A Brief History Of The U.S.-Mexican Border

In many ways, the border of the United States and Mexico is its own country

In the beginning, it was a vague idea, the approximate and inhospitable edge of the Spanish Empire and the beginning of no man’s land.

At the end of the 18th century, the primitive United States of America was far from the nation that would soon become Mexico. Even more “recently,” in the middle of the 19th century, the border between Mexico and the States was only a line drawn on a piece of paper, a porous boundary with no man-made barriers.

Mexico was officially born at the end of 1821. So for two centuries now, along two thousand miles, Mexicans and Americans have had a bittersweet neighborhood.

How The Line Came To Be

The line from San Diego/Tijuana to Brownsville/Matamoros is as large as Western Europe. It measures just about 2 thousand miles from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, a distance equivalent from Madrid to Warsaw. It passes through fertile valleys, white deserts resembling the Sahara, mountainous areas and wetlands. It has a culture of its own and even, in the opinion of some linguists, an incipient language, Spanglish.