On the Border: Society and Culture between the United States and Mexico

Abstract

Borderlands history continues to grow in popularity on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border. Systematic studies of la frontera, from authors as varied as Ramón Gutiérrez, Andrés Reséndez, and David Weber, among others, point to the vitality of the border region as an important site of cultural, social, and physical exchange. Editor Andrew Grant Wood adds On the Border to this growing body of scholarship. Using a multidisciplinary approach, Wood has collected a wide-ranging, what he calls “eclectic,” set of essays that originally appeared as a special issue of the Journal of the Southwest. All of the essays are topnotch, but they are not all studies of the borderland, which makes this collection somewhat frustrating.Eric Michael Schantz’s “All Night at the Owl” is a particularly notable addition to this volume. Schantz examines Mexicali’s Owl Café and Theatre, a center for vice tourism from the 1910s through the 1940s. The Owl offered Americans a social space where they could enjoy an exotic, albeit stereotypical, version of Mexican nightlife. As Schantz notes, “a popular and unthinking way of viewing Mexicali developed that was ultimately the cultural by-product of the border vice tourism industry” (p. 91). Americans came to see border cities as nothing more than large red-light districts, and the Owl was central to the creation of this way of thinking in Mexicali. Equally important is the work of sociologist Josiah McC. Heyman. His essay analyzes U.S. ports of entry along the border as places of international traffic, as well as locations that represent the borderlands in a variety of ways. As Heyman notes, “ports of entry are the border” (p. 222). While he focuses on how Mexicans traveling to the United States and Americans venturing to Mexico are themselves agents of cultural exchange, he also concentrates on American Customs and INS officials. These officers, Heyman argues, are of the borderland — they are in many cases binational, bicultural, and bilingual. Editor Wood’s “Anticipating the Colonias” is another noteworthy essay. Wood explores the evolution of “popular housing” in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. Rather than seeing the precursors of colonias as scummy shantytowns, Wood notes that the residents of popular housing communities organized, protested the city’s neglect, and attempted, but ultimately failed, to incorporate themselves into the larger urban environment. This essay is painfully short and leaves the reader wanting more. Jeffrey Pilcher’s essay on Southwestern cuisine, Lawrence Taylor’s piece on the gold rush in Baja California, and Vincent Cabeza de Baca and Juan Cabeza de Baca’s study of an American family’s suicide in Tijuana are also insightful examples of borderlands scholarship.The problem with this eclectic volume is that many of the essays are not investigations of the borderland. For example, Travis Du Bry’s “Slab City” explores the former military base turned squatter’s paradise in California that is known simply as Slab City. Du Bry provides an interesting assessment of Slab City’s relevance as a place of settlement for latter-day frontier men and women. But, it remains unclear exactly how Slab City fits into the larger category of borderlands studies. While Du Bry offers several vignettes of Slab City’s more permanent residents, he provides little analysis to show how these individuals complicate our understanding of the borderland. Indeed, this essay is less a borderlands study and more American studies. Víctor Manuel Macías-González’s excellent essay has the same problem in reverse. Macías-González explores Mexican homosexuality during the Porfiriato and the postrevolutionary period, a largely unexplored aspect of Mexico’s social history. His analysis of the homoeroticism of the Porfiriato and of bathhouses as places of gay contact is an important contribution to Mexican history. But this is Mexican history, not borderlands history. The pieces by Paul Vanderwood, María Arbeláez, and, to a lesser degree, Daniel Arreola suffer from similar issues.Perhaps a more detailed introduction would have helped clarify why Wood chose the essays for this volume. For the most part, the introduction only summarizes each essay. Wood provides no central argument or theme to tie the essays together. Further, he offers no succinct definition of border or borderlands, which would have gone a long way toward illuminating how all of the essays fit into this volume and how they work together. In short, the editor’s goals remain somewhat of a mystery. Still, the scholarship in On the Border is so fresh, the writing so clear, and the essays so interesting that one can easily look past these criticisms. While the eclectic nature of this book is frustrating, the fact that there is literally something for everyone makes it most satisfying.