Continental Crossroads

“Using new approaches and demonstrating the results of extensive research into the archives of both Mexico and the United States, this pathbreaking book provides a new perspective on our common frontier legacies as well as surprising borderland stories involving Chinese immigrants and African American colonizers, transnational identities, and borderland ‘body politics.’ These highly readable original essays comprise a new history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, one that is enhanced by poignant human stories. This seminal volume should stimulate new studies of U.S.-Mexico border relations in the years to come. Editors Samuel Truett and Elliott Young are to be congratulated on their accomplishment.”—Howard R. Lamar, Sterling Professor Emeritus of History, Yale University

“While duly acknowledging the foundational work of earlier generations of border-crossing historians, Samuel Truett and Elliott Young and their gritty band of young collaborators bring into focus a more socially complex, multiracial, and multiethnic world of transnational players and history-makers. In their original essays, there are Mexicans and Tejanos, Indians and Chicanos, Chinese and Blacks, mestizos and Anglos, gringos and immigrants, and many more, jostling for room, power, and influence in this contested space in order to construct identities, build communities, and challenge and strengthen institutions. With more intentionality than their elders, Truett, Young, et al. seek to define the field of borderlands studies, a project that requires serious intervention into established narratives, methods, and epistemologies. They have thrown down the gauntlet; I suspect many more young scholars of the United States and the American West, of Latin America and Mexico, of Chicano/a and Ethnic Studies, will rush to join them because they sense that if they don't, they risk becoming obsolete before they even begin their careers.”—Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Professor of History and Director, Center for the Study of Race & Ethnicity in America, Brown University