Line in the sand : a history of the Western U.S.-Mexico border

Resource Information

The work Line in the sand : a history of the Western U.S.-Mexico border represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Waubonsee Community College. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Line in the sand : a history of the Western U.S.-Mexico border

Title remainder

a history of the Western U.S.-Mexico border

Statement of responsibility

Rachel St. John

Creator

• St. John, Rachel, 1976-

Subject

• Mexico -- Boundaries -- United States
• Mexico -- Relations -- United States
• Mexican-American Border Region -- History
• United States -- Relations -- Mexico
• United States -- Boundaries -- Mexico

Language

eng

Summary

This work 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 narrative, the author 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, she 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, this book 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

Member of

• America in the world

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

972/.1

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

LC call number

F786

LC item number

.S767 2011

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Series statement

America in the world