The North American West in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Brenden W. Rensink (review)

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Reviewed by:

• The North American West in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Brenden W. Rensink
• Michael Brickey

Brenden W. Rensink, ed., The North American West in the Twenty-First Century. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2022. 380 pp. Hardcover, $99; paper, $30; e-book, $30.

Historian Brenden W. Rensink's edited collection of essays introduces new research on major problems facing the American West in the twenty-first century through "a cohesive set of research questions as explored through a handful of case studies" (xxv). The book is conceptualized as a foray into "Modern West" studies, which is made up of "many intersecting subfields" that follow the New Western History trail blazed by Patricia Nelson Limerick in the 1980s (xxi). The essays herein arose from a 2019 workshop at the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University, and the contributors offer new questions, new findings, new trajectories, and new narratives across the book's five overlapping thematic problem areas.

In Part One, "Environmental Reckonings," Jennifer Dunn looks closely at cultural and economic challenges associated with Superfund site designation in Libby, Montana, while David Vail discusses ecological threats facing vast stretches of farmlands across the Great Plains. In Part Two, "Indigenous Lands and Sovereignty," Marcus Macktima discusses problems associated with the politics of place and identity in and around the ancestral homelands and colonial reservation boundaries of the San Carlos Apache Nation in southeastern Arizona. Soni Grant's ethnographic work with the Diné in New Mexico examines how "land relations established over the course of colonial settlement shape contemporary experiences of extraction" (82). In various ways these authors help us reconsider how places are conceptualized and experienced across multiple spatial and temporal scales in the US West. [End Page 379]

Part Three, "Urban and Rural Transformations," covers the social and cultural impacts of recent economic trends. Stuart Leslie and Layne Karafantis show how the high-tech economy has produced patterns of social inequality that merit comparison between today's tech barons and Gilded Age robber barons. Lindsey Passenger Wieck's essay brings this story street level, to San Francisco, where tech workers' search for urban authenticity has gentrified the working-class Latino Mission District. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Widener's essay on agritourism in Colorado's Grand Valley demonstrates that the tourist desire to consume rural authenticity is helping some small landholders remain in place. The information and tourism economies are modifying western landscapes, social relations, and cultural practices.

Part Four provides new ways of thinking about "Migrant Lives and Labor." Ivón Padilla-Rodriguez gives an overview of the social and political consequences of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and Taylor Cozzens shows how farmworkers have continued their struggle for justice in the decades that followed the United Farm Workers movement. Ernesto Sagás presents the Latino view of the US West as el Norte and contends, "for Latinos, el Norte is more than a geographical label; it is a socioeconomic realm with sharp economic distinctions but blurred cultural ones" (272). Together, these essays help to inform the contemporary discourse of borders, critique the criminalization of "illegal" dark-skinned bodies, and problematize the US-centric conceptualization of the region.

Part Five, "Unresolved Politics and Law," offers new insights into the struggles for LGBTQ rights, for women's rights, and over so-called public lands in the US West. Peter Boag provides an important intervention into both the history and historiography of LGBTQ activism and legislation in the American West, while Chelsea Ball argues that the political history of the Equal Rights Amendment "is still western women's unfinished business" (297). Andrew Gulliford rounds out the volume with an analysis of overlapping Indigenous and settler cultural geographies in southeastern Utah. His discussion of Bears Ears National Monument makes clear how cultural identity claims often center on "public" lands where there [End Page 380] will continue to arise struggles over land rights, debates about land access, and efforts to assert decision-making power. Here we are reminded that law—like place—is never fixed, always contested, and never finished.

The North American West in the Twenty-First Century has mapped a cross-disciplinary path forward for the interdisciplinary...