Diversity, Unwelcome Returns, and the Writing of U.S.–Mexico Borderlands History

Thanks to a recent flurry of books on the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, an even more complicated picture of that region has emerged with important lessons both for our current political moment and historical scholarship. No matter how much work academics do to correct the narrative, many conservatives today still portray the region as ridden with crime and overtaken by undocumented immigrants. If pundits can see beyond this skewed view of things, they focus on longstanding historical connections between the United States and Mexico and argue that we need to build bridges between our countries instead of walls. If observers have an even deeper historical understanding, they may see how the past says a lot about how we have landed where we are today: with a President whose election and term in office have in many ways been based on maligning and committing violent and possibly irreparable harm against immigrants, stoking racial fears, and calling for the construction of more border fencing. Almost all borderlands historians—and, indeed, historians of the United States and Mexico more broadly—have countered these narratives, but not quite in the way that Julian Lim and Fernando Alanís Enciso have done in their respective books, Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands, and They Should Stay There: The Story of Mexican Migration and Repatriation during the Great Depression.

Reading these books together, we come away with an understanding that the borderlands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were more diverse than we may have assumed; that the borderlands were at once spaces of deep unity and also division that shaped and reflected larger national and international dynamics; and that the Mexican government did less for Mexican nationals who returned to Mexico than Mexican leaders prefer to admit. The result of their revisionist histories is unsettling and encouraging.

The main takeaway from Porous Borders is that the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, and the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez region in particular, from the 1880s through the 1930s were in many ways defined by diversity—inhabited by Native Americans, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, non-Mexican whites, Asians and Asian Americans, and African Americans. Members of these communities lived in close proximity, worked together, and sometimes formed partnerships and families.

The industrialization of the borderlands in the late nineteenth century due to railroad construction, mining, and agriculture is a theme in many borderlands histories, but Lim focuses on the multiracial cast that trains brought to the region. As newcomers of different hues arrived, they largely displaced Native communities that, over time, were pushed more and more onto reservations. Chinese immigrants opened businesses in Texas and then Chihuahua, Mexico in part because they were excluded by U.S. immigration laws. Mexican immigrants, as the Chicano historian Mario García demonstrated in his book Desert Immigrants (1981), came to El Paso to work as laborers and as refugees from the Mexican Revolution. Subject to the backlash against Reconstruction and Jim Crow laws elsewhere in the United States, African Americans moved to the Southwest and northern Mexico to seek greater freedom and escape persecution.

In each of these cases, Lim argues, the members of these different communities were greeted not only by new opportunities but also by stubborn oppressions that followed them into the borderlands. This was certainly true for Native Americans, who, in Lim's story, are almost always victims. But it was also true for Asians and Asian Americans, targets of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States and anti-Chinese discrimination in northern Mexico; African Americans, who didn't always find relief from Jim Crow in the...