Mexican Border

I recently read a review of Robert Kaplan's book "The Revenge of Geography" wherein he writes about how geography shapes society. One part of interest to me, but won't expand on in this post is the importance of Ukraine to Russia in whether or not Russia takes a more European or Asian orientation. What I want to talk about here is actually a quote from another book about the Mexican border. The reviewer critiques Kaplan on his views about the Mexican border and quotes another author, George Friedman who wrote "[Mexico's] real, social border will be hundreds of miles north of the legal border.” I thought this was an interesting concept. In terms of geography, the Mexican border is pretty poorly defined and was established at a time when the region was sparsely populated. So here lies a poorly defined border seperating two countries with a massive income gap. This of course leads to massive immigration. Because of the level of immigration and the proximity of Mexico, Mexicans are not being assimilated in the same way immigrants in the past were. They have such a large presence that they are about to maintain their culture and language and current technology allows them to communicate and visit with family in Mexico regularly, so they are never alienated from their history. This means that the Southwest is increasingly looking like its southern neighbors, so while the Mexican border may be south of Texas, Mexican society extends farther north.

In looking at this issue, I wanted to know just how far north Hispanic culture extends today. To do this, I looked at Census data on the Hispanic population just north of the Mexican border. I then used this data to map out a region of the US where the population is 50% Hispanic.

There are counties north of this region which are over 50% Hispanic, but I wanted to create as clean a border as possible without exclaves. Likewise, the region includes counties with very low Hispanic populations, but were surrounded by counties with high Hispanic populations. I left one American exclave though, San Diego and Orange County, because it has a large population, but a relative small Hispanic population.

Overall, this region represents 36 million people, 18 million of whom are Hispanic. New Mexico is clearly the most Hispanic state, although it is sparsely populated so the majority of this region lives in California. Over a quarter of the population is in Los Angeles County alone.

What is striking about this region is how uneven it is. It extends as far north as the Bay Area in California and parts of Colorado and Kansas, but only incorporates the border counties of Arizona and just barely reaches Austin and Houston. Arizona has a relatively low Hispanic population despite being flanked by large Hispanic populations in California and New Mexico. The Hispanic population isn't moving uniformly northward but is following its own patterns, possibly adhering to more sensible boundaries than the arbitrary ones currently in place.