Greg Grandin. The End of the Myth

In the arresting and original The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, Greg Grandin argues that the contemporary politics of the U.S.-Mexico border mark the end of one of the United States’ most influential and protean cultural myths, that of the frontier. For more than a century, he argues, “the frontier served as a powerful symbol of American universalism,” conveying movement and openness, but also the promise “that the brutality involved in moving forward would be transformed into something noble” (269–270). The ascendance of Donald J. Trump to the presidency and the central role played by his promise to wall off and aggressively police the U.S.-Mexico border marks the eclipse of this promise by a very different sensibility. Today “the frontier is closed,” Grandin concludes, “the safety valve shut” (270). Whether or not Trump’s proposed border wall ever materializes, it is “America’s new myth,” a suitable image for a country “that now finds itself trapped by history, and of a people who used to think they were captains of the future, but now are prisoners of the past” (9).

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