by Samuel Truett

In August 1913, San Diego witnessed a strange sight. Trains bearing Mexican prisoners of war rolled into town, depositing their human cargo near the government barracks on Market Street. “Leather-lunged soldiers shouted weird military orders, and bewildered Mexican men and women chattered excitedly,” wrote a reporter for the San Diego Sun. It was as if “some little Mexican town had been picked up with all its inhabitants and transplanted right here in San Diego.”

It was a strange sight because the United States was not at war with Mexico. These men, women, and children were refugees from border battles of the Mexican Revolution, raging since 1910. International law stipulated that the United States—a neutral neighbor—had to hold them as prisoners of war until they could safely be returned to Mexico. They were bound for an internment camp at Fort Rosecrans, just across San Diego Bay.

Stranger still was the bronzed man in a white sun helmet and a linen suit who towered over the other Mexicans. More than six feet tall, with thick glasses, he looked “more like a college professor or a scientist than a soldier,” another reporter wrote. The man before him was Emilio Kosterlitzky, a legendary warrior whose career extended from the Apache wars to the Mexican Revolution.

Emilio Kosterlitzky, posing in uniform, date unknown. The triangle of stars on his visor signify his rank as colonel in the Mexican army.

Some called him a soldier of fortune, a world traveler in search of a good fight. Others said he was a Cossack who had traded the Russian steppes for the Mexican countryside. Like the enigmatic border hero of pulp fiction, he was a man without a history, a citizen without a nation. What larger twist of fate brought this notorious warrior to California? His passage from Mexican battlefield to U.S. internment camp evoked a familiar western plotline: a wild warrior caged, a lone rider unhorsed, the transfor-mation of the wide-open frontier into a patrolled space between nations. Riding west into the sunset, Kosterlitzky prepared to vanish. “I have nothing to say that would make interesting reading,” he told spectators. “I have been talked about enough in the papers. I want to be left out of them as much as possible from now on.”

Border crossings were not new for Kosterlitzky. He was born in Moscow in 1853 as Emil Kosterlitzky, the child of a German mother and Russian father. His father was said to be a Cossack, a member of a military caste, usually composed of ethnic outsiders from Russia’s frontiers who served as soldiers of the Tsarist state. Emil hoped to follow in his father’s footsteps, but instead ended up in the navy. At 18, as a midshipman on a training vessel, he deserted off the Venezuela coast. “Still clinging to his love for horses and his boyhood ambition to become a leader of cavalry,” a journalist later embellished, he sailed to the border state of Sonora, Mexico, and joined the Mexican army. Changing his name to Emilio, he set out to make a fresh start.

The borderlands offered expansive vistas for Kosterlitzky. He became Mexican by marrying into a Mexican family, but he also became part of a frontier military fraternity that gained status by fighting Indians. In the 1880s, in the wars against Apache and Yaqui Indians, Kosterlitzky became a defender of the nation’s front lines. By brutally repressing one group, he earned his place as a citizen of another.
The Apache wars also opened doors north of the border. In 1882, Mexico and the United States signed a reciprocal crossing treaty, allowing troops to pursue Indians across borders. In the 1880s, Kosterlitzky helped U.S. soldiers in the Geronimo campaigns, and he later assisted in the suppression of such “bandits” as the Apache Kid. He was once described as “a favorite with all the boys in blue.”
Americans equated Kosterlitzky with the free and wild Cossack, a mythical icon not unlike the U.S. cowboy. The fact that he rode the Mexican countryside, not the Russian steppe, made him only more romantic. If the violence of the frontier made Kosterlitzky a citizen of a foreign land, the fantasy of the frontier ensured his rise as a local hero. His white skin—and white horse—set him apart from his brown-skinned neighbors, whom white Americans equated with banditry, not heroism. In popular accounts, he was a picturesque leader, whereas his colleagues were considered rough characters.

Kosterlitzky also opened doors as a master linguist. He not only spoke Spanish, but also English, French, German, Russian, Italian, Polish, Danish, and Swedish. Americans with poor Spanish-language skills turned to him as a cultural broker. In 1885, he moved to the center of a new transnational world as an officer in the gendarmería fiscal, or customs guard, where he managed the migration of people, goods, and capital across borders. U.S. investment in Sonora was booming by 1900, and Kosterlitzky served as a policeman and gatekeeper. He distinguished between legitimate and illegitimate border crossings and kept law and order to increase investor confidence.

In this capacity, he was often anything but heroic. He patrolled the border together with such groups as the Arizona Rangers to combat smuggling, fight “bandits,” and suppress labor strikes. Like the Cossacks of Russia, he epitomized the police power of the state—but also of corporate elites, who relied on Kosterlitzky to police the borderlands to their advantage. He thus evoked what was unfree—and not just free—about the frontier.

The Mexican Revolution was fought in part to redress the inequalities of this trans-national world. Many rebels sought to open doors that had been closed to ordinary people and political outsiders. But they also shut other doors. Violence drove out foreign entrepreneurs, and fears of revolutionary bandits and U.S. intervention encouraged both sides to see the border as a dividing line, not a crossroads.

And so it was in 1913, when Kosterlitzky—now almost 60—lost a battle for the border town of Nogales, Sonora. Outnumbered by rebels, he and his troops sought refuge in Arizona. He remained in Nogales, Arizona, for several months before being sent to Fort Rosencrans.
Upon his release in 1914, Kosterlitzky and his Mexican family moved north to Los Angeles. Mexican Los Angeles was booming as a result of the chaos in Mexico; people were leaving in vast numbers, and most immigrants were moving to East Los Angeles, a center of Mexican California even now. Yet Kosterlitzky and his family bought a bungalow to the west of downtown Los Angeles. The only Mexicans on the block, they were lost in an Anglo-American sea.

Why choose exile? It was not the first time Kosterlitzky had jumped ship, vanishing into another culture. Yet whatever his motivation as a teenager, he now had a new reason to lie low and “be left out of the papers as much as possible.”

In his last days at Fort Rosecrans, Kosterlitzky had met up with F. P. Webster, an agent with the Bureau of Investigation (the predecessor to the FBI). Webster asked him to send fellow internees to San Diego to mingle with local Mexicans and learn about revolutionary activities. Kosterlitzky would then translate their findings for Webster.

This relationship opened new doors, for soon after he moved to Los Angeles, Kosterlitzky found steady work as a linguist. According to the 1920 census, he had become a translator for the U.S. Postal Service. But his family knew something the census taker did not. Kosterlitzky lived incognito because he was a special kind of linguist, employed by the Bureau of Investigation for a country that was increasingly concerned about its borders. The United States embraced Kosterlitzky by turning him into a spy.

During World War I, he passed as a German doctor and spoke German with immigrants in Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles. Shortly before he retired in 1927, he turned once again to Mexico while investigating a plot to overthrow the government of Baja California.

Despite his comments back in 1913, Kosterlitzky had not escaped coverage in all newspapers. La Opinión, a publication read by Mexican exiles in Los Angeles, questioned the deeper loyalties of this “soldier of fortune,” who shifted from one nation to the next, offering his services, like the Cossacks of old, to those in power. But Kosterlitzky rarely strayed far from Mexico, at least in the way he perceived his own identity. He never gave up his Mexican citizenship, and when he died in 1928, he was buried at Calvary Cemetery, near East Los Angeles. “We consider Kosterlitzky as a soldier of the Republic,” wept his Mexican pallbearers.

Samuel Truett is assistant professor of history at the University of New Mexico. While at The Huntington as a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow in 2004–5, he conducted research on a biography of Emilio Kosterlitzky as well as on a history of ruins and empire in America.