Empires and Immigrants

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Lim
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
El Paso ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Ciudad Juarez ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Demographic Shift ◽  
International Boundary ◽  
Diverse Groups

This chapter frames the nineteenth century borderlands as a theater of movement that had long been marked by imperial contestations and diverse migrations. Native American, colonial, Mexican, and American migrations shaped the region, keeping territorial boundaries porous, and racial and national identities blurred. Following the transformation of the indigenous borderlands to a capitalist borderlands, the chapter traces the seismic demographic shift that drove the region’s rapid industrialization; as the borderlands connected into national, transnational, and global circuits of migration, and oceanic lines fed back into railway connections, white, black, Mexican, and Chinese immigrants descended on the border from all directions. Focusing on the multiple boundaries that intersected at the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez border – namely, the international boundary as well as the limits of Jim Crow that ended where Texas met New Mexico – this chapter shows how and why the late 19th century borderlands looked so promising for these diverse groups. It begins to develop a transborder framework for understanding immigration, emphasizing how the narrowing of economic opportunities, political rights, and social freedoms in both the United States and Mexico contributed to such diverse men and women coming together in the borderlands.

“Hunting for Chinamen”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Lim
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
El Paso ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Chinese Immigrants ◽  
The United States ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Immigration Law ◽  
Ciudad Juarez ◽  
Railroad Workers ◽  
Chinese Exclusion

Through a close, on-the-ground reading of U.S. immigration records and newspaper accounts, this chapter shows how Chinese immigrants repeatedly improvised new cross-racial strategies to gain entry into the United States during the era of Chinese Exclusion. Their actions not only forced local immigration officials to continually adjust their own practices in response, but to focus increasing attention on racial differentiation. In the process of distinguishing Chinese from Mexican, and rooting out smuggling rings that depended upon the cooperation of Chinese sponsors and immigrants, Mexican guides, and black railroad workers, these street-level bureaucrats not only enforced U.S. immigration law, but did so through practices that rendered multiracial relations and identities suspect and illegitimate. Moreover, as immigration officials and the immigrants they sought to police drew the attention of the federal government to the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez border, they brought the American state into the borderlands. The chapter thus connects local enforcement practices at the border with the broader goals of federal immigration law and nation-building at the turn of the century.

Contemporary Southern Literature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
Southern Literature ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Fundamentalism ◽  
Southern Studies ◽  
The South ◽  
And Migration

From the colonial period through to the present day, the U.S. South has been seen as aberrant or at least different, as separate from, the rest of the nation. Often thought of as backward and strange, the South has also been figured as the nation’s Other, home to anything that the United States disavows: racism, sexism, religious fundamentalism, poverty, and so on. While a debate rages in the field of southern studies about what and where the South exactly is—even whether the South should be spoken of as a solid geography—contemporary literature from the region continues to present the multiple meanings of place today. Indeed, in the 21st century particularly, southern literature is expanding and diversifying more than ever. Identifiable are three dominant trends in contemporary literature from the South. First, and perhaps most dominant, is the narrative of racial memory; this work explores the impacts and legacies of race relations in the region, from slavery and Native American removal through to Jim Crow and beyond. Second is the narrative of the southern environment; these narratives are stories that contemplate and focus on the region’s diverse landscapes, from mountainous Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta to the swampy Gulf. They are also narratives that engage with the dramatic effects of climate change and ecological disaster, highly pertinent in the contemporary era of the Anthropocene. Third, are narratives of an (un)changing South; this writing reflexively and critically explores the meaning of the region in a time of globalization and migration. When the population of the South—which has always been a diverse one—is changing in both dramatic and incremental ways, the stories and narratives of the region are clearly adapting too. Southern literature continues to ask complex questions about what the South means in today’s United States.

Digital Resources: The Wheelan Collection of Photographs of the Mexican Revolution

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anton DuPlessis
Keyword(s):  
Mexican Revolution ◽  
El Paso ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ciudad Juarez ◽  
Land Reforms ◽  
Northern Mexico ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Military Commander ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Ardent Supporter

The John D. Wheelan Collection primarily contains photographs taken along the Texas-Mexico border in the areas of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, México. The processed collection, housed at Texas A&M University’s Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, comprises nearly 700 photographs documenting the Mexican Revolution and the war’s spillover into the United States, during a span of 1912 to 1919. Other portions of the image collection document American soldiers stationed in New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. The images have been digitized as JP2 files and can be viewed at the library’s institutional repository as well as downloaded. While most of the photographs derive from the film stock shot for The Life of General Villa, there are also portraits, scenes of daily life, and landscapes produced by El Paso studio photographers, photo postcards, and postcards. With the exception of some postcards, nearly all the images are black and white. The photos themselves vary in their measurements, though 3.5" x 5" and 5" x 7" predominate; each image’s dimensions is included in the accompanying metadata found in the repository. John Wheelan, already active in the fledging Texan motion picture industry, was one of numerous reporters and photographers who covered the Mexican Revolution. He probably arrived in northern Mexico early in the winter of 1913–1914, when General Francisco “Pancho” Villa held Ciudad Juárez. Villa was considered the most able military commander among the Constitutionalists, a loose coalition of revolutionaries against General Victoriano Huerta’s provisional government. In February 1913, Huerta had conspired in the overthrow of the constitutionally elected government of President Francisco Madero. Villa, an ardent supporter of Madero, was one of several leaders in northern Mexico who were fighting for both the restoration of constitutional government and revolutionary agrarian land reforms.

These People Have Always Been a Republic

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurice S. Crandall
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
New Mexico ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Needs ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Indigenous Groups ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Economic

Spanning three hundred years and the colonial regimes of Spain, Mexico, and the United States, Maurice S. Crandall’s sweeping history of Native American political rights in what is now New Mexico, Arizona, and Sonora demonstrates how Indigenous communities implemented, subverted, rejected, and indigenized colonial ideologies of democracy, both to accommodate and to oppose colonial power.  Focusing on four groups--Pueblos in New Mexico, Hopis in northern Arizona, and Tohono O'odhams and Yaquis in Arizona/Sonora--Crandall reveals the ways Indigenous peoples absorbed and adapted colonially imposed forms of politics to exercise sovereignty based on localized political, economic, and social needs. Using sources that include oral histories and multinational archives, this book allows us to compare Spanish, Mexican, and American conceptions of Indian citizenship, and adds to our understanding of the centuries-long struggle of Indigenous groups to assert their sovereignty in the face of settler colonial rule.

The potential to improve water quality in the middle Rio Grande through effective wetland restoration

2010 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 501-509 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Rodriguez ◽  
Vanessa L. Lougheed
Keyword(s):  
Water Quality ◽  
El Paso ◽  
Treatment Plant ◽  
Rio Grande ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ciudad Juarez ◽  
Irrigated Agriculture ◽  
Nutrient Chemistry ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
United States Mexico

The Rio Grande, which forms the United States—Mexico border for much of its course, receives diverse pollutants from both urban and agricultural areas, most notably in the sister cities of El Paso (TX, USA)—Ciudad Juárez (CHI, Mexico). This study aimed to describe regional trends in water quality in waters near the El Paso–Ciudad Juárez metroplex and to examine the potential for water quality improvement through the use of a created wetland. Very few differences in nutrient chemistry were found among drains, canals and the Rio Grande, with the exception of elevated chloride and lower phosphorus levels found in the drains. Overall, chloride concentrations increased with distance downstream, likely due to concentration of salts via evaporation from irrigated agriculture. A wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) contributed substantially to total phosphorus and nitrate levels, which, together with ammonia, tended to exceed state criteria for water quality downstream of the WWTP outflow. The created Rio Bosque wetlands reduced nitrate concentrations in the water, possibly via denitrification enhanced by algae; algae increased in biomass as water flowed through the wetlands. However, the diversion of water for irrigated agriculture, resulting in the absence of water, and thus aquatic plants, in the wetland in the summer has limited the ability of this wetland to improve regional water quality.

scholarly journals Forgotten Border Actors: the Border Reinforcers. A Comparison Between the U.S.–Mexico Border and South American Borders

2002 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandro Grimson ◽  
Pablo Vila
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
El Paso ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ciudad Juarez ◽  
South American ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
History Of ◽  
Good Neighbor ◽  
The U.S

This article is a critique of two different types of essentialisms that have gained widespread acceptance in places as distant as the U.S.-Mexico border and different Mercosur frontiers. Both essentialisms rely on metaphors that refer to the concept of "union," and put their emphasis on a variety of "sisterhood/brotherhood" tropes and, in particular, the "crossing" metaphor. This kind of stance tends to make invisible the social and cultural conflict that many times characterizes political frontiers. The article wants to reinstall this conflictive dimension. In that regard, we analyze two different case studies. The first is the history of a bridge constructed between Posadas, Argentina and Encarnación, Paraguay. The second is the community reaction toward an operation implemented by the Border Patrolin 1993 ("OperationBlockade") in a border that for many years was considered an exemplar of the "good neighbor relationships" between Mexico and the United States, the frontier between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. Key Words: U.S.-Mexico border, Operation Blockade, Mercosur frontier, political frontier, Argentina, Paraguay, Mexico, United States, Posadas, El Paso , Encarnación, Ciudad Juárez, Border Patrol.

Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Guzmán
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
El Paso ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
American Frontier ◽  
Colored People ◽  
Border Town ◽  
Central Texas ◽  
International Boundary

In 1909, physician Lawrence A. Nixon fled the racial violence of central Texas to settle in the border town of El Paso. There he became a community and civil rights leader. His victories in two Supreme Court decisions paved the way for dismantling all-white political primaries across the South. This book delves into Nixon's lifelong struggle against Jim Crow. Linking Nixon's activism to his independence from the white economy, support from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the man's own indefatigable courage, the book also sheds light on Nixon's presence in symbolic and literal borderlands—as an educated professional in a time when few went to college, as an African American who made waves when most feared violent reprisal, and as someone living on the mythical American frontier as well as an international boundary. A powerful addition to the literature on African Americans in the Southwest, this book explores seldom-studied corners of the Black past and the civil rights movement.

Police, Waterworks, and the Construction of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1924–1954

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 233-256
Author(s):  
C J Alvarez
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
El Paso ◽  
Ciudad Juarez ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Border Fence ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
International Boundary ◽  
Physical Construction ◽  
The U.S

Abstract This article examines four major building projects on the U.S.-Mexico border: the straightening of the Rio Grande around El Paso–Ciudad Juárez, the assemblage of the first large-scale border fence, the fabrication of early Border Patrol watchtowers, and the construction of Falcon Dam. These were the first major efforts to transform the international divide through the built environment. By putting these seemingly dissimilar initiatives into conversation with one another, we can better understand the connections between the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the little-known International Boundary and Water Commission; rethink how the political and social construction of the border was achieved through literal, physical construction; and generate new ways of linking border and environmental history.

A Promiscuous Crowd

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Lim
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
El Paso ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ciudad Juarez ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
White People ◽  
Mexican Families ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
Local Newspapers ◽  
To Come

Focusing on the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez border, this chapter demonstrates how Chinese, Mexicans, and African Americans blurred color lines to create dynamic social environments as well as new legal dilemmas in the borderlands. Drawing upon local newspapers, legal documents, city records, maps, and census materials, the chapter illuminates the various freedoms that non-white people struggled to realize together – particularly in work, public spaces, homes, and marriages. But the chapter also shows how the realities of multiracial life in the borderlands encountered the pressures of an escalating ideology of racial purity and segregation in the United States, culminating in the migration of black-Mexican families across the border into Mexico. Such de-facto expulsions would be a preview of the massive legal expulsions that were yet to come.

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