| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 33.3

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 33.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

La Gran Línea: Mapping the United States-Mexico Boundary, 1849-1957. By Paula Rebert. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. xv + 259 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $45, cloth; $22.95, paper.)

The northern boundary of New Spain, and, later, of Mexico, was always a problem, whether there were Frenchmen or Anglos on the eastern side of it. After the war of 1846-1848, and the consequent loss of half of Mexico's territory to the United States, the problem again became urgent. True, the writers of the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo seemed to offer a solution, but their knowledge of the borderlands was defective, and the lines that they chose, as Rebert puts it, "were replete with possibilities for uncertainty and controversy" (p. 2). 1

Hence the appointment of the joint Mexican-United States commission whose work is the subject of this book. The first two chapters deal respectively with the field surveys and with mapmaking in the boundary office, which was established for defining the border. The next three chapters move on to questions of consultation, cooperation, and controversy. The final chapter considers the eventual status of the "authoritative maps." At each stage, reproductions of the maps bolster and illuminate the narrative. The illustrations, however, are mostly hard to read, not least because the maps on the U. S. side were heavily lacquered, thus making them even more obscure. . . .

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