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Taming the Unruly & Criminal Rio Grande:

Racial Scripts Along the Borderlands

Mighty Rio Grande Now a Trickle Under Siege

New York Times, 2015

"An untamed, flash-flooding home to sturgeon and eels a century ago, much of the Rio Grande today is little more than a magnificently engineered pipe -- diverted, straightened, dammed, bled by canals, linked by tunnel to the Colorado River basin in the north, surrendering its last trickle in the south to a ditch that supplies farmers near El Paso."

"no change shall ever be made"

"mathematical line [...] with due percision"

"serves to keep off the public enemy"

Border between El Paso & Juarez

Chamizal Memorial dedicated to "wild rivers and reasonable men"

Absent from the literature

Pattern #1) Unruly/Disorderly/Chaotic/Deviant Río Grande

"raging unchecked"

"ever-present flood menance"

Research Questions

source: "El Chamizal, caso inconcluso," UTEP Special Collections Library

source: American Society of Landscape Architects

Content Analysis

Search words: "Rio Grande," "Chamizal Dispute" "Rio Grande flood," "Rio Rico, Texas," "Rio Grande land dispute," "Rio Grande canal," "Rio Grande dam," "Texas border," "Zapata, Texas," "Rio Grande illegal alien," "Rio Grande immigration"

Collected: 70 articles (Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Associated Press, & local newspapers in Texas)

Analysis: 31 articles (mostly LA Times & NY Times)

Year Range: 1910-2016

Negative Descriptions of Río Grande: 60

Positive Descriptions of Río Grande: 12

  • 1) the presence of the nearly 6,000 people who lived on the Chamizal

  • 2) the long term consequences of their displacement and dispossession via the treaty and its use of eminent domain to clear what local politicians considered to be “blighted” communities

  • 3) the colonial fiction of fixed, unwavering geopolitical borders

Border between El Paso & Juarez ~1911

"citizenship by erosion"

Pattern #2) A "Dark" Río Grande

  • How did state actors — particularly print media — report on land disputes caused the Río Grande?

*secure the strategic fiction of nation-states as predetermined & anchored bodies of sovereignty

Josiah Gregg: "I look forward with anxiety to the day when [...] flourishing white settlements dispel the gloom at which present presides over this uninhabited region.”

by Alberto Beltrán (1962)

Conclusions

  • What role has print media played in promoting Westward expansion?

Los Angeles Times, 1964

Examples of Positive depictions:

"affords sufficient water power for grist and sawmills enough to supply the entire settlement with flour and lumber"

"whimsical flow of the Rio Grande"

"this historical stream…is rapidly being conquered"

"Rio Grande Favors Us [...] will give Texas more than 10,000 acres of land"

"Agents who once groped in the inky gloom can finally see what they're up against."

courtesy of Nestor Valencia

Theoretical Framework

  • Benedict Anderson's "imagined communities" & print-capitalism

  • Peter Andreas' work on border enforcement as a "ceremonial practice"

  • Natalia Molina's "racial scripts"

  • Maria DeGuzmán's "tropes of night"

El Paso Herald-Post, 1967

1) Reports apply racial scripts that criminalize & racialize the river & borderlands

--> easily transferred over to the Brown bodies moving through this space

"the rampaging Rio Grande seems diabolically intent upon destruction"

"Our agents would go down there into the elements, into the total darkness, where you wouldn't know who's out there or what's coming . . . and it could be quite humbling, quite scary, really. [...] If you can't eliminate it, at least you can illuminate it."

"[The Rio Grande] is the dead zone between midnight and dawn, and Kohn Tiltti smokes an unfiltered cigarette as he cruises the moonlit levee of the Rio Grande. A United States Border Patrol agent for 17 years, he shows neither sympathy nor interest in the aliens he hunts and who are arrested each day."

— New York Times, 1986

  • And how might the images/messages of print media influenced popular conceptions of the borderlands?

"Before, you could be driving the darkness and there could be 50 aliens hiding the brush, and you could pass right by them and not even know it. Now we can see."

"put an end to the border's troublesome pilgrimages"

  • How might we “read” the borderlands as a map of geographic and racial violence?

2) Both are rendered unruly, deviant

---> this shared unruliness between the unsanctioned mobility of undocumented migrants and the river has long been established in public imaginaries as looming threats to the progress of Anglo-America — which, in turn, narrates and legitimizes their domination.

6 reports used tropes of night

El Paso Times, 1967

Los Angeles Times, 1968

3) Part of larger nation-building projects in which the "wild" West and its inhabitants are tamed

---> provides templates of domination & exclusion through with the Anglo-Americans can imagine their "white" nation

Border Lights Illuminate Two Faces of Rio Grande

Los Angeles Times, 1997

Los Angeles Times, 1910

Manichean Dualism

light / day

life

civil / civilization

progress

good

heaven

the holy

known / possible

man

whiteness

heterosexuality

darkness / night

death

uncivil / backward

wilderness

evil

hell

the unholy

fearful unknown

void

(filth of the) earth

women / femininity

Black/Brown races

Indigenous

Otherness

queerness

Los Angeles Times, 1911

Los Angeles Times, 1968

Los Angeles Times, 1919

Los Angeles Times, 1925

New York Times, 1987

Los Angeles Times, 1930

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