"We Didn't Cross The Border, The Border Crossed Us:"

Caused by the meandering Rio Grande, the Chamizal Land Dispute was a century-long international land and boundary conflict over contested terrain known as “El Chamizal” between El Paso, Texas and Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua. In 1964, the United States ratified the Chamizal Treaty, returning 630-acres of South El Paso to Mexico as “El Chamizal"—marking the first and only time the U.S. has returned inhabited land to Mexico since the end of the U.S.-Mexico War. As a result, nearly 6,000 Mexican American residents were forced from their homes to accomplish this task. How did this conflict come to be? Who are the families who were forced from their homes in El Chamizal? And how did this conflict persist for so long? Come learn about this landmark but little-known land dispute, its place in Texas history, and how this story illuminates the Chicano Movement’s refrain “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” 

Alana de Hinojosa is an Assistant Professor of History at Texas State University. She holds a PhD in Chicana/o Studies from UCLA and certificates in American Indian Studies (UCLA), Writing Pedagogy (UCLA), and Digital Public Humanities (George Mason University). She is also a Ford Foundation Fellow and IUPLR/UIC-Mellon Latina/o Studies Fellow. Prior to joining TXST, Alana was a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the School of Transborder Studies at ASU and a Digital Public Humanities Fellow at the ASU Hispanic Research Center.  Alana's research is concerned with histories of displacement, diaspora, and refusal, and what these have to do with the Río Grande. Her current book project focuses on the Chamizal Land Dispute between the United States and Mexico and the landmark Chamizal Treaty of 1964. As a historian, she specializes in U.S.-Mexico borderlands history (specifically, histories of the El Paso-Cd. Juárez borderlands), Chicana/o history, Texas history, and Latinx Geographies.