Borders of Violence and Justice: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Law Enforcement in the Southwest, 1835–1935 by Brian D. Behnken (review)

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• Borders of Violence and Justice: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Law Enforcement in the Southwest, 1835–1935 by Brian D. Behnken
• Tim Bowman

Borders of Violence and Justice: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Law Enforcement in the Southwest, 1835–1935. By Brian D. Behnken. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. 334. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.)

Brian Behnken's Borders of Violence and Justice is an examination of ethnic Mexicans' relationships to "formal and informal law enforcement"—municipal and state police forces, mobs, and the U.S. federal government—from 1835 to 1935. (p. 2) Most importantly, Behnken emphasizes ethnic Mexican people's historical agency to show how resistance and advocacy existed in multiple, and sometimes unexpected, ways.

Behnken begins by surveying ethnic Mexicans' relationships with law enforcement around the time of the U.S. conquest of the Southwest in the 1840s. Informal citizens patrols dominated nonwhites in various Southwestern cities; some lynch mobs, like in the cities of Houston, Santa Fe, and Los Angeles, actually became municipal police forces over time. Behnken also shows how ethnic Mexicans resisted the formalization of law enforcement and governmental authority through mechanisms like the Kearny Code in New Mexico and Stockton proclamation in California, thus exposing the myth of locals' cooperation with the U.S. military during the tense years of the U.S.-Mexico War. In Chapter Two, Behnken analyzes the relatively well-trod ground of nineteenth century vigilantism. Interestingly, Behnken uses stories such as that of Ramon Cordova, who was hanged by a Maricopa County lynch mob after his arrest and found guilty posthumously by a coroner's court, to dispel the myth of a failed U.S. justice system in the Southwest. The next chapter narrates the fascinating stories of Mexican and Mexican-American law enforcement officials in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguing that their collective service "demonstrates one of the ways Mexican-origin people fought for law and order" despite their general dispossession in the decades following 1848. (p. 96) Ethnic Mexican law enforcement is perhaps particularly noteworthy given the justice system's propensity to ascribe an innate criminality to people of Mexican descent, and for the public's propensity to see "bandits everywhere" across the borderlands, the latter an especially acute problem in the early twentieth century Texas borderland. (p. 147) Finally, Behnken convincingly demonstrates in Chapter Six that pressures to reform policing—perhaps most prominently in the wake of Representative J. T. Canales's famous legislative investigations of the Texas Rangers in 1919—helped modernize policing in positive ways across the Southwest, despite the continuation of many forms of anti-Mexican police violence into the modern period.

Borders of Justice and Violence is filled with valuable insights. Again, most importantly Behnken presents a complicated and multilayered narrative that effectively demonstrates the many different approaches that ethnic [End Page 357] Mexicans took toward policing and law enforcement in the wake of Anglo conquest. A crucial component to Behnken's success is the book's readability—Borders of Justice and Violence contributes significant insights to the historiography on policing without sacrificing a narrative voice that will clearly appeal to a lay audience. This book is highly recommended to scholars in the fields of borderlands, policing, and Mexican-American histories.

Tim Bowman West Texas A&M University Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association ...