HIST 359 Mexico-United States Borderlands

This course traces the history of a region that has undergone a series of extensive transformations in the last three hundred years. In the modern era, it changed from a periphery of the Spanish empire to provinces of northern Mexico and finally to the southwest region of the United States. The area is a site of complicated and overlapping histories marked by processes of colonialism, diaspora, and nationalism. With particular attention to issues of race, gender, place, and power we will examine the Mexico-U.S. borderlands through Chicana/o history, Mexican history, and U.S. Western history as well as through fiction and art that explores the themes of boundaries, the body, and space.