International Symposium on Violence in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands a Success

These Ragged Edges: Histories of Violence along the U.S-Mexico Border, published by University of North Carolina Press in their David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History (2022) and co-edited by Andrew Torget and Gerardo Gurza-Lavalle.

The U.S.-Mexico border has earned an enduring reputation as a site of violence. During the past twenty years in particular, the drug wars—fueled by the international movement of narcotics and vast sums of money—have burned an abiding image of the border as a place of endemic danger into the consciousness of both countries. By the media, popular culture, and politicians, mayhem and brutality are often portrayed as the unavoidable birthright of this transnational space. Through multiple perspectives from both sides of the border, the collected essays in These Ragged Edges directly challenge that idea, arguing that rapidly changing conditions along the U.S.-Mexico border through the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries have powerfully shaped the ebb and flow of conflict within the region. By diving deeply into diverse types of violence, contributors dissect the roots and consequences of border violence across numerous eras, offering a transnational analysis of how and why violence has affected the lives of so many inhabitants on both sides of the border.

Contributors include Alberto Barrera-Enderle, Alice Baumgartner, Timothy Bowman, Lance R. Blyth, Elaine Carey, William D. Carrigan, José Carlos Cisneros Guzmán, Alejandra Díaz de León, Miguel Ángel González-Quiroga, Santiago Ivan Guerra, Gerardo Gurza-Lavalle, Sonia Hernández, Alan Knight, José Gabriel Martínez Serna, Brandon Morgan, and Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez, Andrew J. Torget, and Clive Webb.

Dallas, TX – SMU’s William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies hosted a public forum on the history of violence along the U.S.-Mexico border on Saturday, April 16, 2016 at the Latino Cultural Center in Dallas.

Bringing together scholars and journalists from Mexico, the United States and Great Britain, the international forum focused on the long evolution of violence along the U.S.- Mexico border, from the role of the state in borderland violence, drugs and smuggling, to refugees, migrants and mob violence. Over 200 people attended the afternoon conference featuring panel discussions centered on the evolution of violence along the border from the 1800s to the modern drug wars.

This symposium was sponsored by the Clements Center for Southwest Studies in partnership with the Instituto Mora of Mexico City, and with support from SMU’s Embrey Human Rights Program and the Latino Cultural Center, a division of the City of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs.
 
Watch the public forum on the history of violence along the U.S.-Mexico border.

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