Historians have debated the differences between borderlands and frontiers, but what defines a border? The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo marked the Rio Grande as the dividing line between Mexico and the United States, but it did not immediately endow the line with meaning. It was only two decades later, when transnational crime increased, that citizens stopped crossing the river for fear of violence. Though the Rio Grande marked a boundary–the line between danger and safety–it became a border only after the U.S. federal government asserted exclusive jurisdiction after violence threatened to turn into another war with Mexico. By theorizing borders and historicizing border security, this article shows how nonstate forces, such as violence, shape history.

War correspondents, fiction writers, poets, and artists both celebrated and condemned the violence that Texas Rangers exhibited during the U.S.-Mexican War. This ambiguity mirrored how many in the United States expressed qualms about the necessity of war to consummate their manifest destiny, but pro-expansionists used the Ranger mystique to re-situate violence and renovate savagery within new narratives that rendered these fighters as both representatively American and exotically Texan. Anthology article in Bryan, ed., The Martial Imagination: Cultural Aspects of American Warfare. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2013), 1-11, 53-70

This text is extracted from Chapter 2 of my 2015 dissertation, "Painting 'Section' or Painting Texas?: Negotiating Modernity and Identity in the Texas New Deal Post Office Murals." This chapter contextualizes the Texas Post Office murals within the rapidly changing socio-cultural environment of Texas in the late 1930s to early 1940s. Simultaneous to the Great Depression and the rising threat of fascism and war, Texas began to develop as a modern state and its people faced the usual disruptions in the social order due to modernization. Commensurate with these changes, the state's political and business leaders, and many of its most prominent cultural practitioners, utilized a variety of strategies that capitalized on existing discourses to advance a universal concept of the Ideal Texan that suppressed existing social identifications constructed on the divergent, regional development of Texas. And while the murals did not function according to those concerted efforts, they did, as representations of state, regional and local interests, at least reflect them. I therefore argue in this chapter that the Texas Post Office murals, when interpreted within their local contexts, provide insight into a shift in Texas identity from traditional local and regional affiliations to a unified, constructed conceit that issued from the state's business and political elite.