Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border (review)

This terrific account of politics and culture during the Porfiriato stands as one of the most impressive published histories of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands region to date. Historian Elliott Young makes a strong case for seeing a fascinating, if often forgotten, border figure as a central player in regional dramas, but his is no conventional biography. Young contextualizes the journalist Catarino Garza in his time and place, and he shows that Garza's revolution spoke to many other hemispheric dramas during the Age of Revolution. This history should be required reading for Chicana/o historians, for Mexicanists, and for scholars interested in Latin American politics.

Garza was a dynamic intellectual and social critic. A revolutionary writer, a Tejano, and a Liberal opponent of Díaz, he became well known thanks to his unsuccessful 1891 effort to undo Mexico's dictatorship, but Young shows convincingly that Catarino Garza's revolution in fact started much earlier. The journalist wrote himself into a revolutionary role long before he ever picked up a gun, shortly after he arrived in Brownsville from Matamoros in 1877. Critical of both Mexican politics and the social inequalities facing Tejanos by the 1880s, he "proclaimed himself a revolutionary protagonist" (p. 244) and helped "forge a coalition of anti-Porfirian Mexicans in South Texas" (p. 27) across class lines. He celebrated Mexicans as gente culto, criticized "dishonorable" Anglo-Texans, lambasted regional racism, and established Mexican mutual aid societies in the Rio Grande Valley. After the Díaz administration rejected his bid to serve as Mexican consul in St. Louis, Garza took an ever more critical stance towards that administration.

Young uncovers a series of late-nineteenth century borderlands rebellions in which Garza played a role. The journalist faced charges of libel, survived an assassination attempt, and witnessed the lynching of fellow dissidents. When sympathetic Texas-Mexicans "rioted" in Rio Grande City on his behalf, prompting fears of open warfare in Starr County, subsequent harassment solidified Garza's resolve. In the summer of 1891 he led his first armed party into Mexico, and the following months saw hundreds of his guerrillas attacking the regime in four more incursions. Pursued by Mexican and U.S. troops, the Garzistas demanded restoration of the 1857 Constitution. Young likens those calls to later demands by Francisco Madero, suggesting that the 1891 movement used the "'borrowed language' of patriotism and liberalism to legitimize a revolt whose substantive issues were specifically pertinent to northern Mexicans" (p. 117). Binational efforts to repress the movement brought Garza ever greater attention, comparisons to the "barbarous" Apache, and attention from U.S. journalists fascinated by this "western frontier story" (p. 193).

Relying on a wide range of sources, including Garza's own papers, Young offers the first full treatment of U.S.-Mexico border politics during the 1880s and 1890s. He shows how regional debates changed within a new political economy, and he offers bold claims about the period and places that Garza knew well. Challenging existing histories of the area, Catarino Garza's Revolution captures dozens of fascinating historical figures, and it draws readers into a "Kafkaesque drama" (p. 180) defined by a "reign of terror" (p. 267) against local Mexicans in the aftermath of Garza's uprising. Young shows how Texas newspapers adopted the Mexican government's "official assessment of Garza's movement" (p. 197), and he locates the demonization of Garza within a long national tradition of "blam[ing] internal social conflict on outside forces" (p. 200).

Garza responded to critics in his own newspaper and in the New York Times, proving himself an enormously energetic propagandist, and perhaps a prophetic figure, even in exile. Forced to flee Texas, he settled eventually in Costa Rica, where he spent his final years urging new uprisings against Díaz, writing sad and angry letters to his wife in Texas, and involving himself in new political struggles. Garza was killed in 1895 while fomenting...