Thomas Robertson, the author of A Southwestern Utopia, was the son of a Dane name Lajos Proschowski, who came from a Greek Orthodox Polish family converted in Hungary to Lutheranism. Perhaps it is not surprising that a man of such complex antecedents would be born among Mayo Indians in Sinaloa, nor that he continued the pursuit of social idealism that led his forbears from Poland. through Hungary, Denmark, the United States, and into Mexico. He was born and spent all of his boyhood in a “Brook Farm” type of colony at Topolobampo, a name with the rippling sound of a rondo that seems fitting to the bubbling enthusiasm that almost two thousand settlers brought to northwestern Mexico.
The colony was promoted and founded in 1886 by a persuasive civil engineer named Albert Kimsey Owen, at a site where he envisioned the growth of a “great metropolitan city,” with ships lying in the harbor flying the flags of many nations. However, Owen was not only persuasive but a practical enthusiast; it was he who planned and started the construction of a railroad that was to reduce the distance from Kansas to the Pacific Coast by 400 to 600 miles. Although his venture failed, the lines projected for his Kansas City, Mexico y Oriente railway were the basis for the recent completion of the Chihuahua al Pacífico railway; and members of his colony took the first steps pointing the way to the prosperity of the city of Los Mochis and its agricultural hinterland.
But the colony collapsed. Dissension tolls the bell; adversity deflated enthusiasm and antagonism grew between the “practical” private property group and the “idealist” socialists. Directly instrumental in the demise of the colony—although disintegration had already advanced toward an obvious denouement—was a hardheaded organizer named Benjamin Francis Johnson. Gradually acquiring rights to lands and water, he emerged with control of colony lands, and ultimately with four hundred thousand acres in the area, before expropriation ended his operation.
The book is divided into two parts: Part I concerns the founding of the colony, its tribulations, and ultimate decline. The latter fact was not due to bad choice of an area; failure was the result of naiveté. The settlers thought that success would come to them because of their devotion to an ideal. They had too much enthusiasm and too little understanding of simple principles of geography. Hard working and generally intelligent, the fact did not occur to them that a new environment might mean problems in economy beyond their experience.
Part II, “Memories of Sinaloa,” is a straightforward account as perceptive and enlightening as “Two Years before the Mast.” It is told with sympathy for the Indians and an understanding of the problems of the owners in an outmoded economic system.
The book is written with affection, affection not only for the colonizers but also for the land and its earlier inhabitants. Even though one feels that the author’s affections give an idyllic coloration to his tale and that he speaks too cursorily of the disaster that came to so many of the settlers, it is an excellent account of an interesting experiment in an interesting place.
