The story of how Mexico lost half its territory to the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century has been told numerous times. Andrés Reséndez’s contribution aims to advance our understanding by adding the question of national identity formation to the analysis. The author succeeds in this goal, and his focus on identity leads to new interpretations about how the Mexican north became the U.S. Southwest.
The author maintains that “identity choices almost always follow a situational logic” (p. 3). He makes identity a fluid proposition, especially on a border located at the frontier of two nation-states in formation, where people routinely made choices that accumulated over time to become part of the “frontier psyche” (p. 3). Reséndez argues that “two tsunami-like structural forces swept through this frontier area during the first half of the nineteenth century: state and market” (p. 3). These forces provided the larger...
