The U.S.-Mexican Border in the Twentieth Century: A History of Economic and Social Transformation

Abstract

Much of the literary criticism and cultural studies scholarship about the U.S.-Mexico border is thick with theory and thin on empirical evidence. David Lorey’s book, The US-Mexican Border in the Twentieth Century, balances the scales with a richly documented historical account of the border. As a result, he is able to illustrate the century-long continuities between today’s NAFTA and the earlier trade policies of the Porfirian regime. This historical perspective is a necessary corrective to the presentist bent of most analyses of contemporary border drug policy, migration, and trade issues.In spite of the boom in border studies in the last decade, there is virtually no single synthesis of U.S.-Mexican border history. Lorey’s book fills this void with a readable and data-packed narrative that focuses on demographic, political, and economic changes on the border from the late nineteenth century through the present. Latin Americanists will be pleased to discover that Lorey, a Latin Americanist by training, views the border from the south-north as well as the north-south perspective, paying considerable attention to the complexity of politics and economics in Mexico. However, even if you achieve the right balance between the two countries, one has to wrestle with the difficult task of defining where the border begins and where it ends. Rather than focusing on the border as a concept that includes anyplace two cultures interact (virtually everywhere), Lorey approaches the border as a clearly defined region that straddles the U.S.-Mexico boundary line. While he recognizes that “border phenomena are experienced . . . far from the international boundary,” he uses, what he calls, the “simple, if anachronistic, concept of states” to define the region (p. 8). Therefore, he generally relies on statistics from the states on either side of the border to paint a picture of the economic and demographic booms and busts. One could ask whether such a methodology hides more than it reveals, if for instance, data about Dallas or Lubbock, in northern Texas, are being used to illustrate changes along the border.At the end of his introduction, Lorey argues that the “long-term objective of thinking (on a personal level) and policymaking (on a social level) should be to overcome the U.S.-Mexican border” (p. 12). This is a provocative and fertile statement that deserves attention. Overcoming the U.S.-Mexican border can mean resolving material inequalities between the two side of the boundary and reducing conflict between the nations, both of which would be good things. Overcoming the border can also mean, as it has under NAFTA, facilitating capital flows between the countries, which has not necessarily been a good thing for all Mexicans or all U.S. residents. Overcoming the border might also mean the disappearance of the rich transnational hybridized cultures that have emerged there. Even with the more than 250 million legal border crossings each way, every year, the U.S.-Mexico border seems farther from being overcome today than at any other time since it was established.Lorey lays out a road map for understanding the major economic and political shifts along the border in the past century. As we head down the highway into the next century trying to figure out whether the border represents an ideal future of multicultural cooperation or an apocalyptic vision of hyperinequality, environmental destruction, and the triumph of rapacious capitalism, this book is well worth taking along as a guide.

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