This sweeping and original synthesis reinterprets borderlands history from the Mexican perspective. The region included today in the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas formed the far northern frontier of New Spain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. After 1821 it became a part of the newly independent Mexico, which soon lost the land north of the Rio Bravo (or the Rio Grande) to the expanding United States.

Explored here are the varying experiences over nearly 350 years of Mexicans living in lands north of the Rio Bravo.

Professor Gomez-Quinones examines Mexicans' interactions first with Indians and then Anglos and delineates what changes occurred in Mexican and Mexican-American identity and political consciousness. This new interpretation of Mexicans in borderlands history emerges from a wide-ranging analysis including politics and governance, repression and violence, gender and ethnicity, hegemony and ideology, and cultural and social change.