbreak of peace a return to escapades within the realm of the fictional frontier inevitably would follow. The way was paved as early as two years after the victory of the Allies with the signing of a new statute by President Harry Truman in 1947. While the law expressly unified the nation's armed services into a National Military Establishment it carried with it provisions of far greater significance in providing for the creation of a particularly important coordinating instrument, the Central Intelligence Agency. Although the CIA soon would emerge as a major foreign intelligence-gathering source, it was as well the nation's secret army. Relatively soon, clandestine activities of the new agency were to become periodically evident within the realm of the fictional frontier.
Significantly enough it would begin with the intervention of the United States under the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration in the rebel invasion of Guatemala in 1954. With covert backing by the CIA, the forces of Carlos Castillo Armas were enabled to topple the regime of the democratically elected but allegedly left-leaning President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán.
Once more, within the broad latitudes of the fictional frontier, a more sophisticated sort of filibustering still was possible. That Mexico's southern frontier neighbor had long been part of the profitable domain of the United Fruit Company, which looked with extreme disfavor on the Arbenz government, could easily be downplayed. It could seem less important than the United States' frenzied efforts to stamp out the possibility of alleged communist intrusion.
While similar engagements would take place in far more distant corners of the globe as the CIA extended its scope of operations during the Cold War, once more, nearer to home, soon a far more hazardous enterprise had been launched. Indeed, the latter project would call to mind the ventures hatched in old California days from the time of the exploits of Raousset-Boulbon and Pindray to those of Crabb, Moorehead and Walker.
Yet the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the most flagrant example of governmentally sanctioned filibustering, was doomed from the outset. In effect, America's sub rosa involvement with Cuba had been bequeathed from the administration of Eisenhower to that of President John F. Kennedy, the latter imbued even more than his predecessor with the long prevalent concept of a fictional frontier, a concept the charismatic Kennedy easily promoted to the extent of including in its ample latitudes the domain of outer space itself as the ultimate frontier.
Notwithstanding such a vaunted concept, the highly secret mission of an exile Cuban army trained and equipped by CIA forces in America and convoyed to the island republic lying but ninety miles off Florida proved an exercise in futility. Not only did the ill-fated engagement further alienate the Fidel Castro government, it also placed the United States in an untenable position as an aggressor nation and squarely in the path of possible nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union, which supported the newly established Cuban regime. Never before had the cost of filibustering proved so dear. But then never before had the threat of nuclear holocaust seemed so imminent as during the tense days of the Cuban crisis. In retrospect, however, as further facts concerning the Bay of Pigs invasion surfaced, if anything had been learned from the grim misadventure, it had failed to make a lasting impression.
More was to come only three years later under Kennedy's successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, and American intervention in the Juan Bosch presidential affair in the Dominican Republic in 1964. Like Cuba, the Dominican Republic's location within the realm of the fictional frontier was as germane to the issue as was Johnson's deploying 22,000 troops to the Caribbean nation on the grounds of protecting American life and property in the course of an election fraught with what seemed a comedy of errors.
While no repercussions that could at all match the fearful aftermath of the Cuban episode were forthcoming, further activities within the realm of the fictional frontier would for the time subside, minimized by more pressing problems at home. There, both Johnson and the nation were to become increasingly preoccupied with the United States' long festering role in the Vietnam conflict.
And yet, if it was apparent in some circles that the age-old westering movement, which long since had crossed the Pacific, had finally impaled itself in an impasse in Southeast Asia, subsequent parrying in the bountiful reaches of the fictional frontier had far from run its course.
Although the ensuing administration of President Richard M. Nixon would be content with modest skirmishing with Mexico over marijuana traffic across the border, abated activity that had begun under the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations would resume. Indeed, it even would be amplified by American involvement of far greater clandestine proportions under the Ronald Reagan presidency during the 1980s.
Starting off modestly enough with an invasion of Grenada, a tiny Caribbean island few Americans had ever heard of, much more than merely an American presence would be carried forward to the point of recklessness in Central America. Especially in Nicaragua, the old stomping grounds of the Gray-Eyed Man of Destiny, William Walker, celebrated filibuster and self-acclaimed emperor of that long-suffering nation, the United States' involvement in a web of far-reaching intrigue would escalate into an international scandal.
Indeed, the latest excursion into the increasingly turbulent domain of the fictional frontier soon would become a global matter. Effectively curtained by an explosive powder keg of hostilities raging in the Middle East and further fueled by the insatiable thirst for Mideast oil and the nation's implication in the peculiar politics engendered by holy wars escalating in Islamic countries, the extent of the United States' role in Central America would become a confusing issue. The sordid episode, centered on aiding Nicaraguan rebel forces known as contras with funds derived through secret arms sale to Iran, eventually would erupt into the stormy Iran-Contra affair. While the sorrowful contest and the ensuing lengthy and costly series of investigations exploring cupidity in the matter would cap the Reagan years as the administration's crowning scandal, in a much broader sense it could be regarded as but a latent chapter in the long story of fictional frontier excursions.
Although a search for appropriate scapegoats on which to hang the burden would be conducted, the individuality long prevalent in filibustering-type enterprises had actually passed. Even under the administrations of Eisenhower and Kennedy the amorphous layers of the Central Intelligence Agency had covered over all meddling in matters of the fictional frontier as well as elsewhere. With the exception of a lowly Marine lieutenant colonel, Oliver North, tried and more chastised than convicted for his role in the affair, a mosaic of governmental and bureaucratic entanglement would suffice largely to absolve everyone implicated in the entire exercise.
The whole matter, hurried to an aftermath with the close of the Reagan administration, soon would be seen as little more than a momentary diversion as other pressing problems began to occupy the nation. Both the mushrooming subculture of drugs and the rampant rise of drug warfare within the United States itself would further draw--but by no means close--the curtain on the fictional frontier.
Indeed, the stage was set, the background props scarcely struck before the subsequent administration of President George F. Bush had again broached the barrier comprised in the evanescent web of the ever fluid, ever fictional frontier. Before the end of 1989 thousands of United States troops had been deployed in Panama, resulting in the success of the invasionary force whose well-publicized goal was the capture of Panamanian strongman General Manuel Antonio Noriega, swiftly spirited into the United States to stand trial for his alleged lengthy activities in the widespread network of illegal drug trafficking.
While the Noriega affair could be hailed in many circles as a moral triumph and of justice vindicated, on another level it could be questioned whether the end ultimately justified the means, even in the face of the United States' lengthy role in the Canal Zone. Avowed popular support of the mission, both in Panama and the United States notwithstanding, the exercise can be seen as a continuation of the long history of filibustering, of armed intervention justified by the legacy of the frontier as an inherent, perhaps indeed the primal, factor in the national consciousness. Such horizons have been lessened but not seriously curbed as the United States enters the new millennia and the extraordinary reshaping of worldwide political boundaries ushered in toward the close of the twentieth century.
Ongoing problems in drugs and other national maladies notwithstanding, the manifest destiny within the realm of the boundary of the two Americas will be the sobering increases in population, particularly in poorly industrialized countries, and as well a proliferating redistribution of their numbers within the broader confines of the fictional frontier itself. Not only is the Mexican-American border still the most popular locale for illegal entry into the United States by Mexican migrants, it is increasingly the route of choice for undocumented emigrants from far below the southern frontier of the Mexican republic.
Already gathering in alarming numbers along the whole of the nation's southern boundaries are ever more migrants and political refugees, the refugees comprising both spurious as well as genuine contenders for political asylum, many of whose wanderings have been inspired by the United States' involvement in Central America. So much so that public outcries against the soaring rise in illicit traffic in both goods and people, popularly summarized as "drugs and illegals," would surface steadily. Indeed, the more so as the nation's longtime quota systems for immigrants is seriously undermined, permitting record numbers of new arrivals to enter the country, particularly Asians, resulting from the United States' unsettling misadventure in Vietnam as well as elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
While public clamor to deal effectively with those issues would rise and fall more or less in keeping with the usual peaks and valleys within the immigration movement itself, the fulsome tide of it all would continue to make expansive inroads from one end of the ancient borderlands to the other, from Key West to San Diego. Steadfastly, albeit unevenly, plans and proposals would be put forward to deploy armed forces to police the whole area. Some even would call for sealing off the western boundary in some--theoretically, at least--unassailable manner, with imposing ditches, concrete walls, still higher fences.
The prevailing logic therein seems to voice a retreat from the realm of the broader fictional frontier, focusing on the notion that "good fences," as Robert Frost observed, "make good neighbors." History, however, in recording the overrunning of formidable barriers, from the Great Wall of China to that of Hadrian during Roman empire days, and from France's "impenetrable" Maginot Line to the Berlin Wall, fails to bear out such a contention.
Eventually all barriers prove fallible. With time it would be seen that in a world whose ethnic boundaries steadily were receding, economic allegiance and the passion for freedom were gaining over diminishing commitments to cultural and socio-political ties alone. As mutual interdependence among nations becomes increasingly interlocked by a space-age technology, frontiers both real and imaginary are becoming ever more subject to contravention in more subtle ways. Indeed, with the advent of highly sophisticated electronic innovations, they can be bypassed altogether. A long and fascinating era has closed.
But the allure of the fictional frontier not only lives on, it will become even more comprehensive. If it no longer is to bear fruit through contentious border forays, filibustering sorties, economic penetration, high-rolling financiering maneuvers and outright political folly, it still is realizable in other arenas.
If the exceedingly high stakes of patent boundary contravention could yet be risked in covert as well as open governmentally sanctioned intrusions, then certainly on an individual level the game was still worth the candle in the minds and hearts of those willing to take a chance on the hazards of the fictional frontier itself. Alone or in small groups, such aspirants would yet dare to venture forth in their quest to attain what the primal frontier always has held out in the way of hope--dreams, ideals, wealth, a better life, above all the notion of freedom.
Within the storied realm of the fictional frontier lay all of that and more, including the pursuit of liberty and that evanescent quality called happiness. It had been that way from the beginning, since the intrusions of the first Native Americans themselves.
Hope, dreams and ideas, after all, were what the United States had been about all along. Far more than any sort of cultural homogeneity, rather it has been those which have bound and continued to bind the nation together. It follows that the very notion of the fictional frontier will endure, most often as a beacon of hope illuminating the way. So long as disparities between the two principal cultures of the Americas, the once brave New World, continues, why should it not?