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The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Brown and Blue: Mexican Americans, Law Enforcement, and Civil Rights in the Southwest, 1935-2025
This book offers a sweeping history of Mexican American interactions with law enforcement and the criminal justice system in the US Southwest. Looking primarily at Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas, Brown and Blue tells a complex story: Violent, often racist acts committed by police against Mexican American people sparked protests demanding reform, and criminal justice authorities sometimes responded positively to these protests with measures such as recruiting Mexican Americans into local police forces and altering training procedures at police academies.
Brian D. Behnken demonstrates the central role that the struggle for police reform played in the twentieth-century Chicano movement, and the ways its relevance continues to the present. By linking social activism and law enforcement, Behnken illuminates how the policing issues of today developed and what reform remains to be done.
Book Details
- Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
- Publish Date: Dec 2nd, 2025
- Pages: 352
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 9.21in - 6.14in - 0.79in - 1.09lb
- EAN: 9781469690704
- Categories: • United States - State & Local - Southwest (AZ, NM, OK, TX)• Latin America - Mexico• Cultural & Ethnic Studies - Caribbean & Latin American Studi
About the Author
Brian D. Behnken is professor of history at Iowa State University. He also holds affiliate faculty positions in the U.S. Latino/a Studies and African and African American Studies Programs. He is the author of Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas and the editor of Civil Rights and Beyond: African American and Latino/a Activism in the Twentieth-Century United States.
Praise for this book
"A vitally needed study of the relationship between law enforcement, violence, and Chicano civil rights activism across the Southwest."--Max Felker-Kantor, author of DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools
"A tour de force account of police brutality against Mexican and Mexican American people in the US Southwest. This important book places police brutality against Mexican and Mexican American people at the very center of carceral histories."--Robert T. Chase, author of We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners' Rights in Postwar America
"In today's highly charged political atmosphere, Brown and Blue is a timely, powerful, provoking, and much-needed first-class education in the dynamics of 'ethnic control' that reveals the troubling realities of (in)justice in the US Southwest and helps us to better understand the American experience while advancing police reform, justice, and human dignity." --Martin Guevara Urbina, coauthor of Latino Police Officers in the United States: Practice, Policy, and Leadership