Betty Mary Goetting opened the first birth control clinic on the U.S.-Mexico border in 1937. The rhetoric she used to advocate for contraception in El Paso, Texas, paralleled eugenic trends in the birth control movement nationwide, focused on curbing fertility rates among those considered of poor mind and body. Where previous studies focus on the urban North, this borderlands case study places the birth control movement’s attention to overpopulation within the context of immigration restrictions at the U.S.-Mexico border. Goetting’s birth control campaigns, supported by the movement’s pioneer Margaret Sanger, targeted Mexican-origin women as part of a larger process that sought to protect the body politic from non-white immigrants while simultaneously exploiting their labor. Despite Catholic backlash against birth control and the racist rhetoric of Anglo birth control advocates, Mexican-origin women enthusiastically visited the El Paso birth control clinic. Given the dearth of health care afforded working-class, Mexican-origin women at this time, hundreds of women used the clinic’s services for their own purposes—reminding us that birth control movements offer a paradox of coercion and choice.

This special issue of Pacific Historical Review , “Gender and Intimacy across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” is guest edited by Miroslava Chávez-García and Verónica Castillo-Muñoz. The articles in the collection reflect the primacy of gender and intimacy as tools of analysis in recovering the experiences of women of Spanish-Mexican and Mexican origin in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century borderlands. As the authors demonstrate, using gender and intimacy, along with race, ethnicity, class, and culture, allow for the recovery of women’s personal and family lives and how they intersected with the economic, political, and social transformations of the region. The result is nuanced understandings of how women negotiated and resisted state-based, patriarchal ideologies and practices that sought to limit their lives and those of their families. The special issue includes a preface from Marc S. Rodriguez, this introduction, and articles by Celeste Menchaca, Erika Pérez, and Margie Brown-Coronel.

Border fences have a long history in the United States, and that history is deeply entangled with the rise of the carceral state. As fences along the U.S.-Mexico border grew over the course of the twentieth century, they increasingly restricted the mobility of migrants both as they crossed the U.S.-Mexico divide and once they were within U.S. territory. This article analyzes how fear of being apprehended, arrested, detained, or deported has forced migrants to remain in the shadows; and it argues that as border fences expanded in length and height, they transformed the United States into a massive, carceral state.

The mid-nineteenth century territorial growth of the United States was complex and contradictory. Not only did Mexico, Britain, and Native Americans contest U.S. territorial objectives; so, too, did many within the United States and in some cases American western settlers themselves. The notion of manifest destiny reflects few of these complexities. The authors argue that manifest destiny was a partisan idea that emerged in a context of division and uncertainty intended to overawe opponents of expansion. Only in the early twentieth century, as the United States had consolidated its hold on the North American West and was extending its power into the Caribbean and Pacific, did historians begin to describe manifest destiny as something that it never was in the nineteenth century: a consensus. To a significant extent, historians continue to rely on the idea to explain U.S. expansion. The authors argue for returning a sense of context and contingency to the understanding of mid-nineteenth-century U.S. expansion.

This article examines a debate that emerged in El Paso, Texas at the turn of the twentieth century surrounding the transmission of pulmonary tuberculosis from predominantly Anglo American migrants to the city’s ethnic Mexican population. Reports of Anglo-to-Mexican infections came from cities and towns throughout the U.S. Southwest, but by 1915 El Paso had emerged as the epicenter of the debate. Using popular and professional sources, the article tracks a shift in dominant perceptions of tubercular contagion from an association with white bodies to Mexican ones. An early narrative casts the Mexican female domestic servant as a victim of the infectious indigent white consumptive male health seeker. In 1915, as the Mexican Revolution raged and tensions between whites and ethnic Mexicans in the city sharpened, federal public health authorities published a report dismissing health seekers as a source of contagion to ethnic Mexicans. This article highlights the power of notions of race, gender, and class in shaping perceptions of and responses to epidemics, often with tragic results.

The scholarship on the “Yellow Peril” looks at Japanese immigrants (Issei) as an object of anti-Asian racialization in domestic politics or as a distraction in U.S.-Japanese bilateral diplomacy. Seldom do historians consider its ramifications outside those contexts. They also lack perspective on the impact of Issei practice on the geopolitics of Yellow Peril, which spread from California to the U.S.-Mexican borderlands and beyond. This article examines the role of Issei settler colonialism, as well as its unintended consequences, in the formation of discourse on the transborder Yellow Peril. That discourse propelled white America to reaffirm its commitment to the Monroe Doctrine, shifting the nature of U.S. diplomacy from the endeavor to keep European rivals out of the Western Hemisphere to one that sought to exclude the Japanese racial enemy from America’s “backyard.” It culminated in the construction of a hemispheric national security regime.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Spaniards, Mexicans, and Americans of the Far West forged dynamic economies based on livestock, furs, and agriculture. Simultaneously, though, Natives in the borderlands between New Mexico and California expanded their economic and military power even as Californios and Nuevo Mexicanos emerged as dominant ruling classes. Through the formation and expansion of an indigenous captive-and-livestock raiding economy, the “Interior World” challenged the power of newcomers in the Far West. Understanding this raiding economy provides an important look at colonial exchanges from the indigenous perspective within the context of interregional trading networks and borderlands.