The issues that dominate U.S.-Mexico border relations today--integration of economies, policing of boundaries, and the flow of workers from south to north and of capital from north to south--are not recent developments. In this insightful history of the state of Nuevo Leon, Juan Mora-Torres explores how these processes transformed northern Mexico into a region with distinct economic, political, social, and cultural features that set it apart from the interior of Mexico.

Mora-Torres argues that the years between the establishment of the U.S.-Mexico boundary in 1848 and the outbreak of...