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Rethinking History and the Nation-State: Mexico and the United States as a Case Study: A Special Issue
Contributors to this issue have lived transnational lives, pursuing their intellectual
interests across and between different political sovereignties and cultures. As we at the
journal put together the issue, we found that transnational studies often call for crossing
boundaries between history and other disciplines, and the contributors' biographies record
that kind of border crossing as well. And they show that in Mexico, amid political
transformation, historians and other scholars are helping to shape public discussion of the
future of that nation-state--and perhaps of others.
Visit the Web supplement for this issue,
where we have created "picture galleries" to illustrate conflicts and meanings generated
by the border.
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Articles
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Introduction
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Rethinking History and the Nation-State: Mexico and the United States
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by David Thelen
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Chronology: Some Events in the History of Mexico and the Border
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[Top]
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Transnational Challenges to Nation-Centered Stories
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Democracy in Mexico, the Complex Roles of the United States: A Conversation with Sergio Aguayo
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Sergio Aguayo, a scholar and teacher at El Colegio de México in Mexico City who was educated in Mexico and the United States, is internationally known as a champion of democracy and human rights. He most recently published Myths and [Mis]Perceptions: U.S. Elite Visions of Mexico (1998) and 1968: Los archivos de la violencia (1968: The archives of violence, 1998). He helped found and lead important Mexican human rights groups and advises the United Nations high commissioner for refugees. The MacArthur and Ford foundations and the National Endowment for Democracy have honored his work. Since 1984 he has written a weekly column that now appears in sixteen Mexican newspapers.
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Mexico, the Latin North American Nation: A Conversation with Carlos Rico Ferrat
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Carlos Rico Ferrat has combined at least two careers while crossing and recrossing many borders. After studying at universities in Mexico and the United States, he taught and wrote about international politics--particularly relations between Mexico and the United States--for sixteen years. He has taught in Mexico, the United States, and Europe and throughout Latin America. Meanwhile, he advised the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1992 he became a full-time diplomat, successively heading the ministry's Latin American and North American activities. He is now consul of Mexico in Boston.
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[Top]
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Migrants and the Nation-State
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Migration, Emergent Ethnicity, and the "Third Space": The Shifting Politics of Nationalism in Greater Mexico
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David G. Gutiérrez has done much to develop the field of Chicano history, thereby raising questions about the history of the American West as a region and the United States as a nation. An associate professor of history at the University of California, San Diego, he has received many honors for his scholarship and teaching. The Western History Association chose his Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity as the best first book in western American history, 1995-1997. He is at work on a book about ethnicity and citizenship in recent United States history.
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The New Era of Mexican Migration to the United States
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Jorge Durand, professor of geography and anthropology at the University of Guadalajara, studies migrations across the United States-Mexico border in ways that transcend the usual borders of social science. He was educated in Mexico and France, and his books have been published in Mexico, the United States, and France. With Douglas S. Massey (who also collaborates with Durand in this issue), he assembled and commented on retablos, paintings by Mexicans offered in thanksgiving for supernatural help, often help in crossing the United States-Mexico border. The result was the prizewinning book Miracles on the Border (1995). He and Massey direct the Mexican Migration Project.
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A Nation beyond Its Borders: The Program for Mexican Communities Abroad
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While serving in the Mexican government and foreign service, Rodulfo Figueroa-Aramoni has drawn on his interest in public administration. He was educated in Mexico and England, where he studied social science and public administration. He has been ambassador of Mexico to Colombia and director of the Program for Mexican Communities Abroad of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He is now consul general of Mexico in Houston, Texas. In 1981 he published Las priorides nacionales y las politicas de reclutamiento de funcionarios publicos en los países en desarrollo (National priorities and recruitment of public servants in developing countries); it was reissued in 1995.
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Fostering Identities: Mexico's Relations with Its Diaspora
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Carlos González Gutiérrez is a member of the Mexican foreign service who might be called a diplomat with a weakness for social science. After graduate studies at the University of Southern California, in a city bustling with migrants from Mexico, he helped create the Mexican government's outreach to the migrants. Formerly consul for community affairs in the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles and director of community affairs for the Program for Mexican Communities Abroad, he heads the Division of Hispanic Affairs of the Mexican Embassy to the United States. He has written about Mexico's relations with people of Mexican origin in the United States.
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[Top]
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Historical Perspectives on the Mexican Moment
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Janus and the Northern Colossus: Perceptions of the United States in the Building of the Mexican Nation
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Francisco Valdés-Ugalde has consciously tried to link scholarly work with journalism. A political scientist at the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM) and other institutions in Mexico City, he has taught widely in the United States. His scholarship has examined business-state relations in Mexico and the theoretical and international implications of state reform. The latter project has yielded his most recent book, Reforma del estado y coordinación social (State reform and social coordination, 1999), coauthored by Norbert Lechner and René Milian. He has been involved with the journals El Buscón and Fractal and writes a weekly column for a Mexico City newspaper.
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A Conversation with Lorenzo Meyer about Mexico's Political Transition: From Authoritarianism to What?
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Lorenzo Meyer has done much to stimulate Mexican study of interactions between Mexico and the United States. Educated in Mexico and the United States, he teaches political history at El Colegio de México. Sixteen Mexican newspapers carry his columns, and he has won awards for both journalism and scholarship. He has written on the Mexican Revolution, particularly the struggle to wrest control of Mexican oil from foreign interests. México frente a los Estados Unidos, by Meyer and Josefina Vázquez, has appeared in three editions in Spanish (1982, 1990, and 1994) and, as The United States and Mexico, in English (1985). Much of his recent work addresses the ongoing political transformation of Mexico.
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Mexico's Cultural Landscapes:A Conversation with Carlos Monsiváis
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Carlos Monsiváis is widely recognized and much honored as Mexico's leading cultural critic. Through his early journalism, many books of essays, and weekly newspaper column, he has offered a wide audience criticism of the Mexican state, exploration of alternative social movements, and an original take on high and popular cultures. He was among the first Mexican intellectuals to write sympathetically about Mexican American culture. His 1999 book, Parte de guerra. Tlatelolco 1968 (Report of war: Tlatelolco, 1968), written with Julio Scherer García, has caused a sensation by tracing the 1968 killings of demonstrating students to members of the presidential guard, troops close to the president of Mexico.
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[Top]
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Rethinking Nation-Centered Issues
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The Internationalization of Police: The DEA in Mexico
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María Celia Toro is director of the Center for International Studies at El Colegio de México in Mexico City, where she has been a member of the faculty since 1985. A political scientist, she received her undergraduate education there and her graduate education at Stanford University. She has written on drug trafficking in the context of United States-Mexican relations and has served as editor of the international relations quarterly Foro Internacional.
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Reading Mexico, Understanding the United States: American Transnational Intellectuals in the 1920s and 1990s
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Jesus Velasco is assistant professor in the Division of International Relations at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (Center for Teaching and Research in Economics, CIDE) in Mexico City. He received a doctorate in political science from the University of Texas, Austin. He and Rodolfo de la Garza co-edited Bridging the Border: Transforming Mexico-United States Relations (1997). His research examines the role of ideas in United States political realignments and in United States-Mexican relations.
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National Identity on a Shifting Border: Texas and New Mexico in the Age of Transition, 1821-1848
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Andrés Reséndez is assistant professor of history at the University of California, Davis. He received his undergraduate education at El Colegio de México and his graduate education at the University of Chicago. He has published works in both Mexico and the United States. They include a coauthored book on Mexican foreign policy and articles about women's role in the Mexican Revolution and about war and national identity. He was a consultant for a Mexican television soap opera about the nineteenth-century political leader Antonio López de Santa Anna.
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Mexico, the Puzzle: A Conversation about Civil Society and the Nation with Ilan Semo
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Ilan Semo straddles the border between academic history and serious political and cultural journalism. He is professor of modern history at the lberoamerican University in Mexico City and has taught at institutions including the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of California, San Diego. He helped found and edits the quarterly journal Fractal. Among his recent books is La nación: Rituales y metaforas (The Nation: Rituals and metaphors, 1999). He writes regularly for the newspaper La Jornada.
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Oral History
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Introduction, by Michael Gordon and Lu Ann Jones
[Full-text at the historycooperative.org]
Beginnings and Endings: Life Stories and the Periodization of the Civil Rights Movement, by Kathryn L. Nasstrom
[Full-text at the historycooperative.org]
From Anecdote to Analysis: Oral Interviews and New Scholarship in Educational History, by Jack Dougherty
[Full-text at the historycooperative.org]
"I Just Felt Called . . .": Oral History and the Meaning of Faith in American Religious History, by Tracy E. K'Meyer
[Full-text at the historycooperative.org]
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[Top]
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Book Reviews
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A complete listing of book reviews is available here.
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[Top]
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Editor's Annual Report, 1998-1999
Letters to the Editor
Announcements
Recent Scholarship
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[Top]
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On the cover:
In a snapshot taken for the Program for Mexican Communities Abroad, an unidentified man propels
himself across the border between Mexico and the United States by swinging from hand to hand
beneath a bridge. For a collection of color photographs (including this one) drawn from the
files of the Program for Mexican Communities Abroad to illustrate the themes of this special issue,
see http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/mexico.
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