The Early Structuration of Border Studies and the Contribution of the JBS to the Institutionalization of an Emerging Field

Academic fields become institutionalized through a multilayered process in which a group of individuals converges on a core topic of scholarly inquiry and develops the rules and routines that enable its collective practice. Intellectually, such convergence occurs when social phenomena expose the limits and gaps in existing knowledge, prompting scholars to pursue new, deeper theoretical and empirical explanations. The purpose of this article is to explore the institutionalization of border studies, which correlates with the establishment of the Association for Borderlands Studies and the Journal of Borderlands Studies five and four decades ago. It explores how, at the time of establishment, the prevailing social and institutional context of the US-Mexico borderlands shaped the field's content and scope, and how the individuals involved in the process experienced and negotiated the constraints and opportunities arising from such context. The article draws on a review of archival documents and work published in the field's founding years (1965–1980), a bibliographic scan to map the field of border studies during the journal's first decade (1986–1995), and interviews with a select group of pioneering scholars involved directly in the institutionalization of border studies.