Tracing the Evolving Historiography of the U.S.-Mexico Border
Introduction
Regulating the border between the United States and Mexico is not a new issue. In fact, concerns over what to do with the border, what it should look like, and who should be allowed to cross have been prevalent questions since American and Mexican diplomats sat down to establish the border in the aftermath of the Mexican-American war in 1848. While the eastern half of the border is easily distinguished by the Rio Grande, the western border does not correspond to any recognizable geographic features and was instead made up of arbitrarily drawn lines through an uninhabited desert. It is along this permeable border that a borderlands historian like Rachel St. John’s monograph, Line in the Sand (2011), is concerned. While St. John’s work declares itself to be a history of the actual border, earlier historians like Clarence Clendenen and his work, Blood on the Border: The United States Army and the Mexican Irregulars (1969), is more of a military history discussing the United States army’s involvement in border clashes with Indian and Mexican forces. In later years, economic and public policy history became the preferred methodology of examining the history of the U.S.-Mexico border like Douglas Massey’s Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration (2002) which examines the issue of managing immigration from Mexico through the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) in an era of increasing economic interdependence caused by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
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When examined side by side, these three monographs are a good representation of just how drastically historians have changed the way they discuss they border in only the last fifty years. Since its inception, the ways in which historians discuss the U.S.-Mexico border have evolved significantly. Unlike earlier approaches, which were biased toward the United States and primarily concerned with the American point of view, newer works like St. John’s are beginning to take a more transnational approach to tracing the evolution of the boundary between the two nation-states from its inception as a meaningless line on a map to the complex system of barriers and strict regulation that allows for the easy passage of some people, animals, commodities, and goods, while restricting the movements of others. Given the controversy and politics that are deeply entrenched in discussions about the U.S.-Mexico border, St. John’s work is by no means the pinnacle of successful transnational 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 borderlands
history would be inherently transnational because oftentimes borderlands are
“crossroads where people and their institutions and traditions come together,
creating distinctive ways of organizing space and transforming the seemingly
fixed edges of empires and nations into fluid spaces”.[1]
However that is not always the case, especially in the scholarship about the U.S.-Mexico
border, which is heavily politicized in both nations. The best transnational
histories examine the interconnections between political units, especially the
flow of goods, people, and ideas across borders. These works trace how US
involvement overseas shapes not only foreign peoples, but also Americans back
home. The most successful works incorporate a variety of historical methods and
draw on US and foreign archives while paying attention to the role of non-state
actors and the agency of non-elites.[2]
While each monograph discussed tend to only focus on a few of these qualifiers,
there is a noticeable trend that scholarship is becoming more transnational,
however maybe not as quickly as one would thing. The subject matter of borderland
history lends itself well to transnational methodology, however historians are
still more concerned with the elite actors, politics, and the American point of
view for any of these works to be considered truly transnational.
Blood on the Border
Published in 1969, Clendenen’s Blood on the Border: The United States Army
and the Mexican Irregulars is one of the earliest examples of borderland
history and thus takes a more traditionalist approach to historical writing. As
a graduate of West Point and the Curator Emeritus of the Military Collection at
Stanford University, it is no surprise that Clendenen’s monograph is primarily
focused on the tense history of border skirmishes that occurred between the U.S.
and Mexican armies between 1848 and 1917. Clendenen’s work chronicles a series of
episodes where the U.S. and Mexican armies clashed with each other beginning
with the activities of Juan Cortina who was a Robin Hood-like figure, later
chapters also describes U.S. military activity during the Civil War, the
campaigns against the Kickapoos and Apaches, and border problems during the revolutionary
period. Clendenen then devotes over half of the book to examining General Pershing’s
Punitive Expedition against the Mexican revolutionary general Francisco “Pancho”
Villa in 1916.
Clendenen’s main argument is that the
Punitive Expedition was not a humiliating failure for the US military, however
this period of U.S.-Mexico history has been greatly neglected by historians
because it had been forgotten amidst the earlier wars with the Plains Indians
and World War I. He argues: “General Pershing’s Punitive Expedition was soon so
over-shadowed by the entry of the United States into World War I that
historians have given it scant attention, and most of those who grant it a few
sentences, or a paragraph or two, are amazingly misinformed about it. Yet the
operations of small American forces in northern Mexico on numerous occasions
constitute a phase of our military history that is well worth rescuing”.[3]
To support his argument, Clendenen relies
on a variety of sources including interviews, diaries and autobiographies of
American soldiers, as well as U.S. archival sources. However Mexican sources
are nearly nonexistent. He justifies that the exclusion of Mexican sources was
intentional because his goal is to describe the basis on which American
commanders formed their decisions. Clendenen argues that his research
deliberately presents only the American perspective on the border conflicts
because that is the nature of military history. “A military history written
from the point of view of a participant nation is necessarily one-sided; it
cannot be completely objective regarding the enemy… the commander of a military
unit must base his decisions upon the information he actually has at a given
moment—not upon what a scholar or historian may know half a century later… Hence,
I make no apology for having cited very few Mexican sources…”.[4]
Clendenen is also reluctant to include Mexican sources because, he argues, it
is very difficult for an American to obtain firsthand information regarding
events and activities. “Mexicans, for some reason or other,” he says, “are
reluctant to discuss border events with Americans”.[5]
This type of justification for focusing on the American narrative falls in line
with most of the early scholarship about the U.S.-Mexico border. Very little,
if any, of Clendenen’s work can be considered transnational even though its
subject matter is about the US and Mexican army’s movements throughout the
borderlands. Aside from examining the interconnections between political units
(in this case, the militaries of two countries), Clendenen does little to
examine the flow of goods, people, and ideas across borders, or focus on the
role of non-state actors and the agency of non-elites. Little attention is also
paid to tracing how the United States’ involvement overseas affects those back
home.
Beyond Smoke and Mirrors
By 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 still 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 border—specifically the opposing effects 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 piece of machinery and that their monograph is meant to troubleshoot 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 sort of
owner’s manual and describes how the migration system was built, how it worked
until immigration policies first passed in 1986 disrupted it, and how the
system changed as a consequence. Subsequently in its repair manual, the authors
offer a specific set of proposals designed to fix the damage caused by these
policies and make migration efficient and predictable again. The authors argue,
Just 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 conception 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 operated…we 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 ‘owner’s 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.[6]To support their arguments, Massey et al. utilize an economic
history methodology by using a variety of historical methods, statistical methods, and economic theory
to closely examine the relationship between immigration and U.S. public policies. Similar to Clendenen’s
work, Massey et al. also do not look beyond
the American archives for source materials. However their sources do show a
greater amount of variety than Clendenen’s and even includes published articles
from Mexican scholars, which is something Clendenen specifically avoided. The authors
gathered information from a diverse set of sources including official
statistics from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and the U.S.
Bureau of the Census, the Mexican National Statistical Institute, the World
Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations.[7]
Most notably, the authors rely on data compiled by the Mexican Migration
Project (MMP), a bi-national research project compiled by the University of
Guadalajara and the University of Pennsylvania and directed by two of the
authors, Jorge Durand and Douglas S. Massey.[8]
Compared to Clarence Clendenen’s work, Beyond Smoke and Mirror shows a significant transformation 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 hand, 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 address 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 aspect, the authors attempted to explain how United States involvement in Mexico reshaped the lives of not only Mexicans, but also Americans back home.
Line in the Sand
One of the most recent works of scholarship about the U.S.-Mexico border is Rachel St. John’s Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border (2011). As part of Princeton University’s 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 true transnational work are somewhat 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. John’s work does create
a very useful stepping stone to guide future historians away from
nationalistic, America-centered histories and towards studies not confined to
political units that are more concerned with the role of non-state actors as
subjects of an incredibly complex system. St. John attempts to differentiate
her work from earlier scholarship about the border by immediately asserting
that she is writing about the history of the physical border from its
conception up to its modern form in the 1930s. She argues that the actual
border itself is often ignored in scholarship that is supposedly about the
border: “As borderlands historians have emphasized historical processes that
transcend national boundaries and have expanded their focus to include zones of
interaction outside of the US Southwest and Mexican north, they have often
treated the border itself as in 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”.[10]
St. John examines the transformation of the border chronologically from its
origins in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, to a prosperous economic
crossroads, and finally into a heavily policed series of checkpoints intent on
keeping certain people and goods from crossing.
St. John breaks her research up into
chapters that can almost be viewed as a series of vignettes or snapshots
throughout 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 the
border, St. John argues that simply drawing a line on a map does not
automatically guarantee territorial authority for a nation, especially one that
is 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 not
been one before”.[11] This is significant
because for many years, the border remained a porous boundary that actually
encouraged border residents to move freely. This idea of a porous border was
especially beneficial for commercial development and bi-national cooperation,
especially with the arrival of railroads in the 1880s. With the creation of
railroads, St. John notes that a capitalist revolution had occurred, “grasslands
became ranches, mountains became mines, and the border itself became a site of
commerce and communities… by the early twentieth century the border had become
a point of connection and community in the midst of an emerging capitalist
economy and the center of a transborder landscape of property and profit”.[12] However with the
development 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 of
goods and people across the border. By this time, military power was no longer
the primary concern along the border. Instead, the U.S. and Mexico’s
sovereignty was “measured in customs collected, immigrants rejected, and
bandits arrested”.[13] The latter half of St.
John’s work examines
the use of the border to manage immigration. The ultimate challenge for both
countries was the creation of a conditional border that allowed for the passage
of desired migrants and commerce but obstructed the flow of those who were not
welcome.[14]
This conditional border was incredibly inconsistent and depended largely on the
discretion of immigration officials, changes in law, and fluctuating economic
conditions.[15]
St. John attempts to address each of the key aspects of a transnational methodology with varying degrees of success. Most obvious 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 United 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 communities—aspects 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 a
significant hand in influencing the ebb and flow of Mexican immigration,
however they fail at investigating what happened to these people once they
emigrated back to Mexico. St. John discusses the fluctuations of immigration,
but she also attempts to tell the other side of the story by including the
Mexican government’s response to deportations and increasingly strict
immigration laws.[16] In this
way, St. John does a much better job than earlier historians at tracing how
U.S. involvement and policies shaped not only Mexican citizens, but Americans
as well. This becomes increasingly apparent as she examines the sharp increases
in policing of the border in the 1930s as “ government officials not only made
it more difficult for new migrants to cross the border but also criminalized
Mexicans as “illegal aliens” and encouraged, coerced, and forced hundreds of
thousands of Mexican nationals and US citizens of Mexican descent to move to
Mexico”.[17]
Changes in U.S. policy in attempts to protect its economy and citizens clearly
affected deported Mexican citizens and people of Mexican descent, but it also
fed into the growing anti-Mexican sentiment that many Americans were feeling at
the time, essentially treating Mexican laborers as scapegoats for the lack of
jobs leading up to the Great Depression.
One aspect of St. John’s work that
could use improvement is diversifying the sources that she uses. Again, this
appears to be a problem inherent in this subject area rather than any fault of
the author. While Clendenen intentionally used only American sources, later
historians of U.S.-Mexico relations like Massey et al. and even Mae Ngai appear
to have trouble including a fair amount of sources from foreign archives. This
could be for a variety of reasons including language barriers, lack of access
to the archives, or simply because perhaps the majority of scholarship on this
subject could be published in the United States. St. John seems to have been
more successful at including Mexican scholarship in her work compared to
earlier scholars, however for a monograph specifically about the border between
Mexico and the United States, her sources are still notably one-sided. Out of
all of her research, St. John only visited three archives in Mexico to complete
her work. These include the Archivo General del Estado de Sonora, the Archivo
Histórico
Genaro Estrada, and the Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas.[18] In comparison to the
numerous American archives she visited, it is hard to understand why she chose
to include so few Mexican sources when a significant portion of her work is
dedicated to the communities located on the Mexican side of the border. The
vast majority of St. John’s research was conducted within the United States and
she uses a variety of American archives to complete her work using a large
assortment of books, photographs, manuscript collections, microfilm reels,
government documents, and newspapers. St. John’s use of source materials is
comparable to Massey et al. who used similar documents to complete their work only
a decade earlier. The fact that scholars have yet to utilize Mexican sources to
their greatest potential is somewhat disappointing for a work of transnational
history but perhaps the next generation of historians will be able to improve
the situation if the controversy and politics that are deeply entrenched in discussions
about the U.S.-Mexico border ever simmer down. Rachel St. John’s Line in the Sand is the latest attempt
by borderlands historians taking a transnational approach to their work. It may
not be successful in all aspects of a truly transnational methodology however
it does set the stage for future historians to build off of and think outside
of the borders of traditional U.S.-centric histories.
Conclusion
Concerns over regulating the
U.S.-Mexico border, what it should look like, and who should be allowed to
cross it are issues as relevant today as they were when the border was first
established 170 years ago. Tune into any news network today and information on
the latest immigration policies and border control will surely be hotly debated
between policymakers, citizens, and corporations who all have differing
opinions on how the border should operate. While obvious geographical features
like the Rio Grande easily delineate the eastern portion of the U.S.-Mexico
border, the western border cuts through uninhabitable desert that is barely
marked with more than a few fence posts in some areas. It is along this
permeable half of the border that borderlands historians situate their work.
Borderland histories have transformed
significantly over the course of the century as historians are beginning to
leave behind the nationalistic, pro-American sentiments of historical writing
behind in favor of a better-rounded transnational approach that situates
America in the context of the greater history of the world. Published in 1969, Clarence
Clendenen’s Blood on the Border: The
United States Army and the Mexican Irregulars represents the ways in which
earlier historians often used military history when discussing border issues. In
later years, economic and public policy history became the preferred
methodology of examining the history of the U.S.-Mexico border like Douglas
Massey’s Beyond Smoke and Mirrors:
Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration (2002). In recent
years, historians like Rachel St. John are attempting to examine the history of
the actual border itself without tying themselves down to writing specifically
from the perspective of any one nation state. When examined chronologically,
these monographs show just how drastically historians have changed the way they
discuss they border in just the last fifty years. Unlike the earlier approaches
to writing about the border, which were primarily concerned with the American
point of view, newer works like St. John’s are beginning to take a more
transnational approach to tracing the evolution of the boundary between Mexico
and the United States from its inception as an unclear and undefined political
boundary to the complex system of border patrols and strict regulation that
allows 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, the
transnational approach to history was specifically sparked by changes in how we
examine and write about history in a post-9/11 world. However, discussions over
the U.S.-Mexico border do not seem to follow this trend quite as closely as it
is still a subject the general public is hotly divided over. This could be
attributed to many reasons such as current events involving recently elected
U.S. leadership fear mongering that it is imperative for the safety of American
citizens and the economy to build a two thousand mile long wall along the
border. This feeds into a deep-seated distrust of the immigration system after
using Mexican immigrants as a convenient scapegoat for the better half of a
century. As long as U.S. citizens, our government, and policies continue to
vilify our neighbors to the south, any sort of progressive transnational
scholarship will not be possible.
Bibliography
Clendenen,
Clarence C., Blood on the Border: The
United States Army and the Mexican Irregulars.
London: The Macmillan
Company, 1969.
Hamalainen,
Pekka and Benjamin Johnson. “What is Borderlands History?” In Major
Problems in
the History of North American Borderlands, 1-40.Wandsworth
Publishing, 2011.
Accessed May 1, 2017.
http://inside.sfuhs.org/dept/history/Mexicoreader/Chapter8/borderlands/borderlandsch1.p
df.
Massey,
Douglas S., Jorge Durand, and Nolan J. Malone. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration
in 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] Pekka
Hamalainen and Benjamin Johnson, “What is Borderlands History?”, in Major
Problems in the History of North American Borderlands (Wandsworth Publishing, 2011), 1.
[2] Class notes.
[3] Clarence
C. Clendenen, Blood on the Border: The
United States Army and the Mexican Irregulars (London: The Macmillan
Company, 1969). Xvi.
[4] Ibid., xvii
[5] Ibid.
[6] Douglas
S. Massey et al., Beyond Smoke and
Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration (New York:
Russell Sage Foundation, 2002). 2.
[7] Ibid., 165.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., 71.
>[10] Rachel
St. John, Line in the Sand: A history of
the 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.
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