Journal of Southern History

War and Peace on the Rio Grande Frontier, 1830–1880 is a well-conceived, well-written, and well-researched book that offers new perspectives on complicated events that occurred in the Rio Grande borderlands of south Texas and northeast Mexico during the nineteenth century. Most previous scholarship on this time and place focuses on the prolific violence that characterized seemingly incessant warfare, banditry, raiding, and smuggling along the border. Miguel Ángel González-Quiroga argues instead that “alongside the conflict, another reality existed in the region based on coexistence and cooperation among Mexicans, Anglo-Americans, and the other ethnic groups” (p. 1). To demonstrate this underappreciated reality of borderlands history, the author focuses primarily on economic activities, but he also weaves politics, military affairs, and social life into the narrative.

This transnational study is organized into nine lengthy chapters, each based on extensive research in Mexican and U.S. archives. Although the chapters proceed chronologically, spanning the Texas Revolution through the early Porfiriato, one common theme is the borderlands economy and the ways that shared interests in commercial success promoted cooperation between regional inhabitants regardless of nationality, race, and religion. “To a greater degree than any other activity,” the author writes, “commerce—legal and illegal— brought Anglo-Americans, Europeans, and Mexicans together” because profits depended on political and community connections (p. 23). Spotlighting prominent capitalists like Charles Stillman, John J. Linn, and Mifflin Kenedy (among many others), González-Quiroga shows how strategic partnerships, friendships, and even marriages greased the wheels of capitalism on an otherwise tumultuous frontier where neither the Mexican nor the United States government exercised total hegemony.

Within the analytical framework of conflict and cooperation, the book’s sweeping narrative arc covers immigration to Texas and the revolution [End Page 124] that followed in 1836, the era of Texas independence that lasted until 1845, the U.S.-Mexican War, filibusters and revolutions in the 1850s, Mexico’s War of Reform that began in 1857, the creation of a zona libre (free trade zone) along the border in 1858, the U.S. Civil War and French Intervention of the 1860s, Kickapoo and Lipan Apache raiding in the 1870s, the clandestine activities of Juan Cortina and his followers during that same era, and the economic integration that accompanied transborder railroad construction during the Porfiriato. Notably, the author emphasizes the direct roles that Mexicans played as combatants in the U.S. Civil War and French Intervention, showing how these two major North American conflicts encouraged a sort of transnational but regional collaboration, as combatants on all sides sought to gain an upper hand without alienating potential allies. Men such as Santiago Vidaurri, Hamilton P. Bee, Myndert Mynderse Kimmey, Patricio Milmo, and José Augustín Quintero take center stage, forging temporary alliances through extralegal scheming that advanced personal and regional agendas. The result of these localized and often unofficial partnerships, González-Quiroga argues, was an environment wherein military and commercial success required people to look beyond their racial and cultural prejudices in view of achieving national and international goals. “[R]acial animosities cooled somewhat,” he writes, “as the demands of war drew diverse people together and relegated race to a secondary plane” (p. 209).

This book is a welcome addition to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands historiography. Examining the roles of everyday citizens like ranchers, freighters, herders, laborers, doctors, laypeople, and women—in addition to the politicians and soldiers who traditionally dominate these stories—González-Quiroga shows that cooperation coexisted with chaos. He thus offers compelling new ways of looking at the region that can be applied to our understanding of modern borderlands issues.