War redrew the US southern border. The culture never surrendered.

Nicholas Natividad's great-great-great grandfather Juan Velarde was born in a land that, in his lifetime, would be claimed by four different nations.

In what is now the desert Southwest, Velarde was born among the remnants of the Spanish empire and lived under the flags of Mexico and Texas; briefly, the Confederacy, though his family opposed it; and finally, under the stars and stripes of the United States of America.

As America celebrates its 250th anniversary, the border's journey to its current location is the story of the birth of a nation that swallowed up Native American tribes, Spanish descendants and Mexican citizens in its insatiable hunger to grow. It's also the story of a people whose resilience ‒ and quiet resistance ‒ kept their languages, ceremonies and traditions alive.

"With every shift in the border has come a shift in consciousness," said Natividad, who teaches criminal justice and border studies at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. "The way we relate to food, to the mountains, to the river, to each other."

Six generations on, Natividad still lives where his forebears did: in the Paso del Norte region, a landscape of rugged mountains hemmed by a high desert valley that turns green where the Rio Grande runs. He speaks Spanish and English and identifies as Mexican American.

His family tree branches over a region that now encompasses southern New Mexico, West Texas and Mexico. The border shifted and changed hands here at least four times in the 19th century and a fifth time in the 20th, tugged south by war and treaty, peace talks and purchases.

The line now known as the U.S.-Mexico border traversed the American continent like a stubborn pioneer. Natividad's great-great-great grandfather adapted and so did his descendants ‒ withstanding every new attempt to erase their language, culture or traditions.

"The trauma that he went through," Natividad said, "I always wonder if that trauma is deeply embedded within our DNA."

Mapping the conquest

In the fourth-floor archive of New Mexico State's Branson Library, Dennis Daily pulls a delicate 19th century map from its plastic sleeve.

The archive's special collections include maps by French, Dutch, Spanish and American cartographers. Daily leans over a black-and-white map titled in Spanish: "Mapa de los Estados Unidos de Méjico," referring to the country then known as the United States of Mexico. It was published in 1847 by influential New York mapmaker John Disturnell. His maps, later shown to be inaccurate, were used as the basis for the treaty that expanded U.S. territory by 525,000 square miles in 1848.

Daily said he acquired the maps for the cultural and political stories they tell. The university's collection of 17th, 18th and 19th century maps, he added, "allows us to see how these changes have occurred over time and to see the people who were here prior to Spain, prior to Mexico, prior to the United States."

For 300 years, Spain claimed for itself the vast region now consisting of modern Mexico, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Colorado and California ‒ until Mexico won its independence in 1821 after an 11-year war. The sprawling northern territories clear to the Rocky Mountains and beyond transferred to Mexican control.

Next, Texas fought Mexico for its independence, and for a decade beginning in 1836 the Republic of Texas flew its own Lone Star flag in the Paso del Norte, claiming El Paso and part of southern New Mexico.

A flurry of battles and deals just before the American Civil War reshaped the country again.

In 1845, the United States annexed Texas. The following year, war broke out between the United States and Mexico. It ended in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the agreement in which the U.S. negotiated a stunning expansion of its land to the Pacific Ocean; or, as viewed from the south side, arranged a stunning theft.

"While being 250 years old as a nation, this region doesn't have the same birth date as the United States," said Ruben Leyva, a Gila Apache border scholar also at New Mexico State. "We look not so much to 1776 as the starting point for modern U.S. identity. We look at the Mexican-American War in 1848."

That convulsive period, when the Southwest was forced into the United States, is etched in family memories.

American patriotism; native, Spanish and Mexican roots

On a Sunday afternoon in early May, troupes of dancers in San Elizario, Texas, turned the town plaza into a stage for a reenactment of 500 years of borderlands history. A dove white adobe chapel, built where a Spanish fort once stood, towered over them.

Tigua dancers of the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo performed a prayerful ceremony traditional before a hunt. The men wore buffalo headdresses and draped otter pelts around their necks; the women wore flower-print shawls. Another troupe followed, dancing in the style of each subsequent power: Spanish flamenco in long black dresses; Mexican ballet folklorico in colorful swooshing skirts; Tejano two-step in jeans and boots.

As Americans, "I think we're very patriotic but we stuck to our Mexican roots, like our traditions, our fiestas, our dress, our food, the language," said Lillian Trujillo, born nearby and raised in San Elizario, speaking English and Spanish.

Not reenacted: the bloodshed that came with every transition, nor the quieter endeavors to erase the culture. Until very recently, children in West Texas public schools were punished, even beaten, for speaking Spanish; today bilingual education is thriving.

"We can celebrate the founding," Leyva said, "but at the same time we have to also understand ... it's a story of violence and removal and captivity and warfare and dispossession as a part of that history."

Borderland people keep that history and cling to their identity "like a living legacy," he said.

San Elizario existed under at least three different flags. It was founded as a Spanish presidio, or fort, in the late 1700s. When the Spanish empire fell, it became part of Mexico. In 1830, a massive flood changed the course of the Rio Grande, putting San Elizario north, not south, of the river. So it became part of the United States after the Mexican-American War.

As president of the San Elizario Genealogy and Historical Society, Trujillo spent 10 years organizing the Catholic chapel's historical records, digitizing every baptism, marriage and death: 20,000 entries altogether.

She manages an archive, held in the museum on the plaza, of every family with roots in San Elizario. Dozens of white binders are organized by last name, Alarcón to Zuñiga.

"Whatever they bring us, we put up here," she said, flipping through a binder. She paused at a familiar sepia-toned photograph.

"Oh, that was my grandfather," she said, pointing to a man in a U.S. Army uniform during World War I. "Like I said, very patriotic."

Marking the borderline, step by step

At dawn and dusk, the borderland mountains of the Paso del Norte form a jagged watercolor line of deep purple on the horizon.

These mountains show up in black-and-white photographs from the 1890s, when the newly created U.S. Boundary Commission sought to document the still-fresh desert borderline amid concerns that no one knew quite where it lay.

The line was marked then, as now, by obelisks, 276 of them today, placed roughly within view of one another from El Paso west to the Pacific Ocean ‒ an early attempt to harden the line in the sand. Headed east, the Rio Grande marks the boundary on its way to the Gulf of America or Mexico, depending on perspective.

America took shape; colonies became states and their borders changed. The territory of Louisiana split into 15 different modern states. Maine separated from Massachusetts in 1820. Virginia and West Virginia split in 1863. But nowhere in the nation has a borderline continued to capture the modern political imagination ‒ or to stoke American fears ‒ quite like the U.S.-Mexico border.

It last moved in the Paso del Norte region in the 1960s. A small island formed in the middle of the Rio Grande between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, causing a dispute between the two nations over who owned what. The Chamizal Convention of 1963 redrew the borderline. U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson met with Mexico's Adolfo López Mateos in El Paso a year later to formalize the agreement.

The borderline has been, at turns, ignored to the point of poverty; maligned as "insecure"; barricaded by monuments, border agents, steel bollards and razor wire.

U.S. government contractors in March blasted away the south slope of one of the mountains pictured in the 1890s survey, Mount Cristo Rey, to make way for the border wall.

Preserving indigenous tradition

Rudy Cruz Jr., a member of the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo and mayor of Socorro, Texas, knows the story of his people by heart. How they revolted against the Spanish in 1680 and were captured at the northern Isleta Pueblo near modern-day Albuquerque. How they were forcibly marched 400 miles south.

Today, the Tigua are a sovereign nation in Socorro, a rural hamlet between El Paso and San Elizario.

"Have we maintained our ceremonies, traditions and dances? Yes," he said, "but there is a strong Spanish influence."

Many Tigua people are Catholic, he said, yet they maintain a strict separation of church and tradition. The pueblo holds an original ceremonial drum that is centuries old, he added; it came with his people during their forced march south.

"The drum will never enter a church," Cruz said.

His father was born on the reservation, land bordered by the Rio Grande and today, a 30-foot steel wall. His mother was Hispanic, a third-generation Socorro resident with Mexican and Spanish roots. His wife is from Mexico and their son learned the native tongue, T'aiki, in preschool; the family speaks Spanish and English at home.

"We are proud Americans and proud Texans," he said, but also: "The mixture has become stronger between Mexico and me being American Indian," he said. He tells his son, "They have their traditions and ceremonies; we have our traditions and ceremonies."

They celebrate both.

Crisscrossing the border

Natividad keeps on his computer a portrait of his grandmother, Esperanza Almeida López Ochoa, an American citizen through marriage. In the photo, she is young and fair, with red lips and dark hair swept up in 1940s-style victory rolls.

In Natividad's native El Paso, Ochoa Street is named for his ancestors, who crisscrossed borders as they moved. Growing up, he crossed the border to Ciudad Juárez with his mother and grandmother. They would walk the Paso del Norte bridge linking the historic centers of both cities.

What sticks with him still today is how the U.S. border guards treated his grandmother, a U.S. citizen, "grilling her because she had an accent."

He remembers her cool head and his own anger. "She's American!" he recalled blurting, indignant. He remembers his mother telling him to take it easy.

Today, with the language of a border studies scholar, he wonders about how his great-great-great grandfather navigated the changing expectations that each new power exacted, the cultural and linguistic norms he had to learn or unlearn. How he, his mother and his late grandmother navigated the modern border, too. He wonders about how the trauma of the past influences the present.

But also, he added proudly, border residents know how to move between cultures and how to preserve them.

Natividad quoted from memory the late Chicana author Gloria Anzaldúa, a Texan who wrote from the borderlands: "Voyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks."

"She hints that border residents are experts in bridge-building," he said. "Because we see the border differently."