Border Contraband

Border Contraband

Author: George T. Díaz

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2015-02-28

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0292761066

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Winner, Jim Parish Award for Documentation and Publication of Local and Regional History, Webb County Heritage Foundation, 2015 Present-day smuggling across the U.S.-Mexico border is a professional, often violent, criminal activity. However, it is only the latest chapter in a history of illicit business dealings that stretches back to 1848, when attempts by Mexico and the United States to tax commerce across the Rio Grande upset local trade and caused popular resentment. Rather than acquiesce to what they regarded as arbitrary trade regulations, borderlanders continued to cross goods and accepted many forms of smuggling as just. In Border Contraband, George T. Díaz provides the first history of the common, yet little studied, practice of smuggling across the U.S.-Mexico border. In Part I, he examines the period between 1848 and 1910, when the United States' and Mexico's trade concerns focused on tariff collection and on borderlanders' attempts to avoid paying tariffs by smuggling. Part II begins with the onset of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, when national customs and other security forces on the border shifted their emphasis to the interdiction of prohibited items (particularly guns and drugs) that threatened the state. Díaz's pioneering research explains how greater restrictions have transformed smuggling from a low-level mundane activity, widely accepted and still routinely practiced, into a highly profitable professional criminal enterprise.


U.S. Army on the Mexican Border: A Historical Perspective

U.S. Army on the Mexican Border: A Historical Perspective

Author:

Publisher: DIANE Publishing

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 110

ISBN-13: 1437923038

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This occasional paper is a concise overview of the history of the US Army's involvement along the Mexican border and offers a fundamental understanding of problems associated with such a mission. Furthermore, it demonstrates how the historic themes addressed disapproving public reaction, Mexican governmental instability, and insufficient US military personnel to effectively secure the expansive boundary are still prevalent today.


Barbarous Mexico

Barbarous Mexico

Author: John Kenneth Turner

Publisher:

Published: 1910

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13:

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An early 20th century American journalist's articles on Mexico before the Revolution.


An American Family in the Mexican Revolution

An American Family in the Mexican Revolution

Author: Robert Woodmansee Herr

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 9780842027243

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This memoir details the experiences of an American family cuaght in Revolutionary Mexico. Based on personal documents written by Richard Herr's older brother, the manuscript covers a critical period in Mexican history, beginning during the Porfiriato and continuing through the 1920s.


The Plan de San Diego

The Plan de San Diego

Author: Charles H. Harris

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2013-07-01

Total Pages: 379

ISBN-13: 0803264771

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The Plan of San Diego, a rebellion proposed in 1915 to overthrow the U.S. government in the Southwest and establish a Hispanic republic in its stead, remains one of the most tantalizing documents of the Mexican Revolution. The plan called for an insurrection of Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans in support of the Mexican Revolution and the waging of a genocidal war against Anglos. The resulting violence approached a race war and has usually been portrayed as a Hispanic struggle for liberation brutally crushed by the Texas Rangers, among others. The Plan de San Diego: Tejano Rebellion, Mexican Intrigue, based on newly available archival documents, is a revisionist interpretation focusing on both south Texas and Mexico. Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler argue convincingly that the insurrection in Texas was made possible by support from Mexico when it suited the regime of President Venustiano Carranza, who co-opted and manipulated the plan and its supporters for his own political and diplomatic purposes in support of the Mexican Revolution. The study examines the papers of Augustine Garza, a leading promoter of the plan, as well as recently released and hitherto unexamined archival material from the Federal Bureau of Investigation documenting the day-to-day events of the conflict.


Ringside Seat to a Revolution

Ringside Seat to a Revolution

Author: David Romo

Publisher:

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13:

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Presents a comprehensive history of the Mexican Revolution of 1911 and the cities of El Paso and Juarez, and contains essays and archival photographs about Pancho Villa and other revolutionaries of the time.


Blood on the Border

Blood on the Border

Author: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2016-08-03

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 0806156430

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Human rights activist and historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has been described as “a force of nature on the page and off.” That force is fully present in Blood on the Border, the third in her acclaimed series of memoirs. Seamlessly blending the personal and the political, Blood on the Border is Dunbar-Ortiz’s firsthand account of the decade-long dirty war pursued by the Contras and the United States against the people of Nicaragua. With the 1981 bombing of a Nicaraguan plane in Mexico City—a plane Dunbar-Ortiz herself would have been on if not for a delay—the US-backed Contras (short for los contrarrevolucionarios) launched a major offensive against Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime, which the Reagan administration labeled as communist. While her rich political analysis of the US-Nicaraguan relationship bears the mark of a trained historian, Dunbar-Ortiz also writes from her perspective as an intrepid activist who spent months at a time throughout the 1980s in the war-torn country, especially in the remote northeastern region, where the Indigenous Miskitu people were relentlessly assailed and nearly wiped out by CIA-trained Contra mercenaries. She makes painfully clear the connections between what many US Americans today remember only vaguely as the Iran-Contra “affair” and ongoing US aggression in the Americas, the Middle East, and around the world—connections made even more explicit in a new afterword written for this edition. A compelling, important, and sobering story on its own, Blood on the Border offers a deeply informed, closely observed, and heartfelt view of history in the making.