Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona

Runner-up, National Council on Public History Book Award, 2008 Southwest Book Award, Border Regional Library Association, 2008 Borders cut through not just places but also relationships, politics, economics, and cultures. Eric V. Meeks examines how ethno-racial categories and identities such as Indian, Mexican, and Anglo crystallized in Arizona's borderlands between 1880 and 1980. South-central Arizona is home to many ethnic groups, including Mexican Americans, Mexican immigrants, and semi-Hispanicized indigenous groups such as Yaquis and Tohono O'odham. Kinship and cultural ties between these diverse groups were altered and ethnic boundaries were deepened by the influx of Euro-Americans, the development of an industrial economy, and incorporation into the U.S. nation-state. Old ethnic and interethnic ties changed and became more difficult to sustain when Euro-Americans arrived in the region and imposed ideologies and government policies that constructed starker racial boundaries. As Arizona began to take its place in the national economy of the United States, primarily through mining and industrial agriculture, ethnic Mexican and Native American communities struggled to define their own identities. They sometimes stressed their status as the region's original inhabitants, sometimes as workers, sometimes as U.S. citizens, and sometimes as members of their own separate nations. In the process, they often challenged the racial order imposed on them by the dominant class. Appealing to broad audiences, this book links the construction of racial categories and ethnic identities to the larger process of nation-state building along the U.S.-Mexico border, and illustrates how ethnicity can both bring people together and drive them apart.

Table of Contents:
* List of Illustrations * Acknowledgments * Introduction *1. Desert Empire *2. From Noble Savage to Second-Class Citizen *3. Crossing Borders *4. Defining the White Citizen-Worker *5. The Indian New Deal and the Politics of the Tribe *6. Shadows in the Sun Belt *7. The Chicano Movement and Cultural Citizenship *8. Villages, Tribes, and Nations * Conclusion. Borders Old and New * Notes * Selected Bibliography * Index

About the Author :
Eric V. Meeks is an associate professor of history at Northern Arizona University.

Review :
"...[T]he book is a most welcome addition and deserves wide readership among American historians as well as ethnic studies specialists." "Border Citizens serves as a model for future borderlands scholarship... This text will serve as a doorway for students in courses on the West, Chicano/a history, and Native American history to engage each other's respective themes by looking at the way they affect, relate, and respond to other groups." "Border Citizens is an exceptional work... While making a significant contribution to the historiography of Arizona and the Southwest, this book will appeal to anyone interested in Ethnic Studies, Native American Studies, Mexican American Studies, and Border Studies." "Meeks has produced perhaps the definitive account of Southern Arizona's economic and political development while making a strong case for the absolute centrality of race in determining who benefited from these processes." "[Meeks] uses an impressive array of sources and skillfully covers a wide range of issues within eight tightly woven chapters. He is most adept not only in describing Anglo stereotypes of Mexican Americans and Native Americans but also in carefully conveying ethnic Mexican and indigenous viewpoints… [Border Citizens] broadens the historically narrow black-and-white lens scholars have previously utilized to examine the condition of race relations and social inequity." "This impressive and thoroughly researched study provides a timely intervention, probing the history of the Arizona/Sonora borderlands and the interconnection between peoples and cultures of the region. Significantly, it reveals how changing conceptions of citizenship and race were central to the formation of the state and offers insight into why they continue to matter in the present." "By not giving primacy to any ethnic/racial group and by utilizing the scholarship of Native American, Borderlands, Chicana/o, labor, and race studies, Meeks reveals how complex cultural citizenship and nation building have been in Arizona’s past, and from this remarkable work we can only surmise that it will continue to be so in the future." "Eric Meeks’s first book is one of the most interesting and insightful works in either American Indian or Latino history I have seen for some time."