Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border.

Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border. By Elliott Young. American Encounters/Global Interactions. (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2004. Pp. xvi, 407. Paper, $23.95, ISBN 0-8223-3320-1; cloth, $84.95, ISBN 0-8223-3308-2.)

In 1891 Catarino Garza launched a revolution aimed at toppling Mexico's increasingly dictatorial president, Porfirio Diaz. Based in Texas and supported by wealthy Tejanos, many sympathetic Anglos, and virtually the entire Mexican population of south Texas, the revolution lasted less than two years. The revolutionary army had just under thirteen hundred members. On the Mexican side of the border, though some military officers and the general populace covertly sided with Garza, there was little open support. Yet despite its brevity and scale, Garza and his revolution were covered by the New York Times, brutally repressed by the U.S. military, and sufficiently feared by Diaz to prompt him to dispatch not only troops but also assassins.

The revolution, Elliott Young argues, was "part of a broader Latin American movement for liberalism and against imperialism" and surely resonated with a U.S. population witnessing the rise of Populism (p. 10). When Garza fled Texas, he spent time with other revolutionaries. In Florida he consorted with Cubans, including Josi Marti, who, like Garza, was a journalist, a revolutionary, and a Mason. In Costa Rica Garza joined the directorate of the Colombian Liberal War and died leading a small force in support of the Colombian liberal insurrection in 1895.

Young's book is an important contribution to the new borderlands history. It examines the border at its moment of state-launched modernization and does so in a determinedly transnational framework. It is clear in this book what is gained by equally understanding the dynamics on both sides of the border, as the central governments of each side struggled to gain mastery of the region and as the border population, including local officials, resisted that centralization. On both sides there was an economic take-off associated with the advent of the railroads, international markets, and the consolidation of landholding in fewer and fewer hands that made the region ripe for rebellion. On the Mexican side, errant military officers could be courted back to the fold by Diaz, whereas military officers on the United States side--frustrated by native guides who intentionally misled them and refused to track at night despite clear trails in full moonlight--slipped into a darkness akin to that of a Joseph Conrad hero. One of the officers wrote of the region as "An American Congo" in an article published in Scribner's (1894); another described 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 provided people on both sides of the border with a vehicle for voicing an alternative 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 discussions 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.

SARAH DEUTSCH 

Duke University