The US-Mexican borderlands form the region where the United States and Latin America have interacted with the greatest intensity. This work addresses the protracted conflict rooted in the vast difference in power between Mexico and its northern neighbor. Each of the seven parts explores a key issue in borderlands studies.

Looks at life on the Mexican border, including the ethnicity, attitudes, and place of residence of those who live there, and how they interact with other residents

Drawing upon a personal collection of more than 300 letters exchanged between her parents and other family members across the U.S.-Mexico border, Miroslava Chavez-Garcia recreates and gives meaning to the hope, fear, and longing migrants experienced in their everyday lives both "here" and "there" (aqui y alla). As private sources of communication hidden from public consumption and historical research, the letters provide a rare glimpse into the deeply emotional, personal, and social lives of ordinary Mexican men and women as recorded in their immediate, firsthand accounts. Chavez-Garcia demonstrates not only how migrants struggled to maintain their sense of humanity in el norte but also how those remaining at home made sense of their changing identities in response to the loss of loved ones who sometimes left for weeks, months, or years at a time, or simply never returned. With this richly detailed account, ranging from the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s to the emergence of Silicon Valley in the late 1960s, Chavez-Garcia opens a new window onto the social, economic, political, and cultural developments of the day and recovers the human agency of much maligned migrants in our society today.

With the railroad's arrival in the late nineteenth century, immigrants of all colors rushed to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, transforming the region into a booming international hub of economic and human activity. Following the stream of Mexican, Chinese, and African American migration, Julian Lim presents a fresh study of the multiracial intersections of the borderlands, where diverse peoples crossed multiple boundaries in search of new economic opportunities and social relations. However, as these migrants came together in ways that blurred and confounded elite expectations of racial order, both the United States and Mexico resorted to increasingly exclusionary immigration policies in order to make the multiracial populations of the borderlands less visible within the body politic, and to remove them from the boundaries of national identity altogether. Using a variety of English- and Spanish-language primary sources from both sides of the border, Lim reveals how a borderlands region that has traditionally been defined by Mexican-Anglo relations was in fact shaped by a diverse population that came together dynamically through work and play, in the streets and in homes, through war and marriage, and in the very act of crossing the border.

Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest StudiesIn the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mexicans and Americans joined together to transform the U.S.–Mexico borderlands into a crossroads of modern economic development. This book reveals the forgotten story of their ambitious dreams and their ultimate failure to control this fugitive terrain. Focusing on a mining region that spilled across the Arizona–Sonora border, this book shows how entrepreneurs, corporations, and statesmen tried to domesticate nature and society within a transnational context. Efforts to tame a “wild” frontier were stymied by labor struggles, social conflict, and revolution. Fugitive Landscapes explores the making and unmaking of the U.S.–Mexico border, telling how ordinary people resisted the domination of empires, nations, and corporations to shape transnational history on their own terms. By moving beyond traditional national narratives, it offers new lessons for our own border-crossing age.

Seminal essays on how women adapt to the structural transformations caused by the large migration from Mexico to the U.S.A., how they create or contest representations of their identities in light of their marginality, and give voice to their own agency.

This book offers answers to essential questions about the border between the United States and Mexico and connected issues that are accessible to readers interested in immigration, border security, and U.S.-Mexico relations. Comprising seven chapters, The U.S.-Mexico Border: A Reference Handbook surveys the complex topic for students and readers. Chapter 1 discusses the political, social, and economic contexts in which the border came to exist. Chapter 2 discusses problems, controversies, and proposed solutions. Chapter 3 consists of original essays contributed by outside scholars, complementing the perspective and expertise of the author. Chapter 4 profiles major organizations and people who, as stakeholders in border politics, drive the agenda on the issue. Chapter 5 presents data and documents on the topic, giving readers the ability to analyze the facts. Chapter 6 provides additional resources that the reader may wish to consult, such as books, journal articles, and films. Chapter 7 provides a detailed chronology of important events, and the book closes with a useful glossary of key terms used throughout the book and a comprehensive subject index.