Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History.

Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History. Edited by Samuel Truett and Elliott Young. Foreword by David J. Weber. American Encounters/Global Interactions. (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2004. Pp. xviii, 344. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 0-8223-3389-9; cloth, $79.95, ISBN 0-8223-3353-8.)

In a brilliant introduction Samuel Truett and Elliot Young guide the reader through long-standing and current debates over the nature of frontiers, borders, and borderlands more generally. They push the reader to "see beyond the nation, even as we keep the nation in focus" (p. 1). With the promotion of transnational history as an aim, they detail the many tensions between the Herbert Eugene Bolton borderland school and Chicano historians. Until quite recently, the Spanish and Mexican borderland histories were distinct fields that seldom overlapped the study of Mexican American borderlands. Moreover, histories of the American Southwest and Mexico often failed to intermingle. The goal of this volume, itself perhaps a product of the Weber school, is to "recover the hidden relationships between borderland histories" (p. 6). Organized into four sections, this conference volume covers both the history and literature of the borderlands in ten chapters. Since this is an edited volume, I will limit my review to the broad themes of the book and to those chapters written by historians.

The first historical essay, written by Raul Ramos, details the large role played by Mexican and Indian relations in the Spanish and Mexican period of Texas history. This chapter adds to the recent scholarship by James Brooks detailing the complex relationship between Spanish and Mexican colonials and the indigenous peoples of the Southwest. Ramos shows how negotiating the middle ground between peoples was particularly important in a frontier environment where "life involved direct contact with many different cultures, entailed the ever-present possibility of violence, and required the flexibility ... to craft a secure peace" (p. 59).

Several other chapters reveal the hidden histories of the borderland experiences on the part of individuals of Chinese, African American, and Russian ethnicities. In a superb essay, Grace Pena Delgado reveals the ways that Chinese immigrants, because of restrictions on U.S. citizenship and entry into the United States, used Mexican citizenship to open the border to commerce and trade by living and working across the U.S.-Mexico border and, in some cases, becoming quite prosperous. Increased border restrictions after 1900 ended this informal movement.

Karl Jacoby details the life of William H. Ellis, a light-skinned African American who embraced a flexible identity in the late-nineteenth-century border region, at various times presenting himself as Mexican, Cuban, or African American. It seems that Ellis was born in Victoria, Texas, to recently freed slaves and later created a new identity for himself as Guillermo Enrique Eliseo, a Hispanic borderlander and businessperson living and working in Mexico and the United States. Through an extensive network of friends and partners built after many years of trading U.S. goods in Mexico, Ellis came up with a plan to settle twenty thousand African Americans in Durango, Mexico, and through a recruiter sought out Alabama blacks for the "paradise train" bound for Mexico (p. 215).

Samuel Truett details the history of Emilio Kosterlitzky, a Russian immigrant to Mexico who held a prominent military position in northern Mexico and was the favored contact for American mining and commercial interests before the Mexican Revolution. During his life as a Mexican officer and Indian fighter, Kosterlitzky was, as Truett puts it, "a twin agent of the Mexican state and transnational corporate power" who prided himself on being a professional soldier and protector of the Mexican frontier (p. 257). Benjamin Johnson provides a good summary of his brilliant recent book, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven, 2003). Johnson shows the way the separatist Plan of San Diego rebellion and the brutal war against insurgents and innocents on the part of the Texas Rangers led not to a continued revolutionary spirit on the part of Mexican Americans but to an embrace of Americanism. In this telling, Mexican Americans rejected separatism and embraced a partial acculturation. They accepted the tenets of U.S. nationalism while maintaining Mexican cultural practices in their private lives and paved the way for the Mexican American civil rights movement.

This collection highlights some of the best writing in borderlands and Southwest studies and is suitable for classroom use. Although not reviewed here, the essays on the "stories" of the borderlands were quite interesting and would be useful to those seeking to supplement history curriculum with literature, although the rambling and overly theoretical essay by Alexandra Minna Stern seems somewhat out of place here. Overall, this fine collection of essays adds considerably to our understanding of this developing field and challenges historians to take seriously the "transnational historical terrain" (p. 328).

MARC SIMON RODRIGUEZ

University of Notre Dame