The frontier! There is no word in the English language more stirring, more intimate, or more
beloved. . . . It means all that America ever meant. . . . [E]ven now begin the tales of our own old frontier to assume a haziness, an unreality, which makes them seem less history than folklore. Now the truth is that the American frontier of history has many a local habitation and many a name. And this is why it lies somewhat indefinite under the blue haze of the years, all the more alluring for its lack of definition. . . . The fascination of the frontier is and has ever been an undying thing. . . . Take away all our history . . . but leave us forever the tradition of the American frontier. There lies our comfort and our pride. There we have never failed. . . . But, in its broadest significance, the frontier knows no country. It lies also in other lands and in other times than our own. . . . --Emerson Hough, The Passing of the Frontier: A Chronicle of the Old West

At a time when illicit drugs flood the United States across its southern boundaries from Miami to San Diego and illegal aliens of Spanish-speaking origin have become so numerous that a general amnesty has been declared even as concerted efforts seek to make it clear that English, after all, is still the mother tongue of America, it is vital to try to understand how that came to be.

It did not just happen, nor did it simply occur overnight. Rather, it is the culmination of a long process of the nation's westering spirit and the resultant cultural boundary of the Two Americas into the Anglo North and the Latin South.

Far more than the great water barriers of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, the shared border with Mexico signifies it most properly. It is the place below where Latin America begins, the divisionary line between the two great cultures, the point at which Americans eventually were to contain themselves and their activities in the course of their following of the frontier to the Pacific.

For a while it stalled there, the whole western movement. The frontier, it had been discovered, was gone; the free land for the most part claimed; an exciting era had ended. The greatest of oceans, the Pacific, was necessarily a halting place. To the north lay Canada, to the south Mexico.

But self-containment has scarcely been a characteristic of the American people; the freedom of movement, the mobility of life, is something dear to us all. Thus there were still occasional thrusts both north and south--to Alaska, to Cuba, to Puerto Rico, to Central America and its "banana republics," to Mexico itself. But those were largely digressions along the path to self-containment. The boundary of the old Spanish borderlands had been substantially worked out. The never stationary, always mobile northern frontier of New Spain that had reached from Florida to California had been essentially terminated.

Stymied in particular by the southern border, the westering spirit eventually would reassert itself in the bridging of the Pacific, from Hawaii to Guam, Samoa, the Philippines, the Far East, finally into Southeast Asia--and always below the border itself with still later random thrusts to the south, whether it be the Dominican Republic, the tiny island of Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama. The nation continues to reap the often bitter harvest, the results of all of that, whether it be in swarms of refugees from Cuba to Vietnam or in the profusion of Japanese products--the point being that it is easily seen that while Japan lost the war in 1945 it definitely won the economic peace.

Drugs, illegal boat people from the Caribbean to the South China Sea, amnesty for aliens, church sanctuaries and quasi-underground routes for refugees fleeing internecine strife in Central America, Japanese tutelage of Americans in modern technologies, all of that and more are products of the westering spirit and the exercise in self-containment worked out with the establishment of the Mexican-American border. In a sense, it has all come full circle.

Americans, contained at the Rio Grande and the ensuing boundary across the desert Southwest to the Pacific, did not accept that contentedly. Thwarted in efforts to secure a port on the Sea of Cortez--the Gulf of California--they nonetheless were successful in bridging the continent by a climatically favorable southerly route. Even so, in the minds of many the notion of further aggrandizement long prevailed, that, for example, even Baja California should be United States territory, a sort of geographically balanced equivalent, so to speak, to the Florida peninsula.

The closing of the frontier, the taming of the great American West, the hemming in of the nation were facts, incontestably so. But they were in the head more than in the heart. It was perhaps too much to give up all at once; and in a large sense it was never given up altogether, despite later efforts focusing on the new frontier of outer space and putting man on the moon.

The frontier. It is not to argue that its effect was not monumental, much less that it at times was more imaginary than real, but rather that its concept was grasped more in hindsight than in its immediate presence. It had closed actually long before Frederick Jackson Turner called attention to its passing in 1893. Well prior to that it already had turned back upon itself with the admission of California to statehood in the Union in 1850, following the discovery of gold there two years earlier at the celebrated site of Sutter's Mill.

Indeed, the ever receding frontier had disintegrated by 1830 with the opening of the Santa Fe Trail, reaching all the way from Independence, Missouri, to Los Angeles. It was the bridging of the continent via Santa Fe itself, which, having been founded in 1610, was no mere frontier outpost but rather a settled town of civilized amenities with more than two centuries of Spanish history behind it at the time.

Then, too, fourteen years after the heralded beginning of the Santa Fe Trail, the Sacramento Valley of California would be opened to Anglo-Americans by the explorations of John C. Frémont in 1844. Two years later at least twenty percent of the population of San Francisco would be citizens of the United States. Even without the ensuing War with Mexico of 1846-1848, American colonization of what the Spaniards had distinguished as alta, or upper, California was already an established fact, the frontier even then essentially closed.

It is hard to let go of any discovery, particularly one so broadly explanatory as that of the tremendous significance of the frontier, as Turner said, on American life. Barely was it noticed before it had passed. The myth of its mobility goes forward, is reinvented, made fictional, over and over again.

Borders, however, international boundaries that they are, of course are not to be taken lightly even if frontiers are more matters of the heart. America's westering spirit has never really ended, not completely at least, and it seems likely that it never will go totally out of fashion.

The old dream subsides but it never goes away. The fictional frontier is always "out there," somewhere, in the heart if not in the head.

How it came to be is the story of the quintessential boundary of the two Americas. In essence it is simply The Border. So fundamental is it that no one needs to ask which one. It is always the fictional frontier, the southern rim of the ancient Spanish borderlands lying down Mexico way.