Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands by Julian Lim (review)

In March 2018, American conservative politicians used racialized rhetoric to describe a caravan of Central Americans traveling toward the U.S.–Mexico border as a threat to national safety. Their tone was eerily similar to nativist attempts to prevent "Chinamen" crossing from Chihuahua into El Paso "in herds and droves" during the 1890s (103). Given the recent politicized rhetoric describing the border as unsafe and lawless alongside the vitriol surrounding immigration reform, Lim's Porous Borders provides a timely history of the racist ideologies behind these standpoints. Bridging immigration and borderlands history, Lim asks how the multiracial landscape of the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez region affected the national identities and immigration policies of both countries. Using a transnational lens, Lim argues that the United States and Mexico were in a "shared venture" of "controlling race, immigration and the border" from 1880 to 1930 (14).

In five chapters, Porous Borders traces how racially "open borders" eventually became "more racially discriminating" (5). The book begins with the arrival of the railroad, which connected the capitalist dreams of the Gilded Age and Porfiriato. The railroad facilitated the movement of people escaping segregation and seeking labor opportunities in the booming hub of El Paso. The book closes in 1930 when both nations' immigration policies were strictly defined to discourage undesirable bodies from crossing the border in either direction. For example, the 1930 U.S. census removed "mulatto" and added "Mexican" to the racial category. Lim argues that this substitution erased "suggestions of racial mixing" in the populace, which also erased the multiracial borderlands from the national identity (5). At the same time, Mexico constructed their national identity around mestizaje (racial intermixing), which created a "color bar" that blocked the immigration of African Americans and Chinese (158).

Lim's strength lies in how she weaves together the methodologies of transnational, legal, and borderlands studies to understand the development of each country's immigration and border policies. In Chapter 1, she argues that when the railroad and capitalist ventures brought African Americans, Chinese, and Mexicans to the region, the United States and Mexico closed the indigenous borderlands via reservations and extermination campaigns. Her astute observation that Anglos collapsed Tigua identities into Mexican-ness explains why indigenous people often appear invisible in the archives. However, Lim should nod to the fact that indigenous peoples succeeded in usurping attempts at extermination and erasure. Scholars of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan borderlands, such as Guidotti-Hernández, Jagodinsky, Meeks, and Shepherd, have documented how indigenous peoples continue to negotiate their own understanding of borderlands into the present.¹ Moreover, scholars of urban indigenous studies, such as Rosenthal, Vicenti Carpio, LaPier, and Beck, provide useful models for analyzing indigenous agency.²

Chapter 2 documents how El Paso lacked the strict color lines of the U.S. South, which allowed African Americans, Mexicans, and Chinese to cross social and intimate boundaries. These multiracial social relations fueled Anglo reformers' concerns about miscegenation and, worse, the degeneration of national identity. Lim uses city directories to provide a spatial analysis of race and class in El Paso. One of her more interesting findings was the existence of a bordered barrio, Chihuahuita, where multiracial social relations blossomed within the borderland city. This barrio, which belonged almost exclusively to working-class nonwhites, became the site of white ire and blame. A similar spatial mapping of race and class in Juárez provided a point of comparison for how Mexicans responded to multiracial relations south of the line.

In her best chapter, Lim uses legal history and ethnic studies to reveal the stories of indigenous, Mexican, African-American, and Chinese men's deliberate negotiations with state policies. She analyzes legal and government archives to demonstrate the various ways in which Mexican laborers, Apache scouts, African-American soldiers, and Chinese refugees harnessed "the power of the state for...