This is a compelling book. It is a rare anthropological page-turner, despite the long timescale Thomas Sheridan covers: He begins with the prehistory of the Tohono O’odham and ends in the very late 20th century. His topic is time and space in southern Arizona and the construction of space, a theme that he takes from critical geography. Taking up the history of the Upper Santa Cruz river valley and its occupation by different cultures, Sheridan gives an account of the way in which each society has lived in and conceived of the land, for use or possession, sharing or competing.

Sheridan divides the book into two parts, titled “Landscapes of Community” and “Landscapes of Fraud.” In the first, shorter, part, he begins with the O’odham creation story, told by Juan Smith to Julian Hayden, recounting the O’odham conquest of Hohokam. He next describes the entrance of missionaries, first the Jesuits and subsequently the Franciscans. Sheridan describes this “conquest” and the social and ecological revolution that the missions brought about for the O’odham. He moves on to the Hispanic settlement of the area and the ongoing changes and shifts of power that the Spanish military brought to both the missions and the O’odham.

It is in the second, and longer, part that Sheridan tackles the major topic of his book: the land speculation that is so much a part of recent, especially western, U.S. history. The O’odham and, secondarily, the missions are the crucial background for—or perhaps, backbone of—the author’s focus, which is land and the displacement of community. The way in which land speculation in Arizona in the 19th and 20th centuries played out in this particular region is a critical element of his exploration of the social construction of space. Sheridan uses the details of the Tumacácori Land Grant, the Baca Float, and the legal, political, and capitalist games played by a range of characters and institutions to provide a detailed account of the culture that turned land into capital—as he titles chapter 6 “Fictitious Capital and Fictitious Landscapes” (p. 138).

The Baca Float or, to be precise, floats, as there were more than one, were areas selected to compensate heirs of Luis Maria Cabeza de Baca, whose 1821 grant of half a million acres was being turned into a community grant. Tired of battling Comanches, the Baca family had ceased to use the land; after its settlement by small Hispanic farming families, another generation of Bacas attempted to reclaim it. By the mid-19th century, there was a new type of conqueror: “grant litigation had turned the territory into a golden cash cow for lawyers and their political allies” (p. 144). From this point on, the Baca heirs were pawns in an endless series of lawsuits, and the legal battle for possession of the Baca Float is the fraud indicated in the book’s title. Sheridan does full justice to the byzantine lawsuits, the politics, and corporate involvement and to the way in which “ownership” of land in this area led to capital or the appearance of it. He describes, as well, the personalities of different players in this game and the changes in the legal system that supported the speculative and cultural claims of possession, repossession, dispossession of, and profit in, land.

Sheridan’s historical account is underpinned by his anthropological understanding of and geographical perspective on constructions of space, which differ from culture to culture and time period to time period. He writes without jargon, and his preference for a slightly purple prose is expertly used to drive along an account that would in other hands be dry, especially when it reaches the details of the legal cases and the claims and counterclaims of ownership. Instead, the book is a vivid story told by an experienced author who footnotes every detail but brings the land and people to vivid life. He only sketches the shift from Spanish to U.S. power, the changing and developing laws, the society of a changing frontier with its many minor confrontations (such as that between the military and the missions), and the use and abuse of law and writing, all of which could have been taken up in long chapters of their own. But Sheridan keeps a clear narrative thread, allowing the reader to enjoy all the implications without slowing this important and sobering story.
[maps, illustrations, notes, glossary, references, index.]