In a different time and place, V.I. Lenin wrote a caution useful for our understanding of the US-Mexico border as a primary site for the formation of American empire: “there is no more erroneous nor harmful idea than the separation of foreign and internal policy.” Indeed, as I argued in the first part of this essay, the US-Mexico borderlands represent the space—physical, political, ideological—where the foreign and the internal historically collapse into one, shaping the development and contours of US empire in its various iterations. Tracing the history of Arizona’s Fort Huachuca, from its origins as a settler colonial outpost waging war against the Apaches to its current role as the world’s largest drone training base, reveals how and why those imperial iterations came to be.
This history also suggests that the southern US border is the focus of its own “forever war,” fundamentally dependent on conflict against an array of “enemies” for its creation, maintenance and expansion. Since the 1870s, that list of enemies has included rebellious indigenous polities, migrants, refugees, racialized communities living and working in the borderlands, illicit drugs, and even popular movements seeking radical change throughout Cold War Latin America. Past imperial efforts to contain, repel, or destroy those enemies decisively shaped our current “forever war,” the War on Terror.
“Fighting the Wind”
On paper, the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe that ended the US-Mexico War largely created (when paired with the the 1853 Gadsden Purchase) the recognizable border between the two countries. In reality, though, the border—along with vast swaths of the Apachería in Arizona and New Mexico—remained under the control of the Chiricahua Apaches for decades after 1848. Having launched devastating raids deep into Mexico before the war, they continued their raiding activity after 1848, including raids and attacks on Anglo settlers who had moved into indigenous lands. After a decade of skirmishes and minor conflicts, the US military undertook the “Apache Wars,” also known as “America’s longest war,” lasting from the early 1860s through the late 1880s. As an oft-neglected theater of the US Civil War, this “three-cornered war” pitted competing Anglo settler colonial visions for what became the US West against Apache efforts to defend their autonomy and self-determination.
First built in 1877, Fort Huachuca represented one part of the Army’s counterinsurgent strategy against the Apaches: the building of an estimated 50 forts and camps in Arizona—along with reservations—that allowed for the rapid deployment of cavalry to locate and fight Apache warriors. This was a classic guerrilla war. “Fighting the Apache,” wrote the fort’s biographer, “was like fighting the wind.” In the final battles against Geronimo in 1885-1886, the fort served as the main headquarters for the last commander of the campaign, General Nelson Miles.