These Ragged Edges: Histories of Violence along the U.S.-Mexico Border. Edited by Andrew J. Torget and Gerardo Gurza-Lavalle

Abstract

As rhetorics of “security” and “law and order” continue to fuel mainstream political debates about the U.S.-Mexico border, These Ragged Edges challenges the prevailing narratives that characterize this borderland as an inherently chaotic and violent place. The essays in this volume consider the “situational logic” of both individual episodes and regional trends in violence, which was rooted in factors like politics, identity, citizenship, economics, state-building, and discourse (p. 7). At the heart of many of these stories lies inter-community cooperation and networks that transcended barriers of class, ethnicity, and nationality. These are the spaces from which these essays disrupt generalizations and categorical assumptions that tend to flatten the agency of borderlands individuals and communities. The authors showcase a variety of methods by which historians might critically analyze instances and trends in violence along the U.S.-Mexico border, which makes room for a diversity of perspectives. Depending on the case study, the increased presence of the state over time could either pacify or escalate local tensions. Collaborators in violence could overlook factors like race, class, and nationality in the face of a common goal, or allow those same factors to forestall coalition-building. Nonstate violence on either side of the border could fundamentally threaten the legitimacy of each government, but it also made way for local and federal authorities to establish monopolies on force. By creating room for paradoxes such as these, These Ragged Edges shows that there is no essential character to the U.S.-Mexico border that makes it inherently volatile. Such a deterministic narrative emerges from a layered patchwork of violent episodes or trends rooted in circumstances particular to a place and time. From these perspectives, the border is at once a geopolitical abstraction, a symbol of law and order (or lack thereof), a site of meaning-making, and a lived, material reality.