Black and Brown

The border between the United States and Mexico serves as the landscape for Gerald Horne’s study of race relations in the early twentieth century. The prolific author argues that during the tumultuous years between 1910 and 1920, which witnessed both the First World War and the Mexican Revolution, heightened needs for “national security” in the United States exposed social contradictions inherent in the predominant racial hierarchy. In particular, as the U.S. government sent greater quantities of military resources and personnel overseas and refused to entrust or empower soldiers of Latin American descent to patrol the border, it increasingly relied on African American men to protect its southwestern states against rebellious Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans. Empowering black men and dealing with Mexican insurgency provoked a “general crisis of white supremacy” along the border (p. 9).South of the border had been a refuge for many African Americans besieged and oppressed in the United States during the nineteenth century; after the turn of the century, some continued to find social and economic opportunities in Mexico and in the borderlands that were not available elsewhere. Such opportunities included enlistment in the U.S. military, interracial marriage, and — at least across the border — the perception of less racial prejudice. The author documents the example of outspoken and world-famous pugilist Jack Johnson, in exile from the U.S. since 1915 for dating white women. Johnson arrived in Mexico in 1919, and there he staged fights, enjoyed celebrity, started a land company for other black emigrants from the north, spent time with other U.S. radical exiles, and befriended revolutionary president Venustiano Carranza. African Americans in the region defied the predominant racial order of the United States; Johnson advocating “militant emigrationism” (p. 83) to Mexico, while other disaffected blacks in the borderlands acted as “the vanguard of armed resistance to white supremacy” (p. 80).This growing defiance, along with the radical labor activism of the International Workers of the World and the rebellious actions of Mexican revolutionaries and Native Americans, contributed to an intensification of white fear and the need to defend the white order against the nonwhite masses. This was a problem for the U.S. government; with so many soldiers committed to fighting across the Atlantic and perhaps millions of other young men actively evading conscription, it could only turn to black troopers, the Buffalo Soldiers, to guard the border and protect the political and social order. The author carefully details the role of the Buffalo Soldiers in fighting against Wobbly insurgency and Yaqui resistance, as well as in the 1916 invasion of Mexico to retaliate against the forces of General Pancho Villa, a decision that proved disastrous for the troopers. The military’s uneasiness with arming and entrusting the Buffalo Soldiers was reflected in the infamous General John J. Pershing’s refusal of the troopers’ request to storm the state prison that housed their captured comrades, without supervision by white officers. Horne also cites the fear created by borderland violence and by Mexican attempts to court African Americans as allies (as in the Plan de San Diego) as significant reasons that President Woodrow Wilson took serious notice of the Zimmerman telegram, the intercepted note that suggested a military alliance of Mexico and Germany in 1917 and that hastened the U.S. declaration of war against Germany. The implications of racial fear and contradiction in the borderlands, then, were wide ranging.Despite what the title suggests, this book deals primarily with race relations and conflict in the borderlands during the era of the Mexican Revolution but does not reflect extensively on the actual developments or issues of the revolution itself. At times, this will leave Mexicanist historians wanting to know more. For instance, after Carranza fell from power, why did boxer-activist Johnson choose to return to the United States and serve time in federal prison, rather than continue to live in Mexico City under the rule of new president Álvaro Obregón, a leader who, according to the author, welcomed African American migration to Mexico? Though the author does not distinguish clearly the diverse revolutionary leaders or ideologies, nor does he tie border race relations closely to the chronology of the revolution, his general point — that the conflict and disorder of the period fostered racial fluidity and even new opportunities for African Americans in the borderlands — is compelling.Black and Brown is another superb and important book by Gerald Horne, one that forces readers to rethink the borders of racial identities during a tumultuous period in U.S. and Mexican history. Horne makes expert use of an impressively vast range of mostly English-language primary sources, including U.S. military intelligence reports, U.S. Customs records, collections of oral histories, and repositories of private papers, as well as federal, state, and local archives. This fresh and significant scholarship should be of great interest to students of race in the Americas, the African diaspora, borderland studies, comparative empires, and anyone drawn to insightful, thought-provoking historical writing

Economic history · Emigration · Government (linguistics) · Immigration · Latin Americans · Political science · Racism · Sociology · White (mutation) · White supremacy · American History and Culture · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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