Borderlands in North America: A Selective Bibliography

June 14, 2018
By: Ashley Johnson Bavery
Wagon Mound, New Mexico. Spanish-American family waiting at the gate at Bean Day Rodeo

This bibliography supplements a historiographical essay published in the summer 2018 issue of the Immigration and Ethnic History Newsletter (available now to IEHS members and freely available online after a one-year delay).

Conceptual Works

Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.

Johnson, Benjamin and Andrew W. Graybill, eds. Bridging National Borders in North America. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Indigenous Borderlands

Barr, Juliana. Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Blackhawk, Ned. Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Brooks, James F. Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands. Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Taylor, Alan. The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution. New York City: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

White, Richard. Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

US–Mexican Borderlands

Adelman, Jeremy and Stephen Aron. “Forum Essay: From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History.” American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (June 1999): 814-841.

Benton-Cohen, Katherine. Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Cadava, Geraldo. Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013.

Delay, Brian. War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.–Mexican War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

Ettinger, Patrick. Imaginary Lines: Border Enforcement and the Origins of Undocumented Immigration, 1882–1930. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009.

Hämäläinen, Pekka. Comanche Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

Hernandez, Kelly Lytle. Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.

Johnson, Benjamin. Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans Into Americans. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Kang, Deborah. INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1917–1954. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Levario, Miguel Antonio. Militarizing the Border: When Mexicans Became the Enemy. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2012.

Lim, Julia. Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

Martinez, Anne. Catholic Borderlands: Mapping Catholicism onto American Empire. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014.

Mora, Anthony. Border Dilemmas: Racial and National Uncertainties in New Mexico, 1848–1912. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Najera, Jennifer. Borderlands of Race: Mexican Segregation in a South Texas Town. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015.

St. John, Rachel. A Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.–Mexico Border. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Truett, Samuel. Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Immigration and the Twentieth Century

Calavita, Kitty. Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the I.N.S. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Cohen, Deborah. Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

Gamboa, Erasmo. Bracero Railroaders the Forgotten World War II Story of Mexican Workers in the U.S. West. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016.

Lee, Erika. At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Loza, Mireya. Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual, and Political Freedom. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina press, 2016.

Ngai, Mae. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.

Weber, John. From South Texas to the Nation: The Exploitation of Mexican Labor in the Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Young, Elliot. Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through World War II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

US–Canadian Borderlands

Chang, Kornell. Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

Evans, Sterling, ed. The Borderlands of the American and Canadian Wests: Essays on the Regional History of the 49th Parallel. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

Graybill, Andrew. Policing the Great Plains: Rangers, Mounties, and the North American Frontier. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Karibo, Holly. Sin City North: Sex, Drugs, and Citizenship in the Detroit-Windsor Borderland. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Ramirez, Bruno. Crossing the 49th Parallel: Migration from Canada to the United States. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.

Ashley Johnson Bavery

Ashley Johnson Bavery, an assistant professor at Eastern Michigan University, is author of “Crashing America’s Back Gate: Illegal Europeans, Policing, and Welfare in Detroit, 1921–1939,” Journal of Urban History 44 (2018): 239–61. Her book, Destination Detroit: Immigration Politics on America’s Northern Borderland, is under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press.
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