History of the US and Mexico Border

History of the US and Mexico perimeterTracing the Evolving Historiography of the U.S.-Mexico BorderIntroductionRegulating the edge surrounded by the United States and Mexico is non a new issue. In position, denotes over what to do with the spring, what it should look like, and who should be eachowed to hybridizing watch been prevalent questions since the Statesn and Mexican diplomats sat down to effect the environ in the aftermath of the Mexican-American war in 1848. While the easterly half of the peal is easily distinguished by the Rio Grande, the western throttle does non correspond to whatever recognizable geographic features and was instead do up of arbitrarily drawn stresss through an uninhabited desert. It is along this pervious modeling that a shorelands historian like Rachel St. asss monograph, follow in the anchor (2011), is concerned. While St. bathrooms deed decl atomic number 18s itself to be a tarradiddle of the true(a) perimeter, in the firs t place historians like Clarence Clendenen and his arrive at, melody on the Border The United States phalanx and the Mexican Irregulars (1969), is more(prenominal) of a troops record dealing the United States armys involvement in set up clashes with Indian and Mexican forces. In by and by years, stinting and public policy history became the preferred methodology of examining the history of the U.S.-Mexico coast like Douglas Masseys beyond Smoke and Mirrors Mexican Immigration in an Era of sparing consolidation (2002) which fancys the issue of managing immigration from Mexico through the Immigration Reform and correspond Act (IRCA) in an era of increasing sparing interdependence ca utilise by the North American set free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).When examined side by side, these three monographs are a good representation of just how drastic altogethery historians have changed the way they prove they palisade in only the become fifty years. Since its inception, th e ways in which historians discuss the U.S.-Mexico contact have evolved epoch-makingly. conflicting earlier admittancees, which were biased toward the United States and primarily concerned with the American denominate of view, newer ferments like St. Johns are beginning to consequence a more multi field approach to tracing the evolution of the bourn surrounded by the 2 nation-states from its inception as a meaningless farm animal on a map to the confused system of barriers and strict regularization that allows for the easy going of most concourse, animals, commodities, and goods, date restricting the go badments of other(a)s. Given the feud and politics that are deeply entrenched in discussions astir(predicate) the U.S.-Mexico border, St. Johns work is by no means the pinnacle of favored international history, however it does act as a step in the right directions for future historians to further expand upon.It is easy to assume that borderlandshistory would b e inherently transnational because often cartridge clips borderlands arecrossroads where volume and their institutions and traditions come together,creating distinctive ways of organizing lay and transforming the take careinglyfixed edges of empires and nations into bland spaces.1However that is non always the case, especially in the experience around(predicate) the U.S.-Mexicoborder, which is heavily politicized in both nations. The best transnationalhistories examine the interconnections among governmental units, especially theflow of goods, people, and ideas crosswise borders. These whole kit and boodle trace how USinvolvement overseas shapes not only foreign peoples, entirely analogously Americans approvehome. The most successful works incorporate a multifariousness of historical methods anddraw on US and foreign history while paying precaution to the role of non-stateactors and the agency of non-elites.2While all(prenominal) monograph discussed persist to onl y focus on a few of these qualifiers,there is a noticeable trend that scholarship is becoming more transnational,however possibly not as quickly as star would thing. The subject social occasion of borderlandhistory lends itself well to transnational methodology, however historians are salve more concerned with the elite actors, politics, and the American excite ofview for whatever of these works to be considered unfeignedly transnational. origin on the Borderpromulgated in 1969, Clendenens Blood on the Border The United States Armyand the Mexican Irregulars is one of the earliest examples of borderlandhistory and thus takes a more traditionalist approach to historical writing. Asa have of West Point and the Curator Emeritus of the Military Collection atStanford University, it is no surprise that Clendenens monograph is primarilyfocused on the strive history of border skirmishes that occurred between the U.S.and Mexican armies between 1848 and 1917. Clendenens work chronicles a series ofepisodes where the U.S. and Mexican armies clashed with each other beginningwith the activities of Juan Cortina who was a Robin Hood-like figure, ulteriorchapters as well as describes U.S. armed services activity during the Civil War, thecampaigns a earningsst the Kickapoos and Apaches, and border problems during the revolutionaryperiod. Clendenen then devotes over half of the book to examining popular PershingsPunitive Expedition against the Mexican revolutionary general Francisco PanchoVilla in 1916.Clendenens main argument is that thePunitive Expedition was not a mortify become flature for the US military, howeverthis period of U.S.-Mexico history has been greatly pretermit by historiansbecause it had been forgotten amidst the earlier wars with the Plains Indiansand World War I. He make outs General Pershings Punitive Expedition was soon soover-shadowed by the opening of the United States into World War I thathistorians have given it scrimp attention, and mo st of those who grant it a fewsentences, or a separate or two, are amazingly misinformed rough it. Yet theoperations of littler American forces in northern Mexico on numerous occasions produce a phase of our military history that is well worth rescuing.3To protrude his argument, Clendenen relieson a variety of sources including interviews, diaries and autobiographies ofAmerican soldiers, as well as U.S. archival sources. However Mexican sourcesare nearly nonexistent. He justifies that the exclusion of Mexican sources wasintentional because his goal is to describe the root on which Americancommanders formed their decisions. Clendenen argues that his searchdeliberately presents only the American perspective on the border conflictsbecause that is the nature of military history. A military history create verballyfrom the point of view of a participant nation is necessarily unilateral itcannot be shadely objective regarding the enemy the commander of a militaryunit must base hi s decisions upon the discipline he actually has at a givenmomentnot upon what a scholar or historian may know half a century later Hence,I make no apology for having cited very few Mexican sources.4Clendenen is also reluctant to embroil Mexican sources because, he argues, itis very baffling for an American to obtain firsthand information regarding correctts and activities. Mexicans, for some reason or other, he says, arereluctant to discuss border events with Americans.5This type of defense for foc utilise on the American narrative falls in linewith most of the early scholarship about the U.S.-Mexico border. Very little,if any, of Clendenens work can be considered transnational even though itssubject thing is about the US and Mexican armys movements throughout theborderlands. digression from examining the interconnections between political units(in this case, the militaries of two countries), Clendenen does little toexamine the flow of goods, people, and ideas crosswise borders , or focus on therole of non-state actors and the agency of non-elites. Little attention is alsopaid to tracing how the United States involvement overseas affects those back endhome.Beyond Smoke and MirrorsBy the early 2000s, scholarship on the U.S.-Mexico border was starting to become more willing to discuss the non-state, non-American actors, though it as yet tended to have a strong American perspective. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration (2002) by Douglas Massey et al. examines the economic and public policy history of the U.S.-Mexico borderspecifically the opposing effect of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)to draw conclusions about the complexities of how the border operated between 1965 and 1986. Massey et al. argue that the migration system between Mexico and the United States is similar to a complicated bandage of machinery and that their monograph is meant to trou bleshoot the problems of immigration by describing the dramatic impact that immigration policies have had on those living in Mexico as well as the United States.The monograph operates as a appearance of possessors manual and describes how the migration system was built, how it workeduntil immigration policies first passed in 1986 disrupted it, and how thesystem changed as a consequence. later on in its repair manual, the authorsoffer a specific set of proposals intentional to fix the damage caused by thesepolicies and make migration efficient and predictable again. The authors argue, only if as it is not advisable to take a wrench to a precision clock if one is not a qualified clockmaker, it is not wise to pull policy levers if one has no real founding of how the underlying system functions. Yet this is exactly what happened beginning in 1986, when the US Congress and successive presidents presided over a series of legislative and bureaucratic changes that fundamentally changed the rules under which the Mexico-US migration system operatedwe seek to provide policymakers and citizens with a more accurate blueprint of the nuts and bolts of the Mexico-US migration system. We offer a kind of owners manual to explain how the system works theoretically, how it was built historically, and how it functions substantively, or at least how it did function until the 1986 IRCA threw it out of synch.6To support their arguments, Massey et al. utilize an economichistorymethodology by using a variety ofhistorical methods, statistical methods, andeconomictheorytoclosely examine the relationship between immigration and U.S. public policies. Similar to Clendenenswork, Massey et al. also do not look beyondthe American archives for source materials. However their sources do show agreater measurement of variety than Clendenens and even includes publish articlesfrom Mexican scholars, which is something Clendenen specifically avoided. The authorsgathered information from a diver s(prenominal) set of sources including officialstatistics from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and the U.S.Bureau of the Census, the Mexican National Statistical Institute, the WorldBank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations.7 well-nigh notably, the authors rely on data compiled by the Mexican MigrationProject (MMP), a bi-national research project compiled by the University ofGuadalajara and the University of Pennsylvania and directed by two of theauthors, Jorge Durand and Douglas S. Massey.8Compared to Clarence Clendenens work, Beyond Smoke and Mirror shows a significant chemise in how historians study and write about the U.S.-Mexico border though the approach only hits on a few of the key qualifiers of a truly transnational work. For example, Clendenen was solely concerned with recording the experiences of Americans who served in the army in the borderlands and justifying the United States involvement in various border skirmishes. On the other h and, Massey et al. have expanded the scope of their research in order to examine the broader picture of the immigration of non-state, non-elite actors and the influence agricultural employers and American politics had on the ebb and flow of people across the border. Massey et al. also attempt to trade how the implementation of IRCA and NAFTA have interrupted the stable circular flow of Mexican migrants who arrived in the United States, quickly found jobs, and returned to Mexico for several months before migrating back to the United States again. This steady immigration system minimized the negative consequences and maximized the gain for both countries. 9 In this side, the authors attempted to explain how United States involvement in Mexico reshaped the lives of not only Mexicans, simply also Americans back home.Line in the SandOne of the most new-fashioned works of scholarship about the U.S.-Mexico border is Rachel St. Johns Line in the Sand A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border (2011). As part of Princeton Universitys America in the World series, this monograph is meant to represent the newest transnational methodology historians are using when writing about U.S-Mexico border history. St. John does employ a transnational methodology in her examination of the history of the U.S.-Mexico border, displaying a tremendous amount of change in the field, however the degree to which she utilizes key aspects of a authorized transnational work are jolly disappointing for a monograph published in a transnational history series. This appears to be a problem concerning the subject area rather than the author, as other historians such as Mae Ngai and her work, Impossible Subjects Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004),appear to suffer similar shortcomings.Regardless, St. Johns work does createa very serviceable stepping stone to guide future historians away fromnationalistic, America-centered histories and towards studies not confined topolitic al units that are more concerned with the role of non-state actors assubjects of an incredibly complex system. St. John attempts to differentiateher work from earlier scholarship about the border by immediately assertingthat she is writing about the history of the fleshly border from itsconception up to its modern form in the 1930s. She argues that the actualborder itself is often ignored in scholarship that is supposedly about theborder As borderlands historians have emphasized historical processes thattranscend national boundaries and have expanded their focus to include zones ofinteraction outside of the US Southwest and Mexican north, they have oftentreated the border itself as in irrelevant or incidental part of theborderlands. By contrast, I emphasize the centrality of the leap line inthe processes of market expansion, conquest, state building, and personal identityformation with which many borderlands historians are concerned.10St. John examines the transformation of the b order chronologically from itsorigins in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, to a prosperous economiccrossroads, and finally into a heavily policed series of checkpoints intent on property certain people and goods from crossing.St. John breaks her research up intochapters that can around be viewed as a series of vignettes or snapshotsthroughout time of how the western U.S.-Mexico border quickly began to change.From its inception as well as the actual attempts by surveyors to map out theborder, St. John argues that simply sketch a line on a map does not automatically guarantee territorial authority for a nation, especially one thatis not marked by any distinct geographical features like the western border.Essentially, she writes, the creation of the western border conjured up an entirely new space where there had notbeen one before.11 This is significantbecause for many years, the border remained a porous boundary that actuallyencouraged border residents to move freely. This i dea of a porous border wasespecially beneficial for mercantile emergence and bi-national cooperation,especially with the arrival of railroads in the 1880s. With the creation ofrailroads, St. John notes that a capitalist revolution had occurred, grasslandsbecame ranches, mountains became mines, and the border itself became a site ofcommerce and communities by the early twentieth century the border had becomea point of connection and community in the midst of an emerging capitalist delivery and the center of a transborder landscape of property and profit.12 However with thedevelopment of transnational capitalism came the creation of state border control,which was intent on protecting investors that profited from this economy by controlling the passage ofgoods and people across the border. By this time, military power was no longerthe primary concern along the border. Instead, the U.S. and Mexicossovereignty was measured in customs collected, immigrants rejected, andbandits arrested. 13 The latter(prenominal) half of St.Johns work examinesthe use of the border to dispense immigration. The ultimate challenge for bothcountries was the creation of a conditional border that allowed for the passageof desired migrants and commerce but obstructed the flow of those who were notwelcome.14This conditional border was incredibly inconsistent and depended largely on the discretion of immigration officials, changes in law, and fluctuating economicconditions.15St. John attempts to address each of the key aspects of a transnational methodology with varying degrees of success. Most frank is her examination of the interconnections between political units and the flow of goods, people, and ideas across borders because this is the entire basis of her research. Unlike Clendenen and Massey who only focused on the one-way flow of people and goods from Mexico to the United States, St. John actually expands on this idea in her work by examining the flow of people from Mexico to the Un ited States and then back to Mexico at different points in time in the early twentieth century. She spends a considerable amount of time discussing the effects that immigration policy changes had on immigrant laborers, their families, and their communitiesaspects of immigration that the earlier historians had all but ignored.Similar to St. John, Massey et al.also discuss the idea that the economy in the United States played asignificant hand in influencing the ebb and flow of Mexican immigration,however they fail at investigating what happened to these people once theyemigrated back to Mexico. St. John discusses the fluctuations of immigration,but she also attempts to tell the other side of the story by including theMexican governments response to deportations and increasingly strictimmigration laws.16 In thisway, St. John does a much better job than earlier historians at tracing howU.S. involvement and policies shaped not only Mexican citizens, but Americansas well. This becomes in creasingly apparent as she examines the sharp increasesin policing of the border in the 1930s as government officials not only doit more difficult for new migrants to cross the border but also criminalizedMexicans as illegal aliens and encouraged, coerced, and forced hundreds ofthousands of Mexican nationals and US citizens of Mexican gloam to move toMexico.17Changes in U.S. policy in attempts to protect its economy and citizens distinctlyaffected deported Mexican citizens and people of Mexican descent, but it also cater into the growing anti-Mexican sentiment that many Americans were feeling atthe time, essentially treating Mexican laborers as scapegoats for the lack ofjobs leading up to the Great Depression. One aspect of St. Johns work thatcould use improvement is diversifying the sources that she uses. Again, thisappears to be a problem inherent in this subject area rather than any fault ofthe author. While Clendenen intentionally used only American sources, laterhistorians of U.S.-Mexico relations like Massey et al. and even Mae Ngai appearto have trouble including a fair amount of sources from foreign archives. Thiscould be for a variety of reasons including talking to barriers, lack of accessto the archives, or simply because perchance the majority of scholarship on thissubject could be published in the United States. St. John seems to have beenmore successful at including Mexican scholarship in her work compared toearlier scholars, however for a monograph specifically about the border betweenMexico and the United States, her sources are static notably one-sided. Out ofall of her research, St. John only visited three archives in Mexico to completeher work. These include the Archivo General del Estado de Sonora, the ArchivoHistricoGenaro Estrada, and the Instituto de Investigaciones Histricas.18 In comparison to thenumerous American archives she visited, it is hard to understand why she choseto include so few Mexican sources when a significant por tion of her work isdedicated to the communities located on the Mexican side of the border. Thevast majority of St. Johns research was conducted within the United States andshe uses a variety of American archives to complete her work using a largeassortment of books, photographs, manuscript collections, film reels,government documents, and newspapers. St. Johns use of source materials iscomparable to Massey et al. who used similar documents to complete their work onlya decade earlier. The fact that scholars have yet to utilize Mexican sources totheir greatest potential is somewhat disappointing for a work of transnationalhistory but perhaps the next generation of historians will be able to improvethe concomitant if the controversy and politics that are deeply entrenched in discussionsabout the U.S.-Mexico border ever simmer down. Rachel St. Johns Line in the Sand is the latest attemptby borderlands historians taking a transnational approach to their work. It maynot be successful in all aspects of a truly transnational methodology howeverit does set the comprise for future historians to build off of and think outsideof the borders of traditional U.S.-centric histories. inferenceConcerns over regulating theU.S.-Mexico border, what it should look like, and who should be allowed tocross it are issues as relevant today as they were when the border was firstestablished one hundred seventy years ago. Tune into any news network today and information onthe latest immigration policies and border control will for certain be hotly debatedbetween policymakers, citizens, and corporations who all have differingopinions on how the border should operate. While obvious geographical featureslike the Rio Grande easily delineate the eastern portion of the U.S.-Mexicoborder, the western border cuts through uninhabitable desert that is butmarked with more than a few fence posts in some areas. It is along thispermeable half of the border that borderlands historians situate their work.Borderland histories have transformedsignificantly over the course of the century as historians are beginning toleave behindhand the nationalistic, pro-American sentiments of historical writingbehind in favor of a better-rounded transnational approach that situatesAmerica in the context of the greater history of the world. Published in 1969, ClarenceClendenens Blood on the Border TheUnited States Army and the Mexican Irregulars represents the ways in whichearlier historians often used military history when discussing border issues. Inlater years, economic and public policy history became the preferredmethodology of examining the history of the U.S.-Mexico border like DouglasMasseys Beyond Smoke and MirrorsMexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration (2002). In recentyears, historians like Rachel St. John are attempting to examine the history ofthe actual border itself without tying themselves down to writing specificallyfrom the perspective of any one nation state. W hen examined chronologically,these monographs show just how drastically historians have changed the way theydiscuss they border in just the last fifty years. Unlike the earlier approachesto writing about the border, which were primarily concerned with the Americanpoint of view, newer works like St. Johns are beginning to take a moretransnational approach to tracing the evolution of the boundary between Mexicoand the United States from its inception as an unclear and undefined politicalboundary to the complex system of border patrols and strict regulation thatallows for the easy passage of some people, animals, commodities, and goods,while at the same time restricting the movements of others.In many other fields of study, thetransnational approach to history was specifically sparked by changes in how weexamine and write about history in a post-9/11 world. However, discussions overthe U.S.-Mexico border do not seem to follow this trend quite as closely as itis still a subject the gene ral public is hotly divided over. This could beattributed to many reasons such as current events involving recently electedU.S. leaders fear mongering that it is imperative for the safety of Americancitizens and the economy to build a two thousand mile long wall along theborder. This feeds into a deep-seated distrust of the immigration system afterusing Mexican immigrants as a convenient scapegoat for the better half of acentury. As long as U.S. citizens, our government, and policies continue tovilify our neighbors to the south, any sort of progressive transnationalscholarship will not be possible.BibliographyClendenen,Clarence C., Blood on the Border TheUnited States Army and the Mexican Irregulars.London The MacmillanCompany, 1969.Hamalainen,Pekka and benjamin Johnson. What is Borderlands History? In studyProblems inthe History of North American Borderlands, 1-40.WandsworthPublishing, 2011.Accessed May 1, 2017. http//inside.sfuhs.org/dept/history/Mexicoreader/Chapter8/borderland s/borderlandsch1.pdf.Massey,Douglas S., Jorge Durand, and Nolan J. Malone. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors Mexican Immigrationin an Era of Economic Integration. New York Russell Sage Foundation, 2002.St. John, Rachel. Line in the Sand A history of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border. Princeton Princeton University Press, 2011.1 PekkaHamalainen and Benjamin Johnson, What is Borderlands History?, in MajorProblems in the History of North American Borderlands (Wandsworth Publishing, 2011), 1.2 Class notes.3 ClarenceC. Clendenen, Blood on the Border TheUnited States Army and the Mexican Irregulars (London The MacmillanCompany, 1969). Xvi.4 Ibid., xvii5 Ibid.6 DouglasS. Massey et al., Beyond Smoke andMirrors Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration (New YorkRussell Sage Foundation, 2002). 2.7 Ibid., 165.8 Ibid.9 Ibid., 71.10 RachelSt. John, Line in the Sand A history ofthe Western U.S.-Mexico Border (Princeton Princeton University Press,2011). 5-6.11 Ibid., 2.12 Ibid., 64.13 Ibid., 90.14 Ibid., 175.15 Ibid.16 Ibid., 188.17 Ibid.18 Ibid., 249.