Santos Rodriguez was just 12 years old—and handcuffed—when Dallas police officer Darrell Cain played Russian roulette with a firearm against the back of his head on July 24, 1973.

It was an excessively savage attempt to force a confession from the child and his brother as they were trapped in a police car accused of a burglary they had not committed—and it went catastrophically wrong.

On the second pull of the trigger, Cain’s gun fired, killing the boy instantly and traumatising for life his 13-year-old sibling David who witnessed the execution and was then left locked in the vehicle with his brother’s corpse for a further 10 minutes.

This clear-cut and senseless case of police murder would spark large and violent protests among Mexican Americans in Dallas in one of the city’s few racial uprisings.

It was also the cue for this book by Brian Behnken examining endemic police violence in the US towards Mexican Americans, which forms the second title compiled from a decade of research into a phenomenon that stretches back to the 1830s.

Behnken purposefully begins his study by looking at the police murder of unarmed children like Santos, egregious cases of inexplicable brutality, but the book is not confined to victims who are minors.

Brown and Blue: Mexican Americans, Law Enforcement, and Civil Rights in the Southwest, 1935–2025 is a history of violence towards this ethnic group and the resistance it fuelled in the form of a growing Mexican American civil rights movement.

It is a timely volume for two main reasons: once again, Mexican Americans find themselves at the sharp of end of increasingly vicious law enforcement and immigration agencies that the recent case of Renee Good demonstrates are ready to use fatal force at the drop of a hat.

And secondly, as other titles argue, it challenges the far-right narratives propagated by Donald Trump that invert the direction of causality by suggesting this key demographic—there are 37.5 million Mexican-origin people in the US (60 per cent of all Latinos), the nation’s second largest ethnoracial group—is a major driver of violence in US society.

Brown and Blue explores the relationship between law enforcement and the criminal justice system and the Mexican-origin community in the US Southwest—Arizona, New Mexico, southern California, Texas, and occasionally Colorado (the states where Mexicans and Mexican Americans predominate)—a policing history that is, surprisingly, not well known.

And the first observation it makes is that Mexican Americans have suffered a lot of violence at the hands of law enforcement agencies: the book is littered with harrowing descriptions of police abuse, harassment, and murder.

Alongside violence and discrimination within the criminal justice system, Mexican Americans have also been frequent targets of that unique American species of white paramilitary—the vigilante.

The author’s historical research has shown how various forms of “extralegal justice” common in the 19^th-century continued well into the 20^th and have done so to this day.

In exploring these cases, Behnken offers an insight into how racist Trumpian narratives might arise, noting how the criminal justice system worked hard to insulate itself from criticism and change following police violence and to discredit victims as deserving low-lifes.

A number of legal conventions have been consolidated as a result, concepts such as “qualified immunity” which grants officers protection from civil lawsuits after a case of police violence, or the “objectively reasonable standard”, which asks whether an ordinary person would act as the officer did (usually expressed in such phrases as “I feared for my life”).

These have reinforced pre-existing conventions long used to justify police or extralegal violence—from the “ley fuga” or law of flight, which gave officers the power to kill suspects as they fled by shooting them in the back, no matter their age, to vagrancy and loitering laws.

As the author points out, despite the well-known excesses of armed US police towards minorities, the case of Mexicans in the Southwest is nonetheless unique.

That is because this part of the US needed Mexican Americans—as workers, voters, civic actors, and cultural creators who also at times have held some power within the criminal justice system itself as police officers, attorneys or judges.

This has meant that the criminal justice system could not abuse Mexican Americans indiscriminately without risking a reaction, and resistance has been a recurrent characteristic of the Mexican response to police violence.

The author discusses how the nature of resistance changed in different periods in the context of the broader civil rights experience of the Mexican American community.

During the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, as Mexican Americans pushed for integrated schools, voting rights, desegregation, and equality in the delivery of public services, there were also struggles for more inclusive policing and challenges to racism in the justice system.

In this period cities, counties, states and even the federal government classified Mexican-origin people as white—a strategy that delivered few benefits and that was challenged by the Chicano movement, which understood this to be out of step with their lived reality.

The Plan de Aztlán, which sketched out Chicano organisational strategy, implied that Chicanos were proudly brown, not white—a shift that gave them considerable political, social, cultural, and psychological power in interactions with the police.

Mexican resistance to police abuse is a story that offers some hope for other minorities, and reforms won through civil rights activism transformed the criminal justice system.

Behnken points to the landmark case Hernandez v Texas (1954) which not only barred the exclusion of Mexican Americans from jury service but extended the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution to all Americans.

The Escobedo v Illinois (1964) and Miranda v Arizona (1966) cases enumerated the treatment of those in police custody or undergoing interrogations, with the now ubiquitous “Miranda rights” an important feature of police interactions with suspects.

Reforms have also led to the diversification of police forces through minority recruitment, increasing the numbers of Mexican American officers.

But, as the author notes, reforms can be reversed—and the political climate has changed considerably since the 1980s.

His final chapter explores the period between the 1990s and today, with Bill Clinton’s 1994 Crime Bill and the War on Drugs spawning massive new police forces and militarisation that have led to a new era of abuses.

Behnken traces to this period an “explosion” in the number of police officers in the US, law enforcement budgets, and powers handed to officers—all of which have fuelled some of the worst cases of police abuse and murder over the past thirty years.

He concludes: “The activists of the sixties and seventies, like those of today, and many of their allies—as well as some of their adversaries—wanted to see things change. They sought then a brave new world, and I would argue that for a short time, in a few locales, some of them got to live in it. But as with most brave new worlds, it was fleeting. Not only did things revert to the ways they had been before, but in some ways things got worse.”

We might speculate from Behnken’s excellent historical analysis, and in particular his conclusion, that at the level of theory there are good reasons for the reversal of past reforms.

The systemic nature of violence by state agents never happens in a vacuum—indeed, it cannot—and is always a reflection of underlying social relations.

Brown and Blue (and Behnken’s first volume, Borders of Violence and Justice, 2022) highlights a long history of the institutionalisation of racism, whose persistence reveals how the entire apparatus of state repression in the US that includes the National Guard, military, Border Patrol, ICE, FBI, NSA and the judicial and carceral systems continues to treat Mexican-origin people as a colonised group.

Like other minorities, Mexican Americans face insurmountable social obstacles to escape their condition as workers while the police, as guardians of wealth and private property, are a key pillar of the capitalist state that needs to keep them in their place.

Engels argued that the police are merely “special bodies of armed men” enjoying a monopoly on lawful violence separated from the working class and loyal only to the ruling class whose interests they defend.

In this respect, racist police violence against Mexican Americans is simply a reflection of the racist violence of a capitalist system that inflicts poverty on an entire working class—but, more alarmingly, will continue to do so until the state’s machinery is dismantled.

*Please help the Latin American Review of Books: you can subscribe on Substack for just one month ($5) or, if you like what we do, you can make a donation through Stripe or PayPal (send your PayPal contributions to editor@latamrob.com

By Georgina Jiménez

Thanks to the musings of a president aspiring to be an emperor, the “death of civilisation” is in vogue, yet the hidden scars on women left by imperial abuses throughout history need uncovering if they are to be healed.

The greatest and most splendorous known empire of the unconquered American continent, the Mexica—better known as the Aztecs—and its downfall has inspired amazing writing and generated millions of pages over five centuries.

Women in Aztec and other indigenous societies in that era were resourceful, but mainly a resource—it was common for them to be traded to seal alliances between warring tribes, no differently to the role of women in Europe whereby female heirs or queens were used to set deals and solidify empires.

Before his arrival in Tenochtitlán, today known as Mexico City, the conquistador Hernán Cortés was gifted a woman called known as Malinche, a well-bred indigenous lady who spoke various languages and Spanish and acted as his interpreter. Malinche knew the rules of indigenous court life and how to navigate the world of men.

The name of the emperor Moctezuma Xocoyotzin (II), still resounds, but not much is known about his descendants.

It is said that Moctezuma fathered between 100 and 500 children, but only a few were recognised as legitimate. It is also said that it was Moctezuma who received Cortés and his men with open arms.

Cortés was given Moctezuma’s three teenage daughters, the youngest called Tecuipoch (around 11 years old at the time of the Spaniards’ arrival). She was the most important woman in Mexico at the time and was later baptised Doña Isabel Moctezuma.

In a move designed as means to stop all the Moctezuma heirs claiming lands that were rightfully theirs, Cortés awarded Doña Isabel the encomienda of Tacuba. She became Cortés’ “domestic companion”, and gave birth to Leonor Cortés Moctezuma, who was removed from her mother and taken under Cortés’ custody.

The newcomers later returned the monarch’s hospitality with an attack backed by a thousand Tlaxcalteca warriors, a rival tribe to the Mexica tired of the level of taxes imposed on them by the Aztecs.

Moctezuma the emperor did not die by the hand of the Spanish, but under the stones his own people threw at him, indignant about the defeat and what was regarded as his appeasement of the invaders.

Tecuipoch also had the misfortune of marrying six times. From her last two last marriages (to Spanish men) she had six more children. The Other Moctezuma Girls were Tecuipoch’s youngest daughters: Isabel and Catalina Cano de Moctezuma.

In Sofia Robleda’s historical fiction the author presents a series of flashbacks between Tecuipoch and her namesake daughter Isabel, and the trials and tribulations of the girl and her sister Catalina after they receive a mystery package from the afterlife.

Robleda, also author of another journey of discovery (Daughter of Fire) paints a picture of total assimilation of Moctezuma’s legitimate heirs into the nobility established in Nueva España or New Spain, the name given to Mexico after the conquest.

The life of the nobility in this context was like standard European court life during the 16^th century. For Isabel and Catalina Cano de Moctezuma—just like all the noblewomen of Spain, such as Queen Juana de Castilla, (nicknamed throughout the ages “the Mad One”)—their rights to a large portion of the encomienda of Tacuba were denied. Instead, the fate that awaited them was gaslighting and a life of silence and submission surrounded by the walls of a convent.

The book presents a vision of quasi-contemporary young and lively teenagers possessing a rebellious streak, with a mission: decoding and preserving their mother’s last will and in doing so their people’s heritage.

The two teenage girls face the contradiction of being heirs to a fortune but destined not to enjoy it as they were not men, and cheerfully accepting being micromanaged by their entitled testosterone-fuelled brothers. Obeying the stiff and suffocating established rules was comparable to wearing the attire of colonial times, and the remote possibility of finding a marriage that was not transactional became too much. What could a girl do?

Most importantly: the personal contradiction of growing up witnessing the segregation imposed by the Spanish colonisers against the indigenous population and the enslaved Africans they imported, was a prison. It is fair to say that, in this context, women and indigenous people were, and sadly are, still seen by those in power as the lowest in the list of priorities.

Both girls—just like axolotls—belonged to both worlds and none, the dilemma of any modern Mexican, deciding which world won’t betray the other.

The reader can feel that this novel is written for the screen, and certainly it has many elements that could be aimed at visual media. The writing is immersive, with colourful references to streets and landscapes, descriptive of sites surrounding the city, the smells of food and people. There is affection in the way we are told about places and even mythical beings, blending what are the tangible and the spiritual worlds.

It feels clear that Robleda’s intention is to pay homage to a proud but lost world, from which many fragments are still present even now. The narration is sprinkled with terms from the ancient Nahuatl (Mexican) language that today exist in English, but there is a handy Nahuatl glossary attached to enable the reader. Also to help us is a genealogical tree at the start, which could benefit by being printed in a larger format.

But the main aim of this novel is giving voice to the nameless part of most history—women in all their versions, young or old, ghosts or spirits ahead of their time, such as Tecuipoch who freed her slaves as her dying wish.

The effort the author has put into imagining that world and translating it for a contemporary reader, thereby opening the door to a story about which very little has been written, is commendable.

Moctezuma’s granddaughters Isabel and Catalina Cano joined the prestigious Concepción de la Madre de Dios convent, a place reserved for pure-blooded Spanish women. In 1553 they renounced their right of inheritance to Tacuba on behalf of their father and Cano brothers.

The conquest is a sore issue for any Mexican. Cortés died in Spain but as per his last wish was buried in Mexico, where his remains were moved on two occasions. In the period of the war of Independence his body was hidden as it was feared it would be desecrated. He has rested in Mexico City since 1946, in a concealed corner of the Hospital of Jesus of Nazareth, the very spot where he first met emperor Moctezuma.

Five hundred years later two descendants of Moctezuma and Cortés embraced at this same spot in a symbolic attempt to repair the wound left by the Conquest.

We do not know where Moctezuma was buried, although his blood still pulsates through notorious people in Mexico, and even parts of Europe among royal circles.

In Mexico we can trace Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, who has worked in the preservation of Mexico’s indigenous past, and who directed the reconstruction of the Templo Mayor project in Mexico City, one of the most important archaeological sites in the world.

There is also Blanca Barragán Moctezuma, a known descendant of Doña Isabel Moctezuma whose research led to finding Tecuipoch’s testament in 1994.

They have done their part in rescuing the history of this captivating figure, but much more needs to be done in bringing to light a story that Robleda has cleverly unearthed.

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