Crossing an Intellectual and Geographic Border

Abstract

The Canadian-American borderlands have been configured and reconfigured by dynamic flows of trade, investment, migration, family connection, cooperation, and community across the border. One can view this and other borderlands as a dynamic spatiotemporal network with flows, gateways, corridors, and places or as a matrix: a complex web of interactions and dependencies that can in many places at different times be seen to be embedded in unequal economic relations. This article focuses specifically on migration flows in the Canadian-American borderlands during the turn-of-the-twentieth-century period. Flows of people during this period integrated communities on both sides of the border, but such movements varied among the regions that make up the borderland zone. The article uses Canadian and American border-crossing records to show that Canada-U.S. migration must be viewed in relation to patterns of regional transborder development.