Content area
Full text
Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History. Ed. by Samuel Truett and Elliott Young. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. xviii, 344 pp. Cloth, $79.95, ISBN 0-8223-3353-8. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 0-8223-3389-9.)
Continental Crossroads, Samuel Truett and Elliott Young's coedited book, embarks upon a transnational dialogue about the history of the United States-Mexico borderlands. Their intent is to complicate history and offer new lenses for looking at canonized narratives. This approach merges different U.S. historical traditions in order better to understand the historical interrelations of the regions within the borderlands and to plot a rough chronology of formative changes.
In the introduction, Truett and Young offer an overview of the historical genres that have been used to represent the borderlands in the United States and Mexico. This chapter is the core of the book, and it provides an insightful theoretical discussion of how modernity and poststructuralism have influenced the contributors' emplotment of the past. They begin with the classical works of Herbert Eugene Bolton and examine how this school...