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:: The Mesilla Valley, New Mexico
Once known as the "Garden" or "Eden" of New Mexico, the Mesilla Valley, located around present-day Las Cruces, has long attracted settlers and colonists to its fertile lands. Farmers irrigate their fields from the meandering Rio Grande by opening a channel (or, in the past, breaking the dirt banks of the irrigation ditch) to flood their fields. Today, the region is best known for its pecans and chile peppers, but immigrants and locals alike have raised a number of crops for more than 150 years.
Into this region, in 1905, came a number of destitute but enterprising Boers, or white South Africans of Dutch and French Huguenot descent. No longer citizens of their vanquished Boer Republics, after the Anglo-Boer War, they formed a colony in Chihuahua, Mexico, and upon its failure, then drifted into the Mesilla Valley.
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This website borrows the idea of a "persistent frontier" put forth by the Western historian Howard Lamar. In his presidential address at the Western History Association in 1972, Lamar said that, contrary to popular belief, frontiers did not lose their relevance at the end of the nineteenth century; frontiers -- historical, cultural, and academic -- remained especially relevant to the twentieth-century West.
This site takes Lamar's idea of the persistent frontier and personalizes it. Assembled by Andrew Offenburger, a Ph.D. student in history at Yale University, this website documents the people, places, and ideas Andrew encounters in his studies of the U.S. West and global frontiers, and on his own personal, persistent frontiers.
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