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A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border (America in the World)
Princeton University Press
June 2011
On Sale: June 12, 2011
304 pages
ISBN: 0691141541
EAN: 9780691141541
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Line in the Sand details the dramatic transformation of the
western U.S.-Mexico border from its creation at the end of
the Mexican-American War in 1848 to the emergence of the
modern boundary line in the first decades of the twentieth
century. In this sweeping narrative, Rachel St. John
explores how this boundary changed from a mere line on a map
to a clearly marked and heavily regulated divide between the
United States and Mexico. Focusing on the desert border to
the west of the Rio Grande, this book explains the origins
of the modern border and places the line at the center of a
transnational history of expanding capitalism and state
power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moving across local, regional, and national scales, St. John
shows how government officials, Native American raiders,
ranchers, railroad builders, miners, investors, immigrants,
and smugglers contributed to the rise of state power on the
border and developed strategies to navigate the increasingly
regulated landscape. Over the border's history, the U.S. and
Mexican states gradually developed an expanding array of
official laws, ad hoc arrangements, government agents, and
physical barriers that did not close the line, but made it a
flexible barrier that restricted the movement of some
people, goods, and animals without impeding others. By the
1930s, their efforts had created the foundations of the
modern border control apparatus. Drawing on extensive research in U.S. and Mexican archives,
Line in the Sand weaves together a transnational history of
how an undistinguished strip of land became the significant
and symbolic space of state power and national definition
that we know today.
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