Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law by Julian Lim (review)

On August 3, 2019, a young white male from the Dallas suburbs entered a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, and opened fire with an AK-47 assault rifle, killing twenty-two people and injuring twenty-six. The shooter traveled to El Paso to counter what he believed to be the "Hispanic invasion of Texas."¹ Though El Paso's population is now approximately 80 percent Latinx, the city's history actually included the presence of multiple racialized groups, now somewhat forgotten. In Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law, Julian Lim "presents a history of the multiracial U.S. Mexico borderlands, and explores the various contestations over citizenship and belonging that diverse migrants raised by their movements to and throughout the border" (2). The analysis focuses specifically on the El Paso, Texas, transborder region from 1880 to the 1930s and includes the experiences of African American, Chinese, Mexican, and Indigenous people and their interactions with white Americans, often migrants from southern US states. Lim's study, like other recent work in the field of border studies, focuses on the relationships among these groups while also incorporating the impact of state projects—especially the forging of national identity through the enactment of immigration law by both the US and Mexican governments. The author argues that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries African Americans, along with Chinese and Mexican immigrants, lived together in relative harmony; each group regarded El Paso as a place to escape oppressive conditions in their places of origin. By the 1930s, however, both the US and Mexican governments had enacted strict immigration laws focusing on the expulsion of Mexicans and Chinese from the US and the removal of African Americans and Chinese residents from Mexico.

The book is divided into an introduction and five chapters organized chronologically. In the introduction Lim situates her research at the intersection of the fields of Western American history and border studies, stressing that her analysis goes beyond simple immigration history. Chapter 1 begins with a discussion of how Indigenous lands became capitalist borderlands, spurred by the arrival of the railroad in El Paso in 1881. This phenomenon sparked intense economic activity, which attracted Chinese, Mexican, and Black American migrants, but it also prompted the genocide of Indigenous people, as they were killed or forcibly moved to reservations.

Chapter 2 explains that "the [El Paso] region emerged as a historic transit point for Mexican, Chinese, and black men and women looking for alternatives to the restrictive regimes and practices of the Porfiriato, Chinese Exclusion, and Jim Crow" (18). While these residents were able to experience relative freedom, white elites in El Paso, Lim explains in chapter 3, "sought to minimize the multiracial composition of the city, [and] the Chinese became their first target" with the Chinese Exclusion Acts now at their disposal. Chapter 4 addresses the concept of citizenship at the borderlands. As a result of instability caused by the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20, the US government unleashed the Pershing Expedition, which crossed the border into Mexico in search of Pancho Villa and his army. Pershing and his white soldiers were accompanied by Apache scouts, Black soldiers, and Mexican and Chinese refugees. These nonwhite participants would later use this experience to claim the rights of citizenship, not always successfully.

In chapter 5 Lim uses rich archival material to describe how, in the 1930s, both the Mexican and US governments targeted racialized groups in the process of promoting particular idealized national identities. During the Great Depression, the US engaged in massive deportation drives to remove Mexicans and Mexican Americans from US territory; further, Chinese refugees continued to be deported. Mexico, meanwhile, was creating a new postrevolutionary society based on the concepts of mestizaje and indigenismo: the country was supposed to be a nation of mixed-race people (of Spanish and Indigenous ancestry) with little to no room for other groups. During fits of xenophobia, Mexicans attacked Chinese residents, culminating in their expulsion. Many of...