These Ragged Edges: Histories of Violence along the U.S.-Mexico Border

By Andrew J. Torget

The U.S.-Mexico border has earned an enduring reputation as a site of violence. During the past twenty years in particular, the drug wars—fueled by the international movement of narcotics and vast sums of money—have burned an abiding image of the border as a place of endemic danger into the consciousness of both countries. By the media, popular culture, and politicians, mayhem and brutality are often portrayed as the unavoidable birthright of this transnational space. Through multiple perspectives from both sides of the border, the collected essays in These Ragged Edges directly challenge that idea, arguing that rapidly changing conditions along the U.S.-Mexico border through the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries have powerfully shaped the ebb and flow of conflict within the region.  By diving deeply into diverse types of violence, contributors dissect the roots and consequences of border violence across numerous eras, offering a transnational analysis of how and why violence has affected the lives of so many inhabitants on both sides of the border.

Contributors include Alberto Barrera-Enderle, Alice Baumgartner, Lance R. Blyth, Timothy Bowman, Elaine Carey, William D. Carrigan, Jose Carlos Cisneros Guzman, Alejandra Diaz de Leon, Miguel Angel Gonzalez-Quiroga, Santiago Ivan Guerra, Gerardo Gurza-Lavalle, Sonia Hernandez, Alan Knight, Jose Gabriel Martinez-Serna, Brandon Morgan, and Joaquin Rivaya-Martinez, Andrew J. Torget, and Clive Webb.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: May 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781469668406

Book preview

Introduction

The Problem of Violence along the U.S.-Mexico Border

ANDREW J. TORGET AND GERARDO GURZA-LAVALLE

The long border between the United States and Mexico has earned an enduring reputation as a site of brutal violence. During the past twenty years in particular, the carnage of the Drug Wars—fueled by the international movement of narcotics and vast sums of money—has burned into the consciousness of both countries an abiding image of the U.S.-Mexico border as a place of endemic bloodshed. Stories of brutal killings, beheadings, mass graves, and the murder of innocent men and women became numbingly commonplace in newspapers and magazines as journalists documented the rapid escalation of violence among cartels competing for dominance in the growing border drug trade during the early 2000s. In 2010, during a spike in cross-cartel killings, CBS News dubbed Ciudad Juárez (sister city to El Paso across the Rio Grande) the murder capital of the world.¹ Journalists working on both sides of the border began publishing best-selling books—such as Charles Bowden’s Murder City, Ioan Grillo’s El Narco, and Alfredo Corchado’s Midnight in Mexico—that offered deeper dives into drug-related mayhem along the border than any newspaper column could provide.² During that same period, a rising tide of migrants and refugees (often fleeing violence within their home countries) made their way from Central America and Mexico into the United States, generating their own headlines when they crossed the same porous border that had become a war zone between cartels and government forces.³ News coverage of these cross-border movements of migrants helped to magnify widespread perceptions that had already been forged by the Drug Wars: that the U.S.-Mexico border was a poorly regulated, chaotic, and deeply dangerous place. Indeed, anyone paying attention to news coverage of the U.S.-Mexico border during the past several decades has had to wade through seemingly endless stories of borderland chaos and brutality.

Such imagery has bled into popular culture within the United States, shaping worldwide imaginations of this international border. During the 1990s, the cartoonish violence of the El Mariachi and Desperado films (both of which followed a Mexican musician in his shoot-’em-up quest for revenge against the drug lord who murdered his girlfriend) launched the career of filmmaker Robert Rodriguez. Acclaimed novelist Cormac McCarthy offered a far darker, grittier vision of the border in his 2005 novel No Country for Old Men, the story of a borderland drug deal gone awry and the never-ending carnage that followed in its wake. Adapted into a movie in 2007, No Country for Old Men won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, for its portrayal of a drug-ravaged landscape where people find themselves trapped within inescapable cycles of violence that both surrounds and defines them. Philipp Meyer built upon that grim model in his award-winning 2013 novel The Son, which follows three generations of a single family in South Texas where their lives and fortunes are united by an unbroken legacy of brutal violence that weaves across two centuries of life in these contested lands. Adapted into a mini-series, The Son joined a growing chorus of popular works during the past two decades—ranging from the movie Traffic in 2000 to the hugely popular TV series Breaking Bad from 2008 to 2013—where violence is portrayed as the unavoidable birthright of the U.S.-Mexico border.

A similar perception has emerged within Mexico. For much of the twentieth century, most Mexicans—particularly those who lived in Mexico City, the cultural, financial, and political center of the country—regarded the nation’s northern frontier primarily as the site of seedy border towns like Tijuana and Cuidad Juárez (which catered to American tourists looking to escape restrictive U.S. vice laws) rather than as a place of violence. That largely nonthreatening image, however, began to shift during the 1970s, as drug trafficking—and news coverage of it—increased significantly along the U.S.-Mexico border. Mexican filmmakers, in response, began producing movies focused on the violent adventures of borderland drug dealers. Films such as Contrabando y Traición (1977) and La Banda del Carro Rojo (1978) hoped to reach broad audiences by offering highly romanticized takes on the lives of cartel bosses and their gangs, threading elaborate shootout scenes between lurid tales of romance and betrayal in telenovela style. These movies often portrayed drug dealers in a sympathetic light, as anti-government rebels or quasi-folk heroes, and some featured ballads celebrating narco-bosses and their bloody lifestyles.⁴ Although these films were typically low-budget, low-quality productions, they nonetheless found eager audiences on both sides of the border during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The dramatic escalation of drug-related violence during the early 2000s fed directly into these images, hardening perceptions within Mexico about the border as a violent place.⁵ Because so much of the cartel-related bloodshed took place on the Mexican side of the border, the Drug Wars became a constant fixture within Mexican news media. Popular perceptions within Mexico about the border thus began to merge with those in the United States during the early twenty-first century, as both Mexicans and Americans found themselves deluged with news reports on borderland killings at the same moment that Hollywood-produced films like No Country for Old Men and Sicario played to sellout crowds in both countries.

Within all these visions, whether in contemporary news or popular culture, there is often a timeless quality to modern depictions of violence along the border: the characters involved may change, but brutality seems to be the constant backdrop. In large measure because the Drug Wars have continued across multiple decades, bloodshed has come to be a defining aspect of how Mexicans and Americans think about the border between their countries. One powerful result has been the creation of a stubborn perception within the United States (and, to a lesser extent, within Mexico) of the border as a place that surely has always been inescapably violent. Much of this comes from the very human tendency to read the present back into the past: if border violence appears so intractable in the modern era, why would that have been different decades or even centuries earlier? From this perspective, violence can appear as an essential and almost predestined part of the border, as natural to the territory as the landscape itself.

Near the end of the film version of No Country for Old Men, a weary Sheriff Ed Tom Bell visits the ramshackle home of his uncle Ellis, where Bell confesses to feeling over-matched by the brutality that surrounds him. Rather than console Bell, Ellis replies with a parable of sorts: the story of how a relative of theirs was shot and left to die on his own front porch in 1909. What you got ain’t nothin’ new, Ellis concludes. This country is hard on people. According to Ellis, violence always has—and therefore always will—curse this borderland region. You can’t stop what’s coming, he warns.

This book offers a different viewpoint. We do not believe that the U.S.-Mexico border is either destined or cursed to be a violent place. Nor do we believe that bloodshed is an inevitable result of the inequalities between the United States and Mexico that come crashing together in this tumultuous region. We believe, instead, that every episode of borderland violence has its roots within a particular historical context (that is, a specific set of circumstances tied to a certain time and place) and therefore the rapid evolution of conditions along the U.S.-Mexico border during the past two centuries has directly shaped the ebb and flow of conflict within the region. Everything, in other words, depends on context. The Drug Wars of the early twenty-first century, for example, emerged from far different circumstances than those that gave rise to the violence of the Mexican Revolution during the early twentieth century. The bloodshed of Comanche cross-border raiding during the nineteenth century sprang from very different conditions than the violence directed against Latin American migrants smuggling their way into the United States during the early twenty-first century. Violence, therefore, has emerged along the U.S.-Mexico border during particular historical moments because of specific and evolving circumstances in the region, rather than simply being an essential and unavoidable fact of life in the territory during the past two hundred years.

At the same time, we also recognize that the U.S.-Mexico border does possess a particularly violent past. Although it would be hard to quantify such comparisons, the international boundary between the United States and Mexico has witnessed far more large-scale conflicts during the past two centuries (such as the U.S.-Mexico War, the Mexican Revolution, and the modern Drug Wars) than has the line between the United States and Canada.⁶ A similar comparison can be made with Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala, which has experienced its own share of violence over the years but not on the same scale as Mexico’s northern border.⁷ The broad differences between these three major North American borders during the past two hundred years serve as a powerful reminder that international boundaries do not, by themselves, necessitate regular cycles of conflict or violence. At the same time, the fact that the history of the U.S.-Mexico border does stand out as particularly violent among the three suggests that there must be reasons why conditions along this boundary have more frequently fostered violence than other borders on the continent. This is not to say that violence has been a constant force within the region. Despite its popular image, the U.S.-Mexico border has enjoyed periods of calm and peace during the last two centuries. Yet the U.S.-Mexico boundary has also witnessed numerous periods of remarkable brutality during that same timeframe, reinforcing modern perceptions in the United States and Mexico that violence is somehow an immutable part of the nature of this border.

Some factors that have fomented violence in the region can be traced to broad forces shaping the development of both nations. In its most elemental sense, the U.S.-Mexico border has been the primary point of overlap between rapidly evolving conditions in each country during the last two hundred years. Broad structural forces shaping and reshaping the daily realities facing people in both nations could, and often did, come crashing into one another along the border. It was, for example, the place where the expanding power of the U.S. economy during the last two hundred years exercised its most tangible, and sometimes destructive, influences on the more impoverished and extractive economy of Mexico. The rapid growth of U.S. territory and population during the nineteenth century offered powerful economic rewards for those who dared to smuggle cattle and goods across the U.S.-Mexico border. Similar market forces helped to shape the cross-border movement of drugs, weapons, and people throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The proximity of American markets to Mexican territories has, as a result, provided long-term incentives for smuggling along the border, one of numerous ways that economic forces shaping North America have exercised particularly powerful influences along the line.

Other broad developments in both nations have played central roles in defining realities along this shared line. The border has been the place, for example, that often revealed both the grand ambitions and severe limits of political power in Washington, D.C., and Mexico City, as politicians in each country attempted to shape the development of their side of the border and, in the process, their nation’s relationship to the other. Such political measures have taken innumerable forms during the past two centuries, ranging from the presence of military forces along the border to evolving national policies about migration and trade. And each of these measures has helped to continually reshape conditions along the U.S.-Mexico line and thus the lives of the people who lived there. Even the disparate ways that the history between the United States and Mexico has been remembered in each country—such as how the legacies of the U.S. conquest of the modern American Southwest shaped racial and ethnic identities and their portrayal in popular culture—has molded the lived experience along the border. Indeed, the very ways that people of varying backgrounds have imagined each other over the years has, in turn, informed how they interacted with one another, particularly in moments of tension. None of these broad structural forces—whether economic, political, cultural, or otherwise—began at the border, yet the border is the place where those forces from both countries come crashing into one another. And it is in those overlaps between the structural forces in the United States and Mexico and the unique and local conditions of the border itself, which have shaped the evolution of daily realities along this shared line, that we find the waxing and waning of border violence during the past two hundred years.

The boundary between the United States and Mexico, then, offers a remarkable window through which to examine the history of violence in North America. It is a border whose modern image is one of endemic violence—defined by the scourge of drug-related bloodshed. Yet it is also a border whose long history has seen tremendous change and variation, allowing us to examine how shifting circumstances on the ground have affected the evolution of violence in the region over several centuries. It is a place, in other words, where we can ask far-reaching questions: How has violence along the U.S.-Mexico border changed during the boundary’s two-hundred-year history? What role has the border itself played in fostering or suppressing violence during that time period, and has that role changed as conditions in the region have shifted? Are there common threads woven across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries—specific conditions in the region that have persisted across time—that helped make this territory a more frequent site of violence than other international borders on the continent? Indeed, what can we learn about violence in North America if we examine the long history of conflict along the U.S.-Mexico border?

This book is an attempt to begin grappling with such questions by examining various moments of borderland violence from the early nineteenth century through the modern day. The central goal is to historicize those moments of conflict, revealing both what has changed and what has remained consistent about border violence over the years. By diving deeply into episodes of violence, the essays in this volume each provide a case study of the relationship between violence and the border during particular historical contexts. The result is a series of deep treatments of both the roots and consequences of border violence across numerous eras. By stacking these studies side-by-side, something even more valuable emerges from the collection: a broader vision of the evolution of violence along the U.S.-Mexico border over the course of the past two hundred years.

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This volume began as a series of conversations among scholars at two international symposiums held during the fall of 2015 and spring of 2016. During the mid-2010s, the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University formed a partnership with the Instituto Mora of Mexico City, with each institution committing to sponsor and host a series of discussions among researchers studying violence along the U.S.-Mexico border. The driving idea behind the partnership was the same as this volume: to bring together leading scholars in the field for a series of discussions that could begin contextualizing the long history of violence along the border. At the same time, the Clements Center and the Instituto Mora shared another goal for the project. Because we believed that understanding the history of violence in the region would require examining both sides of the border, we decided that we needed to structure the symposiums as a series of transnational dialogues. Our plan was to bring together scholars from both the United States and Mexico in hopes of combining insights, perspectives, and experiences culled from both the northern and southern sides of the international boundary. In framing the symposiums this way, we hoped to create conversations that would be truly transnational—rather than dominated by one particular side—which could, in turn, broaden and deepen the perspectives of contributors from both sides of the border. The result, we hoped, would be a series of essays and discussions that would bring together the best of modern scholarship on the topic while also fostering an ongoing dialogue between U.S. and Mexican scholars about their shared border.

Collectively stretching from the twilight of Spanish power in colonial Mexico through the modern Drug Wars, each essay in this volume investigates distinct episodes, moments, or themes related to violence along or connected to the U.S.-Mexico border. The charge for each contributor was to dive deeply into those moments, eras, and issues in order to examine how violence emerged within particular sets of circumstances. In so doing, each essay shares a common interest in untangling the situational logic behind those moments and restoring the context of the era and specific conditions that produced conflict.

Focusing on situational logic, in turn, allows each essay to engage the great variability of violence. Violence, of course, comes in innumerable forms—it can be physical, emotional, economic, political, and everything in between. It does not even have to take place in order to be powerful, as the mere threat or possibility of violence often feels as real and terrifying as any other form. Throughout both symposiums, we collectively discussed what each of us meant by violence and came up with a basic definition that could encompass the breadth of the collective essays: we consider violence to be damage—whether real or threatened—to humans and property. Within that broad window, however, each of the essays engages the concept of violence on their own terms, exploring the great variability of borderland conflicts within the distinct contexts that produced them. As a result, the chapters that follow do not attempt to fit each of their engagements with violence into a single defining form—they instead embrace both the complexity and wide variation of violence as it played out on the ground along the U.S.-Mexico border.⁸

Focusing deeply on particular moments, eras, and themes also meant that we never intended to provide a comprehensive history of violence along the border. Although that would be an important and noble undertaking, such a project would require a far different approach in order to focus on breadth of coverage rather than depth of investigation. As such, there are numerous moments of border violence that we do not address in this volume simply because we could not include everything. Some of these include well-known moments of martial violence between the United States and Mexico that have received sustained attention from other historians, such as the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846–48 or Pancho Villa’s 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico, and the Pershing Expedition that followed.⁹ Some subjects that we could not address are far less well-known to the public but have nonetheless received important and sustained attention from other scholars, such as the exploitation of ethnic Chinese in the United States and Mexico, the lives of both enslaved and free African Americans along the border, and the use of violence in the exploitation of working-class Mexicans in both countries.¹⁰ Similarly, there is a growing and powerful literature on the borderland abuse of women that reveals the horrific depths of gendered violence in human trafficking and sexual exploitation. In particular, pathbreaking work has emerged during the last several decades on femicides along the U.S.-Mexico border, particularly in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, where untold thousands of women have been brutally murdered during the last three decades, even as official authorities at all levels have continually failed to act.¹¹ And yet, as many historians have documented, law enforcement officials—at the national, state, and local levels—have played powerful roles in fostering this and other forms of violence on both sides of the border through prison systems and border enforcement agencies, such as the Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization Service within the United States and police forces and the federal army within Mexico.¹²

All of these are deeply important subjects that deserve sustained scholarly treatments, and we do not mean to imply that any subject not included here is somehow less important than the topics we do address. But since we knew that we could not address everything, we sought instead to collect a series of particular moments of violence that allowed deep treatments of how the evolution of both broad structures and local conditions could foster and suppress border violence at different moments. We sought out essays, therefore, that could overlap in meaningful ways, whether in themes, in approaches, or sometimes by engaging a singular topic from multiple perspectives, which we could put into conversations with one another as we searched for insights into the ebbs and flows of violence along the border during the past two centuries.

For similar reasons, we did not attempt to cover all the geography of the U.S.-Mexico border in equal measure. As borderland scholars know so well, there is almost no end to the tremendous variety of histories, experiences, and episodes of violence that have played out across the nearly 2,000-mile-long line that divides the United States and Mexico. Although the essays that follow touch on all sections of the border—ranging from Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California to Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora, and Baja California—we also knew that we could not account for all portions of that enormous space in equal fullness. And because we sought out contributions that could overlap thematically over such a long period of time, the essays in this volume tend to engage the eastern half of the border more frequently than the western half. Part of that reflects our decision to begin the volume during the twilight of Spain’s presence in Mexico, as the eastern half of what would become the border emerged as the far more populated region during much of the nineteenth century. Another part reflects what historian Rachel St. John observed in her history of the western half of the U.S.-Mexico border: there has been, for a variety of reasons, much more scholarship produced on the eastern half than the western half, which sometimes provided us more opportunities to bring together scholars around overlaps in their work.¹³ We also did not want the contributors to limit the reach of their work solely to the territories that run parallel to the international line, and thus several essays roam well beyond the border as they trace the power, influence, and implications of borderland violence as far north as Nebraska and as far south as Central America.

Throughout the project, we remained aware that our decision to focus on violence came with its own risks. One that emerged during our conversations in both Mexico City and Dallas was a concern that by focusing on moments of violence, even to contextualize and historicize them, the resulting book would, by necessity, be full of essays about violence, which might thereby contribute to overemphasizing the influence and presence of violence along the U.S.-Mexico border. In other words, stacking treatments of border violence alongside one another has the potential, if only through sheer volume, to reinforce perceptions that violence is an endemic and natural aspect of this borderland region. We openly acknowledge that challenge. Our intention, however, is precisely the opposite: we hope that providing a more historicized understanding of violence along the U.S.-Mexico border will, instead, contribute to an understanding of violence in the region that is more grounded in the evolution of conditions along the border. Indeed, this is one reason we do not seek to be comprehensive in our coverage of either topics or geography: we did not want to give the false impression that violence has been a constant feature of the border’s long history. As borderlands scholars know so well, the U.S.-Mexico border has enjoyed periods of peace—and even during periods of great upheaval along particular portions, numerous other sections of the border often remained unscathed. Although we wrestled with this, we ultimately concluded that the benefits of curating a series of deep examinations of borderland violence outweighed the risks of those collective treatments unintentionally reinforcing the very stereotypes we hope to undermine.

Indeed, we accept that risk because we believe the chapters in this volume make important contributions to a rapidly expanding literature that seeks to create a more contextualized and historicized vision of borderland violence. Some of the most important recent works in borderlands history have focused specifically on the power and legacies of violence in the region. Our understanding of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century U.S.-Mexico borderlands, for example, has been reshaped in recent years by Ned Blackhawk’s Violence over the Land, Cuauhtémoc Velasco Ávila’s La Frontera étnica en el Noreste Novohispano, Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire, Sara Ortelli’s Trama de una Guerra Conveniente, Brian DeLay’s War of a Thousand Deserts, Karl Jacoby’s Shadows at Dawn, José Marcos Medina Bustos and Esther Padilla Calderón’s Violencia Interétnica en la Frontera Norte Novohispana y Mexicana, and Lance Blyth’s Chiricahua and Janos, all of which used the lens of violence as windows into the evolution of these territories.¹⁴ Ana María Alonso’s Thread of Blood, Héctor Aguilar Camín’s La Frontera Nómada, Benjamin Johnson’s Revolution in Texas, Charles Harris and Luis Sadler’s The Plan de San Diego, Timothy Dunn’s The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border, Howard Campbell’s Drug War Zone, Wil Pansters’s edited collection Violence, Coercion, and State-Making in Twentieth-Century Mexico, and Jason De León’s The Land of Open Graves have done the same for our understanding of the place of violence along the border during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.¹⁵ As work on the territories along the shared edges of the United States and Mexico continues to mature as a borderlands field, the role of violence in the evolution of the region has become a powerful lens through which to understand this history.¹⁶

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The essays in this volume are organized into three parts, each of which roughly correspond to eras of violence along the border. Part 1, Livestock, Markets, and Guns, examines the period from the early 1800s through the 1870s, when smuggling—primarily livestock theft—served as a primary catalyst for igniting violence in the borderlands.

As Alberto Barrera-Enderle and Andrew Torget show in their essay, the violence that emerged during the 1810s along the edge between New Spain and the United States had deep roots in the long history of Spain’s failures to occupy and control the territories that would become northeastern Mexico. Throughout the eighteenth century, the territory had remained fiercely contested between interloping Spaniards and the numerous independent Indian groups who lived in and controlled most of the region. The Spaniards who did eke out a life along the border often did so in the shadow of violent raids by nearby Indian nations. At the same time, these Spaniards also found themselves perpetually isolated from the rest of New Spain, as the centralized trading system embraced by royal authorities (which required all trade to flow through Veracruz and Mexico City) ensured that Spaniards living on the northeastern frontier often could not get access to even the most basic necessities. Smuggling along the U.S. border, as a result, emerged as a survival tactic for local Spaniards by the early nineteenth century. Yet it was two major shifts during the 1810s that increased both smuggling and violence to unprecedented levels. The first shift came with the outbreak of the Mexican War for Independence, which brought tremendous bloodshed to Texas and forced hundreds of Spaniards into exile as refugees in U.S.-held Louisiana. The second shift came with the massive expansion of markets in the southwestern United States when the cotton revolution of the 1810s brought insatiable new demands for horses. The combination of these two events dramatically increased the incentives for all peoples living along this border—particularly independent Indians in search of livestock—to engage in smuggling and, as a result, drastically amplified violence in the region on the eve of Mexico’s independence.

Even as Mexico became independent, Indian raids of Mexican settlements for livestock to sell to the United States continued in full fury. Mexico’s national government proved unable to stop the incursions, and each of the northern states of Mexico lacked the resources to shield their settlements from raids. Anglo-Americans, meanwhile, continued to migrate into the regions along the U.S.-Mexico border, which further expanded the markets—and thus incentives—for dealing in stolen livestock. As a result, at the conclusion of the U.S.-Mexico War, the government of Mexico insisted that the United States assume responsibility for preventing further raids across the newly redefined U.S.-Mexico border by independent Indian nations, an agreement enshrined in Article 11 of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo.

What changed after the treaty? Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez tackles this question in an essay drawing on ethnohistorical perspectives to explain the logic behind Comanche predatory incursions into Mexico. Rivaya-Martínez argues that the incentives for and the intensity of Indian raids across northern Mexico remained largely stable during both the periods preceding and following the U.S.-Mexico War. Despite its pledge in Article 11, the United States made little effort to enforce that promise, and in any case, the U.S. Army lacked both the resources and the personnel necessary to carry it out. Because Texas had retained control of its public lands when it joined the United States, the U.S. government also had little capacity to force the Texas state government to comply with Article 11. Incentives for Comanche raiding continued to grow during the decades that followed the 1820s, as herds of bison dwindled on the Texas and New Mexico plains at the same time that Americans began pouring into the newly expanded U.S. Southwest. The combination of those two forces ensured that Indian raids of Mexican territory—which were poorly defended yet relatively rich in livestock—remained highly profitable. At the same time, expanding Anglo-American populations in the region also made firearms more easily accessible to Indian raiders—a reality that persisted even after the war. A weak presence of both the United States and Mexico governments along the border, combined with an expanding supply of firearms and a highly profitable market for stolen livestock, kept strong incentives for violence along the U.S.-Mexico border during the years following the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo.

Lance Blyth focuses on how violence played out on the ground among cattle rustlers working on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Blyth suggests that violence in the borderlands became more pervasive after 1848, arguing that the creation of the new boundary between the United States and Mexico created new incentives for both cattle rustling and violence. The ineffectiveness of government authorities on either side of the international line during the mid-1800s made it difficult to protect herds, and the ability of rustlers to slip easily from one side of the border to the other (much as the Comanches did) helped to shield them from prosecution. Just as important, the borderline also disrupted social networks that had previously served to repress violence. Before the U.S.-Mexico War, ties of friendship, kinship, and social obligation had often bound communities across Anglo-American and Mexican settlements which, while not preventing violence completely, had suppressed cycles of vengeance and retaliation that otherwise could go on for years. The establishment of the new U.S.-Mexico border in 1848, however, severed many of these ties and relationships, which led to escalating cycles of violence. The continued weakness of both the U.S. and Mexican governments in the region, in turn, did nothing to stop the bloodshed.

Part 2, State Power in Transition, focuses on the evolving role of governments in fostering and suppressing the use of violence along the U.S.-Mexico boundary during the second half of the nineteenth century. Both the United States and Mexico attempted to increase their presence along the border during these crucial decades, and each sought—though never fully succeeding—to exert more control over the uses of violence in the region. During the early part of this period, the still-anemic state structures on both sides of the border contributed to outbreaks of violence because both Mexico and the United States proved largely ineffective at policing the territory. By the late 1800s, however, the presence of both governments had increased, which allowed them both to exert expanded influence over border violence.

Miguel Ángel González Quiroga explores a manifestation of state weakness in episodes of what he calls cooperative violence. In examining the Federalist War of 1840 and the Cortina War of 1859, González Quiroga observes the formation of unlikely alliances and collaborations between Mexicans and Anglo-Americans who joined forces to use violence toward mutual ends. Although each conflict arose from different circumstances and played out in disparate ways, both took place against a backdrop of state weakness, and they provide insight into the shifting identities and the ambiguous sense of national allegiance of many people living along the border during this period. When it was in their mutual interest, Anglo-Americans and Mexicans could form interethnic alliances to use violence to attain goals that, if not completely shared, were at least compatible. These alliances also reveal that—at least in certain contexts—ethnicity and race did not always predetermine who would use violence against whom, and that the use of violence in transethnic partnerships could bridge alliances across the border.

Alice Baumgartner offers a different interpretation of the Cortina War, arguing that the conflict marked a turning point along the border when the informal mechanisms that had previously been effective in keeping violence in check on both banks of the Rio Grande strained and broke. Alliances of cooperative violence did not work anymore, she argues, because questions of Cortina’s nationality became a defining issue for the Texas and U.S. governments. If Cortina were merely a troublesome U.S. citizen, then his uprising could be handled by local authorities. If, however, Cortina were instead a Mexican national invading American soil, the revolt then posed a much more significant threat that, in turn, demanded a more vigorous response from the U.S. government. In a borderlands space of shifting and ambiguous identities, questions of citizenship and loyalty had become increasingly important as the United States weighed how to respond to the uprising. In this, Baumgartner agrees with an argument also made by Blyth: state weakness did not necessarily have to give way to endemic violence, so long as the informal social networks and ad hoc agreements that brought together communities and local authorities on both sides of the river could collaborate in the suppression of violence. Yet in the Cortina revolt, these local arrangements no longer sufficed when border violence became nationalized and the response to it therefore became a matter for state and national authorities.

Timothy Bowman focuses on this nationalization phenomenon of border violence, exploring how both Mexico City and Washington, D.C., shifted their perceptions about the border during the period from 1848 to 1875, as each country sought to suppress violence and crime along their shared border. Much of the impetus for that more assertive presence came from those living along the line, as citizens on both sides recognized the dreadful toll that violence associated with cattle theft and Indian raids had wrought in their lives. A stronger state could, they hoped, provide greater stability in the region by cataloguing and suppressing local conflict. In response, the United States created the Robb Commission and Mexico City created the Comisión Pesquisidora, both of which were charged with investigating the history, causes, and costs of border violence on their citizens. The reports, in turn, reveal the growing interest of both the U.S. and Mexican governments in expanding their influence on the use of violence along the border (usually blaming the other side for conflict), as well as the limits of those aspirations during the era.

Gabriel Martínez-Serna offers a deep look at this process of state growth in an essay that focuses on the evolution of state-level security within Nuevo León, which shifted from a militia composed of local citizens intended to fend off Indian raids into a new security architecture of the Mexican state by the late 1890s. The centerpiece of this new security apparatus was a more disciplined, centralized, and state-funded police force, which joined with the new federal rural police—known as the Rurales—to guard the state and the border area. Powerful economic growth and new technologies in the region, such as railroads and telegraphs, contributed to the growing power of these new state-run police forces, which could exert for the Mexican government a more powerful presence along the border toward fighting banditry and repressing those who opposed the regime of Porfirio Diaz.

Part 3, Violence at the Turn of the Century, focuses on the transition that took place during the 1890s and early twentieth century when the line dividing the United States and Mexico became more defined in practice as populations grew on both sides of the border. Growing towns, a denser network of communications, and an expanding Mexican-origin population in southern Texas increased ethnic tensions as well as competition for land and resources.

Against this backdrop, Brandon Morgan analyzes the uprising of Santana Pérez in Chihuahua in 1893–94, when the centralizing and modernizing dynamics of the Porfiriato were in full swing. With a small band of armed men, Pérez raided the customs house of Palomas on the Chihuahua–New Mexico border, with the apparent aim of sparking a broad uprising against Mexico’s national government. A seasoned Apache fighter, Pérez had originally been on the side of the federal army in the suppression of a previous revolt at Tomóchic. The brutality of government repression at Tomóchic, and its sequel at Santo Tomás, however, moved Pérez and his followers to condemn the tyranny of the federal government and take up arms against it. Morgan focuses on the discursive war Mexican officials waged in diplomatic dispatches and newspapers to deny legitimacy to the rebels and portray them as mere bandits. Pérez and his followers, by contrast, succeeded in obtaining favorable coverage in American newspapers, which lent credibility to the revolutionary aims of the revolt. The revolt and the discursive war that surrounded it reveal that the Mexican state had no monopoly on the use of violence on its side of the international border, which people such as Pérez used to resist the efforts at capitalist development and political centralization in the region by the Porfirio Diaz regime.

Indeed, as the twentieth century dawned, outbreaks of violence often involved communities that spanned the border. Sonia Hernández analyzes the case of Gregorio Cortez, a Mexican leaseholder in Karnes County, Texas, who shot and killed the county sheriff in 1901 in an act of self-defense. While attempting to flee, Cortez also clashed with other law enforcement officers, leading Texas to charge him with the murder of three sheriffs by the time he was finally captured and jailed. While imprisoned and awaiting trial, Cortez found himself the target of an attempted lynching, and his ordeal reveals how powerfully ethnic tensions played into the ways that state authorities along the border used violence and sanctioned the use of vigilante justice during the early twentieth century. At the same time, Cortez’s proximity to Mexico also provided him access to ethnic social networks that transcended the border and offered him a measure of protection, as an unlikely transnational alliance of ethnic Mexicans from southern Texas and northeastern Mexico pooled their resources for the legal defense of Cortez. Hernández thus shows how conditions along the U.S.-Mexico border during the early twentieth century could both stoke ethnic tensions that led to violence and foster transnational networks and relations that could, simultaneously, mitigate violence.

Gregorio Cortez was lucky: he not only escaped a lynching but also received a pardon from the governor and was released after spending ten years in prison. Many other Mexicans, however, perished at the hands of lynching mobs throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In a broader approach to the lynching of persons of Mexican descent, William Carrigan and Clive Webb agree with Hernández on the power of ethnic tensions to provoke incidents of extralegal justice. Based on a thorough analysis of more than three hundred documented cases of lynching of ethnic Mexicans in the United States from 1848 until 1928, Carrigan and Webb identified three spikes of such violence over the course of eighty years. The first two spikes, during the 1850s and the 1870s, respectively, coincided with periods during which Mexican immigration to the United States and competition for resources rose considerably, leading to racial friction and bursts of extralegal executions. The border itself played an important role in triggering this behavior. Especially in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, lynching often emerged as a response to fears that supposed perpetrators might seek haven on the Mexican side of the line; it was also a desirable choice for those unwilling to wait for the due process of law. Carrigan and Webb thus posit a correlation of violence with scarce resources, a growing population of Mexican descent (and/or its movement back and forth across the border), and concerns about law and order. The third spike in lynching episodes took place during the Mexican Revolution, especially between 1915 and 1919, when raids related to the Plan de San Diego unleashed a wave of extralegal executions of Mexicans.

Alan Knight’s essay focuses on the relationship between the border and political violence during the Mexican Revolution. Mexico’s civil conflict spilled across the U.S.-Mexico line during the mid-to-late 1910s, as a shift toward irregular warfare in the struggle led to a series of raids and counterraids that culminated in the Plan de San Diego in southern Texas and, more famously, Pancho Villa’s attack on Columbus, New Mexico. From the beginning, Knight argues, the border proved essential to the revolutionary struggle as norteños (people from northern Mexico) found themselves in the vanguard of the fight and relied on the advantages their proximity to the international boundary could provide. Being close to the border—and thus far from central Mexico—made it easier for norteños to defy federal authority, and they tapped into a long tradition of norteño military culture that derived, in part, from the long history of violent clashes with Indians along the border. More important, revolutionary norteños could use the border as a line of refuge and safe haven, much as the Comanches of the mid-nineteenth century had used it, as well as a source for badly needed military supplies that would allow them to continue their fight.

Part 4, Drugs and Migrants, addresses the two subjects most readily associated by the public today with border violence—drug trafficking and illegal migration—by offering long-view historical perspectives on each. For much of the twentieth century, both the movement of undocumented migrants and the smuggling of drugs across the U.S.-Mexico line took place without much violence. That began to shift, however, when the governments of the United States and Mexico increased their efforts to control the transnational movement of people and drugs, which led, in turn, to increasingly complex adaptations by smugglers that bred expanded violence on each side.

Santiago Guerra traces the evolution of the drug trade across the twentieth century, from its early small-scale structure to the massive and complex organizations that control it today. Before the 1940s, families living along the northern edge of the U.S.-Mexico border engaged in smuggling primarily as a means for supplementing their meager farming incomes, relying on their intimate knowledge of the local terrain to avoid detection. But as the U.S. and Mexican governments increased their efforts to curtail such trafficking during the post–World War II era, both the economic rewards of the trade and the violence associated with it increased. The steady militarization of the border during the last few decades of the twentieth century accelerated that process, as small and familial organizations came to be supplanted in the drug trade by complex criminal corporations that could afford the rising costs—and increased violence—associated with drug smuggling. As Guerra explains, this has created a vicious cycle: increased policing of the border, ironically, fostered more violence among drug cartels, which, in turn, has only increased the desire within both Mexican and the United States for greater law enforcement along the border.

Elaine Carey and José Carlos Cisneros provide an important and often ignored perspective on the subject of drug trafficking: the role and experience of women in the trade. Stories of how professional traders have used women as mules are well known, but the historical role of women as cartel bosses and high-level operatives is far less understood. By delving deeply into the lives of a few of these women, Carey and Cisneros show that women were not always the victims of male bosses but that some entered the trade as the result of a rational decision: in a world of poverty and lack of opportunities, compounded by gender inequality, the drug trade could offer women the chance to make a good living and to control their own lives. Carey and Cisneros agree with Guerra on the central role that families played in the early trade. Indeed, they emphasize how women relied on family networks to run their organizations, a trait of female-run organizations that has remained remarkably consistent from the 1950s through the present day. Carey and Cisneros also suggest that women in the trade behave somewhat differently than their male counterparts: women tend to be less prone to resort to violence, even if that has not shielded them personally from bloodshed.

Finally, Alejandra Díaz de León closes the volume with an essay about the relationship between violence and border enforcement against illegal immigration. In the years before the U.S. Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, it was relatively easy for Mexican and Central American migrants to cross into the United States without documentation. IRCA, however, greatly increased policing and restrictions on movement along the border. Those restrictions, in turn, pushed the flow of migration into more remote, desolate, and dangerous portions of the border. The result was a steep rise in the number of migrant deaths and greater vulnerability of the migrants to extortion, kidnapping, forced recruitment, and other abuses in the hands of operatives of criminal organizations and agents of the border patrol. Migrants from Central America (who traverse Mexico on their way to the United States) have become even more vulnerable since the early 1990s, when the Mexican government began cooperating with the United States to halt these movements, subjecting Central Americans to similar problems and exploitation in both countries. As such, violence associated with the U.S.-Mexico boundary spreads well beyond the border itself—reaching as far south as Mexico’s line with Guatemala.

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Studying the history of the U.S.-Mexico border means acknowledging the tremendous diversity of peoples, geographies, events, and experiences that have played out during the past two centuries along this two-thousand-mile international boundary. As the essays in this collection document in vivid detail, violence has also scarred this land in innumerable ways across those great spans of time and space. Stacked alongside one another, the essays also point toward common threads woven throughout these histories of border violence.

Economic inequalities between the United States and Mexico have long fostered powerful incentives for illicit movements across the border. The rapid growth of markets in the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for example, promised lucrative rewards to smugglers willing to flout regulations and restrictions on both sides of the boundary. For most of the nineteenth century, much of that smuggling centered on cattle and horses. During the twentieth century, the trade’s center shifted toward contraband drugs and migrants as U.S. market demands changed. Yet questions of whether and how violence would accompany those illegal movements often pivoted on local circumstances and evolving conditions. The lack of any sustained governmental presence along the border during much of the nineteenth century, for instance, made it difficult for ranchers to protect their herds, which led to increased livestock theft that was, in turn, sometimes accompanied by violence that tended to be episodic, often retaliatory, and usually quite localized. The rapid expansion of governmental presence along the border during the twentieth century, however, led to a very different set of conditions that could foster violence. Efforts to regulate various drugs and narcotics within the United States during the second half of the twentieth century increased both the difficulty and the profitability of such contraband trade, which led to sustained episodes of violence between competing drug suppliers and the governmental agencies that sought to suppress them. As the specific circumstances surrounding border smuggling shifted dramatically over time, so too did the conditions that produced associated violence at particular moments and places along the border.

One of the broader threads of the collection is the documentation of the rise of state power during the past two centuries. Sustained efforts by both the United States and Mexico to increase their position and influence along the border began during the latter half of the nineteenth century, in part as efforts to control and monopolize the use of violence along the border. Yet the increased role of government agents and the accompanied militarization of the border during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries failed to impose enduring control on the use of violence in the region. The expansion of state power on the border has, instead, increased both the legal consequences and the economic rewards for those who would defy federal regulations, which has, in turn, increased the violence associated with the transnational drug trade and human smuggling operations. That shift during the last half century suggests that economic disparities between the United States and Mexico have proven far more powerful than state agencies or governmental policies in shaping borderland realities.

Conditions along the border itself also mattered enormously, as this region has never been merely the farthest extension of the United States or Mexico and their respective governments. The sheer distance of the border from both Washington, D.C., and Mexico City, for example, allowed people in the region more power and ability to defy state authorities and government agencies. Comanche and other independent Indian nations used that distance and the international boundary itself as a shield during much of the nineteenth century against the efforts of Mexican authorities to pursue them for cross-border raiding. Mexican rebels during the Revolution of the 1910s crossed the border regularly for similar reasons and found similar advantages, albeit under wildly different circumstances. On a smaller scale, individuals accused of crimes or transgressions—ranging from those who became famous, such as Juan Cortina, to everyday men and women—often fled across the border in order to escape prosecution by authorities or the wrath of their neighbors and the violence that could result. The border, in that sense, has long held the power to protect people and suppress violence by offering asylum. Yet, at the same time, fears that suspected criminals might try to escape justice by crossing the border also led to spikes in extralegal lynching during the late 1800s and early 1900s, demonstrating that circumstances with the potential to suppress violence in certain moments could also, in other moments, foster it.

A persistent thread throughout the collection is that communities and relationships along the border mattered in determining the use or suppression of violence in the region. Social networks, community relationships, personal friendships, and ad hoc agreements that spanned the international boundary often empowered people who lived near this line to work together toward either the suppression or exploitation of violence in their communities. Whether it was regulating cross-border cattle rustling during the nineteenth century or coordinating familial networks for the drug trade during the twentieth century, transnational relationships had the power at different moments to amplify or