Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University. The U.S.-Mexico borderlands have long supported a web of relationships that transcend the U.S. and Mexican nations. Yet national histories usually overlook these complex connections. "Continental Crossroads" rediscovers this forgotten terrain, laying the foundations for a new borderlands history at the crossroads of Chicano/a, Latin American, and U.S. history. Drawing on the historiographies and archives of both the U.S. and Mexico, the authors chronicle the transnational processes that bound both nations together between the early nineteenth century and the 1940s, the formative era of borderlands history.
A new generation of borderlands historians examines a wide range of topics in frontier and post-frontier contexts. The contributors explore how ethnic, racial, and gender relations shifted as a former frontier became the borderlands. They look at the rise of new imagined communities and border literary traditions through the eyes of Mexicans, Anglo-Americans, and Indians, and recover transnational border narratives and experiences of African Americans, Chinese, and Europeans. They also show how surveillance and resistance in the borderlands inflected the "body politics" of gender, race, and nation. Native heroine Barbara Gandiaga, Mexican traveler Ignacio Martinez, Kiowa warrior Sloping Hair, African American colonist William H. Ellis, Chinese merchant Lee Sing, and a diverse cast of "politicos" and subalterns, "gendarmes" and patrolmen, and "insurrectos" and exiles add transnational drama to the formerly divided worlds of Mexican and U.S. history.
"Contributors." Grace Pena Delgado, Karl Jacoby, Benjamin Johnson, Louise Pubols, Raul Ramos, Andres Resendez, Barbara O. Reyes, Alexandra Minna Stern, Samuel Truett, Elliott Young