Search

Contrary to common assumptions, Spanglish, the mix of Spanish and English, has been around since before 1848, with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, even if Merriam-Webster.com traces the origin of the word to 1958 and the OED to 1933. This personal meditation discusses the effort to codify a bilingual Spanglish-English dictionary by "a lay lexicographer" and the responses it received. It explores the way Spanglish is a global phenomenon whose base is the United States, enriched by various Spanishes, including Cuban, Dominican, Mexican, and Puerto Rican. It reflects on the evolution of Spanglish in tandem with the growth and diversity of the Latino minority in the US, the presence of US culture in the Americas, and the multiplicity of online resources. It includes personal anecdotes as well as lexicographic examples.

Mexico’s defeat in the war that (in the U.S.) takes the country’s name resulted as much from the strategic context created by unrealized nation-building that followed independence as it did from American tactical supremacy. Three centuries of Spanish empire did not translate into national military excellence due to the decades of revolutionary upheaval that followed the sudden decapitation occasioned by Napoleon’s ouster of the monarchy in Madrid. That the occupation which followed major combat provided salutary lessons learned in dealing with guerrillas rather than a Vietnam-like litany of quagmire eventuated from the conscious designs of military leadership steeped in the same Napoleonic dynamic that had produced our opponent. The United States wisely chose to leave issues of state-building and governance to the Mexicans themselves, while annexing the sparsely populated northern remnant of Spanish empire.

The story of Modesta Avila, the first convicted felon in Orange County, California, is both a popular California legend and a potent metaphor used by scholars to illustrate themes of social injustice, ethnic intolerance, railroad intransigence, the decline of the Californios, and the treatment of Hispanics following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Because of its frequent use as a metaphor to explain serious historical themes, the accuracy of the story is important; however, key elements are inaccurate and need revision. New research—into original land titles, Mexican land grants, genealogy, trial transcripts, applications for appeals to governors Markham and Waterman, the personal notes of the historian Jim Sleeper, and hundreds of contemporary news articles—results in a revised and compelling story that has even stronger metaphorical import for historians and others to deploy in their work.

The article explores the role that the language of banditry and outlawry played in the transformation of Mexican territory into American national space in the wake of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Through a reading of Cherokee author John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, it suggests that the appellation of “bandit” attached to Mexican resistance worked to delegitimate racialized resistance to American colonization while authorizing anti-Mexican, vigilante violence as a nationalizing activity for Euro-Americans living in the borderlands.

When we understand our histories and identities in terms of the transnational forces that shaped our nationalist frameworks, we discover substantial precedent for North American identities and cultural spaces. During and immediately after the War of 1848, U.S. and Mexican liberal nationalists unsuccessfully crafted transnational identities in non-fiction essays and editorials. The historical overlap of Mexican and U.S. American New World liberalism, defined as it is by awkward and uneven parallelisms, modifies common assumptions about histories of liberal nationalism and nationalidentity formation. North American identities have arisen in strategic contexts defined by experiences of double-(un)consciousness, disjunction, fracture, and paradox. Al entender nuestras historias e identidades en términos de fuerzas transnacionales que han constituido nuestros modelos nacionalistas, descubrimos un precedente importante respecto de las identidades norteamericanas y los espacios culturales. Durante e inmediatamente después de la guerra de 1848, algunos liberales mexicanos y estadunidenses forjaron sin éxito identidades transnacionales en ensayos de no ficción y editoriales. El traslape histórico del liberalismo del Nuevo Mundo de México y Estados Unidos, caracterizado por extraños y desiguales paralelismos, ha modificado los supuestos comunes sobre las historias del liberalismo nacionalista y la formación de identidades nacionales. En Norteamérica estas últimas surgieron en contextos estratégicos definidos por experiencias de doble (in)conciencia, disyunción, fractura y paradoja.

In the U.S.–Mexico context, the concepts of the border, borderlands, and la frontera represent their ongoing complex geopolitical, cultural, and historical relations. With the signing of the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty in 1848 and the Gadsden Purchase in 1853, the Mexican and U.S. governments established the southern border of the United States. The border is the international boundary line between the two countries, and the borderlands are the zones neighboring both sides of that boundary. It is a place where the First and Third Worlds collide daily, creating borderlands that amount to collective spaces of transcultural/transnational encounters. The concept of la frontera represents a counter-narrative of the term “frontier,” which became synonymous with American expansionism, or the westward expansion of the United States as proclaimed by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1883. The Spanish term “frontera,” as used in this framework, presupposes a knowledge production ranging from the implications of land annexation to the geopolitical and cultural processes of borderland sites. While the borders mark the place where adjacent jurisdictions, communities, and nation-states meet, it has also been a hotly contested subject—literally and figuratively speaking—inciting extreme emotional reactions that fuel negative stereotypes about immigrants, ethnic discrimination, and xenophobia. Immigration has become one of the most salient sociopolitical issues discussed on the national level. Unfortunately, it is debated mainly outside of the historical context because the histories embedded in its borderlands can contribute enormously to inform current political debates about immigration in the United States. Border crossers coming from south of the border are often portrayed by U.S. politicians as the most unwelcome and undesirable (yet necessary) immigrants. As the national discussion on immigration reform continues and the alleged ills of the U.S.–Mexico border dominate the political discourse and the media, expressive art and print culture must continue to form novel epistemologies of borders and counter unsubstantiated alternative facts propagated by anti-immigrant groups. To that end, it is important to consider the border's literature and imagine the borderlands as the fruitful heterogeneous site of an imagined and creative homeland: Aztlán.

The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) formed the background for independence movements in the Americas. Great Britain increased its colonial land and was forced to make reforms in order to govern its territory, as was Spain, in order to modernize. Their subjects felt the consequences. Because of their experience in politics, those from the Thirteen Colonies resisted and eventually declared independence in 1776. France had been weakened by its losses and recognized the Confederation in 1778, before drawing Spain into the short fight. Because they were less important than their territory in the West Indies, Great Britain recognized their independence in 1783, ceding them the territory up to the Mississippi. The French Revolution allowed them to strengthen their government, trade as a neutral country, and purchase Louisiana in 1803. New Spain was unfortunate in that it was a valuable viceroyalty of Spain, and, as it did not have allies, its long and bloody fight broke apart the administration. Upon achieving independence in 1821, it found itself in a deplorable situation. Impoverished and without political experience, it aroused the ambition of new trade countries and of the United States, the uninhabited territory to its north. To populate it, Mexico offered facilities and attracted American settlers, who violated the conditions that had been set and declared independence in Texas, joining the United States in 1845. Mexico’s political inexperience, coupled with the siege coming from Spain, France, and the United States, prevented the country from consolidating a system of government and reviving its economy. By 1840, it exhibited a substantial contrast with the United States, which had a stable government, a connected and productive territory, and a growing population. In 1845, after annexing Texas, population reached nearly 20 million, while Mexico scarcely had 7 million. By the time the United States initiated the attack, the result was foreseeable. Various armies were invading, and their fleets seized the ports in February 1847. New Mexico and California had been invaded and annexed, and the occupation was a heavy burden, as President Polk forced Mexico to pay. The bitter peace treaty was signed in 1848, and the United States’ newly annexed territory stretched to the Pacific.

In this essay, we trace the relations among the early years of the US–Mexico borderlands after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), the role of racialist discourse in shaping the border and US immigration policy, and contemporary bordering and security environments. Our ultimate aim is to show how contemporary security knowledge and practices form an assemblage with racialist discourses and practices in the post-9/11 era. Current security thinking is in itself racialized and follows the contours of what Etienne Balibar has described as ‘neo-racism’ (1991), which has offered vigilante groups more credibility in matters of security and immigration than they previously enjoyed. In short, we will show how the racial–territorial nexus of ‘classical’ racism has come together with the security–economy nexus of securitization theory and practice to form a neo-racist assemblage that we identify at the heart of US–Mexico border security and migration debates.

The Mexican-American War ranks among the most consequential events in the history of both nations. Although the casus belli for the United States’s May 12, 1846, declaration of war was the Mexican ambush of a U.S. Army patrol in the disputed Nueces Strip on April 25 of that year, two underlying causes rendered conflict inevitable. The dispute over Texas was the first, and the desire of both nations to control the Mexican provinces of Nuevo Mexico and California was the second. President James Knox Polk identified the acquisition of that territory as the principal objective of his administration. The conflict also remains noteworthy for the extent to which the political milieu in both countries proved as important as events on the battlefields. In México, a devastating war of independence (1810–1821), multiple violent overthrows of the federal government, the failure of two constitutions to produce a structure acceptable to both conservatives and liberals, and enmities generated by the socioeconomic structure severely limited México’s growth, tranquility, and potential for armed resistance to an invader. In the United States, the national unity evident at the outbreak of the war faded in the face of sectional rivalries, unexpectedly high casualties, and declining relations between the executive and legislative branches. The military phases of the war fall into two segments. In the first, forces considerably smaller than those deployed in later phases of the war fought in Texas and in the Mexican provinces of Nuevo Mexico, California, Tamaulipas, and Nuevo Leon. When United States victories in northern Mexico failed to produce the anticipated Mexican surrender, the second phase of the conflict began on March 9, 1847, with General Winfield Scott’s invasion of central Mexico and ended with his entrance in Mexico City on September 14, 1847. In the following seven months, both governments sought to obtain the best terms. A rising tide of violent rural rebellion in Mexico and a rising tide of Whig opposition to the Polk administration in Washington served as catalysts during the negotiations. Two agreements, the February 2, 1848, Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo and the March 6, 1848, Truce Agreement brought hostilities a close. Consequences of the conflict included the Mexico’s loss of 525,000 square miles of territory, the emergence of the United States as the dominant continental power, the dispossession of many Mexican citizens living in what had become U.S. territory, and the reestablishment of Mexican sovereignty over territories in rebellion.

John Mckiernan-Gonzalez’s insightful book analyzes the role of public health regulation along the border of Mexico and the United States as a state-building project that helped to define both nations during a period of significant change in the borders and in the political systems of each. His narrative begins in the period following the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and ends during World War II. Like other scholars—including Natalia Molina, Nayan Shah, and Alexandra Stern—he is particularly interested in the ways that issues of race, the body, health, citizenship, and politics intersect. He focuses especially on those policies that emerged to address communicable diseases such as smallpox, typhus, and cholera, as well as the multilayered contestation of such measures. Mckiernan-Gonzalez argues: “Public health provided another theater for people to demonstrate their ability to participate in national society—to show that they were indeed worthy of citizenship” (p. 3). Those policies shaped local, national, and international politics, as well local communities along the border, in this century-long span; both U.S. and Mexican officials envisioned their regulatory efforts as a modernizing project. The author explains that, while public health officials sought to regulate the border and to clearly demarcate national boundaries and identities, those borderlands and their complex history of intersecting peoples, traditions, and economies could not be neatly contained. In fact, in discussing the complex terminology of place names and labels to identify race, nationality, and political alignments, the book’s preface hints at the difficulty of that project. Mckiernan-Gonzalez’s impressive and extensive primary research draws on Department of State and U.S. Public Health and Marine Hospital Service records at the U.S. National Archives, Texas state archival records, several Mexican government records collections, as well as university archival collections and a large number of Spanish- and English-language newspapers in

For generations, Mexicans and American Indians ritualistically and reciprocally took captives from one another's societies throughout what are today the US–Mexico borderlands. Many of these captivities originated on what had become US territory by 1848. Yet no law expressly duty-bound US officials to locate and liberate this class of captives. In this article, I argue that Article IX's liberty clause in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) could have been used by federal authorities as the basis for a territorial liberation program. I believe federal authorities were reluctant to make use of Article IX as a liberating tool because this type of program had political implications for black slavery in the South and because racial asymmetries in the enforcement process devalued non-white captives.

It has been argued that the United States did not receive California from Mexico by “right of conquest” or by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo because the majority of California was not under the control of the Mexican government. In eastern portions of Southern and Central California, few or no Spanish occupants were present. Northward from Santa Rosa to what would become the Oregon border, no Mexican governmental institutions were to be seen. This area was the aboriginal homelands of the Pomo, Wiyot, Yurok, Hupa, Karuk, Modoc peoples, just to name a few. They had lived there for thousands of years, and their aboriginal rights and supreme entitlement to their land and natural resources were undeniable. Therefore, the settlement of California must be reviewed and reevaluated.

Building on the demonstrated need for compassionate migration policy detailed in the rest of this volume and the sources of compassion suggested in Chapters 16–18, this concluding chapter summarizes and examines the suitable venues and blueprints of compassionate migration policy. These range from traditional immigration policymaking venues like the U.S. Congress to new interventions in compassion such as desert Samaritans. This chapter briefly surveys the landscape of the potential immigration venues in the hopeful search for compassion and sites of humanity in migration policy for the Americas, and supplies a detailed blueprint for those local governments, U.S. states, and civil society organizations (CSOs) willing to embrace and practice compassionate migration policy at the subnational level.

The United States–Mexico War was the first war in which the United States engaged in a conflict with a foreign nation for the purpose of conquest. It was also the first conflict in which trained soldiers (from West Point) played a large role. The war’s end transformed the United States into a continental nation as it acquired a vast portion of Mexico’s northern territories. In addition to shaping U.S.–Mexico relations into the present, the conflict also led to the forcible incorporation of Mexicans (who became Mexican Americans) as the nation’s first Latinos. Yet, the war has been identified as the nation’s “forgotten war” because few Americans know the causes and consequences of this conflict. Within fifteen years of the war’s end, the conflict faded from popular memory, but it did not disappear, due to the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War. By contrast, the U.S.–Mexico War is prominently remembered in Mexico as having caused the loss of half of the nation’s territory, and as an event that continues to shape Mexico’s relationship with the United States. Official memories (or national histories) of war affect international relations, and also shape how each nation’s population views citizens of other countries. Not surprisingly, there is a stark difference in the ways that American citizens and Mexican citizens remember and forget the war (e.g., Americans refer to the “Mexican American War” or the “U.S.–Mexican War,” for example, while Mexicans identify the conflict as the “War of North American Intervention”).

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. Please check back later for the full article. Mexican immigration to the United States is a topic of particular interest at this moment for a number of political reasons. First, and probably foremost, Mexicans are currently the single largest group of foreign-born residents in the country. In 2013, the United States counted 41.3 million individuals of foreign birth; 28 percent, or 11.6 million, were Mexican. If census data are aggregated more broadly, adding together the foreign-born and persons of Mexican ancestry who are citizens, the number totals 31.8 million in 2010, or roughly 10 percent of the country’s total population of 308.7 million. What has nativists and those eager to restrict immigration particularly concerned is that the Mexican origin population has been growing rapidly, by 54 percent between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, or from 11.2 million to 31.8 million persons. This pace of growth has slowed, but not enough to calm racial and xenophobic fears of the citizenry fearful of foreigners and terrorists. Mexican immigration to the United States officially began in 1846 and has continued into the present without any significant period of interruption, also making it quite distinct. The immigration histories of national groups that originated in Asia, Africa, and Europe are much more varied in trajectory and timing. They usually began with massive movements, driven by famine, political strife or burgeoning economic opportunities in the United States, and then slowed, tapered off, or ended abruptly, as was the case with Chinese immigration from 1850 to 2015. This fact helps explain why Mexico has been the single largest source of immigrants in the United States for the longest period of time. The geographic proximity between the two countries, compounded by profound economic disparities, has continuously attracted Mexican immigrants, facilitated by a border that is rather porous and that has been poorly patrolled for much of the 20th century. The United States and Mexico are divided by a border that begins at the Pacific Ocean, at the twin cities of San Diego, California and Tijuana, Baja California. The border moves eastward until it reaches the Rio Grande at El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Júarez, Chihuahua. From there the border follows the river’s flow in a southeastern direction, until its mouth empties into the Gulf of Mexico where Brownsville, Texas and Matamoros, Tamaulipas sit. This expanse of over 1,945 miles is poorly marked. In many places, only old concrete markers, sagging, dry-rotted fence posts with rusted barbed wire, and a river that has continually changed its course, mark the separation between these two sovereign national spaces. Since 1924, when the U.S. Border Patrol was created mainly to prohibit the unauthorized entry of Chinese immigrants, not Mexicans, American attempts to effectively regulate entries and exits has been concentrated only along known, highly trafficked routes that lead north. The inability of the United States to patrol the entire length of its border with Mexico has meant that any Mexican eager to work or live in the United States has rarely found the border an insurmountable obstacle, and if they have encountered it temporarily so, they have simply hired expensive professional smugglers (known as coyotes) to maximize safe passage into the United States without border inspection or official authorization. In 2014, there were approximately 11.3 million such unauthorized immigrants in the United States; 49 percent, or 5.6 million of them were Mexican. Over the long course of history Mexican immigration is best characterized as the movement of unskilled workers toiling in agriculture, railroad construction, and mineral extraction; for the last two decades, they have worked in construction and service industries as well. This labor migration has evolved through five distinct phases, each marked by its own logic, demands, and governance.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) and was promoted as a way to extend the right of United States (U.S.) citizenship to Native, African, and Mexican Americans. In reality, the government reneged its responsibilities for federal protection of the rights of its new citizens, and constructed an empire that elevated Euro-Americans' social, economic, and class status, while diminishing the status of others. This article examines how the land grant adjudication process in postwar New Mexico formed a new political economy that adversely affected Mexicana property rights. As my primary source, I use testimonios from the Spanish Archives of New Mexico taken by the U.S. Surveyor General's Office from 1854–1890 to discuss how the testimonios are memories better categorised as an alternative historical archive within the officialised records. Thought of in this way, the testimonios counter traditional historical accounts that elide the importance of matrilineal links to the pro...

Ocean Howell Making the Mission: Planning and Ethnicity in San Francisco Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015, 400 pp., 8 color and 60 b/w illus. $45 (cloth), ISBN 9780226141398 Despite its small size—only 49 square miles—San Francisco contains approximately 120 individual neighborhoods defined by topography, climate, and culture. Many are well known, including Pacific Heights, the Haight-Ashbury, and the Castro, but the cultural heart of San Francisco is its Mission District. Long San Francisco's barrio, as well as home to thriving bohemian artistic and music scenes, the Mission District has become contested territory in recent decades. Ocean Howell's Making the Mission is the first scholarly monograph to explore the complex story of this ever-changing urban crucible. The Mission, as it is known locally, is indeed a “city within a city”—a blue-collar ethnic enclave that has so far resisted the homogenizing currents of late-stage American capitalism, if not the insatiable housing needs of Silicon Valley. Howell explores not only how the Mission District has resisted these forces but also how it has played a key role in guiding the development of the city as a whole. The book begins in 1906, but the neighborhood's history goes back much further, to the foundation of Mision San Francisco de Asis (Mission Dolores) in 1776. During its first half century of existence, the area surrounding the mission was farmland tended by Native American converts to Catholicism. Mexico's 1821 declaration of independence brought significant changes, including the secularization of Mission Dolores in 1834. During the 1840s, a small village grew up around the crumbling mission complex. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 was supposed to preserve the rights of former Mexican citizens in the conquered territories, but Manifest Destiny swept everything away, and by the 1850s, American newcomers had seized most of the land, consigning the city's dwindling Spanish-speaking population to economic marginalization and eventual assimilation. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, San Francisco ballooned from 150,000 people in 1870 to …

The earliest appraisals of the Southwest were far from admiration. The first US account was by Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike following his expedition of 1806 and 1807. He spoke in general terms of the barren and parched soil. "The one good purpose served by these vast eastern plains was to stem the westward migration and leave the prairies incapable of cultivation to the wandering and uncivilized aborigines of the country." Speaking specifically of New Mexico he said that except for the Rio Grande and its tributaries, all the rest of the country presents to the eye a barren wild of poor land, scarcely to be improved by culture, and appears only capable of producing a scanty subsistence of the animals that live on a few succulent plants and herbage. Following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, a US Senator from Texas petitioned Congress to force Mexico to take back New Mexico and Arizona. That prompted the Governor of New Mexico under Mexico's rule, Manual Armijo, to coin the phrase, "Poor New Mexico, so far from heaven, so close to Texas." Even the more modern-day cowboy philosopher Will Rogers commented that the Rio Grande was the only river he ever saw that needed irrigating.

I will begin with a confession. As I see it, the first time I taught Latina/o history was a disaster. It was fall 2000, and I was a newly hired assistant professor at Oberlin College. I had just finished my dissertation over the summer and had almost zero teaching experi ence?I had been a teaching assistant for several courses in graduate school. I also did not like the idea of standing in front of dozens of twenty-year-olds and lecturing them on history-related topics, or on anything else for that matter. I had been fairly content squirreled away in the Pittsburgh hills, and the thought of several rows of skeptical stu dents leaning back in their chairs, arms crossed, as I lectured did not thrill me. It did not help that I had gone to a small liberal arts college and had been precisely that kind of student?capable and engaged, but also skeptical and even a little suspicious of my professors. At the same time, I was thrilled to be able to teach a course in Latina/o history. My colleagues placed no restrictions on me, no hints to stay away from this topic or nudges to include that event. I thought, and still do, that there are enough similarities between the histories of Chicanas/os and Puerto Ricans and Cuban Americans, not to mention immigrants from the Dominican Republic and Central America and elsewhere in Latin America, to justify treating their diverse experiences in the United States within a single, semester-long course. As I saw it, I could go in two directions. I could treat the history of each group as a relatively discrete unit?a section on Chicana/o history followed by one on Puerto Ri cans, and so on, with transition days between topics to highlight similarities and differ ences. Alternatively, I could move chronologically from the sixteenth century to the near present, ending more or less with the Mariel boatlift in the 1980s. Along the way, I would shuttle around in space rather than in time, from the Mexican North and the American Southwest to the Spanish Caribbean and Miami and New York, describing what life was like in Cuba and Puerto Rico in 1848 when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, how nuevomexicanas/os in 1898 reacted to the Spanish American War, or how Puerto Ri cans viewed the Peter Pan flights from Cuba in the 1960s. I chose the latter approach. I chose poorly. Without an adequate textbook, I spent the semester feverishly writing lectures, a man on the run trying to unite disparate histories into coherent narratives. I compared slavery in the nineteenth-century Caribbean with

The US–Mexico international border was officially established in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It extends 1960 miles from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, with four US states (California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas) bordering six Mexican states (Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas). There are 14 sister-cities that are paired and interdependent on each side of the border, separated only by the international boundary – most famously, San Diego–Tijuana and El Paso–Ciudad Juarez. There are 42 official crossing points along the US–Mexico border. It is estimated that it is one of the most transited borders in the world, second only to the US–Canada border. Populations along the US–Mexico border also include many indigenous tribes who live on both sides of the border and are separated by the international boundary. There are 26 federally recognized indigenous tribes on the US side, and seven officially-recognized indigenous tribes on the Mexican. Conflict over indigenous sovereignty and immigration law enforcement has emerged recently. Most notably, the Tohono O'odhma people, mostly settled in northern Sonora, Mexico, and in north to central Arizona, have complained that the US Border Patrol has detained and deported members of their nation traveling through their own traditional lands. With the Agreement on Cooperation for the Protection and Improvement of the Environment in the Border Area, signed in 1983 in La Paz, Baja California, Mexico, both the United States and Mexico designated the border region as 62.5 miles (100 kilometers) on each side of the international boundary. Today, 12 million people live in this border region , 90 percent of whom reside in the 14 sister-cities . The population is expected to reach 19.4 million by 2020 (EPA 2009). One of the most important issues, that has actually brought about cooperation among both the United States and Mexico, has been the pollution along the border. Rapid population growth coupled with industrial development and waste has created environmentally unsound air and water quality for the population living in the 14 metropolitan areas along the US–Mexico border. Population growth, as well as migration, unemployment and underemployment, along the border has been closely linked to the emergence and expansion of the maquiladoras – outsourced assembly plants. In 1965, the Mexican government launched the Mexican Industrialization Program (BIP) to provide economic incentives for US and international companies to establish assembly plants in the border region. In 1994, the US–Mexico border was opened up further to trade and assembly plants with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Keywords: borders; immigration; migration; violence

Despite its Current Obscurity today, overshadowed by higher-voltage conflicts such as the Civil War and World War II, the U.S.–Mexican War was an almost unqualified triumph for the United States. In terms of military and geopolitical goals, the United States far exceeded even its own expectations. As well as scoring some pretty impressive victories, up to and including storming Mexico City, the United States succeeded in the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which concluded the war, to annex huge tracts of land from Mexico for what was even then a bargain-basement price: more than half of Mexico's territory (including Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, and significant chunks of Colorado, Nevada, and Utah) for only fifteen million dollars. The advantage of this deal to the newly expanded United States became clearer as only a year after the treaty was signed gold was discovered in California and, within two decades, there was also a thriving silver-mining industry in Nevada.At the time, of course, the war was huge news. The U.S.–Mexican War generated innumerable items of propaganda and related material. As Ronnie C. Tyler has shown, a huge market in chromolithographs of the war emerged, representing “bravery, nobility, and patriotism” (2). The leading lithographers of the day, such as Nathaniel Currier, Carl Nebel, and James Baillie, sold thousands of oversized lithographs of battle scenes, war heroes, and sentimental themes (Baillie's Soldier's Adieu and Currier's The Sailor's Return were particular favorites). Even more numerous were written and performed reports of the war, from the hundreds of newspaper reports from the front to dime novels, songs, poems, broadsheets, plays, and minstrel shows, as well as the typical 19th-century round of essays, sermons, and oratory.

Rosemary A. King, Border Con.uences: Borderland Narratives from the MexicanWar to the Present Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004, xvii + 170 pp. In BorderCon.uences, RosemaryKing offers a comparative analysis of the literature of the borderlands with specific attention to "geopoetics," which she characterizes as a way of reading the representation of place and space within a specific genre. King begins her study with narratives that capture the legal debates of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Subsequent chapters look at the production of fiction about theMexican Revolution in 1910, as well as post-Second-World-War narratives that contemplate the costs of assimilation. In surveying one hundred fifty years of Mexican-American, Native-American, American, and Mexican writing, King brings into focus historical, legal, and cultural elements of life on the frontier. Her selection of texts is appropriate and illuminates her theory of geopoetics. In the introduction, King maps out her terminology and the scope of her scholarship, which includes the narratives of twelve authors. In order to locate her discussion in concrete terms, she notes the variety of names associated with the region between theU.S. andMexico and the connotations of those names:Herbert Eugene Bolton's coining of the term"borderlands,"Americo Paredes's idea ofGreaterMexico, as well as Richard Bauman's reading of the border as Mexico de Adentro (inside the country of Mexico) and Mexico de Afuera (Mexico outside its borders). Chapter 1 explores how the theme of cultural difference operates in the nineteenth-century romance, concentrating on the work of three women writers in order to discuss "domestic places and national divides." King examinesHelenHunt Jackson's wildly popular novel, Ramona (1884), and Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don (1885), both of which take place in southern California. King also addresses Jovita Gonzalez's Caballero: A Historical Novel (1996), which is set in Texas in the 1840's. Border Con.uences adds depth to the relatively recent scholarship on Jackson, Ruiz de Barton, and Gonzalez. The author's treatment of Ruiz de Burton, in particular, reminds readers that Mexican-American writing dates back to the nineteenth century, a fact frequently ignored in contemporary scholarship, which usually begins with the twentieth. Helen Hunt Jackson, who was a white reformer for Indian rights in the nine-teenth century, offers in Ramona a Native-American counterpoint to Harriet Beecher Stowe's treatment of slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Ramona articulates, in King's estimation, the absolutist elements (good / evil or hero /villain) needed for a romance; Ramona draws on such binaries to enrich her description of conflicts betweenAnglos, Mexicans, and Indians. ForKing, intercultural disputes and negotiations in the novel take place in the domestic sphere. With that in mind, King addresses Indian dispossession by following the flight of Ramona and her husband Alessandro from the Moreno estate and on to various towns and villages, each of which ultimately gives way to the authority of white settlers. King identi.es in a triangulation of SenoraMoreno (aMexican of Spanish ancestry), Ramona (of Scottish and Indian), and Alessandro (of Indian) the nineteenth century racial hierarchies that privilege Spanish blood over Indian blood and, to some extent, Indian blood over that of the mestizo or mestiza. Along with her reading of Ramona, King's interpretation of Ruiz de Barton's The Squatterand the Don fits nicely within the framework of geopoetics. The novel centers on lawsuits over Don Mariano's ownership of the Alamar ranch and how, in King's words, Ruiz de Burton "creates an us-or-them mentality" between the American squatters and the Mexican ranchers. The chapter contextualizes the struggle between the two groups when King observes that "whether one farms wheat or raises cattle makes a difference in the novel, as it did historically in the 1870's when the local economy of southern California was changing from cattle ranching to agriculture-based capitalism" (King 19). …

Cooperation over shared United States–Mexico waters dates back to the Treaty of Peace, Friendship, Limits, and Settlements, know as the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed in 1848. This treaty established the international boundary from the Gulf of Mexico along the Rio Grande to El Paso, Texas, then west to the Pacific Ocean just south of San Diego Harbor, a stretch of 3141 km. For 2001 km of that border, the Rio Grande serves as the boundary line. This is a long and complex boundary with topography ranging from coastal plains to mountain ranges and high desert. The climate is predominately semiarid to arid, has two major watersheds, the Rio Grande (called the Rio Bravo in Mexico) and the Colorado River, many smaller watersheds, and numerous groundwater basins. This was a treaty of intent, not of specifics. The treaty did not deal with details of the boundary line, management of water between the two countries, fluctuation of the river courses, water quality, or groundwater resources. Subsequent agreements would have to deal with these issues. Keywords: water management; treaties; conventions; United States; Mexico

There has been little exploration of the psychological impact of land loss and displacement on American minority populations. What little there is, is evident in research on Native Americans. Virtually absent from the mental health literature is research on the psychological processes of land loss and the coping strategies employed by the Hispanos of Northern New Mexico. Hispanos received land grants by the Spanish and Mexican governments beginning in the 17th century. Living in Northern New Mexico for many years, this author observed negative emotions regarding land loss within the Hispano community. Such observations were reinforced by the continued appearance of local and national newspaper articles on land grant activism and litigation in Northern New Mexico and annual commemoration of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, a document drafted at the end of the Mexican American War in 1848, upholding the rights of Hispanos to the possession of land grants. Such observations led this writer to initia...

California local government in the Anglo-American period did not get off to a particularly auspicious start. For a short time during the United States military occupation and thereafter, some of the Hispanic institutions, especially the office of alcalde, a position that existed in many localities, mainly in northern California, continued in effect. This office combined legislative, judicial, executive, and law en forcement functions in one person. But there was little patience among newcomers with the lack of separation of powers and checks on the power inherent in the po sition, and the rapidly increasing throng of citizens from the United States de manded prompt instituting of offices and procedures with which they had more confidence. Sometimes this impatience ran roughshod over existing officials and the rights of people who had been in the region much longer. Yet in an amazingly short time the structure and functions of local government as they would continue to operate were successfully established throughout the state. In southern California the transition from the Mexican forms of local government to that of the United States was sufficiendy gradual to be generally less painful for Spanish-speaking residents, who supposedly were assured full rights of citizenship by the recent Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, than was often the case in northern California. In the huge Los Angeles County, which in 1850 stretched east to the Colorado River and into what would later become southern Nevada, the first County Court of Sessions met June 24,1850, with Augustin Olivera serving as pre siding judge.1 Since he could not speak English and at least one of the associate jus tices knew no Spanish, G. Thompson Burrill, who was also the sheriff, was ap pointed county interpreter at an additional salary of fifty dollars per month. By June 1852, the state legislature had provided for a five-member county commission or board of supervisors in a few of the larger counties, including Los Angeles. There

The 2,000-mile border that separates Mexico from the United States has long provided producers of popular culture with fertile grounds for exploring American identity. Hollywood has typically viewed the region through the broader prism of US national frontier mythology, cementing the Western as its inspirational genre of choice for myth-infused explorations of the borderlands. The source of the frontier myth itself was a political discourse informed by notions of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority, American exceptionalism and of imperialism justified through divine sanction. Among other things, belief in this Manifest Destiny misrepresented a history by which one can acknowledge Mexico as the victim of US aggression. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended one-and-a-half years of a conflict that Mexicans still call the War of the North American Invasion. In defeat, vast tracts of Mexico’s territory-from Texas to California-were ceded to the United States and the US-Mexico border was officially established as a geopolitical entity. Throughout the twentieth century, the US attitude to the border has generally been one of paranoid defense: typically (if tacitly) understood in terms of race, of safeguarding Anglo-American civilization from the Latin American other, something “to distinguish us from them” (Anzaldua 25, original italics).1 Maintaining this distinction meant resisting-often with extreme violence-the attempted “incursions” of this other.

[EN] This paper describes the evolution and erasure of the urban acequia landscape in three urban centers of the American Southwest. These cultural landscapes were first developed by Native American peoples in present day New Mexico, Arizona and California. In the late sixteenth century, expansion of New Spain into the region introduced acequia irrigation methods to establish permanent agricultural settlements. Further expansion of these systems occurred in the seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries. Spanish settlement policies followed La Recopilación de Las Leyes de Las Indias which established design criteria for organizing acequia irrigation systems and the built environment. This study explicates the transformation and adaption of the urban acequia landscape from the settlement period under Spanish Law, the Mexican Period, and through the organization as modern cities of the American Southwest. Today, the cities of San Antonio, Albuquerque, and Los Angeles have evolved into major population centers while containing the material memory of the acequia landscape in the urban form of the city. Through the use of geospatial visualization mapping, this paper documents the morphological process of urbanization and how irrigation systems became the framework for the spatial organization of the southwest cities that were within Mexican territory before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Si la signature du Traite de Guadalupe Hidalgo - mettant fin a la guerre entre les Etats-Unis et le Mexique - devait garantir les droits civiques et fonciers des Mexicains ayant choisi de rester dans les nouveaux territoires americains, la realite fut tout autre. L'A. examine l'heritage du Traite de Guadalupe Hidalgo dans les conflits fonciers opposant Mexicains-americains et Anglo-americains, centrant son analyse sur l'experience des Tejanos du Texas.

At the very root of the concept of an American nationality lies the myth of a limitless frontier that unites with unconstrained mobility as an essence of freedom, both physical and spiritual. Early American literature recreated that sense of ceaseless movement into new frontiers that carried with it endless opportunity for adventure, escape, exploration, and quest. But by 1900, unexplored land was no longer limitless and our ethos about the land was reversed: instead of "penetrating" the landscape, the United States (1) was newly threatened with "penetration" by advancing numbers of immigrants landing on the shores. With the closing of the frontier by the end of the 1800s, "the very boundlessness of this racial and ethnic diversity generated a need to reinforce interior borders" (Takaki 83). This desire for protection from encroachment by minority groups led, among other things, to the relocation of Native Americans from their homelands to reservations and to the segregation laws of the 1890s that restricted the African American from mainstream American social or political arenas. Likewise, in the 1800s, Mexican settlers and Chinese immigrants faced loss of land rights. For the Mexicans in frontier territory, the "discovery" of America entailed the loss of their land. For centuries, natives of Latin American countries and Mexico had crossed the Rio Grande in search of work, political asylum from oppressive regimes, and opportunity. With the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the United States government remapped western territory by annexing an entire territory, its possessions and its people, creating borders where there had been none. To end the conflict, Mexico accepted the Rio Grande as the Texas border and ceded the southwest territories to the United States for $15 million, a territory that includes present day California, New Mexico, Nevada, and parts of Colorado, Arizona, and Utah. The treaty moved borders and ushered in a perpetual struggle over land and its inhabitants' "place" on that land. The very meaning of land and ownership became unstable, subject to shifting borders and constant redefinition: those who had been Mexican suddenly found themselves inside the United States, "foreigners" on their own land, politically vulnerable, powerless, and economically dispossessed. With the intrusion of Anglos, the land itself became a site for the clash of political and cultural ideologies which, according to Americo Paredes, has contributed to the sense of an "in-between existence" (qtd. in Saldivar 17) that characterizes the Mexican-American border culture. At that historical moment in 1848 when all Mexican nationals in the conquered borderlands overnight "became" United States citizens, "the Mexican American people were created as a people: Mexican by birth, language, and culture; United States citizens by the might of arms" (Rodolfo Alvarez qtd. in Saldivar 17). So how does that subject survive in exile? Divested of nationhood and reinvested with new loyalties, the wanderer claims or feels claimed by no nation and bears the emotional costs for losing placement in history and in time. For Chinese immigrants, the perceptions of an open continent and limitless opportunity were attractive, but harsh exclusionary laws enacted in the 1890s and reinforced in the early twentieth century constrained their ability to "move" within the American landscape. The Exclusion Laws of 1924 prohibited entry of "aliens ineligible for citizenship," further restraining the Chinese-American population. Chinese were systematically denied the more lucrative forms of livelihood and were concentrated in low-wage jobs. In the early years of immigration, the Chinese who had joined the Gold Rush in California were soon taxed out of their mining claims; they sought work in other areas, mainly in laying the new railroads. In urban areas, they were relegated to low paying jobs as cigar workers, tailors, and seamsters. …