Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1928 by William D. Carrigan, Clive Webb (review)

In William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb’s long-anticipated monograph examining mob violence against Mexicans, an important new dimension has been added to lynching scholarship. Until very recently, two basic themes undergirded much of the popular and academic interpretations of lynching: the black-white dichotomy of victim and perpetrator and a regional concentration on the South from roughly 1890 to the 1940s. Forgotten Dead adds to these traditional categories by focusing on the lynching of Mexicans (by which the authors mean both people born in Mexico and people of Mexican descent born in the United States) in the American Southwest from 1848 to 1928. While not necessarily a thesis-driven book, two themes propel the narrative. First, the authors argue racial prejudice and economic competition fostered anti-Mexican mob violence. Secondly, and perhaps more provocatively, Carrigan and Webb demonstrate how Mexicans and Mexican Americans garnered the power of the Mexican state in their efforts to combat mob violence in the American Southwest.

Forgotten Dead is organized thematically into four chapters. The first two chapters detail the broad trends that emerged from the authors’ analysis of 547 cases of anti-Mexican mob violence. Although the final assessment that economics and racial prejudice accounted for most instances of mob violence does not differ from previous lynching studies, the nuances to that argument are important. Depending on geographic location, economic contests could be rooted in labor competition or in competition over land. As opposed to African Americans, Mexicans had a long history of legal landownership in the Southwest that changed the nature of economic competition between Anglos and Mexicans when compared to whites and African Americans in the South. The last two chapters discuss the various ways Mexicans combatted mob violence, specifically armed self-defense, public protest through Spanish-language newspapers, and, most effectively, the institutions of the Mexican state. These resistance efforts were effective at times; however, the main impetus behind the decline of anti-Mexican mob violence, according to the authors, was a decline in acceptance of vigilantism among the Anglo population in the Southwest. By the 1920s, Anglos believed “that justice should be meted out not by vigilantes but through the legal system in a deliberate and formal manner that emphasized due process rights and procedures” (164).

Of particular interest for readers of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly will be the centrality of Texas to the authors’ arguments. “Anti-Mexican mob violence in the Lone Star State,” Carrigan and Webb argue, “was greater in scope and longer in duration than anywhere else in the United States”(56). Nearly half of the victims accounted for by the authors were killed in Texas. Moreover, several of the lynchings that occurred in Texas prompted the most well-publicized critiques and reactions by Mexicans to mob violence, particularly the 1910 lynching of Antonio Rodríguez in Rock Springs, Texas, and the 1911 lynching of Antonio Gómez in Thorndale, Texas. Finally, the authors spend considerable time examining the role of the Texas Rangers in the perpetuation of anti-Mexican mob violence in Texas throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Forgotten Dead is a well-written and thoroughly researched account of the violent relationship between Anglos and Mexicans in the Southwest that, as the title implies, has seemingly been forgotten. Central to this collective amnesia, the authors argue, was the mass number of African American victims of mob violence and the assimilationist stance of Mexican civil rights groups that “precluded agitation on the issue” (167). This argument deserved a more thorough explanation; however, the issues regarding the causes of the rise and decline of anti-Mexican mob violence are well documented and well argued throughout the monograph.