Borders

In the morning hours of February 2, 1848, Mexican and United States government officials gathered within northern Mexico City to sign a treaty ending the twenty-one-month war between the two nation-states.¹ This settlement, known as the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, forever changed the course of history for the North American southwest as it led to the creation of a 1,954 mile border, both imagined as a line in the sand and a line demarcated by natural landmarks: oceans, rivers, mountains. Overnight, the U.S. obtained nearly two-thirds of Mexico’s claimed Indian lands above the Río Bravo river, and almost half of its western coast up through 1854. While this newly drawn border separated people, land, and, based on longitude, determined one’s status as a citizen, such a border also reified notions of race, gender, and sexuality that would shape the national histories of both Mexico and the United States from the nineteenth into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This chapter canvasses the history and power of borders in late North American and United States history when borders helped facilitate the conditions for the formations, migrations, and transformations of sexuality over time.