Mappings offer opportunities to rethink paradigms engrained in our logic. Seldom do we have the opportunities to revise the historical record or wager a counternarrative to the existing citizenship discourse that prevails in the United States. At no other point in time has the discussion of Anglo dominance been more relevant and at the same time submerged in misreading or misunderstanding. The US–Mexico borderland is a semiotic field of conflict and struggle, or so the political rhetoric that propelled Donald Trump to the office of the presidency conveys. The main reason for this aberrant conclusion to the US election of 2016 is that people simply could not wrap their heads around the vitriol around anti-immigrant and anti-Latina/o sentiment in this country, much of which is aimed at the US–Mexican border. What has been absent from these readings or misunderstandings of the electorate is the manifestation of “whiteness” as an exertion of political will.

Lee Bebout's incredible assessment of the construction of “whiteness” in Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the U.S. Racial Imagination in Brown and White provides an adept reading of the current climate that is indispensable to understanding the role of Anglo dominance in the age of Trump. Perspective drives the book to a rewarding set of readings with a clear and succinct view of changing narratives. Bebout situates the book at the nexus between Chicana/o and critical whiteness studies.

The terminology laid out in the book is critical to representations of the book's aim, which is to flush out and conceive a relationship between Anglo dominance and its conclusions about how Mexicans, Mexican Americans and Chicana/os have figured in the politically charged situation in the twenty-first century. The book also goes to great lengths to explain the foundation of “whiteness” as a symbolic and sociohistorical facet of Anglo-American dominance noted as a discursive field whereby its logic is diffuse and adaptive to the changing political winds. This interesting facet is explained in the different chapters that stretch across the American citizenship model from a historical perspective.

Among the more notable elements of the book, chapter 3 reflects on the twenty-first century's unwieldy problem of whiteness as a project of humanitarian goodwill that ultimately distorts and dements racial discourses and compromises cultural selfhood. In this chapter, Bebout reveals how the “act of saviorism simultaneously maintains and conceals other, broader forms of injustice” (110). In this discussion, Mexicans as “others” are expected to be grateful to their saviors where “the aggrieved subject is compelled to owe a debt of gratitude to the white savior, again reinforcing the racial order” (110). Through the arrangement of kindness rhetoric, it is next to impossible to have a sense of autonomy or cultural determination without being beholden to the supreme benefactor. Equality is not possible under these circumstances.

This book reaches beyond readings of stereotypes and bias. There is no complacency in this book either. Bebout elaborates on a theoretical problem that has been an issue in the political world as well as the academic world, that our thinking about Mexican identity since the Treaty of Hidalgo Guadalupe draws heavily from expansionism. The problem certainly lies in the fact that notions of American citizenship rely on a nineteenth-century expansionist model, and not much has changed since. Civil rights have provided some protections but few guarantees of the role of citizenship and the symbolic recognition that goes with it.

Shifting our perspective and building further to a borderlands approach might be a possible recourse, but changing the symbolic underpinnings of the Mexican as exploitable labor should be part of the discussion as well. Otherwise we sustain the server/served dialectic, a borderlands reassessment of the master/slave-driven economy of US capitalism. There is a materiality in play here where certain bodies are rendered visible only through the gaze of opportunism.

Most of the examples provided in this study are familiar and de rigueur; the aim, however, is different, the perspective eye-opening, and for good reason. A new twist on the obvious is another way to look at Bebout's study of whiteness in relation to brown bodies. The imaginative fiction that has been driving US–Mexico relations is steeped in tragic tales of dominance for and about material gain, which is the inimical driving force of whiteness in this book.