Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History / Edition 1

by Samuel Truett

Overview

Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.

The U.S.-Mexico borderlands have long supported a web of relationships that transcend the U.S. and Mexican nations. Yet national histories usually overlook these complex connections. Continental Crossroads rediscovers this forgotten terrain, laying the foundations for a new borderlands history at the crossroads of Chicano/a, Latin American, and U.S. history. Drawing on the historiographies and archives of both the U.S. and Mexico, the authors chronicle the transnational processes that bound both nations together between the early nineteenth century and the 1940s, the formative era of borderlands history.

A new generation of borderlands historians examines a wide range of topics in frontier and post-frontier contexts. The contributors explore how ethnic, racial, and gender relations shifted as a former frontier became the borderlands. They look at the rise of new imagined communities and border literary traditions through the eyes of Mexicans, Anglo-Americans, and Indians, and recover transnational border narratives and experiences of African Americans, Chinese, and Europeans. They also show how surveillance and resistance in the borderlands inflected the "body politics" of gender, race, and nation. Native heroine Bárbara Gandiaga, Mexican traveler Ignacio Martínez, Kiowa warrior Sloping Hair, African American colonist William H. Ellis, Chinese merchant Lee Sing, and a diverse cast of politicos and subalterns, gendarmes and patrolmen, and insurrectos and exiles add transnational drama to the formerly divided worlds of Mexican and U.S. history.

Contributors. Grace Peña Delgado, Karl Jacoby, Benjamin Johnson, Louise Pubols, Raúl Ramos, Andrés Reséndez, Bárbara O. Reyes, Alexandra Minna Stern, Samuel Truett, Elliott Young

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822333890
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	11/01/2004
Series:	American Encounters/Global Interactions
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.32(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.86(d)

About the Author

Samuel Truett is Assistant Professor of History at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

Elliott Young is Associate Professor of History at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon; he is the author of Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border, published by Duke University Press.

Table of Contents

Foreword / David J. Weber ix

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: Making Transnational History: Nations, Regions, and Borderlands / Samuel Truett and Elliott Young 1

Frontier Legacies

Finding the Balance: Bexar in Mexican/Indian Relations / Raul Ramos 35

Fathers of the Pueblo: Patriarchy and Power in Mexican California, 1800-1880 / Louise Pubols 67

Borderland Stories

Race, Agency, and Memory in a Baja California Mission / Barbara O. Reyes 97

An Expedition and Its Many Tales / Andres Resendez 121

Imagining Alternative Modernities: Ignacio Martinez’s Travel Narratives / Elliott Young 151

Transnational Identities

At Exclusion’s Southern Gate: Changing Categories of Race and Class among Chinese Fronterizos, 1882-1904 / Grace Pena Delgado 183

Between North and South: The Alternative Borderlands of William H. Ellis and the African American Colony of 1895 / Karl Jacoby 209

Transnational Warrior: Emilio Kosterlitzky and the Transformation of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1873-1928 / Samuel Truett 241

Body Politics

The Plan de San Diego Uprising and the Making of the Modern Texas-Mexican Borderlands / Benjamin Johnson 273

Nationalism on the Line: Masculinity, Race, and the Creation of the U.S. Border Patrol, 1910-1940 / Alexandra Minna Stern 299

Conclusion: Borderlands Unbound / Samuel Truett and Elliott Young 325

Contributors 329

Index 331

Editorial Reviews

"While duly acknowledging the foundational work of earlier generations of border-crossing historians, Samuel Truett and Elliott Young and their gritty band of young collaborators bring into focus a more socially complex, multiracial, and multiethnic world of transnational players and history-makers. In their original essays, there are Mexicans and Tejanos, Indians and Chicanos, Chinese and Blacks, mestizos and Anglos, gringos and immigrants, and many more, jostling for room, power, and influence in this contested space in order to construct identities, build communities, and challenge and strengthen institutions. With more intentionality than their elders, Truett, Young, et al. seek to define the field of borderlands studies, a project that requires serious intervention into established narratives, methods, and epistemologies. They have thrown down the gauntlet; I suspect many more young scholars of the United States and the American West, of Latin America and Mexico, of Chicano/a and Ethnic Studies, will rush to join them because they sense that if they don't, they risk becoming obsolete before they even begin their careers."--Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Professor of History and Director, Center for the Study of Race & Ethnicity in America, Brown University

From the Publisher