War on the Border: Villa, Pershing, the Texas Rangers, and an American Invasion

 

Few Americans know the history of Mexico, even when the Mexico’s history is entangled in our history.  Jeff Guinn’s War on the Border: Villa, Pershing, the Texas Rangers, and an American Invasion is a helpful way to alleviate our abysmal ignorance of US meddling in Mexico. 

Here Guinn documents our intricate, and nearly always illegal, manipulations of Mexico’s internal affairs, in this case in the Mexico Civil War in the early years of the twentieth century.  Reading this book one can’t help but see in Perishing’s Punitive Expedition more recent invasions of other countries to pursue America’s enemies.  We never did get Poncho Villa, by the way.  Catching a fugitive in his own country, or a friendly country, or in this case an indifferent country, was as difficult in 1916 as it is in 2022.