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Taming the Unruly & Criminal Rio Grande:
Racial Scripts Along the Borderlands
"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."
Chamizal Memorial dedicated to "wild rivers and reasonable men"
"raging unchecked"
"ever-present flood menance"
Research Questions
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
Pattern #2) A "Dark" Río Grande
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.”
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
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
"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"
6 reports used tropes of night
El Paso Times, 1967
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, 1919
Los Angeles Times, 1925
New York Times, 1987
Los Angeles Times, 1930