When Borders Cross Peoples: The Internal Colonial Challenge to Borderlands Theory

Struggles, such as those of the Irish in Northern Ireland, Tibetans in China, and Mexicans in the United States, have had much to do with historic claims to homeland, especially around issues involving shifting borders and migration. In the US the perception of Mexicans as aliens in the Southwest derived from the Anglo-American imposition of a borderline across Mexico in 1848. In response to the dominant US view, ethnic Mexicans countered with their own image of the Southwest as Mexico's lost northern borderlands and of the border as immoral and irrelevant. By the 1960s, supporting that image, ethnic Mexicans helped develop "internal colonialism"-a theory dismissed in the 1980s, but persistent. The purpose of this paper is to outline the connections between internal colonial and borderlands theories and to argue for the necessity of the former to understand the historic situations of indigenous and hybrid populations within the borders of modern nation-states.