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Maria Raquel Casas, Eric V. Meeks. Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona. Austin: University of Texas Press. 2007. Pp. xiii, 326. Cloth $60.00, paper $24.95, The American Historical Review, Volume 115, Issue 3, June 2010, Pages 847–848, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.115.3.847
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A significant contribution that Spanish Borderlands history has made to American historiography is its ability to provide a different historical context for discussions of race and ethnicity. Seeing how “Indians,” “Mexicans,” and “Anglos” encountered and defined one another has deepened our understanding about how racial-ethnic identities are historically constructed in particular places and times, but few works have investigated these issues as thoroughly and provocatively as Eric V. Meeks's well-written book. Meeks argues that the history of Arizona followed a dualistic process whereby the establishment of an Anglo political economy and “the ways in which race, ethnicity shaped labor markets, defined citizenship criteria, and inscribed national boundaries” were constantly challenged by people of indigenous and Mexican descent through resistant adaptation, the “unanticipated, resilient, and sometimes defiant ways in which people adapt to impositions by those in power” (p. 4). Meeks's work is not merely a discussion of subordinate, subaltern resistance to a dominant political economy; rather, by examining race and ethnicity from the 1880s to roughly the 1980s he points to the tension and complexity of identity formation by Native Americans and peoples of Mexican descent. For example, in the 1960s a group calling itself the Pascua Yaquis requested federal recognition as Native Americans with rights to establish a reservation, even though the majority of Yaqui spoke Spanish or Yaqui, had adapted “Mexican” cultural practices and kinship ties, occupied similar socioeconomic spaces with Mexicans and Mexican Americans, and resisted being identified as Native American. By examining inter-, intra-ethnic, and racial tensions, Meeks forces readers to question their assumptions about what constitutes “Anglo,” “Indian,” and “Mexican” identities in the twentieth century.
