Syllabus, US-Mexico Border Issues
HIST 416/516; x-list CJUS 416/516
Online, spring 2024
Instructor Brandon Morgan (Brandon, he/him)
Text me at (385) 743–8515
WNMU email: morganb4@wnmu.edu
Other email: bmorgan19@cnm.edu
Virtual office hours: T 10:00–11:00 am MST, via this Zoom link, or by appointment.
The academic field of border studies was born on the international boundary between the United States and Mexico. Scholars from both nations, historians primary among them, have come together over the years to recognize and evaluate the myriad ways that the border is at once a geographical fiction and a real, lived experience; a barrier and a point of connection; a marker of national and racial division and a delineation of a close partnership.
In this course, we will study the U.S.-Mexico line in terms of all its complexities and contradictions. The border was forged through a war of conquest and expansion in the mid-nineteenth century. From that time forward, it has meant different things at different scales to different people. Policymakers in Washington D.C. and Mexico City saw the need to flex their respective state muscles at their edges to shore up national power and identities. All the while, fronterizas/os at the local and regional levels continued to cross the river and the desert between the two nations to preserve family, business, religious, and social ties. Most recently, cries for border control have vilified immigrants and heightened militarization along the boundary. How can an understanding of the border’s complex and diverse history help us to engage meaningfully with ongoing public debates about thorny issues like immigration, narco- and human trafficking, international travel, and commerce?
Required Readings
All available via the WNMU bookstore, most in digital (Red Shelf) format:
Alice Baumgartner, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War (BasicBooks, 2020) ISBN: 9781541617773
Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border (Princeton University Press, 2011) ISBN: 9781400838639
Jennifer Koshatka Seman, Borderlands Curanderos: The Worlds of Santa Teresa Urrea and Don Pedrito Jaramillo (University of Texas Press, 2021) ISBN: 9781477321928
Kelly Lytle-Hernández, ¡Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010) ISBN: 9780520257696
Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border (Riverhead Books, 2018) ISBN: 9780735217720
Óscar Enrique Martínez, The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail (Verso, 2013) ISBN: 9781781681329
Grad Students (516) also need:
Julian Lim, Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (UNC Press, 2017) ISBN: 9781469635507
Rebecca Berke Galemba, Contraband Corridor: Making a Living at the Mexico- Guatemala Border (Stanford University Press, 2017) ISBN: 9781503603998
Optional for all (416/516):
Truett and Young, eds., Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History (Duke University Press, 2004) ISBN: 9780822333890
Other readings, including journal articles and internet resources, available in the appropriate Modules inside Canvas.
Coursework:
One of William Faulkner’s most quoted and paraphrased lines comes from Requiem for a Nun (1951): “The past is not dead. It’s not even past.” The border, perhaps more than many other historical subjects, underscores the reality of the intimate connections between past and present. To understand current public discourses about the border, we must understand its long, contested history.
To that end, our work together in this class will center on three guiding questions:
- What are the various purposes of borders and how are borders delineated and defined?
- How has the creation, delineation, and enforcement of the U.S.-Mexico border shaped the relationship between the two nation-states that it unites and divides?
- How have scholars approached the creation, delineation, and enforcement of borders and why has the U.S.-Mexico border stood out as a prime example for study? How have scholarly approaches to the border changed over time?
The learning activities outlined below are designed to create spaces where we will explore these questions — particularly the third one. That’s where we’ll focus the majority of our attention this semester. As we complete the coursework, keep in mind a fourth question that was posed in the introduction: how can an understanding of the border’s complex and diverse history help us to engage meaningfully with ongoing public debates about thorny issues like immigration, narco- and human trafficking, international travel, and commerce?
Although I’ve designated specific digital tools for the completion of each assignment, I realize that we have many different options for creating sharable knowledge online. If you would like to complete one of the assignments using a tool other than the one I’ve designated, please contact me so that we can discuss that possibility. I am a firm believer in Paulo Freire’s assertion that learning doesn’t come through the consumption of ideas, but by creating and recreating them. It’s okay to hack the class.
Activities and Assignments
Reading Comments: Our initial discussions of all of the assigned readings will begin on Mastodon, using #Hist416.
Blog Posts: Each of us will create several blog posts here on Medium over the course of the semester to reflect on the readings and activities we’ve used to explore the histories of the border.
Discussions: We will use the discussion board in Canvas to pose evaluative questions and think more deeply about the interpretive issues that we encounter through our study.
Border Timeline OR Story Map: We’ll each build a timeline or story map using a service like Tiki-Toki, Timeline JS, Google Earth Tour Builder, StoryMap JS, or TimeMapper. Our timelines/story maps will provide context to help us better understand and think about the historical composition of the border. This project will be completed in steps over the semester and will serve as the final project for the course. There are no exams.
Public Work
Since some of our work for the course will be created on publicly available and accessible platforms, including Medium, Tiki-Toki, Adobe Express, etc. Working publicly comes with both advantages and risks. Please think carefully about your digital identity and presence. If you would like to remain anonymous, I encourage you to use a pseudonym. If you’d rather not upload a photo, create an avatar for yourself or find an image that represents you. Think carefully about these choices and don’t hesitate to chat with me about them.
Plagiarism
In the digital realm, as well as in academia, authorship is a hotly debated topic — especially since the advent of generative AI. In literature, digital media, historical study, and even the social sciences, we are influenced by the ideas and insights of those who produced work on topics before we came to them. In this class, I encourage you to recognize the ideas (from authors, peers, internet sources, me, etc.) that have influenced your own thinking about the work you produce. You should feel confident in learning from others’ ideas and making them your own — this is the creation and recreation of knowledge that Paulo Freire was talking about. Make your learning your own by borrowing from others’ ideas and then breaking their assumptions — question them, turn them upside down, manipulate them, and apply them. This doesn’t mean that you can copy and paste wholesale someone else’s work and try to pass it off as your own. That’s just stealing.
Full disclosure: I borrowed and remixed these ideas from Jesse Stommel.
Philosophy on Teaching and Learning
First and foremost, teaching and learning are acts of love that beg our entire attention and our best efforts. For me, the purpose of teaching and learning in higher ed is to explore the contours of our humanity to better understand our role in constructing the society we live in. History, in particular, offers us the unique opportunity to build empathy and compassion for people who hold worldviews that differ from our own. In recognizing the diversity of perspectives on the past, the study of History emphasizes how we personally connect past and present. The study of past societies and cultures generates the power to put ourselves in others’ shoes and understand their viewpoints on their own terms. Will we put in the effort to do so?
Course Assessment and Grading
Reading Comments: 15%
Blog Posts: 30%
Discussions: 30%
Final Project: 25%
=100%
Scale:
A=90–100%
B=80–89%
C=70–79%
D=60–69%
F=0–59%
Your lowest Reading Comments, Discussion, and Blog scores will be dropped.
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