Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands by Paul Barba

Abstract

Reviewed by: Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands by Paul Barba Floyd William Holder IV Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands. By Paul Barba. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 474 pp. Maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $65.00 cloth. I am a fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). For those who also are fans of the MCU, Country of the Cursed and the Driven (CCD) is the slaveholding scholarly writing version of the MCU and should pique your interest. Like in the MCU for Thor, Iron Man, and Black Widow, prior works about Spanish slaveholding, tribal slaveholding, and white-Anglo slaveholding exist. This text in the CCD Universe—I’m coining this phrase now—is like the Avengers films in that it brings each of these previously kept separate stories together in one place to highlight how they are interrelated and essential to one another’s story. Instead of the MCU’s Loki playing the villain, this text uses the borderlands of Texas, a lawless place in the world that exists in the gray area of society [End Page 361] and allows slavery to thrive despite an outside world beating it back from afar. This location villainy is vital to note, as Barba writes, “Slavery in the Texas borderlands was never a static institution or system of practices; it was, rather, part of a web of ever-changing processes.” As a geographer I note that the borderlands mentioned in the title represent an area known as a transition zone, where the dominance of one culture, society, people, etcetera, begins to fade, and that of another begins to take hold. Accordingly, this text doesn’t cover the Great Plains proper, but it does cover the area at the Great Plains’ fringes, a place that influences and gets influenced by the Great Plains. Future work by the author and others in the borderlands should look at other subject matter in the region, such as prostitution, alcohol, and non-prescription drugs, and cover the work similarly to discover how their stories intertwine. French wine, Spanish rum, English port, Irish beer, and Native firewater in the area must have some fantastic intertwining story arc. Either way, this reviewer cannot offer many genuine critiques that would improve the text. It is a compelling read about the bigger story of slaveholding and how all our ancestors are a bit guilty on the matter. One item that does stand out is the lack of any story arc covering slaveholding by blacks or Africans. “Uncle Tom” commonly describes a person of African descent as a traitor to their race. Besides the apparent restriction of space and time to write, why was a story arc not included in this vein? Doing so would offer a lot of insight into something not felt to exist but had to in some way. Floyd William Holder IV Social Sciences Department Western Texas College Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln