Outfoxing all other military and political personnel in the territory of Baja California Norte, Colonel Esteban CantU, on becoming governor, astutely played the leaders of the Mexican Revolution one against another. A compelling figure in the Mexican Revolution, he maintained his independence from Mexico City until he was forced from office in August 1920. While CantU was appointed governor by Venustiano Carranza, Pancho Villa, and Eulalio Gutierrez of the Convention Government, he followed their orders only when it suited him and published the laws of the government in Mexico City to give the appearance that he was loyal to the central power when in fact he was not. He was more concerned with neighboring Sonora and supported every anti-central government movement in that state to secure his own independence. When he gained power, CantU faced an indescribable morass of crime and immorality in Tijuana and Mexicali: white slavery and prostitution; opium dens; cocaine, morphine, and heroin dealers; and gambling halls, saloons, and dives of all descriptions. Governor CantU either licensed many of these or became connected to them in some other way, personally profiting from such activities but also employing much of this revenue to create the territory's first reliable infrastructure. This engaging account reveals the complexity of the Mexican Revolution, with a cast of characters that includes officers and officials of the Porfirian regime, revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries, US investors, crackpots, German spies, Japanese schemers, Chinese workers, and purveyors of every sort of vice.

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.