Bridging National Borders in North America: Transnational and Comparative Histories (review)

First presented at a two-part symposium cosponsored and hosted by the Department of History at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, and the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University during 2006 and 2007, these ten original essays offer cogent insights into the possibilities and value of approaching transnational history from a continental perspective and integrating the study of both the U.S.-Mexican and U.S.-Canadian border regions into the broader narrative of the North American past. Some of these works focus exclusively on the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, others treat the U.S.-Canadian region, and two consider both borders together. As editors Benjamin H. Johnson and Andrew R. Graybill note in their introduction, the concepts expressed in this groundbreaking volume should help bridge the "intellectual and spatial divides that all too often separate historians engaged with critical questions about a continent . . . where border building and border crossing have become central features of contemporary life." (25)

This anthology is divided into four main parts. The two essays comprising the first section, "Peoples In Between," discuss dynamics of the relations among residents of the U.S.-Mexican border region during the mid-to-late 1800s and the inherent difficulties of determining the citizenship and a discrete racial category for trans-border Plains Métis (mixed bloods) in Western Canada in the 1870s. Part two, entitled "Environmental Control and State Making," treats Canadian efforts to prevent the spread of communicable diseases across the northern border, ranching and the international movement of livestock along the western U.S. Mexican border, and efforts to conserve the diminishing salmon population in the waters off Washington State and British Columbia. Part three, "Border Enforcement and Contestation," examines the efforts of national governments to enforce borders and border crossing through an analysis of the operations of the Bureau of Immigration during World War I and the attempts of Japanese citizens, legally barred from immigrating to the United States or Canada, to invoke the "transit privilege" under international law in order to enter the United States and travel to Mexico or Canada. The final section, "Border Representation and National Identity," focuses on such cultural themes as racial romanticism and the development of Mexican tourism, depiction of the two borders in Hollywood motion pictures during the first half of the twentieth century, and the historiography of the northern fur trade.

Three articles are particularly relevant to those interested in the history of Texas and the Southwest: Miguel Ángel González's revisionist "Conflict and Cooperation in the Making of Texas-Mexico Border Society, 1840-1880," Rachel St. John's excellent "Divided Ranges: Trans-border Ranches and the Creation of National Space along the Western Mexico-U.S. Border," and S. Deborah Kang's "Crossing the Line: The INS and the Federal Regulation of the Mexican Border." All of the offerings in this collection reflect skillful exposition, thoughtful analysis, and careful scholarship. Representing a broad range of topics from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, they provide a solid foundation and point of departure for further research in an area of intellectual inquiry that should become an increasingly important focus of attention of scholars in the future.