Joseph Werne spent 30 years digging through archived material in the United States and Mexico to learn all about the men who created the U.S.-Mexican border. He now tells their story in The Imaginary Line (Texas Christian University Press, 2007).
In his latest book The Imaginary Line, author and historian Joseph Werne ‘65 examines the creation of the U.S.-Mexican border and the men who spent nearly 10 years surveying that line. Werne, a history professor at Southeast Missouri State University, spoke with Denison Magazine about the border at its very beginning, the men charged with dividing two nations, and what they might think of that border today.
What kinds of challenges did the Mexican and U.S. commissions face in surveying the border?
The main problem was a lack of water all the way west of the Rio Grande. They finished the last of the monuments without any water at all–that meant that they could not make mortar to make more permanent boundary markers. There weren’t many people living out past San Diego and El Paso del Norte (now called Ciudad Juárez), so there were no cities to go to. No railroads. No roads. It was tough work, and sometimes they just made mistakes. One mistake gave 320 square miles of Mexican territory along the Arizona border to the United States.
One spot along the route is continually mentioned in the book. What was so important about 32° 22” north latitude?
What made it critical was the United States’ desire to have a railroad to tie California and Texas to the rest of the nation. In those days, railroad engineering was a pretty new business, and they weren’t really sure where they could build a railroad. Should it be in the northern part of the country? Should it run through the center? During the Mexican War, Major Emory, who would later serve on the U.S. Boundary Commission, noticed the topography of the region along the 32nd degree of latitude, and it was his opinion that that was the only place where a railroad could be built.
Neither the U.S. nor the Mexican government gave their commissions the supplies and money they needed to complete their work. Why?
On the Mexican side, there wasn’t enough money to go around. García Conde and José Salazar, the two leaders of the Mexican commission, both used their own credit to further the survey. The U.S. government didn’t fund its commission very well because of political squabbling. The Whigs were in control and were upset that Polk appointed Democrat John B. Weller to lead the U.S. commission. The Whigs tried to ruin Weller’s credibility in California by cutting him off. They gave him no money. They killed his credit. It was all politics.
How does the Rio Grande play into disputes?
The Rio Grande is a river, and rivers meander. It jumps from its banks and floods and carves a new channel. There is a U.S.-Mexican commission right now that is in charge of the boundary, and they’re swapping little chunks of territory on a yearly basis. The boundary actually shifted in the 1800s while they were still making the survey.
How would you describe the ways that the border binds–as opposed to divides–the two nations?
The people who live in the lower Rio Grande region refer to it simply as The Valley. It’s a different place. Mexicans and Americans have friendships on both sides of the border. They have businesses on both sides of the border. There’s cooperation between Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo. Their fire departments help each other out. For a long time it was an unpopulated area–when you went east of San Diego and west of El Paso, Texas, there wasn’t much there until after the U.S. Civil War. Then ranches were founded and silver was discovered, and those things drew people to the area. When you have a lot of people at the boundary, they’re going to have to interact. This interaction has just grown and grown over years, and now the area is a vibrant economic region on its own account.
But tensions flare whenever we talk about immigration. How has the border affected immigration?
There has always been migration across the border. You see Western movies where a guy robs a bank and then heads to Mexico. It was easy–you just rode your horse there. The boundary markers were quite far apart. In one case, the markers were more than 100 miles apart. Even as late as 1910, people just walked across from one town to the other. Cross the street, you’re in California. Cross the street you’re in Mexico. It’s always been a very porous border.
Drug violence in Mexico is a big topic in U.S. Mexican relations right now. What can the United States be doing to help?
Felipe Calderón, the Mexican president, has launched a war against the drug cartels. I watch the Mexico City news every night, and they’re arresting these guys by the dozens. But the cartels are fighting back. What we can do is prevent guns from being smuggled into Mexico. If a drug lord has a 50-caliber machine gun, he can outgun the Mexican police. More than 9,000 people have been killed by Mexican drug violence in the last couple of years. Some of them are innocent bystanders, but many are drug leaders killing drug leaders, which in my opinion, is OK, but it doesn’t make the gun trading safe, especially along the border.
Having studied the personalities of the border surveyors from the 1850s, do you have any sense of what they might think of the border today?
They would be extremely surprised to find millions of people living on the border in huge cities. They thought they were running the boundary through a desert and that it would be a unpopulated forever.