The Broken Edge: Violence, Kinship, and Nation in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1820-1890

This dissertation is a study of how people experienced and gave meaning to the violent conflicts that transformed the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands from a multipolar region into one dominated by two modern nation-states. As multiple imperial and national projects converged here between 1821-1890, borderland violence became a central way in which local people interacted with and participated in nation- and state-making. Using archival evidence from both sides of the modern border, I examine how borderlands people used gendered, racialized, and familial ideologies to organize, understand, and politicize these conflicts as well as to reckon their shifting positions within emerging nation-states. With the right ideological help, borderland violence made the abstractions of nationalism and state power intimately real for local people. These discourses were also key tools in mobilizing the local manpower and resources required for making war and creating and maintaining social hierarchies. Alongside varying forms of coercion, they created and legitimized political power at the grassroots level. Thus, I show how the ideologies and institutions of the nation-state emerged within pre-existing networks of kinship, community, and exchange