Border Dilemmas: Racial and National Uncertainties in New Mexico (review)

New Mexicans love to describe their state as a model for tolerance based upon their respect for the contributions and cultures of Euro-Americans, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans. Anthony Mora, however, raises serious historical questions and reservations about this construction of triculturalism. In his astute analysis of how national identities were constructed along the border between the United States and Mexico during the territorial period from 1848 to New Mexican statehood in 1912, Mora suggests that the formation of a New Mexican identity was a complicated negotiation that did not necessarily guarantee the equitable treatment of all peoples and cultures.

When the United States annexed New Mexico following the U.S-Mexican War in 1848, Mexicans tended to define citizenship through performance standards and cultural expectations, while the Euro-Americans adopted a more rigid racial identification of citizenship which excluded Mexicans and Indians. For Euro-Americans, their minority status in New Mexico made it difficult to gain statehood within the United States with its racially constructed vision of citizenship. Thus, both whites and Mexican elites forged the concept of a New Mexican identity divorced from Mexico. Euro-Americans perceived New Mexico as a unique part of the United States in which dominant whites would guide the colonized region, while the local Mexican population would benefit the nation through cheap labor, entertainment or tourism, and even anthropological study of the exotic other. The Spanish origin of the Mexican population was emphasized to place clear racial markers between New Mexico and Mexico—a practice that also sought to differentiate New Mexico from Texas. Mexicans in the state elites also employed this concept to highlight their status as natives who brought civilization to the region, challenging the racial hierarchy enunciated by Euro-Americans and establishing their claim for incorporation into the American nation. This depiction of New Mexico has, nevertheless, been achieved to a great extent at the expense of Indian people and the masses of New Mexico, whose standard of living continues to reflect a legacy of colonialism.

Mora breaks this large picture down into the case studies of the New Mexican communities of Las Cruces and Mesilla. Following the conquest of New Mexico, residents of Dona Ana in southern New Mexico formed the competing towns of Las Cruces and Mesilla. Residents of Las Cruces sought to incorporate their community into the emerging Euro-American economy and identity with the United States. Those migrating to Mesilla, on the Mexican side of the border, were resistant to the Euro-American culture. Nevertheless, in the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 Mesilla was granted to the United States. The citizens of Mesilla, however, continued to embrace their Mexican identity, and Mora examines this resistance to Euro-American culture through discussion of religion, language, gender, architecture, and economic development. In the long run, Las Cruces emerged as dominant, but the history of Mesilla indicates that the formation of a New Mexican identity separate from Mexico was contested by many residents of the region.

Mora’s Border Dilemmas is a valuable contribution that sheds considerable light on historic and contemporary New Mexico through the examination of Spanish as well as English sources; presenting a more complex portrait by providing elements of the Mexican population in New Mexico with a voice in shaping their identity. The conversation over New Mexican identity in Mora’s study is largely bicultural, and scholars should be encouraged by this path-breaking study to expand their research into the perspective of the Indian people in New Mexico.