Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (review)

Borderline Americans takes us to a seemingly marginal location, Arizona’s Cochise County, to tell a central story about the construction of race and nation. In this border region where a uniquely diverse collection of peoples lived and labored, we discover the difficulties and fluidity of racial classification. Certainly other authors of race relations in the American West have explored the contested processes by which lines are marked among social groups, but few of them have explained the local and global events, decisions, and interactions that made southern and eastern Europeans “white” and Mexicans something other than “American.” Borderline Americans also succeeds in complicating popular myths of the Wild West and spotlighting the power of white women in a space conventionally conceived as the domain of men. All of these insights, Benton-Cohen rightfully asserts, are relevant to current notions of the U.S.–Mexico border as a fixed line between firmly established nation-states—notions made “possible only because of a long history in which government officials, corporate interests and local citizens made that border seem natural by establishing ‘Mexican’ and ‘white American’ as the region’s only relevant—and totally separate—racial categories” (6).

This account, which begins in the late nineteenth century, features four communities that negotiated distinct resolutions to the dilemma of who is an American and who is not. Although conflicts divided neighbors, Benton-Cohen makes clear that the common threat of Apache Indians, and a broad base of landownership and water rights, encouraged significant cooperation between Mexican and Euro-Americans in Tres Alamos. Selective solidarity persisted in nearby Tombstone as U.S. and Mexican officials jointly worked to deter raiding American cowboys. Although race did not dominate the discourse about border enforcement, the town’s Chinese and Apache residents “counted firmly as racial others” (50). However, this sense of “fellow-feeling,” at least among Mexican and Euro-Americans, declined as industrial capitalism and race science developed. In Bisbee, where the corporate policy of Phelps Dodge drew racial boundaries between workers, white women’s reforms worked “in tandem with a dual-wage system and white man’s camp ideology to sharpen racial difference” (115). Meanwhile in Warren, a rival mining company, Calumet and Arizona, stratified its labor force by rewarding “patriotic” workers deeply loyal to management.

As the twentieth century continued, shared worlds at the border increasingly dissolved; Anglo homesteaders without the experience of common living poured into the region because of a depleted water supply and overgrazing that challenged Mexican American landowning. Mexican Americans were also able to take advantage of local and national promoters celebrating American independence, which obscured their presence. Again white women played actual and symbolic roles in this transition. Such emerging distinctions and inequalities became sharply evident in the Bisbee Deportation and its aftermath. The segregation of schools and the uneven distribution of New Deal benefits confirmed that “Where once diverse ideas about race had competed and coexisted, by the 1930s, the line between Mexican and white was entrenched” (265). Yet, Benton-Cohen hastens to add that the line was never stable; workers and their families continued to challenge a dual-wage system premised upon ideas of racial hierarchy through the second half of the twentieth century.

Borderline is an enjoyable and persuasive work, but not without flaws. The geographically driven organization makes it difficult to track changes. Even if the complex racial processes that the work depicts cannot be neatly contained between dates, a clearer explication of chronology and sequence across chapters and communities would have been helpful. Also, a fuller development of the perspectives and racial attitudes of Mexicans on both sides of the border would have enriched the analysis. Overall, Borderline deserves a privileged place on reading lists dedicated to histories of comparative race relations, gender, and the American West.