Border Dilemmas

Identity construction of Spanish-speaking inhabitants of New Mexico has drawn a great amount of attention. Recent attention by scholars such as Pablo Mitchell and John Nieto-Phillips has produced a clearer understanding of this issue. Border Dilemmas by Anthony Mora successfully adds to the clarification. The thesis of this engaging book is that changing social and economic conditions alter identity imaging significantly from the perspectives of both outsiders and insiders. Using numerous and varied sources, the author demonstrates this by providing a unique geographical slice of New Mexican social history. The story begins with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and ends with New Mexico achieving statehood in 1912. The increasing US hege mony played a pivotal role in the shifting images of Hispanics in New Mexico. Unlike most assessments of this subject, the study focuses on southern New Mexico, where the Rio Grande crosses into Texas, rather than the northern part of the state. The remarkable contribution of this book is to show that cultural change unevenly affected adjacent regions within the same nation.The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo placed Las Cruces on the east bank of the Rio Grande in the United States, but the sparsely settled village of Mesilla across the river remained in Mexico. A mere six years later the United States acquired the Mesilla Valley with the Gadsden Purchase. In this short time its population had increased as “repatriated” Mexicans who did not want to live in a conquered New Mexico moved west of the river. Joined by migrants from northern Mexico, the region acquired a firm Mexican identity. In contrast, immediately after becoming part of the United States, Las Cruces began a long, tortuous path of constructing cultural and racial imagery.The rest of the book revolves around this theme. To demonstrate these contrasts the book provides evidence found in written texts and architectural landscapes, to name a few sources. On the Las Cruces side, for example, residents adopted a territorial architectural style common in the rest of New Mexico and Arizona, a style that is definitely Anglo-American inspired. On the Mesilla side, Mexican adobe row houses remained more the norm. New Mexicans’ claim of a Spanish heritage rather than one linked to Mexico has been attributed to northern New Mexico rather than the south. But according to Mora this claim has existed throughout New Mexico, including Las Cruces. Important here is the author’s claim that the assertion was less prevalent in the Mesilla Valley.New Mexico’s efforts to achieve statehood complicated even further the construction of an image of Mexicans. Some members of Congress openly opposed this act because the territory’s population was too Mexican. In turn, New Mexicans anxious to achieve statehood attempted to portray the Mexican population pluralistically as Spanish yet as loyal white citizens. This was not a new representation but one that intensified during the era of lobbying for statehood.In recent scholarship, structural causality has been overshadowed by the concept of agency that attributes human action to individual decision rather than the influence of outside forces. Mora convincingly makes a case for the latter. He does not deny that structural conditions often led to identity formation, but the study gives short shrift to influential material changes such as the coming railroad. This resulted in Anglo-American preference for construction of buildings in the style of the eastern United States versus the adobe of Mexico. The author uncovered evidence that some outsiders considered Mexican construction inferior, reflecting a racist view of Hispanics in New Mexico. But it is possible that often such decisions were unrelated to perceived inferiority and that those able to afford modern construction chose it for that reason regardless of ethnicity.Most imagined identities change or disappear at a dizzying rate and have an organic birth in the community or are intellectually created, usually by elites, for political pur poses or aggrandizement. This is the assessment provided here. It is disappointing that Mora did not delve more into a community-based construction of identity. Southwest Mexicans have applied the name Manito, from hermanito (little brother), to migrating New Mexican workers for many years now. It is an organically coined term, and it was used also as a self-referent by New Mexicans who at times claimed a Spanish rather than Mexican heritage. It is not in much use today since internal migration of working-class New Mexicans has declined considerably, overshadowed by immigration from Mexico. Growing up in Arizona, I heard it applied mainly to migrants from the north. But this book deals mainly with southern New Mexico, and I wonder if the image constructed by elites in this area had a grassroots following.These observations by no means detract from the value of this book. Mora’s work certainly provides a theoretical platform for understanding the issues of changing identity of Mexican Americans outside of New Mexico

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