During the height of Mexico’s drug war-related violence a few years ago, Americans learned that an “Iron River of Guns” channeled arms and ammunition from U.S. dealers to Mexican cartels. What few in the U.S. realize is that the Iron River of Guns has a long and consequential backstory. This talk will explain the transformative role that U.S. arms exports played throughout the first century of Mexico’s independent history, from the war for independence from Spain in the 1810s through the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s.
Brian DeLay teaches history at UC Berkeley. He is author of War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (Yale University Press). He’s published articles on a variety of topics, including a comparison of instability in the 19th and 21st century borderlands; Lincoln's policy toward the French Intervention; violence and belonging on the Navajo-New Mexican frontier; the international context for John Singleton Copley’s iconic painting Watson and the Shark; and Indians, U.S. Empire, and narratives of American foreign relations. He is the editor of North American Borderlands (Routledge, 2012), and the coauthor of the U.S. history textbook Experience History. “Shoot the State,” his current book project for W.W. Norton, uses the arms trade to explore struggles over freedom and domination in the Americas from the age of revolutions through World War II.