IHR Book Award and Author Reception

The history of the U.S. southern border involves a mix of not just Mexican and Anglo-American communities, but many others, including Chinese and African American migrants. So how did the multiracial past of the U.S.-Mexico border develop a monoracial identity? How do the politics of immigration reform inhibit the U.S. from embracing its culturally diverse reality?

At this event, Book Award winner Julian Lim will discuss her winning book "Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands." All nominated works will also be on display at the event. 

About the author

Julian Lim is an assistant professor of history at Arizona State University. She has published articles on race, immigration and refugee law and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in the Pacific Historical Review, the California Law Review and the U.C. Irvine Law Review.

About "Porous Borders"

With the railroad's arrival in the late nineteenth century, immigrants of all colors rushed to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, transforming the region into a booming international hub of economic and human activity.

As these migrants came together in ways that blurred and confounded elite expectations of racial order, both the United States and Mexico resorted to increasingly exclusionary immigration policies in order to make the multiracial populations of the borderlands less visible within the body politic and to remove them from the boundaries of national identity altogether.

"Porous Borders" tells the stories of the many communities that found themselves at the U.S.-Mexico borderlands during this time.

Location and parking

The event will be held in the Bistro Room, on the first floor of the University Club on ASU's Tempe campus.

The closest parking garage is the ASU Fulton Center Garage on University and College. Rates vary based on time in lot. We are not able to validate parking.