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morgan / Columbus, New Mexico XXXXXXXXXX
Columbus, New Mexico
The Creation of a Border Place Myth, 1888–1916
BRANDON MORGAN
••
Mexican Revolutionary general Francisco “Pancho” Villa’s raid on Columbus in the early morning hours of 9 March 1916 put the New Mexican village on the national and international map. Newspapers
on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border
andished the story of Villa’s attack on
the front page. Although Columbus is remembered today as the site of the only
organized Mexican revolutionary attack on U.S. soil, boosters had been hard at
work from 1888 to 1916 to
ing the border village to national notoriety.
Agents of the Columbus & Western New Mexico Townsite Company pub-
lished pamphlets and lyers to promote the up-and-coming town. In the weekly
Columbus (N.Mex.) News and its successor, the Columbus (N.Mex.) Courier, ref-
erences were routinely made to the projected growth of the town. At times, edi-
tor Pe
ow G. Mosely even argued that Columbus would exceed El Paso, Texas,
in size and notoriety within only a few short years. hese concentrated eforts
were intended to create what geographers Rob Shields, Christian Brannstrom,
Brandon Morgan received a PhD in History from the University of New Mexico in 2013. He
cu
ently teaches Latin American and Borderlands History at Central New Mexico Commu-
nity College and in the Virtual College at Western New Mexico University. Along with teach-
ing, he is working on revisions of his dissertation manuscript, “Columbus, New Mexico, and
Palomas, Chihuahua: Transnational Landscapes of Violence, 1888–1930,” for future publica-
tion with Texas A&M University Press. he author would like to thank Richard Dean, Presi-
dent of the Columbus Historical Society, for his generosity in providing access to his personal
archive as well as a place to stay in Columbus. he comments of the members of my disser-
tation committee, Linda B. Hall, Samuel Truett, K. Maria D. Lane, and Judy Bieber, as well as
feedback from Sarah Cornell and the NMHR’s anonymous peer reviewers helped me polish
the arguments and ideas presented in this piece. I thank them for their insights. Any e
ors
are, of course, my sole responsibility.
XXXXXXXXXXNew Mexico Historical Review / Volume 89, Number 4, Fall 2014
and Matthew Neuman have termed a “place myth.” Such myths aimed at over-
coming negative stereotypes or images of a given town or region to recreate it as
a place attractive for settlement and development.
For over a decade, boosters, settlers, and capitalists attempted, in and around
Columbus, to create a place myth that would reconigure the town as the epit-
ome of American development and modernization along the international bor-
der between New Mexico and Chihuahua, Mexico. heir endeavors to construct
this place myth illustrate the ways in which elite actors intended to recreate the
Columbus area as a space irmly controlled by white Americans.1 Place myths
efectively reoriented the public images of several southwestern towns around
the turn of the twentieth century, but the case of Columbus underscores the
limitations of the place-myth construct. In the end, Mexican revolutionary
actions beyond the boosters’ control thwarted their work to redeine the town’s
image. No amount of image-making could disconnect Columbus from its his-
torical ties to Mexican issues and events just over the border.
he creation of place myths, deined by geographer Shields as “stable sets of
place images,” was common throughout the American West in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries. Place images are the ideas and meanings
connected to physical places. Such images are oten the result of “stereotyp-
ing, which over-simpliies groups or places within a region, or from preju-
dices towards places or their inhabitants.”2 Brannstrom and Neuman build
on Shields’s work in their article “Inventing the ‘Magic Valley’ of South Texas,
1905–1941.” Based on their research on the Lower Rio Grande Valley in Texas,
they argue that place myths tended to appear in remote locations because out-
siders had little or no personal experience upon which to base their perceptions.
Isolation and lack of experience oten meant that existing images of such areas
were negative stereotypes. Boosters and other local elites with a stake in recre-
ating speciic regions or townsites virtually had free reign to redraw ideas about
their targeted places through newspapers, pamphlets, and mailers. Brannstrom
and Neuman conclude, “Although distance and
evity of experience make
place myths possible, the negative stereotypes and the imperative for accumula-
tion make place myths necessary.”3 Indeed, for a small time prior to World War
II, the Lower Rio Grande Valley became the “Magic Valley” along the very lines
that the architects of the place myth had intended.
Many small rural towns throughout the American West seemed to it this
pattern near the turn of the twentieth century. Historian David M. Wrobel has
portrayed that time in the West as one “of anxious transition from the premod-
ern to the modern”—the precise conditions that preoccupied oicials and devel-
opers in Poririan Mexico as well. In that context, “western promoters hu
iedly
aced toward the future, oten announcing its presence before it had actually
morgan / Columbus, New Mexico XXXXXXXXXX
a
ived, while old settlers lamented that a
ival and expressed their reverence
for past times.” Although booster literature may easily be dismissed as “the lies
of unscrupulous salesmen,” Wrobel points out that “it is important to treat these
sources as relections of the purpose of their creators rather than as accurate
descriptions of places and events.”4 In other words, booster bombast oten had
the intended purpose of refashioning public images of western towns, whether
or not their claims had any foundation in reality.
Turn-of-the-century Columbus was such a place, struggling in a harsh envi-
onment on the periphery of both the United States and Mexico. Local elites
worked to redeine the town as an attractive and prosperous place for white
family farmers to build their lives and their futures by casting it as quintes-
sentially American. Although I will make some attempts to illustrate the for-
mation of contesting place images and myths about Columbus at this time, I
follow Brannstrom and Neuman in privileging elite perspectives.5 I do so pri-
marily because Columbus is, and was, such a liminal place relative to centers
of political and economic power in both the United States and Mexico that it
has received only a cameo appearance in historical and geographic literature
on the Borderlands and the Mexican Revolution. Indeed, had Pancho Villa not
aided the town in 1916, it might make no appearance at all in the historical
ecord. Yet most, if not all, scholars of the history of the modern U.S.-Mex-
ico Borderlands and the Mexican Revolution
iely mention Columbus as the
site where Villa’s anti-American frustrations took their most tangible shape. In
these accounts, Columbus is refe
ed to as the “sleepy border town” or the “U.S.
army ga
ison town on the border” that was the victim of Villa’s rage. At that
point, scholars generally turn to a discussion of Villa’s possible motives for the
attack and of its impact on the course of the civil war then raging in Mexico. he
village of Columbus and its residents are banished to historical oblivion as col-
lateral damage of the Mexican Revolution.6 An examination of the elite-gener-
ated place myth in Columbus is a irst step toward piecing together a historical
na
ative told from the border village itself.
he history of Columbus and its place myths begin on the Palomas tract in
northern Chihuahua. On 4 June 1888, Luis Huller signed a colonization con-
tract with Carlos Pacheco, the secretaria de fomento (Secretary of Public Works)
in Mexico City. Pacheco had been working to advance Poririan colonization
policies intended to modernize and industrialize the Mexican republic by set-
tling white Europeans and Americans on tracts of government land. In the
1880s, such concessions were made to groups of Italians, Germans, Boers, and
Mormons in states throughout Mexico. By 1888 Huller and his International
Company of Mexico already controlled vast land grants in Chiapas and Baja
California, as well as shipping concessions in the Gulf of California and a rail-
XXXXXXXXXXNew Mexico Historical Review / Volume 89, Number 4, Fall 2014
oad right-of-way in Sonora.7 he contract of 1888 granted Huller the right to
control the Palomas tract in northern Chihuahua in exchange for the creation
of colonies there. It required Huller’s company to “establish 500 colonists at
least, during the period of three years, and to increase the said number with ity
more every year for a period of ive years.” In addition to these requirements,
sixty percent of the total number of colonists had to be Mexican, with “prefer-
ence to such Mexicans who reside in New Mexico, Upper California, Arizona
and Colorado, through the press and through the agents it [the company] may
appoint to that efect.”8
Although the exact methods employed by the company to attract settlers—
oth Mexican repatriates and foreigners, such as the German colonists who
settled on Huller’s lands in Chiapas—remain unclear in the historical record,
Huller’s company did draw to Palomas a handful of settlers, including Colum-
us founder Andrew O. Bailey. Huller’s control of the Palomas tract promised to
transform a desert region, dominated until very recently by various Apache and
Tarahumara peoples, into a place that was ripe for both agricultural production
and cattle raising. Yet, as historian Jane-Dale Lloyd states, through “false prom-
ises Huller abandoned on the tract a few impoverished Mexican families, who
had hoped to work rich agricultural lands that did not exist.”9 Indeed, when
the Mexican government imprisoned Huller for misappropriating the Interna-
tional Company’s funds in 1889, he began trying to sell the Palomas conces-
sion. Between 1889 and 1910, the company, with subsidiaries on both sides of
the international line, changed hands a number of times. By the time the Mex-
ican Revolution
oke out in 1910, California capitalist Edwin Jessop Marshall
had acquired the tract under the auspices of the Palomas Land and Cattle Com-
pany. As Lloyd so aptly points out, these developments were detrimental to the
inhabitants of Palomas. A Mexican customs house, relocated to the town in late
1892 from La Ascensión, kept the small