@article{caldemeyer_voyles_2024, title={The Intimacies of Infrastructure: Histories of Exploitation, Labor, and Community Life in Territorial Arizona and Kentucky at the Turn of the Twentieth Century}, volume={121}, ISSN={["2161-0355"]}, DOI={10.1353/khs.2023.a923652}, abstractNote={The Intimacies of Infrastructure:Histories of Exploitation, Labor, and Community Life in Territorial Arizona and Kentucky at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Dana M. Caldemeyer (bio) and Traci Brynne Voyles (bio) Introduction These two essays, set close to a continent apart, explore histories that, despite differences in subject matter and context, reveal surprising thematic overlaps about labor and community life at the turn of the twentieth century. In Kentucky's eastern and western coalfields, capitalism transformed nearly every aspect of life, not just by altering the land and workplace relations, but by changing how communities functioned. In territorial Arizona, a diverse workforce employed by the federal Reclamation Service completed construction of the first dam on the Colorado River to divert water to vast new agricultural fields. [End Page 341] At first glance, these stories—one about coal and the other about water—seem to have little in common. What similarities are there between dams in the desert and mines in the mountains? Their differences are clear. And yet, both histories involve laborers' intimate navigations of powerful external forces: federal authority and corporate hegemony. They both trace diverse workforces grappling with the realities of racism, white privilege, dispossession, and exploitation; and they both consider the outcomes of massive infrastructural changes to landscapes, whether the extraction of resources or the damming of rivers. In both histories, external forces reached into these regions with a mission to "develop" or "modernize" the land. Yet not all who lived in these areas could enjoy the fruits of this labor. As individuals navigated the structures created by these external entities, they became capitalists and colonizers themselves. As a result, capitalism and colonialism drove wedges in communities and workforces, increased competition between neighbors, and ultimately dictated who could profit from these advancements and who could not. Transforming the Land—For Some, but Not Others In each of these histories, vast transformations of landscapes held promises of economic development for local communities. Infrastructure projects, from coal mines to a dam meant to spur agriculture, asked communities to invest their labor—and often, their health—in transformations designed to "modernize" the "rugged" Kentucky terrain and make homes in the Arizona desert. Though far apart, both sites saw the deployment of standard narratives of white settler economic progress in the late-nineteenth century, in which investment in the land would produce profit for individuals and institutions alike. Blasting mines and building dams would make the land desirable for the kinds of homes Americans sought in these turn-of-thecentury years. But homes for whom? In these far-flung places, nonwhite people were expected to participate in infrastructure projects, but not to benefit. In Arizona, [End Page 342] Native workers were employed to build the very infrastructure of their own dispossession from their homeland to reservations. In eastern Kentucky, mountain folk lost their land through underhanded deals that caused them—white and Black—to be exploited by absentee landowners. In both the eastern and western Kentucky coalfields, Black workers were required to pay dues to unions that did little to help fight the racism they faced. The opportunities that were originally promised by the development and modernization of the land did not always arrive as planned. Coal jobs did not always meet expectations and the river did not always deliver water as easily as promised. Moreover, those who occupied the land for generations were expected to labor for and pay into the structures that actively worked against them. Heaping on the Troubles: Producing Fractured Communities In both cases, vast structural changes to landscapes impacted individual peoples' lives in a profound manner. Together, these essays demonstrate that structural changes touched peoples' lives in the most intimate ways. The presence of extractive capitalism in Kentucky meant that local residents found that their day-to-day lives came to be shaped by the drive for profit, right down to their relationship with neighbors and to each other. The pursuit of reclamation of the Colorado River in Arizona, similarly, reconstructed everyday life around the dam. These histories, then, are not just about the power and influence of large corporate projects and vast infrastructure schemes, but also about how that power impacted local communities. Individuals...}, number={4}, journal={REGISTER OF THE KENTUCKY HISTORICAL SOCIETY}, author={Caldemeyer, Dana M. and Voyles, Traci Brynne}, year={2024}, month={Sep} } @article{voyles_2024, title={The Laguna Diversion Dam in Arizona: Reconsidering the Dams on the Colorado River, Starting with the First}, volume={121}, ISSN={["2161-0355"]}, DOI={10.1353/khs.2023.a923651}, abstractNote={The Laguna Diversion Dam in Arizona:Reconsidering the Dams on the Colorado River, Starting with the First Traci Brynne Voyles (bio) Uncle Sam's Big Dam On March 30, 1909, in the farthest southwestern corner of the Arizona Territory, a crowd of an estimated two thousand people gathered along the bottomlands of the region's most powerful river, the Colorado, for a celebration. The governor of the territory was there, as were a number of his appointed officials; the federal government was represented by members of the Reclamation Service, a newly created federal bureaucracy designed to foster dryland irrigation projects in western states; and more than half the crowd was made up of members of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, who had journeyed to this part of the Sonoran Desert by train to witness the development of what they described to a journalist as a minor part of Los Angeles's vast "back country," a hinterland of the region's most rapidly growing urban population.1 Pickpockets wended their way through the crowd, relieving the celebrants of their cash and valuables.2 The area the crowd had gathered in was several miles outside the town of Yuma, Arizona. Up until then, it had been known primarily [End Page 359] as the site of the territorial prison and not much else, situated downriver from the convergence of the Gila and Colorado Rivers. These two rivers, both with reputations for sudden floods and for carrying thick deposits of silt, had together created a vast desert valley where the crowd gathered. The soft valley floor was formed by fine alluvial soil laid out in a great plain in view of distant mountains. This was, and remains, a central portion of the homeland of the Indigenous Quechan Nation (settlers called them Yumas), who had farmed the rivers' rich bottomlands for generations. In 1909, the crowds, though maybe not the pickpockets, had gathered in this part of Arizona Territory to celebrate the culmination of work on the first federal dam to be constructed on the lower Colorado River: the Laguna Dam. This was a rock-filled weir-style dam made of three parallel concrete walls, each nearly five-thousand-feet long and five-feet thick, filled with rocks harvested from the nearby plains and mountains. "Uncle Sam's Big Dam," as one journalist dubbed the Laguna, was the culmination of nearly four years of labor, initiated and spurred on by the Reclamation Service, to bring the Colorado River under federal control (work that became more urgent in the aftermath of the disastrous floods in California's Imperial Valley beginning in 1905). The goal of this first reclamation dam, as one reporter put it at the time, was not so much to "chain" the great Colorado River, but to render it "harnessed and driven at will."3 The crowds certainly expected the river to be harnessed. What they saw was something slightly different: almost on cue, the river rose four feet in the first of its regular spring floods (which the engineers had been hoping to get ahead of). The water rushed so ferociously across the new dam that nearly all the planned activities for the celebration had to be scrapped. No longer would sightseers be shuttled across the top of the dam to see its construction from above. Water was surging over it. No longer would speechifiers deliver their prepared remarks on man's most recent conquest over nature; the river [End Page 360] was making too much noise for the crowd to hear them. No one let it dampen their fun, however. Instead, onlookers gazed in awe as flood water "plung[ed] through the gates, to break below into frothing, chocolate-colored cascades."4 Dam officials may have noticed when the unexpected flood swept away thirty feet of one of its cement wings, near an intake canal, but they kept mum in front of the crowds (though the next day, they would hustle hundreds of workers, still nursing hangovers, out of bed and back to the dam site to repair the damage).5 One of the planned activities could still take place, despite the flood: a parade choreographed to illustrate for the crowd...}, number={4}, journal={REGISTER OF THE KENTUCKY HISTORICAL SOCIETY}, author={Voyles, Traci Brynne}, year={2024}, month={Sep} } @article{voyles_grosse_2023, title={Working across Lines: Resisting Extreme Energy Extraction. By Corrie Grosse}, ISSN={["1939-8603"]}, DOI={10.1093/whq/whad117}, abstractNote={Journal Article Working across Lines: Resisting Extreme Energy Extraction. By Corrie Grosse Get access Working across Lines: Resisting Extreme Energy Extraction By Corrie Grosse (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022. ix + 256 pp. Photographs, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95, paper.) Traci Brynne Voyles Traci Brynne Voyles North Carolina State University Raleigh, North Carolina, USA voyles@ou.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, whad117, https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/whad117 Published: 06 September 2023}, journal={WESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY}, author={Voyles, Traci Brynne and Grosse, Corrie}, year={2023}, month={Sep} }