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

Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border immediately assumes a valued place in the historiography of transnational border scholarship. To the study of our southwestern border St. John returns the national boundary itself in a manner that transcends the common, simplistic efforts that cast the border either as a totalizing demarcation line between oppositional cultures and politics or as an imaginary construct largely irrelevant to a specialized transnational culture. Rather, she argues that "questions about the control of space, the negotiation of state sovereignty, and the significance of national identities have been entangled with the boundary line since its creation and continue to define the border today" (5). Her work is especially valuable because it addresses the border where it is most illusory: the vast reach from El Paso-Juarez to San Diego-Tijuana that has received relatively little transnational scholarship.

St. John's opening chapter recounts the arduous and often futile attempts to locate and establish the international boundary itself. Her second chapter features extensive use of archival sources that illuminate Mexico's efforts to combat filibustering, especially in Sonora, and the cooperation by both countries to quash Apache resistance. Her account of cooperation for mutual advantage, in this case by furthering military sovereignties, is a recursive theme, one that undermines widespread beliefs about rigidly antagonistic interests.

With "Landscapes of Profits: Cultivating Capitalism across the Border," St. John presents compelling evidence that the commodification of the borderlands flourished when a transnational network, especially of railroads, connected to the larger U.S., Mexico, and world markets. The infrastructure necessary to convert the natural resources to valued commodities transformed settlement and labor patterns and redefined traditional national sovereignties. The border actually unified more than it divided many "binational" communities, at least initially.

In her fourth chapter, St. John returns to the theme of "surprisingly collaborative" efforts in which officials and residents "negotiated" immigration and customs practices that "enabled the nation-states to monitor and profit from transborder traffic and build binational ties that helped bring law and order to the border" (91). Chapter five describes the Mexican Revolution along the border, which St. John usefully breaks into three periods of increasing hostilities—1910-13, 1913-17, 1917-20—marked "the end of the era of fluid transborder movement and peaceful binational communities" (120). By 1920, the fence running down Nogales's main street represented the "permanent feature" of future relations (147).

The next chapter, "Like Night and Day: Regulating Morality with the Border," unfolds a fascinating explanation for the construction of a vice line in the sand. The fruitless quest for a more moral America actually was counterproductive: "each new law restricting gambling, prostitution, and prize fighting spurred the growth of border vice districts" (151). Further, Americans owned most of the houses of ill repute in the vice districts, where typically American prostitutes serviced typically American patrons. Thus, in one of the many ironies St. John reveals, the United States largely created the very dangers it feared.

In her final chapter, St. John elucidates the various immigration laws and their consequences. Realizing that "many readers may find it hard to imagine that restricting Mexican immigration has not always been the central feature of state control" on the border, her final chapter and conclusion forcefully convey that the negotiated and changing nature of the border—as uniter or divider; facilitator or obstacle—remains its defining characteristic.

Though few personal anecdotes, especially of Mexican immigrants, detail the developments St. John so thoroughly presents, which gives the account a bit of a view-from-20,000-feet feel, her work is a marvelous achievement. Just as no river runs through the western border, relatively little transnational scholarship has brought life to it compared to the Texas-Mexico region. This work will change that situation.