Patricia Nelson Limerick has argued that, for much of the twentieth century, Anglo-America has been ‘fixed on the definition of the frontier drawn from the imaginative reconstruction of the story of the United States and its westward expansion’. A prominent scholar of the New Western History, Limerick has sought to deconstruct the ‘interpretive straightjacket’ of Turner's Frontier Thesis and redefine the concept of the frontier. Interestingly, she points out that, despite the ‘spectre’ of the Frontier Thesis, ‘North America has, in fact, had two strong traditions in the use of the term’. On the one hand, is the ‘idea of the frontier’ that, as an ‘extremely well established … cultural common property’, pertains to a Turnerian ideal, a space ‘where white settlers entered a zone of “free” land and opportunity’. On the other hand, is a less familiar, though ‘more realistic usage of la frontera’, which describes the cultural complexities and individual experiences along ‘the borderlands between Mexico and the United States’.

As a concept la frontera stands opposed to the frontier's ‘imaginative reconstruction’ by giving lie to its grand narrative of optimism and simplistic binarism, of its tale of righteous pioneers carving a civilisation out of the wilderness. Instead, it exposes a darker, more complex ‘legacy of conquest’ (using Limerick's own terminology), which includes ethnic cleansing, expropriation of land and resources, and environmental despoliation.