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Raúl A. Ramos | 316 Even with the end of the Revolution the effects of violence,migration and state formation continue to impact Mexican ethnic identity formation in the United States.Whether through the repatriation drives of the Depression era, or Zoot riots and the Bracero Program in World War II, the American state leveraged its monopoly over violence to shape ethnic Mexican communities throughout the Southwest. Although historians have documented these events, other effects of state authority and violence lay in the shadows. Detailed analysis of mortality statistics on the border by Karl Eschback and colleagues a decade ago revealed the human cost of border enforcement in migrant deaths.8 They estimated sixteen hundred possible migrant deaths in the five-year period between 1993 and 1997.These border deaths remain out of the daily coverage of the border, whereas the drug wars on the Mexican side make front-page news.The American state recently deployed new strategies to militarize the border through fencing, troop relocations, drone flights, and computerized surveillance . Despite the economic recession of 2008, migrants continue to lose their lives attempting to evade these new technologies.9 In the year commemorating the centennial of the Mexican Revolution , ethnic Mexicans continue to feel the reverberations of violence, migration, and state control. Debates around free trade, border atrocities, and immigration status have now taken a central position in American political discourse. Once again, violence on the Mexican side serves as a pretext to mobilize the state to limit and constrict Mexican bodies.10 Ethnic Mexican communities follow the spread of these anti-immigrant laws and sentiments across the nation with great interest, whether because of familial connections or simply the impact of the discourse on American identity.Although the actors and settings have shifted over time, Mexican people are intimately familiar with the processes and obstacles unfolding in the present. As disheartening as these most recent developments appear , the essays herein speak volumes about the resilience and strategic responses that can always be found in Mexican communities across Texas. Notes 1.I use the term“ethnic Mexican”to emphasize a connection with being Mexican and Mexico and to deemphasize migrant generation, birth location, or citizenship status.The term has come into increased use as a way of moving away from labels and toward markers of difference. 2. Recent works have taken a transnational approach, especially in the nineteenth- 317 | Understanding Greater Revolutionary Mexcio century American West and Mexican North. See Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900–1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); ElliottYoung, Catarino Garza’s Revolution on theTexas–Mexico Border (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier:Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850 (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Sam Truett, Fugitive Landscapes:The Forgotten History of the U.S.– Mexico Borderlands (New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 2006); Robert McKee Irwin, Bandits, Captives, Heroines, and Saints: Cultural Icons of Mexico’s Northwest Borderlands (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); and OmarValerio-Jiménez, River of Hope: Identity and Nation along the Rio Grande, 1749–1890 (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming). 3.Thomas Bender, “Historians, the Nation, and the Plenitude of Narratives,” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed.Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California, 2002); and Micol Seigel,“World History’s Narrative Problem,” Hispanic American Historical Review 84 (August 2004): 442. 4. David Gutiérrez and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, “Introduction: Nation and Migration,” American Quarterly 60 (September 2008): 504. 5 . The memory of violence in Chile during the Pinochet regime has been a recent subject for historians who have traced the ways these memories shape society. Lessie Jo Frazier, Salt in the Sand: Memory,Violence, and the Nation-State in Chile, 1890 to the Present (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 59–62. 6. John McKiernan-González,“Bodies of Evidence: Representation and Recognition on the Mexican Border,” Interpreting Latino Cultures:A Smithsonian Symposium, November 21, 2002; and Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 57–81. 7. Pierre Nora discusses the places where public memory is created, including the creation of a new framework for time. Pierra Nora,“Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, No. 26, Special Issue: Memory and CounterMemory (Spring 1989): 19. 8 . Karl Eschbach, Jacqueline Hagan, Nestor Rodríguez, Rubén Hernández-León, and Stanley Bailey,“Death at the...

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