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17 Chapter 1 Cowboys and Bandidos A Reexamination of the Texas Rangers I have never been known to start a fight . . . but I will finish one if drawn to it. —Chico Cano As the state’s primary paramilitary police force in the nineteenth century, the Texas Rangers had the ostensible responsibility of maintaining law and order, a duty that meant pacifying Native Americans and securing the Texas border region from the recurring conflict with Mexicans . For some scholars it also meant the Rangers were extensions of the state and its political system. They acted as agents of ethnic cleansing and were the enforcers of “an Anglo-Texas strategy and a policy that gradually led to the deliberate ethnic cleansing of a host of people, especially people of color.”1 Borderlands scholar Julian Samora adds that the Rangers were responsible for “securing the rapidly expanding frontier of the [Texas] Republic , and later the borders of the state of Texas. Their reason for being was not to arrest drunks and chase bank robbers but to fight ‘Injuns’ and ‘Meskins.’”2 However, as time and circumstance changed so did their work. The end of the “Indian Wars” in the 1880s, the expanding frontier, and its isolated character attracted notorious criminals as well as revolutionaryminded Mexicans. As a consequence, the Rangers became the state’s leading law enforcement body on the border at the turn of the twentieth century.3 This chapter is not a comprehensive history of the Texas Rangers nor will it present overwhelmingly new historical evidence related to the notorious paramilitary state police force. Rather, this case study is a reexamination, or reconceptualization, of the Texas Rangers in the late 1800s and early 1900s. A brief review of the Rangers will offer a lens into its role in establishing authority and how the organization is intimately tied to the development of the border social economy. The organization commonly used harsh methods to both pacify the region and usher in a new era of economic development. Pacification and economic expansion involved racialized conflict, the collapse of a complex Mexican social structure, the isolation of Mexicans in the bottom segment of the working class, and the Americanization of life along the US border. Historians differ on the degree to which Ranger violence contributed to this momentous change, but they agree that the state police force played a crucial role. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Rangers battled with a wide variety of criminals and political misfits that plagued nearly every county in the state of Texas.4 This consensus, however, does not take into account significant differences in the Ranger story, nor does it use these differences to underscore varying consequences to their law enforcement work. chapter 1 18 The West Texas and northern Mexican region that encompasses El Paso and Ciudad Juárez offers an opportunity to reevaluate the role the Rangers played in pacifying the border and in establishing racialized American authority. The region stands apart from the remainder of the state with its largely Mexican demographic and isolated mountainous landscape. The vast space and the long border with Mexico as well as the important point of international exchange at El Paso and Ciudad Juárez presented unique and often insurmountable challenges to effectively pacify and develop the region.5 Its frontier conditions and sequestration from centralized power inclined the border community to self-sufficiency and fierce resistance to outside interference .6 As a result of the region’s natural and social isolation, the Rangers failed to establish effective authority in West Texas as they did in other parts of the state. In addition, highly racialized conflict appeared frequently, as the opposing factions fought to establish authority in the desolate region. Episodes such as the San Elizario Salt War of 1877 and the illegal prizefight between Bob Fitzsimmons and Peter Maher perpetuated the independent spirit of West Texas as many residents resisted state authority. However, border bandit Chico Cano’s feud with Ranger Joe Sitters and the Porvenir Massacre underscored an intensely racialized conflict that transcended personal vendetta and vilified ethnic Mexicans all along the Texas-Mexico border. The final years of the Mexican Revolution and what border scholars Charles Harris III and Louis R. Sadler call “the bloodiest decade” of violence between Rangers and ethnic Mexicans sets up a war zone. Policing of the border by the Texas Rangers evolves into an aggressive act of protecting whites...

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