Continental Crossroads

Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.The U.S.-Mexico borderlands have long supported a web of relationships that transcend the U.S. and Mexican nations. Yet national histories usually overlook these complex connections. Continental Crossroads rediscovers this forgotten terrain, laying the foundations for a new borderlands history at the crossroads of Chicano/a, Latin American, and U.S. history. Drawing on the historiographies and archives of both the U.S. and Mexico, the authors chronicle the transnational processes that bound both nations together between the early nineteenth century and the 1940s, the formative era of borderlands history.A new generation of borderlands historians examines a wide range of topics in frontier and post-frontier contexts. The contributors explore how ethnic, racial, and gender relations shifted as a former frontier became the borderlands. They look at the rise of new imagined communities and border literary traditions through the eyes of Mexicans, Anglo-Americans, and Indians, and recover transnational border narratives and experiences of African Americans, Chinese, and Europeans. They also show how surveillance and resistance in the borderlands inflected the “body politics” of gender, race, and nation. Native heroine Bárbara Gandiaga, Mexican traveler Ignacio Martínez, Kiowa warrior Sloping Hair, African American colonist William H. Ellis, Chinese merchant Lee Sing, and a diverse cast of politicos and subalterns, gendarmes and patrolmen, and insurrectos and exiles add transnational drama to the formerly divided worlds of Mexican and U.S. history.Contributors. Grace Peña Delgado, Karl Jacoby, Benjamin Johnson, Louise Pubols, Raúl Ramos, Andrés Reséndez, Bárbara O. Reyes, Alexandra Minna Stern, Samuel Truett, Elliott Young

“Using new approaches and demonstrating the results of extensive research into the archives of both Mexico and the United States, this pathbreaking book provides a new perspective on our common frontier legacies as well as surprising borderland stories involving Chinese immigrants and African American colonizers, transnational identities, and borderland ‘body politics.’ These highly readable original essays comprise a new history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, one that is enhanced by poignant human stories. This seminal volume should stimulate new studies of U.S.-Mexico border relations in the years to come. Editors Samuel Truett and Elliott Young are to be congratulated on their accomplishment.”—Howard R. Lamar, Sterling Professor Emeritus of History, Yale University, “While duly acknowledging the foundational work of earlier generations of border-crossing historians, Samuel Truett and Elliott Young and their gritty band of young collaborators bring into focus a more socially complex, multiracial, and multiethnic world of transnational players and history-makers. In their original essays, there are Mexicans and Tejanos, Indians and Chicanos, Chinese and Blacks, mestizos and Anglos, gringos and immigrants, and many more, jostling for room, power, and influence in this contested space in order to construct identities, build communities, and challenge and strengthen institutions. With more intentionality than their elders, Truett, Young, et al. seek to define the field of borderlands studies, a project that requires serious intervention into established narratives, methods, and epistemologies. They have thrown down the gauntlet; I suspect many more young scholars of the United States and the American West, of Latin America and Mexico, of Chicano/a and Ethnic Studies, will rush to join them because they sense that if they don't, they risk becoming obsolete before they even begin their careers.”—Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Professor of History and Director, Center for the Study of Race & Ethnicity in America, Brown University

Samuel Truett is Assistant Professor of History at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.Elliott Young is Associate Professor of History at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon; he is the author of Catarino Garza’s Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border, published by Duke University Press.