The U.S.-Mexico border crisscrossed the American continent like a stubborn frontier. Rebuilding Indigenous, Spanish, and Mexican communities and telling stories of resilience and resistance.
How Mexican American families survived the changing borders
As the 250th anniversary of the United States approaches, we look at one family’s experience at the historically changing U.S.-Mexico border.
Nicolas Nativida’s great-grandfather, Juan Velarde, was born in land that would be claimed by four different countries during his lifetime.
Velarde was born in what is now the desert Southwest among the remnants of the Spanish Empire and lived under the flags of Mexico and Texas. Long story short, he joined the Confederate Army, but his family was against it. And finally, under the stars and stripes of the United States.
As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, the journey that led to its current location is a story of a nation whose insatiable hunger for growth engulfed Native American tribes, Spanish descendants, and the Mexican people. This is also the story of a people whose resilience and quiet resistance kept their language, rituals and traditions alive.
“Every time the border changes, there’s a shift in mindset,” said Nativida, who teaches criminal justice and border studies at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces. “How we interact with food, mountains, rivers, and each other.”
Six generations later, Nativida still lives where his ancestors lived: in the Paso del Norte region, a rugged mountain landscape fringed by high desert valleys where the Rio Grande flows. He speaks Spanish and English and identifies as Mexican-American.
His family tree now spans an area that includes southern New Mexico, western Texas, and Mexico. Here, drawn south by wars and treaties, peace negotiations and takeovers, borders shifted or changed hands at least four times in the 19th century and five times in the 20th century.
The line now known as the U.S.-Mexico border crisscrossed the American continent like a stubborn frontier. Nativida’s great-grandfather adapted, and his descendants likewise endured every new attempt to erase their language, culture, and traditions.
“I always wonder if the trauma he went through is deeply embedded in our DNA,” Natividad said.
draw a map of conquest
In the fourth-floor archives of New Mexico’s Branson Library, Dennis Daley pulls a delicate 19th-century map out of its plastic sleeve.
The archive’s special collection includes maps by French, Dutch, Spanish and American cartographers. The Daily bent over a black-and-white map with the Spanish title “Mapa de los Estados Unidos de México,” referring to the country then known as the United Mexican States. The book was published in 1847 by the influential New York cartographer John Disternell. Although his map was later found to be inaccurate, it was used as the basis for a treaty that expanded the territory of the United States by 525,000 square miles in 1848.
Daly said he acquired the map to learn about the cultural and political stories it tells. The university’s 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century map collections “allow us to see how these changes occurred over time, and to learn about the people who were here before Spain, before Mexico, before the United States,” he added.
For 300 years, Spain claimed vast territory in present-day Mexico, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, and California, until Mexico won its independence in 1821 after an 11-year war. The vast northern territory extending into the Rocky Mountains and beyond was transferred to Mexican control.
Texas then fought Mexico for independence, and for ten years starting in 1836, the Republic of Texas flew its own Lone Star flag in Paso del Norte and claimed El Paso and parts of southern New Mexico.
A series of battles and trades just before the Civil War reshaped the country once again.
In 1845, the United States annexed Texas. The following year, war broke out between the United States and Mexico. This treaty ended in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In this treaty, the United States negotiated an incredible territorial expansion into the Pacific Ocean. Or, from the south, an amazing theft was planned.
“This region has been a nation for 250 years, but it doesn’t have the same birth date as the United States,” said Ruben Leyva, a Gila Apache border scholar also from New Mexico. “We don’t really look to 1776 as the starting point for modern American identity. We look to the Mexican-American War of 1848.”
Those turbulent times when the Southwest was forced into the United States are etched in the family’s memories.
American patriotism. Native, Spanish and Mexican roots
On a Sunday afternoon in early May, a troupe of dancers from San Elizario, Texas, turned the town square into a stage to reenact 500 years of borderland history. A dove-like white adobe chapel stood on the site of a former Spanish fort.
Tigua dancers from Isleta del Sur Pueblo performed a traditional prayer ceremony before hunting. The men wore buffalo headdresses and otter skins around their necks. Women wore floral shawls. Another troupe followed, dancing in the style of each subsequent faction. Spanish flamenco in a long black dress. Folklórico is a Mexican ballet with colorful skirts. Tejano two-step wearing jeans and boots.
As Americans, “I think we’re very patriotic, but we stuck to our Mexican roots: traditions, festivals, clothing, food, language,” said Lilian Trujillo, who was born nearby and grew up in San Elizario and speaks English and Spanish.
Neither the bloodshed that occurred with each transition nor the silent efforts to erase culture were replicated. Not long ago, children in public schools in West Texas were punished and even beaten for speaking Spanish. Bilingual education is popular today.
“We can celebrate our founding,” Leyva said. “But we also have to understand that this is a story of violence, displacement, captivity, war, and deprivation as part of history.”
Borderlands people protect their history and cling to their identity “like a living heritage,” he says.
San Elizario existed under at least three different flags. It was founded as a Spanish presidio, or fort, in the late 1700s. After the collapse of the Spanish Empire, it became part of Mexico. In 1830, a great flood changed the course of the Rio Grande, putting San Elizario north of the river instead of south. Therefore, after the Mexican-American War, it became part of the United States.
As president of the San Elizario Genealogical and Historical Society, Mr. Trujillo spent 10 years organizing the Catholic chapel’s historical records, digitizing every baptism, marriage, and death: 20,000 records in total.
She manages the archives of all the families with roots in San Elizario, which are kept in the museum in the square. Dozens of white binders are organized by last name, from Alarcón to Zuniga.
“Whatever they bring us, we put it here,” she said, flipping through a binder. She paused at the sight of a familiar sepia-toned photograph.
“Oh, that’s my grandfather,” she said, pointing to a man in a World War I U.S. Army uniform. “Like I said, it was very patriotic.”
Mark borders step by step
At dawn and dusk, Paso del Norte’s border mountains paint a jagged watercolor line of deep purple on the horizon.
These mountains are visible in black and white photographs from the 1890s. At the time, the newly formed U.S. Boundary Commission was attempting to document the still-raw desert border amid concerns that no one knew where the desert border was.
The track was then, and still is, marked with an obelisk., Currently, 276 of them are located within near-visual distance from El Paso west to the Pacific Ocean. This is an early attempt to strengthen the line in the sand. Heading east, the Rio Grande marks the border on its way to the Gulf of America or Mexico, depending on your point of view.
America took shape. Colonies became states and borders changed. The territory of Louisiana was divided into 15 different modern states. Maine separated from Massachusetts in 1820. Virginia and West Virginia separated in 1863. But no border anywhere in the country continues to capture the modern political imagination or inspire fear in the United States as much as the U.S.-Mexico border.
The last time it moved to the Paso del Norte area was in the 1960s. A small island formed in the middle of the Rio Grande between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, sparking a dispute between the two countries over who owned what. The 1963 Treaty of Chamizal redrawn the boundaries. A year later, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson met with Mexico’s Adolfo López Mateos in El Paso to formalize the agreement.
National borders have been ignored, sometimes to the point of poverty. It is vilified as “unsafe.” Barricades have been erected with monuments, border guards, steel bollards and razor wire.
In March, U.S. government contractors blasted the southern slopes of Mount Cristo Rei, one of the mountains photographed in the 1890s survey, to build a border wall.
protect indigenous traditions
Rudy Cruz Jr., a member of Isleta del Sur Pueblo and the mayor of Socorro, Texas, knows the residents’ stories by heart. How they rebelled against the Spaniards in 1680 and were captured in northern Isleta Pueblo, near present-day Albuquerque. How were they forced to march 400 miles south?
Today, the Tigua people are a sovereign nation in Socorro, a rural village between El Paso and San Elizario.
“Do we maintain our rituals, traditions and dances? Yes, but there is a strong Spanish influence,” he said.
Although many Tigua residents are Catholic, they maintain a strict separation between church and tradition, he said. The pueblo has original ceremonial drums that are centuries old, he added. It came with his people on a forced march south.
“Drums never go into a church,” Cruz said.
His father was born on a reservation that borders the Rio Grande and is now surrounded by a 30-foot iron wall. His mother was a third-generation Hispanic resident of Socorro with Mexican and Spanish roots. His wife is from Mexico, and his son learned his native language, Taiki, in kindergarten. The family speaks Spanish and English at home.
“We’re proud Americans, we’re proud Texans,” he said, but added, “There’s more and more intermixing between me and myself as Mexicans and American Indians.” He told his son, “They have their traditions and rituals, but we have ours.”
They celebrate both.
cross the border
Nativida has a portrait on his computer of his grandmother, Esperanza Almeida López Ochoa, who became an American citizen by marriage. In the photo, she is young and fair-skinned, with red lips and black hair tied into a 1940s-style Victrol style.
Ochoa Street in Nativida’s hometown of El Paso was named after his ancestors who migrated across the border. When he grew up, he crossed the border to Ciudad Juárez with his mother and grandmother. They walked across the Paso del Norte Bridge, which connects the historic centers of both cities.
What still sticks in his mind is the treatment of his grandmother, an American citizen, by the U.S. Border Patrol, who “treated her harshly because she had an accent.”
He remembers her cool head and his own anger. “She’s American!” he recalled blurting out indignantly. He remembers his mother telling him to “slow down.”
Now, using the language of border studies scholars, he wonders how his great-grandfather navigated the changing expectations of new powers and the cultural and linguistic norms he had to learn and unlearn. Also about how he, his mother and late grandmother crossed modern borders. He wonders how his past trauma affects his present.
But he also proudly added that border residents know how to move between cultures and how to preserve them.
Nativida quoted the memory of the late Gloria Anzaldúa, a Texan and Chicana writer who wrote from the borderlands: “Navigators, there are no bridges. Build them as you walk.”
“She’s implying that border residents are experts at building bridges,” he says. “Because we have a different view of borders.”
