Now more than ever, we need the knowledge, narratives, and histories from the Race to the Truth series, which unapologetically brings attention to marginalized groups in America. David Dorado Romo’s Borderlands and the Mexican American Story (Race to the Truth) breaks down the hegemonic door that has tried to shut out the complexities of Mexican American and borderland history. This book provides great insight in a digestible way for both younger and older readers alike. While the book is designated as a middle grade reader, many age groups would benefit from picking up this book.
David Dorado Romo is no stranger to writing about borderland history. His impactful, academic text Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juárez: 1893-1923 provides an archival window to people and places in El Paso and Juárez that were on the periphery of the Mexican Revolution. His passion for history continues, and really shines through, in this middle grade reader.
Beyond simply retelling the recognizable stories about Mexican American history, the author takes us to the borderlands before it was Mexico and the United States.
Our reading journey begins with the history of the oldest footprints found in North America. These footprints were made by the indigenous people who walked the land before conquest and colonization forever changed the landscape. By starting with these footprints, readers are shown that before the land was split in two, there existed no borders. Dorado Romo goes on to detail the numerous movements, policies, and people that shaped the land into what we now recognize as Mexican Americans and the US-Mexico border.
Borderlands and the Mexican American Story is a refreshing and influential book broken down into 16 impressive chapters for a total of 334 pages. What stood out most with each chapter were the well thought out critical questions marking the end of each topic. This book refuses to shy away from the complicated and complex history of Mexican Americans and the Border and invites readers to sit and reflect on the history they have just learned.
Some in the Mexican American community have grown up hearing the phrase, “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us,” and we finally have a young reader friendly book that gives a nuanced understanding of how that border crossing happened, how it changed the land, and how that crossing continues to impact Mexican Americans in the United States. The book does not concern itself with the older history many of us have come to know; instead Dorado Romo presents us with important figures, activists, and leaders history has not talked a lot about. Readers learn about Teresita Urrea, a spiritual revolutionary; Severita Lara, a student activist; and a class of 4th graders who fought to make sure Mexican American history was not forgotten in California.
Dorado Romo discusses the many injustices faced by Mexican and Mexican American communities such as forced fumigations with toxic chemicals, forced sterilization of women, and many other horrible incidents. Dorado Romo makes it a point to share historical moments up until 2022. A reminder that Mexican American history is still being written. The final chapter titled “An Unwillingness to Disappear” is a fitting way to end a book that is enacting this very idea.
Borderlands and the Mexican American Story will not let Mexican American history disappear and invites us to continue digging deeper into that history.
Growing up in Texas as a Mexican American child, I wish I had this book available to me while in the public school system. Now as an adult, I reflect on moments where it felt like puzzle pieces of my history were missing, where I felt that I wasn’t being told the full truth. Dorado Romo gave me more pieces of that puzzle. Now more than ever, we need books that continue to document the histories of marginalized communities.
David Dorado Romo is an author, historian, translator, and musician from El Paso, Texas. For more of his work, see:
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