The land along the U.S.-Mexican border is often portrayed as the place where two separate cultures meet--or indeed collide. Yet this is not the first meeting of the two cultures, not their first collision, and not their first confluence. Their respective ancestral cultures in England and Spain, argue scholars Milo Kearney and Manuel Medrano, had common roots in medieval Europe, and both their conflicts and the shared understandings that may form the basis for their cooperation trace back to those days.
Kearney and Medrano explore three interlinking themes. First, they assert that Mexican...