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

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Reviewed by:

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

These Ragged Edges: Histories of Violence along the U.S.-Mexico Border. Edited by Andrew J. Torget and Gerardo Gurza-Lavalle. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. 408. Notes, index, illustrations, graphs, maps, tables.)

These Ragged Edges: Histories of Violence along the U.S.-Mexico Border edited by Andrew Torget and Gerardo Gurza-Lavalle provides a chronological overview of violence along what is today the U.S.-Mexico border from the early nineteenth century to the present. Most of the chapters focus on the Texas-Mexico border. All the chapters provide important insights that contribute to our understanding of the forces that shape border violence. The only defect of the book is that one author engaged in a marinization of another scholar's work through non-citation.

Torget and Gurza-Lavalle stated that the aim for their collection was to provide a structural understanding that illuminates circumstances that create and perpetuate violence on the border. They refer to the chapters as "case" studies (p. 6) that should be viewed collectively to find the "evolution of conditions" (p. 9) for why violence occurs, as opposed to the view that violence is "endemic and natural" (p. 9) to the border.

The collection is divided into four parts. In "Livestock, Markets, and Guns" three chapters focus on how weak sovereign control and the United States' market economy contributed to livestock theft and smuggling. From the U.S.-Mexico War to the post-Civil War period, the lack of state control over the newly created boundary allowed Comanches and other livestock rustlers to commit cross-border theft and find sanctuary from prosecution on either side. Of historiographic note is Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez's rejection of Hämäläinen's imperial desires and DeLay's vengeance explanation for Comanche raiding in Chapter 2. Instead, he argues Comanche raiding resulted from economic opportunity.

The second section, "State Power in Transition," examines the rise of strongmen. Interestingly, Alice L. Baumgartner rejects Miguel Ángel González-Quiroga's intra-ethnic cooperative violence thesis by focusing on the issue of citizenship as disrupting cooperation. J. Gabriel Martínez-Serna [End Page 358] ends this section noting the Porfiriato did not monopolize violence during its early phase, as traditionally understood.

The third section "Violence at the Turn of the Century," centers on state-sanctioned violence. Brandon Morgan examines the Santana Pérez insurgency against the Díaz regime during the late nineteenth century, and Sonia Hernández uncovers the transnational political alliance that rallied to Gregorio Cortez's defense after he killed two Texas sheriffs in self-defense. William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb argue for factors for understanding spikes in ethnic Mexican lynchings. The first and second factors are alike: vigilantes feared that persons might escape to Mexico before apprehension by authorities and that prisoners might escape jail after apprehension. Third, language barriers led to summary executions, and fourth, increased migration contributed to a rise in ethnic/racial tensions.

The final section, "Drugs and Migrants," follows the increase in border and immigration control in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Santiago Ivan Guerra traces the shift from family to international criminal organization monopolization of the drug trade that led to greater violence. Elaine Carey and José Carlos Cisneros Guzmán make a continuity argument for women's presences within the drug trade, while Alejandra Díaz de León argues that increased enforcement led to a rise of migrant deaths as result of criminal organizations victimizing them or having to cross more dangerous routes.

One criticism I have of the collection is the lack of a conclusion that sums up the various findings. No clear sense of the historiographic direction that scholars can build from is offered based on the chapter findings. Concerning the issue of marginalizing another scholar's work, Alan Knight failed to cite my command-and-control critique of Charles H. Harris III's and Louis R. Sadler's thesis that Venustiano Carranza orchestrated the Plan de San Diego to garner United States recognition...