Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands

In 2005, a, rancher and newspaper editor named Chris Simcox set out to maintain the border between the southwestern states and Mexico. He and his Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, dedicated to reporting undocumented migrants crossing into the U.S., were merely the latest in a lineage of self-appointed patriots patrolling the border. Nearly 100 years earlier, Harry Wheeler, an Arizona sheriff, stormed through Cochise County asking illegal residents, “Are you an American, or are you not?” before rounding them up in the Bisbee Deportation. At the turn of the last century, Cochise County represented the “New America” that emerged from the nation's incorporation of northwestern Mexico, the immigration of Europeans to work as miners and the passage of constitutional amendments loosening the racial strictures around citizenship. Benton-Cohen uses the backdrop of the Wild West, with its bustling commerce and growing population, to wage a discussion on racial division and the power of “white privilege”—even where the black-white dichotomy didn't necessarily exist—in this richly detailed anthropological look into the creation of racial boundaries and their application in present-day immigration reform debates. (May)