Reverberations of Racial Violence: Critical Reflections on the History of the Border 9781477322703

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Reverberations of Racial Violence

Jack and Doris Smothers Series in Texas History, Life, and Culture

Reverberations of Racial Violence Critical Reflections on the History of the Border Edited by Sonia Hernández and John Morán González

University of Texas Press   Austin

Copyright © 2021 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2021 Publication of this work was made possible in part by support from the J. E. Smothers, Sr., Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-­7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp-­form ♾ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Names: Hernández, Sonia, 1976– editor. | González, John Morán, editor. | Graybill, Andrew R., 1971– Anglos, Mexicans, and Rangers in Texas, 1850–1900. Title: Reverberations of racial violence : critical reflections on the history of the border / edited by Sonia Hernández and John Morán González. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020044288 ISBN 978-1-4773-2268-0 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4773-2270-3 (library ebook) ISBN 978-1-4773-2271-0 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Canales, J. T. ( José Tomás), 1877–1976. | Texas Rangers—History— 20th century. | Mexicans—Violence against—Texas—History—20th century. | Mexican Americans—Violence against—Texas—History—20th century. | Mexican Americans—Political activity—Texas—History—20th century. Classification: LCC F395.M5 R48 2021 | DDC 363.209764—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044288 doi:10.7560/322680

Contents



Foreword  vii Antonia I. Castañeda



Acknowledgments 



Introduction: Memory, Violence, and History in the 1919 Canales Investigation  1 Sonia Hernández and John Morán González



Poem 1. Yo Soy de Frank Rabbaté  Diana Noreen Rivera

ix

20

SECTION I. La Matanza and the Canales Investigation in Context

1.

Refusing to Forget: A Brief History  27 Trinidad Gonzales, Benjamin Heber Johnson, and Monica Martinez

2. Anglos, Mexicans, and Rangers in Texas, 1850–1900  Andrew R. Graybill 3. Texas in Four Parts: The Bordered World of 1919  Walter L. Buenger

49

69

4. La Matanza and the Canales Investigation in Comparative Perspective  92 William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb 5. Representation, Refusal, and Remembrance: Lynching and Extralegal Violence in Mexico and the United States, 1890s–­1930s  103 Gema Kloppe-­S antamaría

vi  Contents

SECTION II. J. T. Canales, Resistance, and Resilience

6. The World of Education among Ethnic Mexicans in J. T. Canales’s South Texas  121 Philis M. Barragán Goetz and Carlos K. Blanton 7. Humanizing La Raza: The Activist Journalism of the Idar Family in Early Twentieth-­Century Texas  143 Gabriela González 8. José Tomás Canales and the Paradox of Power  Richard Ribb

158

9. J. T. Canales’s Contributions in Law, Civil Rights, and Education, 1920–1976  178 Cynthia E. Orozco SECTION III. Reflections on Recovering a History of

State Violence and Its Reverberations 10. Hidden History: A Journey through the Past, with Hard Lessons for the Present  211 Kirby F. Warnock 11. Recovering the 1919 Canales Investigation of the Texas Ranger Force: Archival Investigation and Its Consequences, 1975–2010  219 James A. Sandos 12. The Legacy of La Matanza, Intergenerational Trauma, and the Writing of El Rinche  229 Christopher Carmona 13. Stewarding the Personal Narratives of Painful History  Margaret Koch 14. Reckoning with the Past toward the Here and Now  Katherine Hite

Poem 2. Living Witness  Nati Román

Epilogue  283 John Phillip Santos

Contributors  Index  295

288

279

244

263

Foreword Antonia I. Castañeda

“Teníamos tierras. Nos las quitaron los rinches malvados.” Dispossessed of their homeland, Tejano-­mexicano families in the early twentieth century became a migratory labor force recruited to fulfill the seasonal labor demands of commercial agriculture, be it in the cotton fields of Texas, the beet fields of the upper Midwest, or the hop yards, lettuce fields, and vineyards of the coastal West. Whether on the migrant trail or at home in South Texas, however, the displaced Tejano community refused to forget. Across time and space, in corridos, poems, and stories, the memory of dispossession and Texas Ranger violence reverberated across generations, to be told and safeguarded from the erasure to which Texas officialdom consigned them. Journalists documented the atrocities in the Spanish-­language press. Parents established escuelitas to counter exclusion, segregation, and miseducation. Activists organized meetings and groups to defend Tejano and mexicano civil rights. In the present era of renewed anti-­Mexican rhetoric in the national discourse, this remarkable collection of critical essays on the history of the violence carried out against Tejanos in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Texas Rangers powerfully reveals the supremacy of race and extralegal violence in the formative period of Texas, a history that the state’s officialdom largely buried. This collection has its origins in an unprecedented historical exhibition, Life and Death on the Border 1910–1920, at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in 2016. Participants and audience members at an accompanying public forum included descendants of Tejanos killed by the Texas Rangers. The exhibition and symposium were followed in 2019 with a conference at the Bullock commemorating the hundredth anniversary of state Representative J. T. Canales’s historic investigation of Texas Rangers’ vio-

viii  Antonia I. Castañeda

lence against Tejanos in South Texas between 1910 and 1920, the report of which was secreted away for more than a half century. The exhibition, the symposium, the conference, and this resulting anthology are pivotal components of the Refusing to Forget project’s initiative to bring the history of calculated and implacable violence against the Tejano community, one sanctioned and justified by the state, to public consciousness and open dialogue, since the official record was held secret and replaced by a false narrative of lawlessness and banditry. To publicly memorialize the victims of La Matanza of 1915 and the Porvenir massacre of 1918, Refusing to Forget also inaugurated a set of Texas state historical markers. In putting together a remarkable anthology of essays that document the brutality deployed to dispossess the Tejano population of its properties, the organizers have made an immeasurable contribution to demythologizing the triumphalist and false narrative of the development of Texas that is incarnated by the Texas Rangers. The essays that constitute the anthology superbly contextualize the era and expose the lynchings and assassinations of Tejanos young and old, skillfully engage the memories of Tejano families and communities and their responses to the violence, and effectively explore means and methods for public reckoning, for memorializing the lives so violently taken, and for initiating healing from the historical trauma the Texas Rangers enacted with impunity.

Acknowledgments

The editors gratefully acknowledge the major support of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for Reverberations of Racial Violence and the conference that inspired this volume, “Reverberations of Memory, Violence, and History: The Centennial of the 1919 Canales Investigation,” held January 31 to February 1, 2019, at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum. Other sources of support included Texas A&M University (the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, the Latino/a and Mexican American Studies Program, the Center of Digital Humanities Research, and the Carlos H. Cantu Education and Opportunity Endowment Fund); Brown University (the John Nicolas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage); Southern Methodist University (the Clements Center for Southwestern Studies); and the University of Texas at Austin (the Center for Mexican American Studies). Humanities Texas provided a seed grant that helped get the Refusing to Forget Project off the ground in 2014. Our deepest gratitude goes to the wonderful professionals at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum. Margaret Koch, Kate Betz, Toni Beldock, Gilbert Medina, and the indefatigable Jenny Cobb Peterson were instrumental in making the “Life and Death on the Border, 1910–1920” exhibit and the “Reverberations of Memory, Violence, and History” conference the major successes they were. In the production process at UT Press, we have Kerry Webb, Tana S ­ ilva, and Sandra Spicher to thank for their expert guidance and attention to detail. We would also like to thank Texas A&M students Tiffany Gonzalez and Teresa Rodriguez for logistical support, and UT Austin students Skylar Epstein and Aoife McDonnell for proofreading skills.

x  Acknowledgments

Abrazos fuertes a nuestras familias, who patiently gave us the time and space to complete this project. ¡Mil gracias! Finally, none of this would be possible without the Descendants, the families of those killed during La Matanza. Without their courage and persistence, much of this history would have been lost. They have proved that, even a century later, the pursuit of justice never ends.

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Introduction: Memory, Violence, and History in the 1919 Canales Investigation Sonia Hernández and John Morán González

Among the least-­known events in the long history of civil rights in the United States is a state legislative investigation into the state-­sanctioned violence committed against Mexican Americans by the Texas Rangers more than a century ago. In 1919 the Brownsville landowner, attorney, civic leader, and state representative José Tomás ( J. T.) Canales launched a state legislative investigation into Ranger activity that resulted in hearings before the state legislature and a report with more than a thousand pages of testimony.1 The inquiry Canales initiated publicly exposed the violence committed by Texas Rangers during the 1910–1920 period against predominantly Texas-­ Mexico border communities, with a focus on the peak of such atrocities in 1915–1919. The transcripts of the hearings were not made available to the public for more than five decades, despite the state’s original intention to do so. A century after the hearings, scholars of state violence came together to share research at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin, the state capital, with much of the discussion stemming from careful examination of the Canales hearings. Together, scholars, educators, community members, and students from school districts and universities across the state and nation reflected on factors that led to increased violence against Mexican-­origin communities; they considered community members’ strategies to respond to such violence and pondered the challenges of studying state-­encouraged violence. At stake was an understanding of the broader implications for the histories of civil rights, the experiences of women, the gendered dimensions of violence, and the racialized processes of state violence for white-­supremacist nation-­making. This collection is a testament to that public dialogue, amplifying and advancing the conversation about the legacies of violence in the United States and beyond its borders.

2  Sonia Hernández and John Morán González

Some of the worst racial violence in US history took place along the US-­ Mexican borderlands and particularly in South Texas from 1910 to 1919. Violence against Mexican communities along the border included lynchings and execution-­style killing by law enforcement, even shooting of unarmed prisoners in the back. Extralegal executions became so common that a San Antonio newspaper reported the “finding of dead bodies of Mexicans, suspected for various reasons of being connected with the troubles, has reached a point where it creates little or no interest.”2 Contrary to media-­circulated reports of the time, such violence did not erupt spontaneously in 1910. In those accounts, the Mexican Revolution is invoked as the main trigger of anti-­Mexican violence on the north side of the Rio Grande. However, anti-­ Mexican violence at the hands of Texas Rangers and other law enforcement agents was not a direct consequence of the long Mexican Revolution that began in 1910 but rather a continuation of anti-­Mexican violence of the mid- to late nineteenth century. Violence increases during periods of conflict (Texas Revolution, US-­Mexico War), yet numerous examples of anti-­ Mexican violence abound during peacetime. While an exhaustive history of anti-­Mexican violence in the United States before the Mexican Revolution is beyond the scope of this volume, a growing historiography on the topic illustrates the historical context well in place by the time physical and rhetorical violence against Mexican Americans increased during the 1915–1919 period.3 In 1919, the only elected state representative of Mexican descent serving in the Texas legislature, J. T. Canales, called for a legislative investigation into the violence committed by the Rangers during the previous years. The investigation initiated a new era of civil rights activism by the Mexican American communities. The following essays situate this period at the center of a larger nation-­ making project during a formative period in Texas. Early Mexican American civil rights activists such as J. T. Canales fought in their own ways the imposition of a Juan Crow order that deeply affected the lives of Mexican-­origin people. In contrast to Texas and US historiographies that overly emphasize consensual nation-­building, this volume highlights the constitutive place of state and state-­sanctioned racial violence in the making of the modern United States; the essays reshape understandings of how twentieth-­century US nation-­building operated through and not despite this violence. Taken together, the essays place the traumatic events north of the Rio Grande into a transborder history to jumpstart a public conversation about state violence, white supremacy, and the resilience of communities of color. In this instance, state violence both reflected and advanced deep socioeconomic transformations in the Texas-­Mexico borderlands. In the process, state vio-

Introduction 3

lence became normalized and continued to erase these events from public consciousness and state recognition. Historical Context A popular saying in the US-­Mexican borderlands is “We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us.” This sentiment is directly tied to the long history of the region before the US-­Mexican border was drawn on February 2, 1848, as a result of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the US-­Mexico War. Long before the area of South Texas now known as the lower Rio Grande Valley was claimed and settled in the mid-­eighteenth century by Spaniards as Nuevo Santander, it was occupied for thousands of years by Native peoples including the Coahuiltecans. Before a border was established, people along the Rio Grande experienced extensive periods of contact, conflict, and monumental change. Cultural encounters between Native peoples and Spanish, criollo, and mestizo settlers were followed by the Texas Revolution in 1835, the war between the United States and Mexico in 1846, and the entrance of Anglos into the Hispanic world of ranching. The twentieth century brought profound transformations to the borderlands, such as large-­scale commercial agriculture and modern irrigation, maquiladoras, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the construction of physical barriers on the US side of the Rio Grande. The Texas-­Mexico borderlands and its people have experienced extended periods of both contact and conflict. The years leading up to the transition from ranching to commercial agriculture were particularly transformative in the area of race and ethnic relations along the border. Since at least the 1750s, Spanish and later Mexican and Tejano ranchers used the land for household subsistence agriculture and animal husbandry such as cattle ranching and goat herding; some Mexican-­ origin landowners continue to farm and ranch in this manner to this day. As waves of immigrants of non-­Hispanic origin descended on the region, new perspectives on land use were introduced based on generation, gender, religion, and ethnic and regional orientation. A first wave of Anglo migrants arrived in South Texas in the aftermath of the US-­Mexico War. The historian David Montejano and others have documented, these first-­wave migrants typically followed Mexican-­origin inhabitants’ tradition of cattle ranching.4 Of particular consequence was the large influx of Anglos typically categorized as second-­wave immigrants who arrived in the region after 1900.

Map 0.1. United States-­Mexico border, ca. 1920. Courtesy, US Air Force Historical Research Center, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama.

Introduction 5

Map 0.2. Railroad connections, ca. 1882. Library of Congress, #LC Railroad Maps, 547.

In marked contrast to earlier arrivals, second-­wave Anglo migrants, predominantly farmers from the US Midwest, formed part of the newcomer class that sought to participate in the newly promoted commercial agricultural boom in the lower Rio Grande Valley. This “Magic Valley” marketing explosion and construction of irrigation from the Rio Grande, as well as the linking of towns and cities north and south of the border by railroads, transformed the region into a hub for year-­round crop growing. Members of the local elite such as J. T. Canales, unaware of the lasting impact irrigation and more intensive farming would have and the newcomers it attracted, were among those promoting technological innovation in agriculture. Construction of massive lifting pumps, large dams, and irrigation projects, all of which justified laying more railroad tracks, solidified the bur-

6  Sonia Hernández and John Morán González

geoning commercial agriculture sector, accelerated the displacement of the original grantees from their land, and spurred the large-­scale movement of non-­Hispanic people to the lower Rio Grande Valley. Anglo newcomers upset the established order with their sheer numbers and substantial economic means, and their racial ideologies left a long-­lasting legacy. As the region transitioned to commercial agriculture, ethnic Mexicans provided most of the labor. The historian Arnoldo De León has documented that by the 1920s, most Mexican American workers found themselves performing stoop labor in the lower Rio Grande Valley and Winter Garden District’s commercial agricultural farms.5 Even in the absence of the Mexican Revolution, there were causes enough to provoke resentment among the Mexican-­origin community as they had, as a group, experienced land loss, political disenfranchisement, and hitherto unaccustomed racial segregation in public accommodations. In the numerous Rio Grande Valley towns founded in the early twentieth century, railroad tracks demarcated newly imposed boundaries of race and class. To complicate the situation, the Mexican Revolution brought turmoil to the US-­Mexican borderlands. Over the course of the 1910s, nearly a million Mexicans perished in the revolution and another million fled north to the United States. As Mexicans south of the Rio Grande participated in the revolution, for or against it, ethnic Mexicans dealt with rising violence in South Texas. Five years into the Mexican Revolution, what the English-­ language press of the time termed “the border war” or “border troubles” of South Texas had been primed. From 1915 to 1919, hundreds if not thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans lost their lives at the hands of law enforcement north of the border including Texas Rangers and local sheriffs as well as vigilante posses. Extralegal executions became so common that a headline in Harper’s Weekly in 1915 referred to the rampant violence as “Open Gun Season on Mexicans.” The following year, South Texas residents from the small town of Kingsville, in an act of desperation, sent a telegram to US President Woodrow Wilson describing their fears. They wrote, “One or more of us may have incurred the displeasure of someone, and it seems only necessary for that someone to whisper our names to an officer, to have us imprisoned and killed without an opportunity to prove in a fair trial, the falsity of the charges against us.”6 Residents made clear in their petitions to President Wilson that they faced considerable risks in sending such a note, writing that “some of us who sign this petition, may be killed without even knowing the name of him who accuses. Our privileged denunciators may continue their in-

Introduction 7

famous proceedings—answerable to no one.” When Francisco “Pancho” Villa and his forces attacked Columbus, New Mexico, Wilson responded by sending thousands of US soldiers to the Mexican border state of Chihuahua with orders to capture the rogue revolutionary general. Wilson’s response to numerous incidents of anti-Mexican violence in Texas was the entire opposite. US military forces failed to capture Villa, and the deployment of troops along the border to prevent revolutionary incursions only complicated the already violent situation. Authorities proceeded to consider any “suspicious” Mexican a bandit. The heightened rhetoric created an excuse to kill Mexicans at will. Estimates of the total number of victims range from three hundred to five thousand among scholars from the 1930s to the present, including the Texas Ranger hagiographer Walter Prescott Webb.7 Such state violence did not happen in a vacuum. The first decades of the twentieth century signaled profound changes in attitudes and perceptions about people of color including African Americans and Mexican Americans that informed the larger project of nation-­making. As ideas about citizenship and belonging shifted to cast certain groups of people as foreign, as in the case of Mexican Americans, other groups, notably African Americans, that engaged in activism to promote their civic rights or labor rights were cast as un-­American or as radicals endangering the very meaning of Americanism. Women of color who engaged in the women’s suffrage movement and labor activism were portrayed as lacking morality and even as mujeres de la calle (women of the street). Ideas about gender and sexuality steeped in the nineteenth-­century cult of domesticity shaped state perceptions about women’s public presence as activists. Nationwide violence directed at these groups reached a level of brutality that belied the idea of a progressive, modern United States. Suffragists were ridiculed and objects were hurled at them from ordinary observers. Deputized vigilantes in 1917, with the support of large mining corporations, marched Mexican Americans, eastern European immigrant coal miners, and others out of Bisbee, Arizona, at gunpoint and left them to fend for themselves in the desert. African Americans, many of whom were World War I veterans, were targets of white supremacists during the Red Summer of 1919. Labor activists of all stripes, especially those who promoted direct action, were tortured, jailed, and some deported. This was the backdrop of anti-­Mexican violence in the early twentieth century. What happened along the US southern border was a microcosm of larger national trends; yet, this history has only recently begun to receive adequate scholarly attention.

8  Sonia Hernández and John Morán González

Growing Scholarship on Anti-­Mexican Violence One of the books that established a scholarly interest in the topic of anti-­ Mexican violence and Ranger violence was Américo Paredes’s 1958 classic text “With His Pistol in His Hand”; in this book, Paredes counters Walter Prescott Webb’s 1935 tome on the Texas Rangers, which set the standard for works that uncritically examined them. In subsequent years, several scholars expanded an understanding of the topic; among these are James A. Sandos’s Rebellion in the Borderlands, Benjamin Johnson’s Revolution in Texas, Arnoldo De León’s edited anthology War along the Border, Nicholas Villanueva Jr.’s Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands, and more recently, Monica Martinez’s The Injustice Never Leaves You.8 The authors of these books have consulted, to a certain extent, the Canales hearings, now available online at the Texas State Library and Archives Commission portal as “The 1919 Ranger Report.” Together, these studies have advanced public knowledge of the context that led to more racially charged violence against Mexican Americans, the role of the Mexican Revolution in exacerbating an already tense situation, the gendered dimensions of violence and revolution, and community responses to such violence. Sandos and Johnson take the anarchist-­influenced 1915 Plan de San Diego as a turning point in both citizenship and identity formation or on the origins of the manifesto and its influence on larger questions of border- and state-­making. De León’s anthology features essays on how Tejanos participated in and were affected by the Mexican Revolution. While Villanueva’s work places the lynching of Mexican-­origin individuals in Texas in comparative context; he argues that compared to lynchings of African Americans, ethnic Mexican communities had resources that helped attract international attention to lynching practices. Martinez further excavates the gendered and familial context of anti-­Mexican violence and explores ways in which gender shaped community responses to such widespread state-­sanctioned violence. In this collection we build upon these studies by placing racial violence within the larger context of the problem of lynching of Mexican-­origin people in the US Southwest; the larger question of US civil rights beyond a white/Black paradigm; the larger problem of state and non-state-­sanctioned violence; the broader historical, literary, and geographical significance of the US-­Mexican borderlands; and finally, the urgent need to engage in public dialogue about these dark moments in US history as well as the larger lessons about survival and resilience. The essays to follow build on earlier studies both to prompt discussions regarding how historical memory about

Introduction 9

violence shapes an understanding of these dark chapters in our nation’s history and to consider how these moments were collectively addressed. We believe that this critical anthology will open up scholarly opportunities for future research inquiries that make more explicit connections between disparate civil rights movements, community responses to violence, and the ways anxieties about citizenship and political rights manifest along the nation’s southern border then and now. Historians and other scholars have become increasingly interested in the topic of anti-­Mexican violence such as the “reign of terror” across South Texas in 1915–1920. Recent scholarship reveals that Texas Rangers played a key role in brutally suppressing an uprising of Texas Mexicans commonly known as the Plan de San Diego.9 The 1919 Canales investigation provides extensive details from Texans, both Anglo and Mexican, who testified about the violence committed by the Rangers. As many of this volume’s contributing authors show, abundant evidence about the Rangers’ indiscriminate killings of members of the Tejano elite as well as others reveals their prominent role in anti-­Mexican violence. As the United States entered World War I, a national state of surveillance was established to counter the supposed radicalization of suspect populations. South Texas, in many ways, served as a microcosm of a shift toward vigilantism and its accompanying violence; the border was a stage where such national anxieties were publicly displayed and the Texas Mexican communities bore the brunt of it. Among the efforts to address the rampant violence directed at ethnic Mexicans was Canales’s decision to file a bill intended to prevent a repeat of the Texas Rangers’ actions by dramatically restructuring the force. Eye-­ opening accounts of Ranger atrocities fill the pages of the subsequent investigation and hearings. While a preponderance of evidence pointed to wrongdoing by Rangers, no single agent was indicted. Embarrassed by Ranger lawlessness, state authorities buried the eyewitness testimony recorded in the investigation in the Texas state archives for more than fifty years. Essay Contributions In selecting the essays that follow, we shared a conviction that understanding the past is crucial to understanding the present and that multiple expressive renditions of the past help grasp the complexities of both past and present. The volume opens with Diana Noreen Rivera’s poem “Yo Soy de Frank Rabbaté,” composed and performed for La Matanza of 1915 state

10  Sonia Hernández and John Morán González

historical marker unveiling in Cameron County in October 2017. “La Matanza” refers to the rampant killing of Mexican-­origin people in South Texas. The term appears in various Spanish-­language newspapers of the period and reflects how Texas Mexican communities made sense of the violence. Matanza, a slaughter, was a popular term used to describe the killing of animals. The state marker placed off US Interstate Highway 69E in Cameron County bears the name La Matanza to mark the general area where the killings took place. In Rivera’s poem, the unnamed contemporary narrator recounts family lore of how, at the height of the era’s state-­sanctioned violence against ethnic Mexicans, a great-­granduncle saved his life at the expense of his dignity. Standing at his grave, the narrator acknowledges the difficulty of knowing what her ancestor might have thought and felt in the moment of danger, calling him “a mystery viewed through shards of glass,” a history known only in fragments. At the mercy of the Texas Rangers, Tío Simón desperately pronounces himself the “property” of Frank Rabbaté, a prominent white landowner, in order to escape the deadly fate of so many others. As the narrator herself acknowledges, this period of communal abjection cannot be romanticized the same way as the traditional corrido heroes con pistola en la mano, with pistol in hand, or the Chicano cultural nationalists of the 1960s and 1970s.10 The poem is a powerful reminder how the remembrance of such histories of abjection are crucial to ensuring their transcendence at a later moment. In the opening essay, “Refusing to Forget: A Brief History,” Trinidad Gonzales, Benjamin Heber Johnson, and Monica Martinez explore how members of the Refusing to Forget project came to examine the phenomenon of state and state-­sanctioned violence as a white-­supremacist instrument of economic, political, and social disenfranchisement. The conflicts over the rapid transformation of the lower Rio Grande Valley from a Tejano-­ owned ranching economy to an Anglo-­dominated agricultural economy stemmed from the newcomers’ firm beliefs in white supremacy, necessitating the relegation of ethnic Mexicans to the lowest rung of the racial hierarchy as cheap, exploitable labor. The authors note that Texas Mexicans resisted these changes in various ways, from attempts to benefit from them to armed guerrilla warfare. The ensuing indiscriminate repression and collective punishment by the Texas Rangers, county sheriffs, and local vigilantes highlight how state violence was used to crush the uprising by los sediciosos, seditionists who advocated for the creation of a separate political entity, but also to fully consolidate white supremacy for corporate agribusiness, a con-

Introduction 11

dition that held sway in the lower Rio Grande Valley for more than fifty years and has consequences still felt to this day. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought profound societal transformations including migration, industrialization, and the exigencies of modern life. South Texas was no exception, and the life of J. T. Canales exemplified those contradictions. He was both an active proponent of what he believed to be the necessary agricultural modernization of the lower Rio Grande Valley and the legislative champion of those ethnic Mexicans targeted by the state violence used to consolidate said modernization. These far-­ reaching transformations unfolded within the context of rapidly changing racial dynamics that had begun to manifest in the aftermath of the 1848 war between Mexico and the United States. Andrew R. Graybill examines such dynamics in his chapter, “Anglos, Mexicans, and Rangers in Texas, 1850–1900.” Graybill documents the clashes between Anglos and Mexicans in South Texas and shows how these encounters grew out of conflicts over basic resources such as land, cattle, and trade routes that assumed ever-­larger racial dimensions after 1848. He notes that state violence in the service of racial domination occurred well before La Matanza, the rampant killings of ethnic Mexicans in Texas during the 1910s. Graybill assesses the role of the Texas Rangers in securing Anglo dominance through violence and intimidation, from the Rio Grande to the Nueces River. In particular, the racialized tropes of Mexicans as cattle rustlers, bandits, and anarchistic revolutionaries were repeatedly deployed to justify Rangers’ torturing and killing of Mexicans, even as figures as varied as Juan Nepomunceno Cortina and Catarino Garza protested the poor treatment of mexicanos by Anglos. Such racial dynamics were not limited to interactions between Mexican-­ origin people and Anglos. Walter L. Buenger describes the rich cultural history of groups that, while in conflict at times, interacted and borrowed from one another; in doing so, Buenger sheds light on the complexities of race and ethnic relations. His “Texas in Four Parts: The Bordered World of 1919” usefully depicts the Texas of this era as by no means socially homogeneous but rather consisting of four major cultural, racial, and economic regions: eastern Texas, western Texas, southern Texas, and central Texas. Each region had its own unique combination of communities that adapted to or adopted cultural lifestyles of others, such as musical traditions and food. While there were moments of interethnic collaboration, anti-­Mexican violence, lynching in particular, was widespread in the greater US Southwest. The period of violence Canales referenced in his bill was part of a

12  Sonia Hernández and John Morán González

larger problem of anti-­Mexican sentiment. Within this larger context, Wil­liam D. Carrigan and Clive Webb place La Matanza among national white-­supremacist strategies of racial terror in their essay, “La Matanza and the Canales Investigation in Comparative Perspective.” For Carrigan and Webb, the question of lynchings—which here covers all extralegal violence, whether carried out by white mobs or by agents of the white-­supremacist state—should be viewed within the changing contexts of justifications for such violence and the repercussions faced by local governments when pressured by foreign consulates. With the lynchings of whites dramatically falling off after Reconstruction, lynching primarily became an instrument of white-­supremacist terror against African American, Mexican American, and other racialized communities. Peaking between 1890 and 1930, lynchings began to wane only after two significant shifts: the “weakness of the frontier court system” argument became less credible among most whites in the early twentieth century, and foreign governments, notably the Mexican consulates, became more vocal about reparations as the US government strove to cultivate foreign relations. While these general trends were important, Carrigan and Webb argue that the Canales investigation, while failing to hold state agents and especially the Texas Rangers accountable, had a major influence in curbing such extralegal violence. Lynching was not solely an American problem, though. Gema Kloppe-­ Santamaría reveals in “Representation, Refusal, and Remembrance: Lynching and Extralegal Violence in Mexico and the United States, 1890s–­1930s” that a narrow focus on lynching as a phenomenon peculiar to the racial dynamics of the United States reinforces a misleading sense of, once again, American exceptionalism and obscures the lessons about extralegal violence that could be learned by comparing lynching practices in the United States and Mexico. Through extensive media coverage in each nation of lynchings in its neighbor’s territory, lynchings became markers of the presence or absence of a national civilization. Hence, Kloppe-­Santamaría argues, lynchings inside and outside national territory were central in the creation of a national identity around law and order. While lynchings within national territory set racial and other principles of inclusion or exclusion within the body politic, lynchings outside of it adversely defined the limits of what counted as “civilized” in the family of nations. With the rise of white-­supremacist racial theories that cast nonwhites as mentally deficient and the rise of the Progressive education movement that promoted the tracking of students by perceived ability and promise, public school policy makers such as superintendents increasingly segregated primary education by race. Underscoring such approaches as a type of cul-

Introduction 13

tural and educational violence, Philis M. Barragán Goetz and Carlos K. Blanton, in “The World of Education among Ethnic Mexicans in J. T. Canales’s South Texas,” analyze the deteriorating educational situation for ethnic Mexicans in the early twentieth century. Not content with second-­ class education, the Mexican communities of South Texas turned to organizing and enrolling their children in escuelitas, local educational institutions that offered a culturally relevant and often bilingual alternative to the deficit approach practiced in Anglo-­operated public schools. Escuelitas demonstrated the high value Mexican communities placed on education, contrary to white-­supremacist beliefs, and proved that they would provide what public officials would deny. In “Humanizing La Raza: The Activist Journalism of the Idar Family in Early Twentieth-­Century Texas,” Gabriela González considers the role of the Idar family of Laredo, Texas, and particularly that of Jovita Idar, in leading Mexican antiracist activism in early twentieth-­century Texas along the border. She finds that the Mexican community in Texas experienced the contradictory aspects of border modernity: on one hand, technological and material progress for them, and on the other, state-­sanctioned violence directed against them. As publishers of La Crónica newspaper, the Idar family was in a unique position to comment on these contradictions but also urge antiracist action. In particular, the Idars used the newspaper in 1911 to organize the Primer Congreso Mexicanista, a statewide call to organize ethnic Mexicans in defense of their civil rights. In addition, Jovita Idar became widely known for her courageous activism, even blocking the Texas Rangers, who were infuriated by La Crónica’s criticism of their extralegal violence, from confiscating the newspaper’s printing press. For her defiance of both white-­supremacist and machista gender roles, Jovita Idar is celebrated today as a fronteriza feminista. Much like the Idars, the Canales family represented the small but vocal progressive wing of Mexican American society, with origins dating back to the Spanish land grants. While J. T. Canales’s civic activism was not confined to his pursuit of justice with respect to Texas Ranger atrocities, the investigation into them figures prominently in his life career. In “José Tomás Canales and the Paradox of Power,” Richard Ribb gives a detailed account of the political maneuverings around the Texas state legislative investigation forced into action by Canales’s House Bill 5, which threatened to drastically alter and downsize the composition of the Rangers. The Texas legislature had little choice but to open an investigation, but with numerous political supporters seeking to blunt its impact or completely derail Canales’s bill. Ribb documents that Canales found himself politically isolated when

14  Sonia Hernández and John Morán González Figure 0.1. J. T Canales, 35th session, Texas legislature, ca. 1917. Courtesy, State Preservation Board, Austin.

his presumed ally progressive Governor William P. Hobby demonstrated by his actions that he was more interested in backing from Ranger supporters than from Texas Mexicans. Throughout the two-­week investigation and hearings, Canales was insulted as “the greaser from Brownsville,” questioned as to his loyalty to the United States because of his Mexican ancestry, and stalked on Austin streets by none other than Frank Hamer, the Texas Ranger with the well-­deserved moniker “the Angel of Death.” The outcome of the investigation showed Canales the limits of political alliances in an era when white-­supremacist thought dominated. While the investigation transcript, some 1,600 pages long, was a public document, it was not until several decades after its completion that scholars were able to access it. The historian James A. Sandos was the first scholar in the contemporary era to recover the transcripts of the Canales investigation. In “Recovering the 1919 Canales Investigation of the Texas Ranger Force: Archival Investigation and Its Consequences, 1975–2010,” Sandos recounts his efforts as a doctoral student in history to find the public state document that had been made inaccessible for more than five decades. His research discoveries and interests in this era led him to write Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and the Plan of San Diego, 1904–1923, published in 1992. Sandos writes, “At that time there was little audience for my work,” but Rebellion in the Borderlands became an influential touchstone for a generation of borderlands scholars beginning to reexamine the events of la ma-

Introduction 15

tanza and the central role of state violence. Its bilingual, transnational historiographic methodology, accomplished by Sandos’s consultation of Mexican and US archives, was groundbreaking; now, incorporation of binational archival material is a common practice for scholars who wish to explore the complexities of the region’s social dynamics. As Sandos reflects on his book from retirement as professor emeritus, he acknowledges, “Our involvement in this project contributes to the vitality of recovering history as an active pursuit, a struggle to claim control of the dominant historical narrative and reshape it to reject false stories about the past.” Part of the recovery work conducted by Sandos and Ribb has helped other scholars and residents better understand this episode in history. Building from this research and conducting his own, Texas native Kirby Warnock relates how he learned rather quickly that what he had been taught about the Rangers was not the truth. In a history course he took at Baylor University, he embarked on an oral history project with his grandfather. What he discovered changed his life. His grandfather Roland Warnock had defied unwritten rules of Anglo solidarity in 1915 to help bury Antonio Longoria and Jesús Bazán, prominent Tejano members of the community and victims of Texas Rangers in Hidalgo County. Doing so earned Warnock the enmity of the Rangers, who later shot and killed Roland’s father, Franklin Warnock, on the streets of Mission, Texas. Nearly ninety years later, in 2004, Kirby Warnock released the groundbreaking documentary Border Bandits, which helped break the wall of silence in public discussions of state violence at the hands of Rangers of this era. In his personal essay in the present volume, “Hidden History: A Journey through the Past, with Hard Lessons for the Present,” Kirby Warnock reflects on the making of Border Bandits and the state of public discussion of La Matanza since its release. As his family mourned the loss of Franklin Warnock, Canales had just embarked on his own project to address Texas Ranger atrocities. He would do so in 1919, and as Cynthia Orozco writes in this volume, he remained quite active long after the tragic 1915–1920 era. Canales’s activist career after the investigation was noteworthy. In her chapter, “J. T. Canales’s Contributions in Law, Civil Rights, and Education, 1920–1976,” Orozco recounts how Mexican American civil rights defined Canales’s activist work in the five decades following the state legislative investigation of the Texas Rangers. In the 1920s and 1930s, Canales sought to build organizations that would fight for Mexican American civil rights; chief among his accomplishments in this regard was his major role in founding the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) in 1929. Writing its constitution and eventually serving as its president, Canales steered LULAC on a civil rights

16  Sonia Hernández and John Morán González

trajectory guided by two principles: working through existing legal structures for civil rights and encouraging full participation by Mexican Americans in US political and social life. While Canales and LULAC parted ways in the early 1940s, he devoted the remainder of his life to legal work and writing the Texas Mexican side of Texas history against academic historians such as Walter Prescott Webb of the University of Texas. Contemporary historical approaches were crucial in telling the larger story of violence, its legacies, and the ways communities and individuals dealt with it. Yet, expressive culture and sites of memory have an equally important role to play in this public retelling. Christopher Carmona, Margaret Koch, and Katherine Hite examine the crucial role of reaching public audiences in renarrativizing the history of violence and its long-­lasting consequences as well as the intimate ways public history intersects with people’s daily lives. Carmona lends a writerly response to this period in “The Legacy of la Matanza, Intergenerational Trauma, and the Writing of El Rinche.” He outlines how, according to contemporary theories of intergenerational trauma, legacies of violence leave an indelible mark on affected bodies and descendants. Specifically, the history of state violence, embodied by the Texas Rangers and perpetrated against the mexicanos of the lower Rio Grande Valley, have left a cultural and biological imprint of white supremacy. Drawing on the legacies of resistance to oppression, Carmona relates how he wrote his novel El Rinche as a counternarrative that upends common tropes of Anglo triumphalism with a cross-­racial, cross-­cultural protagonist, a light-­skinned Mexican American who learns the skills of Japanese ninja and adopts the guise of the hated Rangers to protect his community from their depredations. As public memory sites, state-­supported history museums serve as a gateway to people’s sense of history and their own sense of identity and belonging within a historical narrative. As director of the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum, Margaret Koch has insight into the process behind incorporating more inclusive historical exhibits in cultural institutions that is equally powerful and instructive. In her chapter, “Stewarding the Personal Narratives of Painful History,” Koch details how the Bullock Museum and Refusing to Forget entered into a productive collaboration to create a special exhibition about La Matanza, Life and Death on the Border, 1910–1920, which ran for three months in early 2016.11 More specifically, Koch describes the various considerations for the Bullock Museum as a public, taxpayer-­ funded entity with multiple constituencies and stakeholders including the K-­12 educational system, elected and appointed state officials, the bilingual Latina/o population, and the general public. With the successful run of Life

Introduction 17

and Death on the Border, 1910–1920 and similar exhibitions, Koch calls for greater engagement on the part of public history museums with topics often deemed too controversial in the past in order to foster greater awareness and dialogue about difficult issues confronting the nation. Katherine Hite’s “Reckoning with the Past toward the Here and Now” situates public commemorations of La Matanza as a contemporary practice of US and Latin American social justice memory work. Arguing that reckoning with the violence of the past is essential to enacting justice in the present, Hite proposes that the goal of sites engaged in such work should be “empathic unsettlement,” the identification of memorial and museum visitors with the victims of social injustice that leads to a questioning of their received assumptions. She draws her examples from four such museums across the Americas: El Olimpo in Buenos Aires, a notorious Dirty War torture location; the Londres 38 in Santiago, Chile, a similar site during the Augusto Pinochet regime; the Museo de la Palabra y la Imágen in San Salvador, El Salvador; and the Equal Justice Initiative memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. Each of these memory sites engages visitors in a way that ideally fosters the desire to do more than sightsee but to become agents for change and social justice. For Hite, these sites are vital to furthering democratic societies in their public explorations of past state atrocities. Taken together, the essays in this collection exemplify the new scholarly attention to topics long ignored and hidden while also pointing to a new understanding of cultural resilience in the face of brutality. The 2019 release of the film Porvenir, Texas by Andrew Shapter, who died just months before finalizing the film, presented an opportunity for greater public reckoning of this chapter in the nation’s history.12 Porvenir, Texas dramatically recounts the horrific events that unfolded on a chilly late-­January night in 1918. Juan Flores, then a young boy whose life was spared at the last moment, witnessed the execution of his father and fourteen other men, one of whom was not much older than Flores. Juan Flores suffered lifelong trauma as a result of his and his family’s experience. The voice of Juan Flores is heard loud and clear in footage shot near the end of his life, a reminder that despite atrocities they endure, people do march forward. Retellings like that of Juan Flores raise up voices that have for too long been silenced or have appeared as mere footnotes. One emerging voice, that of San Antonio resident Nati Román, speaks to the ugliness of that past, the struggles, but most importantly of a new path that must emerge from those dark lessons. Her moving poem “Living Witness” offers a powerful conclusion to the volume in a poetics of Mexican communal survival in Texas over the course of a difficult century. The brutal

18  Sonia Hernández and John Morán González

state violence of the past cannot possibly be forgotten; the poem recounts the lynching of a mexicano at the hands of Anglo assailants for the land he worked as his own. This violence is etched into the landscape, trapping his tortured soul in the tree from which he is hanged. But, much like Rivera’s narrator in “Yo Soy de Frank Rabbaté,” the unnamed present-­day narrator of “Living Witness” finds the stories told in corridos and tales passed along by abuelitas that become “a portal to the past” through which the narrator and her community “Relearn Rediscover Reclaim our rightful place in History.” Only by publicly restoring the difficult history of La Matanza can Texas and the United States determine the meaning of democracy that lies ahead. Notes 1. The full version of the Canales investigation report is posted in three volumes as “The 1919 Ranger Report” on the Texas State Library and Archives Commission website at https://www.tsl.texas.gov/treasures/law/index.html#Canales. 2. “Trouble Zone along the Rio Grande,” San Antonio Express, September 11, 1915. 3. See the classic work of Américo Paredes, “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958). See also Arnoldo De León, They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes Toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983); William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 4. David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987). 5. De León, They Called Them Greasers, 87–102. 6. In Benjamin Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 147. 7. Walter Prescott Webb, Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1935). 8. Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and the Plan of San Diego, 1904– 1923 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992); Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Arnoldo De León, ed., War along the Border: The Mexican Revolution and Tejano Communities (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012); Nicholas Villanueva Jr., Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017); Monica Marti­ nez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-­Mexican Violence in Texas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). 9. The issue of terminology is always fraught, particularly as communal self-­ identification in the Texas Mexican community changed considerably over the first three decades of the twentieth century. The terms “Texas Mexican” and “Tejano/a” refer to US citizens of Mexican descent resident in Texas, while “Mexican Ameri-

Introduction 19

can” refers to US citizens of Mexican descent in general. “Mexican national” or mexicano refers to a citizen of the Republic of Mexico regardless of place of residence. “Mexican” refers to the image of Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans alike in the Anglo-­American racial imaginary, while “ethnic Mexican” references the transnational cultural identification of Mexican national and Mexican Americans in “Greater Mexico,” Américo Paredes’s term for the cultural geography of Mexico outside the geopolitical boundaries of the Mexican nation-­state. We also follow Spanish-­language conventions except in cases where explicitly contravened or in quotations. 10. The reference is from Paredes, “With His Pistol in His Hand.” 11. Life and Death on the Border 1910–1920, Bullock Texas State History Museum, https://www.thestoryoftexas.com/visit/exhibits/life-­and-­death-­on-­the-­border-­1910 -­1920. 12. Porvenir, Texas, dir. Andrew Shapter (PBS Voces, 2019), official site https:// www.porvenirtexas.com; PBS Voces, https://www.porvenirmassacre.org/pbs-­documen tary.html.

Yo Soy de Frank Rabbaté Diana Noreen Rivera

“Yo soy de Frank Rabbaté!” “Yo soy de Frank Rabbaté!” My father would repeat your words great grand-­uncle performed with an intonation of quaking fear and assertion as he reached the part of your story marked in family lore where you, Tío Simón, pleaded for your life before a band of rinches. Tío, as I sit before your headstone in the tiny cemetery of Sebastian I can only re-­member that turning point in your life and mine through a cloudy prism of refracted light that does not shine on the day, or time, or place, or season of your 1920-­something plight. Like Simon the Zealot most obscure of the Apostles,

Yo Soy de Frank Rabbaté 21

mi Tío Simón, you are a mystery viewed through shards of glass. But, I will sing of your survival —imagining— in poetic gospel to serve the resurrection of your memory. Perhaps the day was cool and clouded with the heather-­gray sky of a winter’s northern? Perhaps it was a July afternoon burning with the dense heat of summer? Perhaps it was a morning spring alive with mockingbird, and thrush, and sparrow songs and you walked along a now forgotten path in the vast chaparrals of Cameron County. Whatever the clime may have been, Tío, I see you walking, as the story goes, walking as so many farmhands were accustomed to as they trekked from field to field caring for the crops of their employers. Then, the natural sounds of the chaparral are disrupted, and your footsteps are lost in the noise of hooves thundering from some unknown horizon, and you are surrounded

22  Diana Noreen Rivera

by a pack of rinches. Three, four, five, maybe six White men on horseback armed with .30–30 rifles, the sights of their barrels pointed at you the nucleus of their hate. “Donde vas, muchacho?” “Quien eres?” they ask in Texan-­accented Spanish through crooked smiles taking pleasure in your fright, toying with you in the manner of a cat pawing and clawing, keeping its prey alive for the sport of the hunt before the killing. Again and again you hear “Donde vas, muchacho?” “Quien eres?” and over and over you tell them the only words worth repeating, “Yo soy de Frank Rabbaté!” “Yo soy de Frank Rabbaté!” You, Tío, forgo your identity, forgo your manhood and proclaim yourself the property of your jefe— Perhaps you reason in your fit of fear that rinches wouldn’t dare destroy Frank Rabb’s chattel no more than they would dare rustle Rabb’s horse or steal his farm goods?

Yo Soy de Frank Rabbaté 23

You are not Joaquín Murrieta of the past nor Corky Gonzales of your future. Perhaps you know proclaiming “Yo soy Simón” will be your death knell? “Yo soy de Frank Rabbaté” perdido en un mundo de confusión. I am Frank Rabb’s lost in a world of confusion, caught up in the whirl of a gringo society you feign, you feign, I imagine you feign! There would be no blood coating clay-­hardened ground, no ruby-­red iron soaking the earth. No—just a stream of piss released in your terror, soaking through your trousers, reaching your huaraches, watering the soil beneath your feet and raucous, rinche laughter cutting through the air of your shame— and salvation.

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CHAPTER 1

Refusing to Forget: A Brief History Trinidad Gonzales, Benjamin Heber Johnson, and Monica Martinez

The horror unleashed on ethnic Mexicans in the border region during the 1910s was one of the worst episodes of sustained racial violence in the history of the United States. Hundreds if not thousands died at the hands of their neighbors, vigilante mobs, local law enforcement, US soldiers, and the Texas Rangers. They were shot along roadsides and in fields, huddled together and gunned down, tortured and murdered in front of their families, hanged from trees, decapitated, tied to logs and set loose in the Rio Grande; their bodies were sometimes left in the open for months, other times burned en masse or defiled. The mourning families of some victims had no idea who the murderers were and called for investigations. Other families knew exactly who killed their fathers, uncles, brothers, sons and daughters, and they endured knowing that some of them held high offices and positions of social prominence in the years and decades to come.1 Along with our colleagues Sonia Hernández and John Morán González, we established Refusing to Forget in 2013 to commemorate this violence and honor the struggles of those who resisted it and those who strived for its public recognition decades later. We offer this overview of the killings during the 1910s, state Representative José Tomás ( J. T.) Canales’s efforts in 1919 to hold the Texas Rangers responsible, and our work to publicly acknowledge the state-­sponsored violence and its enduring consequences a century later. For decades after the region’s incorporation in the United States in 1848, ethnic Mexicans in the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas voted, held office, and served on juries, unlike in the rest of the state, where their communities had already been disenfranchised by Anglo-­Americans. The few whites who migrated there scarcely encouraged the local population to assimilate to Anglo-­Texan cultural norms; rather, they became Mexicanized, speak-

28  Gonzales, Johnson, and Martinez

ing Spanish, converting to Roman Catholicism, and marrying into ethnic-­ Mexican families. By the early twentieth century, changes in both state governance and the border region set the stage for cataclysmic violence. Large numbers of white Americans moved to the region, such that the total population increased by more than 150 percent between 1900 and 1920.2 The newcomer farmers showed little respect for the border Mexican culture they came into, bringing as they did Progressive Era racialist beliefs in white supremacy. The turbulence of the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920 exacerbated an already tense situation. Over the course of the decade, nearly a tenth of the Mexican population perished and another tenth fled to the United States. Revolutionary turmoil unsettled South Texas’s Anglo farmers and provided them with an excuse for the suppression of ethnic Mexicans’ political rights. Border turmoil became the spark that ignited a brutal period of repression. Scattered attacks on ranches, irrigation works, and railroads by ethnic Mexicans quickly developed into an outright rebellion in South Texas. This appeared to be the fulfillment of the Plan de San Diego, drafted in South Texas in early 1915. This manifesto called for a “liberating army of all races”— composed of Mexicans, African Americans, and Native Americans—to “kill all white males over age sixteen and overthrow United States rule” in Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. The newly freed territory would form an independent republic, perhaps to rejoin Mexico at a future date or remain its own political entity. The insurrectionists, known as los sediciosos, killed a handful of whites but prompted indiscriminate reprisals. Any ethnic Mexican found in the vicinity of a raid could become a suspect and be denied due process.3 The Texas Rangers played a key role in perpetuating the atrocities. For instance, on September 28, 1915, after a clash with some forty raiders near Ebenezer in Hidalgo County, the Rangers took about a dozen prisoners and promptly hanged them, leaving their bodies in the open for months. Several weeks later, on October 19, after a dramatic attack derailed a passenger train at Olmito near Brownsville, Rangers detained ten ethnic Mexicans, quickly hanged four, and shot and killed four others. Cameron County Sheriff William T. Vann blamed Texas Ranger Captain Henry Ransom for the killings. Vann took two suspects from Ransom into his custody, likely saving their lives. Both later proved to be innocent of any involvement in the train derailment.4 This was not Ransom’s first such murderous action. On September 24, 1915, he was in a posse of men who casually shot Jesús Bazán and Antonio Longoria in the back after they reported that some of their horses were

Refusing to Forget 29

stolen by insurgents. Ransom ordered witnesses not to bury the bodies, shocking rancher Sam Lane, himself a former Ranger, and the young Anglo ranch hand Roland Warnock, who helped bury Bazán and Longoria several days later. That fall, Ransom made a habit of running ethnic Mexicans out of their homes as he patrolled the countryside. He casually reported to Ranger headquarters in Austin, “I drove all the Mexicans from three ranches.”5 Former Rangers were also among the worst perpetrators of violence. A. Y. Baker, a Ranger involved in disputed shootings of ethnic-­Mexican suspects during the previous decade, had left the Ranger Force to become Hidalgo County sheriff by 1915. He developed a similar reputation for brutal racial violence. Many sources named him as the instigator of the September 1915 mass hanging. Decades later, a soldier deployed by the National Guard at the time recalled that he witnessed Baker “killing three guys, three Mexican fellows in cold blood . . . that’s the kind of man A. Y. Baker was. He was killing Mexicans on sight.”6 The Texas-­Mexico border increasingly became a militarized zone. In 1913 Texas Governor Oscar Colquitt dispatched more than 1,000 state militiamen and the Texas National Guard to South Texas. By 1916 President Woodrow Wilson’s administration deployed approximately 100,000 troops to the southern border. A large contingent of the US military was mobilized and deployed on the Texas-­Mexico border. Military officers became alarmed at the conduct of Rangers and other law enforcement officers. As mass killings of ethnic Mexicans began, US Secretary of State Robert Lansing telegraphed Texas Governor James Ferguson to enlist his support in “quieting border conditions in the district of Brownsville” by “restraining indiscreet conduct.” This oblique reference to lynchings was soon replaced by more pointed and adamant condemnations of state officials, such as General Frederick Funston’s threat to put South Texas under martial law to restrain vigilantes, Rangers, and local law enforcement personnel.7 After a brief resumption of a few raids in the spring of 1916, the uprising associated with the Plan de San Diego ended. But the Rangers’ involvement in attacking ethnic Mexicans continued. In May 1916, José Morin and Victoriano Ponce were arrested in Kingsville on suspicion of plotting a raid. The two men disappeared after Ranger Captain J. J. Saunders took them into custody. Thomas Hook, a local Anglo attorney, helped residents prepare a telegram to US President Woodrow Wilson asking for federal intervention to safeguard their rights. Soon thereafter, Saunders pistol-­whipped Hook in a courthouse hallway.8 The entry of the United States into World War I in 1917 brought changes

30  Gonzales, Johnson, and Martinez

to the Ranger Force that heightened the suppression of Mexican American civil rights. The state expanded the force from 73 salaried Rangers to more than 150. The state also added Special Rangers, who worked without pay but held the legal authority to make arrests and use deadly force. Moreover, legislation empowered the governor to appoint three Loyalty Rangers in each county to monitor antiwar activity. By the end of the war, the force included 11 Ranger captains, 150 regular Rangers, 400 Special Rangers, and approximately 800 Loyalty Rangers, a total of approximately 1,350 Texas Rangers, well over the 1,000 allotted by the Texas legislature. In South Texas, Loyalty Rangers participated in an unprecedented assault on Mexican Americans’ voting rights. In the 1918 election, Rangers reduced the number of votes cast in Alice, Texas, from some three hundred in an earlier primary to only sixty-­five in the general election. “The former large number of Mexicans who have voted in previous elections was conspicuous by their absence,” noted one observer. “They did not congregate at the polls, but up town they gathered in small groups and discussed among themselves this new thing of being watched by the Rangers.”9 Even before the appointment of Loyalty Rangers, voting across South Texas plummeted wherever the Rangers were deployed. They harassed, disarmed, and humiliated Mexican American officeholders such as Cameron County Deputy Sheriff Pedro Lerma. Rangers entered Lerma’s home while he was absent, “frighten[ing] his wife and daughters to death.” Toribio Rodríguez, a Brownsville policeman, wrote a dying declaration in front of witnesses on the afternoon of November 12, 1911. He testified that the night before, he heard a gunshot near Tres Puentes and, en route to the area, encountered men in a carriage who fired their guns, wounding him in the arm and knocking him off his horse. While Rodríguez rested at home after receiving medical treatment, a group of Texas Rangers and local law enforcement came to Rodríguez’s home, pulled him from his bed, and shot him in the back. The Ranger captain of the group “said that if I did not have enough with that to die, they would give me more. After that they took me to jail, in a hack, putting me on the step of the coach, I seated in the [back] of the coach with my feet on the step. . . . I understand and believe I am going to die.”10 Other Mexican Americans in similar law enforcement positions were forcibly disarmed; one was hanged by the neck—twice. If US citizenship and being a law enforcement officer did not protect ethnic Mexicans from torture and violent interrogations, ordinary ethnic Mexicans could expect the worst of Ranger violence. In 1918, José Hernández was arrested by Texas Rangers at his home near Donna, Texas. Rangers from Captain Charles Stevens’s company accused Hernández of

Refusing to Forget 31

theft and tortured him, demanding that he confess to the crime. Rangers placed a rope around his neck and lifted him so that his feet barely touched the ground. They then flogged him until he fell unconscious. Hernández’s son was forced to watch his father’s torture.11 The killings and torture did not go uncontested. People of conscience took enormous risks to stop the violence and to expose it. The Brownsville lawyer and local historian Frank Cushman Pierce became disturbed by the wanton killing of innocent people in the summer of 1915, as the wave of violence began to rise. He began keeping a list that would come to include 102 named victims, based almost entirely on his own investigations in southern Cameron County in 1915 and 1916. Pierce confronted one of the worst vigilantes, the agricultural developer Lon Hill, and ensured that the Mexican consul had a copy of the list so that one day perhaps Hill would be charged for his crimes. Hill was never indicted. The perpetrators of violence in that era enjoyed a culture of impunity, and not even one was ever brought to justice.12 Sheriff Vann strenuously objected to Ranger and state authorities in 1915 and 1916. He openly broke with them in 1918 and arrested three Rangers for the murder of Florencio García, an agricultural laborer. García’s bullet-­ riddled remains were found several weeks after his arrest by Rangers who claimed to have released him. Relatives of the victims, including Florencio’s father, Miguel García, pressed for investigations, at times relying on the support of Mexican diplomats to pressure Texas authorities to prosecute assailants. Florencio García’s assailants were never prosecuted, but the investigations left a record of his murder and his family’s efforts to seek justice.13 The most dramatic effort to hold authorities accountable came in early 1919 in what became known as the Canales investigation. During the 36th session of the Texas legislature, state Representative José Tomás Canales, the only Mexican American state representative, filed a bill intended to prevent a repeat of the Ranger violence of the decade. The final legislation initiated at his prompting eliminated the Loyalty Rangers and reduced the force to twenty-­four men or eighty in an emergency declared by the governor. It further required Rangers to have experience as law officers with a record of good conduct and obedience to the law in their home counties, to post large bonds, and to be subjected to dismissal if local authorities filed complaints of maltreatment of prisoners.14 To make the case for his bill, Canales filed nineteen charges against Rangers and their commanders. Canales charged the Texas Rangers with denying residents due process, torturing prisoners, murdering unarmed prisoners, and coordinating massacres. Canales also charged that state admin-

32  Gonzales, Johnson, and Martinez

istrators instigated and sanctioned these acts of violence. Denial of the civil rights of ethnic and racial minorities, in other words, was not the work of a few unrestrained or rogue agents but rather a key characteristic of state policing. The state-­sanctioned reign of terror was finally discussed in public as journalists from across the state and nation covered the proceedings. In the span of two weeks, eighty-­three witnesses testified, resulting in three volumes of testimony totaling 1,605 pages of evidence. The investigation developed into two competing representations of violence on the Texas–­ Mexico border. Representative Canales called witnesses who described the Rangers as instigating violent conflict by abusing local residents. The pattern of abuse by state police, he argued, had the lasting consequence of a widespread mistrust of state government by ethnic Mexicans. He argued that the state-­sanctioned practice of killing ethnic Mexicans and terrorizing residents constituted a moral outrage. He said he hoped the evidence that showed Rangers denying residents their due process rights—­specifically the right to an impartial trial and the assumption of innocence until convicted—would inspire a wholesale reform of state policing.15 Some of the damning evidence included the dying declaration of Toribio Rodríguez and testimonies by witnesses. R. B. Creager, a Brownsville lawyer, testified that a majority of Rangers in Cameron County and some collaborating law enforcement officers added “fuel to the flame, to make worse the bandit condition. . . . There were I should say conservatively 100 maybe 200 Mexicans killed during the bandit trouble, and in my judgement ninety percent of those killed were innocent as you or I.” Creager described how Rangers made their ethnic-­Mexican targets “disappear.” Representative Canales clarified, “Evaporations as they call it here?” Creager spoke specifically about the murder of Toribio Rodríguez in Brownsville and read from Rodríguez’s dying declaration, entering the statement into evidence. Creager identified Captain Sanders as participating in the event and Andres Uresti, a deputy sheriff, as the man who shot Rodríguez in the back.16 The Rangers’ backers mounted a ferocious counterattack. Attorney Robert E. Lee Knight defended the Texas Rangers during the hearings. Depicting Anglo-Texans as an earnest and hardscrabble frontier people under siege by Indians and Mexicans from the state’s origins, legislators defended the Ranger Force as “a living monument so far as Mexican banditry is concerned.” Knight and his witnesses argued that Texans relied on the Rangers for protection from ongoing attacks from so-­called Mexican bandits. They described the Texas–­Mexico border region as lawless and foreign terrain. Knight also called on politicians like US Congressman Claude Benton Hudspeth, who under oath testified, “A Ranger cannot wait until a

Refusing to Forget 33

Mexican bandit behind a rock on the other side shoots at him three or four times. . . . [Y]ou have got to kill those Mexicans when you find them, or they will kill you.”17 When Canales took the stand, he came under an insulting and racially charged cross-­examination from Knight, who sought to impugn his credibility and loyalty to the US government. At one point during a heated exchange, Knight asked, “Now, Mr. Canales, you are by blood a Mexican are you not?” Canales insisted that he be recognized as a US citizen, responding, “I am not a Mexican, I am an American citizen.” Knight, asked again, provoked the state representative, “By blood?” To this insulting suggestion that his ethnic heritage made him any less American, Canales replied, “Well, Mexican, you may call it, that’s true, a Texas Mexican.” Fueled by eugenic anxieties about racial purity, Knight alleged that Canales, because of his “Mexican blood” and because he had “blood relatives” living in Mexico, had some unconscious allegiance to bandits and to Mexico and should therefore be deemed an unreliable witness with questionable motives.18 Besides the insulting interrogations, Canales faced threats and violence outside of the hearings. Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, who would gain fame in the 1920s as the lawman who shot the notorious outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, stalked Canales in South Texas and in Austin during the hearings. Canales’s family feared that Canales would be assassinated; he walked to the hearings surrounded by friends, including Representative Sam Johnson, father of the future US President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Years later Canales wrote the investigation “nearly cost my life.”19 Canales’s original bill was defeated. “I do not recognize my child,” he said of the legislation passed on March 7, 1919. Yet his efforts did bear some fruit. The adjutant general of the Ranger Force dismissed the Loyalty Rangers and disbanded several companies of regular Rangers. The transcripts of the hearings also serve to document acts of violence and include them in state records. The transcripts reflected so poorly on the force that the state House of Representatives refused to print them as was customary.20 Like all widespread state-­sanctioned racial violence, the killings of the 1910s wrought enduring consequences. Many ethnic-­ Mexican families abandoned their ranches and farms, trading economic independence for the exploitation of working as wage laborers at the bottom rung. Some moved to nearby towns, cities farther away, or to Mexico; many joined the ranks of the migrant agricultural workforce that toiled in Texas cotton fields, picked blueberries and sugar beets in Michigan, or labored in factories in Detroit or Chicago. In addition to this shifting racial hierarchy, laws targeting ethnic Mexicans introduced a new segregation in South Texas known as Juan Crow.

34  Gonzales, Johnson, and Martinez

Ethnic Mexicans found themselves increasingly segregated from Anglos in neighborhoods, schools, churches, and restaurants. They were also disenfranchised, intimidated from voting or holding public office, and excluded from juries, all of which were civil rights that Mexican Americans had exercised since the border region became part of the United States. Economic marginalization went hand in hand with political disenfranchisement; by 1920, a significant number of Mexican American property owners in Texas had lost their lands. David Montejano has referred to this displacement as the “farm colonization” of the region and “one of the most phenomenal land movements in the history of the United States.”21 Refusing to Forget We knew this history well in 2013 when, along with Sonia Hernández and John Morán González, we founded Refusing to Forget. Trinidad Gonzales heard these stories growing up, from family accounts of the killing of his great-­grandfather Paulino Serda and Paulino’s father, Donanciano, by Texas Rangers during the period. During our coursework in graduate programs in history in the 1990s and 2000s, all of us encountered several generations of writing on the violence. The first scholar to focus on Texas Ranger violence against Mexican Americans was Américo Paredes in “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958). This classic work, a foundational text for Mexican American studies, was in part a refutation of Walter Prescott Webb’s Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense (1935), which portrayed the Rangers as heroes and Native Americans and Mexicans as the racialized villains. Notably, the violence of the 1910s was too much even for Webb, who admitted that a “reign of terror” was visited upon Mexicans and Mexican Americans.22 The Chicana/o movement of the 1960s and 1970s shaped the next wave of scholarship on anti-­Mexican violence. Scholars such as Julian Samora and Rodolfo Rocha emphasized the role of the violence in subordinating ethnic-­ Mexican communities and the history of overt, especially armed Mexican resistance to Anglo colonization of the Southwest.23 However, making violent conflict between Anglo and Mexican men central to these accounts sometimes obscured the voices and lives of victims and survivors. A sharper focus on life during this reign of terror was made possible by James A. Sandos, who as a doctoral student in the 1970s demanded to see the transcript of the 1919 legislative investigation, as he describes in his essay in this volume. The publication of Sandos’s dissertation as the book Rebellion in the

Refusing to Forget 35

Borderlands (1992) marked the first scholarly monograph whose central subject was this border violence. Sandos’s crucial work was also recognized by Mexican scholars, which led to the Spanish translation of his book, published in 2010 as Rebelión en la frontera: Anarquismo y el Plan de San Diego, 1904–1923.24 In the 1980s, ethnic-­Mexican literary authors like Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, and Helena María Viramontes turned to community memory to recover how racial violence shaped the lives of women and children. Anzaldúa, born on a ranch in Hidalgo County and a sixth-­generation American, learned a history of South Texas from her grandmother that challenged public school lessons and Texas myths. In her book Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza, she depicts the early twentieth century as a period of “racial terrorism.” She laments, “Race hatred had finally fomented into an all-­out war. My grandmother lost all her cattle, they stole her land.”25 In poems such as “We Call Them Greasers” she memorializes the racial and sexual violence suffered by women, which were not preserved in records like the 1919 state investigation into Texas Ranger abuse. At the turn of the twenty-­first century, more historical studies came to fruition. Richard Ribb’s 2001 dissertation, “José Tomás Canales and the Texas Rangers: Myth, Identity, and Power in South Texas, 1900–1920,” at the University of Texas at Austin centers on the Ranger Force and the heroic efforts of José Tomás Canales to hold it to account. Benjamin H. Johnson’s Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (2003) critically focused on the violence in South Texas and its enduring consequences for Mexican American identity and politics in the region. These works are part of a wider academic turn to studying the culture and impact of anti-­Latino violence. Trinidad Gonzales advanced these efforts as one of the first to include a list of recovered victims’ names from La Matanza of 1915.26 He helped to shift debates about the number of people murdered to the humanity of the slain by bringing the names of victims into public conversation. He insists that scholars remember and recover the lives of those murdered during the era.27 For her research, Monica Muñoz Martinez met descendants who had preserved their family histories and were working to secure restitution and recognition. Published as The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-­Mexican Violence in Texas (2018), her work traces the longer legacies of violence, how they shaped communities and social relations generations later, and analyzes the power of memory and memorialization. By the time we established Refusing to Forget, the traumatic experiences of the 1910s were powerfully evoked in novels and films. In the late 1930s,

36  Gonzales, Johnson, and Martinez

Américo Paredes, born in 1915 at the height of the violence, wrote a novel in the late 1930s entitled George Washington Gómez, whose protagonist grows up in the shadow of his father’s killing by Rangers and the segregation and disenfranchisement that followed the bloodletting. The book sat unpublished until 1990 but upon its release it quickly became an important and widely taught text in Mexican American studies and literary history.28 In 2004 Kirby Warnock released his documentary film Border Bandits, which centers on the experiences of his grandfather, an Anglo ranch hand who was appalled by the double murder of Jesús Bazán and Antonio Longoria and helped to bury their remains. Warnock’s film was broadcast on public television and shown in more than a dozen venues around Texas.29 In 2013, the year we founded Refusing to Forget, The Son was published; it is a fictional account of a South Texas ranching dynasty written by the prominent novelist Philipp Meyer. One of the book’s narrative threads is an account of the 1910s violence as seen by a member of an Anglo family who killed their Mexican neighbors and seized their land. The novel was reviewed internationally, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and became a miniseries for AMC in 2017.30 In short, by 2013, as the centennial of the height of the violence in 1915– 1916 approached, these accounts were told powerfully and extensively in scholarly articles and books, fiction, and film. Yet it seemed to us that the entire set of works, including our own scholarship, failed in one critical task: to change stories about Texas, the border, and American history that circulate in the public sphere. The gap between advances in the field of history and public understanding of this history remained vast. Violence such as La Matanza of the 1910s was rarely if ever taught in schools, even in the mandatory Texas history class for seventh graders in the state. Lynchings have been portrayed as though they only took place in the Deep South or only targeted African Americans, and contemporary border issues have been analyzed as though there was no fraught history of the region. Cultural institutions like the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum overlooked these episodes in their public exhibits and programming. Or worse, like the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum, they presented the Texas Rangers as unvarnished heroes. Mentions of the violence of the 1910s at the Ranger museum and elsewhere framed it as the righteous suppression of banditry, implicitly demeaning the victims and precluding any public consideration of the racial dynamics that were both cause and consequence of the murders. Our hope was that the centennial would provide an opportunity to leverage generations of scholarship to change public understandings of the past. We also listened to the calls from descendants of racial violence for state

Refusing to Forget 37

cultural institutions to give a public accounting of this history. Families for too long had carried the weight of history, remembering the names of their loved ones, preserving family archives, organizing memorials, and asking Texas institutions to participate in their efforts. Here was an opportunity for experts in the field to collaborate with residents, teachers, community groups, and state institutions to develop accurate and professional public history projects. We started this work in February 2013 when the team met at the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies Tejas Foco Conference in San Antonio. During a daylong planning session we aligned our goals and planned a public commemoration strategy. We laid plans for a multifaceted public history project. A museum exhibit would help us reach schoolchildren and teachers who would then be more likely to avail themselves of our curricular plans and incorporate the history into their teaching. Historical markers would encourage the Texas Historical Commission to participate in the public commemoration efforts and ensure that the very government complicit in so much of the violence was officially recognizing it so the work would carry the imprimatur of the state and not just the validation of academics. Public programming and ceremonies for a historical marker, we hoped, would reach a wider public audience. We realized the public projects needed simultaneously to educate, commemorate, and memorialize the victims of racial violence who were often desecrated and criminalized in death. We were guided by a commitment to “respecting the death of strangers.”31 To accomplish this we needed the input of families and descendants of victims of the violence. Benita and Evaristo Albarado, two Texas residents who helped preserve the history of the 1918 Porvenir massacre, joined our first planning session to share their thoughts. The inclusion of the Albarados in these early conversations was just the start of our collaboration with descendants. Throughout the project Norma Longoria Rodriguez, Melba Coody, Christine Molis, and Arlinda Valencia were crucial collaborators. Curtis Smith, the chief of staff of state Representative Terry Canales, a great-­nephew of José Tomás Canales, also participated in this first meeting, reassuring us that we would have some political and bureaucratic support moving forward. From that point forward, we had one eye on the past and one on the present. Unfortunate developments since Refusing to Forget’s 2013 founding only made the project’s message more urgent. Dan Patrick was elected Texas lieutenant governor in November 2014 on a platform featuring the alleged dangers of immigration from Latin America, long a pronounced theme of his previous work as a radio show host. His election marked a

38  Gonzales, Johnson, and Martinez

sharp rightward turn for a Texas Republican Party that had been relatively moderate on such questions. Donald Trump began his campaign for the US presidency the following year with lurid and sensationalistic depictions of the dangers of a porous southern border, even using racist descriptions of Mexicans as rapists and murderers. Similar criminalizing and racist rhetoric during the Trump presidency has misrepresented the border as a national threat and, as in the 1910s, depicted “Mexicans” as dangerous criminal invaders. The rhetoric serves to erase a century and a half of Mexican American history and the extraordinary legacies of anti-­Mexican violence. At the same time, history and historical memory have become one of the battlegrounds over the resurgent racism of the Trump years. Trump could not bring himself to condemn a 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which white supremacists marched in support of preserving Confederate monuments slated for removal and ensuing violence took the life of the counterprotester Heather Heyer. The 2017 opening of a remarkable museum and memorial to lynching victims by the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, and the wave of removals of Confederate statuary and memorabilia prompted by the enormous Black Lives Matter mobilizations signified that the nation was beginning to grapple with some of the most difficult and tragic episodes of US history, even if the border and Mexican Americans were seldom a part of this story. After we left our initial meeting in 2013, we focused our attention on finding a cultural institution to collaborate with us in developing a historical exhibit, and we started our work to submit applications for state historical markers. The exhibit would be a cornerstone of the public project. While we considered independently curating an exhibit to be on display at a public university, we were convinced by our ongoing discussions that we should collaborate with a public cultural institution. Martinez explains, “If state institutions continued to disavow histories of racial violence, how could broader publics come to relearn the history? Without state participation, the memorialization efforts risked allowing the state to maintain outdated narratives.”32 Yet we also had reasons to fear working with a state institution. We did not intend to design a polemic; the truth of what happened was powerful and damning enough. But we did want an unflinching look at the violence that would not refrain from naming names and making clear the extent to which the Rangers were responsible for state-­sanctioned racial terror. We considered whether we would need to cede editorial control to the institution’s staff and, if so, whether the resulting exhibit would shy away from the most difficult aspects of the story, leaving us and the descendants with whom we worked frustrated and disappointed. Given the tenor

Refusing to Forget 39

of state and national politics, we considered whether a public institution would even be willing to tackle such a topic. The Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum was the most appealing potential venue. Located in downtown Austin between the University of Texas and the state capitol, its attractive, professional exhibits have attracted more than nine million visitors since its opening in 2001.33 It presented both a comprehensive story of Texas history and more specialized rotating exhibits. Yet the Bullock’s exhibits prior to 2013 tended toward the Anglocentric.34 Moreover, the museum is overseen by the Texas State Preservation Board, made up almost exclusively of elected Texas officials including the governor, lieutenant governor, and speaker of the House. After conversations with other cultural institutions in Texas, we reached out to Margaret Koch, then the director of exhibits and as of this writing the director of the Bullock. Her forthrightness about the necessity and challenges of addressing difficult subjects in public institutions earned our trust and assuaged our concerns. The Bullock was in the midst of planning the Texas Social Justice Series to explore race, ethnicity, class, and gender throughout Texas history. The museum staff was also actively working to expand its coverage of West and South Texas and of Mexican Americans more broadly. To emphasize the lives interrupted by the reign of terror, the museum staff turned to the private archives of Texas residents who had preserved their family histories in their own homes. Descendants like Norma Longoria Rodriguez, Melba Coody, Christine Molis, Benita Albarado, and Evaristo Albarado generously lent family documents and photographs that helped the staff put faces and names to some of the victims of racial violence. Visitors had a chance to see the faces of Jesús Bazán and Antonio Longoria and their widows, Epigmenia Bazán and Antonia Longoria, who had to navigate a violent world in the days and years following the double murder. A portrait of Narciso Flores and Juan Bonilla Flores, two boys who survived the Porvenir massacre of 1918, invited visitors to consider the widespread impacts of violence witnessed by children and adults. The exhibit presented the richness of its subjects’ lives rather than only their suffering and deaths. We were particularly moved to see descendants of those slain attend the opening symposium, make subsequent trips to the exhibit, and find satisfaction in the public recognition of this history, especially in the state’s most prominent public history venue.35 The exhibit was subsequently honored with a Leadership in History award from the American Association for State and Local History, and it was a major part of Refusing to Forget’s successful application for the Autry

40  Gonzales, Johnson, and Martinez

Public History Award, granted annually by the Western Historical Association to “media exhibits, public programs, or written works that contribute to a broader public reflection and appreciation of the past or serve as a model of professional public history practice in the history of the North American West.” The exhibition also figured prominently in Refusing to Forget receiving the American Historical Association’s 2019 Herbert Feiss Award for distinguished contributions to public history. The exhibit, however, was only temporary. In contrast, historical markers serve as permanent sites of remembrance by the state. The team planned ceremonies in conjunction with the unveiling of markers. We hoped ceremonies would serve as the long-­delayed recognition of the dignity for victims and their families and descendants. Also, the markers and ceremonies would provide opportunities to reach people outside of Austin. We submitted applications for five state markers through the Texas Historical Commission’s Undertold Markers program. The commission inaugurated the program in 2006 to “address historical gaps, promote diversity of topics, and proactively document significant underrepresented subjects or untold stories.”36 Undertold Markers applications are considered by the Texas Historical Commission as a whole, while other applications go through the local historical commissions, some of which are effectively defunct or shy away from engaging with troubling histories. The application to document La Matanza of 1915 in Cameron County was a general acknowledgment of the scope of the killings. The marker was to be placed on a highway from San Benito to Brownsville where Lisandro Muñoz and many unidentified people were murdered by law enforcement and vigilantes. A marker for Jesús Bazán and Antonio Longoria in Hidalgo County would be placed at the site of those notorious murders; it reflects the sustained efforts of the Bazán and Longoria families to gain public recognition of the violence. A marker for the Porvenir massacre of 1918 in Presidio County would memorialize a horrific event with the largest known toll of victims, fifteen men and boys, that deeply influenced Canales to pursue legislative reform of the Ranger Force. We also wanted to commemorate the lynching of Antonio Rodríguez in Edwards County because his death was formative for Mexican and Mexican American antiviolence mobilizations. Finally, a marker in Webb County for Jovita Idar, the pioneering Laredo journalist and crusader against mob violence, was intended to memorialize the border’s history of a vibrant press and the long history of social justice efforts. We shared the same apprehension concerning the marker proposals that we did when approaching the Bullock Museum. Would the Texas Histori-

Refusing to Forget 41

Figure 1.1. La Matanza of 1915 historical marker, approved 2014, erected 2017. Courtesy, Refusing to Forget.

cal Commission accept the idea of permanently placing historical markers that exposed state atrocities? La Matanza of 1915 and Jovita Idar marker proposals were accepted during the first round of submission. The Jovita Idar marker proposal highlighted the efforts of a civil rights figure who exposed discrimination and lynching, but the marker language did not indict

42  Gonzales, Johnson, and Martinez

the state for extralegal violence. We believed that of all five applications, this one might be accepted. On the other hand, we were surprised when our proposal for La Matanza of 1915 marker was accepted because it held law enforcement officers including the Texas Rangers accountable for participating in the murders of “hundreds, possibility thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans.”37 As a result of the acceptance of that proposal and the Bullock Museum’s move to work on an exhibit, we started becoming more optimistic that state historical institutions were willing to confront dark chapters of the state’s history. A new era of truth-­telling, it appeared, was on the horizon in 2014 as we approached the hundred-­year anniversary of La Matanza. The application for a marker acknowledging the Porvenir massacre was accepted the next year, but it took three attempts before the Texas Historical Commission approved a marker acknowledging the murders of Bazán and Longoria. Even with its rejection of the Antonio Rodríguez marker proposal—on the grounds that the Edwards County Historical Commission opposed hosting it—but the eventual acceptance of our four other proposals, we believed that the commission was genuinely interested in telling an inclusive history.38 Not everything was smooth sailing, however. The contemporary politics of race and the border finally caught up with us with the Porvenir marker. Martinez’s application for a marker commemorating this horrific 1918 massacre led by Texas Rangers from Company B was approved by the Texas Historical Commission in 2015. Pursuing standard procedures, the commission staff began drafting language for the marker and circulated multiple drafts to Martinez and Presidio County Historical Commission Chair Mona Blocker Garcia. After several revisions, in May and June 2018 Martinez and Blocker Garcia signed off on the marker text, moving the process closer to completion. The Texas Historical Commission staff subsequently encouraged Martinez and descendants of the Porvenir massacre, led by Arlinda Valencia, to start planning the unveiling ceremony. The staff went so far as to help coordinate reserving a location for the unveiling ceremony on September 1, 2018, at the Magoffin home in El Paso. In July 2018, the Texas Historical Commission approved the final marker and the staff submitted a rush order to the foundry so the plaque would be ready for the planned commemorative ceremony. Just weeks before the marker was to be cast, pressure from the Presidio County Historical Commission convinced the Texas Historical Commission to halt the production of the marker and cancel the unveiling ceremony. Blocker Garcia had written a letter to the state commission claiming to be

Refusing to Forget 43

“shocked” that the marker text had been approved, and she opined that “the militant Hispanics have turned this marker request into a political rally and want reparations from the federal government for a 100-­year-­old-­plus tragic event.” Despite written evidence to the contrary, Blocker Garcia insisted that she had not approved the final marker text. The Presidio County attorney soon followed with a letter demanding that the ceremony be cancelled and the marker’s language rewritten, warning without basis that the event was a “major political rally” for then-­US Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke and that longtime controversial Chicano activist José Ángel Gutiérrez would participate. Blocker Garcia made no secret of her contempt for the victims of the massacre. She protested language from an early draft that described the massacre as targeting the Porvenir community “without provocation,” arguing that the community was targeted after “years of rape, robbery and pillage.” She also cited an apocryphal story about a teenage goatherd from the village who testified that Porvenir residents had participated in a raid in December 1917 on the Brite Ranch some fifty miles away. In Blocker Garcia’s account to the Texas Observer reporter Daniel Blue Tyx, the young man was later taken into a witness relocation program in Oklahoma.39 But there is no documentary evidence of the existence of such a figure, and no federal witness protection program existed at the time. We were startled that the Texas Historical Commission allowed these ill-­considered and last-­minute charges to delay the casting of the marker, thereby casting a shadow over the gathering that Arlinda Valencia and others worked so hard to assemble. Even more disappointing was that the state commissioners or staff did not contact the Refusing to Forget team to respond to the objections and allegations. We had a track record of national recognition, high academic standing in state institutions,40 and productive collaborations with the Bullock Museum and the state commission on three other historical markers. Moreover, the state commissioners and staff refused to answer specific questions about why the staff was forced to halt the marker production, what the procedures would be for moving the process forward, and when the marker might be ready for an unveiling ceremony. Instead, the staff periodically contacted Martinez asking her to provide historical documents to support the previously approved language drafted by the staff and to get her feedback on suggested changes, relying on her expertise without acknowledging that the false claims levied against her had halted the marker unveiling. The Texas Historical Commission did not publicly diffuse public misunderstandings that “militant Hispanics” had

44  Gonzales, Johnson, and Martinez

hijacked the Undertold Marker procedures or correct any of the false accusations made by the Presidio attorney or the Presidio County Historical Commission chair. Despite Blocker Garcia’s racist smearing of the victims, descendants, and Refusing to Forget team members and the false accusations made by the Presidio County attorney, the state commission let them preside over a ceremony unveiling the marker that the commission staff organized on November 30, 2018, in Marfa. The original organizers of the September 1, 2018, event in El Paso were unable to participate because of the short time frame and long distance required to travel to Presidio County. Nevertheless, the Porvenir marker was cast and placed twenty-­seven miles west of Marfa on US Highway 90, with virtually the same language approved in July 2018. In the end, the local opposition was not enough to halt this effort to recognize the tragedy of Porvenir. But rather than being an opportunity for commemoration and healing, the marker’s unveiling saw the reemergence of racial animus. Acrimonious and emotionally difficult as it was at times, the dispute over the Porvenir marker encapsulated the opportunities and challenges of commemorating the violence of the 1910s. We had significant assets to draw upon in our efforts. Generations of scholarship including our own research provided abundant evidence about the killings, the lives and communities that it traumatized, and the enduring consequences it wrought. Victims’ descendants such as the Longorias and Albarados supplemented this information and helped guide us to an embrace of state programs and institutions like the Undertold Markers program and the Bullock Texas State History Museum. The professional staff at the Texas Historical Commission and the Bullock as well as our colleagues at universities like the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley were invaluable collaborators who helped tell an important story about the border and Mexican American history, and they were willing to navigate the potential adverse consequences of doing so. Numerous reporters, attuned to contemporary border politics, readily saw the resonance of our story in an age when the border is again represented as a national security threat to justify coercive measures such as mass confinement and family separation. News stories helped us achieve our goal of bringing the events of the 1910s to wider public consciousness. The comments of Blocker Garcia and others during the Porvenir dispute were proof that many could not accept the state recognizing its role in these horrors. But we managed to have the history of state-­sanctioned violence told nonetheless, more broadly than it had been since the Canales hearings of 1919. We are haunted by the spectacle of renewed anti-­Latinx racial violence.

Refusing to Forget 45

On August 3, 2019, a gunman with deep anti-­Latinx hatred drove to El Paso and murdered twenty-­three people and left twenty-­four more with serious injuries. The written screed he left warned of the dangers of immigration and Latinx political power, echoing both the rhetoric of contemporary figures such as Donald Trump and Dan Patrick but also of Texas officials a century ago. The day before the El Paso terrorist attack, Texas Governor Greg Abbott sent out a fundraising letter asking for support in defending the border; in it he employed the same dangerous tropes that the terrorist used in his writing. While the attack does not represent the kind of state-­sanctioned violence that occurred during the 1910s, the anti-­immigrant rhetoric remains the same, that Latinx people represent a danger to American society, casting them as foreign and un-­American. Such rhetoric is a powerful tool for shaping policing policies that justify the denial of the human rights and dignity to people through mass deportation, family separation, and incarceration of men, women, and children that have not been deployed since the Japanese American internments during the World War II. Unlike the era of La Matanza, when children lived in terror from witnessing violence against their parents, children being separated from their families today are the targets of torture by the US government. This time the violence is driven by immigration agencies of the federal government, many of whose employees are themselves Latinx. The civil rights movements that took place early in our own lives preclude, at least so far, a return to the mass murders of the 1910s. And contemporary border politics center on Central American migrants and refugees rather than long-­standing Mexican American residents. Yet the issue at hand, as in the past, is the danger of demagoguery by elected and appointed officials and the consequences of imbuing law enforcement officers with the message that those in their custody do not merit equal or humane treatment and that the officers therefore can act with impunity. Migrants and refugees are again being criminalized and denied due process. And Latinxs with American citizenship in the United States are terrorized by racialized policing and the ongoing fear that immigration agents will raid neighborhoods and workplaces to remove family members and longtime residents from their communities. A 2019 report by the American Immigration Council points out that 4.1 million US citizen children under the age of eighteen live with at least one undocumented parent, 5.9 million US citizen children live with undocumented family members, and roughly a half million US citizen children experienced the apprehension, detention, and deportation of parents between 2011 and 2013.41 A century after the state investigation into abuse by Texas Rangers, concerns are being raised by human rights attorneys, advocates for migrants

46  Gonzales, Johnson, and Martinez

and refugees, and even the United Nations about abusive federal border enforcement policies and actions of individual Border Patrol agents. It remains to be seen if agents or presidential appointees will be held accountable for human rights violations. If the nation is to successfully resist contemporary dehumanization, perhaps that will be in part because Americans can draw upon precisely the sobering histories of what has happened along the border when people failed to hear voices of conscience like Jovita Idar, William T. Vann, and José Tomás Canales. As historians of this period, we feel a solemn calling to bear witness to the past to ensure that the heroic stance Canales took in 1919 will reverberate more than a century later. It would be well to remember what the Czech writer Milan Kundera once wrote: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”42 Notes 1. Benjamin H. Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Monica Muñoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-­Mexican Violence in Texas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). 2. La Crónica, May 7, 1910, 2. For lower Rio Grande Valley demographic changes from 1900 to 1920, see Trinidad Gonzales, “The World of México Texanos, Mexicanos, and México Americanos: Transnational and National Identities in the Lower Rio Grande Valley during the Last Phase of United States Colonization, 1900–1930” (PhD diss., University of Houston, 2008), tables 2-­B, 283–284; 7-­A, 292; 7-­B, 293. 3. For discussions of the Plan de San Diego, see Johnson, Revolution in Texas, and James A. Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and the Plan of San Diego, 1904–1923 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992). 4. William T. Vann, testimony, Proceedings of the Joint Committee of the Senate and the House in the Investigation of the Texas State Ranger Force, Adjutant General Records, Texas State Archives, Austin (hereafter cited as Proceedings of the Joint Committee), 574–575; “Sheriff Vann Explains to Ranger Committee How to ‘Ransomize,’ ” Austin American Statesman, February 8, 1919. 5. Ransom to Adjutant General (quote), January 24, 1916, Aldrich Papers, box 3P157, folder 2, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin; Norma Longoria Rodriguez, interview by Monica Muñoz Martinez, September 22, 2010, San Antonio, TX, digital recording; Norma L. Rodriguez, “Antonia Bazán Longoria (1877–1966),” Los Tejanos, http://los-­tejanos.com/essays.htm; Ernestina Longoria Martinez and Armando R. Longoria, interview by Norma L. Rodriguez, July 26, 1992, Los Tejanos, http://los-­tejanos.com/rangers.htm; Martinez, Injustice Never Leaves You, 76–81. See also Kirby Warnock’s film Border Bandits (Transpecos Productions, 2003) and article “Trouble on the Border,” Border Bandits Movie, http://www .borderbanditsmovie.com/story.htm. 6. Adam Medveckey, interview by Amando Raoms, Pharr, TX, August 22, 1978,

Refusing to Forget 47

Lower Rio Grande Valley Historical Collection, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. 7. Funston to Ferguson, September 16, 1915, “Records of the Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs of Mexico, 1910–1929,” RG 59, M 274, 812.00/16198, General Records of the Department of State, National Archives. 8. Johnson, Revolution in Texas, 147–148. 9. Johnson, Revolution in Texas, 166–167; unsigned report (quote), November 5, 1918, Alice, TX, in Walter Prescott Webb Papers, box 2R290, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. 10. “Dying Declaration of Toribio Rodriguez,” November 12, 1911, evidence, Proceedings of the Joint Committee, 375–376. 11. Johnson, Revolution in Texas, 167; Martinez, Injustice Never Leaves You, 196–197 and various passages on the torture and abuse of prisoners in Ranger custody and intimidation of families that witnessed vigilante and Ranger violence. 12. Johnson, Revolution in Texas, 114–115, 119. 13. On Florencio García, see Martinez, Injustice Never Leaves You, 1–6; Annette Rodriguez, “Recognition of Social Murder: How Lynching Invented ‘The Mexican’ ” (PhD diss., Brown University, 2016), chapter “Los Desaparecidos.” 14. Martinez, Injustice Never Leaves You, 175. 15. Martinez, Injustice Never Leaves You, 175, 182–186. 16. R. B. Creager, testimony, Proceedings of the Joint Committee, 353–357. 17. Claude B. Hudspeth, testimony, Proceedings of the Joint Committee, 969–970; Martinez, Injustice Never Leaves You, 183–185, 208–211. 18. José T. Canales, testimony, Proceedings of the Joint Committee, 857; Martinez, Injustice Never Leaves You, 189–195, 859, 941–942, 1010–1020. 19. Johnson, Revolution in Texas, 174; Canales to Gerald Mann, May 15, 1942 (quote), J. T. Canales Papers, box 430–3, South Texas Archives, Texas A&M University at Kingsville. 20. Johnson, Revolution in Texas, 175. 21. David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), 104, 108. 22. Américo Paredes, “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958); Walter P. Webb, The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935), 478. 23. Julian Samora, Joe Bernal, and Albert Peña, Gunpowder Justice: A Reassessment of the Texas Rangers (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), and Rodolfo Rocha, “The Tejano Revolt of 1915,” in Mexican Americans in Texas History: Selected Essays, ed. Emilio Zamora, Cynthia Orozco, and Rodolfo Rocha (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2000). 24. Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, Mexico: Gobierno del Estado de Tamaulipas, 2010. 25. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999) 29, 30; Sonia Saldívar-­Hull, Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) 26–27. 26. Trinidad Gonzales, “The Mexican Revolution, Revolución de Texas, and Matanza de 1915,” in War along the Border: The Mexican Revolution and Tejano Communities,

48  Gonzales, Johnson, and Martinez

ed. Arnoldo De León (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012), 107–133; Santiago G. Guzman, “Sangre que clama al cielo venganza,” El Defensor, May 9, 1930. The term matanza typically is used to refer to the slaughtering of animals, but Guzman uses it to describe the killings of 1915, so we chose to use it to remain consistent with the language usage of the time. 27. Gonzales, “Mexican Revolution, Revolución de Texas,” 125. 28. Américo Paredes, George Washington Gómez (Houston: Arte Público, 1990). 29. For discussion of the film and its reception, see Martinez, Injustice Never Leaves You, 104–110. 30. Philipp Meyer, The Son (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013). 31. Trinidad Gonzales, “Respecting the Death of Strangers,” story project, Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum, February 19, 2016, https://www.thestoryof texas.com/discover/texas-­story-­project/life-­death-­border-­trinidad-­gonzales. 32. Martinez, Injustice Never Leaves You, 273. For a longer description of the Refusing to Forget collaboration with descendants and public institutions, see Margaret Koch’s chapter in this anthology. 33. “About,” Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum, https://www.thestoryof texas.com/about/about-­the-­museum. 34. Walter Buenger, “ ‘The Story of Texas’? The Texas State History Museum and Forgetting and Remembering the Past,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 105, no. 3 ( January 2002): 480–494. 35. For a detailed discussion of the exhibit creation, politics, and respectful representation, see Margaret Koch’s chapter in this volume. 36. “Undertold Markers,” Texas Historical Commission, https://www.thc.texas .gov/preserve/projects-­and-­programs/state-­historical-­markers/undertold-­markers. 37. For marker text and location, see “Details for Matanza of 1915,” Atlas no. 5507018128, Texas Historic Sites Atlas, https://atlas.thc.state.tx.us/Details/550701 8128/print. 38. For more on the marker applications, see “Refusing to Forget,” Process: A Blog for American History, May 3, 2016, http://www.processhistory.org/refusing-­to-­forget/. 39. Daniel Blue Tyx, “The Fight to Commemorate a Massacre by the Texas Rangers,” Texas Observer, November 26, 2018. 40. Refusing to Forget members John Morán González and Sonia Hernández direct Latino and Mexican American studies programs at the state’s two flagship public universities. 41. American Immigration Council, “US Citizen Children Impacted by Immigration Enforcement,” November 22, 2019, https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil .org/research/us-­citizen-­children-­impacted-­immigration-­enforcement. 42. Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994), 4.

CHAPTER 2

Anglos, Mexicans, and Rangers in Texas, 1850–1900 Andrew R. Graybill

In June 1967, state Senator Joe Bernal, a Democrat from San Antonio, traveled to Starr County in South Texas to investigate rumors that the Texas Rangers were abusing striking Mexican farmworkers. Among the allegations were charges of verbal and physical assault, but Bernal was perhaps even more concerned that the constabulary was on hand to break the strike rather than to keep the peace. In Rio Grande City, Bernal confronted A. Y. Allee, the captain of Ranger Company D, and the two argued bitterly about the situation, with Allee strenuously defending the actions of the men under his command. Bernal would have none of it, telling a reporter that the Rangers were “the Mexican-­Americans’ Ku Klux Klan. All they need is a white hood with ‘Rinches’ written across it.”1 On its face, Bernal’s claim was an exaggeration, of course. For one thing, the Klan is a terrorist organization, while the Rangers are among the most famous law enforcement officers in the world, described by one historian as “the men who wear the star.”2 And yet Bernal had a point. Just as the Klan traces its origins to the efforts by whites during Reconstruction to disenfranchise African Americans, the Rangers were formally institutionalized by the Texas state legislature in 1874 to defend Anglo interests against Native Americans and people of Mexican descent.3 In fact, the Special Force of Rangers, one of the constabulary’s two detachments, was deployed precisely to bring order to the region between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande when the area was roiled after the Civil War by alleged depredations by Mexicans against white cattlemen.4 These efforts foreshadowed the brutality unleashed by the Rangers against Mexicans in the early twentieth century that brought on the Canales investigation of 1919.

50  Andrew R. Graybill

Map 2.1. Early twentieth-­century Texas. From Andrew R. Graybill, Policing the Great Plains: Rangers, Mounties, and the North American Frontier, 1875–1910, reproduced by permission of the University of Nebraska Press, copyright 2007 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Map created by Ezra Zeitler.

Although the Anglo presence in Texas dated to 1821 and the founding of Stephen F. Austin’s colony at the invitation of the Mexican government, few whites lived in the area between San Antonio and the Rio Grande before mid-­century.5 American victory in the US-­Mexico War of 1846–1848, however, opened South Texas to white settlement, and cities such as Brownsville, at the mouth of the Rio Grande, began to swell with white arrivals, most of whom were looking to capitalize on lucrative border trade. Richard King and Mifflin Kenedy, two men strongly associated with the rise of Anglo hegemony in South Texas, purchased decommissioned military boats and quickly monopolized the shipping of goods arriving from ports along the Gulf of Mexico by displacing or buying up their competition.6 In 1850, there were about 2,500 whites and more than 18,000 Mexicans in the trans-­

Anglos, Mexicans, and Rangers 51

Nueces region, and although vastly outnumbered, Anglo-­Texans set about constructing a rigid socioeconomic order that used the power of the state to favor the white population and keep Mexicans “in their place.”7 This official coercion contradicted the guarantees of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the US-­Mexico War and held that Mexicans electing to remain in the United States after 1848 would receive all the rights of US citizens. It is worth asking why Anglo-­Texans felt it necessary to control Mexicans in the first place. On the most basic level, whites in Texas believed that the two races could not live together peacefully, an opinion no doubt buttressed by the recent war and the unpleasant memories of the Texas Revolution little more than a decade earlier.8 Although many Mexicans had fought for independence with Sam Houston and other Anglo leaders in the struggle against Santa Anna, after 1836 whites tended to look upon Mexicans as outsiders whose social and political loyalties lay with Mexico rather than with Texas and the United States. Some Tejanos, moreover, were uncomfortable with the rapid postrevolution expansion of slavery in the new Republic of Texas. When Mexican President Vicente Guerrero abolished slavery in 1829, he had bowed to the demands of irate Texas enslavers and exempted them from the decree. Thereafter, many Tejanos worked to undermine the peculiar institution in Texas by helping enslaved people seek freedom on the other side of the Rio Grande.9 Such actions infuriated white Texans and convinced them of Tejano disloyalty. Reinforcing this distrust was a powerful current of anti-­Mexican racism that was practically an article of faith among nineteenth-­century Anglo-­ Texans. The historian Arnoldo De León has argued, “Anglos perceived the physical contrasts of Mexicans as indicating mental and temperamental weaknesses” that rendered them unfit for the privileges of equal citizenship.10 Whites made some exceptions for individual Tejanos, drawn almost exclusively from the wealthier classes and beyond suspicion in terms of their fidelity to Texas, but many Anglos considered their Mexican neighbors socially and intellectually inferior and by dint of their Catholicism, mindlessly devoted to the pope. Scholars have noted the southern roots of many of the state’s white migrants and suggested that their animosity toward Mexicans derived from the racist tenets of Herrenvolk democracy, characterized by a dim view of those not belonging to the supposed “master race.”11 Above all, white migrants and officials alike chafed at the simple fact that Mexicans possessed strong legal claims to the lands and resources of South Texas, rights that had been recognized first by the Spanish crown and later by the Republic of Mexico.12 Although much of the territory belonged to rich Tejanos, which was trouble enough for settlers and entrepreneurs, still

52  Andrew R. Graybill

other tracts were publicly held, established by Spain for communal use by the population of a given pueblo. After 1848, many Anglo-­Texan settlers south of the Nueces River knew that until they had wrested control of the lands along the Rio Grande from their ostensibly backwards owners, white dreams of profits generated by the commercial development of the Valley would never materialize. The combination of prejudice and economic ambition led Anglos in South Texas to create an oppressive sociopolitical system, the promises of Guadalupe Hidalgo notwithstanding. Tight white control of civic institutions, especially the legal establishment, conferred on Mexicans second-­ class citizenship at best, exposing them to repeated Anglo abuses, including double standards in the courts.13 One of the most violent episodes of this period, the so-­called Cart War of 1857, demonstrated conclusively the adverse conditions facing Mexicans in South Texas and the costs of their political powerlessness. Incensed by Mexican control of freight lines between San Antonio and the Gulf coast, a dominance achieved by the Mexicans’ assessment of lower rates, white teamsters initiated a brutal and largely unchecked campaign of violence against their Mexican rivals, forcing them to abandon the trade.14 None of the assailants suffered arrest or incarceration for the murders. Especially worrisome to Mexicans of the trans-­Nueces region was their accelerating land loss, facilitated by the imposition of a US legal culture foreign to and often hostile toward Texas Mexicans. Aided by shrewd Anglo attorneys such as Stephen Powers, a real estate lawyer specializing in Spanish and Mexican law, white merchants and entrepreneurs weakened Mexican property claims in South Texas with dramatic results.15 Between 1840 and 1860, for instance, all but one of the original Mexican land grants in Nueces County fell into Anglo hands.16 This shift suggests the disproportionate wealth and legal influence enjoyed by the small population of whites in South Texas at the expense of their much more numerous Mexican neighbors. The acquisition of vast tracts of territory, coupled with the dominance of commercial trade along the lower Rio Grande by men such as Kenedy, King, and their partner Charles Stillman, had made Tejanos “foreigners in their native land” by the early 1850s.17 Such circumstances kept racial tensions on a slow boil for the first decade after the US-­Mexico War, but they bubbled over in the summer of 1859. That July, Juan Cortina, the son of a wealthy landowning family, witnessed the abuse of one of his former employees at the hands of Brownsville’s white

Anglos, Mexicans, and Rangers 53 Figure 2.1. Juan N. Cortina, ca. 1864.

Courtesy, Jerry D. Thompson.

marshal, Bob Shears.18 Apparently, the Mexican ranchero was drunk and had mistreated the owner of a local coffee shop. In the process of arresting the man, Shears began to pistol-­whip him, prompting Cortina to interfere. When Cortina offered to take charge of the man, Shears reportedly asked Cortina, “What is it to you, you damned Mexican?” and refused to surrender the ranchero. At that point, Cortina shot the marshal, threw the ranchero onto the back of his horse, and rode out of town.19 With Shears’s recovery, the affair, however unsettling to whites of the lower Rio Grande Valley, might have ended without further incident. But Cortina had reached the breaking point after more than ten years of Anglo rule in South Texas, and he was not content to let the matter rest. He returned to Brownsville two months later with a large party of armed men; they killed four city residents, including two whom Cortina alleged had murdered Mexicans but suffered no punishment. From his mother’s ranch outside of town, Cortina then issued a proclamation that read in part, Our object, as you have seen, has been to chastise the villainy of our enemies, which heretofore has gone unpunished. These have connived with each other . . . to persecute and rob us . . . for no other crime on our part than that of being of Mexican origin. . . . To defend ourselves, and making use of the sacred right of self-­preservation, we have assembled in a popular meeting with a view of discussing a means by which to put an end to our misfortunes. . . . Our personal enemies shall not possess our lands until they have fattened it with their own gore.20

54  Andrew R. Graybill

Cortina’s wealth and stature had insulated him from many of the humiliations suffered by less fortunate Texas Mexicans and thus made him a seemingly unlikely insurgent. With this resolution, though, he attracted the support of hundreds of aggrieved Mexicans on both sides of the Rio Grande. For the next five months they controlled South Texas, burning the ranches of whites as well as those belonging to the Anglos’ wealthy Tejano allies. The Cortinistas (a term that here applies to Tejano combatants and sympathizers but should not be taken to include all or even most Mexicans in South Texas) soon found themselves opposed by the Texas Rangers, though it is worth noting that Ranger companies at this time served only on a temporary basis. A detachment of fifty men under the command of William Tobin arrived in Brownsville in early November and swiftly complicated matters by organizing the lynching of Tomás Cabrera, an elderly Cortina lieutenant who had been captured and thrown in jail.21 This action prolonged the conflict by provoking the rebels into further attacks and imbuing them with a renewed sense of purpose. Another Ranger squad led by the more disciplined John S. “Rip” Ford made a better showing, defeating the Cortinistas at Rio Grande City in late December and La Bolsa in early February.22 Ford’s men then crossed the Rio Grande and by March 1860 had driven Cortina’s “foreign horde” away from the border and deep into the interior of Mexico.23 Such actions met with the approval of Anglo-­Texans such as Brownsville Mayor Stephen Powers, who several months before had urged the governor to pursue a strategy of “pursuing [the Cortinistas] & hunting them down like wild beasts.”24 While this campaign effectively ended the war, Anglo losses were staggering; before their retreat, the Cortinistas had depopulated the area, disrupted trade for 240 miles along the Rio Grande from Laredo to Brownsville, and destroyed virtually all property belonging to whites, with damage estimates exceeding $330,000.25 The events of 1859–1860 terrified white Texans. Major Samuel P. Heintzelman, who commanded US Army troops in the area, captured the popular sentiment of Valley Anglos in a report submitted to Congress: “It is dangerous for Americans to settle near their boundary. . . . The industrious, enterprising, active race on one side cannot exist in such close proximity with the idle and vicious on the other without frequent collisions.”26 With the Cortina War, whites sensed for the first time since their occupation of the region both their profound vulnerability and the depth of Mexican frustration with their dispossession by the newcomers. Compounding white fears was the participation in the rebellion of a number of Mexicans from the south bank of the Rio Grande, many of whom considered the

Anglos, Mexicans, and Rangers 55

river an artificial border separating them capriciously from their families and friends on the American side.27 Anglo-­Texans in the trans-­Nueces, on the other hand, felt their own isolation acutely; Brownsville was more than 150 miles from Corpus Christi and nearly 300 miles from the perceived security of San Antonio. As whites slowly made their way back to the lower Rio Grande Valley after the Cortina War and resumed control of the lands of South Texas, they developed plans to turn a profit from their expansive real estate holdings by raising and selling cattle. Although Anglo-­Texan ranching began earlier in the century, the Civil War had prevented cattle drives and thus bottled up transport of Mexican longhorn cattle that numbered an estimated five million by 1866. Ranchers returning from Civil War battlefields scoured their pastures, gathering as many animals as possible to claim as their own.28 While this practice helped some Texans build vast herds, such acquisitions could not always offset the losses incurred by livestock raids, which became more brazen after the Civil War. For instance, when Richard King and Mifflin Kenedy began to count stock in 1866 in order to dissolve their famed partnership, they could account for fewer than one third of their estimated 167,000 cattle, charging that the rest, more than 100,000 head, had been driven off by thieves.29 Anglos blamed the thefts on Mexicans from both sides of the Rio Grande.30 Writing in his 1885 memoir, Ranger Rip Ford recalled that after the Civil War, “bad Mexicans who had been engaged with Cortina crossed into Texas and began depredating upon our people. They murdered men, robbed ranches, and were guilty of many cruel and atrocious acts.”31 To a certain extent, the old Ranger was correct; Mexicans had indeed raided Anglo ranches in South Texas and in the process had no doubt killed a number of white stockmen. In one of the more notorious incidents, Mexican raiders attacked Anglo settlements within several miles of Corpus Christi and a few weeks later burned five cattle ranches in the town’s vicinity. Moreover, there was plenty of evidence to suggest that Cortina, who had returned to the border region after the Civil War, was behind some of the thefts. Even the faraway New York Times declared in an editorial that Indians in Texas did not “do half the damage accomplished by the prince of bandits.”32 The question of theft was problematic, however, as many Mexicans in the Nueces Strip, a name for the area between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande, contended that the cattle actually belonged to them and had been illegally appropriated along with their land by white settlers. This, to be sure, was the perspective of John Kelsey, an Anglo who had lived in South Texas

56  Andrew R. Graybill

since the 1840s. Kelsey took issue with the findings of an 1872 US commission sent to investigate alleged depredations on the frontier and reported extensive cattle theft perpetrated primarily by Mexicans. While conceding that there were some “bad men” among the area’s Tejano population, Kelsey explained that such numbers were “in about the same proportion as in other parts of the United States.”33 He insisted that the report of the US commissioners was greatly exaggerated and reflected the influence of wealthy Rio Grande Valley capitalists such as King and Kenedy who were in fact the thieves, as they appropriated cattle from poorer whites and Mexicans alike and then blamed the thefts on Cortina. A committee sent by the Mexican government in 1873 to investigate the border troubles reached a conclusion similar to Kelsey’s.34 No less a figure than Walter Prescott Webb, an ardent defender of the Texas cattle barons, conceded that men like King and Kenedy had built their herds at least in part by branding the stock of displaced Mexicans.35 Clearly, it was difficult to determine in these cases exactly who was stealing from whom, and one’s perspective likely depended on ethnicity; whites suspected Mexicans, and vice versa. What is certain is that by the early 1870s the struggle between Anglo ranchers and Mexican “bandits,” a ubiquitous pejorative intended to discredit Mexican grievances, was at its base a bitter contest over resources. Or, in the words of a group of South Texas whites: “On the Rio Grande the decision will consign the country to Mexican bandits, or secure it to American settlers. It is abandonment on one side, and reconquest on the other. It is a contest between civilization and savagery.”36 As their losses exceeded an estimated $25 million, ranchers begged state officials in Austin to deliver them from so-­called Mexican depredations. Texas authorities turned to the Rangers to end the cattle raids allegedly perpetrated by Mexicans and to reassure anxious whites that South Texas was safe for Anglo settlement and commerce. In 1874 state lawmakers established the Special Force of Rangers, a single company charged with bringing order to the Nueces Strip.37 Their decision was an easy one, as the US soldiers in the state had no authority to make arrests and were thus concerned with Mexicans only to the extent that they posed a threat of armed invasion on the scale of the Cortina insurgency. Moreover, given the constant frictions along the border, officials in Washington were hesitant to risk an engagement using federal troops that might send an overly aggressive message to their counterparts in Mexico City. Meanwhile, local sheriffs along the Rio Grande had no power outside their small jurisdictions and were heavily occupied in their own localities anyway. The Rangers, who had achieved their greatest success, and notoriety for brutality, as a unit during the US-­

Anglos, Mexicans, and Rangers 57

Mexico War, once again seemed the obvious choice to shore up Anglo gains along the border.38 The Special Force was led by Captain Leander H. McNelly, a Virginian who had come to Texas in 1860 and later served with Confederate forces in Texas, New Mexico, and Louisiana during the Civil War. After the end of the conflict in 1865, McNelly joined the Reconstruction-­era state police, a short-­lived force that was hated by many white Texans for its efforts to protect African Americans from extrajudicial violence. A short man weakened by tuberculosis, McNelly had nevertheless earned a reputation as a ruthless solider, and he brought this quality to the Ranger company under his command.39 From the beginning, the preferred tactics of the Special Force in dealing with the Mexican population of South Texas featured intimidation, torture, and the liberal use of violence. George Durham, who served in the unit, later recalled that McNelly “said in so many words that all he wanted was dead bandits. He didn’t want prisoners. He didn’t want reports. . . . Captain said reports weren’t what bandits needed. He held that a well-­ placed bullet from a Sharps did more for law enforcement than a hundred reports.”40 As suggested by McNelly’s grim directive, the Rangers approached this struggle with a clear determination to exterminate suspected Mexican cattle thieves. And fueling their animosity was a deeply seated anti-­Mexican prejudice dating back to their involvement in the US-­Mexico War. During that conflict, Ranger companies behaved with such ferocity against Mexican soldiers and citizens alike that they became known as los diablos tejanos, the Texan devils. So objectionable was their conduct that US Army General Zachary Taylor ordered that no more troops from Texas be sent to Mexico. The Rangers’ experience in the Cortina War a decade later only hardened their hatred of Mexicans.41 Two Ranger engagements with Mexicans in 1875 underscore George Durham’s point about McNelly’s strategy. In the first of these, McNelly’s squad encountered a party of Mexicans on the Palo Alto prairie about ten miles north of the Rio Grande commanding a large herd of cattle allegedly stolen from white ranchers. The Rangers attacked them without warning, and McNelly later explained to the adjutant general, “Not one [of the Mexicans] escaped out of the twelve that were driving the cattle. They were all killed.” Their bodies, along with those of three other Mexicans dispatched earlier in the skirmish, were collected and stacked in the plaza at Brownsville as a warning to other would-­be rustlers.42 The Rangers recovered 216 head of cattle, many bearing Texas brands, and returned them to their owners.43 For their part, Mexicans in the Valley were incensed by the slaughter and the

58  Andrew R. Graybill

attention lavished by Brownsville’s white residents on L. B. “Berry” Smith, the one Ranger who died in the engagement. Margarito Vetencourt, a friend of one of the dead Mexicans, insisted that the victims “had been unjustly killed and fouly murdered . . . by the State troops.”44 Five months later, McNelly learned that Mexicans had herded approximately 250 cattle to the south bank of the Rio Grande, again, all of them supposedly stolen from Texas ranchers. Against the advice of Major D. R. Clendenin, the senior US Army official at nearby Ringgold Barracks, McNelly forded the river with a squad of thirty men on the night of November 18, 1875.45 Acting on a tip, at dawn the following day the Rangers attacked the Las Cachuttas ranch, cutting down at least five men inside the compound.46 It was only after the skirmish that McNelly learned he had charged the wrong stockade; his intended target, the Cuevas ranch, was a half-­mile farther along the trail.47 Rounding up his men, McNelly quickly made his way to Las Cuevas, but the Rangers had lost the element of surprise, and a party of 250 Mexican ranch hands chased the Texans for several miles to the bank of the river. There, instead of crossing back into the United States, McNelly ordered his men to dig in and prepare to fight the Mexicans, who outnumbered them nearly ten to one, on their own soil. Surveying the situation from the north side of the Rio Grande and fearing that the Rangers would be wiped out, a US Army detachment crossed over to cover the Rangers with a Gatling gun, enraging officials on both sides of the river.48 Incredibly, McNelly was able to bluff the Mexicans into returning sixty-­five head of cattle, which he delivered personally to Richard King.49 Such escapades served well the Anglo ranchers of the Nueces Strip, none more than King, who along with several prominent South Texans outfitted McNelly’s squad and lavished gifts and supplies on them. Several weeks before the June fight at Palo Alto, McNelly wrote the adjutant general from King’s massive Santa Gertrudis ranch explaining that he could not yet move against the Mexican raiders as he was “waiting for some horses kindly furnished by the stock men of this section.”50 Before the November invasion of Mexico, members of the Special Force stayed as guests at the ranch, and when they returned driving cattle marked with the King brand, the grateful owner wrote McNelly a $1,500 check, from which the captain distributed $50 to each man.51 King then threw a banquet for the squad and had his daughters bake them a cake decorated with the inscription “Compliments of the two Miss Kings to the McNelly Rangers.” As a final gesture of appreciation and one certain to reap future rewards, King presented the company

Anglos, Mexicans, and Rangers 59

a few weeks later with “thirty spanking new 44–40 Winchester repeater carbines and several thousand rounds of shells.”52 Armed engagements with alleged Mexican thieves were not the only means employed by the Special Force to tame the Nueces Strip. The Rangers directed their efforts against the larger Mexican community, becoming, in effect, an occupation force in post-­Civil War South Texas. Facilitating this duty was their reflexive view of Mexicans as criminals. Webb once explained to a colleague at the University of Texas, “To a Ranger [in this period], anyone with an olive skin, black eyes, black hair and a hint of a Mexican accent must be guilty of something illegal, presumably murder, robbery, cattle-­rustling, or invasion.”53 Such beliefs led to practices like Captain Warren Wallace’s system of mandatory registration in Nueces and Duval Counties that even he conceded was illegal. Hoping to “fix the habitation” of all Mexicans in the region in order to monitor the movements of suspected cattle thieves, Wallace and a small detachment of Rangers visited every ranch in the area in the summer of 1874 and recorded the names of all Mexican residents. Mexicans, however, lodged so many complaints of “unlawful and outrageous conduct” against Wallace and his men that officials in Austin soon disbanded the company. Among their grievances was Wallace’s alleged use of la ley fuga, the fugitive law, in which law enforcement officers shot a suspect “in the act of escape.” Wallace himself admitted that he used torture to obtain confessions and intelligence.54 Still more effective perhaps in lessening the Mexican hold on South Texas cattle were the organized campaigns of intimidation launched by the police. As Ranger N. A. Jennings explained, members of the force in the mid-­1870s would visit border towns—even crossing into Mexico—in order “to carry out a set policy of terrorizing the residents at every opportunity,” believing that “the more we were feared, the easier would be our work of subduing the Mexican raiders.” Jennings noted that: “If we could find a fandango, or Mexican dance, going on, we would enter the dancing-­hall and break up the festivities by shooting out the lights. This would naturally result in much confusion and, added to the reports of our revolvers, would be the shrill screaming of women and the cursing of angry Mexicans.” These operations had the desired effect, for “in a few weeks we were feared as men were never before feared on that border.”55 This practice only came to end when a single Ranger, drunk on mescal, attempted to close down a Brownsville fandango all by himself and had to be rescued by six of his comrades, who clubbed the enraged partygoers with the butts of their guns.

60  Andrew R. Graybill

Ranger abuses not only turned the Mexican community against them but also drew the attention and reprobation of federal observers. A congressional inquiry of the late 1870s into the troubles along the Texas frontier determined that the Rangers regularly used torture in gathering intelligence or coercing confessions from suspected Mexican brigands. A military officer stationed in South Texas explained, “The State troops . . . resorted to means of extorting information, which, if it had been adopted by the United States troops, would have led them into serious troubles, probably a trial before the courts.”56 In the final analysis, the Special Force was highly successful in meeting its objective, namely, the eradication of livestock theft by Mexicans and the defense of expanding Anglo cattle interests in South Texas.57 A historian of the Rio Grande Valley has argued that “probably the most effective single factor [in ending the cattle raids] was the appearance on the frontier of the Texas Rangers under Captain L. H. McNelly in the summer of 1875.”58 Statistics from the period lend credence to this claim. Ranchers in the trans-­ Nueces claimed loss by theft of an estimated 900,000 head of livestock between 1869 and 1874, while the Texas adjutant general, who reported such figures assiduously in the hopes of increased appropriations for the Rangers, listed only 1,160 cattle stolen between September 1873 and 1875 and a negligible number thereafter.59 While men like Richard King benefited from this Ranger assistance, South Texas Mexicans paid a heavy price.60 Looking back on his service under McNelly, George Durham recalls, “I’d come to Texas to get me a piece of ground, maybe a few head of stock, build me a house. But what I’d really done was hire out at thirty-­three dollars a month to kill people. That’s all I’d done. Kill people.”61 Even after the risk of cattle theft had waned, the Rangers continued to defend with brute force the interests of the Anglo elite in South Texas, a strategy that embroiled the constabulary in a 1902 episode that became something of a cause célèbre among Mexican residents. In May that year, Ranger Sergeant A. Y. Baker and two policemen were scouting for thieves on the outskirts of the King Ranch when Baker discovered Ramón de la Cerda, an opponent of King Ranch expansion, illegally branding a steer. Both men fired at the same time, and de la Cerda was killed. Given that Baker escaped unharmed, although de la Cerda’s bullet felled his horse, the event exacerbated simmering racial tensions in the area. Complicating the situation was that members of the King family and several other leading Anglos pledged their support for Baker, and the results of an unofficial inquest into the killing suggested that de la Cerda had been bound and dragged before his death.

Anglos, Mexicans, and Rangers 61

Such circumstances nourished Mexican resentment throughout the summer, and on September 9, Ranger Emmet Roebuck was killed when he, Baker, and a King Ranch employee were waylaid en route to Brownsville. Baker was wounded in the leg but survived. Ramón de la Cerda’s nineteen-­ year-­old brother Alfredo, who had threatened to kill Baker while the Ranger was released on bond, was among the five primary suspects in the ambush. Less than a month later, Baker killed Alfredo de la Cerda in a Brownsville store, claiming self-­defense, although it was never determined whether de la Cerda was armed.62 In what seems to have been an act of quiet protest, someone sent a copy of the younger de la Cerda’s formal death notice to Governor Joseph D. Sayers.63 Nevertheless, to the outrage of Valley Mexicans, a Brownsville court released Baker on bond and acquitted him of murder the following year, evidently satisfied by his account of the shooting.64 Tejano despair only deepened during the opening decades of the twentieth century. One measure of their resentment emerged in the corrido, a style of narrative folk song or ballad unique to the Rio Grande border that developed in the years after the US-­Mexico War. Given the inequities in South Texas and the role of the Rangers in their perpetuation, it is no surprise that the rinches were often the subject of such tunes. In numerous songs Mexicans trumpet the heroism of otherwise peaceful men driven to violence by an unjust and racist system, while jeering at the police lackeys of an expanding capitalist state. The final stanza from “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez” celebrates the title character’s epic 1901 flight from Anglo law enforcement officers: “Then said Gregorio Cortez / With his pistol in his hand / ‘Ah, so many mounted Rangers / Just to take one Mexican!’ ”65 The nadir for Tejanos came during the decade of the Mexican Revolution when the Rangers helped to crush the irredentist Plan de San Diego insurrection that erupted in South Texas in 1915. This rebellion called for the creation of an independent republic from the lands taken from Mexico by the United States after 1848 and the killing of all white males over the age of sixteen.66 Aided in their work by armed vigilance committees, the Rangers killed hundreds, perhaps thousands of Mexicans, the overwhelming majority of whom had no connection to the uprising. Only then did officials in Austin yield to Mexican demands for an investigation of Ranger tactics in South Texas more formal and extensive than any conducted in previous years. The findings of the commission headed by J. T. Canales, a descendant of Juan Cortina, would not have surprised Mexicans living throughout Texas but especially south of the Nueces, with its reports of pistol whippings, torture, extrajudicial murders, and other abuses of power.67 But by that point, the transition in Texas from Mexican to Anglo rule was com-

62  Andrew R. Graybill

plete, epitomized by the size of the King Ranch, which would grow eventually to more than 825,000 acres. Notes 1. In “Conversations with the Captain,” Texas Observer, June 9, 1967, 23. Rinche is a derogatory Mexican slang term for the Rangers. For more on the Rangers and their relation to farmworkers in the 1960s, see John Weber, From South Texas to the Nation: The Exploitation of Mexican Labor in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). For a consideration of the historical origins of Mexican agro-­industrial labor in the Rio Grande Valley, see Timothy P. Bowman, Blood Oranges: Colonialism and Agriculture in the South Texas Borderlands (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2016). 2. Charles M. Robinson III, The Men Who Wear the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (New York: Random House, 2000). 3. I have followed David Montejano’s example and used “Mexican” to refer to both Texas Mexicans and Mexicans born south of the Rio Grande, except at moments when I have found it necessary to emphasize national origin. See David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), 10. “Tejano” refers exclusively to Texas-­born Mexicans. 4. There has been some debate about the relation between the Special Force and the Texas Rangers because the unit was originally formed as Washington County Volunteer Militia Company A. However, as the company served under the direction of the state’s adjutant general and its members considered themselves Rangers, most historians—including this author—have done so as well. See Robinson, Men Who Wear the Star, 182; Robert M. Utley, Lone Star Justice: The First Century of the Texas Rangers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 158. The other unit was the Frontier Battalion, which served simultaneously to subjugate Native Americans in the central, northern, and western parts of the state. For a historical interpretation that considers the hostile Anglo perspective toward nonwhite peoples more generally, see Gary Clayton Anderson, The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820–1875 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005). 5. Again following Montejano’s lead, I use “Anglo” and “white” interchangeably to describe Anglo-­American and European immigrant peoples in Texas (Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 10). For more on Austin, see Gregg Cantrell, Stephen F. Austin: Empresario of Texas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). 6. Robert B. Vezzetti, “Steamboats on the Lower Rio Grande in the 19th Century,” in Studies in Brownsville History, ed. Milo Kearney (Brownsville, Texas: Pan American University Press, 1986), 78. 7. Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 31. Following the American victory in 1848, Mexicans living in territory ceded to the United States were given one year to decide between two options: they could either liquidate their property holdings and move to Mexico, or they could choose to become American citizens. Those remaining in US territory after one year were considered to have elected US citizenship; David J. Weber, Foreigners in their Native Land: Historical Roots of the Mexican Americans (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973), 143. For more on the treaty and its histori-

Anglos, Mexicans, and Rangers 63

cal implications, see Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990). 8. For a reconsideration of popular and academic scholarship on the events of 1835– 1836, see James E. Crisp, Sleuthing the Alamo: Davy Crockett’s Last Stand and Other Mysteries of the Texas Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 9. Arnoldo De León, They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes towards Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), 49–53. See also Rosalie Schwartz, Across the River to Freedom: U.S. Negroes in Mexico (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1975); Sarah Cornell, “Citizens of Nowhere: Fugitive Slaves and Free African Americans in Mexico, 1833–1857,” Journal of American History 100, no. 2 (September 2013): 351–374; James David Nichols, The Limits of Liberty: Mobility and the Making of the Eastern U.S.-­Mexico Border (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018). For more on Guerrero, see Theodore G. Vincent, The Legacy of Vicente Guerrero, Mexico’s First Black Indian President (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001). For a thorough consideration of the importation of the cotton-­slavery complex into Texas, see Andrew J. Torget, Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800–1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). 10. De León, They Called Them Greasers, xi. 11. José Limón, American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1998), 11–13; Weber, Foreigners in Their Native Land, 152. For more on the roots and ideology of the Herrenvolk, see George M. Frederickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). 12. For a study of differing Anglo and Mexican notions of property, see María E. Montoya, Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict over Land in the American West, 1840–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 13. For context, see Arnoldo De León and Kenneth L. Stewart, Tejanos and the Numbers Game: A Socio-­Historical Interpretation from the Federal Censuses, 1850–1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989). 14. De León, They Called Them Greasers, 83–84. 15. Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 41–74. Armando C. Alonzo has challenged Montejano’s claims, arguing that Mexican land loss in Texas only accelerated in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; Tejano Legacy: Rancheros and Settlers in South Texas, 1734–1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998). While this may have been true for many wealthy Mexicans, it seems clear that the majority of small landowners and more than a few of the landed elite as well suffered significant dispossession by white lawyers immediately following the midcentury war. The bitter, thirty-­year legal battle of 1849–1879 surrounding the Espíritu Santo land grant, which Anglos had illegally appropriated in order to found the town of Brownsville, is but one example of such legal chicanery (“Brownsville Town Tract Litigation, 1849–1879,” box 2-­23/214, folder 6, Harbert Davenport Collection, Texas State Library and Archives [cited hereafter as TSLA]). 16. Albert Camarillo and Pedro Castillo, Furia y muerte: Los bandidos chicanos (Los Angeles: Aztlán, 1973), 7–8. 17. Weber, Foreigners in Their Native Land. 18. The conflict, still vividly recounted along the border, has been treated in a number of secondary works, most of a deeply partisan nature. Lyman L. Woodman’s Cor-

64  Andrew R. Graybill

tina: Rogue of the Rio Grande (San Antonio: Naylor, 1950) reflects the Anglo perspective of the events, condemning Cortina as an opportunistic murderer. Charles W. Goldfinch, Juan N. Cortina: A Reappraisal (1949; New York: Arno, 1974), and José T. Canales, Juan N. Cortina Presents His Motion for a New Trial (1951; New York: Arno, 1974) adopt a much more sympathetic approach, seeing in Cortina’s rebellion the culmination of a decade of Mexican frustrations following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. For a view of the conflict through the eyes of a US Army officer, see Jerry D. Thompson, ed., Fifty Miles and a Fight: Major Samuel Peter Heintzelman’s Journal of Texas and the Cortina War (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1998). See also Jerry D. Thompson, ed., Juan Cortina and the Texas-­Mexico Frontier (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1994), and especially his biography Cortina: Defending the Mexican Name in Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007). 19. Goldfinch, Juan N. Cortina, 42. 20. US Congress, Difficulties on the Southwestern Frontier, House Executive Document 52, 36th Congress, 1st Session (1860), 70–72, emphasis in original. 21. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Texas led the nation in the lynching of Mexicans between 1848 and 1928, accounting for 282 of the 597 reported victims of such crimes. It is important to note that both of these figures are conservative estimates. See Wil­ liam D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, “The Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin or Descent in the United States, 1848–1928,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 411–438, figures from page 415. See also their co-­authored monograph, Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) and their contribution to this volume. 22. For more see John Salmon Ford, Rip Ford’s Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987). 23. For the best description of Ranger involvement in the Cortina War, see Robert M. Utley, Lone Star Justice: The First Century of the Texas Rangers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 107–119. Ford had a complex relationship with Cortina, described by historian Jerry Thompson as “love-­hate.” Although the Ranger captain inveighed against Cortina in his 1885 memoir, he also took credit in the same volume for having saved his adversary from a Mexican firing squad in the mid-­1870s; Thompson, Juan Cortina, 2–3. For Ford’s reference to the Cortinistas as a “foreign horde,” see J. S. Ford to Governor Runnels, November 22, 1859, vol. IV, box 2R291, Walter Prescott Webb Papers (cited hereafter as Webb Papers), Center for American History at the University of Texas, Austin (cited hereafter as CAH). 24. Stephen Powers to Governor Runnels, October 23, 1859, vol. IV, box 2R291, Webb Papers, CAH. 25. Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 32–33. For damage estimates, see US Congress, Troubles on the Texas Frontier, House Executive Document 81, 36th Congress, 1st Session (1860), 77. 26. US Congress, Troubles on the Texas Frontier, 14. 27. For more on such communities, see Omar Valerio-­Jiménez, River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 28. Ernest Staples Osgood, The Day of the Cattleman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 27–33.

Anglos, Mexicans, and Rangers 65

29. John D. Young and J. Frank Dobie, A Vaquero of the Brush Country: The Life and Times of John D. Young (1929; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 56. 30. For broader context, see Alice Baumgartner, “The Line of Positive Safety: Borders and Boundaries in the Rio Grande Valley,” Journal of American History 104, no. 4 (March 2015): 1106–1122. 31. Ford, Rip Ford’s Texas, 408. 32. “An Irrepressible Bandit,” New York Times, October 14, 1874. 33. John P. Kelsey, “A Statement of Facts Respecting the Reports about Cattle and Hide Stealing upon the Rio Grande by Citizens of Mexico, and Respecting the Report of the US Commissioners to Texas, Appointed under Joint Resolution of Congress, May 7, 1872,” in Western Americana: Frontier History of the Trans-­Mississippi West, 1550– 1900 (New Haven, CT: Research Publications, 1975), 3. The report is Depredations on the Frontiers of Texas, 42nd Congress, 3rd session (1872), no. 39, 1–63. 34. Mexico, Report of the Committee of Investigation Sent in 1873 by the Mexican Government to the Frontier of Texas, translated from the official edition (New York: Baker & Godwin, 1875), 27–32. It is important to note that this report was deeply partisan in nature, like many of the contemporaneous US congressional investigations of trouble along the Texas-­Mexico border including Depredations on the Frontiers of Texas. 35. Llerena B. Friend, “W. P. Webb’s Texas Rangers,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 74, no. 3 ( January 1971), 321. 36. Memorial to the Hon. E. B. Pickett, president of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Texas, November 24, 1875, box 401–393, folder 15, General Correspondence (cited hereafter as GC), Adjutant General Records (cited hereafter as AGR), TSLA. 37. Robinson, Men Who Wear the Star, 182–183; Utley, Lone Star Justice, 157–159. 38. Utley, Lone Star Justice, 57–86. For wider context on atrocities committed by US troops in Mexico during the conflict, see Paul Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair: Soldiers and Social Conflict during the Mexican-­American War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). See also Amy S. Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico (New York: Knopf, 2012), and Peter Guardino, The Dead March: A History of the Mexican-­American War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). 39. For more on McNelly, see Robinson, Men Who Wear the Star, 182–183; Wilkins, The Law Comes to Texas: The Texas Rangers, 1870–1901 (Austin: State House, 1999), 84–87. For a full-­length biographical study, see Chuck Parsons and Marianne E. Hall Little, Captain L. H. McNelly, Texas Ranger: The Life and Times of a Fighting Man (Austin: State House, 2001). 40. George Durham, as told to Clyde Wantland, Taming the Nueces Strip: The Story of McNelly’s Rangers (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962), 130. 41. Michael L. Collins, Texas Devils: Rangers and Regulars on the Lower Rio Grande, 1846–1861 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012). 42. L. H. McNelly to William Steele, June 1875, emphasis in the original, box 2Q400, folio 8, Texas Adjutant General Records (cited hereafter as TAGR), CAH. There are conflicting reports on the total numbers of Mexicans killed in the battle and displayed afterward in the square. Durham reports the actual tally as sixteen (Taming the Nueces Strip, 76), while the Brownsville city marshal said he had collected only

66  Andrew R. Graybill

eight bodies, “all we could find, though not all that were killed” (testimony of Joseph P. O’Shaunessy before F. J. Parker, US Circuit Court, Eastern District of Texas, June 16, 1875, box 2Q400, folio 8, TAGR, CAH.) The numbers cited in text reflect McNelly’s version of events. 43. Notice from the Office of the Inspector of Hides and Animals at Brownsville, June 17, 1875, box 2Q400, folio 8, TAGR, CAH. 44. For his part, Vetencourt was charged with making threats and attempting to assault a Brownsville resident, and because he could not pay the $500 bond, he was committed to the county jail; transcript in Justice Court, Precinct No. 2, Cameron County, Texas, June 16 and 18, 1875, box 2Q400, folio 8, TAGR, CAH. 45. In 2004, nearly 130 years after his death, McNelly was tried by students in a mock trial at Baylor University law school for his invasion of Mexico and found “mostly not guilty” by the members of the jury (“Texas Ranger Facing Trial for 1875 Incident,” Waco Tribune, May 8, 2004). 46. Utley explains that other participants in the raid estimated the dead at five or six times this number (Lone Star Justice, 166). 47. Walter Prescott Webb, The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense (1935; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), 263–265. 48. Diego García, mayor of Camargo, Tamaulipas, wrote to Sergeant John H. Wilkinson of the 8th US Cavalry that the crossing of the US troops “infringes upon the laws and friendly relations existing between the United States and Mexico,” and he insisted that the American forces withdraw (Diego García to J. H. Wilkinson, November 19, 1875, box 2-­23/963, GC, AGR, TSLA). On the US side, Colonel J. H. Potter, acting on direct orders from Washington, wrote from Fort Brown to demand McNelly’s retreat and prohibit further army assistance ( J. H. Potter to A. J. Alexander, telegram, November 20, 1875, box 2-­23/963, GC, AGR, TSLA). 49. L. H. McNelly to William Steele, telegram, November 22, 1875, box 401-­393, folder 10, GC, AGR, TSLA. 50. L. H. McNelly to William Steele, May 1875, box 2Q400, folio 8, TAGR, CAH. 51. N. A. Jennings, A Texas Ranger (1899; Chicago: Lakeside, 1992), 211. King continued to serve as McNelly’s benefactor even after the Ranger captain’s death, fronting the $3,000 needed to construct McNelly’s tomb in Mt. Zion cemetery in Burton, Texas (“The Fall of a Lawman and His Tomb,” Dallas Morning News, February 10, 2002). 52. Durham, Taming the Nueces Strip, 134 (quote); Webb, Texas Rangers, 278. 53. The quotation comes from the foreword by Joe B. Frantz to Ben Procter, Just One Riot: Episodes of the Texas Rangers in the Twentieth Century (Austin: Eakin, 1991), viii. 54. Wallace noted that he instituted this practice “without authority of law” (Warren Wallace to William Steele, August 22, 1874, box 2Q400, folio 8, TAGR, CAH). See also Warren Wallace to William Steele, August 21, 1874, CAH, TAGR, box 2Q400, folio 8; Utley, Lone Star Justice, 161. 55. Jennings, Texas Ranger, 151–152. 56. US Congress, Texas Border Troubles, House Miscellaneous Document 64, 45th Congress, 2nd Session (1878), 130–131. 57. To be sure, Utley takes a different view, arguing that the Mexican government’s forced exile of Cortina to the interior of Mexico was the real reason the raids came to

Anglos, Mexicans, and Rangers 67

an end (Lone Star Justice, 167–168). I find this unpersuasive for several reasons. First, Utley himself notes only a few pages earlier that “the mere presence of Rangers curtailed the depredations of stock thieves,” making explicit mention of the activities of Wallace, among others (161). More importantly, Cortina, while certainly the most powerful raider along the border, was hardly the only individual bent on (re)claiming Texas cattle. Thus the almost total disappearance of Mexican cattle raids after the mid-­ 1870s cannot be explained simply by his absence from the frontier. 58. LeRoy P. Graf, “The Economic History of the Lower Rio Grande Valley, 1820– 1875” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1942), 644. 59. The figure of 900,000 comes from the introduction by Ben Procter to the reissue of N. A. Jennings’s memoir, Texas Ranger, xxxiii. The smaller number can be found in the Special Report of the Adjutant-­General of the State of Texas, September 1884 (Austin, TX: State Printer, 1884), appendix. 60. South Texas was not the only site of conflict between Mexicans and the Rangers. In 1877, the two groups collided near El Paso when an Anglo lawyer tried to privatize a group of salt lakes used communally for generations by local Mexicans (Paul Cool, Salt Warriors: Insurgency on the Rio Grande [College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008]). 61. Durham, Taming the Nueces Strip, 127. 62. J. A. Brooks to Thomas Scurry, May 18, 1902, box 401-­469, folder 1, GC, AGR, TSLA; J. A. Brooks to Thomas Scurry, June 2, 1902, box 2R289, vol. XV, Webb Papers, CAH; J. A. Brooks to Thomas Scurry, October 4, 1902, box 401-­472, folder 17, GC, AGR, TSLA. 63. The notice is wrenching, as it mentions “su inconsolable madre,” his inconsolable mother (Death notice for Alfredo de la Cerda, October 4, 1902, box 401-­472, folder 18, GC, AGR, TSLA). 64. Utley, among others, has argued that the Rangers’ actions were justified by self-­ defense (Lone Star Justice, 276–277). While this interpretation is difficult either to sustain or to refute, evidence abounds of provocative police behavior in the Brownsville area before and after the events, lending credence to Mexican skepticism of the Ranger version. First, Baker admitted that on the day he killed Ramón de la Cerda, he had accosted Reyes Silguero and left him tied to a tree for thirty-­six hours, believing that he was a cattle thief; in fact, Silguero was a fence-­rider for the King Ranch. Moreover, after Baker’s June examining trial, Ranger Captain J. A. Brooks conceded that he had beaten the leader of a crowd that had gathered to jeer Baker, and following Baker’s October arraignment in the death of Alfredo de la Cerda, Brooks wrote candidly to the adjutant general that owing to the ill will of the Mexicans, “I am satisfied that we will be compelled to kill some of these people to protect ourselves.” Finally, the Mexican ambassador to the United States was so concerned by the events that he mentioned the case specifically in a letter to the US State Department complaining of Ranger excesses (adjutant general to Joseph D. Sayers, November 11, 1902, box 2R289, vol. XV, Webb Papers, CAH; J. A. Brooks to Thomas Scurry, June 20, 1902, box 401-­472, folder 16, GC, AGR, TSLA; J. A. Brooks to Thomas Scurry, October 5, 1902, box 401-­472, folder 17, GC, AGR, TSLA; Mexican ambassador to US State Department [translation], February 11, 1904, vol. XVI [enclosed in letter from John Hay to Governor of Texas, February 16, 1904], box 2R289, Webb Papers, CAH; undated and untitled document of charges against the Rangers, box 2R289, vol. XV, Webb Papers, CAH).

68  Andrew R. Graybill

65. Américo Paredes, “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), 3; Américo Paredes, A Texas-­Mexican Cancionero: Folksongs of the Lower Border (1976; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995). Cortez became a hero to many Tejanos for resisting arrest in 1901 on a charge of horse theft during which he killed a white sheriff and fled. This prompted a huge manhunt that ended in the apprehension of Cortez just miles from the Rio Grande. He was sentenced to life in prison but received a pardon in 1913 and died three years later at age forty. For his part, Paredes, who spent almost his entire career as a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, nursed a deep skepticism of the Rangers that lasted until his death in 1999. See “Don Graham’s Texas Classics: Border Skirmish,” Texas Monthly, January 2000, 26. 66. See James Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and the Plan of San Diego, 1904–1923 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), and especially Ben­ jamin H. Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). 67. For more on Canales, see Richard H. Ribb, “José Tomás Canales and the Texas Rangers: Myth, Identity, and Power in South Texas, 1900–1920,” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2001); Monica Muñoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-­Mexican Violence in Texas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), especially 182–216.

CHAPTER 3

Texas in Four Parts: The Bordered World of 1919 Walter L. Buenger

Despite scholars’ admirable efforts, Texas history often remains one-­ dimensional and static. Texas might be conceptualized instead in evolving sets of four, at least for 1919, when four distinct cultural groups lived in four varied regions. Distinction from one another, however, did not mean separation or lack of connections between groups and places. Adaptation, imitation, and resistance characterized the interactions between these groups and the regions where they lived as World War I and its aftermath accelerated long-­running changes.1 Texas as a whole and José Tomás ( J. T.) Canales in particular were moving haltingly and incompletely from a world of more distinctive groups and diverse regions toward a more uniform reality.2 Once historians abandoned the classic version of Texas history that celebrated elite Anglo males, they still often focused primarily on one region and one demographic group: men, women, rich, poor, Indian, Anglo, Tejana/o, African American, German Texan, or Czech Texan. That kind of narrow focus obscures the totality of the past and the influences that shaped each group. By 1850 Anglos, whose culture usually could be traced back to the US South and before that to the United Kingdom, were the largest and dominant group in Texas as a whole. Yet even then and much more so by 1919 in some counties of the state they were fewer in number than one or more of the other major cultural groups: African Americans, ethnic Mexicans including longtime Tejano families residing in Texas and recent immigrants from Mexico, and ethnic Europeans. Indian presence in Texas had shrunk to indigenous control of a few thousand acres, and while they still played a role through the power of myth and memory, the other groups had a much more direct impact on twentieth-­century Texas culture. In all areas of Texas, the rubbing together of two or more groups had from the beginning of their

70  Walter L. Buenger

encountering each other changed each group’s nature and altered the outcomes of events. In other words, the size and combinations of groups set the tone for the four specific regions of Texas in 1919: eastern Texas, western Texas, southern Texas, and central Texas. In every region except central Texas one or two groups predominated, but all four cultural groups lived in that mid-­ region. To the extent that Anglos were Anglo-Texans and not simply southern whites, that Tejanas/os were not mexicanos or for that matter not simply identical to all Latinos, that descendants of German or Czech immigrants were German Texans and Czech Texans, and African Americans were Black Texans, it was largely because of being part of a particular cultural and demographic mix not found elsewhere.3 Significant sharing between groups had quickened by 1919, creating a more uniform Texas identity, especially among elites. Canales and other Tejanos shared that emerging identity and helped create it. For Tejanos and other Texans, this faster pace of change meant cultural adaptation and borrowing, but it also meant cracks in the hegemony of Anglo elites that allowed resistance. Remembering that Canales joined the Presbyterian Church in the 1890s and supported Prohibition, both originally Anglo cultural traits, highlights the nature of this process. His adaptation and imitation, position between cultural groups, and numerous ties to prominent Anglo elites partially explained his success in resisting and publicizing the abuse of ethnic Mexicans. He could not be labeled a total outsider by Anglos.4 Focusing on demographic trends from 1887 to 1930, on environmental factors and market-­based agriculture, on music, on World War I, on politics, and on memory places Canales and other Texans in the context of Texas in four moving parts.5 Four Groups and Four Regions, 1887–1930 Too much has been made of Texas exceptionalism, but in the years between the compilation of the incredibly detailed state census of 1887 and the equally detailed 1930 US Census, the size and nature of the distinct cultural groups in Texas set it apart from Mexico and the US states on its borders. Texas as a whole in those years had a smaller percentage of African Americans than Louisiana and Arkansas; a larger percentage of African Americans than Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Mexico; a larger percentage of Anglos with cultural roots in the American South than New Mexico and Mexico; a larger percentage of Europeans, especially German

Texas in Four Parts 71

and Czech speakers, than all areas on its borders; and a larger percentage of Spanish speakers than Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. As the cultural geographer Terry G. Jordan put it, Texas lay “astride a fundamental culturo-­ linguistic divide.”6 Still, ascribing that divide to the entire state oversimplifies the reality of Texas. Despite all the cultural mixing of the previous decades, Texans in 1919 still lived in cultural islands partially shaped by where they and their ancestors came from. East of a line from Fort Worth to Houston most counties resembled, both culturally and demographically, states from Tennessee south to the Gulf Coast. South of a line from Corpus Christi to San Antonio and on to El Paso, the Anglo population had recently increased, but the region still culturally and demographically resembled northern Mexico. West of a line from Fort Worth to a hundred miles due west of San Antonio, Anglos predominated, but they were Anglos who brought to the region the cultures of the South and the Midwest. Between those three regions and between the emerging cities of Dallas, San Antonio, and Houston lay a remarkably heterogeneous world of Anglos, African Americans, ethnic Europeans, and ethnic Mexicans. There lay the true “culturo-­linguistic divide” that forced all Texans to accommodate a bordered reality. When debating a statewide issue such as Prohibition, voting for a state officeholder such as the governor, advocating reform, conducting business outside their regions, and in a host of other ways, Texans encountered a bordered world. To add to this complex picture, each of the groups and regions changed after 1887. Before that year, cultural differences separated Anglos from the Upper South, Lower South, and the Mountain South from each other, and all these Anglo subgroups differed dramatically from whites from the North. After 1887, however, Anglos largely morphed into two groups: southern Anglo and northern Anglo.7 Anglos from all regions of the South grew closer together after the Civil War as railroads enabled the cultivation of cotton, a definitive feature of the Lower South, in more counties and as a flood of Anglos from the Lower South poured into all of Texas, encouraging imitation of the features of their culture. This increasingly amalgamated group of southern Anglos reached their highest percentage of the total population about 1887 but declined as a part of the whole after that. Meanwhile, northern Anglos migrated to Texas at a faster rate, meaning Anglos as a whole remained over 60 percent of the state’s total population, but more of them were from the North.8 Moreover, these Anglos from outside the South clustered in southern Texas and western Texas. By 1919, rapid growth and bright economic prospects also attracted Anglos from the North to Texas cities. Anglos from the South moved to these places as well,

72  Walter L. Buenger

and they remained the largest single migration stream to the state. The mix simply changed, leading to new realities.9 African Americans’ population distribution also changed between 1887 and 1930 as they left rural and small-­town Texas and moved out of state or to larger Texas cities, especially Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio. Thus, many rural counties lost African American population, and the overall proportion of African Americans in the state declined from about 20 percent of the population in 1887 to 15 percent in 1930. As with Anglos, by 1930 a significant percentage of those African Americans represented a new cultural type. Afro-­Creoles from southwestern Louisiana moved to Texas cities in large numbers during and after World War I, creating more bifurcated African American communities in a place like Houston. As the number of African Americans grew in urban centers, so did their dominance of particular neighborhoods where, ironically, segregation fostered the growth of African American businesses, a larger Black middle class, and a more cosmopolitan culture.10 Ethnic Europeans, meanwhile, remained dominant in some rural areas of the state. Starting in the 1840s, large numbers of Europeans immigrated to Texas, and as late as 1919, especially in rural areas, they along with their children and grandchildren still primarily spoke their ancestral languages and retained their traditional religious affiliations. To some extent religion, language, and other cultural characteristics divided Europeans by their areas of origin. Yet they had more in common with other Europeans than with non-­ Europeans. If they married outside of their language groups, they usually married partners from another European ethnic group, and if they were Catholics they often attended the same churches. German speakers made up more than 50 percent of the European population, and Czech speakers were the second-­largest group. Most European countries contributed to the Texas population, and census records confirm that the overwhelming majority of ethnic European Texans lived in the central region. German Texans alone dominated ten counties in that area. The detailed state census of 1887 indicates that European Texans made up about 11 percent of the total Texas population and including the third generation, they remained near that level in 1930.11 In comparison, ethnic Mexicans made up only about 4 percent of the Texas population in 1887, but in the 1890s and increasingly in the new century, waves of immigrants from Mexico arrived in Texas. While they settled primarily along the southern border, they quickly surpassed German Texans as the largest non-­English-­language group in San Antonio. As with African Americans in Houston, Mexican-­born elites and a rising middle class

Texas in Four Parts 73

distinguished the urban experience from the rural experience of most new arrivals, who remained agricultural workers. Divisions also existed between Tejanos whose families had long been in Texas and new arrivals, and some long-­established Tejano families such as the Canales family clung to landownership and retained ties to traditional Anglo and Tejano power brokers. Nonetheless, all ethnic Mexicans faced the pressures created by the arrival of new Anglo immigrants and the rise of irrigated agriculture. Gradually the ethnic-­Mexican population pushed northward beyond San Antonio into the central part of the state, where they often replaced African Americans as agricultural workers. By 1930, the US Census found that people who were termed “Mexicans” made up 12 percent of the Texas population, and they made up an estimated 90 percent of the population of some southern counties. This lopsided demographic concentration was rare in Texas except for isolated counties in the central region where German Texans predominated and counties in the west where Anglos enjoyed a similar dominance. And even in these lopsided counties the process of adapting to, imitating, and resisting other cultures persisted.12 Environment, Agriculture, and Markets Critics of this cultural approach to understanding Texas often emphasize the overriding influence of the environment, especially the aridity of western and southern Texas, and the variable rainfall patterns of the central region. As answer to this criticism, I ask, why was the Southern Baptist denomination so dominant in Lubbock, and why was cotton grown in the surrounding counties? Why did Canales switch from ranching to the cultivation of cotton as his major economic activity? The answer to these questions lies in the nexus between the stubborn persistence of some cultural traits, the ability to adapt to a more demanding environment in order to continue those traits, and the influence of markets on crop selection. Far more than the environment of a place influenced the nature of the regions of Texas.13 Oversimplification of religious affiliation often obscures more than it reveals, but that affiliation does offer a clue about the persistence of culture. Religious affiliation, or the lack of such affiliation among German “free thinkers,” often followed families as they moved to Texas and across Texas. Religious affiliation thus serves as a cultural marker and a symbol of the reassurance of the familiar in a new place. Obviously, the ability or inability of a denomination to adapt and change with the times mattered and influenced their ability to attract and retain members. Use of revivals, mission-

74  Walter L. Buenger

ary efforts, and other techniques could bring new members for Baptists and other Protestants, but all churches were typically brought into western Texas and other parts of the state by new residents. In 1926, for example, there were twenty Southern Baptist churches in Lubbock County with more than 4,000 members out of a county population of about 39,000 in 1930. The number of northern Methodist churches and southern Methodist churches in western Texas offered another revealing snapshot, with the members of the southern church outnumbering those in the northern church. Immigrants to western Texas brought their religious affiliations with them, and those with southern roots also brought an affinity and familiarity with the cultivation, marketing, and financing of cotton.14 Aridity did not stop that expansion of a cultural trait, and the cotton trade, not oil or ranching, dominated the economy in almost every Texas county by 1930. Market-­driven innovations made this possible. Technological change such as the development of more modern irrigation systems is often cited as the driver for such expansion, but instead the impetus for innovation was a blend of clinging to the familiar, adapting to and imitating what people saw around them, and changes in market forces. Once boll worms and boll weevils made cotton cultivation riskier and more expensive in eastern and central Texas, white farmers left in search of better conditions to grow their traditional crops. They found them in the western part of the state, where colder winters and the development of new cotton varieties limited insect damage. The market drove movement westward and experimentation with new varieties. The relative scarcity of labor drove innovation with mechanical harvesters and the use of migrant labor. The push westward made the expansion of the railroad network attractive and the sale of ranch land to farmers lucrative. Yes, a wet cycle in the rainfall pattern helped drive the move west in the early 1910s, but even when the inevitable dry cycle followed, cotton remained the dominant crop.15 A similar push out of the Midwest and eastern Texas made South Texas lands attractive and allowed the development of the cotton and citrus trades. For midwesterners it was not a case of growing something familiar but of growing something lucrative in a place and way that limited insect damage. By 1930, Canales had joined the rush to grow cotton and take advantage of a favorable labor market. Cotton prices varied wildly, but growers in western and southern Texas could ride out these swings if their operations were large and efficient enough. They could even take advantage of the downturns to buy out smaller-­scale cotton producers. Culture, as reflected in the nature of agricultural pursuits, certainly changed. Canales moved from ranching to cotton farming. But he moved not because of the environment so much as

Texas in Four Parts 75

because of his ability to adapt and imitate the practices brought in by another cultural group and an ability to respond to the shifting market. This was a market that had enough volume, cheap labor, access to water, access to capital, and examples of success with cotton to encourage Canales and others to experiment with something new. Place and region mattered, but they mattered more because of the combination of market-­driven innovation and examples from other cultures than because of the limits of nature. Obviously, freezes, floods, droughts, heat waves, and other environmental factors mattered, and perhaps in the long run nature prevailed in more arid regions and those with extreme variations in weather patterns. Still, in the years around 1919, adaptation and imitation of other cultures and market opportunities brought change that overcame the influence of the environment.16 Music Music offers a way to flesh out this process of change brought by adaptation, imitation, and market-­driven innovation. And it offers as well an example of resistance to total amalgamation into one culture. Music shows what happened when the four groups encountered each other, and it provides another entry point in understanding how Anglo-Texans, African American Texans, European Texans, and Tejanos left behind the culture and life of their respective points of origin and entered a new, hybrid world of cultural fusion. Use of the accordion serves as a classic example of this fusion. Specialists in Texas music attribute the introduction of the accordion to German immigrants in northern Mexico and Texas. By 1919 the instrument had passed into common use in Tejano music, where it remains a fixture, especially in conjunto music. Polkas both as a dance form and a style of music serve as another connecting link between ethnic Mexicans and Europeans. Both groups engaged in almost continual borrowing from each other and from Anglo- and African American musical traditions. In this way music typified what happened when Canales and others moved beyond traditional Tejano cultural practices. Adapting and imitating other cultural forms, they made them their own, but they also built bridges to other groups.17 Santiago Jiménez Sr. (1913–1984), born in San Antonio, became one of the most accomplished accordion players and conjunto musicians and songwriters, and he stands as an excellent specific example of how cultural borrowing did not mean total absorption into another culture. His polka “Viva Seguin” became a regional hit in the 1940s, and he also popularized the use

76  Walter L. Buenger

of a Mexican tololoche or contrabajo, a stringed instrument that sometimes has a double bass, and other stringed instruments. Importantly, though, he continued playing the traditional two-­row button accordion throughout his life. In this as in so many other ways he demonstrated how Tejano music reflected adaptation and imitation of other cultures but also resistance to absorption into a more homogenized culture.18 Adolph Hofner (1916–2000), son of a German Texan father and a Czech Texan mother, also exemplified this cultural mixing. Hofner spent much of his life in the San Antonio area. He sang in Czech and English, but most of his songs had a clear western swing flavor. Even the traditional polkas that he and his band performed echoed western swing, which had grown from a fusion of African American–­influenced jazz and big band music. Members of his ensemble played the accordion, of course, but they also played the fiddle and other instruments common to western swing. They borrowed songs from Tejano and Mexican traditions as well. Like Jiménez, Hofner adapted and imitated other cultures, but by singing in Czech throughout his life he resisted total absorption into the English-­speaking world. He remained a Czech Texan, not simply a Texan.19 Hofner and Jiménez owed part of their longtime popularity to growing up with radio, records, and other new forms of distributing and enjoying music. Here again, as with Canales converting to cotton cultivation, evolving market conditions spurred innovation as consumer spending and the emergence of urban music centers created new demand for music. Before 1919, which lay on the cusp of the explosion of such new responses to the demand for music, other market-­driven innovations had been in place for more than a decade. Most notably, the completion of an intricate web of railroads by 1910 and the introduction of automobiles after that allowed faster and easier movement across the state. That, too, contributed to the fusion of cultures evident in music, the movement of ethnic Mexicans north and Anglos south and west, and the greater homogenization of all Texans. As exemplified by cotton cultivation moving into practically every Texas county, greater uniformity between the regions was emerging.20 World War I World War I accelerated the cultural homogenization across Texas and initiated further changes. African Americans left. Ethnic Mexicans continued arriving. European immigration ceased. Cities grew. Oil production and industry expanded. A sense of Texanness solidified its hold on the pub-

Texas in Four Parts 77

lic imagination of many. Women voted. These trends appeared obvious by 1919.21 Migration from low-­wage to high-­wage areas explained much of the population shift. Wartime troop buildup took workers out of the civilian economy, and arming and equipping those troops as well as supplying demands created by European armies stimulated industrial production and the flow of money through the American economy. As a result, cities in the North, the West, and Texas grew rapidly, and wages increased. African Americans left low-­wage rural areas and small towns for high-­wage urban areas. Ethnic Mexicans left Mexico, where revolution had destabilized the economy, and they came to Texas or moved farther north within Texas. Cotton prices spiked from 1915 to 1919 as demand for cotton goods grew, and that created labor demands as growers rushed to take advantage of the bonanza. Ethnic-­Mexican labor filled the niche created by the departure of African Americans.22 Meantime, war halted migration from Europe, and anti-­German sentiment increased after the United States declared war on Germany in 1917. German Texans adapted by more frequently using English in public and imitating some Anglo cultural forms such as an increased acceptance of discrimination against African Americans, but in a classic sign of cultural resistance, extensive use of the German language bounced back after the war and persisted through 1940. Postwar immigration restrictions, however, ensured that European immigration never returned to prewar levels. Not surprisingly, the percentage of ethnic Mexicans surpassed that of European Texans by 1930; Mexican immigrants were generally exempted from the immigration restriction laws between 1917 and 1929.23 World War I also encouraged large-­scale urbanization. By 1920 Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio had each passed 100,000 in population. By 1930 El Paso joined them to give Texas more cities above 100,000 population than the entire Lower South combined. Marketing and financing the surging production of cotton and livestock sparked part of this growth, as did improvements in transportation, but consumer spending, the spur to industrialization provided by oil and mining, the growth of financial institutions, and construction also helped. An economic crash that followed the war was far shallower in cities than in the countryside. Cities were the future, rural life the past,24 yet that rural life, especially the image of the white cowboy, was often memorialized in the emerging country and western music and various other forms of popular culture. In the midst of the newness of cities, the image of rural Texas offered fixity amid flux but led to the question of just who was a Texan. Were Tejanos Texans? Were Afri-

78  Walter L. Buenger

can Americans Texan? Were women Texans? Were European Texans really Texan? Were city folk Texans? By extension, who was an American? The Ku Klux Klan asked in the 1920s who was “100 percent American?”25 The answer to those questions remained contested in 1919 as demonstrated by the curious outcome of the proposed state constitutional amendment taking the vote away from immigrant males who had declared their intent to naturalize and awarding the vote to women. Through much of the nineteenth century and until 1921, immigrants who declared their intent to become citizens six months in advance of an election could vote.26 Women voted for the first time in party primaries in 1918, another sign of change, but their voting in all elections required a state constitutional amendment that first needed a two-­thirds majority in the legislature to get it before voters. They got such a supermajority in 1919, but that amendment included taking away the ballot from noncitizens. Aliens could vote in the constitutional amendment election, but women could not. The amendment failed, demonstrating both the strength of the ethnic vote and lingering opposition to giving women the vote. Texans may have passed a tipping point when a new culture and identity became obvious, but shards of the past remained.27 Politics and Tipping Points Complete suffrage came to Texas women from the national level, summing up the tipping point crossed by 1919. In June that year, Texas legislators made the state the ninth to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, and by the next year enough states supported it for women to vote in all elections. As politics made clear, the state, its regions, and its people had entered a more national and uniform era. Changes in Texas voting laws between 1902 and 1921 suggest a drift toward limiting voting by the poor of all types, ethnic Mexicans, African Americans, and immigrants, while giving the vote to more prosperous Anglo women. The public face, at least the voting face, of Texas was becoming more of one type: Anglo and relatively affluent. As the struggle over Prohibition between 1911 and 1930 demonstrates, affluent Anglos never won complete control, and diversity and distinctiveness between groups and regions never totally vanished. Prior to 1919, amendments to the Texas constitution to enact statewide Prohibition twice came before Texas voters. In 1887, Prohibition lost decisively, but in 1911 it lost narrowly. In 1887, while townspeople and southern white Protestants tended to support the measure more heavily than other groups, such polar-

Texas in Four Parts 79

ization was not as sharp as it became by 1911. By then Anglo support had coalesced, especially among the upper and middle class who lived in towns and cities. Opposition from European Texans, Lutherans, Catholics, rank-­and-­ file African Americans, the white working class in cities, and most ethnic Mexicans remained strong enough to secure a narrow victory.28 The 1911 referendum was as much about class and culture as it was about the consumption of alcohol, and that was certainly how opponents of Prohibition argued. They were defending a normal part of their lives and their culture when they defended the use of alcohol. They cast themselves as champions of tradition, and Prohibitionists cast themselves as heralds of a new and brighter tomorrow. County and regional voting returns demonstrated the level of polarization; counties with large urban centers, counties and regions dominated by the working class, European Texans, African Americans, and ethnic Mexicans all voted overwhelmingly against Prohibition. Central Texas, the urban centers on the edge of that region, and South Texas saw especially solid votes against Prohibition. Supporters of Prohibition argued that in the lower Rio Grande Valley the local political machines, not the voters, cast the ballots. A similar charge of undemocratic elections could be made for eastern Texas, however, where whites had long suppressed the African American vote. The bottom line was that minority groups and the urban working class refused to fall in line to support Prohibition, and where they could vote they carried the day against it. Cultural and regional diversity continued in 1911.29 As with allowing women to vote in the general elections, change came from the national level with the passage and ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, a change that was later confirmed by the passage of a state constitutional amendment. Despite the laws, the use of alcohol did not disappear in central Texas. In Austin County, for example, the Cat Spring Agricultural Society recorded in its minutes the routine purchase of beer for gatherings through the 1920s. The members kept the minutes in German, but they did not make much effort to hide their beer drinking from their fellow German Texan sheriff. A similar defiance of the law likely occurred also in southern Texas, given the ease of obtaining alcohol from Mexico. The further integration of Texas into the nation suggested by the top-­down arrival of Prohibition occurred, but the case should not be overdrawn. Cultural and regional distinctions persisted, and if anything, the extreme animosity stirred among the working-­class and minority groups by efforts to force them to conform to Prohibition continued their separation from Anglo elites. Resistance, once again, caused the persistence of differences.30

80  Walter L. Buenger

As much as any other bit of evidence available to us then, Prohibition demonstrated the cultural divisions in Texas and the persistence of distinctiveness through 1930. Of course, not every African American, German Texan, or ethnic Mexican opposed Prohibition. African American religious leaders sometimes supported the cause, German Methodists did likewise, and so did Canales. In each case, affiliation with a Protestant denomination that supported Prohibition seemed to be the obvious common thread, but all also were connected to groups and associations outside their communities and regions. For Canales, business interests, education, political affiliations and friendships, denominational ties and influences, and family bonds all contributed to the creation of a classic border figure moving between cultural groups, but that did not mean totally abandoning one group for another.31 While he supported Prohibition, Canales also demonstrated the power of resistance to discrimination and forced exclusion or cultural amalgamation. In 1919, Canales’s membership and actions in the state legislature demonstrate that transformation to a uniform Texas as a piece of the national whole would be contested and incomplete. Canales faced an audience of some Texans and most fellow lawmakers who sought to narrow the definition of who was an American and who was a Texan, but their push for conformity or in some cases exclusion from full citizenship elicited continued challenges from those demanding a far broader definition of belonging. Canales was part of that challenging. Tejanos belonged. They deserved fair treatment as equal citizens even from the mythic Texas Rangers. Making that demand kept Canales a part of his region and his traditional culture.32 But Canales’s support of Prohibition suggested he was anything but a radical defender of ethnic-­Mexican culture. He encouraged the use of English and promoted patriotism and loyalty to the government during World War I. He described the United States as a melting pot of different peoples, and in 1945, when he looked back at how his home region had changed, he noted with approval: “I have seen people of various races living and learning to live peacefully, side by side; and this experience has been beneficial to all our people.”33 Despite this inclusiveness, he sometimes moved to exclude recent immigrants from Mexico who were not yet US citizens from Tejano organizations. But he also resisted more forcefully and effectively than most the brutal violence directed at ethnic Mexicans by the Texas Rangers, Anglo ranchers, and US armed forces.34

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Memory and Belonging Canales, like some other Texans of the 1910s, balanced a desire for a common core of American and Texan culture with the recognition of the distinctiveness of the groups and the regions of his state. Throughout that tumultuous decade some Texans, often led by elite Anglo women, promoted the Alamo as a symbol of patriotism and sacrifice, and they held up the Texas Revolution as a great moment in the expansion westward of American civilization. Promoting Texanism and Americanism got wrapped up in another of the great drives of the decade—the solidification and codification of white supremacy. For Canales and other Tejanos, the Alamo divided more than united the people of Texans. It did so in large part because for many Anglos, ethnic Mexicans fell somewhere on the spectrum between white and Black. They were not quite white. As depicted in the twin movies put out by D. W. Griffith in 1915, Martyrs of the Alamo and Birth of a Nation, the two minority groups were the enemy within. African Americans were beasts to be brutally tamed so white civilization could return after Reconstruction. Mexicans were villains to be removed so Anglo civilization could advance. As such, ethnic Mexicans could be killed without regard for their humanity, as fifteen were at Porvenir in Presidio County in 1918. They could be lynched without regard for law or decency, just as the African American Jesse Washington was lynched in Waco in 1916. Canales fought not just the brutality of the Texas Rangers; he stood against myths and tropes that reduced his people to less than human.35 After 1890, white supremacy steadily grew and solidified because of those myths, memories, and other cultural expressions as well as new laws. Expressions of white supremacy could be overt or subtle, but they were an inescapable part of life in Texas. In 1919, for example, a gang led by local officials badly beat John Shillady, the national secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Governor William P. Hobby blamed the victim for that brutal beating and urged the NAACP to get out of Texas. Even in less overt and obvious forms, white supremacy became increasingly internalized among Anglos and other Texans including some European Texans and a few elite Tejanos.36 Monuments, markers, plaques, advertising symbols, and other types of visual art were among the most enduring but often subtle reminders of white supremacy. As they became increasingly common in Texas after 1890 they helped anchor notions of race, ethnicity, and Texanness in the public mind. There seemed to be some movement over time to celebrate a Texas Anglo

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past instead of a Confederate past, but both celebrations continued well into the 20th century. Both celebrations also tended to underscore white supremacy by lifting up and making permanent heroic images of elite Anglo males. These idealized images solidified the image of Confederates and Texas Revolution era figures as brave, dauntless, self-­sacrificing, and worthy of emulation. Until well after the mid-­twentieth century very few competing statues of non-­Anglos and relatively few statues of women appeared in the state. Certainly by 1919, what the next generation saw in the public space to emulate and become was overwhelmingly Anglo, male, and elite.37 What that next generation heard and read about the past was often an even more overt and empathic paean to white supremacy. In his memoirs written in the 1890s and published in 1900, Francis Richard Lubbock, the governor of Texas during the Civil War, recalls, The morning of January 14, 1874 dawned upon Texas redeemed from radical rule, upon Texas free and at peace for the first time since 1861. With the restoration of white supremacy and Democratic rule, Texas started anew on a prosperous career. For this deliverance we are under perpetual obligations to the northern Democracy, who sympathized with us in our oppression and helped us in our struggle every way they could.38

That was the image of the past absorbed by Anglo-Texans for decades: one virtuous party, one virtuous race, a race that even bridged the divide between North and South. Tellingly those words were created in the 1890s, a time when Anglo elites busied themselves fulfilling what they struggled to do in the 1870s: exert dominance by white and relatively affluent Democrats united with like individuals from the North. With the coming of the poll tax in 1902 and the statewide all-­white primary soon after, elite Democrats achieved what Lubbock claimed happened decades before, and they constructed a history and mythology to make that change seem eternal and fixed. Memory, myth, and constructed history spoke to the present more than they accurately depicted the past.39 Pushed and pulled by the cultural tidal wave behind the intensification of white supremacy and seeking to stay relevant in the emerging reality of early twentieth century Texas politics, some non-­Anglos moved toward the elite and middle-­class Anglo position on race. They adapted by conforming at least to a limited degree to white supremacy and Democratic rule. Counties dominated by German Texans, for example, voted for the 1902 poll tax amendment by a higher percentage than the state as a whole. William A. Trenckmann, a leading spokesman for German Texans who served in the

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state legislature with Canales in the first decade of the new century, supported the primary laws and other measures to limit the political influence of African Americans and solidify the power of Democrats. He did not support lynching, but German Texans did participate in the ghastly and very public lynching of Antonio Gómez in Thorndale in Milam County in 1911. Gómez may have been as young as twelve, and he was badly beaten, dragged through the center of town, and eventually hanged in retaliation for allegedly murdering Charles Zeischang. German Texans and other European Texans were part of the lynching fever that denied a fair trial and humane treatment to African Americans and ethnic Mexicans.40 Did Canales, like Trenckmann, move toward acceptance of white supremacy after 1900? We know too little for a sure judgment, but the violence directed against ethnic Mexicans probably slowed or prevented Canales from making such a move in the 1910s. Later, in their efforts to claim that they were white and not subject to segregation laws directed at African Americans, some ethnic-­Mexican leaders did seem to accept the segregation of African Americans, but others did not and worked with African Americans to end segregation. What we do know about Canales points to the significant possibility of his integration into a national and a Texas Anglo culture. He attended law school at the University of Michigan and traveled through the midsection of the country as a young man. In 1910 he married an Anglo woman, Anne A. Wheeler, and the couple later adopted her niece. He participated in religious traditions with few Tejano adherents at that time. Business and politics brought him into constant contact with Anglos, and he won elections and increased his wealth and landholdings. While arguing for a melting-­pot approach to life in Texas, he encouraged the use of English.41 Yet Canales used the English language to challenge the myths, memories, and slanted histories of the Texas Revolution and other events in the Texas past. He argued for inclusion for Tejanos in the drama of the Texas past not as villains but as equal contributors. Starting in the 1940s, when he compiled recollections of his own life, and continuing into the 1950s, he called for a reconsideration of alleged Tejano villains such as his relative Juan Cortina. He called for moving beyond the point at which “human passions and prejudices act as a fog so that you often understand and see very indistinctly the facts that are taking place.” He had evolved to a new level of cultural resistance to the dehumanization and stereotyping of ethnic Mexicans that allowed violence. He spun his own myths and stereotypes, but he employed them to facilitate the inclusion of Tejanos as true Texans. He wanted to “go forward in our efforts to produce the best and finest type of

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a true American in Texas.” He wanted to end the divisions between groups, but that remained his dream and hope, not a reality.42 Resistance to violence and cultural exclusion directed against ethnic Mexicans worked to keep Canales apart from Anglos, just as resistance to Prohibition worked for German Texans. That resistance caused him to fear for his life in 1919 when he challenged the Texas Rangers, but fear did not prevent him from having a long career as an advocate of Tejano civil rights. His resistance caused him as late as 1950 to see what he termed “citizens of Anglo-­American descent” and “Latin American people” as two distinct groups. The melting pot Canales hoped for remained a dream of the future, and his heart remained with his people.43 In the end ethnic Mexicans were his people, and Canales understood that they could not yet be melted down in one American mainstream. As long as they were treated by Anglos as others, thus sparking resistance, they remained a separate people. In his eyes they were Latin Americans but, Canales insisted, also citizens. And he wanted them treated as citizens. At least into the 1930s he lived in a world of four cultural groups and four regions. The very name of the group he helped found in 1929, the League of United Latin American Citizens, suggested his answer to this world of fours and to the changing situation ushered in by World War I. English may have been the official language of LULAC, but in reality it was a bilingual organization with a bicultural purpose.44 He wanted citizens of his region and ethnicity treated as Americans, but he recognized they were a distinct group facing specific challenges. Ironically for someone with many ties to the larger Anglo world, Canales found himself cast into the role of defender of a distinctive place and people, but then perhaps those ties better equipped Canales to fill that role. And that role and his ties to other cultural groups in Texas exemplified the world of four moving parts. Certainly, all the parts were connected, and people of all cultural groups moved haltingly toward a greater unity and commonality. Yet in 1919 and beyond they remained distinct. Notes 1. On Texas historiography, see Walter L. Buenger and Arnoldo De León, eds., Beyond Texas through Time: Breaking Away from Past Interpretations (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2011); Walter L. Buenger and Robert A. Calvert, eds., Texas through Time: Evolving Interpretations (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991). For relevant examples of the benefits of looking at more than one group

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and region, see David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836– 1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987); Brian D. Behnken, Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Max Krochmal, Blue Texas: The Making of a Multiracial Democratic Coalition in the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 2. On J. T. Canales, see Evan Anders, “Canales, José Tomás,” modified March 28, 2016, Handbook of Texas Online (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2010), http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fcaag. For broader context, see Benjamin Marquez, Constructing Identities in Mexican-­American Political Organizations: Choosing Issues, Taking Sides. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003); Cynthia E. Orozco, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009); Arnoldo De León, “Mexican Americans,” in Discovering Texas History, ed. Bruce A. Glasrud, Light Townsend Cummins, and Cary D. Wintz (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), 31–48; Arnoldo De León, ed., War along the Border: The Mexican Revolution and Tejano Communities (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012). 3. For an important example of the making and remaking of group culture, see Tyina L. Steptoe, Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016). For an excellent example of the use of Indians in myth and memory, see Paul H. Carlson and Tom Crum, Myth Memory and Massacre: The Pease River Capture of Cynthia Ann Parker (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2010). For an earlier expression of my argument, see Walter L. Buenger, “Making Sense of Texas and Its History,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 121 ( July 2017): 1–26. I use such terms as “Anglo-Texan,” “German Texan,” and “Tejano” to describe those of a particular cultural group who lived in Texas. Thus, if one was born in Germany or Mexico but immigrated to Texas, the person ceased to be a German or Mexican but retained much of their former culture. This could persist and did persist for multiple generations. They were Mexican Texan (Tejano) and German Texan, not Mexican and German and not simply Texan. Certainly these groups were all shaped by interaction with other cultural groups in Texas, but the boundaries between groups persisted far longer than often acknowledged. “Ethnic Mexican” is used to designate a larger group encompassing all those in the United States who traced their families’ origins to Mexico. 4. On Canales and his pride in his own family and close ties to Anglo elites see José Tomás Canales, “Personal Recollections of J. T. Canales,” typescript, 1945, Canales, Joe T., vertical file, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. Also see Anders, “Canales, José Tomás”; Joseph L. Locke, “The Heathen at Our Door: Missionaries, Moral Reformers, and the Making of the ‘Mexican Problem,’ ” Western Historical Quarterly 49 (Summer 2018): 127–153. 5. For an introduction to such topics, see Terry G. Jordan, North American Cattle Ranching Frontiers: Origins, Diffusion, and Differentiation (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993); Walter L. Buenger, “Across Many Borders: Persistence and Transformation in the Texas Economy and Culture, 1830–1850,” in Single Star of the West: The Republic of Texas, 1836–1845, ed. Kenneth W. Howell and Charles Swanlund (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2017): 305–364. 6. Jordan, “A Century and a Half of Ethnic Change in Texas, 1836–1986,” South-

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western Historical Quarterly 89 (April 1986): 385. Also see L. L. Foster, Forgotten Texas Census: First Annual Report of the Agricultural Bureau of the Department of Agriculture, Insurance, Statistics, and History, 1887–88 (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2001), xlix–­liv, 1–250; US Census Bureau, US Censuses 1890–1930, https://www .census.gov/library/publications.html#.html; Texas Almanac and State Industrial Guide, 1931 (Dallas: A. H. Belo, 1931), 133–159. 7. Jordan, “Ethnic Change in Texas,” 388–392; Terry G. Jordan, “The Imprint of the Upper and Lower South on Mid-­Nineteenth-­Century Texas,” Annuals of the Association of American Geographers 57 (December 1967): 667–690; Terry G. Jordan, “The Texan Appalachia,” Annuals of the Association of American Geographers 60 (September 1970): 409–427. 8. This is a point made in Jordan, “Ethnic Change in Texas,” 388–392; and it is underscored by the statistics given in Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910 Abstract Population (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1913), 181–185. In 1910, for example, about 25 percent of, or some 210,000, native-­born Americans born outside of Texas but then living in the state were born in nonsouthern states. Since there was little reason for African Americans born outside of the South to move to Texas, most of these nonsouthern migrants were Anglos. This migration pattern also is noted in Texas Almanac and State Industrial Guide, 1931, 133. 9. See Neal Foley, White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 10. Steptoe, Houston Bound; James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Bernadette Pruitt, The Other Great Migration: The Movement of Rural African Americans to Houston, 1900–1941 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2017). Also see Texas Almanac and State Industrial Guide, 1931, 133–135; US Census, 1880–1930. 11. Jordan, “Ethnic Change in Texas,” 418–419; Foster, Forgotten Texas Census; US Census, 1880–1930. 12. Jordan, “Ethnic Change in Texas,” 418–419. Among many works also see Timothy Bowman, Blood Oranges: Colonialism and Agriculture in the South Texas Borderlands (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2016); Cory Wimberly, Javier Martínez, David Muñoz, and Margarita Cavazos, “Peons and Progressives: Race and Boosterism in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, 1904–1941,” Western Historical Quarterly 49 (Winter 2018), 437–464; Arnoldo De León and Kenneth L. Stewart, Tejanos and the Numbers Game: A Socio-­Historical Interpretation from the Federal Censuses, 1850–1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989); Emilio Zamora, The World of the Mexican Worker in Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1993); Emilio Zamora, Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas: Mexican Workers and Job Politics During World War II (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008); Arnoldo De León, “Mexican Americans,” modified January 26, 2017, Handbook of Texas Online (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2010), http:// www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/pqmue. 13. Walter L. Buenger, “Texas and the South,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 103 ( January 2000): 309–326; Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (Boston: Ginn, 1931); Flannery Burke, A Land Apart: The Southwest and the Nation in the Twentieth

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Century; Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); David M. Wrobel and Michael C. Steiner, eds., Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997). 14. Census of Religious Bodies, 1926, volumes 1 and 2. For insight into how religion operated in immigrant communities see Felipe Hinojosa, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). 15. John F. Griffiths and Greg Ainsworth, One Hundred Years of Texas Weather, 1880–1979 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1981); Roy Sylvan Dunn, “Droughts,” Handbook of Texas Online (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2010), http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/ybd01. Also see “Weather Highlights from 1899–2000,” updated November 14, 2014, drawn from National Climatic Data Center, https://www.weather.gov/media/ewx/wxevents/ewx-­18992000 .pdf; Terry G. Jordan, “Hill Country,” Handbook of Texas Online (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2010), http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles /ryh02. 16. For an interesting look at the persistence of regions that suggests the role of memory and culture, see Terry G. Jordan, “Perceptual Regions in Texas,” Geographical Review 68 ( July 1978), 293–307. For the counterarguments that stress the influence of the environment and the evolution of a sense of being new and distinct from past cultures, see Webb, Great Plains, 10–46: Glenn Sample Ely, Where the West Begins: Debating Texas Identity (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2011). This is a question that preoccupies the historiography of the Southwest and West. See, for example, Worster, Under Western Skies; Wrobel and Steiner, Many Wests; Burke, Land Apart. For the move away from a ranching-­based economy by Canales and others, see Canales, “Personal Recollections,” 11–24. 17. Teresa Palomo Acosta, “Texas-­Mexican Conjunto,” modified December 5, 2015, Handbook of Texas Online (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2010), http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/xbtpa; Gary Hartman, The History of Texas Music (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008), 20–195. 18. Jill S. Seeber, “Jiménez, Santiago, Sr.,” modified June 13, 2016, Handbook of Texas Online (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2010), http://www.tshaonline.org /handbook/online/articles/fji03. 19. James Manheim, “Adolph Hofner Biography,” All Music, n.d., https://www .allmusic.com/artist/adolph-­hofner-­mn0000927461; Martin Donell Kohout, “Hofner, Adolph,” modified May 11, 2016, Handbook of Texas Online (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2010), http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles /fhobv. Also see “Adolph’s Beautiful America,” Sixty Cycle, 2004, http://www.sixty cycle.com/adolphv2.html. 20. On the evolution of Texas music, see Hartman, History of Texas Music, 1–14; Laurie E. Jasinski, ed., Handbook of Texas Music, 2nd edition (Denton: Texas State Historical Association, 2012). 21. For a fuller expression of these ideas with detailed citations, see Walter L. Buenger and Walter D. Kamphoefner, eds., Preserving German Texan Identity: Reminiscences of William A. Trenckmann, 1859–1935 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press,

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2018); Walter L. Buenger, The Path to a Modern South: Northeast Texas between Reconstruction and the Great Depression (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001). 22. One of the most important questions in the post-­Civil War history of Texas and the South is why African Americans did not leave earlier. Part of the answer may have been lack of opportunity or local barriers to labor movement, but clearly World War I lessened those obstacles and created greater incentive. For more on the economy and the Great Migration, see Gregory, Southern Diaspora; Gavin Wright, Old South New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986). 23. Buenger and Kamphoefner, Preserving German Texan Identity, 23–38, 132– 184; Matthew D. Tippens, Turning Germans into Texans: World War I and the Assimilation and Survival of German Culture in Texas (Austin: Kleingarten, 2010); Robert R. McKay, “Mexican Americans and Repatriation,” Handbook of Texas Online (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2010), http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/on line/articles/pqmyk; G. Cárdenas, “United States Immigration Policy toward Mexico: An Historical Perspective,” Chicana/o Latina/o Law Review 2 (1975): 66–75, https:// escholarship.org/uc/item/0fh8773n. 24. For urban population figures, see Michael T. Kingston, ed., The Texas Almanac and State Industrial Guide, 1984–1985 (Dallas: Dallas Morning News, 1983), 347–352; David G. McComb, The City in Texas: A History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 148–235. http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hyunw. 25. For a start in understanding the cultural transformation of Texas from a Confederate to a western state, see Michael Phillips, “Why Is Big Tex Still a White Cowboy? Race, Gender, and the Other Texans,” in Beyond Texas through Time, ed. Buenger and De León, 125–178; Buenger, Path to a Modern South, 104–222. On the Klan and Texas politics, see Norman D. Brown, Hood, Bonnet, and Little Brown Jug: Texas Politics, 1921–1928 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1984). The largest Klan newspaper in the state was The Texas 100 Percent American; see in particular “A Klansman’s Creed,” April 21, 1922. 26. Texas Constitution of 1876, as amended 1896, reproduced in Francis Thorpe, The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the States, Territories, and Colonies Now or Heretofore Forming the United States of America, vol. 6, 3672 (1909); Marsden v. Troy, 189 S.W. 960, 961, Texas Civil Appeals, 1916; Ron Hayduk, “Resident Non-­Citizen Voting in Texas: A History,” http://ronhayduk.com /immigrant-­voting/around-­the-­us/state-­histories/texas-­history/. 27. Buenger, “Making Sense of Texas”; Lewis L. Gould, Progressives and Prohibitionists: Texas Democrats in the Wilson Era (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973), 250–257. 28. On the history of Prohibition in Texas, see K. Austin Kerr, “Prohibition,” Handbook of Texas Online (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2010), http:// www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/vap01. 29. For on-­the-­spot reporting, see Dallas Morning News, July 22, 23, 24, 1911; San Antonio Light, July 23, 30, 1911; Houston Post, July 22, 23, 24, 1911. For complete voting returns and a comparison with 1887, see Texas Almanac and State Industrial Guide 1912 (Dallas: Morning News, 1912), 42–45. Also see Joseph L. Locke, Making the Bible Belt: Texas Prohibitionists and the Politicization of Southern Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1917); Buenger and Kamphoefner, Preserving German Texan Identity,

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29–31; H. A. Ivy, Rum on the Run in Texas: A Brief History of Prohibition in the Lone Star State (Dallas: Temperance, 1910); Gregg Cantrell, “ ‘Dark Tactics’: Black Politics in the 1887 Texas Prohibition Campaign,” Journal of American Studies 25 (April 1991): 85–93; Buenger, Path to a Modern South, 113–117; Gould, Progressives and Prohibitionists, 42–57; Anders, Boss Rule in South Texas. 30. For a quick sketch of the fate of Prohibition in Texas after 1911, see Robert Plocheck, “Prohibition Elections in Texas,” Texas Almanac Online (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2018), https://texasalmanac.com/topics/elections/prohibition -­elections-­texas. 31. Gregg Cantrell, Feeding the Wolf: J. B. Rayner and the Politics of Race, 1850– 1918 (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2001); Paul F. Douglass, The Story of German Methodism: Biography of an Immigrant Soul (New York: Methodist Book Concern, 1939); Brownsville Herald, March 31, 1976. On Canales as a border figure, see Canales, “Personal Recollections,” especially his description of how he became a Presbyterian while living with an Anglo family in Kansas City (8). 32. The English-­only movement, whose proponents sought the use of only English in official spheres, brought opposition that exemplified how some Texans resisted being defined by language as alien (Carlos Kevin Blanton, The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836–1981 [College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004]), 42–110. Non-­English-­language groups also fiercely resisted Prohibition and the Ku Klux Klan (Buenger and Kamphoefner, Preserving German Texan Identity, 11–38; Kerr, “Prohibition”). 33. Canales, “Personal Recollections,” 27. Also see J. T. Canales, Bits of Texas History in the Melting Pot of America, 2 vols. (Brownsville, TX: privately printed, 1950, 1957). 34. For background and context on the complex question of how ethnic Mexicans viewed themselves see Neil Foley, Quest for Equality: The Failed Promise of Black-­Brown Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Neil Foley, Mexicans in the Making of America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014); Carlos Kevin Blanton, George I. Sánchez: The Long Fight for Mexican American Integration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 182–204. 35. For comments by Canales on the Alamo and the Texas Revolution as a source of division, see Canales, Bits of Texas History, 1:5–7. This entire first volume, published in 1950, is in many ways focused on reconstructing public memory and placing violence in context. For an introduction to the study of the role of memories of the past, see Gregg Cantrell and Elizabeth Hayes Turner, eds., Lone Star Pasts: Memory and History in Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007), especially Don Graham’s chapter, “Mission Statement: The Alamo and the Fallacy of Historical Accuracy in Epic Filmmaking,” 242–269. Also see Richard Flores, Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); Monica Muñoz Martinez, “Porvenir Massacre,” modified January 29, 2019, Handbook of Texas Online (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2010), http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/jcp02. For broader context on violence, memory, and the Porvenir massacre, see Monica Muñoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-­Mexican Violence in Texas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). 36. Michael L. Gillette, “National Association for the Advancement of Colored

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People,” modified July 7, 2016, Handbook of Texas Online (Austin: Texas State Histori­ cal Association, 2010), http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/ven01. For a start in understanding the history of white supremacy, see Grace Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998); Joel Williamson, A Rage for Order: Black-­White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Foley, The White Scourge; Behnken, Fighting Their Own Battles; Krochmal, Blue Texas; Steptoe, Houston Bound; Ronald H. Baylor, “Another Look at ‘Whiteness’: The Persistence of Ethnicity in American Life,” Journal of American Ethnic History 29 (Fall 2009): 13–30. 37. On countermemories to the dominant strain, see chapters 13 and 14 in this volume. On statues in Texas, see Carol Morris Little, A Comprehensive Guide to Outdoor Sculpture in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996). Also see Gregg Cantrell, “The Bones of Stephen F. Austin: History and Memory in Progressive Era Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 108 (October 2004): 145–178; Cantrell and Turner, Lone Star Pasts; Buenger, Path to a Modern South, 104–132; Phillips, “Why Is Big Tex Still a White Cowboy?,” 125–178. 38. Francis Richard Lubbock, Six Decades in Texas (Austin: Ben C. Jones, 1900), 605–606. On Lubbock, see Louis Mitchell, “Lubbock, Francis Richard,” modified April 5, 2018, Handbook of Texas Online (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2010), http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/flu01. 39. On the poll tax and the white primary in Texas, see Sanford N. Greenberg, “White Primary,” modified November 3, 2015, Handbook of Texas Online (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2010), http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/on line/articles/wdw01; O. Douglas Weeks, “Election Laws,” modified July 25, 2016, Handbook of Texas Online (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2010), http:// www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/wde01. 40. For the 1902 vote, see Texas Secretary of State, Election Division, “Election Returns for 1902,” Texas State Library and Archives, Austin. Also see Seth Shepard McKay, Texas Politics, 1906–1944: With Special Reference to the German Counties (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1952), 9–20; Buenger and Kamphoefner, Preserving German Texan Identity, 23–28; William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence Against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 82–83; William D. Carrigan, The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836–1916 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 132–208; Nicholas Villanueva Jr., The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017), 62–78; Cynthia Skove Nevels, Lynching to Belong; Claiming Whiteness through Racial Violence (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007). 41. Lilly Linares, “The Life of José Tomás Canales,” Presente! (University of Michigan), April 22, 2018, https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/presente/2018/04/22/the-­life-­of-­jose -­tomas-­canales/; Canales obituary, Brownsville Herald, March 31, 1976. 42. Canales, Bits of Texas History, 1:6–7. Also see Canales, “Personal Recollections”; Jose T. Canales, “Juan N. Cortina Bandit or Patriot? An Address by J. T. Canales to the Lower Rio Grande Valley Historical Association. 22 October 1951,” pamphlet (San Antonio: Artes Gráficas, 1951).

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43. Canales, Bits of Texas History, 1:6–7. For contrasting views on the limitations that “whiteness” placed on cooperation between African Americans and ethnic Mexicans, see Behnken, Fighting Their Own Battles; Krochmal, Blue Texas. 44. Cynthia E. Orozco, “League of United Latin American Citizens,” modified January 26, 2017, Handbook of Texas Online (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2010), http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/wel01.

CHAPTER 4

La Matanza and the Canales Investigation in Comparative Perspective William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb

Between 1910 and 1920, Anglo mobs killed an unknown number of ethnic Mexicans and Mexican nationals. Historians estimate the number of such victims to be as low as five hundred and as high as five thousand. The most probable figure is the low thousands. On January 31, 1918, the Brownsville resident and Texas State Representative José T. Canales demanded a legislative investigation and filed nineteen charges against the Texas Rangers for their participation in the era’s violence. The subsequent investigation confirmed the role of the Rangers in what has been called La Matanza and “La Hora de Sangre.”1 The hearings were a pivotal moment in the decline of anti-­Mexican mob violence in Texas. Combined with the continuing protests of the Mexican government, Canales’s efforts helped, albeit indirectly, to stop the extralegal executions of ethnic Mexicans decades before African American protests finally helped end similar atrocities against Black victims. Through an approach that places anti-­Mexican violence and the protests against such violence in a comparative perspective, we hope to provide greater understanding of the significance and efficacy of the Canales investigation, which seems on its face to have ended with little justice for the victims of the era’s violence. In order to examine the impact of Canales’s protests, it is important first to sketch the history of anti-­Mexican mob violence in Texas and the southwestern United States and to note how that violence compared with mob violence against other groups of victims such as Anglos and African Americans. Mob violence against ethnic Mexicans began even before the ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, but such violence markedly increased in the 1850s. The largest and most infamous lynch mobs of this era operated in the California gold fields, but many ethnic Mexicans in Texas also died at the hands of vigilantes. During the summer of 1857, vigilantes

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presumed to be composed of working-­class men who transported goods in the Texas interior assaulted ethnic Mexicans attempting to compete with them for business. The mobs hanged or shot an unknown number of their rivals in public spaces and in remote, out-­of-­the-­way locations. The town of Goliad, on the route between San Antonio and the Gulf Coast port of Indianola, was the epicenter of this violence. John Linn, an Irish immigrant who had lived in Texas since 1829, recalls in his later memoir that the Anglo vigilantes based in Goliad assassinated a number of innocent ethnic Mexicans on the roads, sabotaged their carts, then sold goods from the victims. Linn observes, that the “authorities of Goliad County seemed to regard the whole thing with supine indifference.”2 It is estimated that seventy-­five ethnic-­Mexican men along the route were killed during this period, many of them hanged from an oak tree in front of the Goliad courthouse.3 Many other episodes of anti-­Mexican violence took place in the 1850s fueled by a combination of ethnic prejudice, economic competition, and a general ethic in Texas supporting extralegal violence for certain types of crime. Extensive mob violence against ethnic Mexicans occurred in the 1850s, yet African Americans were more rarely the victims of similar attacks since the vast majority of Blacks in Texas were valuable property. The historian Michael Pfeifer documents the lynching of nine enslaved people in Texas before the US Civil War. While this number, like all such precise lynching statistics, is surely an undercount, it does contrast sharply with the number of ethnic Mexicans lynched during the same period. Even when one does not count the seventy-­five men killed in the Cart War, thirty-­one ethnic Mexicans were lynched in Texas during a period when the population of African ancestry in Texas greatly exceeded that of people of Mexican ancestry. Only after emancipation did mobs in Texas begin to target African Americans to the degree that had been the case for ethnic Mexicans in the previous twenty years.4 Texas mobs also targeted Anglos for various crimes in the antebellum period. As the sectional conflict expanded, mobs increasingly targeted not only whites accused of murder and property crimes but also whites associated with abolitionism and the Republican Party. Such political violence grew during the Civil War and Reconstruction era when mobs lynched white Unionists in startling numbers. The most infamous episode of politically motivated mob violence in this era was the mass hanging of suspected Unionists in Gainesville, Texas. In October 1862, mobs gathered more than two hundred men suspected of opposing the Confederacy and the government’s new draft law. With scant evidence and no sanction of law, the vigilantes hanged forty-­one men. While the Gainesville hangings were the most

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spectacular singular episode, such violence became even more commonplace after the Civil War as the struggle over the political future of Texas took place during Reconstruction. In the spring of 1868 in central Texas, a group of men alleged to be members of the Ku Klux Klan hunted down and killed seven white men and one boy; three of them were German immigrants, and all were alleged to be Unionists and potential Republican voters.5 White-­on-­white mob violence in Texas declined after the end of Reconstruction, but the lynching of ethnic Mexicans increased substantially in the 1870s as a result of crimes and competition related to the cattle boom. After the end of the Civil War, livestock owners saw great opportunities for profit if they could get their cattle to the North. Greater demand for meat, the extension of railroad lines to the West, the invention of refrigerated railcars, and the defeat of the Plains Indians all combined to create a boom in Texas cattle prices and subsequently the establishment of regular cattle drives to railroad towns like Abilene, Kansas. The higher cattle prices also spurred criminal activities all the way to the border with Mexico and beyond. In 1872, the Goliad Guard noted that “a company of Minute Men has been organized at Atascosa County to redress depredations made upon Texans by ethnic Mexican cattle thieves.” The newspaper’s editor heartily approved of this news, opining for the vigilantes to “Give em h——l, boys.”6 Two years later, the rhetoric had only grown more extreme. The Brownsville Ranchero recommended that citizens “turn out en masse” and hang “every man who cannot give a good account of himself, and raze to the ground every ranch known to harbor these villains who make cattle and horse stealing a business.”7 According to our data, mobs killed some fifty ethnic Mexicans in Texas between 1873 and 1877 alone. A combination of factors, including the end of the cattle drives and international protest of lynching in the United States from Mexico, China, and Italy, led to the decline of anti-­Mexican mob violence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such a decline, however, was not the case with African Americans. Mobs, larger and larger over time, continued to lynch African Americans in significant numbers. As a result, lynching became heavily associated with Black victims in the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century. Racism and bitter feelings toward ethnic Mexicans also persisted and occasionally led to the types of lynchings experienced by African Americans, such as the lynching of fourteen-­year-­old Antonio Gómez in 1911.8 The specific episode that triggered the rise of so much anger and vigilantism against ethnic Mexicans, however, was the Plan de San Diego that prompted a series of raids led by local Tejanos that targeted Anglo ranches

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and the economic infrastructure of the lower Rio Grande Valley.9 In a climate of intense paranoia, Anglos committed countless atrocities on ethnic Mexicans whom they mistakenly suspected of collusion with the insurrectionists. In September 1915, three ethnic-­Mexican suspected raiders who were being held in the San Benito jail were taken out in the middle of the night and lynched.10 In October, vigilantes hanged four ethnic Mexicans for their alleged role in the derailment of a train.11 Similar specific information is lacking for most ethnic Mexicans killed during this period. According to the September 15, 1915, issue of the San Antonio Express, “The finding of dead bodies of Mexicans . . . has reached the point where it creates little or no interest.” Virgil Lott, a newspaperman in South Texas, summed up the violence of the era years later: “How many lives were lost cannot be estimated fairly for hundreds of Mexicans were killed who had no part in any of the uprisings, their bodies concealed in the thick underbrush and no report ever made by the perpetrators of these crimes.”12 One particular episode of violence had a great influence on the formation of the Canales investigation: the Porvenir massacre. Two hours past midnight on January 28, 1918, a band of Texas Rangers and masked ranchers arrived at the home of Manuel Morales in the Presidio County village of Porvenir. A Christmas Day raid on the Brite Ranch consumed their thoughts. They had learned that ethnic-­Mexican outlaws had attacked the ranch, in the process killing several Anglos and ethnic Mexicans, robbing the store, and stealing numerous horses. The Rangers and local ranchers believed that residents of Porvenir were acting as spies and informants for these ethnic-­ Mexican raiders who lived across the border. The investigators rounded up approximately two dozen men and searched their houses. What happened next is a matter of dispute, but a later investigation concluded that the Rangers and ranchers marched fifteen men of Mexican origin to a rock bluff near the village and executed them. The remaining residents of Porvenir fled to Mexico, leaving the village abandoned. A local grand jury returned no indictments in the case. There are parallels to such violence in the African American experience. Mobs threatened and used indiscriminate violence designed to force African Americans to abandon Black communities throughout the South, as in the infamous example in Rosewood, Florida, in 1923. There was nothing in the Anglo experience since Reconstruction that equaled the mass mob violence that took place against both ethnic Mexicans and Blacks in the twentieth century. With this basic understanding of the patterns of mob violence against ethnic Mexicans and how they compared to mob violence targeting Anglos

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and African Americans, we now turn to a study and comparison of how ethnic Mexicans and other groups protested lynching. Public extralegal executions declined dramatically over the course of the twentieth century, becoming relatively infrequent by the 1940s. However, the public toleration of mob violence eroded earlier for some groups more than others. The reasons for this variation were complex, though always rooted to a degree in the racial attitudes of the white majority. One factor that also played a role involved the differing ways that groups protested and attempted to end the lynchings of whites, Blacks, and foreign nationals including Mexicans. White-­on-­white lynching declined dramatically in the late nineteenth century. More research needs to be done on this subject, but the primary reason for this decline was connected to the erosion of the “weakness of the courts” defense of lynching. The argument that mobs needed to take the law into their own hands due to the ineffectiveness of the local courts stretched back to at least the 1830s, when such ideas were emboldened by the Jacksonian era’s celebration of the opinions and decisions of the common man. The widespread acceptance of this argument throughout the nation only took place with the California Gold Rush, when reports of ineffective courts reached eastern newspapers. The strength of the “weak courts” argument then became so powerful that it was adopted by mobs throughout the United States for the next several decades. The chaos of the Civil War and Reconstruction provided more legitimacy to the argument in the minds of many Americans. After Reconstruction collapsed, the defense of lynching as a necessary response to an ineffective legal system became less effective. As states built and expanded their jails and prisons, this ostensible defense of lynching became threadbare. Condemnations of lynching increased.13 At the same time that the frontier defense of lynching was in decline, another phenomenon emerged to weaken America’s culture of lynching. Beginning in the 1880s, foreign nations mounted successful diplomatic protests against the lynching of their citizens on US soil. Such protests had been raised for years, but the US government had long deflected them, pointing diplomats to state and local authorities who were unresponsive. With growing US aspirations to play a larger role on the world stage, the federal government began to take a greater interest in diplomatic relations. The 1885 massacre of Chinese immigrant miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, began a new approach by the US government, one of paying indemnities to the families of victims of mob violence. This approach was greatly amplified after the 1891 lynchings of Sicilian Italian immigrants in New Orleans and the 1895 lynching of a Mexican national named Luis Moreno in Yreka, California.

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The international protests played a critical role in the decline of both white-­on-­white lynchings and of mob violence against ethnic minorities such as the Chinese and Mexicans. State and local officials, now wary of drawing the ire of the federal government, began to signal that lynching would no longer be tolerated. While this did not end mob violence immediately, it played a critical role in the dramatic decline at the turn of the century of white-­on-­white lynching and the killing of foreign nationals. The idea that lynching culture in the United States was growing weaker in the 1890s is, of course, very wrong. Scholars have named the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth “the lynching era” for good reason, as the number of Black victims of mobs rose sharply and the size and visibility of lynch mobs greatly increased.14 The reasons for the rise of white-­on-­Black lynching have been long debated, and no single explanation accounts for the phenomenon. One reason that seems clear, however, is that the justifications of lynching changed. The frontier argument had never been particularly effective in justifying mob violence against African Americans. The lynching of Blacks was much more likely to be justified as a necessary response to African American acts that threatened the social order, whether those were traditional crimes against whites like murder or more system-­threatening acts like planning a slave rebellion or allying with white Republicans during Reconstruction. With the end of slavery and the Reconstruction-­era experiment in multiracial democracy, white justifications of mob violence against Blacks transformed and began to be centered on allegations of Black men raping white women. It was not until the 1880s or the 1890s that the charge of rape proved explosive and ignited large lynch mobs. The manipulation of the cry of rape to justify extralegal violence had antecedents, most notably in the claims justifying violence against the Plains Indians. There is little doubt, however, that the use of the rape charge by southern white politicians, newspaper editors, and other defenders of white supremacy differed profoundly in scale and scope from that of earlier generations. The charge of rape proved particularly powerful in motivating white mobs to act and in persuading other whites to tolerate lawlessness in such cases. This new, powerful justification of lynching, and with no foreign governments advocating on African Americans’ behalf, led to the era of greatest mob violence against Blacks, between 1880 and 1930. This brings us back to the question of mob violence against ethnic Mexicans and the Canales investigation. The lynching of ethnic Mexicans declined dramatically at the end of the nineteenth century only to resurface in the second decade of the twentieth century. One example that demonstrates

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the similarities and differences between the lynching of ethnic Mexicans and Blacks was the burning of Antonio Rodríguez in Rocksprings, Texas. On November 3, 1910, a mob broke into the jail where Rodríguez was awaiting trial for murder, dragged him outside, smothered his body with oil, and burned him at the stake before a large mob. Local residents agreed that “the action of the mob was justified as the lives of the ranchers’ wives had been unsafe because of the attempted ravages of Mexican settlers along the Rio Grande.”15 The ritualistic execution of Rodríguez was similar to those of African Americans at the same time. Mob attacks on Blacks had become disturbingly common by this time, while Rodríguez’s lynching was one of just a handful of such killings of ethnic Mexicans. The Rodríguez lynching suggests that racial and ethnic prejudice against ethnic Mexicans was powerful enough that the potential existed for a return to the earlier levels of anti-­ Mexican mob violence, at least in Texas. Events in the intervening years would turn that potential into tragic reality. Given the torrent of violence between 1915 and 1919, it is surprising that public extralegal mob violence against ethnic Mexicans had disappeared by the end of the 1920s. To account for this dramatic change, two factors need to be taken into consideration. First was the return of diplomatic protest by Mexico, and second was the heroic investigation led by J. T. Canales. In some respects, Canales’s fight ended in failure. The measures eventually enacted by the state legislature fell far short of the radical changes he proposed, an outcome that left him disillusioned with politics. In exposing the abuses suffered by ethnic Mexicans to public view, Canales nonetheless succeeded in tempering the worst excesses of the Texas Rangers. His accomplishment in securing implementation of legislative reform to restrain racial violence is without parallel in the experience of southern Blacks. Canales was born in Nueces County in 1877 into a wealthy family with deep roots in South Texas. Having earned a law degree from the University of Michigan, he practiced law in Corpus Christi and Laredo before, in 1904, taking up a position at the county assessor’s office in Brownsville. The next year he entered politics and won election to the state House of Representatives, serving the Ninety-­fifth District for a total of four terms. Canales embodied the acculturationist strategy of many middle-­class ethnic Mexicans. He married a white woman named Anna Anderson Wheeler and converted from Catholicism to Presbyterianism. While superintendent of the public schools in Cameron County, he emphasized the teaching of English. During World War I, he worked hard to prevent Mexican laborers from returning to Mexico to avoid the draft. During the period of border violence

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beginning in 1915, he aided the US Army by organizing a company of Mexican American scouts.16 Canales also fought hard for equality for ethnic Mexicans in Texas. Even while supporting adaptation to white cultural norms such as speaking English, he appreciated that improvements in race relations had to be a reciprocal process. By far, his most radical act on behalf of his fellow Mexican Americans was his confrontational stand against the Texas Rangers. While commanding his mounted scouts who gathered intelligence for the US Army, he witnessed abuses of power by the Rangers. He began lobbying for an investigation by the state legislature of what had transpired on the border. On January 16, 1919, Canales dramatically proposed a new law to the Texas House of Representatives that would reorganize the Rangers. In the bill he sought to improve the character of those enlisted as Rangers by mandating that they have at least two years of experience, be no younger than twenty-­five years old, and provide evidence from a commissioners’ court of their virtue. Moreover, the law proposed that the Rangers be required to post bond: $15,000 for captains, $12,000 for sergeants, and $5,000 for privates. Critically, the law would have strengthened local civil authorities by requiring that the Rangers transfer prisoners to the custody of the sheriff of the county where they made the arrest. Finally, the bill would make the Rangers criminally liable for any abuse of office including the mistreatment of detainees. The proposed bill created an uproar. Even before filing of the bill and initiating the hearings, Canales placed himself in serious danger by confronting the Rangers. His outspoken criticism had provoked Ranger Frank Hamer to threaten Canales to cease complaining about the Rangers or, Hamer said, “you are going to get hurt.”17 Although Hamer was warned to stop harassing Canales, he and others continued their attempts to intimidate the lawmaker. In one account, Canales’s friends hid him in a jail to protect him from possible assassination. When his wife, Anne, complained to the speaker of the House, the latter offered without any apparent sense of irony to redeploy one of the Rangers as a bodyguard.18 During the joint House-­Senate hearings to investigate the Ranger Force, Canales acted as prosecuting attorney and introduced nineteen charges against the Rangers, all relating to mistreatment, torture, and murder of criminal suspects. Controversially, Canales’s accusations targeted not only the specific Rangers who allegedly committed the abuses but also those who conspired to cover up their misdeeds, including the state adjutant general and by implication the governor. Of all the disturbing testimonies of Ranger

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violence elicited by Canales through his witnesses, none was more alarming than that of the Porvenir massacre.19 Canales’s bill never passed. After the hearing, the investigating committee recommended the passage of a substitute bill, one that was much weaker, removing the need for Rangers to post bond and other key elements. Canales appealed to his fellow legislators that the bill was a “whitewash,” but he could not prevent the House from approving the committee report that underpinned it by an overwhelming majority of 87 to 10.20 A combination of the threat of physical violence and the disappointing final bill to reform the Rangers alienated Canales from the local Democratic machine. He did not seek reelection when he completed his term of office in 1920. Canales’s efforts to curb Ranger violence should not be judged a complete failure. The exposure of abuses persuaded the adjutant general to rescind the appointments of Special Rangers. Recruited during the turbulence of the Mexican Revolution, these officers had not undergone a rigorous screening process. Some of the individuals committed the worst of the violence against ethnic Mexicans. One example was the not-­coincidental dismissal of W. W. Sands by the adjutant general just before the 1919 legislative hearings commenced. Sands had recently escaped conviction when his trial for the murder of a US Army soldier ended in a hung jury. Without Canales’s investigation, it seems highly unlikely that the authorities would have dismissed Sands. In addition to dismissing particular Rangers, authorities also disbanded several companies of the regular Ranger Force. While such reductions in size may have happened in any event and were far from what Canales aimed for initially, the overall impact of Canales’s investigation was indeed meaningful.21 Canales’s investigation, combined with the return of diplomatic protest by the Mexican government after the instability of the Mexican Revolution abated, were the two key factors in ending the public extralegal violence against ethnic Mexicans. By the late 1920s, whites in South Texas found that the long-­existing practice of law officers executing ethnic-­Mexican prisoners at night for “resisting” would no longer go without investigation and punishment. The turning point came when the popular World War I veteran Sheriff Raymond Teller was sent to federal prison after a contentious investigation into his murder of three ethnic-­Mexican prisoners in 1926. The episode certainly did not convince J. T. Canales that Mexicans in the region could expect justice and fair play, but it was a dramatic improvement over the recent past for ethnic Mexicans and, from the perspective of the 1920s, over the stormy present and future for African Americans.22

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Notes This essay is an expanded version of a short article that appeared on January 10, 2016, as part of the Refusing to Forget exhibition at the Bullock Texas State History Museum. It draws on the data published in our book Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 1. Walter Prescott Webb, The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), 478. 2. John J. Linn, Reminiscences of Fifty Years in Texas (New York: D. J. Saddler, 1883), 352–354, 353 (quote). 3. Manuel Robles to Lewis Cass, Secretary of State of the United States, October 14, 1857, translation, Office of the Governor, record group 301, Records of Elisha Marshall Pease, box 30126, folder 47, Texas State Archives, Austin. 4. Carrigan and Webb, Forgotten Dead, appendix A. 5. Richard B. McCaslin, Tainted Breeze: The Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas, 1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994); William D. Carrigan, The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836–1916 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 81–92. 6. Galveston News, November 9, 1872. 7. Galveston News, June 23, 1874. 8. Carrigan and Webb, Forgotten Dead, 81–82. 9. These attacks were part of a revolutionary plan to create a separate sovereign state in the US Southwest for persons of color. The historian Benjamin Heber Johnson has demonstrated that the frustrations of the Mexican raiders stemmed from a combination of factors that had undermined the position of Mexicans vis-­à-­vis Anglos since the introduction of the railroad into the lower Rio Grande Valley in 1904 (Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003], chapter 1). 10. Dallas Morning News, September 15, 1915. 11. Bonham News, October 22, 1915. 12. Virgil Lott Narrative, part II, 41, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. 13. Christopher Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (New York: Palgrave, 2002). 14. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, American Lynching (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). 15. “Anti-­American Riots in Mexico,” The Independent, November 17, 1910. 16. Evan Anders, “Canales, José Tomás,” Handbook of Texas Online (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2010), http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/arti cles/fcaag. 17. In Monica Muñoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-­Mexican Violence in Texas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 187. 18. Richard Ribb, “Patrician as Redeemer: José Tomás Canales and the Salvation of South Texas, 1910–1919,” Journal of South Texas 14 (Fall 2001): 189–203; Johnson, Revolution in Texas, 174.

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19. Texas Legislature, “Proceedings of the Joint Committee of the Senate and the House in the Investigation of the Texas State Ranger Force,” typed transcript, 36th Legislature, regular session, 1919, 2 vols., Legislative Papers, Texas State Archives, Austin. 20. Unidentified newspaper clipping, Texas Ranger Scrapbook, folder 2, Texas Rangers Papers, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin; Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler, The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution: The Bloodiest Decade, 1910–1920 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2004), 459–460. 21. Martinez, Injustice Never Leaves You, 186. Benjamin Márquez, LULAC: The Evolution of a Mexican American Political Organization (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 32–34; Neil Foley, Quest for Equality: The Failed Promise of Black-­Brown Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 14–15. 22. Carrigan and Webb, Forgotten Dead, 147–154.

CHAPTER 5

Representation, Refusal, and Remembrance: Lynching and Extralegal Violence in Mexico and the United States, 1890s–­1930s Gema Kloppe-­S antamaría In November 1926, a newspaper editorial entitled “Crimes and Civilized Countries” denounced a campaign of defamation against Mexico that was being promoted in the United States. According to the editorial, published originally in the Mexican newspaper El Universal and reproduced in translation in the New York Times, the campaign consisted of “enlarging upon crimes committed during the revolutionary periods in Mexico and in pointing to the instincts of Mexicans as ferocious, as if war, even in civilized nations did not arouse the lowest passions.”1 The piece then makes reference to the number of lynchings of ethnic Mexicans in Texas as well as the level of impunity surrounding those cases.2 El Universal editors assert that if events such as those had happened to US nationals in Mexico, the US press would in no time call Mexicans savages and complain about the inability of Mexican authorities to protect the security and integrity of residents of Mexico. The writers add, “If we use the same standard as some newspapers employ to measure us we should arrive at the conclusion that the American nation is a collection of crazy lynchers, a congregation of cannibals.” After acknowledging that in every country there are crimes that the law and authorities simply cannot prevent, the piece concludes, “We [Mexicans] must assert that we do not have the custom of lynching, a most cowardly crime, and this much is in our favor.” The newspaper editorial is illustrative of the discourses surrounding lynching and the use of extralegal violence in Mexico and the United States during the first decades of the twentieth century. In particular, it sheds light on Mexico’s highly critical stance toward the actions perpetrated by US lynch mobs as well as on both countries’ concerns with their images as civilized or modern nations. Mexican public opinion was especially condemnatory of lynchings perpetrated against ethnic Mexicans, but the same

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critical undertone can be found in regard to mob killings directed at African Americans and other ethnic minorities in the United States. In addition to illustrating Mexico’s disapproving view of US lynching, the article exemplifies a recurrent and more problematic narrative articulated in Mexican public opinion. Such narrative entailed the obscuring or even overt denial of the occurrence of lynching in Mexican territory whenever the country’s so-­ called civilization and political stability were brought into question. Mexican and US representations of lynching and extralegal forms of violence taking place on both sides of the border from the 1890s until the 1930s affected each country’s understanding of extralegal violence in relation to debates about civilization, modernity, and savagery. An examination of cases of lynching reported in US and Mexican newspapers shows the connections between US and Mexican lynching and points to the importance of thinking about this practice from a comparative perspective to go beyond parochial or even nationalistic narratives linking lynching to the supposedly inherent savagery of any given country or people. The Mexican public’s awareness of the occurrence of lynching of ethnic Mexicans in the United States challenged the external image of Mexico as a place of danger and lawlessness; that perception, as purveyed in US media, was often set against a representation of the United States as a place of modernity and order. American and Mexican media portrayals of lynching as an exclusively US practice obscured quite similar dynamics underlying the occurrence of lynching in both countries. These dynamics included the presence of state actors such as police officers and mayors in the organization and legitimation of the practice as well as public attitudes condoning the use of extralegal violence against individuals who were considered unworthy of being punished through legal procedural means. Finally, Mexico’s condemnation of extralegal violence against ethnic Mexicans in the United States did not generate a parallel public outcry against the lynching of dozens of Mexican citizens in its own territory. Nationalism, together with certain notions of civilization, modernity, and savagery, contributed to the Mexican public’s partial understanding of lynching as well as to selective remembrance of victims of mob violence. US and Mexican Representations of Extralegal Violence Lynching and extralegal violence stood at the center of public debates regarding the status of Mexico and the United States as civilized and modern nations. Although not entirely new, the image of Mexico as a lawless and

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dangerous place was surely deepened by the 1910 Revolution and the ensuing anxieties regarding the well-­being of US citizens living in a country no longer secured by the law and order of the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship.3 An illustrative case of the favorable representations of Mexico that predated the revolutionary period can be found in the US news coverage of the lynching of Arnulfo Arroyo, a man accused of assaulting President Porfirio Díaz on September 16, 1897. According to the first press reports, Arroyo had been taken into police custody and stabbed to death by a mob that had broken into the municipal palace with the intention of lynching him.4 The Los Angeles Times claimed that since “Mexicans are not addicted to the lynching habit,” the collective killing of Arroyo could only be interpreted as an expression of the high esteem Mexican people felt for President Díaz and of the great indignation that the attempt against his life had aroused among citizens.5 President Díaz lamented the event and its consequences for the honor of a country that had, he declared, never witnessed a lynching before.6 This was hardly Mexico’s first lynching; during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, communities resorted to lynching and rioting to resist authorities that threatened communal forms of organization.7 Yet the US media concurred this was a novel phenomenon in Mexico. The New York Times characterized the lynching as an “act unprecedented in the history of the country” and quoted Mexican officials’ disbelief in the face of such an unexpected “outburst of popular feeling.”8 Despite initial representations of this event as a sporadic act perpetrated by the pueblo, subsequent investigations revealed that there was no mob breaking into the prison and that the actual perpetrators of the lynching were a group of police officers avenging the president’s assailant.9 Ten police officers were sentenced to death for Arroyo’s lynching, a verdict that was celebrated in the United States as a sign of the efficacy of Mexico’s justice system. In reference to the impunity of lynchings in the United States, a Washington Post article asks, “Can any one recall an instance in which a body of lynchers in this country has been convicted of murder?”10 Along the same lines, the Los Angeles Times reflects on how Mexico, a country often “stigmatized as the home of turbulence, violence and revolutions,” offered a valuable example on how to deal with “wild justice” by “upholding the honor of the law.”11 The Mexican Revolution and the violence that ensued would shatter this image of Mexico as a country committed to the rule of law. The fear of “riotous mobs” affecting foreigners living in Mexico became widespread, as did the notion that the Mexican government could not guarantee the life and property of US citizens.12 For instance, US newspapers decried the anar-

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chy and disorder that reigned in Mexico after Villista troops murdered more than a dozen US citizens in the town of Santa Isabel, Chihuahua, in January 1916. A representative article, with the headline “Mexican Savagery,” asserts, “The probability seems strong that, as in many other cases of outrages of Americans, there will be no redress from Mexico.”13 It adds that Villa had denied the crimes and offered a reward for the summary execution of those responsible for the mass killing. This, the article states, would in any “civilized country” be considered a lynching, and it declares that the United States wanted justice, not slaughter.14 The article concludes by quoting a New York judge’s opinion about Mexico that characterized the country as one stricken by “atrocities, cruelties, desolation, chaos, carnage, lawlessness, ashes.”15 In an interview published in 1921, Mexican President Álvaro Obregón offered a response to this type of characterization of his country.16 Answering a series of questions posed by the New York World, Obregón denied the notion that Mexico had a militaristic spirit or that the revolution was a “favorite sport” of Mexicans. He explained that if there was a traditional inclination Mexicans shared, it was their love of the land. He further denied the existence of an anti-­US sentiment in Mexico, asserting instead that the revolution had made efforts to redress Mexicans’ animosities toward the United States and Spain.17 More effective than this type of public statement in defense of Mexico was the circulation of news regarding the lynching of ethnic Mexicans in the United States. As has been documented by William Carrigan and Clive Webb, there were at least 597 cases of lynching of ethnic Mexicans in the United States between 1848 and 1928.18 Driven primarily by racial prejudice, these lynchings generated outrage and indignation among the Mexican public and provided an opportunity for revolutionaries to point at the so-­ called savagery and injustice characterizing the country’s northern neighbor. One of the most notorious lynchings of an ethnic Mexican took place at the outset of the revolution. On November 3, 1910, a mob lynched Antonio Rodríguez, a man who was accused of the murder of Effie Greer Henderson, a white young woman, in Rocksprings, Texas.19 Rodríguez, who was a migrant worker and twenty years old at the time of his death, was tied to a stake and burned alive. The killing gave rise to riots and attacks against US individuals and properties in Mexico and led to an increase in mob violence against Mexicans in the United States.20 In Mexico City, rioters attacked the offices of the Mexican Herald, a US-­owned newspaper whose readership comprised US nationals living in the country. Cries of “Death to the Yankees” were heard as rioters threw rocks at the building and at the man-

Lynching and Extralegal Violence in Mexico and the United States 107

aging editor of the newspaper.21 In Guadalajara, riots organized mostly by high school and university students attacked two Protestant schools run by US citizens and tried to lynch Carlos B. Carothers, a Saltillo-­born US citizen who lived like and identified with his wealthy compatriots living in Guadalajara.22 Although Porfirio Díaz was quick to repress the protests in Mexico, reassuring his allies that no anti-­US actions would be tolerated in the country, the lynching of Rodríguez was nevertheless referred to by revolutionaries as a classic example of how justice was served in the United States. The famous revolutionary newspaper Regeneración, published by the Flores Magón brothers in California, featured several articles criticizing the savagery of the United States. A note published on December 31, 1910, denounces the impunity following Rodríguez’s lynching and states, “There will be no punishment for the savages of blond hair that sacrificed Antonio Rodríguez in a bonfire.”23 Another piece criticizes the US press for spreading, without any evidence, news of the alleged lynching of a young man from the United States in the midst of Mexico City’s riots.24 Under headlines such as “Lynched by Mexicans,” the incendiary news could serve as an excuse for invading Mexico, the Regeneración article warns.25 The same article notes that even though Rodríguez and many more ethnic Mexicans had been lynched in the United States, there were no headlines in US newspapers that read “Lynched by Americans.” Contributors to Regeneración denied the occurrence of any lynching resulting from the riots in Mexico City. They did, however, celebrate the “virility” of Mexican rioters and anticipated that Texans would think twice “before turning more Mexicans into barbecue.”26 Ricardo Flores Magón himself wrote an article invoking the manliness of Mexicans and criticizing the backwardness and ignorance of Mexico’s northern neighbor. Under the headline “The Barbarity of the United States,” Flores Magón denounces the lynching of Mexicans: The American people distinguish themselves from all others on earth by their selfishness . . . their hatred toward every person who does not belong to the Anglo-­Saxon race, their religious fanaticism, their vulgarity and their stupidity. . . . For the Mexican there is no justice in the courts, [and] for the Mexican there is no consideration as a human being. . . . [T]he Mexican . . . is lynched for any excuse. . . . Let’s make the stupid American people understand that we Mexicans know how to make ourselves respected. I do not speak as a patriot, but as a man.27

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Written with indignation and resentment, Flores Magón’s opinion piece reflects how knowledge of US lynchings allowed Mexican revolutionaries to question the supposed modernity of the United States.28 An article published in the Mexican newspaper El Informador in 1922 echoed this opinion. In the context of the various cases of lynching of ethnic Mexicans in Texas, the article condemns the custom of “our civilized and Christian neighbors” who kill Mexicans as sport and with the “unanimous support of authorities and neighbors.”29 It states that the difference between the killing of US citizens in Mexican territory and those of ethnic Mexicans in the United States was that the latter were perpetrated by bandits who acted outside the law and in a country disrupted by revolution, while the former occurred before the eyes of US law enforcement officers and authorities at large who allowed the arbitrary killings of ethnic Mexicans.30 Interestingly, Flores Magón’s depiction of white norteamericanos as ignorant savages and religious fanatics resonates with how the Mexican press referred to perpetrators of lynching in Mexico during the postrevolutionary period. In the 1920s and 1930s, in particular, supporters of the state’s anticlerical and modernization campaigns denounced the lynching of teachers, tax collectors, health inspectors, and other representatives of the state as a product of the ignorance, backwardness, and religious fanaticism of the perpetrators.31 An article published by the government’s mouthpiece, El Nacional, declares lynching a “tactic” used by religious fanatics to oppose the progressive ideas of the revolution.32 Although Mexican lynchings were not primarily driven by racial discrimination as in the United States,33 public officials and political elites tended to explain their occurrence in terms of race and ethnicity.34 Lynchings of those who represented the modernizing forces of the state were explained as a result of the religious fanaticism of entire communities that had for too long lived under the influence of the Roman Catholic Church.35 These communities were, for the most part, described as Indian or indigenous, even though many lynchings of public officials actually took place in mestizo communities.36 The US press covered Mexican lynchings on a regular basis. On July 28, 1926, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times reported that a mayor had been lynched in the town of Nochistán in the state of Zacatecas. A group of locals stoned the mayor to death and then hanged him after learning that he ordered the arrest and imprisonment of a Catholic priest who refused to follow the new anticlerical laws.37 A few months later, the New York Times reported the lynching of a man in Acámbaro, Guanajuato state, who had robbed a church; his body was left hanging from a tree in the main

Lynching and Extralegal Violence in Mexico and the United States 109

square.38 A 1923 article reported the lynching of two Protestant ministers in Oaxaca,39 and an article three years later reports the lynching of a US Protestant minister in Guanajuato.40 The Mexican government openly denied these lynchings, particularly in the face of concerns expressed by US officials.41 However, the occurrence of similar incidents of mob violence in Mexico perpetrated by Catholics against anticlerical officials suggests that these lynchings were indeed taking place in the country.42 The Mexican government may have had good reason to deny the incidents, as Mexican officials were engaged in an active diplomatic campaign to denounce the lynching of ethnic Mexicans in US territory.43 The dissemination of US news regarding lynchings in Mexico was bad publicity for a government that was trying to assert the validity of its diplomatic efforts and demands upon the premise that lynching was only a problem north of the border. Furthermore, the occurrence of lynching further fueled the notion that the Mexican government was incapable of securing the life and property of Mexicans and foreigners alike.44 Mexican public officials were not alone in creating a narrative that depicted lynching as a US phenomenon. The attempted lynching of Juan Castillo Morales, a Mexican soldier accused of having brutally raped and murdered a girl in the border city of Tijuana in 1938, exemplifies how public opinion contributed to reproducing this narrative. The case, which was reported also in the US press,45 gained great publicity in Mexico.46 In the central state of Puebla, local newspapers strongly condemned the attempted lynching. Under the headline “In This Place, We Do Not Lynch,” an editorial criticizes such savage practice and attributes the “cannibal” incident to the proximity of tijuanenses, residents of Tijuana, to the United States. The editorial further explains that people who attempted to lynch the soldier were emulating the type of punishment used in “Yanquilandia [Yankeeland] against blacks who rape girls, setting fire to them, and diabolically dancing around their smoking humanity.”47 Despite Mexican representations of lynching as an American phenomenon, it would be in Mexico, not the United States, where the practice would persist throughout the twentieth century and even the twenty-­first.48 Echoing the political dimension of US mob violence, lynchings in Mexico were legitimated by the actions or omissions of public officials who were supposed to guarantee the rule of law. Just as sheriffs and police officers participated in and condoned lynchings in the United States,49 mayors and police officers in Mexico participated in the collective killings of purported criminals. Although some scholars have attributed lynching in Mexico to the lack of state presence,50 an argument that echoes the frontier theory of US lynch-

110  Gema Kloppe-­Santamaría

ing,51 evidence suggests that authorities were not necessarily absent during these events. In November 1928 a mob lynched Mariano Sosa, a man who was doing time at a prison in the state of Mexico.52 After seizing the prisoner from the hands of the police, the group of men stabbed Sosa to death. The Mexican press suspected the involvement of the mayor in Sosa’s lynching. In May 1930, a Mexican newspaper reported the “triple lynching” of three suspected criminals in Tepetzala, Puebla. Far from preventing the attack, the town’s mayor incited the perpetrators of the lynching by ordering the tolling of the church bells while the mob hanged the three men from a tree in front of the municipal offices.53 As in the attempted lynching of Juan Castillo Morales in Tijuana and the lynching of Arnulfo Arroyo in Mexico City, authorities were not absent but were often simply incapable or unwilling to stop these killings. As explained by scholars studying lynching in the United States, it is not the absence of the state but a particular disdain of procedural justice on behalf of both citizens and authorities that can explain the persistence of lynching.54 Despite Mexico’s formal abolishment of the death penalty, lethal forms of punishment prevailed in the form of the ley fuga (law of flight) and lynching.55 Although Mexican public opinion generally was critical of lynchings of public officials in charge of the state’s modernizing and secularizing efforts, Mexicans tended to support the use of extralegal forms of violence to punish suspected criminals such as robbers, murderers, rapists, and kidnappers who were considered unworthy of procedural forms of justice. The national newspaper La Prensa describes how a “savage” man had abused and then murdered a six-­year-­old girl on July 4, 1930, in Tlaquepaque, Jalisco state. After revealing gruesome details about the murder, the newspaper describes and implicitly justifies villagers’ efforts to find the criminal to lynch him.56 On July 15, 1934, a local newspaper in Puebla reported that the “caveman” Fidel Lopez Cortés raped the girl Leonor Cruz in Puebla City.57 The next day, the newspaper announced that the police shot the alleged rapist upon his attempt to escape prison; the article celebrates the authorities’ steadfast actions to prevent the criminal’s escape.58 Mexican public opinion overall viewed suspected criminals as savage, ignorant lowlifes. Criminals were construed as individuals who belonged to a category of people undeserving of thorough legal protections because of the uncivilized character of their actions. Like supporters of lynching in the United States, those who justified lynching in Mexico did so not only on the basis of the inefficacy of the justice system but also on the alleged inhumanity and even savagery of those who were lynched. Thus, even when postrevolutionary politicians rejected in principle the death penalty in favor

Lynching and Extralegal Violence in Mexico and the United States 111

of more modern and civilized punishments, in practice lethal and extralegal forms of punishment were justified by the general public and executed by public officials, from police officers to mayors, against ostensibly savage alleged criminals. Mexican public opinion maintained a dual standard in regard to victims of lynching. Lynchings of ethnic Mexicans in the United States generated indignation and uproar, while the lynching of Mexican citizens in Mexican territory was tolerated as a necessary response to savage and low-­class criminals. Conclusion In his seminal 1905 work on the history of lynching in the United States, James Elbert Cutler characterizes lynching as a “criminal practice which is peculiar to the United States.”59 To illustrate his point, Cutler observes that no other civilized nation such as Canada, England, France, and Germany experienced mob violence in which a crowd captured an alleged criminal and executed him with no regard for the formal mechanisms of justice. Cutler certainly did not have the United States’ southern neighbor in mind when writing his book. Even though he was well aware of the lynching of ethnic Mexicans in US territory,60 there is no reference in his work to lynchings taking place in Mexico either of US citizens or of Mexican citizens. Cutler probably did not count Mexico among the civilized countries comparable to the United States. Even so, he may have been unaware that the practice occurred in Mexico, although a review of US newspapers from the time shows that the US public had access to that information.61 Whatever his reasons, Cutler’s omission of Mexico in the study of US lynching is not unusual. With the exception of a few studies,62 the historiography of lynching in the United States has been devoid of comparative analysis and has thus contributed, in many cases inadvertently, to reifying the notion that lynching constitutes a US exception. Furthermore, even among studies that have presented a more transnational or global approach to US lynching, Mexico appears only in the margins despite that country’s geographical proximity to the United States.63 The absence of a comparative dimension in the US historiography on lynching may reflect that in Latin America and other regions, sociologists and anthropologists have, for the most part, studied this practice by focusing on the current context.64 In Latin America in particular, literature on lynching has centered on cases taking place since the 1990s and interpreted

112  Gema Kloppe-­Santamaría

their occurrence against the backdrop of the region’s increasing levels of insecurity and crime.65 A focus on the histories of lynching and extralegal violence in Mexico and the United States highlights how representations of lynching have affected each of these countries’ understanding of extralegal justice in connection to debates about civilization, modernity, and savagery. It furthermore allows linking the experiences of mob violence in the United States and Mexico by reflecting on the roles state violence and public opinion have played in the organization and legitimation of lynching. Representations of lynching have affected each of these countries’ debates and public understandings of civilization and savagery in relation to violence. The occurrence of lynching and other acts of mob violence has been used to assert the civilization or backwardness of the nationals of the other country. Lynchings in each country have seldom been analyzed on a comparative basis. When the Mexican press referred to lynchings in the United States, it treated them as a US phenomenon; when US newspapers reported lynchings in Mexico it referred to the local conditions surrounding the events but rarely connected their occurrence back to mob violence in the United States. In the contemporary context, in which extralegal forms of violence continue to be a source of friction in the bilateral relations, Mexican nationals and immigrants are portrayed as inherently dangerous, and the Mexican government responds with calls to nationalism and the overt denial of human rights violations in the country.66 A reflection on this recent past offers important lessons and a cautionary tale regarding representations of extralegal violence caught in nationalistic debates or in mutual allegations of the other country’s uncivilized character. Such representations prevent full recognition of the victims of extralegal violence on both sides of the border whose very deaths ought to be remembered. Notes The chapter benefited from suggestions provided by participants in the Seminario de Relaciones Internacionales of the Center for International Studies of El Colegio de México and of the Borderlands Seminar at the Newberry Library in Chicago. 1. “Mexicans Complain of Calumnies Here,” New York Times, November 4, 1926. The editorial was first published in El Universal of Mexico City, then in translation in the New York Times. 2. I define “lynching” as a collective, public, extralegal, and particularly cruel form

Lynching and Extralegal Violence in Mexico and the United States 113

of violence aimed at punishing individuals considered offensive or threatening by a given group or community. 3. On perceptions of the Mexican Revolution as a threat to the stability and well-­ being of Americans and other foreigners living in Mexico, see Timothy Henderson, The Worm in the Wheat: Rosalie Evans and Agrarian Struggle in the Puebla-­Tlaxcala Valley of Mexico, 1906–1927 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 4. “Diaz’s Assailant Lynched,” New York Times, September 18, 1897. 5. “Summary Vengeance,” Los Angeles Times, September 18, 1897. 6. Claudio Lomnitz, “Mexico’s First Lynching: Sovereignty, Criminality, Moral Panic,” Critical Historical Studies 1, no. 1 (2014): 89. 7. See William B. Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979). 8. “Diaz’s Assailant Lynched,” New York Times, September 18, 1897. See also “Mexican Justice,” Los Angeles Times, October 10, 1897. 9. “Mexican Police Arrested,” New York Times, September 20, 1897; “The Lynching of Arroyo,” New York Times, September 22, 1897. 10. “A Lesson from Mexico,” Washington Post, November 25, 1897. 11. “Mexican Justice,” Los Angeles Times, October 10, 1897. 12. Henderson, Worm in the Wheat, 45, 154, 158; Horacio Legrás, Culture and Revolution: Violence, Memory, and the Making of Modern Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), 31–34. Newspaper clips and diplomatic notes of the time are found in legajo (leg.) 410, expediente (exp.) 3, and leg. 622, exp. 4, Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, Archivo Histórico Genaro Estrada, Fondo Embajada de Estados Unidos, Mexico City. 13. “Mexican Savagery,” The Outlook (New York), February 2, 1916. See also “Massacre of Americans under Orders of Villa,” Herald Democrat (Leadville, CO), January 14, 1916. 14. “Mexican Savagery,” The Outlook, February 2, 1916. 15. Although they were fewer, certainly other, more favorable representations of Mexico’s political context were published as well, such as Samuel Guy Inman, “Mexico and America Compared,” The Billboard (Cincinnati, OH), September 13, 1919. 16. Álvaro Obregón, La situación de México: Declaraciones del presidente de la República Mexicana, general Álvaro Obregón, al representante del diaro norteamericano The New York World (Buenos Aires: A. Molionari, 1921). 17. Obregón, La situación de México, 11, 22, 30. 18. William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, “The Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin or Descent in the United States, 1848 to 1928,” Journal of Social History (Winter 2003): 413. See also Nicholas Villanueva, Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderland (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017). 19. “Why Rodriguez Was Burned,” New York Times, November 11, 1910. The accusation made against Rodríguez was underpinned by the racial tensions at the time that continue to surface in the memory and retelling of the event in Rocksprings (Monica Muñoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-­Mexican Violence in Texas, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018, 40–45). 20. “Americans Victims of Mob in Mexico,” Los Angeles Times, November 10, 1910; Ana María Serna, “La Ley Lynch: un mórbido espectáculo,” in El Libro Rojo, ed.

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Gerardo Villadelángel Viñas (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2008), 254–255; Villanueva, Lynching of Mexicans, 53. 21. Frederick C. Turner, “Anti-­Americanism in Mexico, 1910–1913,” Hispanic American Historical Review 47, no. 4 (November 1967): 505. 22. Avital H. Bloch and Servando Ortoll, “ ‘¡Viva México! ¡Mueran los yanquis!’ The Guadalajara Riots of 1910,” in Riots in the Cities: Popular Politics and the Urban Poor in Latin America, 1765–1910, ed. Silvia M. Arrom and Servando Ortoll (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1996), 206–207. 23. “Impunidad para los linchadores,” Regeneración, December 31, 1910. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine. 24. I refer specifically to an article published in the Los Angeles Record on November 10. This and other news articles suggest that a young man had been lynched and a child stoned to death. However, those allegations were never proved. See untitled, New York Times, November 11, 1910; “Reaping the Whirlwind,” Regeneración, November 12, 1910. See also Serna Rodríguez, “La Ley Lynch: Un mórbido espectáculo,” 254. 25. “Reaping the Whirlwind,” Regeneración, November 12, 1910. 26. “Actualidades,” Regeneración, December 10, 1910. For similar articles, see “Puntos Rojos,” Regeneración, November 19, 1910; “The Mexican Unrest” Regeneración, De­cember 3, 1910. 27. Ricardo Flores Magón, “La barbarie en los Estados Unidos,” Regeneración, August 5, 1911. 28. US and Mexican newspapers articulated opposing views of the lynching. Overall, English-­language newspapers condemned the murder of Effie Henderson, while the Mexican press focused on the brutal lynching of Antonio Rodríguez (Martinez, Injustice Never Leaves You, 8). On how the Texan Spanish-­language newspaper La Crónica denounced the lynching of Rodríguez, see Gabriela González, chapter 7 in this volume. 29. “Dos sistemas para matar hombres,” El Informador, October 30, 1922. 30. The same year this article was published, 1922, the Mexican government condemned numerous lynchings perpetrated in Texas with the complicity of the Texas Rangers (“Sesenta ciudadanos mexicanos han sido asesinados este año en los EE.UU.,” El Mundo, November 18, 1922; “Investigación por el linchamiento de Zarate,” El Mundo, November 23, 1922; “El Gob. mexicano pide garantías para sus cónsules en Texas,” El Informador, November 17, 1922; “Protestan por el linchamiento de Villareal,” El Informador, November 17, 1922. 31. In the 1920s and 1930s, in the context of the Cristero War (1926–1929) and of the Second Cristiada (1934–1938), lynchings, riots, and vigilante killings were organized in defense of the Catholic religion and in clear opposition to the postrevolutionary project (Gema Kloppe-­Santamaría, “Lynching and the Politics of State Formation in Post-­Revolutionary Puebla (1930s–­50s),” Journal of Latin American Studies [February 2019], https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022216X18001104. 32. “El linchamiento, táctica de lucha de los fanáticos,” El Nacional, January 7, 1935. 33. See Michael Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); David Garland, “Penal Excess and Surplus Meaning: Public Torture Lynchings in Twentieth-­Century America,” Law and Society Review 39, no. 4 (2005): 793–833; Martinez, Injustice Never Leaves You, 6–7. 34. Gema Santamaría, “Lynching, Criminality, and Racialized Subjects in Mexico,”

Lynching and Extralegal Violence in Mexico and the United States 115

in Voices of Crime: Constructing and Contesting Social Control in Modern Latin America, ed. Luz Huertas, Bonnie Lucero, and Gregory J. Swedbert (Tempe: University of Arizona Press, 2016); Gema Santamaría, “Legitimating Lynching: Public Opinion and Extralegal Violence in Mexico,” in Violence and Crime in Latin America: Representations and Politics, ed. Gema Santamaría and David Carey Jr. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017). 35. “No es posible declarar si se ha logrado algo con la desfanatización de indios,” Excelsior, September 11, 1935. 36. Although lynchings in Latin America are neither grounded in racial or ethnic differences nor informed by customary laws, lynchings and their perpetrators have been racialized by media and official representations (Christopher Krupa, “Histories in Red: Ways of Seeing Lynching in Ecuador,” American Ethnologist 36, no. 1 (2009): 20–39). 37. “Mayor Is Reported Lynched for Killing Mexican Priest,” New York Times, July 28, 1926; “Mexican Mob Lynches Mayor in Church War,” Los Angeles Times, July 28, 1926. 38. “Church Thief Hanged by Mexicans,” New York Times, September 17, 1926. 39. “Report 2 Preachers Lynched in Mexico,” New York Times, February 7, 1923. 40. “Report American Lynched,” New York Times, August 3, 1926. 41. The Mexican embassy issued a formal statement regarding the lynching of the mayor in Nochistán, Zacatecas, claiming that the case was not only exaggerated but, “as most of the news regarding the religious situation in Mexico,” absolutely false (“Denies Lynching of Mexican Mayor,” New York Times, July 30, 1926). 42. From 1934 to 1938, Catholic mobs lynched dozens of rural teachers who promoted the new secular and socialist model of education implemented by the federal government (David Raby, “Los maestros rurales y los conflictos sociales (1931–1940),” Historia Mexicana 18, no. 2 (1968): 190–226). 43. This diplomatic campaign gained momentum in the 1920s, during the years that these lynchings reportedly took place (William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1929 [New York: Oxford University Press, 2013], 153–154). Mexico’s diplomatic efforts also included denunciations of violations in due process experienced by Mexican immigrants (F. Arturo Rosales, ¡Pobre Raza! Violence, Justice, and Mobilization among Mexico Lindo Immigrants, 1900–1936 [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999], 118–129). 44. For an example of the concerns that violence against Americans in Mexican territory created among public officials in Mexico, see July 28, 1919, leg. 622, exp. 4, fojas 272–275; leg. 666, exp. 27; leg. 410, exp. 3, Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, Archivo Histórico Genaro Estrada, Fondo Embajada de Estados Unidos, Mexico City. 45. “Alleged Girl Slayer Executed in Mexico,” New York Times, February 18, 1938. 46. Castillo Morales had saved himself from a mob that broke into the military fort where he was being held, but he was later executed by the military. His execution generated a series of protests in Tijuana that caught the attention of President Lázaro Cárdenas (Paul J. Vanderwood, Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004]). 47. “Aquí no linchamos,” La Opinión, February 17, 1938. 48. See Raúl Rodríguez Guillén, “Los linchamientos en México: Crisis de autoridad y violencia social,” in Los linchamientos en México, ed. Raúl Rodríguez Guillén and

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Juan Mora Heredia (Mexico City: Ediciones y Gráficos Eón y Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2006). 49. On the participation of the Texas Rangers on lynchings against ethnic Mexicans, see chapters 2 by Andrew R. Graybill and 4 by William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb in this volume. 50. Carlos Vilas, “(In)Justicia por mano propia: Linchamientos en el México contemporáneo,” Revista Mexicana de Sociología 1 (2001): 131–160; Leigh Binford, “A Failure of Normalization: Transnational Migration, Crime, and Popular Justice in the Contemporary Neoliberal Mexican Social Formation,” Social Justice 26, no. 3 (1999): 123–144. 51. For an explanation of the frontier theory, see James Elbert Cutler, Lynch Law: An Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States (New York: Longmans, Green, 1905), 1. A useful critique of such theory can be found in Carrigan and Webb, “Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin,” 415–416. 52. “Linchan a un reo en la cárcel de Tenago,” La Prensa, November 14, 1928. 53. “Un triple linchamiento fue perpetrado en el pueblo de Tepetzala ayer,” La Opinión, May 11, 1930. 54. Pfeifer, Rough Justice, 94–100; Carrigan and Webb, “Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin,” 416; Garland, “Capital Punishment and American Culture,” 353. 55. The ley fuga entailed the extrajudicial killing of a criminal upon his alleged attempt to escape from the authorities (Pablo Piccato, A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017], 107–125). 56. “Querían linchar a un salvaje en Guadalajara,” La Prensa, July 5, 1930. 57. “Una hija del Dr. Cruz Cázarez fue víctima de brutales ultrajes,” La Opinión, July 15, 1934. 58. “Pagó con su vida el ultraje a una niña,” La Opinión, July 16, 1934. 59. Cutler, Lynch Law, 1. 60. Cutler, Lynch Law, 132, 171–173, 181. 61. “Diaz’s Assailant Lynched,” New York Times, September 17, 1987; “Mexican Justice,” Los Angeles Times, October 10, 1897; “Justice in Mexico,” Los Angeles Times, November 25, 1897; “Mexican Mob Lynches Mayor in Church War,” Los Angeles Times, July 28, 1926; “German Red Reported Lynched in Mexico,” New York Times, June 17, 1931; “Lynching of Laborer in Mexico Reported,” Los Angeles Times, March 10, 1934; “Mexicans Hang Teacher,” New York Times, May 27, 1935; “Mayor Hanged in Mexico,” New York Times, June 2, 1935. 62. Michael J. Pfeifer, ed., Global Lynching and Collective Violence, 2 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017); William D. Carrigan and Christopher Waldrep, eds., Swift to Wrath: Lynching in Global Historical Perspective (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013); Manfred Berg and Simon Wendt, eds., Globalizing Lynching History Vigilantism and Extralegal Punishment from an International Perspective (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Robert W. Thurston, Lynching: American Mob Murder in Global Perspective (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2011). 63. To my knowledge, only Pfeifer’s edited volume incorporates a chapter on lynching in Mexico: Gema Santamaría, “Lynching, Religion, and Politics in Twentieth-­ Century Puebla,” in Global Lynching and Collective Violence, 2:85–114. 64. Carrigan and Waldrep, Swift to Wrath, 1–2. 65. Angelina Snodgrass Godoy, “When ‘Justice’ Is Criminal: Lynchings in Con-

Lynching and Extralegal Violence in Mexico and the United States 117

temporary Latin America,” Theory and Society, 33, no. 6 (2004): 621–651; Daniel Goldstein, “ ‘In Our Hands’: Lynching, Justice, and the Law in Bolivia,” American Ethnologist 30, no. 1 (2003): 22–43; Leigh Binford and Nancy Churchill, “Lynching and States of Fear in Urban Mexico,” Anthropologica 51, no. 2 (2009). For an exception to this literature, see Hinnerk Onken, “Lynching in Peru in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” in Globalizing Lynching History, 173–186; Kloppe-­Santamaría, “Lynching and the Politics of State Formation in Post-­Revolutionary Puebla.” 66. Gema Santamaría, “Mexico: Nationalism Alone Is Not the Answer to Trump,” AULA Blog, April 13, 2017, https://aulablog.net/2017/04/13/mexico-­nationalism-­alone -­is-­not-­the-­answer-­to-­trump/.

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CHAPTER 6

The World of Education among Ethnic Mexicans in J. T. Canales’s South Texas Philis M. Barragán Goetz and Carlos K. Blanton

There has been a resurgence of scholarship on various aspects of La Matanza, the slaughter of hundreds or perhaps thousands of ethnic Mexicans throughout South and West Texas along the US-­Mexico borderlands during the 1910s.1 People in South Texas have long known about these atrocities, prompting J. T. Canales to lead a legislative investigation in 1919. Yet traditional works of Texas history by Walter Prescott Webb in the 1930s and T. R. Fehrenbach in the 1960s justify the atrocities. These uncritical works defend the Texas Rangers as uncomplicated heroes who saved Western civilization from the savagery of Native Americans and the lawless banditry of Mexicans. Such traditional narratives deflect responsibility from their heroic subjects with few details and instead rely on stereotypes about the supposed defects in the Mexican character.2 Ironically, Canales’s legislative and activist work in 1919, particularly the attention he gave to La Matanza, influenced Webb to write Texas Rangers, and subsequently Canales referenced Webb when discussing the events preceding 1919. On the whole, however, these authors extend comparatively little space to the bloody 1910s, when the Rangers, as J. T. Canales observes, “committed many indiscriminate murders on our people.”3 In recent years many scholars have begun to rediscover the period in their academic work, examining what caused La Matanza of the 1910s in South Texas. Why did such violence toward ethnic Mexicans erupt in that time and place? Was it a moment of collective madness that spontaneously erupted in several places? Was it a spillover of violence from the Mexican Revolution?4 The research that several of these scholars have produced transcends into activism that some communities champion while others seek to deny or diminish. Professors John Morán González, Sonia Hernández, Monica Muñoz Martinez, Benjamin H. Johnson, and Trinidad Gonzales

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have formed the Refusing to Forget project dedicated to raising awareness of the untold stories of border violence against Mexican people during this period. Though the scholars are highly regarded among their colleagues and the community alike, their work has had its detractors.5 The violence was older than the 1910s, as Andrew R. Graybill notes in chapter 2 of this collection. But the violence extended beyond guns, ropes, and fires. It stemmed from a wide array of increasingly hostile social relations, evident in the prevalence of unfair labor conditions; in the near total lack of accountability for police authorities, of which the Texas Rangers are only a part; and in Anglos’ efforts to deny voting and other civil rights to Mexican Americans. These hostile social relations and the political, cultural, and literal violence they engendered deeply influenced the newly expanding public school system in the late nineteenth century. The public schools reflected and furthered this sorry state of human relations through an intentional disparagement of Mexican culture. From the 1880s, when it first began expanding under the auspices of reforming educators, the public school system in the state waged a cultural war against all ethnic Mexicans. These efforts gained momentum at the turn of the twentieth century. The foundation for this cultural war was the notion that ethnic Mexicans as a racial group were a deficient people. There existed a wealth of supposedly objective evidence for this point: superintendents’ reports that characterized ethnic Mexican children as an educational problem. Historians have used several interpretive perspectives in rebuilding more accurate and evidence-­based historical narratives that balance such state documents with the agency this community experienced. The field of Mexican American history continues to rely on two lenses for interpreting the past: oppression and resistance.6 Ethnic Mexicans are either victims of American oppression in the former or active agents in resisting said oppression in the latter. While we consider these lenses useful, they cannot account for every facet of ethnic Mexican experience in the United States, particularly in terms of education in Texas. That experience is a little of both— oppression and resistance. But more importantly, the use of both or either illustrates a window into a wider field of cultural negotiation that more precisely pinpoints shifting positions, why they shift, and under what circumstances; these are more productive questions than stark, binary notions of self-­determination or victimization. This approach offers a more nuanced portrait rather than a monochromatic one. Ethnic Mexicans’ engagement with various educational institutions, of both the state’s and their own making, illustrate the ways educational choices reflect this cultural negotiation. And reducing the complexity of cultural creation to two dichotomous

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frameworks obfuscates the nuance embedded in these educational experiences. It does so in the cultural war of the public education system as well as in the various ways ethnic Mexicans have responded. The cultural war waged by Anglos with power and by the state manifested in the development and expansion of the public school system. It reveals much about the social conditions that produced La Matanza and indicates how many school superintendents, consciously or unconsciously, were complicit in constructing the myths of deficiency and inferiority that girded and justified the violence. The ways Mexicans and Mexican Americans resisted and negotiated the public school system’s cultural war ultimately reveal the political, cultural, and literal violence of the 1910s to have been largely ineffective in its aim of totally dominating the ethnic Mexican population.7 Myth and History Remembering is activism, Katherine Hite argues in her essay in this collection. Early Chicana/o historians, in recovering the educational past, inherently defended the Mexican American students and their capacities in the past and, implicitly, the present.8 A number of historians have documented how the public schools in Texas treated Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants as second-­class people. The idea of ethnic Mexicans as uneducable or as educational problems is a myth that scholars have continually addressed.9 The first monograph on Mexican American educational history was Guadalupe San Miguel’s “Let All of Them Take Heed”: Mexican Americans and the Campaign for Educational Equality, published in 1987. San Miguel confronts the pervasive myth that Mexican Americans have not historically or presently valued education. He finds “Mexican Americans as active agents in history,” a fact that “provides a crushing blow to the myth of Mexican American indifference toward public education.”10 San Miguel further states, “According to this myth, which has been passed down through the years, Mexican Americans have not really cared for education or else they have failed to appreciate its importance and benefit to their community in particular and to the society at large.”11 He studies the effects of this myth on American educational historiography, which up until the publication of his book completely ignored the scholastic plight of Mexican Americans. In the preface San Miguel notes, “Although the full reasons for neglecting the past experiences of Mexican Americans in education are not apparent, professional historians are partially to blame for this sad condition.”12 He does

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not explicitly link professional historians’ indifference to Mexican American educational history to the influence of the myth; rather, he diplomatically refers to reasons for their indifference as “not apparent.” But he leaves it difficult to imagine any other possibility. This myth is rooted in the early days of the Texas public school system more than a hundred years before the publication of San Miguel’s book. The chaotic history of Texas’s 1836 separation from Mexico and existence as an independent republic before its 1845 annexation to the United States fueled the notion that ethnic Mexicans were uneducable. The Texas Republic’s declaration of independence cites Mexico’s failure to create a public school system as one of the reasons for secession. Some three quarters of a century later in December 1910, F. M. Bralley, state superintendent of public instruction, gave a speech to the Texas State Teachers Association’s annual meeting in which he used the education clause in the state’s founding document as evidence that Texas’s commitment to public education for all illustrated its commitment to democracy.13 This skewed retelling of the state’s origin story is in line with John Morán González’s argument that “the strongest sense of a stable nationalist identity for Anglo-­Texans came through Texas history and its narrative of unbridled racial triumphalism.”14 Myths about ethnic Mexicans’ indifference to education fed into these larger narratives of racial triumphalism and justified their static, low-­ paying, unskilled labor. The myth went so: A population that is both indolent and ignorant could not possibly contribute much else to society; and the schools for them could not be expected to actually teach them much. Progressive Education in Texas The ways of teaching ethnic-­Mexican students stemmed from the pedagogical ferment of the Progressive education movement, which, on the surface, was responsible for improving the American education system in a number of ways: passing compulsory attendance laws, modernizing the curriculum, and professionalizing the teaching profession. On the other hand, Progressive education was responsible for educational discrimination against a number of peoples: African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and non-­English-­speaking European immigrants such as the German Americans and Czech Americans who were prominent in Texas. The Progressive education movement was divided among adherents of different kinds of approaches to meet these larger goals. Thinkers such as John Dewey in the early twentieth century regarded learning by rote and

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its almost mechanical, unquestioning approach as stifling. They argued that education ought to be, as practicably as possible, tailored to the individual needs of the child and made relevant to the child’s social milieu. In an increasingly industrialized world that made ever more demands to educate its workforce and citizenry, this was a tall order. While some proponents of the movement challenged established ways of thinking and the status quo, a much larger contingent of the movement was captivated by the belief that schools should be efficient sorters of talent. Some Progressives held that success was attainable for all; others contended that not all would benefit from the same kind of education and should be taught in ways that would provide the best practical benefit for employment, especially for racial minorities who were believed to possess fewer inherent academic capabilities.15 Most school officials in Texas took the Progressive mantra seriously, though in ways that reinforced rather than challenged their own racism. Although theoretically radical in possibility, Progressive education in practice tended to reify the existing social order when it came to race, class, and gender. Concomitantly, much of the Progressive Era racism was highly contingent upon local circumstances such as the personalities of school authorities and teachers, the economic structure of the area, and the political importance of ethnic Mexican communities there. Racial segregation, a throttled-­down curriculum of low expectations, an emphasis on practical trades, and an unwillingness to interfere with the migratory and child labor demands of the agricultural industry were served by the new Progressive education as a part of the perceived natural order within which its advocates sought to work. The old racial prejudice against Mexican-­origin people was now given a shiny new scientific vocabulary: dual-­language handicap; intelligence quotient in the moron, imbecile, or idiot range; educational retardation and other such terms. All were tediously unrelenting in their coded meaning as to Mexican and Mexican American deficiency.16 Once the public school system started to become the most salient institution for educating all young Texans, it adopted specific pedagogical tactics to “Americanize” its growing immigrant scholastic population as well as champion Anglo-­Texan historical narratives. School administrators and teachers relied heavily on segregated schooling, vocational training, shabby one-­room schoolhouses, and noncompliance with compulsory education laws to set children on the path toward the low-­paying, unskilled jobs that their parents had.17 Academics from different disciplines and backgrounds, such as Paul S. Taylor and Herschel T. Manuel, interviewed various superintendents throughout South Texas in the 1920s and 1930s. Many of the school administrators, whose districts were 75–90 percent ethnic Mexican,

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argued that education made these children pompous, arrogant, and dissatisfied with their low socioeconomic status. In other words, education ruined them as workers rather than training them to accept their menial lot in life. The State’s Actions toward Ethnic Mexicans and Education The Progressive Era’s educational policies and practices became more encompassing in their reach and their righteous sense of scientific justification as the twentieth century proceeded. This racial oppression can best be viewed through a few avenues of analysis: the practice of physically segregating all ethnic Mexican children regardless of citizenship into separate schools or campuses on the basis of race; the widespread belief that all Mexican and Mexican American children suffered from a crippling problem with language that justified remedial curriculum and physical separation; and the unfounded conviction, prevalent among Anglo education officials, that the inherently deficient culture of ethnic Mexicans virtually precluded their children from obtaining any meaningful education. Segregating ethnic Mexicans from Anglos was a common social practice, though an uneven one during the nineteenth century. The twentieth century ushered the rise of large-­scale agriculture, an ever-­widening socioeconomic slippage of Mexican Americans, and greater immigration of Mexican laborers and families. In this context, practices of segregation hardened. The use of IQ tests, the prioritizing of an “Americanization” emphasis upon schooling, and the mandating of specialized health and hygiene courses for an increasingly racialized group of people all contributed to justifying separate and unequal education. This oppressive educational segregation occurred in a different manner than that experienced by other racialized groups such as African Americans. This was largely because of Mexican Americans’ legal whiteness, the interpretation of which was subject to the whims of local superintendents. Anglo settlers in South Texas transferred the Jim Crow style of racial segregation experienced by African Americans to Mexican Americans without much critical thought. Dimmit County, founded in 1880, operated a small public school system. In the 1892–1893 academic year, the county schools drew in 206 students, including 16 African Americans. But for some years prior, the county had been segregating African Americans and Mexican Americans together from Anglos. In July 1893, County Judge J. B. Spears tersely noted, “The Col. School was mixed (Mex. & Negroes) [and] discontinued because illegal.” Spears did not repent of his wish for racial seg-

Education among Ethnic Mexicans in Canales’s Texas 127

Map 6.1. Schools and escuelitas in J. T. Canales’s South Texas, 1884–1927. Courtesy,

Martin Goetz.

regation. Rather, this acknowledged that the growing recognition of the nominal whiteness of Mexicans mandated a tripartite system of segregation rather than a bipartite one; the distinction was more an annoying complication to the local enactment of racial segregation than any serious blow to it.18 Nearby La Salle County put African American and ethnic Mexican children in the same classes without any reference to illegality as late as 1904.19 That Mexican-­origin people had only a nominal whiteness, which is to

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say no meaningful one, is evident in these records. Even when there were no African Americans, the segregation of ethnic Mexicans took place as readily as it did with African Americans. In the 1888–1889 academic year, Starr County Judge John Kelsey acknowledged segregation despite not having any African American enrollment in the schools of that overwhelmingly ethnic-­Mexican county.20 A similar situation occurred in Zavala County that same academic year. County Judge O. A. Mills reported that though there were not any African American students in the scholastic census, there were still two county schools in the rural community of Batesville, one for whites and the other for “Mexicans.” The “Mexican School” instructor earned less than half the pay of one of the corresponding white teachers in the same community.21 The Falfurrias Independent School District reported an interesting transformation in racial identity when it used the ethnic categories provided in the 1909–1910 state census form to mark the overwhelming majority of “Mexican” and the small numbers of “German” and “Colored” students as distinct from “American” (white) students; by the 1910–1911 census using the same form, the county incorporated the Germans into a larger American category, though the Mexican (referring to citizens and immigrants) and African American categories remained unchanged. White and off-­white blended, while Black and brown remained distinct and apart.22 The local administration of state language curriculum for Spanish speakers took place without any semblance of language testing or other objective criteria to justify a diagnosis of language deficiency. Rather, the school districts and county schools across the state relied on physical appearance, residence, and surname. As more and more Mexican Americans challenged school segregation in the courts, some districts became adept at using pedagogical justifications for their race-­based segregation, although they never conducted any assessments. It was not until the Del Rio Independent School District lost the Salvatierra case in 1929 that school districts began articulating a pedagogical justification that allowed the Del Rio ISD to win the case on appeal. Subsequent cases, notably the Texas-­based Delgado (1949) and Hernández (1957), indicate that federal and state authorities continued to permit local school officials to segregate ethnic-­Mexican children for pedagogical reasons that largely rested on the need for a specialized curriculum to address allegedly inherent educational deficiencies related to language use.23 Even before these court cases forced the school districts to use pedagogical justifications as a cloak for race-­based segregation, the state of Texas

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already had adopted a series of English-­only laws prohibiting bilingualism in the schools in 1918 and 1923. Language was a constant marker of racial discrimination that ethnic Mexicans faced whether they spoke English or not. Language was one of the central mechanisms for the continuing racial discrimination against them. The typical response from local school officials was to blame Mexican children for not knowing English in the first place, putting the schools in the frustrating position of needing to teach unconventionally. Typical was Hidalgo County Judge Max Stein, who in 1890 reported to the state that more than 90 percent of the county’s school-­ age children were ethnic Mexicans and came to school with “a historical prejudice against the English language.” Given this condition, he reasoned, the poor appearance of his county’s educational accomplishments should be excused. He argued that given the “indifference” of this majority population, “it is surprising that we make any progress at all.” The justification for casting aspersions on the overwhelming majority of his students was based on Stein’s sense of history and culture, not actual knowledge of students’ educational backgrounds and certainly not any actual assessment of their abilities.24 Similar disgust at how the alleged prejudice against the English language caused stagnation in schools drove turn-­of-­the-­century Zapata County Judge A. P. Spohn to hire bilingual teachers, much to his chagrin.25 A similar outlook pushed Cameron County Judge B. W. Baker to acknowledge that illiteracy in his county existed in English but not so much in Spanish, meaning that his schools were forced to recognize bilingualism and biliteracy in ways he felt he needed to sheepishly explain to the state.26 Duval County Judge James O. Luby in 1890 blamed language for his schools’ difficulties. Luby wrote that the Mexican-­origin people were “very sensitive” about making mistakes in speaking English and that this fault, combined with a natural inclination to only speak Spanish outside the classroom, created enormous difficulties for those schools.27 There was a widespread belief among school officials that Mexican and Mexican American children were uneducable or somehow intellectually deficient. Rationalizations for lowered expectations and the denial of educational opportunities were prevalent in the bureaucratic submissions sent by county officials throughout South Texas. These reports argued that ethnic Mexicans’ mental and moral deficiency justified any amount of seemingly ill treatment or unfair conditions. It also justified dramatically lowered school performance expectations. Racists needed the idea of ethnic-­Mexican educational deficiency to racially segregate them as a fish needs water in which

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to swim. While the deeper, psychological motivations for racist policies such as segregation lie in the dark recesses of the mind, the ideas of Mexican deficiency justified these policies as uncontroversial, obvious, and even natural.28 In 1911, the year before José T. Canales took over as superintendent of Cameron County schools, the Brownsville Independent School District in the county instituted a three-­tiered sorting system within the first grade: low first low, low first high, and high first. The second and third grades then were broken into two tiers each, low and high second and low and high third. District officials reported that some 95 percent of the ethnic Mexican students in Brownsville schools were concentrated in first through third grades; probably most were in the “low” category, as they experienced, on average, 1.5 years of “grade retardation,” to use the terminology of the time, and were overage for the grades in which they were placed.29 In its 1897– 1898 annual report, the Eagle Pass Independent School District operated seven schools: four for whites ranging from primary to high school, two Mexican schools at the primary level called “Mexican I” and “Mexican II,” and one “Colored” school. The teachers in the segregated Mexican and African American schools were paid similarly to one another but far less than all but one Anglo teacher.30 Anglo officials excused their schools’ poor academic performance, even by the low bar of more than a century ago, by blaming the ethnic Mexican students and their culture. Webb County Superintendent Richardson in his 1902–1903 report asserted that it was “a significant fact that 98% of the crime of this county (as per court records) is among the ignorant Mexican population.” The children of these criminals, he went on, were so poor as to be starving.31 Maverick County’s J. A. Bonnet in the 1896–1897 annual report for that county’s schools fulminated that the ethnic-­Mexican majority of parents and students there cared not for education, and even if they had, they possessed no money for books. What especially galled Bonnet was that Mexicans and Mexican Americans would always shout “Viva Mexico” and could never really be made into patriotic Texans.32 Cameron County Superintendent E. H. Goodrich blamed ethnic Mexicans for his not being able to satisfactorily do his job. It was their fault, he remarked, because Mexicans were such a “migratory people,” making their “proper supervision impossible” and contributing to his lackadaisical inability to find enough teachers to form enough schools to expend the entirety of his state-­approved funds based on need as indicated by the school census.33 E. R. Tanner, the superintendent of Laredo ISD in 1885, blamed “hostility” from the Catholic Church as the reason for the schools’ poor attendance rates.34 For some officials, ethnic Mexicans were simply not intelli-

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gent enough to benefit from much schooling. Hidalgo County Superintendent R. A. Marsh in his 1907–1908 report complained about the difficulties of teaching them English and acknowledged the state superintendent’s help in suggesting new teaching methods for non-­English speakers that he came to adopt for the county schools. One year later, Marsh excitedly predicted future success for Hidalgo County schools in noting the arrival of an “intelligent class of farmers,” Anglo growers attracted to the lower Rio Grande Valley’s economic development.35 Other superintendents articulated the conviction of not only Mexican cultural deficiency but Mexican moral deficiency as well. Bonnet, judge and superintendent of Maverick County, wrote in his 1899 report, “About 80% of the children are of Mexican descent and their parents take no interest in educational matters. As a rule they send their children to school only to keep from taking care of them.”36 Bonnet stated, rather unequivocally, that ethnic Mexican parents did not value education, and this assertion was the foundation for how he interpreted their actions and how he engaged with those students. He contended that if the parents neglected to send their children to school, it was because they clearly did not value education, but even if they overcame the obstacles of poverty and living great distances from the schools, an issue he mentioned in his report the following year, that still was not an indication that they valued education. Rather, he argued, the families must have intended to send their children to school for free day care. Bonnet insinuated that Mexican people lacked cultural virtue and any action they took simply confirmed it. As these numerous reports from superintendents throughout South and West Texas indicate, the myth of Mexican and Mexican American disinterest in education was pervasive and needed no actual facts behind it, even in official reports. Negotiating the System Mexican American citizens negotiated the restrictive policies of Progressive education in Texas in a number of ways. A few Mexican American men succeeded in rising to prominent leadership roles in which they accommodated to the rigid system of educational Jim Crow. This was not a self-­loathing or defeatist kind of accommodation. They still countered the pervasive, disparaging myths about ethnic Mexican children in numerous ways. José T. Canales served as Cameron County superintendent of schools from 1912 to 1914 during a lull in his political career in the state capital. Nearly two decades before he cofounded the League of United Latin American Citizens

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(LULAC) and supported its controversial English-­language policy, he vigorously championed English-­only school policies. Canales stated that he “impressed upon our country school teachers” that “the English language should be spoken both in the school-­room as well as during recess.” He also argued for teaching schoolchildren “to sing, in English, either sacred or patriotic songs.” He noted, “This last requirement was made because I had observed that most of our Latin American children have a good ear for music. . . . I believe that my system succeeded.”37 Canales’s approach was not a mindless accommodation or abject self-­loathing. It was a strategic positioning to exploit the cracks in an otherwise hostile, racist state system of education. In his brief time as Cameron County school superintendent, Canales took the ethnic identification of his county’s population very seriously. Texas of that era was a polyglot state in terms of ethnicity and regional political culture, as noted by Walter Buenger in chapter 3 of this collection. So Canales’s attentiveness to such identities came in handy. He worked hard for a precise accounting of who was Mexican versus who was Mexican American, who was Anglo versus ethnic white such as German American. Texas had a complex population, and Canales’s seemingly fussy precision with regard to ethnic identity can be seen as a kind of pushback against the simplistic racism that underlay educational segregation and discrimination against ethnic Mexicans. Reflecting on his time as superintendent, he states, “Common schools in Cameron County began to render a very valuable service, not only by training future generations, but in transforming the Latin American children from regarding themselves as ‘Mexicans’ by becoming loyal citizens of the United States of America.”38 In Canales’s time as Cameron County superintendent, he created a space where ethnic-­ Mexican families could negotiate their own identities, but he also expected that some change had to come from them. His successor to the superintendency, however, abandoned any such notions of complexity. He reverted to a tripartite racial identification system in which there was white, Black, and brown and nothing else.39 Other Mexican American school officials, a shrinking number as the nineteenth century became the twentieth century, did signal Anglo cultural hostility but often in ways intended to defend their people. For example, although in the late nineteenth century the Hidalgo County Judge Juan Manuel de la Viña acknowledged “race prejudice to overcome” by his people, he hinted that it was slowly dawning on “the more intelligent Mexicans” to educate their children. In other words, de la Viña said that his people may have given some cause for stereotypes before, but no more. Those ideas of

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the past had no role in the future.40 Webb County Judge I. M. Rodriguez was far more disparaging, perhaps reflecting an elitist position and pointing to the ways class cut across these communities. In 1884, Rodriguez reported that the large county had only one county school with just twenty-­two students and no permanent schoolhouse; rather than accept any administrative responsibility for the situation, he blamed ethnic-­Mexican parents for not making use of state money to create their own schools.41 Far more sympathetic and understanding of the depth of the problems was Zapata County Judge José Antonio G. Navarro. He maintained in his 1893–1894 report that the extreme poverty of many of the ethnic Mexicans in the county was lamentable and could only be overcome by greater levels of state support for the entire education process, including free textbooks. But this was still something of an accommodation to racism. Though Navarro did not condemn his people’s culture as incurably hostile to education, he did write of them as a problem for the schools and teachers.42 These ethnic Mexican officials were in the middle. Canales, de la Viña, and Navarro mediated between the increasingly hostile world of Anglos and their public school system and the declining position of their own communities. Community Action and Transformation In addition to negotiating the public school system in accommodating ways, ethnic Mexicans also rejected the public school system by participating in alternative schooling in the form of escuelitas and taking part in campaigns to fund education in Mexico. In the nineteenth century, before the public school system had established deep roots in these South Texas locales, escuelitas, “little schools,” could be found in every county in South Texas. A Laredo ISD superintendent as early as 1894 estimated that some forty escuelitas in the area drew hundreds of students away from the district’s increasingly white public schools.43 Escuelitas were community schools ethnic Mexicans founded to provide their children with opportunities for education when there really were very few options. These little schools’ existence counters the pervasive myth that ethnic Mexicans did not value education until Anglo saviors made them take advantage of the opportunities. The escuelitas offered a Spanish-­language education with a Mexican-­centric curriculum. The Americanization movement of the Progressive Era had an ambivalent impact on escuelitas. While it convinced many ethnic Mexicans of the importance of teaching their children English, it also encouraged them to keep sending their children to these little schools so they could learn

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proper Spanish and Mexican history in the face of such intense acculturation policies. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, the Mexican government’s views of the education of ethnic-­Mexican children, as indicated by the work of various consuls working in the US Southwest, transformed in myriad ways with an undeniable impact on escuelitas. In late summer 1910, the Mexican consulate conducted an investigation into the state of public education for ethnic-­Mexican children in South Texas. In August that year, after reading several stories in the Mexican press, the Mexican ambassador to the United States, Francisco de la Barra, whose office was in Washington, DC, asked Miguel E. Diébold, the Mexican consul in Laredo, Texas, to conduct an investigation into the allegations of Mexican children not being permitted to attend the public schools.44 In November 1910, Diébold reported that he did not find any evidence of the exclusion of Mexican children in that consular district, which included Webb, Zapata, and Duval Counties. Diébold visited four of the six public schools in Laredo. He accepted the school officials’ argument that ethnic-­Mexican children needed to be segregated because they could not speak English and that such segregated schools gave special attention to these Spanish-­speaking Mexican children.45 Diébold’s own investigation did not extend beyond a small number of schools in the three counties in his district on or near the Texas-­Mexico border in which ethnic Mexicans held a significant majority. Yet the Mexican consulate intended to publish his findings and claim that the entire state of Texas did not discriminate against ethnic Mexicans educationally or politically. Many ethnic Mexicans viewed such a plan with outraged incredulity. Upon hearing of the consulate’s intention, La Crónica newspaper publishers Clemente Idar and his father, Nicasio Idar, of Laredo undertook their own investigation about the state of education for Mexican children in Texas. The Idars encouraged readers to share their experiences, and they published their findings as well as readers’ letters in La Crónica.46 This convinced the Mexican consulate to reopen the investigation. By early 1911, however, Mexico had already begun its downward spiral into the violent chaos of the revolution. All the consulate’s documents regarding the inquiry into the exclusion of Mexican children from public schools in Texas are dated no later than early February 1911. After 1920, the Mexican consulate took a renewed interest in its citizens living north of the Rio Grande, and created a Department of Protection that acted as a mediator between its citizens and American employers.47 Mexican citizens living in the United States, caught up in the consulate’s

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renewal of interest, hoped to construct a network of educational funding and facilities in the areas north and south of the Rio Grande where ethnic Mexicans lived. La Prensa, a widely read newspaper in San Antonio, encouraged those who benefited from the consulate’s support to give back to the mother country. Throughout 1921 the newspaper carried out a campaign to raise money to fund the construction of two schools in the city of Dolores Hidalgo, Guanajuato, the “cradle of Mexican independence.” Escuelas del centenario, as these schools were called, symbolized the key role the Mexicanization of the Mexican colony played in Mexico’s reconstruction after the revolution. The consulate encouraged its citizens in the United States to maintain Mexican cultural traditions, learn Mexican history, and speak proper Spanish, not “Tex-­Mex.” In turn, these citizens were expected to return the favor by sending money back to the homeland to help fund the education of their compatriots.48 Two of the many donors to La Prensa’s campaign were Juan Manuel de la Viña’s sons, Juan and Plutarco of Edinburg.49 Another significant development and one that was far more involved than La Prensa’s campaign was the Mexican government’s role in supporting escuelitas and Spanish-­language libraries in South Texas. Throughout the 1920s, small communities contacted the Mexican consulate to ask for materials to support their escuelitas. Besides sending the requested resources, consuls attended fundraisers and events associated with the little schools. In February 1927, residents of Alamo in Hidalgo County opened Escuela Benito Juárez, an escuelita that offered classes to children and adults. Consul Samuel Treviño oversaw the preparations for the school’s formal inauguration, a daylong event that focused on patriotism, academics, and theater.50 The director of Escuela Benito Juárez, Edmundo Villalpando, had left his native city of Saltillo because he could no longer earn a living as a teacher there and immigrated to Texas in 1927.51 In Treviño’s letter to the consul in San Antonio he calls Villalpando a “valuable element in this region,” a professor who was “competent in all senses.” He laments Mexico’s loss of someone who “possesses titles, diplomas, and mentioned honors” so that he could open a school with very few resources “in some village not even of medium importance.”52 Treviño’s letter to the consul general in San Antonio about the events in Alamo is one of the last files on escuelitas in the archive for the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores in Mexico City. Subsequent files pertaining to the education of ethnic-­Mexican children in Texas deal with issues of segregation in Del Rio and Mission; further files cover similar matters in California. In 1910, consular officials agreed that pedagogical segregation was evidence of a supportive public school system, but by 1930 they came

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to acknowledge that the rising generation of Mexican American activists needed help in their plight of educational exclusion more than they needed help in attaining Spanish literacy. Indicative of these transformations is the trajectory of Edmundo Villalpando. He never returned to Mexico, at least not for any extended period. After Escuela Benito Juárez closed, he worked as a shoemaker and then a printer in Mission, Texas. He died in 1967, and the informant of record on his death certificate indicated that Villalpando was a citizen of the United States.53 It is highly likely that the children who attended Escuela Benito Juárez and studied under Villalpando self-­identified the same way once they reached adulthood. Perhaps the most important outcome of this particular moment in escuelita history is the impact these little schools had on their own decline. Many of the children who experienced both the Americanization pedagogies of the public schools and the Mexico-­centric curriculum of the escuelitas grew up to be the first advocates for Texas Mexicans calling themselves Mexican Americans, for the creation of civil rights organizations that rested on US citizenship and the English language, and for restrictive immigration policies. A key example is J. T. Canales, who, while living in the Brownsville area during his early childhood, attended two private schools in Matamoros, Mexico, and an escuelita in South Texas. He did not attend a US public school until the age of ten, when in 1887 his family moved to Nueces County. Even then, his family continued to send him to Spanish-­language schools.54 The training Canales received enabled him to lead an investigation against the Texas Rangers in 1919 as a state representative and still require Mexican students to speak and sing English as Cameron County school superintendent. These two aspects of his career are not contradictory so much as they are indicative of a new Mexican American identity. These Mexican American activists drew from their experiences with escuelitas to negotiate their existence in the United States, eventually drawing from the escuelita model and curriculum to bolster their own activism.55 Conclusion Mexicans and Mexican Americans in South Texas experienced a discriminatory public school system founded on the myth of deficiency in the values, intelligence, and culture of those students’ communities. This rotten foundation influenced how the public schools established policies regarding curriculum and expectations about the students’ abilities. This was not just a matter of harsh words or scornful looks. By the early twentieth century, the

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state of Texas had developed a system of public schooling that relegated Mexican people, regardless of nationality, citizenship, or any other kinds of distinctions, as mental defectives and terrible burdens on the public schools. This was a cultural war waged against ethnic-­Mexican people by the state of Texas and those individuals who administered and staffed its public schools. Regardless of how kind one or another person may have been, they taught racist lessons from racist foundations. Replacing this intellectual paradigm of deficiency has taken more than a century and is still incomplete. Recovering the entire history, however, is an important step. In the decades leading up to and long after the bullets flew in La Matanza of the 1910s, this cultural assassination took place. Yet, ethnic Mexicans navigated this cultural war with nimbleness and agility that challenged and worked within this oppressive system in order to alter it. Their success is measured not in absolute terms but rather in the gradual process of negotiation and repositioning through time that has ground down the racist rot. José T. Canales exemplified this resistance leadership during the state legislative hearings that took place a century ago. He sought to combat the abuses of the Texas Rangers, yet he did so from the perspective of patriotism and loyalty to country as well as pragmatism. This would become the Mexican American Generation response a decade later and in some respects has defined much of the larger community’s activism over the years. Notes 1. Throughout the essay, we standardize our use of “Mexican” and “Mexican American” when referring to these populations as divided by US citizenship or use “ethnic Mexican” to refer to both populations in a larger sense when citizenship distinctions are less useful. Historical actors of the time frequently conflated terms that today would be seen as separate, such as “race” and “ethnicity.” 2. Walter Prescott Webb, The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935); T. R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans (New York: Macmillan, 1968). Webb’s book received the imprimatur of the US government when President Lyndon B. Johnson wrote the foreword for the 1965 reissue, though the publishers cut the openly racist Albert Trombly poem “The Texas Rangers” that served as the epigraph to the original edition. For work on the relationship between Trombly and Webb, see John Morán González, Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 53–66. 3. In Canales’s autobiographical sketch that he wrote for Judge Harbert Davenport of Brownsville in 1945, he briefly discusses the “bandit troubles” and the subsequent “Legislative Ranger Investigation.” Interestingly, he directs Davenport to “the book written by Prof. Walter Prescott Webb entitled ‘The Texas Rangers’ published in 1935

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pages 513–516” for more information on his role in the matter ( J. T. Canales, “Personal Recollections of J. T. Canales Written at the Request of and for Use by the Honorable Harbert Davenport in Preparing a Historical Sketch of the Lower Rio Grande Valley for the Soil Conservation District, Recently Organized, in Cameron County, Texas,” April 26, 1945, box 2–23/214, folder “Personal Recollections of J. T. Canales,” Harbert Davenport Papers, Texas State Archives, Austin). In his final chapter, titled “Some Adventures of a Ranger Historian,” Webb states quite frankly, “It was the agitation preceding the Canales investigation that suggested the need for a history of the Texas Rangers” (The Texas Rangers, 549). 4. Benjamin Heber Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Monica Muñoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-­Mexican Violence in Texas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). In Arnoldo De León, ed., War along the Border: The Mexican Revolution and Tejano Communities (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012), particularly see the essays “La Rinchada: Revolution, Revenge, and the Rangers, 1910–1920,” by Richard Ribb, and “The Mexican Revolution, Revolución de Texas, and Matanza de 1915,” by Trinidad Gonzales. 5. For a history of the project see chapter 1 of this collection. The Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum showcased the groundbreaking Life and Death on the Border, 1910–1920 exhibit in 2016. Martinez has crafted a website, Mapping Violence (https:// mappingviolence.com), that allows users to get a special sense of murders and lynching in Texas in this period and extending into the 1920s. The Refusing to Forget team in October 2017 helped spur the creation of a state historical marker in Cameron County for La Matanza of 1915. The Refusing to Forget webpage discussing the marker is at https://refusingtoforget.org/historical-­markers/matanza-­of-­1915/. For the Bullock exhibition, see https://www.thestoryoftexas.com/visit/exhibits/life-­and-­death-­on-­the -­border-­1910-­1920. For information on the Presidio County Historical Commission’s decision to halt the installation of the marker, see https://refusingtoforget.org /historical-­markers/porvenir-­massacre/. See also chapter 13 in this collection. 6. For early work that also uses nonbinary analysis, see Arnold De León, The Tejano Community, 1836–1900 (Albuquerque: New Mexico Press, 1982). For work that examines ethnic Mexican history in South Texas in this era, 1900–1920, as a clash between new and old settlers, farmers, and ranchers trying to oppress and resist each other, see David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), part II. 7. David Montejano’s Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas focuses on the “sequence of class orders” within four periods—incorporation, reconstruction, segregation, and integration—and examines the “distinct ethnic relations” within each one. His analysis implies that the effectiveness of the cultural war’s oppression was timeand place-­specific. Though our analysis is centered on the 1900–1920 period, we draw our larger conclusion about the ultimate ineffectiveness of the cultural war’s oppression from the longer history of ethnic Mexican education in Texas. Despite the unrelenting nature of various forms educational discrimination, ethnic Mexicans pursued many solutions for educating their children during each of the four periods (Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 8).

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8. See chapter 14 by Hite in this collection. 9. For the more systematic studies of various aspects of ethnic Mexican education, see Guadalupe San Miguel Jr., “Let All of Them Take Heed”: Mexican Americans and the Campaign for Educational Equality in Texas, 1910–1981 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987); Carlos Kevin Blanton, The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836–1981 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004); Philis M. Barragán Goetz, Reading, Writing, and Revolution: Escuelitas and the Emergence of a Mexican American Identity in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020). For work that addresses various aspects of schools in Texas as a major focus in their work, see Ruben Flores, Backroads Pragmatists: Mexico’s Melting Pot and Civil Rights in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Leticia Garza-­Falcón, Gente Decente: A Borderlands Response to the Rhetoric of Dominance (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998); Gene B. Preus, To Get a Better School System: One Hundred Years of Educational Reform in Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009). 10. San Miguel, “Let All of Them Take Heed,” x, xvi. 11. San Miguel, “Let All of Them Take Heed,” xvi. 12. San Miguel, “Let All of Them Take Heed,” ix. 13. “Teachers of Texas Are in Annual Convention at Abilene,” Houston Post, December 29, 1910; “Extracto de un discurso del superintendente de instrucción pública de Texas,” La Crónica (Laredo, TX), January 12, 1911. 14. Morán González, Border Renaissance, 8. 15. For more on divisions within the Progressive education movement and helpful typologies of Progressive education reform, see Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958 (New York: Routledge, 1986). 16. Carlos K. Blanton, “From Intellectual Deficiency to Cultural Deficiency: Mexican Americans, Testing, and Public School Policy in the American Southwest, 1920– 1940,” Pacific Historical Review 72, no. 1 (February 2003): 39–62; Gilbert G. González, Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation (Philadelphia: Balch Institute Press, 1990); Gilbert G. González, “Segregation and the Education of Mexican Children, 1900– 1940,” in The Elusive Quest for Equality: 150 Years of Chicano/Chicana Education, ed. José Moreno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review, 1999). 17. Carlos Kevin Blanton, “Race, Labor, and the Limits of Progressive Reform: A Preliminary Analysis of the Enforcement of Compulsory Attendance in South Texas during the 1920s,” Journal of South Texas 13, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 207–219; Paul S. Taylor, An American-­Mexican Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1934), chapter 24. 18. J. B. Spears, “Annual Report of the County Superintendent of Dimmit County,” July 31, 1893, pp. 1–4, 4 (quote), box 4–23/250, County Superintendent Records (hereafter cited as CSR), Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Austin (hereafter cited as TSLAC). 19. C. C. Thomas to Arthur Lefevre, June 29, 1904, box 4-­23/196, CSR, TSLAC. 20. John P. Kelsey, “Annual Report of Public School Affairs of the County of Starr,” August 19, 1889, pp. 1–4, 4-­23/204, CSR, TSLAC. 21. O. A. Mills, “Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of Zavala County,” June 21, 1899, pp. 1–8, 4-­23/209, CSR, TSLAC. 22. Sam P. Vale, “Summary of the Scholastic Census of the Independent District of Falfurrias,” June 26, 1909, pp. 1 (quotes), 2, 701-­60, District Superintendent Reports

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(hereafter cited as DSR), TSLAC; Sam P. Vale, “Summary of the Scholastic Census of the Independent District of Falfurrias,” June 25, 1910, pp. 1–2, 701-­60, DSR, TSLAC. 23. Blanton, Strange Career of Bilingual Education, 95–96, 112–117. See also Richard Valencia, Chicano Students and the Courts: The Mexican American Legal Struggle for Education Equality (New York: New York University Press, 2008); Carlos K. Blanton, George I. Sánchez: The Long Fight for Mexican American Education (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). 24. Max Stein, “Annual Report of Public School Affairs of the County of Hidalgo,” July 25, 1890, pp. 1, 2 (quotes), 4-­23/269, CSR, TSLAC. 25. A. P. Spohn, “Annual Report of County Superintendent of Public Instruction for Zapata County,” September 1, 1898, pp. 1–3, 4-­23/209, CSR, TSLAC. 26. B. W. Baker, “Annual Report of the Public School Affairs of the County of Cameron,” October 26, 1885, p. 1, 4-­23/233, CSR, TSLAC. 27. James O. Luby, “Annual Report of Public School Affairs of the County of Duval,” September 1, 1890, pp. 1, 2 (quote), 4-­23/250, CSR, TSLAC. 28. For more on the concept of deficiency in ethnic Mexican education, see Rich­ ard R. Valencia, Dismantling Contemporary Deficit Thinking: Educational Thought and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2010). 29. C. G. Hallmark, “Supplemental Report of C. G. Hallmark of the Independent District of Brownsville, Texas,” May 29, 1911, p. 1, box 701-­21, DSR. TSLAC. 30. William B. Hawkins, “Annual Report of the City Superintendent of the City of Eagle Pass,” undated (likely summer 1897), pp. 1–6, 2 (quotes), box 701-­54, DSR, TSLAC. 31. B. Richardson, “Annual Report of the County Superintendent of Public Instruction of Webb County,” June 3, 1903, pp. 1, 2 (quote; parenthetical note in original), box 4-­23/222, CSR, TSLAC. 32. J. A. Bonnet, “Annual Report of J. A. Bonnet, County Superintendent of Maverick County,” September 3, 1897, pp. 1–4, 4 (quote), box 4-­23/193, CSR, TSLAC. 33. E. H. Goodrich, “Annual Report of the County Superintendent of Cameron County,” November 6, 1907, pp. 1–6, 1 (quotes), box 4-­23/233, CSR, TSLAC. 34. E. R. Tanner, “Annual Report of the Public Schools of the City of Laredo,” September 1, 1885, p. 1, 701–86, DSR, TSLAC. 35. R. A. Marsh, “Annual Report of the County Superintendent of Public Instruction in Hidalgo County,” August 31, 1908, pp. 1–2, box 4-­23/269, CSR, TSLAC; R. A. Marsh, “Annual Report of the County Superintendent of Public Instruction in Hidalgo County,” undated (likely summer 1909), pp. 1 (quote), 2, box 4-­23/269, CSR, TSLAC. 36. W. A. Bonnet, General Report to the Superintendent of Public Instruction, 1898–1899, Maverick County file, box 4-­203/193, State Department of Education files, TSLAC. 37. Canales, “Personal Reflections,” 18–19, Harbert Davenport Papers. 38. Canales, “Personal Reflections,” 18–19, Harbert Davenport Papers. 39. J. T. Canales, “Census of the San Benito ISD,” July 4, 1913, pp. 1–2, 4-­16/107 B, TSLAC; J. J. Callaway, “Census of the San Benito ISD,” July 3, 1916, pp. 1–2, 4-­16/107 B, TSLAC.

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40. J. M. de la Viña, “Annual Report of the County Superintendent of Hidalgo, County,” undated [likely summer 1897], pp. 1–6, 1 (quotes), 4–23/269, CSR, TSLAC. 41. I. M. Rodriguez, “Annual Report of the County Judge of Webb County,” September 4, 1884, pp. 1–4, 4-­23/222, CSR, TSLAC. 42. J. Antonio G. Navarro, “Annual Report of the County Superintendent of Public Instruction of Zapata County,” August 17, 1894, pp. 1–4, 4-­23/209, CSR, TSLAC. 43. F. A. Parker, “Annual Report of the Superintendent of Schools in the City of Laredo,” June 14, 1894, 701-­86, DSR, TSLAC, 1–2. 44. Francisco de la Barra to Miguel E. Diébold, August 13, 1910, legajo 352, Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, Archivo de la Embajada de Mexico en los Estados Unidos de América, Mexico City (hereafter SRE). 45. Miguel E. Diébold to Francisco de la Barra, November 3, 1910, legajo 352, SRE. 46. See the following articles in La Crónica: “La exclusión de los niños mexicanos . . . ,” December 17, 1910; “Tanto los niños mexicanos como los mexico-­americanos, son excluidos . . . ,” December 24, 1910; “La exclusión en el condado de Guadalupe . . . ,” December 31, 1910; “La prensa de Mexico y de Texas se interesa por el bienestar de los mexicanos en este pais,” January 12, 1911; “La exclusión de los niños mexicanos . . . ,” January 19, 1911; “La exclusión en las escuelas . . . ,” February 9, 1911. For a discussion of the Idar family and the Mexican consulate investigation of 1910, see Philis M. Barragán Goetz, Reading, Writing, and Revolution, chapter 2. For a history of the Idar family, see chapter 7 of this collection. 47. “Mexican Consul General Has Department in Office to Aid Friendless; Organizes Society,” El Paso Herald, April 6, 1921. 48. Examples of such articles in La Prensa are “Dolores Hidalgo, la cuna de independencia nacional,” June 19, 1921; “La Colonia mexicana responde al llamamiento para que contribuya a la celebración del centenario,” June 15, 1921; “Se inician suscripciones en varias partes para las escuelas del centenario,” June 20, 1921; “La iniciativa de ‘La Prensa’ esta siendo aceptada con entusiasmo en todas partes,” June 17, 1921; “El gobernador de Guanajuato y el cabildo de Dolores Hidalgo, acogen con entusiasmo la idea de las escuelas del centenario,” July 3, 1921; “Escuelas-­monumentos seran las que se construyan en el pueblo de Dolores Hdgo.,” July 29, 1921; and “La primera Cruz Azul mexicana que contribuye para levantar las escuelas del centenario,” June 18, 1921. See also Emilio Zamora, “Las Escuelas del Centenario in Dolores Hidalgo, Guanajuato: Internationalizing Mexican History,” in Recovering the Hispanic History of Texas, ed. Monica Perales and Raúl Ramos (Houston: Arte Público, 2010). 49. “Lista de los donativos para las escuelas de Dolores Hidalgo, GTO,” La Prensa, July 9, 1921. 50. Samuel Treviño, McAllen, to Cónsul General de México, San Antonio, February 8, 1927, legajo NC 2005-­86, SRE. 51. Treviño to Cónsul General, February 8, 1927; US Census 1930, Hidalgo County, Texas, population schedule, Edinburg City, p. 10 A (stamped), dwelling 176, family 187, Edmundo Villalpando, digital image, Ancestry.com, accessed July 29, 2018, https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/6224/images/4547979 _00650?treeid=&personid=&hintid=&usePUB=true&usePUBJs=true& _ga=2.14139 8578.1696384946.1595984499-­1848826854.1595984499&pId=62990950.

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52. Treviño to Cónsul General, February 8, 1927. 53. Edmundo Villalpando registration, digital image, “World War II Draft Cards (4th Registration) for the State of Texas,” Records of the Selective Service System, 1926–1975, RG 147, National Archives at St. Louis, MO, accessed July 29, 2018, https://www.ancestry .com/imageviewer/collections/1002/images/004162148_03464?treeid=&personid =&hintid=&usePUB=true&usePUBJs=true& _ ga=2.183302822.1696384946 .1595984499-­1848826854.1595984499&pId=12671534. Edmundo Villalpando death certificate, Texas Department of State Health Services, Texas Death Certificates, 1903– 1982, digital image, Ancestry.com, accessed July 29, 2018, https://www.ancestry.com /imageviewer/collections/2272/images/33154_b062748-­01318?treeid=&personid=&h intid=&usePUB=true&usePUBJs=true& _ga=2.183302822.1696384946.1595984499 -­1848826854.1595984499&pId=145678. For work on the Mexican consulate and escuelitas in South Texas, see Philis M. Barragán Goetz, Reading, Writing, and Revolution. 54. Canales, “Personal Reflections,” Harbert Davenport Papers. 55. Barragán Goetz, Reading, Writing, and Revolution, chapter 5.

CHAPTER 7

Humanizing La Raza: The Activist Journalism of the Idar Family in Early Twentieth-­Century Texas Gabriela González

As activist journalists, members of the Idar family engaged in the transborder struggle to save la raza, the ethnic-­Mexican community, from antidemocratic forces in Mexico and Texas during the early twentieth century. Central to understanding the nature of activist journalism carried out by the Idars and other transborder activists is knowing the reality that both structural and representational forms of racism existed to such a degree that the word “Mexican,” a nationality, became racially charged within the Anglo-­ American general public and infused with genocidal hatred within the more violent components of this body politic.1 Among those more violent components of Anglo-­Texan society during this period are the Texas Rangers and vigilante groups. By the time the legislative investigation of the Texas Rangers took place in 1919, initiated by state Representative José Tomás ( J. T.) Canales, officers of this law enforcement organization had earned their nickname as rinches malvados (evil rangers). In the 1910s, many ethnic Mexicans perished in what Anglos knew as “the Bandit Wars” but Mexicans experienced as La Matanza (the killing).2 To understand the genocidal aspects of this period in Anglo and ethnic-­Mexican relations it is important to track what stages came before La Matanza, an analysis of the activist journalism of the Idars provides this background. A brief discussion of the components of genocide sets up that analysis.3 In a briefing paper he delivered before the US State Department in 1996, Gregory H. Stanton, the president of Genocide Watch, outlined eight stages of genocide.4 Prior to the extermination stage, a victimized group of people is cast into an “us versus them” dynamic that might emphasize racial and ethnic classifications and codify these socially constructed distinctions into strict laws. Mixed categories might be outlawed, resulting in segregation and antimiscegenation laws. Next, the symbolization stage involves the

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use of symbols to denote the classifications. Skin color, facial features, and particular dress styles can serve as such symbols. Although not mentioned by Stanton, it is possible that a language distinct from that of the dominant society could also stand out as a symbol of the people to be victimized. The next stage involves dehumanization. By denying the humanity of those classified as “other,” the potential for killing them with impunity is introduced. The organization stage that follows next is essential, in that genocide requires collective action or communal complicity in the sense that it is driven by a specific group identification. Thus, ordinary citizens, terrorist groups, governmental entities, law enforcement agencies, and the media may all be involved in various ways. Significantly, once in the dehumanization and organization stages, the killings may take on a ritualistic element in which bodies are mutilated to emphasize the denial of the outcast group’s humanity. These stages also involve a furthering of stereotypes ascribed to the victimized group during earlier stages. By the time of the polarization stage, the society is on a downward killing spiral that may provoke revenge killings, though those can also occur at the earlier dehumanization stage. The preparation stage includes identification, when lists of victims are drawn up and ID cards or some other means are devised to mark people as appropriate for slaughter. Extermination is the final solution, according to the dominant group, that has by then grown accustomed to seeing the victim group as a social problem to be eliminated. In this stage, anyone can become a victim, adults and even children, men and women. Besides bodily mutilation, others might be burned. Victims might be buried in mass graves without burial services or markers because to the dominant group seeking to exterminate them, they are not human. In the final stage, the parties responsible for genocide practice denial, and members of the dominant society rarely punish the criminals within their element if the victims belonged to an “othered” group.5 Transborder activists understood that the marginalization of ethnic-­ Mexican people needed to be their prime concern. They engaged in various aspects of the Mexican Revolution while often addressing injustices in the United States against ethnic Mexicans. The antidote to this marginalization, they contended, would be the incorporation of la raza into a national community, be it Mexican or American. They understood that citizenship rights resided within the modern state. As long as raza in Mexico belonging to the lower castes were racialized or categorized as degraded Indians or mixed-­race people devoid of a national identity and as long as raza in the United States were racialized as a “Mexican problem” incapable of joining the white citizenry, in neither nation would la raza experience the fruits

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of modernity. Such was the quandary that led some activists in Texas on a quest to redeem la raza by seeking to save ethnic Mexicans from unequal treatment through direct critiques and actions against Juan Crow. But they did more than that; they also developed a gendered class politics of respectability that sought to eradicate representational racism. Thus, redeeming la raza also meant saving ethnic Mexicans from stereotypes that cast them as uncivilized at best and subhuman at worst. These activists knew that degrading images of ethnic Mexicans, their racialization as an inferior people, helped to justify their ill treatment and exploitation.6 As journalists, the Idars found themselves situated in the liminal space between social and educational privilege and the rise of a modern state that was attractive with all the bells and whistles of modernity’s promise and technology’s allure but deadly with its reliance on race categorizations and violence to advance the prerogatives of capital.7 Into this mix, the general Anglo-­American populace contributed their own anxieties about modern change comingled with tendencies to blame the other for everything from economic insecurities to the “brown scare,” whereby they came to define ethnic-­Mexican men with revolutionary violence and border banditry. Anglos demonstrated a general mistrust that bore a resemblance to the toxic dynamics of previous generations, when nineteenth-­century ethnic Mexicans were seen by some Anglo-Texans as less powerful versions of General Santa Anna, never to be fully trusted. From the myths of the Alamo grew a racial Texas slave republic eager to be annexed to the United States as a slave state. In the land where Black people continued to be oppressed long after their emancipation from enslavement, brown people began their journey as the militarily conquered people with valuable land and labor soon to be claimed by Anglo-­American settler society in South Texas and elsewhere. And so, for decades after the final guns of the US-­Mexico War fell silent, the social, cultural, political, economic, and psychological conquest of ethnic Mexicans in Texas and throughout the now American Southwest continued.8 But it did not go unchallenged. The Idar family and other activists exposed, protested against, and organized efforts to address the detrimental impact of white supremacy upon their communities.9 On January 8, 1910, an article appeared in the Spanish-­language Laredo newspaper La Crónica describing the paper’s first year of life. Published by Nicasio Idar with significant contributions from his children, Clemente, Eduardo, and Jovita, La Crónica defended the interests of the “méxico-­texano element.” The newspaper reported on everything from local to global events and demonstrated concern for the plight of ethnic Mexicans in Mexico and in the United States. While Nicasio Idar did not intend for the newspaper

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to become embroiled in polemics, La Crónica soon became a voice of critique for an array of political phenomena and actors on both sides of the border ranging from the Porfiriato to the Catholic Church to violent Texan mobs.10 An article in La Crónica with the headline “Barbarismos” reports on the arrest of twenty-­year-­old Antonio Rodríguez by sheriff’s deputies in Rocksprings. The guilt or innocence of Rodríguez, charged with the murder of Mrs. Lem Henderson, an Anglo-­American woman on a ranch near town, will never be known. While he was imprisoned, a mob of Anglo-­Americans stormed the jailhouse, kidnapped him, and burned him alive.11 Less than five months after Antonio Rodríguez’s gruesome murder, fourteen-­year-­old Antonio Gómez, accused of killing a German American, found himself in a similar predicament. After Gómez’s arrest in Thorndale, Texas, a mob kidnapped him, beat him to death, and dragged his body around town behind a buggy. As in the Rodríguez case, the lynching party escaped punishment. In an article reporting on the Gómez lynching, Nicasio Idar laments, We await to learn what the government of Texas will do, but we must suppose that the lynchers will be charged but be released on bond. And after tiring the public with trial drills, the case will be dismissed, for up to now, we do not recall any American ever being punished for lynching a Mexican, despite the fact that some [lynchings] have been committed.12

Nicasio Idar carefully explained how the death of the German American was an accident rather than premeditated murder, but the facts of the case would never make it into a courtroom because the accused had been denied due process and instead was murdered in the most barbaric way by white townsmen. At the root of this and other gruesome crimes visited upon ethnic Mexicans, Nicasio Idar argued, could be found an intense hatred on the part of a sizable proportion of the Anglo-­Texan population and in particular, members of the lower classes possessing far less education than more cultivated Anglos who exploited Mexicans on an economic level but at least treated them with greater respect. Still, the better treatment by some more privileged white Texans could not negate the reality of a broader dominant society that had established its dominance through warfare, conquest, and overt and subtle forms of white supremacy. Nicasio Idar provided a list of the humiliations ethnic Mexicans suffered in the Texas interior, including school segregation and exclusion of ethnic Mexicans from such businesses as barber shops, hotels, and restaurants. Besides those deprivations, ethnic Mexicans suffered the worst physical abuses

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of a criminal element within Anglo-­Texan society, “barbaric acts of cruelty and savagery committed against Mexicans, burning them alive or lynching them without cause.”13 The Mexican consul’s incapacity to intervene made matters worse, Idar wrote. He asserted that ethnic Mexicans would find no justice from Texas government officials or through a consular system still tied to Porfirismo and less invested in protecting the rights of Mexicans in Texas. He theorized that perhaps only the American federal government might provide hope for redress, but more immediate would be the need for ethnic Mexicans to unify and organize their communities.14 Fostering unity and organization involved the politics of resistance coexisting with the politics of respectability, a strategy succinctly captured by the newspaper’s motto, “We work for the progress and industrial, moral, and intellectual development of the Mexican inhabitants of Texas.” Here the very notion of categorizing ethnic Mexicans as being worthy of the benefits of progress and capable of industrial, moral, and intellectual development represents a challenge to a white-­supremacist worldview that cast ethnic Mexicans as being forever inferior to whites. But this form of resistance has conservative implications, placing the burdens of respectability upon not just a small ethnic-­Mexican middle class but also a working-­class ethnic-­ Mexican majority that already had to carry the pressures and abuses of economic modernization on their laboring backs. In any case, Nicasio Idar and his family continued to use newspapers to monitor anti-­Mexican sentiment and to protest racial discrimination and violence. In addition, the Idars assisted ethnic Mexicans through fraternal orders, ladies auxiliaries, and civic clubs. In 1911 the Idar family’s organizational efforts culminated in el Primer Congreso Mexicanista, the First Mexicanist Congress. The brainchild of Clemente Idar, Nicasio’s eldest son, the First Mexicanist Congress invited Mexicans throughout Texas to attend a weeklong conference in Laredo. A circular promoting the congress announced its main objectives: to seek mutual protection and ensure respect and justice, to study the most effective way to procure instruction for ethnic-­Mexican youth, and to advocate for the improvement and well-­being of la raza.15 Whether through the press, organizations, or a groundbreaking transborder congress, activists such as the Idars designed strategies of cultural redemption and reform needed in the struggle against marginalization. Challenging the white-­supremacist belief in the inferiority of people of Mexican descent, these activists encouraged their fellow ethnic Mexicans to defeat stereotypes by seeking measures of respectability, becoming gente decente (decent people). Thus, unlike applications of the gente decente concept to describe privilege purely in the service of power, in the Texas context and

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despite its problematic class implications, the term describes privilege in the service of a human rights struggle. Gente decente tended to be educated and middle-­class, although workers, especially skilled ones, could potentially construct themselves as such. Indeed, reformers in Mexico, as middle-­ class moral gatekeepers, sought to inculcate gente decente values and integrate the working class and indigenous groups into civilized society as part of their nation-­building project. In the late nineteenth century, as Mexico experienced modernization, the developing middle class sought to distinguish itself from the mass of workers through consumption patterns and by claiming the mantle of respectability. The concept of gente decente, “the decent people” or “the respectable,” suited those middle-­class needs. In their attitudes and perspectives about life and society, the influence of modernity and western culture in the lives of the gente decente seemed undeniable.16 Part of that civilizing process required by modern society involved the acquisition of various levels of education and skills development. Certainly, capitalism benefited from the spread of literacy even as it continued to exploit the less educationally privileged. But for Jovita Idar, education represented the advancement of ethnic-­Mexican families. Broadly speaking, education and skills acquisition held the promise of eventual social and political integration for ethnic Mexicans. Using the press to instigate social change, Jovita Idar called upon her Spanish-­speaking readers to take responsibility for their children’s education. And yet, Idar was not blind to the dangers of full assimilation in an American society that failed to appreciate their background as ethnic Mexicans and racialized them in myriad ways. Idar worried that the drive to assimilate Mexican schoolchildren in US-­based schools deprived youngsters of their linguistic and cultural heritage. In an article on the conservation of nationalism, Idar agreed that learning English made life in the United States easier and certainly should be encouraged, as English would be the language they would use to defend their rights. Yet to lose one’s native tongue would lead to the loss of group identity.17 Therefore, Jovita Idar called for the development of more escuelitas, private schools for Mexican children in the United States taught by Spanish-­dominant or bilingual teachers. In Jovita Idar’s activist journalism, the concepts of cultural redemption and material uplift can be seen. In La Crónica the Idars focused on this mission of uplift but also expended much energy on a crusade to expose injustice and call for change. In an article on the education of Mexican children in Texas, Jovita Idar called upon the ethnic-­Mexican community to take a proactive approach in this matter because neither the Mexican nor American government had prioritized the preparation and future of their children:

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Figure 7.1. Jovita Idar (second from right) and staff at El Progreso newspaper, Laredo, Texas, 1914. Courtesy, Special Collections, Institute of Texan Cultures, University of Texas at San Antonio.

A great part of the scorn with which the foreigners [Americans] around us see us is due to the lack of education and, moreover, the gross ignorance of an immense majority of our compatriots and being that it is no longer easy to educate those great masses of workers, at least we can endeavor, even to the point of sacrifice if necessary to enlighten our children so that at least we can avert this evil in the future.18

This passage encapsulates the cultural redemption philosophy that tolerance could be achieved, at least in part, through group cultural change. If ethnic Mexicans could become more educated, perhaps they would no longer be marginalized in the United States. Jovita Idar was as concerned about stereotypes of women as she was about the disparaging images of Mexicans. Sexism, like racism, could be disarmed by calling upon women to empower themselves with the shield of education and the robes of respectability. In an article titled “For the Woman Who Reads,” Idar promotes the idea that education elevated women and by extension, men: “The educated woman who has received in the home or school the fundamental principles of a moral education and who follows these sees

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herself respected, exalted, and received wherever she goes. . . . The educated woman more often is good, and being good [she] spreads an atmosphere of purity that elevates man.”19 By this standard, a woman’s power rested in her ability to be pure and moral. Her sublime role was to inspire men to find their own moral compass and in this way contribute to civilization. Jovita Idar also issued a critique of the social structure that encouraged racism and sexism. As seen in her call for Spanish-­language or at least bilingual instruction, she highlighted the inadequacy of Texas schools in this regard and the pernicious manner in which public school policies undermined the learning process of ethnic-­Mexican children. An assimilationist, English-­only pedagogical approach sent an underlying message of inferiority to schoolchildren in an environment where their cultural traditions and the Spanish language were seen as detriments to education.20 In terms of sexism, Jovita Idar did more than reassure conservative readers with Victorian notions of womanhood. A feminist line of reasoning also informed her thought process, defining the modern woman as one with “ample horizons”: “A Woman must always seek to acquire useful and beneficial knowledge, for in modern times she has ample horizons. Science, industries, the workplace, and even the home demand her best aptitudes, her perseverance and consistency in work and her influence and assistance for all which is progress and advancement for humanity.”21 The modern world needed women who, like Jovita Idar, had prepared themselves educationally to make contributions in different areas.22 While Jovita operated out of Laredo, Eduardo Idar served as La Crónica’s traveling correspondent and spent time in Brownsville and San Benito, Texas. In addition to working for La Crónica, he also earned a position in the Brownsville Herald and started other newspapers such as El Eco del Golfo and La Luz. Like Jovita and their elder brother, Clemente, Eduardo was committed to muckraking journalism when it came to racism and racial discrimination. He readily exposed what his investigative journalism revealed about white supremacy in Cameron County. In an article appearing in La Crónica in 1911 a few months prior to the Primer Congreso Mexicanista, Eduardo expressed outrage that ethnic-­Mexican subscribers in South Texas were not receiving their copies of La Crónica in the mail due to racist office workers and mail delivery personnel. “To this degree have things developed, the savage rural administrators and their assistants do not want la raza mexicana to read and receive instruction. Shameless filth is truly what the decadent North American civilization is.” He also expresses concern that the less literate among the ethnic-­Mexican communities failed to understand a change in requirements within Mexican citizenship systems:

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These are the things that consuls should remedy in those cases that concern their co-­nationals. But it already can be seen with the new registration requirements that the majority of Mexicans in Texas will become stateless; for the great majority do not know how to read and would take some years to learn that the Mexican government will only recognize those who are registered. Nevertheless, by our own efforts we will remedy all that is possible.23

The previous year, La Crónica’s correspondent reported from San Benito that on La Panola ranch, Jacinto Treviño had fatally shot an American engineer in charge of the community water pump. The engineer had beaten Jacinto’s brother, and it was believed that this led to the killing. Texas Rangers accompanied the justice of the peace Valentin Gavito, and sheriff’s deputies apprehended Hilario Treviño, who was accused of being an accomplice. S. A. Robertson, a prominent trustee of the Rio Grande Construction Company, attempted to promote the idea of lynching Hilario. Eduardo Idar seemed to be emitting a sigh of relief when he wrote, “The lynching was avoided in time, due to the courageous actions of the employees present. Such conduct [calling for a lynching] reflects poorly on Mr. Robertson, who previously enjoyed the best sympathies of the community of San Benito.”24 Besides Eduardo in the Rio Grande Valley, La Crónica had correspondents, agents, and friends in other Texas communities that allowed Nicasio to monitor various situations and events involving the increasingly dehumanizing treatment of ethnic Mexicans. An enthusiastic member of Lincoln’s party, the Republican Nicasio Idar watched with grave concern as the Democratic Party dealt with ethnic Mexicans possessing US citizenship either by exploiting them politically to maintain machine politics in some communities or by disenfranchising them through the white primary and poll taxes. One county he watched carefully was Val Verde, where his correspondent “El Mensajero” of Del Rio reported much concerning news. The white-­owned newspaper there, The Herald, wrote that it was time for Democrats to eliminate the vote of ethnic Mexicans in the upcoming primaries in order to nominate “good people” for public posts, which represented code language to mean white people for positions of power. The Herald also accused ethnic Mexicans of not possessing political principles and selling their votes. La Crónica interpreted this as the Herald’s way of saying Mexicans were not good citizens and therefore deserved to be disenfranchised. According to La Crónica, another newspaper, the West Texas News, in Colorado, Texas, called on Democrats to take note of “voters who do not know, in good English, how to make their selection of their candidates for public posts.”25

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A defiant Nicasio Idar advised that Mexicans should respond to the Val Verde Democratic Party’s call for white primaries by establishing their own primaries, whether through the Republican Party or another party. Furthermore, he blamed Anglo political bosses for the corrupt political machines that preyed upon Mexican voters. Finally, he called upon Mexicans to study the matter carefully, for “the Democratic Party has never wanted Mexicans. . . . This county [Webb] and Zapata County, in which almost all intelligent Mexicans belong to the Republican Party, are the only two counties where Mexicans enjoy political privileges, and they have the right to run for the highest posts in the county.” In another article, La Crónica took aim at the Democratic congressional Representative John N. Garner, reminding readers that his party had disenfranchised Mexicans in Val Verde and elsewhere; wherever Mexicans could still vote, they should vote for Garner’s opponent, the Republican candidate Noah Allen.26 Within days of learning about the Val Verde journalists promoting the white primary, La Crónica’s correspondent in San Angelo, Texas, reported that Mexicans in that community had protested the segregation of their children and hired an attorney. The school board would not budge, and the board president said that in the event the courts granted Mexicans access to schools, “this would demoralize the public school system.” Later, when the school board offered to build a new, separate school for Mexican schoolchildren, the committee nominated by the Mexican community along with their lawyers refused the offer. La Crónica applauded the “dignified attitude” of the San Angelo Mexican community while protesting the offense issued by the school board in reference to Mexican people. Once again, a reference to the Democratic Party as the enemy of ethnic Mexicans reminded readers that by becoming the party of blancos (whites), the party continued to find ways to humiliate Mexicans: “The political party we are referring to is the Democratic one, that in its terrible hatred wants to condemn Mexicans to the condition of beasts of burden, denying Mexican youth instruction and the amalgam with other superior peoples who have rights by concession of the laws of this nation, but we are certain that this will not happen.”27 And yet, despite the attitude of the school board and the Democratic Party of the period, the journalists at La Crónica remained optimistic. In the same article, the author, who may have been Nicasio Idar, remarks, The example of the Mexicans in San Angelo has to be imitated by all Texas Mexicans, until achieving the triumph of our aspirations so that the méxico-­ texanos of tomorrow, with the aplomb that will be theirs due to a good education, will be able to exercise, with good judgment and discernment, their

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political rights, running for the highest posts in the county of their residence and voting for those candidates who deserve their vote and who are not hostile toward them.28

La Crónica continued on its mission to seek the betterment of a Mexican people that white supremacists sought to dehumanize. Not long after Nicasio Idar’s death on April 7, 1914, the newspaper ceased to operate. Jovita and Eduardo Idar would continue their human rights journalism. She became active in El Progreso, a Spanish-­language newspaper published in Laredo that supported the Mexican Revolution leader Venustiano Ca­rranza. The brother and sister teamed up to develop Evolución, a progressive Spanish-­ language newspaper and separately each would become involved with other newspapers. These and other Spanish-­language newspapers reported on the major events of the day, including La Matanza, the race war that the Texas Rangers and lynch mobs waged on much-­feared ethnic Mexicans during the Plan de San Diego raids. Certainly there is evidence of anti-­Mexican sentiments and violence prior to the killings of 1915 and 1916. By that time, ethnic Mexicans had experienced property dispossession through legal and extralegal means, forms of exclusion such as school segregation, and various forms of political disenfranchisement from political machines to the poll tax of 1902 and the all-­white primary of 1905 to intimidation and threats of violence.29 These represented reasons the Idars felt compelled to engage in human rights journalism and were inspired to organize the First Mexicanist Congress in 1911. But one important question that needs to be asked is why they chose Laredo for this significant transborder human rights conference. The easy answer is that they chose Laredo because that was their base of operations and where they resided. More complex is the reality that Laredo represented a safe haven. While Laredo had a hierarchal class structure that privileged elites such as the descendants of Spanish Mexican land grantees and the European American commercial class, members of which often intermarried with Spanish Mexican elite women, Laredo did not present the virulent anti-­Mexican profile that other communities in Texas did during this period. In Laredo, a bilingual and bicultural society offered a measure of protection for ethnic Mexicans, at least from the more outrageous forms of white-­on-­brown violence. Certainly, racism and class exploitation existed, but in Laredo, ethnic Mexicans such as the Idars could thrive. The family patriarch Nicasio Idar served as justice of the peace and assistant city marshal in Laredo. He belonged to numerous civic organizations and was a thirty-­third-­degree Freemason. He owned property including a

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real estate business that his wife, Jovita Vivero de Idar, helped manage, and they owned and published La Crónica. Their children, including Jovita, enjoyed the benefits of a strong education at home and at institutions such as the Methodist-­affiliated Laredo Seminary, later named the Holding Institute. Jovita found much admiration and respect among Laredoans. She founded La Liga Feminil Mexicanista (League of Mexican Women) and enticed local schoolteachers to join her in an effort to provide free education and supplies for Laredo’s indigent children. Her friend, the wealthy Leonor Villegas de Magnon, trusted Jovita with important projects associated with La Cruz Blanca (the White Cross), a medical brigade affiliated with the Constitutional forces of the Mexican revolutionary general Venustiano Carranza. She was also involved in women’s committees during Laredo’s annual Washington’s birthday celebration and in 1910 participated in an organizing committee for the centennial celebration of Mexico’s independence. Her brothers were involved in these civic celebrations as well as La Cruz Blanca, and they also joined their father’s world of Freemasonry and labor activism.30 In Laredo the Idars got a glimpse of the immense possibilities for ethnic Mexicans in the modern world if only they could rid it of racism and the Juan Crow structures that this social ill had created. The Idars pursued the ideal of progress. In an article about the prospects of Brownsville’s development, Eduardo wrote that in order to make Brownsville the best city in the Rio Grande area, “all citizens from all social classes, creeds, races must work as one individual with the same end in mind and by all means in their reach, work with effort, with perseverance and faith in all areas of industry to obtain this one unique result: Progress!” Regarding ethnic Mexicans in Brownsville, Eduardo called for them to unite as one to amplify their political voice. By merging ethnic-­Mexican parties, he contended that the community could deny Anglo-­Texans power in a region where ethnic Mexicans were the demographic majority yet not always respected.31 Conclusion In Texas the desire to modernize a marginalized group involved the strong efforts of transborder activists to help ethnic Mexicans reclaim their humanity through a process of deracialization that challenged stereotypes and an anti-­Mexican animus known as “the Mexican problem” in Anglo-­ Texan society. This racist concept was a response to the white-­supremacist desire to deal with Mexicans as “nonwhites” in the context of the Herren-

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volk democracy, the Anglo-­American racial state that relied on the Black/ white dichotomy. Not fitting neatly into exclusive Black or white categories, Mexicans and many “othered” groups have complicated that racial binary. They have destabilized the racial state with their claims to whiteness, demands for rights, and reimaginings of US citizenship beyond the merely political to encompass economic contributions and cultural and linguistic priorities. Ultimately, their greatest challenge to white supremacy has been their cries for social justice and their willingness to expose the underside of a modern state professing democratic ideals. Notes 1. Gabriela González, Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 15–16, 142. 2. For an in-­depth examination of J. T. Canales’s work in defense of la raza, see Cynthia E. Orozco, chapter 9 in this collection. 3. La Matanza, mob violence, the Plan de San Diego, and the investigation of Texas Rangers have been examined by numerous scholars, among them Benjamin Heber Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans, Western Americana Series (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Juan Gómez-­Quiñones, Roots of Chicano Politics, 1600–1940 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994); Cynthia E. Orozco, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009); Evan Anders, Boss Rule in South Texas: The Progressive Era (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982); Richard Ribb, “La Rinchada: Revolution, Revenge, and the Rangers, 1910–1920,” in War along the Border: The Mexican Revolution and Tejano Communities, ed. Arnoldo De León (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2012); Trinidad Gonzales, “The Mexican Revolution,” “Revolución de Texas,” and “Matanza de 1915,” in War along the Border, ed. De León; William D. Carrigan, Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Monica Muñoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-­Mexican Violence in Texas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). 4. Gregory H. Stanton, “The 8 Stages of Genocide,” Genocide Watch, 1998, http:// genocidewatch.net/2013/03/14/the-­8-­stages-­of-­genocide/. Though originally written and presented to the Department of State in 1996, “The 8 Stages of Genocide” was published by Genocide Watch in 1998. 5. Stanton, “8 Stages of Genocide.” 6. González, Redeeming La Raza, 1–10. On the racialization of ethnic Mexicans, see Natalia Molina, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Reginald Horseman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-­Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). 7. González, Redeeming La Raza, 7–8, 63. On the dynamics of middle-­class reformers’ attraction to modernity, see William E. French, A Peaceful and Working People:

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Manners, Morals, and Class Formation in Northern Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996). 8. On the conquest, subjugation, and resistance of ethnic Mexicans during the nineteenth century, see Raúl A. Ramos, Beyond the Alamo: Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987); Andrew Torget, Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800–1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Robert J. Rosenbaum, Mexicano Resistance in the Southwest (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1998); Jerry Thompson, Cortina: Defending the Mexican Name in Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007). 9. Scholars who have written about the Idars to various extents include Jose E. Limón, “El Primer Congreso Mexicanista de 1911: A Precursor to Contemporary Chicanismo,” Aztlán 5, nos. 1–2 (Spring–­Fall, 1974): 85–117; Emilio Zamora, The World of the Mexican Worker in Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1993); González, Redeeming La Raza; Gabriela González, “Jovita Idar: The Ideological Origins of a Transnational Advocate for La Raza,” in Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives, ed. Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Stephanie Cole, and Rebecca Sharpless (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015); Sonia Hernández, Working Women into the Borderlands (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014). 10. “El primer año de vida,” La Crónica, January 8, 1910. 11. “Barbarismos,” La Crónica, November 12, 1910; Limón, “El Primer Congreso Mexicanista de 1911,” 88. 12. N. Idar, “Cobarde infame e inhumano lynchamiento de un jovencito mexicano en Thorndale, Milam Co., Texas,” La Crónica, June 29, 1911. 13. N. Idar, “Cobarde infame e inhumano lynchamiento.” 14. N. Idar, “Valiente cobardia de los linchadores de Thorndale, Texas, los Estados Unidos y Mexico nada pueden hacer para el castigo de los criminales—represalias unica solución posible,” La Crónica, July 13, 1911. 15. “Primer Congreso Mexicanista, verificado en Laredo, Texas, EEUU de A. los dias 14 al 22 de septiembre de 1911. Discursos y conferencias por la raza y para la raza,” pp. 2–3, Tipografía de N. Idar, 1912, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. Indicating the strong connection between the First Mexican Congress and fraternal orders, the author of the circular emphasized that the Orden Caballeros de Honor (Order of the Knights of Honor) and the Masonic Lodge Benito Juárez planned to hold their own conferences in Laredo during the same period. This guaranteed the strong representation of fraternal orders at the Mexicanista congress. 16. French, Peaceful and Working People, 4–6. 17. Jovita Idar signed her articles using two pseudonyms, A. V. Negra and Astrea. A. V. Negra, “Por la raza: La niñez mexicana en Texas,” La Crónica, August 10, 1911; A. V. Negra,“Por la raza: La conservación del nacionalismo,” La Crónica, August 17, 1911. 18. A. V. Negra, “Por la raza: La niñez mexicana en Texas,” La Crónica, August 10, 1911. 19. Astrea, “Para la mujer que lee,” La Crónica, October 26, 1911.

The Journalism of the Idar Family 157

20. A. V. Negra, “Por la raza: La conservación del nacionalismo,” La Crónica, August 17, 1911. 21. Astrea, “Para la mujer que lee,” La Crónica, October 26, 1911. 22. Astrea, “Debemos trabajar,” La Crónica, November 23, 1911. 23. “El colmo de lo intolerable,” La Crónica, January 19, 1911. 24. El Corresponsal, “Notas de San Benito,” La Crónica, June 18, 1910. 25. In “Oido al parche,” La Crónica, June 11, 1910. 26. “Oido al parche,” La Crónica, June 11, 1910; “Mr. Garner confiesa su temor de que lo derrote el Lic. Noah Allen,” La Crónica, October 29, 1910. 27. El Corresponsal, “Los mexicanos de San Angelo demandan a los sindicos, protestan contra la segregación de los niños mexicanos de las escuelas,” La Crónica, June 25, 1910. 28. El Corresponsal, “Los mexicanos de San Angelo demandan a los sindicos,” La Crónica, June 25, 1910. 29. Robert A. Calvert, Arnoldo De León, and Gregg Cantrell, The History of Texas, 5th ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 254; Randolph B. Campbell, Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 338, 369. 30. González, Redeeming La Raza, chapters 1–3; Leonor Villegas de Magnón, The Rebel (Houston: Arte Público, 1994). 31. Eduardo Idar, “El progreso de Brownsville y su adminstración pública,” La Crónica, February 9, 1911; Eduardo Idar, “Asuntos de actualidad en Brownsville, información de nuestro corresponsal viajero Eduardo Idar, La Crónica, January 5, 1911.

CHAPTER 8

José Tomás Canales and the Paradox of Power Richard Ribb

José Tomás ( J. T.) Canales arrived in Austin in January 1919 determined to bring about meaningful reform to the Texas Rangers. Within hours, he faced physical intimidation and political stonewalling. Within days, he faced a panel of unsympathetic legislators and a hostile crowd intent on silencing and discrediting him. Within weeks, his effort to reform the malignant Ranger Force led to its exoneration and glorification. The keys to understanding the hearings of 1919 emerge in Canales’s character and the context of his activity, especially the events immediately preceding the hearings, in the last months of 1918. Understanding Canales allows for understanding the hearings as more than political theater. What he experienced in 1918 and 1919 represented a paradox of his own power: the more he exercised it regarding the Rangers, the more harmful the results, for him personally as well as for his legislative efforts. J. T. Canales (few called him “Joe”) served three terms as state representative from Brownsville, Cameron County, in the southernmost tip of Texas.1 Canales was a landowner, lawyer, legislator, proto-­civil rights figure, historian, and philanthropist.2 He also was a deeply religious Protestant who in 1919 saw himself as an individual on a mission to deliver South Texas from destruction, disintegration, and evil, if not from sin itself. He saw that the race war of 1915–1916 had engulfed South Texas and truncated the private and public economic development he had facilitated for many years. In addition, he contended that it was the Texas Rangers who had turned a brush fire into the conflagration that scorched thousands of farms, ranches, and people, primarily Border Mexicans, during the border war.3 Though Canales proposed a bill of modest reform in the Texas legislature, House Bill 5, the Rangers and their supporters from both outside and

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within government counterattacked with such force that it was doomed. The bill triggered joint legislative hearings that, instead of focusing on the Rangers’ atrocities against Border Mexicans, became a referendum on the continued existence of a Ranger Force and an inquisition on Canales’s motives and character in proposing the bill in the first place. Thus, the joint hearings became a call for an up-­or-­down vote on the continuation of the Rangers and focused on Canales himself in an ad hominem assault that was intended to quiet any protest or true reform at all. That tactic was meant not only to crush the legislative initiative but to discredit Canales as a legislator as well. In the process, hearing participants typically used the Rangers and Canales as proxies for “white” and “Mexican,” which, in an era of hardening racial politics, tainted Canales as unpatriotic and tantamount to a criminal. Canales was a considerable force in Texas. In their 150-­year presence in South Texas, his family accumulated large landholdings, unlike most Border Mexican families, and undertook consistent efforts at modernization. His education and experience—participation in perhaps the last long cattle drive, a law degree from the University of Michigan, legal representation of the railroads and area elites—made him uniquely qualified to represent South Texas. His elite status, however, often left him unaware of the experiences of most residents and inaccessible to them. Canales enjoyed cordial relations with most of the area’s elite, Anglo and Tejano. He worked in the powerbroker James B. Wells’s land office, carried out legal work for the infamous King Ranch, and worked closely with the politically dominant Guerra family to elect candidates in Starr County. His law office was an unofficial conference room for regional and state affairs. However, by the 1910s, in the matter of politics and the Rangers specifically, he respected his presumed Anglo peers much more than they respected him, though they needed him more than he needed them. The nature of Canales’s power—heritage, education, connections, and character—had undermined him before the showdown at the capitol. His severe limitations often overshadowed his considerable strengths. Thus, at times he could not see the inherent contradictions of his activities, and these inconsistencies allowed others to use him to promote practices antithetical to his goals. Canales held such a lofty view of his considerable talents and influence that it blinded him to his naivete, left him vulnerable to flattery, easily sparked self-­righteousness, and caused him to be duped time and again. For example, he did not foresee at all that his legislative efforts to improve the Rio Grande Valley, especially his decisive work on passing irrigation incentives, actually hastened the confrontation between new Anglo

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land-­seekers and established Border Mexican families and, soon enough, the paramilitary presence of the Rangers to cement the area’s transformation to a market economy. What he did have, despite these factors, was a firm grasp of basic truths about a reign of terror by the Rangers in his beloved South Texas. But he did not see beneath the veneer of civility and cooperation offered him by the regime of Governor William P. Hobby. To gain appropriate context about Canales and the hearings requires looking closely at the year 1918. Canales eagerly awaited acting Governor Hobby’s reign. Hobby supported many Progressive issues that Canales long had been championing: electoral reform, Prohibition, women’s suffrage, regulatory action. Canales considered reforming the Rangers as another part of a shared Progressive approach. Finally, Canales could welcome a modern governor. When the special session of the legislature convened in Austin in March 1918, Canales arranged a meeting to discuss the Rangers with the Hobby regime’s Ranger team: Adjutant General James A. Harley, Hobby’s adviser Francisco Chapa, and newly appointed Ranger Inspector William Hanson. At the meeting, Canales described “terrible conditions” in South Texas “by reason of the Ranger outrages.” The men listened “very patiently” to Canales, then congratulated him on being frank with them, Canales recalled. Hanson, the first Ranger to hold “Inspector” rank, a position that called for him to investigate and monitor the Rangers, promised to “do his duty” and to “correct all those evils.”4 Canales, in essence, was briefed on a reform program that Hobby had outlined to Chapa just weeks before. His regime, Hobby had written Chapa, would offer a different Ranger than had served before: “That type of old time ranger known as the ‘gunman’ will be eliminated under my administration, and only those men who are peaceful and law abiding, and yet who are firm, will be employed in the [Ranger] service.”5 Reform was coming to the Rangers, Hobby vowed. Canales had heard it all before, just the year before, in fact, when Canales received Governor James Ferguson’s “word of honor” to reform the Rangers.6 From the meeting with Hobby’s team, nevertheless, Canales accepted that the Hobby administration “would correct the faults of the old,” and hoped that Hanson’s “intelligence and shrewdness” would be used “for the purpose of weeding out bad men.”7 Inspired by the promise of a Progressive regime, Canales joined the others in ensuring a Hobby victory in the coming election and in securing political allegiance afterward. Convinced of the salubrious effect of a Hobby victory, the very busy Canales suspended his law practice on June 20, 1918, more than a month before the Democratic primary, to focus on campaign activities.8

José Tomás Canales and the Paradox of Power 161

Hobby’s Ranger team had its own agenda regarding the Ranger Force. Adjutant General Harley operated as a Hobby campaign coordinator in the election fight against Ferguson in the 1918 July primary and in the November general election.9 Chapa used Rangers to pursue a private foreign policy regarding Mexico on the basis of a special understanding between Harley, Hanson, and Chapa.10 Hanson, Chapa’s nominee for inspector, longed for revenge for his substantial losses occasioned by the overthrow of Mexico’s dictator Porfirio Díaz. Chapa and Hanson had been convicted for violation of neutrality acts in support of counterrevolutionaries, Hanson in Mexico and Chapa in the United States.11 As to the coming primary, Canales was key. In one example of delicate political maneuvering to implement a plan to regain support from the Guerra family and associates, threatened by Hobby’s appointment of newcomers to campaign positions in Starr County, Hanson joined Canales on a visit to Rio Grande City, Starr County. To resolve the standoff that had developed between the pro-­Hobby newcomers in the region and the old guard machine bosses, such as Wells and the Guerras, explained Canales, he, Hanson, and Assistant Adjutant General Walter F. Woodul decided to get their “good friend” James B. Wells “to go there in person” to smooth things over.12 By using Canales as a willing intermediary, though one unaware of the larger plan, Hanson and the campaign committee had successfully avoided direct confrontation with the Wells and Guerra machines without abandoning the Hobby appointees in the area. The South Texas strategy worked. With huge majorities throughout the region, Hobby carried Texas by a two-­to-­ one margin over the impeached former governor Ferguson, who had won by the same margin in the general election just two years before.13 Hanson congratulated Canales for his “splendid” work in the “great victory not only for Governor Hobby, but [also] for clean government in our beloved state.” He assured Canales that Hobby was most appreciative as well. Hanson continued on a very personal, if insincere, note, “I want you to understand that I am your true friend and it will always give me pleasure to serve you when opportunity offers and, honestly, it will give me pleasure to support you for Governor at some time in the future.”14 The ever-­ manipulative Hanson played directly to Canales’s sense of self-­importance and thereby bought the Hobby effort additional months of Canales’s campaigning. So, by the beginning of the traditional general election cycle in September 1918, Canales felt that the Hobby regime had justified his patience regarding their promises of reforming the Rangers. Where for so long the Rangers had committed “wholesale slaughter,” he recalled, they now com-

162  Richard Ribb

mitted only “occasional misdeeds.”15 The focus for the general election campaign turned from drumming up support for Hobby to assuring Border Mexicans that the Rangers would offer protection and not destruction under the Hobby regime.16 Hanson assured Canales that he would “have everything arranged to your satisfaction” by late September, and then Hanson would come south for a “trip up the River” to promote together the new program of openness and support.17 Simultaneously, however, Hobby decided to resume the use of Rangers as a paramilitary force, this time to intimidate potential voters and attack Border Mexicans, including Canales’s own relatives. Finally, belatedly, Canales began to suspect that he had been strung along and duped into providing political cover for Hobby as long as he was useful. By October, his suspicions were confirmed. The working relationship between Inspector Hanson and Representative Canales ended on October 14, 1918, on a northbound train out of Brownsville. The two Hobby men conversed about Ranger matters in Hanson’s compartment much of the afternoon. Canales took the opportunity to express frustration about unfulfilled promises to address Rangers’ mistreatment of his brother and cousin earlier that fall. To Canales, Hanson’s failure to investigate his specific complaints, especially ones involving his close relatives, constituted not just a dereliction of duty but a personal affront. In response, Hanson argued that Rangers received blame for acts committed by others. Hanson finally dismissed Canales when Canales rendered an opinion regarding the killing of Lisandro Muñoz by Ranger John Edds.18 Soon after the lengthy conversation ended, Canales disembarked from the train in Kingsville and immediately wrote Francisco Chapa. Hanson was “doublecrossing” the two of them, wrote Canales, by not conducting the investigations “as he promised you and promised me.”19 Canales mistakenly believed that Chapa would help unravel what he considered Hanson’s ball of lies regarding Ranger misdeeds. Canales ignored the considerable evidence that Chapa was much more interested in order than in the law or justice. Canales overlooked Chapa’s well-­documented personal activity on behalf of authoritarian and militarist regimes in Mexico and his unwavering support of the Rangers during the border war. Further illustrating Canales’s naivete regarding his assumption that Chapa would assist him in seeking reform of the Rangers was his failure to consider that Chapa had recommended Hanson for the position of inspector in the first place.20 Aware of the seriousness of the conflict with Canales, Hanson immediately wrote Harley, “I had a long talk with our mutual friend, Representative

José Tomás Canales and the Paradox of Power 163

Canales, and I find that he is bitter, and seems a little bit unreasonable, as usual” about recent Ranger misdeeds. Three days later Hanson divulged to Harley that he had not closed the Lisandro Muñoz case yet because he was still “awaiting the receipt of petitions and letters in favor of the Rangers.”21 In working for Hobby’s election, Canales was oblivious to the connection between Hanson, Harley, and Hobby’s attempt to cleanse state politics and their intention to protect and use the Rangers. Thus, in several important respects, Canales’s idealism and misplaced personal loyalty to Hobby prevented him from recognizing the complexities of the political role of the Rangers and hence of the larger context of his earlier complaints against them. Despite Hobby’s avowed intentions of reform, he reappointed all three Ranger captains who had served in South Texas during the border war.22 Like his predecessor Ferguson, Hobby recruited penitentiary officers for the Ranger Force.23 Like governors before him, Hobby appointed Rangers on the basis of their political usefulness.24 Hobby doubled the number of regular Rangers and stationed six of eight companies in South Texas.25 Canales had traveled South Texas assuring crowds a new day had come regarding the Rangers, but he had been betrayed. Deceived and dismissed, Canales fumed about the subversive Hanson and considered his options regarding the Rangers for the upcoming legislative session. Canales found out how dangerous he was in the eyes of the Ranger team one morning in early December 1918 in Brownsville. As Canales strode down Elizabeth Street to his offices in the Merchant’s National Bank building, a huge man he vaguely recognized, Frank Hamer, yelled, “Come here!” Ranger Sergeant Frank A. Hamer, or “Pancho,” as he became known, was thirty-­four years old at that time.26 The twenty-­six bullet wounds in his massive body, some 230 pounds with “not an ounce of fat” on a 6′3″ frame, testified to Hamer’s knack for violence that he had shown since he killed his first man at age sixteen.27 His reputation as an extraordinary shot grew by his participating in more gunfights than any other Ranger.28 Yet Hamer’s favorite weapon was not a gun but his open hand slapped against the head of an opponent. W. W. Sterling, later his superior as adjutant general, described the procedure: “When he boxed a man alongside the head, it reminded me of a grizzly bear cuffing a steer.”29 When Hamer approached Canales, his hands were empty. Hobby’s stated intentions to purge the Rangers of the old-­style gunmen to the contrary, Hamer had rejoined the Rangers in October 1918 and was assigned to a new company with headquarters at the Miller Hotel in Brownsville, just down the street from Canales’s law office. Hanson had told Hamer of the several discussions between Ranger officials and Canales that

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were intended to placate Canales. After Canales’s refusal to provide specifics about the complaints, Hamer pressed on: “You are hot-­footing it . . . between here and Austin and complaining to the Governor and the Adjutant General about the Rangers, and I am going to tell you, if you don’t stop that you are going to get hurt.”30 Canales returned to his law office following the confrontation with Hamer. After reflecting on the enormity of the collaboration between Hanson and Hamer, Canales went to Sheriff William T. Vann for advice. Vann had an answer ready for Canales: “My advice to you is [to] take a double-­ barreled shot-­gun . . . and kill that man.” Vann offered to send a deputy as backup.31 Canales refused Vann’s suggestion, even though he agreed with Vann’s assessment that no jury would convict him for killing Hamer. Instead, Canales replied, “Yet I prefer that Mr. Hamer will carry out his threat rather than [I] . . . violate a law of God.”32 The day after the encounter with Hamer, Canales wrote a lengthy letter to Governor Hobby. He recounted Hamer’s threats to do him bodily injury for reporting abuses and outrages by Rangers to Hanson. Canales said Hanson had determined that the best way to stop complaints was not to change Ranger behavior but to send “ruffian Haymer [sic] [to] gag me.” He reiterated that no investigation of the Hamer affair or any other incident could yield fruitful information because “the very man who does the investigating is the very man who orders the outrages to be done.”33 Canales considered Hamer’s assault another manifestation of Hanson’s duplicity. Characteristically, Canales found parallels to this deception in the Bible: “I recognized the voice of Jacob but the hand of Esau.”34 Canales closed the letter by asking Hobby whether he would provide the protection to which Canales was entitled as a citizen.35 Hobby seemed to acknowledge the validity of Canales’s concerns in his reply: “I will investigate the matter mentioned in your letter of December Twelfth and see that justice is done.”36 Hobby chose to investigate the matter by turning it over to Adjutant General Harley, who suggested that a reprimand from Hanson should straighten Hamer out.37 If Canales agreed to a personal discussion of the matter as soon as convenient, then Harley “would better understand how to adjust the matter.” Playing the good cop to Hanson’s bad cop, Harley confided, “I have found your advice and information in the past to be very valuable.” The adjutant general signed off with “kindest regards, and the season’s greetings.”38 Canales fired back an immediate salvo. He responded to Harley that he was always ready to overlook the mistakes of others, but the threat from Hamer was no mistake and simply part of Hanson’s strategy to suppress dis-

José Tomás Canales and the Paradox of Power 165

sent in South Texas. As for Hanson’s approach to discipline, Canales mused, “I am sure Hanson will reprimand this fellow Haymer [sic] by making him Captain of the Rangers.” (Hamer did indeed become captain the next year and senior captain three years later.) Canales agreed to meet with Harley in January 1919 before the legislative session began, adding a caveat: “if I live that long.” Ever the gentleman, Canales returned the season’s greetings, extending them to Harley’s family as well.39 On the day he received Canales’s rebuttal, Harley wired Hamer that Canales had reported the threat and that Hamer must leave Canales alone: “Under Governor’s orders you are instructed not to make any threats against the lives of any citizens, especially J. T. Canales.”40 Instead of reprimanding or dismissing Hamer, Harley called him to Austin two weeks before the opening of the legislative session, timed to the arrival of Canales.41 Harley wired Canales about the orders given to Hamer to leave him alone. Continuing a policy of appeasement, he reiterated his desire to meet with Canales before the next legislative session.42 “If Mr. Hamer makes similar threats,” wrote the disbelieving Canales to Harley, “I trust you will send him another long telegram.”43 The pivotal events of the final months of 1918 scarred Canales, especially the encounter with Hanson on the train in October and the assault by Hamer in early December. Politically, the intervention by the Rangers in the November general election represented to citizens and political bosses that Canales could not deliver his part of the bargain, namely, that he could not control the Hobby efforts in South Texas. The “doublecross,” as he considered the turn of events, affected him emotionally as well. He highly valued his political independence, as his efforts for Prohibition and women’s suffrage in opposition to his friend Wells demonstrated, yet he also highly valued personal loyalties, as in his lifelong ties to Wells, the Guerras, and incredibly, Hobby himself. Canales risked friendships and political capital to support the Hobby campaign and felt discarded when his value was spent. For the prideful Canales, a savvy political operator in his own right, the belief that Hanson had misled, fooled, and, in a word, duped him initially evoked a mixture of self-­loathing and outrage. Events in 1918 ended Canales’s hopes for Rangers to reform themselves. Canales’s February 1918 meeting with Hobby advisers Chapa, Harley, and Hanson had concluded with promises to address Ranger misbehavior and to reconstitute the force itself; December’s encounter with Hamer signified a complete betrayal of those promises. For Canales, the euphoria of the Progressive ascendancy and the Hobby gubernatorial victory evaporated in the harsh realizations at the end of the year.

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J. T. and Anne Canales arrived in Austin on Sunday, January 12, 1919, for the 36th biennial session of the Texas legislature. He planned to fulfill his promise to meet with Harley before the session actually opened, still hoping to work out suitable measures to reform the Ranger Force.44 Besides maintaining the delusion that his personal appeal might sway Harley, Canales sought to avoid a conflict that would cause “even the slightest reflection” on the administration of Governor Hobby, whom he had worked so hard to elect.45 Loyal to his presumed Progressive ally Hobby, Canales sponsored a successful resolution that provided money for decorations and a brass band for the governor’s inauguration.46 Canales spent Monday, January 13, his first full day back in Austin, meeting with colleagues about the upcoming legislative session, or so he had planned. While chatting with fellow legislators at the Driskill Hotel, Canales was startled by Frank Hamer, who sauntered by, making his presence “very marked.” Canales continued making the rounds, moving on to the Avenue Hotel nearby. Again Hamer appeared. Aware of Harley’s orders for Hamer not to harm him or “make a personal matter of your official duties,” Canales was outraged by Hamer’s brazen behavior. He reasoned that Hamer figured “I would be intimidated if I would make any charges against these rangers or introduce any law attempting to regulate them.”47 Canales kept his promise to meet with Harley, despite Hamer’s interventions. Francisco Chapa joined the conversation in Harley’s office, and the Ranger junta again offered no concrete steps to regulate the Rangers. Canales concluded that Harley intended to stall any reform action until the legislature adjourned. He informed Harley that he would have to appeal to the people of Texas for support and that he planned to file reform legislation on opening day, and he left.48 Though conceding that “whatever was in [Hamer’s] mind only he and God know,” Canales did know that Hamer was stalking him in violation of direct orders from Harley, clearly showing that the Ranger team already was preparing to discredit Canales, or worse.49 To everyone but Canales, that was obvious. When Anne complained to the speaker of the House about threats made against her husband, the speaker offered to provide a Ranger as a bodyguard.50 Shorn of hope for the Rangers to police themselves, incensed by his yearlong manipulation by Hanson, Harley, and Chapa at Hobby’s direction, and livid over the intimidating tactics of Hamer, the following morning Canales wrote out in longhand House Bill 5, “An Act reorganizing the State Ranger Force, prescribing the pay, qualifications and duties of State Rangers.”51 The original Canales bill reflected his attempt to return the force to its

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level before the border war and World War I.52 Between September 1917, when he assumed office, and December 1918, Hobby had doubled the number of paid Rangers to 127, all of whom operated as regular Rangers.53 Canales’s bill continued the tradition of total control of the Rangers by the governor and his appointee, the adjutant general. Canales insisted that a Ranger be of “good moral character” and certified by the commissioner’s court of his home county as a “peaceful and law-­abiding citizen.” Most importantly, a Ranger would have to furnish a “good bond” signed either by a reputable surety company or two solvent individuals approved by the governor.54 Conceptually, a streamlined, more professional Ranger organization matched the Hobby administration’s Progressive policies to bring efficiency to state agencies.55 Efficiency, however, was not a criterion for judging the Rangers and never had been. The Rangers’ brutality was the foundation for Canales’s effort. His devout faith in God and progress, his conviction regarding the sanctity of the law, and his lustrous sense of personal honor also drove Canales to file the reform bill. Casting himself as the great redeemer, Canales intended to purify the Rangers, even at great risk to himself. When Canales presented HB 5 to the House, he explained that the Rangers had committed terrible, illegal acts and that the adjutant general’s office had not deigned to correct them. Instead, “the men who killed those men and who threatened my life, are still on the force,” Canales fumed. He affirmed that the border needed Rangers for protection but not “officers of this character.”56 He concluded, “If you kill this bill, you had just as well sign an order to send my body home feet first.” Martyred, he figured he would not live another six months if his bill failed.57 Though Canales proposed the bill in response to Rangers’ atrocities, Harley suggested that an investigation that would focus on “the good that [the Ranger Force] does and the forces of evil that it must necessarily encounter,” the better “to legislate for or against its existence.” In other words, he and his associates made the Canales bill a referendum on the Rangers’ very existence: Did Texas want Rangers or not?58 In addition, Harley said the House must consider who brought charges against the Rangers and why they did so.59 Representative Barry Miller, point legislator for the Ranger team, took to the House floor to give the opening salvo in the protracted fight by the Hobby administration against HB 5. Quite simply, Miller blurted, “No finer page of Texas history has ever been written than the one written by the Rangers of Texas.”60 Staring at Canales, he charged, “Some of the wild and lawlessness and enemy-­loving characteristics . . . probably found first lodgment in Michigan,” a reference to Canales’s alma mater.61

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Next up, Representative Windsor Stewart claimed that the name “Ranger” caused terror to strike deeper in the hearts of a “Mexican” than “hell fire” struck in the heart of an “American.” He quickly explained that he was not a “Mexican hater, by any means,” and “in fact had worked Mexicans for years.” Stewart concluded his remarks with the strongest possible appeal to Texas nationalism: after the “sacred” Alamo and San Jacinto, the third tribute to liberty was a “living monument so far as Mexican banditry is concerned, and it is nothing other than the brave, gallant, dashing and courageous Ranger organization!”62 Canales “leaped to his feet and demanded to be heard,” according to a newspaper report. His face was “pale and set and yet a hectic flush was burning on each cheek” as he began speaking in a voice “clear and resonant”: “If you want to be men then be brave [and] kill my bill on a straight, fair vote, . . . [not] by subterfuge and innuendo.” He challenged his fellow lawmakers, “In brief, don’t be a coward!”63 Canales, speaking more loudly still, assured the House, “I am not an enemy to the Ranger force.” Canales again used biblical metaphors to explain his aims for the Rangers. He evoked the image of a magnificent tree and said the only way for the “great tree to live and thrive” is to prune it. By removing the dead wood, he contended, “the system may be purified and not destroyed.” Canales’s homily continued: God “removes every branch that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit He prunes to make it bear more fruit.” Canales also invoked the Gospel of John in the parable of the Good Shepherd and his flock to describe the attempts of false shepherd Miller and other opponents to draw away his supporters.64 Representative Miller immediately proposed an investigation of the Rangers and their presumed foes. Perhaps hoping he could mitigate the bias already in evidence, Canales successfully offered a concurrent resolution creating a committee of four House members and three Senate members to oversee a full inquiry by joint committee.65 Canales wanted to show that the Rangers committed illegal and violent acts against citizens of the state and that Harley and Inspector Hanson overlooked or blindly justified them. The Ranger team sought to make the hearings a referendum on the continued existence of the fabled force and an inquiry into the perfidious Canales. The inquiry began on January 30, 1919, with Canales, Harley, and the joint committee of legislators meeting about logistics. Robert E. Lee Knight, a Hobby spokesman and former legislator, and Dayton Moses, an attorney for the Southwest Cattle Raisers Association, soon joined the Rangers’ defense team. The chairman of the committee, Representative William Bledsoe, vowed at the outset that the Rangers would continue, as if Canales intended to abolish them and despite evidence

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to the contrary, such as the proposed bill itself.66 Bledsoe also controlled the evidence presented by, for example, limiting testimony about the significance of an image depicting Rangers dragging corpses.67 Further, Bledsoe stated that he was determined to “get through with [the Hearings] just as fast as we can.”68 The Rangers’ case against Canales rested on three related arguments: he was Mexican; he served as a puppet for larger political interests; and finally, he intended to destroy the Rangers, a move that constituted a direct attack on the Hobby administration. The racial argument was that all Texas Mexicans were Mexicans, all Mexicans were bandits at heart if not in deed, Canales was a Texas Mexican, and therefore he was a bandit or sympathizer. As a result, Canales magnified the Rangers’ occasional “casual mistakes,” Knight contended.69 Knight and Harley also attacked his patriotism, offering evidence that distant relatives had fled “back” to Mexico to escape the draft.70 Thus Canales soon became “Venustiano Canales,” a nod to President Venustiano Carranza of Mexico, with his “fangs” at Harley’s neck.71 The Hobby regime also accused Canales of serving as a puppet for Archie Parr, a longtime family friend of the Canaleses, political boss of Duval County, and state senator for South Texas, in his hotly contested effort against D. W. Glasscock.72 As the Parr-­Glasscock dispute between the machine boss and Hobby’s upstart candidate played down the hall in the Senate chamber, Knight and Harley tried to reduce Canales’s charges to crass political maneuvering to extend Parr’s corrupt and corrupting influence beyond South Texas. The Hobby team stood to gain support from folks who thought the Ranger problem was South Texas’s alone as well as bolster the prospects for Hobby’s man Glasscock. The third argument against Canales was that his charges condemned not just the Rangers but the legislative process and Hobby as well. In this view, he was an egomaniac consumed with a personal and political agenda that threatened the integrity of the investigation. Knight declared that Canales wanted to “destroy absolutely the efficiency of this force, even to the extent of its abolition.”73 Knight used one written comment made by Canales to Cameron County Sheriff Vann to support his contention that Canales actually did want to abolish the Rangers. The next day, Canales produced that communication, in which he clearly articulated that his bill would do no such thing.74 Canales explained that he was seeking a compromise between the hardline “abolishers” such as Vann and the Ranger loyalists such as Hanson.75 Knight had a final question: “[Y]ou were intending again to be as wise

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as the serpent and as harmless as the dove?” The reference was to Canales’s earlier scriptural language regarding electoral interactions with Inspector Hanson. Canales answered yes, he was.76 With the filings of dozens of documents pertaining to the charges and countercharges, the hearings closed at 6 p.m., Thursday, February 13, two weeks after they began. Canales testified twice before the committee for a total of some six-­plus hours, longer than anyone else. Canales had conducted the prosecution of the Rangers by himself. In the end, he was overconfident if not hopelessly naive in believing that the committee would render a verdict on the basis of evidence and not politics, racism, and tradition. The Ranger defense team wanted to turn the committee’s decision into a referendum on Governor Hobby, patriotism, and the retention of a legendary Anglo-­Texan tradition. The chances of Rangers escaping censure depended on shifting the investigation to the untrustworthiness of Canales. The Ranger team sought to simplify the hearings down to the question of a former Ranger: “Who do you believe: the Rangers or that ‘Greaser’ [who] stured [sic] up [this] mess?”77 Greater access to supporting evidence would have made his case considerably more compelling, but Canales, nevertheless, did manage to construct virtually overnight a powerful case illuminating the Rangers’ reign of terror during the second decade of the twentieth century. Canales had hoped to establish not only that the Rangers had committed atrocities against South Texans but that la rinchada, the widespread brutality and murder of mejicanos by los rinches, as Spanish speakers in South Texas still derisively refer to the Rangers, had sown the very violence the Rangers presumably fought to curtail.78 The unanimous opinion of the committee held that conditions along the border necessitated the maintenance of an adequate Ranger Force with just compensation. It found that the evidence against Adjutant General Harley for improper conduct was “wholly insufficient” and to the contrary, that an “intelligent” and “conscientious” Harley had operated “in the best manner possible.” Inspector Hanson had been “efficient, prompt and fair . . . at all times.” As for Canales, the committee concluded, he had “been motivated by no improper motives” in making the charges.79 Hanson crowed in a letter, “Vindication complete.” He rejoiced at having survived the “cowardly attacks” by Canales.80 Texas’s leading newspaper, the Dallas Morning News, gave the report a qualified endorsement, adding that Canales provided a large public service in disclosing a state of affairs that neither the legislators nor most citizens knew anything about. The editorial said that only Canales’s courage and sense of responsibility prevented the continuation of “shocking and intolerable conditions.”81

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The fates of HB 5 and the committee report intertwined inextricably. Bledsoe’s motion to adopt the report carried 87–10.82 A few days after the hearings ended, the House speaker called for consideration of Canales’s original reform bill. Canales immediately asked for postponement for a few days because his “weakened physical condition” left him “in no physical condition” to defend his bill. Bledsoe, however, was eager for the House to consider HB 5 because he had a hostile bill ready to substitute for it. Bledsoe prevailed.83 Canales launched a counterattack on the Bledsoe bill that raises questions as to his emotional and not just physical state.84 He accused Bledsoe of saying something untrue about his bill, and Bledsoe raced to fight with Canales on the floor of the House.85 After Bledsoe stood down when the sergeant-­at-­arms intervened, he revealed his true thoughts about Canales, his “voice trembling with emotion”: “I offer my apologies to the membership of this House, but when one has sat for weeks, day after day, listening to a man guilty of the things this man has done, seeing him use every method to accomplish personal ends instead of representing his people, as he has sworn to do, patience ceases to be a virtue.”86 After the House cooled down, Canales watched as the Bledsoe version passed easily.87 He tried to get his name removed from Bledsoe’s substitute version, observing, “I do not recognize my child,” but he failed.88 In his final act as legislator, he succeeded with a resolution ordering the House clerk to provide a copy of the transcript and committee report relating to the Ranger investigation to the state library “to be kept as one of the archives of the State.” The resolution also instructed the clerk to obtain a receipt.89 His dream of redemption, of winning back his honor, avenging los inocentes in South Texas, restoring the rule of law, and purifying the Rangers died with the adoption of the Bledsoe bill. Perhaps the devout Canales found solace in the words of the prophet Isaiah, who claimed he heard God wonder, “Is my hand shortened, that it cannot redeem? Or have I no power to deliver?” (Isaiah 50:2). The hearings did produce a few minor results, such as the dismissal of Captain John Sanders and a handful of other Rangers. But there was no structural reform. Without needed reform as Canales had advocated, the Rangers of Governor William Hobby underwent only cosmetic change. In fact, the ideas and practices of the Ranger traditionalists Hanson, Harley, and Chapa dominated for generations. Thus, the hearings served as an inoculation for the Rangers. Although the Rangers experienced a little pain during the hearings and the immediate aftermath, they soon rebounded stronger and more resistant to further attack.

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In the wake of the hearings, as after the Mexican War, influential spokesmen touted the Rangers. Most notable was Walter P. Webb, who cast them as mythic heroes. In the 1920s alone, forty-­one B-­movies featuring Texas Rangers as white-­hatted heroes thrilled Saturday matinee crowds.90 And soon the Lone Ranger galloped into the living room.91 In 1922 the New York Times reported what the real Rangers were up to: “The killing of Mexicans without provocation is so common as to pass almost unnoticed,” except by the victims’ friends and families, presumably. Another writer concluded that “some Rangers have degenerated into common man-­killers.”92 Yet these critiques had no effect on the Rangers’ status. Still Canales continued to seek social justice. He never again served in the legislature after 1920, but he fought against discrimination in public education, political participation, and social interaction.93 His experience in 1919 forcefully demonstrated that Anglos no longer accepted traditional class and political ideals as sufficient criteria to participate fully in the affairs of state, at least not the state of Texas. Years after the hearings, Canales experienced an incident of raw racism in daily life in Alice, Texas, a town near his birthplace and ancestral ranch, where his family had opened banks, sat on boards of directors, and shipped cattle, and where he had practiced law for decades. One day he passed in front of a barbershop whose owner he knew personally. The fastidious Canales entered for a haircut and shave, but the owner refused to serve him, saying, “You do not belong to the right race.” Canales retorted, “I thought that only registered stock were required to show a pedigree,” and left. Canales recalls in a memoir, “My feeling must have been very similar to those of [ Juan] Cortina’s when the Anglo-Americans of his time not only refused to recognize him as an American citizen, but scornfully referred to him as ‘a damned “Mexican Greaser.’ ” Cortina, an ancestor of Canales, was a well-­known nineteenth-­century border figure cast as a terrorizing bandit by most Anglos and as a liberating Robin Hood figure by Border Mexicans. Aware of what Cortina “must have felt and what he had to endure,” Canales now felt what had caused Cortina to “resort to violence” and himself to turn to writing, and changing, history.94 Notes 1. Canales signed his correspondence “J. T.,” and family members addressed him that way, too. Author interview with two great-­nephews, Gus T. Canales, who operates La Cabra Ranch, and Mark Cisneros, then president of nearby Texas A&M University–­Kingsville, February 16, 2001.

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2. Biographical information derives from J. T. Canales, “Personal Recollections of J. T. Canales . . . ,” 5, typescript, “Canales, Joe T.,” vertical file, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. Attached to “Personal Recollections” in the archive is the nine-­page document “Genealogy Of Andres Canales and Tomasa Cavazos de Canales . . . ,” 9, typescript, marked in pencil “Exhibit A.” The other primary autobiographical material appears in J. T. Canales, “A Neighbor’s Recollection of Mrs. Henrietta M. King,” typescript, José Tomás Canales Collection, South Texas Archives, Jernigan Library, Texas A&M University–­Kingsville. 3. A note on terminology: I use mejicanos when referring to residents of Mexican ethnicity, regardless of citizenship status; “Tejanos” when referring to Texas citizens of Mexican ethnicity; and “Border Mexicans” when referring to ethnic Mexicans on either side of but near the Rio Grande. 4. Canales testimony, Proceedings of the Joint Committee of the Senate and House in the Investigation of the Texas State Rangers, 36th Legislature, Regular Session, January 14–­March 19, 1919, typescript, Ranger Force Investigation (RFI), Legislative Papers, Texas State Library and Archives (TSLA), Austin (hereafter cited as Canales testimony, RFI), 877–888. Canales remembered the meeting taking place in February. He first appears on the daily roll calls of the House on January 9, 1917, in the House Journal, 35th Texas Legislature, Regular Session, January 9 to March 19, 1917, 2. The meeting apparently took place before the session ended on March 27. 5. Hobby to Chapa, January 5, 1918, letter book 6, William P. Hobby Papers, Governors’ Papers, TSLA (hereafter Hobby Papers). 6. Canales testimony, RFI, 869–870. James B. Wells confirmed Canales’s account of the meeting with Ferguson in his testimony. He confirmed that Canales “wanted to see the [Border] Mexican people and [Border] Mexican interests protected” (RFI, 707–708). 7. Canales testimony, RFI, 870, 877–888. 8. Canales to Hobby Campaign Committee Headquarters, June 3, 1918, William P. Hobby Sr., Family Papers, Briscoe Center for American History. 9. Harley suggested adding two stump speakers to the campaign files (Harley to R. W. Brahan, Hobby Headquarters, Austin, June 5, 1918, Hobby Family Papers, Briscoe Center for American History). Harley starred for the University of Texas football team in its championship season of 1907. After he left the adjutant general’s office in September 1919, Harley ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1922; he served as general counsel to the South Texas Chamber of Commerce, and at his death in 1942, he was executive director of the San Antonio Housing Authority. Information is derived from clippings of The Pioneer 3, no. 6 ( June 1922), 21, and the Austin American ( January 1917?), in James Harley, vertical files, Briscoe Center for American History; Harley obituary, (University of Texas) Alcalde 31, no. 1 (October 1942), 24. 10. Adjutant General W. D. Cope to Fred Marks, March 13, 1920, Adjutant Generals’ General Correspondence, TSLA (hereafter AGGC). Cope followed Harley as adjutant general in September 1919. This letter is marked “X F. A. Chapa,” which probably indicates that a copy was sent to Chapa. One aspect of the agreement was that Marks lived and worked out of San Antonio, where Chapa lived and Hanson had his office. For Marks’s Ranger career, see his file in Service Records, Adjutant General’s Papers, TSLA. Marks enlisted as a Loyalty Ranger on July 11, 1918. The Special Ranger enlistment oath carries the notation “OK WMH [William M. Hanson]” on

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the front. On the back appears the notation “Cancelled Mr. Marks now in the Regular Force 10/23/18 Hanson.” He joined the regular force on October 21, 1918, according to his second enlistment oath, in which he lists his residence as 618 Frost Building, San Antonio, Hanson’s office address. Marks reenlisted on June 20, 1919; his termination date does not appear in the records. 11. Richard Ribb, “La Rinchada: Revolution, Revenge, and the Rangers, 1910– 1920,” in War along the Border: The Mexican Revolution and Tejano Communities, ed. Arnoldo De León (Texas A&M Press, 2012), 56–106, especially 58–63. 12. Canales to [Kirk] Hobby Campaign Committee, July 15, 1918, Hobby Family Papers, Briscoe Center for American History. The Hobby campaign angered the Guerra group in Starr County with its appointment as Hobby campaign coordinator of John Monroe, who had openly and bitterly defected from the Guerra machine in 1914. See Evan Anders, Boss Rule in South Texas: The Progressive Era (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 62; Canales to Hanson, July 22, 1918, RFI, 922–923. 13. Anders, Boss Rule in South Texas, 246, 255. 14. Hanson to Canales, July 31, 1918, RFI, 1016. 15. Canales Testimony, RFI, 870. 16. Canales to Hanson, September 21, 1918, RFI, 924. 17. Hanson to Canales, September 23, 1918, RFI, 1017. 18. Canales Testimony, RFI, 882. 19. Canales Testimony, RFI, 884, paraphrasing his letter to Chapa of October 14, 1918. Chapa did not produce the letter during the Ranger investigation despite repeated requests by Canales and the committee. 20. Chapa testimony confirms he had recommended Hanson for inspector (RFI, 219). 21. Hanson to Harley, October 23, 1918, RFI, 781. Later, in the Ranger investigation, this tactic evolved into packing the house with Ranger supporters and presenting a false dichotomy, an either/or proposition of having Rangers in South Texas in the same manner and disposition as always or not at all. 22. The captains were John Sanders, Monroe Fox, and Henry Ransom (Annual Report of the Adjutant General of Texas for Year Ending December 31, 1918 [Austin: Von Boeckmann-­Jones, 1919], 59). 23. Hobby appointed K. F. Cunningham as captain and reappointed B. C. Veale as private. For Cunningham’s experience in the penal system, see the account of his shooting of Veale in “Ranger Killed Yesterday in Pistol Duel,” Austin Statesman, February 8, 1919, 4. Veale claimed experience as a “convict guard” (Veale, Adjutant General Service Records, TSLA). 24. Quartermaster Harry M. Johnston described himself as a “reporter” in his enlistment oath (Adjutant General Service Records, TSLA). 25. The force had seventy-­three Rangers when Harley assumed office on September 29, 1917 (Annual Report of the Adjutant General of Texas for Year Ending December 31, 1918 [Austin: Von Boeckmann-­Jones, 1919], 7). Hobby later doubled that number (p. 11). 26. Hamer, enlistment oath, Adjutant General Service Records, TSLA. 27. Hamer’s physical dimensions appear on “United States’ Citizens’ Identity Card for Use on the Mexican Border,” stamped “April 1919, Brownsville-­Matamoros, crossing and recrossing privileges,” reproduced in H. Gordon Frost and John H. Jenkins,

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“I’m Frank Hamer”: The Life of a Texas Peace Officer (Austin: Pemberton, 1968), 93. Testimony of “Captain” E. A. Sterling sets the wound count (RFI, 1504). Frost and Jenkins discuss Hamer’s history of killings in “I’m Frank Hamer,” 8–9. 28. Frost and Jenkins, “I’m Frank Hamer,” i-­ii. Walter Webb labeled Hamer the “Best Gunman in Texas” on a photograph in his private collection, “Texas Rangers (small photos)” folder, Walter P. Webb Papers, Briscoe Center for American History. 29. Sterling, Trails and Trials, 420–421. 30. Canales testimony, quoting Hamer, RFI, 886. Hamer’s threat is confirmed in Jesse Dennett testimony, RFI, 528. 31. Canales testimony, quoting Vann, RFI, 886–887. 32. Canales testimony, RFI, 887. 33. Canales to Hobby, December 12, 1918, RFI, 890. 34. Canales to Hobby, December 12, 1918, RFI, 889. 35. Canales to Hobby, December 12, 1918, RFI, 890. 36. Hobby to Canales, telegram, December 14, 1918, RFI, 890–891. 37. Harley to Canales, December 19, 1918, RFI, 892. 38. Harley to Canales, December 19, 1918, RFI, 892. 39. Canales to Harley, December 21, 1918, RFI, 892–894. 40. Harley to Hamer, telegram, December 23, 1918, RFI, 148–149. When Canales found this telegram during his research in the Ranger investigation, he exploded. The telegram to Hamer served as the centerpiece for charge 16, which held that with such a policy of notifying the alleged offenders, “citizens refuse to make charges against Ranger for violations” out of concern for their safety. 41. Harley placed Hamer on “detached duty” in Austin on December 31, 1918 (Biennial Report—1918, 61). Canales arrived on January 12, 1919 (RFI, 900). 42. Harley to Canales, telegram, December 23, 1918, RFI, 894. 43. Canales testimony, paraphrasing his letter to Harley of December 24, 1918, RFI, 897–898. 44. Canales to Harley, telegram, December 23, 1918, RFI, 895. Canales notified Harley that he could not be in Austin until January 12 unless, he added, “you need to see me earlier.” 45. Canales testimony, RFI, 899–900. 46. House Journal, 36th Legislature, Regular Session, January 14–­March 19, 1919, 124. 47. For Canales’s comments, see RFI, 900; for Harley’s order about Hamer, see Harley to Frank Haymer [sic], telegram, December 23, 1918, RFI, 895. 48. Canales testimony, RFI, 898. 49. Canales testimony, RFI, 901. 50. Brownsville Herald, January 30, 1919, 1. 51. The text of the bill as slightly amended by committee appears in House Journal, 36th Legislature, Regular Session (1919), 163–164. 52. The information for the original HB 5 and amendments is from Bill File, 36th Legislature, Regular Session, Legislative Papers, TSLA. The bill called for the following raises: captain, from $125 to $150; sergeant, $60 to $100; private, $50 to $75. 53. Adjutant General’s Annual Report—1918, 11, TSLA. The figure accounts for status of the Ranger Force as of December 31, 1918. 54. HB 5, section 7.

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55. “Governor Hobby’s Message,” editorial, Dallas Morning News, January 20, 1919, 8. 56. “Outrages by Texas Rangers Are Charged: Many Innocent Men Murdered in Border Counties, Declares House Member,” Dallas Morning News, January 24, 1919, 1. 57. Brownsville Herald, January 25, 1919, 1. 58. Harley to R. E. Thomason, speaker of the House, January 26, 1919, House Journal, 36th Legislature, Regular Session, 196, emphasis added. 59. Harley to Thomason, January 26, 1919, House Journal, 36th Legislature, Regular Session, 196. The attacks on the whistleblower as politically motivated during the impeachment hearings and trial of President Trump echo the attacks on Canales. 60. “Outrages by Texas Rangers Are Charged,” Dallas Morning News. 61. “Consideration of Canales Bill Halted Suddenly: Its Author Moved Re-­ Commital,” Austin Statesman, January 28, 1919, 2. 62. “Consideration of Canales Bill Halted Suddenly,” Austin Statesman. 63. “Consideration of Canales Bill Halted Suddenly,” Austin Statesman. 64. “Consideration of Canales Bill Halted Suddenly,” Austin Statesman. Bible quotations are from the New Revised Standard Edition. Canales probably would have been quoting from the Revised Version, developed in 1888 and 1901. Indicative of his faith are his religious writings: A Bunch of Pansies as Easter Greetings (Brownsville?: author?, 1931); Sobre de fe de nuestros padres (Brownsville: author, 1950); Character Builders and Leaders of Men, 2 vols. (San Antonio: Artes Gráficas, 1959, 1960). 65. “Ranger Probe Decided on by Senate,” Austin Statesman, January 28, 1919, 8. 66. Moses testimony, RFI, 100–101. 67. In R. B. Creager testimony, RFI, 363–366. 68. Bledsoe, RFI, 162. Harley objected to the presentation of charges through Canales, but Bledsoe assured Harley that no “abuse of that privilege” would take place (163). 69. In Canales testimony, RFI, 905. 70. In Canales testimony, RFI, 1010. 71. For “Venustiano Canales,” Congressman Claude Hudspeth to Harley, May 26, 1919, 579/23, AGGC; “fangs” quote, M. P. Cullinan to Hobby, January 29, 1919, 578/19, AGGC. 72. See, for example, Canales testimony, RFI, 921–930, 958–959. 73. R. E. L. Knight, in Capt. J. H. Rogers testimony, RFI, 1248. 74. Canales to Sheriff Vann, January 17, 1919, in Canales testimony, RFI, 1560–1561. 75. Canales testimony, RFI, 1569–1570. 76. Canales testimony, RFI, 1571–1572. 77. Ex-­Ranger T. N. Reneau to Quartermaster R. W. Aldrich, March 28, 1919, 3P157/2, Aldrich Papers, Briscoe Center for American History. 78. This term is a derivative of el rinche, the derogatory term for “Ranger” widely used by Spanish-­speaking residents in South Texas to this day. W. W. Sterling, a Ranger captain who rose to adjutant general in the 1930s, used “rinchada” to designate “any clash with Rangers that resulted in the death of bandits” (Trails and Trials, 357). A more historically accurate definition would be a period or an incident in which Rangers summarily harassed, brutalized, or executed Border Mexicans. 79. House Journal, 36th Legislature, Regular Session, 536–539. The report does not

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mention that the committee ruled early in the proceedings that it had no jurisdiction regarding the adjutant general’s behavior. 80. Hanson to J. J. Thornham, February 14, 1919. Thornham, judge of Willacy County, received thanks for sending unspecified files to Hanson during the hearings. Underlining in the original. 81. “The Report on the Canales Charges,” editorial, Dallas Morning News, February 21, 1919. 82. House Journal, 36th Legislature, Regular Session, 712–713. 83. “Canales Talks of His Bill; Opposes the Substitute,” Austin Statesman, March 6, 1919, 1–2. 84. Some family members mentioned to me that Canales may have suffered a short-­ lived “nervous breakdown” as a result of the hearings and legislative struggle, from which he quickly and fully recovered. In any case, his actions in the days immediately following the issuance of the report reflect a certain desperation. 85. “State Ranger Bill Engrossed in House–-­Canales Makes Hard Fight for His Bill, but Disowns It after It Was Amended,” Dallas Morning News, March 8, 1919, 5. 86. San Antonio Daily Express, March 8, 1919, 1. Anders observes, “Not even Archie Parr, whose reputation for political chicanery was unrivaled, ever provoked the kind of emotional, almost violent outburst that Canales faced” (Boss Rule in South Texas, 272). 87. House Journal, 36th Legislature, Regular Session, 831, 866–867. Canales was present but did not vote. 88. “State Ranger Bill Engrossed in House,” Dallas Morning News, March 8, 1919, 5. 89. House Journal, 36th Legislature, 1st and 2nd called sessions, May 5–July 22, 1919, 420. 90. Don Graham, Cowboys and Cadillacs: How Hollywood Looks at Texas (Austin: Texas Monthly, 1983), 267. 91. Robert Heide and John Gilman, Box-­Office Buckaroos: The Cowboy Hero from the Wild West Show to the Silver Screen (New York: Abbeville, 1989), 66. 92. New York Times, November 18, 1922, and George Marvin, World’s Work magazine (1900–1932), both quoted in Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico: The Spanish-­ Speaking People of the United States (1948; New York: Praeger, 1990), 109. 93. The dutiful Canales remained in Austin for the four called sessions of the 36th legislature that had opened in January 1919 and continued until October 1920 (House Journal, 36th Legislature, Fourth Called Session, September 21–­October 2, 1920, 99). Cynthia E. Orozco expands on these contributions by Canales in chapter 9 of this volume. 94. Canales included the incident in the introduction to a private printing of “Juan N. Cortina, 1824–1892: A Reappraisal,” the master’s thesis of his son-­in-­law, Charles W. Goldfinch, with whom he shared the family’s collection on the ancestor. Goldfinch earned his master’s degree from the University of Chicago in 1948. The original publication of the work was printed at Canales’s expense in 1950 by Bishop’s Print Shop in Brownsville. The work, along with Canales’s “Juan M. Cortina Presents His Motion for a New Trial,” a speech he delivered to the Lower Rio Grande Valley Historical Association in 1951, appears in Goldfinch and Canales, Juan N. Cortina: Two Interpretations (New York: Arno, 1974).

CHAPTER 9

J. T. Canales’s Contributions in Law, Civil Rights, and Education, 1920–1976 Cynthia E. Orozco

The Renaissance man J. T. Canales enjoyed many identities: descendant of a Spanish land-­grant family, attorney, state legislator, civil rights leader, philanthropist, and writer.1 Canales was a millionaire, but as he was of Mexican descent, it is unsurprising in 2020 to find only one published biography of him, since there are few scholars of Tejano and Tejana history.2 The José Tomás Canales Estate collection was donated to the South Texas Archives in the Jernigan Library at Texas A&M University–­Kingsville in 1990. Canales has been the subject of several journal articles, theses, a dissertation, and a book.3 Perhaps one of the most revealing incidents about the challenges Canales faced is that while on the floor of the Texas state legislature as an elected member of the Texas House of Representatives, he was called “the greaser from Brownsville.”4 Yet in the 1930s, Canales was called “that lovable old character and champion of Latin Americanism” by Jesse Sloss, a fellow member of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and half-­brother to the Rio Grande Valley activist Adela Sloss-­Vento.5 Until recently Canales has mostly been known as a critic of the Texas Rangers and founder of LULAC, and most historical knowledge of Canales is about him before 1920. I discuss him as a founder LULAC in my 2009 book on that organization, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed. LULAC is the oldest Latino civil rights organization in the United States; it was founded in Corpus Christi in 1929 by principal founder Alonso S. Perales and others, though Canales wrote the bulk of the constitution. The historian Joseph Medina Orbock refers to Canales as a “patron,” a political boss, in the 1950s.6 Michael Lynch and the scholar and Canales relative Carlos Larralde authored the first full biography of him, published in 2015, uncovering some of Canales’s philanthropic work, especially in education.7 Still, new sources provide more information and allow for greater interpretation.

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My investigation here is based on documents not previously examined; it is based on the Canales archive, the Alonso S. Perales Papers, the LULAC archive in Austin, and numerous issues of LULAC News, the league’s news magazine since 1931. These archives reveal some of Canales’s most important contributions to Latinos in the twentieth century. Little is known of Canales’s work as an attorney and a civil rights activist, particularly in LULAC.8 Here I identify information about his law firm affiliations and show his significant role in civil rights throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1950s. He played a major role in the Latin American Citizens League (LAC), a civil rights organization in the Rio Grande Valley. Founded in 1927 in Harlingen, Texas, LAC merged with other associations to form LULAC. Canales served as the major author of LULAC’s constitution and held various positions within LULAC, notably his national presidency in the early 1930s. Canales also worked as an educator and a lay historian. He promoted college education for Latinos and was among the first to call for Latina/o studies. He advocated for Latinos in higher education and for intellectual endeavor within the Mexican American community. Canales’s work in those three arenas, law, civil rights, and education, is less known than his political life. In 1909 he ran as an independent for county judge. He lost that race but showed his independent streak by running outside the Democratic Party. In 1914, running as a Democrat, he was elected as a Cameron County judge.9 Canales served as a state legislator five times, 1905–1911 and 1917–1921. As a legislator, Canales filed charges against the Texas Rangers for wanton anti-­Mexican violence in the 1910s. The inscription on the Texas historical marker honoring Canales in Brownsville states, “Canales decided against seeking reelection due to backlash from his charges against the Rangers.”10 His private correspondence and memoirs reveal Canales’s thoughts about his work to expel racist, murderous Rangers and reform the Ranger force. In 1953 Canales wrote, “I conducted what is known as the ‘Ranger Investigation’ when our State Ranger Force were [was] represented by a very undesirable element, and which resulted in the cleaning out of said Ranger Force, and the dismissal of forty-­five (45) undesirable characters.”11 In 1956 he wrote his friend Alonso S. Perales, “You know that I exposed my life in 1919 when I filed my charges against the abuses of the then Ranger Force.”12 This may be Canales’s only personal written assessment of his brave actions against the Rangers. By 1920, Canales ended his tenure as an elected official, though in the 1930s he served as Brownsville city attorney. Nevertheless, Canales participated in politics and corresponded with politicians most of his life. He advised Governor Miriam “Ma” Ferguson,

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who banned the use of masks by the Ku Klux Klan. He welcomed LULAC’s entrance into politics in the late 1930s when it began to develop resolutions about federal legislation, and he welcomed a change in LULAC’s constitution that allowed elected officials to join. Canales grew more conservative in his politics and voted for some Republicans in the 1950s. He endorsed the Republican Dwight Eisenhower for president in 1952.13 He became a strong anticommunist and a fervent anti-­ unionist. He disliked the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) founded in the late 1930s. Canales supported the Republican US Senator Martin Dies of Texas, a major critic of communists in the United States and associate of Senator Joe McCarthy, another politician Canales supported.14 He was both liberal and conservative.15 Throughout his life, he was pro-­Latino, pro-­democracy, and antiracist, yet pro-­business and antilabor. Attorney The teacher and LULAC co-­activist José de la Luz Sáenz, originally from Alice, Texas, called Canales “the dean of Spanish-­speaking lawyers,” and such would be the case before World War II.16 Indeed, Canales was the first Tejano to obtain a law degree.17 However, he was not the first to obtain an education in law in Texas; that was Manuel C. (M.C.)Gonzales in the 1920s.18 Canales obtained his law degree from the University of Michigan in the 1890s. In 1900 Canales joined Captain T. W. Dodd’s law firm in Laredo and served as a general attorney for the Tex-­Mex and Mexican National Railway Company.19 In 1903 he returned to Brownsville to practice law. He also worked in the Cameron County Assessor’s office in the 1900s. He served as Cameron County judge from 1910 to 1914. From 1915 to 1919 he was a senior partner in the Canales and Dancy firm, from 1919 to 1925 in the Canales and Davenport firm, from 1925 to 1929 in the Canales and McKay firm, and from 1929 to 1932 in the Canales and Eidman firm.20 Canales was typically the senior law partner. He served as Brownsville city attorney from 1930 to 1938.21 A 1952 letter shows that he worked alone in his law practice in Brownsville that year and Lynch and Larralde state he had a private law firm until 1976.22 Canales hired the second Tejano lawyer to join his firm, Alonso S. Perales, when he was fresh out of law school. Perales was originally from Alice, Texas,

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and had also lived in San Antonio as a young adult.23 Canales allowed Perales to join his law practice after he completed studies at George Washington University in Washington, DC, in the 1920s. The seasoned lawyer Canales advised and counseled the young attorney. He learned of Perales through his friend Casimiro Pérez Alvarez, an astute civic activist and journalist from Rio Grande City and Perales’s father-­in-­law.24 Perales joined the law firm of Canales and McKay but only stayed in the Valley briefly, departing for diplomatic missions on behalf of the US government and finally settling in San Antonio. While in the Valley, Perales spearheaded the formation of LAC in 1927, and Canales took part in its formation. LAC was the first Mexican American civil rights organization in the lower Rio Grande Valley and followed the Order Sons of America (OSA) founding in San Antonio in 1921. Although Canales did not play a major role in civil rights litigation, he had a role in filing the Salvatierra case in Del Rio, Texas, the first legal challenge to segregated schools for Mexican-­descent people in the state, serving as an appeals attorney.25 Only a few years earlier in Kingsville, Texas, he pressed the public schools for better educational conditions.26 Manuel (M. C.) Gonzales, as LULAC president in 1930–1931, appointed Canales and J. B. Rubio to the league’s segregation committee.27 On November 29, 1931, LULAC held a special convention in San Antonio to address the Del Rio segregation issue; Canales submitted a resolution stating, In the Del Rio Case the Court of Appeals clearly held that Children may not legally be segregated merely on the basis of Race. Segregation, if any, must be based on other grounds. The legal recognition of this principle is an important step forward. In any given case now, it is necessary only that the segregation practices is [are] clearly justified on the basis of the reasons alleged or that it [is] clearly not justified.28

The resolution asked the few Latino lawyers and LULAC councils to promote health and cleanliness, possible excuses for racial segregation. Attorney Canales was particularly interested in ethics, a topic on which he wrote extensively. He authored “The New Mexico Civil Code” for the Texas Bar Journal (1947) and Ethics in the Profession of Law (1953).29 The ethics book includes chapters titled “Lawyer as an Advocate,” “The Lawyer’s Accountability,” “The Lawyer in Politics,” “The Lawyer as an Adviser,” “Advertising Lawyers,” “The Lawyer as Champion and Defender of a Free Government and of Our Civil Liberties,” and “Lawyer’s Right to Criticize the Judges and Courts.” Along with the lawyer and historian Harbert Daven-

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port, Canales coauthored “The Texas Law of Flowing Waters with Special Reference to Irrigation from the Lower Rio Grande” in 1949, which spurred his book writing in the 1950s.30 This article included autobiographical notes by Canales. In 1959, Canales donated $1,000 to University of Michigan law students to write essays on ethics.31 As an attorney, Canales acted in an ethical manner. He filed charges against two allegedly unethical Mexican American lawyers, so he was not protective of all Latinos because of race. He filed charges against Jim Hogg County attorney Fidencio Garza.32 And he charged District Judge Ezequiel Salinas of Laredo of unethical behavior, which led Salinas to file libel charges against Canales. Instead of fighting the charge, because of his and his wife’s health problems he simply paid the $500 fine.33 Salinas had even been the LULAC national president in 1939–1940. Civil Rights Activist In civil rights Canales was key to establishing LAC in the late 1920s, developed LULAC in the 1930s, and then appeared again in early 1950s activism. Canales played an integral role in helping get LAC off the ground as the first Mexican American civil rights organization in the Rio Grande Valley.34 The Order Sons of America was the first major ethnic-­Mexican civil rights organization in Texas, founded in 1921 in San Antonio. OSA spread south to Corpus Christi and other towns but not as far south as the lower Rio Grande Valley.35 Canales had contact with the Corpus Christi chapter of the OSA.36 LAC was founded at a conference in Harlingen in 1927 which was to determine citizenship eligibility; Perales and J. Luz Sáenz had initiated the idea in 1924 in a lecture tour when Perales lived in the Valley while working in Canales’s law firm. Canales not only attended the Harlingen convention but was the man who moved to exclude Mexican immigrants from the proposed new organization.37 Women were not permitted at that conference. Perales and his cohorts were not successful in uniting with the OSA in Harlingen, so LAC was founded. Canales organized a council in Brownsville. He co-­wrote the LAC constitution with Eduardo Idar of Laredo, prepared the “Manual for Its Use,” and had the manual printed while Perales, LAC’s first president, was away on diplomatic business for the US government. Canales served as LAC interim president while Perales was absent. Still, he did not consider himself the primary mover behind LAC. In 1953, he wrote the following account of its origin and that of LULAC:

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Figure 9.1. Delegates to the constitutional LULAC convention, Corpus Christi, 1929.

Courtesy, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Library, University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at Austin.

The movement was originated by certain appeals through the Press made either during July or August of 1928 [1927] by Alonso S. Perales and the late Professor J. Luz Sáenz. The first meeting was held in the city of Harlingen, Texas and I was named to represent my city of Brownville [sic] at said meeting. Mr. Ismael Zarate, who was then and is still Chief Deputy County Clerk of Cameron County, was my fellow delegate.38

Moreover, in a 1960 letter Canales notes, “I was invited to attend this junta, at Harlingen, as a Representative from Brownsville, Texas. . . . I attended because both of my friends, Prof. J. Luz Sáenz, and Honorable Alonso S. Perales, wrote me a personal invitation.”39 While Canales did not initiate LAC, he fostered its success. Canales and LULAC

Canales had a profound influence on LULAC’s establishment, development, and continuation into its second decade. He attended the league’s

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founding convention in Corpus Christi in February 1929 and its constitutional convention in May 1929. Mauro Machado of the OSA in San Antonio suggested that the name include “United,” and then John Solis proposed “United Latin American Citizens.” Canales seconded Solis’s motion.40 Canales prepared the draft of the LULAC constitution between February and May 1929, and it was approved in May.41 While Perales oversaw the new organization’s aims and principles, Canales was the major author of the LULAC constitution.42 In the 1950s and in 1960, Canales wrote Perales, Sáenz’s son-­in-­law and LULAC leader Luis Alvarado, and LULAC News editor Luciano Santiscoy about his authorship of the document. The constitution was detailed and thorough. It consisted of Article I (Name); Article II (Aims and Principles), Article III (Membership); Article IV (Supreme Council); Article V (Local Councils); Article VI (Membership Responsibilities); Article VII (Motto and Oath of Officers and Members); Article VIII (Removal and Impeachment of Members). As an astute lawyer and past politician, Canales was best qualified to write LULAC’s constitution. He led discussions on it at the May 1929 constitutional convention in Corpus. It did not allow more than one term for the president and required that officers and headquarters rotate. Canales explains the significance of these critical elements in a LULAC News essay: “All persons familiar with history know that one of the great curses which have pursued the Latin Americans is the tendency of one person to acquire and retain supreme power.”43 By the late 1930s, Canales saw the need for revision of the 1929 constitution. In 1938 he supported the idea that LULAC members be allowed to run for the state legislature or school boards; in other words, elected officials should also be allowed to be LULAC members. The 1929 constitution excluded elected officials so they would not use LULAC as a political tool. Perhaps the entrance of New Mexico into LULAC helped Canales see that the inclusion of elected officials would not be a detriment. New Mexico had numerous Hispano elected officials.44 At the 1939 convention in San Antonio, Canales later recalls, “We amended the original constitution and gave it a National Character.” He adds, “I, also, wrote the whole of said amendment which was unanimously adopted and we then incorporated the League under the Laws of Texas.”45 Canales contributed as well to writing LULAC’s aims and principles, the organization’s guiding ideals and goals. In a 1953 letter to Santiscoy, Canales explains that he wrote the first four aims and Eduardo Idar wrote the other twenty-­one.46 The aims Canales likely wrote are the following:

Canales’s Contributions in Law, Civil Rights, and Education 185

1) To develop within the members of our race the best, purest, and most perfect type of a true and loyal citizen of the United States of America. 2) To eradicate from our body politic all intents and tendencies to establish discriminations among our fellow-­citizens on account of race, religion or social position as being contrary to the true spirit of Democracy, our Constitution and Laws. 3) To use all the legal means at our command to the end that all citizens in our country may enjoy equal rights, the equal protection of the laws of the land and equal opportunities and privileges. 4) The acquisition of the English language, which is the official language of our country, being necessary for the enjoyment of our rights and privileges, we declare it to be the official language of this Organization, and we pledge ourselves to learn and speak and teach same to our children.47

There are several drafts of the aims and principles in Perales’s handwriting in the Perales archive. My research shows that Idar, Canales, Perales, and Sáenz wrote the aims, though Perales seems to have been the final arbitrator.48 Not only did Canales play the major role in writing the LULAC constitution, he served LULAC in other positions. He was a board trustee, national president, and LULAC News magazine writer. He joined LULAC’s first board of trustees, also known as the Supreme Council, from 1929 to 1930 and served through 1931, along with Perales, Gonzales, Sáenz, Ben Garza, Andres de Luna, and Luis Wilmot, the last three of Corpus Christi. In December 1931 Canales presided over the education committee.49 He served on the board in 1931–1932 under the Gonzales administration, his own administration, that of Mauro Machado (1933–1934), Emilio Lozano (1934–1935), James Tafolla Jr. (1935–1936), Frank Galvan (1936–1937), Ramón Longoria (1937–1938), and Filemón T. Martínez (1938–1939), but not during the Ezequiel D. Salinas administration (1939–1940).50 Canales served LULAC in several other capacities. In July 1938 he served on the nominating committee.51 In 1938 he was appointed special organizer for the lower Rio Grande Valley, and as such he reorganized the Mission, Texas, council in 1939.52 With his November 1938 LULAC News essay on the topic of Santa Fe, New Mexico, he influenced LULAC to hold its 1940 national convention in that city.53 This led to the league’s expansion into the US Southwest. In 1940–1941, under the administration of Antonio M. Fernandez of New Mexico, Canales was listed as chaplain general. Canales played a role in preventing labor activism within LULAC. He

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actively worked to get the labor organizer and civil rights leader Clemente Idar, brother of Eduardo Idar, disbanded from LULAC in 1931.54 This was a major coup. Clemente and Eduardo were the sons of Nicasio Idar of Laredo, who with his family published newspapers and organized a statewide antilynching conference in 1911.55 Clemente was an AFL organizer and a major author of the OSA constitution.56 LULAC members Clemente Idar and M. C. Gonzales questioned why Canales and Perales, as LULAC leaders, testified before Congress in 1930 about the John Box immigration bill to curtail Mexican immigration. Idar and Gonzales wrote a letter to officials in Washington, DC, suggesting that Canales and Perales did not have the league’s authorization to represent LULAC at the congressional hearing. Idar was likely bothered that Canales also represented business interests and thus not labor’s interests at the hearing. Canales and Perales demanded an apology; Gonzales gave one, but Clemente Idar quit LULAC. Canales’s role as national LULAC president has not been widely studied. He made his mark as the fourth national president in 1932–1933 after being elected at the LULAC convention in Hebbronville, Texas. He followed Ben Garza, Alonso S. Perales, and M. C. Gonzales as president. Eduardo Idar tossed around Canales’s name as the possible first LULAC president in 1929. However, it was Perales who strategized to make Ben Garza the first president. This was a smart move on Perales’s part, suggesting that the league would not be presided over by the most educated, wealthiest, or power-­hungry men. Canales did not seek out the presidency and did not seek power. Canales was an effective president.57 Officers under his administration included E. E. Peña of San Diego, Texas, as vice president; Federico Recio of Brownsville as secretary; Mauro Machado of San Antonio as treasurer; John Solis of San Antonio, Special Organizer General; José V. Alamia of Edinburg as organizer general; M. C. Gonzales of San Antonio as inspector general; Henry Canamar of San Antonio as director of publicity; Andres de Luna of Corpus Christi as custodian of records; and Rubén Lozano of San Antonio as chair of the education committee.58 In July 1932 there were forty-­four LULAC chapters, all in Texas.59 Expansion was part of Canales’s goal. Under his administration, J. C. Machuca and a colleague organized a LULAC council near El Paso, Perales in South Texas, Solis in North and East Texas, J. A. Alamia in the Rio Grande Valley, Filemón Martínez in New Mexico, and Jacob Rodríguez in California.60 Canales wrote that he organized the El Paso council through power of attorney to Machuca, whom he called an intellectual. He appointed the New Mexican Martínez, calling him “my Agent to organize Councils in New Mexico,” and reported

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that Martínez organized councils in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.61 Canales pointed to the “westward trend of LULAC” as Tejanos made contact with peers in New Mexico, Arizona, and California.62 Canales wrote that he “established Council No. 16, organized by Perales,” in San Antonio, the first place where two male LULAC councils appeared in the same city.63 He presided over a regional convention in Brownsville with two hundred attending and another convention in Premont, Texas. These regional conventions were organized to impart civic instruction.64 A major problem Canales addressed during his term as president was misappropriation and misapplication of LULAC funds.65 Canales’s administration reorganized or initiated LULAC scholarships for future college students. An October 1932 LULAC News reported scholarships of $100 to José Ángel Hernández of Brownsville, $50 to Juana Minerva Ortiz of Dilley, Texas, and $50 to Noe Jiménez of San Diego.66 The next month it published Hernández’s essay “A Nation’s Real Wealth.”67 Education committee chair Rubén R. Lozano of San Antonio appealed to members to raise funds and contribute toward the scholarships: “Within five or less years the result of this labor will be noticed, and therefore, from the bottom pits of our hearts and as true Lulacs, [we] hereby appeal to our Councils and membership at large for a hearty cooperation.”68 And indeed, a 1937 LULAC News article reported that “the Scholarship Fund was made workable, whereby several deserving men and your [sic] women were given a start in higher education.”69 As president, Canales advocated for Mexican ethnicity in the public schools. He called upon LULAC members to organize el Día de la Raza in cooperation with schools as an early call to acknowledge Mexican culture in Texas schools.70 Canales’s reply to a question of ethnicity within the league reveals his thinking on European ethnics in the United States. A Del Rio LULAC council member asked him if a local Italian might join. Canales responded, “A person of Italian extraction is eligible to membership in our league because he is of Latin extraction. When we used the word ‘Latin’ extraction we had in mind to include French, Italian, Spaniards, and Spanish Americans as well as of Mexican American origin, and the word Latin was the broadest term that we could find to include all these races.”71 Here Canales seemed to veer toward nondiscrimination against European ethnics who were discriminated against by the dominant society of British and German descent. Canales contributed essays to LULAC News and was its most prolific writer; it had 1,200 subscribers in the early 1930s.72 A review of LULAC News permits this conclusion. His numerous articles include “To Live or

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to Die?,” November 1931; “Vengeance,” December 1931; “The Romans of Today,” February 1932; “Unity,” April 1932; “Three Mile Posts in LULAC,” May 1932; “Usury,” July 1932; “Get Acquainted,” November 1932; “The Westward Trend of LULAC,” July 1937; “The Right of LULAC Councils to Secede and Form a Rival Organization,” October 1937; “Our Civil Liberties,” August 1938; “Believe in God,” September 1938; “Santa Fe,” November 1938; “Swapping Votes,” February 1939; “Intelligent Citizenship and Civic Pride,” March 1939; “Echoes from the San Antonio LULAC Convention,” July 1939; and “Viva El Presidente General,” December 1939.73 Canales addressed improving LULAC, politics, and civil rights. In “Usury” he calls for the US government to take over the banking business to stop banks from acting like “leeches” and “parasites.”74 In “Our Civil Liberties” in the August 1938 issue, Canales urges LULAC councils to be more vigilant and form local committees to address racial discrimination. Going further, he adds, Remember that LULAC means service. Let us render our own people a real service by preventing these insults. I suggest that our President General should write these councils to do their duty and to appoint a Legislative Committee with authority to study, prepare and urge before our next Legislature the enactment of a Texas Civil Rights Statute. It will be a great forward step in the right direction as well as the carrying into effect one of aims and purposes.75

Canales calls for collecting data and “a detailed and thorough statement of the nature of the discrimination must be made in each case, giving the names of credible witnesses who are United States citizens.”76 Seeing travel as education, Canales also wrote about his travels to New Mexico. In 1939 he served as associate editor of LULAC News.77 Under Canales’s presidency LULAC began to allow women. LULAC admitted only men when it was founded in 1929. In 1933 the Supreme Council (the board of trustees) called on member councils “to send a matron or maid of honor to represent the local councils [at the annual convention] in addition to the delegates provided by the constitution”; the women would be “entertained” but would also “have a place on the platform with the general officers of the Supreme Council.”78 At the Del Rio convention, one ladies auxiliary attended in addition to matrons and maids of honor from nine councils. So, some women had already organized into an auxiliary. Moreover, a significant event occurred at the convention; Joe V. Alamia and J. M. Canales of the Edinburg LULAC council entered a resolution

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“permitting Latin American women to organize on the same basis as men and to be known as Ladies LULAC councils.”79 It is unclear if they were motivated to do so by witnessing the activist work of Adela Sloss-­Vento in the Rio Grande Valley.80 Just before the 1933 convention, Canales wrote to Perales that he was glad he had not overtly excluded women from LULAC when he authored its constitution: I did not get to see the article with reference to the organization of the women auxiliary council at Alice. I believe that you are correct with reference to the fact that under our constitution both males and females can become active members of a council. I am glad that I had this foresight when I wrote that article of the constitution in permitting the membership to male persons. Now, with reference to whether it will be better to have our women organize separate from the men or whether to permit them to join the same council is a matter which I would like to let the supreme council decide. I will not undertake to decide such an important question by myself. I sent the Alice Women a charter No. 1 as Ladies Auxiliary council, but that charter can be recalled and a new charter substituted. In fact, they forwarded a check for $5.00 which I have still in my possession not knowing what to do with it.81

The Supreme Council decided councils should be separated by gender. Women were thereafter empowered to join LULAC, and they did so in separate, gender-­segregated councils called Ladies LULAC. By 1940, there were twenty-­five such councils. Women’s segregation in ladies’ councils in LULAC worked to marginalize Latinas from the early 1930s until the Chicana movement in the 1970s. While Canales was conservative in some aspects of gender politics, he was liberal in other ways. When he stepped down from the presidency, he provided a litany of issues to address but did not reference how they affected women. He advised LULAC members to address education, especially the needs of developmentally challenged students, playground and sanitation issues, health and disease, parent-­teacher associations, hospitals, red-­light districts, and school attendance.82 However, he voted for women suffrage; he supported women like Elena Zamora in seeking higher education; he wrote about the Angel of Goliad as an example of a Mexican woman to foster pride; he supported the activist Sloss-­Vento; and he visited with the author Florence Johnson Scott in his home.83 Still, he married a woman not involved in politics or civil rights. Overall, he had a mixed record in gender politics.

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Post-­LULAC Activism

Despite Canales’s solid contribution to the league, he still had a tenuous relationship with the organization and parted ways with it around 1941.84 He followed Perales’s departure as well as that of Sáenz. Canales explained his departure in private correspondence. In 1958 he wrote to Perales, “I would have been thrown out of LULAC, at its meeting in Dallas in 1941. Thus, I became with you and Prof. Sáenz, outcasts from Lulac; and of this I am and I feel very proud.”85 In 1960 he wrote to Luis Alvarado, “May I conclude by stating that I found that ambition, selfishness and politics revealed the ingredients of the organization to the first three, to wit: Perales, Luz Saens [sic], and Canales. The first two were forced to become inactive, and through [sic] out of active membership, and the latter was forced to resign in 1940 [1941] to prevent being expelled.”86 Canales seems to have quit LULAC over concerns for protecting the league’s original intent. In November 1938 LULAC News published “LULAC and the English Language,” by the San Antonio attorney and LULAC member Gus García, in which he argues that too many LULAC meetings were being held in Spanish despite LULAC’s support for learning English. García may have been the first to criticize the aims and principles or argue for their revision or update; the 1929 constitution made English LULAC’s official language.87 At the 1939 national LULAC convention the constitution was revised for the first time, and Canales served on that committee.88 He suggested that LULAC celebrate the new constitution and the dissolution of the original charter for LULAC Texas to make it into a true national organization. He declares, “What a grand feast we Lulacs will have!”89 All revisions and resolutions were codified in the November 1940 LULAC News.90 Yet, Canales also advocated for protecting LULAC’s aims and principles, the LULAC constitution, and its one-­term presidency: The Honorable J. C. Machuca of El Paso . . . will tell you who contributed (for ten years) more to its development and tried to keep said organization from degenerating into a political instrument. All of its original aims and purposes were thrown out and the organization making the President disqualified for more than one terms [sic], without a written provision, but by common understanding, (tradition) and honorable custom.91

Canales, Perales, Gonzales, and Jacob Rodríguez of San Antonio objected to this change.92 Canales disagreed with LULAC’s national presi-

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dent, Dr. George I. Sánchez, over the dissolution of the aims and principles, as he explains in a letter in 1941: The Doctor was possibly never denied admittance to a hotel, or a barbershop or to a restaurant; he has not been humiliated in that way and therefore does not see any reason for enumerating them in the Aims and Purposes. He seems to think that all that is necessary is to have a social service club like the Rotarians, Lions, etc., who meet to eat a meal and to pass resolutions and that is all that is necessary. I am afraid that he is too idealistic and impractical.93

However, in fairness, Sánchez was a true LULACer and did not seek to make LULAC into a version of the Lions Club. Apparently, he and García worked to revise the constitution to permit Anglo members. Perhaps Sánchez and García knew a handful of Anglo liberals and agreed that these allies should be invited. Mexican immigrants were still not permitted, and African Americans were not considered. Perhaps Canales knew few white liberals. Albuquerque LULAC made Mayor Clyde Tingley an honorary member in 1940.94 Another concern Canales had in 1939 was ethical behavior within LULAC, especially at national convention elections. In “Swapping Votes,” he condemns the practice of league members trading votes and advises, “Our votes should be sacred and to be used only for the best interest of the League.” He contends that at the 1939 El Paso national convention, Filemón Martínez of New Mexico was the best presidential candidate but lost due to vote swapping for resolutions or candidates. “It is treason to Lulac,” Canales asserts.95 He refused to endorse Mauro Machado’s candidacy for president, perhaps feeling that doing so would have been unethical.96 Another example of his ethical behavior was his refusal to seek reelection as president of national LULAC.97 Canales is in part responsible for LULAC’s expansion into the Southwest and especially New Mexico. By 1940, about the time Canales departed, LULAC News announced the organization’s conference in Santa Fe as the “largest congregation of Latin Americans ever held in the United States.”98 That annual meeting and the 1941 conference in Dallas were Canales’s last. In 1942 he wrote to Perales, who had left LULAC, “As I have said to you before, it makes no difference what organizations each one of [sic] belongs to or what anyone says about us.”99 Both would continue to promote ethnic-­ Mexican activism outside of the league. While LAC and LULAC held Canales’s interest in the 1920s and 1930s,

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his 1940s activism was more subdued or declined. Perhaps his experience in LULAC, possible burnout as the Brownsville city attorney in the 1930s, and the chaos of World War II explain this void; perhaps he sat back watching the rise of the American GI Forum in 1948 and its leader, Dr. Hector P. García.100 But Canales was active again by 1950. After ethnic Mexicans began filing affidavits about racial discrimination in Texas and these complaints were forwarded to the US State Department by Perales and Gonzales, Governor Coke Stevenson created the Texas Good Neighbor Commission in 1943. Canales called its members “glorified tourist guides and hand shakers.”101 The Good Neighbor Commission had no legislative power and little funding; it proved ineffective as yet another token effort initiated by white Texas officials. In 1950 Governor Allan Shivers established the Texas Council on Human Relations, likely prompted by Canales.102 In 1953 Canales told Perales he was forwarding $900 from the “Texas Good Relations Association” for the defense in Hernández v. State of Texas, an appeal that went before the US Supreme Court in 1954 in which a Tejano defendant accused of murder was tried by a jury that included no men of Mexican descent.103 This $900 likely came from the philanthropist Canales, who often declined to take credit for his donations. In 1952 Canales served as a speaker at the major antiracism conference in Mission, Texas, that was organized to condemn “The Wetback in the Lower Rio Grande,” a 1951 publication by the University of Texas. Some three hundred people attended.104 The paper focused on migrant workers in the Bracero Program, which began in 1942 and continued through 1964 as a labor agreement between the United States and Mexico. Mexican laborers, Mexican and US labor unions, LULAC, and the American GI Forum were not consulted about the Bracero Program. In the early 1950s, large numbers of unauthorized migrants entered the United States outside of the Bracero Program, and US government officials began calling them “wetbacks,” a derogatory slur related to crossing the Rio Grande. Professor George I. Sánchez commissioned his colleagues Olen Leonard and Leonard Saunders to write a study of these migrants. The report they produced came to be known as “the wetback pamphlet,” although it was a long paper, not a pamphlet or book. While it contained useful social science data, it also included interviews with anonymous people, some who were white racists. Given the interviewees’ anonymity and the paper’s lack of professional editing, it looked like Sánchez, the two authors, and the University of Texas sanctioned the racist comments. The title alone was racist. Members of the Mexican-­descent community were incensed at the racist commentary and called the convention in Mission. Perales played a role in

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the event though he did not attend. But Canales spoke, and the activist Adela Sloss-­Vento recorded the event.105 By the mid-­1950s Canales began to exit civil rights efforts and dedicate more time to his writing. Scholar and Educator An intellectual and grassroots historian, Canales appreciated education, doing so also as a politician and philanthropist. As a state legislator, he supported improvements in rural schools, teachers’ professional development, and school funding.106 From 1912 to 1914, he served as superintendent for Cameron County schools, where he promoted the English language and US patriotism. He supported literacy efforts and donated $1,000 in 1958 to the Literacy Center at Baylor University and its literacy project for Rio Grande Valley residents.107 He also supported Texas Southmost College in Brownsville, one of a few institutions of higher education in South Texas.108 But Canales’s interest in education was also personal, as he was an intellectual. He studied Latin, Greek, and French as a hobby and was particularly interested in theology. His essay “Unity” gives a sense of his breadth of history. In it he refers to the Roman senator Cato the Elder, the American colonist Patrick Henry, President Woodrow Wilson, and the Battle of Verdun during World War I, suggesting human will backed by providence.109 He maintained a serious library and donated the 1,298 volumes in his private law library to Starr County, where they are housed in the J. T. Canales Memorial Library in the courthouse. Moreover, Canales’s intellectual interests included Mexican American and Mexican history. He corresponded with the only professionally trained Mexican American historian in the state, Carlos Eduardo Castañeda, who was born in Matamoros, Mexico, and raised in Brownsville.110 Castañeda was a LULAC member and civil rights activist. Canales chaired the committee that founded the Brownsville Historical Association and served as its president in 1951–1952.111 He corresponded with Mexican academics and researchers, including Archbishop Francisco Plancarte y Navarette, Ezequiel Padilla, Alberto María Carreno, Father Mariano Cuevas, and Vito Alessio Robles.112 Canales often wrote about character, ethics, and Tejano history and made extensive contributions to LULAC News. He wrote the book Sobre la fe de nuestros padres before 1941 but privately published it only in 1950.113 Canales picked up his writing in the 1950s, perhaps seeking the “joys of scholarship.”114 Besides Sobre la fe de nuestros padres, Canales also wrote and pri-

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vately published Bits of Texas History (1950), Juan N. Cortina: Bandit or Hero? (1951), Ethics in the Profession of Law (1953), The Tragic Quadrangle (1955), Bits of Texas History in the Melting Pot of America (1957), Juan N. Cortina Presents His Motion for a New Trial (1957), La Guerra de Tejas (1959), Builders of Character and Leaders of Men (1959), and Character Builders and Leaders of Men (1960). The Tragic Quadrangle is about Spanish and Portuguese Jewish settlement in North America, particularly in Nuevo León in northern Mexico.115 In 1952 he wrote “Personal Recollections of J. T. Canales,” a memoir within a broader history of South Texas, especially as related to water. He also wrote “A Bunch of Pansies as Easter Greeting.”116 Canales’s many essays include “Brownsville during the Civil War: Cotton and Guns” and “Our First Centennial: 1851–1951,” the latter about a religious organization.117 Others are “The New World in the Américas,”118 “A Neighbor’s Recollection of Mrs. Henrietta M. King,” and some articles for the Brownsville Historical Society.119 His unpublished manuscripts include “The Framework of the Federal Government” (1924) and “Outline of Old Testament History” (1928).120 His newspaper articles include “Y ayuda a vindicar a los tuyos” in La Prensa of San Antonio around March 1928, a series of articles in 1953 for La Verdad of Corpus Christi, and essays on law for the San Antonio Express in 1955 and 1956.121 Canales’s scholarly interests included Spanish land grants, genealogy, and historical figures such as Juan N. Cortina and the Angel of Goliad.122 Cortina is known in Texas history as a man who rebelled against Texan authorities in the 1850s. But Canales saw Cortina, his great-­uncle, as a Tejano hero defending the rights of Tejanos after the US-­Mexico War. In 1930 Canales wrote about this view to Elena Zamora: Knowing that you are interested in any matter pertaining to the life of General Cortinas [sic] I am enclosing herewith a carbon copy of a joint resolution presented in the House of Representatives together with a petition asking for amnesty in behalf of Cortinas [sic]. . . . I have not come across that article that you were going to write about General Cortinas [sic]. Please tell me whether or not it was published and if so in what paper and if you have a copy please send me one.123

Canales also wrote to Perales about Cortina: You are right, Cortina was our predecessor in fighting for our people and against race discrimination. He used a different method to accomplish this from the one you and I have been using. He used force because that was the

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only means he had at that time. We have used education and an appeal to reason, but it is the same fight and we are merely carrying out what he begun on [sic] 1859.124

Canales saw himself as a revisionist historian “refuting history fables” written by Anglos, as the historian Omar Valero-­Jiménez has argued.125 Canales wrote Perales that folklorist J. Frank Dobie and historian Walter Prescott Webb said they would revise their own work on Cortina after considering Canales’s book. He wrote Perales, “as you have been my loyal collaborator in my effort to clean Texas History from its lies and in vindicating the rights of our Latin American fellow citizens in Texas.”126 He considered the Texas State Historical Association to be the perpetuator of these lies. He was aware of Webb’s influence in Texas history; Webb questioned Canales’s research on crypto-­Jews.127 Canales was interested in the Angel of Goliad, a woman whose name is unrecorded in history for tending wounded Texan soldiers in the Battle of Goliad in 1835.128 Canales spearheaded the establishment of a monument and scholarship in her honor; Governor Price Daniel appointed him state chair of the committee.129 The statue is located in Goliad. He created the Angel of Goliad nursing scholarship in 1950.130 In a 1953 essay about the scholarship, Canales expresses pride that she was a humanitarian and Mexican-­descent woman: “It was in memory of this wonderful Christian woman, whose real name is somewhat doubtful, but who almost twenty (20) years before the English nurse, Florence Nightingale, became famous in the Crimean War, performed the same duties, to our Texas heroes, during their struggle for independence.” He adds, “The name of ‘ANGEL of GOLIAD’ was given to her by those whose lives she saved from the massacre of Goliad and who, unlike her countryman, the President of Mexico, came to Texas to save rather than to destroy human lives.”131 He also advocated for a nursing school in her honor: “Up to this date Texas and its citizens have not honored the memory of this Godly woman as it should be, not by erecting a statute [statue] or by putting up a marble obelisk; but by finding [funding] a State School of Nursing in her memory.”132 In the mid-­1950s he created the Canales Foundation with $50,000 to establish the J. T. Canales School of Nursing at Mercy Hospital in Brownsville, promoting nursing as an occupation for Mexican American women, to whom he offered scholarships, likely named after the Angel of Goliad.133 Besides working as a scholar, Canales encouraged Latinos to seek a college education, and he promoted college scholarships for them, first through LULAC and then privately. He may have been among the first to raise schol-

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arships for Latinos.134 LULAC created scholarships during his presidency in the early 1930s. Scholarships he funded in the 1950s benefited students including a nephew of Alonso S. Perales and the son of Adela Sloss-­Vento,135 both of whom went on to obtain doctorates. Canales did not name these scholarships after himself due to his religious beliefs. He explains to Perales, You suggest that I should create a scholarship, to be known as “Jose T. Canales Scholarship.” I thank you for the suggestions, but wish to tell you that I am adverse to giving myself publicity. I give my charity in a less conspicuous way, trying to live up to the Biblical command of not letting my left hand know what my right hand is doing. It appears to me that a more practical suggestion would be that some of my friends, who have appreciated what I have done in behalf of my people, would raise such scholarship, but it would be highly improper for me to do so.136

In honor of his deceased brother he created the Andres C. Canales scholarship in the early 1950s, offering $600 to deserving college freshmen.137 Canales argued for Latino studies at the college level. He and Sánchez, then of Albuquerque LULAC Council 34, wrote a resolution “to secure a chair of Latin American culture and Literature in every University in the United States of America” and promoted it at the national convention in San Antonio in 1939.138 They argued that major universities should sponsor a chair of Hispanic studies. To date, not even southwestern states have such a chair. However, in summer 1940 the University of Texas announced an Institute of Latin American Studies, and Castañeda, an Austin LULAC member, played an active role in establishing it. Canales might have pushed for its creation and may have funded it. Canales believed Latinos needed chairs at universities which permitted more time researching and less time teaching and performing administrative tasks. He supported an attempt by Castañeda, perhaps one of two Mexican American historians with doctoral degrees in the nation, to obtain a chair.139 Canales wanted Castañeda to write a history of South Texas while holding a position as distinguished professor at Pan-­American College in Edinburg.140 Lynch and Larralde note that Canales wanted the University of Texas to establish a “massive” oral history project to record civil rights activists; to some extent, the University of Texas professor Maggie Rivas-­ Rodriguez took up that call decades later, in the 2000s.141 Canales even influenced Américo Paredes, also of Brownsville, who visited Canales in his home and went on to obtain a PhD in English literature.142 With Sánchez, Paredes founded the Center for Mexican American Studies at the Univer-

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sity of Texas at Austin in 1970, about thirty years after Canales’s call for such studies. Canales also mentored his great-­nephew Carlos Larralde, who obtained his PhD from UCLA in 1978 and authored Mexican American Movements and Leaders among other key works on Texas and California history.143 Death and Tributes Canales lived longer than his co-­activists Sáenz and Perales. He suffered a “mental collapse” in the mid-­1950s, perhaps due to Salinas’s libel lawsuit against him.144 He cut back his activism after 1958.145 His wife, Anne Wheeler Canales, died around 1960, as did his friend Perales. Canales wrote to Perales’s wife, saying, “The death of your dear husband, my dear friend Alonso, increased my sorrow very much and, at the risk of getting worse, I made the effort to pay my respects to him and attended the funeral. . . . I have had nothing but adversities since the death of my dear wife. Only my faith in God keeps me alive.”146 His nurses, some exercise, and faith kept him going. His assistant Lala Tijerina told Adela Sloss-­Vento in 1962, “He goes out for a ride in the mornings and takes a little walk in the afternoons but never goes to the office, nor does he attend to any business matters. Two nurses attend to him, one in the forenoons until 3:00 pm and the other from 3:00 p.m. to 11:​00 pm so he will not be alone and also to give him his medicine.”147 Canales continued to write to politicians from 1960 to his death in 1976, but he did not participate in civil rights organizations. There is no evidence suggesting he was involved with the Political Association of Spanish Speaking Organization (PASSO) in 1960 or the Chicano movement that arose in Texas from the early 1960s to the late 1970s. Canales died in 1976. During Canales’s life he received recognition from the Tejano community but none from the Anglo community. He was featured on the covers of several magazines, including LULAC News in April 1932 and December 1939.148 Margil López, a member of the Sarita LULAC chapter, wrote two poems honoring Canales that LULAC News published in 1932.149 The two San Antonio LULAC councils honored the exiting president with a banquet in 1933.150 Perales published a letter noting Canales’s achievements as LULAC national president.151 In 1934 LULAC News published an anonymous poem in his honor.152 La Verdad in Falfurrias honored him in an article in 1935.153 In 1937 LULAC News published a brief biography.154 Brownsville named an elementary school after him in 1949. Another tribute appeared in the Revista Latino-­Americana of Mission in May 1953, with Canales on the cover; the editor Gilberto Díaz wrote the cover article, “J. T. Canales: Un

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insigne jurista y un osado defensor de nuestra raza.”155 And in Sloss-­Vento’s 1977 book on Perales, she refers to Canales’s activism and generosity.156 I revised the historian Evan Anders’s Handbook of Texas article on Canales with attention to some of his contributions, and the revised article was published in 1996. In 2009, a Texas historical marker was placed at his Brownsville residence. Conclusion As the first Latino state legislator in Texas in the twentieth century, J. T. Canales brought charges against the Texas Rangers and organized a legislative investigation into violence against ethnic Mexicans in South Texas. As an attorney, civil rights activist, and writer he fostered the empowerment of Latinos in the twentieth century. In the arena of civil rights Canales was not “at the forefront of the battle for Tejano civil rights.” Instead, he worked diligently in the background.157 He did not initiate significant civil rights endeavors in comparison with Alonso S. Perales, but he was a doer. When needed and called upon, he provided expertise and knowledge especially as the author of the LULAC constitution, LULAC national president, and writer. Motivated by faith, he preferred to work in the background. Canales molded and developed LULAC, the most important national Latino civil rights organization of the twentieth century. As the primary author of the LULAC constitution, he prepared an extensive document to make LULAC a permanent institution. LULAC has withstood the test of time including the Depression. And as coauthor of LULAC’s aims and principles, Canales condemned political bossism, racially segregated schools, and racial inequality. Canales served LULAC in numerous capacities, notably as its national president in 1932–1933 and a frequent LULAC News contributor. Talented, judicious, and effective, as national president he fostered LULAC’s expansion into New Mexico and other southwestern states and the inclusion of women as members of Ladies LULAC. True to his convictions he later quit LULAC because he would not abandon his principles. He demanded a pro-­ active approach and condemned trading votes without attention to the ultimate best for the league. Canales was one of the most active Mexican American writers in the United States before the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. He authored numerous books and wrote extensively for LULAC News. He wrote

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Tejano history because he was aware of racially biased Texas history. He saw himself as a revisionist historian correcting racist narratives of Texas history. He was an early lay Tejano historian deciding which Tejano and Tejana figures in history deserved attention and offering a Mexican American interpretation. He made a broader call for Latino studies at the college level and perhaps was the first to do so, preceding the work of George I. Sánchez and Américo Paredes to institutionalize Chicano studies at the University of Texas at Austin around 1970 as part of the Chicano movement. Canales advocated for ethnic pride by celebrating Día de la Raza in public schools and calling for ethnic-­based curriculum. Canales was an ethical and caring man. He cared about the ethnic-­ Mexican people in Texas and their civil rights. He cared about the aspirations of young people seeking higher education. He cared about Mexican American women who might seek nursing as a career and middle-­class job. This confirms what Lynch and Larralde have listed as Canales’s personal beliefs: God, personal ethics, and equality.158 While progressive in participating in the Mexican American civil rights movement, Canales became conservative in partisan politics, had a mixed record in gender politics, and was conservative on labor issues. He welcomed women into the league, though in separate councils, Ladies LULAC. In the 1950s he supported some Republicans and was anticommunist. He did not like unions or unionists such as Clemente Idar; pressure from Canales led to Idar leaving LULAC. Though there were tributes to Canales during his lifetime, he is underrecognized. The grounds of the Texas state capitol boast some dozen Confederate statues, yet the only memorial dedicated to Tejanos and Tejanas is related to Spanish colonization. No Latinas or Latinos from the nineteenth or twentieth centuries have been honored. Canales is best honored in the classroom with the reissuing of his publications. Moreover, it would behoove Texas to honor Canales with a statue on the grounds of the Texas state capitol.159 He was not a “greaser from Brownsville,” as a fellow lawmaker once called him during a 1911 state legislative session.160 Lynch and Larralde consider the epithet “a badge of honor for one who held the line and fought for his beliefs.”161 Indeed, Canales risked his life for racial and social justice. Notes 1. Canales was also a farmer, rancher, school superintendent, state legislator, Texas Ranger critic, League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) cofounder, city attorney, county judge, historian, and public intellectual. He was a man of faith as well, at different times, a Presbyterian, an Episcopalian, and a Catholic. On J. T. Ca-

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nales’s religious background, see Michael Lynch and Carlos Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales: Latino Civil Rights Leader, An Intimate Portrait (Saarbrucken, Germany: Lambert Academic, 2015), 71, 78, 88–89. They state he was of “crypto-­Jewish” origin but was raised Catholic, became Presbyterian, then Episcopalian, and then Catholic again. Canales’s study of theology helps explain these shifts. 2. Evan Anders, “Canales, José Tomás,” New Handbook of Texas, ed. Ronnie C. Tyler, Douglas E. Barnett, and Roy R. Barkley (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1996) 1:953–954. While working as a research associate in Hispanic studies for the Texas State Historical Association from 1988 to 1992, I added Canales’s civil rights work to Anders’s entry on Canales in the book. I brought attention to Canales’s autobiographical essay “Personal Recollections of J. T. Canales Written at the Request of and for Use by the Honorable Harbert Davenport in Preparing a Historical Sketch of the Lower Rio Grande Valley for the Soil Conservation District, Recently Organized in Cameron County, Texas” (Brownsville, 1945), 11, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin (hereafter Briscoe Center). 3. Evan Anders, Boss Rule in South Texas: The Progressive Era (Austin: University of Texas, 1987), 241. Anders saw Canales as an independent Democrat. Edgar Greer Shelton notes, “While he is not a boss in the sense that the Guerras are in Starr County, he does have a lot of influence” (Political Conditions among Texas-­Mexicans [San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1974]), 79. Dissertations and theses on Canales include Richard Henry Ribb, “José T. Canales and the Texas Rangers: Myth, Identity, and Power in South Texas, 1900–1920” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2001); Jerry David Frasier, “A Political Biography of José Tomás Canales” (master’s thesis, Corpus Christi State University, 1992. Essays on him include Carlos Larralde, “José Tomás Canales and the Texas Rangers,” Journal of South Texas History 10 (1997): 38–60; Richard Ribb, “Patrician as Redeemer,” Journal of South Texas 14, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 189–203; Cecilia Aros Hunter and Leslie Gene Hunter, “ ‘My Dear Friend’: The J. T. Canales-­Lyndon B. Johnson Correspondence,” Journal of South Texas 5 (Spring 1992): 26–50. 4. José E. Limón, “El Primer Congreso Mexicanista in 1911, a Precursor to Chicanismo,” Aztlán 5, no. 12 (Spring-­Fall 1974): 85–117. 5. J. W. Sloss, “Brownsville Council No. 3,” LULAC News, June 1937, n.p., Rubén Bonilla-­Wilmot Papers, Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin (hereafter Bonilla-­Wilmot Papers, BLAC). 6. Joseph Medina Orbock, “The Trials of Unity: Rethinking the Mexican-­ American Generation in Texas, 1948–1960,” in In Defense of My People: Alonso S. Perales and the Development of Mexican-­American Public Intellectuals, ed. Michael A. Olivas (Houston: Arte Público, 2013), 51–74. 7. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales. 8. Craig A. Kaplowitz, LULAC, Mexican Americans, and National Policy (College Station: Texas A & M University, 2005); Benjamin Márquez, LULAC: The Evolution of a Mexican American Political Organization (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993); Cynthia E. Orozco, “League of United Latin American Citizens,” New Handbook of Texas 4:129–131; Cynthia E. Orozco, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Austin: University of Texas, 2009); Amy Walters Yarsinske, All for One and One For All: A Celebration of 75 Years of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) (Virginia Beach, VA: Donning, 2004).

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Texas legislator and Canales’s great-­grandson Terry Canales comments on Canales in “Canales: Texas Has Come Far, but Not That Far,” Rio Grande Guardian, October 14, 2017, https://riograndeguardian.com/canales-­texas-­has-­come-­far-­but-­not-­that-­far/. 9. “In 1910, Attorney JT Canales Ran for County Judge,” El RRun RRun, January 28, 2016, https://rrunrrun.blogspot.com/2016/01/in-­1910-­attorney-­jt-­canales-­ran -­for.html. 10. The José Tomás Canales Texas Historical Marker was installed in Brownsville in 2009 at his past residence. Information about this and other markers is at TxHistoricalMarker, https://www.txhistoricalmarker.com/text?text=Civil+Rights. 11. J. T. Canales, Ethics in the Profession of Law (San Antonio: Artes Gráficas, 1953), 54. 12. J. T. Canales to Alonso S. Perales, May 28, 1956, box 436, folder 13, José Tomás Canales Estate Collection, South Texas Archives, Jernigan Library, Texas A&M University at Kingsville (hereafter JTC). 13. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 64. 14. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 10. 15. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 64. In 1939 Canales and George I. Sánchez prepared a resolution for the national LULAC conference condemning communism, fascism, and Nazism. Canales disliked Democrat US presidents whom he associated with US involvement in global wars—World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. He corresponded with numerous national and Texas politicians such as US Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, US Senator William Blakely, US Senator Martin Dies, and Congressmen Lloyd M. Bentsen, Joe M. Kilgore, and Ralph Yarborough, Governor Price Daniels, and Henry B. Gonzalez, who in 1961 became the first Tejano member of Congress. 16. J. Luz Sáenz, “Lulacs Are Civic Patriotic Organization,” El Paso Herald Post, February 23, 1953. On Sáenz see Emilio Zamora, “Sáenz, José de la Luz,” modified January 26, 2017, Handbook of Texas Online (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2010), http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fsa97; Emilio Zamora, “José de la Luz Sáenz: Experiences and Autobiographical Consciousness,” Leaders of the Mexican American Generation, Biographical Essays, ed. Anthony Quiróz (Denver: University of Colorado, 2015), 25–56. 17. Michael Olivas, Colored Men, Hombres Aquí: Hernandez v. Texas and the Emergence of Mexican American Lawyering (Houston: Arte Público, 2006). 18. Cynthia E. Orozco, “Manuel C. Gonzales,” New Handbook of Texas, 3:227. 19. Canales, “Personal Recollections,” 11. 20. Lily Linares, “The Life of J. T. Canales,” Latinx Histories @ UM, April 22, 2018, University of Michigan, https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/presente/2018/04/22/the -­life-­of-­jose-­tomas-­canales. Information about the Canales and McKay law firm comes from letterhead on the firm’s stationery in letters in Perales Papers. 21. Canales, “Personal Recollections,” 11–12. An essay he wrote suggests he was glad to be finished with his city attorney work by February 1938 (“Going out El Paso Way . . . ,” LULAC News, February 1938, 29, Bonilla-­Wilmot Papers, BLAC). 22. In Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 6. 23. Cynthia E. Orozco, “Alonso S. Perales,” New Handbook of Texas, 5:148–149; Cynthia E. Orozco, Pioneer of Mexican American Civil Rights: Alonso S. Perales (Houston: Arte Público, forthcoming).

202  Cynthia E. Orozco

24. Cynthia E. Orozco, “Casimiro Pérez Alvarez,” New Handbook of Texas, 1:151. 25. Cynthia E. Orozco, “Del Rio ISD v. Salvatierra,” New Handbook of Texas, 2:578–579; “Del Rio Regional Convention,” LULAC News, October 1932, 7–8, Bonilla-­Wilmot Papers, BLAC. 26. J. T. Canales, interview by Paul S. Taylor, folder “Along the Rio Grande El Paso to Brownsville,” Paul S. Taylor Collection, University of California at Berkeley. 27. “Actividades de la LULAC,” LULAC News, January 1932, 18, Briscoe Center, University of Texas at Austin. 28. “Resolution,” LULAC News, January 1932, 20, Briscoe Center. 29. J. T. Canales, “The New Mexican Civil Code,” Texas Bar Journal (October 1947): 8–10; Canales, Ethics in the Profession of Law. 30. The article by Canales and Davenport was privately printed in 1949 and revised and updated for the Baylor Law Review in 1956. 31. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 28. 32. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 48–52. 33. J. T. Canales to Alonso S. Perales, June 29, 1956, box 436, folder 13, JTC. 34. Orozco, Pioneer; Orozco, No Mexicans. 35. Cynthia E. Orozco, “Order Sons of America,” New Handbook of Texas, 4:1166; Orozco, No Mexicans, 73–89. 36. Anders, “Canales, José Tomás,” New Handbook of Texas, 1:953–954. Canales was not a member of the OSA and merely had contact with its members. 37. Cynthia E. Orozco, “Harlingen Convention,” New Handbook of Texas, 3:463– 464; Orozco, No Mexicans, 120–150. 38. Untitled attachment to J. T. Canales to Mr. Luciano Santiscoy, September 29, 1953, box 436, folder 23, JTC. 39. J. T. Canales to Mr. Luis Alvarado, September 6, 1960, box 436, folder 23, JTC. 40. Mauro M. Machado, “The Word ‘United,’ ” LULAC News, January 1938?, 15–16. See also LULAC, 50 Years of Serving Hispanics, Golden Anniversary, 1929–1979 (Corpus Christi: Texas State LULAC, 1979), n.p. 41. “J. T. Canales, Past President General LULAC,” LULAC News, June 1937, n.p., Bonilla-­Wilmot Papers, BLAC. 42. A draft of the 1929 constitution has not been located after searches in the Perales, Canales, Ben Garza, Adela Sloss-­Vento, and Oliver Douglas Weeks papers. 43. J. T. Canales, “Three Mile Posts in LULAC,” LULAC News, May 1932, 4, Briscoe Center. 44. Cynthia E. Orozco, “Regionalism, Politics, and Gender in Southwestern History: The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) Expansion into New Mexico from Texas, 1929–1945,” Western Historical Quarterly 29, no. 4 (November 1998): 459–483. 45. Attachment, Canales to Santiscoy, September 29, 1953, JTC. 46. Canales to Santiscoy, September 29, 1953, JTC. 47. Constitution, League of United Latin American Citizens, 1929, box 1, folder 4, Oliver Douglas Weeks Papers, BLAC. 48. Cynthia E. Orozco, “Eduardo Idar,” New Handbook of Texas, 3:814; Orozco, No Mexicans, 101–104; Gabriela González, Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Respectability, Race, and Rights (Oxford, England: Oxford University, 2018).

Canales’s Contributions in Law, Civil Rights, and Education 203

49. “Actividades de la Lulac,” LULAC News, December 1931, 12, Bonilla-­Wilmot Papers, BLAC. 50. I compiled “LULAC General Officers, 1929–1970,” a list of annual LULAC national officers based on LULAC News. 51. “Minutes of the Tenth Annual Convention of the League of United Latin American Citizens, Nominating Committee,” LULAC News, July 1938, 26, JTC. This was the first national convention to be held in El Paso. 52. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 20, 21. 53. J. T. Canales, “Santa Fe,” LULAC News, November 1938, 35–36, Alice Dickerson Montemayor Papers, BLAC (hereinafter Montemayor Papers, BLAC); Orozco, “Regionalism, Politics, and Gender.” 54. Canales critiques Clemente Idar and M. C. Gonzales in “Wolves in Sheep Clothing,” box 9, folder 9, Carlos E. Castañeda Papers, BLAC. 55. Orozco, No Mexicans, 70–72; González, Redeeming La Raza. 56. Cynthia E. Orozco, “Clemente Idar,” New Handbook of Texas, 3:813–814; Orozco, No Mexicans, 101–104; González, Redeeming La Raza. 57. Cynthia E. Orozco, “Alonso S. Perales and His Struggle for the Civil Rights of La Raza through the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) in Texas in the 1930s: Incansable Soldado del Civismo Pro-­Raza,” in In Defense of My People: Alonso S. Perales and the Development of Mexican-­American Public Intellectuals, ed. Michael A. Olivas (Houston: Arte Público, 2013), 3–28. 58. The information is from the “LULAC General Officers” list I compiled. 59. “Councils of the L.U.L.A.C.,” LULAC News, July 1932, n.p., Briscoe Center. 60. “Organizer for New Mexico,” LULAC News, February 1933, 11, Briscoe Center. 61. J. T. Canales to Luis Alvarado, September 7, 1960, box 436, folder 23, JTC. Canales responded to questions from Alvarado likely precipitated by Perales’s death in May 1960. 62. J. T. Canales, “The Westward Trend of LULAC,” LULAC News, July 1937, 34, Bonilla-­Wilmot Papers, BLAC. He writes, “It was very gratifying to me to notice that at the Houston General Convention there were delegates from New Mexico, and I also understand, from the States of Arizona and California. This is to me a very healthy sign.” 63. On the controversy between Council 2 and M. C. Gonzales versus Council 16 and Perales about dual councils in one city, see Orozco, “Alonso S. Perales and His Struggle.” Lynch and Larralde call the San Antonio Council 2 “rogue” but it was not; it was simply not what Perales expected a council to be (Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 17). Another rendition is described in M. C. Gonzales, “Council No. 2 Has Been the Blood Vessel of LULAC Organization,” LULAC News, January 1938, 12–13. 64. “The Brownsville Regional Convention,” LULAC News, July 1932, 10–11, Briscoe Center; “To All Councils Constituting the League of United Latin-­American Citizens, Greetings,” LULAC News, February 1933, 15, Briscoe Center; “Importante junta hubo en Brownsville,” LULAC News, February 1933, 18, Briscoe Center. 65. J. T. Canales, “Leadership and Discipline,” LULAC News, August 1937, 16, Montemayor Papers, BLAC. 66. “Awards for LULAC Scholarships,” LULAC News, October 1932, 6, Bonilla-­ Wilmot Papers, BLAC.

204  Cynthia E. Orozco

67. José Ángel Hernández, “A Nation’s Real Wealth,” LULAC News, November 1932, 6–7, Bonilla-­Wilmot Papers, BLAC. Ortiz was profiled in the article “Miss Juana Minerva Ortiz,” LULAC News, December 1932, 8, Briscoe Center. 68. Rubén R. Lozano, “An Appeal,” LULAC News, November 1932, 5, Briscoe Center. 69. “J. T. Canales, Past President General, LULAC,” LULAC News, June 1937, n.p., Bonilla-­Wilmot Papers, BLAC. 70. “J. T. Canales Letter to All Local Councils of Said League,” LULAC News, October 1932, 6, Bonilla-­Wilmot Papers, BLAC. 71. In Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 17. 72. “Something to Crow About,” LULAC News, January 1932, 17, Briscoe Center. 73. Untitled attachment to J. T. Canales to Mr. Luciano Santiscoy, September 29, 1953, box 436, folder 23, JTC. The attachment answered Santiscoy’s inquiry and explained his contributions to LULAC and why he quit. His articles follow: “To Live or to Die?,” November 1931; “Vengeance,” December 1931; “The Romans of Today,” February 1932; “Unity,” April 1932; “Three Mile Posts in LULAC,” May 1932; “Usury,” July 1932; “Get Acquainted,” November 1932; “The Westward Trend of LULAC,” July 1937; “The Right of LULAC Councils to Secede and Form a Rival Organization,” October 1937; “Our Civil Liberties,” August 1938; “Believe in God,” September 1938; “Santa Fe,” November 1938; “Swapping Votes,” February 1939; “Intelligent Citizenship and Civic Pride,” March 1939; “Echoes from the San Antonio LULAC Convention,” July 1939; and “Viva El Presidente General,” December 1939. 74. J. T. Canales, “Usury,” LULAC News, July 1932, 5, Briscoe Center. 75. J. T. Canales, “Our Civil Liberties,” LULAC News, August 1938, 8, Bonilla-­ Wilmot Papers, BLAC. 76. In the same issue is Andres Hernández, “In Relation to Our Civil Liberties,” LULAC News, August 1938, 12–14, Bonilla-­Wilmot Papers, BLAC. 77. J. T. Canales, “Swapping Votes,” LULAC News, February 1939, 11–12, JTC. 78. “To All Councils Constituting the League of United Latin-­American Citizens,” LULAC News, April 1933, 2, Briscoe Center. 79. “Brief Resume of the Work Accomplished at the Del Rio Annual Convention,” LULAC News, May 1933, 13, Briscoe Center. 80. Cynthia E. Orozco, Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-­Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020). 81. J. T. Canales to Alonso S. Perales, April 17, 1933, box 4, folder 11, Perales Papers; an image of the letter is available online at https://digital.lib.uh.edu/collection/perales /item/57. 82. “Program of Activities Recommended by the Retiring President General J. T. Canales,” LULAC News, May 1933, 14, Briscoe Center. 83. On Elena Zamora O’Shea, see Philis M. Barragán Goetz, Reading, Writing, and Revolution: Escuelitas and the Emergence of a Mexican American Identity in Texas (Austin: University of Texas, 2020), and Omar Valerio-­Jiménez, “Refuting History Fables: Collective Memories, Mexican Texans, and Texas History,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 123, no. 4 (April 2020), 390–418. 84. Lynch and Larralde indicate that Canales rejoined LULAC: “Research had not yet revealed why he returned to the organization” ( Judge J. T. Canales, 16n40). They also

Canales’s Contributions in Law, Civil Rights, and Education 205

state he had a “turbulent” relationship with LULAC (15). In my review of LULAC materials I have located no evidence that he rejoined. 85. J. T. Canales to Alonso S. Perales, April 29, 1958, JTC. 86. J. T. Canales to Luis Alvarado, September 6, 1960, JTC. This was one of two letters Canales wrote to Alvarado in 1960 about leaving LULAC. 87. Gus C. García, “LULAC and the English Language,” LULAC News, November 1938, 29–30, Alice Dickerson Montemayor Papers, BLAC. 88. J. T. Canales, “Viva El Presidente General,” LULAC News, December 1939, 12, Bonilla-­Wilmot Papers, BLAC. In the article he writes favorably about LULAC President Ezequiel Salinas, who would sue him for libel in the 1950s. 89. J. T. Canales, “Echoes from the San Antonio Lulac Convention,” LULAC News, July 1939, 24–25, Bonilla-­Wilmot Papers, BLAC. 90. LULAC News, November 1940, Manuel C. Gonzales Papers, BLAC. This issue contains all the resolutions and the revised constitution. It does not include the aims and principles that Canales said were deleted. 91. J. T. Canales to Carlos Castañeda, October 13, 1941, box 9, folder 6, Castañeda Papers, BLAC. 92. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 21. 93. J. T. Canales to Carlos Castañeda, October 13, 1941, box 9, folder 6, Castañeda Papers, BLAC. On Sánchez, see Carlos Blanton, George I. Sánchez, the Long Road to Integration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). On García, see Orozco, “Gustavo C. García,” New Handbook of Texas, 3:84; Anthony Quiróz, “I Can See No Alternative Except to Battle It Out in Court,” Leaders, 209–228. 94. “Compliments of Mayor Clyde Tingley,” advertisement by Tingley, LULAC News, March 1940, 23, Montemayor Papers, BLAC. This edition of LULAC News focused on the Coronado Cuarto Centennial. 95. J. T. Canales, “Swapping Votes,” LULAC News, February 1939, 11–12, Montemayor Papers, BLAC. 96. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 19. 97. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 20. 98. Advertisement for LULAC National Assembly, LULAC News, March 1940, Montemayor Papers, BLAC. 99. J. T. Canales to Alonso S. Perales, March 13, 1942, box 431, folder 15, Perales Papers. 100. On the American GI Forum, see Carl Allsup, American GI Forum, Origins and Evolution (Austin: Center for Mexican American Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 1982); Henry A. J. Ramos, The American GI Forum: In Pursuit of the Dream, 1948–1983 (Houston: Arte Público, 1998). On García, see Ignacio M. García, Hector P. García: In Relentless Pursuit of Justice (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2003); Michelle Hall Kells, Everyday Rhetoric and Mexican American Civil Rights (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006); Cecilia García Akers, The Inspiring Life of Texan Héctor P. García (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2016). Lynch and Larralde assert that Canales was a charter member of the forum, but they do not offer evidence ( Judge J. T. Canales, 7). 101. “Good Neighbor Shake-­Up Asked,” San Antonio Express, October 23, 1951, folder 22, box 436, JTC.

206  Cynthia E. Orozco

102. Cynthia E. Orozco, “Texas Council on Human Relations,” New Handbook of Texas, 6:310–311. 103. J. T. Canales to Carlos E. Castañeda, October 28 and November 3, 1958, folder 13, box 436, JTC. 104. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 133. 105. Inventory Report, 40, A1999-­022.0016, STAD box 043B, JTC. In 2017 I identified this recording by Adela Sloss-­Vento in the Canales papers at Texas A&M in Kingsville. It is the only copy of the audio proceedings of the March 1952 Latin American convention in Mission held to protest “the wetback pamphlet.” Another speech Canales gave was “Discurso pronunciado por el sr. Lic. Jose T. Canales, el dia 18 de julio de 1954 en Rio Grande City, Texas,” La Verdad, Corpus Christi, July 23, 1954, 3. 106. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 5–6. 107. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 27. 108. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 28. 109. J. T. Canales, “Unity,” LULAC News, April 1932, 5–6, Briscoe Center. 110. Félix D. Almaráz Jr., Knight without Honor, Carlos E. Castañeda, 1896–1958 (College Station: Texas A&M University, 1999); Marianne M. Bueno, “Intellectually He Was Courageous; in Public Action He Was Cautious and Prudent”: A Reassessment of Carlos E. Castañeda’s Wartime Service,” in Latina/os and World War II: Mobility, Agency, and Ideology, ed. Maggie Rivas-­Rodriguez and B. V. Olguín (Austin: University of Texas at Austin, 2014), 95–114. 111. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 34. 112. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 84–85. 113. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 23. 114. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 22. 115. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 39. 116. In Judge J. T. Canales (108), Lynch and Larralde note that Canales contributed toward his great-­nephew Larralde’s 1978 UCLA dissertation, “Chicano Jews in South Texas,” and gave his son-­in-­law Charles William Goldfinch his manuscript, which resulted in Goldfinch’s “Juan N. Cortina, 1842–1892: A Reappraisal” (master’s thesis, University of Chicago, 1949) and Juan Cortina, 1842–1892: A Re-­Appraisal (Brownsville, TX: Bishop’s Print Shop, 1950). 117. These went unpublished (Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 31n94). 118. Inventory, A1990–034.0210 STAD box 0436A, JTC. 119. Inventory, A1990–034.0280 STAD box 0438B, JTC. 120. Folder “Writings of LULAC Charter Member J. T. Canales,” box 1, folder 15, Oliver Douglas Weeks Collection, BLAC. 121. Alonso S. Perales to J. T. Canales, February 9, 1953, box 436, folder 13, JTC. In the letter, Perales mentions the 1928 newspaper article. 122. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 84; J. T. Canales to Alonso S. Perales, March 26, 1928, box 2, folder 3, Perales Papers. Canales also wrote about Don Pedrito Jaramillo. 123. J. T. Canales to Elena Z. O’Shea, April 17, 1930, box 9, folder 6, Castañeda Papers, BLAC. See Elena Zamora O’Shea, El Mesquite: A Story of the Early Spanish Settlement between the Nueces and Rio Grande as Told by “La Posta del Palo Alto” (Dallas: Mathis, 1935); Elena Zamora O’Shea, Andres Tijerina, and Leticia Garza-­Falcón, El

Canales’s Contributions in Law, Civil Rights, and Education 207

Mesquite: A Story of the Early Spanish Settlements between the Nueces and the Rio Grande, as Told by ‘la Posta del Palo Alto” (College Station: Texas A&M University, 2000); Cynthia E. Orozco, “Elena Zamora O’Shea,” New Handbook of Texas, 4:1176–1177. 124. J. T. Canales to Alonso S. Perales, March 26, 1928, box 2, folder 3, Perales Papers. 125. Omar Valero-­Jiménez, “Refuting History Fables: Collective Memory, Mexican Texans, and Texas History,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 123, no. 4 (April 2020): 390–418. 126. J. T. Canales to Alonso S. Perales, February 18, 1950, box 426, folder 136, JTC. 127. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 42. 128. J. T. Canales to Alonso S. Perales, March 26, 1928, box 2, folder 3, Perales Papers. 129. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 40. 130. J. T. Canales, “Brief History of Angel of Goliad Scholarships,” attachment, Canales to Santiscoy, September 29, 1953, box 9, folder 6, JTC. Canales sent this attachment to Santiscoy to inform him of the scholarship. 131. On the origins of Chicana/o studies, see Michael Soldatenko, Chicano Studies: The Genesis of a Discipline (Tucson: University of Arizona, 2012); Rodolfo F. Acuña, The Making of Chicana/o Studies in the Trenches of Academe (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011). 132. Canales, “Brief History of Angel of Goliad Scholarships.” 133. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 25–26. 134. J. T. Canales to Fernando Ximénez, April 3, 1933, box 4, folder 11, Perales Papers. 135. Alonso S. Perales to J. T. Canales, November 27, 1954, box 436, folder 13, JTC. 136. J. T. Canales to Alonso S. Perales, September 24, 1947, box 436, folder 13, JTC. 137. J. T. Canales to George J. Garza, National LULAC president, July 13, 1951, box 436, folder 22, JTC; Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 24. 138. J. T. Canales, “Vive el presidente,” LULAC News, December 1939, Bonilla-­ Wilmot Papers, BLAC; “On the Objective of Lulac,” LULAC News, June 1940, 43, Montemayor Papers, BLAC; “Objectives,” LULAC News, June 1940, 29, in the author’s possession. 139. Ernesto Galarza earned a PhD in history at Columbia University in 1949. 140. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 38–39. 141. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 44. 142. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 44. 143. Carlos Larralde, Mexican American Movements and Leaders (Los Alamitos, CA: Hwong, 1976). 144. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 27. 145. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 80. 146. J. T. Canales to Mrs. Alonso S. Perales, June 23, 1960, box 10, folder 1, Perales Papers. 147. Lala Tijerina to Mrs. Vento, April 20, 1962, box 10, folder 5, Perales Papers. On Sloss-­Vento, see Adela Sloss-­Vento, Alonso S. Perales, His Struggle for the Rights of Mexican-­Americans (San Antonio: Artes Gráficas, 1977); Arnold Carlos Vento, Adela Sloss-­Vento, Writer, Political Activist, and Pioneer Civil Rights Leader (Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2017); Orozco, Agent of Change; Cynthia E. Orozco and Jazmin De

208  Cynthia E. Orozco

Leon, “Vento, Adela Sloss,” modified April 4, 2017, Handbook of Texas Online (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2010), https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online /articles/fve19; Cynthia E. Orozco, “Adela Sloss-­Vento,” in Latinas in the United States: a Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korral (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 686; Cynthia E. Orozco, “Pioneer Woman of Civil Rights,” Corpus Christi Caller, November 14, 2017. 148. His photo is on the covers of LULAC News, April 1932, and December 1939, Bonilla-­Wilmot Papers, BLAC. The 1939 cover includes Canales and Mrs. J. T. Canales. LULAC News articles about Canales are “Program of Activities Recommended by The Retiring President General J. T. Canales,” May 1933; “Brownsville Council No. 3,” June 1937; “J. T. Canales, Past President General, LULAC,” July 1937; “Echoes from the San Antonio LULAC Convention,” July 1937; “Judge J. T. Canales and Family Visit New Mexico,” September 1938; “Canales and Baca or ‘Drenaje’ for the ‘Vacas,’ ” December 1938; “J. T. Canales of Brownsville Challenges JC Machuca of El Paso to Mortal Combat unless Satisfaction is Given,” July 1939; “LULAC through the Years, History of Former LULAC Presidents,” February 1954. 149. Margil López, “Al Ilustre Licenciado J. T. Canales Presidente General de la LULAC,” LULAC News, May 1932, 1, Briscoe Center; Margil López, “Al Presidente General de la Liga Latino Americano Sr. Lic. J. T. Canales,” LULAC News, September 1932, 18, Bonilla-­Wilmot Papers, BLAC. 150. “Un banquete en honor del Hon. Lic. José T. Canales Ex-­Presidente Gral. de la Liga,” LULAC News, May 1933, 22, Briscoe Center. 151. Alonso S. Perales, “EL Lic. José T. Canales Como Presidente General,” flyer, 1933, box 4, folder 2, Perales Papers. 152. “To Hon. J. T. Canales,” LULAC News, May 1934, 19, Bonilla-­Wilmot Papers, BLAC. 153. “El Lic. José T. Canales,” La Verdad, June 1, 1935, box 11, folder 23, Perales Papers. 154. “J. T. Canales, Past President General,” LULAC News, June 1937, Bonilla-­ Wilmot Papers, BLAC. 155. Revista Latino-­Americano, May 1953, 3, 5, box 11, folder 16, Perales Papers. 156. Sloss-­Vento, Alonso S. Perales, 5. 157. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 55 (quote). The authors report that Canales was humble but also a hypochondriac and a mysophobe (75–76). 158. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 2–3. 159. Paul J. Weber, “Texas Set to Remove Confederate Plaque from State Capitol,” Associated Press, January 11, 2019, https://www.apnews.com/6328477fa1124ade 85ff9103df5a9784. 160. Limón, “El Primer Congreso Mexicanista,” 89. 161. Lynch and Larralde, Judge J. T. Canales, 115.

CHAPTER 10

Hidden History: A Journey through the Past, with Hard Lessons for the Present Kirby F. Warnock

When I was an eight-­year-­old boy, my family and I visited my grandfather and grandmother, Roland and Marie Warnock, at their ranch near Fort Stockton, Texas. It was 1960, during the golden era of the TV western, so, naturally, I was proud that I had a grandfather who was a real cowboy. He could ride and rope and shoot and wore his cowboy hat everywhere, except indoors. As we sat down to dinner one evening, he recounted a story from his younger days. The story took place in 1915, when he was a nineteen-­year-­ old cowboy working on the Guadalupe Ranch near the town of McAllen in the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. He told us that he saw a group of Texas Rangers shoot two unarmed Mexican American men in the back and leave their bodies where they lay. Two days later, he and another ranch hand buried the men. He also told me that two days after that, one of the killer Rangers, Bill Sterling, accompanied by his brother Ed, shot his unarmed father, Franklin Warnock in the back, killing him on the streets of Mission, Texas. My grandfather’s story troubled me, because the Lone Ranger would never shoot a man in the back (he always shot the gun out of their hand), and the Texas Rangers were supposed to always be on the side of justice, just like in the theme song to Tales of the Texas Rangers. Years went by, and in 1973 I was a senior undergraduate student at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, majoring in history. I was taking a brand-­new course in “oral history” where we were tasked with recording eighteen hours of remembrances from an elderly person as an assignment. I knew that my grandfather’s cowboy stories would get me an easy A, so I packed up the reel-­to-­reel tape recorder (state of the art back then) and drove out to his ranch. I didn’t really give a lot of forethought to what he might tell me, and I mainly wanted to hear stories of the cowboy life, such as roundups, trail

212  Kirby F. Warnock Figure 10.1. Roland

Warnock, 1919. Courtesy, Kirby Warnock.

drives and the saloons in town. (I was a twenty-­year-­old college student, so my priorities were girls and parties.) I captured his memories of working ornery cows in South Texas, riding cattle cars to Fort Worth, and breaking wild horses. When I asked him to tell me the story of “the two dead Mexicans,” he told it again, but this time added names, dates, and places. It was a detailed account of what happened on that day back in 1915, with an important fact that I had not picked up on the first time: those two men were killed in retaliation for a “Mexican bandit raid” on the nearby McAllen Ranch. However, the “bandits” were actually contracted to kill the ranch’s owner, James B. McAllen, because he was keeping a fourteen-­year-­old Mexican girl on his ranch. According to my grandfather, he was only one of four people left alive who knew the reason for that “raid.” This young girl had come across the Rio Grande to escape the violence of the Mexican Revolution, and Mr. McAllen had given her a job to “keep the house clean and look after it when he was away.” Mr. McAllen’s family lived in a nice home in Brownsville, so he had long stretches of time

Hidden History 213

away from them out on the ranch. In time, that relationship between himself and the young housekeeper became much more intimate. I turned in my tapes, earned an A, and thought nothing more about it for nearly twenty years, when I decided to publish his stories in a short book titled Texas Cowboy in 1992. The book contained all of his stories of cowboying on the Texas frontier, but the one that got the most response was his tale of the two Mexicans killed by the Rangers. I kept getting phone calls from Hispanics in the Rio Grande Valley saying, “I read your book, and the Rangers killed my father,” or uncle, brother, or grandfather. This raised my eyebrows, because I thought the Rangers had killed only these two men. One day in October 1995 I heard a recording on my answering machine: “I am Diorica McAllen, and we are the McAllens no one knows about.” I immediately contacted a friend of mine, Randel Bird, who worked in television production, and we headed to McAllen to get the woman’s story on videotape. While I knew about capturing oral histories on audio tape, I didn’t have the expertise in shooting video. My friend worked on the PBS show Wishbone and also shot footage for Walker, Texas Ranger, so I knew he would help me get good imagery as well as the true story. Diorica McAllen proceeded to confide in Randel and me in sharing her story. She told us that she was the descendant of that fourteen-­year-­old girl on the McAllen ranch. When she read a copy of Texas Cowboy, she knew she had to track me down and get the whole story out there. Mr. McAllen had fathered children by the Mexican woman who worked on his ranch, and one of those children was Willie McAllen, Diorica’s dad. I set out to find if she had any documentation that could support her story and was surprised when she produced a birth certificate for her father, Willie McAllen, that named James B. McAllen as the father. I knew that there was a story here because it totally altered the “official” narrative of the Texas Rangers and the Rio Grande Valley. For years I was taught that all of the Rangers were noble men, unafraid of death (as Walter Prescott Webb wrote) and that the Rio Grande Valley was somewhat of an empty wasteland until the Anglo citrus growers came in and “built the Valley,” as the story goes. It was after I heard Diorica’s story that I decided to produce a documentary on this hidden history and the untold story of the Hispanic experience in the Valley. I titled the film Border Bandits because every Anglo account I had read said that the Rangers were killing bandits who had come across the river to raid ranches and homes. This narrative was reinforced by Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus, New Mexico. My finished documentary aired on PBS in 2006. During its production, I was stunned to learn that the Rangers didn’t just kill these two men; they

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killed hundreds if not thousands during the 1910s under the guise of calling the victims “bandits.” In reality most of the bandits in the Valley were longtime Hispanic residents of the area who had their lands taken by extralegal means, and they were pretty upset about it. There was also a revolution taking place in Mexico at the time, so there were real bandits coming across the Rio Grande to steal anything that could be used to supply their armies, but there were also thousands of Mexican Americans, US citizens, who had lived on this side of the river for more than a hundred years. During my research I was given a copy of “With His Pistol in His Hand” by Américo Paredes, which provided a different viewpoint of this time in Texas. There was also what could mildly be termed corruption within the Texas Rangers. Ever since their reestablishment after Reconstruction, the state’s governor had the power to appoint Texas Rangers. By the early twentieth century, this practice had become a way to reward political supporters. People who paid campaign contributions to the governor’s election fund could receive a Ranger appointment. By 1915 there were thousands of men claiming to be Rangers. Most had no training and used the badge to commit violent acts against people they perceived as enemies or even rivals for land or money. Evidence of this is found in, of all places, Bill Sterling’s autobiography, Trails and Trials of a Texas Ranger. In it, he almost proudly admits that he was appointed a Ranger captain after the gubernatorial election of Dan Moody in 1927 because he had contributed to Moody’s campaign. The practice of awarding Ranger badges in exchange for campaign contributions was also borne out in the thousands of Ranger appointments passed out by Governor James E. “Pa” Ferguson. All of this was a pretty stunning revelation to me. I had always believed that the Texas Rangers were upright, moral men, but I soon discovered that many of them in 1915 were totally unfit to wear the badge. Lastly, a huge transformation was taking place in the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas from 1910 to 1920. Developers were purchasing tracts of land to sell to investors for orange and grapefruit groves. The problem was that this land was already owned by Mexican Americans who had been living there for nearly three hundred years, dating back to the Spanish colony of Nuevo Santander. Unlike the Native Americans, they held title to those lands. To get that property, the Anglo developers had to persuade the Hispanic owners to sell their lands or simply label them as bandits and kill them. The phrase “You don’t buy from the husband, you buy from the widow” became popular throughout the Valley. Another way was to seize the land through nonpayment of property taxes, then auction it off to Anglo investors.

Hidden History 215 Figure 10.2.

“Cheap Labor Plentiful” item in a promotional flyer of Melado Land Company, 1915. Courtesy, Museum of South Texas History, Edinburg.

Worse yet, many of these scoundrels (I don’t know what other term to use) were awarded commendations for bravery or had a Texas Historical Commission marker on their graves even though they had gunned down unarmed, elderly men. The pinnacle of this hypocrisy was that one of the killers my grandfather named, Bill Sterling, rose to become adjutant general of Texas, the chief officer for the Texas Rangers. He was honored with a Texas historical marker on his grave that praised him for “never having to kill a man in his long years of service.” I knew this to be a lie because I had located the arrest warrants, trial transcripts, and newspaper accounts of his murder trial for killing my great-­ grandfather, Franklin Warnock, on the streets of Mission, Texas, just four days after he killed the two Mexican Americans. Yet for the two “Mexicans” he killed, there was nothing. No newspaper account, no charges, and no trial. It became apparent to me that Mexican Americans in the Rio Grande Valley were living in a parallel universe, one that took place in the same time as the Anglos but in a completely different world. I soon discovered from the dead men’s family that their names were Jesús Bazán and Antonio Longoria. We located the headstones where my grandfather buried them, and then we found out that both were US citizens but also Antonio Longoria was a former postmaster and a certified Texas schoolteacher. He had married one of the daughters of Jesús Bazán, whom my grandfather described as “a good old man who was afraid.” It was a striking example of how justice was meted out in South Texas in 1915. For killing my great-­grandfather, there was the pretense of a trial (the jury found both Sterling brothers not guilty), but for the two dead Mexican Americans, there was nothing. Not even a death certificate. The only reason I was able to find all of this information is because I spent

216  Kirby F. Warnock

countless hours in museum archives and court repositories digging through reams of paper files. None of this material was digitized, but it was all there. I cannot say that it was suppressed because it was available to any researcher, but it was hidden in that I had to produce exact dates, names, and places to find it. Otherwise I would be pointed to a room full of file cabinets and told to find it myself. This entire episode shook my faith in everything I had been taught. I hold a BA in history from Baylor University, but this was a story we were never told in Texas history class. I can see why. It reveals something that most Texans would rather not admit because it is so ugly. The most shocking part of my research was the photos. The Rangers and their supporters made hundreds of photographs of them posing with the bodies of dead Mexican Americans, whom they always labeled “bandits.” However, a dead person cannot say, “I’m not a bandit.” In the archives of the Museum of South Texas History and at the Texas State Library in Austin are dozens of these photos as well as postcards. The postcards were the most disturbing because they look like something a person would send from a deer hunt, but instead of posing with a ten-­point buck, they were posing with bodies of dead men, stacked like cord wood. It doesn’t take much of a leap to compare these photos with ones from the Holocaust. When Border Bandits was released, I was surprised that I didn’t get major pushback from Ranger supporters. Instead, I received emails and letters from Mexican Americans thanking me for finally telling this story. The best compliment I received was from the well-­known Chicano activist José Angel Gutiérrez, who said, “Whenever I try to tell this story I’m just an angry Chicano with a chip on my shoulder, but Warnock tells this so convincingly no can watch this and say it never happened.” It’s a rather sad state that people won’t believe a story about Anglo injustice unless it comes from another Anglo. I also believe that my grandfather’s story gained traction because it was a television documentary and not a thick book, as unfortunately, hardly anyone reads any more. Several books have tried to tell this story, such as Ben Johnson’s Revolution in Texas, Monica Muñoz Martinez’s The Injustice Never Leaves You, and Américo Paredes’s “With His Pistol in His Hand,” but they haven’t captured the public’s imagination as well as the moving image does. Mainly I wanted to tell my grandfather’s story because he was a man who had a strong sense of right and wrong. There was no underlying motive, no attempt to revise history, but just the fact that he saw something he knew was wrong and wanted to tell it. I was nominated for Texan of the Year by the Dallas Morning News for my documentary, but in the end, nothing more came from it. There was

Hidden History 217 Figure 10.3.

Jesús Bazán headstone, Mission, Texas. Courtesy, Kirby Warnock.

no push to include this story in Texas history books and no removal of the markers that honored the Rangers who committed the atrocities. It wasn’t until a group called Refusing to Forget started pushing for some new historical markers that I witnessed what I would call change, but it still has a long way to go. I’ve heard a saying: “Let’s tell the truth and see where it leads us.” I know that my grandfather’s story can withstand scrutiny. Today’s Texas Rangers will not be denigrated if we admit that the ones wearing that badge in 1915 were totally unfit for service. Let the truth come out, and let’s be big enough to admit mistakes. We don’t need to compensate the victims. For right now, they would just like for someone in power in Texas to say, “This did happen, and we are sorry for it.” That would go a long way toward righting this wrong without any reparations, just admitting the truth.

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I know that the Lone Ranger would at least do that much. The late University of Texas professor Don Graham once told me that South Texas had the richest history of the entire state, but most of it was oral history, passed on from one generation to the next. It’s good that family members are preserving it, but it’s not history until it’s written down. I was fortunate enough to have transcripts of my grandfather’s recollections, but I also sought out any documentation that would verify his story. This is something important for all oral historians. The eyewitness account is good, but if you can find any documents to validate the stories, that will nail it down. We often say that history is written by the winners. While the Mexican Americans of the lower Rio Grande Valley lost the fight for their lands and their lives, the changing demographics of Texas and the promise of a coming Hispanic majority may prove them to be the winners in the long run. Note More information on the documentary Border Bandits is available at http://www .borderbanditsmovie.com.

CHAPTER 11

Recovering the 1919 Canales Investigation of the Texas Ranger Force: Archival Investigation and Its Consequences, 1975–2010 James A. Sandos Memory is actually a very important factor in struggle. . . . If one controls people’s memory, one controls their dynamism. . . . It is vital to have possession of this memory, to control it, administer it, tell it what it must contain. Michel Foucault

My 1972 article “The Plan of San Diego: War and Diplomacy on the Texas Border, 1915–1916” is based on extensive work I had done in the US National Archives in 1970–1972.1 Although I knew my research was new and significant, I also knew it was insufficient. Most importantly, I had not then consulted sources in Texas or in Mexico. If I wanted to convert my previous inquiry into potential doctoral scholarship, I would need to do much, much more. I went to Austin, Texas, in the summer of 1975 to further my inquiry into violence along the Texas-­Mexico border from 1910 to 1920. I was particularly interested in the Texas State Archives because I had found a stunning document in the US National Archives in Suitland, Maryland, earlier that summer. It was a carbon copy of volumes 1 and 2 of the three-­volume work entitled “An Investigation of the Texas Ranger Force” initiated by José T. Canales, a member of the Texas state legislature, through a committee inquiry that began January 31, 1919. There was no indication in the National Archives where the third volume was. The first two volumes documented raids, primarily from Mexico, on American citizens who were living and working in South Texas, across the river that served as a boundary called Río Bravo by Mexicans and the Rio Grande by Americans. The third volume had not been sent to the National Archives, I suspect, because it dealt mainly with Texas Ranger atrocities against Mexicans and Mexican Americans.

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Those carbon-­copied volumes had been included as evidence submitted into Record Group 43 of the US National Archives, Records of International Conferences, Commissions, and Expositions, and buried under the title “Records of the United States Commissioners of the American and Mexican Joint Commission, 1916.” The research collection was known informally as the Gray-­Lane Files, for the names of two of the American commissioners to that conference who were, respectively, Judge George Gray and Franklin K. Lane, President Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of the interior. The ostensible purpose of the American-­Mexican Joint Commission was to investigate and adjudicate US claims against Mexico for damages done to US citizens and their property arising from the Mexican Revolution that had begun in 1910. Because of its failure to reach a conclusion, the commission accomplished nothing. In 1923 the United States created another body, the Mexican Claims Commission, that actually adjudicated those claims. The 1923 document is much better known than that of 1916. I discovered, however, that the 1916 records contained a wealth of information from US intelligence services revealing President Wilson’s deep mistrust of the emerging Constitutionalist leader of Mexico, Venustiano Carranza. US policy makers had come to believe that Carranza had created and manipulated cross-­border attacks from Mexico under the aegis of the Plan de San Diego, Texas, of 1915, that sought to kill all North American males over the age of sixteen and to remove Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico from the American union because of Anglo discrimination against and mistreatment of Latinos, ethnic Mexicans, Blacks, and Indians. From those separate entities, adherents of the Plan de San Diego sought to create new and independent countries. US intelligence sources suspected the plan was a ploy by disaffected grumblers from both Mexico and Texas to force the United States to recognize Carranza’s government as the only legitimate force capable of quelling cross-­border raids and restoring peace to the border. In return for Carranza’s political recognition by Wilson as the sole legitimate Mexican government, the narrative went, Carranza would deploy his troops, some of which presumably had participated in the attacks against Texas, to end cross-­border raiding against US ranchers, farmers, and citrus cultivators in the lower Rio Grande Valley. From the American perspective, Carranza was guilty of fostering violence against the United States. How could meaningful negotiations be conducted with a potential Mexican government that was, ipso facto, guilty of sabotage against the United States? In the 1916 hearings, US officials shared

The 1919 Canales Investigation of the Texas Ranger Force 221

these intelligence reports with their Mexican colleagues. There is no doubt that these allegations were transmitted to Carranza himself. My interest, was less in US officials’ suspicions about Carranza than in developing a larger picture of what had happened, that is, the where and why. I also wanted to know what role the Texas Ranger Force played to both repress and provoke ethnic violence along the border. My knowledge of border turmoil in that era had come largely from the on-­scene notes made by Frank C. Pierce in his “Partial List of Mexicans Killed in [the lower Rio Grande] Valley since July 1, 1915,”2 compiled at the request of Jesse C. Johnson, US consul in Matamoros, Mexico. Pierce’s subsequent privately printed work, A Brief History of the Lower Rio Grande Valley,3 augmented his earlier report. These accounts were Pierce’s compilation of aggressions he had noted against Latinos and ethnic Mexicans from 1915 to 1917, stories that Pierce had derived from newspapers, oral reports from Texas Rangers, conversations with ethnic Mexicans and Latinos, and his personal observations. Pierce did not claim his enumeration to be complete. Instead his record was a notation of the magnitude of atrocities he contended had been visited upon ethnic Mexicans and Latinos during those years. Generally, Pierce asserted that the victims of white-­administered justice had been guilty of nothing more than being ethnic Mexicans and Latinos, available to be killed. The Canales investigation into the behavior of the Texas Ranger Force might, I thought, have more information to amplify Pierce’s suspicions. Did it ever, especially in volume 3! When in Austin in 1975, I saw that the catalog in the Texas State Archives indicated it held all three volumes of the Canales investigation. Upon my request to see the report, the archivist told me that it would take some time to retrieve because it was in a locked case. I was told that the Texas state legislature had sealed the Canales investigation for fifty years in 1919, probably to protect the Rangers’ reputation, and the only indication that anyone had consulted it was a note that the famed Texas historian Walter Prescott Webb had looked at it in the early 1930s while researching his book The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense.4 In that accolade to the Texas Ranger Force, Webb revealed none of the unfavorable information in the Canales investigation. Webb had no interest in criticizing the legendary Rangers whom he wished to lionize, and the Canales investigation was clearly inconvenient and to him, irrelevant. Upon further inquiry, I learned that the alleged fifty-­year restriction was discovered to have expired in 1969,5 and so I was permitted to see the document. Recorded Texas Ranger abuse of ethnic Mexicans and Latinos and

222  James A. Sandos

of those whites who supported justice against the aggressions was hard to comprehend. I grew up in the television land of Tales of the Texas Rangers and Track Down, featuring Robert Culp as Hoby Gilman, a Texas Ranger; both series depicted the Rangers as self-­sacrificing lawmen helping people. The Canales investigation, corroborated by other sources, ended my youthful fantasy about the Texas Rangers. For example, in May 1916, Circuit Court Judge T. Wesley Hook was contacted by Fenón Moraida, the pastor of a Protestant congregation in Kingsville, Texas, with a petition from church members protesting abuse of citizens by Captain J. J. Sanders, head of Company A, Texas Ranger Force. Moraida asked Hook to write the American president protesting Sanders’s mistreatment of two men who had disappeared while in the captain’s custody. Those who disappeared while in Ranger control were locally referred to as having been “rangered” or subjected to “rangering.” Hook translated the petition into English and sent it to President Woodrow Wilson; the petitioners were “asking for the protection to which [we] are entitled under the laws of this country.”6 Wilson had been informed the previous fall of Texas Ranger abuse of ethnic Mexicans and Latinos; on receiving the petition Wilson asked Hook to thank local Mexicans for their law-­abiding behavior. Wilson then told the Department of Justice not to surrender any further prisoners to Texas authorities. When Sanders learned of the complaint against him and his company, he became enraged. After several months of brooding and following a morning of drinking alone in his hotel room, he accosted Hook in the judge’s chambers in the courthouse at Falfurrias, Texas. Sanders demanded to know if Hook was the “son-­of-­a-­bitch” who had written the president about the Mexicans. Hook acknowledged writing, whereupon Sanders drew his pistol and began striking the judge on his head and face with its barrel. Hook later said had he been armed, Sanders would have killed him. Upon discovering that Hook was unarmed, Sanders muttered an apology for drawing on a man without a gun and left the judge’s chambers. Sanders suffered no repercussions for assaulting the judge.7 Obviously, if a senior Ranger captain could pistol-­whip an Anglo circuit court judge in his chambers with impunity, in the isolation of the chaparral he could do whatever he pleased with any ethnic Mexican or Latino he suspected of being a threat to white society. Despite the protest to President Wilson, Ranger behavior toward ethnic Mexicans and Latinos did not improve. Philip Wright, a chaplain from Long Island, New York, was assigned to border duty in South Texas as part of Wilson’s mobilization of the National Guard to protect the Texas-­Mexico border in the summer of 1916. In

The 1919 Canales Investigation of the Texas Ranger Force 223

June 1916 Wright reported a grim tale to the Department of Justice about three Rangers in an automobile, their Ranger company not identified, who visited a suspected raider in McAllen, Texas. Wright describes what happened next: “They invited the man to get into the car with them and without saying another word to him, drove out into the country and shot him dead.” When the chaplain protested to the Rangers that they should have gone through the courts if they suspected the man of being a raider, he received a bizarre response. Wright reports, “They said they could not do that because he would be tried before a court of [ethnic?] Mexicans who would have acquitted him without regard to the evidence.”8 Really? Are we to believe that ethnic Mexicans or Latinos would have been privileged over whites in the composition of a jury in South Texas in 1916? Or that they were even permitted to serve on juries hearing cases against whites? Or that their testimony would be either sought out or accepted in such cases? The Rangers’ argument to the chaplain was simply preposterous! Widespread fear among the Anglo population that summer sanctioned such drastic Ranger acts. Moreover, for local protection in the Valley, General James Parker, commandant of Fort Brown in the US Army’s Brownsville District, encouraged the formation of “civilian home guards” to protect locals from suspected or actual raids. These groups were simply US Army–­ sanctioned bands of vigilantes.9 A real estate agent in San Diego, Texas, wrote the Department of Justice asking that a local Spanish-­language newspaper, La Gaceta, be suppressed because of its inflammatory tone. His evidence was that the newspaper had “published an article branding the State Rangers as murders [sic] and called them assins [sic] too. This was on account of the good work they have done in this part of the country.”10 The “good work” consisted of terrorizing the population of ethnic Mexicans and Latinos to assuage white fears of continued ethnic-­Mexican and Latino violence against the white overlords. The Department of Justice did not suppress the newspaper. In early 1919, José T. Canales, a state legislative representative from Brownsville, brought a request to the Texas state legislature to investigate Texas Ranger Force activity in the lower Rio Grande Valley from 1915 to 1919; in doing so, he unleashed a torrent of resentment from those who supported Ranger actions. Canales’s joint legislative committee held hearings on January 31 and February 1, 1919. The committee found uncontradicted evidence that the Ranger captains of Companies A, B, and D had committed criminal acts. Sanders of Company A had pistol-­whipped a judge. Fox of Company B had desecrated Mexican corpses by dragging them through the brush with one end of each rope tied to the legs of the dead, the

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other wrapped around the pommel of Rangers’ horses. The Rangers paused for a photograph of themselves and made a postcard of the act to sell on both sides of the border.11 Ransom of Company D had murdered four ethnic-­ Mexican and Latino suspects following the train derailment at Brownsville on October 18, 1915. These accounts were only a small part of the entire story. The committee concluded that “the Rangers have become guilty of, and are responsible for, the gross violation of both civil and criminal laws of this State and deserve the condemnation of all law-­abiding citizens for so doing.”12 To correct Ranger abuses, the Canales committee then recommended that the Ranger Force be reduced in size and placed under a separate authority responsible to the state adjutant general and to the governor. The committee reportedly ordered its own three volumes of testimony sealed for fifty years, but a partial copy of it was sent to Washington, DC, for the use of the 1916 Mexican Claims Commission. The partial document clearly arrived too late to be used by the commissioners because that body had adjourned, without issuing a report, two years earlier, on January 15, 1917. When commissions receive testimony after they have finished or suspended their work, additional material is placed in a miscellaneous file. Researchers frequently do not know that documents sent to federal commissions are not read after the commission has been closed and dissolved.13 In a bizarre twist of fate, the Canales report remained sealed in Austin and was unavailable to unprivileged researchers, while in Washington, DC, the report remained unread in the National Archives before I found the incomplete document there in 1975. This situation would be absurd if it were not so tragic. The results of my research in 1975–1976, including extensive inquiry into regional and national archives in Mexico, informed my doctoral dissertation. But bringing forth a book from all that material seemed to take forever. When I found the link between the anarchist thinking of the brothers Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón and their newspaper, Regeneración, published in the United States, with the Plan de San Diego, I was able to pull the story into a coherent focus. The result was Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and the Plan of San Diego, 1904–1923, published in 1992. The reviews were mixed, as there was little audience then for my work. David Weber, the dean of borderlands history, told me a year after it appeared that he had been asked by the editor of the University of Oklahoma Press, my book’s publisher, what book, in his opinion, was the most important history title the press had published in 1992; David told him Rebellion in the Borderlands. I did not receive an award from the press, though, obviously. That year’s award went to a book on art history, a field that is rarely

The 1919 Canales Investigation of the Texas Ranger Force 225

controversial; my book, in contrast, surely was. And it did not sell well. Remainder bins are for the poor sellers. That, I thought, was that. I had invested a good chunk of my life working on a study that few would read. ¡Así es la vida! I turned to other research topics, principally in California Indian history, in which I attempted to analyze white-­Indian relations with a strong emphasis on uncovering evidence to include the perspective of those Native Americans involved. When I first became a scholar, it was standard for an author to have died before her or his work was revised. Such was not to be my fate. Benjamin Johnson, thirteen years after my book appeared, presented us with his Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans.14 Ben’s approach differed from my focus on anarchism; he presented his original argument that this dreadful carnage led to the creation of a new Mexican American political identity in South Texas that would become nationally politically significant. Ben’s book is both important to American history and a terrific work! I am very glad that he wrote it. I was surprised when I was contacted in 2008, twenty-­six years after my book appeared, by a Mexican historian in Tamaulipas, Mexico, who wanted to arrange a translation into Spanish of Rebellion in the Borderlands for the 2010 bicentennial of Mexican independence in 1810 and the centennial of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Beyond surprised, I was also honored to have my work chosen for the commemoration. Mercedes Guhl translated it. When I finished Rebellion in the Borderlands, I was concerned that some of my arguments would be provocative, especially to Mexican scholars. I criticized Mexican historians for failing to include the Plan de San Diego in their enumerations of political plans and other writings as part of the literature of the Mexican Revolution.15 To do so, however, would have required those scholars to challenge a carefully crafted popular memory, and doing so could well have cost them their professional careers. This dilemma suggests why we need to critically interrogate the formation of popular history as well as the identity and motives of those who shaped and continue to shape its iteration. During the twentieth century, the official history of the Mexican Revolution was decided by the political entity that would become the Partido Revolucionario Mexicano (PRI, Institutional Revolutionary Party), comprising those who had fought and won the major military campaigns and in turn taught their version to Mexican schoolchildren. In the PRI’s version, the Mexican Revolution began with Francisco I. Madero and his Constitutionalist movement in 1910; the PRI claimed Madero’s mantle while ignoring other revolutionary factions. Following Madero’s assassination in

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1913, he became glorified in death as “the Apostle and Martyr of the Revolution.” PRI propagandists remade the collective memory of the revolution into a unified movement in which divisions between factions such as Pancho Villa’s Villistas and Emiliano Zapata’s Zapatistas were erased and recast as Madero’s allies who joined the movement either earlier or later. This interpretation was essentially untrue of Zapata and only partially true of Villa. Returning to Foucault’s comments about historical memory with which I began, it should be understood that in creating the myth of Madero as the undisputed leader of the Constitutionalist Revolution, the PRI remade the politics of Mexican historical memory. Even those revisions to the histories of armed revolutionary factions were hardly enough for the PRI. The brothers Flores Magón were refashioned into precursors (precursores estimados) of Madero who agreed with him completely. In historical reality, Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón regarded the short man (they always belittled his stature) from a wealthy northern Mexican family as a mere reformist and not as a genuine revolutionary, one who should have been seeking economic and social as well as political change. The Flores Magón brothers denounced and rejected him. Their views faded away as the brothers were transformed into John the Baptist forerunners of the Christlike Madero. Accepting the Flores Magón brothers as genuine anarchists would have described them as they were: contemptuous of Madero and of his and anyone else’s reformist politics. Carranza’s actions to quell border raiding was also unpopular with Mexican scholars who thought that the first chief of the Constitutionalist movement should have been and indeed, in their view, had been sympathetic to Latino and ethnic-­Mexican outrage over the discrimination and abusive treatment to which they were subjected in South Texas. In that version, Carranza had aided and abetted border violence emanating from Mexico. In the course of my own research, I found no compelling evidence to prove the allegation that Carranza supported cross-­border raiding or that he could have prevented it. I did find, however, that he tried to stop it. He feared that such assaults against Texas would result in another US invasion of Mexico, as had happened in the US seizure of the port of Veracruz in 1914 and in 1916 following Pancho Villa’s attack upon Columbus, New Mexico, on March 9, when Wilson dispatched a column of infantry and cavalry against Villa that was called the Punitive Expedition. Its officially stated goal was to capture Villa, but the secret orders commanded General John J. Pershing to disperse Villa’s forces. The Punitive Expedition returned without capturing Villa but did scatter his followers. In the eyes of the US public, the Punitive Expedition failed in its mission.16

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At the time my book appeared, I did not expect a positive response to my critical analysis of Ranger activity in Texas. I did hope that an emerging generation of self-­identified Chicano scholars would study the Plan de San Diego and its two Tejano leaders, Aniceto Pizaña and Luís de la Rosa, in depth and retrieve life stories from their descendants. The dominant narrative of the Texas Rangers continues to be triumphalist. In 2017 a tome of 650 pages appeared, containing only one admission of Ranger misdeeds: the Porvenir massacre of January 28, 1918. The authors do not mention the Refusing to Forget movement or its role in getting a marker for the site. The writers comment that José Tomás Canales was “legally and politically . . . over his head” in criticizing the Rangers and then assert, “For public consumption Canales altruism is, inexplicably, somewhat at odds with his personal correspondence.”17 They do not specify the object of Canales’s altruism or offer examples to support their assertions. If I have contributed in some small way to the Refusing to Forget movement in Texas, a powerful call to protest by remembering and documenting the Ranger rampages of 1910–1920, then I derive satisfaction from knowing that issues raised in my early work have been and will continue to be pursued by other scholars and descendants of Ranger victims. Our involvement in this project contributes to the vitality of recovering history as an active pursuit, an ongoing struggle to claim control of the dominant historical narrative and reshape it to reject false stories about the past. Our participation simultaneously sends a message that racism will not be ignored, nor will historical injustices be dismissed from our minds. We will remember and in that act of remembering, an act that is frequently difficult and painful, we can and will re-­create the larger truth, one that has been denied, ignored, or conveniently forgotten. Said simply: We refuse to forget! Notes Epigraph: Michel Foucault, cited in Keith Michael Baker, “Memory and Practice: Politics and the Representation of the Past in Eighteenth-­Century France,” Representations 11 (Summer 1985): 134. 1. James A. Sandos, “The Plan of San Diego: War and Diplomacy on the Texas Border, 1915–1916,” Arizona and the West 14 (Spring 1972). 2. Foreign Service Post Records, Matamoros, 1915, RG 84, “Records of the Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State,” US National Archives. 3. Menasha, WI: George Banta, 1917. 4. Houghton-­Mifflin, 1935. 5. I thank Richard Ribb, a senior academic adviser in the dean’s office of the Col-

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lege of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin, for several stimulating conversations in January and February 2019 about whether the Canales investigation had been sealed officially. Ribb is the author of “José Tomás Canales and the Texas Rangers: Myth, Identity, and Power in South Texas, 1900–1920” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2001). He also wrote chapter 8 of this volume. 6. Judge T. Wesley Hook to Woodrow Wilson, June 4, 1916, Department of Justice, straight numerical file 90755, RG 60, US National Archives. Hook was transmitting a petition he had translated from Spanish from the Reverend Fenón Moraida to the president bearing thirty-­six signatures protesting Texas Ranger treatment of Mexicans in the lower Rio Grande Valley. A copy is in the Woodrow Wilson Papers, series 4, case 95z, reel 216. Wilson Papers are available on microfilm from the US Library of Congress. 7. Hook to Wilson, June 4, 1916. The pistol-­whipping account is from Hook. 8. Philip T. Wright to Department of Justice, June 9, 1916. 9. James A. Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and the Plan of San Diego, 1904–1923 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 162. 10. William E. McCord to Department of Justice, December 9, 1916. 11. The postcard is reproduced in Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands, 91, figure 5. 12. Journal of the Senate, p. 23, State of Texas, 35th Legislature, Regular Session, 1919. 13. Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands, 162. 14. Yale University Press, 2003. 15. The departure point for researching those plans was Planes políticos y otros, prologue by Manuel González Ramírez (Mexico City, 1954), for a discussion of political movements primarily generated during the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920. 16. James A. Sandos, “Pancho Villa and American Security: Woodrow Wilson’s Mexican Diplomacy Reconsidered,” Journal of Latin American Studies 13, no. 2 (November 1981): 293–311. 17. Bob Alexander and Donaly E. Brice, Texas Rangers: Lives, Legends, and Legacy (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2017), 360, 361.

CHAPTER 12

The Legacy of La Matanza, Intergenerational Trauma, and the Writing of El Rinche Christopher Carmona

My life as a writer—or my life, period—would not have become what it is: that of a witness who believes he has a moral obligation to try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory. Elie Wiesel, preface to Night

This story did not start with me. This story began five hundred years ago, when the Spanish landed on an island in the Caribbean. But my story, this story about the Texas Rangers, los rinches, began when I was about eight years old and my grandfather told me stories about los rinches and the terrible things they had done to the ethnic Mexicans in el valle. I was young, so I didn’t understand the significance of hearing these stories, of recording them. They were just stories buried deep in my grandfather of what forced him and his family into Mexico for two years while the Rangers wreaked havoc. These stories would stick with me, and now these stories are bled out in a series of novels I am writing. When I was a kid, I watched all the cowboy movies and shows that were popular in the 1980s, like Young Riders, Young Guns, The Gambler, Pale Rider, and of course, The Lone Ranger. Like young boys my age, I had toy guns, plastic badges, and cardboard hats. I played the cowboy, the hero, and on occasion, with a plastic bow and suction cup arrows, I played the Indian. I watched the Lone Ranger and saw him as a hero against those corrupt railroad tycoons and their henchmen but more importantly, the nameless bandidos who terrorized white civilization with their brown skin and Spanish tongues. They were the epitome of evil. It took me many years to realize that I could never be the cowboy. I was always the bandit in the eyes of white America. It’s a strange feeling to try and reconcile that John Wayne’s vari-

230  Christopher Carmona

ous cowboy characters hated me simply because I was Mexican. I, with my plastic cap gun, so wanted to be like him or Clint Eastwood or any of the various white-­skinned saviors of the American West, but I couldn’t. That door was never opened for me or anyone like me. We were always the brush and refuse of the land that these cowboys cleared for white families to settle. As a kid, I never understood this because everything I saw in the movies, on TV, and in magazines and books were white heroes killing brown bandidos, and I never felt like the bandido. James Baldwin, in his essay “The American Dream and the American Negro,” put it best: It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, 6, or 7 to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, and although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you. It comes as a great shock to discover that the country which is your birthplace and to which your life and identity has not, in its whole system of reality, evolved any place for you.1

My great-­grandfather had to take his family and flee his home so they wouldn’t be killed. I couldn’t imagine that kind of fear. But I could feel it. That small, round badge and that big cowboy hat were the closest to white robes that we have known here on the border. We were not targeted because we were a threat to white power like the Blacks of the South. We were targeted because we owned lands that they wanted. The Anglos. The farming corporations. So, they killed us and plowed over our history and erased the memory of these proud people from American history. But our memories persist in the corridos we sing and the stories we are told as children about the rinches. Always in a hushed tone, so they won’t hear. As I got older, the profile of the Texas Rangers was elevated with the extremely campy and successful TV show Walker, Texas Ranger. I felt the conflict, the anger, and the fear that my grandfather must have felt as they rolled into ranchos and burned and killed. It wasn’t until I was at a conference a few years ago speaking about los rinches with Sonia Saldivar-­Hall, a University of Texas at San Antonio professor who is originally from Brownsville, that this story was born: This superhero story. As Saldivar-­Hull and I spoke, a graduate student was with her from California, a young Chicana who was pursuing Chicano studies. As the student listened to us talk about the Texas Rangers and their atrocities, her mouth fell open in disbelief. She told me she had never heard these stories. She told me that all she knew about the Texas Rangers was Walker,

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Texas Ranger and The Lone Ranger. It was in that moment I realized that the stories of thousands of terrorized ethnic Mexicans were not known to most of the world, not even to those who study our own history. At about the same time, I saw the horrible reimagining of The Lone Ranger with Johnny Depp as Tonto and realized that popular media are still telling the same lies about these people. I, as a writer, felt it was my duty to rectify the situation in the only way I knew how, through writing. I decided to take the myth of the Lone Ranger and turn it on its head. I set my story in the Rio Grande Valley from 1905 to 1920, and I made my superhero into a light-­skinned ethnic Mexican, a son of a rancher with a land grant who disguises himself as a Texas Ranger. A brown boy wearing white skin would defend the Mexican people from the atrocities of the Texas Rangers. Intergenerational Trauma The need to tell this story comes from many places. It comes from the stories my grandfather told me. It comes from a history that was almost lost to the world. It comes from my ancestors speaking through me to make sure these stories are not forgotten. Even though the passage above sounds poetic and metaphysical, it is very much grounded in science, in our genetic code. Years ago, when I was taking a Native American Rhetorics and Literature course during my graduate studies, I came across a poet by the name of Joy Harjo who changed my approach to writing but also my entire view of indigeneity and the rhetoric of colonization through science. In her book A Map to the Next World she writes, For years, the predominant anthropological theory of the study of North American Indians was and still is the Bering Strait theory, that is, that North America was settled by a relatively late migration of peoples from Asia. . . . The logic of that notion is so faulty as to be preposterous. There is no such thing as a one-­way land bridge. People, creatures and other life will naturally travel back and forth. Just as we will naturally intermarry, travel up and down rivers, cross oceans, fly from Los Angeles to Oklahoma for a powwow. The fault of that theory and so many others in the western world is that Indians are somehow less than human, or at least not as advanced as western European cultured humans. We are constantly being defined from the point of view of the colonizer.2

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This challenge to the Bering Strait theory is not a new concept to indigenous peoples, but Harjo’s articulation of it changed my entire concept of how to view history. This view of history that is supposedly supported by science is now being challenged as new evidence points to indigenous peoples having been here long before the commonly held time frame of 12,000 years. A 2012 study conducted by scientists at Copenhagen University has found evidence of peoples living on the continents known as North and South America as far back as 130,000 years and perhaps longer.3 As science slowly catches up to what indigenous thinkers have known for generations, new research emerges that further validates our connections to our ancestors and how the lessons they learned are passed down to us on a genetic level. The legacy of colonization and genocide has had long-­lasting effects on the survivors from generation to generation. Over the past thirty years, research has been done to understand the psychological effects of colonization and genocide on generations of people who did not experience the initial traumas. In their 2018 article “Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma Effects” in World Psychiatry, Rachel Yehuda and Amy Lerhner report, “There is now converging evidence supporting the idea that offspring are affected by parental trauma exposures occurring before their birth, and possibly even prior to their conception.”4 The research they discuss has mainly been focused in three major areas: Holocaust survivors, indigenous populations, and more recently on slavery and its effects on the African American population. The effects of intergenerational trauma on current peoples is slowly becoming a diagnostic tool for patients suffering from various psychological disorders such as anxiety, depression, and even PTSD (post-­traumatic stress disorder).5 The research has mostly been focused on indigenous communities around the world, and the findings are being utilized to treat disorders that have no discernible root cause in a patient’s lifetime. Although at this point such treatments are seen as experimental and to some critics as “quack psychology,” the acknowledgment of intergenerational trauma has been effective in treating individuals in certain populations. A study done in 2015 looked at what reconnecting younger generations of Native Americans to elders and customs to which they had been cut off might reveal about a psychological legacy of colonization.6 A 1998 report titled “The American Indian Holocaust” refers to this legacy as “a continued intergenerational impact that has caused an array of social, physical, and mental health disparities; such collective experience of trauma is referred to in the literature as historical trauma.”7 In the 2015 study, the researchers interviewed Native American elders and learned that they considered the impacts of

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the traumas of colonization and genocide to be what the authors call “genetic memory components” and that “genetics actually hold a part of that [memory] and it is passed on to successive generations.”8 This analysis by the Native elders pairs quite well with recent scientific evidence identifying those genetic memories. For the purpose of this piece, I am utilizing The Two-­Eyed Seeing approach, which is “the blending of Indigenous and Western research methods, knowledge translation, and program development.”9 Two-­Eyed Seeing recognizes indigenous knowledge as a distinct and whole knowledge system that exists side by side with mainstream western science.10 Rachel Yehuda, a professor of psychiatry at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in Manhattan, has conducted a depth of research into epigenetics and the intergenerational transmission of trauma. In layman’s terms, she is researching how serious incidents of trauma such as slavery and holocaust and post-­traumatic stress disorder can be passed down through generations in shared family genes. Her research has revealed that when people experience trauma, it changes their genes in a very specific and noticeable way, so when those people have children and their genes are passed down to their children, the children also inherit the genes affected by trauma.11 When people go through periods of excessive stress, their experiences can alter how their genomes are expressed. An extra layer of information is placed on top of their descendants’ DNA sequences. The DNA sequence itself doesn’t change, but its “clothes” do, so to speak. Generally speaking, this is known as the vaguely defined field of epigenetics, which means “outside genetics.”12 The field of epigenetics is slowly catching up to what the Native American elders were telling researchers in the 2015 study.13 Although this field of study is in its infancy, the concepts of intergenerational trauma have been studied for years in very specific contexts such as the high rates of substance abuse and psychological disorders among indigenous youth. In the 1998 study of Native American youth, the findings were that “Native American youth suffer from psychosocial problems such as extremely high levels of substance abuse, violence, and suicidal behavior. For Native females, the mortality rate is 24% and for Native males, 35%; both are significantly higher rates than that for all races in the United States at 10.3%. . . . Alcoholism, suicide, and homicide death rates are higher for Native youth than youth in the population in general.”14 One of the prominent psychological researchers in this field is Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, who for years has studied the effects of intergenerational trauma on Native Americans. She has noted that this phenomenon is not strictly reserved for indigenous communities but is prominent in any

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group of people that has suffered the effects of colonization and oppression. Brave Heart and L. M. DeBruyn, authors of the 1998 study, note that common factors in those suffering from the effects of intergenerational trauma, such as “forced assimilation and cumulative losses across generations, including language, culture, and spirituality, contributed to the breakdown of family kinship networks and social structures. This historical legacy and the current psychosocial conditions contribute to ongoing intergenerational trauma.”15 Even though Brave Heart’s work is mostly focused on Lakota youth, there is an opening here to begin to see how Latino communities are also affected by intergenerational trauma. Latino people across all of the Americas suffer the same effects of colonization as indigenous folks. To some, we, as Latinos, are indigenous, and for others, we are cousins; still others do not even identify with their indigenous roots. However, what affects us all is the continuing legacy of colonization. Every different Latino population has a distinct experience with colonization, but here I focus on the trauma inflicted on the ethnic-­Mexican communities by the violence in South Texas in the 1910s known as La Matanza. Ethnic Mexicans now, a century later, are several generations removed from the atrocities of that time and are left with little or no knowledge of that traumatic period in our history. The period was marked by the terroristic reign of the Texas Rangers and other agents of law enforcement. Monica Muñoz Martinez connects Rangers to vigilantes as well: “In the name of policing the border, they [Texas Rangers] regularly collaborated with vigilantes to summarily execute residents and created a reign of social terror that denied residents their civil and social rights. Between 1910 and 1920, historians estimate that state agents and vigilantes murdered thousands of ethnic Mexicans.”16 This time in American history is rarely discussed in classrooms across Texas, much less across the United States, but these events led to a dramatic shift of power from Tejanos, who owned most of the lands in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, to prominent Anglo businessmen and ranchers. These non-­Hispanic new owners appear as the founding fathers of the Rio Grande Valley. David Montejano observes, “Most Texan historians agree that intimidation and fraud played an important part in the dispossession of rancheros (or small ranchers). . . . [N]ot only did the new American law fail to protect the Mexicans but it also was used as the major instrument of their dispossession.”17 This was done through the use of unethical and often illegal practices. “Sheriffs sold three times as many parcels for tax delinquency in the decade from 1904 to 1914 as they had from 1893 to 1903,” Benjamin Johnson has found. “These sales almost always transferred land from Teja-

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nos to Anglos. Because records of land ownership in the region had been poorly maintained when the land was less desirable, Anglo settlers could often challenge ownership in court.”18 Those affected included both landowners and the Mexican-­origin communities in the area, like that of my great-­grandfather and his family. What is more unnerving about the actions of the individuals involved in these criminal acts of terrorism against a population of their own fellow citizens is that no one was ever charged or held accountable for what happened during this time. This was simply labeled as progress and then erased from the history books. Martinez summarizes these actions well: “Overlapping colonial systems of racialized and gendered violence developed a social process of differentiation on the US–­Mexico border that regularly denied the privileges of citizenship to ethnic and racial minorities. Anti-­Mexican violence on the US–­Mexico border cannot be disentangled from the violence practiced in prior and concurrent state-­building initiatives.”19 It wasn’t until J. T. Canales, the only Mexican American member of the state legislature at the time, called for a hearing into the actions of the Texas Rangers in 1919. It was because of these seminal hearings that these activities of the Rangers were brought to light. It was also because of the hearings that the Texas Ranger Force was reduced in size, reorganized, and more strictly regulated. Even after the Texas Ranger Force was reduced and reorganized in light of the Canales hearings in 1919, those rinches became local law enforcement officers, such as the Hidalgo County sheriff and several city marshals, and the men who paid for the Ranger Force to terrorize ethnic Mexicans became the political and economic bosses of the area. The culture of fear that was instilled during La Matanza continued well into the 1960s and 1970s. My grandmother often whispered the stories of the rinches to me but always punctuated the stories with, “Don’t talk to the Anglos about this.” This, for me, left a legacy of trauma that I still do not completely understand. The legacy of La Matanza has stayed with me throughout my childhood and still stirs within me today. That is what led me to do the work I am doing now and to write the books I have written about these events. In intergenerational trauma research, the effects of trauma manifest in different ways for different people. In her 2005 study of Native American youth disconnected from their cultural histories and traditions, Kimberly Walker identifies generational differences: Trauma symptoms in the form of traumatic dream imagery and depressive ideation were reported by the majority of participants despite the majority of participants [having] reported growing up disconnected from their tribal

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cultures and customs. There was a generational difference in how participants gained knowledge of their history and culture in that all of the participants in the elder group [were] more likely to report gaining knowledge through a family elder.20

Although Walker is looking at Native Americans, this disconnection is often found in descendants of survivors of the violence earlier Mexican American communities suffered. Later generations are not taught this history but experience its repercussions. People affected by this type of intergenerational trauma deal with it in various ways.21 Brianna Tarpey, citing an earlier study, notes, [P]arents who are traumatized by terrorism transmit symptoms of experiencing terror to their children. Furthermore, traumatic parental experiences can interrupt the bonds of attachment between the children and parents, and exposure to terror can affect parenting, both of which may transmit trauma symptoms to the children or, in some cases, promote resilience.22

Resilience in Responding to Intergenerational Trauma The key to healing from intergenerational trauma is reclaiming one’s identity.23 Considerable research points to the importance of resilience in this process. In searching to reclaim one’s identity, three major forms of treatments have been effective: artistic expression, reconnection with elders, and the study and teaching of culturally relevant histories.24 As a writer and poet, my response and my personal form of healing has always been my writing. I chose to create a series of young-­adult novels and a series of poems that deal with the traumatic events of La Matanza. I have spent six years researching the violence of that period and interviewing descendants of those murdered or affected by the violence. In doing this research, I had two objectives in mind: to bring this untold history of Mexican Americans to the world and to create a positive figure to whom younger readers can relate. When I first tried to write this story that would eventually become El Rinche: The Ghost Ranger of the Rio Grande,25 I found that I didn’t know how to write it. All of the research and the concept for the characters were floating around in my head, but I didn’t know how to tell the story. When I say I didn’t know how to tell this story, I am referring to the aesthetics of the story. The telling of the story is very important for a creative writer. It is the engine that drives the narrative, and I couldn’t find

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the right engine to drive this story. That is, until I was introduced to Lin-­ Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton. In 2015, Miranda took the theater world by storm in telling the story of Alexander Hamilton in a hip-­hop musical with a cast of people of color. This approach married Miranda’s own love of American history with the music and experiences he knew. Because of this play, the aesthetics behind that style of writing historical pieces has been challenged, and this has opened the door for Latino writers to challenge their own aesthetics. Because of the success of Hamilton, an audience and a readership have become more open to a new approach to storytelling, one that institutes a cultural aspect to the writing of historical stories that challenges the traditional linear and formalist approaches to writing. This was a play about the United States’ first treasury secretary told as a story of an immigrant who becomes one of America’s most influential founding fathers. What makes this play unique is not that it is a hip-­hop musical with philosophical arguments about the formation of this country through rap battles. This play also challenges how historical writing is viewed, through Miranda’s casting of people of color in traditional and historical white roles. Aaron Burr was originally played by Leslie Odom Jr., an African American actor. The role of George Washington was also played by an African American, Christopher Jackson. Of course, the role of Alexander Hamilton was played by Miranda, a Puerto Rican actor, singer, and writer. This casting challenged the visual representation of America as white and opened up a whole new optic of American history. It is not merely a white history, but to quote a song from the play, “a story of immigrants” because “immigrants, they get the job done.” Miranda successfully told the story of America as an immigrant story and wrote the music in a truly American style: hip-­hop. This in itself is not new, but what makes Hamilton a sea change in Latino storytelling is that it was successful. Hamilton has gone on to become one of the highest-­grossing Broadway shows of all time. It has garnered several Tony Awards and even won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. The success of Hamilton has opened the door for other playwrights and writers to begin to challenge traditional aesthetics of telling historical stories. In the realm of fiction, there are writers like Rios de la Luz, who blends the stories of growing up on the border, sexual assault, and queerness through the lens of science fiction, surreality, and straight-­up gritty storytelling. In her collection of short stories, The Pulse between the Dimensions and the Desert, de la Luz writes, “It started with trauma. Nothing sci-­fi about it. No heavenly attributions. Just straight up time travel through trauma.”26 Choosing to tell her stories through the lens of surreal science fiction breaks

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barriers in Chicana forms of storytelling. Usually the use of magical realism is expected, but de la Luz chooses not to delve into the supernatural but rather the medium of science fiction in the tradition of David Lynch and Thomas Pynchon. This is new for Latino aesthetics in writing, and it challenges how we as Latino writers tell our stories, our traumas. In her story “Martian Matters,” the narrator’s abuela is always asking her about having a boyfriend, but since the narrator is queer, she only responds, “Grandma, no tengo un boyfriend.”27 Instead she confronts her queerness through this encounter with her first girlfriend: You wake up from a dream and you think it’s real, right? You meet your soulmate in a planetarium on Mars. She’s a Martian, you’re a human prototype, but you go down on each other anyway, beneath the cosmic replicas in the tiny fortress that overlooks the pale blue dot called earth and the real starts birthing themselves and exploding into nothingness. You wake up and she doesn’t exist. You do, but you’re not really sure why.28

De la Luz’s writing is a new turn in the Latino literature scene with this debut collection of short fiction, and her style challenges what Latino writing should be. This comes in the wake of the success of Miranda’s Hamilton. For me as a Chicano writer, Hamilton has influenced my own writing in my series of novellas. El Rinche, the protagonist, is a reimagining and flip of the script of an American popular culture icon. Set in the Rio Grande Valley of 1905–1921, this ghost ranger is Ascencion “Chonnie” Ruiz de Plata, the son of a wealthy ethnic-­Mexican rancher north of Brownsville, Texas, who is holding onto one of the last land grants in the Valley. In this story, the villains are the Texas Rangers and the Anglo families who hire the Rangers to terrorize the ethnic-­Mexican people. In this way, the Rangers act as the thugs who chase ethnic Mexicans into Mexico so Anglos can take their lands. El Rinche is trained by the historical figure Bass Reeves, “the real Lone Ranger,” an African American marshal in North Texas and Oklahoma on whose life and deeds a radio series was based.29 Chonnie is also trained by an ex-­ninja master who had grown bitter by the modernization of Japan and moved with his family to Port Isabel, Texas, to live as fishermen, as happened with some Japanese immigrants in South Texas. Chonnie’s constant companion is Tal’dos, a half-­Cherokee-­Carizo, two-­spirited female-­to-­ male transgender Indian who has sworn to kill as many Rangers as possible after they raped and murdered his mother. Tal’dos is also the child of Bass Reeves’s fictional law enforcement partner, Running Wolf, when he was a marshal. Running Wolf’s dying wish was for Bass to find Tal’dos because

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they had been estranged for most of Tal’dos’s life. These are the events that led Bass to travel to South Texas and get entangled in the stories’ adventures. At the beginning of the story, Tal’dos rescues Chonnie after the Rangers ambushed him, his brother, and his father and left him for dead. After Tal’dos nurses Chonnie back to health, the two vow to stop the Rangers at all costs from taking Tal’dos’s ranch and those of other ethnic Mexicans as well as to stop the terrorizing of ethnic-­Mexican people of the area. Knowing that they can’t simply be bandits, Chonnie decides to disguise himself as a Ranger or a ghost of a ranger and fight them from the shadows in which they never really know if he is a man or a ghost. The local people called him “El Rinche” or “El Rinche Fantasma” and are the only ones who know that he fights for the Mexican people. They tell his story through corridos, and for this book, the author Juan Ochoa has written the song “El Corrido del Rinche Fantasma.” The corrido is one of the major vehicles that mexicano people have used to tell the tales of their heroes.30 This was one of the culturally aesthetic choices I made in telling this story. I chose to write this book through the truth of these people’s lives mixed with my own experiences growing up on the borderlands. I chose to approach the telling of this story through the aesthetic of memory and how it actually works. Memory does not operate on a linear scale. It is not a straight line from the day someone is born to the point in time of the writer’s focus. It doesn’t work that way at all. It is more like Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-­ Five, in which memory is unstuck in time. In psychological terms, there are two types of memory, implicit and explicit memory. Implicit memory, L. R. Squire’s explains, “includes information acquired during skill learning, habit formation, simple classical conditioning, and other knowledge that is expressed through performance rather than recollection.”31 Katherine Nelson notes, “Explicit memory is the development of explicit, autobiographical memory. . . . [It] has been found to be markedly influenced by ‘memory talk’, in which adults (usually parents) talk to children about the contents of their memory.”32 What I am discussing is explicit memory, including memory told in story form. The best way this was explained to me as a student was by a former professor, the writer Paul Christensen, who said memory is like a magnetic ball in the subconscious, and it attracts other like memories, pulling them from all the recesses of the mind. They come not in linear order but by significance. For example, the smell of my aunt’s refried frijoles brings back a memory of my grandma’s refried beans when I was ten and then my mom’s refried beans when I was twenty. These memories come at me not in any particular order but rather by importance, in this case, the ones I loved the most. Sorry, Mom. This is how

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I approached writing El Rinche. The book is filled with references to songs, toys, and popular culture that I grew up with and mixed into the superhero story of Chonnie. When Inez had first met Chonnie, they were only eleven years old. She thought he was a gringo at first, but then he spoke, and she knew he was something else. It wasn’t just that they shared los ojos verdes. It was more than that. They were thick as thieves. But Chonnie didn’t get himself into trouble like los otros güercos. He liked books and daydreaming. He would help Inez with her reading and arithmetic, but she preferred chasing rabbits and playing in the resacas, even though they were rumored to have alligators. She only ever saw one, peeking its eyes above the waterline, and then just as quickly as it popped up, it was gone. Forever. But the one place that was theirs was el monte. In that monte, they sacrificed dozens of toy indios and bandidos to the jungle in the imaginary war against COBRA, a “ruthless organization determined to rule the world,” and with the help of los bandidos rojos and whatever toys were they could scrape together they had entire armies in that overgrown lot beyond the grazing grounds. Inez once had a figure, Zartan, that was supposed to change color in the sunlight. That is what the advertisement in the back of the catalogue Chonnie had gotten from San Antonio had said. They scraped together twenty cents and sent away for it. When it arrived, they laid it on the ground and waited for the sun to do its magic, but after a while of Zartan staying the same color, they were left unappeased by its unwillingness to change colors. Inez thought he still might be there buried under fifteen years’ worth of dried cracked soil and other forgotten toys.33

By bending the reality of how history is supposed to be told, I am honoring a tradition of writing that is uniquely from my own Chicano experience. My experience is always a mixture of Mexican and American cultures smashed together to create something new. Gloria Anzaldúa captures this borderland experience: “Like all people, we perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates. Like others having or living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-­consistent but habitually incomparable frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision.”34 I embrace that choque in my writing. I grew up in the small town of Donna, Texas, which is where my grandfather spent most of his life and where my father spent most of his life. My mother and her father grew up in Donna as well. My lineage is tied to the Rio Grande Valley for at least five generations, and to disregard my own

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experiences in the telling of this story would do a disservice to my history and the history of those affected by the violence of a century ago. I grew up with G.I. Joe and the Lone Ranger fighting each other behind glass marbles and the remnants of Power-­Prop Flying Glider airplanes. Ramon Ayala crooning in the background while my father barbequed and my grandfather cradled his Lone Star, his blue work shirt completely unbuttoned and sweat trickling down his chest. All the while wearing his faded white Stetson hat and staring out across our yard into the neighbors’. His stories would soon begin to roll out of him about the horrors of los pinches rinches. Even though I was an eight-­year-­old child listening to these tales, I knew they were important because they stuck with me and eventually became the focus of my work. I am now barely beginning to grasp the severity of the impact of La Matanza on me and my family, and I hope that I have come out on the other end of this intergenerational trauma through embracing the path of resilience. Through my writing I am acknowledging the damage done in that extremely violent time. Through my writing I am resisting the narrative of being a victim. Through my writing I know I am practicing healing, and by getting these books out into the world I am hoping to connect with others. There is a responsibility to healing that is rarely talked about. Healing is first for oneself, but it is not only for you because the damage that is inflicted upon you is also felt by those around you. Someone who is going through a healing process has a responsibility to share that knowledge and that process with others. Healing is not a solitary act; it is a communal act. Marianne Hirsch, in her work on Holocaust survivors, uses the term “postmemory.” She posits that members of the later generations “ ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up.”35 These memories, Hirsch explains, “were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.”36 The stories I carry are not verified in documents or photographs, even though some exist, but these stories have been told to me and transmit as much intergenerational memory as do the epigenetics of our DNA. Notes 1. James Baldwin, “The American Dream and the American Negro,” New York Times, March 7, 1965, archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/spe cials/baldwin-­dream.html. 2. Joy Harjo, A Map to the Next World: Poems and Tales (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 45. 3. Lewis Page, “Native Americans Arrived to Find Natives Already There, Fossil Poo Show,” The Register, July 13, 2012.

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4. Rachel Yehuda and Amy Lerhner, “Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma Effects: Putative Role of Epigenetic Mechanisms,” World Psychiatry 17, no. 3 (2018): 244. 5. Yehuda and Lerhner, “Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma Effects, 244. 6. Lisa Grayshield, Jeremy J. Rutherford, Sibella B. Salazar, Anita L. Mihecoby, and Laura L. Luna, “Understanding and Healing Historical Trauma: The Perspectives of Native American Elders,” Journal of Mental Health Counseling 37, no. 4 (2015): 301. 7. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart and L. M. DeBruyn, “The American Indian Holocaust: Healing Historical Unresolved Grief,” American Indian and Alaska Native Mental Health Research: Journal of the National Center 8, no. 2 (1998): 58. 8. Grayshield et al., “Understanding and Healing Historical Trauma,” 301. 9. Cheryl Bartlett, Murdena Marshall, Albert Marshall, and Marilyn Iwama, “Integrative Science and Two-­Eyed Seeing: Enriching the Discussion Framework for Healthy Communities,” in Ecosystems, Society, and Health: Pathways through Diversity, Convergence, and Integration, ed. Lars K. Hallström, Nicholas Guehlstorf, and Margot W. Parkes (Montreal: McGill-­Queens University Press, 2015), 280–326. 10. Naseba Marsh, Teresa, Sheila Cote-­Meek, Nancy L. Young, Lisa M. Najavits, and Pamela Toulouse, “Indigenous Healing and Seeking Safety: A Blended Implementation Project for Intergenerational Trauma and Substance Use Disorders,” International Indigenous Policy Journal 7, no. 2 (2016): 3–43. 11. Yehuda and Lerhner, “Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma Effects,” 4. 12. Cath Ennis, “Epigenetics 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Explaining Everything,” The Guardian, April 25, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/science/occams -­corner/2014/apr/25/epigenetics-­beginners-­guide-­to-­everything. 13. Grayshield et al., “Understanding and Healing Historical Trauma,” 301. 14. Brave Heart and DeBruyn, “American Indian Holocaust,” 60. 15. Brave Heart and DeBruyn, “American Indian Holocaust,” 8. 16. Monica Muñoz Martinez, “Recuperating Histories of Violence in the Americas: Vernacular History-­Making on the US–­Mexico Border,” American Quarterly 66, no. 3 (2014): 662. 17. David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), 51–52. 18. Benjamin Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 35. 19. Martinez, “Recuperating Histories of Violence,” 662. 20. Kimberly Walker, “An Exploration of the Transmission of Historical Trauma in Urban Native Americans” (PhD diss., Alliant International University, 2005), 2. 21. Walker, “Exploration of the Transmission of Historical Trauma,” 3. 22. Brianna Tarpey, “Addressing Intergenerational Trauma as Part of Trauma-­ Informed School Programs” (master’s thesis, Saint Mary’s College of California, 2017). 23. Marsh et al., “Indigenous Healing and Seeking Safety,” 9. 24. On reconnection with elders, see Grayshield et al., “Understanding and Healing Historical Trauma.” On culturally relevant histories, see Marsh et al., “Indigenous Healing and Seeking Safety.”

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25. Christopher Carmona, El Rinche: The Ghost Ranger of the Rio Grande (Lubbock, TX: Jade, 2018). 26. Rios de la Luz, The Pulse between the Dimensions and the Desert (Tigard, OR: Ladybox, 2015), 46. 27. De la Luz, Pulse between the Dimensions, 1. 28. De la Luz, Pulse between the Dimensions, 2. 29. Art T. Burton, Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 13. 30. Américo Paredes, “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958), 12. 31. L. R. Squire, “Declarative and Non-­Declarative Memory: Multiple Brain Systems Supporting Learning and Memory,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (1992): 233. 32. Katherine Nelson, “Events, Narratives, Memory: What Develops?,” in Memory and Affect in Development: The Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology, vol. 26, ed. Charles A. Nelson (New York: Psychology, Taylor and Francis, 1993), 240. 33. Carmona, El Rinche, 35. 34. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 2012), 78. 35. Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (2008): 105. 36. Hirsch, “Generation of Postmemory,” 106.

CHAPTER 13

Stewarding the Personal Narratives of Painful History Margaret Koch

All I knew was that my grandfather had died. They didn’t say murdered. Just that he died. . . . I think it was too painful. H. F. Longoria, McAllen, Texas

Memory is a powerful tool. Aristotle wrote that “memory relates to the past.” While a common first reaction to that statement might be “Well, of course it does,” Humanities at Stanford examined the connection of memory and history more recently through its “History, Memory, and Reconciliation” series of events and research projects.1 In an interview about the study, Assistant Professor of English Saikat Majumdar refers to “memory as a document of culture.”2 That intersection of experience, memory, and documentation of the past is seen perhaps most overtly in the museum experience of today. In response to self-­examination of their relevance in communities and the sustainable support of their patrons, many museums across the United States have shifted in recent decades toward presenting a more accessible storytelling approach to history. Museums have reemphasized the power and importance of memory, oral history, and tradition passed down through generations as having an impact on understanding the historical narrative. In this approach, communities become the center around which successful cultural institutions design their programming. In its “Code of Ethics for Museums,” the American Alliance of Museums lists among its core standards that “the museum identifies the communities it serves, and makes appropriate decisions in how it serves them” and “asserts its public service role and places education at the center of that role.”3 Recognized as an accredited institution of the American Alliance of Museums, the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin works to adhere to the alliance’s standards

Stewarding Narratives of Painful History 245

Figure 13.1. Opening tableau of Life and Death on the Border, 1910–1920 exhibit.

Courtesy, Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum.

and an all-­encompassing mission to “engage the broadest possible audience to interpret the continually unfolding Story of Texas through meaningful educational experiences.”4 The museum’s core values stress leadership, excellence, accessibility, diversity, engagement, and relevance. Those primary values permeate the culture of the Bullock Museum and the way staff guides the development and implementation of all aspects of its educational programming. Few things spur on a historian, educator, or curator to begin a new project more than wanting to fight against the proliferation of misinformation, historical inaccuracy, or lack of context being touted in the public sphere. History museums are in a unique position to do so, as they are seen as among the most trustworthy of sources.5 There is still work to be done to determine whether the approximately 35,000 museums in the United States actually merit that trust from their communities, especially when visitor studies suggest people are coming to museums as a leisure experience.6 If we accept that visitors are being honest as to why they are coming, then we must ask what challenges we face when our mission is to inform, connect, and make relevant the historical narrative as well as to entertain on a personal level. Exhibition developers and curators often use first-­person narratives to help visitors reflect on how the world in which they find themselves came

246  Margaret Koch

to be in ways that, ideally, instigate an emotional connection. Such narratives may have a stronger impact and be remembered longer because of that emotional connection.7 Among many museum professionals there is a greater appreciation that our collective understanding of history is evolving with each new discovery and that history is actually very personal. The Bullock Museum made this truth the foundation on which it developed its 2018 permanent exhibition Becoming Texas. The telling of that history, while including well-­researched primary sources—the tangible, cultural evidence of our development and existence as a state—has meaning attached to it by audiences, many of whom have lived with the deeply personal legacy of past events. Some events were joy-­filled, others quite painful. If memory is passed down through successive generations, then so can be the emotion that accompanies the memories. The telling of history is fairly straightforward when the events or people being highlighted are beautiful, inspiring, and peaceful or as people persevering against all odds at little cost to others, the inspiring hero narrative. The path to exhibition development becomes more complex when the history to be revealed must necessarily include those narratives that were painful and remain so to modern-­day generations. To tackle the telling of these subjects, a more thoughtful approach is required, with special attention to not just what history is being told but who has the authority and legitimacy to tell it and how. Origins of an Exhibition In January 2014 the Bullock Texas State History Museum was contacted by another state agency with which the museum had frequently partnered, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission. A proposal for an exhibition had been submitted by a group of historians and supported by a well-­respected state representative. John Morán González, Trinidad Gonzales, Sonia Hernández, Benjamin Johnson, and Monica Muñoz Martinez, with the support of Representative Terry Canales, presented a thoughtful approach to revealing the depths to which Texas’s past had been withheld from a greater public awareness and the impact of that era today. Without the physical space to undertake a project on the scale suggested, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission reached out to see if the museum might take on the project. The proposed exhibition was designed to bring past events to the wider public awareness by commemorating the centennial of racially motivated

Stewarding Narratives of Painful History 247

violence along the Texas-­Mexico border.8 Intrigued by the possibility that this project could become something long-­lasting and impactful to community members, we entered into conversations with the historians to determine its feasibility. It could be argued that much of Texas’s formative history is brutal and bloody. The characteristics so often admired in those identified as heroes in Texas history are in reality also loaded with the baggage of human complexity, their successes and failures frequently acquired at the expense of someone else. Here then was a history involving state-­sanctioned violence as recent as the dawn of the twentieth century, the modern era, a time often heralded as one of innovation and progress. As the team at the Bullock Museum learned through the process of exhibition development, the violence had roots deeper and further into the past, with ramifications for the present. A more thorough look was then given to the narrative about principal characters who had primarily been seen as heroic persons in textbooks and prior exhibitions, as well as in popular culture since the 1930s, and the undertaking brought additional responsibilities to the state’s official history museum. In its primary role as the state museum of Texas, the Bullock Museum must be responsive to numerous stakeholders, including legislators, local and statewide taxpayers, and thousands of national and international visitors each year of all ages and cultural and economic backgrounds. More than 100,000 visitors a year are on school field trips, as Texas history is a mandatory subject taught in fourth and seventh grades. The museum’s entire ethos is built on relations with program partners and artifact lenders, as the museum does not collect artifacts but does produce media archives, and most importantly those who walk through its doors or use its online resources; the Bullock Museum focuses on a visitor-­centric approach. Exhibitions at the Bullock Museum are based primarily on artifacts and the stories they tell; it is what sets most museum experiences apart from all other media. Museums require the display of tangible evidence that artifacts, in the broadest sense of the word, bring to the public. Archival documents, maps, three-­dimensional objects, oral histories, artwork, and so forth all provide portals through which greater understanding is nurtured. Receiving numerous requests and ideas for exhibitions every year, the Bullock Museum staff considers each proposal thoroughly and reviews everything from how the proposal furthers the mission of the institution to the availability of experts, audience appeal, potential supporting programming, relevance, and marketability, as well as budget and schedule considerations. External consultants, experts in the field either from personal experience

248  Margaret Koch

or scholarly study, play a critical role in the exhibition development process. In the best relationships, the museum staff members, who understand the audience and expectations, and its advisers form a symbiotic connection that results in an accurate and engaging experience by combining artifacts, label text, imagery, and media to encourage learning by the visitor. Each side listens to and challenges the other to ensure accuracy and understand the possibilities and the limitations of the medium of exhibition. The result of that partnership between the museum and the historians who brought this proposal forward was Life and Death on the Border, 1910–1920, an exhibition on view from January 23, 2016, through April 3, 2016. It is still in circulation, to some extent, on the museum’s website.9 Related programming inspired by the exhibition included teacher-­enrichment seminars that reached capacity, several first-­person stories submitted to the online archive, the Texas Story Project, and an online tribute to música tejana. The exhibition was heralded not just in the local Austin American-­Statesman but in press as far-­reaching as the El Paso Times, the Guardian of London, Slate, and the Journal of American History. In recognition of its innovative presentation of public history, the exhibit received an Award of Merit for Excellence from the prestigious American Association for State and Local History in 2016. These acknowledgments, while greatly appreciated, don’t fully capture the two years of collaboration, trust building, and negotiations that resulted in the exhibition or the risk factors that the museum might face in committing to a project that would present for visitor understanding the role of key instigators in the history portrayed—the iconic and often memorialized Texas Rangers. Yes, those Rangers. The legendary men of mythic valor and popular culture, the Texas star–­badge-­wearing, Wild West–­taming, 1930s Bonnie and Clyde–­capturing, 1990s Chuck Norris Walker, Texas Ranger, don’t-­mess-­with-­my-­heroes-­since-­the-­1930s Rangers.10 Starting at the Beginning The planning team faced numerous questions in its initial meetings. Was the Bullock Museum the right institution to share this history? Perhaps that was the easiest of the questions to answer, with an unequivocal yes: state museum, state history, lasting state implications. What tangible evidence still existed in the twenty-­first century to convey the complexity and nuances of the story? As so often happens when history of those marginalized has been suppressed, exhibition developers needed to dig deeply and think broadly to locate artifacts that provided a portal into

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the history. In this case, the state’s own record of hearings convened in 1919 regarding atrocities provided the starting point. The advisers’ previous research and connections with descendants who were willing to share photographs, artifacts, and most importantly for this exhibition, family narratives established the foundation on which the museum could build the exhibition. What would visitors need to know about the context of the period in order to be drawn into a history that was not very uplifting and make that personal connection needed for understanding? For the average visitor, 1900 is a long time ago. Adding to the goal a desire to dispel myths and encourage deeper analysis of what has been taught in most school textbooks and seen frequently in popular culture, the challenge grows. Examining a time of revolution in a neighboring country and a world war, visitors’ eyes begin to blur with keeping track of it all. Yet those pieces of the puzzle could not be left out of the exhibition conversation. The stoking of underlying fears fueled by revolution and war, privilege, and economics threaded its way into the racism that smoldered under the surface of the South Texas community life at the time and surfaces often through US history and geography. The team and advisers determined that the most productive way to begin to draw people into the story would be with the familiar, personal, and nonthreatening and reveal those nuances throughout, which led to the next question. What assumptions and prejudices were the average museum visitors arriving with regarding ethnic Mexicans and Latinos, who had a major role in the land called Tejas long before Anglo settlers migrated? There were many stereotypes, and advisers had experienced them firsthand. The team acknowledged the need to emphasize and reestablish the historical fact that Latinos and ethnic Mexicans had long familial legacies in Texas going back many generations. They were landowners, politicians, ranchers, and business owners who had contributed greatly to the history of the state. They had agency to direct their lives, and so they were not simply the poor victims of others’ actions against them. Perhaps that is one of the most difficult historical conditions to portray in any exhibition without inviting revictimization. The team had to determine the best methods to acknowledge in artifacts and images the horror of murder. One could argue that in the twenty-­first century, most households are bombarded with news headlines, games, and television shows that depict murder daily, but returning to the question of expectations, most visitors do not expect to encounter such violence (even in Texas) during their museum visits. Was there a way to present the systemic lynching of a population without revictimizing the men, women, and children who were murdered or causing more pain to their descendants? This was and remains a pain-­filled story.

250  Margaret Koch

The murders devastated families, and justice after the hearings fell short by today’s standards. Visitors would include those descendants whose ancestors had been attacked. We personally invited them, and they entrusted us with their stories. Several told of hushed conversations around kitchen tables, understanding only that something terrible and fear-­inducing had occurred. Ultimately, this remained their story, one that had not yet been validated fully by any state institution since 1919. The museum was now stewarding the narrative, facilitating the telling of a very personal, often very private history; the trust placed in the museum to do so accurately was sacred, to them, our advisers, and our staff. We also had to determine at which point in history the exhibition would end. Was there hope and self-­determination on the heels of the Canales hearings in 1919, or was there more to be told? The Canales hearings, officially the Joint Committee of the Senate and the House in the Investigation of the Texas Ranger Force, resulted in a verdict that did not indict the Texas Rangers for wrongdoing but did recommend a reduction in the force. Texas State Representative José Tomás ( J. T.) Canales (1877–1976), who called for the hearings to investigate the Rangers’ use of indiscriminate force without trial against those appearing to be ethnic Mexicans and endured threats against his life for doing so, had very few of his other recommendations approved. Yet, wives and mothers had risked their lives to testify, and out of a time of violence, a time of increased solidarity among ethnic Mexicans and Latinos would emerge, and with it, the founding the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and a rebirth of artistic expression. The exhibition would end with a room devoted to the authors, artists, protesters, and musicians who carried on the culture of their ancestors in the ensuing decades. Was the exhibition intended to be a memorial to those who were murdered during the violence? A conscientious decision was made by the Bullock Museum that this would not be a memorial. Our role was to facilitate the sharing of the historical narrative. There were other, better-­suited locations for such memorials, and the Refusing to Forget project has since been able to work with the Texas Historical Commission to have historical markers raised in several locations around Texas. The museum’s role was to present the story, to reveal a history that had not been widely told in the public sphere. No museum is neutral in facilitating such a narrative, as curators make choices all the time based on what is available to them and on what they believe visitors can consume within a particular time and space. The Bullock Museum has adopted a role as advocate for the telling of those stories that are not widely known or appreciated, as well as those that are

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familiar, all of which help us understand how we got to where we are today. In the words of the museum’s late founder, Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock (1929–1999), “If we don’t know where we’ve been, we sure don’t know where we’re going.”11 The staff was aware, however, that visitors will always bring their own experiences with them on their visits and that by being sensitive to the emotions that might be wrapped up in those experiences, visitors’ memories might be triggered by what they saw, read, and heard throughout the exhibition. That necessitated a thoughtful and multistep process of artifact selection, imagery, and copyediting of label text in English and Spanish, as the exhibition was bilingual. One of the most moving moments I witnessed occurred early in the installation of a large introductory graphic panel prior to the public opening. The contractor installing the mural, on a ladder six feet in the air, stopped in his motions of smoothing the image against the wall and paused to read the words in front of him. He immediately pulled out his mobile phone to make a call and, in Spanish, related to whoever was on the other end what the exhibition was about; essentially, the state museum was telling the history of their people. An exceptionally good exhibition is always determined by how frequently the sharing of experience with others happens and by how much it inspires and furthers conversation and learning. The exhibition had not yet opened, but it was beginning to have that effect. An overarching question we at the museum had to consider was, what might be potential backlash from museum constituents and stakeholders? If we proceeded as we intended to do, what talking points might staff members need in order to navigate concerns raised by visitors or the press? We were well aware that there were numerous Texas Ranger supporters who might feel threatened by a telling of a more complete history and want to deny that atrocities had occurred or that they did not matter or were justified. Because the historical record might not match their understanding of that history or what they had been promoting, there would be the potential threat of criticism of the museum that could affect the support of stakeholders. This was not new territory for staff. A few years before undertaking Life and Death on the Border, the museum hosted a showing of the 2004 documentary Border Bandits by filmmaker Kirby F. Warnock. The presentation included a group of panelists and questions from the audience and proved popular and overall uncontroversial. The Bullock Museum had not shied away from developing and presenting the more disagreeable but honest side of Texas history, including the story of immigration to Texas in the traveling exhibition Forgotten Gateway:

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Coming to America through Galveston Island in 2009, under the curatorship of Suzanne Seriff of the University of Texas at Austin. There were precedents for discussing racism, economics, and violence within educational programming at the museum. The museum first and foremost based Life and Death on the Border on primary documents, not the least of which was the three-­volume set of typed transcripts from the legislative hearings created by the state, held in their original form by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, and published online by the commission.12 The team felt that any charges of “revisionist history” could be easily refuted. In addition, the development team kept the executive team fully informed at all times and used staff meetings to help the wider museum staff understand the exhibition and how best to promote it. As a result of this preparatory work, unfavorable reviews of the exhibition were limited to two posts by independent bloggers. The overwhelming outpouring of favorable and thoughtful press reviews and critiques of the exhibition served to highlight the public’s readiness to learn more about a collective, complex story and openness to handle topics that challenged a glossier perspective of Texas history. Two hundred visitor surveys were collected by the museum staff over the course of several months in 2018 using the Visitors Count! research program of the American Association for State and Local History. In those results, Bullock Museum visitors overwhelming identified themselves as being in favor of learning about the complexity of Texas history and its relevance for them today. The Exhibition Script development for an exhibition unfolds like a theatrical script in many respects. After an initial outline or storyboard, sections, like scenes, unfold, with the physical space of the gallery providing the boundaries. As curator for the Bullock Museum, Jennifer Cobb Peterson divided the exhibition into primary, linear themes, as the timeline for the events themselves was determined to be the best way to walk visitors through the story. The introduction makes clear what the exhibition was about: Beautiful and dynamic, yet also unforgiving, the borderlands between Texas and Mexico have been home to diverse populations for generations. When Mexico ceded territory to the United States at the end of war in 1848, these Native American, Spanish, and Mexican descendants became US citizens as white settlers rushed to south Texas. It was a migration that would change

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economic and political power in the region, divide communities, and deepen racial tensions with lethal consequences. Fueled by a revolution that spilled over the border from Mexico into Texas, long-­standing fears and prejudices gave rise to vigilantism and retaliation. Texans would witness and perpetrate some of the worst state-­sanctioned racial violence in US history. The aftermath of the violence would rekindle a fight for civil rights.13

Large-­format images with years and text overlays cued visitors to the rest of the exhibition’s sections: Life on the Border 1900, 1904; Rebellion and Resistance 1915, 1919; 1920–­Present, Refusing to Forget. The gallery itself is in an open rotunda, providing vistas that draw visitors further into the space, with a side gallery in which the last section of the exhibition, 1920–­Present, Refusing to Forget, was displayed. It might be easy to assume that since among the largest group of museum visitors are those with some degree of college education, visitors to the Bullock Museum have a solid understanding of basic US and Texas history. However, visitor surveys across the decades and those done internally by the Bullock Museum dating back to 2011 show that while many adult visitors might know bits and pieces of their history, few have retained what was covered in school. Not wanting visitors to be frustrated by the place they are patronizing by making assumptions about what they know and in the process make them feel stupid about what they don’t know and inhibiting an enjoyable learning environment, museums have found it helpful to provide baseline information about a subject for clarity. For example, creating a large graphic map of Texas, the exhibition team identified exactly what geographic area was meant in referring to “the Border”: The 1,900 mile-­long United States-­Mexican border spans six Mexican states—Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas—and four US states—California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. 1,254 of those miles are found in Texas and delineated by the Rio Grande, where the vast, mostly rural expanse stretches from the border towns of El Paso/Ciudad Juarez in the west to Brownsville/Matamoros in the Lower Rio Grande Valley.14

The visual representation with the definition helped visitors place themselves in the landscape, even though they were physically 350 miles east of the borderlands in the central Texas rolling-­hill country, where Austin is situated. Given the significantly violent nature of the story that was being re-

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vealed throughout the exhibition and stereotypes visitors might have regarding Mexican Americans, the exhibition team decided to highlight artifacts ­related to family life immediately at the entrance of the exhibition. A 1902 custom-­made, lace wedding dress and matching Parisian shoes worn by María de Jesús Treviño de la Garza Falcón, descended from a prosperous Tejano family who had been in Texas since 1747, greeted visitors and provided a connection that was very human and celebratory. Relics of devotion and items of daily labor began to paint an image of family, home, faith, and community that would be relatable to visitors from other cultural backgrounds. The section beginning with the year 1904 began to introduce the controversial role of economic development and the growth of the railroads, Anglo settlers and speculators, the disenfranchisement of some long-­standing borderland Tejano families, and the resilience of others. Highlighting those economic changes, artifact label copy drew visitors deeper into the changing demographics and hinted at racial strife: In the span of a decade, land values increased astronomically with the arrival of the railroad. Undeveloped farm and ranch land rose from $5 to $50 an acre to $100 to $300 an acre. Conflicts over property ownership intensified as land grants remained complicated and poorly recorded. Many Tejanos were forced by legal challenges, fraud, or physical threats to sell portions of their lands to Anglo settlers and search for other livelihoods. From 1900 to 1910, Tejano landowners lost a total of more than 187,000 acres to Anglo speculators in Cameron and Hidalgo counties alone. More and more Tejanos were reduced to fieldwork, helping to enrich the farmers whose arrival brought Tejanos’ dispossession.15

Wherever possible, published accounts from the time reinforced the underlying history, such as this quote from La Crónica, a Spanish-­language newspaper in Laredo, Texas, of May 7, 1910: “The lands which mainly belonged to Mexicans pass to the hands of Americans. . . . The old proprietors work as laborers on the same lands that used to belong to them.” The use of sources from the period helped the exhibition messaging to come through in the actual voices of the time rather than through contemporary interpretation that a museumgoer might suspect has a hidden agenda. But again, museums are not neutral in their selections; they are curating those voices that will have the biggest impact and resonate most with their visitor demographics. By the time Bullock Museum visitors approached the 1910 date on the timeline, the stage was set for specific accounts of violence perpetrated by

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vigilantes. Newspaper articles from both sides of the US-­Mexican border show how the press was even then influencing people’s perceptions of events, in this case the lynching of Antonio Rodríguez in Rocksprings, Texas. ARIZONA REPUBLICAN, “TEXAS FIRE HAS SPREAD,” NOVEMBER 10, 1910 EL DEMOCRATA FRONTERIZO, “LAS MANIFESTACION ES ANTI-­A MERICANISTAS EN MEXICO,” NOVEMBER 19, 1910

These two newspaper articles, both about the lynching of Antonio Rodriguez, demonstrate different views of the case—one from the Anglo viewpoint, the other from the Mexican perspective. With many citizens using the newspapers for updates, journalists and editors influenced public perceptions of every event by what they chose to include or leave out of articles.16

Visitors reached 1915 in their journey through the exhibition with more knowledge of US concerns over Germany’s overtures to the Mexican government as a potential strategic partner in World War I and the chaos of the Mexican Revolution. They could then approach Texas Ranger artifacts and historical interpretation that painted a different image of the Rangers than that portrayed by the chivalrous and daring Lone Ranger or Walker, Texas Ranger of Hollywood fame. Texas Governor James Ferguson called on the Texas Rangers to restore order along the border. The state legislature authorized mass inductions and the immediate creation of new companies. By 1916, hundreds of untrained Rangers patrolled the state. Ranger captains led their men in a reign of terror and intimidation, launching their own brand of lynch law against Mexicans and Tejanos on suspects and innocent alike. From 1915 to 1916, at least 300 “suspected Mexicans,” the majority American citizens, were executed by hanging or shooting on the Texas side of the Rio Grande without any trial or conviction. Criticism of the Rangers’ actions came from within US army leadership, who argued their lack of restraint exacerbated an already bad situation. Major General Frederick Funston’s repeated complaints prompted the Texas adjutant general and Governor James Ferguson to issue formal orders to Ranger officers that they “prevent the execution of all Mexicans except by due process of law.” 17

Central to this section was acknowledging the human toll through artifacts and images in particular. Distinguished faces peering at the camera, men and women of stature, are seen in family portraits. The image requiring the most sensitivity came in the form of a commemorative postcard of 1915.

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The photograph is a striking one and not unlike the souvenir postcards depicting the lynchings of African Americans that circulated around the same time period. Dead men lying in the dusty scrub of west Texas, ropes around their feet held by Texas Rangers on horseback, were relegated to the mere and inaccurate title of “Dead Mexican Bandits, 1915.” With the research of the scholarly advisers, the museum was able to share more information about the postcard within the exhibition. Texas Rangers and local vigilantes exerted little effort to distinguish between rebellious Tejanos and residents not taking part in the uprising. Shortly after a Mexican raid on the Norias Ranch, unknown assailants killed four Tejanos found in the area—three of whom were identified as Abraham Salina, Eusebio Hernández, and Juan Tobar. The following morning, three Texas Rangers including Captains William Hanson and James Monroe Fox posed with their lassos around the lifeless bodies. The picture soon circulated as a souvenir postcard, dehumanizing those slain and prompting outrage amongst Tejanos. Postcards depicting violence against minorities were common novelties during the early 20th century.18

The decision was made to show the actual postcard, one of a series, and to also use a large-­format graphic of the Rangers on horseback as the backdrop to the 1915 timeline wall without showing the murdered men at the horse’s feet. The intentional cropping of the image at large scale highlighted the power of the Rangers without revictimizing the men murdered. In an era when families were too frightened at times to even go out into the desert to reclaim the bodies of their loved ones, we wanted to show respect for the deceased, without sugarcoating the atrocities committed. During the run of the exhibition, a family contacted the curator about using portraits of their ancestors, Jesús Bazán and his family, in the exhibition. While the museum would not typically rearrange a temporary exhibition to add artifacts, the family’s trust in us with their history made it imperative that we do just that. With slight shifts in the display of other artifacts, we were able to include the Bazán family story a month after the exhibition opening. The flexibility of any museum to adjust its plan in response to new information has become more imperative. The centerpiece of the 1919 thematic section of the exhibition was the investigation of the Rangers, with the original three-­volume set of testimony transcripts on loan from the Texas State Library and Archives Commission. It was the first time the volumes had been on public view. The label copy states, “[B]ecause the hearings’ content reflected so poorly on the organiza-

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tion, copies of the hearing transcripts were not made accessible to the public until the 1970s.”19 The volumes remained closed to limit the potential for light exposure to fade the type, while an iPad nearby encouraged visitors to search the first-­person testimonies to read the accounts in digital format. Except for those families who lived with the aftermath and the few newspaper accounts of the hearings, the darker days of the Rangers began to fade from memory, and a new, more heroic image of the Ranger appeared in popular culture and entered the psyche of the American public, with those of Mexican descent portrayed frequently as the lawless outsiders in need of Ranger justice. But in real life, Latinos were still combating the injustice that seemed ever present. The last section of the exhibition dealt with the issues faced by US citizens from “Juan Crow” laws and the formation of unions and leagues such as LULAC, in 1929, that were designed to advance the interests of Latinos. Literature, movies, music, and artwork spurred on a cultural renaissance that brought people together and preserved their heritage in the face of obstacles, highlighting once more the power of working together for a common cause. Transformative Response and Lasting Effects During the three-­month run of the exhibition, more than 49,000 visitors came through the Bullock Museum. The museum’s reputation for taking on challenging projects with modern-­day relevance, the exhibition team’s depth of research, collaborations with distinguished advisers, and the building of trust with lenders have had lasting repercussions. In 2019 the museum cohosted a symposium, recognized by the Texas State Senate and House on the anniversary of the Canales hearings, entitled “Reverberations of Memory, Violence, and History: A Conference for the Centennial of the 1919 Canales Investigation.” Legislative resolutions, signed by the president of the state Senate, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, and Speaker of the House Dennis Bonnen, paid tribute to J. T. Canales and underscored that the investigation “stands as a pivotal episode that helped document racial injustice in the United States.”20 With the incentive of the conference and the anniversary, the museum placed into its core history galleries artifact rotations again telling the story of the violence and the formation of LULAC that followed. Life and Death on the Border was not the first bilingual exhibition the museum had mounted, but it reinforced bilingual labeling as important to visitors. Over the next few years, the Bullock Museum will be transform-

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ing each section of its core history galleries to English and Spanish, with every temporary exhibition originated by its development team being presented in both languages. The multigenerational effect this has on learning, when older generations whose first language is Spanish can assume the role of teacher with the younger generations, is critical to this constituency embracing the museum as a welcoming place for them where their history is valued. The Bullock Museum has always taken a practical yet in-­depth approach to its educational projects before proceeding to allocate resources, human and financial, based on best practices developed over decades in the museum profession.21 Does the project first and foremost further the mission of the institution and have the potential for an outstanding and impactful visitor experience? Does it further the understanding of Texas history in all its complexities and give platform to multiple perspectives and voices? Is its foundation sound, historical, accurate research? Does the planning team have the bandwidth to successfully complete the project in the projected time frame with available or anticipated resources for the audience that it hopes to reach? Is it marketable? This latter question is important because the museum relies on admission fees as well as donor funding for most of its annual operating budget, which includes special programs. And again, not the least of the questions to be answered is what the possible repercussions are of taking on a historically sensitive topic. It is not unusual for a museum to self-­censor to attempt to mitigate risk and controversy. If, however, a museum examines anticipated backlash from as many angles as possible, asking, “What is the worst that can happen?,” then it is in a better position to develop a strategy for response. This includes developing talking points that stakeholders invest in and adhere to when discussing why the project was produced. For a history museum, this might entail primary sources and material that provide the impetus; for a science museum, it might be contemporary scientific test results and experiments visitors do in the gallery themselves. When this critical step of self-­analysis is missed, the museum and its stakeholders may come under fire and face a difficult road in reestablishing trust with stakeholders and community members. There are numerous examples of museums being unprepared for public response when the full history of an event or artifact is revealed. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s 2003 planned reinterpretation of the Enola Gay created disagreement among advisers, underestimated the emotions attached to the plane by US veterans, and was ultimately scrapped, much to the chagrin of historians.22 Another example is History Colorado’s

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earlier-­than-­planned closure of its 2012 Sand Creek Massacre exhibition after descendants and tribal historians charged that tribes were not consulted in the process of its creation.23 In contrast, the Minnesota Historical Society’s 2012 exhibition on the US-­Dakota War, developed by thorough research and consultation with tribal nations, was heralded by historians and American Indians for its accurate and honest look at the era and its legacy.24 Stakeholders include advisers, community members, descendants, artists whose work is being shown, board members, funders, and even businesses being portrayed, and each decision made by an exhibition planning team needs to be carefully weighed and examined beyond the historical perspective. Without stakeholder support, the institution places itself in a precarious position. Ultimately the questions must honestly examine controversial issues. The risk may be worth it, especially when the result brings to light what has been hidden or whitewashed or unknown. Each institution’s leadership must make that determination for the institution. The Bullock Museum was able to handle comments from the few who took issue with the interpretation presented because it had the material culture and state historical record as the basis for the exhibition, as well as the support of primary stakeholders, and had thoughtfully prepared messaging that resonated with the press and the museum audience. Some of that criticism was rooted in the belief that the museum existed to simply promote a history that looked at the victories of Texas heroes rather than the legacy inherent in a comprehensive view of how Texas came to be and at what cost. The Bullock Museum’s founders had the foresight to mandate innovative and up-­to-­date research as well as serving diverse audiences for new projects. But the museum staff also did not ignore the strong emotional connection that descendants of those persecuted, as well as twenty-­first-­ century supporters of the Texas Rangers, brought with them into the exhibition. Imagery, artifacts that were once held by very real persons, subjective newspaper headlines, and first-­person testimony have more than an intellectual effect on visitors; they have the power to evoke a visceral one. And that point of contact can either draw people in to explore and learn more or shut them down because the proposed exploration is too painful or too unfamiliar and thus easily dismissed. The museum staff, knowing and understanding their visitors and having the invaluable support of capable advisers, ultimately presented Life and Death on the Border as a very human journey. The overwhelming response from visitors highlighted that success in drawing the public into the story rather than pushing them away or abandoning it. That is the power of ex-

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hibition as a medium for understanding. The groundbreaking collaborative “Value of History Statement,” a document developed by a national group of scholars and museum leaders concerned about the marginalization of history within the United States, recognizes the potential benefits of sharing stories: “History nurtures personal and collective identity in a diverse world. People discover their place in time through stories of their families, communities, and nation. These stories of freedom and equality, injustice and struggle, loss and achievement, and courage and triumph shape people’s personal values that guide them through life.”25 That personal connection related to identity and the experience shared with the staff by descendants who see for the first time their family’s pain-­filled history acknowledged by a state institution will continue to help the museum build relations and trust within the communities served. With partnerships, the museum will be able to bring to light new research and the material culture of previously marginalized voices to reveal a collective history. Having established the criteria for what, how, and when the team undertakes challenging projects in the future to meet its mission, the Bullock Museum will continue to take on those subjects that have lasting impact and can be used as a model by other museums across the country. As more and more previously marginalized voices are brought to light, we will begin to see a more honest, comprehensive, and complex history revealed. Notes Epigraph: H. F. Longoria, quoted in David McLemore, “The Forgotten Carnage between Hispanics, Rangers,” Dallas Morning News, November 27, 2004. Heriberto F. Longoria Jr.’s grandfather, the rancher, landowner, and respected business leader Antonio Longoria, along with Jesús Bazán, was shot in the back and killed in September 1915 by Texas Rangers. No one was arrested or tried for the murders. Longoria’s story and family photos were featured in the exhibition Life and Death on the Border 1910–1920. 1. “History, Memory, and Reconciliation,” Humanities at Stanford, April 1, 2010, Stanford Humanities Center, http://shc.stanford.edu/news/research/%E2%80%9 Chistory-­memory-­reconciliation%E2%80%9D. 2. “History, Memory, and Reconciliation.” 3. American Alliance of Museums, “Core Standards for Museums,” 1993, amended 2000, https://www.aam-­us.org/programs/ethics-­standards-­and-­professional-­practices /core-­standards-­for-­museums/. 4. American Alliance of Museums, “Core Standards for Museums.”

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5. Colleen Dilenschneider, “People Trust Museums More than Newspapers: Here Is Why That Matters Right Now (Data),” Know Your Own Bone, April 26, 2017, https:// www.colleendilen.com/2017/04/26/people-­trust-­museums-­more-­than-­newspapers -­here-­is-­why-­that-­matters-­right-­now-­data/; Roy Rosenzweigh and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 6. John H. Falk, Identity and the Museum Experience (London: Taylor and Francis, 2009). 7. Chai M. Tyng, Hafeez U. Amin, Mohamad N. M. Saad, and Aamir S. Malik, “The Influences of Emotion on Learning and Memory,” Frontiers in Psychology (2017): 1454, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01454/full. 8. Refusing to Forget to Margaret Koch, January 27, 2014, on file with the Bullock Museum. 9. Bullock Texas State History Museum, Life and Death on the Border 1910– 1920, January 2016, https://www.thestoryoftexas.com/visit/exhibits/life-­and-­death -­on-­the-­border-­1910-­1920. 10. The conversations, debates, and protests of 2020 across the nation have led to the reexamination of how communities memorialize leaders who were involved in atrocities. One action was the removal of the statue of Ranger Captain Jay Banks from Dallas’s Love Field airport (Chacour Koop, “Statue of Texas Ranger Removed from Dallas Airport after Book Depicts Racist History,” Fort Worth Star-­Telegram, June 4, 2020, https://www.star-­telegram.com/news/state/texas/article243275556.html). 11. In Bullock Museum, Bob Bullock—God Bless Texas, video, 4:22, posted February 27, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PA5LYNFmrIg (footage of the lieutenant governor’s press conference announcing the campaign to build a museum). 12. Texas State Libraries and Archives Commission, “Our Collections,” n.d., https:// www.tsl.texas.gov/collections. 13. Bullock Museum, final exhibition text copy, Life and Death on the Border 1910– 1920, January 2016. 14. Bullock Museum, final exhibition text copy. 15. Bullock Museum, final exhibition text copy. 16. Bullock Museum, final exhibition text copy. 17. Bullock Museum, final exhibition text copy. 18. Bullock Museum, final exhibition text copy. 19. Bullock Museum, final exhibition text copy. 20. Texas Senate Resolution No. 87; Texas House Resolution No. 139. 21. For past and current conversations on museum-­planning best practices, see Kathleen McLean, Planning for People in Exhibitions (Washington, DC: Association of Science-­Technology Centers, 1993); Nina Simon and Seema Rao, Museum 2.0, blog, https://museumtwo.blogspot.com/. 22. Debbie Ann Doyle, “Historians Protest New Enola Gay Exhibit,” Perspectives on History, December 1, 2003, https://www.historians.org/publications-­and-­directories /perspectives-­on-­history/december-­2003/historians-­protest-­new-­enola-­gay-­exhibit. 23. Steven K. Paulson, “History Colorado Center Closes Sand Creek Massacre Display,” Associated Press, in Denver Post, August 27, 2013, https://www.denverpost .com/2013/08/27/history-­colorado-­center-­closes-­sand-­creek-­massacre-­display/.

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24. Rick J. Lybeck, “Fear and Reconciliation: The U.S.-­Dakota War in White Public Pedagogy,” PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2015, https://core.ac.uk/download /pdf/76357571.pdf. 25. “The Value of History Statement,” History Relevance, n.d., https://www.history relevance.com/value-­history-­statement. History Relevance began as a collaborative effort in 2012 and continues to research and shape the national discussion on the study and use of history within communities while creating a common language as to why history matters in the modern world.

CHAPTER 14

Reckoning with the Past toward the Here and Now Katherine Hite

Refusing to Forget’s National Endowment for the Humanities award is a powerful testament to the important work of the project’s scholars and advocate organizers at this critical moment in US history and politics. Indeed, across the Americas we are seeing the ways deep memories of violence are resurfacing for new kinds of debate, recognized both as unaddressed wounds of the past and as constitutive of the many forms of contemporary violence. Activists at sites of memory in Argentina and Chile push the connections between the violent military regimes and transformations of the political economy under dictatorship with the social inequality and marginalization today.1 In El Salvador, academics, journalists, and politicians increasingly debate the relations among the country’s 1980s civil war, US financing of the Salvadoran military, and the Salvadoran refugees of that period to today’s violent crises and the fleeing of Salvadoran men, women, and children to the US border.2 Lawyers and researchers in Alabama link memories and histories of twentieth-­century lynching and racial terror to twenty-­first-­century state-­sponsored mass incarceration and brutality.3 Refusing to Forget scholars of the Rio Grande Valley draw from intergenerational family memories to raise questions regarding relations among the early twentieth-­century killings of ethnic Mexicans in southern Texas during the Mexican Revolution and contemporary border policing.4 An important part of this surge has been an explosion of major memorial sites and museums of memory, attracting an enormous range of visitors. These sites, however fitfully, open the possibilities for meaningful dialogue and connection regarding the legacies of state-­sponsored political repression, racism, and imperialism. I reflect here on the varied perspectives and imaginaries that emerge from select memorial and museum sites of the Americas, both South and North, often from intense, unyielding contesta-

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tion regarding the sites. A central question for me and in the context of this collection of essays regards how historical memory work also addresses the failures to ally across racial boundaries in the historical antilynching movements, including between Mexican American and African American organizations and communities battling white-­supremacist terror. As a newcomer to the period on which this volume is focused, I find this somewhat ironic, given the Plan de San Diego manifesto, a rebellion against Anglo and some Tejano ranch owners to reclaim land wrested from Mexican and Indian people. The manifesto urged oppressed groups including African Americans, ethnic Mexicans, Native Americans, and others deemed nonwhite to join in an uprising across the US Southwest. I suggest ways that sites of memory harness memorial and memorial museum narratives and representations toward a message and perhaps a responsibility that sticks with and inspires visitors beyond their visits. Critical pedagogy and the concept of empathic unsettlement can be key dimensions of a process of reckoning with the past toward solidaristic action in the present. Memorials and Memorial Museums Politics and Process There is nothing easy or straightforward about memorialization processes. Scholars and activists must explore head-­on the significant silences, fear, and denial of the relation between violence past and present as well as the persistent invisibility of significant historical atrocities. Clearly throughout the United States citizen initiatives are arising to remove monuments and memorials, to mark formerly invisible past sites of violence, and to establish museums of memory that address atrocities of the past in relation to the present. Several of these initiatives are emotionally charged, and many people find such demands for a reckoning to be offensive. I would like to believe, for example, that more people would sympathize with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill grassroots action to topple the “Silent Sam” confederate statue if they were familiar with the words of the Carolina industrialist and public advocate for the Ku Klux Klan Julian Carr, who delivered a lengthy speech at the 1913 unveiling of the monument: One hundred yards from where I stand, less than ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-­whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a southern lady, and then rushed for protection to

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these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 Federal soldiers. I performed the pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison.5

The vile inaugural speech drives home the racist realities embedded in Chapel Hill symbols and institutions, including the premiere public university of the state, almost a good half century post-­Civil War. The 1913 Silent Sam must be debated in its specific historical-­genealogical context. Moreover, North Carolina’s 2015 legislation (G.S. 100–2.1) prohibits conventional democratic institutional channels for discussion and debate regarding the memorials, and it is all the more jarring that even the one official state body charged with investigating and rendering decisions on memorials, the North Carolina Historical Commission, does not have the legal authority to approve a monument’s removal.6 From 2014 to 2019, politicians scrambled to enact state laws to continue the mythology of the heroic Confederacy. State laws prohibiting democratic debate over removals went on the books in Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Virginia, and Kentucky and were heatedly debated in Texas and elsewhere, reflecting significant reactions to twenty-­first-­century movements for change.7 In 2020 the renewed national activism of the Black Lives Matter movement forcefully challenged these reactionary efforts, while toppling white-­supremacist symbols throughout the country. The restrictive laws have not prevented discussion of new memorial or commemorative efforts of various kinds. In 2018, amid heated public municipal sessions, the city of Griffin, Georgia, just outside Atlanta’s city limits, proclaimed April to be Confederate History Month. Two weeks later, the Griffin City Council rescinded the proclamation.8 In a distinct vein, and as contributors to this volume know very well, applications to the Texas Historical Commission’s Undertold Markers program established in 2006 continue in a steady stream from a vast range of communities around the state. There is political intent in all major memorial-­making. One US memorial-­ making collective that towers above the rest in this regard is the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a long-­standing organization that has been perhaps the most impressive intentional memorial group that the United States has ever seen. During the more immediate wake of the Civil War, its mourning the loss of loved ones in funereal, tombstone-­like memorials was one such effort. The United Daughters of the Confederacy represents a quite distinct political intent in instantiating monuments to Confederate leaders, sponsoring the “everyman” Confederate soldier monument and Silent Sam kind of monuments in cities and towns across the South and creating gran-

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diose and comparatively new memorials in places like the Gettysburg National Military Park. The increase in memorial-­making is paralleled by a proliferation of memorial museums. While memorials invite reflection, even as lightning rods for contestation, memorial museums emphasize education, pedagogy, and more or less cohesive narratives. Some think of the proliferation of museums of memory in Foucauldian terms, as a new capturing, controlling, and confining of atrocious memories. The Museum of Human Rights and Memory in Santiago, Chile, often faces criticism as a site that limits its official narrative to 1973–1990, the years of the dictatorship of Chilean General Augusto Pinochet. This chronology avoids contextual explanations of what led to the 1973 military coup d’état, or of the ways the transformations under the dictatorship affected and continue to affect the postmilitary democratic regime from 1990 onward. In another instance, until only recently in Montgomery, Alabama, city leaders commemorated the local civil rights hero Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement while insisting on downplaying the brutal historical violence of slavery and Jim Crow. The sociologist Tony Bennett might argue that such official efforts reproduce the authority of states to write history in ways that silence significant state and societal violence and recover state power.9 Yet memorial museums are also significant responses to inquiry, demand, and at times, prolonged struggle, and they therefore offer possibility for serious questioning, dialogue, and connection. In Buenos Aires, El Olimpo, a former clandestine detention, torture, and extermination site, is the dynamic result of a protracted struggle to recuperate the space. In El Olimpo today, human rights and political activists guide visitors through to explain the once-­diabolical uses of the space, and they encourage and sponsor ongoing community work. This includes an alternative classroom for struggling teens, a knitting circle, a community space for neighborhood meetings, and more. Activists of El Olimpo consistently work to invite grassroots participation regarding contemporary issues and concerns of the neighborhood and the country while respecting the centrality of transmitting memories of violence.10 Major memorial sites and memorial museums are spaces of instruction and sometimes of transformation. Even with dynamic growth of virtual, internet access and online exploration of sites, more and more people have been physically visiting museums and memorial sites in the United States and throughout the world. Despite some indication of a decline in art-­ museumgoing, pre-­Covid-­19 pandemic, attendance at history and memorial museums had increased substantially.11 Increased museumgoing underscores

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the value of personal human experience and interaction within the physical spaces, including the ways such spaces facilitate face-­to-­face connection, learning, and relationships. What Sticks? I wish to understand visitors’ experiences at and within memorial sites, especially what “sticks” after the visit.12 What is going to be heard, and how is it felt, processed, retained, carried, and perhaps even mobilized? With a significant number of tourists focused more on documenting their own presence through selfies and the like than deeply engaging with the spaces themselves, what might distinguish voyeurism from deliberative engagement? What might responsibility of a kind people are comfortable with, or perhaps even uncomfortable with, look like?13 What survives the intense but very brief encounters, emotionally, cognitively, politically? While absolute claims cannot be made about what visitors will experience and carry with them, the museology literature does agree on a handful of basic approaches that seem to stick with visitors beyond their encounters within the museum. Regarding representation and narrative, the literature generally argues that less is more in terms of text, that imagery and sound matter most, and that the power of a story, of individuals narrating their stories, resonates best.14 Museum studies have also shown that intergenerational family visits demonstrate meaningful experience beyond the museum. Similarly, small school groups of active teachers and their students, especially those who discuss the visits before and after the events, create a more enduring pedagogical experience.15 These basic techniques and findings are in play at memory museums internationally. The debate is about design, selection, context, chronology, narratives, and so forth—in other words, about an agreed-­upon sensibility and message of the museum. I now want to take a closer look at empathy as a critical dimension of the possibility of any reconciliation or healing, both of which are underlying themes of the work of Refusing to Forget. Here I borrow a simple conceptualization of empathy from Jodi Halpern and Harvey Weinstein: “Empathy involves imagining and seeking to understand the perspective of another person.”16 Imagining particularities of others, being curious about other individual human beings, the authors argue, is a fundamental precursor to countering “dehumanization,” “stereotyping,” “generalizing,” and “distancing.”17 Spaces of memory encounters can constitute such processes of thinking, feeling, and imagination.

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Furthermore, the great variation of empathy must be recognized amid equally varied contexts. One can embrace particular memory projects wholeheartedly but cannot deny regional, national, social, political, and cultural contexts in which such projects are shut down, ignored, dismissed, or rendered virtually nonexistent or invisible to different degrees. Such contexts undeniably affect visitor engagements with the sites. I want to take care not to exaggerate empathetic experiences or to project such experiences onto broader spheres and constituencies. I do want to explore what is asked of us in memorial sites. As a teacher who has accompanied US and Latin American university students to major memory sites in Chile, Argentina, and Peru as well as the United States, I find that a critical dimension of what sticks takes place when memorial-­goers experience “empathic unsettlement,” a dynamic exchange, spoken or unspoken, during their encounters with exhibits and narrators that jars, that unsettles, that reframes visitors’ thinking and emotions in productive ways and moves visitors toward understanding another while appreciating that the trauma or injury of another is largely beyond total understanding.18 Empathic unsettlement may be even more powerfully at work when visitors can connect traumatic or violent memory to their national identities as well as their own lived experiences. Empathic unsettlement, that middle ground between engagement and disruption, presents a moment when critical pedagogy can be at its best.19 In ways that mirror Buenos Aires’s El Olimpo, another such site practices an agenda that is exemplary in this regard. It is the former clandestine detention, torture, and disappearance site Londres 38 in downtown Santiago, Chile.20 During the several guided visits there I have taken with colleagues and students, US and Chilean, I have appreciated the constant self-­reflection and critique on the part of the predominantly young Londres 38 guides as they engage with visitors.21 At Londres 38, guides record audio of most group visits in order to process and reflect collectively on the kinds of questions and interactions that take place. Guides think out loud with visitors and ask them questions about why they are there and what they are experiencing. For US students, occasionally, the Chilean guides raise questions about what the students are viewing and experiencing in light of the United States’ deep complicity in the destabilization of Chile’s democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende and subsequent tacit support to the military regime during its early and most brutal years. This directness forces visitors to try to articulate what drew them into the site and what unnerves them once inside. Londres 38 activists also consistently seek to establish the connections between past and current activism, and they

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maintain engagement with contemporary Chilean social movements, including the student movement, the women’s rights movement, and the Mapuche indigenous movement. Research supports the finding that Chilean visitors do make such connections of the violence, fear, and sense of political threat of the past with the many dimensions of police repression during mobilizations in the present.22 Turning toward a distinct major site of memory in another region of Latin America, in San Salvador, El Salvador, the Museo de la Palabra y la Imágen: Tejiendo la Memoria (MUPI) directly confronts the legacies and connections of past to present. Its cofounder and director, Carlos “Santiago” Henríquez Consalvi, has created a small but dynamic and well-­visited space that attracts thousands of visitors each year, primarily Salvadoran schoolchildren. Through itinerant exhibitions, workshops, and events, the MUPI also reaches the Salvadoran countryside. The exhibits rely on Salvadoran artists, performers, musicians, poets, activists, and leaders to convey the country’s century or more of struggle and resistance. The museo includes a display of the 1932 peasant uprising, another of the history of the radio station that broadcast throughout the Salvadoran civil war, Radio Venceremos, which Henríquez founded, and another of the 1981 massacre of hundreds of civilians by the Salvadoran army at El Mozote. Grassroots women’s struggles feature strongly in the space. The MUPI is intentionally pedagogical, and its staff uses a range of dynamic, interactive techniques to engage schoolchildren and youth during school trips to the museum and out in the countryside. Given that El Salvador went through an all-­out civil war that only formally ended in 1992, not a single child who engages with the MUPI, whether in San Salvador or in rural communities, does not have a family untouched by the war in some way. The MUPI uses this knowledge to develop pedagogical tools that allow young people to explore the war’s effects and legacies as well as to imagine alternative, nonviolent futures amid ongoing day-­to-­day violence. The MUPI also sponsors talks, performances, films, and traveling exhibits that address past cross-­regional migration, US deportation, and the current crises. There has been no shying away from the inseparability of El Salvador’s contemporary realities, historic struggles and failures to transform the state, and US power and appeal. In the United States, there are well over five hundred US military and war museums, and I cannot begin to claim to know their narratives. Yet if the military and war museums on the National Mall in Washington, DC, or the National Vietnam War Museum in the works outside Fort Worth, Texas, are any indication, there appears to be no memorial museum site that calls attention in a critical way to these in-

270  Katherine Hite

tense historical and contemporary interrelations with El Salvador and elsewhere, to US imperial reach, and to their profoundly violent effects. Memory Sites, Critical Pedagogy, and Activism In the United States, it is helpful to pay attention to two of the most important antiracist organizations in the country, both of which are in Montgomery, Alabama: the historic Southern Poverty Law Center and the more recently established Equal Justice Initiative. These organizations recognize the importance of memorials and markers that celebrate unsung civil rights activists and that remind visitors of the profound acts of violence that are foundational to the US state. The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) is a civil rights law firm that has gained worldwide as well as national recognition. Begun in 1989 to defend incarcerated men and women who lacked proper legal representation, it has since grown to model memory research, representation, and advocacy to urge a national conversation regarding the ways the failure to confront the past sustains racist understandings and practices in the present. The EJI has also been central to legal reform, including the 2005 US Supreme Court decision to exempt juveniles from capital punishment. EJI’s publications, videos, and other materials are consistently oriented toward public education. In the spring of 2016, just prior to EJI’s public announcement of the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice, my brother Edmund Roberts and I visited the EJI because I was most interested in what was then termed “the Lynching Project.” As many now know, the EJI has systematically documented the sites of thousands of lynchings of African Americans between 1865 and 1950 across twelve US states.23 Confronting the estimate that the lynchings of African Americans during those decades numbered approximately 3,200, the EJI documented nearly 6,500 lynchings, more than double the number previously recorded. In addition, EJI researchers collected soil from dozens of the sites and created a memorial wall in their downtown Montgomery law office filled with the jars containing the soil. At that time, their hope was that in each of the sites the researchers had visited, grassroots organizations, educational institutions, religious groups, and others near those sites would assume the commemorative work of creating local markers and educating their communities. The day we first visited, EJI Justice Fellow Alayah Glenn took my brother and me through the organization’s building and introduced us to the many projects, including the intensely powerful lynching memorial wall. Glenn

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had been a part of the Lynching Project research team, and in 2015 she traveled to Waco, Texas, to investigate the lynching of Jesse Washington. On April 19, 1916, the eighteen-­year-­old African American sharecropper Jesse Washington was lynched in full view of local authorities.24 In broad daylight, Washington was dragged several blocks from the McLennan County Courthouse and tortured, mutilated, and set afire. His burned corpse was hung on a pole outside Waco’s city hall, and 15,000 citizens from around the area came to view Washington’s body. Glenn described to us her work in the Waco library and archives and her outreach to African Americans and others in Waco who were seeking to build a memorial.25 Edmund’s and my connection with Glenn influenced our own search two months later when we visited Waco and the as-­yet-­to-­be-­marked site of Washington’s torture and murder. On April 26 and 27, 2018, Edmund and I returned to Montgomery to join the thousands who attended the inauguration of EJI’s new Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The Montgomery museum emphasizes what is less common among US civil rights museums: slavery of the past and mass incarceration in the present. Given that the museum and memorial are projects of a public-­advocacy law firm, the projects are also intensively legally focused. The memorial emphasizes that lynchings took place in broad daylight, deliberately before the offices and officers representing local public authority. The museum and memorial drive home the violence of law itself. During the inauguration, my brother and I met Lou Snead and his wife, Michelle Augustine, who had traveled from Williamson County, Texas. A retired white minister, Snead recounted the work that he and Augustine were doing in Georgetown, particularly involving the Monument to the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors that stands in front of the county courthouse on the public square voted “The Most Beautiful Town Square in Texas.”26 Snead’s congregation, a Georgetown chapter of the Unitarian Universalists, led a petition drive to have the monument moved to the local cemetery or the county historical museum nearby. The petition failed. Snead and Augustine also cofounded the Courageous Conversations Interfaith Initiative, which grew from a coalition of predominantly African American and white churches in Georgetown in the aftermath of the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Within the Courageous Conversations Interfaith Initiative, Snead convened the Cultural and Historical Advocacy action group to sponsor forums and activities regarding Texas’s racist historical context and the legacies of racist violence. In 2016 the Cultural and Historical Advocacy group sought

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the Williamson County Commissioners Court’s permission to submit a proposal to the Texas State Historical Association for a contextual plaque to be placed next to the Confederate monument. The county commissioners denied permission. In 2017 the action group presented a revised proposal, which was also rejected.27 In 2019, tensions surfaced within the larger Courageous Conversations group regarding the Cultural and Historical Advocacy group’s work to remove or move the monument. Some Courageous Conversations members claimed such work had been confrontational rather than conciliatory. Snead, Augustine, and others disbanded the Cultural and Historical Advocacy group and joined the newly formed Wilco Patriots. Snead and Augustine continue to lobby the Georgetown City Council and testify before the Williamson County commissioners’ weekly public meetings. To counter the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ reenactments, the Wilco Patriots carry out more direct actions, including reenactments of an enslaved Black woman speaking out about the horrors of her enslavement. Through several months in 2020, the group conducted weekly protests featuring Wilco Patriot members at a table with signs that read, “Monument to Traitors!” “Prove Me Wrong!” As of late July 2020, and despite the many Texas Confederate monuments that have been removed in the wake of the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd and the renewed energy of the Movement for Black Lives, the Williamson County courthouse monument remains. Snead and Augustine were so inspired by their Montgomery experience that they organized a community bus trip to return to Selma, Birmingham, and the Montgomery museum and memorial. Among those who signed on to travel was eighty-­three-­year-­old Johnnye Patterson, “the last still living daughter of one of the lynched victims from this county who is memorialized in the new museum in Montgomery.”28 Snead and Augustine have truly modeled grassroots memory work. There is perhaps no one in the United States today who has been a more eloquent, inspiring articulator regarding the question of empathic unsettlement than Bryan Stevenson, the EJI’s cofounder and the driving force behind the museum and memorial. Stevenson emphasizes the power of becoming “proximate” to those who are suffering from inequality and racism, of becoming “uncomfortable,” and of struggling with and for the “downtrodden,” no matter how painful, how “heart-­breaking.” Stevenson suggests that such proximity can also allow recognition of one’s own, intimate “brokenness,” in constant need of work and repair. “If you are willing to

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get closer to people who are suffering,” Stevenson states, “you will find the power to change the world.”29 Today, dozens of communities are in conversation with the EJI to ensure spaces for the eight hundred EJI-­designed corten steel monuments representing the lynchings in their home counties.30 Nevertheless, there is a notable silence in the museum and memorial regarding the lynching of ethnic-­Mexican people. Because of the works of Monica Muñoz Martinez, William Carrigan, Clive Webb, Ben Johnson, and Arnoldo De León,31 I found myself searching for the named and the many unnamed ethnic-­ Mexican human beings lynched in the Texas counties where the EJI had also documented the lynchings of African Americans. For the moment, at least, they are not there. There are different kinds of silences. Silences work by omission and commission; silences can be deliberate but sometimes pregnant, charged. Encounters are also loaded, fraught, but suggestive of possibility. Debates are taking place all over the world regarding questions of silence, denial, societal complicity, bystanders, and beneficiaries in the midst and the aftermath of systematic state-­sponsored violence.32 How do people understand silences and encounters within physical spaces of memory and more broadly across class, race, nationality, and gender, across borders, and essentially, across power? Such debate brings the Refusing to Forget project here. So, ideally, how do, or can, or should museums insist that visitors connect past violence to ongoing violence and urge them to dig deep to reflect on how all are variously implicated and toward what end? How do museums and memorials make connections across borders without losing or diluting the voices, demands, and intricacies of local memory struggles? For me, underneath it all, such questions push me to become a better teacher. As teachers, we have our own empathic relations to the sites, and at the same time, we are trying to observe, support, and discuss the variety of empathic unsettlements among our students. It can be quite hard to articulate how we feel as visitors to spaces and sites of tremendous historical violence. Silence should be respected, and yet sharing and processing must also be encouraged. I would argue that sites open up the possibility of deep memory work, but it is up to us educators to process and to push the implications we and the students are facing. The United States is a society of deep denial that nonetheless lives the violence of past atrocities very much in the present. Americans ignore the genocidal foundations whose legacies are much in evidence in Pine Ridge,

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South Dakota, and on reservations throughout the US West, and in the legacies of enslavement and the reproduction of slavery’s architecture in today’s social structure and the institutionalized racism, from the US educational system to the US incarceration system. The same denial of history and the ongoing legacies of racism and imperial might is at work in the contemporary anti-­immigrant backlash, including against Salvadorans who have fled or are fleeing violence. The contemporary crisis at the border is intimately linked to the US-­supported imperialist repression of the 1980s, post-­Salvadoran civil war devastation, and US insistence in the 1990s on the extreme neoliberalization of the Salvadoran economy, which emptied any remnants of a social welfare state.33 Exhumation work in African American burial grounds from New York City to Sugar Land, Texas, have revealed unbelievably disturbing postslavery brutality inflicted on African American bodies in the United States from North to South.34 In Sugar Land, the large convict-­leasing program, known as the “second enslavement,” provided the backbreaking and dangerous labor from the 1880s through the 1910s, the years in which the African-­ American prison laborers were interred in the graveyard. Mortality rates among sugar plantation laborers were high, major injuries from the sugar processing machinery were common. Like the findings on the bodies of the enslaved in New York City, archaeologists of the Sugar Land site are documenting the post-­slavery laborers’ “bone infections, healed breaks, bones distorted by heavy labor and muscles torn away from the skeleton.”35 Activists in Fort Bend County, where Sugar Land is located, organized to save the burial grounds, and they continue to press for proper identification of the individual remains of the ninety-­five persons who are buried there.36 This multidisciplinary volume, presencing the Canales investigation of the Texas Rangers a century later, acknowledges that La Matanza, the state-­sanctioned massacre of ethnic-­Mexican people, is alive and felt and demands a reckoning. Refusing to Forget joins movements across the Americas that are making racist, imperialist atrocities known and visible and forcing wider public conversations regarding the horrors of the past and the ways it lives on. Such critical scholarship and advocacy represent the effective use of history and the return of the repressed, ever-­jarring historical realities haunting the here and now. Notes 1. See particularly the work of Londres 38, a former site of detention and disappearance in downtown Santiago, Chile, http://www.londres38.cl/1937/w3-­channel.html;

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and in Buenos Aires, El Ex-­Centro de Detención, Tortura y Desapareción El Olimpo, http://www.exccdolimpo.org.ar/. 2. “From War to Politics: An International Conference on El Salvador’s Peace Process” was sponsored by the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, and King Juan Carlos Center, New York University, March 31–­April 2, 2016. See also Leisy J. Abrego, “On Silences: Salvadoran Refugees Then and Now,” Latino Studies 15 (2017): 73–85. 3. The Equal Justice Initiative does robust public educational work in historical memory and has established the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama (https://eji.org/). 4. Monica Muñoz Martinez, “Recuperating Histories of Violence in the Americas: Vernacular History-­Making on the U.S.-­Mexico Border,” American Quarterly 66, no. 3 (2014): 661–689. 5. In Antonia Noory Farzan, “ ‘Silent Sam’: A Racist, Jim Crow–­Era Speech Inspired UNC Students to Topple a Confederate Monument on Campus,” Washington Post, August 21, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-­mix/wp /2018/08/21/silent-­sam-­a-­racist-­jim-­crow-­era-­speech-­inspired-­unc-­students-­to -­topple-­a-­confederate-­monument-­on-­campus/?utm_term=.24f4c81e0b5d. This article also includes a link to the original speech. 6. Merit Kennedy, “Three North Carolina Confederate Monuments Will Stay in Place, Commission Decides,” National Public Radio, August 22, 2018, https://www .npr.org/2018/08/22/640923318/3-­north-­carolina-­confederate-­monuments-­will -­stay-­in-­place-­commission-­decides. 7. See, for example, the Alabama Preservation Act of 2017, or the Kentucky Memorial Preservation Act of 2018. These state laws are not going unchallenged, however, and in Birmingham, a judge overturned the Alabama Preservation Act (Brigit Katz, “Alabama Judge Overturns Law that Protected Confederate Monuments,” Smithsonian.com, January 16, 2019, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-­news /alabama-­judge-­overturns-­law-­protected-­confederate-­monuments-­180971282/). In Texas, the highly restrictive Senate Bill 1663 making it virtually impossible to remove a monument ultimately failed to come to the Texas House floor for a vote during a recent legislative session. There is now a bipartisan commission to study the nineteen portraits hanging in the Texas Senate chambers that include Jefferson Davis and Albert Sidney Johnston (Chuck Lindell, “Confederate Monuments Bill Fails to Get House Vote,” Austin American Statesman, May 20, 2019, https://www.statesman.com /news/20190520/confederate-­monuments-­bill-­fails-­to-­get-­house-­vote). 8. Lauren Foreman, “Georgia City Rescinds Confederate History Proclamation,” Atlanta Journal-­Constitution, April 11, 2018. 9. See Bennett’s Pasts beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism (London: Routledge, 2004) and his classic Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995). 10. Ana Guglielmucci, La consagración de la memoria: Una etnografía acerca de la institucionalización del recuerdo sobre los crímenes del terrorismo de Estado en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Antropofagia, 2013); Ex Centro Clandestino de Detención, Tortura y Exterminio “Olimpo” (Buenos Aires: Instituto Espacio para la Memoria, n.d.). 11. “Met Museum Attendance Up Six Percent in 2016, Natural Museum Attendance Holds Steady,” New York Business Journal, June 2, 2017, https://www.bizjour

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nals.com/newyork/news/2017/06/02/met-­museum-­attendance-­up.html; Bob Beatty, “Running the Numbers on Attendance at History Museums,” Hyperallergenic, March 1, 2018, https://hyperallergic.com/429788/running-­the-­numbers-­on-­atten dance-­at-­history-­museums-­in-­the-­us/. 12. Regarding the “stickiness” of affect, see Sara Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigwort (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 29. 13. There is a growing subgenre in museum studies termed “trauma studies,” or “dark” or “death” tourism. Trauma-­tourist analysts explore the many tensions between memorial museums as sites of mourning or education on the one hand and tourist practices as conventionally escapist and pleasure-­seeking phenomena on the other. The juxtaposing term “death tourism” most explicitly captures such tension. For one insightful set of analyses, see Brigitte Sion, ed., Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape (London: Seagull, 2014). See also Paul Williams, Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Ksenija Bilbija and Leigh A. Payne, eds., Accounting for Violence: Marketing Memory in Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). US commerce also has a penchant for commodifying and materializing, for turning even atrocious pasts into postcards, T-­shirts, coffee mugs, and key chains testifying to visits to the memory tree of the former World Trade Center’s 9/11 memorial, say, or to the survivor tree at the Oklahoma City memorial, even as today my students have no idea what happened in Oklahoma City in 1995. See Marita Sturken, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). It is worth noting that in contrast, at most memorial museums throughout Latin America there are neither entrance fees nor gift shops. Commodifying atrocity is not a new US phenomenon, as the historical postcards of human beings and lynching trees attest. 14. John H. Falk, Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast, 2009). 15. Erminia Pedretti, “Challenging Convention and Communication Controversy: Learning through Issue-­Based Museums,” and Janette Griffin, “Students, Teachers and Museums: Toward an Intertwined Learning Circle,” in In Principle, In Practice: Museums as Learning Institutions, ed. John H. Falk, Lynn D. Dierking, and Susan Foutz (New York: Altamira, 2007). 16. Jodi Halpern and Harvey M. Weinstein, “Rehumanizing the Other: Empathy and Reconciliation,” Human Rights Quarterly 26 (2004): 561–583. 17. Halpern and Weinstein, “Rehumanizing the Other,” 568. 18. For more on empathic unsettlement, see Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). 19. For my initial development of this idea of empathic unsettlement and critical pedagogy, see Katherine Hite, “Teaching the Politics of Encounter: Empathic Unsettlement in Spaces of Memory in Chile,” Radical History Review 124 ( January 2016): 217–225. 20. See the Londres 38 website, http://www.londres38.cl/1937/w3-­propertyvalue -­32006.html.

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21. Those who work at the Londres 38 historic site of conscience include many of those termed of the third or even fourth generation, those born toward the end of the Chilean dictatorship of 1973–1990 and thereafter, whose formative years are well in the aftermath of the dictatorship, two or three generations removed from those who were most directly affected by the regime repression. Today’s Chilean memory activists are sometimes grandchildren of victims and children of those whose childhoods were affected traumatically by what was done to their parents. For more on the intergenerational transmission of trauma in Chile, see Daniela Jara, Children and the Afterlife of Violence: Memories of Dictatorship (New York: Palgrave, 2016). 22. See Isabel Piper, “Violencia política, miedo y amenaza en lugares de memoria,” Athenea Digital 15, no. 4 (December 2015): 155–172. 23. Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, 2nd edition (Montgomery, AL: Equal Justice Initiative, 2015). 24. See William D. Carrigan’s ample, powerful account in The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836–1916 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). 25. Alayah Glenn, conversation, April 6, 2016. 26. City of Georgetown, Texas, official website, https://georgetown.org/. 27. Cultural and Historical Advocacy group, interview, Georgetown Public Library, Georgetown, TX, January 30, 2019. 28. Lou Snead, email to the author, August 24, 2018. 29. Cited in Leandra Fernández, “Empathy and Social Justice: The Power of Proximity in Improvement Science,” Carnegie Commons Blog, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, April 21, 2016, https://www.carnegiefoundation.org/blog /empathy-­and-­social-­justice-­the-­power-­of-­proximity-­in-­improvement-­science/. 30. “Monument Placement Initiative of the Community Remembrance Project,” Equal Justice Initiative, https://eji.org/community-­remembrance-­project. 31. Martinez, “Recuperating Histories of Violence”; William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Benjamin Heber Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Arnoldo De León, ed., War along the Border: The Mexican Revolution and Tejano Communities (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2012). 32. Many such debates launch from Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963). For a powerful, provocative discussion of beneficiaries, see, among other works of Mahmood Mamdani, his comparative thinking on Rwanda and South Africa in When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). On beneficiaries and bystanders, see Bronwyn Leebaw, Judging State-­Sponsored Violence, Imagining Political Change (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2011). On denial, see Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Malden, MA: Polity, 2001). 33. William Robinson, Transnational Conflicts: Central America, Social Change and Globalization (London: Verso, 2003); Ellen Moodie, El Salvador in the Aftermath of Peace: Crime, Uncertainty, and the Transition to Democracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Herman Rosa and Michael Foley, “El Salvador,” in Good

278  Katherine Hite

Intentions: Pledges of Aid for Post-­Conflict Recovery, ed. Shepard Foreman and Stuart Patrick (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000), 114–117. 34. “Documenting Slavery by Another Name in Texas,” editorial, New York Times, August 13, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/13/opinion/texas-­slavery-­african -­american-­graveyard.html; Brent Staples, “A Fate Worse than Slavery, Unearthed in Sugar Land,” New York Times, October 27, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018 /10/27/opinion/sugar-­land-­texas-­graves-­slavery.html. 35. “Documenting Slavery by Another Name,” editorial, New York Times. 36. For further elaboration of the Sugar Land memorial activists’ struggle, see Morgan Jerkins, “Bones That Revealed a Texas Town’s Forgotten Racial Past Deserve Respect,” The Guardian, March 7, 2019.

Living Witness Nati Román

Because you were a strong little semilla Full of life You burst forth from the soil that nourished you, Lifted your eyes to the sky And let your billowing branches stretch across The rippling silk pasture as if reaching For the ends of the earth. Because the Earth loved you and The sky fed you, Your roots burrowed deep And your glistening leaves fluttered Like a million tiny wings ¿Quien era el primero? Who was the first to look upon your Handsome, grooved face your Thick, jutting limbs And see their potential To kill? Those men, pale as stone Insatiably hungry for land Who draw lines in the dirt Lines in the water. They fitted you with cords and rope That squeezed your arms like a tourniquet

280  Nati Román

Burned your bark and Scraped it clean That tugged like a caught bird and then Was still. The men of stone circled on their horses Shouted and blasted their pistols into the air And even Laughed. And as the men kept coming And your arms kept burning you Wept For the men whose contorted clay faces Lay etched in your mind. Men the colors of clay and leaves Men who laughed and fought Kissed and spit Men that twirled their señoras when They danced That slurped their caldo And bounced their children on their knee Men that worked long days Men that worked for months men Always willing to work Men whose eyes burned like fire Before the grip of the tree Turned them to glass. You heard the women cry out for them In the distance The women who suffered So many women that suffered Who put the pieces of their lives back together like patchwork Who grew skin as thick as yours. Do you feel the spirit brush Your canopy as it ascends Into the atmosphere?

Living Witness 281

Does it linger in your tangled branches? Is it crystal cold with fear Or warm like a flash of sun between The shifting clouds The birds no longer nested In your tresses You prayed for these souls to shake free From your grasp With the next heavy rain Prayed the rain would cleanse you Of the putrid stench of Death When your leaves like memories shriveled and dried You cast them into the night like Cenizas in the wind Then the winds changed Tales of Cortina pierced the fog of fear like the arrows of our ancestors Stories of resistance sprouted amongst the weeds Women and men stood up and said: ¡No nos vamos! And here you stand and Here I stand 161 years later Once a gateway to death Now a portal to the past I trace my finger along your deep ridged grooves Like a needle along a tired record and Hear the echoes of tragedy reverberate Through time Like a corrido with whose melody we cleanse Our wounds. I have traveled back in time to see you To make sense of the stories Told by our abuelas and our mothers And discover You have been waiting for me You wait for all of us

282  Nati Román

Are you surprised by how quickly we have forgotten? But here we are now Face to face And you still weeping year after year for The souls that turned to butterflies beneath your shade And you wait for us to remember Relearn Rediscover Reclaim our rightful place in History

Epilogue John Phillip Santos

I can’t think of another example of the phenomenon that this book of essays represents. A group of historians and scholars of various fields, allied with descendants of the victims of a murderous scourge against mexicano Texans in the Rio Grande Valley and other Texas border communities early in the twentieth century, deploy their scholarship to bring about a long-postponed public reckoning with that brutality and the reverberations of those injustices, many at the hands of Anglo law enforcement officials, principally the Texas Rangers. The new, rigorous historiography produced by the coalition of Refusing to Forget scholars was on its own a significant achievement in the arena of Texas borderlands historiography,1 itself a hundred-year-long project that had its distant beginnings with figures such as Herbert Eugene Boulton and Carlos Eduardo Castañeda. But this project, as described in chapter 1 of this volume, was never intended to be an undertaking of solely academic history. Some of the participating scholars were from the region, and some were from families who carried stories of ancestors lost in La Matanza, as the period of most intense violence came to be called. This wasn’t just history; it was living testimonio that harbored the promise of expiation in the face of impunity. Bringing forth this new historiography revealed new details of the violence and human toll of the period but also transformative understandings of the personal resilience, forbearance, and perseverance of families who endured the infamies, many of whom were descendants of earliest settlers of the region from the era of New Spain. Academic history wouldn’t suffice for the Refusing to Forget scholars. Their intent was a multifaceted public history project. Indeed, this peripatetic project would ultimately include a museum exhibition, public programs and a symposium, and the successful

284  John Phillip Santos

effort to place four historical markers on sites of murders and lynchings of Tejanos. The history would be brought back to the communities and the people who were a part of the legacy. And now this book extends the story’s reach. The implications of that story being revealed in so many settings in our time will reverberate into the future. A literary mentor of mine long ago put a challenge to writers: “I propose that you seek in yourselves remembrance of the before, and tell what you find, and believe your words.”2 But the compromiso with a people’s memory within each person, mixing the personal and the collective, is a fragile thing, especially if the memory is a legacy of pain, upheavals, disruptions, and death. Glorious memories, whether real or imagined, often stubbornly perdure. But the memory of great loss might be held close for a generation or two; then at some point, it seems, it can evaporate, become forgotten, repressed, or, through the malign intercession of others, even erased. By returning to the “remembrance of the before,” something is perhaps revealed about who we are becoming. Such was the case with the memory of La Matanza, as chronicled in the revelatory 2016 Life and Death on the Border 1910–1920, the museum exhibition imagined and realized at the Bullock Texas State History Museum by the Refusing to Forget scholars, along with a host of community members. Ironically, I learned of the exhibition from an article that appeared in the Manchester Guardian before the show’s opening—tidings of my own South Texas people’s history coming from distant shores. Nothing had appeared in the San Antonio press to note the show’s debut, much less its significance for my city’s own historical Chicano/Tejano community. The exhibition was solemn, unstinting in its historical analysis, rich with artifacts, photographs, and documents that told the story of this murderous decade in the Tejano epic, when likely thousands died in extrajudicial killings and lynchings. But Life and Death on the Border, as discussed in chapter 13, went beyond merely chronicling this period of infamy; it captured, perhaps for the first time in a museum context, the cultural ambiente of the people of the borderlands where these atrocities took place. Bullock Museum director Margaret Koch mentions in the chapter that during the three-month run of the exhibition, the museum had 49,000 visitors. We saw photos of Tejanos dressed in suits and ties and European finery. Lace dresses perhaps imported from Paris or brought from Mexico City, alongside humble painted wooden crosses such as the cruz de animas, reflected a fusion of European and indigenous styles, a distinctly mestizo telling of the sacred saga from the Fall in the Garden of Eden to the crucifixion of Christ.

Epilogue 285

Conjuring the political turmoil of the times, there was a copy of the insurrectionary Plan de San Diego from 1915, a call to throw off Anglo repression once and for all. Postcards captured Texas Rangers on horseback in the brush country, smugly posing over the corpses of four Tejanos. Other photographs memorialized more Tejano victims of the killings, landowners and simple folk alike. And there were the three great blue volumes of the transcripts of the investigation of the Texas Rangers by the Texas legislature undertaken at the urging of Brownsville state Representative J. T. Canales in 1919. These tomes were all the more auspicious to behold there because the historic event that the Canales hearings represented, the possibility of bringing the perpetrators of much of the murderous violence of the previous decade to justice, would ultimately be postponed. Those volumes were sequestered until the 1970s, viewed only by historian Walter Prescott Webb, author of the 1935 hagiography The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense; Philis Barragán Goetz and Carlos K. Blanton note in chapter 6 that Webb wrote the book to counter the image of the Rangers left by the Canales hearings. Another text in the exhibition was from 1951, “The Wetback in the Lower Rio Grande.” Captions exposed the ways insults and infamies of earlier decades were refocused into hostility for the undocumented based on a “principled” call for segregation in the Valley on “hygienic” grounds, and not for “racial reasons.” The exhibition concluded with an account of the rise of the Chicano movement in the 1970s and beyond, with its spirit of resistance, activism, and liberation embodied in works of art, music, film, and literature. I was deeply moved to see this exhibition presented in the Bullock Texas State History Museum, an intimation that the fullness of our Tejano family stories, our fraught tales of survival and becoming, might finally be heard in the public square for all to hear and for us to remember and reflect upon. And this telling of the story was indeed made possible by the many survivors of those killed in La Matanza who never let the memory of this time pass away. From the stories held close in the survivors’ hearts, from the records recovered in libraries and official archives, the testimony of this period of genocidal violence was returned to the public, for all to see, hear, and witness. It represents a rare instance when academic historiography merges with and helps to restore and renew the story of a people. These achievements left me with a series of questions: How had so much been forgotten? What does it mean to remember this story now? What lessons do we learn from this telling, as well as the work of the historians of Refusing to Forget? We can choose our future, but we also choose our

286  John Phillip Santos

stories of the past. The story of La Matanza had been erased from official chronicles and repressed or forgotten in the legacies of many of our families; this history was never taught to me in Texas public schools. It was as if, put beyond the reach of our memory, that memory would never play a role in who we were becoming. The present volume is a triumph of living memory and scholarship over erasure and repression, but it also imposes the question of what it could mean to put aside the legacy of forgetting and remember this legacy now, as amply and deeply as we can. The chapters in this volume help to illuminate how La Matanza emerged, in medias res, in the much longer story of our ancestral histories in the lands that would become northern Mexico and South Texas. The violence against Tejanos and the role law enforcement officials played in dispossessing them of their properties, and their dignity, sought to complete the onslaught against Tejano settlers that followed the war for Texas independence from Mexico. What followed was a centurylong campaign of border disputes, settling of scores, determining who owned what and who could marry whom. Several authors in this volume point to J. T. Canales’s central role as lawyer, educator, and legislator. Described variously as an advocate of acculturation and a radical, an exemplary polymath, possibly a furtive white supremacist, and someone easily duped, Canales remains something of an enigma. In this mosaic of refractions, I see a complex, protean personage, rooted in his land-grant family’s past, improvising his way into an American future, an emblem of borderlands immanence whose identity through his life revealed an ever more nuanced assemblage of narratives. Though Canales failed in his campaign against the Rangers, he succeeded in voiding forevermore the impunity with which they exercised their extrajudicial murders. Is it possible to arrest the cycle of ethnic violence? To turn from genocidal violence with impunity toward reckonings of justice and reconciliation? For all of the pain, loss, and death that this legacy carries, the ongoing saga of becoming also testifies to the resilience and survival of the people of this story. Underlying the chronicles of upheavals and grief, I’ve wondered whether the saga of the Texas borderlands hasn’t always been harboring a profound immanence, the long-unfolding story of how we come to reveal ourselves to ourselves, in this unique, often clamorous place of meetings between myriad humanity, nations, and peoples. As I write in 2020, five hundred years since the fall of Tenochtitlán, one hundred years on from La Matanza and the Canales hearings, the shapeshifting presence of violence in the borderlands continues its transmutations. In the very same lands where the events took place that have been chronicled in the Life and Death on the Border exhibition and this book,

Epilogue 287

today the world sees a proliferation of immigration detention centers in the United States, families of the undocumented being separated, violence against women along the border, and an ever-increasing toll of death. Plans and construction are under way to build a wall across this homeland, a wall between the past and the future. The centennial year of the Canales hearings saw a massacre carried out in a Walmart in El Paso by an assassin who announced he was seeking out Mexicans to kill. And in 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic arrived like a new scourge of death in the Rio Grande Valley. But the long-reigning statue of the Texas Ranger, One Riot, One Ranger, based on the infamous Ranger Captain Jay Banks, has just been removed from Dallas’s Love Field terminal. In 2019, plans to replace the Ranger statue with another honoring the Chicana civil rights icon Adelfa Callejo were rescinded. The community is now being consulted regarding what will replace the statue. After the media disseminated a video of George Floyd being murdered by a police officer on a street in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, a national, even worldwide, uprising against impunity appears to be taking shape. In that video, an evidentiary artifact impossible in the era of La Matanza, with his knee on the neck of Floyd, the officer gazes into the camera with a blithe impunity. What else is being contested now in our historic borderlands? The right to migrate through these historic lands of our becoming and immanence, just as our ancestors did, indigenous and mestizo. How do these struggles relate to the scourges, grief, and resilience of our past? That literary mentor of mine also has observed, “Our truth cannot be all-told, from the beginning told, unless we tell it to one another.”3 Laura (Riding) Jackson says, “There is something to be told about us for the telling of which we all wait.”4 That is the essence of immanence in the borderlands, of a history and a future gradually being revealed. Notes 1. See chapter 1 for a listing of these significant works and some of their significant precursors. 2. Laura (Riding) Jackson, The Telling (London: Athlone, 1972), 50. 3. Jackson, The Telling, 21. 4. Jackson, The Telling, 9.

Contributors

Philis M. Barragán Goetz is an assistant professor of History at Texas A&M University–­San Antonio, focusing on Mexican American history, women’s studies, and US social and cultural history. She is also a co-­coordinator for the Women and Gender Studies program. Her book Reading, Writing, and Revolution: Escuelitas and the Emergence of a Mexican American Identity in Texas was published by University of Texas Press in 2020. She received her PhD in American studies from the University of Texas at Austin.

Carlos K. Blanton is a professor of history and department head at Texas A&M University. His authored books include The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836–1981 (Texas A&M University Press, 2004) and George I. Sánchez: The Long Fight for Mexican American Integration (Yale University Press, 2014). He edited A Promising Problem: The New Chicana/o History (University of Texas Press, 2016). Blanton’s work has been honored with the Coral Horton Tullis Award for best book in Texas history (2005), the Bolton Cutter Award for best article in Borderlands history (2010), and the National Association of Chicana-­Chicano Studies best book award (2016). Walter L. Buenger is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the Summerlee Foundation Chair in Texas History. He is the author of, among other works, The Path to a Modern South: Northeast Texas between Reconstruction and the Great Depression (University of Texas Press, 2001) and co-­author (with Victoria Buenger) of Texas Merchant: Marvin Leonard and Fort Worth (Texas A&M University Press, 1998).

Contributors 289

Christopher Carmona is an associate professor of Mexican Ameri-

can studies and creative writing at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He serves on the Texas State Board of Education ad hoc committee for Mexican American studies and the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) Tejas Foco Committee on Implementing Mexican American Studies in PreK-­12 Education in Texas. His short story collection The Road to Llorona Park won the NACCS Tejas Award for Best Fiction Book of 2016. Carmona’s other works include books of poetry and a series of young-­adult novellas about a Chicano superhero, El Rinche, set in the early twentieth century.

William D. Carrigan is the chair of and a professor in the Department of History at Rowan University. His books include The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836–1916 (University of Illinois Press, 2004), winner of the Richard Wentworth Prize. With support from the National Science Foundation, the Clements Center, and other institutions, Carrigan and Clive Webb have cowritten articles and chapters on the lynching of people of Mexican origin in the United States as well as the book Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1928 (Oxford University Press, 2013). Antonia I. Castañeda is an emeritus professor of history at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio. She is the author of numerous scholarly articles including the prize-­winning “Women of Color and the Re-­Writing of Western History: The Discourse, Politics, and Decolonization of History.” Castañeda cofounded and coedited the Chicana Matters Book Series with the University of Texas Press. She remains active as a public historian and community activist. Trinidad Gonzales is an instructor at South Texas College in McAllen.

His areas of research include the Rio Grande Valley during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is a founding member of Refusing to Forget and served as councilor of the American History Association. He contributed “The Mexican Revolution,” “Revolución de Texas,” and “Matanza de 1915” to the critical anthology War along the Border: The Mexican Revolution and Tejano Communities, edited by Arnoldo De León (Texas A&M University Press, 2012).

Gabriela González is an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she teaches courses on the US-­Mexican

290  Contributors

borderlands, Latina/o history, and women’s history. She is the author of Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights (Oxford University Press, 2018). The book received awards including the Texas State History Association Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize for Best Book on Texas History. González also has written on transborder activists including Carolina Munguía, Emma Tenayuca, and Jovita Idar.

John Morán González is the J. Frank Dobie Regents Professor of

American and English Literature and director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature (University of Texas Press, 2009) and The Troubled Union: Expansionist Imperatives in Post-­Reconstruction American Novels (Ohio State University Press, 2010), as well as reviews and articles in numerous journals. He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Latina/o American Literature (2016) and coeditor, with Laura Lomas, of The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature (2018), which was selected as a 2018 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. González is a founding member of Refusing to Forget.

Andrew R. Graybill is a professor of history and the director of the

William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University. He is the author of The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (Liveright, 2013) and has written or edited three more books. He writes regularly for Texas Monthly and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications, and is an elected member of the Texas Institute of Letters. With Benjamin H. Johnson, he edits the David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History at the University of North Carolina Press.

Sonia Hernández is an associate professor of history and the former

director of the Latino/a and Mexican American Studies Program at Texas A&M University. Her book Working Women into the Borderlands (Texas A&M Press, 2014) received the Sara A. Whaley Book Prize of the National Women’s Studies Association, the Liz Carpenter Award of the Texas State Historical Association, and the Jim Parish Award for Research of the Webb Heritage Foundation. A Spanish translation of the book was published in Mexico as Mujeres, trabajo y región fronteriza (2017). Her article “Revisiting Mexican(a) Labor History through Feminismo Transfronterista: From Tampico to Texas and Beyond, 1910–1940” in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies (2015) was given an Outstanding Article award by LASA and is fea-

Contributors 291

tured in her forthcoming book from the University of Illinois Press. Hernández is a founding member of Refusing to Forget.

Katherine Hite is a professor of political science on the Frederick Ferris Thompson Chair at Vassar College. She is the author of Politics and the Art of Commemoration: Memorials to Struggle in Latin America and Spain (Routledge, 2012) and When the Romance Ended: Leaders of the Chilean Left, 1968– 1998 (Columbia University Press, 2000). She is the coeditor with Daniela Jara of Ghosts, Exhumations, and Unwieldy Pasts, a special issue of Memory Studies ( June 2020), and with Mark Ungar of Sustaining Human Rights in the Twenty-­First Century: Strategies from Latin America ( Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Benjamin Heber Johnson teaches history at Loyola University Chi-

cago. He is the author of Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (Yale University Press, 2003) and Escaping the Dark, Gray City: Fear and Hope in Progressive-­Era Conservation (Yale University Press, 2018), as well as journal articles and other books. He is also a past editor of the Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive Era and is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. Johnson is a founding member of Refusing to Forget.

Gema Kloppe-­S antamaría is an assistant professor of Latin American

history at Loyola University Chicago. Her research focuses on state building, violence, religion, and justice in Mexico and Latin America. She is the author of In the Vortex of Violence: Lynching, Extralegal Justice, and the State in Post-­Revolutionary Mexico (University of California Press, 2020). She is also the lead editor of the books Violence and Crime in Latin America: Representations and Politics (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017) and Human Security and Chronic Violence in Mexico: New Perspectives and Proposals from Below (Porrúa, 2019).

Margaret Koch is the director of the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum. At the time of planning for Life and Death on the Border 1910– 1920, she was deputy director and director of exhibits, facilitating curatorial and design development of the exhibition.

Monica Martinez is an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. She is working on Mapping Violence, a digital research project that recovers histories of racial violence in Texas between 1900 and

292  Contributors

1930. She is the author of the multiple-­award winning The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-­Mexican Violence in Texas (Harvard University Press, 2018). Martinez is a founding member of Refusing to Forget.

Cynthia E. Orozco is a professor of history and humanties at East-

ern New Mexico University at Ruidoso. She is the author of No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (University of Texas Press, 2009), Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-­Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist (University of Texas Press, 2020), and Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights: Alonso S. Perales (Arte Publico, forthcoming). She is a coeditor, with Emilio Zamora and Rodolfo Rocha, of Mexican Americans in Texas History: Selected Essays (Texas State Historical Association, 2000).

Richard Ribb is an independent scholar and educational consultant to

young adults in transition to college or career, grounded in his experience teaching American and Texas history at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, and Austin Community College. His essay “La Rinchada: Revolution, Revenge, and the Rangers, 1910–1920” appears in War along the Border: The Mexican Revolution and Tejano Communities, edited by Arnoldo De León (Texas A&M Press, 2012).

Diana Noreen Rivera is an assistant professor of literature and cultural studies and an affiliate faculty member in Mexican American studies at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Her work covers nineteenth- and twentieth-­century Mexican American/Chicanx literary history. She is the editor of The Far East Journals and Other Cold War Era Writings of Américo Paredes, forthcoming from Michigan State University Press. Her articles and essays have been published in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Journal of South Texas, Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, Chicana/Latina Studies, and Oxford Bibliographies. Nati Román has served as the president of Somos La Gente, a Mexi-

can American studies student group at San Antonio College devoted to promoting culture, knowledge, and community enrichment through Chicanx, Latinx, and Indigenous empowerment. She participated in the successful movement to remove the Ranger mascot at San Antonio College and has given presentations on the violent history of the Texas Rangers. Her research interests include Borderlands history, Texas myths, resistance

Contributors 293

to state-­sanctioned violence, and the history of Mexican American student groups at San Antonio College.

James A. Sandos is the Farquhar Professor of the American Southwest,

emeritus, in the Department of History at the University of Redlands. Among his many published works are Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and the Plan of San Diego, 1904–1923 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), translated into Spanish for the centennial of the Mexican Revolution as Rebelión en la frontera: Anarquismo y el Plan de San Diego, and Converting California: Indians and Franciscans in the Missions (Yale University Press, 2004).

John Phillip Santos , the first Latino to be named a Rhodes Scholar, is a journalist, author, and documentary filmmaker. His 1999 work, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation was a finalist for the National Book Award. He teaches Mestizo cultural studies in Honors College at the University of Texas San Antonio. Kirby F. Warnock is a writer, filmmaker, and teller of Texas stories. His

first film, Return to Giant, was a finalist at SXSW 1996 and purchased by Warner Home Video. His second documentary, Border Bandits, aired nationally on PBS in 2005 and won the Audience Award at the Deep Ellum Film Festival in Dallas.

Clive Webb is a professor of modern American history at the University of

Sussex. His research expertise includes US-­British relations, political violence, and race and ethnicity. He and William Carrigan have collaborated extensively on research into the lynching of people of Mexican origin in the United States. They have cowritten articles, chapters, and the book Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1928 (Oxford University Press, 2013), with support from institutions including the Huntington, the National Science Foundation, and the Clements Center.

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Index

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. Abbott, Greg, 45 activism: and El Olimpo, 266; and Idar family, 143; and Londres 38, 268– 269; and Mexican American Generation, 137; perceptions of, 7; and public education, 136; remembering as, 123; and scholarship, 121–122 African Americans: and activism, 7; and convict leasing, 274; and Ku Klux Klan, 49; and LULAC, 191; and lynching memorial, 271, 273; lynchings of, 8, 93, 94, 97–98, 104; and migration patterns, 88n22; and mob violence, 95; and Progressive education, 124; and Prohibition, 79; and segregation, 83, 126–127; and Texas culture, 71, 72, 145; and twentieth-­ century Texas, 70; and voter suppression, 78 agriculture: and displacement, 6; and migrant labor, 33; and railroads, 71; and segregation, 126; and technological innovation, 5; transition from ranching to, 3, 73–75, 76; and white supremacy, 10–11, 230; and World War I, 77 Alabama Preservation Act (2017), 275n7 Alamia, J. A., 186 Alamia, José V., 186, 188–189

Albarado, Benita, 37, 39 Albarado, Evaristo, 37, 39 Allee, A. Y., 49 Allen, Noah, 152 Allende, Salvador, 268 Alvarado, Luis, 184, 190 American Alliance of Museums, 244 American Association for State and Local History, 39–40, 248, 252 American Federation of Labor (AFL), 180, 186 American GI Forum, 192 American Historical Association, 40 American Immigration Council, 45 “The American Indian Holocaust” (Brave Heart and DeBruyn), 232, 234 American-­Mexican Joint Commission, 220 anarchism, 8, 11, 14–15, 224, 225, 226 Anders, Evan, 198, 200n2, 200n3 Angel of Goliad, 194, 195 Anglos: and J. T. Canales, 70, 83; as historians, 195; and land theft, 230, 234–235, 254; in lower Rio Grande Valley, 27–28; and LULAC, 191; lynchings of, 93–94; and Mexican Americans, 122; and Mexicans, 50–51; as migrants, 3; and migra-

296  Index

tion patterns, 86n8; and myths of the Alamo, 145; and racial ideologies, 6; and Rio Grande Valley economy, 213, 214–215; and sociopolitical control, 52; and Texas culture, 71–73; and white supremacy, 154–155 Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas (Montejano), 62n3, 138n7 anticommunism, 180, 199 anti-­immigrant sentiment, 45, 274 anti-­Mexican sentiment, 11–12, 147, 153 antimiscegenation laws, 143 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 35, 240 archives: and Bob Bullock Museum, 247; and Border Bandits, 216; and J. T. Canales, 173n2, 178–179; and Canales investigation, 9, 171, 219– 220, 221; and escuelitas, 135; and Alayah Glenn, 270–271; and Life and Death on the Border, 1910–1920, 248, 285; and Alonso Perales, 185; private, 36–37, 39; and Rebllion in the Borderlands, 14–15, 224 Argentina, 17, 263, 266, 268 Arroyo, Arnulfo, 105, 110 Asian Americans, 45, 96–97, 124, 238 Augustine, Michelle, 271–272 Austin, Stephen F., 50 Austin American-­Statesman, 248 Autry Public History Award, 39–40 Ayala, Ramon, 241 Baker, A. Y., 29, 60, 61, 67n64 Baker, B. W., 129 Baldwin, James, 230 “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez” (folksong), 61 bandits: and Anglo ranchers, 56; and Juan Cortina, 55; and McAllen Ranch raid, 212; and Mexican Revolution, 108; as racialized trope, 169, 211, 213–214, 216; and Texas Rangers, 32–33, 57, 176n78 Bandit Wars. See La Matanza Banks, Jay, 261n10, 287 Barragán Goetz, Philis M., 13, 285 Barrow, Clyde, 33

Bazán, Jesús, 15, 28–29, 36, 40, 42, 215, 217, 256 Becoming Texas (2018 Bullock Museum exhibition), 246 Bennett, Tony, 266 Bentsen, Lloyd M., 201n15 Bering Strait theory, 231–232 Bernal, Joe, 49 bilingual education, 13, 89n32, 129, 148, 150 bilingual exhibits, 251, 257–258 bilingualism, 16, 84, 129, 153 Bird, Randel, 213 Birth of a Nation (film), 81 Bits of Texas History in the Melting Pot of America (Canales), 194 Black Lives Matter movement, 38, 265 Black people. See African Americans Blakely, William, 201n15 Blanton, Carlos K., 13, 285 Bledsoe, William, 168–169, 171 Blocker Garcia, Mona, 42–44 Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum: and Canales investigation, 1; and controversial exhibits, 16–17; elision of state-­sanctioned violence by, 36; and exhibition development, 247–252; and Life and Death on the Border, 1910–1920, 245, 256–260, 284–285; and Refusing to Forget, 39, 42, 43; and Texas State Library and Archives Commission, 246; values of, 244–245; and visitors, 253–255 Bonnen, Dennis, 257 Bonnet, J. A., 130, 131 Border Bandits (Warnock), 15, 36, 213– 214, 251 Borderlands/La Frontera (Anzaldúa), 35 border policing, 44–45, 263, 287 Boulton, Herbert Eugene, 283 Box, John, 186 Bracero Program, 192 Bralley, F. M., 124 Brave Heart, Maria Yellow Horse, 233–234 A Brief History of the Lower Rio Grande Valley (Pierce), 221

Index 297

Brite Ranch, 43 Brooks, J. A., 67n64 Brown, Michael, 271 Brownsville: bodies displayed, 57–58, 65–66n42; and J. T. Canales, 179, 180, 182, 197–198; and Canales investigation, 222–223; and Carlos Eduardo Castañeda, 193; and Juan Cortina, 52–55; and Alfredo de la Cerda killing, 61, 67n64; and Espíritu Santo land grant, 63n15; and Frank Hamer’s threats to J. T. Canales, 163–165; Eduardo Idar on, 154; and LULAC, 187; and Américo Paredes, 196; and Toribio Rodríguez’s murder, 30, 32; and school segregation, 130; and Texas Rangers, 59 Brownsville Herald, 150 Brownsville Independent School District, 130 Brownsville Ranchero (newspaper), 94 Buenger, Walter L., 11, 132 Builders of Character and Leaders of Men (Canales), 194 Bullock, Bob, 251 Caballeros de Honor (Order of the Knights of Honor), 156n15 Cabrera, Tomás, 54 California: and borderlands, 253; and Flores Magón brothers, 107; and Carlos Larralde, 197; and LULAC, 186, 187, 203n62; lynchings in, 92, 96; and Native Americans, 225; and Plan de San Diego, 28; and school segregation, 135; and Texas Ranger lore, 230–231 Callejo, Adelfa, 287 Canales, Andres C., 196 Canales, Anne A. Wheeler, 83, 98, 99, 166, 197 Canales, J. M., 188–189 Canales, José Tomás ( J. T.), 14; on the Alamo, 89n35; Bob Alexander and Donaly E. Brice on, 227; and cotton growing, 73, 74–75; discrimination

against, 172; and education, 130, 131– 132, 136, 193–197; and ethics, 181– 182; and Frank Hamer, 166, 175n40; historical marker for, 201n10; and William Hobby, 160–164; life and work of, 98–100, 158–159, 178, 179–180, 198–199, 199–200n1, 286; and LULAC, 15–16, 182–189; post-­ LULAC activism of, 190–192; and Prohibition, 80; and technological innovation, 5, 11; and Texas culture, 81; and Texas identity, 69–70; tributes to, 257; as voice of conscience, 46; and white supremacy, 83–84 Canales, Terry, 37, 246 Canales and Dancy, 180 Canales and Davenport, 180 Canales and Eidman, 180 Canales and McKay, 180 Canales Foundation, 195 Canales investigation: backlash against, 158–159, 179; and Bob Bullock Museum, 257; centennial of, 287; effects of, 1, 2, 12, 92, 98, 137, 172, 177n84, 235, 274; findings of, 61; and Frank Hamer, 166, 175n40; hearings, 31–33, 99–100, 167–171, 250; in Life and Death on the Border, 1910–1920, 285; and Plan de San Diego, 9; and Porvenir massacre, 40, 95; report of, 219–220, 221, 223–224; study of, 35; transcript of, 8, 14–15, 18n1; and Walter P. Webb, 121, 137–138n3, 285 Canamar, Henry, 186 capitalism, 148 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 115n46 Carmona, Christopher, 16 Carothers, Carlos B., 107 Carr, Julian, 264–265 Carranza, Venustiano, 153, 154, 220– 221, 226 Carreno, Alberto María, 193 Carrigan, William D., 12, 106, 273 Cart War of 1857, 52, 93 Castañeda, Carlos Eduardo, 193, 196, 283 Castillo Morales, Juan, 109, 110, 115n46

298  Index

Catholics, 72, 79, 108–109, 114n31, 115n42 cattle: and Anglo migrants, 3; and Anglo-­Tejano conflict, 11; and anti-­ Mexican violence, 94; and Gloria Anzaldúa’s family, 35; and J. T. Canales, 159, 172; and Juan Cortina, 66–67n57; and Texas Rangers, 49, 57–58, 59, 60, 67n64; theft of, 55–56 Center for Mexican American Studies at UT Austin, 196–197 Central American migrants, 45–46 Cerda, Alfredo de la, 61, 67n64 Cerda, Ramón de la, 60, 67n64 Chapa, Francisco, 160–161, 162, 166, 171 Character Builders and Leaders of Men (Canales), 194 Chicana/o historians, 123–124 Chicano movement, 34–35, 197, 199, 285 Chicano nationalism, 10 Chicano studies, 199 Chile, 263, 268–269, 277n21 China, 94, 96 Christensen, Paul, 239 Cisneros, Sandra, 35 civil rights: beyond white/Black paradigm, 8; and J. T. Canales, 15–16, 179, 187, 188, 198, 200n2; and Canales investigation, 1, 2, 32–33; denial of, 122; and LAC, 181; and LULAC, 178; and Mexican Americans, 34; museums of, 271; and public education, 136; and World War I, 30 civil rights movement, 9, 45, 199, 266 Clendenin, D. R., 58 colonization, 34, 199, 231–234 Colquitt, Oscar, 29 Confederate History Month, 265 Confederate monuments, 38, 81–82, 264–266, 271–272, 275n7 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 180 convict leasing, 274 Coody, Melba, 37, 39 Cooper, Gary, 230 corridos, 18, 61, 230, 239

Cortez, Gregorio, 68n65 Cortina, Juan N., 11, 52–55, 53, 64n23, 66–67n57, 83, 172, 194–195 Cortina War, 54–55, 56, 57, 63–64n18 Cortinistas, 54, 55 cotton, 33, 63n9, 71, 73, 74–75, 77 Courageous Conversations Interfaith Initiative, 271–272 Creager, R. B., 32 Cristero War (1926–1929), 114n31 Cruz, Leonor, 110 Cuevas, Mariano, 193 Culp, Robert, 222 cult of domesticity, 7 Cultural and Historical Advocacy (organization), 271–272 culture: and Anglo migrants, 28; of anti-­Latino violence, 35; of the Bob Bullock Museum, 245; and J. T. Canales, 83, 132, 187, 196; and exhibition development, 250; and gente decente, 148; homogenization of, 76–78; and intergenerational trauma, 234, 235–236; and land theft, 35; of lynching, 96–97; material, 259, 260; and memory, 244; and migration, 85n3; and music, 75–76; popular, 238, 240, 247, 248, 249, 257; and Prohibition, 79–80; and public education, 122, 126, 129, 130, 133, 136–137; and regions, 87n16; and religion, 73–74; and sites of memory, 16; and twentieth-­century Texas, 69–70, 71–72 Cunningham, K. F., 174n23 Cutler, James Elbert, 110–111 Dallas Morning News, 170, 216 Daniels, Price, 195, 201n15 Davenport, Harbert, 137–138n2, 181–182 Davis, Jefferson, 275n7 death penalty, 110–111 death tourism, 276n13 DeBruyn, L. M., 234 dehumanization, 46, 83, 144, 267 De León, Arnoldo, 6, 8, 51, 273

Index 299

Delgado [Delgado v. Bastrop] (1949), 128 Democratic Party, 151–152, 179 Depp, Johnny, 231 deracialization, 154–155 Dewey, John, 124–125 Día de la Raza, 187, 199 Díaz, Gilberto, 197–198 Díaz, Porfirio, 105, 107, 161 Diébold, Miguel E., 134 Dies, Martin, 180, 201n15 Dirty War, 17 disenfranchisement, 6, 10, 34, 36, 153, 264 displacement, 6, 34 Dobie, J. Frank, 195 Dodd, T. W., 180 Durham, George, 57, 60 Eagle Pass Independent School District, 130 Eastwood, Clint, 230 economic development, 131, 158, 254 Edds, John, 162 education: and J. T. Canales, 159, 179, 181, 187, 193–197, 199; and escuelitas, 133–134; and ethnic Mexicans, 122–134, 136–137; and Idar family, 154; Jovita Idar on, 150; and Mexican diplomats, 135 Edwards County Historical Commission, 42 Eighteenth Amendment, 79 Eisenhower, Dwight, 180 “El Corrido del Rinche Fantasma” (Ochoa), 239 El Eco del Golfo (newspaper), 150 El Informador (newspaper), 108 El Mozote massacre, 269 El Nacional (newspaper), 108 El Olimpo (newspaper, Buenos Aires), 17, 266, 268 El Paso terrorist attack, 45, 287 El Paso Times, 248 El Progreso (newspaper), 153 El Rinche (Carmona), 16, 236, 238–240 El Salvador, 263, 269–270 El Universal (newspaper), 103

empathic unsettlement, 264, 268 empathy, 267–268 English-­only movement, 89n32, 128– 129, 132, 150, 190 Enola Gay, 258 epigenetics, 233, 241 Equal Justice Initiative, 17, 38, 270–271, 272–273, 275n3 Escuela Benito Juárez, 135, 136 escuelas del centenario, 135 escuelitas, 13, 133–134, 135–136, 148 Espíritu Santo land grant, 63n15 ethics, 181–182, 191, 193–194, 244 Ethics in the Profession of Law (Canales), 181, 194 ethnic identity, 132 ethnicity, 56, 81, 84, 108, 132, 137n1, 173n3, 187 ethnic Mexicans: atrocities against, 221; and “brown scare,” 145; and J. T. Canales, 80; and culture of fear, 235; defined, 18–19n9; and Democratic Party, 151–152; and education, 148–150; and escuelitas, 133–136; Nicasio Idar on, 146–147; Eduardo Idar on, 154; in lower Rio Grande Valley, 27–28; and lynching memorial, 273; lynchings of, 97–98, 103–104, 106–108; and mob violence, 92–93; and Progressive education, 125–134; and Prohibition, 79; and public education, 122–124, 136–137, 138n7; and segregation, 33–34, 83; and Texas culture, 71, 72–73, 85n3; and Texas Rangers, 229; and US State Department, 192; and voter suppression, 78; and whiteness, 155 European immigrants, 124 European Texans, 72, 75, 77–79, 81–83 Evolución (newspaper), 153 family separation, 45–46 farmworkers, 49, 62n1, 215 Fehrenbach, T. R., 121 Ferguson, James E. “Pa,” 29, 160, 161, 214, 255 Ferguson, Miriam “Ma,” 179–180

300  Index

Fernandez, Antonio M., 185 First Mexicanist Congress, 153, 156n15 Flores, Juan Bonilla, 17, 39 Flores, Narciso, 39 Flores Magón, Enrique, 107, 224, 226 Flores Magón, Ricardo, 107–108, 224, 226 Floyd, George, 272, 287 Ford, John S. “Rip,” 54, 55, 64n23 Forgotten Gateway (exhibition), 251–252 Foucault, Michel, 226 Fox, James Monroe, 223, 256 fraternal orders, 156n15 frontier theory, 109–110, 116n51 Funston, Frederick, 29 Gainesville hangings, 93–94 Galvan, Frank, 185 García, Florencio, 31 García, Gus, 190, 191 García, Hector P., 192 García, Miguel, 31 Garner, John N., 152 Garza, Ben, 185, 186 Garza, Catarino, 11 Garza, Fidencio, 182 Gavito, Valentin, 151 gender: and Bob Bullock Museum, 39; and J. T. Canales, 199; and class politics, 145; and cult of domesticity, 7; and Jovita Idar, 13; and land use, 3; and LULAC, 189; and memory sites, 273; and Progressive education, 125; and violence, 1, 8, 235 genocide, 143–144, 232–233, 286 Genocide Watch, 143 gente decente (decent people), 147–148 George Washington Gómez (Paredes), 35–36 Gettysburg National Military Park, 266 Gilman, Hoby, 222 Glasscock, D. W., 169 Glenn, Alayah, 270–271 Goldfinch, Charles William, 177n94, 206n116 Goliad Guard, 94

Gómez, Antonio, 83, 94, 146 Gonzales, Manuel C. (M. C.), 180, 181, 185, 186, 190 Gonzales, Trinidad, 10–11, 34, 35, 121– 122, 246 González, Gabriela, 13 Gonzalez, Henry B., 201n15 González, John Morán, 27, 34, 121–122, 124, 246 Goodrich, E. H., 130 Graham, Don, 218 Gray, George, 220 Graybill, Andrew R., 11, 122 Gray-­Lane Files, 220 Greater Mexico, 18–19n9 Great Migration, 88n22 Griffith, D. W., 81 Guardian (UK newspaper), 248 Guerra family, 159, 161, 165, 174n12, 200n3 Guerrero, Vicente, 51 Guhl, Mercedes, 225 Gutiérrez, José Ángel, 43, 216 Halpern, Jodi, 267 Hamer, Frank: and J. T. Canales, 14, 33, 99, 163–165, 166; and James Harley, 175n40 Hamilton (play; Miranda), 237, 238 Hamilton, Alexander, 237 Handbook of Texas (website), 198 Hanson, William, 163–165, 166, 168, 170, 171, 256 Harjo, Joy, 231–232 Harley, James A.: and J. T. Canales, 160, 164–165, 166; and Canales investigation, 167, 168, 170; and Frank Hamer, 175n40; and William Hanson, 162–163; and William Hobby, 161; life and work of, 173n9; and Texas Rangers, 171 Heintzelman, Samuel P., 54 Henderson, Effie Greer, 106 Henderson, Lem, 146 Henríquez Consalvi, Carlos “Santiago,” 269 The [Del Rio] Herald, 151

Index 301

Herbert Feiss Award, 40 Hernández, Eusebio, 256 Hernández, José, 30–31 Hernández, José Ángel, 187 Hernández, Sonia, 27, 34, 121–122, 246 Hernández v. State of Texas, 128, 192 Herrenvolk democracy, 51, 154–155 Heyer, Heather, 38 Hill, Lon, 31 Hirsch, Marianne, 241 historical markers, 40–44, 41, 217, 250, 284 historical memory, 38, 226, 263, 264, 275n3 historiographic methodology, 15 History Colorado, 259 History Relevance, 262n25 Hite, Katherine, 16, 17, 123 Hobby, William P.: and J. T. Canales, 14, 164, 166; and Guerra family, 174n12; and NAACP, 81; and Texas Rangers, 160–162, 163, 167, 171 Hofner, Adolph, 76 Holding Institute, 154 Hook, Thomas, 29 Hook, T. Wesley, 222 House Bill 5. See Canales investigation Houston, Sam, 51 Hudspeth, Claude Benton, 32–33 Idar, Clemente, 134, 150, 186, 199 Idar, Eduardo, 150–151, 154, 184, 185, 186 Idar, Jovita, 13, 40, 41–42, 46, 148–150, 154 Idar, Nicasio, 134, 146–147, 151, 152, 153, 153–154 Idar family, 143, 145 immigration: Bob Bullock museum exhibition on, 251–252; and border abuses, 45–46, 287; and John Box bill, 186; and J. T. Canales, 136; fearmongering about, 37–38; and LULAC, 186; of Mexican laborers, 126; restrictions on after WWI, 76, 77 indigeneity, 231–232

Injustice Never Leaves You (Martinez), 8, 35, 216 “Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma Effects” (Yehuda and Lerhner), 232 intergenerational trauma, 231–236, 241 irrigation, 3, 5–6, 74, 159–160 Italy, 94, 96 Jackson, Christopher, 237 Jackson, Laura (Riding), 287 Jennings, N. A., 59 Jim Crow, 126, 131 Jiménez, Noe, 187 Jiménez, Santiago Sr., 75–76 Johnson, Benjamin Heber: on dispossession of Tejano lands, 234–235; and Life and Death on the Border, 1910– 1920, 246; on lynchings, 273; and Refusing to Forget, 10–11, 121–122; Revolution in Texas, 8, 35, 101n9, 216, 225 Johnson, Jesse C., 221 Johnson, Lyndon B., 33, 137n1, 201n15 Johnson, Sam, 33 Johnston, Albert Sidney, 275n7 Jordan, Terry G., 71 “José Tomás Canales and the Texas Rangers” (Ribb), 35 Journal of American History, 248 J. T. Canales School of Nursing, 195 Juan Crow, 2, 33–34, 145, 256 Juan N. Cortina: Bandit or Hero? (Canales), 194 Juan N. Cortina Presents His Motion for a New Trial (Canales), 194 Kelsey, John, 55–56, 128 Kenedy, Mifflin, 50, 52, 55, 56 Kentucky Memorial Preservation Act (2018), 275n7 Kilgore, Joe M., 201n15 King, Richard, 50, 52, 55, 56, 58, 60 King Ranch, 62, 159 Kloppe-­Santamaría, Gema, 12 Knight, Robert E. Lee, 32, 168, 169–170 Koch, Margaret, 16–17, 39, 284

302  Index

Ku Klux Klan, 49, 78, 94, 179–180, 264, 264–265 Kundera, Milan, 46 la Barra, Francisco de, 134 labor activism, 7, 154, 185–186 labor conditions, 122 La Crónica (newspaper), 13, 134, 145– 147, 148–153, 254 La Cruz Blanca (White Cross), 154 Ladies LULAC, 189 La Gaceta (newspaper), 223 La Guerra de Tejas (Canales), 194 La Liga Femenil Mexicanista (League of Mexican Women), 154 La Luz (newspaper), 150 La Matanza: and Canales investigation, 92; demand for reckoning, 274; and El Rinche, 236; as genocide, 143; historical marker for, 9–10, 40–42, 41; history’s avoidance of, 36; and intergenerational trauma, 234–236, 241; in Life and Death on the Border, 1910–1920, 284–285, 285–287; and museum exhibits, 16–17; precursors of, 11; reporting on, 153; scholarship on, 121–123; study of, 14–15; victims of, 35; and white supremacy, 12 land ownership, 234–235 Lane, Franklin K., 220 Lane, Sam, 29 Lansing, Robert, 29 La Prensa (newspaper), 110, 135, 194 Laredo Seminary, 154 la Rosa, Luís de, 227 Larralde, Carlos, 178, 180, 197, 199, 206n116 Latin America, 37–38, 111–112, 115n36, 269, 276n13 Latin American Citizens League (LAC), 179, 181, 182–183, 191 Latinos: atrocities against, 221–223; and J. T. Canales, 179, 182, 195–197, 198; and colonization, 234; discrimination against, 220; and “Juan Crow” laws, 257; lack of monuments to, 199; and

LULAC, 250; and stereotypes, 249; and Texas culture, 70 Latino studies, 196, 199 La Verdad (newspaper), 194, 197 la Viña, Juan Manuel de, 132–133, 135 la Viña, Plutarco de, 135 law enforcement: and “Ballad of Gre­ gorio Cortez,” 61; and extralegal executions, 2, 6, 27, 108; and former Texas Rangers, 235; and genocide, 144; and La Matanza, 283, 286; and La Matanza historical markers, 40, 42; and martial law, 29; and Leander H. McNelly, 57; and racialized violence, 45; racial roots of, 49; and Toribio Rodríguez’s murder, 30, 32; and vigilantes, 234; and Warren Wallace, 59. See also police Leadership in History award, 39–40 League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), 183; and J. T. Canales, 15–16, 178, 179, 180, 182–189, 190–192, 198, 204–205n84; and college scholarships, 196; and English language, 84, 131–132; and ethnic Mexicans, 250; formation of, 257; and injustice, 256; and school segregation case, 181 Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice, 270–271 Lehrner, Amy, 232 Leonard, Olen, 192 Lerma, Pedro, 30 “Let All of Them Take Heed” (San Miguel), 123–124 ley fuga (law of flight), 110, 116n55 Life and Death on the Border, 1910–1920, 245 (exhibition), 248–258, 259–260, 284–285 Linn, John, 93 literacy, 129, 136, 148, 193 Literacy Center at Baylor University, 193 “Living Witness” (Román), 17–18, 278–282 Londres 38 (Santiago, Chile), 17, 268– 269, 277n21

Index 303

The Lone Ranger (radio and TV show), 229, 230–231 Longoria, Antonio, 15, 28–29, 36, 40, 42, 215 Longoria, Ramón, 185 Longoria Rodriguez, Norma, 37, 39 López, Margil, 197 Lopez Cortés, Fidel, 110 Los Angeles Times, 105, 108 Lott, Virgil, 95 Loyalty Rangers, 30, 31, 33 Lozano, Emilio, 185 Lozano, Rubén R., 186, 187 Lubbock, Francis Richard, 82 Luby, James O., 129 LULAC News, 179, 184, 185, 187–188, 190, 193, 197 Luna, Andres de, 185, 186 Luz, Rios de la, 237–238 Luz Sáenz, José de la, 180 Lynch, David, 238 Lynch, Michael, 178, 180, 199 Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands (Villanueva), 8 Lynching Project, 270–271 lynchings: along the border, 2; and the Cortina War, 54; documentation of, 270–271; and exhibition development, 249–250; and German Texans, 83; historical markers for, 284; historiography of, 111–112; history’s avoidance of, 36; Nicasio Idar on, 146; international attention to, 8; of Mexicans, 64n21; movements against, 264; postcards of, 255–256, 276n13; prevention of, 151; protests against, 96; and race, 93–94; racialization of, 115n36; and religious fanatacism, 108–109, 115n41; US military condemnation of, 29; and white supremacy, 11–12, 81 Machado, Mauro, 184, 185, 186, 191 Machuca, J. C., 186, 190 Madero, Francisco I., 225–226 Majumdar, Saikat, 244

Manchester Guardian, 284 Manuel, Herschel T., 125 A Map to the Next World (Harjo), 231–232 maquiladoras, 3 Marks, Fred, 173–174n10 Marsh, R. A., 131 “Martian Matters” (de la Luz), 238 Martínez, Filemón T., 185, 186–187, 191 Martinez, Monica Muñoz: on anti-­ Mexican violence, 235; and Bob Bullock Museum, 246; Injustice Never Leaves You (2018), 8, 216; on lynchings, 273; and Mapping Violence website, 138n5; and Porvenir massacre marker, 42, 43; and Refusing to Forget, 10–11, 35, 38, 121–122; on vigilantes and Rangers, 234 Martyrs of the Alamo (film), 81 Masonic Lodge Benito Juárez, 156n15 mass incarceration, 263, 271 McAllen, Diorica, 213 McAllen, James B., 212–213 McAllen, Willie, 213 McCarthy, Joe, 180 McNelly, Leander H., 57–59, 60 memorial-­making, 264–267 memorial museums, 276n13 memory, 239–240, 244 memory activists, 277n21 Mexican American Generation, 137 Mexican American Movements and Leaders (Larralde), 197 Mexican Americans: and activism, 136; Anglos’ denial of rights to, 122; and Bob Bullock Museum, 39; and Border Bandits, 216; and citizenship, 7; defined, 18–19n9; and justice system, 215; lynchings of, 8; and political identity, 225; and public education, 123–124, 125–126; and segregation, 126–127; and stereotypes, 254; theft of land from, 214 Mexican American studies, 34, 36, 196–197 Mexican Claims Commission, 220, 224

304  Index

Mexican consulates, 12, 31, 134–135, 147 Mexican Herald, 106–107 Mexican immigrants, 77, 115n43, 123, 182, 191 Mexican land grants, 52, 63n15 Mexican nationals, 18–19n9, 92, 112 mexicanos, 11, 16, 18–19n9, 70, 114n30 Mexican Revolution: and American-­ Mexican Joint Commission, 220; and anti-­Mexican violence, 2; and Venustiano Carranzo, 153; and contemporary border policing, 263; and La Matanza, 121; and McAllen Ranch raid, 212; official history of, 225– 226; and Plan de San Diego, 61; and South Texas, 6–7, 28; and Special Force of Rangers, 100; and Tejanos, 8; and transborder activists, 144–145; and US citizens, 105–106 Mexicans, 215; and cattle rustling, 56– 59; and the Cortina War, 54–55; and land claims, 51–52; as portrayed by Webb, 34; racialized tropes of, 11; racist rhetoric about, 38; and Texas Rangers, 49 Mexico, 4; and J. T. Canales hearings, 33; and Juan Cortina, 66–67n57; and Cortinistas, 54; and escuelitas, 135–136; and la raza, 144–145; and lynchings, 12; lynchings in, 104–106, 108–112; and Mexican Revolution, 77; and modernization, 148; and Prohibition, 79; and protests against lynchings, 92, 94, 98, 103–104, 106– 108; and Special Force of Rangers, 56–57, 58, 59; and Tejanos, 51–52; and Texas culture, 70–71, 72–73, 85n3; and Texas public education, 134–136; and Texas Rangers, 161; and Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 62–63n7 Meyer, Philipp, 36 Miller, Barry, 167, 168 Mills, O. A., 128 mining, 7, 77 Minnesota Historical Society, 259 Miranda, Lin-­Manuel, 237

modernization, 11, 108, 147, 148, 159, 238 Molis, Christine, 37, 39 Monroe, John, 174n12 Montejano, David, 3, 34, 138n7, 234 Monument to the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors (Georgetown, TX), 271–272 Moody, Dan, 214 Moraida, Fenón, 222 Moreno, Luis, 96 Morin, José, 29 Moses, Dayton, 168 Movement for Black Lives, 272 muckraking journalism, 150 Muñoz, Lisandro, 40, 162, 163 Museo de la Palabra y la Imágen (MUPI), 17, 269–270 museology, 267, 276n13 Museum of Human Rights and Memory (Santiago, Chile), 266 Museum of South Texas History, 216 museums, 244–246, 266–270 music, 75–76 música tejana, 248 myths: about ethnic Mexicans, 124, 131–132, 145; and Anglo elites, 82; and Gloria Anzaldúa’s family, 35; and J. T. Canales, 81, 83; and Mexican Revolution, 225–226; and Native Americans, 69; and public education, 123–124, 131, 133, 136–137, 249; and Texas Rangers, 230–231 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 81 National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies Tejas Foco Conference, 37 National Endowment for the Humanities, 263 nationalism, 104, 112 nation-­making, 1, 2, 7 “A Nation’s Real Wealth” (Hernández), 187 Native Americans: atrocities against, 273–274; and intergenerational

Index 305

trauma, 232–234, 235–236; and land theft, 214; and museum exhibitions, 259; and Plan de San Diego, 28, 264; as portrayed by Webb, 34; and Progressive education, 124; and South Texas, 3; study of, 225; and Texas culture, 70; and Texas Rangers, 49, 62n4, 121 Navarro, José Antonio G., 133 Nelson, Katherine, 239 neutrality, 161 New Mexico: and J. T. Canales, 188; and LULAC, 184, 185, 186–187, 191, 198; and Plan de San Diego, 28, 220; and Pancho Villa, 7, 213, 226 “The New Mexico Civil Code” (Canales), 181 New York Times, 103, 105, 108–109, 172 New York World, 106 “1919 Ranger Report.” See Canales investigation Nineteenth Amendment, 78 No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed (Orozco), 178 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 3 North Carolina Historical Commission, 265 Nueces Strip, 55–59 Nuevo Santander, 3 Obregón, Álvaro, 106 Ochoa, Juan, 239 Odom, Leslie Jr., 237 Oklahoma City memorial, 276n13 oral history, 15, 196, 211–212, 218, 244 Orbock, Joseph Medina, 178 Order Sons of America (OSA), 181, 182, 184, 186 O’Rourke, Beto, 43 Orozco, Cynthia, 15 Ortiz, Juana Minerva, 187 Padilla, Ezequiel, 193 Pan-­American College, 196 Paredes, Américo, 8, 18–19n9, 34, 35–36, 68n65, 196–197, 199, 214, 216

Parker, Bonnie, 33 Parker, James, 223 Parks, Rosa, 266 Parr, Archie, 169 Partido Revolucionario Mexicano (PRI, Institutional Revolutionary Party), 225–226 Patrick, Dan, 37–38, 45, 257 Patterson, Johnnye, 272 Peña, E. E., 186 Perales, Alonso S.: and antiracism convention, 192–193; and J. T. Canales, 179, 180–181, 189, 194–195, 196, 197; and LAC, 182–183; and LULAC, 178, 184, 185, 186–187, 190, 191; Adela Sloss-­Vento on, 198 Pérez Alvarez, Casimiro, 180–181 Pershing, John J., 226 “Personal Recollections of J. T. Canales,” (Canales), 194 Peterson, Jennifer Cobb, 252 Pfeifer, Michael, 93 Pierce, Frank C., 221 Pierce, Frank Cushman, 31 Pine Ridge, SD, 273–274 Pinochet, Augusto, 17, 266, 277n21 Pizaña, Aniceto, 227 Plancarte y Navarrete, Francisco, 193 Plan de San Diego: brutal suppression of, 9; and Canales investigation, 61; and Venustiano Carranzo, 220; and Flores Magón brothers, 224; in Life and Death on the Border, 1910–1920, 285; and Mexican history, 225; and mob violence, 94–95; reasons for, 101n9; reporting on, 153; reprisals for, 28; as turning point, 8; uprising’s end, 29 “The Plan of San Diego” (Sandos), 219 police: and “Ballad of Gregorio Cortez,” 61; in Brownsville, 67; and Ramón de la Cerda, 60; in Chile, 269; and George Floyd, 272, 287; lack of accountability, 122; and lynchings, 104, 105, 109; in Mexico, 110–111; and Reconstruction, 57; terror campaigns of, 59; and Texas Rangers, 30. See also law enforcement

306  Index

Political Association of Spanish Speaking Organization (PASSO), 197 political violence, 93–94 poll taxes, 82–83, 151, 153 Ponce, Victoriano, 29 Porvenir, Texas (film), 17 Porvenir massacre (1918): Bob Alexander and Donaly E. Brice on, 227; and Canales investigation, 100; details of, 95; historical marker for, 40, 42–44; history of, 37; recounting of on film, 17; survivors of, 39; and white supremacy, 81 Powers, Stephen, 52, 54 Presidio County Historical Commission, 42–44 Primer Congreso Mexicanista, 13 Progressive education movement, 12–13, 124–126, 131 Progressive Era, 28, 125, 126, 133–134 Prohibition, 70, 71, 78–80, 84, 89n32, 160, 165 PTSD (post-­traumatic stress disorder), 232, 233 The Pulse between the Dimensions and the Desert (de la Luz), 237–238 Punitive Expedition, 226 Pynchon, Thomas, 238 racialization, 144–145 racialized policing, 45–46 racial triumphalism, 124 racism: and Anglo-­Texans, 51; and Bob Bullock Museum, 252; and J. T. Canales, 170, 172; and First Mexicanist Congress, 153; and Jovita Idar, 149– 150; and Idar family, 154; legacies of, 274; and Life and Death on the Border, 1910–1920, 249; and lynchings, 94; and politics of respectability, 145; and Progressive education, 125; proximity to, 272–273; and public education, 132, 133; and Refusing to Forget, 227; state-­sponsored, 263; structural and representational, 143; and Donald Trump, 38; and “The

Wetback in the Lower Rio Grande,” 192 Radio Venceremos, 269 railroads, 5–6, 5, 6, 28, 71, 76, 159, 254 ranching, 3, 10–11, 55, 73, 74–75 Ransom, Henry, 28–29, 223–224 Rebelión en la frontera (Sandos, tr. Guhl), 35, 225 Rebellion in the Borderlands (Sandos), 8, 14–15, 34–35, 224 Recio, Federico, 186 Reconstruction, 12, 93–94, 95, 96, 97 Red Summer, 7 Refusing to Forget: and Bob Bullock Museum, 16; and empathy, 267; and historical narrative, 227, 250, 274; and historiography, 283–284; and museums, 273; National Endowment for the Humanities award, 263; origins of, 10, 27, 34; work of, 35–44, 121–122, 138n5, 217, 285 Regeneración (newspaper), 107, 224 religious affiliation, 73–74 religious fanaticism, 108, 115n41 reparations, 217 Republican Party, 38, 93–94, 152 Republic of Mexico, 51 Republic of Texas, 51, 124 resilience, 236, 286 respectability, 145, 147–148 “Reverberations of Memory, Violence, and History” symposium, 257 Revista Latino-­Americana, 197–198 Revolution in Texas ( Johnson), 8, 35, 216, 225 Ribb, Richard, 13–14, 15, 35 Richardson, B., 130 Rio Grande Valley: and J. T. Canales, 193; and Canales investigation, 223; and cattle barons, 56; and commercial agriculture, 5–6, 10–11; and the Cortina War, 53–55; and ethnic Mexicans, 27–28; and irrigation, 159–160; and LAC, 179, 181, 182; and La Crónica, 151; and land theft, 214; and LULAC, 185; and Lean-

Index 307

der H. McNelly, 60; and Mexican Americans, 215, 218; Mexicans killed in, 221; and pandemic, 287; people of, 3; and Plan de San Diego, 94–95, 101n9, 220; and Progressive education, 131; and Prohibition, 79; and Refusing to Forget, 263; and Adela Sloss-­Vento, 189; and Tejano-­Anglo power shift, 234–235; and Texas Rangers, 16, 211, 213, 228, 283 riots, 106–107, 114n31 Rivas-­Rodriguez, Maggie, 196 Rivera, Diana Noreen, 9–10, 18 Roberts, Edmund, 270, 271 Robertson, S. A., 151 Robles, Vito Alessio, 193 Rocha, Rodolfo, 34 Rock Springs, Wyoming, massacre, 96 Rodríguez, Antonio, 40, 42, 98, 106– 107, 113n19, 114n28, 146 Rodriguez, I. M., 133 Rodríguez, Jacob, 186, 190 Rodríguez, Toribio, 30, 32 Roebuck, Emmet, 61 Román, Nati, 17–18 Rubio, J. B., 181 Sáenz, J. Luz, 183, 185, 190 Saldivar-­Hall, Sonia, 230–231 Salina, Abraham, 256 Salinas, Ezequiel D., 182, 185, 197 Salvatierra [Independent School District et al. v. Salvatierra], 128, 181 Samora, Julian, 34 San Angelo, 152–153 San Antonio Express, 95, 194 Sánchez, George I., 191, 192, 196–197, 199, 201n15 Sand Creek Massacre exhibition (2012), 259 Sanders, John J., 29, 32, 171, 222, 223 Sandos, James A., 8, 14–15, 34–35 Sands, W. W., 100 San Miguel, Guadalupe, 123–124 Santa Isabel, Chihuahua, 105–106 Santiscoy, Luciano, 184

Saunders, Leonard, 192 Sayers, Joseph D., 61 Scott, Florence Johnson, 189 Second Cristiada (1934–1938), 114n31 segregation: and ethnic identity, 132; and ethnic Mexicans, 83; and genocide, 143; and Progressive education, 125; and public education, 126–130, 135–136, 153; and racist insults, 285; and railroads, 6; and school boards, 152–153 Serda, Donanciano, 34 Serda, Paulino, 34 Seriff, Suzanne, 252 sexism, 149–150 sexuality, 7 Shapter, Andrew, 17 Shears, Bob, 52–53 Shillady, John, 81 Shivers, Allan, 192 “Silent Sam” statue, 264 Silguero, Reyes, 67n64 Slate (website), 248 Slaughterhouse-­Five (Vonnegut), 239 slavery, 51, 97, 232, 233, 266, 271, 274 Sloss, Jesse, 178 Sloss-­Vento, Adela, 178, 189, 193, 196, 197, 198 Smith, Curtis, 37 Smith, L. B. “Berry,” 58 Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, 258–259 Snead, Lou, 271–272 Sobre la fe de nuestros padres (Canales), 193 Solis, John, 184, 186 The Son (Meyer), 36 Sons of Confederate Veterans, 272 Sosa, Mariano, 110 Southern Poverty Law Center, 270 South Texas map, 127 Spears, J. B., 126–127 Special Force of Rangers, 30, 49, 56–59, 60, 62n4, 100 Spohn, A. P., 129 Squire, L. R., 239

308  Index

Stanton, Gregory H., 143–144 state violence: and Canales investigation, 31–33; and history, 8–9, 18; and mob violence, 112; and nation-­ building, 7; normalization of, 2–3; public discussion of, 15; study of, 1; and white supremacy, 10–11, 16 Stein, Max, 129 stereotypes, 83–84, 121, 132–133, 144– 145, 147–148, 149–150, 154–155, 249, 254 Sterling, Ed, 211 Sterling, W. W. “Bill,” 163, 176n78, 211, 214, 215 Stevenson, Bryan, 272–273 Stevenson, Coke, 192 Stewart, Windsor, 168 Stillman, Charles, 52 Tafolla, James Jr., 185 Tales of the Texas Rangers (radio and TV show), 222 Tanner, E. R., 130 Tarpey, Brianna, 236 Taylor, Paul S., 125 Taylor, Zachary, 57 Tejano music, 75–76 Tejanos: and the Alamo, 81; and J. T. Canales, 80, 83–84; defined, 18– 19n9; and La Matanza, 286; and land theft, 234–235, 254; in Life and Death on the Border, 1910–1920, 284– 285; and Mexican Revolution, 8; and Plan de San Diego, 94–95; and slavery, 51; and Texas culture, 85n3 Teller, Raymond, 100 Texas Bar Journal, 181 Texas Council on Human Relations, 192 Texas Cowboy (Warnock), 213 Texas Good Neighbor Commission, 192 Texas Historical Commission, 37, 40–44, 215, 265 “The Texas Law of Flowing Waters with Special Reference to Irrigation from the Lower Rio Grande” (Canales and Davenport), 181–182

Texas legislature, 2, 13–14, 30, 31, 158– 159, 166–172, 173n4, 285 Texas map, 50 Texas Mexican community, 18–19n9 Texas-­Mexico border, 1, 3, 29, 32–33, 65n34, 134, 219–221, 222–223, 246–247 Texas Observer, 43 Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum, 36 Texas Rangers: and anti-­Mexican violence, 2; atrocities by, 219, 222–224, 255–256; and Bob Bullock Museum, 248; and Canales investigation, 12, 14–15, 27, 31–33, 84, 99–100, 158– 159, 179, 250; and cattle rustling, 56; and congressional inquiry, 59; and the Cortina War, 54–55; and El Rinche, 16; and William Hobby, 160–162; and House Bill 5, 1, 166– 171; and intimidation campaigns, 59; and La Matanza, 143, 234; and La Matanza historical marker, 42; in Life and Death on the Border, 1910– 1920, 285; and Mexican Americans, 214; Mexican government’s condemnation of, 114n30; and Mexican Revolution, 6; murders by, 28–29; myths of, 222, 227, 229–230; and oral history, 211–213; and Américo Paredes, 68n65; Américo Paredes on, 35–36; and Plan de San Diego suppression, 9; and Porvenir massacre, 42, 95; and Refusing to Forget, 283; reorganization of, 235; resistance to, 13; and state violence, 15; and striking farmworkers, 49; supporters of, 251, 259; and William T. Vann, 31; and US-­Mexico War, 57; and Walter P. Webb, 285; and white supremacy, 10–11; and World War I, 30 “The Texas Rangers” (Trombly), 137n1 Texas Rangers (Webb), 34, 121, 137– 138n2, 137n1, 221 Texas Revolution, 2, 3, 51, 81 Texas Senate, 275n7

Index 309

Texas Social Justice Series, 39 Texas Southmost College, 193 Texas State Archives, 219, 221 Texas State Historical Association, 200n2, 272 Texas State Library, 216 Texas State Library and Archives Center, 256 Texas State Library and Archives Commission, 246, 252 Texas State Preservation Board, 39 Texas Story Project, 248 Tex-­Mex and Mexican National Railway Company, 180 Tijerina, Lala, 197 Tijuana, 109 Tingley, Clyde, 191 Tobar, Juan, 256 Tobin, William, 54 torture: and Canales investigation, 99; of ethnic Mexicans, 27; and family separation, 45–46; of José Hernández, 30–31; of labor activists, 7; in Latin America, 17, 266, 268; during Mexican Revolution, 61; and Special Force of Rangers, 57; by Texas Rangers, 60; by Warren Wallace, 59; of Jesse Washington, 271 Track Down (TV show), 222 Tragic Quadrangle (Canales), 194 Trails and Trials of a Texas Ranger (Sterling), 214 trauma studies, 276n13 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 3, 51, 52, 62–63n7 Trenckmann, William A., 82–83 Treviño, Hilario, 151 Treviño, Jacinto, 151 Treviño, Samuel, 135 Treviño de la Garza Falcón, María de Jesús, 254 Trombly, Albert, 137n1 Trump, Donald, 38, 45 Two-­Eyed Seeing, 233 Tyx, Daniel Blue, 43

Undertold Markers program, 40–44, 265 Unionists, 93–94 United Daughters of the Confederacy, 265–266 United Nations, 46 United States: and Chile, 268; and la raza, 144–145 “Unite the Right” rally, 38 “Unity” (Canales), 193 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 264–265 University of Texas, 192, 196–197 University of Texas–Rio Grande Valley, 44 Uresti, Andres, 32 US Army: and anti-­Mexican violence, 57; and J. T. Canales, 98–99; and Cortinistas, 54, 63–64n18; and Leander H. McNelly, 58; and W. W. Sands, 100; and Texas Rangers, 255; and vigilantes, 223 US-­Dakota War exhibition (2012), 259 US imperialism, 269–270, 274 US-­Mexico border, 3, 4, 121, 235, 274 US-­Mexico War, 2, 3, 50, 57 US military, 7, 29, 269, 269–270 US National Archives, 219, 220, 224 US State Department, 192 US Supreme Court, 192 Valencia, Arlinda, 37, 42, 43 Valero-­Jiménez, Omar, 195 “Value of History Statement,” 259–260 Vann, William T., 28, 31, 46, 164, 169 Veale, B. C., 174n23 Veracruz port seizure, 226 Vetencourt, Margarito, 58 vigilantes: and Bob Bullock Museum exhibit, 255, 256; and the Cart War, 92–93; deputization of, 7; and historical markers, 40; and La Matanza, 234; lynchings by, 92–93, 95; and martial law, 29; resistance to, 31; and seditionists, 10–11; and US Army sanction, 223 vigilantism, 6, 9, 94–95, 252–253

310  Index

Villa, Francisco “Pancho,” 7, 226 Villalpando, Edmundo, 135, 136 Villanueva, Nicholas Jr., 8 Villegas de Magnon, Leonor, 154 Viramontes, Helena María, 35 “Viva Seguin” ( Jiménez), 75–76 Vivero de Idar, Jovita, 154 Vonnegut, Kurt, 239 voting rights: and Democratic Party, 151–152; denial of, 122; loss of, 34; and poll taxes, 153; and Texas Rangers, 30; and white supremacy, 82–83; for women, 78, 189 Walker, Kimberly, 235–236 Walker, Texas Ranger (TV show), 213, 230–231 Wallace, Warren, 59 War along the Border (De León), 8 Warnock, Franklin, 15, 211, 215 Warnock, Kirby, 15, 36, 251 Warnock, Marie, 211 Warnock, Roland, 15, 29, 36, 211–213, 212 Washington, Jesse, 81, 271 Washington Post, 105 Wayne, John, 229–230 Webb, Clive, 12, 106, 273 Webb, Walter Prescott: and J. T. Canales, 16, 121, 137–138n2, 195; on cattle barons, 56; and Frank Hamer, 175n28; and Lyndon B. Johnson, 137n1; on Mexican stereotypes, 59; on number of victims, 7; and Américo Paredes, 8; and Texas Ranger hero myth, 172, 213; Texas Rangers, 34, 221, 285 Weber, David, 224 “We Call Them Greasers” (Anzaldúa), 35

Weinstein, Harvey, 267 Wells, James B., 159, 161, 165 Western Historical Association, 40 western swing, 76 West Texas News, 151 “The Wetback in the Lower Rio Grande” (University of Texas), 192 white-­on-­white lynchings, 93–94, 96– 97 white supremacy: and ethnic Mexicans, 154–155; and Idar family, 145; ­Eduardo Idar on, 150–151; Nicasio Idar on, 146–147; and lynchings, 97; and nation-­building, 1; and Progressive Era, 28; and state violence, 2, 10–11, 16; and Texas culture, 81–83 Wilco Patriots, 272 Wilmot, Luis, 185 Wilson, Woodrow, 6–7, 29, 220, 222 Winter Garden District, 6 Wishbone (TV show), 213 “With His Pistol in His Hand” (Paredes), 8, 34, 214 women, 7, 35, 188–189, 199 Woodul, Walter F., 161 World War I, 9, 29–30, 76–78, 98; veterans of, 7 Wright, Philip, 222–223 Yarborough, Ralph, 201n15 Yehuda, Rachel, 232, 233 “Yo Soy de Frank Rabbaté” (Rivera), 9–10, 18, 20–23 Zamora, Elena, 189, 194 Zapata, Emiliano, 226 Zapatistas, 226 Zarate, Ismael, 183 Zeischang, Charles, 83