The line dividing the United States and Mexico is invisible, 
"imaginary," drawn through shifting sands and changeable rivers. 
The economic, social, and political issues surrounding this line, 
however, are all too real, and the line snakes its way through a 
history of conflict, through questions of definition, maps and 
claims of ownership, and personal and political gerrymandering.

    In The Imaginary Line: A History of the United States and 
Mexican Boundary Survey, 1848–1857, Joseph Richard Werne 
sets out to explore this border and the men who drew it. Using a 
variety of sources, including manuscripts, government documents, 
contemporary accounts, and memoirs, he creates a map of his 
own, one that charts the intersection of individual lives, politics, 
and geography. Werne proposes to revise the common view of the 
U.S.-Mexican Boundary Survey Commission as directed and 
funded almost entirely by the United States; the recent release of 
documents and archived files from the Mexican Boundary 
Commission allows further study of the Mexican commission's 
role and demands recognition of the equal Mexican contribution 
to the commission's immense task.

    The diverse group of military and civilian surveyors, engineers, 
and politicians that composed the Joint Commission had to 
reconcile disparate personal interests and backgrounds, as well as 
different maps and equipment. Their efforts were of "epic quality" 
and represent the coinciding cooperation and conflict that 
comprises border relations today. Werne's study describes their 
lives and work, their survival of the hostile environment, and their 
struggles with inadequate funding and government corruption, 
tying their stories into the approaching civil war in the United 
States, the rapidly lengthening transcontinental railroad, and 
political instability in Mexico.

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JOSEPH RICHARD WERNE is a professor of history at Southeast 
Missouri State University, where he has also served as director 
of the Latin American Studies Program. He has served twice as 
president of the Midwest Association for Latin American Studies, 
and his essays have been published in Southwestern Historical 
Quarterly, Journal of the Southwest, and Historia Mexicana. He 
received his B.A. from Denison University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. 
from Kent State University. Werne has traveled numerous times in 
Mexico, Latin America, and Spain.