Fort Worth author Jeff Guinn discusses his new book on US-Mexico border history

Former Fort Worth Star-Telegram journalist Jeff Guinn explores Mexico-United States border history with his twenty-fifth book, “War on the Border.”

After examining eras of American history with books on Jim Jones, Bonnie and Clyde, and Charles Manson in recent years, Guinn turns his lens to Pancho Villa in his latest work.

We recently caught up with the 70-year-old New York Times bestselling author (the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.)

What made you start looking at the history of the US-Mexico border?

I like to write books about parts of American history where I feel I need to know more. I think it would be pretty dull writing a book where you think you already know everything, and you are just writing the book to demonstrate your opinion. And when there was all the talk about the big, beautiful wall that was going to get built and Mexico was going to pay for it I thought that sounded a little odd and I was interested in learning more about the history of the border. One of the most interesting things that turned up was that we had tried to build walls along the border before, starting in 1903, and they never worked. I think that whoever thought that one was going to spring up didn’t know much about US-Mexico border history either.

While researching this book, were there any particular locations you visited that brought everything into focus?

The split city of Nogales on the Arizona-Mexico border. The people on each side of the border had gotten along particularly well there yet there was a huge shootout at one point during the border strife of the 1910s. And the wall there is particular high and gruesome and topped with razor wire. It’s a huge ugly thing. Talking with old-timers on both sides of the border, who remember when it was a bucolic place and everybody got along so well, the contrast with the way it is now made me feel sad. But it helped me understand how the borders have always been like that and Nogales was the exception to the rule. But it isn’t anymore.

Were there similarities you noticed between US-Mexico border conflict in the early part of the 19th century and in the last few years?

Very much so. History doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The same issues that are plaguing the border right now—from violence on both sides to refugees who are simply showing up needing immediate care to barebones sort of prison camps—it’s still the same as it was over a hundred years ago. These problems are going to keep happening the same way until we finally work with Mexico and figure out some logical, pragmatic system for border crossings and immigration. The things that you’re reading about in the newspapers and seeing on the news are, practically word for word, what was going in the late 1800s and early 1900s. We’re not learning from history.

What did you learn about how Americans have historically viewed Mexicans?

The problem is we’ve always sort of looked at Mexico as some place we can go and take what we want and leave the parts we don’t want. Mexicans became a portion of our labor force very early on and their work is taken for granted. There’s a certain cultural disdain I think a lot of Americans feel for them. You have to remember Mexico was about the same size of the United States and (its federal republic) came along about 50 years after we did. But the first thing American ambassadors asked when they arrived in Mexico City were not “Congratulations on your new democracy.” They wanted to know which parts of their country Mexicans were willing to sell them. It didn’t go over very well. And the government is so far away in Mexico City that a lot of the northern states have always been kind of out of control. But Mexicans believe, with some justification, that Americans simply don’t respect them as a people or a culture.

Pancho Villa’s plan to provoke a US invasion was so crazy, sort of like the way Charles Manson hoped to benefit from trying to start a race war.

I think that we always have individuals who will come up with crazy ideas, usually to the detriment of themselves or others. I would like to listen to a conversation between Francisco Villa and Charlie Manson. All my books are about some interlinking parts of American history. Villa was in the right place at the right time to create chaos and he did it. And that was true of Manson, to a certain extent it was true of Bonnie and Clyde, and Jim Jones was in the right place to do some shocking things.

Your books often have larger-than-life antiheroes.

Villa invented himself. He cultivated his image, sold film rights to his rebellion to Hollywood producers. He had a great sense of how to market himself. Like Manson, he knew how to create an image and sell it through the media. He really was sort of a Robin Hood as far as some of the poorest people in Mexico were concerned. On the other hand, he would slaughter a whole village of people if he was angry about something.

The sensationalism from respected sources is shocking in this book. That had to make your research more difficult.

I always have found that the real truth is more interesting than the mythology. The more a certain part of our culture is clinging to alternative facts, believing what they want even if it’s not true, I think that’s very counterproductive. Nothing good is going to come of it. You can love your country and still realize there are some parts of its history we need to learn from so we don’t keep doing these things.