Abstract
The author, an associate professor of history at Harvard University, leads readers through the first 80 years of life on this border following the Mexican land cessions stipulated by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. In her chapter "Holding the Line," she details efforts to control Apache raiders and defeat filibustering foreigners in the Mexican north, finding evidence of "the subtle ways in which the boundary line had already begun to change the landscape of power in the region" (p. 40).