Review of \u3ci\u3eU.S.-Mexico Borderlands: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives\u3c/i\u3e Edited by Oscar J. Martinez

U.S.-Mexico Borderlands is an addition to the Jaguar Books on Latin America Series coedited by W.H Beezley and C.M Maclachlan. In this volume, Oscar J. Martinez pulls together important essays written by outstanding US-Mexico Border scholars and journalists. Official and personal documents enhance the scholarly renditions that span border history and sociology beginning with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and take the reader into current interpretations of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Significantly the book is written in a bilateral-border spirit, its contributors hailing from both Mexico and the United States. Writing from a lifetime of work on the border, Martinez provides an informative introduction that sets conflict and interdependence as the two primary themes of the book. The volume is divided into seven sections: Making the Boundary, Border Strife, the Rise of Transborder Interaction, the Mexican Revolution, Boom and Bust, Interdependence, and A World Apart. Each section begins with an introduction outlining the important events, themes, and historical context for the essays that follow. Each section also includes scholarly chapters (often previously published articles), followed by original documents ranging from treaties (the text of the Treaty of Velasco), journalistic accounts (Mexican Maids: El Paso\u27s Worst Kept Secret), personal histories (Jose Vasconcelos\u27 A Mexican Schoolboy\u27s Experience in Eagle Pass, Texas), and even poetry (Martinez\u27 La Frontera). Each essay and document is also preceded by short but excellent prefaces that highlight crucial events and outline the context for the issues subsequently presented. Taken as a whole these introductions and prefaces provide the introductory reader with a broad scope of Borderlands history. The readings range from the macro-sociological to local accounts that examine the details of human experience. The book is well balanced and covers topics of contemporary focus illustrating the complexity of borderlands history and sociology. These topics include women\u27s involvement in maquiladora work and as domestic servants, as well as La Crisis and the Transfrontier Metropolitan Structure. This is an excellent introductory text. Martinez has included a good list of suggested readings and borderlands films for teaching, which many readers will find helpful. Its greatest deficiency, however, is that there are no maps. In addition there is little scholarly critique of interpretive history or sociology. Social science perspectives of cosmopolitanism or of transnational processes set in the global context of capitalism and economics would have added to this perception of the borderlands