| This study examines the spatial transformation of the western half of the U.S.-Mexico border from its delimitation in 1848 until the early years of the Great Depression. During this period, the border stretching from west of El Paso-Ciudad Juarez to the Pacific Ocean changed from an infrequently crossed desert to a complicated landscape of trans-national exchanges, bi-national communities, and state controls that channeled and restricted trans-border movement. I explore how border spaces revealed the shifting priorities and power of the United States and Mexico and created the context in which people came to think of themselves as Mexicans and Americans. Analyzing the spatial transformation of the border---a space that was implicitly trans-national, yet weighted with great national importance---I bring together national histories of definition, expansion, and control with local and trans-national stories of social and economic development along the desert border.; Drawing on both U.S. and Mexican archives, I focus on American and Mexican attempts to assert state control over the border and the people who lived along it in the face of environmental limitations and myriad challenges to national sovereignty. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Native Americans, filibusters, bandits, investors, and immigrants moved along and across the border, defying national definitions of space and identity. I explore how these actors, at times in opposition to and at others assisted by the hamstrung states, became part of a distinctive trans-border society and economy by the beginning of the twentieth century. At the same time, the expansion of the American state and the political, economic, and cultural turmoil of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries complicated trans-national commerce and communities. Analyzing the effects of the Mexican Revolution, World War I, moral reform movements, and immigration legislation, I show how concerns with national ideology, security, citizenship, and character were inscribed on the border. Gradually, the U.S. and Mexico succeeded in bringing the spatial reality of the border more into line with the rhetoric of national sovereignty. By the 1930s, the border had become both a symbol and a physical marker of national divisions and differences. |
