Takeaways from The Nine Nations of North America

When I first moved from West to East in the mid-1990s, it struck me that perhaps the border should be drawn down the middle of the continent rather than along the 49th parallel, and upon mentioning it, I was recommended a book called The Nine Nations of North America.

Based on his popular Washington Post article (itself based on countless conversations with roving reporters), Joel Garreau’s book revised the continent’s borders to isolate nine distinct units. As Canada and the United States celebrate national holidays (on the heels of La Fête Nationale in Quebec), it seems like a fitting time to revisit the book, originally published in 1981.

Here’s what we learned (again):

1 Nine Lives Garreau’s book identifies the nine nations as: New England (the region we expect plus Canada’s Atlantic Provinces); the Foundry (the industrial U.S. Northeast and Midwest plus Southern Ontario); Dixie (the South – more on that nomenclature soon); the Islands (South Florida and the Caribbean); MexAmerica (most of the U.S. Southwest and Northern Mexico); Ecotopia (the West Coast); the Empty Quarter (most of the interior West and North); the Breadbasket (the U.S. and Canadian prairies); and Quebec (the only of the nine nations with existing borders). It should be noted, though, that the revised boundaries don’t accommodate the traditional or current lands of Indigenous North Americans any more than the actual political borders do. The idea that a de facto nation exists across a de jure border? That was not new, even then.

2 True North The divisions between nations can be seen most clearly north of the Canadian border, according to Garreau – attributable to the decentralized nature of confederation as well as Canada’s somewhat linear population distribution. In the book, which appeared the year after both the first Quebec referendum and the unveiling of the National Energy Program, Garreau writes, “Not only does Ottawa face a separatist Quebec, but the energy-rich environs of Alberta in the Empty Quarter show repeated determination to set their own course, refusing to be treated like a colony with oil reserves to be exploited.” He draws an immediate parallel to the U.S. portion of the Empty Quarter, where the percentage of land controlled by the federal government at the time of publication exceeded the percentage controlled in Washington, DC (this includes Indian Reservations, administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs – the most explicit colonization here). Another harbinger that seemed worth mentioning at the dawn of the 1980s? “The first quarts of crude are only beginning to be cracked commercially from tar sands.”

3 Ford to City: Drop Dead One of the takeaways my own recommender recalled from the book was how in the southwestern third of Connecticut, the border between New England and the Foundry is where Red Sox fans give way to Yankees fans, many of whom were then living in a very different city. Garreau cites how, to many, the wealth accruing in municipalities like Houston at the time was “proof that cities like New York were overpriced, overtaxed, and overrated.” Many still think New York is overpriced, and those who can afford it still tend to think it’s overtaxed, but its rating has rebounded mightily. Garreau designated New York as an aberration, part of no nation. “New York City, for the purposes of discussing aberrations, does not include the six or so million people jammed into the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Harlem,” he writes. “Those places are perfectly well understood as part of the Foundry. ‘New York’ is Manhattan south of Ninety-sixth Street on the West Side and south of Eighty-sixth Street on the East Side, with a few major colonies scattered throughout the suburbs.” Today’s aberration surely pushes farther north in Manhattan and across the bridges into Brooklyn. 4 Big, Beautiful Wall “It’s a place where cops sometimes shoot third-generation Americans of Mexican descent for very controversial reasons, a region faced with the question of whether the American Dream applies to innocent kids born of people who have crossed the border illegally.” So wrote Garreau about MexAmerica almost four decades ago, and sadly it could have been been written yesterday. So why has little changed? “Too many people on both sides of the border benefit from the situation just as it is,” Garreau states – again, almost 40 years ago. “The Border Patrol isn’t a federal law enforcement arm, it’s a regulatory agency. Just like the one that watches over the stock market.” The threat of terrorism has complicated this arrangement more than it has fundamentally changed it. 5 Star-crossed Cities “San Francisco and Los Angeles are not just two cities. They represent two value structures,” the book declares. “Indeed, they are the capitals of two different nations – Los Angeles is the capital of MexAmerica, and San Francisco that of Ecotopia.” While Southern California had the aerospace industry, Garreau was profiling Ecotopia at an inflection point in the tech revolution (Apple’s IPO was in 1980). The book refers to Silicon Valley as “the home of the semiconductor industry, which has been referred to as the basic manufacturing component of the future – the ‘steel of the twenty-first century.’” Right on, but it’s his brief focus on Stanford University’s policy of allowing scientists to personally profit from their work at the university that seems the most telling now. Today, Silicon Valley – with its products and wealth increasingly seeking to be borderless – might be recategorized as an aberration.

6 Anti-bellum The book used a Confederate battle flag as the symbol for the nation of Dixie (the song “Dixie” was itself the unofficial anthem of the Confederacy). Since then the flag has been removed from state houses, most notably South Carolina’s after the Charleston church shooting in 2015, and its inclusion in the state flag of Mississippi faces a legal challenge. At the time of publication, however, The Dukes of Hazzard and its automotive iconography was watched in 20 million homes a week, according to Nielsen. “The teen-agers have an exquisite sense of where, geographically, displaying an ancient defiance by flying the Stars and Bars [another Confederate flag] from their radio aerials will rile the grownups,” wrote Garreau back in 1981. “The merchants have finely tuned ideas about where it is that calling their establishments the Dixie Bar and Grill, or Rebel Auto Sales, will help them make money.” Fast-forward to this past May, and Biloxi, Miss. became the latest of many tourist destinations to remove the flag from city property.

7 Maîtres Chez Nous Despite the failed referendum in 1980, Garreau’s methodology affirms that Quebec nationhood predates the discussion of separation, rather than being a question to be debated within it. In a way, the chapter on Quebec is the most instructive with regard to colonization: Garreau highlights business and technological successes by Quebecois that were previously viewed with skepticism by Anglophones. However, he also writes, “By North American standards, the Quebecois have been here since the dawn of time” – a rebuttal to tourists that fetishize its Europeanness, but also a limited comparison between North American colonial history and civilization elsewhere. But then, that

has been the North American standard, one which is now (hopefully) changing.

GOOGLE EARTH