The Limits of Liberty: Mobility and the Making of the Eastern U.S.–Mexico Border by James David Nichols

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Limits of Liberty: Mobility and the Making of the Eastern U.S.–Mexico Border by James David Nichols Mark A. Goldberg The Limits of Liberty: Mobility and the Making of the Eastern U.S.–Mexico Border. By James David Nichols. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. Pp. 312. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) In The Limits of Liberty, James David Nichols examines a range of nineteenth century border crossers who conceptualized the Texas–Mexico border as the dividing line between refuge and limited opportunity. Oftentimes conflicting with neighboring nation-states’ definitions of how the boundary should operate, “mobile peoples transformed a limit that governments intended to mark one territory off from another into a line of opportunity, economic mobility, and even social stability” (228). Focusing on American Indians, runaway black slaves, Mexican debt peons, norteño (northern Mexican) settlers, Anglo Texan vigilantes, and Mexican and U.S. state officials, Nichols offers a bottom-up view of the border, tracing migration in multiple directions to understand the diverse meanings border subjects ascribed to the shifting dividing lines. He builds on borderlands histories that explore groups relationally in an era when the border and nation-building on both sides were in flux. Nichols conducted exhaustive research in local, state, and national archives in Mexico and the United States to offer an important, multifaceted picture of migration in the region and its impact on border construction at the local and national levels. The book is organized chronologically, and Nichols begins with a discussion of Lipan Apache mobility across the Colorado River, which essentially divided Anglo and Mexican settlements in Mexican Texas. Lipans turned to Anglo Texans when the Mexican state failed to provide promised resources. Removed from the United States, immigrant Indians like the Cherokees also looked to Mexico and crossed into Texas for land, turning the U.S.–Mexico border into a racial borderline between a nation that rejected Indians and one that accepted them (to a degree). Nichols then shifts to a discussion of runaway slaves who imagined the U.S.–Mexico border as a line of liberty, bringing into focus the extensive communication networks that linked slaves across the U.S. South. African American slaves fled into Mexico throughout the antebellum period, challenging “attempts by North Americans to strip blacks of personhood both at home and abroad” (145). The discussion of runaway debt peons reorients the narrative toward a migration stream from Mexico to Texas. Peons rejected crushing, lifelong debt for their families by seeking work [End Page 463] north of the border. The absence of laborers radically transformed northern Mexican agriculture, first by removing a large part of the labor force and then by fueling workers’ struggle for better wages south of the border. The last third of the book centers on the relationship between mobility and sovereignty at the border. Anglo Texans regularly crossed into Mexico to retrieve runaway slaves or to punish raiding Indians, which Mexican settlers and officials saw as a threat to national sovereignty. After midcentury, what began as conflict turned into cooperation, and the new Liberal Mexican government worked with vecinos (property owners of good reputation) and the United States to crack down on border crossers. Fulfilling the vecinos’ visions, the Mexican state sacrificed the migrants’ liberty for sovereignty, and “the meaning of the border as a limit of state power [came] to contradict, and sometimes trump, its significance as a line of liberty” (191). The Limits of Liberty is a phenomenal study of the nineteenth-century Texas–Mexico border. Nichols’s use of liberty as an organizing concept does raise questions, however. Liberty as an idea feels U.S.-centric, clashing with Nichols’s coverage of the messy border region where many actors vied for control and autonomy. While one can argue that Mexican political culture engaged with the idea, the question arises: were all border crossers seeking liberty with their feet? In the case of Native peoples, a liberty framework seems to shift the narrative away from Indian world-views and political organization. Nevertheless, The Limits of Liberty makes significant historiographical interventions and is an outstanding contribution to border studies, Texas history, and the history of the American West and...