This volume presents quantitative material collected from a variety of sources for a border region defined as encompassing California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas in the United States and Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas in Mexico. As Volume 11 in the Supplement Series to Statistical Abstract of Latin America, Border Statistics offers significantly more data than its predecessor, Statistical Abstract of the United States—Mexico Borderlands (1984). Functionally, it is organized like the earlier volume into two major but unequal parts: more than four hundred pages of tables (“Statistics and Time Series”) and less than fifty pages of text (“Quantitative Analysis of the Border Region”). Part One is further divided into four principal categories: “Life on the Border,” “Work and Migration,” “Border Economy,” and “Trade, Tourism, and Finance.” Part Two consists of three quantitative essays: an overview of the border region by Paul Ganster and Alan Sweedler, a comparative treatment of wage and price data from Tijuana and San Diego by Jeffrey Bortz, and an analysis of the social costs of the maquiladora industry by George Baker.

The problems and shortcomings of Border Statistics are largely those of its theme. The border as an entity is poorly defined in an institutional sense, and few statistics were collected and compiled in ways that enhance understanding. The book makes no attempt to assess the veracity of data or to relate statistics to source context. Absent here is any analysis of the principal statistical sources cited. Chronologically, the quantity of data reported is uneven. Most statistics end at or before 1980, with only a few series (less than 8 percent of the tables) extending beyond 1984. Less than 5 percent of the tables present statistics from before 1930. Finally, the book is handicapped by the nature of the print medium. The same facts and figures incorporated into an electronic data base would be more accessible and more amenable to quantitative analysis.

Even with these limitations, this work is an indispensable resource tool for everyone who writes about or otherwise investigates the border, its people, or its products. Where else in a single volume can one find relevant data extracted from major governmental and private statistical sources in the United States and Mexico and from hundreds of books, monographs, articles, and other published and unpublished materials? For the most part, statistics are presented in legible, well-organized, and self-explanatory tables. A list of the volume’s 450 tables and an index provide access to most categories of information that readers are likely to seek.