How the West Was Juan: Reimagining the U.S.-Mexico Border approaches the contemporary border by asking readers to imagine that the nineteenth-century map had broken differently. Steven W. Bender returns to the era before the present U.S.-Mexico boundary, when Spain and then Mexico governed a vast northern territory he calls “Alto Mexico,” and uses that counterfactual geography to unsettle what later generations learned to treat as inevitable.

In Bender's alternate borderlands, the present-day United States would be missing California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and portions of several other states. The thought experiment becomes a way to examine conquest, law, migration, demography, economic power, and the stories nations tell to naturalize possession. Rather than treating the border as a fixed line, Bender makes it historical, psychological, moral, and political terrain.

The result combines legal scholarship, cultural studies, history, and speculative play. It asks what changes when readers stop assuming today's map was destined to exist—and what that estrangement can reveal about belonging, appropriation, and the long afterlife of the U.S.-Mexico War.