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  • The Southern Exodus to Mexico: Migration across the Borderlands after the American Civil Warby Todd W. Wahlstrom
  • John McKiernan-González
The Southern Exodus to Mexico: Migration across the Borderlands after the American Civil War. By Todd W. Wahlstrom. Borderlands and Transcultural Studies. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Pp. xxx, 189. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8032-4634-8.)

How does southern history shift when Native Americans, Mexicans, and African Americans share pages and a central narrative with Confederates after the Civil War? Todd W. Wahlstrom’s The Southern Exodus to Mexico: Migration across the Borderlands after the American Civil Warprovides a clue. The book seeks to anchor Confederate ambitions after the Civil War in a more global and multiethnic cultural frame. To me, this is the abiding tension in the project: Wahlstrom brings southern history to the northern Mexican borderlands, treating individual Confederate merchants and soldiers alongside [End Page 946]Comanche and Kickapoo migrants within a sharp-edged Mexican political context. The tension lies in keeping the southern dimensions of this North American migration prominent but not overwhelming.

By bringing the tenuous dimension of the commercial allegiances between erstwhile Confederate elites and conservative landowners and politicians in Tamaulipas and Coahuila into view, Wahlstrom has done Mexicanists a great service. The book mines a variety of personal papers in special collections across the United States that give both day-to-day reports and textured portraits of the way Confederate southerners learned to work with politically conservative Mexican elites. These documented interactions provide a window into the direct military challenges Confederate soldiers faced from local Mexican, Apache, and Kickapoo militias when they sought to take possession of land south of the Nueces River. Many U.S.-based historians portray an easy projection of American power southward; Wahlstrom makes the weak jury-rigging of these projects very clear. In this fashion, he challenges the seamless way classes and popular books proclaim “America in the World.”

Wahlstrom has done historians of the West and Native America a large favor. The same papers and documents that illuminate the transnational alliances between conservative elites also make a political project of various Comanche, Kickapoo, and Apache bands clear. They worked to remove white southern and conservative political influence from the Coahuila and Nuevo León borderlands. Wahlstrom’s analysis of the attacks makes it clear that these bands fought French and southern influence and often allied themselves with Mexican popular militias for this purpose. His discussion of African American movement south hints at individuals’ ability to seize the moment when Confederate authority and anti-black conservative political power receded in the regions, using the violence and chaos to escape owners and employers and to make new and perhaps more peaceful lives away from their earlier bonds. Wahlstrom’s account points to the territories opened to peasants and workers by the collapse of the French empire in Mexico, an opening rendered tragic by the rural enclosures that came with mines, railroads, and resurgent haciendas under the Porfiriato. The Southern Exodus to Mexicoadds to the growing argument that Mexico is a key part of the American West.

This brings us back to the earlier question: how southern is The Southern Exodus to Mexico?If southern history predates nineteenth-century U.S. territorial expansion, includes Mexican Americans and Comanche leaders by name, and treats the movement of families as a key theme, the chastening of Confederate exiles in northern Mexico by multiple ethnic communities—as Wahlstrom amply demonstrates—should be central to the South. I am not convinced that northern investors eluded similar obstacles in imposing their vision on Mexico, in particular if the time frame for their investments included the Mexican Revolution. The Southern Exodus to Mexicoshould be included in any conversation about the global dimensions of southern history. [End Page 947]

John McKiernan-González
Texas State University

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