The historiography of borderlands has evolved greatly over the course of the twentieth century and twenty-first century. The two fathers of borderlands history were Frederick Jackson Turner, who made the frontier and the American West a hot topic among scholars beginning in the 1890s, and Herbert Eugene Bolton who popularized the concept of Spanish borderlands in the 1920s. Both men tended to romanticize the frontier/borderlands with “romantic stories of Indians, missionaries, and soldiers on the Northern Frontier of New Spain,” says Samuel Truett and Elliott Young.[1] Bolton trained scores of graduate students in the Spanish borderlands thus his conceptualization of the borderlands persisted long after his retirement. Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis was equally persistent through the 1960s.

After the 1960s there was a turn to broader, yet more in depth, examination of borderlands with studies probing questions on race, class and gender. There was an interest in the origins of these themes in the borderlands and understanding how one influenced the other. The 1980s and 1990s experienced a gradual move away from privileging the American Southwest and most recently there has been an emphasis on transnational borderlands history and widening the scope well beyond the American Southwest and United States – Mexico border to borderlands worldwide.

Three definitions of “borderlands” have dominated borderlands historiography: frontier zones, geographic zones/contested spaces, and zones of cultural hybridity. First, in their noteworthy article, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the peoples in between North American History,” Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron differentiate between “borderlands” and “frontiers.” Frontiers are understood to be “a meeting place of peoples in which geographic and cultural borders were not clearly defined,” in short, borderless lands.[2] They stress the role of intercultural relations in producing blending and readjustment as opposed to outright triumph. In the past, frontier zones were frequently associated, and nearly synonymous with, the American Southwest. This definition was used broadly in the earliest historiography of borderlands.

Second, Adelman and Aron describe “borderlands” as “contested boundaries between colonial domains.”[3] The contested spaces/geographic zones may be distinct culturally, politically, socially, demographically, economically, and/or environmentally. Finally, zones of cultural hybridity are marked by frequent cross-cultural exchange that create unique and pluralistic identities differing from those far removed from the border. Samuel Truett and Elliot Young explain in their introduction to Continental Crossroads, “[w]hen we look at identity in the borderlands, what we find is not a simple story of Mexicans on one side and North Americans on the other, or even a simply story of South – North or East – West relationships. Instead, we discover a multiplicity of overlapping and competing histories.”[4]This last definition is used widely in current scholarship that seeks to blur the lines that so often confined borderlands historiography. The pull towards a transnational analysis is facilitating a wider examination of how borderlands have been