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Borders mark off the place where one nation ends and another begins. But what happens when you belong to a people that has lived on both sides of the border, since long before the border even existed? Historian Jennifer Bess looks at two Native groups—the Quechan and the Tohono O’odham—to study their relationship with the U.S.-Mexico border and their mobility across it. Her article in Pacific Historical Review, “The ‘Crisis’ of Native American Mobility: Border-Crossing, Imperial Anxieties, and the Spanish-American War, 1896-1898,” received an honorable mention for the Judith Lee Ridge Prize of the Western Association for Women Historians.

Your article focuses on Native American “mobility” across the U.S.-Mexico border. Can you tell us a bit more about this concept and why it’s so important?

Great question! For me, mobility and borders are inseparable, so two issues come to mind. These days the border is in the news constantly, so much so that borders seem like natural phenomena. But we know they’re not. They’re political constructs made from negotiations, wars, and decisions about natural barriers like rivers or mountains. As political constructs, they take into account certain features of nations and populations and ignore other features, such as collective identities that don’t correspond with borders. That brings us to the second issue: Indigenous homelands. Homelands predated the international borders, of course, yet the politicians ignored them. In turn, Native Americans of the Southwest could only ignore the border for so long. In the late 1800s, the border became less porous, more highly surveyed, and—in fits and starts—more militarized. These changes were important to Native peoples attempting to retain food sources, ranching lands, pilgrimage pathways to sacred grounds, and family ties. Mobility was (and still is) intrinsic to being human.

How did you become interested in this topic?

I was doing research on the Akimel O’odham, the northern relatives of the Tohono O’odham featured in this article. I happened across a letter in the National Archives and Records Administration and found myself distracted by its vivid account of some alleged cattle-rustling Tohono O’odham cowboys stealing stock from Mexico and driving the herd back up into Arizona in 1898. The coincidence of this event with the Spanish-American War magnified its importance to such an extent that the State Department, the War Department, the Treasury Department, and the Department of Justice all reacted. It seemed crazy to me! 

So, I copied the letter and squirreled it away for later. Once I had time to do more research, I found that the Tohono O’odham and the local Indian agents confirmed that the cowboys had been retrieving their own cattle from their own homes south of the border. They were, in other words, moving cattle from place to place as cowboys do. The federal reaction amounted to much ado about nothing . . . except that some officials in the U.S. and Mexico wanted to press charges and secure the border from people they called “Spanish sympathizers.” It’s a gem of a story, a tragedy for the cowboys wrongly imprisoned (some for an entire year), and a timeless lesson in the dangers of overreaction and cultural hubris. 

How does your article change how we think about the relationship between Indian Affairs and international relations?

After having discovered some of the complexities of the Tohono O’odham story, I wondered how unique it was, so I started seeking comparable cross-border stories and came across the Quechan efforts to escape mandatory schooling and a particularly tyrannical school matron by retreating to homelands south of the border. The comparison between their success in using the border as a shield against cultural assimilation and the O’odham tragedy highlights issues of Native sovereignty and the various local, national, and international pressures on the Indian Office. We tend to think about Indian Affairs as a domestic issue, but my research has shown that Indian policy is also vulnerable to international pressures like Mexico’s federal government wanting the U.S. to punish the alleged cattle-rustlers and Mexican land-owners seeking the removal of “American” Indigenous peoples from purchased lands.

What’s next?

I’m fascinated by the threads of border security, nationalism, and Native American sovereignty running through these stories, and I’ve also learned how important the border is to contemporary Native Americans whose homelands are divided by it. This Pacific Historical Review article is the seed of a book project titled A New Home for the Old Way: Native Americans, the U.S.-Mexico Border, and Nineteenth-Century Sovereignties, which Texas Tech University Press has agreed to publish. Two chapters will develop the two stories covered in this article, but I’ve also found examples of Native Americans from the Northeast and from Indian Territory seeking to remove to Mexico in order to escape federal control and the reservation system. Additional chapters will develop these stories. While Mexico did not turn out to be the promised land in any of the cases I’ve located, the quest for self-determination has been so critical that peoples took great risks for the chance of success. These strike me as timeless stories, as integral to the human condition—and the Indigenous condition—today as they were almost 150 years ago.

We invite you to read Jennifer Bess's article, “The ‘Crisis’ of Native American Mobility: Border-Crossing, Imperial Anxieties, and the Spanish-American War, 1896-1898,” for free online for a limited time.

Print copies of the Spring 2024 issue of Pacific Historical Review (issue 93.2), in which Bess's article appears, as well as other individual issues of PHR, can be purchased on the journal’s site. 

For ongoing access to PHR, please ask your librarian to subscribe and/or purchase an individual subscription.

We publish PHR in partnership with the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association.