Mexico-US Borderlands History: A Reading List

As the first university press in the South, UNC Press pioneered in tackling issues of the day through the honest, and sometimes gritty, lens of reality, in order to challenge the status quo in a historically diverse and complex region. Our association with the oldest public university in the nation inspires in us a commitment to bring new and established peer-reviewed research to academic and general audiences—notably recognized for our publishing on US and world history—a mission that informs all we do.

Learn about the complex histories of Mexico and the US through the following selection of UNC Press titles. Request them at your library, or order directly via uncpress.org and receive a 30% discount on print format books using promo code 01SOCIAL30.

All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands by Stephanie Elizondo Griest,
with a new preface by the author
“Griest glimpses the modern immigrant experience through the lives of people who live in more than one culture. . . . Wrestles with profound questions of identity and belonging in a constantly shifting and increasingly unstable world.”—Publishers Weekly

Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship by Omar Valerio-Jiménez
“An exceptionally well-researched investigation into the ways Mexican Americans used the memory of conquest and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to push for civil rights in the US Southwest. His work is an important reminder of the impact of legal agreements and their capacity to shape communities, identities, and collective memories across generations.”—American Journal of Legal History

Borders of Violence and Justice: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Law Enforcement in the Southwest, 1835-1935 by Brian D. Behnken
“Compellingly argue[d]. . . . Challenging popular myths that vigilantism emerged in the absence of functioning legal institutions, Behnken demonstrates that extralegal violence in fact operated with and through law enforcement across the decades of his study.”—Western Historical Quarterly

These Ragged Edges: Histories of Violence along the U.S.-Mexico Border
edited by Andrew J. Torget and Gerardo Gurza-Lavalle
“The scholars in this volume deepen the complex understandings of this region but also contribute to broader histories of violence and limn the experience of navigating the hard edges of nations, empires, and markets—matters far from contained in these borderlands alone.”—Journal of American History

Are We Not Foreigners Here?: Indigenous Nationalism in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
by Jeffrey M. Schulze
“A timely contribution to the historiography of transnational peoples straddling the U.S.-Mexico border.”—Pacific Historical Review

Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands by Julian Lim
“Lim’s Porous Borders is a delight to read. It is a model of superlative historical writing to which all ought to aspire. With enviable ease, it converses with the literature in several fields, including immigration, borderlands, legal, and urban history.”—Journal of Social History

Migrant Longing: Letter Writing across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands by Miroslava Chávez-García
“Clearly of deep intellectual value. . . . Provides an unfortunately needed humanization of Mexican immigrants during a time period when countless millions of Americans view Mexican and Latin American immigrants as a scourge to be kept at bay. Ultimately, this is scholarship at its finest.”—Western Historical Quarterly