“As It Is Waged by Savage Tribes between One Another”: Rendering Violence, Race, and Nation in the US-Mexican War

Violence outside of combat was a prominent feature of the U.S.-Mexican War.  Individuals and groups on all sides perpetrated a wide range of such violence, including small-scale acts, both lethal and non-lethal, as well as organized guerrilla resistance and at least two mass killings of civilians. While pitched battles between state-sanctioned armies could be understood through familiar and readily available systems of meaning, acts of violence outside of combat carried no such support. Instead, they were often seen as anomalous events that demanded comment, action, and reckoning. As a result, participants and observers spilled much ink wrestling with their meaning, generating uniquely rich sources.  Individual episodes sometimes sent out far-reaching ripples, provoking comment and action across great distances.  In this way, they offer a bridge between the intimate worlds of the individual, small group, and locality; and the sweeping scales of region, nation, and continent.  Finally, more than perhaps any other set of wartime events, acts of violence exposed the complex and overlapping networks of collective identity that underlay the U.S.-Mexican War.  Individuals on all sides actively used these incidents in the construction of identities and groups—whether local, regional, national, or racial.  Both on paper and on the ground, acts of violence could serve to strengthen or fracture these constructions.

This paper will examine representations of violence outside of combat in the print and visual cultures of Mexico and the United States.  Observers and participants in both countries wove together the languages and ideologies of race and nation in complex ways to contest the meanings of these events.  Strikingly, they often turned to the common reference point of frontier warfare against Native Americans to rationalize acts of wartime violence.  Their writings and artwork offer unique insights into the evolving meanings of race and nation in mid-nineteenth-century North America.