Elliott Young

Continental crossroads : remapping U.S.-Mexico borderlands history

The lands along the U.S.-Mexico border have long supported a complex web of relationships transcending the U.S. and Mexican nations, processes at once part of and separate from national histories. Yet these borderlands histories are characterized most of all by their absence from mainstream history. In revealing them, Continental Crossroads lays the foundations for a new borderlands history that lies at the crossroads of Chicano/a, Latin American, and U.S. history. Drawing on research based on the archives and historiographies of both the U.S. and Mexico, the contributors chronicle the complex trans-national processes which unfolded between the early nineteenth-century and the 1940s, the formative era of borderlands historiography. The work of a new generation of historians, these essays examine a wide range of topics, including complex inter- and intra-ethnic relationships along the Texas and California borderlands in the early nineteenth century. Contributors look at the multiple literary worlds and imagined communities that emerged in the region--including different versions of the ill-fated 1841 Santa Fe expedition as told by Anglo-Americans, Mexicans, and Indians, and the travel narratives of a Mexican border journalist and revolutionary. Several essays explore Mexican and American relations to others in the region, including African Americans, Chinese, and Europeans. Other essays look at the tensions surrounding the last armed rebellion of Mexican Americans in Texas in 1915 and compare conceptions of masculinity among the Texas Rangers and the U.S. Border Patrol. Contributors: Grace Pena Delgado; Karl Jacoby; Benjamin Johnson; Louise Pubols; Raul.Ramos; Andres Resendez; Barbara O. Reyes; Alexandra Minna Stern; Samuel Truett; Elliott Young

Red Men, Princess Pocahontas, and George Washington: Harmonizing Race Relations in Laredo at the Turn of the Century

In 1898, a group of elite Anglo Americans and Texas Mexicans joined together to celebrate George Washingtons birthday on the U. S.-Mexico border in Laredo, Texas. This article describes how the week-long festivities helped construct and project an image of Anglo-Mexican racial harmony and how the Laredo elite created an inclusive concept of Americanization at the same time it cast African Americans and Indians as “savage” outsiders.

Remembering Catarino Garza's 1891 Revolution: An Aborted Border Insurrection

La revolucion de Catarino Garza en 1891 muestra el surgimiento de la oposicion al regimen del Presidente Porfirio Diaz en la frontera mexicanotexana. Aunque el intento de tumbar a Diaz fracaso despues de un par de anos, Garza exitosamente evadio los ejercitos y autoridades de ambos lados del rio causando un escandalo en la prensa internacional. La importancia de Garza y su movimiento, sin embargo, no esta en su fuerza militar o en la ausencia de la misma. La revuelta de Garza es significante porque muestra los cambios economicos y afiliaciones sociales en la sociedad fronteriza a fines del siglo XIX. Esta transformacion permitio y al mismo tiempo obstaculizo la formacion de una coalicion pluriclasista mexicana.

Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border

Catarino Garzas Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border rescues an understudied episode from the footnotes of history. On September 15, 1891, Garza, a Mexican journalist and political activist, led a band of Mexican rebels out of southern Texas and across the Rio Grande, declaring a revolution against Mexicos dictator, Porfiro Diaz. Backed by a broad cross-border alliance of ranchers, merchants, peasants, and disgruntled military men, Garzas revolution was the largest and longest lasting threat to the Diaz regime up to that point. After two years of sporadic fighting, the combined efforts of the U.S. and Mexican armies, Texas Rangers, and local police finally succeeded in crushing the rebellion. Garza went into exile and was killed in Panama in 1895. Providing the first full-length analysis of the revolt and its significance, Elliott Young argues that Garzas rebellion is an important and telling chapter in the formation of the border between Mexico and the United States and in the histories of both countries. Throughout the nineteenth century, the borderlands were a relatively coherent region, separate in many ways from Mexico and the United States. Analyzing archival materials, newspapers, travel accounts, and autobiographies from both countries, Young shows that Garzas revolution was more than just an effort to overthrow Diaz. It was part of the long struggle of borderlands people to maintain their autonomy in the face of two powerful and encroaching nation-states and of Mexicans in particular to protect themselves from being economically and socially displaced by Anglo Americans. By critically examining the different perspectives of military officers, journalists, diplomats, and the Garzistas themselves, Young exposes how nationalism--and its pre-eminent symbol, the border--was manufactured and resisted along the Rio Grande.