A Savage Song : Racist Violence and Armed Resistance in the Early Twentieth-century U.S.–Mexico Borderlands

A savage song examines the multiple narratives of race, manhood, and nation to emanate from practices of anti-black and anti-Mexican terror in the early twentieth century, tracing within them the broader reverberations of slavery, settler colonialism, and U.S. imperialism. It considers instances of violence enacted by white citizens and agents of the state, as well as instances in which Mexican and black men respectively took up armed resistance to massacre. Drawing upon mainstream and radical print media from the United States and Mexico, cultural texts, government documents, and archival materials, the book asks how these moments of killing and dying were understood by a range of actors, under what historical conditions they unfolded, and how they came to be infused with raced, gendered, and historical meaning. Notions of masculine power were central to explanations that sought to rationalize or celebrate racial violence and the order it enforced, as well as those which sought to imagine new worlds. In U.S. cultural and political discourses, the racial degeneracy of black and Mexican men was delineated not only in the acts of savagery they supposedly committed or threatened to commit, but also in the profuse, public, and abject manner in which they died. Mexicans and African Americans challenging U.S. violence deployed their own discourses of death and resistance that both subverted and rearticulated dominant gendered logic. This book examines key moments in which collective and state violence invigorated racialized social boundaries around Mexican and African Americans in the United States, and in which they violently contested them. Bringing anti-Mexican violence into a common analytical framework with anti-black violence, A savage song examines several focal points in this oft-ignored history, including the 1915 rebellion of ethnic Mexicans in South Texas, and its brutal repression by the Texas Rangers and the 1917 mutiny of black soldiers of the 24th Infantry Regiment in Houston, Texas, in response to police brutality. Aragon considers both the continuities and stark contrasts across these different moments: how were racialized constructions of masculinity differently employed? How did African and Mexican American men, including those in uniform, respond to the violence of racism? And how was their resistance, including their claims to manhood and nation, understood by law enforcement, politicians, and the press? Building on extensive archival research, the book examines how African and Mexican American men have been constructed as ‘racial problems', investigating, in particular, their relationship with law enforcement and ideas about black and Mexican criminality. This book examines key moments of violent social unrest in the twentieth century United States. Investigating the centrality of constructions of gender to American racism, it asks how African and Mexican American men, including those in uniform, responded to the violence of racism, and how their resistance, including their claims to manhood and nation, were understood by law enforcement, politicians, and press. Front matter Dedication Contents Series editors’ foreword Acknowledgments Introduction: The twentieth century dawns in blood Imagining slaves and sovereigns This land of barbarians The Mexican has a country Without a tremor War to the knife Epilogue Bibliography Index