Miguel Antonio Levario. Militarizing the Border: When Mexicans Became the Enemy.

Abstract

Miguel Antonio Levario's new volume is a useful contribution that adds to our knowledge of developing racial animosities along the important West Texas border with a focus on the period between the 1870s and the 1930s. During those years, violence resulting from shifts in political power created tension between Anglos moving into the area, Mexicans who had lived on the land as it transitioned to U.S. territory after the Mexican-American War, and an increasing number of immigrants from Mexico after the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920). Levario repeatedly insists that violence in the region and increasing militarization on the U.S. side of the border led to the development of the notion of Mexicans not simply as “nonwhites” but, much worse, as “enemy other[s]” (p. 3), though proof of his contention requires more of an overview than the case studies (of the worst cases) in this text provide. Certainly, the border was a region of vicious incidents that frequently, but not always, had a racial component. However, the author's strategy of taking up just a few of these cases makes it difficult to understand the overall development of the situation. The first incident, which Levario describes as a “war,” was a dispute in 1877 over open access to salt licks. When local officials gave new landowners the right to privatize and exploit these resources, violence broke out, and the Anglo who had bought the disputed land was taken hostage by a mob, described by Levario as “several hundred men, most of whom were Mexican” (p. 21; emphasis added by reviewer). The story is complicated. The two men who challenged the privatization were imprisoned not exclusively by Anglo authorities but by a local Texas judge, Gregorio García, aided by his brother, Justice of the Peace Porfirio García. These two were taken prisoner by the mob along with the new landowner and a man named Kerber, the sheriff of El Paso County. Order was eventually restored by the Texas Rangers—who were not known for their tender sensibilities toward residents of Mexican origin—and the salt lick was eventually privatized. The quick conclusion here, according to Levario, is that both sides used violent means to control this resource, leading to an increased racialization in the region. Yet Spanish-surnamed authorities were involved in the attempt to make the resource private, and were briefly held hostage; the mob, according to Levario, was largely but not entirely Mexican or Mexican American. One suspects that the issue here had significant class aspects rather than being entirely racial. Levario is on stronger ground when he discusses the raid on the Brite Ranch by men presumed to be under the control of Chico Cano, and the subsequent murder of fifteen male citizens in the town of Porvenir by a combined force of Texas Rangers and the U.S. Eighth Cavalry in 1916. However, although the Brite Ranch incident is discussed in the same chapter as the dispute over salt, they occurred almost forty years apart, and any sense of continuity is tenuous.