Border Policing: A History of Enforcement and Evasion in North America ed. by Holly M. Karibo and George T. Díaz (review)

Historians of the U.S. Southwest would be hard-pressed to find a moment in history when the boundaries of the nation—both geopolitical and citizenship—were clearly delineated, consistently enforced, and widely accepted. The framing of "crisis" has been a recurring feature of border policing in U.S. history since at least the early nineteenth century. This much is deftly and effectively argued in Holly M. Karibo and George T. Díaz's edited volume Border Policing: A History of Enforcement and Evasion in North America. Comprising events, actors, and processes from the War of 1812 to contemporary media representations of border security, the book relies on a comparative and interdisciplinary framework to examine policing along the country's northern and southern borders. By looking at places and processes, the book shows readers both their distinctiveness and their similarities.

Of chief concern is the fact that both border zones are part of a growing border-policing regime that has subjected people to differential treatment, especially racialized others targeted by state violence since the nineteenth century: Native Americans, Chinese and Syrian migrants, and ethnic Mexicans, to name a few. The editors ask, "How have states (at the federal, state, provincial, and local levels) attempted to regulate and police people and goods at their geographical and political borders? And how have local communities responded to, been shaped by, and at times undermined particular policing objectives and practices?" (6). Contributors rigorously explore these questions in archival materials produced by a range of actors in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Most of the fourteen chapters follow governmental actors and actual policies, laws, and procedures in border policing, although many also document the practices of non-state actors like Native Americans, vigilantes, smugglers, and migrants. Echoing the approach in new borderlands historiography, most of the chapters frame their objects of analysis in a transnational manner by engaging actors, ideas, and materials across geopolitical borders. Doing so demonstrates how border policing, an integral part of state- and nation-making, has not been limited to governmental agencies, but instead is the result of differently located, distributed processes.

The book is divided chronologically into four parts, each devoted to the means of producing national borders in North America since the nineteenth century. Starting with an emerging, ever-changing geopolitical and physical boundary, the book shows the importance of defining and policing borders to state- and nation-making. The aim of the editors is to demonstrate how border zones moved from soft and "relatively fluid transnational regions" into hardened, "expansive military zones" (5). Yet, I think the book aptly shows the partial, incomplete, and contingent nature of border policing itself. And with regard to militarization—as a progressive, ever intensifying process—the production of the border can be seen as entangled with military logics at the heart of state-making. That is not to say that armed vigilantes, soldiers, and police agents do not denote a distinctive modality of border policing and enforcement. Yet it does push border studies scholars of all stripes to question if militarization should be seen as an intensifying process over time or as a central dynamic of nation-making and imperial formations, particularly in the context of settler colonialism. In this sense chapters 1, 3, 8, and 12 (especially those chapters devoted to Indigenous communities and their contestations of settler colonial boundaries) help carve new ground, not only for studying but also for interrogating border policing across different regions and across clashing concepts of nation.

In short, to study border policing as a changing historical practice affords insight into its values, imaginaries, actors, and actions. In this sense, the authors in this collection contribute to the growing scholarly consensus that posits borders as central artifacts and geographical areas in the making of national cultures and their...