Border Bandits Border Raids

Border Bandits is an account of the many, many stories of back and forth skirmishes between the Mexicans and Texans during the late 1800s and early 1900s. There practically wasn't a border, which caused a lot of problems and thievery between the two countries. These seventeen tales in this book re-create border raids that originated from both sides of the fluid and much contested line and tells the stories of colorful characters – Mexican and American – that have since secured their place in history.

Brian Behnken offers a sweeping examination of the interactions between Mexican-origin people and law enforcement—both legally codified police agencies and extralegal justice—across the U.S. Southwest (especially Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas) from the 1830s to the 1930s. Representing a broad, colonial regime, police agencies and extralegal groups policed and controlled Mexican-origin people to maintain state and racial power in the region, treating Mexicans and Mexican Americans as a "foreign" population that they deemed suspect and undesirable. White Americans justified these perceptions and the acts of violence that they spawned with racist assumptions about the criminality of Mexican-origin people, but Behnken details the many ways Mexicans and Mexican Americans responded to violence, including the formation of self-defense groups and advocacy organizations. Others became police officers, vowing to protect Mexican-origin people from within the ranks of law enforcement. Mexican Americans also pushed state and territorial governments to professionalize law enforcement to halt abuse. The long history of the border region between the United States and Mexico has been one marked by periodic violence, but Behnken shows us in unsparing detail how Mexicans and Mexican Americans refused to stand idly by in the face of relentless assault.

Much has been debated about the presence of undocumented workers along the South Texas border, but these debates often overlook the more complete dimension: the region’s longstanding, undocumented economies as a whole. Borderlands commerce that evades government scrutiny can be categorized into informal economies (the unreported exchange of legal goods and services) or underground economies (criminal economic activities that, obviously, occur without government oversight). Examining long-term study, observation, and participation in the border region, with the assistance of hundreds of locally embedded informants, The Informal and Underground Economy of the South Texas Border presents unique insights into the causes and ramifications of these economic channels. The third volume in UT–Pan American’s Borderlife Project, this eye-opening investigation draws on vivid ethnographic interviews, bolstered by decades of supplemental data, to reveal a culture where divided loyalties, paired with a lack of access to protection under the law and other forms of state-sponsored recourse, have given rise to social spectra that often defy stereotypes. A cornerstone of the authors’ findings is that these economic activities increase when citizens perceive the state’s intervention as illegitimate, whether in the form of fees, taxes, or regulation. From living conditions in the impoverished colonias to President Felipe Calderón’s futile attempts to eradicate police corruption in Mexico, this book is a riveting portrait of benefit versus risk in the wake of a “no-man’s-land” legacy.

There is hardly a person alive today that has not heard of the battle of the Alamo and its famous defenders. Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and William Travis, have all been glorified in book and film. The fourteen-day battle is known throughout the world and is often highlighted to show to what degree men are willing to sacrifice for what they believe in. But, why and how did this final incomprehensible calamity come about? How accurate are these versions that we have been told? Not till recently have other controversial accounts surfaced. Accounts in the form of affidavits, claims, letters, and diaries of Tejanos living in San Antonio de Bexar at the time, including Mexican Army participants, who were eyewitnesses to the event that unfolded in 1836. This new information details some very different and surprising events. Many feel that there were other underling circumstances and certain theories even point to possible conspiracies. I have used a fictitious family and known historical events to give the side of the people living in Bexar at the time and how events unfolded on a day by day basis in this Mexican town we all know as San Antonio. I try and detail what took place behind the scenes. Although this book is fictional it’s based on true events. The main character , a 12-year-old boy named Temo. Although fictional, could have very well been have lived in Bexar during this time, but by a different name, who knows.

In the early twentieth century, social banditry was endemic in the countryside near the border between the northern Malaysian state of Kedah and Siam, and some outlaws became local heroes. Cheah Boon Kheng's account of peasant banditry and the society where it flourished draws on colonial records, literary sources and interviews to examine the circumstances that led the Governor, Sir Laurence Guillemard, to call the border area "one of the most lawless and insecure districts" in British Malaya during the 1920s. Considering banditry from the perspective of the peasant community, Cheah concludes that it grew out of lax government, weak policing, the geography of the border region and underdevelopment, and suggests that bandit heroes might be seen as symbols of rural protest. His discussion of the details of rural life in the early twentieth century and the conditions that underlay rural crime provide a unique social history of rural society in Malaya. This innovative volume broke new ground in Malaysian studies when it first appeared in 1988. This second edition is intended for the work to reach a new audience.

In this historical book, Buel takes the reader on a journey through the actions of the most notorious outlaws of nineteenth-century America as they fought for the South in lightning strikes against the armies of the North, developing tactics that would come in handy later in their lives. Buel explains in the book how, after the war, the gang seamlessly transitioned from guerrilla warfare to bank robberies, evading capture and killing opponents. They couldn't keep eluding lawmen and vigilantes forever, as Buel vividly describes, the gang's eventual demise.