"Whenever we exist on any land, we know it is our country": Cocopa Mobility and the Colorado River in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1887–1936.

This article examines how the Cocopa Indians, indigenous to the Colorado River delta region spanning the U.S.-Mexico border, maintained a degree of autonomy between the 1890s and 1920s by adapting their traditional mobility patterns to the challenges posed by expanding nation-states and capitalist development. The Cocopas’ seasonal movements with the shifting river and their role as migratory laborers allowed them to evade rigid border enforcement and land dispossession efforts by both U.S. and Mexican governments. However, infrastructural projects like the 1905 “great diversion” of the Colorado River, establishment of the Cocopah Indian Reservation in 1917, and intensified border controls in the 1920s gradually restricted their mobility and divided the tribe along national lines. The article highlights how the interplay between landscape variability and political borders shaped Native strategies of survival, illustrating that Cocopa mobility was both a cultural practice and a geopolitical act that enabled resilience amid pressures of colonization and state control.