This 1562 map above of “Americae” by Diego Gutiérrez and Hieronymus Cock was published in 1562 by the Casa de Contratación in Seville--the central authority for Spanish travel to America and custodian of charts and sailing directions. This map suggests concrete place claims and administrative units created by Spain such as “Tierra de Patagonia,” “Regio de Brasil,” “Regio de Peru,” “Tierra Florida,”  “California,” and “Nuevo España.” The different place names and administrative units on the map provide a detailed sense of region and differentiated locations, suggesting the possibility of many different types of borders—but all still within a continent labeled as “Americae.”

Figure 6. Stanley Alan Arbingast, “The Viceroyalty of New Spain, 1786-1821,” map, in Atlas of Mexico (Austin, 1975), 26. Used by permission of the University of Texas, Austin

A map of the Viceroyalty of New Spain from 1786 through 1821 provides more familiar outlines of the U.S. as a growing empire perched to absorb the territory of New Spain as its own territory expands westward. This map provides a picture of U.S. empire-building which in many ways resembles that of a colonial power-vis-à-vis New Spain. Here, “America” is not claimed as a hemispheric label but as part of “The United States of America,” forming the pivot point for U.S. nationalism and claims to further territory. In addition to the “United States of America,” we see “The Louisiana Purchase,” a series of “intendencies” inside of New Spain’s boundaries which signal future states in independent Mexico and in the territories that the U.S. will usurp from Mexico in 1848. The Province of Texas, the Government of New Mexico, and the Government of New California all portend contested territories. The Vice-Royalty of New Spain spanned from north of the Great Salt Lake including the government of New California, the Government of New Mexico, and the provinces of Texas, Coahuila, and Nuevo Santender which all occupied territory that the U.S. took from Mexico in 1848. Mexico became independent of Spain in 1821.

In Texas, Spain and then Mexico used land grants to encourage Hispanic and Anglo settlement. By the 1830s, Texas contained 25,000 Anglos and 4,000 Spanish-speaking Mexicans. In the 1830s, Mexico abolished slavery and passed the Colonization Law to prevent slaves from being imported into Texas by Anglo landowners. Anglo settlers revolted and created the Republic of Texas in 1836. Mexico never recognized the independence of Texas and broke off diplomatic relations with the U.S. when it admitted Texas as a state in 1845. The U.S. government tried to purchase areas of New Mexico and California from Mexico, which Mexico refused.

In the summer of 1845, John O’Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, published an essay titled “Annexation” which urged the U.S. to admit Texas as a state to the union. In that essay, O’Sullivan coined the famous saying “manifest destiny,” urging not only the end to opposition to the annexation of Texas, but also forecasting Mexico’s justifiable loss of California as well to the U.S.

Why, were other reasoning wanting, in favor of now elevating this question of the reception of Texas into the Union, out of the lower region of our past party dissensions, up to its proper level of a high and broad nationality, it surely is to be found, found abundantly, in the manner in which other nations have undertaken to intrude themselves into it, between us and the proper parties to the case, in a spirit of hostile interference against us, for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions….

…California probably, next fall away from the loose adhesion which, in such a country as Mexico, holds a remote province in a slight equivocal kind of dependence on the metropolis. Imbecile and distracted, Mexico never can exert any real governmental authority over such a country. The impotence of the one and the distance of the other, must make the relation one of virtual independence; unless, by stunting the province of all natural growth, and forbidding that immigration which can alone develop its capabilities and fulfill the purposes of its creation, tyranny may retain a military dominion, which is no government in the, legitimate sense of the term. In the case of California this is now impossible. The Anglo-Saxon foot is already on its borders. Already the advance guard of the irresistible army of Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down upon it, armed with the plough and the rifle, and marking its trail with schools and colleges, courts and representative halls, mills and meeting-houses (O’Sullivan).

The Congressional Globe of February 11, 1847, reported: Mr. William Fells Giles, representative of Maryland saying, “I take it for granted, that we shall gain territory, and must gain territory, before we shut the gates of the temple of Janus. .. . We must march from ocean to ocean. .. . We must march from Texas straight to the Pacific Ocean, and be bounded only by its roaring wave.... It is the destiny of the white race, it is the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race. .. .” (Zinn 155). U.S. imperial desires to claim Mexican territory moved to action in 1848. The expansion of U.S. territory based on the justified claims of “the white race” proceeded forward. The work of Laura Gómez (2007) uses the territory of what is now the state of New Mexico to trace the origins of Mexican-American as a racial group in the U.S. Her work focused on this process in relation to the codification of race in the law in the 19^th century.

Figure 7. Sir Adolphus Willam Ward, G.W. Prothero, Sir Stanley Mordaunt Leathes, and E.A. Benians, “US Expansion”, map, in The Cambridge Modern History Atlas (London, 1912), map 12. Used by Permission of the Perry-Castañeda Collection, University of Texas, Austin

An armed clash between Mexican and U.S. troops along the Rio Grande provided the incident for the U.S. to declare war against Mexico. In 1848, at the conclusion of the U.S.- Mexican War, the two countries signed the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. The treaty called for Mexico to give up almost half of its territory, which included modern-day California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and parts of Colorado, Nevada, and Utah. In return, the U.S. paid $15 million in compensation for war-related damage to Mexican land. 

At the time of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected as stated in the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud (see Menchaca, Mexican Outsiders; Menchaca, Recovering History; Pitt).

As the preceding discussion of colonial and national maps makes clear, not only are space and place claimed and codified in shifting frames, these mapping processes also produce racial and ethnic categories as well which are captured in the shifting borders within and between what became the U.S. and Mexico. A long view of more contemporary regional histories of the southwest such as those provided in the recent historical work of Rudy Acuña (Corridors of Migration) and Andrew Truett permit us to understand how legal, cultural, racial, and political borders as well as literal geographical borders were created in the late 19^th and 20^th century. The parallel and integrated development of the U.S. and Mexican mining and ranching industries in this region along with transportation corridors based on railroad lines also served as corridors of political, cultural, economic, and family transborder relationships that endure to this day and have stretched to include the broader territories of the U.S. and Mexico. Putting the borderlands at the center gives us a crucial optic for understanding the long-term integration and transnational history of the nations now called Mexico and the United States.

Figure 8. The 1891 Grain Dealers and Shippers Gazeteer, “Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad Route,” map, http://www.memoriallibrary.com/Trans/RRGaz/ATSF/map.htm. Used by permission of the MARDOS Memorial On Line Library

Truett’s and Acuña’s books both focus on the transnational development of the “copper borderlands” in the states of Chihuahua, Sonora, Arizona, and New Mexico in the 19^th and early 20^th century. These case studies on the links between U.S. entrepreneurial capital, engineers, the U.S. and Mexican governments, local political officials on both sides of the border, displaced native peoples such as the Apache, and Mexican-origin laborers who worked the copper mines provide a map for future trends of capital investment, unofficial border control that has operated outside of “official” policing, heightened nationalism, and debates about the meanings of citizenship.

 If anyone ever doubted whether or not the U.S. could be counted as an empire-builder, Truett’s account of regional development provides a playbook for how this worked in the building of the transborder copperlands. In a meeting of the Democratic Club on New York City’s Fifth Avenue in 1891, Walter S. Logan, a Wall Street lawyer who was pushing U.S. investment in Mexico, described his vision for “a landscape of extraction that flowed across national borders” (Truett 2). Logan went on to help entrepreneur William Cornell Greene create the Greene Consolidated Copper Company in conjunction with the Mexican state, and others. Nacozari, Cananea and other northern Mexican mines were connected by railroad to Douglas, Bisbee, Tombstone, Nogales, and beyond. Green’s control in the town and mine of Cananea was absolute until the worker’s strike of 1906.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Rudy Acuña’s study of the same region suggests how opposition politics worked on top of this empire-building economic integration. Acuña documents in great detail how beginning with the creation of beneficence or mutualista organizations for miners that provided death insurance and then through the emergence of labor organizing in Tombstone, Clifton, Morenci, and Metcalf, Arizona, the U.S. side and then the Mexican side of the copper borderlands became centers of labor militancy. By clearly showing the links between leaders of the Clifton-Morenci Strike of 1915-1916, the presence of sympathizers of the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM, founded by Ricardo Flores Magón in 1905), in Arizona, and El Paso Texas, and the mine at Cananea, Acuña documents how labor militancy and then revolutionary Mexican politics were knit together by the economic and transportation system of the copper borderlands region. The regional case studies of Acuña and Truett also provide a historical and conceptual basis for understanding how contemporary drug cartels put their businesses together in the same region, but with expanded operations throughout Mexico and the U.S.

Beyond Mapping: Racialization of Mexicans and U.S. Immigration Policy in the 20^th Century

Until 1924, there was very little control of the U.S.-Mexico border and the mining, railroad, and farming industries were aided by Mexican workers. Earlier exclusion laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1892, the Gentleman’s Agreement of 1907 between Japan and the U.S., and the 1917 immigration act which created the Asiatic-barred zone excluding most Asians from the U.S. except Japanese who were needed to harvest sugar beets—all these prior policies foreshadowed the contradictory nature of U.S. immigration and border policy towards Mexico in ways that continue today.  By 1917, people excluded from entering the United States included “all Asians, illiterates, prostitutes, criminals, contract laborers, unaccompanied children, idiots, epileptics, the insane, paupers, the diseased, and defective, alcoholics, beggars polygamists, anarchists, and more” (Lytle-Hérnandez 27). When foreign laborers are needed, the real and metaphoric border is more open, but when national politics and economics require a scape-goat, “foreign workers” and immigrants get the blame for many of the country’s problems. As we can see, the national and ethnic target of who the “problem immigrant population” is can change through time, but the moral assertion of who has the right to be here and who does not remains. Because of the historically subordinate status of Mexico as a nation to the U. S. since 1848 and the ongoing racialization since that time of people of Mexican descent as “foreign,” the metaphoric U.S.-Mexico border and who belongs on which side of it has been an ongoing source of contention and public debate.

Beginning with the establishment of the U.S. border patrol in 1924 and the he Immigration Act of 1924, or Johnson–Reed Act, people of Mexican descent have increasingly been constructed in popular and political discourse as “illegal aliens,” a racialized category which is often generalized to all brown, Latino “looking” persons—whatever their citizenship, national original, legal status, education, class, or gender. As argued by Mai Ngai in an insightful article on “The Strange Career of the Illegal Alien,” the advent of mass illegal immigration and deportation policy under the Immigration Act of 1924 altered meanings of inclusion in and exclusion from the nation:

The process of territorial redefinition and administrative enforcement informed divergent paths of immigrant racialization. Europeans and Canadians tended to be disassociated from the real and imagined category of illegal alien, which facilitated their national and racial assimilation as white American citizens…Mexicans emerged as iconic illegal aliens. Illegal status became constitutive of a racialized Mexican identity and of Mexicans’ exclusion from the national community and polity.

After passing the National Origins Act of 1924, a few days later Congress set aside one million dollars to “establish a ‘land-border patrol’ of the Immigration Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor” (Lytle-Hérnandez 32). Historian Kelly Lytle-Hérnandez argues that the establishment of the U.S. border patrol in the Texas-Mexico borderlands enabled working class laborers (mostly white, but some Mexican-American) to move into stable law enforcement positions with authority and that they also “found a unique way to participate in the agricultural economy: they policed the region’s workforce” (45). Because border patrol officers had a great deal of control over not only enforcement activity on a daily basis but also over the direction that future immigration law enforcement took, Lytle-Hernandez suggests that local officers “also created a new axis of racial division in borderlands communities by linking Mexican immigrants to the crime, conditions, and consequences of being illegal in the United States” (45). The U.S. racial narrative linking Mexican nationality with illegality and perceived “Mexican” physical appearance as “brown” began on the southern borderlands in the 1920s through law enforcement practices and linguistic categories. The hardening of the U.S.-Mexico border after 1924 and the creation of “legal” and “illegal” forms of migration and migrant status created two streams of Mexican migration to the U.S. While Mexican officials and researchers such as anthropologist Manuel Gamio had previously extolled the virtues of mass emigration to the U.S. because it raised household income through remittances (Mexican Migration 30), “the transformation of mass labor migration to mass illegal immigration converted the profits of labor emigration into the problems of illegal immigration” for the Mexican government (Lytle-Hérnandez 89-90). The narrative of illegality thus has an impact on Mexican policy as well, resulting in efforts to prevent smuggling of undocumented workers over the border that began in the 1920s and continued with the Bracero program. The racial narrative of the “Mexican illegal” was scripted on both sides of the southern border and spread from there to the rest of the country.

Mexican labor was viewed as a desirable alternative to other immigrant labor because, in the words of lobbyist S. Park Frisselle (who reported to the Fruit Growers Convention in 1927), “As you know, the Mexican likes the sunshine against an adobe wall with a few tortillas and in the off time he drifts across the border where he may have these things…If charity spends one dollar on the Mexican in California, the State profits two dollars by having him here. The Mexican can be deported if he becomes a country charge, but the others are here to stay” (McWilliams 127). While large farms used Mexican labor during the growing season until the early 1930s, during the winter months workers went to nearby cities where some became a part of relief programs aimed at the poor.

Historically, it was not only the border patrol that acted to restrict the movement of Mexicans in the U.S. and to deport them. After the depression became entrenched in the early 1930s, William N. Doak, Herbert Hoover's newly appointed secretary of labor sent immigration officers throughout the country searching for “illegal aliens.” Although Mexicans were not supposed to be the only targets, they appear to have been the majority of people either deported or intimidated into departing voluntarily. During the Great Depression, local authorities throughout the Southwest and Midwest repatriated up to one million Mexicans during the early 1930s (Balderrama and Rodríguez; Valenciana). Approximately 60 percent were children of American citizens by native birth (Ngai, Impossible Subjects 72). By the Great Depression, the population of Mexicans in the U.S. was over 1.4 million. Once the U.S. entered World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the position of Mexican laborers was once again reassessed in relation to U.S. interests.

In order to bridge the gap between the increasing demand for agricultural workers and their decreasing numbers among the U.S. population, in 1942, Public Law 45 was created to appropriate the necessary funds to implement an executive agreement with Mexico to import thousands--and eventually millions--of guest workers or braceros. Although the Bracero Program was created to alleviate wartime labor shortages, it lasted until 1965. Millions more workers were contracted in the period after the end of World War II (4,746,231) than during the war itself (167,925) (Carrasco 203, n. 50). The Bracero Program allowed the importation of Mexican workers for annual harvests with the stipulation that they were to return to Mexico after their work was finished. Braceros were contract workers who were supposed to have certain guarantees met in terms of housing, transportation, wages, recruitment, health care, food, and the number of hours they worked. The contracts—initially negotiated directly between the U.S. and Mexican governments—even stipulated that there should be no discrimination against the braceros. However, compliance officers, including Mexican consular officials, were few and far between. Later contracts were switched to private contractors in the U.S. Most growers and the U.S. government ignored the terms of the contracts but the braceros had no recourse. After the initial agreement with Mexico for the Bracero Program expired in 1947, the program continued for agricultural workers under a variety of laws and administrative agreements. It was terminated in 1964.

Along with the legally contracted male, temporary agricultural and railroad workers of the Bracero Program came many other Mexican nationals who crossed illegally into the United States. These might have included those who could not get a contract, who didn’t want to be limited by the temporary natures and time constraints in the Bracero Program or who for other reasons were not bound by the legal process. Rapid industrialization of Mexican agriculture in the 1940s, an increase in population, and food shortages pushed people to the North (Lytle-Hernandez 113). Unsanctioned border crossings in the 1940s were of concern to the Mexican government as well as to the U.S. government. 

The Mexican government became increasingly concerned with the greater flow of Mexican workers north, both as braceros and undocumented workers. Mexican agribusinessmen, particularly from the cotton industry, pressured the Mexican government to end unsanctioned migration to the U.S. (Lytle-Hérnandez 114-117). In 1943, the Mexican Embassy in Washington D.C. “warned the U.S. Department of State that if control was not established over the flow of illegal immigration into the U.S., Mexico would ‘effect a complete revision of the [Bracero] program agreements’” (Lytle-Hernández 117). The result was that by 1944, the chief supervisor of the Border Patrol, W. Kelly began an “intensive drive on Mexican aliens” by deploying what were called “Special Mexican Deportation Parties” (Lytle-Hérnandez 117). Kelley increased border patrol personnel and by November of 1944, 42, 928 Mexican nationals had been deported out of California (Lytle-Hérnandez 117). The numbers continued to increase and were formalized in the 1950s as “Operation Wetback.” Importantly, the contradictory policy of both inviting Mexicans in as legally contracted workers under the Bracero program and deporting those who came to work without documentation as “illegals” involved Mexican policy makers as well as those in the U.S.

On the U.S. side, bracero workers were welcome as long as they were obedient and did not question the terms of their labor contracts. At the end of the bracero program in Oregon in 1947, for example, the labor camps were closed, and all contracted laborers were supposed to return to Mexico. Not all of them did and there were other workers already in the state who were undocumented as well. In Oregon, use of the label “illegal” for Mexican workers can be traced most recently to changes in the ways that contracted workers were categorized while working under the Bracero Program from 1943-1947 and then afterwards. There, bracero workers went from being written about as heroes when they arrived in the state in 1943 and 1944 in headlines such as “Wheat Saved by Mexicans,” “Mexican Harvesters Doing a Great Job in Fields and Orchards...”[4] to being called “wetbacks” and “illegals” by the late 1940s and early 1950s in the same newspapers. The racialized discourse of illegality, criminality, and Mexicanness that solidified on the southern border in 1924, became generalized throughout the U.S. in the 1940s and 1950s. The Border Patrol’s project of policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration clearly intensified, “resulting in 474,720 interrogations reported by the U.S. Border Patrol in 1940 to 9, 389,551 in 1944” (Lytle-Hérnandez 120). The total number of Mexicans deported and departing voluntarily to Mexico was 16,154 in 1943. By 1953, that number was 905, 236 (Lytle-Hérnandez 122).

The 1950s were also marked by “Operation Wetback,” a program focused on preventing undocumented people from entering the U.S. and on rounding up and deporting undocumented people already here. While this was its tactical packaging, according to historian Lytle-Hérnandez, “mass deportation, or at least the threat of mass deportation” was seen by Border Patrol Commissioner Swing and others as a means for confronting the interrelated crises of control along the U.S. border and consent among influential growers who “refused to concede to a new era of migration control” (169). 

In Oregon and other states, the newspaper headlines from Operation Wetback helped to cement the racialization of people of Mexican origin as “illegals” in regional political narratives. A newspaper article in the Oregonian on May 15, 1953, ran with the headline, “Agents Sweep Rising Tide of Mexican Illegals South to Border.”  The paper reported, “Most of Portland’s deportees are flown to Los Angeles. The immigration service flies them from there to Guadalajara, about 1500 miles south of this border, just to discourage them from returning so quickly. Now the flood of wetbacks is so great they are being swept back just to the border” (Richards 4). The culture of immigration raids and the right of INS agents to detain “foreign-looking” workers in any location became entrenched and continues to this day.

It is widely agreed by scholars of immigration that past U.S. immigration policies—particularly the U.S. Bracero program of 1942-1964 which resulted in 4.5 million Mexican nationals being legally contracted for work in the United States (some on multiple contracts) and the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) and the Special Agricultural Worker’s Program (SAW) which resulted in the legalization of nearly 3 million people—have had a large hand in setting up current patterns of immigration. In November of 1986, President Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which allowed those who had been living undocumented in the US since January 1, 1982, to apply for amnesty and legal temporary residency, and then permanent residency. In addition, any person who worked in agriculture for ninety days between the period of May 1, 1985, through May 1, 1986, could receive temporary residence and later permanent resident status through the Special Agricultural Workers program (SAW). On this basis, farmworkers also received temporary residency. IRCA conferred legal status on nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants whose family members then became eligible for permanent residency in the U.S. As discussed by Phil Martin, while policy makers had hoped that IRCA would decrease unauthorized immigration and increase real farm wages, instead it accelerated the spread of unauthorized Mexican workers throughout U.S. agriculture and reduced wages (183). Once they were legalized, SAW workers could live and work anywhere in the U.S. While most legal and undocumented farmworkers were found in western states, Texas, and Florida before 1986, after 1986 legalized SAW workers spread throughout the U.S. As Martin documents, “Pioneer SAWs served as anchors for the unauthorized workers who continued to arrive in the United States from their hometowns, giving rise to phrases that described Mexican immigration as the ‘changing face of’ or ‘Latinizing” of rural America” (187). In addition, employers began hiring unauthorized workers through labor contractors all over the U.S. This left many workers worse off, reducing earnings by 30 to 40 percent according to Martin (187). Additional immigration legislation by the Bill Clinton administration further undermined the ability of relatives of those who had received amnesty in 1986 to become legal residents due to increased income requirements.

The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) expanded the definition of deportation removals to include people who used to be excluded at the border as well as people deported from the interior of the United States. IIRIRA also made it more difficult for people to sponsor relatives to come to the United States by increasing income requirements from at or above 100 percent of the U.S. poverty level to at or above 125 percent of the U.S. poverty level. In 1998, this was close to $20,000 for a family of four. In 1999 this is about $24,000. It also set deadlines for when people already in the U.S. could apply through their families for residency. If you missed a 1998 deadline you had to leave the country and apply from your home country. This law was revised with a “sunset” clause under Clinton and this was extended by Bush, giving divided families a new chance within new deadlines to apply for residency without undocumented members having to leave the U.S. and apply from their home countries. The application cost ($1000 plus lawyer fees) plus minimum income levels still make this difficult for those such as farmworker families who average about $8,000/yr. Clinton’s other branch of immigration policy—border security—also had a major impact on immigrant communities.

Beginning in 1994, U.S. border defense policy moved away from internal detentions to fortifying the border in highly trafficked crossing points through the construction of large walls and other barriers, use of high-tech equipment to track migrants, increased numbers of border patrol agents, and a new system of identification linked to fingerprinting all who are detained. Operation Gatekeeper was launched in the San Diego/Tijuana area. By early 1998, Operation Gatekeeper had been in place for more than three years and arrest rates fell significantly. The second phase of the border “defense plan” focused on classic crossing routes in central Arizona and south Texas. The enforcement offensive south of Tucson, dubbed “Operation Safeguard” was launched just a few weeks after Gatekeeper in San Diego. By 1999 defense walls and agents were being planted along the full length of the border. Operation Rio Grande targeted the zone of South Texas focused on McAllen, Brownville, and Laredo. Arrests were dropping in these sectors. The outcomes of these efforts were that greater numbers of migrants attempted to cross in the rugged mountains to the west of San Diego in Imperial County. Here people began dying in the cold of winter. Others were pushed into the desert in western Arizona. Significantly increased migration during the 1990s coupled with a border defense policy that squeezed people into extremely rugged terrain in California and increasingly in Arizona produced hundreds of migrant deaths every year. In 2009, there were 221 Arizona border deaths recorded by the Border Deaths Data Base of the Arizona Star.

In April of 2010, Arizona governor Jan Brewer signed into law SB1070 aimed at identifying, prosecuting, and deporting undocumented immigrants. The law gave police broad power to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally. While U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton issued a preliminary injunction suspending several key provisions of the law, which were to come into force on July 29, 2010, this didn’t stop the political and cultural force of the Arizona law in the U.S. In 2010, lawmakers in other states introduced or planned to introduce similar legislation. In many ways, SB1070 codifies the long process of the racialization of Mexicans in the U.S. as “illegal” that began in the 18^th century and welds it to the militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border by official and unofficial forces (see Chavez; Doty). While such a conclusion is sobering from a structural perspective, we also need to remember Mexican immigrants and migrants as active subjects who have agency in producing significant ideas and discourses themselves. A transborder perspective allows us to bring these subjects and their agency into focus.

A Transborder Perspective: Communities

Because of a long history of political, economic, and social integration with Mexico as well as a result of U.S. and Mexican labor and immigration policies, today a majority of communities in Mexico are transborder communities. Such communities are full of people accustomed to living in multiple localities and discontinuous social, economic, and cultural spaces. People here have worked out a social world that exists within a multi-sited existence. One Mixtec community I have carried out fieldwork in since 2004, San Agustín Atenango in Oaxaca, does not exist in one geographic place, but is now present throughout multiple sites in the U.S. and Mexico. Spread out in at least thirteen different locations in the U.S. as well as others in Mexico, the home community of Atenango sports many empty houses, signaling both the presence of remittances to those who remain and coordinate family building projects and the strong presence of the people of Atenango in other locations. A review of different generations of migrants and immigrants from Atenango can be connected to the different sites.

Figure 9. Lynn Stephen, Transborder Lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California, and Oregon (Durham, 2007), 112.

José Luis García López was born in 1936. He worked as a bracero worker in California and Texas from 1953 until 1964. Prior to that, he went to work in Veracruz harvesting coffee and sugar cane. After being a Bracero, he worked as a farm laborer in Sinaloa and Baja California with his wife and children. He has not returned to the U.S., but his son is living and working in Santa Maria California while his wife and two children remain in San Agustin. Many other men from his community were braceros as well from the 1940s to the 1960s. The map above shows his paths of migration to the U.S. as a bracero.