Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border by Rachel St. John (review)

Rachel St. John has written an intelligent and highly readable transnational history of the western half of the United States-Mexico border. The author, an associate professor of history at Harvard University, leads readers through the first 80 years of life on this border following the Mexican land cessions stipulated by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. This is a tumultuous, complicated, and tremendously important story, and St. John tells it well.

Why just the western span of the border? The author limits her investigation to the international border lying between El Paso, Texas, and the Pacific Ocean for sensible reasons. On the eastern half of the border, the Rio Grande provided a natural boundary and it "had drawn people to its banks for trade, travel, and settlement long before it became part of an international border" (p. 2). In contrast, the deserts and mountains of the western half of the border offered no singular delineating geographic feature and were, by comparison, sparsely populated. The western border was "made up of a series of imaginary lines," then, and provides an excellent subject to "gain broader insight into how nation-states and borders function" (pp. 2, 5).

The book proceeds chronologically, but with shifting thematic focuses. The opening chapter details the excruciating and halting process by which the border came to be surveyed and marked by a binational set of commissioners. "The discrepancy between the ability of the nation-states to delimit the boundary line in the treaty and to demarcate it on the ground," St. John writes, "marked the beginning of a long history in which the border would repeatedly reveal the divide between the states' aspirations and their actual power" (p. 14). But state power was not thoroughly wanting in the borderlands, and St. John argues that it increased over time. In her chapter "Holding the Line," she details efforts to control Apache raiders and defeat filibustering foreigners in the Mexican north, finding evidence of "the subtle ways in which the boundary line had already begun to change the landscape of power in the region" (p. 40). A particularly outstanding chapter on the impact of industrial capitalism on the borderlands reveals how "grasslands became ranches, mountains became mines, and the border itself became a site of commerce and communities" (p. 63). The Mexican Revolution and U.S. involvement in the First World War brought a hardening of the border, as represented in the 1918 construction of a border fence to divide the twin cities of Nogales on the Arizona-Sonora border. The effects of Prohibition and new immigration enforcement measures during the 1920s close the story. The author's research covers only developments up to the 1930s, although her conclusion addresses contemporary political battles in the United States over the border, including passage of the Secure Fence Act of 2006.

Throughout the narrative, the author advances several arguments. State power, circumscribed and contested though it was, "had become the defining feature of spatial organization along the border" by the 1930s (p. 197). At the same time, officials from both governments "repeatedly discovered that they needed to adopt binational strategies to achieve their goals of state control," as with informal crossing arrangements to deter Apache raiders or outlaws (p. 7). Throughout, the author also has interesting things to say about nationalism and identities in the borderlands.

St. John's research is thorough and impressive. The ambitions of the project required that she master a wide-ranging secondary literature and conduct primary research on a variety of topics. There has been a tremendous outpouring of scholarly research on various aspects of the history of this international border, and St. John makes good use of this literature. Further, this is a truly transnational piece of scholarship. She has used English- and Spanish-language source materials and conducted research in both...