War and Peace on the Rio Grande Frontier, 1830–1880 by Miguel Ángel González-Quiroga (review)

Miguel Ángel González-Quiroga’s War and Peace on the Rio Grande Frontier provides a well-researched and informative addition on the history of the borderlands, chronicling its transition from a contentious boundary to a divided border. While the decades of examination are replete with strife between Anglos and ethnic Mexicans—as well as war between national forces that vied for the region—the author focuses on moments of cooperation between border peoples. González-Quiroga does this by investigating how commerce, religion, and political interests prompted Anglos and ethnic Mexicans on both sides to embrace amity over animosity.

Commerce runs like a stream throughout the book, winding its way through five decades. Despite the changing flags of Mexican, Texan, U.S., Confederate, and again U.S. governance, trade and economic interests brought people together despite differences. Throughout the mid-nineteenth century, the border proved lucrative to business as Anglo and European merchants settled along the Rio Grande and traded with ethnic Mexicans on both sides of the river. This trade proved mutually beneficial and fostered cooperation rather than conflict. Although González-Quiroga mentions that some of these dealings between newly arrived merchants and local elites led to interethnic marriage based on class ties, the book does not focus on gender, and readers interested in this issue will be disappointed.

Even in the midst of conflict, González-Quiroga finds cooperation. The U.S. Civil War, for instance, saw Mexican Americans fight for both the Union and the Confederacy. Juan Cortina sided with his former foe—the U.S. Army—to fight Confederates, not out of sympathy for the Union as much as spite for local Anglos who threatened Mexican interests. However, peace did not return after the war. Between 1868 and 1880, neither the United States nor Mexico wielded sufficient state power, creating a “magnet for violence” within the borderlands (p. 259). Cattle rustlers, “outlaws,” and highwaymen drawn by growing trade brought the “worst [violence] in the history of the border” (p. 250). In an attempt to protect property and capital, the governor dispatched Texas Rangers who “tortured” and killed suspects (p. 266). Though conceding the historiography of Texas Rangers as brutal enforcers of white supremacy, the author argues that the prevalence of racial violence between Anglos and Mexicans is complicated by exceptional cases such as Mexicans working with law enforcement to settle personal vendettas and by pointing out that officers also pursued Anglo cattle rustlers (p. 267).

The author’s efforts are noble, but in seeking to balance the depiction of race relations the book fails to acknowledge that prejudice and unequal power relations between Anglos and Mexicans made cooperation limited. The Mexican villagers who Richard King recruited to staff his ranch worked for him as servants, not as partners. White Protestant missionary efforts to convert Mexicans stemmed from anti-Catholic prejudice and cultural disdain. The book acknowledges conflict, but focuses on cooperation to balance what González-Quiroga calls a “Hobbesian” depiction of life in the borderlands because the groups “gradually learned to coexist” (p. 358). The book ends in 1880, before the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution disrupted state grasp and the region descended into racial violence that left hundreds of ethnic Mexicans in the Rio Grande borderlands dead and more displaced.

Despite this, the book offers a wealth of information on the daily lives of border people in the nineteenth century. In particular, the book provides a great deal on labor relations. Ethnic Mexican cart drivers or “carrerteros” carried the commerce that made the borderlands flourish (p. 201). Skilled laborers received good pay—as high as seven hundred dollars for their work. Aside from offering modest people a means for economic betterment, such skill commanded respect and a path to negotiate the fraught race relations and instability of the era. For instance, during the U.S. Civil War a...