Limits of Liberty

James David Nichols is an assistant professor of history at City University of New York, Queensborough Community College.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsIntroduction“A Country in Which He Could Acquire Liberty”:The Making of Borderlands MobilityChapter 1“La Frontera del Norte:” Lipan Apaches and the Troubled Rise of Mexico in the BorderlandsChapter 2Racial Fault Lines: Immigrant Indians in MexicoChapter 3“Impatient for the Promised Freedom”:Runaway Slaves in the Age of the Texan RevolutionChapter 4“A Great System of Roaming:”Runaway Debt Peons and the Making of the International BorderChapter 5Warriors in Want: Immigrant Tribes and Borderlands InsecurityChapter 6The Line of Liberty:Runaway Slaves after the Treaty of Guadalupe HidalgoChapter 7Bordering on the Illicit:Violence and the Making of the International LineChapter 8“Not Even Seeming Friendship”:Lipan Apaches and the Promises and Perils of Play-off DiplomacyChapter 9Sacrificed on the Altar of Liberty:Regionalism and Cooperation in the Age of VidaurriConclusionMobility Uninterrupted: The Limits of LibertyBibliographyNotesIndex

“James Nichols shows how a dizzying array of historical actors used the early U.S.-Mexico border for their own purposes, sometimes pleasing national authorities and sometimes greatly vexing them. We are accustomed to thinking of borders as barriers, but Nichols shows how this border invited crossing and inspired dreams of hope and freedom. This deeply empathetic and creative study should be required reading for borderlands historians.”—Benjamin H. Johnson, associate professor of history at Loyola University. Chicago“As James Nichols reveals in this important new book, the U.S.-Mexico border has simultaneously functioned as a space of liberation and opportunity as well as a zone of confinement and limitation. Grounded in research in archives on both sides of the border and peopled with a fascinating cast of fugitive slaves, escaped peones, and indigenous peoples, The Limits of Liberty is essential reading for all borderlands historians.”—Karl Jacoby, professor of history at Columbia University“The Limits of Liberty skillfully captures a range of borderlanders along this developing and changing line of liberty; it especially excels by providing new perspectives on slaves and slavery, debt peons, vecinos, and the Lipan Apaches, using narrative accounts based on archival materials to reveal new dimensions of the U.S.-Mexico border.”—Todd W. Wahlstrom, visiting assistant professor of history in Seaver College at Pepperdine University “Nichols offers a prismatic view of the various peoples moving through the Texas-Mexico borderlands during tumultuous points in the nineteenth century. . . . By stimulating our thinking on what liberty has meant to different people, and in what ways freedom can appear and disappear, Nichols continues the important work of delving into the long-intertwined histories of Texas, Mexico, and the still-swirling spaces and societies between.”—Lori A. Flores, associate professor of history at Stony Brook University, SUNY