A few weeks before I read this book, I was visiting New Mexico, and when I asked at the Post Office where the nearest FedEx office was, the clerk, a Mexican American, immediately joked, “You're asking me where FedEx is? Get the rope!” Being African American, I found little humor in his remark. Reading Gonzales-Day's history, Lynching in the West, 1850–1935, shed much light into that encounter and the history behind it.

In this book, the author addresses two main aspects of this tragic history: first, the transracial nature of lynching in the US, since most investigations have concentrated on its impact on African Americans, and second, the erasure of this history by regionalist narratives and by the romanticization of “frontier justice” in movies and literature. Gonzales-Day uses newspaper articles, correspondence, legal archives, and photographs from 1850 to 1935 to reconstruct the history of racial violence against Mexicans, Asians, Native Americans and Spaniards in California from the Gold Rush to the Depression. Framing the study within these two important economic events enables Gonzales-Day to show how manifest destiny, land rights, and other contested economic domains in the West were often at the heart of legal and extralegal executions. The strongest and most compelling sections of the book are examinations of specific cases (Jose Tiburcio Vasquez, Hong Di, and Joaquin Murietta), which include testimony and representations of the accused criminal in popular imagery, such as photographs, prints, and paintings. He also includes two appendices listing the names, locations, ethnicities of criminals, and the crimes for all of the lynchings he compiled during his research.

Gonzales-Day is an artist (this book stems from research he has done for his artwork about lynching, some of which is included) and not a historian. Although his close analyses of the visual culture he cites are thorough and insightful, he neglects to acknowledge such important and recent studies such as Dora Apel's Imagery of Lynching (Rutgers, 2003), Jonathan Markowitz's Legacies of Lynching (University of Minnesota, 2004), and James W. Loewer's Sundown Towns (New Press, 2005) that make a point of uncovering racial violence in California and the Mid-west.

What is also unfortunate about this book is that it is badly organized and repetitive. The chapters stand as self-contained essays, not chapters. For example, Gonzales-Day includes a section on the significance of souvenir and commercial photography in almost each chapter, rarely adding any new information. Discussions of Darwinism and the evolution of the terms “Mexican” and “Greaser” also recur frequently. Gonzales-Day has collected a great amount of well-researched and important data about race relations, lynching, vigilantism, and legal history in California; however, awkward prose, ubiquitous subheadings that stand in for transitional sentences, and typos make this book too frustrating to grasp as a coherent text, although it is satisfying and informative if read in parts.