5 Dancing on the Rim, Tiptoeing through the Minefields: Challenges and Promises of the Borderlands

February 15, 2006

There is a story my father told me, of huddling in the straw beneath a pile of robes in a horse-drawn sleigh, hiding there with his twin brother, two older sisters, and his father, who had paid a farmer to smuggle them across a frozen river to another country. It was sometime in the winter of 1923–1924. Dad was six years old. He and my Uncle David remembered the crisp tart apples they got to keep them quiet crossing the border. They both always loved Granny Smith apples.

They were not fleeing a pogrom, though my mother’s grandfather, according to family lore, walked across the Urals to Berlin to avoid serving in the czar’s army. He became a rabbi, sailed to New York in 1892, and sent for his fiancée the next year, after a Baltimore congregation hired him.¹ Their journeys, like my Dad’s, were part of a worldwide diaspora from 1830 to 1930 when 10 percent of all people moved across national boundaries.²

The histories that became U.S. creation stories explained how diverse Europeans forged a common national identity. Frederick Jackson Turner, who authored a formative history, credited the frontier, among other things, with making a “composite nationality” from a nation of immigrants. The Chicago School of sociologists and Oscar Handlin’s school of immigration history judged the “uprooted” by how well they assimilated as Americans.³

My Dad’s story, though, was not of uprooted flight from poverty or persecution. His parents were British descendants of German Jews, merchants whose trade and families crossed and re-crossed the British Channel. One of those ancestors lived awhile in Scotland, where family legend has it, he changed our name from Baruch to Jameson.⁴

My Dad’s mother was born Esther Wechsler in London in 1878. She grew up in a comfortable household that included two cousins and thirteen Wechsler children, twelve of whom went to university. Esther became a social worker, worked with sex workers on the London docks, married Jacob Jameson, and, in 1908, bore their eldest daughter, Ena. Jacob left for the United States sometime after that. Esther and Ena joined him in Dayton, Ohio, where my Aunt Babette was born in 1915, and the twins, David and Henry, two years later.⁵

When my Dad was very young, they moved to Montreal and lived for a while with my grandmother’s brother Moses and his wife Rae, who had emigrated to Canada, and their children, Margie and Lew, who were born in Canada. Then in 1923 Grandma got a job in Newark as the first director of women’s activities in the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Associations.⁶ She crossed the border alone, leaving Jacob to follow with the children. The icy river Dad remembered crossing was the St. Lawrence. This raises a question. The three youngest children were U.S. citizens; my grandparents and Ena had already entered the United States. So why the elaborate efforts to evade the border guards? Why was Dad sneaking into the land of his birth?

The answer lies in the changing legal constructions of borders. Grandma and Ena first entered the U.S. in 1913. The family left for Canada after 1917, when the boys were born. That year the 1917 Immigration Act added to the list of people barred from the U.S., among others, “all idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, epileptics, [and] insane persons” or anyone an “examining surgeon” found to have a “defect” that might “affect the ability of such alien to earn a living. . . .”⁷ My Aunt Ena had Down syndrome. Her parents feared that she would be turned back at the U.S. border.

My grandparents knew that nations police their borders. History helps create them. History as a discipline developed with the creation of nation states, assumed to be the proper subjects of histories.⁸ In state-centered histories, people were important as citizens—as subjects of states, not of histories. Border-crossing was important only to get them inside the nation. As historians wrote histories of nations, they not only “imagined communities” as Benedict Anderson suggested, but also erected the borders of what Sarah Carter called their “categories and terrains of exclusion.”⁹ Historians chose the actors and crafted the narratives that told who belonged and who was an outsider, who became part of an imagined collective past and who was marginalized or excluded.

The border, in my father’s story, was the line that separates nations, where they assert their sovereignty by determining who and what to admit or exclude. Turner’s frontier line served a similar function: it excluded Indigenous peoples and justified conquest as progress from Indigenous “savagery” to the newcomers’ “civilization.”¹⁰ The popular U.S. image, “a nation of immigrants,” excluded lots of people: native North Americans, involuntary immigrants like African Americans, “aliens not eligible for citizenship” like Chinese laborers, and the peoples of northern Mexico, who came into the country involuntarily, through warfare, not immigration.¹¹ The east-to-west trajectory of the national narrative erased people who arrived at the West Coast from Asia, or north from Mexico, or south from Canada. But it erased them differently. Anglo-Canadians were simply absorbed; Mexicans and Chinese were trivialized and demonized; Native peoples were conquered and then pushed to the margins. That imagined national community erased continental connections and wrote a colonized North American history that began only when White people arrived from the East. The erasures continued within national borders that were supposed to be gateways to the benefits of citizenship. The histories of shared composite nationality detoured around barriers that selectively denied citizenship rights like voting, suing, testifying in court, owning property, or sometimes oneself.

If history helped craft these boundaries, historians have also stretched and breached them as they probed inequalities of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and wrote histories that cross national borders. I am distinguishing borders (lines that separate or divide) from borderlands (zones—sometimes around borders—where diverse people come together or mingle). In this sense, borders and borderlands can be either national or social categories. National borders separate nations: their borderlands are places where social relationships cross those borders. Social borders erect social barriers, like those of race, for instance, while a parallel social borderland might be a zone or place where people of different races meet. Borders and borderlands can have multiple meanings; their significance usually differs for the various people they divide or connect. A border, for instance, can function both to exclude and to protect. A national border can prevent certain people from entering a country; a social border can prevent people of different races or the same sexes from marrying one another. But borders can also function positively, to protect identity—as Canadians have viewed the Canada-U.S. border positively because it separates Canada from the United States.¹² Or as religious institutions—churches, mosques, and synagogues—may exclude people of other religions and at the same time provide safe spaces to share valued common identities and practices.

In recent decades historians have shown increasing interest in transnational, comparative, borderlands, and migration histories that blur the focus on separate national pasts. The Journal of American History devoted two issues to transnational histories in 1999. New histories are stretching geographic, social, and temporal boundaries of the borderlands, and are finally exploring the borderlands of Canada and the United States.¹³

The borderlands I want to explore here are the borderlands of national memories, where the histories that move across national and social boundaries clarify their categories and terrains of exclusion. I’ll be dancing around the borders of North America and some of their borderlands, especially the ones where I’ve lived. The tune I danced to as I wrote this essay was Tracy Chapman’s “Telling Stories,” which refers to the “fiction in the space between” the lines of written memory.¹⁴

Part of that fiction divides the histories of colonizers and Indigenous peoples, private lore and public history. The family story with which I began is a shorthand into the spaces between personal memories and shared ones, and between shared stories and national ones. Whatever private needs pulled my family across the St. Lawrence, they joined a then-record 200,000 migrants who entered the U.S. from Canada between July 1923 and June 1924, spurred in part by fears that Canada would be included in new U.S. legislation to restrict immigration.¹⁵ Perhaps that fear pushed Grandma to take her job in Newark; I don’t know. I do know my family was not that different from many others who crossed and re-crossed North America’s boundaries, at least since the first migrants crossed the Bering Land Bridge or emerged from the previous world. We all have such stories. How we connect them to history is something else.

One way to understand my Dad’s story was simply that he crossed the border and entered the United States, where his children could claim its history as our own. The reality is messier. My grandparents separated and my grandfather returned to Montreal. One of my grandmother’s brothers settled in Toronto; another in Melbourne. I have cousins in (at least) the Netherlands, Australia, England, Israel, and the U.S. Moses and Rae moved their family to New York. I first met Dad’s cousin Margie in the early 1950s when she and her husband George visited us in Texas. They later told me that while Margie stayed to visit, George went on to Mexico to arrange escape routes for American Communists during the McCarthy era. That story introduces borders as gateways to sanctuary, as both the Canadian and Mexican borders served for runaway slaves, as the 49^th Parallel served for a time for Sitting Bull and Louis Riel, for devout Mormons and Vietnam War draft resisters—as Canada served Chileans fleeing the overthrow of Allende, as it may serve gays and lesbians who wish to marry or women seeking legal abortions.¹⁶

In 1999, for less dramatic reasons, I moved to Calgary. I was asked at my job interview how I felt about moving across a border. I answered too glibly, “I’ve been crossing them all my life.” I had spent most of my life in the territory that historian Herbert Eugene Bolton called the Spanish Borderlands.¹⁷ My borderlands, though, were social and cultural. They involved race, religion, and gender: being a blonde Jew with a Scottish name; a woman in a male-dominated profession; wrestling with nationalist, androcentric, and Euro-centric histories.

I learned that history in the public schools of Galveston, once a major port of entry that called itself the Ellis Island of Texas. It became an entry to another borderland when, in November 1528, two makeshift boats landed the first Spaniards on its sandy beaches. Karankawa Indians enslaved them, but four survivors—Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Alonso del Castillo, Andres Dorantes, and Esteban, his African Moorish slave—began in 1534 to wander westerly across the continent. When Cabeza de Vaca published his reminiscences in 1542, his references to emeralds and towns “of great population and great houses” inspired claims to what became the northern frontiers of New Spain.¹⁸

I learned Cabeza de Vaca’s name but not Esteban’s and little else about those complex borderlands in segregated public schools that taught me almost nothing of the history of race that I inherited and lived on Galveston island, where boundaries of power separated Euro-Americans, ethnic Mexicans, and African Americans. Before the Civil War, free Blacks had to register with the mayor and weren’t allowed on the streets after 10 p.m. Only White men who owned at least $500 in property could vote.¹⁹ Germans were the largest foreign-born group; by 1880 there were also many Italians, Greeks, Belgians, Danes, Mexicans, Portuguese, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Spaniards, Swedes, Welsh, and Canadians.²⁰ Established German Jews and their British-born rabbi founded the Galveston Movement in 1907 to deal with an influx of eastern European Jews. They met their ships and sent these eastern European Jews to towns that wanted their skills, thus aiding their settlement while keeping them off the island and often isolating them far from any Jewish community.²¹ I grew up in a selectively diverse Galveston, attending Greek Easter fairs and Irish Catholic weddings, teen dances at the Episcopal Church but not at the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) Hall, and not the local Juneteenth or Cinco de Mayo celebrations.²²

The two main industries were the port and the University of Texas Medical School. Married White women did not work outside their homes; African American women were maids. In a town where you were a doctor’s kid or a longshoreman’s kid, the overlapping inequalities of class, race, and gender were inescapable. My parents crossed those boundaries as Civil Rights advocates, and as my mother graduated from Medical School and practiced medicine, which made us something like the children of cross-dressers in the gender-conscious Galveston of the 1950s.

White children in Galveston attended schools named Alamo, Travis, Crockett, Bowie, Goliad, San Jacinto, and Stephen F. Austin. “Mexican” kids went to the same schools but were seldom tracked into college-bound classes. Black children attended Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. We all used the same textbooks in wretched Texas history classes that did not teach us that Stephen F. Austin owned slaves, or that slavery was an issue in what we learned to call the War for Texas Independence. The only character in our textbooks who was not an Anglo man was Antonio López de Santa Anna—and he made it only as the losing general in the battle we pronounced Sayan Djuhssintow (San Jacinto).²³

Perceptive readers might notice that I have still not really gotten out of U.S. history. Unless you are American, you may have noticed I’ve been using symbols and stories that exclude you—using Stephen F. Austin, Booker T. Washington, Juneteenth, and Cinco de Mayo, for instance, to represent larger histories. If you are Canadian or Mexican, however, you are more likely to know these references than most Americans would be to recognize the significance of Vimy Ridge, Batoche, Acoma, the Cypress Hills, Obregón, or la Malinche. One huge challenge of the historical borderlands is recognizing the categories and terrains of exclusion within national histories and between them.

I have, in fact, as you have may have perceived, been writing a very American essay: egocentric, self-referential, and self-revealing. That judgment would be very Canadian. Borderlands histories demand that we risk learning how our nations and our comfort zones of behavior appear from the other side of a border.

I began with my Dad’s story for several reasons. The first was rhetorical: I used it to claim my family’s ties to Canada, though in truth they became important to me only after I began to wrestle with my links to two nations. My identities were learned, not encoded in genetic maps of my ancestors’ migrations. The second reason is partly personal: since I crossed the border, I’ve thought a lot about my grandmother, about what it meant to her to live and work and raise her kids so far from England. I’ve thought about the subtle processes by which we learn another culture, history, maybe a more multi-valent identity; about how crossing borders changes how we see the past. And I used this story to play with how people and their stories can be connected to histories or separated from them.

My family crossed national borders. So did the people whose histories I recorded in Cripple Creek, like May Wing, whose family odyssey led from Ireland to Wales, to Wisconsin, Colorado, British Columbia, and back to Colorado.²⁴ So did Rachel Calof, whose memoir has engaged me for some time, who moved from Russia to North Dakota in 1894. Some of the extended Calof clan moved to Winnipeg; I know some of their descendants in Calgary.²⁵ As they moved, people built movements and institutions. Labor unions, religious organizations, agrarian movements, and fraternal lodges, for instance, all crossed the 49^th Parallel. Mutualistas and some of the same labor unions crossed the U.S.-Mexico border.²⁶

Yet for much of my life I lost focus at the U.S. border. People moved to the margins of my attention as they left the history I knew. I don’t know if this is particular to me, or particularly American. I suspect it may be similar to how some of my colleagues lose focus on women or people of color as their stories cross over the boundaries of place-centered histories or the categories of public and political power those histories privilege. It is costly not to cross those borders. Without crossing them, I cannot connect Coxey’s Army and the On to Ottawa Band; nor Western Federation of Miners locals in Cripple Creek, Rossland, Cananea, and Nanaimo; nor the Seattle and Winnipeg General Strikes; Ludlow and Mackenzie King; nor Coronado, David Thompson, and Lewis and Clark, much less Sacagawea, Charlotte Thompson, and Malintzin, who played similar roles in three national histories.²⁷ I can’t connect my story with my grandfather’s.

If my childhood history classes did not prepare me for the racialized complexities of the social borderlands I inhabited, if they did not prepare me to locate my Latinx or African American neighbors in history (or myself for that matter), they prepared me even less to cross the border into Canada. My childhood taught me about social boundaries that marked inequalities of race or class. These were less apparent to me as I crossed the Canadian border, but other boundaries and differences emerged. Ninety percent of Canadians live within a few hundred miles of the border; the U.S. looms larger here than Canada does in the U.S. Our televisions are saturated with U.S. programming. In Calgary my basic cable package includes the local Spokane and Coeur d’Alene stations. When I asked colleagues who live in the Canada-U.S. borderlands about their television coverage, an interesting—if predictable—pattern emerged. I watch Canadian, U.S., and British newscasts. Susan Armitage, however, whose nightly local newscasts beamed into my living room, did not get Canadian television in Pullman, Washington. According to Chris Friday and Cecilia Danysk, Bellingham, just south of the border, seemed to be a minor exception. Their cable coverage from Seattle did not include Canadian stations, but local radio got Vancouver and Victoria stations that carry English, French, and Cantonese programming. On local TV, without cable, Dr. Friday reported, they “ONLY get Canadian stations and one local station which always gives the weather in BC in centigrade!” Jean Barman reported that in Vancouver, just north of the border, she got ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS from Seattle; UPN and FOX from Tacoma; the local Bellingham station; and that with cable it was also possible to get Detroit PBS, A&E, CNN, and WTBS from Atlanta. Catherine Cavanaugh reported that Edmonton got the same stations as Calgary, plus Detroit PBS.²⁸

If the U.S. airwaves erase Canada, Canadians get a distorted picture of the U.S. according-to-CNN. And if U.S. airwaves regularly cross national borders, U.S. histories do so mostly to cover wars—mostly those in which the U.S. has participated. It has been even easier for American historians to erase Canada than Mexico, perhaps because the Mexican border was secured by warfare and the Canadian border through treaties. The Mexican border became a racialized line that drew differences in skin color and language; the Canadian border became an imagined zone of similarity touted as the longest undefended border in the world. My grandparents’ fears notwithstanding, the U.S. did not deploy a Border Patrol along the St. Lawrence in 1924 to keep out an imagined invasion of illegal immigrants as it did along the Mexican border. It did not deport Canadians in the 1930s, as it did Mexicans and their American-born children.²⁹

Yet from 1850 through 1970, Canadians outnumbered Mexicans among foreign-born people living in the U.S. Mexican-born migrants did not pass them until 1980.³⁰ My point here is not whose group was bigger, but that size does not matter. Perceptions of threat were economic, racialized, and historically constructed; they had little to do with numbers. Anglo-Canadians, by virtue of skin color and language, “pass” in the U.S. far better than Americans do in Canada. Few in the United States have marked the nationality of Peter Jennings, Morley Safer, John Roberts (the journalist, not the Chief Justice), or Kevin Newman, or feared the foreign slant they might give the news.³¹ Few have feared the cultural imperialism of William Shatner, Mary Pickford, Kiefer Sutherland, Neil Young, Faye Wray, Joni Mitchell, Céline Dion, Dan Ackroyd, Norman Jewison, or Michael J. Fox. But Canadians do notice that the border that was supposed to contain U.S. expansionist designs has been less successful keeping Canadians in. As Charles Dickie, the MP from Nanaimo, moaned in 1928: “we are losing the cream of our population.”³² The song for this dance comes from Stan Rogers:

California! My friends all call you home,

And if you take away another, I’ll be that much more alone . . .

But can I once taste Northern waters, then forsake them for

the South

To feel California’s ashes in my mouth³³

Ashes of another kind stuck in my throat the morning of September 12, 2001, as I scanned my lecture notes for a new class I was co-teaching with Sarah Carter on the Comparative History of the U.S. and Canadian Wests. It was the day after nineteen Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes and flew two of them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and another into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. A fourth flight, probably intended for the U.S. Capitol, crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back and stormed the cockpit. The attacks killed all nineteen hijackers and 2,996 victims: all 246 passengers and crew on the four planes, 2,606 in the Twin Towers attack, and 125 at the Pentagon.³⁴

In the immediate aftermath, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, for the first time ever, grounded all flights over or bound for the continental United States, and guided some 3,300 commercial flights and 1,200 private aircraft to land at airports in Canada or the U.S. As many of them landed at the Calgary airport, I had no idea how long they would be grounded, or how long I would be unable to get to my family in the United States if they needed me.

The next day, still profoundly shaken, I was scheduled to talk about “Mythic Wests and National Histories.” I had intended to contrast Turner with his Canadian counterparts like Harold Innis, who located change not on the edges of advancing frontiers, but in distant metropoles that developed staple resources like furs, lumber, minerals, and fish, and with George F. G. Stanley, whose mythic Canadian narrative of western settlement separated a peaceful and orderly Canadian West from the violent individualism of U.S. frontiers. Stanley’s kinder, gentler West arrived as the North West Mounted Police marched west from Manitoba in 1874 to protect the prairies from the Métis, First Nations, and lawless U.S. whiskey traders.³⁵ I intended, too, much as I have here, to talk about how the United States racialized its border with Mexico but imagined whiteness and sameness along the 49^th Parallel. As I distractedly reviewed my notes, a CNN newscaster speculated that the planes that leveled the Twin Towers took off from Maine and Massachusetts because dark-skinned terrorists could sneak across the Canadian border. I somehow got through a shaky lecture, ending with the implications of that newscast: borders and borderlands are historically constructed; their meanings change. Whatever I thought I knew about borders and their meanings was shifting around us as I spoke.

The fault lines had long been evident, as a brief perusal of the Calgary Herald revealed.³⁶ For six months before 9/11 and a year afterwards, most border-related stories concerned security and business. Of ninety-five articles that mentioned the U.S.-Canada border, forty-five dealt with border security, twelve with cross-border political protest, and thirty-one with business and trade. The constant lurking subtext pulled tensely between Canadian sovereignty and Canada’s economic ties to the U.S. Already, before 9/11, the news began to racialize the border. Pre-9/11 coverage of border security dealt with terrorism, political protest, and immigration. Terrorist coverage focused on Ahmed Ressam, who had been denied Canadian refugee status, and who was arrested in Port Angeles, Washington, on December 14, 1999, trying to smuggle explosives into the United States. Convicted of terrorist conspiracy, Ressam’s case resonated even more ominously after 9/11.³⁷

The threat of illegal immigrants was doubly racialized: in terms of the immigrants themselves and of potential points of entry. Amid U.S. charges that illegal aliens were sneaking in through Canada, the RCMP insisted that the traffic worked both ways, that humans “surpassed tobacco and alcohol as the contraband of choice being smuggled into Canada from the United States,” and that East Asians preferred the U.S. while most Pakistanis and Middle Easterners chose Canada. The RCMP suggested that the Mohawk reserve spanning Quebec, Ontario, and New York was a prime smuggling site.³⁸

The main security issue, however, immediately before 9/11, was protesters from the U.S. bound for the April Summit of the Americas meeting in Quebec. Again, it was feared that “native communities on the Canada-U.S. border support the smuggling of summit protesters,” 300 of whom, trying to enter Canada at the Seaway International Bridge in Mohawk territory, met “a gauntlet of more than 100 law enforcement officers.”³⁹ At the Peace Arch crossing south of Vancouver, however, far from Quebec and still racialized as White and open, U.S. and Canadian police closed the border to ensure “the safe movement” of some 2,000 protesters.⁴⁰

In those contexts, U.S. Ambassador Paul Celucci advocated immigration “harmonization” to create a continental security perimeter, a “NAFTA plus” approach to “harmonize trade, immigration, and security policies between Canada and the U.S., and perhaps eventually Mexico.”⁴¹ This raised predictable fears, expressed in one op-ed headline: “Erasing borders with U.S. will erase Canada from map.” This piece invoked a long history of resistance to U.S. hegemony dating from Confederation, and the defeats of “the Liberal push for commercial union with the U.S. in 1891” and of the “proposed Canada-U.S. free trade agreement in 1911.”⁴²

As luck would have it, Celucci addressed the Tri-Lateral Business Leaders Conference at the Calgary Chamber of Commerce the night of September 10, 2001. The headline on September 11 announced, “Ambassador urges more open border.”⁴³ The same day, the Herald’s Ottawa correspondent predicted that:

Entire forests will fall to document the ramifications of this day on U.S. economic and political relations, but it’s clear Canada’s interconnected economy will suffer as the U.S. shrinkwraps into an angry, protective shell in response to the attack.

Recent talk of relaxing or eliminating our border suddenly sounds a lot more farfetched.⁴⁴

In the immediate aftermath, the U.S. reported that five terrorists had entered from Quebec and Nova Scotia. North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan complained that nothing but orange traffic cones stopped people after 10 p.m. at fifteen border crossings into his state. Washington Senator Patty Murray claimed that some of the nineteen terrorists the FBI connected to the attacks entered the U.S. from Canada.⁴⁵ Fear and blame reverberated along the 49^th Parallel long after the U.S. knew that the terrorists entered through its own borders.

One other pre-9/11 story briefly illuminated the equally racialized borderland that divided the Blackfoot Confederacy into Montana and Alberta tribes when Britain and the United States drew the border in 1818. Claiming that Canadian and U.S. customs officials defiled their sacred bundles, seized sacred objects, and mistook sweetgrass for marijuana, Peigan (Piikani) spokesman Edwin Small Legs said, “We want our own border crossing and our people working there from both sides of the nation.” Canada Customs and Revenue replied that officials were trained to respect native religious artifacts “when conducting routine inspections.”⁴⁶

As the border was reconstructed, officials struggled to contain a racialized threat but still promote trade. That economic border, too, was only selectively permeable: the U.S. fenced out Canadian softwood lumber, Alberta beef, and PEI potatoes; the Canada Wheat Board prosecuted prairie farmers for selling grain across the border at U.S. prices.⁴⁷ As the National Guard patrolled the U.S. side, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Immigration and Naturalization Services announced: “U.S. border officials are cracking down harder than their Canadian counterparts, but that’s because the U.S. has far more enemies than Canada.”⁴⁸ As I spoke in 2006, latter-day rogue Minutemen patrolled the Arizona desert and were expanding into California, Texas, and New Mexico. The Minutemen predicted that “Historians will write about how a lax America let its unique and coveted form of government and society sink into a quagmire of mutual acrimony among the variant sub-nations that will comprise the new self-destructing America.” And the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps announced on its website that: “activated volunteers on the northern border with Canada—Maine, Vermont, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Idaho, and Washington State” are “creating new operations, this is truly an exciting time for Patriots!”⁴⁹ The Mexican newspaper La Jornada simply called these “patriots” “la organizacion racista.”⁵⁰

I tell this story to suggest the very real challenges of today’s borderlands. One urgent pull to imagine transnational histories is that we do not have histories to help us grapple with the transnational present. Terrorists may attack nations, but they are not contained within them. Nor are greenhouse gasses, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement (USMCTA), the European Union (EU), capital flight, job outsourcing, avian flu, or AIDS.⁵¹ It is hard to deal with issues that we cannot locate in recognizable frameworks and narratives. Without stories that cross national and social divides, it is hard to recognize humanity across those borders or to imagine a connected future. Histories that patrol national borders serve us no better than my childhood histories that drew racial color lines.

A second reason to pursue transnational histories is to connect ourselves to our pasts, and to futures in which we embody multiple identities. When I travel to the United States, I leave Canada through the U.S. Department of Customs and Border Security; I enter on my U.S. passport. I return to Canada on my permanent resident card. My roots reach to Russia, Poland, Germany, England, and the U.S. I could, if I wished, hold citizenship in the United States, Canada, Israel, and England. The same hungers that drew me to women’s histories and the histories of the people I grew up with pull me to the borderlands of the U.S. and Canada and to a history of North America that began long before European empires. A number of historians opened the human meanings of these borderlands for me. Sylvia Van Kirk, Sarah Deutsch, Jennifer Brown, Albert Hurtado, Sarah Carter, and Gloria Anzaldúa, among others, shifted the historical focus to relationships that reveal human agency and its limits, the private arenas where cultures are transformed, the intimate borderlands where new people were born who embodied difference in new ways.⁵² It has proved difficult to maintain the focus on agency, intimacy, and human exchange after national borders were drawn and the narratives shifted to state-focused histories. The difference between seeing these borderlands in human terms and nationalizing ones is summed in a brief contrast. Anzaldúa, wrestling with her embodied legacy, wrote:

To survive in the Borderlands

you must live sin fronteras

be a crossroads.⁵³

Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, in contrast, writing within national and imperial frameworks, projected borderlands that ended in the 19^th century with the formation of nation states that turned “borderlands into bordered lands.” Their borderlands could not bridge colonial and national histories or embrace the post-colonial agency of people born there of brutal and tender intimacies, who, in the borderland-to-nation framework, became one of the “hybrid residuals” of frontier encounters.⁵⁴

My urgent hope is that our borderlands may help us imagine histories to ground more inclusive, egalitarian, and mutually respectful futures. The borders we patrol and the borderlands of national identities are in enormous flux; this moment contains both intense nationalisms and fragile recognitions of interdependent global economies, ecologies, migrations, and politics, of connections to honor and differences to respect.

Richard White once asked rhetorically, “Is There a North American History?”⁵⁵ He answered that “It is difficult to write a history of North America if there is no common North American identity” as there is in Europe.⁵⁶ To the extent that there is a shared European identity, historians helped construct it. However difficult, the challenge of borderlands histories is not just to find identity and connection, but to explain difference, distrust, and disconnection. There is no particular reason that histories must tell stories of composite identities. They can chronicle relationships of domination and inequality. They can illuminate cataclysmic disconnects like those between the histories of Indigenous North Americans and those of European conquest. Transnational histories will not serve us well if we simply debate whether to draw our borders at the Rio Grande and 49^th Parallel, or around the continental perimeter, if they erase social and national boundaries rather than illuminate them.

It is challenging to write histories that connect people who know each other so little, challenging both conceptually and practically. States, after all, fund history programs, and the furor over the new social history in both the U.S. and Canada is sobering for the resistance transnational histories will face.⁵⁷ Yet transnational histories are not non-national histories. As my father’s border crossing, the Blackfoot Confederacy’s religious objects, and the Minutemen all testify, national histories patrol real borders that construct real power.

So, what may help us on these intriguing journeys? Let me suggest some steps that might help us dance on these rims. We might imagine the dance hall, where lots of people are dancing, but the spotlight has been on one national dance, and only on the folks who lead it. Our task is to refocus, and to imagine dancing in the same space with the Indigenous people to one side, the nations dancing next to us, the women in the corner, the newcomers waiting shyly by themselves—to combine waltzes, fandangos, horas, hip hop, polkas, and jigs without stepping on one another’s toes. As a beginning, I offer eight not-so-easy rules for dancing in the borderlands:⁵⁸

1. (As we’d say in Texas): Dance the first dance with the ones that brung you. Root yourself in the histories of where you stand. Notice who is not there and whose stories are missing.

2. Learn the tunes before you dance. Ground yourself in the histories of all sides of the borders you’re crossing.

3. Dance where they do the dance you want to learn. To borrow from Matt Garcia’s A World of Its Own, we might dance at the Rainbow Gardens to learn Latinx dances or go to the El Monte American Legion Dance Hall to learn how a shared teen culture connected Whites, Mexican Americans, Blacks, and Asian Pacific Islanders.⁵⁹ The borders we cross and the arenas in which we dance should fit our questions.

4. Not everyone dances to the national anthem. Dancing to a bagpipe or the Marine Corps band may not be the best way to approach borderlands where people move to salsa, blues, hip hop, or a sacred Sun Dance.

5. Evade the chaperones—the ones who tell you that you’ll betray the family if you dance with a stranger, that you can’t squander the time to learn a new history, that you can’t cross disciplinary boundaries or use non-traditional sources. You know who they are. Give them the slip.

6. Just because you dance with someone doesn’t mean you’ll go home with them. People may work or dance in the borderlands, but few people live there or intermarry. If 10 percent of the world’s people crossed national borders between 1830 and 1930, 90 percent did not, and border crossing itself is hard to measure in a century when many borders were drawn, including those of North America. A danger of multicultural histories has been seeing people of color as important only in relationship to White people. Don’t repeat the same mistake with people of other nations.

7. If you usually lead, try following—and vice-versa. People whose job in the dance is to follow often know all the parts better than those who lead—they have to psych what the leaders are going to do if they don’t want to get trampled. To really enter the borderlands is to give up histories based in imperial, national, or public power, in androcentric or racialized categories—to imagine, as Susan Johnson eloquently urged us, a history in which we can disconnect difference from domination.⁶⁰

8. Dance with a buddy. Better yet, dance with lots of buddies. It’s the only way to learn when your steps are invading someone else’s comfort zone, and for those of us trained in national histories, there is too much to learn to do it alone. The borderlands are about relationships and conversations, some not yet begun. They are best explored collaboratively.⁶¹

We are dancing into unfamiliar territory. Most of our ancestors did, too, and for similar reasons: so that their children might have better futures. Dance lightly. There are lots of unmined stories in the spaces between our rims, and lots of minefields as well: minefields of national frameworks, national borders that constrict our vision, unexamined assumptions, unfamiliar languages, unequal power, and unshared memories. Let’s dance through them. We could learn new ways to move as we dance these rims together.

Notes

Thanks to Tim Cole for outstanding research assistance; Sean van der Lee for the La Jornada story; Doug Francis and Jeanne Perreault for their critiques of an earlier draft; and Jeremy Mouat, Sarah Carter, and my colleagues and students at the Universities of Calgary and New Mexico for helping me think about borderlands. This article was prepared as my 2005 presidential address to the Pacific Coast Branch-American Historical Association. I am grateful to Janet Brodie, then Executive Director of the PCB-AHA, for her support during my presidential year and for her work on conference arrangements. The title of the essay borrows from the theme for the 2005 conference “Dancing on the Rim: Nations, Borderlands, and Identities.” I am grateful to Program Committee Co-Chairs Katherine Morrissey and Jose Alamillo, and to Dr. Morrissey for “Dancing on the Rim.” I am especially grateful to Calgary friends and colleagues Don Smith, Nancy Townshend, Gordon Fairchild, and Max Foran who made the trek to Corvallis for the conference. My address was published in the Pacific Historical Review 75:1 (February 2006). I’m grateful to the journal for granting authors permission to re-publish our own work.

1. 1 My information comes partly from family lore, and partly from an article published by Congregation Shearith Israel in Baltimore, “Rev. Dr. Schepschel Schaffer: Twenty-five Years of Activity in the Cause of Orthodox Judaism, 1893–1918 5653–5678” (Baltimore, January 1918). My copy of the article came from a cousin of my mother. It does not have page numbers or any other publication information. Schepschel Schaffer was born May 4, 1862, in Bausk, in the Province of Courland, Russia; the story of his travels is complicated, and versions of it are not necessarily consistent. In any event, he married Anna Lapidoth, from Rossieny. In Germany, he met my mother’s other grandfather, Rabbi Philip Klein, who later served a congregation in New York.

2. 2 Donna R. Gabaccia, “Is Everywhere Nowhere? Nomads, Nations, and the Immigrant Paradigm of United States History,” Journal of American History 86 (1999): 1120.

3. 3 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in History, Frontier, and Section: Three Essays by Frederick Jackson Turner, ed. Martin Ridge (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 59–91, 75–76. Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie, The City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925); Oscar Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants, 1790–1865: A Study in Acculturation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941) and The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migration That Made the American People (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1951).

4. 4 Information on my father’s family comes from family oral tradition and from a family tree compiled by Nicholas Landau, “Descendants of David Haenlein Wechsler.”

5. 5 My grandmother’s father, Joel Barnhardt Wechsler, was born in Schwabach, Bavaria, in 1845 and, like many Schwabach Jews apparently worked in the gold leaf trade. He married Jette (Henrietta) Thalheimer in Rotterdam in 1877. My grandmother was born in 1878, shortly after they moved to London; she was their second child. “Descendants of David Haenlein Wechsler,” private communication from Nicholas Landau, and conversations with my grandmother.

6. 6 Moses (Moe) was the ninth child in the family; he married Rachel (Rae) Fleisig, and they emigrated to Montreal sometime before 1916, when Margaret (Margie) was born. “Descendants of David Haenlein Wechsler.” My grandmother later became the executive director of the Essex County Council [New Jersey] of Jewish Welfare agencies, a predecessor of the United Jewish Federation (now the United Jewish Communities of MetroWest). She retired and moved to Galveston, Texas, in 1947, shortly after I was born.

7. 7 The law commonly called the 1917 Immigration Act refers to the Act of February 5, 1917, entitled “An Act to regulate the immigration of aliens to, and the residence of aliens in, the United States.”

8. 8 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Ian Tyrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review 96 (1991): 1031–55.

9. 9 Anderson, Imagined Communities; Sarah Carter, “Categories and Terrains of Exclusion: Constructing the ‘Indian Woman’ in the Early Settlement Era in Western Canada,” Great Plains Quarterly 13 (1993): 147–61.

10. 10 Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 60.

11. 11 The term “alien” included any individual who was not a native-born or naturalized citizen of the United States; Chinese were deemed “ineligible to citizenship” under section 14 of the Act entitled “An Act to execute certain treaty stipulations relating to Chinese,” approved May 6, 1882, otherwise known as the Chinese Exclusion Act.

12. 12 For how the Canadian-U.S. border has been constructed and functioned differently in the two national histories, see Elizabeth Jameson and Jeremy Mouat, “Telling Differences: The Forty-Ninth Parallel and Historiographies of the West and Nation,” Pacific Historical Review 75:2 (May 2006): 183–230; Sheila McManus, The Line Which Separates: Race, Gender, and the Making of the Alberta-Montana Borderlands (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005). For a popular treatment, see Will Ferguson, Why I Hate Canadians (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1997), esp. 96–113.

13. 13 The Journal of American History 86 (1999), special issues on “Rethinking History and the Nation-State: Mexico and the United States as a Case Study,” and “The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History.” For examples of the new migration history, see Marc S. Rodriguez, ed., Repositioning North American Migration History: New Directions in Modern Continental Migration, Citizenship, and Community (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2004); Samuel Truett and Elliott Young, “Making Transnational History: Nations, Regions, and Borderlands,” and Truett and Young, “Conclusion: Borderlands Unbound,” in Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History, eds. Samuel Truett and Elliott Young (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 1–32, 325–28. This scholarship is among the extensive work that developed from the new immigration, ethnic, and social histories; they remain focused on the United States and on the Mexican-U.S. borderland. For the less extensive body of scholarship that addresses the Canadian-U.S. borderland, see Bruno Ramirez, Crossing the 49^th Parallel: Migration from Canada to the United States, 1900–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Randy William Widdis, With Scarcely a Ripple: Anglo-Canadian Migration into the United States and Western Canada, 1880–1920 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998); McManus, The Line Which Separates; Beth LaDow, The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland (New York: Routledge, 2002); Theodore Binnema, Common and Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001); Paul W. Hirt, ed., Terra Pacifica: People and Place in the Northwest States and Western Canada (Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, 1998); John M. Findlay and Ken S. Coates, eds., Parallel Destinies: Canadian-American Relations West of the Rockies (Seattle and Montreal: University of Washington Press and McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002); William G. Robbins, ed., The Great Northwest: The Search for Regional Identity (Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2001); Carol Higham and Robert Thacker, eds., One West, Two Myths: Essays on Comparisons (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005); John J. Bukowczyk, Nora Faires, David R. Smith, and Randy William Widdis, eds., Permeable Border: The Great Lakes Basin as Transnational Region, 1650-1990 (Pittsburgh and Calgary: University of Pittsburgh Press and University of Calgary Press, 2005); Sterling Evans, ed., The Borderlands of the American and Canadian Wests (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006); and Michel Hogue, Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People (Chapel Hill and Regina: University of North Carolina Press and University of Regina Press, 2015).

14. 14 I am borrowing this image from the theme of the 2005 PCB-AHA program: “Dancing on the Rim: Nations, Borderlands, and Identities,” Ninety-eighth Annual Meeting, Pacific Coast Branch-American Historical Association, Corvallis, Oregon, August 4–7, 2005; Tracy Chapman, “Telling Stories,” Telling Stories, copyright 1999, Purple Rabbit Music, ASCAP.

15. 15 The figure includes migrants from Newfoundland. Kenneth Lines, British and Canadian Immigration to the United States Since 1920 (San Francisco: R & E Research Associates, 1978), 58–59, 69.

16. 16 Like many American communists, our cousins abandoned the party as Stalinist realities became known. For the cross-border migrations for sanctuary of Sitting Bull, following the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and of Louis Riel and his followers, after the 1869–1870 Rebellion, see LaDow, The Medicine Line, 43–72; Michel Hogue, “Disputing the Medicine Line: The Plains Crees and the Canadian-American Border, 1876–1885,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 53 (2002): 2–17; Joseph Kinsey Howard, Strange Empire: A Narrative of the Northwest (New York: William Morrow, 1952). The references to gays and lesbians wishing to marry and women seeking legal abortions were located in U.S. legal and political realities in 2005–2006. On June 26, 2015, the United States Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriages throughout the United States. The reference to political assaults on the right to legal abortions remains pertinent in 2025.

17. 17 Herbert Eugene Bolton, The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1921).

18. 18 David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 43–45.

19. 19 See Susan W. Hardwick, “Galveston: Ellis Island of Texas,” Journal of Cultural Geography 20 (2003): 76–77.

20. 20 Hardwick, “Galveston: Ellis Island of Texas,” 73–75, 77–79.

21. 21 Hardwick, “Galveston: Ellis Island of Texas,” 80–82; Natalie Ornish, Pioneer Jewish Texans: Their Impact on Texas and American History for Four Hundred Years, 1590–1990 (Dallas: Texas Heritage Press, Publishers, 1989), 119–30; Ruthe Weingarten and Cathy Schechter, Deep in the Heart: The Lives & Legends of Texas Jews: A Photographic History (Austin: Eakin Press, 1990), 84–85. Funded by New York financier Jacob Schiff, the Galveston Movement existed largely due to the leadership and commitment of Rabbi Henry Cohen of Galveston’s Congregation B’nai Israel. The goal of dispersing the new arrivals was partly humanitarian, to avoid an impoverished urban ghetto, but it also achieved distance between the largely eastern European Orthodox Jewish newcomers and the German Reform Jews of Galveston. Rabbi Cohen arrived in Galveston in 1888 and stayed in Texas until his death in 1952; he was a renowned humanitarian. In the interest of full disclosure, in 1962 I won the annual essay contest that honors his memory. For more on Rabbi Cohen, see Anne Nathan and Harry I. Cohen, The Man Who Stayed in Texas (New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1941); Henry Cohen: Messenger of the Lord, compiled by A. Stanley Dreyfus (New York: Bloch Publishing Co., 1963); and Jimmy Kessler, Temple B’nai Israel: The Story of a BOI (Austin: Nortex Press, 2004), 42–47.

22. 22 Juneteenth, which commemorates the emancipation of Texas slaves, has particular resonance for the Galveston African American community. On June 19, 1865, Union troops landed at Galveston and Major General Gordon Granger issued General Order No.3, which enforced the January 1, 1863, Emancipation Proclamation in Texas and ended slavery in the state. See Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), 61. As a child, I noticed gatherings of African Americans along the Galveston beachfront each June, but I was an adult before I had any idea why they had gathered or what they were celebrating.

23. 23 The Battle of San Jacinto was the final battle in Texas’s successful war for independence from Mexico.

24. 24 See Elizabeth Jameson, All That Glitters: Class, Conflict, and Community in Cripple Creek (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 26–27, 33–34.

25. 25 J. Sanford Rikoon, ed., Rachel Calof’s Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1995); Maier Calof, Miracles of the Lives of Maier and Doba Calof (n.p., 1941).

26. 26 Which organizations and associations do and do not cross borders is a subtle matter. For instance, the Western Federation of Miners (1893–1916), later the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (1916–1967) had local unions in Mexico, the United States, and Canada, but different ethnic groups were admitted to or excluded from local unions in different localities. The Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Knights of Columbus were more common sites of Irish association in the United States, while the Orange Order was more common in Canada. As in Ireland, the Orange Order is primarily Protestant.

27. 27 This is an admittedly idiosyncratic set of examples, rooted in my own research interests. It is clear that people and ideas crossed borders to connect the social movements and strikes listed. William Lyon Mackenzie King, later the Prime Minister of Canada, advised John D. Rockefeller and helped devise the plan for company unions Rockefeller implemented after the Ludlow, Colorado, coal miners’ strike. Sacagawea, who guided Lewis and Clark on their westward journey, Charlotte Thompson, wife of explorer David Thompson, and Malintzin, Hernán Cortes’s interpreter and the mother of his son, all occupy similar places in their respective national histories as Native women who assisted European/European American explorers and ultimately helped them claim Native territory.

28. 28 Quote from Chris Friday, private communication. Thanks to historians Sheila McManus (Lethbridge, Alberta), Catherine Cavanaugh (Edmonton, Alberta), Jean Barman (Vancouver, British Columbia), Cecilia Danysk and Chris Friday (Bellingham, Washington), Susan Armitage (Pullman, Washington), and Howard Shorr (Portland, Oregon) for private communications regarding their respective local TV stations. Based on this limited sample, it appeared that U.S. viewers got Canadian television only if they lived within range of Canadian stations, a relatively rare situation, but Canadian cable packages regularly include U.S. networks. Thanks to Brian Scrivener for the additional information that the Bellingham station was started by Canadian interests to serve the Vancouver market at a time when CBC had a monopoly. Private ownership of TV stations was not allowed until 1958.

29. 29 Jameson and Mouat, “Telling Differences”; Alexandra Minna Stern, “Nationalism on the Line: Masculinity, Race, and the Creation of the U.S. Border Patrol, 1910–1940,” in Truett and Young, Continental Crossroads, 299–323; Camille Guérin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900–1939 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994); Guérin-Gonzales, “Repatriacion de familias immigrantes durante la Gran Depresion,” Historia Mexicana 138 (1985): 241–74; Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995).

30. 30 Canada’s rank among sources of the foreign-born population in the United States as reported on the decennial U.S. census varied between third and fourth from 1850–1980; Mexico ranked roughly seventh or eighth numerically until 1970, when it moved to fourth (Canada was third); in 1980 Mexico moved to first place and stayed there through 2000. Canada’s third-fourth place ranking held until 2000, when an influx of Chinese, Filipinos, Indians, Cubans, Vietnamese, El Salvadorans, Koreans, and Dominicans reconfigured the foreign-born population and dropped Canada to tenth place. The “Mexican” ranking among the foreign-born, however, from 1850 through much of the 19^th century, discounts many ethnic Mexicans born in Mexico, whose birthplaces became “United States” after the Mexican-American War. See “Countries of Birth of the Foreign-Born Population, 1850–2000 (resident population)”, http://infoplease.com/ipa/A0900547.html, accessed July 20, 2005.

31. 31 See Anthony Wilson-Smith, “Canadians Invade U.S. News,” Maclean’s, June 22, 1998.

32. 32 Lines, British and Canadian Immigration to the United States, 57–69.

33. 33 Stan Rogers, “California,” copyright 1981, Fogarty’s Cove Music, used by permission. I am grateful to Ariel Rogers for her gracious response to my request to quote these lyrics.

34. 34 Passengers and crew aboard the fourth hijacked aircraft learned from friends and family about the attacks in New York and Washington. As they attempted to retake the plane, the hijackers deliberately crashed it into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. The death figures are from Patrick Jackson, BBC News, “September 11 Attacks: What Happened on 9/11?,” BBC, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57698668, accessed August 3, 2021.

35. 35 Harold A. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1930), best known in Canada through the revised edition. Harold A. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956) or through the 1999 edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), with a new introduction by Arthur Ray; George F. G. Stanley, “Western Canada and the Frontier Thesis,” Canadian Historical Association, Report of the Annual Meeting (1940), 105–14.

36. 36 This discussion is based on ninety-five articles in the Calgary Herald from March 11, 2001, through September 11, 2002, that mentioned the U.S.-Canada border. I am grateful to Timothy J. G. Cole for assistance with the newspaper research.

37. 37 “Ressam guilty of terrorism: Millennium celebrations targeted,” Calgary Herald, April 7, 2001; Tim Naumetz, “Entry to US shows leaks: 11,000 illegals caught last year,” Calgary Herald, November 7, 2001; Kari Shannon, “Al-Qaeda links land terror suspect in Jail,” Calgary Herald, September 4, 2002.

38. 38 Rick Mofina, “Feds mum on border-crossing threat,” Calgary Herald, March 16, 2001; Dene Moore, “Most illegal human cargo heading south of border,” Calgary Herald, May 28, 2001.

39. 39 Rick Mofina, “Feds mum on border-crossing threat”; Dene Moore, “Most illegal human cargo heading south of border.”

40. 40 “Border crossing closed for march,” Calgary Herald, April 22, 2001.

41. 41 Mike Trickey, “U.S. ambassador favours closer links with Canada: Celucci urges immigration ‘harmonization’,” Calgary Herald, June 30, 2001; Mike Trickey, “Border blues cost billions,” Calgary Herald, August 7, 2001.

42. 42 David Orchard, “Erasing borders with U.S. will erase Canada from map,” Calgary Herald, August 20, 2001. See also Charles Mandel, “National identity just a memory after NAFTA,” Calgary Herald, June 30, 2001; James Baxter, “Security over sovereignty, Canada told,” Calgary Herald, September 19, 2001; Mike Trickey, “US plans a worry to Ottawa,” Calgary Herald , December 12, 2001; Trickey, “Sovereignty weighs heavily on ‘smart border’ plan,” Calgary Herald, December 13, 2001; Norma Greenway and Tim Naumetz, “Proposed security pact draws criticism,” Calgary Herald, August 29, 2002.

43. 43 Kerry Williamson, “Ambassador urges more open border,” Calgary Herald, September 11, 2001.

44. 44 Don Martin, “Eerie quiet falls on Ottawa,” Calgary Herald, September 11, 2001.

45. 45 Paul Cherry and William Marsden, “Canada linked to suspects: Five terrorists entered U.S. from N.S. and Quebec,” Calgary Herald , September 13, 2001; Jonathan Peterson, “Congress plans tougher security: Orange cones only deterrent at some crossings,” Calgary Herald, October 3, 2001; Norma Greenway and Mike Trickey, “Traffic cones only deterrent at border; U.S. senator calls for humans at checkpoints after dark,” Calgary Herald, October 4, 2001. See also David Pugliese, “Canada called a weak link: Report critical of border security,” Calgary Herald, September 13, 2001; “Stand on guard: Much will depend upon who Canada lets in, and how,” Calgary Herald, September 14, 2001; Wayne Winters, “We’re sorry,” Calgary Herald, September 13, 2001; Helen Branswell, “U.S. vows to beef up ‘porous’ border,” Calgary Herald, September 26, 2001; James F. Smith and Maggie Farley, “What Americans are saying about us: Two articles in major U.S. papers raise questions about Canada and its security,” Calgary Herald, September 29, 2001; Rod Love, “Leaky borders are a threat to everyone,” Calgary Herald, September 30, 2001; Robert Russo, “Ashcroft backs off on border criticism,” Calgary Herald, October 3, 2001; Juliet O’Neill, “Manley tackles Clinton over border allegations: Minister fights perception of lax security,” Calgary Herald, October 25, 2001; Joe Laurie, “Manley irked by rumours: Border weakness called unfounded,” Calgary Herald, November 6, 2001; Matthew Sekeres, “Manley denies Canada a hotbed for terrorists,” Calgary Herald, April 26, 2002.

46. 46 Mark Reid, “Sacred bundles ‘defiled’ by border guards: Blackfoot want own border crossing,” Calgary Herald, June 8, 2001.

47. 47 See James Baxter and Hilary MacKenzie, “US fires first salvo in softwood lumber war,” Calgary Herald, April 3, 2001; Juliet O’Neill, “US lumber tariff ‘dead wrong’: Energy minister heats up trade battle,” Calgary Herald, August 23, 2001; Graham Thomson and Ed Struzik, “Alberta bristles at trade threat,” Calgary Herald, March 27, 2002; “Ottawa sours on U.S. tactics: Manley says Americans are ‘irresponsible’,” Calgary Herald, May 15, 2002; James Baxter, “Ottawa plans softwood lumber attack: Feds to spend 20 million to promote Canada’s cause,” Calgary Herald, May 28, 2002; Lisa Schmidt and Chris Varcoe, “Trade spats can be resolved, says Bush,” Calgary Herald, June 26, 2002; James Baxter, “WTO ruling favours Canada: Moral win declared in softwood tiff,” Calgary Herald, July 27, 2002; Linda Slobdian, “Making public aware of a lonely fight,” Calgary Herald, June 15, 2002; Slobdian, “Farmers stand their ground: Trio risks jail rather than pay fine,” Calgary Herald, July 15, 2002.

48. 48 Mark Reid, “Border delays sink town’s economy: Lineups keep Canadians at home; Series; G8 summit; Kananaskis,” Calgary Herald, May 12, 2002.

49. 49 “U.S. Border Control: The Minuteman Project,” The Minuteman Project, http://www.usbc.org/minuteman1.html, accessed July 22, 2005; “Minuteman Civil Defense Corps: Minuteman Corps New Mexico,” The Official Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, http://www.minutemanhq.com/nm/, accessed July 22, 2005; “MinuteManHQ On Patrol: In Four States All Month In October,” The Minuteman Project, http://www.minutemanhq.com/project/, accessed July 22, 2005.

50. 50 Cristobal Garcia Bernal Enviado, “La SG refuerza su vigilancia en la frontera norte ... con 8 agentes Beta,” La Jornada, April 3, 2005. See also Sergio Lagarde Moguel, “Reclutan en EU a niños y ancianos para cazar immigrantes,” La Cronica, March 29, 2005; Leslie Gómez, “La SRE condena a caza immigrantes y exigo\e a Estados Unidos detenerios,” La Cronica, March 30, 2005. Thanks to Sean van der Lee who directed me to these sources.

51. 51 In 2021, I would add COVID-19.

52. 52 Sylvia Van Kirk, “ ‘Women in Between’”: Women in Fur Trade Society in Western Canada,” Canadian Historical Association, Historical Papers (1977), 31–46, and Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670–1870 (Norman & Winnipeg: University of Oklahoma Press and Watson & Dwyer, 1980); Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Peggy Pascoe, “Western Women at the Cultural Crossroads,” in Trails: Toward a New Western History, eds. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1991); Albert L. Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 40–58; Sarah Carter, Capturing Women: The Manipulation of Cultural Imagery in Canada’s Prairie World (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997); Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: aunt lute book, 1987).

53. 53 Gloria Anzaldúa, “To live in the Borderlands means you,” in Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 216.

54. 54 Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104 (1999): 814–41, esp. 815–16. For critiques, see “Forum Essay: Responses: Borders and Borderlands,” American Historical Review 104 (1999): 1229–34; see also Adelman and Aron, “Of Lively Exchanges and Larger Perspectives,” American Historical Review 104 (1999): 1235–39.

55. 55 Richard White, “Is There a North American History?,” Revue française d’études américaines 79 (1999): 8–28.

56. 56 White, “Is There a North American History?,” 24.

57. 57 For Canada, see Michael Bliss, “Privatizing the Mind: The Sundering of Canadian History, the Sundering of Canada,” Journal of Canadian Studies 26 (1991–1992): 5–17; J. L. Granatstein, Who Killed Canadian History? (Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998). For the United States, see Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987); William J. Bennett, The De-valuing of America: The Fight for Our Culture and Our Children (New York: Summit Books, 1994); Lynne V. Cheney, Telling the Truth: Why Our Culture and Our Country Have Stopped Making Sense—and What We Can Do About It (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).

58. 58 I borrowed the reference from the then-popular TV sitcom “8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter,” starring John Ritter and Katey Sagal and co-starring Kaley Cuoco, Amy Davidson and Martin Spanjers. The series ran on ABC from September 17, 2002, to April 15, 2005.

59. 59 Matt Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900–1970 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), esp. chap. 6, “Memories of El Monte: Dance Halls and Youth Culture in Greater Los Angeles, 1950–1974,” 189–214.

60. 60 Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), esp. 19, 342–44.

61. 61 I have learned the value of collaborative work from some class collaborators. I thank the Learned Society of Calgary for making the dance fun; and Sheila McManus, Sarah Carter, Sue Armitage, and Jeremy Mouat for being great dance partners.