Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History

Abstract

This collection of essays showcases the work of young, U.S.-based scholars working on U.S.-Mexico borderlands history during what the editors refer to as the region’s “formative” period, the 1820s through the 1940s. Samuel Truett and Elliott Young begin with an introduction situating the collection within existing literature. Rather than redefine the field, the editors insist that there is more to gain by seeing borderlands history as a “meeting place” for multiple fields, where Chicana/o, U.S. West, Spanish borderlands, and Mexican specialists can converse together “on their own terms” (p. 12). The essays reflect the fruits of such conversations.Many of the contributors add welcome complexity to familiar borderland subjects. In the opening essay, Raúl Ramos explores a range of attitudes held by Spanish and Mexican officials in San Antonio, Texas, regarding their powerful Indian neighbors. Locating interesting continuities in outlook and policy before and after Mexican independence, Ramos nonetheless has little to say about Indians themselves — a curious omission given the volume’s emphasis on multiple perspectives and boundary crossing. Andrés Reséndez’s excellent essay on borderlands literary cultures in the mid – nineteenth century begins with a failed attempt by Texans to extend their dominion over eastern New Mexico in 1841. Reséndez taps into fascinating differences in the ways borderlands peoples articulated corporate identity by placing sensationalized U.S. accounts of the Texan endeavor alongside the published accounts of Mexicans and pictographic calendars of Kiowa Indians. Louise Pubols presents a subtle portrait of political culture in post-1848 California. Writing against the more familiar story of elite Californios naively colluding with American newcomers and quickly losing their wealth and power, the author focuses instead on the prominent de la Guerra family of southern California and the endurance of their patriarchal political network into the 1870s.Benjamin Johnson’s essay serves as a tight précis of his important 2003 book, Revolution in Texas (Yale Univ. Press). When in 1915 ethnic Mexicans began attacking ranches and killing Anglos along the lower Rio Grande, Texas Rangers and vigilantes responded with often-indiscriminate reprisals. Johnson argues that in the disastrous aftermath of the rebellion, Tejanos came to embrace their American citizenship and fight politically for the ideal of “multiracial democracy” (p. 293). Alexandra Minna Stern explores the creation of the U.S. Border Patrol. Stern tells a tale of a hardening border, racist medical quarantines, and punitive immigration laws, all policed by a newly constituted Border Patrol service armed with extraordinary powers and inflated notions of masculinity.Other contributions enlist little-known actors to guide the reader through a complex and rich landscape of borderland dreams, schemes, and social relations. Bárbara O. Reyes explores the story of Bárbara Gandiaga, a native woman convicted in 1806 of conspiring to kill a friar at a mission in Baja California. By putting the official, Dominican account in conversation with a very different telling collected in the late nineteenth century, Reyes offers a penetrating critique of how one woman’s story became fodder for competing discourses: one Catholic and colonial, the other anticlerical and reformist. Elliott Young uses a pair of travel narratives written by the journalist and anti-Díaz revolutionary Ignacio Martínez to gesture at critiques of modernity arising out of the borderlands in the late nineteenth century. Young mines the travel narratives for Martínez’s evolving and sometimes contradictory thoughts about colonialism, development, and justice. Grace Peña Delgado explains how class structured opportunities for Chinese immigrants on the U.S.-Mexican border during the 1880s and 1890s. As exclusionary legislation complicated Chinese immigration through places like San Francisco or New York, many would-be immigrants — especially merchants — found better opportunities for life and for border crossing in northern Mexico.In one of the collection’s strongest pieces, Karl Jacoby recounts the efforts of William H. Ellis to organize an African American colony in Mexico in 1895. Billed as a nondiscriminatory haven for poor black farmers, Ellis’s colony attracted enough immigrants to panic white landowners in the U.S. South. Jacoby is at his best when discussing the complex but fascinating reasons for the project’s demise, an event that he argues prefigured growing prejudice against blacks in Mexico. Samuel Truett’s essay on Emilio Kosterlitzky, a Russian immigrant in Mexico who became a lauded military figure in northern Sonora, follows the transformation of the northwestern borderlands from a frontier zone of Indian wars to a transnational theater of labor struggle. Kosterlitzky’s eventful life, ending as a spy for the U.S. government, highlights the changing possibilities and limitations of transnational identity in the turn-of-the-century borderlands.While organized both chronologically and thematically, this collection is not (and was not meant to be) a comprehensive text for borderlands history. However, its clear, engaging essays would enrich undergraduate classes, and graduate students and professors will find in Continental Crossroads a lively tour of the region’s new and clearly flourishing historiography.