The line dividing the United States and Mexico is invisible,
""imaginary"", drawn through shifting sands and changeable rivers.
The economic, social, and political issues surrounding this line,
however, are all too real, and the line snakes its way through a
history of conflict, through questions of definition, maps and
claims of ownership, and personal and political gerrymandering. In
""The Imaginary Line: A History of the United States and Mexican
Boundary Survey, 1848-1857"", Joseph Richard Werne sets out to
explore this border and the men who drew it. Using a variety of
sources, including manuscripts, government documents, contemporary
accounts, and memoirs, he creates a map of his own, one that charts
the intersection of individual lives, politics, and geography.
Werne proposes to revise the common view of the U.S.-Mexican
Boundary Survey Commission as directed and funded almost entirely
by the United States; the recent release of documents and archived
files from the Mexican Boundary Commission allows further study of
the Mexican commission's role and demands recognition of the equal
Mexican contribution to the commission's immense task. The diverse
group of military and civilian surveyors, engineers, and
politicians that composed the Joint Commission had to reconcile
disparate personal interests and backgrounds, as well as different
maps and equipment. Their efforts were of ""epic quality"" and
represent the coinciding cooperation and conflict that comprises
border relations today. Werne's study describes their lives and
work, their survival of the hostile environment, and their
struggles with inadequate funding and government corruption, tying
their stories into the approaching civil war in the United States,
the rapidly lengthening transcontinental railroad, and political
instability in Mexico.
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