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    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)

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    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.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Book Section
    Additional Information: Series ISSN: 2946-3912
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): policing, Mexican Americans, Texas Rangers, violence, racism
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences
    Depositing User: Margarita Aragon
    Date Deposited: 16 Nov 2023 11:14
    Last Modified: 16 Nov 2023 15:34
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/50384

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