Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the US-Mexico Divide

by C.J. Alvarez

From the boundary surveys of the 1850s to the ever-expanding fences and highway networks of the twenty-first century, Border Land, Border Water examines the history of the construction projects that have shaped the region where the United States and Mexico meet. Tracing the accretion of ports of entry, boundary markers, transportation networks, fences and barriers, surveillance infrastructure, and dams and other river engineering projects, C. J. Alvarez advances a broad chronological narrative that captures the full life cycle of border building. He explains how initial groundbreaking in the nineteenth century transitioned to unbridled faith in the capacity to control the movement of people, goods, and water through the use of physical structures. By the 1960s, however, the built environment of the border began to display increasingly obvious systemic flaws. More often than not, Alvarez shows, federal agencies in both countries responded with more construction―“compensatory building” designed to mitigate unsustainable policies relating to immigration, black markets, and the natural world. Border Land, Border Water reframes our understanding of how the border has come to look and function as it does and is essential to current debates about the future of the US-Mexico divide.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

312 pages, Hardcover

Published October 22, 2019

Reviews

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I continue to be astonished by the number of people who believe that Joe Biden somehow "opened" a border that was presumably previously closed. For one, everything I read demonstrates that deportations under Biden were substantially higher than those under the first Trump administration (although, as always, changes in definition muddy the statistics some). Biden also made the asylum system tougher, if not consistent.

Such opinions betray a fundamental ignorance of the border, which was not even really surveyed for decades after the nineteenth century treaty that ceded the American west to this country. (Truthfully, as this book points out, adjustments were still being made in the 1960's to account for changes in the riverbed of the Rio Bravo/Grande). It follows a long meandering river, separates interdependent cities, and crosses mountains, deserts, and the territory of the Tohno O'odham nation. The trade routes that it bisects existed before either nation was created and continue to handle hundreds of billions of merchandise, legal and illegal. If it was easy to "close" that border, it would have already been done.

C.J. Alvarez sketches out the history of this contested region with rigorous and fascinating detail. My favorite is the Tejanos who devised a long-distance lighting system to warn each other of the presence of the Texas Rangers who--and too few people know this--conducted a reign of terror along the border between 1910 and 1920.