Reading list from HIST 4300: History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands syllabus
“Borders” and “Borderlands”
Jeremy Adelman, and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in between in North American History,” The American Historical Review 104 (1999), 814-41.
Pekka Hämäläinen and Samuel Truett, “On Borderlands,” Journal of American History 98 (September 2011), 338-361.
Gloria E. Anzaldúa, “Towards a New Consciousness,” in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Book, 1987), 77-91.
Early America
Juliana Barr, “A Diplomacy of Gender: Rituals of First Contact in the “Land of the Tejas,” The William and Mary Quarterly 61 (July 2004), 393-434.
Juliana Barr, “Geographies of Power: Mapping Indian Borders in the ‘Borderlands’ of the Early Southwest,” The William and Mary Quarterly 68 (January 2011), 5-46.
*Primary Source* Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca on native Texans (1542)
David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America: The Brief Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
*Primary Source* José Maria Sánchez on Texas (1828)
Andrés Reséndez, “National Identity on a Shifting Border: Texas and New Mexico in the Age of Transition, 1821-1848,” The Journal of American History 86 (September 1999), 668-88.
The Mexican American War
Timothy Henderson, A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and its War with the United States (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007).
Brian Delay, “Independent Indians and the U.S. Mexican War,” The American Historical Review 112 (February 2007), 35-68.
Mexican American War Primary Source Packet:
- José Joaquin de Herrera, Proclamation Denouncing the United States [June 4, 1845].
- John O’Sullivan on “Manifest Destiny,” [July/August, 1845]
- Gen. Francisco Mejia, Proclamation [March 18, 1846].
- James K. Polk, Call for War [May 11, 1846].
- Henry Clay, the War with Mexico [November 13, 1847]
- Abraham Lincoln, House Speech [January 12, 1848]
- Frederick Douglass, “The War with Mexico,” [January 21, 1848]
- Ulysses S. Grant, Memoirs: Causes of the Mexican War [1885]
*Primary Source* Juan Seguín, “A Foreigner in My Own Land” (1858)
Slavery and Freedom
Sarah E. Cornell, “Citizens of Nowhere: Fugitive Slaves and Free African Americans in Mexico, 1833–1857,” Journal of American History 100 (September 2013), 351-374.
The Modern Borderlands
Alice L. Baumgartner, “The Line of Positive Safety: Borders and Boundaries in the Rio Grande Valley, 1848–1880,” Journal of American History 101 (March 2015), 1106-1122.
*Primary Source* John G. Bourke, “The American Congo,” Scribner’s Magazine (May 1894), 590-609.
Gladys A. Hodges, “Bridges across the Borderline: The Local Politics of Building the First International Rail Bridges in the Americas at the Two El Pasos, 1880-1883,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 116 (July 2012), 26-38.
Gregg Cantrell, “Our Very Pronounced Theory of Equal Rights to All”: Race, Citizenship, and Populism in the South Texas Borderlands,” The Journal of American History (December 2013), 663-690.
Rodolfo Rocha, “The Tejano Revolt of 1915,” in Mexican Americans in Texas History: Selected Essays (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2000), 103-120.
*Primary Source* Text of the Plan de San Diego
Grace Peña Delgado, “Border Control and Sexual Policing: White Slavery and Prostitution along the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1903-1910,” Western Historical Quarterly (Summer 2012), 157-178.
Immigration and Recent History
Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California, 2010)
Cynthia E. Orozco, “The Mexican Colony of South Texas” and “Ideological Origins of the Movement,” in No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 17-62.
Thomas A. Guglielmo, “Fighting for Caucasian Rights: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and the Transnational Struggle for Civil Rights in World War II Texas,” Journal of American History 92 (March 2006), 1212-1237.
Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil’s Highway: A True Story (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2004).
Maria Sacchetti, “The Unforgotten” Boston Globe (July 26, 2014).
Kelefa Sanneh, “Untangling the Immigration Debate,” The New Yorker (October 31, 2016).