معلومات المقرر

HIST 498/C (Fall 2024): ADVANCED TOPICS IN HISTORY

Debates and distortions about the US-Mexican border are central to American political attention in our current moment. In the winter of 2024, nearly half of all adult Americans reportedly accepted the notion that illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country. In this class, we reframe current frameworks of the US-Mexican frontier by examining the long history of the borderlands region and the interactions between the Indigenous people, Spaniards, Blacks, and Anglo-Americans who populated it across time. We will use both scholarly and eye-witness accounts from Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’s tale of his sixteenth-century journey from Florida through Texas and California to Luis Alberto Urrea’s reconstruction of the harrowing story of 26 Mexican men who paid to be smuggled across the dangerous Sonora-Arizona crossing known as The Devil’s Highway in 2001. This seminar focuses on the key issues of race, labour, identity, and community to unpack current misperceptions of the border, border policy, and border impermeability.