Porous Borders

In Porous Borders Julian Lim explores how diversity at the U.S.-Mexico border in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries complicated notions of community and belonging. This ambitious project required Lim to illuminate the distinct experiences of multiple groups using tools from legal, labor, political, and cultural history. She draws archival materials from both sides of the border—including court records, official and personal correspondence, and apt illustrations—to recover the names and faces of people who lived these histories. Lim's work makes an important contribution to borderlands studies. Lim begins in 1850, with the challenges faced by the U.S.-Mexico Joint Boundary Commission, charged after the Mexican-American War with drawing a border “where the dirt and sand betrayed no hint of where one country ended and the other began” (p. 21). Lim immediately signals that she is not solely concerned with fraught encounters between Anglos and Mexicans. The area was home to indigenous people, including the warlike Apache, who needed to be removed before the frontier could be exploited. “What deeply frustrated and confounded U.S. and Mexican officials,” Lim notes, “was the ease with which Apache bands moved across the international line, manipulating the border for their own purposes” (p. 31). The people who arrived in subsequent decades similarly exploited the ambiguities of the borderlands

Border Security · Commission · Diversity (politics · Frontier · Genealogy · Indigenous · Political science · Politics · Sociology · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Migration and Labor Dynamics