Banditos were Mexican bandits and outlaws who engaged in brigandage along the Texas-Mexico border during the Wild West era, from the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848 until the end of the Mexican Revolution in the 1920s. During that time, the Texas-Mexico border was very dangerous due to political and economic turmoil in Mexico, which caused thousands of peasants to take up arms as revolutionaries or bandits and occasionally make forays into the United States for a variety of reasons, including cattle raids, vendettas, or vigilantism. Rural poverty in Mexico in the post-Spanish era and the disenfranchisement of Mexicans in the American Southwest following the war with the United States led to banditos such as Joaquin Murrieta and Juan Cortina becoming "social bandits" and Robin Hood-like figures, taking on the US Army, the Texas Rangers, the Confederate States Army, the French Army, the Mexican Army, and even Mexican revolutionary armies and providing for the needs of their impoverished communities. From 1848 to the 1920s, there were 17 significant border raids in South Texas and Northern Mexico, with most of them being cattle raids to obtain some of the hundreds of thousands of unbranded cattle who roamed the chaparral. Big ranchers in the US hired cowboys and vaqueros to launch cattle raids into Mexico to acquire unbranded cows from their herd, and this would occasionally result in raids on Mexican ranchos by gangs such as the Cochise County Cowboys of Arizona. This era produced notable outlaws such as Chico Cano, Pancho Villa, Juan Cortina, John Flynt, the Dominguez clan, and many others, and places such as Brownsville, Neville, Boquillas, Porvenir, and San Ignacio in Texas and Columbus in New Mexico were raided by bandits, renegade soldiers, the Texas Rangers, and armies from both sides of the border. During that era, a border was merely a line which was easily traversed by invaders from both countries, notably during the Cortina Troubles and the Mexican Revolution. The end of the Mexican Revolution in the 1920s, the strengthening of the US-Mexico border, and the improvement of law enforcement in both nations led to the end of the age of the bandito and vaquero in the 1920s, around the same time as the end of the Wild West and the Plains Indian Wars.
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