918 THE JOURNAL OE SOUTHERN HISTORY

American Congo" in an article published in Scribner's (1894); another de-

scribed the area as "darkest Texas" (pp. 220, 238). As Young makes clear,
these men were part of a global colonizing effort, and the same soldiers who
pursued Garza had served at Wounded Knee and would later face strikers at
Pullman.
The colonized, however, were not powerless. In the U.S., they had the vote,
and local officials proved a thorn in the side of the federal forces, even
bringing officers to trial. The myriad local Spanish-language newspapers pro-
vided people on both sides of the border with a vehicle for voicing an alter-
native narrative of events. Local papers countered the depiction of the
border's population as largely illiterate and uninterested. One editor wrote a
rebuttal to the Scribner's article, but Scribner's would not publish it. In the
crucial arena of the press wars, the cards were stacked against the locals.
This book is valuable for those studying the U.S. West or South or, indeed,
the era of empire. It opens with a stunning introduction to borderlands history
that beautifully places the story in its nuanced, broad, transnational context
drawing on a wide variety of theoretical and methodological tools without
sacrificing clarity and accessibility. The middle chapters, which include dis-
cussions about the press, honor and masculinity, the economic context, and
the demographics of the Garzistas, are worth reading but tend to get bogged
down in detail and repetition. The penultimate chapter, however, "Colonizing
the Lower Rio Grande Valley," is again brilliant, illuminating the dynamics
not just in the Southwest but at the heart of the global imperial effort.
Duke University SARAH DEUTSCH

The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution: The Bloodiest Decade,
1910-1920. By Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler. (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, c. 2004. Pp. xiv, 673. $37.50, ISBN
0-8263-3483-0.)

Although the controversial activities ofthe Texas Rangers during the era of
the Mexican Revolution prompted a state congressional investigation in 1919,
the subject received relatively little attention (at least from Anglo researchers)
during the twentieth century. Recent years, however, have witnessed the ap-
pearance of several projects that consider these events, including Benjamin H.
Johnson's Revolution in Texas: How a Eorgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody
Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven, 2003) and Border
Bandits, a 2003 documentary by Kirby Wamock, a Texas filmmaker. The
Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution: The Bloodiest Decade, ¡910-
¡920, by Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler, is the latest—and certainly
the most comprehensive—addition to this growing field, though it is far from
the most edifying.
The book examines the role of the Rangers between 1910 and 1920, a
decade shaped to a great extent in Texas by the chaos of the Mexican
Revolution. While the constabulary performed a host of typical law enforce-
ment duties during the period—from policing labor disputes to keeping order
in the state's oil boomtowns—chief among their assignments was the securing
of the 1,250-mile Texas-Mexico border, a central Ranger responsibility since
 BOOK REVIEWS 919

the end of the Mexican-American War. This mission took on added impor-
tance after 1910 as the Mexican Revolution spilled across the Rio Grande and
into the Lone Star State, where refugees sought shelter from the fighting and
exiled dissidents cultivated support for key players such as Francisco Madero,
Pancho Villa, and Venustiano Carranza, among others. In response to such
developments, officials in Austin called on the Rangers to thwart Texas-based
efforts to undermine the Mexican government and also to defend the state
from invasion by Mexican insurrectionists. It was in fulfillment of this last
charge that the Rangers brutally suppressed the irredentist Plan de San Diego
uprising of 1915-1916, killing anywhere from three hundred to five thousand
Mexicans in the process and earning lasting notoriety for the constabulary.
To be sure, Harris and Sadler's volume has several strengths, most notably
its mammoth base of archival research (drawn from repositories in both the
United States and Mexico), which justifies historian Alwyn Barr's assessment
of the study as "probably the most thoroughly researched book on the Rangers
in any period" (quotation on dust jacket). The authors' investigative efforts
have turned up numerous intriguing (if obscure) episodes in the history of the
force, further developing the images of colorful men whose stories are already
familiar to Ranger scholars and buffs. More importantly, their research reveals
the extent to which political machinations—especially in the governor's of-
fice—directly affected the composition and deployment of the constabulary,
sometimes exposing its members to unfair criticism and misuse.
And yet even as the depth of the authors' research constitutes the book's
single greatest attribute, the organization of their findings blunts the volume's
possible impact by drowning the reader in a sea of undifferentiated detail. In
this sense, the method of Harris and Sadler invites comparisons to Walter
Prescott Webb's encyclopedic approach in The Texas Rangers: A Century of
Frontier Defense (Austin, 1935). Like its predecessor. The Texas Rangers and
the Mexican Revolution presents its audience with a staggering amount of
information but offers little in the way of a sustained analytical interpretation
by which to separate the substantial from the inconsequential. That determi-
nation, it seems, is left to the reader—no small task considering that the text
runs to more than five hundred pages, packaged in an oversized format, no less.
Also problematic is the authors' misleading insinuation of their work into
the bitter historiographical debate over the Rangers, which has in the past
fallen rather neatly into pro and anti camps. As Harris and Sadler insist, their
"purpose is neither to justify nor to condemn but rather to paint as accurately
as possible a portrait of the Rangers, warts and all" (p. 8). This is an admirable
goal, and one they might have achieved had they not succumbed to the
tendency of Ranger hagiographers to venerate the machismo of members of
the force, as they do, for example, with Anderson Yancey Baker, whom they
describe as "a man not to be messed with" (p. 57). Later, they explain that
"Baker had his faults—among them that of shooting Hispanics out of hand—,
but lack of nerve was not one of them" (p. 279). Numerous wry asides,
awkward attempts at humor (sometimes making light of otherwise gruesome
episodes), and intemperate dismissals of alternative scholarly viewpoints as
mere political correctness consistently undermine their stated objectivity and
severely compromise the quality of the book.
920 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

In the end. The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution contains some
useful resources for other researchers—including a sixty-eight-page appendix
listing those men who served as Rangers between 1910 and 1920—but the
narrative and analysis (such as it is) are muddled, amorphous, and downright
unsettling in parts.
University of Nebraska, Lincoln ANDREW GRAYBILL

Racial Thinking in the United States: Uncompleted Independence. Edited by

Paul Spickard and G. Reginald Daniel. African American Intellectual
Heritage. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, c. 2004.
Pp. X, 361. Paper, $20.00, ISBN 0-268-04104-0; cloth, $50.00, ISBN
0-268-04103-2.)

The editors of Racial Thinking in the United States: Uncompleted Inde-

pendence, Paul Spickard and G. Reginald Daniel, plainly state the ambitious
objective of this anthology: to "investigate the creation of racial ideas and
systems in the United States in the context of slavery and colonialism and the
subsequent revisions of those ideas and systems in later eras" (p. 2). The
editors divide the twelve essays, which are by authors from the disciplines of
history, sociology, American studies. Chicana and Chicano studies, African
American studies, and Asian American studies, into four categories: "Creating
Racial Hierarchy in Slavery and Colonialism," "Anomalies in the Racial
Binary," "Monoracial Challenges to Racial Hierarchy," and "Multiracial
Challenges to the Racial Binary."
The first section of the book considers the origins of the American racial
binary. First, G. Reginald Daniel traces the roots and development of the idea
of race and, in particular, the early belief that race had a basis in biology. Next,
Stephen A. Small examines the contention that blacks of mixed racial origins
in Jamaica received some advantage or privilege during the era of slavery.
Small argues that any such advantage has been greatly exaggerated; the ma-
jority of Jamaicans of mixed racial origins lived in very harsh circumstances
with little assistance from their white relatives.
The next section, which discusses individuals whose very existence ap-
pears to dispute the racial binary, begins with Hanna Wallinger's essay about
Alice Dunbar-Nelson and her private descriptions of passing. Wallinger ar-
gues that Dunbar-Nelson sometimes passed for white in "areas in which
segregation went hand in hand with severe personal inconvenience," such as
in transportation, restaurants, and public performance halls, but that she
"never seriously considered her place in the African American community"
(p. 87). Moreover, according to Wallinger, Dunbar-Nelson felt no guilt about
these temporary acts of passing. Paul Spickard follows with an essay that
provocatively considers why some prominent individuals of mixed race,
specifically W. E. B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, Walter White, and Frederick
Douglass, chose to pass for black. In the final essay in this section, Lori Pierce
posits that in Hawaii, whites appropriated the discourse of aloha to embrace
racial and ethnic diversity without threatening white hegemony.
The third section focuses on the efforts of individual racial groups to
contest the racial hierarchy and includes an evaluation of the shortcomings of
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