Border Citizens

Reviews / Votes

There is much to applaud in Eric V. Meeks's Border Citizens, a sweeping account of shifting racial hierarchies and resistance in Arizona. . . . Meeks compellingly argues that racial identities in Arizona transformed from being relatively fluid in the early twentieth century to increasingly inflexible and static. The book is similarly successful at depicting resistance and resistant adaptation by Native and ethnic Mexican peoples. . . . The book is a most welcome addition and deserves wide readership among American historians as well as ethnic studies specialists. (Journal of American History) Border Citizens serves as a model for future borderlands scholarship. . . . This text will serve as a doorway for students in courses on the West, Chicano/a history, and Native American history to engage each other's respective themes by looking at the way they affect, relate, and respond to other groups. (Pacific Historical Review) Border Citizens is an exceptional work. . . . While making a significant contribution to the historiography of Arizona and the Southwest, this book will appeal to anyone interested in Ethnic Studies, Native American Studies, Mexican American Studies, and Border Studies. (Journal of Arizona History) Meeks has produced perhaps the definitive account of Southern Arizona's economic and political development while making a strong case for the absolute centrality of race in determining who benefited from these processes. (American Indian Culture and Research Journal) [Meeks] uses an impressive array of sources and skillfully covers a wide range of issues within eight tightly woven chapters. He is most adept not only in describing Anglo stereotypes of Mexican Americans and Native Americans but also in carefully conveying ethnic Mexican and indigenous viewpoints. . . . [Border Citizens] broadens the historically narrow black-and-white lens scholars have previously utilized to examine the condition of race relations and social inequity. (Journal of American Ethnic History) This impressive and thoroughly researched study provides a timely intervention, probing the history of the Arizona/Sonora borderlands and the interconnection between peoples and cultures of the region. Significantly, it reveals how changing conceptions of citizenship and race were central to the formation of the state and offers insight into why they continue to matter in the present. (The Western Historical Quarterly) By not giving primacy to any ethnic/racial group and by utilizing the scholarship of Native American, Borderlands, Chicana/o, labor, and race studies, Meeks reveals how complex cultural citizenship and nation building have been in Arizona's past, and from this remarkable work we can only surmise that it will continue to be so in the future. (American Historical Review)