Policing the savage horde: the Texas Rangers and colonial narratives of anti-Mexican violence

Aragon, Margarita (2024) Policing the savage horde: the Texas Rangers and colonial narratives of anti-Mexican violence. In: Bhatia, Monish and Poynting, S. and Tufail, W. (eds.) Racism, Violence and Harm: Ideology, media and resistance. Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9783031378782. (In Press)

Abstract

In this chapter, I will examine how U.S newspapers, memoirs and works of popular history narrated the anti-Mexican violence of the Texas Rangers through tropes of settler colonial mythology. In particular, I will focus on interpretations of a wave of violence inflicted upon ethnic Mexicans in south Texas in 1915. Cultural and media narratives of indiscriminate killing of ethnic Mexicans at the time they were unfolding and in the subsequent decades frequently acknowledge the illegality, the excess, of Ranger violence but rationalize it as emerging from the nation’s continental destiny. I argue that the mediation of anti-Mexican violence rehearsed logic present in justifcatory discourses of racialized state violence used today.

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