The Limits of Liberty

In 1928, Lucien Febvre published a brief essay called “Frontière: The Word and the Concept,” in which he traced how the meaning of borders in France shifted, according to the aims and interests of its rulers. In the 90 years since the essay's publication, historians have explored how the purpose and significance of borders have changed over time. The Limits of Liberty makes an important contribution to this scholarship. By excavating how native peoples, runaway slaves, and debt peons conceived of the US-Mexican border in the nineteenth century, James David Nichols shows that even within the same time period, borders can assume multiple—and contested—meanings.To native peoples, the border was the key to survival. In the early nineteenth century, the Mexican government encouraged the Lipan Apaches to settle in the northern reaches of the nation. But the Lipans proved erstwhile allies. Rather than defending the frontier from indios bárbaros, as the Mexican authorities intended, they used their knowledge of the local geography to raid on one side of the border and hide their spoils on the other. Beginning in 1819, the Mexican government began to recruit native peoples from other parts of North America, particularly those who were being forced from their lands in the southeastern United States. Nichols argues that these schemes ended in failure because norteños remained skeptical of the alliances and because the Mexican government failed to provide the resources that might have helped the immigrant tribes establish new communities across the border.The Mexican government forged more successful alliances with fugitive slaves. By escaping from the United States to Mexico, runaway slaves made the border into the “line of liberty” (p. 125). The Mexican government embraced its identity as an antislavery crusader because it served as a point of contrast with the United States. But the liberty that Mexico promised had practical limits. Nichols finds that fugitive slaves were denied the rights of citizenship, not to mention that they were vulnerable to being kidnapped by slave catchers from the United States.At the same time that fugitive slaves fled to Mexico, debt peons escaped in the opposite direction. From their perspective, Mexico represented coercion, while Texas promised freedom. Southerners used the experience of debt peons to their advantage, often exaggerating the conditions under which peons labored in Mexico in order to cast black slavery in a more positive light. Like runaway slaves, debt peons imbued the border with “potentially subversive meanings” and, in the process, forced the governments of both Mexico and the United States to articulate the differences between their two nations (p. 7).Like any important work of scholarship, The Limits of Liberty raises as many questions as it answers, chief among them the motives behind Mexico's antislavery policies. Nichols argues that the Mexican government cast itself as a beacon of liberty in order to distinguish itself from the United States. But the protection that Mexico granted to fugitive slaves was the primary reason that the Texas authorities refused to return debt peons. Moreover, this policy encouraged slaveholders from the United States to invade Mexico to return their “property.” Why did the rhetorical gains of antislavery seem to outweigh its practical disadvantages? Why didn't the Mexican government sign an extradition treaty that would have secured the return of debt peons from the United States and removed the pretext for violations of Mexican sovereignty? More interesting still, Nichols gives a number of examples of local authorities upholding Mexico's antislavery policies, even though, as he recognizes, the state's “‘vision’ was myopic at best” (p. 190). Why did local authorities and ordinary citizens protect fugitive slaves? Was the Mexican government really in a position to impose these policies “from the top down,” as Nichols suggests (p. 153)?Uncovering the perspective of Indians, escaped slaves, and debt peons using archives in both Mexico and the United States is an ambitious task. Historians of Mexico may find that the book's treatment of Federalists and Centralists lacks nuance, while scholars of the United States may question the decision not to interrogate the “heavily biased” Texas newspapers or the unabashedly proslavery Eagle Pass; or Life on the Border on which the book frequently draws (p. 135). But these cavils should not detract from Nichols's argument that the meaning of the US-Mexican border was constructed both from above and from below. The aims and interests of governments were important, as Lucien Febvre argued, but so too were the actions and demands of the people who moved between them

Economic history · Ethnology · Frontier · Genealogy · Government (linguistics) · Immigration · Meaning (existential) · Political science · Scholarship · Skepticism · Cuban History and Society · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Migration, Health, Geopolitics, Historical Geography

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