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Like Chicano political culture, southwestern national identity is another complex subject that cannot be successfully explained through Turner’s frontier process. An understanding of Anglo-American national identity can benefit from an understanding of the place of the frontier within popular culture, and the idea that the American West signified the historic “struggle with the wilderness [that] turned Europeans into Americans.”<ref>Limerick, pg.20</ref> However, this perspective obscures the identities of nonwhite inhabitants of the West. Andres Resendez’s 2005 book, <I>Changing National Identities of the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850</I>, examined the identity choices of Tejanos, Nuevomexicanos, Mexicans, and Americans in the Southwest in the first half of the nineteenth century. The region transitioned from the periphery of the Spanish empire, to the northern states of Mexico, and ultimately into the American Southwest, and the people that lived on the borderland faced stark choices between Mexican and American national identity. Resendez found that identity choices of people living on the frontier did not derive from inherent identification with either national project, but instead grew out of “situational” logic, as Southwesterners were buffeted by the forces of the American economy and coerced by the Mexican state.<ref>Andres Resendez, <I>Changing National Identities on the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850</I>, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).</ref>