Militarizing the Mexican Border: A Study of U.S. Army Forts as Contact Zones

Abstract

In the twenty-first century, the United States-Mexico Borderlands is a militarized zone. Although this appears to be a recent phenomenon, the region has a long history of militarization dating back to the aftermath of the 1846-48 U.S. War with Mexico. While borderlands historians of the post-1848 Southwest have focused on the transformation of Mexican pueblos into American cities, or women negotiating conquest in New Mexico and California, none have crafted a narrative of the nineteenth century that centers the United States Army’s impacts on the formations of race and gender vis-à-vis the federal fort. This dissertation interrogates how some U.S. military posts facilitated the collision of race relations among multiple racial groups residing in their orbits in Texas, New Mexico, and Mexico from 1846 to 1917. By doing so, this dissertation assembles a tentative genealogy of the army garrison as a useful category of analysis. I deploy Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of the contact zone as a methodological scaffold to make visible how federal forts prove to be helpful sites of analysis for historians interested in exploring some of the border’s racial, gendered, and sexual tensions. I investigate how White and Black military personnel, as well as Texas and New Mexico Native and Mexican peoples, interacted with one another due to their proximity or orientation to army installations. Forging a narrative from U.S. Congressional reports; New Mexico and Texas Military Department communiqués; soldier letters, memoirs, and published works; civilian testimonies; borderlands newspapers; and U.S. and Mexican diplomatic correspondence, I first historicize the border ix garrison as a contact zone that emerged when how Congress established, plotted, and built these posts through the first half of the nineteenth century. The rest of the dissertation offers case studies that dive into certain aspects of the outpost’s impacts for the auxiliary military and civilian populations (women, war correspondents) that negotiated the militarized border. These case studies demonstrate how army contact zones contributed to the region’s racial anxieties, contending that early nineteenth-century militarization played an instrumental role in the formation of the borderlands. My dissertation enters three fields: the history of U.S. militarization, the study of the American Army, and finally, examinations of race and identity in nineteenth-century borderlands history. The convergence of these literatures allows me to explore the complexity of American racialization over the nineteenth century for some Mexicans, Native peoples, and African Americans as well as for White women and men of varying ethnic, religious, and national origins. As the first chapter charts the early history of Congress’s plotting of its forts, the second focuses on how White women and Black military personnel encountered race relations within and among army stations, culminating in an analysis of the 1866 Raid at Bagdad in the port of Bagdad, Tamaulipas, Mexico. The third chapter uses the life of Captain John Gregory Bourke to examine how White army officers utilized the space within and beyond the fort to construct ethnological thought regarding Mexican and Native peoples while the final chapter surveys the letters, memoirs and publications by army troops and officers deployed to the 1916 borderlands in the aftermath of the Pancho Villa’s Raid on Columbus.