Beyond the River's Violence: Reconsidering the Chamizal Border Dispute.

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 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. 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. 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. [Extracted from the article]