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Eric V Meeks, Borders of Violence and Justice: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Law Enforcement in the Southwest, 1835–1935, Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 3, December 2024, Pages 592–593, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae214
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Borders of Violence and Justice is an informative, well-written history of how criminal justice institutions developed alongside widespread, unjust vigilantism across the U.S. Southwest in the century after the 1835 Texas rebellion. Brian D. Behnken argues that white people engaged in lynching and other forms of violence to impose order and white supremacy, justifying their actions by proclaiming, despite evidence to the contrary, that formal criminal justice was failing (p. xx). He also argues that “Mexican-origin people” resisted and “creatively adapted” to racial violence in ways ranging from “social banditry” to becoming law enforcement officials (pp. 10, 82).
The book begins with the mid-nineteenth-century U.S. invasion of northern Mexico and Mexican resistance to various military incursions. Behnken effectively explains how invading armies either created or laid the foundation for early governments that, in turn, created policing agencies such as the Texas Rangers, sheriff's and other law enforcement offices, penal codes and jails, and “pseudo constitution[s]” such as New Mexico's Kearney Code and Arizona's Howell Code (pp. 24, 44). These systems coexisted and overlapped with vigilante groups that engaged in “mob Law,” which persisted “because White folks erroneously believed that the law didn't work” (p. 51). Behnken intersperses this discussion with examples of resistance, including calls for justice by officials in Mexico.
