Overview

Brian Behnken offers a sweeping examination of the interactions between Mexican-origin people and law enforcement—both legally codified police agencies and extralegal justice—across the U.S. Southwest (especially Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas) from the 1830s to the 1930s. Representing a broad, colonial regime, police agencies and extralegal groups policed and controlled Mexican-origin people to maintain state and racial power in the region, treating Mexicans and Mexican Americans as a ""foreign"" population that they deemed suspect and undesirable. White Americans justified these perceptions and the acts of violence that they spawned with racist assumptions about the criminality of Mexican-origin people, but Behnken details the many ways Mexicans and Mexican Americans responded to violence, including the formation of self-defense groups and advocacy organizations. Others became police officers, vowing to protect Mexican-origin people from within the ranks of law enforcement. Mexican Americans also pushed state and territorial governments to professionalize law enforcement to halt abuse. The long history of the border region between the United States and Mexico has been one marked by periodic violence, but Behnken shows us in unsparing detail how Mexicans and Mexican Americans refused to stand idly by in the face of relentless assault.

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9781469670126

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"[The book] paints a detailed picture of a history still alive in southwestern society, not only in terms of its legacy but also through its continuous renewal. The foundations of the Southwest are tainted with blood that Brian D. Behnken painstakingly makes visible, recognizing and substantiating the generational trauma experienced by Mexican Americans to this day.""--H-Migration Compellingly argue[d]. . . . Challenging popular myths that vigilantism emerged in the absence of functioning legal institutions, Behnken demonstrates that extralegal violence in fact operated with and through law enforcement across the decades of his study.""--The Western Historical Quarterly Offers a well written and much needed examination of the ways the Mexican-origin community contended with law enforcement in the US . . . . impressive in its scope and succeeds in demonstrating how racism became institutionalized in police forces in the borderlands . . . . timely.""--Pacific Historical Review"

Author Information

Brian Behnken is associate professor of history at Iowa State University. He also holds affiliate faculty positions in the U.S. Latino/a Studies and African and African American Studies Programs. He is the author of Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas and the editor of Civil Rights and Beyond: African American and Latino/a Activism in the Twentieth-Century United States.

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