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In today’s guest post, Danielle Smith, Interim Director of the Center for International Studies at Georgia Southern University writes about the recent history of Europe’s borderlands in the context of the on-going refugee crisis. Danielle’s research interests cover memory and identity constructions in transitional societies, especially focusing on Europe. 

Quickly skimming the international press coverage from a week ago yields headlines that flattered Angela Merkel and the German government for their openness and incredible dedication to taking humanitarian action in the face of a seemingly overwhelming number of asylum-seeking refugees entering Europe. The Economist went so far to praise Chancellor Merkel’s “brave, decisive, and right” leadership on the issue as a sea change from years of “cautiously incremental decision-making.” This global eagerness to praise the German government’s actions glossed over – as anyone who has followed the state’s relationship with its minority populations can predict – the internal derision and push-back from nativist and nationalist groups.

This time the rhetoric was ignited by the arrival of refugees in numbers larger than predicted, and served to magnify far-right, right, and even some centrist party fears about safety, security, and the fate of Germany as a nation. To these groups, Germany’s overwhelming burden stems from the inability and unwillingness of other European Union states to take on their fair share of refugees, as determined a quota recently set by the European Commission. Nationalist rhetoric contextualizes this crisis as further weakening Germany economically and culturally. On September 13, the German government announced its intention to reverse previous pledges and close its southern borders with Austria by 5pm, thus temporarily exiting the Schengen Area. These chaotic and vacillating decisions represent far larger than a single domestic or foreign policy action by the state of Germany. It does, rather, symbolize decades of unresolved issues related to the development of a supra-national European identity and the role of state and national borders that stubbornly remain in conflict with the idea of “Europe” as an identity space.

An important feature in the creation of identities and nations are borderlands, representing a set of boundaries where people attempt to define the beginning and ending of “otherness,” a task that can only be achieved in the idealistic self-delineating of national identities. On the contrary, borderlands are often classified as frontiers because they represent a co-mingling of identities along politically designated boundaries. These complicated situations suffer from a variety of conflicting responses related to the proper conceptualization for imagining these landscapes and dividing national groups, ranging from attempted cultural integration, to forced assimilation, to outbreaks of violent ethnic chauvinism. For the EU, the Schengen Agreement originated as a remedy for divisive centripetal forces which produce nationalist center-seeking and “othering” at defined borders.

In large geographic states, people have the ability to physically move away from borderlands to the center and escape the constant pressure of and disentangle themselves from the immediacy of these otherness questions. Pursuing nation-states counters the purpose and goals of developing a European Union of ever closely tied states. Fostering borderless mobility between states serves to confer the conception of a state to the larger territory of Europe, especially as comprised by those states that agree to and abide by the terms of Schengen. This is an important point as the classical definition of a state does include the presence of a permanent population. Borderless mobility, then, enables heterogeneity amongst nations formerly confined to specific spaces and eliminates inclusion/exclusion dynamics by erasing borders that foster such practices. Ideally, no European whose nationality originates within the Schengen Area can be an “other,” and these national identities become combined into the ideal of “European.” Continue reading →

We’re excited to present this guest post by Gregory Lella, a PhD student in the History department at the State University of New York at Stonybrook. His main research interest is internal law enforcement and incarceration within the U.S. military, particularly in enclaves, bases, and facilities located outside of the United States. He is interested in how the military’s parallel culture and legal system functioned in the context of the carceral state.

Donoghue, Michael. Borderland on the Isthmus: Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the Canal Zone. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014.

Michael Donoghue’s Borderland on the Isthmus is an ambitious attempt to chronicle the social history of the Panama Canal Zone using the lens of borderlands history. Focusing on the years between 1903 and 1999, Donoghue produces a study of identity, culture, race, gender, and sexuality that accomplishes many of its objectives but in some moments falls short of its challenging goals.

Donoghue studies the Canal Zone as a noncontiguous borderland—or a borderland geographically disconnected from a larger imperial entity—and he structures his chapters thematically rather than chronologically, with each focusing on a different group of people or the complications of a particular identity. Though this decision results sometimes in confusion for the reader—several subheadings and broad jumps between different topics can be disorienting—his analyses of race relations in the Panama Canal Zone and the relations between civilians (Zonians) and the military are insightful. When it comes to analyzing gender relations in and around this borderland, however, Donoghue places far more emphasis on the history of sex and prostitution than gender relations on the whole. The book’s tendency to focus on spectacular and shocking stories centering on sex—for instance, the first chapter’s opening anecdote about American GIs being fellated through a border fence by Panamanian prostitutes—only works if the author successfully uses these stories to illustrate a larger, deeper argument. Some of the book’s stories are loosely connected by theme but the reader is left wishing at times that the author made stronger, more coherent arguments to follow. Continue reading →

Coordinators for the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies—Tejas Foco have sent along three calls for submissions for awards considerations ahead of the 2016 conference. We’ve attached the PDFs below:

2016 NACCS TEJAS POETRY BOOK AWARD

2016 NACCS TEJAS AWARD FOR FICTION

2016 NACCS TEJAS NON-FICTION BOOK AWARD

THEME: Preserving Traditions, Stories, and Customs, Values, of the Mexican and Mexican American Community

The 2016 NACCS Tejas Foco conference is an interdisciplinary conference that is calling for submissions that offer insight into traditions, oral history (leyedas), passed down by our antepasados, customs, dichos, creencias, folkore (i.e., La Llorana, El Cucuy), language (i.e., caló), food, religion (i.e.religious drama pastorela), literature, music (baladas), pastimes (i.e., game of Huachas), folk art (i.e., murals, retablos), folk medicine (sobador/a, curandero/a), education, and Latino/a history and how they affect our everyday lives and identity.

We encourage submissions that seek to address the following, but not limited to, questions:

• What external socioeconomic forces causes us to move away from these customs and traditions?
• What generational factors operate in explaining the dilemma behind our children becoming non-practitioners of nuestra cultura and especially practicing the Spanish language and recognizing the value of bilingualism as an asset?
• How does assimilation into American mainstream culture affect these customs and traditions and how has our culture changed over time?
• What can we do, if anything, to stop the disappearance of customs and traditions? Or is disappearance inevitable and/or necessary to move forward? (Are some customs better left behind?)
• How does the Mexican and Mexican American culture change American national and local cultural practices?
• What is the role that folklore and public culture play in social movements? How do social movements influence Chicano/Mexicano culture?
• How could Mexican and Mexican values serve to enrich contemporary mainstream America?
• How does gender, sexuality and LGBT analyses offer new insights to understanding customs and traditions?

Continue reading →

Today’s guest blogger, David Purificato, is a Ph.D. student at the Department of History, SUNY at Stony Brook University, we are excited to feature his book review on Borderlands History! David is interested in nineteenth century antebellum American cultural, social, and domestic history, with a focus in material culture and the history of the book.  He is currently conducting preliminary dissertation research by looking at backgrounds in nineteenth century illustrations and Fashion Plates to better understand how the book as an object functioned in the American parlor.   

Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America. By Peter Andreas, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 355 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. Paperback, $19.95).

Peter Andreas’s Smuggler Nation examines North America’s long relationship to smuggling and the nation’s history of illegal trade from the colonial period to the twenty-first century. He argues that federal attempts to stop illicit “cross border economic flows” to and away from national borders have “defined and shaped” the United States, and ultimately created the modern American police state (2). Asserting that today’s appeals for border control suffer from “historical amnesia” and the belief in the myth that the U.S. ever had secure borders, Andreas looks for a long and deep history of the clandestine to demonstrate how the United States’ development has always been tied to the practice of smuggling (3).

Continue reading →

For much of its history, the United States has fostered the dream of building an empire. From visions of the Empire of Liberty to Manifest Destiny and the expansion westward, colonizing native peoples and increasing Washington’s dominion at the expense of Mexico. In 1893, as Frederick Jackson Turner’s observation that the “frontier” had closed in U.S. society, this did not mean a cessation in a desire for expansion and control of new territory. The Monroe Doctrine grouped the entire Western Hemisphere under the aegis of the United States, Americans sought to command economic and political opportunities in the region. The result of this policy had far-reaching social, political, and economic ramifications for the other countries involved.[1]

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the frontier became the border, the United States expanded its notions of what an American empire should encompass in terms of ideas and territory. This growing imperial dragnet ensnared elite Nicaraguans with modernizing dreams, a savvy island dictator who hoped to “blanche” his realm, and the Chinese diasporic community in the Republic of Panama. Studying how local elites and non-elites viewed American power, and interacted with it, reveals the dynamic movement and complexity of ideas related to empire as they were transmitted between “periphery” and “metropole.” Continue reading →

Women’s History Month is slowly coming to a close. This month the Borderlands History Interview Project chose to focus on the career of Vicki L. Ruiz, a pioneer in women’s history of the borderlands. We were not the only ones who thought to celebrate Ruiz. The University of California, Irvine’s convocation of the Nuestra América: Rethinking Fronteras in US History, A Conference Honoring the Career of Vicki L. Ruiz sought to do just that! What follows is a brief recounting of the conference and a discussion of the influence Ruiz continues to have in the academy.

At the Nuesta América conference, Dr. Margie Brown-Coronel asked the audience “What Would Vicki Do (WWVD)?” Well, she’d do a lot. She’s the outgoing president of the Organization of American Historians and the current president of the American Historical Association. In the past Vicki Ruiz was president of the Pacific Coast Branch of the AHA, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and the American Studies Association. What else would she do? She authored and edited over a dozen books and articles on the history of Mexican-American women and men in the United States. In 2012, she was the first Latina to be inducted into the Academy of Arts and Sciences. At the end of March, Ruiz will be celebrated by the National Women’s History Project as a Women’s History month honoree. Her scholarship would center the lives of Chicanas and Latinas in the United States history and foreground the importance of the borderlands in this larger narrative. While her career, scholarship, and service have garnered the attention of the academy for decades, her teaching and mentorship also reveal all that Vicki has done and continues to do. Continue reading →

“Camille Guérin-Gonzales died on Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2015, at Agrace Hospice Care in Madison, after 14 months of living exuberantly, purposefully, and consciously with a cancer diagnosis that she never let define her…”

On Friday, February 13, 2015, I had the privilege and distinct honor of interviewing Dr. Vicki Ruiz, Chicana scholar, historian, and professor at the University of California, Irvine. This was the second interview in our Borderlands History Interview Project (BHIP) and it was marvelous. We discussed her views on balancing work and life, her current projects, her take on borderlands history and its significance within the canon, as well as critical intersections between race, gender, and class within our scholarship and the academy.

Continue reading →