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

Julian Lim has made an important contribution to borderlands history by crafting a complex historical narrative that includes the entwined experiences of Native Americans, Chinese, African Americans, and Mexicans in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, and the role of the nation-states claiming jurisdiction over their racialized bodies. Primarily drawing from newspapers, official records, private correspondence, journals, and other primary sources, Porous Borders covers the period from 1880 to the 1930s, exhaustively examining local interracial relations in El Paso/Ciudad Juárez area in the context of regional, national, and transnational socioeconomic dynamics. Lim addresses cooperation and tensions among migrant groups who, despite hegemonic ideas of racial purity and borders, developed business, friendship, and family relations with the other Others. The accelerated growth of El Paso, linked to the construction of the railroad and the arrival of thousands of immigrants by the 1890s, allowed for non-segregated residential arrangements that challenged notions of moral and racial containment. These local stories reflect global economic agendas but also arose as a reaction against oppressive policy systems that operated at the national level in the United States and Mexico. According to Lim, the Porfiriato, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the Jim Crow system forced immigrants to find a place in the borderlands, away from national restrictions. Lim argues that the borders were racially open in the 1880s but had "hardened" by the 1930s through immigration policies and laws seeking to prevent racial integration. Ideas of purity were not restricted to whiteness but demanded clear definitions and separation of non-white populations, as well as the erasure of narratives of interracial bonding.

Chapter one describes the transformation of the borderlands from Indigenous land to "capitalist borderlands." The Spanish colonizers in this area faced the continuous pressure of Indigenous communities to reclaim their land and resources. Lim describes the Mexican state as a powerful entity, as imperialistic as the Spanish, waging violent anti-Indian campaigns. For their part, states Lim, Indigenous residents of the area had strong pre-established social, cultural, and environmental customs and were still largely in control when the United States won the war against Mexico in 1848. The construction of the railroad under the new national flag meant opportunities for businesspeople and immigrants, at the expense of Native American populations, Lim argues.

Chapter two describes scenes of everyday multicultural relations in a racially fluid El Paso, eventually curtailed by selectively enforced miscegenation and anti-vice laws. According to Lim, moralizing temperance campaigns were aligned with a white supremacist scientific discourse. The anti-miscegenation raids of 1893 against black and Mexican marriages constituted a public condemnation of racial amalgamation, which extended beyond the white/black binary.

In chapter three, Lim argues that the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 caused an increase in the immigrant population in Ciudad Juárez with a consequent new transculturation dynamic. The act provided El Paso's elites with a tool to separate Asian immigrants from other nonwhite communities through stricter surveillance of internal, ethnically demarcated borders. Lim argues that the intervention of national forces to control racialized borders resulted in a more vigorous institutional racial classification policy, eventually policing stricter racial boundaries and developing ideas of containment.

In chapter four, Lim addresses the effects of the Mexican Revolution on immigration dynamics. An important feature of this chapter is the description of the methods through which the Chinese merchants (who aided General John J. Pershing's Punitive Expedition into Mexico) circumvented the Chinese Exclusion Act. Lim examines Mexican immigration laws that worked in tandem with those of the United States to harden international borders.

In chapter five, Lim demonstrates how the Mexican and U.S. immigration laws became closely aligned in the 1920s and 1930s, creating a transnational system of exclusion along racial lines. Lim cites as an example of double marginalization the anti-black laws on...