As the intense focus of xenophobic angst, the border is constantly in the news these days. The far right's chant of “build that wall” suggests a permanence, a barrier that is real, if porous, and that merely needs to be policed more effectively. If for no other reason than this misreading of the border and its history, this intervention represents a welcome corrective, a reminder that the border has long been (and remains) a shifting ideological project aimed at producing legible difference where one often finds just the opposite. For the Yaqui, Kickapoo, and Tohono O'odham communities that are the bases of the study, the border has represented both an arbitrary imposition on their community lands and an opportunity to undertake their struggles for autonomy in novel fashions.

The border acquired meaning in distinct fashion for these three communities. For the Yaquis, who until the mid nineteenth century lived fairly concentrated in the Yaqui Valley in Sonora, the creation of the border did not bifurcate traditional communities so much as it created new opportunities to carry on their struggle for survival against a genocidal state. Arms purchased in Arizona as well as the relative safety of diasporic Yaqui communities in Arizona and California helped forestall the complete annihilation of their community during the reign of Porfirio Díaz. The Kickapoos, in turn, were not originally a border culture, having migrated there from the Great Lakes as a result of conflicts (originally with the Iroquois) associated with the gradual expansion of European settler colonialism in North America. Movement back and forth across the border allowed them to limit the power of both the Mexican and the US states.

The Tohono O'odham differed from the other two inasmuch as their traditional homelands were divided by the border, though they similarly developed a series of strategies to turn the border to their favor during the late nineteenth century. Exercising these strategies grew increasingly difficult after the onset of World War 1, when the United States began to police and restrict movement across the international boundary. By the 1990s, while the population of Tohono O'odham on the northern side of the border was growing rapidly, Mexican census takers could find no Tohono O'odham living south of the border.

The analysis is at its most interesting and compelling where Schulze focuses on the ways that the simultaneous consolidation of the frontier and national forms of tribal recognition affected cross-border peoples. The long fights for federal recognition and rights in both Mexico and the United States reveal the complex ways that overlapping sovereignties and a lack of formal documentation have plagued these three communities, each of them in a particular way, given their different histories of migration and settlement: the Yaquis migrated to the United States from Mexico, the Kickapoos migrated southward, and the Tohono O'odham remained in place. We also see here how the complex racial qualifications for citizenship in the United States during the early twentieth century, and problems with documentation in later years, led to people who had migrated as children finding themselves trapped on one side of the border. We also see how notions of foreignness have plagued efforts to claim birthright citizenship for people who, because of questions about their origins, seem foreign. Nevertheless, in spite of small populations and abject poverty, Schulze also reminds us that these communities have managed to carve out unusually sovereign spaces along the US-Mexican border.

Schulze's primary lens for viewing these phenomena is nationhood. In many ways, this makes a great deal of sense, because it is the nation that has provided the language through which the persistence of certain forms of difference over time can be understood. It is also clear that the Mexican nation and the United States ultimately represent the foils for persistent forms of local identity in the border. Really quite remarkable is the extent to which members of these communities have retained and at times recreated a sense of communal belonging in spite of expulsion, migration, the loss of land, and genocidal state policies. And still, there may be a missed opportunity here. At times, Schulze seems to assume the primacy and permanence of indigenous nationalisms, when those very phenomena are as much a product of long histories of exclusion and colonialism as they are a product of something inherent to these communities. That said, this is a fascinating study of these three border cultures.