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H-Diplo Roundtable Review
www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables
Volume XIV, No. 17 (2013)
21 January 2013
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Copyright (c) 2013 H-Net:  Humanities and Social Sciences Online.
H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for
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Roundtable Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse
Roundtable Web/Production Editor:  George Fujii
Commissioned for H-Diplo by Thomas Maddux
---------------

Introduction by Samuel Truett

Rachel St. John.  Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S. Mexico
Border.  Princeton University Press, 2011, 2012.  ISBN:  9780691141541
(cloth, $39.95); 9780691156132 (paper, $24.95).

Stable URL:
http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-XIV-17.pdf
---------------
Contents [Page numbers refer to the PDF edition]

Introduction by Samuel Truett, University of New Mexico        2
Review by Flannery Burke, St. Louis University        6
Review by Geraldo Cadava, Northwestern University        10
Review by Pekka Hämäläinen, University of California, Santa Barbara       
16
Review by Kelly Lytle Hernandez, University of California, Los Angeles
   19
Review by John Paul Nuño, California State University, Northridge        25
Author's Response by Rachel St. John, New York University        29

---------------

Introduction by Samuel Truett, University of New Mexico

A little over a decade ago, the historian of U.S. foreign relations Nathan
J. Citino contemplated the significance of frontier and borderlands
approaches to his field.  Such histories, he wrote, "do not simply offer
scholars of U.S. foreign relations another category of analysis."1
Instead, they carried historians to the brink of a larger transnational
sensibility-a new way of historically relating the United States to other
parts of the world by focusing not only on diplomatic or other
state-to-state networks, but also more broadly on cultural, economic,
social, and environmental entanglements.  "Only those historians who leave
the familiar landscapes of American historiography and venture into the
terra incognita of other literatures," Citino argued, might fully
comprehend these broader horizons, and thereby "recognize how
unexceptional the American experience truly is."2

Eleven years later, these words seem remarkably prescient.  The field of
borderlands history has moved into the mainstream, building precisely on
the promise that Citino identified in his now-landmark essay.  More and
more historians are taking the plunge, drifting beyond the borders of
their 'native' imperial or national histories, engaging strange
literatures, learning new languages, and leaving familiar centrist
bearings behind.  In its attention to global networks, entanglements, and
comparisons, borderlands history has become less bound to any given place.
 It has become, for a new generation of scholars, a way of seeing the
world.

Rachel St. John's new book, Line in the Sand, embodies the best of this
new sensibility.  As scholars of U.S. foreign relations take stock of the
field-and how much it has changed in the past decade-they could hardly
pick a better starting point than this engaging historical sweep of what
St. John calls the western U.S.-Mexico border (reaching from the Pacific
to the Rio Bravo).  Line in the Sand draws on the archives and
historiographies of both the U.S. and Mexico to situate the U.S.-Mexico
borderlands in a transnational context.  It focuses on strategies that
nation-states, market actors, and ordinary people used to navigate an
increasingly regulated space, while also offering a deeply humanized
narrative of a region that found its center in what would later become one
of the more notorious dividing lines in American history.

The reviewers here call Line in the Sand well-written, and an exemplar of
the historian's craft.  Flannery Burke judges it a "clear-headed guide" to
a place that has eluded understanding for centuries, Kelly Lytle Hernandez
describes it as a "smartly written" book, whose breadth alone will win it
"a wide readership," and Pekka Hämäläinen calls it "the work of a
historian's historian:  deeply researched, intellectually rigorous,
methodologically innovative, and engagingly written."  All of the
reviewers appreciate St. John's broad regional scope, and the ways she
moves us beyond the field's tendency to privilege local tales.  But they
disagree on the architectural implications of this decision.  "Such a
sweepingly inclusive approach could have resulted in a disjointed work of
dangling threads," notes Hämäläinen, yet the book "finds its center from
the outset and never loses it."  Lytle Hernandez, by contrast, calls the
book a "series of essays," and writes that it would be impossible to cover
so much space and time any other way.

These larger concerns-how to contain the borderlands spatially and
temporally-are increasingly familiar to the field's practitioners.  Unlike
national or imperial histories, which are typically easy to plot on a map
(and often come with clear starting points, if not also rise-and-fall
plots), borderlands histories have the tendency to morph, slip, trespass,
and evade.  They frequently antedate or outlast standard imperial or
national histories.  There is a lot that one simply cannot take for
granted in the framing of borderlands histories, and much depends on the
author.  Perhaps the most visible spatial decision that St. John makes is
that of anchoring her story primarily to the border, and it is a choice
that the reviewers generally appreciate.  "Borderlands has become an
elastic concept," writes John Paul Nuño, and Line in the Sand counters
this trend in useful ways:  it "serves to remind scholars not to quickly
dismiss territorial borders."  U.S.-Mexico borderlands historians "have
paid surprisingly little attention to the space of the border itself,"
concurs Geraldo Cadava.  By offering us a corrective to this trend, he
argues, St. John takes us in important new directions.

And yet, does she do enough?  Cadava and Lytle Hernandez both advocate in
their reviews for even more attention to the material culture and built
environment of the border.  For Cadava, Line in the Sand opens a door
through which others might pass, whereas Lytle Hernandez wonders if St.
John's failure to develop "an analysis of the boundary as a physical form"
may in fact undermine the book's "promised history of the border."  If we
may have to await a deeper history of the materiality of the borderline,
readers are almost unanimous in embracing another aspect of St. John's
spatial analysis:  her careful and consistent attention to issues of
scale.  Moving nimbly across scales, from the global to the local, St.
John gives us a "comprehensive frame," Burke says, "that explains why and
how a border can change everything from who has sovereign territory to
what's available in the grocery store."

If the border anchors the spatial coordinates of Line in the Sand, it also
has an important role to play in framing the book's borderland narrative.
The tale begins with disoriented boundary surveyors in search of a border,
and it ends with a new era of state controls and fences.  Nuño observes
that readers may feel that  St. John is reiterating a "linear story" of
how two nations turned-to borrow a phrase from historians Jeremy Adelman
and Stephen Aron-"borderlands into borders."3  To put it another way, what
begins as a relatively fluid web of entanglements yields, by the end of
the story, to a clear, state-managed dividing line with a visible
"material reality" (to use Lytle-Hernandez's term).  A firm border, in
this framework, sets clear temporal as well as spatial parameters:  the
story ends with the state and its technologies of separation and
exclusion.

And yet, as Hämäläinen proposes, St. John's story is also more complicated
than this.  What makes her story so important is its attention to multiple
strands-some of which end with states and their borders, and others which
lead in different directions altogether.  Instead of a linear tale of
fluidity yielding to rigidity, Hämäläinen sees a story with "multiple
voices, multiple storylines, and multiple contingencies."  The larger
lesson of Line in the Sand, Hämäläinen proposes, is that "the border does
not have a linear past, and it will not have a linear future."

Participants:

Rachel St. John is Associate Professor of History at New York University.
Her research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century North American
history with a particular emphasis on state-formation and nation-building.
 Her first book, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico
Border, was published by Princeton University Press in 2011.  She is
currently working on a new book project, "The Imagined States of America:
Nation-building in Nineteenth-century North America," which will explore
the diverse range of people and communities who attempted to create
nation-states in North America over the course of the nineteenth century.

Samuel Truett is Associate Professor of History at the University of New
Mexico.  He is the author of Fugitive Landscapes:  The Forgotten History
of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (2006) and co-editor (with Elliott Young)
of Continental Crossroads:  Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History
(2004).  His new project, Empire's Castaway:  The Travels and Tangled
Tales of an English Globetrotter who Became a Mexican Villager, focuses on
the borderlands and entanglements of the global nineteenth century through
the voyages of a sailor-turned-peasant and his border-crossing cohort.  He
is also writing a history of the obsession with ruins and lost worlds on
imperial borderlands on the North American continent, from the sixteenth
century forward.

Flannery Burke is an Associate Professor of History at St. Louis
University and the author of From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism
and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan's.  She is currently working on a cultural
history of the twentieth-century Southwest tentatively titled, Out of
Place, Out of Time? The Southwest and the Nation in the Twentieth Century.

Geraldo L. Cadava teaches Latino and U.S.-Mexico borderlands history at
Northwestern University. His first book is a history of the Arizona-Sonora
border region since World War II, entitled The Heat of Exchange: Latinos
and Migration in the Making of a Sunbelt Borderland, forthcoming from
Harvard University Press.

Pekka Hämäläinen is Professor of History at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, and, starting in 2012, the Rhodes Professor of American
history at Oxford University and a Fellow at St. Catherine's College.  He
is the author of The Comanche Empire (2008) and the co-editor (with
Benjamin H. Johnson) of Major Problems in the History of North American
Borderlands (2011).  He is currently writing a book on cross-cultural
relations, power struggles, borderlands, and empires in North America from
1600 to 1900.

Kelly Lytle Hernandez is Associate Professor in the UCLA Department of
History and director of the UCLA Department of History's Public History
Initiative. Her research interests are in twentieth-century U.S. history
with a concentration upon race, migration, and police and prison systems
in the American West and U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Her new book, MIGRA! A
History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010)
is the first book to tell the story of how and why the U.S. Border Patrol
concentrates its resources upon policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration
despite the many possible targets and strategies of U.S. migration
control. Her current research focuses upon exploring the social world of
incarceration in Los Angeles between 1876 and 1965.

John Paul Nuño is an Assistant Professor of history at California State
University, Northridge. In 2010 he received his Ph.D. in Borderlands
History from the University of Texas at El Paso. He is currently examining
Seminole-Spanish diplomacy at the turn of the nineteenth century. This is
part of a larger project that traces racial discourse in the Florida
Borderlands among indigenous and European groups.

Notes

1 Nathan J. Citino, "The Global Frontier:  Comparative History and the
Frontier-Borderlands Approach in American Foreign Relations," Diplomatic
History 25:4 (Fall 2001), 678.

2 Citino, 688.

3 Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, "From Borderlands to Borders:  Empires,
Nation-States, and the Peoples in between in North American History,"
American Historical Review 104:3 (June 1999), 814-41.

---------------
Review by Flannery Burke, St. Louis University

When I was twelve years old my grandfather moved from Santa Fe to Mesilla,
New Mexico, to become the superintendent of schools for the Gadsden School
District.  My grandfather was a product of the borderlands.  Born in
Watrous, New Mexico, he learned Spanish from the cradle and learned
English from teachers who forbade his first language at school.  Such a
background should have prepared him well for the move to Mesilla, less
than thirty miles from Mexico, but the border was different from the
borderlands.  When I visited, I heard a lot about Pancho Villa.  The
agriculture was more corporate than in northern New Mexico.  Family
outings were now exotic adventures to an entirely different country.  We
would return with paper flowers, embroidered dresses, and whole quarts of
vanilla extract.  But such visits were also fraught with anxiety.  My
grandmother did not speak Spanish.  Her lack of understanding and the
greater poverty in Juarez made her nervous.  My dad always worried over
the fact that I had been born at Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines.
He would instruct me to answer "United States" when asked my place of
birth on our return.  My uncle, a teenager at the time, had heard (likely
exaggerated) stories of his older brother's rowdy exploits across the Rio
Grande, and he very much wanted to head to Juarez with friends, unattended
by adults.  Meanwhile, my grandfather struggled to support
Spanish-speaking students in Gadsden, where language could be a marker of
illegal immigrant status.  When my grandfather retired and returned to
Santa Fe, I felt relieved.  I had enjoyed visiting, but the region had
confused me.  I often wondered if the area was more like Arizona and if an
upbringing there would have prepared my grandfather and our family better
for life in southern New Mexico.

In retrospect, I needed a basis of comparison less, and a clear-headed
guide more.  In Rachel St. John's Line in the Sand: A History of the
Western U.S.-Mexico Border, I have finally found one - a "narrative
geography" (10) of a place that I did not understand.  If I think back to
our family visits, I can see every layer of meaning that a man-made
national border added to the landscape.  St. John begins with the drawing
of the boundary line itself in the early 1850s and then turns to the ways
Native Americans and filibusters used the border to their advantage,
precipitating international negotiations over military jurisdiction into
the 1880s.  Subsequent chapters address the foundation of American
corporate enterprises that stretched across the border, civic boosting of
border towns, the Mexican Revolution, and efforts to control cross-border
traffic and limit border-town vice.  St. John ends with the foundations of
contemporary debates about immigration laid in the 1930s. The place now
makes more sense --from my grandfather's battles over the immigrant status
of students to my uncles' desire to party in Juarez to the very names of
the places that were my grandfather's new home and workplace: Mesilla and
Gadsden, the Mexican and American names for the treaty that settled the
boundary between Mexico and the United States.

Until I read this book, I would not have thought to turn to diplomatic
history to understand velvet paintings of Pancho Villa and cotton growing
in the desert. And the book is decidedly diplomatic history. St. John's
capacity to see the region as a place created by international negotiation
is a great strength.  The book is a history of the border, the actual line
separating one nation from another.  And, like a declaration of war or an
international trade treaty, the border was a tool for both nations, a tool
that national leaders as well as border residents used and re-fashioned to
their particular needs with varying degrees of success.  As such, the
border requires an analysis of what two nations meant to each other and
how they negotiated the space between themselves.  Yet those negotiations
took place at a variety of levels.  As St. John explains: "A critical part
of the development of state power was the ability of nation-states to
operate on a variety of scales-making wide-reaching policy on a national
level, but utilizing the discretion of individual agents to give nuance to
those policies on the local level" (7).  A social history might well
capture my family's various experiences, but it would be less likely to
provide a comprehensive frame that explains why and how a border can
change everything from who has sovereign territory to what's available in
the grocery store.

If St. John's book shows the direction that diplomatic history is heading,
then I very much look forward to reading it.  For historians of policy and
diplomacy, there is just as much attention as one expects to the thorny
points of international negotiation, but the work also provides an
invitation to place transnational corporate ownership and tourist trips to
Mexican vice districts into the wider frame of state power.  Moreover, St.
John shows an extraordinary sensitivity to contingency and the many
different shapes and forms that Mexico, the United States, Apacheria, and
numerous other territories might have taken, given a shift in power in the
past.  These seemingly incidental moments are often the purview of social
history, but St. John shows just how much the decisions of everyday people
and mid-level officials shifted the functioning of the border.  Her
conclusions are especially relevant for contemporary debates about the
border and immigration, not because she suggests policy solutions, but
because she shows just how transitory those debates are.  St. John ends
her discussion in the 1930s to show the contingent nature of the border's
meaning.  As she concludes: "The border has not always been a barrier and
there is no reason to think that it will not become something else in the
future" (208).

None of which is to say that social history is absent in Line in the Sand.
 St. John owes a debt, which she readily acknowledges, to the social
historians and historians of Native America who helped to break the
national boundary at the U.S.-Mexico border and moved the field toward
transnationalism.  Samuel Truett's Fugitive Landscapes is especially
present in the footnotes when St. John outlines the increasing power of
U.S. corporate entities along both sides of the border.1  Brian DeLay's
War of a Thousand Deserts forms a strong foundation for St. John's chapter
on "land pirates" and Apaches, who spent the middle years of the
nineteenth century trying to carve their own sovereign spaces and who
rushed north and south of the border as they fled and taunted Mexican and
American troops.2  By re-framing the stories she tells as a part of
international negotiations, however, St. John brings together what were
previously told as disparate stories, while still providing a clear
narrative line for readers to follow.
This clarity will enable the book to work especially well in the
undergraduate classroom.  Students accustomed to seeing the workings of
government policy as distant events will be more likely to understand the
impact of government decisions on their everyday lives.  Students
struggling to show how everyday people shape national and international
events can find evidence for their claims in St. John's work.  And
students inclined to see an inevitability to national borders will be hard
pressed to hold to such a position. Undergraduate students might benefit
from creating "maps of contingency" by drawing alternate lines that might
have been the U.S. Mexico-border or the borders of other nations that
never took full form or that existed briefly or for only a few individuals
or for only brief periods of time.

Borderlands historians might conclude by this point that St. John has
written a work of borderlands history and, of course, she has.
Nonetheless, I see value in parsing the book's contributions into the
fields of diplomatic history and social history.  First, I doubt that
diplomatic historians would look regularly to borderlands history as a
source of contributions to their field without a book such as this one.
Second, querying the relationship between the border and the borderlands
should be a central question of borderlands history.  As St. John notes,
"As borderlands historians have emphasized historical processes that
transcend national boundaries and have expanded their focus to include
zones of interaction outside of the U.S. Southwest and Mexican north, they
have often treated the border itself as an irrelevant or incidental part
of the borderlands.  By contrast, I emphasize the centrality of the
boundary line in the processes of market expansion, conquest, state
building, and identity formation with which many borderlands historians
are concerned" (6). Studying the border and the borderlands together
highlights the border region within the larger space of the Southwest
borderlands.  Proximity to the border is one factor that varies over the
region and shifts valences of power and lines of economic exchange.
Exploring the border and the borderlands in tandem is more likely to
reveal a full portrait of the region.

As borderlands historians turn their attention to the relationship between
the border and the borderlands, I hope that the power of individual state
governments receives more attention.  I am thinking particularly of the
relationship in the twentieth century between the states of Arizona and
New Mexico, not just because of my research interests in my home state,
but also because of Geraldo Cadava's recent Journal of American History
essay in which he describes how the repercussions of the border "refract".
 Cadava argues that the border causes effects that rebound from the border
region toward Mexico and the United States, but the border also
contributes to shifts and realignments within and between border
communities.  Cadava focuses on the Tohono O'odham of Sonora and Arizona
and concludes: "The border refracted these [concepts of modernity and
abandonment] and other ideologies every which way, undermining conceptions
of an ontological divide between the United States and Mexico and
demonstrating the deep sense of affinity and alienation experienced by
borderlands residents."3  While there has been some scholarly attention to
the ties and barriers between New Mexico and Texas and Arizona and
California, I would like to see more attention given to the affinity and
alienation between Arizonans and New Mexicans.

I think St. John's book may give us a way to do so.  Northern New Mexico
has long held the attention of historians -- perhaps too long.  There is
not nearly as much scholarly work on Arizona, and as scholarship by
Katherine Benton-Cohen and others has shown, studies of Arizona have much
to show us about the relationship between class and race, Mexico and the
United States, and employers and laborers.4  I fear, though, that as work
on Arizona grows, historians will be tempted to compare Arizona and New
Mexico in the same facile ways they are compared in popular contemporary
conversations about the region.  From such juxtapositions it is far too
easy to conclude that the states are entirely different.  In such
comparisons, Arizona has and always will be a politically conservative
state driven by mining and other economic interests and intent on
perpetuating a racially stratified society with whites on top and all
non-whites, including Mexican Americans, below.  In contrast, New Mexico
appears to be politically liberal, beholden to no industry but tourism,
and steeped in a heritage that acknowledges and celebrates its tri-ethnic
origins.  Neither, of course, is a full portrait, but more importantly,
the juxtaposition compares southern Arizona with northern New Mexico.
More work needs to be done on northern Arizona and southern New Mexico as
sites of political negotiation, economic development, and racial identity.

Rachel St. John's book opens such a view for scholars of the region.
Moreover, she invites cross-state comparisons north and south of the
border.  What would a history of the region bounded by Ensenada and
Cananea look like?  Or one of the area between White Sands and Tucson? Or
that between Taos and the Grand Canyon?  Perhaps, just as I speculated as
an adolescent, an upbringing in southern Arizona might have better
prepared me for my grandfather's experiences in southern New Mexico,
because these regions share a relationship to the U.S.-Mexico border, even
as they are divided by differing state government policies.  Studies of
Chihuahua and Sonora might reveal similar ties and divisions.  Studies of
such zones would help to explain and complicate how the border shapes the
region and how the power of the border differs depending on a borderland
community's proximity to the border itself.  I look forward to reading
books that, by examining the relationship between the border and the
borderlands, pull together the histories of multiple centuries and
multiple regions and deepen our understanding of the American Southwest.
In the meantime, we have, in Line in the Sand, an important first step in
this direction.

Notes

1 Sam Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the
U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006).

2 Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the
U.S.-Mexican War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

3 Geraldo Cadava, "Lines within Ambos Nogales and the Tohono O'odham
Nation," Journal of American History 98:2 (September 2011): 383.

4 Katherine Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor
War in the Arizona Borderlands (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2009).

---------------
Review by Geraldo Cadava, Northwestern University

Rachel St. John's Line in the Sand is the best book yet on the early
development of the U.S.-Mexico border. It also has great relevance for
contemporary debates about the border and Mexican immigration to the
United States, and should be read widely by policy makers who continue to
claim that border debates in the United States have arisen only during the
very recent past. St. John argues, instead, that they are the product of
histories that stretch back to the mid-nineteenth century. The brevity and
clear prose of her book also make it perfect for students of borderlands
history at all levels, including the undergraduates who more often than
not enter college with fixed ideas, or ideas misinformed by the images
they see on television. Finally, St. John's book brings together the
concerns and approaches of several subfields of U.S. and Mexican history,
including histories of the U.S-Mexico border, the American West, Mexico's
frontera norte, or northern frontier, and-most important for the readers
of H-Diplo-U.S. international relations.

St. John describes historical change along the U.S.-Mexico border between
the mid-nineteenth century, when boundary surveyors for the United States
and Mexico drew the border as a literal line in the sand, until the early
twentieth century, by which point, she tells us, the 'modern' border had
taken shape. In general, she describes the border's transition over an
eighty-year period from an invisible line to a heavily policed and
regulated boundary. In doing so, she follows the cues of other borderlands
historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including
Samuel Truett, Katherine Benton-Cohen, and Benjamin Johnson, all of whom
argue that the border, in one way or another, hardened by the
mid-twentieth century.1 Like them, she argues that histories of the border
necessarily move back and forth among local, national, and international
scales, and that local conditions often trumped national imperatives,
allowing local immigration officials, for example, to selectively enforce
national laws, and local actors, like raiding Apaches, to shape border
policy. And she joins them in arguing that the border became a way for the
United States, whose national and international power increased during the
period, to try to "control space," negotiate "state sovereignty," and
define the "significance of national identities." All of this reflected
the machinations of a government that sought to "improve" its "ability to
manipulate spatial controls to reflect state priorities" (5-6).

St. John adds to their work several useful metaphors to describe the
dominant characteristics of the border during particular periods, and of
the period she studies as a whole. Her chapter titles say it all:
"Landscape of Profits" (about the capitalist revolution along the border
during the late nineteenth century), "The Space Between" (about U.S. and
Mexican jurisdictional and policing concerns during the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries), "Breaking Ties, Building Fences" (about
conflict during the Mexican Revolution era), and "Insiders/Outsiders"
(about the rise of immigration policies that targeted Mexicans). She also
describes the border as a "conditional barrier" that excluded
"undesirable" immigrants but "let in citizens, local crossers, and
much-needed immigrant laborers," and also smoothed the way for
cross-border commerce on a grand scale (175). Indeed, the term captures a
key characteristic of the U.S.-Mexico border across time and space.

By design, many of the points St. John makes will surprise readers who
have little historical knowledge of the border. While fences, drugs, and
undocumented immigration shape ideas about the need for a rigid border
today, St. John convincingly shows that the border was not always this
way. Only over the course of decades did the border become a clearly
demarcated international boundary. Even as the border became a clear
boundary, its sole purpose was never to exclude Mexican immigrants and the
illicit goods some carried with them into the United States. Moreover,
even when the sole function of the border was exclusion, it never fully
succeeded in achieving this goal. Line in the Sand therefore corrects
contemporary, and widespread, misconceptions about the border. But
refuting dangerous stereotypes-that all Mexicans are criminals, that
Mexicans are the only borderlands criminals, that Native Americans were
violent marauders, or that Mexico is a backwards country-is the work of
all borderlands historians.

What makes Line in the Sand stand out compared with other studies of the
U.S.-Mexico border are three contributions in particular. First, St. John
reorients regional histories of the U.S. Southwest and Mexican north, from
1850 to 1930, around the development of the borderline itself. Second, she
offers a history of the relationship between social, cultural, and
political change, and the development of particular border spaces. Third,
she reveals how the borderline itself produced differences on each side of
the border as much as it reflected them. These contributions will
influence how scholars think and write about the border for years.

St. John tells stories that are familiar to historians of northern Mexico
and the American West, but she places them in the context of the evolution
of the U.S.-Mexico border. Mexican American historians have recognized the
effects of the U.S-Mexico War on Mexican American communities throughout
the U.S. Southwest, and how population displacements in Mexico during the
Mexican Revolution led to the first wave of mass Mexican migration to the
United States. Historians of the American West have detailed the effects
of railroad construction throughout the region, especially how it
facilitated the transport of people and commodities into and out of the
area. Mexicanists have described the impact of conquest and annexation on
Mexico's sense of loss, the shifting power dynamics between Mexico and the
United States, and the international histories of the Mexican Revolution
that led Mexico and the United States to the brink of war, eventually
causing the United States to enter World War I.

Moreover, like St. John, Katherine Benton-Cohen has written about Apache
Raids in Arizona and Sonora; Samuel Truett about transnational copper
industries; and a number of other scholars about the cross-border effects
of the Mexican Revolution and the rise of anti-Mexican sentiment during
the Great Depression, which for the first time led U.S. officials to turn
restrictive immigration policies against Mexicans.2 But St. John brings
these histories together as part of the broader story of how the
U.S.-Mexico border, and the many debates it inspired, evolved between the
mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As cross-border raids and
filibustering, new border policing regimes, the prevention of
revolutionary violence from spilling across the border, vice regulation,
and concerns about Mexican immigration shaped border debates during the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the "once-unmarked boundary
line" became a "space of gates, fences, and patrols" (2).

By gathering together histories that sit at the nexus of several regional
subfields and reading them through the lens of the border itself, St. John
bucks trends in the work of many borderlands scholars. Scholars of early
American borderlands before the U.S.-Mexico War have focused on themes
including violence, power, captivity, intercultural and inter-imperial
negotiations in so-called contact zones, or middle grounds of human
interaction and mutual misunderstanding. Scholars who have worked on the
same period as St. John have, like her, focused on cross-border raiding
practices, the development of international capitalism, revolutionary
violence, and the passage of new immigration laws during the early
twentieth century. Finally, social scientists who focus on the border in
the very recent past have focused almost exclusively on themes of
militarization, border enforcement, and undocumented immigration. St. John
picks up on these themes-or, in some cases, picks them apart-by focusing
on the space of the border itself. While it makes sense that early
American borderlands scholars would not focus on the border, since there
was no U.S.-Mexico border in early America, historians of the period since
the mid-nineteenth century have paid surprisingly little attention to the
space of the border itself. As St. John describes it, in many studies, the
border is an "irrelevant or incidental part of the borderlands" (5).

Nevertheless, Line in the Sand is less a history of the built environment
of the border than a history of how the social, economic, and political
histories of a given moment shaped how the border changed over time. In
other words, she describes the physical character of the border-how it was
at first a series of lines drawn on maps, then became a line of refuge,
beyond which U.S. and Mexican authorities had difficulty pursuing outlaws,
and then a space linked by railroad tracks and customs houses that later
became divided by fences-but these elements of her story are secondary to
the broader historical debates reflected by the changing shape of the
border itself. For example, cross-border raids by Apaches, and filibuster
expeditions into Sonora and elsewhere in Mexico, led to the first
concerted efforts to police the border. International railroad connections
led to the growth of transborder commerce, which in turn led to the
emergence of twin border cities as an important part of border landscapes.
Fears about the spread of violence and imperialist aggression led U.S. and
Mexican citizens to argue for the construction of fences along the border,
which, although prompted by battles during the Mexican Revolution, from
that moment forward became a permanent feature of the borderlands. The
growth of moral reform movements during the 1920s then caused U.S. and
Mexican governments to use the border as a way of policing morality, and
during the 1930s and beyond, the border became a space to police the
movement of immigrants, dominated by government officials of one sort or
another.

The broader histories that led to changes along the border-again, Indian
raids and filibusters, capitalist revolutions, revolutionary violence,
morality, and immigration-offer a highly effective way of narrating the
early history of the U.S.-Mexico border. But as I read Line in the Sand, I
also imagined another book that would focus closely on the built
environment of the border, thereby inverting the order of the one St. John
wrote. She includes so many wonderful details that gesture towards a
comparative history of border cities, a subject that has not received full
historical attention. St. John writes, the "twin towns of the desert
border were a product of the boundary line itself" (83). They emerged
during the late nineteenth century with the sole purpose of negotiating
the rise in international commerce. Mining companies, customs houses,
immigration offices, rail yards, stores, and communities created an
"industrial landscape" along the border (85). They became sites of
binationalism, with names that served as perfect reflections of their deep
connectedness, like Calexico and Mexicali, hotels named El Internacional,
and shops called the International Drug Store. As communities and vice
districts formed all along the border, in Ciudad Juárez, Mexicali, and
Nogales, races and sexes intermixed. Historians have yet to write this
book, but it would be a good one, offering an inside-out, bottom to top,
or ground-up account-choose your own metaphor-of the broader historical
forces St. John uses as her points of departure.

Line in the Sand demonstrates that the border not only reflected broader
historical changes, but also produced differential development on both
sides of the international line. The establishment of the border produced
space on either side of it that became a kind of safe haven for
cross-border raiders fleeing justice. To filibusters, one such group of
raiders, the border reinforced U.S. sovereignty in the area and emboldened
them to push into Mexico. In this sense, as St. John notes, the borderline
changed regional power relations, as Apaches, filibusters, and others used
the boundary strategically. Then during the Mexican Revolution, Mexican
rebels cut railroad ties that affected commerce on both sides of border.
During the 1920s and 1930s, a period during which they were discriminated
against in Mexico and excluded from the United States, Chinese immigrants
living in Mexico also used the border strategically, opting for arrest and
deportation in the United States rather than persecution in Mexico. U.S.
officials took responsibility for their deportation, and in this way,
Mexican officials, while they could "do little to prevent the United
States from repatriating Mexicans," could "use the boundary line to force
the U.S. government to help fund the deportation of Mexico's Chinese
population" (195). Such dynamics, St. John tells us, reveal how the
border, even though it had become a "tool of the states," could also be
used to their disadvantage, since the United States had to assume the
expense of their deportation. The border thus became a "relational space"
where developments on one side of the border affected histories of the
other side as well (195-196).

The most poignant example of how the borderline both reflected and
produced changes on each side of the border comes in Chapter 6, about
anti-vice movements, the growth of vice industries, and the policing of
morality. To my mind, this is the best and most original piece of St.
John's work. In this chapter, St. John brilliantly analyzes how moral
reform movements in the United States led to the establishment of vice
industries south of the border, including casinos, bars, and brothels. In
response, the U.S. government closed the border to traffic at night, when,
presumably, Americans would be most likely to head south to engage in
behavior prohibited to them at home. So far, this story follows St. John's
impulse to demonstrate how national politics influenced change along the
border. But the aftermath of this border policy demonstrated how social,
political, and economic change also moved from the border to the interiors
of both nations. The policy angered Mexican businessmen, who claimed it
harmed their financial interests, and led Mexicans to establish anti-vice
movements of their own, causing Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas to
convert casinos into trade schools, which temporarily, and only
officially, closed down border vice industries. Before Cárdenas cracked
down, the Mexican government had used vice industry profits to build dams,
schools, and other infrastructural projects. This example fully
demonstrates the deep intertwining, transnational connections, mutual
influences, and general messiness of borderlands history. That Mexico
ended up benefitting financially from the policing of morality in the
United States also shows how nations and their peoples could, unwittingly
or not, and in ways however small, take revenge upon the imperialist
aggressions of the United States that had led to the establishment of
borders in the first place. This is a story not unrelated to how Native
American communities have profited from the establishment of various
gaming ventures. These are histories that should, and surely will, shape
future borderlands histories and broader narratives of relationships
between the United States and other sovereign nations.

While Line in the Sand advances borderlands history in the ways I have
discussed above, future borderlands scholars can expand on several threads
in St. John's narrative that she touches on only briefly, but which
deserve greater, more focused attention. A comparative history of twin
border cities, and a fully fleshed out story of how nations affected by
U.S. expansion have exacted some measure of revenge, are two possible
paths new scholarship could follow. Others include a more explicit
comparison of different kinds of borderlands spaces, including urban and
rural, or the western border, which is St. John's focus, and the eastern,
Rio Grande portion of the border. I also think scholars could conceptually
and empirically expand the U.S.-Mexico border even farther eastward by
looking at the Gulf of Mexico as a water border dividing and linking the
two countries.

Also, St. John, building on work by the political scientist Peter Andreas,
gives us the useful concept of the border as a "conditional barrier" open
to some kinds of goods, services, and products, but closed to others.3
This kind of control over the border has been a fantasy of policy makers
and businessmen along the border for more than a hundred years, making its
way most recently into Mitt Romney's remarks during the Republican primary
debate in Mesa, Arizona, as his ideal vision for the border. Of course St.
John is right: the border has always been simultaneously open and closed.
It also simultaneously links and divides, and is, at the same time, the
beginning and ending point of two nations. But as we now take these
dynamics for granted, have we pushed to its limits our understanding of
how the border functions? Maybe we have, but I think we should
nevertheless continue to think about new ways of conceiving of the border,
as a line that moves not only from east to west, but also north and south,
for example, dividing border cities and ranch lands, or indigenous
populations and Mexican or Mexican-American populations. What else might
we be able to say about the border if we see it this way?

Finally, I want to make a couple observations about borderlands
chronology, as presented by St. John and other borderlands historians
writing about the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I think
we should push St. John's analysis into the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries. This is what I try to do in my own work, so I
recognize that this point will sound self-serving. St. John argues that
the border, however unevenly, became increasingly firm by the 1930s as a
result of deportations and the application for the first time of
restrictive immigration policies to Mexicans. Then in her conclusion,
beginning with the Secure Fence Act of 2006, she argues that very recent
immigration and border debates flowed from the earlier histories she
writes about. By the 1930s, immigration control had become the focus of
border debates, and, presumably, it remained so. The "modern" border, with
its system of immigration controls, policing mechanisms, and fences, was
in place before World War II. Both the United States and Mexico, St. John
tells us, "continued to build on that foundation for the remainder of the
twentieth century," and "we are living today with the legacy of those
ideas about the border and state control" (202, 204). I would not deny
that the 1920s and 1930s were important turning points; laws, fences, and
attitudes toward Mexicans changed. But the post-World War II histories of
immigration and border debates were less predictable, and more formative
for the present, than Line in the Sand and other borderlands histories
suggest. In some ways, the post-World War II period, between 1940 and
2010, repeats St. John's story about the border's opening then closing, or
invisibility then increasing solidity. The post-World War II period
included decades when the international line seemed meaningless, and open
to the free flow of goods and people, despite sporadic and transnational
conflicts over immigration and other issues. Border debates then became
increasingly polarized from the 1970s forward, as a result of shifting
Cold War politics, a rise in undocumented immigration, and drug
trafficking-not as a result of social, economic, and political histories
set in place by the 1930s-even though the dream of open borders did not
fade, as evidenced by new borderlands economies in the age of
neoliberalism and globalization, and defined by episodes like the
construction of maquiladoras and the implementation of the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In this respect, Line in the Sand has helped
us take a big leap forward towards understanding how the border has
functioned in American life, but we should continue to strive to
understand how, when, and why the border changed, as well as the roots of
present day debates.

Notes

1 Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the
U.S.-Mexico Border (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Katherine
Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the
Arizona Borderlands (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); and
Benjamin H. Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and
Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2005).

2 See, for example, Mario Garcia, Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El
Paso, 1880-1920 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), Chapter 9;
George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and
Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1995), Part One and Chapter 10; Abraham Hoffman, Unwanted Mexican
Americans in the Great Depression: Repatriation Pressures, 1929-1939
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974); and Francisco Balderrama,
Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, Revised Edition, 2006).

3 Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, Second Edition, 2009).

---------------
Review by Pekka Hämäläinen, University of California, Santa Barbara

Rachel St. John's Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico
Border offers much to admire. It fills a yawning historiographical gap,
being, quite remarkably, the first analytical history of the creation and
evolution of the U.S-Mexico desert border in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.  While much has been written about the modern border
and the disputes around it, Line in the Sand is the first work that takes
a comprehensive look at the past.

Line in the Sand, moreover, is the work of a historian's historian: deeply
researched, intellectually rigorous, methodologically innovative, and
engagingly written.  The book covers a vast range of topics from local
border crossings to the enforcement of territorial boundaries, from
community building to nation building, from the rise of transnational
capitalism to the struggles for national sovereignty, from the
bureaucratization of transborder relations to the racialization of others,
from identity formation to historical memory.  Such a sweepingly inclusive
approach could have resulted in a disjointed work of dangling threads, but
Line in the Sand finds its center from outset and never loses it.

The book's main theme-and the core of its originality-is St. John's effort
to defamiliarize the U.S.-Mexico border, to make us see the border and its
making anew, without the obscuring layers of presentism.  Over the past
decades, the U.S.-Mexico border has turned into a focal point of
xenophobia, caustic immigration debate, and international controversy;
Line in the Sand, better than any other study, shows that the prevailing
condition of intense border control and militarization cannot be projected
backward in time.  Things were once different and perhaps they can be
different once more.  This underlying notion, together with St. John's
calm and smooth prose, makes Line in the Sand a work whose influence can
reach far beyond the scholarly community.

The historicization of the U.S.-Mexico border is an overarching theme that
makes Line in the Sand so compelling, but St. John understands that this
is a theme that needs to be shown, not told.  Thus the book develops
variations of the central theme through a number of narrative arcs: the
emergence and persistence of permeable transborder communities; the
primacy of local negotiations in arranging transnational spaces on and
around the border; the gradual emergence of racial stereotypes that
conflated Mexican immigrants and unskilled labor; the broadening of the
category of unwanted border crossers from Native Americans to Chinese to
certain Europeans to Mexicans; the binational efforts to make the
borderlands safe for transnational capitalism; the rise of border vice
industries; the gradual and often ad hoc implementation of immigration
laws and bureaucratic border controls.  These developments do not only
unfold along parallel lines, St. John shows how they built and piled on
one another, producing layered histories that transcend places and
periods-drug traffickers employing the already established channels for
smuggling Chinese immigrants, illegal immigrants capitalizing on the
cross-border mobility of local inhabitants and transnational corporations,
cohering national governments denouncing the fluid transborder relations
they had once sponsored to solidify state power in the center.  From such
blending of story lines and analytical modes emerges nothing short of a
total history of a contested place in time: Line in the Sand is at once a
political, economic, social, cultural, environmental, legal, local,
regional, national, and transnational history of the desert border between
the United States and Mexico.

St. John interweaves her many threads together so effortlessly that it may
be easy to miss how much conceptual and methodological work the book does.
 Line in the Sand is the first study to make the western U.S.-Mexico
border-rather than the borderlands around it-its subject.  The new
borderlands and transnational histories of the past two decades have
illuminated previously neglected developments that transcended imperial
and national borders, but only a few among the recent studies have had
much to say about the border itself.  St. John puts the border front and
center and by doing so tugs borderlands and transnational histories
forward.  She is the first historian to systematically show how the border
came to signify drastically different things for different peoples and
institutions: Native Americans, local Mexican and American citizens, legal
and illegal immigrants, migrant laborers, border officials, metropolitan
investors, filibusters, and national governments.  By analyzing how
different meanings collided, overlapped, shifted, and persisted on the
border, St. John not only sheds light on the crucial importance of the
boundary line in shaping local and national identities, intergovernmental
relations, and capitalist development.  She also reveals how radically the
strategies of state building have changed since the mid nineteenth
century.  She uncovers an era-roughly from the 1850s to the 1910s-when
both Mexico and the United States were comfortable with transnational
spaces and when state building was not based on an exclusionary
territorial logic.  Here St. John makes an important contribution to the
burgeoning literature that places U.S. history and foreign policy in
larger comparative context.  She shows how the United States and Mexico
forged their respective national spaces in tandem-sometimes competing,
often cooperating, and always defining themselves in interaction with the
other-thereby inviting scholars to look at the border as the crucible
where key aspects of U.S. and Mexican national projects took shape.

Line in the Sand also breaks new methodological ground.  Much of the
recent borderlands and transnational history has operated on relatively
limited analytical registers.  There are many studies that focus on local
spaces and processes and there are numerous studies that trace larger
transnational networks and developments, but there are only a few works
that operate on multiple analytical scales, moving from the local all the
way up and back again.  Historians have called for scale-transcending
analyses for quite some time now; Line in the Sand shows how it can be
done in practice.  The book moves flexibly across intimate, local,
regional, national, transnational, and global registers, providing a
multivaried analysis of the border and the people, institutions, and ideas
that shaped it.  Moreover, St. John executes the shifts so nimbly that the
reader hardly notices them, thereby making a quiet-and therefore all the
more effective-methodological intervention.  Her narrative underscores the
importance not only of including but also blending multiple analytical
modes when writing about borders, borderlands, and transnational
phenomena.  For over three generations, the western U.S.-Mexico border was
less a line than a shifting relational space where local, regional,
national, and global processes interpenetrated one another-and not
necessarily from the bigger institutions down.

Line in the Sand opens with a description of the United States and Mexican
Boundary Commission between 1849 and 1852-confused, frequently lost,
desperately trying to draw a line according to agreed coordinates-and it
closes with a 1931 story of a group of Mexican Chinese slipping under a
border fence in Nogales, Arizona, only to be captured by U.S. immigration
officials.  These opening and closing scenes capture the changes that had
taken place on the border during the eighty intervening years: the growth
of federally -enforced regulatory apparatus, the erosion of local agency,
the bisection of binational communities, the decline of transborder
movement.  But, crucially, the closing scene is not the sum of the stories
that had unfolded before it; there is no direct narrative line from the
disoriented Boundary Commission to the definite state-enforced border
fence.  Instead, St. John uncovers numerous stories pulling in different
directions and towards ends that were often more local and regional than
national.  One of those border stories was the Mexican Revolution, which
galvanized the U.S. government, changing its attitude toward the border.
State control grew neither linearly nor organically on the desert border.
It came there abruptly in the aftermath of a sprawling and seemingly
uncontainable revolution.

For some, this ending may seem too sharp, even artificial.  Why not flesh
out the developments from the 1920s to the present with more detail than
what St. John provides in her brief and speedy conclusion?  And why not
discuss the parallels between the 1910s and 1920s and our era-the threat
of what may seem like foreign wars spilling into U.S. borders, the onset
of economic crises that harden attitudes toward immigrants and their
labor, the recasting of the U.S.-Mexico border as a conflict zone and a
security problem?  I, for one, welcome St. John's abrupt ending, for it
underscores her commitment to writing histories that step outside of easy
linearities to uncover developments that did not necessarily last and
blossom-not at least from our limited present-day vantage point.  The
160-year existence of the U.S.-Mexican border, St. John suggests, consists
of two halves that have surprisingly little in common.  The border does
not have a linear past and it will not have a linear future.

---------------
Review by Kelly Lytle Hernandez, University of California, Los Angeles

A Line on the Page

Line in the Sand begins with a provocative observation. When first
established in 1848 by U.S. and Mexican diplomats during their
negotiations in U.S.-occupied Mexico City at the close of the U.S.-Mexico
War, the new U.S.-Mexico border ran down the belly of the Rio Grande and
then across mountains, rivers, and deserts to the Pacific Ocean south of
San Diego, California. Today, the western U.S.-Mexico border may be
defined by a "patchwork of steel mesh, picket fencing, vehicle barriers,
and barbed wire stretching from the desert floor marking the boundary
line's course from the Pacific Ocean to the Rio Grande,"(1) but as Rachel
St. John reminds us, when U.S. and Mexican officials first marked it on a
map "the desert border running from west of El Paso to the Pacific Ocean
did not correspond to any previously existing geographic feature"(2). The
Texas-Mexico border, embodied by the Rio Grande, had long served as a
gathering site for humans, flora, and fauna in the region but the western
hemisphere of the U.S.-Mexico border, explains St. John, was a political
fabrication -- nothing but a "series of imaginary lines" (2) - in a region
the border's first surveyors described as a "sterile waste, utterly
worthless" place. (3) In Line in the Sand, a book of essays, Rachel St.
John proposes to chronicle how a meaningful boundary -- a "landscape of
fences and patrols,"  -- was etched into the wasteland of the western
U.S.-Mexico borderlands between the 1850s and the 1930s(7).

At the outset of the book's introduction, St. John reminds us of what many
have forgotten in the rise of borderlands history.  "The border," she
writes "has a history" and she proposes to explore the "history of how and
why the border changed"(1). To do this, she offers two lines of
intertwined research and analysis. With the first, she "traces the
transformation of the once unmarked boundary line into a space of gates,
fences, and patrols that allowed the easy passage of some people, animals
and goods, while restricting the movement of others [telling] the story of
how the border shifted from a line on the map to a clearly marked and
policed boundary where state agents attempted to regulate who and what
entered the nation"(2). The objective of this line of analysis is to
examine how the western U.S.-Mexico boundary developed from a wasteland
into a "landscape of fences and patrols"(7). In telling this story, St.
John promises to make a contribution to borderlands history by
"emphasiz[ing] the centrality of the boundary line in the processes of
market expansion, conquest, state building, and identity formation with
which many borderlands historians are concerned"(6).

With the second line of analysis, St. John proposes to examine how the
first, the creation and evolution of the "border's physical form," forged
"an entirely new space in the west"(2).  The distant governments of the
U.S. and Mexico claimed to control this space but since, as St. John
writes, "state power is never absolute," this only opened up new
possibilities for contestation as people leveraged, manipulated,
challenged, reinforced, defended, brokered, and were even smothered by the
new boundary(7).  With these lines of analyses and research, St. John
promises a more textured and historical view of the U.S.-Mexico border's
contemporary form.

In seven smartly written essays, St. John marshals a broad range of
historiographies and archives to chronicle what she identifies as key
moments and stories in the making of the western U.S.-Mexico border. The
remarkable breadth of stories that St. John tells is certainly one of the
most distinctive and important contributions of Line in the Sand and will
win it a wide readership. The book begins with an essay on the long
struggle of U.S. and Mexican surveyors to measure, mark, and gather
general topographical information about the new U.S.-Mexico border.  The
second essay charts the subordination of filibusters and the military
conquest of the Apaches in the 1880s. Chapter three examines how "the
border became the centerpiece of the landscape of binational interaction
and exchange"(10). In particular, St. John charts the rise of capitalism
across, at, and against the border. Chapter four turns to the State to
examine how government actors attempted to "regulate, tax, and restrict
transborder movement and enforce jurisdictional boundaries"(10). This is
the story, in particular, of customs officers struggling to enforce the
line in the sand. Chapter five examines how the Mexican Revolution and
World War I transformed the western U.S.-Mexico boundary from a "site of
interaction and cooperation to one of conflict and division"(10). This was
the era, St. John argues, when border enforcement and control first took
shape. Chapter six demonstrates how prohibitions in the U.S. prompted vice
districts and smuggling along the border and explores how state actions
experimented with border control as a method to control illicit activities
across the boundary. Chapter seven charts the rise of the immigration
control regime now familiar along the border. The book closes with a
reflection on the border fencing projects at the turn of the twenty-first
century.

With these selected topics, Line in the Sand offers an expansive treatment
of social, political, and military history along the western U.S.-Mexico
border that has otherwise only been discretely chronicled. By bringing
these topics together in one text, St. John demonstrates the shifting
meaning of the border and provides much-needed broad-stroke views of the
U.S.-Mexico border's formation between the 1850s and 1930s.  Undergraduate
readers in particular will revel in the border's broad and shifting
meaning and the unexpected turning points in its development long before
the consolidation of the U.S. immigration regime during the 1920s. I am
certain that when I assign it to my graduate students, those who are
steeped in the literature of the borderlands will be grateful for the
book's expertly-crafted balance of breadth and concision in a story that
"move[s] across time and space"(9). Still, after reading the text several
times, I am left wanting. Let me explain.

As a historian of policing the border, I found St. John's promise to
"emphasize the centrality of the [western] boundary" to be downright
titillating. The western U.S.-Mexico boundary - that is, the line in the
sand that runs from El Paso to the Pacific Ocean -- is fairly obscure or,
at best, only clarified in chunks and compartments as it is embedded in
the local histories in the border region and histories of the borderlands.
Since the 1968 publication of Robert Hine's Bartlett's West: Drawing the
Mexican Boundary, we have learned about the troubled effort to survey the
border but we still know very little about the marking, fencing, and the
overall effort to make the U.S.-Mexico boundary a material reality as it
stretches across mountains and deserts and through growing border towns.1
St. John's promise to chronicle the U.S.-Mexico border's "landscape of
fences and patrols" was enticing and she employs a rich definition of the
boundary as not only the line in the sand that can be surveyed, cleared,
marked, and even fenced but also as the political boundary that more often
than not is embodied by an "array of physical structures and government
agents" (6). As such, boundary markers, border monuments, customs houses,
ports of entry immigration and customs officers, U.S. and Mexican troops
are all, rightly, part of her analysis as embodiments of the western
U.S.-Mexico boundary.  I enthusiastically read Line in the Sand for a
history of the boundary in its physical and embodied form followed by the
meanings that this new and evolving border spawned. In particular, I read
to discover how Line in the Sand was going to bring the border back into
borderlands history, a very exciting prospect.

The book's construction as a series of essays was a wise choice. It would
be impossible to provide a comprehensive analysis of the western border's
development over eighty years.  The two-prong analytical framework --
chronicling the boundary to examine its many meanings -- is also strong.
What Line in the Sand does do very well is bring multiple literatures into
conversation about the shifting and conditional meaning of the western
U.S.-Mexico border between the U.S.-Mexico War (1846-1848) and the mass
repatriation of Mexicanos during the 1930s. My critique of Line in the
Sand is that the boundary itself is not a consistent or rigorous subject
of analysis.  Too often St. John's examination of the boundary hovers in
the realm of its political fabrication while the boundary's construction
as a material form is presented as a passive creation and the boundary's
multiple everyday representations by institutions and state actors are
vague. Whereas the book successfully chronicles the shifting meanings of
the border, it lacks depth and precision in the analysis of the boundary
as a physical form, whether embodied, performed, or material.

The opening chapter of Line in the Sand chronicles the struggle to map and
mark the western U.S.-Mexico boundary between 1850 and 1855. The U.S. and
Mexican survey teams first met in the scorching desert outside of Tucson,
Arizona in late-summer 1851 and disagreed from nearly the first moment of
the survey.  The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the U.S.-Mexico
War and determined that the western U.S.-Mexico boundary line was to head
directly west from the Rio Grande River in El Paso, Texas, across the
desert, over mountains, and into the Pacific Ocean but the surveyors could
not agree where to begin the survey along the river. The U.S. surveyor
said it began farther south. The lead Mexican surveyor said it began
farther north. Such unsurprising disputes continued throughout the survey,
which was not completed until 1855, yet as the surveyors continued their
work the most enduring challenges they confronted were the landscape and
local inhabitants.  The unfamiliar landscape they sought to mark and
render "legible" as a meaningful political boundary in the sand bested
them many times. Across the difficult and often remote terrain, as St.
John beautifully writes, it often seemed that "rather than establishing
the border, they [the surveyors] seemed to be searching for it"(13). They
ran out of food, got lost, trudged through desert heat, exhausted their
supplies, feared Apache attacks, ran up debts, broke their tools, had
chapped lips, and fell to illness.  "From its very beginnings," writes St
John, "the border eluded state control"(15).

Plagued by troubles, the surveyors resolved to only establish seven
markers across the western boundary.  Although few in number, these
markers are critical because they were the first, and for a long time,
only, physical reality of the new U.S.-Mexico boundary across the nearly
seven hundred miles between El Paso, Texas and the Pacific Ocean.  It is
with the story of these markers that St. John's promised history of the
border begins to falter. St. John suggests the locations for two of the
original markings of the border -- a point just south of San Diego Bay and
the confluence of the Gila and Colorado Rivers - but where and whether the
other five boundary markers were actually established and what form they
took and how they were made is unclear (27). Rather than chronicle the
making of the border's actual physical form, what St. John emphasizes is
the boundary's development as a set of twists and turns by longitude and
latitude according to the maps created by surveyors and adjusted by
politicians. Representing St. John's emphasis on the border as a political
imagination, figures 1.1, 1.2. 1.3, and 1.4 picture the western
U.S.-Mexico border as a continuous line on the page without any evidence
as to the location of the original boundary markers.  In fact, no map in
the book represents the border's material reality between El Paso and the
Pacific Ocean. Although there are four maps of the border's evolving
location as a formal site of political division between the United States
and Mexico, the border's physical and embodied forms -- the boundary
markers in the early years and the border monuments, military forts,
immigration stations, customs houses, and fences, in later years -- are
not mapped. By only mapping the continuous line of the border's political
formation, St. John ironically reifies the formal state definition of the
border, a "series of imaginary lines," (2) and elides the promised history
of the border's history as a physical form.

In the following chapters, there are flashes of focus on how the border
changed as physical form  -- pages 91 to 95 and pages 144-45, for example
- but there is no sustained examination of the making of the boundary as a
material reality. Precisely how the western U.S.-Mexico border became
marked and represented in everyday life remains obscure. How, for example,
were the monuments, fences, immigration stations, and customs houses
built?  One of the greatest stories of the fencing of the U.S.-Mexico
border during the 1990s was that the companies contracted to build the
fence hired undocumented Mexican labor to get the job done, revealing the
greater tensions, inequities, demands, and interests in border
enforcement.  Such stories of the actual construction of the boundary as a
built environment are untold in St. John's narrative and analysis.  For
example, in figures 4.1 to 4.3, St. John provides wonderfully illustrative
images of the border's embodiment in monuments and cleared strips but she
does not detail the formation of these physical forms of the border. The
sixty-foot cleared strip between Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora,
for example, is chronicled as the result of little more than a
presidential proclamation. The forced removal of homes, businesses, barns,
fences and a railroad depot is told in just a few sentences and
represented in the passive voice. The border, as a physical form, appears
without labor and only a little protest but also without entanglement in
the regional economies or social inequities of the borderlands that St.
John expertly discusses throughout the book.

Similarly, the patrols of immigration officers, customs officials, and
military troops who so often embody the boundary in St. John's story are
not given sufficient treatment. For example, St. John writes of the
military patrols during the era of the Mexican Revolution that the
"soldiers became a human wall along the boundary line" because "in the
absence of a permanent physical barrier marking the line, armed soldiers
performed the border"(141) but she provides no insight into actual patrol
techniques and practices and does not provide a deep social profile of the
men 'performing' the border. This is crucial because when chronicling the
history of the border and forwarding men and their patrols as constituting
the "human wall" that stood in the void of any actual physical boundary
the author should provide a more textured analysis of who they were and
how they "performed the border." Here the performance and performers
receive no analysis or deep empirical digging. No militia or National
Guard records are cited in the discussion of the National Guard (militia)
on the border during the Mexican Revolution. Without a look into muster
rolls and correspondence records, St. John's social profile of the "human
wall," is derived from the reminiscences of external sources, a cowboy
(John Henry Eicks) and ranching woman (Mary Rak Kidder). Their
characterization of the militia and their patrols is unchallenged and not
triangulated with original research into the servicemen who flooded into
the region during the Mexican Revolution.  Further St. John does not
reveal how the militia actually went about 'performing the border.'  How
were their patrols organized and implemented? Similarly the profiles and
actions of other state actors, immigration and customs officials, in
particular, are left vague.  For example, on page 98, the book begins to
home in on the boundary itself by focusing on the establishment of customs
houses along the line but we learn nothing of how the ports of entry were
selected or how the customs houses were designed and constructed. We also
learn nothing of the men assigned to enforce the boundary at and through
these sites. The boundary as a built environment and embodied form,
therefore, is not examined, stripping depth from St. John's promised
history of the "landscape of fences and patrols."(7)

Without a precise and rigorous treatment of either the physical boundary,
where it existed, or of the men and their practices, when they represented
the boundary, Line in the Sand does not firmly fix or detail the western
U.S.-Mexico boundary as a substantive there there beyond the politicians'
line in the sand.  The monuments, promised to be built every 5 miles along
the border; the fences, as erected through border towns such as Nogales,
Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora; and the formation of the immigration
stations and customs houses are framed almost as immaculate conceptions of
the political imagination and disputes of the western U.S.-Mexico
boundary.  Unfortunately, Line in the Sand does not provide its promised
history of the border. It does not offer a penetrating empirical and
analytical breakaway of, as St. John promised, "how the border shifted
from a line on a map to a clearly marked and policed boundary where state
agents attempted to regulate who and what entered the country"(2). I am
left to wonder how a more penetrating analysis of the border as a physical
form may have impacted St. John's analysis of the border's many meanings.
Despite all of these "nots" and wonderings, Line in the Sand is an
important book as it persuasively pushes back against ahistorical notions
of the border's permanence and it offers a well-crafted and much-needed
consolidation of multiple literatures addressing the border's many
meanings and uses across space and time. As such, I expect it to be a
widely-assigned text in borderlands classes.

Notes

1 Robert Hine, Bartlett's West: Drawing the Mexican Boundary (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1968).  For a more recent treatment of the survey
see, Joseph Richard Werne, The Imaginary Line: A History of the United
States and Mexcio Boundary Survey, 1848-1857 (Fort Worth: Texas Christian
University Press, 2007).

---------------
Review by John Paul Nuño, California State University, Northridge

Scholars have embraced the use of borderlands and transnational frameworks
in order to escape the analytical limitations inherent within a
nation-state perspective. For instance, Glorida Andalzúa and Mario García
highlighted the development of a border culture that transcends the
political demarcation between Mexico and the United States.1 Consequently,
borderlands has become an elastic concept encompassing both physical and
metaphorical borders that simultaneously serve to separate yet create
points of interaction concerning issues such as citizenship, identity,
gender, race, and sexuality. A borderlands study can take place anywhere;
geographical proximity to the border in question is not a prerequisite.
For instance, the city of Chicago, over 1,300 miles away from the
U.S.-Mexico border, experienced significant Mexican immigration beginning
in the late 1910s. Certainly sociocultural borderlands existed among
ethnic communities as they navigated various urban spaces. In light of
these transnational processes the physical border can seem, if not
insignificant, then at least malleable. However, this expansive definition
of borderlands has, at times, led us to overlook ever-increasing
militarization of the border and nation-states' efforts to define
citizenship and identity. Rachel St. John's text, Line in the Sand: A
History of Western U.S.-Mexico Border, serves to remind scholars not to
quickly dismiss territorial borders and their impact on a region's
political economy, peoples, and cultures.

Along the U.S.-Mexico border (particularly in urban areas) fences, barbed
wire, check points, surveillance drones, custom agents, and border patrol
agents dutifully prevent unauthorized movement while safeguarding
permissible transnational economic exchanges. These symbols of state power
represent the culmination of nearly a century of federal policy directives
implemented and negotiated by local officials and communities. St. John
traces the development of the border from "a line on a map to a clearly
marked and policed boundary where state agents attempted to regulate who
and what entered the nation" (2). She argues that state forces, local
actors, and historical processes led to shifts in the nature of the
border. By the 1930s, the border became a site of capitalist development,
transnational trade, enforcement of territorial sovereignty, and a marker
of national identity.

Although Mexico and the United States eventually solidified control over
their border, during much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, local forces largely drove the region's historical events. St.
John's first chapter highlights the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the
creation of the U.S.-Mexico border. Consequently a bi-national border
commission undertook harrowing journeys to survey the new border. Their
difficulty demonstrated the inability of both nations to project their
power upon the new boundary. The second chapter further reinforces this
point by highlighting filibustering efforts and military operations
against indigenous peoples. State-sponsored military operations struggled
to restrain groups such as the Apache from utilizing the international
border to their advantage. Chapter three recounts the economic development
of the Southwestern Borderlands and its incorporation into the market
economy. The arrival of the railroads led to the development of border
communities centered on agriculture, ranching, and mining. In the
following section, the author traces early efforts to control trans-border
economic exchanges. Border officials weighed local realities when making
pragmatic decisions concerning access. The fifth chapter examines how the
Mexican Revolution led to increased immigration into the United States.
Consequently, further steps were taken to control immigration, in
particular the building of fences, which drastically altered border
spaces. In the book's sixth chapter the author traces the utilization of
the discourse of vice and morality in relation to border controls. A
number of border checkpoints, in the name of protecting Americans, had
imposed nightly curfews that interfered with the daily flow of the border.
According to the text's final chapter, by the 1930s, immigration rather
than trade or morality became the main focus of an emerging "immigration
control apparatus" (176). Immigrants and laborers seeking to cross the
border were subject to literacy tests, head taxes, and health inspections.
Both nation-states put into place the type of controls, such as the
creation of the Mexican Border Defense force or the U.S. Border Patrol,
that have come to epitomize the contemporary Southwestern Border.

While examining the evolution of the U.S.-Mexico border, St. John's work
makes a number of effective arguments. The author seeks to present a
complex and nuanced view of the border. As a result, she uses Mexican
archival sources to demonstrate that the United States was not alone in
efforts to extend national jurisdiction and control over its territorial
borders. Mexico also sought to impose order on the border and often
cooperated with its northern neighbors in pursuit of this goal. This was
evident in bi-national agreements that allowed U.S. forces to follow
"hostile" groups across the international boundary (57). Additionally,
Mexico also developed its own laws and organizations to regulate
immigration into the country (178). The Mexican government was not simply
a victim of its powerful neighbor to the north but embarked on its own
nation-building project. St. John joins a number of scholars, such as Ana
María Alonso, who have examined Mexican policies around the turn of the
twentieth century aimed at "civilizing" frontier peoples.2 Rather than
highlighting national animosity or rivalry, St. John demonstrates that
Mexico and the United States were engaged in similar processes.

Historians have recently broadened their scope beyond a Mexican and
Euro-American dichotomy to fully understand the effects of strict border
controls. St. John seeks to be part of this larger historiographic
movement by discussing the border in relation to indigenous peoples and
Chinese immigrants. Scholars such as Brain DeLay and Eric Meeks have
illustrated how native peoples were, if not dominant, then important
actors in Southwestern Borderlands.3 St. John writes that in the latter
half of the nineteenth century the Apache manipulated the international
boundary to evade state jurisdiction. In response, the United States
sought to restrict native peoples' space to reservations. The author's
work also devotes significant space to Chinese immigrants crossing the
border.4 The Chinese were targeted in anti-immigrant campaigns in both
Mexico and the United States. A number of immigrants even crossed into the
United States to utilize deportation proceedings in order to return to
China and escape Mexican persecution (194). St. John's inclusion of
indigenous peoples and Chinese immigrants provides an invaluable
perspective. She demonstrates how Mexico and the United States sought to
regulate groups that they perceived as national threats.

While examining federal policies on the border, St. John remains cognizant
of the tensions between national and local forces. She attempts to
maintain a delicate balance between both and seeks to avoid a narrative
that solely privileges state power. The text contains a number of
interesting personal accounts and case studies that highlight how local
actors either challenged the nation-state or negotiated its power. In an
engaging narrative style, St. John recounts how people living in border
communities both demanded tighter controls on "foreigners" and yet
lamented the restrictions on their own movement. Local residents could
nonetheless circumvent restrictions and maintain their daily trans-border
routines by establishing relationships with customs agents. In 1918 a U.S.
immigration inspector notified his superiors that he was not derelict in
his duties when he allowed locals to pass without questioning since he
recognized them. The U.S. government responded to these local needs by
issuing more readily attainable border-crossing cards to satisfy residents
(180).

St. John makes a concerted effort to present a complex view of the
U.S.-Mexico border's evolution. Nevertheless, readers may still feel Line
in the Sand is the linear story of how two nation-states turned
"Borderlands into Borders," to borrow a phrase used by Jeremy Adelman and
Stephen Aron in their discussion of colonial borderlands.5 The text could
have addressed this with more discussion on the ways that the border
remained porous despite the tighter controls initiated in the 1920s and
1930s. In particular, it would have been interesting to examine how the
border affected the Tohono O'odham. Their communities spanned across the
U.S.-Mexico border and Eric Meeks writes that despite isolation between
some settlements, travel across the border and seasonal migration for
agricultural labor did occur.6 Did increased border controls also affect
these communities or did Tohono O'odham travel with little disruption?
However, indigenous peoples' roles in the book are limited to the second
chapter and discussions of military efforts to stop Apache raiding.

Overall, St. John has expertly written a synthesis of the formation of the
U.S.-Mexico border from its inception to the 1930s. Scholars have
previously written about the expansion of state power in the borderlands,
efforts to control immigration while encouraging trade, and the
construction of national identity at the border. However St. John
contributes to these studies with a well-researched examination of these
broader processes as they unfolded on the physical border.

Historians are gratified when their work is relevant to contemporary
events and political issues. Undoubtedly Line in the Sand directly speaks
to the continuing militarization of the border. In fact the book's most
insightful section examines  the construction of the border fence in the
city of Nogales, Arizona. The subsequent spatial reorganization of the
community is especially pertinent in light of current events. In 2006 the
U.S. Congress passed the Secure Fence Act, which allotted more than a
billion dollars to extend the border fence beyond urban areas. In some
cases Americans have found that the fence was actually built behind a
buffer zone. Consequently, a number of U.S. citizens have found that their
homes and properties are cut off from their neighbors. This has led to a
similar disruption of community space that the residents of Nogales faced
in 1920s. We are all reminded once more that the line in the sand matters.

Notes

1 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: The New Mestiza = La Frontera (San
Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987); Mario T. García, Desert Immigrants: The
Mexicans of El Paso, 1880-1920 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).

2 See Ana María Alonso, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and
Gender on Mexico's Northern Frontier (Tucson, University of Arizona Press,
1995).

3 Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the
U.S.-Mexican War (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2008); Eric V. Meeks,
Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona
(Austin, University of Texas Press, 2007).

4 For more work on the Chinese in the borderlands see: Evelyn Hu-DeHart,
"Immigrants to a Developing Society: The Chinese in Northern Mexico,
1875-1932," Journal of Arizona History 21 (Autumn 1980): 275-312; Julia
Maria Schiavone Camacho, Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the
Search for a Homeland, 1910-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2012).

5 Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron. "From Borderlands to Borders: Empires,
Nation-States, and the Peoples in between in North American History."
American Historical Review 104 (June 1999): 816.

6 Eric V. Meeks, Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and
Anglos in Arizona (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 142.

---------------
Author's Response by Rachel St. John, New York University

It strikes me that a book, not unlike the boundary line about which I
wrote, is created with a certain sets of concerns, assumptions, and goals
in mind, but that once it is finished it goes out into the world where
people, in this case readers with distinct disciplinary approaches and
scholarly concerns, bring different perspectives to bear that shape the
way they read it.  I have been both humbled and flattered by what this
great group of scholars has both brought to and taken away from Line in
the Sand.  While I cannot fully respond to all of the points made in these
reviews-and at any rate must leave it to other readers to read the book
and come to their own conclusions-I would like to try to respond to some
of the issues raised and to provide some further context about how I
approached the topic, how my thinking about the border was transformed
throughout the process of researching and writing this book, and where I
think scholarship on the border might go in the future.

In her review, Flannery Burke frames Line in the Sand in two distinct
ways: first, in light of the local context of the southern New Mexico that
she visited as a child and, second, in relation to the broader field of
diplomatic history.  While I hope that readers, like Burke, will find Line
in the Sand to be a helpful contribution to the literature on U.S. and
Mexican diplomatic history and the related field of 'the United States and
the World,' it is worth noting that I did not initially intend to write
diplomatic history.  Rather, I set out to better understand the history of
the U.S.-Mexico border as a space-a space that I first knew, much like
Burke, on a local level through my own adolescent encounters with the San
Diego-Tijuana border.  Growing up in Southern California, I had visited
and on occasion crossed the border without much thought.  As a graduate
student focusing on western and environmental history, I became interested
in this space where the artificial and, as I would learn, quite arbitrary,
boundary line that U.S. and Mexican officials had imposed in the
mid-nineteenth century had come to mark a stark divide and to exercise
enormous influence over the lives of the people who lived along and
crossed it.  I wanted to know how this had happened.

As I began my research into the border's history, two things initially
struck me.  The first was the power of the boundary line to create such
stark distinctions.  The second, as a number of the reviewers have also
noted, was the way that the border operated and was significant on
multiple scales.  The border has simultaneously been a local space in
which people have worked, traveled, and made their homes and a site of
national and international definition, negotiation, and policing.  While
it was my own experience of the local context of the border which first
drew me to want to explore its history, I soon became fascinated by the
way the United States and Mexican governments had claimed and used the
border to serve national and international agendas as well.  I quickly
realized that the border's history could not be told at the local level
alone and set out to explore local, state, and national archives across
the United States and Mexico in order to write a narrative that could
engage all of the scales on which the border existed.

I also sought out secondary literature that would help me to better
understand and contextualize the border.  I was first drawn to the
burgeoning interdisciplinary scholarship on the U.S.-Mexico border and
other boundaries around the world.  In the early stages of my research, I
found Peter Sahlins' Boundaries: The Making of Spain and France in the
Pyrenees and its exploration of how national identities took form at the
margins of nations to be particularly helpful.1  Equally influential was
the work of scholars in other disciplines, including sociology, geography,
anthropology, and international relations, which  illuminated the
complexity and contestation surrounding the late-twentieth-century
U.S.-Mexico border and particularly the issues related to immigration,
trade (both legal and illicit), and urbanization.2  However, as I read
these works on the modern border, I was struck by the fact that they at
times lacked historical depth.  In order to understand the
late-twentieth-century border, they often began their studies with a
discussion of the delimitation of the boundary line in the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo and then jumped ahead to the second half of the
twentieth century.  I wanted to know what had happened in the period in
between-a period stretching from 1848 to the early years of the Great
Depression which, I soon concluded, had witnessed profound transformations
in both the meaning and spatiality of the border that provided a window
into how state power and priorities had shifted during this critical
period of nation-building in North America.

What I concluded in the course of my research is that the U.S.-Mexico
border, despite widespread contemporary assumptions about its significance
as a barrier to immigration and illegal activity, has meant many different
things and served many distinct purposes throughout its history.  As I
wrote in the introduction to Line in the Sand, the border was at different
times "a marker of military sovereignty, a site of transborder trade, a
home to binational communities, a customs and immigration checkpoint, a
divide between political and legal regimes, and even, at times, a
battlefield." (3) These meanings not only changed over time, but, as Pekka
Hämäläinen notes in his review, "the border signified drastically
different things for different people and institutions."  In Line in the
Sand I explored these different meanings by tracing the narrative of the
border from its creation in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo through the
early 1930s.  While each chapter has a thematic focus that highlights the
aspects of the border that were most significant during a given period in
its history, I also drew attention to the ways in which the multiple
meanings of the boundary line became intertwined and layered over one
another, often with unintended consequences.  As Flannery Burke notes in
reflecting on the Gadsden, New Mexico, of her childhood where she sees
"every layer of meaning that a man-made national border added to the
landscape," none of the previous and alternate meanings of the border ever
entirely disappeared.  For instance, the United States and Mexico did not
cease to desire military authority over their shared border once they
defeated the Apaches.  To the contrary, the urgency of military
sovereignty reemerged during the Mexican Revolution and First World War
and continues to echo in the rhetoric of homeland security, national
defense, and both nations' wars on drugs to this day.  The same is
certainly true of bi-national economic cooperation.  Despite the growth of
border crossing regulations and traffic jams at border ports of entry,
neither international trade nor bi-national communities ceased to exist.
However, while the border has continued to be a site of military
sovereignty and economic, social, and cultural exchange, these meanings
are, particularly from the perspective of the states, often subsumed today
beneath the preoccupation with controlling trans-border migration and
smuggling.  Among my goals in Line in the Sand was to show how the
multiple meanings of the border were layered on top of each other, but
also how different priorities gained precedence at different times.

As the meaning of the border changed, so did border spaces.  By space I
mean not just the physical structures or built environment of the boundary
line, but the broader spatial context that shaped movement, property
ownership, and personal interactions along the border.  As Geraldo Cadava
notes in his review, Line in the Sand is not primarily a history of the
built environment of the border.  A reader who, like Kelly Lytle
Hernandez, is looking for detailed descriptions of the border's built
environment and the making of boundary markers and barriers will find more
thorough treatments of those subjects in the work of historians who have
focused on the mapping, surveying, and marking of the boundary line and
geographers who have analyzed the development of border cities and
environments. 3  Although Line in the Sand covers some similar terrain and
topics, it diverges from this body of scholarship by focusing on the
broader spatial dynamics that defined the U.S.-Mexico border.  Seen
through the lens of spatial history, the built environment was just one
facet of an evolving array of legal, economic, political, social, and
cultural constructs that influenced how people related to each other and
operated in space.  In this context, laws and assumptions about race and
citizenship were as significant in influencing how an individual
experienced the border as the construction of boundary markers or barbed
wire fences.

In thinking about border spaces, I was influenced by the work of
theorists, geographers, and historians who had explored the ways in which
individuals, nation-states, societies, and economies have both actively
produced spaces that reflect human goals and values and been constrained
by the spatial realities that they created.4  Perhaps no one was more
influential in my thinking about spatial history than my mentor, Richard
White, whose own spatial turn coincided with the years I was working
closely with him at Stanford.5  The western U.S.-Mexico border seemed
particularly apt for spatial analysis.  The delimitation of the border in
1848 began a process that was at its most basic level about the production
and division of space.  While there were a number of studies that focused
on the mapping and surveying of the boundary line and the development of
urban spaces along the border, no one had analyzed how the growth of state
power, settlement, and capitalist economies and the evolution of ideas
about national territory, membership, and economics had transformed both
the meaning of the border and how it channeled and constrained movement.6
It was this that I set out to do in Line in the Sand.

As my work on the border progressed, I also came to identify with and to
be in dialogue with another body of literature-borderlands history.
Diverging from the older Boltonian school of borderlands history which had
focused on the Spanish colonial experience in the present-day U.S.
Southwest, borderlands history experienced a resurgence in the 1990s and
2000s as young scholars extended the geographic scope and chronology of
the field and brought fresh perspectives to the study of the borderlands
at the edges of empires and surrounding international boundaries across
North America and the world.  As I wrote in the introduction to Line in
the Sand, these scholars blended "Spanish colonial borderlands history
with the analytical approaches of Native American, Chicano/a, and western
history," drew attention to "broad processes of conquest, colonization,
and cultural interaction and exchange," and became "models for
transnational history." (5)7  In addition to the obvious regional
connection between my work on the border and many of these books which
focused on the U.S. Southwest and Mexican North, my interest in the
expansion of state power, the demarcation and division of territory, and
the ways in which people responded to these incursions into their everyday
lives drew me into the orbit of the new borderlands history.

As both Geraldo Cadava and Flannery Burke note in their reviews, Line in
the Sand both is in conversation with and owes a debt to earlier works of
borderlands history.  However, I think it is also worth reiterating what
is different about Line in the Sand.  First, as a number of the reviewers
underscore, is my emphasis on the border itself.  At a time when, as John
Paul Nuño notes in his review, "borderlands has become an elastic concept
encompassing both physical and metaphorical borders," my work draws
attention to the specificity of the boundary line within the broader
context of the borderlands.  Second, although I, like other borderlands
scholars, have written a transnational history, I would suggest that my
intentions in doing so may have been slightly different than those of the
authors of some other works that take a transnational approach.  At a time
when many scholars had embraced a transnational framework in order to
decenter or transcend the nation-state as a category of analysis, I
approached the border to better understand how nation-states took form,
evolved, and asserted their power.  In this sense, I think Line in the
Sand is in line with the field of diplomatic history which, although
operating on an international and at times global scale, continues to
emphasize the role of nation-states and state actors.

Finally, in contrast to some borderlands historians, most notably Jeremy
Adelman and Stephen Aron who, in their 1999 American Historical Review
article, "From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the
Peoples in Between in North American History," have argued that the
central problematic of borderlands history is to explain and chart the
shift from imprecise, contested "borderlands" to fixed, national
"borders," I see the border's history as less linear and more multifaceted
and contested. 8  By highlighting the multiple and shifting meanings of
the border and the extent to which state power was never absolute and
always negotiated, Line in the Sand challenges the binaries-of open vs.
closed, soft vs. hard, lawless vs. controlled, and porous vs.
impermeable-that have so often dominated the rhetoric about both the
contemporary and historic U.S.-Mexico border.  Reading some of the
reviewers' responses has reminded me again of how hard it is to get past
these binaries.  Geraldo Cadava notes in his review that I show how "the
border, in one way or another, hardened by the mid-twentieth century."
Similarly, John Paul Nuño remarks that, "readers may still feel Line in
the Sand is the linear story of how two nation-states turned 'Borderlands
into Borders,' to borrow a phrase used by Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron
in their discussion of colonial borderlands."  He goes on to suggest that
I might have further emphasized the continued porosity of the border
throughout the twentieth century.  While I agree with Nuño's suggestion
that further discussion of the Tohono O'odham would have made a valuable
additional chapter (although one that I think would most fruitfully be
pursued beyond the time frame of Line in the Sand), I would draw attention
to the examples of continued contestation and permeability that I did
include.  As I noted in the conclusion to my discussion of 1930s
immigration enforcement in Chapter Seven, "The persistence of undocumented
immigrants, along with other people who went under, over, through, and
around the states' fences, testified to the constant challenges to the
states' authority to define the meaning of the border and control who and
what crossed it." (196)  To this day, the border remains contested,
imperfectly controlled, and both intentionally and unintentionally porous
in many ways.  I would argue that the rhetoric that Cadava evokes of
"soft" and "hard" borders, much like the language of "open" and "closed"
borders, mischaracterizes the more complicated shifts in the form and
meaning of the border that occurred over time along the boundary line.  As
I asserted in Line in the Sand, "while both the U.S. and Mexican
governments gradually expanded their presence and power on the border over
the course of its history, this is not a history of how either
nation-state managed to close the once-open border, but rather of how the
border evolved, often into forms and meanings that neither nation-state
could predict or fully control." (4-5) The border came to have a greater
presence in individuals' lives by the 1930s not because it had become
harder or more closed, but rather because more people had come to live
along and cross it and both governments used it as a tool to restrict and
regulate a much wider range of activities and movement.

I unfortunately do not have enough space to address all of the thoughtful
issues the reviewers have raised, but before I close I want to briefly
acknowledge a few points that I think are particularly useful in
suggesting directions for future scholarship on the border.  Although my
story closes in the 1930s, Cadava makes a compelling argument for why
other historians, as both he and Lytle Hernandez have done in their recent
work, should continue the study of the border's evolution up through the
mid-twentieth century.  Highlighting the significance of state (as well as
national) boundaries, Burke convincingly suggests that future historians
will be able to develop a more nuanced understanding of border dynamics by
more fully addressing the differences between state jurisdictions on both
sides of the border.  With her own work on the members of the Border
Patrol serving as an implicit model, Lytle Hernandez emphasizes the need
for further exploration of the experiences of U.S. servicemen who were
stationed on the border.  By raising these and other important questions
about the border's history, each of these reviewers has illuminated new
connections for me in thinking about my own work and, more importantly,
suggested exciting new directions for future scholarship on the
U.S.-Mexico border.  I am gratified that Line in the Sand is provoking
such stimulating conversations.  It will certainly not be the last word on
the subject.

Notes

1 Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the
Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

2 See, for instance, Lawrence A. Herzog, Where North Meets South: Cities,
Space, and Politics on the U.S.-Mexico Border (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1990); Lawrence A. Herzog, ed., Shared Space: Rethinking the
U.S.-Mexico Border Environment (La Jolla: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies,
2000); Daniel D. Arreola and James R. Curtis, The Mexican Border Cities:
Landscape Anatomy and Place Personality (Tucson: The University of Arizona
Press, 1993); Pablo Vila, Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social
Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the U.S.-Mexico
Frontier (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000); Joseph Nevins,
Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the "Illegal Alien" and the Making of
the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (New York: Routledge, 2002); Peter Andreas,
Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2000).

3 See, Drawing the Borderline: Artist-Explorers of the U.S.-Mexico
Boundary Survey (Albuquerque: The Albuquerque Museum, 1996); Robert V.
Hine, Bartlett's West: Drawing the Mexican Boundary (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1968); Paula Rebert, La Gran Línea: Mapping the United
States-Mexico Boundary, 1849-1857 (Austin: University of Texas Press,
2001); Joseph Richard Werne, The Imaginary Line: A History of the United
States and Mexican Boundary Survey, 1848-1857 (Fort Worth: Texas Christian
University Press, 2007); Robert M. Utley, Changing Course: The
International Boundary, United States and Mexico, 1848-1963 (Tucson:
Southwest Parks and Monuments Association, 1996); Fred Rochlin and Harriet
Rochlin, "The Heart of Ambos Nogales: Boundary Monument 122," The Journal
of Arizona History 17:3 (Summer 1976): 161-80; Herzog, Where North Meets
South; Herzog, ed., Shared Space: Rethinking the U.S.-Mexico Border
Environment; Arreola and Curtis, The Mexican Border Cities; Nathan F.
Sayre, Ranching, Endangered Species, and Urbanization in the Southwest:
Species of Capital (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2002).

Recent works by historians Katherine Morrissey and Mary E. Mendoza which
discuss the photography of the boundary surveys and border fences, dipping
vats, and bath houses respectively represent important new additions to
the rich literature focusing on the materiality of the boundary line.
Mary E. Mendoza, "If We Build It They Won't Come: The Physical
Manifestation of the U.S.-Mexico Border," paper presented at the Western
History Association 52nd Annual Conference, Denver, Colorado, October 4,
2012; Katherine Morrissey, "Borderline Photography: The Visual Legacy of
the 1890s U.S./Mexico International Boundary Survey," paper presented at
the Western History Association 52nd Annual Conference, Denver, Colorado,
October 4, 2012.

4 See for instance, Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1991); Derek Gregory and John Urry, eds.,
Social Relations and Spatial Structures (London: MacMillan Publishers Ltd,
1985); Kate Brown, "Gridded Lives: Why Kazakhstan and Montana Are Nearly
the Same Place," American Historical Review 106:1 (February 2001): 17-48.

5 For work that White has since published in spatial history see, Richard
White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America
(New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2011); Richard White, "What Is Spatial
History?," working paper, February 1, 2010, The Spatial History Project
Website, available at
http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=29,
accessed online September 28, 2012.

6 Drawing the Borderline: Artist-Explorers of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary
Survey; Hine, Bartlett's West; Martínez, Troublesome Border; Metz, Border;
 Rebert, La Gran Línea; Werne, The Imaginary Line; Utley, Changing Course;
Rochlin and Rochlin, "The Heart of Ambos Nogales"; Herzog, Where North
Meets South; Herzog, ed., Shared Space: Rethinking the U.S.-Mexico Border
Environment; Arreola and Curtis, The Mexican Border Cities.

7 For overviews of the field of borderlands history see, Pekka Hämäläinen
and Samuel Truett, "On Borderlands," Journal of American History 98:2
(September 2011): 338-61; Benjamin H. Johnson and Andrew R. Graybill,
"Introduction: Borders and Their Historians in North America," in Benjamin
H. Johnson and Andrew R. Graybill, eds., Bridging National Borders in
North America: Transnational and Comparative Histories (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010); Samuel Truett and Elliott Young, "Making
Transnational History: Nations, Regions, and Borderlands," in Samuel
Truett and Elliott Young, eds., Continental Crossroads: Remapping
U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).  A
small sampling of the borderlands histories that influenced me include,
Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the
Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1991); David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1992); Ana María Alonso, Thread of Blood:
Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico's Northern Frontier (Tucson:
The University of Arizona Press, 1995); James F. Brooks, Captives and
Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); María E. Montoya,
Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict over Land in
the American West, 1840-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2002); Benjamin Heber Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten
Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Andrés Reséndez, Changing National
Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005); Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The
Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2006); Andrew Graybill, Policing the Great Plains:
Rangers, Mounties, and the North American Frontier, 1875-1910 (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2007); Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand
Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2008); Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2008); Truett and Young, eds., Continental Crossroads.
For the classic work of Boltonian borderlands history see, Herbert Eugene
Bolton, The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the
Southwest (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921).

8 Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, "From Borderlands to Borders: Empires,
Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,"
American Historical Review, 104:3 (June 1999): 814-41.


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