Beyond the River’s Violence: Reconsidering the Chamizal Border Dispute

When Julio Provencio sold his lands along the Rio Grande border line between El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua to Santiago Alvarado in 1885, he articulated a predicament that many Mexican landowners in his community faced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “I find myself in a sad plight on account of poverty and being quite old,” he wrote in the deed. He was selling, he wrote, because he could not “wait any longer for the fixing of the boundary line by the Governments of the United States of America and Mexico, in accordance with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.” He described his lot as “a piece of agricultural land situated on the left bank of the river of this Municipality [Paso del Norte] of the district of El Chamizal … which was abruptly thrown by the floods on the foreign side.”¹

Provencio’s deed exemplifies the tensions that were mounting between landowners in the urbanizing area along the riverbanks of the Rio Grande between the cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez over the course of the nineteenth century. Provencio was one of dozens of local Mexican claimants embroiled in what would become a century-long boundary conflict over a tract known as El Chamizal. Periodic flooding between the cities in the latter half of the nineteenth century caused the riverbanks to change shape and location over time, moving the Chamizal lands to the “U.S. side” of the river border and troubling the boundary established by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Poverty and old age prevented Provencio from awaiting the resolution of the international dispute, which remained at an impasse until the Chamizal Treaty of 1963 returned approximately 630 acres to Mexico and relocated the river channel.

Conventional scholarship has primarily interpreted the Chamizal Treaty as a breakthrough in diplomatic relations between Mexico and the United States, framed by the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis.² Overall, diplomatic history approaches, along with the public history and memorialization of the settlement, have emphasized peace and friendship between the two nations and overlooked the long history of violence, environmental crisis, and displacement along the Chamizal tract. Later generations of social historians and Chicana/o studies scholars have highlighted the South El Paso communities who were displaced by and resisted the Chamizal Settlement, but few historians have investigated environmental and social conditions on the tract before the mid-twentieth century.³

This article applies an environmental history framework and looks further back into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to populate the history of El Chamizal with a community of residents who actively engaged in the territorial dispute and shaped the natural landscape.⁴ It tells the environmental and diplomatic history of El Chamizal looking north from Mexico, utilizing records from Mexican claimants, the Chamizal Title Company—which ostensibly represented those claimants—and Mexican consuls and diplomats who oversaw negotiations over river management and the disputed territory. Exploring the lives and memories of Chamizal claimants reveals that contemporary local actors were aware of the stakes of chronic and abrupt environmental change in the riverbed between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez and worked to modify the built environment to stabilize the international border and protect their property claims. Claimant testimony and Mexican diplomatic records also contain articulations of environmental justice, linking the Chamizal dispute to broader concerns with land and water rights in the border region.

Reconsidering the Chamizal case reveals that nineteenth-century cycles of flood disasters in the region facilitated U.S. encroachment onto Mexican claimants’ land in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, emphasizing how acts of nature and environmental change—in addition to conquest and treaties—factored into Mexican land loss after the U.S.-Mexico War.⁵ The Chamizal case also illuminates the intersections between the environment, territory, and private property. It offers a case study in how private property is fundamentally “an environmental relationship between people, nature, and the state” and sheds light on the entanglements between the natural environment and territorial sovereignty in U.S.-Mexican relations.⁶

More broadly, this article suggests the promise of applying environmental history approaches to diplomatic history questions. Beyond geopolitics and matters of environmental governance, environmental history’s concerns with landscape change and environmental justice offer a useful lens through which to reframe diplomatic relations. Furthermore, environmental history engages with issues of sovereignty, territory, and subsistence in ways that are generative for diplomatic historians. While environmental history initially emerged with a focus on the U.S. West, environmental historians are beginning to formulate transnational approaches that consider topics such as migration, U.S. empire, and postcolonialism.⁷ New scholarship in the subfield has treated questions about environmental change, human agency, and culture, illuminating the relationships between the natural landscape and human political and social relations.⁸

Environmental history lends itself to transnational and borderlands history because it takes as a given the ways in which the natural environment transcends and disregards the boundaries of the nation-state.⁹ Rivers and bodies of water can be dynamic meeting places, as global historian Alison Bashford has proposed in her “terraqueous” history framework.¹⁰ Bashford’s terraqueous framework deepens and extends conventional borderlands and frontier interpretations of El Chamizal, which have also investigated the paradox of “the fixity of national belonging in a world defined by mobility.”¹¹ In its function as the international boundary, the Rio Grande has historically done “connecting work,” creating a shared environmental context for the United States and Mexico through its floods and impacts on the landscape, “displacing national geographies” in a very tangible sense in the ways that it has troubled territorial claims.¹² The El Paso-Juárez valley may seem largely irrelevant to and disconnected from global processes and contexts, but the environmental and diplomatic history of the Chamizal case reveals its connections to broader global history for over a century, from the crucial impacts of El Niño and La Niña climate patterns originating in the Pacific Ocean to hemispheric relations during the Global Cold War.

Mapping a river in motion: Early Settlement in the El Paso-Juárez Valley and Boundary Treaties, 1827–1860

When it was ratified in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo designated the Rio Grande as the international boundary. The line would begin in the Gulf of Mexico and run west “from thence up the middle of that river, following the deepest channel, where it has more than one” until “the town called Paso,” or Paso del Norte, the pre-1848 Mexican settlement that would eventually become El Paso and Ciudad Juárez.¹³ Faulty astronomical coordinates and an unreliable treaty map, however, had located Paso del Norte too far north and east, leading to immediate controversy over the river border’s true location. In 1850 the U.S. and Mexican boundary commissioners negotiated the Bartlett-García Conde Compromise, which updated Paso del Norte’s geographical coordinates and extended the border westward along the thirty-second parallel, granting Mexico more territory to the north in the Mesilla Valley of New Mexico and the United States more territory to the west. U.S. public opinion quickly turned against this compromise, and the U.S. boundary commission was recalled. The Treaty of 1853 incorporated the Gadsden Purchase, authorized the adjusted New Mexico-Chihuahua boundary line extending westward from El Paso, and reiterated the terms of Article V of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, including the ambiguous delimitation of the Rio Grande boundary. Although both the 1848 and 1853 treaties stipulated that the river border would run through the center of the river and its deepest channel, it did not account for an essential environmental reality: rivers move. Furthermore, the treaty made no stipulation as to whether the border line should be permanently fixed by the treaty and subsequent surveys or if—and how—the international boundary could change as the river moved.¹⁴

With such a large floodplain, the shape-shifting Rio Grande would eventually cause disputes between Mexico and the United States along its entire winding length. But rapid urbanization and proximity between the downtown centers of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez made the twin cities the epicenter of debates about the river boundary in the second half of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century. The characteristics of the river’s movement would become essential to the drawn-out Chamizal arbitration, with the United States arguing that slow erosion, or accretion, had caused the border line to shift, while Mexico held that the river had changed suddenly in periods of flooding, through a process known in international law as avulsion. The principles of accretion and avulsion have their roots in common law and Roman civil law and have historically been applied to domestic property, although they were recognized principles of interstate boundary law by the late nineteenth century, informing U.S. Supreme Court decisions such as Iowa v. Nebraska (1892) and Missouri v. Nebraska (1904). The use of accretion and avulsion principles as the primary arguments by the United States and Mexico in the Chamizal case, argues geographer John Donaldson, was one of the first explicit attempts to extend these principles to international law.¹⁵

It took over half a century before international boundary law would be tested in the Chamizal dispute, but the river landscape of the Paso del Norte region transformed continuously in the first two decades after the 1848 and 1853 treaties and the 1850s boundary surveys. Since at least the Mexican period (1821–1846) and during the Texas Republic (1836–1846), when Texas claimed what is now downtown El Paso as a part of Bexar County, Rio Grande flooding consistently destroyed buildings and unsettled Indigenous and settler land claims.¹⁶ After 1848, U.S. and Mexican survey commissions confronted the challenge of converting the treaty’s “line in the sand” into a rational and legible international border.¹⁷ Members of the survey commissions in the 1850s knew more than the architects of the 1848 treaty about the Rio Grande’s propensity to move. But they downplayed its potential impact on the international boundary. In the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Chamizal arbitrations, Mexico would argue that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Treaty of 1853 implied a “fixed-line interpretation” of the boundary, a stance muddled by the 1850s commissioners’ submission of two different maps of Paso del Norte showing two distinct river locations, apparently due to the Rio Grande’s movement over the course of the time between the U.S. and Mexican surveys.¹⁸ A note on a map produced by the U.S. commission flagged differences with Mexico’s map of the Paso del Norte boundary, claiming that, “the River changed its bed, as it is constantly doing, but always within narrow limits.” Breaking with the binational commissions’ standard cartographic practices, only Mexico’s version of the map of El Paso was signed by both commissioners, leaving the commissioners’ stance on the boundary’s variability unclear to future arbitrators of the Chamizal dispute.¹⁹

After the boundary commissioners certified the border line, locals were left to figure out the new implications of the international border running through their community. The Ponce de León land grant, for example, predated the Rio Grande boundary and had been on the north side of the river in 1827 when it was granted. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ostensibly protected Mexican property rights, regardless of citizenship status. But Article X of the treaty, stipulating that Mexican land grants would be protected, was stricken from the version of the treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate.²⁰ Questions about how to assimilate U.S. and Mexican property regimes after 1848 were further muddled by the constantly shifting Rio Grande, and heirs to the Ponce de Leon grant were convinced in the 1850s to sell the land to the predominantly white, English-speaking, U.S. (or Anglo American) speculators, who sold unsurveyed tracts to settlers.²¹ The boundaries of these land grants had to be squared with the ranches and small parcels purchased by incoming Anglo American settlers arriving to the small town of El Paso on the north bank of the river, as well as the property claims of Mexican tenants and smallholders, many of whom had lived and worked the land on the Chamizal tract since as early as the late eighteenth century.

Local testimony about mid-nineteenth century environmental change and property ownership would later be foundational to the evidence submitted in the Chamizal case, but the relatively sparse population of the El Paso-Juárez valley in the mid-nineteenth century made reliable testimony on environmental change challenging to locate and verify. Population estimates for Paso del Norte, on the Mexican side of the boundary, range from 10,000 to 13,000 in the 1840s through 1860s. Meanwhile, on the Texas side, the city of El Paso did not exceed a population of 100 to 200 until as late as the 1870s.²² Anson Mills, an early Anglo leader and surveyor in the region who arrived in the late 1850s, described the nascent town of El Paso on the Texas side as a ranch populated by 200 to 300 people, predominantly Mexican farmers and their families.²³ As one newspaper noted in the early twentieth century, nearly all of the residents of the entire El Paso-Juárez valley in the mid-nineteenth century were Mexican: “The town [El Paso] was of no importance,” the newspaper reported, predicting that “the arbitrators who are to settle the dispute will have to depend on Mexican testimony.”²⁴

Mexican residents and the few Anglo Americans who were present in the region in the 1850s and 1860s, however, clearly understood the Rio Grande’s frequent tendency to flood and change course. Anson Mills noted that “during the floods the bed of the river was constantly changing by erosion and deposit.” He further explained, “generally this change took place slowly … but frequently hundreds of acres would be passed in a single day.”²⁵ Although Mills was present in the late 1850s, he left the region for two decades to fight for the Union in the Civil War and explore the Western United States and thus was not present to witness the crucial transformations of the riverbed in the 1860s. When Mills returned to El Paso in the 1880s, he remained keenly observant of water and environmental issues on the Rio Grande but ultimately reformulated his characterization of the river’s tendency to move to support the United States’ argument that the river had changed slowly through accretion. Mills’s changed stance on this issue mattered substantially more than that of the average El Paso citizen; he would later serve as the U.S. boundary commissioner in the failed 1911 arbitration of the Chamizal case, convincing the U.S. government to decline the proposed settlement.

“Por la violencia del rio”: the creation of the Chamizal tract, 1860–1880

Amidst political instability on both sides of the border during the U.S. Civil War and Mexico’s War of Reform and French occupation, climate and environmental volatility troubled the integrity of the post-1848 boundary in the Paso del Norte border region. The fixed geopolitical border negotiated in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and certified by the 1850s binational boundary surveys endured for just over a decade before major flooding in the 1860s caused the Rio Grande to shift southward. Establishing the consequences of flooding and the characteristics of the Rio Grande’s movement between 1853 and 1865 was central to the multiple attempted arbitrations of the Chamizal dispute. Interviews conducted by the Chamizal Title Company in 1907 help reconstruct the 1860s floods that initially changed the Rio Grande’s course and altered the border line. The documents provide a window into the social and environmental history of the disputed tract and its residents through the first decade of the twentieth century, showing how a local environmental crisis became a diplomatic dispute. The testimonies compose a record of environmental and social memory tied to the periodic flooding of the river, revealing the impact of the Rio Grande floods on Mexican landowners. The Mexican claimants’ testimonies shed light on the trauma of environmental crisis and dispossession from their lands by opportunistic Americans. Additionally, the testimonies expose a history of claimants’ attempts to mitigate flooding and modify the riverbanks to preserve their homes and livelihoods, showing that they understood the transnational stakes of the river’s unfettered movement. The 1860s also witnessed the first attempt at resolving the Chamizal dispute diplomatically, but for the most part, the issue remained a local problem with locally generated solutions.

Reconstructing a social and environmental history of the Chamizal tract requires attention to the erasure of Chamizal claimants from maps and documentation of the development of El Paso’s urban space. Although U.S. maps often presented El Chamizal as empty, undeveloped space, the Chamizal Title Company records reveal that the tract had been continuously occupied by Spanish and Mexican settlers since the eighteenth century. By the time the international boundary was established, these landowners had extensively cultivated the land and altered the built and natural environment. The persistent portrayal of the Chamizal area as empty space on city maps into the early twentieth century contributed to the ambiguity around the status of the tract and erased its historical and contemporary occupancy. As Alana de Hinojosa has argued, neither the full spatial extension of the Chamizal tract nor the puzzling environmental history of the series of floods that generated the dispute have been adequately acknowledged in the scholarship and memorialization of the Chamizal Settlement. Instead, historians, diplomats, and some El Paso-Juárez locals have perpetuated and naturalized the Chamizal Settlement’s “narrative of closure and progress,” limiting the spatial understanding of El Chamizal as the 630 acres returned to Mexico and labeling the 1864 flood as the definitive cause of territorial shift on the Chamizal tract.²⁶ This article concurs with de Hinojosa’s findings, conceptualizing the Chamizal tract more broadly than the territory exchanged in the 1960s and examining the environmental legacies of the Rio Grande floods that produced the Chamizal dispute without presuming that it is possible to uncover an authoritative timeline, map, or environmental truth about the Chamizal tract and the Rio Grande’s movement. Tracing the history of the Chamizal dispute alongside the development of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso—from a single Mexican village, to two small border towns in the mid-nineteenth century, to a burgeoning twentieth-century binational metropolitan area—underscores dynamic relationships between the built environment, the Rio Grande, and the tract’s residents, revealing a much more urban history of El Chamizal than most documentation indicates.

The Chamizal Title Company’s oral history and documentation project centered around proving the timing and locations of the 1860s floods to verify that the border had changed rapidly through avulsion. The company argued that two major floods in 1862 and 1865 had “thrown” the Chamizal tract to the northern bank of the Rio Grande. Strangely, nearly every secondary source on the Chamizal dispute agrees that the most relevant and substantial flood occurred in 1864. It is unclear whether the Chamizal Title Company made an unintentional error or had a reason for claiming that the most significant floods occurred in different years. The company’s assertion that the largest flood was in 1862, followed by another major inundation in 1865, is unsubstantiated in other primary or secondary literature, but it is plausible. Historical climate records suggest that 1862, 1864, and 1865 were all very likely El Niño years. Though generated due to warm surface waters in the Pacific Ocean, the El Niño weather pattern tends to cause increased rainfall and flooding across the U.S. South and Southwest. Other areas in the U.S. West, including California, Nevada, and Oregon experienced record flooding in 1862, and military records from the U.S. Civil War noted that the Rio Grande in south-central New Mexico, between Fort Craig and the town of Mesilla, ran unusually high in summer 1862.²⁷ These discrepancies underscore the enduring uncertainties surrounding the details of the river’s movement in the nineteenth century, which the Chamizal Title Company and others clearly used to their advantage. They also highlight the potential of using environmental historians’ archival approaches—climate records, in this case—to corroborate more conventional archival sources.

The company’s goal in the 1907 interviews was to produce a collection of flood testimonies to prove the avulsive movement of the Rio Grande and to obstruct U.S. claimants’ attempts to dispossess Mexican landowners.²⁸ The leading questions and rote format of the testimonies make them seem, at first glance, redundant and mundane, but embedded within them lie useful hints about the information the Chamizal Title Company thought would be key to make their legal case, as well as incidental environmental knowledge and memory in the Chamizal tract. Although official surveys and treaties would serve as the most authoritative sources over the long Chamizal boundary arbitration, these community testimonies also produce a “cartography of memory” of nineteenth-century Rio Grande flood events and demonstrate the local contours of what eventually became an international dispute.²⁹

The identities of the interviewees reveal a profile of who the Chamizal Title Company perceived as holding community authority, reliable environmental memory, and—importantly—friendly testimony to the Mexican claimants’ and title company’s case. All interviewees were elderly men, primarily in their sixties and seventies (although two men claimed, improbably, to be 114 and ninety years old).³⁰ Targeting this age bracket for the testimonies made practical sense, as the interviewees would have been young men or boys in the 1850s and 1860s when the international boundary was surveyed and subsequently disrupted by major floods. The exclusive selection of men suggests that credible knowledge of the river and the environment was perceived as gendered—women landowners appear consistently throughout the company’s records, so the omission of women in the flood testimonies does not necessarily reflect gender differences in claiming or owning lands on the disputed tract. In addition to compiling the testimonies of older men, the interviews favored multi-generational landholdings in the Chamizal zone, complementing the archive of land records that the Chamizal Title Company and their primary agent, William J. Warder, had amassed.

Flooding was a known and expected part of life in El Chamizal, and residents were aware of the flood risk they took on by owning and occupying property near the riverbed. The interviewees claimed deep knowledge of the contours of the river and its surrounding landscape.³¹ Knowledge of the Rio Grande was useful to Mexican landowners beyond supporting their claims to the tract. El Chamizal’s residents had to be both flood-minded and drought-minded as the river cycled through extreme periods of inundation and aridity within a regular calendar year, as well as longer cycles of drought and water abundance.³² Landowners knew this seasonal cycle intimately.³³ Eulalio Sandoval remembered that the 1850s, when the U.S. and Mexican Boundary Commissions first mapped the border line, was a time of drought: “I remember that about the year 1856 the river was dry for 5 or 6 years and that during those years no crops were made.” In 1862 came a “great flood” that lasted for two months and caused the Rio Grande to first run in two channels before abandoning its old channel for the new one cut by the flood.³⁴ José Madrid, a lifelong Chamizal resident, remembered that the river had changed channels twice during his lifetime and called the 1862 flood “the worst flood that I have known in the river … the water was so high it overflowed its banks and spread over the valley.”³⁵

Testimonies, deeds, and other documents in the Chamizal Title Company’s records describe the violence of the river and contain language that supports Mexico’s claim of avulsion. Describing the movement of the river as violent underscored the intensity of environmental change in the riverbed and supported Mexico’s claim to El Chamizal. For example, in a document from 1900, the widow María Elena Domingues granted Santiago Alvarado power of attorney to “sell half of my lands that, by the violence of the river, were transferred to [the northern] bank.”³⁶ Five years later, Domingues granted Alvarado power of attorney yet again, this time to sell all of her landholdings in El Chamizal. At that time, she described her land as having been “thrown upon the Northern side of said river.”³⁷ This language characterizing the Rio Grande as violent and mobile was common throughout title records and other documents collected by the Chamizal Title Company, and it functioned to embed the legal argument of avulsion directly into Mexican land documents.

In addition to the descriptions of the river and the avulsive change of the riverbank, violence also appears in narratives of confrontations that occurred between Mexican claimants and Americans after major flood events. These alleged attacks were made by individuals, as well as by railroad and real estate companies. Multiple claimants described returning to their lands after seeking high ground to find Americans on their property who claimed that the international boundary had shifted their land into U.S. territory. “After the river had changed its channel, when these people came back to the lands they were prevented from taking possession by the Americans who claimed that the boundary line between the two countries followed the river and that the Mexicans could have no interests North of that line,” Apolinar Apodaca testified.³⁸ Matías Velarde’s testimony disagreed on the timing, arguing that it took some time post-flood for conflict to arise in the Chamizal tract. “After the changes of channel, the Mexicans claimed the land up to the old abandoned channel of the river, and at first the Americans made no opposition to the claim, but later the Americans claimed down to the new channels of the river,” he remembered. “After that there were difficulties between individuals who claimed land in the Chamizal.”³⁹ Mariano Ferrales estimated that “the difficulties with the Americans regarding the ownership of the lands” took about ten years to develop after the river channels changed in the 1860s.⁴⁰

Other interviewees described violent conflict and intimidation tactics by American squatters to keep Mexican landowners off their Chamizal lands. Pablo Gumesindo Tellez remembered, “when the water dried, many returned to their properties but the Americans chased them away, treated them very badly, so they didn’t return out of fear.”⁴¹ He recalled that two landowners, Francisco and Silvario Varela, were “trampled and even jailed by the Americans in defense of their lands.”⁴² Tellez remembered that other Mexican claimants who faced violence remained on their lands, although their title to the property was not recognized: “the Americans flogged them, but afterwards they allowed them [the Mexican families] to reside here, but not possess their properties.”⁴³ Although encounters on the Chamizal tract were neither as violent nor as deadly as other confrontations between ethnic Mexicans and Anglo Americans in the Texas borderlands during this period—including the El Paso Salt War of 1877—those encounters should nonetheless be understood in the broader context of cultures of violence, processes of settler colonialism, and the development of capitalism in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands during the latter half of the nineteenth century.⁴⁴

The testimonies also reveal Chamizal landowners’ attempts to modify and control the river environment to reduce flood risk, which would stabilize the international boundary line and reduce the risk of flood damage to human life and property. In reaction to the pervasive flooding, residents of El Chamizal attempted both makeshift and more official methods of modifying and controlling the movement of the river. Several of the interviewees worked on the construction of a canal intended to reroute the river back to its pre-1862 channel. Dolores Bernal, a local farmer who worked on the canal construction, reflected on the apparent tacit agreement between the two cities at the time that the Chamizal lands still belonged to Mexico. According to Bernal, the canal was dug “on land that was conceded at the time by everyone to belong to Mexico and I cannot see how it was that the Americans permitted the canal to be dug, for the purpose it was intended, if the land over which it ran did not belong to Mexico.”⁴⁵ The 1860s canal project ultimately failed, although Mexican claimants offered different explanations for the failure. Apodaca speculated, “no dam was placed across the new channel to make all of the water run through the canal, and the floods continued to run down the new channel and gradually the canal filled up.”⁴⁶ José Madrid posited, instead, that “the river was washed out further south and the current did not go through the canal as expected.”⁴⁷ Mariano Ferrales offered a third hypothesis for the failure of the canal: “a dam built by Captain French on the American side of the river” in the late 1860s.⁴⁸ Facing the paradoxical choice between access to flowing river water for irrigation and household use and the stability of the international boundary, Mexicans and Americans would continue their attempts to modify the banks of the Rio Grande even as the dispute remained unresolved.

In 1865 and 1866, Mexican President Benito Juárez’s republican government installed itself in Paso del Norte for nine months while Maximilian I occupied Mexico City with his imperial government. During his short stay in the city that would later adopt his name, Juárez became involved in local politics, particularly issues surrounding agrarian rights, water, and irrigation. He granted expansions to Paso del Norte’s land base, promoting agriculture and ranching, and also witnessed firsthand the impact of seasonal flooding of the Rio Grande in 1865. That year, floods had destroyed the city’s main irrigation canal, the Acequia Madre, leaving many farmers without access to irrigation water, including on the Chamizal tract. In response to the dire need for potable water and imminent conflict over irrigation waters, Juárez approved appropriations for the repair and extension of the acequia canal system along the Rio Grande.⁴⁹ The transfer of the Chamizal tract to the north bank of the Rio Grande also concerned Juárez. In December 1866, he asked Matías Romero, Mexico’s ambassador in Washington to initiate a formal claim to El Chamizal. But the United States stalled any resolution to the dispute by claiming that the river had shifted south gradually through accretion, which would become the official U.S. stance on the Chamizal question.⁵⁰ U.S. evasion of the issue, combined with Juárez’s short stay in the city, Mexico’s ongoing war against French occupation, and the relatively rural nature of the valley at the time likely all contributed to the failure to resolve the Chamizal question in the 1860s. Juárez’s integrated approach to irrigation, agriculture, and the Chamizal territory in Paso del Norte, however, reveals how, from the perspective of Mexican claimants and their municipal and federal governments, as early as the 1860s, diplomatic claims to the Chamizal were intertwined with environmental justice issues regarding land and water rights. Thus, the Chamizal dispute and acequia repair were connected to broader themes in Mexican nineteenth- and twentieth-century history concerning the distribution of land and usufruct rights to agrarian smallholders.⁵¹

Although by the late 1860s the U.S. and Mexican federal governments had begun to acknowledge a broader issue surrounding boundary stability and territorial sovereignty, local testimonies suggest that the dispute unfolded more slowly on the ground than it had between the two governments. Bernal’s testimony, along with others’ claims that U.S. encroachment on Chamizal lands did not begin immediately after the 1860s floods suggest the existence of an intermediate period in the late 1860s and into the 1870s when the river had clearly moved but Mexican sovereignty over the Chamizal lands was generally accepted on the ground. In other words, at least in the hyper-local context of the Chamizal tract, the principle of avulsion was upheld and the border line was understood to remain fixed in its position stipulated by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the international boundary survey commissions of the 1850s. After El Paso’s incorporation as a city in 1873 and the arrival of the railroad in the early 1880s, the Chamizal question escalated, as it began to draw corporate developers and land speculators, who ultimately campaigned to bring the case to international arbitration.⁵²

“An agitation of injustice”: Defending the Mexican claim and capitalizing on the Chamizal dispute, 1880–1913

In the decade or so after the major 1860s floods, U.S. companies and individuals began to claim that the Chamizal tract—now north of the itinerant Rio Grande—belonged under El Paso’s jurisdiction by the principle of accretion. Developers’ and settlers’ encroachment onto the Chamizal tract coincided with the arrival of the Southern Pacific railroad in 1881, ongoing environmental change, and attempts to manipulate the river to control flooding and stabilize the border. By the early 1880s, U.S. developers had platted the disputed Chamizal area north of the Rio Grande, subdividing it into evenly sized parcels along neatly gridded streets. Developers then sold the lands, still claimed under Mexican titles, under U.S. title as “additions” to the city of El Paso. These additions, known by the city of El Paso and U.S. claimants as the Cotton, Campbell, and Magoffin Additions would make up the core of the urban portion of the Chamizal claims. A special edition of the El Paso Times published in 1882 described the city’s new additions in detail, portraying them as uninhabited and ripe for settlement. The “picturesque” Magoffin Addition, for example, the Times described as “covered with beautiful natural groves, the native grasses of the country, and marked by acequia canals from the Rio Grande. Every acre is well-adapted to cultivation and particularly to the culture of grape.” The sales pitch for plots on the Cotton Addition commented, “the soil is very rich and generally responds well to tillage.”⁵³ Although the ads for the new additions suggest untapped agricultural potential and empty space, the detailed references to cultivation and acequias—an irrigation technology common in the Spanish and Indigenous Southwest—instead indicates prior cultivation and management of the environment. In this 1882 ad copy, the active presence of Mexican claimants on these lands—as well as the Indigenous communities who had claimed and tended to the lands before Spanish and Mexican land grants parceled out the Chamizal tract to settlers—is completely erased.⁵⁴

As U.S. developers began advertising and selling plots in the new additions in the final decades of the nineteenth century, Mexican claimants found an unlikely ally in an Anglo American who had begun a scheme to oppose the developers and, allegedly, to defend Mexican titles on the disputed tract. Between 1893 and 1905, William J. Warder pursued a systematic plan to purchase Mexican titles to the lands in the area along the Rio Grande international border line between the two cities. Warder worked his way north towards El Paso from Ciudad Juárez’s Acequia Chamizal, collecting property records and surveying smallholders’ tracts. The maps and sketches he produced reveal small, irregularly shaped plots of land that contrast starkly with the grid that El Paso developers had overlaid across the disputed zone.⁵⁵ In cases in which the Mexican claimants refused to sell outright, Warder entered into agreements to represent them as their legal agent for the recovery of their lands lost to the U.S. developers and their clients claiming U.S. title. This legal representation came at a steep cost to the claimants, however, as they typically signed away one third to one half of their lands to Warder in exchange for his services.⁵⁶ As claimants awaited the settlement of the Chamizal dispute, they often remained on their previous landholdings as tenants of Warder and, later, the Chamizal Title Company (headed by Arizona businessman and rancher Brewster Cameron). It was standard practice in Mexico during the presidency of Porfirio Díaz (1884–1911) to compensate surveyors with titles to one third of the land area that they surveyed, which is likely the reason Mexican claimants to the Chamizal tract would have accepted a similar arrangement with Warder and later the Chamizal Title Company in exchange for legal representation.

In 1905, the Chamizal Title Company paid Warder $100,000 to purchase all of the Mexican titles he had accumulated, which amounted to an estimated ninety to 100 percent of the Mexican titles in the Chamizal tract. This encompassed the same area claimed as the new city additions in the southernmost urban area of El Paso under U.S. titles, bounded by Overland Street to the north and the Rio Grande to the south. The company also obtained title to large portions of Isla de Córdova, a 400-acre tract immediately downriver, which was recognized as Mexican territory but had been “cut off” from Mexico by a diversion canal intended for flood control, an intercity project completed in 1899.⁵⁷

After purchasing all of Warder’s Mexican titles to the Chamizal lands, the Chamizal Title Company continued to employ Warder and built upon his work, researching and collecting Mexican claimants’ land records, including deeds, surveys, and family genealogies dating back to the eighteenth century. The company’s archive of land records contains hundreds of files on small tracts of land near the Rio Grande dating from the 1730s through the early twentieth century, often tracing multiple generations of land ownership within a single family. Many of the titles originated from colonial Spanish grants and grants to “national lands” in the 1820s after Mexico achieved its independence, thus predating the international border line. Constructing extensive and—ideally continuous—files for each tract in the disputed Chamizal zone helped the Chamizal Title Company make the case for Mexican claims to the territory in dispute.

The Chamizal Title Company and William Warder positioned themselves against the developers of the El Paso City additions and portrayed themselves, somewhat disingenuously, as working in partnership with Mexico’s government and claimants. The transfer of Mexican titles and the Chamizal Title Company’s agreement to represent Mexican claimants occurred with the permission of the Mexican government and the support of Mexicans with larger and more valuable landholdings on the disputed tract. In the months leading up to the transfer between Warder and Cameron, the latter had undergone a lengthy petition process to gain permission to purchase Mexican lands within twenty leagues, or seventy miles, of the international border as a foreigner.⁵⁸ Mexico’s Secretaría de Fomento’s agreement to grant the permit, along with the explicit support of the larger landholders in the Chamizal tract, suggest that Cameron, Warder, and the company’s actions at least made it appear as though they genuinely supported the Mexican claims. In a 1908 letter defending Brewster Cameron, W.J. Warder, and the Chamizal Title Company to Mexico’s Minister of State, Santiago Alvarado described the company and its agents’ activities, claiming that Cameron had employed engineers and surveyors at the company’s expense, advanced money to defend Mexican claimants on the tract, and had caused “an agitation of the injustice” against the claimants by “asserting courageously and publicly through the press and otherwise his confidence in the validity of the Mexican titles and rights to the land in dispute.”⁵⁹

This testimony also included lengthy praise of Warder, whom Alvarado claimed “defended the rights of his Mexican clients” until he had “expended his entire fortune” and no longer had the “means to bear the heavy and continuous expense” of defending Mexican claims to El Chamizal.⁶⁰ The company’s outward appearance as advocates for Mexican claimants and their alliances with wealthier Mexican stakeholders in the dispute explains how they were able to accumulate so many Mexican titles in the Chamizal tract without Mexican resistance. It also suggests the significant role of local Mexican allies. These co-conspirators, particularly Santiago Alvarado and Dr. J.A. Samaniego, appear consistently in the company records as claimants themselves as well as agents of the company who served as witnesses on notarized documents and collectors of other claimants’ testimonies.

Neither Warder nor the Chamizal Title Company, however, revealed their full motives to their Mexican clients. In reality, the Chamizal Title Company had purchased enough titles across the disputed zone that they apparently stood to benefit from arbitration and resolution. They sought to capitalize on the uncertainty of the titles to purchase the lands at low prices, with the expectation that their value would vastly increase once the boundary dispute was settled—in favor of either country. They expected that such a settlement would be forthcoming by the International Boundary Commission. In his defense of the company, Alvarado also asserted that Cameron and Warder had strategically used the “bitter enmity of the local American claimants” that they had each incurred for their representation of Mexican claimants to “unsettle the titles to all lands within the tract in dispute to such an extent that the American claimants were forced thereby to join the Mexican claimants” to demand a swift and early settlement of the dispute.⁶¹

The Chamizal Title Company’s internal records paint an even darker picture. The firm was engaging in land speculation for the personal gain of a handful of U.S. businessmen—and perhaps a few of the wealthier Mexican landowners involved in the dispute. Although they advanced a pro-Mexico position publicly, the company had also positioned itself to profit from a decision in favor of the U.S. claim. For example, referring to a portion of the “Island” lands located just downriver from downtown El Paso and Juárez, the company’s attorney, Seymour Thurmond predicted in 1907 that the lands had a high prospective value because “they will come under the dominion of the United States as soon as the pending controversy between the United States and Mexico as to the true international boundary between the two countries at El Paso is settled,” which he predicted would occur within a year. “Thus,” he wrote, “the owners [would] be enabled to sell the entire tract out for City additions at large prices immediately.”⁶²

Dr. J.A. Samaniego, a frequent co-conspirator with the Chamizal Title Company and owner of some of the “Island” lands immediately downriver from the core of the Chamizal tract, had received three documented offers for the land in question, including one from Colonel W.C. Greene, owner of the Greene Consolidated Copper Company in Cananea, Mexico, for “$200.00 per acre if the tract should not come into the United States within a reasonable time” and “$2,000.00 per acre if the tract should come into the United States within a reasonable time.”⁶³ Although it represents one of the more extreme bids for the contested lands, Greene’s offer underscores the intensity of the land grab occurring in the Chamizal tract, the perceived urgency of settling the dispute, and outsider monied interests supporting the U.S. land claim behind the scenes.

The company’s correspondence and public advertising, however, claimed to seek justice for the Mexican landowners. Spanish-language newspapers in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso advertised Warder’s work as an agent for Mexican claimants. A typical ad in Spanish stated, “It would be foolish for Mexicans to purchase Mexican titles of any lot situated on the disputed lands of ‘El Chamizal’ without first visiting the offices of the Chamizal Title Company,” warning of fraudulent sales made to “poor Mexicans.”⁶⁴ When Warder and the title company were themselves accused of public disinformation and mail fraud during a 1907 newspaper advertising campaign, Cameron defended Warder and the company in a letter to U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, claiming “the outrageous wrong of the threatened fraud order” was “all the more grievous because of the fact that the lands in controversy were originally taken from the Mexican claimants and brought under the jurisdiction of the United States by methods employing more of intimidation and force than justice.”⁶⁵ The Chamizal Title Company consistently used this rhetoric of defense and outrage on behalf of the Mexican claimants while undermining the claimants’ landholdings through steep fees for legal representation and the accumulation of as many Mexican titles as possible for the company by convincing claimants to sell rather than waiting for the resolution of the dispute.

In 1905, El Paso developer Frank Cotton had sued Warder to remove Mexican “squatters” in the Cotton Addition area of the disputed zone, approximately fifty tenant households that Warder had moved onto the tract under Mexican title. Warder continually appealed the suit, and the case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In October 1907, amidst the Chamizal Title Company’s efforts to collect flood testimonies from Mexican claimants, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it lacked jurisdiction in Warder et al v. Cotton, recommending arbitration of the Chamizal dispute through an international tribunal. Two editorials in the El Paso Morning Times debated the significance of the Supreme Court decision for the Chamizal case. W.B. Merchant, the attorney for the Cotton estate, proclaimed that the decision made the U.S. titles to the Cotton Addition “perfectly safe,” adding, “ask any reputable lawyer in El Paso about the Warder Mexican claims and he will tell you that they are worthless.” Seymour Thurmond, the Chamizal Title Company’s attorney, responded: “Until the question is finally settled, the titles are not ‘perfectly safe.’” Instead of confidently asserting the validity of the Mexican claim, however, Thurmond took a more conservative approach, claiming that “no lawyer, reputable or disreputable, can truthfully say at this time whether the land belongs to Cotton or to the Chamizal Title Company and its clients, who claim the title thereto under Mexico.”⁶⁶ Thurmond’s equivocation in the editorial marked the beginning of the Chamizal Title Company’s unraveling, apparently due to financial reasons rather than decreasing faith in the validity of the Mexican claim.

Records from Mexico’s foreign ministry (Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, or SRE) reveal their skepticism of Brewster Cameron and the Chamizal Title Company’s methods and intentions and shed light on the disjointed nature of the “pro-Mexico” side of the Chamizal claim. When Cameron brought three Mexican claimants to Mexican Boundary Commissioner Fernando Puga’s office in June 1907, Puga expressed suspicion of both Cameron and the claimants. He conveyed classism towards the claimants, calling them “rustic people” and suggesting that they were merely tenants to a U.S. landowner. But Puga reserved most of his ire for Cameron and the Chamizal Title Company. He claimed they had misrepresented the 1853 river channel as too far north of its actual position, a line they had “deduced apparently through bad faith, or without scientific basis, relying on dubious testimony” and inaccurate surveys. In Puga’s view, the Chamizal Title Company was emboldening people to make false claims, which heightened the SRE’s sense of urgency in resolving the dispute.⁶⁷ According to Kenneth Yielding, the Chamizal Title Company’s actions “did not create much interest within the [U.S.] Department [of State], for there was never any assurance given that the company had any authority to speak for the Mexican government.”⁶⁸ Nevertheless, the Chamizal arbitration was reopened by Mexican initiative in 1907, likely in reaction to the Chamizal Title Company’s legal activities and agitation in the local press.

Although they disagreed with the Chamizal Title Company’s methods, Mexican diplomats also remained confident that the case would be resolved in their nation’s favor, and they pursued a settlement of the Chamizal dispute alongside a broader environmental and border agenda. The period of 1880 to 1913 also saw the first major diplomatic attempts to address issues that had emerged along the length of the United States-Mexico border. Those attempts included three treaties in the 1880s. The Convention of 1882 authorized a second boundary survey commission to resurvey and replace border monuments along the western land border; the Treaty of 1884 clarified that the principles of accretion and avulsion applied to the Rio Grande boundary; and the Treaty of 1889 established the International Boundary Commission (IBC) to investigate boundary changes and apply the provisions of the Treaty of 1884.⁶⁹ In 1896, the IBC accepted Chamizal Case No. 4, opening diplomatic arbitration of the dispute for the first time. Mexico’s Secretary of Foreign Relations and local governments on both sides of the border also contested the city of El Paso’s proposal to construct a sewage system in the Chamizal zone. SRE records and the Chamizal Title Company’s dealings in the disputed district reveal the disjointed nature of the pro-Mexico Chamizal claims. While avulsion was at the core of all arguments in favor of Mexico’s claim to the Chamizal, local actors articulated different environmental and diplomatic arguments and priorities than the Mexican Boundary Commissioner and the SRE. In this period, Mexican diplomatic efforts had a mixed record overall on environmental and social justice. When environmental and social justice dovetailed with larger diplomatic goals, such as negotiating the division of Rio Grande water between the United States and Mexico, Mexican diplomats promoted environmental justice. But in the Chamizal case, Mexican diplomats and the boundary commissioner prioritized broader goals of sovereignty, compensation, and closure of the dispute. Meanwhile, the Chamizal Title Company claimed a more expansive spatial definition of the Chamizal tract and ostensibly sought justice for dozens of claimants.

Beyond negotiating major treaties in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, Mexican diplomats were concerned about maintaining environmental stability and promoting equity in water distribution and public health in the region. When the Mexican consul at El Paso learned of a proposed sewage system in El Paso in 1887, he reported to the SRE that the project was “not simply waste and floodwater drainage, but rather a sewer through which all of the city’s rubbish would be dumped into the river,” creating unsafe drinking water for residents of Paso del Norte and populations downriver.⁷⁰ The consul’s argument against the project was three-pronged: first, he articulated concerns over the disputed Chamizal tract, through which the drainage pipes would have to cross, violating Mexican claimants’ private property and riparian rights; second, that water rights and the right to pollute the Rio Grande had to be agreed upon by both nations since the river served as the international boundary; and third, that pollution-based environmental injustices would disproportionately impact Indigenous peoples and downriver communities on both sides of the border.

Citizens of the Ysleta Pueblo (then located two miles downriver on the north riverbank), the municipal government of Paso del Norte, the state of Chihuahua, and the SRE all protested El Paso’s proposed sewage project. In an editorial in the local Ysleta newspaper, two Anglo Americans praised Mexico’s approach to environmental protection and rights, claiming that a single “ranchero, however poor and humble he may be” should be “equally entitled to have pure [waters] and have his rights protected as the many citizens of El Paso or Paso del Norte.” They further asserted that “it is an act of wisdom on the part of the Mexican government to guard the interests of [the] valley, both present and prospective.”⁷¹ The city of El Paso’s approach to managing wastewater offers an example of how the Chamizal tract—as well as Mexican territory across the river—was treated as a wasteland, wherein Mexican territory and bodies were rendered as “marginal, worthless, and pollutable.”⁷² Although offloading pollutants and negative externalities across the border is commonly associated with dynamics of the later North American Free Trade Agreement era, this conflict over waste management in the El Paso-Juárez valley offers a nineteenth-century example of the intersections between capitalism, empire, and pollution.⁷³ The SRE would similarly protest in 1909–1911, when the Pearson company attempted to purchase a thirteen-acre property on the Chamizal tract to build an industrial plant and a garbage dump. The SRE contended that “the general uneasiness and apparent insecurity of all the Mexican owners of El Chamizal would be intensified” by the Pearson company’s project.⁷⁴

The drive to “conquer” the Rio Grande and its surrounding arid lands was akin to other patterns in the U.S. West, particularly in the relationship between the development of capitalism through environmental domination. Reining in the Rio Grande and fixing the boundary between the United States and Mexico between the two cities was crucial to capitalist development in El Paso, shoring up land claims and serving business interests, ultimately furthering development of the city as a Southwestern and transnational hub. But converting the Rio Grande into a “river of empire” met unique resistance and challenges due to the river’s transnational context; the conflict over El Chamizal was not just about international law and treaty interpretations but also about resource relations, property, and the distributions of harm within the racially and culturally heterogeneous transnational community of El Paso-Juárez.⁷⁵ While clearly invoking the Chamizal dispute in protesting the proposed sewage system and garbage dump, Mexican diplomats also articulated a nineteenth-century version of environmental justice and rights for the broader borderlands population, not just Mexican citizens on Mexican territory.

Comparing Mexico’s actions in protest of El Paso’s waste management projects and in support of an international water treaty suggests that water issues inspired more environmental justice arguments than did questions surrounding land and territory. An internal SRE memo from 1909 indicated that the SRE’s goals for Chamizal arbitration were “not the reoccupation of El Chamizal, but simply the recognition of its sovereignty” and inclusion of El Chamizal in “lands subject to compensation by virtue of the normal variations of the river since 1853.”⁷⁶ Those records suggest that Mexican diplomats viewed the Chamizal dispute as just one piece of the larger diplomatic puzzle of water rights and river movement along the Rio Grande and Colorado Rivers. After the 1906 Boundary Waters Treaty and later water treaties in 1933 and 1944 settled most remaining border construction and water distribution disputes, Mexico could no longer use broader treaty negotiations over Rio Grande waters and territory as a vehicle for resolving the Chamizal claim. By the early twentieth century, Mexico began to approach the Chamizal case as more about making larger anti-imperialist claims and demanding recognition of sovereignty and return of due acreage, rather than supporting broader environmental justice and monetary compensation for border residents. Following the principles of the 1905 Bancos Treaty, which “eliminated” small islands of foreign territory produced by flooding and erosion by transferring jurisdiction to the nation on the corresponding riverbank, arbitration commissioners and diplomats appear to have viewed the disputed Chamizal tract as transferrable and interchangeable, as long as the terms of transfer could be agreed upon through arbitration. This objectification of property and territory shaped the ultimate resolution of the dispute and had resounding consequences for the Chamizal claimants and non-claimants who were removed through eminent domain.

In 1911, the International Boundary Commission ruled mostly in Mexico’s favor, awarding a portion of the disputed zone to the United States and returning most of El Chamizal to Mexico. The United States declined to accept the ruling, following the recommendations of Commissioner Anson Mills, who argued that the treaty establishing the tribunal did not allow for a resolution that would have the United States and Mexico divide title to the lands. Mexico was unable to press the issue as it was plunged into the Mexican Revolution. Scholars have highlighted the importance of the political and military relationship between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, and it seems likely that the two nations would have prioritized the stability of those relations over the ongoing and still unresolved Chamizal dispute, particularly during the tumultuous years of the Mexican Revolution.⁷⁷ After the United States refused to recognize the presidency of Victoriano Huerta in 1913, diplomatic negotiations over the Chamizal stalled indefinitely.⁷⁸ The Chamizal question—and the territory’s residents—were left in legal limbo until the early 1960s.⁷⁹

Mexican diplomats advocated for further arbitration of the Chamizal case throughout the first half of the twentieth century, but negotiations were not seriously reinitiated until U.S. President John F. Kennedy took an interest in the matter in the early 1960s. Historian Eric Zolov has placed the success of the 1963 Chamizal Treaty in the context of the Good Neighbor policy, which Mexico leveraged into the 1960s and early 1970s, as it became “the last Good Neighbor.”⁸⁰ Zolov suggests that the collaboration between the United States and Mexico paradoxically deepened while Mexico “projected itself as a relevant Cold War actor” and was courted diplomatically by the Soviet Union.⁸¹ In reaction to Mexico’s internationalism and “global pivot,” Zolov argues, U.S. diplomats sought high-profile diplomatic reconciliations, including addressing the Chamizal and Colorado River disputes in the 1960s, suggesting that the environment has been an important factor in U.S.-Mexican diplomacy, particularly along the international border line.⁸²

Few scholars have studied in depth the pre-1960s history of El Chamizal or acknowledged the role of land speculation and cyclical environmental crises in the century-long buildup of the Chamizal dispute. The Chamizal Title Company’s land and business records shed light on the role of corporate interests in both dispossessing Mexican landowners on the tract and instigating an attempted arbitration of the Chamizal case in the early twentieth century (1910–1911). Analyzing Mexican diplomatic records and the Chamizal Title Company’s partnership with Mexican claimants in the early twentieth century reveals that both dispossession and efforts to combat it had long and complex histories in the disputed territory. Much like the Rio Grande, the territory understood as El Chamizal shape-shifted over the course of the century-long dispute as diplomats, lawyers, corporations, and nature reshaped the tract’s meaning and boundaries.

The space that Mexican claimants remembered and knew as Mexican territory, from the new Rio Grande channel to as far north as First or Second Street in downtown El Paso was, for the most part, not the territory returned to Mexico in the 1960s. The settlement forcibly removed approximately 5,500 residents from the urban portion of the tract, but many Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans remained in the originally disputed area that was not returned to Mexico. Furthermore, many of those removed from their homes had not laid claim to the Chamizal tract, although many were part of South El Paso’s broader Mexican American and ethnic Mexican community. The southernmost urban area retained by the city, claimed by many of the Mexican landowners represented by Warder and the Chamizal Title Company, is known today as the neighborhoods of Segundo Barrio and Chihuahuita, home to middle- and working-class Mexican Americans and recent arrivals from Mexico. In addition to the century-long territorial dispute over El Chamizal, generations of residents in Segundo Barrio and Chihuahuita have fended off attempts at urban renewal by the city of El Paso. From anti-adobe campaigns in the 1880s, to proposals to relocate the city’s redlight district to the area in the 1910s, to a targeted downtown revitalization program supported by then-city councilman Beto O’Rourke in the early 2000s, development initiatives and economic injustice have been deeply intertwined with migration, race, and space in South El Paso since the beginnings of the Chamizal dispute and the city of El Paso in the mid-nineteenth century.⁸³

Centering El Chamizal’s Mexican claimants and the environmental history of the tract highlights the underlying and ongoing role of environmental injustice in the history of the Chamizal dispute. Once threatened by intense periodic flooding and violent altercations with U.S. claimants, the post-Chamizal Settlement era has brought new environmental and social challenges to residents of the formerly disputed Chamizal tract. After the settlement, the landscape was transformed and the Rio Grande irrevocably altered when the river’s channel was relocated and lined with concrete to prevent future flooding and movement. The concretization of the Rio Grande altered its temperature and flow, killing vegetation and turning it into a “deadened zone.”⁸⁴ Industrialization along the riverbed in the 1960s through the 1990s led to increased toxicity and decreased water quality. Although local public memory often celebrates South El Paso’s neighborhoods for their Mexican heritage and transnational ties, it was one of the lowest-income zip codes in the United States in the late twentieth century and into the 2000s.⁸⁵ Drownings of poor children in Segundo Barrio and cross-border migrants became common in irrigation ditches and the Rio Grande along the Chamizal tract.⁸⁶ The Rio Grande and its banks, once a natural landscape remembered by Chamizal residents as their homelands and spaces that fostered community and livelihoods became deadly in new ways over the second half of the twentieth century.

More generally, an environmental history approach to the Chamizal case shows how environmental change can have reverberating impacts on relations between private citizens, corporations, and states at multiple scales, suggesting the promise of historical research that places environmental and diplomatic history in conversation with each other. Bridging environmental and diplomatic history approaches offers the opportunity to leverage both subfields’ tendencies to toggle between the local, the international—even the global—to explore and explain historical change and dynamics more deeply. Diplomatic history should look to environmental history to explore the power dynamics and conflict that emerge around environmental change and disasters, which disrupt notions of the nation-state as separate and self-contained. Environmental historians have shown that natural disasters, climate, and landscape change are historical processes that have always mattered to human communities and politics at multiple scales, and the natural environment and environmental justice will become increasingly relevant to diplomatic history in the face of ongoing and future climate crises.⁸⁷

Footnotes