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Introduction-TheInjusticeNeverLeavesYou_21.pdf
The Injustice
Never
Leaves You
i\nti-wi exican Violence in Texas
Monica Munoz ~1artinez
-
Introduction
IT WAS AN OTHERWISE ordinary day in early April 1918, but Miguel Garcia,
a Mexican national living in Texas, was growing concerned. His son Flor-
encio, twenty-five years old, had not yet returned home from his job as a
cattle herder in Cameron County. Garcia started walking through town,
asking relatives, friends, neighbors, and eventually even the county attorney
and local law enforcement officers if they had seen Florencio. Days passed
without news . Then someone told Garcia that Texas Rangers had arrested
Florencio over a week earlier, on April 5,just south ofBrownsville. Garcia
knew that when ethnic Mexicans disappeared after being arrested, the pris-
oners' remains were often found hidden in the groves of mesquite trees
in the rural Texas landscape. This grim news prompted Garcia to start
searching the brush in the countryside for his son's remains .1
Miguel Garcia repeatedly asked for help from local authorities . Oscar C .
Dancy, the Cameron County attorney, remembered Garcia's persistence:
"the old man, the father of the boy, was at my office. He was at my office
two or three times and my residence once." 2 Weeks later, local residents
found human remains outside of Brownsville. "We found the bones of a
human being," Dancy would later testify. "We found a pair of pants and a
jumper and as I recollect it, a shirt, black hair and a hat ... a light Texas
2
THE INJU STI CE NEVER LEAV Es You
I . ,. he remembered, adding that there were bullet h
vboy Stct~on iat, "1 I l I oles co\ . "Y.
0 perhaps three. · T 1e c ot 1111g matched th
I rough the J-1cket. w , 'd d e de- tl .
1 G ' a had previously prov1 e , and the invcstig .
scri cion M1gue arc1 , . . at1on · P
I b d , had been shot m the back three times. The rem .
suggested that t 1e o ) f h . a1ns ~.
1 f
I th ,5 a skull with a tuft o air, and bones scattered consisted 011 Y O c O c ' , as
· l 1 .k ,1 by coyotes or buzzards. Garcia arrived at the s
far as 300 yan s. 1 c )' . . cene .fi d I shoes hat and clothing as belongmg to Florencio Th and 1dent1 1e t 1e • ' . . • e
11 . d ogrammed handkerchief out of the Jacket they had d'
father pu c a mo11 I . ' 4 is-
d alld verified that it was 11s sons. covere , . According to witnesses who last saw Flo_ren~10, he had been _m the cus-
tody of three Texas Rangers (the s_tate. po1JCc) 111 ~he Brownsv_i Ile jail just c. I • d earance An invest1gat10n by Mexican consuls rn Browns
be1ore 115 1sapp ' · - ville revealed that the Rangers, accompanied by two civilians and a US soldier, arrested Florencio at Las Tranquilas Ranch. The Rangers asked a
local rancher, Chas Champion, if they could borrow a lock and chain to
secure their prisoner to a tree while they slept. Considering this unneces-
sarily rough treatment, the rancher instead found a judge, who gave the
officers permission to place Florenc10 in jail overnight in the custody of
local police. 5
Pressure from Mexican consuls mounted. On May 24, 1918, Mexican
Inspector General Andres G. Carda in El Paso wrote to Texas governor William P. Hobby asking for an investigation. According to the state po-
lice, the remains could not belong to Florencio because the bones had been bleached white by the sun. These bones, they suggested, belonged to
someone killed months earlier. They also denied that the father had posi-
tively identified his son's clothing. ln addition, the Rangers testified that they had in fact arrested Florencio on April 5 but had released him that
same evening and did not place him in jail. They refuted witnesses who
saw him behind bars. Their prisoner, they suggested, had not suffered any harm. The Rangers furthermore insisted that the truth was quite different: local residents had spotted Florencio across the border in Mexico. 6 Never- theless. Garcia remained convinced that Texas Rangers had murdered his son.
In light of such discrepancies, how do we go about unearthing the his- tory of violence on the US-Mexico border? If we relied on the Ranger investigation, we would not learn much more. But Florencio. born in Tam- aulipas, Mexico, was a Mexican national living and working in Texas.
INTRODUCTION 3
Without immigration quotas or limits on migration from Mexico, Mexican
nationals and American c1t1zcns moved easily back and forth across the
border. The death of a Mexican national 1n Texas prompted the local
Mexican consuls to investigate his death. Their investigation found that
Florencia's arrest had been based on unfounded suspicions. Letters from
businessmen 111 the region defended Florencio's reputation as a diligent la-
borer. According to Oscar Dancy, locals remembered him as an "abso-
lutely straight, square Mexican boy, above the average laborer or peon." 7
Was Florencio Garcia a threat and a thief or a dutiful laborer?
To these officials, Mexican and American alike, Florencio Garcia was
not a friend, relative, or a neighbor. His death was a diplomatic inconve-
nience. As one diplomat said, the death threatened both relations between
the United States and Mexico and the potential for even more farming in
the region. In April in south Texas, lots of crops needed tending. If word
spread that Mexican laborers were being continually mistreated, workers
might flee for other opportunities in the South or the West. Without field
hands, the farming economy would be devastated. For Mexican officials,
and some Americans, Garcia's story was the latest in a long series of abu-
sive policing by the Texas Rangers. These state police officers had a habit
of disturbing the delicate equilibrium oflabor and race relations. That equi-
librium needed to be reestablished by diplomats and political leaders, who
worried about potential economic losses. The records show that officials
recognized the systemic impact of Florencio Garcia's death but reveal no
sense that they mourned it.
For the relatives and friends of Florencio, on the other hand, his loss
was something else entirely. His loss was personal. Furthermore, it signaled
the unjust death of yet another ethnic Mexican without recourse from the
judicial system, the state administration, or the Mexican consul. Florencio's
death was just one short chapter in a long history of racial violence in the
borderlands.
On May 27, 1918, the Cameron County acting coroner, Henry J. Kirk, confirmed the family's claims when he filed a death certificate for Flor-
encio Garcia. Since the recovered body revealed little, the coroner had to
modify the certificate. Its generic language reads: "I hereby certify that I at-
tended deceased from ___ 191_, to ___ 191_, that I last saw h_
I. 191 and that the death occurred on the date stated above a 1ve on ___ _, at __ m." Kirk drew a line through most of this section, and instead
4 THE INJUSTICE NEVER LEAVES YOU
followed the statement " I hereby certify that I" with handwritten words .
The modified form continued, "found the identified remains and that
death occurred 011 unknown date." Where the cert ificate asked for the cause
of death, Kirk wrote "u nknown. " 8 The certificate also included important
information :ibout Florencio Garda and his family . Florencio was born 011
April JO, 1885 and he was married, although there was no space on the form to include his spo use's name. The reco rd identified him as the son of
Miguel Garcia and Teburcia Velasquez, both of Tamaulipas. It noted that
his remains were buried on May 26, 1918, in Brown svi lle. Miguel Garcia
had identified the remains and helped ensure that accurate information
would be on file in the official death registry for the state of Texas.
The Garcia family must have been unsettled by Kirk 's decision not to list
a cause of death on the certificate, despite investigators who described what
appeared to be three bullet holes in the back of Florencia's jacket. Kirk's
decision, however, did not prevent the family from filing civil charges.
Now with a certificate to prove Florencio was indeed dead, and not alive
and well in Mexico as the state police suggested, Texas Rangers George W .
Sadler , John Sittre , and Alfred P. Locke were arrested just days after the
Garcia family buried their son. The officers filed a bond of $3,000 each
and were remanded to the custody of the captain of their company,
Charles F. Stevens.9 The charges were brought before the same Henry J. Kirk who acted as both county coroner and justice of the peace. Kirk
convened a grand jury that consisted entirely of Anglo residents with the
exception of one local ethnic Mexican . After reviewing the ev idence ,
the grand jury decided not to indict the Texas Rangers. Oscar Dancy later
remembered that by 1918 grand juries in the region were "almost solidly
Americans, mostly newcomers." The newcomers were Anglo Americans
who had migrated from southern states. Their arrival expanded Jim Crow
laws, the systemic segregation laws targeting African Am ericans, to the
US-Mexico border. Targeted by ''Juan Crow" laws, as historians now pop-
ularly refer to them , ethnic Mexicans found themselves increasin gly seg-
regated from Anglos in schools, churches, and restaurants and discouraged
from voting or serving onjurie s.10
The grand jury's decision gave the state police continued license to char-
acterize th e life of Florencio Garcia as they saw fit. In 1919, when Captain
Stevens testified to the incident before a committee inve stigatin g abuses
by the state police, he ignor ed the certificate of death and again asserted
1NTRODUCTI ON
!.
l(rtll lf'CI ""'"'
•Ute In1rm1tioc.H1 1.i1t of C..ua, of bu1h-St1l1 1hr Di11nt Ca'i11in1 Dutll. or, f• duth1 ltON Vlol1nt....C.u, .. . S11t1 (I) Muu ol hJur,; tad (2) •h11\H Ac.dduul . lwlddal, or HomlcldaL
11 LINOTK OP RUIDINCI: (11'0< Ko1pltah, la11h•tl0M, Tnn1i,n11, o, •~unt RuJd1nl1.)
Al place la tht / • of du1h- .. - 1n..- - - l'll01.----da.. Statt - ----:rra- -- .. .._~._
Wlltrc ... tliJUM tonlnctcd, if 094: II ,,u •• r dnthl- --- --- - -- -- ---
- Fo«11ar or ua\W rcdda-nu
_ If PLACI OP ,■URIAL OR IIIMOVAL DATI OP,., IIIIIIAL
, ~ ~ ~--M, _ u,8'.. ~ 1-ADDRI -, ~e_fi,; .. ~ ~,;
5
Death certificates for victims of anti-Mexican violence at the hands of police are hard to find. In the case of the murder of Florencio Garcia in 1918, the acting
coroner for Cameron County had to modify the certificate to indicate that the date of his death was "unknown." Later investigations showed that he died in the custody of Texas Rangers. Florencio Ga rcia, May 1918, certificate number 19810, Bureau of Vital Statistics, State Registrar Office, Austin.
that Garcia never met harm at Ranger hands. He testified under oath that
Garcia had last been seen living in Mexico. 11 Stevens's testimony attempted
to erase the murder as well as the pain suffered by the surviving Garcia
relatives. It also threatened to erase their efforts to seek justice in the after-
math of Garcia's murder . Stevens swiftly disavowed the murder and pre-
served the reputation of the state police.
Garcia's family pushed the Texas courts and police in multiple ways,
imploring them to act on behalf of their son, to find his remains, to record
6 THE INJUSTICE NEVER LEAVES y
Ou
d P rosecute the assailants in vo lved in his mu d
his death, an to r er. His
l . . b ther and his unnam ed spouse, as well as Oscar Dan e C
parents, 11s ro ' . Y, has . A t 1io Valiente and Leopoldo Espmosa, were imp Champion, n o1 ' . . acted by
. d his disappearance. They relayed to mvest1gators the d . Jus arrest an . . . etails
I . they saw him alive and provided an opportunity c
of the a t ume ' . . tor the . d' . 1 tern to prosecute those involved m his murder. They left t JU 10a sys . races from 1918 in the historical record. B~t with _ t~e concl_usion of the abuse . t' u·on in 1919 Florencio and his surviving family disappear f inves 1ga • . . rom
h d And Y et this trace however mcomplete , 1s essenti al The s II t e recor . ' · rna
incomplete traces revealing the collective concern for his life helped ensur;
that today there are documents that challenge the pol_ic~ account s. They
provide an alternative story to the one where Florencio 1s a criminal and
his family's grief is unfounded. The larger tragedy of Florencio Garcia's death, and the attempts by the
state police to disavow his murder, lies in its utt er ordinariness. Searching
the Texas landscape for the remains of a loved one was an awful-an d
awfully familiar-ritua l, repeated countle ss time s before . By 1918, the
murder of ethnic Mexicans had become commonplace on the Texas- Mexico border, a violence systematically justified by vigilantes and state
authorities alike. Historians estimate that between 1848 and 1928 in Texas
alone, 232 ethnic Mexicans were lynched by vigilante groups of three or more people. These tabulations only tell part of the story.12
Despite popular assumptions that vigilantism in th e nineteenth century
occurred primarily in regions where law enforcem ent institutions lacked
structure and social influence, vigilantism was in fact practiced in places
where criminal justice systems were well established. Violence that super-
seded judicial procedures regularly articulated popular distrust of the justice
system or local frustration with the bureaucracy of crimina l prosecution.
Lynch mobs commonly took prisoners from jail even though courts would
likely have sentenced them to execution. These vigilante actions, how-
ever, were tacitly sanctioned by the judicial system w henever local grand juries failed to indict or prosecute assailants who parti cipated in mob vio-
lence.13 Moreover, law enforcement officers facilitated the conditions for making prisoners vulnerable to mob violence and even parti cipated in
lynchings. Vigilante violence on the border had a state-bui lding function. It both directed the public to act with force to sustain hierarchies of race
INTRODUCTION 7
.ind class and complemented the brutal methods oflaw enforcement Ill this ' dH pcno .
In addit1011 to these acts by mobs, state and local police commmed
extralegal acts of v10lcnce that are often overlooked in lynching statistics.
When includ111g acts of extralegal violence at the hands of Texas Rangers
and local police, the numbers of victims of racia l violence in Texas soars.
Extralegal violence at the hands of law enforcement has for too long
been shielded in a cloak of legal authority. The decade between 1910
and 1920 was a particu larly brutal period, when ethnic Mexicans were criminalized and harshly policed by an intersecting regime of vigilantes,
state police, local police, and army soldiers. During these years of vitriol
and aggression, law enforcement officers, soldiers, and vigilantes claimed
the lives of hundreds more ethnic Mexicans, citizens of the United States
and Mexico alike. Estimates of the number of dead range from as few as
300 to as many as several thousand.
State racial terror and vigilantism were linked. In particular, police abuse
and collusion with vigilante mobs, followed by state cover-ups, set a pat-
tern for sanctioned abuse. The frequency, and normalcy, of anti-Mexican
violence seeped far beyond Texas and encouraged a public passivity toward
violent policing that has had long-standing consequences for peop le living
near the border.
The violence on the Texas-Mexico border took many forms. Ethnic
Mexicans were intimidated, tortured, and killed by hanging, shooting,
burning, and beating . Nearly all the known victims were adult men, though
a few women and children suffered the same vicious wrath. What this
violence nearly always shared was location: death often occurred in the
isolation of the rural Texas landscape. The thick mesquite brush and the dark
of night frequently cloaked these acts from public view. 15 These events
were also linked in a broadly felt injustice. Assailants rarely faced arrest
and grand juries regularly failed to indict the accused for wrongdoing. For
members oflaw enforcement, a culture of impunity prevailed.
Terror and intimidation permeated the region. For each victim that died,
there were others who witnessed the violence. People organized their daily
routines to avoid conflict with law enforcement officers or known agita-
tors of vigilante violence. Children witnessed parents being beaten, or
worse, and cousins saw their kin being shot. Many of the dead would not
8 THE INJUSTICE NEVER LEAVES You
be recovered or given a proper burial. Assailants threatened witnesses and
prevented them from tending to the bodies of loved ones. Still, relatives
and friends earched , and protested the ongoing murders, for months and
years and decades . Some would store the sites in their memories, to share
them years later. Journalists described the violent scenes as they were unveiled in the day-
light or exposed in unexpected encounters with corpses hanging from
telephone poles or the limbs of mesquite trees. People spotted decapitated
bodies floating down the Rio Grande. 16 Such encounters with the dead
surely provoked a range of reactions, from horror to anger to a righteous
sense of justice served . But for friends, neighbors , or family of the dead,
and for allies in the struggle against injustice, finding the remains was also
part of a much longer process of grieving and of remembrance.
This book is about the long legacies of violence. It returns to a period of
terror acknowledged by historians of the border but forgotten in public
memory. Politicians, historians, the media, and historical commissions of
the early twentieth century all inscribed a celebratory version of events
in newspapers, books, lesson plans, museums, and monuments. This ver-
sion of history was a key ingredient in their nation building. It hid state crimes and disavowed the loss and trauma experienced by residents. His-
torical institutions neglected to keep accurate records of racially motivated
killings and in this way bolstered efforts to erase this period of terror
from state history. Records that do exist often labeled the dead as criminals.
The fryustice Never Leaves You reveals how the keepers of history convinced
the broader United States that this period should be remembered instead
as a time of progress .
The architects of official history, however, did not account for the other
ways history is made. They did not consider the witnesses and survivors of
violence who would pass memories from one generation to another. 17 They
underestimated residents who had their own claim in the border region
and refused to be intimidated, residents who would share their stories with
their children, residents who would leave personal records documenting
the terror that shaped daily life. The Injustice Never Leaves You is their story.
ln addition to the recovery of a history of state violence in the borderlands,
it reveals valiant acts of preservation and remembrance conducted by people
INTRODU CTION 9
who lived in a world shaped by violence but who refused to be consumed by it.
The efforts of such people, of course, exist outside of official history,
ju~t like the murdered human beings they sought to remember. There are
no indexes that name all the dead and catalog the circumstances of their
murders; all such efforts to remember are partial and unofficial, existing in
the margins. There are, however, signal cases that provide insight into the
conditions that allowed this vast violence against Mexicans to flourish. In
the pages that follow , we will examine a public lynching of a Mexican
national by an Anglo mob in central Texas in 1910; a double murder of
two Texas landowners by a Texas Ranger and a local posse in south Texas
in 1915; and a massacre organized by Texas Rangers, local ranchers , and US
soldiers in west Texas in 1918. Separated by time, location, and outcome,
these cases give a glimpse into the far-reaching practices of anti-Mexican
violence. They show that neither class, citizenship, nor social influence
protected ethnic Mexicans in this decade. Studied together, these cases
expose the linked practices of racial violence that created a long-lasting,
pervasive atmosphere of terror. Mobs lynched ethnic Mexicans with impu-
nity, state and local police colluded with vigilantes, and the militarization
of the border fed anti-Mexican sentiment, making racial violence all the
more lethal.
This book documents both a ferocious period of terror and also the
various techniques grieving relatives and their communities employed to
hold vigilantes, police, and governments accountable. Living amidst terror,
communities utilized multiple strategies for survival. People still challenged
the criminalization of ethnic Mexicans and sought justice for the dead.
Residents took up arms and engaged in public protest, witnesses faced
assailants in court, journalists documented and criticized violent events in
editorials, local politicians petitioned for change, and Mexican diplomats
pressed for investigations and arrests. Recounting these myriad acts dis-
rupts the typical narrative: that violence is followed by reconciliation, that
the dead were likely criminals anyway, that the mere passage of time can
heal wounds .18
This book also highlights the long efforts to reckon with loss and shows
that mourning can be a practice of resistance, passed from generation to
generation, continuing even a century later. Recovering the names of the
dead and the names of those who brought them harm is a crucial and
10 TII E INJ US TI C E N EVER LEAVE S y
OlJ
• . ti , struggk against st,1tc vio lence. Such endurin on •0111g dfort in 11: . ' ~ . g efforts
_g , )SttlOll lO popular memory. tcc;t1fy to the value f , oJtcn 111 direct oppc . • 0 con_
I c: II vtth the p,isl. The families who have reckon d ncccmg ti ur 11 u Y \ e Wnh
I , 1 ·bor a lc\soll we all shou ld heed . We must reckon w ·th rim , 10 encc lJ 1 1 the
(; I ti ~ •out hcr n border of our country was created-and policed
act t 1:H i c ' . - .
1 d oc valiantly and th ,1t we have cont111uaJly suppressed h'
v1oknt y, :111 11 • ' t 1s accllr ,tc past ft 1s a past that bleeds mto the present, a suppres . truer, more • · · s1on
chat contrnu es to shape our future .
FORGING BORDERS WITH VIOLENCE
Thi s history of violence takes shap e around the contested creation of the
US-Mexico border and efforts for eco n om ic contro l by new Anglo set-
tlers. In 1821, Mexico gained its ind ependence from Spain. But within forty
years of independence, a tangled series of conflicts-the Texas Revolution
(1836) and the US-Mexico War (1846- 1848)-rcsulted in the United States
acquirin g half of Mexico's territory. As a result, the political border of the
region now known as Texas was conti nu ally shiftin g. Native American na-
tion s, especially th e Coma n ch e, co ntinu ed to contest outside governance-
Spanish, Mexican , Texan, and ultimately American-in the region. Anglo
migration into the region ens ur ed th at settlers had to contend with Native
Americans and Mexicans, two gro up s that stru gg led throughout the nine-
teenth centur y to maintain their place in the region as the colonial powers
shifted.
The se constru cted and chan gi n g boundaries required constant enforce-
ment across the centur y. In 1823 Stephen F. Austin, an early Anglo settler
who lived in the regio n soo n to be Texas, organized a small group of men,
called rangers, to protect settl ers and their property. After Texas claimed
indep endence from M ex ico in 1836, the m en worked to ensure that Anglo
settlers flourished in the new Republic of Texas. That flourishing, however,
came at th e expe nse of gro up s identified as enem ies of the new settlement
as well as tho se group s wan ted for labor . The Texas Rangers were descr ib ed
as a "fightin g force" created by Anglo sett lers co fight in the ongoing war
for racial supremacy, battling Mexican land owners and indi geno u s natio n s,
includin g the Tonkawas, Lip an Apache, Waco, Karankawa, Kiowa, and
Comanche. The Te xas Rangers targeted both th e " Indi an warrior" and
th e Mexican vaq11ero as enemies of white supr emacy. 19
INTRODUCTION 11
The Rangers also did their part to help preserve a slave-based agriculture
by violently policing enslaved African men and women. During the state's
Jong history of chattel slavery, the Rangers tracked and punished enslaved
people crying to cross the Rio Grande into Mexico to freedom. Once across
che border, the men, women, and children were out of reach of those at-
tempting to claim them as property, who were not allowed to follow them
into Mexico . Of course, Rangers frequently broke the neutrality laws that
forbade their trips across the border. They also terrorized ethnic Mexicans
accused of harboring runaway slaves. One Texas Ranger described them as
''b lack as niggers ... and ten times as treacherous ."20
[n the early nineteenth century, Texas Rangers blurred the lines be-
tween enforcing state laws, practicing vigilantism, and inciting racial
terror. Historians now view the Texas Rangers as the first prominent
Western vigilantes to be endowed with legal authority. 21 The most fre-
quent complaints of Texas Rangers abusing their power came through
what some referred to as la fey de fi~ga, or the law of flight or escape.
Under this morbid legal regime, Rangers released prisoners and ordered
them co run. Officers then proceeded to shoot the prisoner while in flight,
later filing reports that they killed the prisoner to prevent escape or
because the prisoner resisted arrest. 22 As early as 1870, a newspaper editor
from west Texas reported disgust at the frequency with which Texas
Rangers used the expressions "ki ll ed while attempting to escape" and
"k illed while resisting arrest." The editoria l alleged that these expressions
had dire resonances "that are fast coming to have a melancholy and ter-
rible significance to the people of Western Texas. They furnish the brief
epitaph to the scores who have fallen and are falling victims to the igno-
rance, the arrogance, or the brutality of those charged with the execution
of the ]aw."23
The US military also actively policed ethnic Mexicans. They collaborated
with Rangers to suppress uprisings that challenged American rule in the
region . Ethnic Mexican landowners identified as people of the region and
not of Mexi co or the United States. They embraced nineteenth-century
liberal ideologies that held individual freedom and liberty as core princi-
ples. As historian Elliot Young exp lains, "For border people, freedom spe-
cifically meant preventing central-government interference in a region that
had been relatively isolated and semiautonomous for its entire history. The
centralist versus federalist struggles in Mexico that ultimately resulted in
12 THE INJU STI CE NEVER LEAVE S You
Tcxa, independence 111 1836 were part of this long history of fighting for ,, , ..
autonomy. Some Mc-xic.1ns remted federal encroac hm ent by merely continuing
to Jive as they had before the region shifted hands. Others, prompted
by threats to their land ownership and economtc influence, resorted to
armed remtancc. A decade after the United States claimed half of Mexico's
territory through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848,Juan Nepomu-
ceno Cort111a took up arms and rebe lled against the new nation and new
Anglo settler~ recruited to south Texas after the state was annexed into the
Umtcd States. In the summer of 1859 Cortina defended a Mexican m11c/1ero
from a public beattng by shooting Brownsville cit y m arshal Robert Shears.
In November 1859, Cort ina delivered a proclamation accusingjudges and
attorneys of expropriating land from Mexican lando wners and practicing
anti-Mexican v10lence. The son of a wealthy landowning family, Cor ti na
led an estimated 600 men in a battle against the Texas Rangers and the US
Army. He described Anglo settlers as "vampire guises of men" who robbed
property and hunted and murdered Mexican men "like wi ld beasts." 25 De-
spite being defeated, Cor tina wo uld in spire a genre of border ballads sung
by ethnic Mexicans to honor those w ho stood up to discrimination, co lo-
nization, and violence. 26
Ten years after Corti na's re volt, ethnic M ex ican lando wners suffered
losses as Anglo colonization was fortified with t echno logical advances. In
1874, lllino1s farmer J. F. Glidden patented his invent10n of barbed wire, which became a favored tool for defining private property and guaranteed
the successful colonization of the western Unit~d States.27 By fencing in
the rural landscape in the 1870s, Anglo ranchers created barriers to rivers
and streams, blocked previously unfettered grazing patterns for cows and
goats, and summarily stifled ideals of open land use and communal access
practJCed by rancheros for numerous generations. The changes in property
ownership and ranching paved the way for Texas land to be subdi vided
and sold for commercial farming. It took little more than a decade for ranch
lands in Texas to be fenced in entirely. Ethnic Mexicans in the Southwest
found themselves assigned as manual agric ultur al labor in this new economy,
giving rise to the popular Mexican saying "co11 el ala111bre vi,io el liambre"-
with the barbed wire came hunger. 28
Alongside technological innovations, new American property laws and
taxation ignored ranchero property rights under the 1848 Treaty of Gua-
INTRODUCTION 13
dalupe Hidalgo. This culminated in a sweeping reorganization of Anglo-
Mexican relations in Texas. 29 Taxation, court-ordered surveys of land
boundaries, and challenges to the validity of Spanish land grants kept Mex-
ican landowners depleting their cash to pay legal fees. When landowners
came up short on paying taxes or private debts, county sheriffs and county
courts would coordinate auctions at which thousands of acres could be
purchased for less than a penny an acre. In 1877 the Hidalgo County
sheriff sold 3,000 acres for $15.00 and the following year sold another
4 000 acres for $17.15. Texas laws targeted Mexican property owners in '
the state. 30
The shifts in economic influence led to increased racial tensions and to
resistance. In September 1891, Catarina Erasmo Garza led a group of hun-
dreds of border residents back and forth across the Rio Grande in a revolt
against both Mexico and the United States encroaching on a population
that had enjoyed living, mostly unimpeded, on the margins of national
power. Riding into battle with the motto fibres fro11terizos (free border
people) stitched on their hatbands, the Garzistas were a multiclass move-
ment that included wealthy merchants and landowners, lower-middle-class
professionals, poor farmers, and landless ranchers. Mexican nationals and
Texas-Mexicans, as well as a few Anglos, Italians, and residents from
interracial marriages between Ang los and Mexicans, filled out the ranks
of the rebellion . 31
The geographical distance from the central governments made appre-
hending revolutionaries on the far reaches of US and Mexican soil tactically
and strategically difficult. 32 Efforts by the Mexican and US governments
to incorporate the borderlands required infrastructure that would connect
the regions to markets, transportation, and communication systems. In
1891 two rail lines finally connected Laredo, Texas, to northern tracks.
The Texas-Mexico track ran from the port city of Corpus Christi co
Laredo. The International and Great Northern Railroad linked Corpus
Christi to San Antonio, which then connected to tracks that led north, east,
and west. These railroads opened Laredo to the markets in centrally located
San Antonio and allowed goods to be transported across the country. It would
be another decade before a rail line from Mexico City to the northern
Mexican border would open up international commerce, but even so, in
the late nineteenth century, the railways and telegraph lines that crossed the
US-Mexico border were becoming crucial elements in government attempts
1-l TIIF. INJUSTICE NEVER LEAVES You
to enfoice c.ontrol over the pcopll ll\ 111g 111 the border regions. These
I lt ·1- 1ctrtt,.ttti·• ' were counlc<l w ith v iolent policing . . it vanre\ 111 u , , , -. r Miltt .lr} stratqpc, for JcCcating C,1tanno Garz.1's rebellion were brutal
anti ,e t ,1 precedent for later pr.1ctices by the US Army and state police alike.
US Arm} c..ipt,1111 John Gregory Uourkc, leading the suppremon, was one
of man} \\ ho embraced cutthroat ,;tratcg1es on the borch :r . He made hi,;
approach clear when he wrote, "The cheapest thing to do is to shoot them
down wherever lthey arc ] found skulking ,1bout with arms 10 their hands,
and to bum down some of the ranchos which gave them shelter." Accord111g
to the c,1ptain, k1\1111g rebels was not enough. He wante<l the complete dev-
astation of any commu111ty thought to support the Garza revolt. Having
refined these Jcthal methods during a fifteen-year effort waging war on the
Apache nation in Arizona, the capta in brought them to the border region
in Tcxas .-u
Spanish-language journalists expressed outrage at the devastation. The
Rio Grande City newspaper El Bien Pt',/1/ico published accounts 111 the 1890s
that documented atrocities committed by US soldien. The editor, Jesus T. Recio, published petitions sent to the governor of Texas and letter s sub-
stantiatmg grievances against Bourke and his attempts to terrorize civilian
communities. R eem ch;"trged the army with burning ranches of suspected Garza allies, threatening residents with lynching, searching house s without
warrants, and stealing guns, horses, and private family papers. Complaints
were filed with the army, the distnct attorney, the attorney general, the
governor of T ex as, Mexican officials, and President BenJamin Harrison.
The charges of abuse by the US military would fall on deaf cars, and Cap- tarn Bourke would contmuc to lead a brutal repression of revolutionary
activ1t1es and ,;pread fear throughout the region. 3 ·1
The Garza revolt was defeated and by 1892 Garza was living in exile.
Pumng down the revolutions allowed the US state to militarize the Rio
Grande and transform the borderlands from a region where people united
by culture, tradition, and proximity moved freely across border s into an
in creas 111gly political and social boundary. 15
The US effort to forcibly end the rebellion became a measure of its
growing imperial dnve for conquest . In these same decades, the United
States was also increasing its territory to include Puerto Rico, the Philip-
p111es, Guam, and Hawai'1 and co exert control in Cuba, the Dominican
Republic, and Panama. Military officers like Captain Bourke invoked dis-
INTRODUCTION 15
Courses and strategies employed by the United States in otl · • 1 . . , . 1cr 1mpena en- deavors that relied on notions of race and Anglo sup!.!rio ·t Tl .1. . . . . n y. 1c m1 1tary officers 111A1ctcd racial terror on ethnic Mexicans in an effort to end chal-
lenges to Anglo social, political, and economic control. They enabled a
culture of US imperialism that justified Anglo domination in south Texas and in the US West more broadly.3<•
Handily suppressing the revolt showed that the federal government was
capable of bringing stability to the border region that encouraged Anglo
economic investment. 37
The military campaigns were coupled with media
coverage that portrayed south Texas as having infinite economic potential
that was wasted in the hands of inferior ethnic Mexicans incapable of de-
veloping the land. 38
The remaining ethnic Mexican landowners struggled
to maintain their land through the first decades of the twentieth century.
With the completion of the railroad in 1904, produce grown in south Texas
could be shipped from Brownsville to Corpus Christi and on to national
markets via the Missoun-Pacific railroad system. By 1907 the railway hauled
approximately 500 carloads of farm products daily. A new wave of Anglo
migration came to the Texas-Mexico border region.
The agricultural revolution witnessed skyrocketing land values and in-
spired outside land developers and commercial farmers to migrate to south
Texas in droves. According to David Montejano, land promoters worked
to "convert pastures into plow fields" by marketing ranch lands chat could
grow profitable cash crops and helped replace ranching with farming. By
the 1920s, the number of farms increased dramatically while their size
decreased. Land developers recruited Anglo buyers from the Mississippi Valley to settle in the region and take part in the "farm revolution." These
events meant a drastic reorganization of land and space in south Texas. In
Hidalgo County, for example, the 1910 census records showed 677 farms
averaging 969.5 acres, but by 1930 the numbers jumped to 4,327 farms av-
eraging 126.9 acres. Successful recruitment efforts resulted in rapid popu-
lation growth in the region as well. In the early 1900s the population in deep south Texas counties totaled 79,934, but by 1920 the population rose
to 159,842, and in 1930 the number doubled to 322,845. Montejano de- scribes this as "one of the most phenomenal land movements 111 the his-
f I U . d S ,,39 tory o t 1e mte taces. · Witnessing this social transformation firsthand, Jovita Gonzalez de-
scribed this farm colonization as an "American invasion ... hordes of
.J
fHE INJUSTICE NEVER LEAVts y
16 Ou .. 15 poured into the rcgion." IO A tean f kino: A111cnc,11. . • 1 o land
111011c, ·11 1•1 .. J ,mercial forming practices that literal] de,
. . courJgeo con . Y requir "dopt:r' c.:n .
1 1 !scape itself Employers relied on Me . ed a
. ttion of t 1e all( ' . . X1can w rr,1nstonn,
1 1 nd for the conung agnculcural revolut· age
)tivarc tie a ion. Te ).1bor to cu ' ountryside of mesquite trees and cacti c ams
I ··ired dense c overed of 111en ct:, 1 . h choked che landscape and made farming d'
1 11
I thorn~. w uc 1flicu1 b,ub~ ,ltll I ced brush country. t. f crops soon rep a . Ro\\'S O 1 5 transformed the social and political land An 7lo farrn sett er ' . scape as
g . 1 ne They ushered rn Juan Crow laws of seg . ,,Jl as the phys1ca o . . regat1on \\ c . . d . cerracial marnages, formerly a part of the social fab . .
d prohib1te in ' . . h . . tic 1n an d Mexican commumties. T ey ms1sted on the new mixed Anglo an . . . . . code
, . hich in turn mitiated a new racial hierarchy p I' . of social relat10ns, w · o tt1cal
k h over local governments. The newcomers moved to d'
battles coo 5 ape . . . . . 1s~ · . M ··can residents and mmimize their social or econ .
enfranchise exi ' . . om1c Th
charged Mexican ranchers with usmg political mach. influence. ey . . Ines
. b orbs with droves of Mex1cans seen as ignorant and u fi co fill voting o . n it
. . . t . n in elections. Accordmg to Anglo settlers, ethnic Mexic for part1C1pa 10 . . . . an
'd. d 'd not merit the nghts and pnvileges of Amencans despi't rest en cs 1 • . ' e
l . t s as legal citizens and their Jong history m the region . One news
t 1elf sea u - d earled local Mexican residents as a "class of foreigners who clai·m paper em , . . .
American citizenship but who are as ignorant of thmgs Amencan as the
mule."~1
r 11
contrast, several articles published in the Spanish-language newspaper
La c,011[ca challenged the racism sweeping across south Texas. Texas- Mexican journalists, writing in the midst of the social upheaval, criticized
Anglo politicians and landowners for denying civil rights to ethnic Mexican
residents in Texas and for relegating them to cheap labor. One article in
1910 described their exclusion from schools as a grave attempt to create
an ignorant class. Moreover, journalists condemned the frequent use of
vigilante violence to create a docile labor force. The article charged that
through violence Anglos attempted to "condemn the Mexicans to a con-
dition of beasts of burden."42
Although the farm colonization in the region was well under way, the
new settlers still felt their control was tenuous. Economic dominance of the
region did not remove the threat of revolt in the minds of the Anglo residents in south Texas. Proximity to Mexico left many feeling vulnerable. Politi- cians, military leaders, and local residents increasingly portrayed residents
INTRODUCTION 17
in che Mexican nation as a threat to Aincnca, 1 1
. . ' capita 1st 111tcrcsts 111 the
outhwcst. Their fears were soaked in racist pc f h rcept1ons o t c, r south
Texas neighbor\ and yet Anglo perceptions were 011
a nun · 1
I · • , , 1enc eve , correct.
Even as they altered the land, they remained a mino ·t 1
• . . , n y popu at1on.
The cthmc Mexican population was growi 11g to M . . 1 , o. ex1c,1n nat1ona s n11grated north to escape an economic depression 111 1880 d • • an a recession In 1906. Between 1910 and 1920 even more Mexicans c d ·
. rosse over mto the United States to escape the Mexican Revolution. During the civil war
in Mexico as many as one million Mexicans sought refuge in the United
States. Most of them came via the Texas-Mexico border. Although many
refugees soon returned to Mexico, the number of ethnic Mexicans in the Umted States tripled during the decade of the 1910s_43
Beyond proximity and population growth, the turbu Jenee of the Mex-
ican Revolution in Mexican towns on the international border caused fear
in neighboring American cities. Residents worried that the revolutionary
plots to overthrow the Diaz admi111stration and redistribute land 111 Mexico
could spill across the border and threaten Anglo property ownership and
US contro l. Texas governors and residents alike made requests for US
troops to guan l the Texas-Mexico border. Rumors circulated of the threat
to Mexican border towns like Matamoros and neighboring US towns like Brownsville.
State violence was the response. In 1913 Texas governor Oscar Colquitt dispatched over 1,000 state militiamen and the Texas National Guard to
appease residents of Brownsville and El Paso.44 As US soldiers stationed on
the Texas-Mexico border trained before deployment in World War I, they
transformed the border into a militarized zone. The newest advances in
military technology, including barbed wire, spotlights, tanks, machine
guns, and airplanes were used to surveil Mexican residents.
Refugees fleeing the Mexican Revolution were met with growing na-
tivist sentiment . Denied humanitarian aid, refugees were portrayed as a
threat to Anglo Americans. In 1914, for example, defeated Mexican fed-
eral soldiers and panicked civilians crossed into west Texas to escape the
devastations of civil war. They were met with hostility and imprisoned at a
camp in Fort Bliss, just outside of El Paso. West Texas towns called for arriving refugees and federal soldiers alike to be segregated from U<:; resi- dents. Mexican soldiers and Mexican women and children walked on foot
across the unforgiving desert from the border town of Presidio seventy miles
t8
THE INJUSTICE NE VER Li:
AVts rau
. cl· 1
blanket< stand wirh their possc~s,011s, gu.1rdcd b\' US Refugees \Happe u • . .
• 1 1
,,14 Jpproximately 4,500 M1.:x1can rctugt:t:s fkc,ng the violence f sold1crs. n 1 . , • • 0 .·. R. ,olution were 1111pnso11cd at a camp 111 Fort Bliss Just outside f the Mcx1cJn e\ . o Tl llp held Mexican men, women, and children, as well as Mcx·,c El Paso. 1e ca, ' . . • an
I Id . s Yale Collection of Western Americana, Bcrnecke Rare Book a d federa so 1er · n
Manuscript Library.
to Marfa, where a train transported them to Fort Bliss. While detained,
Mexican soldiers were forced to build a prison camp that stretched across
forty-eight acres of land. An intimidating barbed wire fence, stacked ten
strands high and secured to the ground by hog-wire fence, surrounded the
camp. Some reported that electricity charged the barbed wire fence with
a lethal current. 45
While Mexican federal soldiers and civilian refugees were treated as na-
tional threats and placed in prison camps, civilians in Texas accused of
being revolutionaries or bandits could expect far worse treatment. During
this era, the figure of the menacing Mexican revolutionary and bandit was
cemented in popular imaginary. In 1915, for examp le, the New York EPe· 11i11g Telegra111 published a cartoon by Nelson Green depicting a grinning
Uncle Sam using a shovel to toss piles of dead Mexican revolutionaries
wearing sombreros into an "international rubbish can."46
INTRODUCTION
In the 1910s the figure of the menacing Mexican revolutionary and bandit was cemented in the popular imagination. In 1915 the Ne111 York E11e11i11g Telegram published a dehumanizing cartoon by Nelson Green depicting a grinning Uncle Sam using a shovel to toss piles of dead Mexican revolutionaries wearing sombreros into an "international rubbish can." Cartoon Drawings Collection,
LC-DIG-acd-2a08860, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division,
Washington, D.C.
Depicting Mexicans as waste did no favors for ethnic Mexicans living
in the United States. Between 1914 and 1919, state administrations re-
sponded to the calls to guard the Texas-Mexico border, creating the
condition s for a dramatic increase in violent policing. By 1916 the Wilson
administration had deployed approximately 100,000 National Guard troops
between Yuma, Arizona, and Brownsville, Texas. 47 Unfamiliar with the
border region in Texas, US troops struggled to po lice the Rio Grande. As
19
THE INJUSTICE N EVER L
20 EAvt . d 'd s y%
. . . , ti c border contrnuc , res1 ents freque 1 11w1n1ht,inzc
1 • ntYclai
c,1 s -r. , . Rangers, not more outsiders. The stat . ' ll1ed tL Jed 111ore 1C(i1S . . . e Police 11ey
nee I
d more effective than soldiers from 11 1 , they
,d were loca an . . on 1ern s ar, guc '
1 , 1 de lsiind. In 1915 the state police includ d · tates 1·k cw York or '10 . ' . . , e o111 i e
N I Texas legislature increased the state budg Y twent . , lllen o nc . I et and th 1/, SIX ' d' dthchiringprocess. In 1916 rnndredsofnew..,., eg0..,_
nor expe ,te 1exas R er '
1 •on and by 1918 the force swelled to appro . anger
atrollcd t 1e reg1 , . . . X101ate! s P· decade's end, the 111tersect111g regimes of vigila Y 1,350 Rangers. By b d . nte, state
I' . g cook hold of the roa er social landscape d , and military po icin 48 ' eclarin
. enemies of the state. gall Mexicans
. 1 the expansion of the Texas Rangers was a re In parttcu ar, . . sponse to 1. e in 1915. In the summer, authont1es reported th l calJs for more po ic at oca) r . lanning co subvert US control of the borderland E es,,
dents were P . . . . s. / P!a 11
D . a manifesto atmbu ted to Mexican sed1t1onists II de
Sa11 ,c,~o, ' ca ed fo I rt
hrow US rule in south Texas and an end to AngI r a revo t to ove o econo"'.
h "L 'b . A f .. ,1c and political power_ throug _a I erat~ng rmy o race a~d people" in,
I d . thnic Mexicans African Americans , and Japanese living . ,,
cu 111g e ' . . in 1exas N Mexico Arizona Cahforma, and Colorado. The plan went f: ' ew , , . so ar as
II for the expulsion of Anglos by murdering all Anglo me . to ca n sixteen years and older.
49 . . _
Resisting the expansion of farm colomzat1on m the region reflected
broader pubic sentiment that objected to the economic exploitation of
Mexican wage laborers, the institutionalization of racism through Juan
Crow laws in Texas, and the increasing military presence. El Plan de San
Diego called for burning bridges and derailing trains, among other acts of
rebellion to interrupt federal, state, and local infrastructure. Raiders also
targeted prominent ranches that had become a symbol of Anglo farm col-
onization. The King Ranch, for example, was known in this period as the
greatest symbol of Anglo domination on the frontier. As the first ranch to
be fenced with barbed wire in the nineteenth century and the first to de-
velop a new breed of cattle in the United States, the ranching empire main-
tained a staggering two million acres of land at its peak and maintained
property across several counties. so
As a method for transitioning from ranching to farming during the ag-
ricultural revolution in the early twentieth century, prominent families
directed farm towns as bankers merchants and political officials. The south , ' Texas town of Kingsville in Kleberg County, for example, located in the
1NTRODUCTION 2\
,niddle of the Kmg Ranch, became entirely serviced by the Kmg Kleberg fanuly companies. The fam1ltes owned or pnmanly financed the Kmg \- ville Company, the Kleberg Bank, the Krng' s lnn, the K111gsv1llc lee ,m<l Milling Company, the Kingw1lle Publishing Company, th e K111gw1llc Power Company, as well as 1rrigat1on and co tton ginning com panie <;. This financial monopoly gave the family the power and influen ce to have a Texas Ranger headquarters . Such intimate relationships with the Ranger s led re<;-
idents of south Texas to comrnonly refer to them as the King Ranch's private security. The ranch was known as the most well-guarded piece of
private property. 51
On August 8, 1915, some sixty men raided the flag station at the Las
Norias section of the King Ranch where the Texas Rangers maintained
their headquarters. The response to the raid was swift and brutal , with Texas
Rangers leading the charge. One soldier later reflected in his memoir that
among the Rangers there was a "savage radical clement." He described
"glaring abuses in retribution and threatening to dear the Valley of Mex, -
cans."52 In an indiscriminate manhunt, Ranger s killed ethnic Mexican men
in revenge for the raid . Locals later lamented that any Mexican man in close
proximity to the ranch faced the wrath of state and loca l law enforcement
posses, soldier s, and vigilantes. Local resident Frank C. Pier ce tallied at least
102 left dead in the wake of this killing spree, almost double the number
of men alleged to have raided the King Ranch. 53 Historians est1mate that
between August 4, 1915, and June 17, 1916, Texa s Rang ers and deputy
sheriffs killed more than 100 Mexican residents without conducting proper investigations. Some described the violent period as an "orgy of blood-
shed"; others estimate that the number of deaths in thi s short period was
closer to 300. Texas judge James Well s estimated that in Hidalgo and Cam- eron Counties alone Texas officers and vigilantes executed between 250
and 300 Mexican men in less than a year. 54
Some Anglo investors profited from the period of fear and wartime anx-
iety. They utilized local and state police to protect their claim s to property
and to help dismantle the remaining economic control by a class of e thnic
Mexicans in south Texas through intimidation and violence. Writ er and
theorist America Paredes wrote that in this era, the Texas Ranger s in par -
ticular "furnish(ed] the fortune-making adventurer with serv ice s not ren-
dered by the United States Army or local sheriff s. And that is why from
the point of view of the maker s of fortune the Ran ge rs were so 1mport ~mt
22 THE IN JUSTI CE NEVER LEAVES You
, c. . , of the Border.'' I le continued, "The Rangers and th to the p,\Clt1cat1on ose
I . d tli ,
1 r method~ undoubtedly exacerbated the cultural con A.
\\: 10 11111tate C . ICt on the Border rather than allayed it ... the Rangers stirred up more trouble
d 1155
than they put own. . . The mamfcsto and ongoing raids gave state authont1cs ammunition to
profile ethnic Mcxicam as enemies of ~h~ state. The . raids al_so amplified calls by Anglo residents for more pohcrng of ethnic Mexicans. David
Moi1teJano wrote of El pfa11 de Sa11 Diego, "The losers in these conflicts were
usually the uninvolved civilian population, who bore the brunt of esca-
lating and mdiscrimmate retaliation and counterretaliation." 56
The dramatic changes of this period turned ethnic Mexican residents
into permanent enemies of the state. Any local resident that looked Mexican,
regardless of citizenship, social status, or evidence of guilt, could be pro-
filed as a "bandit" or "bandit sympathizer" between 1910 and 1920. State and local pohce ignored legal procedures and regularly denied residents the
right to trial by Jury and to presumed innocence. This pattern of vio-
lence continued for years. In 1919 the brutality of the Texas Rangers had become so brazen that the state legislature agreed to form a senate com-
mmee to investigate abuses by the state police. Anglo residents, civilians,
businessmen, and politicians alike lined up to defend the Rangers. They
suggested that the violence at the hands of the state police only matched,
but did not exceed, the violence against Americans by Mexicans in Texas
and across the border. In other words, Rangers responded with violence
to quell violence on the US-Mexico border. They described the border
region as an area of social crisis. C. L. Jessup, a ten-year resident of Brownsville, went so far as to admit that state police and local residents
waged an all-out war against Mexicans. Jessup described local residents as living in "simply a state of war; every home almost was an arsenal."57 The attorney questionmg Jessup reiterated, "The war is 011 the M · b d
. . n S8 ex1can an 1tt1.
RESEARCHING HISTORI ES OF VIOLENCE
In the early twentieth century, Texas politicians, the state police th . t d h' , e main-
s ream press, an istorians had intersecting interests that res l d . · h' . . . ute mpor-
traymg t is period of ant1-Mex1can violence as rightfully do 11 . f . ne, a m the
name o protectmg the private property of US c1·t· d . 1zens an secunng the
1NTRODUCTION 23
us-Mexico border Recovering at~ alternative account require~ returning
to the landscape of the Texas - Mexico borderlands and looking for the re-
mains of the departed. Dut our process of exhumation must be done with
reat caution; photographs, testimonies, and reports that describe the dead
~ 1 ust be handled with great sensitivity, in order to avoid reinforcing their
erasure and further normalizing the violence. Our efforts require us to
rch first and foremost, for lost humanity. 59
sea , Across the first half of the twentieth century, both the actions of the
state police and the victims of state violence caught the attention of a
number of scholars. 60
These accounts typically focused on periodic mo-
ments of armed conflict between Anglo and Mexican men; rebellion and
repression take center stage. This research offered two competing narra-
tives: the first valorized the actions of the Texas Rangers; the second valo-
rized the actions of residents who chall enge d the stat e police with armed
rebellion. The two opposing strains of scholar ship helped develop two dif-
ferent groups of celebrated heroes who would be fixtures of popular cu l-
ture for decades .
Walter Prescott Webb, a prolific historian known for his foundational
work on the American West, grew up in the rural community of Ranger,
Texas, where he attended Ranger High School. In 1935 he published
The Texas Rangers: A Cent11ry of Frontier Defense, which for decades re-
mained the definitive account of the heroic Rangers narrative, a celebration
of the Rangers for their dogged efforts to dispel the dangers of the frontier
for Anglo settlers. 61 He credited the stat e police with ushering Texas into
a modern era. His account showed little concern for the brutally repressive
methods employed by Ranger s and US soldiers . Instead, Webb's narrative
is full of racist descriptions of Anglo superiority over savage Native Amer-
icans and inferior Mexican s cursed with mixed blood. For a quarter of a
century, Webb's celebratory interpretation of the state police stood as the
official account of this period.
America Parede s's publications in the mid-twentieth century helped cast
an alternative light on the history of the Texas Rangers. He reinterpreted
the Texas Ranger s as outlaws who abused their authority to displace
Mexican landowners and intimidate residents, and he celebrated Me xican
residents who resisted state violence. His first book , "With His Pistol i11 His
Hand": A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958), studied the Mexican ballad tra-
dition, the corrido, and the local heroes who featured prominently in the
