The U.S. - Mexico Borderlands

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course examines the US-Mexico Borderlands from a time before political borders to the contemporary moment. As a vast geographical and conceptual space of cooperation and antagonism, the borderlands that include what is today the southwestern United States and northern Mexico comprise a crucial site to interrogate the formation and limits of colonial imposition, national identity, state power, racial segregation, environmental transformation, and capitalist expansion. In this course, we will map the history of the Mexico-US borderlands by drawing from testimony, fiction, images, cartography, music as well as scholarship that centers the experiences of those who have lived in and moved through this territory. This course is open to all.