How violent American vigilantes at the border led to Trump’s wall

From the 80s onwards, the borderlands were rife with paramilitary cruelty and racism. But the president’s rhetoric has thrown fuel on the fire. By Greg Grandin

No myth in American history has been more powerful, more invoked by more presidents, than that of pioneers advancing across the frontier – a word that in the United States came to mean less a place than a state of mind, an imagined gateway into the future. No writer is more associated with the idea of the frontier than Frederick Jackson Turner, who, in the late 1800s, argued that the expansion of settlement across a frontier of “free land” created a uniquely American form of political equality, a vibrant, forward-looking individualism. Onward, and then onward again. There were lulls, doubts, dissents and counter-movements. But the expansionist imperative has remained constant, in one version or another, for centuries. As Woodrow Wilson, who before he was president was a colleague of Turner, said: “A frontier people always in our van, is, so far, the central and determining fact of our national history. There was no thought,” Wilson said, “of drawing back.”

So far. The poetry stopped on 16 June 2015, when Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign by standing Turner on his head. “I will build a great wall,” Trump said.

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