Behnken, Brian D.

OUR SYNOPSIS: Brian D. Behnken “explores the Mexican-origin community’s relationship with formal and informal law enforcement in the U.S. Southwest from 1835 to 1935.” He emphasizes “the ways Mexican-origin people challenged the often abusive nature of southwestern policing,” both official and vigilante. He also shows how these people “faced a kind of multifaceted colonialism that included marginalization, violence, and dispossession, but in some cases inclusion and even a measure of power sharing.” (2-3) While taking a borderlands approach, he “focuses primarily on California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, especially the southernmost parts of these states and territories where Mexicans and Mexican Americans predominated.” (10) He demonstrates how the United States violently imposed its growing settler-colonial regional control through warfare and law enforcement. The establishment of criminal justice systems was a vital instrument of U.S. state building. However, the imposition of settler colonialism also included substantial unofficial law enforcement. White people falsely claimed mob law was necessary because of insufficient formal justice enforcement. In reality, formal justice systems were immense and effective but vigilantes had separate goals. He shows that “Although mobs asserted that extralegal justice was justice, their real goal was to exert vengeance or to punish.” (50) These mobs violently enforced white supremacy. A major way that Mexican-origin people resisted their oppression was by becoming official law enforcement officers themselves. He argues that many of these officials “chose law enforcement because they viewed policing as a kind of civil rights strategy to help the Mexican American community.” (82) Further resistance came from Mexican-origin people who responded to their criminalization and attempted incarceration with mobility and evasion.