Forging the Tortilla Curtain: Cultural Drift and Change along the United States-Mexico Border from the Spanish Era to the Present.

By Thomas Torrans. (Fort Worth, Tex.: TCU Press, c. 2000. Pp. [xiv], 424. $29.95, ISBN 0-87565-231-X.)

This tour of United States-Mexico border relations from Spanish colonialism to California's Proposition 187 is an ambitious undertaking. Relying upon secondary sources and his journalistic background, Thomas Torrans tries to incorporate Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis into his perceptions of the border environment as a source of glory and potential opportunity. But it does not work. Turner himself would find border relationships way too complex and contradictory for his thesis to be used in this way.

As our guide, Torrans points to striking features of the border: its Great River, border towns, and social environment. He realizes that the contested border terrain is now full of corporate filibusters, free-traders, and multinational scalp-hunters of every sort, and he shows how border culture has been flexible in adapting to these agents of change. He builds on the idea of a "Mexamerica" that has become the cultural front line between Latin and Anglo America, yet he does not clearly define its geography or history.

The book is divided into three parts: "The Economics of Space," "Dividing The Continent," and "A Disparate Unity." Each part is subdivided into chapters briefly covering Spanish-Mexican institutions, Native Americans, filibustering, dispossession of the land, labor issues, border warfare, drug trafficking, and other topics that fall under the shadow of El Norte. Torrans is interested in historically "Americanizing Mexico" after 1850 (p. 161), and he quickly gets there, using the text to discuss North American aggression and imperial designs. He thus looks at the William Walkers and Henry Alexander Crabbs of the borderlands region, describing their failed schemes and dreams.

Part Three of the book is especially meaningful. Analysis of the Chinese question in U.S.-Mexico affairs is well done. Both neighbors sometimes indulged in hostility against available Chinese communities. Illegal immigration from Latin America is addressed as a necessary aspect of the global marketplace and an exploitation that knows no borders. International significance of the drug trade is also clearly explained. The discussion about illicit drugs presents the problem more as a result of U.S. demand than of Mexican avarice. Torrans believes that as America's appetite for drugs has increased, Mexico has become more compromised in supplying them. A brief epilogue analyzes U.S. "containment" policy in Latin America and its relation to a continued vague "commitment" to Manifest Destiny.

Like the narrative in some respects, the illustrations appear somewhat randomly selected. The endnotes tend to be more textual annotations than notes to sources, although a lengthy bibliography offers a diversity of secondary readings. Three maps complement the general reader's guided tour of the Borderlands.

ROBERTO MARIO SALMON
University of Texas-Pan American