Native migrations: the first footsteps -- The first colonization: Spanish settlement of the Southwest -- A culture interrupted: Mexico before the American invasion -- Land grabs and invasions: the Alamo and the Mexican American War -- The Anglos take over: the trauma of the second conquest -- Mexican Americans and the Civil War: The other Underground Railroad -- Railroading the borderlands -- The U.S. Borderlands and the Mexican Revolution -- The other side of the Mexican Revolution -- The ethnic cleansing of brown America -- Mexican Americans during the Second World War -- The Chicano movement -- The Hispanic decade -- The New World border: one wall comes down, another goes up -- The border becomes "ground zero" -- The truth, today: an unwillingness to disappear.