Continental Crossroads

The lands along the U.S.-Mexico border have long supported a complex web of relationships transcending the U.S. and Mexican nations, processes at once part of and separate from national histories. Yet these borderlands histories are characterized most of all by their absence from mainstream history. In revealing them, Continental Crossroads lays the foundations for a new borderlands history that lies at the crossroads of Chicano/a, Latin American, and U.S. history. Drawing on research based on the archives and historiographies of both the U.S. and Mexico, the contributors chronicle the complex trans-national processes which unfolded between the early nineteenth-century and the 1940s, the formative era of borderlands historiography. The work of a new generation of historians, these essays examine a wide range of topics, including complex inter- and intra-ethnic relationships along the Texas and California borderlands in the early nineteenth century. Contributors look at the multiple literary worlds and imagined communities that emerged in the region--including different versions of the ill-fated 1841 Santa Fe expedition as told by Anglo-Americans, Mexicans, and Indians, and the travel narratives of a Mexican border journalist and revolutionary. Several essays explore Mexican and American relations to others in the region, including African Americans, Chinese, and Europeans. Other essays look at the tensions surrounding the last armed rebellion of Mexican Americans in Texas in 1915 and compare conceptions of masculinity among the Texas Rangers and the U.S. Border Patrol. Contributors: Grace Pena Delgado; Karl Jacoby; Benjamin Johnson; Louise Pubols; Raul.Ramos; Andres Resendez; Barbara O. Reyes; Alexandra Minna Stern; Samuel Truett; Elliott Young