The Problem of Violence along the U.S.-Mexico Border

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, this talk directly challenges 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, Gerardo Gurza-Lavalle and Andrew Torget 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.

This talk by Gurza-Lavalle and Torget is grounded on their edited volume, These Ragged Edges: Histories of Violence along the U,S,-Mexico Borderlands (David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History, University of North Carolina Press, 2022).

Andrew Torget is associate professor of history at the University of North Texas and was the inaugural David J. Weber Fellow for the Study of Southwestern America in 2011-12. Torget is the author of the award winning volume, author of Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850.

Gerardo Gurza-Lavalle is professor of history at the Instituto Mora in Mexico City. He is a specialist in the history of the United States in the 19th century, and has also published works on US-Mexico relations during the same period. His works include Empires, Republics and Peoples in Struggle for Territory: Mexico-United States Relations, 1756-1867 (co-authored with Marcela Terrazas), and An Ephemeral Neighborhood: The Confederate States of America and their Foreign Policy toward Mexico, 1861-1865.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

McCord Auditorium Dallas Hall 3rd Floor, 3225 University Boulevard, Dallas, United States