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Why Should Anyone be Interested in the Spanish Borderlands of the southeastern United States during the last years of the Spanish occupation, and what has occurred that makes the area of more than passing interest at the present time ? First, this area of Spain's New World colonial empire was unique. And second, the availability of a significant amount of new source material has given rise to a healthy increase in scholarly interest and productivity during the past decade.

The Renaissance of Interest in Spanish Louisiana Over the Past Ten Years owes much to the acquisition of important document collections by such universities as Loyola in New Orleans, Northwestern of Louisiana, Tulane and Memphis State. Graduate students and scholars who lacked sufficient funds for research in Europe now find adequate materials in the United States.

In the Great Struggle for the Mastery of the North American Continent during the second half of the eighteenth century, the major European powers—Britain, France, and Spain—confronted each other on the lower Mississippi and along the Florida frontier. The fate of both East and West Florida was determined by this titanic struggle. Britain emerged from the Seven Years' War as the mightiest nation on earth. Her fleet had captured Havana, and to redeem this valuable port Spain agreed to cede the Floridas.

Establishing Boundaries for Spanish West Florida is No Simple Matter. Under consideration is not the entire province of Spanish West Florida stretching to the Mississippi but the smaller region bounded on the west by the Perdido River, the Suwannee River on the east, the Gulf of Mexico on the south, and the uncertain boundary with the United States on the north. Pensacola and San Marcos are two principal settlements, and this area approximates the western panhandle of the present-day state of Florida. When Spain acquired West Florida in 1783 the British boundary was the Apalachicola River, but Spain in 1785 moved it eastward to the the Suwanee River. (Few maps indicate this eastward shift.) The purpose of making the Suwannee River the eastern boundary was to transfer San Marcos and the province of Apalachee from East Florida to West Florida. After the 1795 Pinckney Treaty Spain and the United States agreed that the northern boundary was the thirty-first parallel west from the Chattahoochee River and the parallel intersecting the Flint and Chattahoochee rivers running eastward. Until after the Pinckney Treaty went into effect in the late 1790s, Spanish West Florida's northern boundary was indefinite. Spain regarded the Yazoo parallel, the Tennessee, Cumberland, or even Ohio rivers as the northern limit. This meant that for well over a decade Spain considered the western part of Georgia, the eastern part of Alabama, along with bits of Tennessee and North Carolina, as part of West Florida.

ABSTRACTThe US‐Mexico border is both a line of potential separation and a span of contact and blending of cultures. National and local perceptions and intentions about this boundary often differ, and the formulation and implementation of border policy is thus subject to many conflicting pressures. Not the least are those generated by government agencies with border responsibilities. Perspectives as local, border, and field offices, combined with inter‐agency rivalry and uncertain jurisdictions, lead to border management operations that are inconsistent with apparent national (central) policy, illustrated by the complex bureaucracy present in El Paso—the largest urban site on the border. Proposed solutions cluster around improvement of the existing structure (with better equipment, budgets, or staffing) or reorganization of the primary border agencies. Recent efforts by the federal government to introduce changes based on both of these approaches have been markedly unsuccessful, reflecting a continuing inability to resolve fundamental differences of opinion (both intracentral and central‐border) on the goals of border policy.