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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...