The Aimless Life: Music, Mines, and Revolution from the Rocky Mountains to Mexico

In 1915, Leonard Worcester Jr., a prominent mining executive, was imprisoned in a Chihuahua jail without being given a bond or a trial. He was accused of defrauding a Mexican company by officials loyal to Francisco "Pancho" Villa, but he was eventually released. Worcester's memoir, written in 1939, provides a unique perspective on the U.S.-Mexico border region's history, including the expansion of the American West, mining, labor, the formation of reservations, the Great Depression, and the Mexican Revolution.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 186 pages
Publication date: 01 July 2021
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

In early March of 1915, news broke in El Paso that Leonard Worcester Jr., a prominent mining executive in the border region, was being held in a Chihuahua jail without trial or release on bond. Officials loyal to Francisco "Pancho" Villa had accused Worcester of defrauding a Mexican company related to a shipment of zinc, a charge without merit. While struggling to convince Mexican officials of his innocence, Worcester found himself caught up in a maelstrom of economic interests, foreign diplomacy, and revolution that engulfed the U.S.-Mexico border region after 1910.

Worcester's 1939 memoir of his "aimless" life offers an important perspective on U.S. and Mexican history, challenging the bombast of boosters promoting Manifest Destiny. Introduced, edited, and annotated by Andrew Offenburger, Worcester's first-person account details the expansion of the American West, mining and labor in Colorado, the formation of reservations in Indian Territory, the Great Depression, and the everyday nature of the Mexican Revolution in Chihuahua.

Worcester's memoir, one of the few written by an American living in the Mexican borderlands during this critical historical era, provides a snapshot of the capitalist development of the American West and borderlands regions in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781496222909