Bridging National Borders in North America

often very good ones, that stop arbitrarily at the boundaries-between North Dakota and Saskatchewan, for example, or between Arizona and Sonora-and that ignore the land and the people just on the other side, as well as the line in between. They also often succumb to the temptation to superimpose these lines on earlier historical periods, when they did not yet exist, thereby assuming the inevitability of the modern map. Maps of the modern world, in which sharp borders delineate discrete nations marked with dierent hues, are so deceptively straightforward that it is easy not to interrogate them. National borders represent the territorial embodiment of a bundle of ideas that modern states have propagated and enforced. They tell us that all of humanity is divided up among discrete nation-states; that these nations have sovereign power over particular territory to the exclusion of other nations; and that, collectively, nations exercise this sovereignty over all the earth, save the uninhabitable continent of Antarctica. The existence of national borders implies that those living within the territory demarcated by them are subject to the rule of that nation and owe it their allegiance. The mere fact of living within a nation's borders implies that one is the product of that nation's past, and that one's own fate is inextricably linked to that of one's fellow countrymen above all others. Moreover, should an individual cross a border to live in another country's territory, he or she then becomes subject to the laws of that nation, assuming, in essence, that nation's history. Indeed, precisely because the nation-state has become the dominant form of political organization in the modern world, we often look at modern maps and the borders that divide nations without questioning or even recognizing these assumptions. By the mid-twentieth century, nationstates had divided up most of the earth's territory, population, and economic life among them, having supplanted, incorporated, or conquered all non-national societies. But rather than unquestioningly accepting the existence of such national borders, we might instead treat them as interesting intellectual problems, and ask some historical questions about them: How did they come to be, and how and why did they take on their current configurations? With what other ways of organizing people and space did they come into conflict, and how were these struggles resolved? What kinds of goods and which sorts of people did national governments want to cross these borders easily, and which ones not at all? And how many of these items and individuals have actually crossed? Did borders mean

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