Nation-Building and Creosote Knowledge at the U.S.-Mexico Border

• In Event: Settler Ecologies, “Natural Resources,” and Unruly Responses to Extraction

Abstract

The creosote bush, Larrea tridentata, is a desert shrub that was cast at the bottom of the vegetal hierarchy in European invader/settler imaginaries. Settler colonists who came to the hot deserts of North America considered the plant representative of what was undesirable land and generally worthless as a resource. It was not until the late 19th and 20th centuries that U.S. and Mexican governments as well as private entrepreneurs began looking at the common shrub as a potential resource. But the creosote bush was not easily exploitable and seemingly thwarted its own commodification.
This paper tells a history of nation-building with this ‘lowly’ desert shrub through its intersections with the science, war, and industry in the U.S. and Mexico. Beginning with the Spanish Royal Botanical Expedition and the plant’s initial collection and naming, both subsequent governments would find ways to exploit the plant’s chemical-rich composition as they looked inward to nature and plants within their borders, natures which were often the same across nation-state boundaries. In this context, the plant was understood far from its environmental contexts and emplaced connections. States seemingly came to know ‘themselves’ only through processes of abstraction and reduction. Thus, the creosote bush went from “worthless” to valuable by way of science, by outsiders in labs, separated from its very nature and the people who lived with it and understood it in more embodied environmental forms.

Author

• Ligia Arguilez, University of Texas, El Paso