Violence on the South Texas Mexico border

Land equaled investments and high profits for Magic Valley boosters, which meant that investors used the power of the state, surfaced a violent wave of policing justified through racial narratives to protect their investments. It has been documented that between 1910- 1920, thousands of Mexicanos were violently killed in South Texas. Today, scholars call these events, La Matanza. (Refusing to Forget Project)

Historical Marker between San Benito, Texas and Brownsville, Texas. Photo taken by Nansi Guevara

In the Lower Rio Grande Valley, at the southern tip of the state, large numbers of white Americans moved to the region for the first time, so many that the population nearly doubled within just a few years. Rising land values, increased property tax bills, and land title disputes worked to strip many ethnic Mexicans of their land. …As a Laredo newspaper observed in 1910, “The lands which mainly belonged to Mexicans passed to the hands of Americans . . . the old proprietors work as laborers on the same lands that used to belong to them.”

The newcomer farmers showed little or no respect for the enduring economic, cultural, and political power held by ethnic Mexicans in South Texas. These northerners increasingly turned to the tactics of segregation and marginalization, supported by statewide measures such as the poll tax and whites-only policies. These institutional policies are known as Juan Crow.   

-Refusing to Forget Project–

The turbulence of the Mexican Revolution (1910-20) exacerbated an already tense situation. Over the course of the decade, nearly a tenth of the Mexican population would perish and another tenth would flee to the United States, setting into motion a pattern of migration that endures a century later.  

– Refusing to Forget Project– 

Robert Runyon, 1915, Texas Rangers pose on a South Texas ranch in 1915 after one of their notorious "bandit raids." The Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin.

The Texas Rangers

The Texas Rangers were founded to expand the white man’s frontier even further west and protect white settlers from natives. The untold history of the Rangers is the cruel violence, brutal policing, and mass killings they incited on the South Texas border. The Texas Rangers were sent down to the border to pacify the border. 

In the Texas Monthly podcast, Juan Herrera examines the image of the Texas Ranger, and the historical violence that still struggles to be acknowledged in history and by the force today. (Texas Monthly podcast)  

Trinidad Gonzales, a current professor of Mexican American Studies at South Texas College and co-founder of the Refusing to Forget Project, remembers his family speaking of the Texas Rangers, only that they called them Los Rinches. He recalls his seventh grade history class in 1982: 

Trinidad Gonzales: The textbook about the Texas Rangers was: “Texas Rangers good; Mexicans, Indians, bad. They helped settle the frontier and pacified and dealt with . . . So you’re reading that as a Mexicano and reading about the Texas Rangers, and as a twelve-, thirteen-year-old, you’re going through this psychological tension of like, “Okay, my family has told me these stories about los rinches and how they killed my great-grandfather and his father.” But I’m reading it in the official state textbook of Texas saying Mexicans are bad. So that poses a question to Trini at that age, it’s like, “Are my family lying to me? Or maybe my ancestors were bad? How do I deal with this? How do I reconcile what I’m being told at home and what I’m reading in the textbook?” And my teacher was Mr. Garza. And of course, he’s mimicking what the textbook says, “Well, the Rangers were good. The Mexicans were bad. They were bad Mexicans.” And of course I’m not participating because I don’t know how to participate in that conversation. He goes, “Well, don’t believe everything you read in the textbooks. The old people call them los rinches.” It was the first time I ever heard an educator tell me that, or a teacher tell me that. And there was such an affirmation to like, “Oh, okay. My family’s not crazy. I haven’t been lied to, right?”

 - White Hats Podcast

Links:

https://refusingtoforget.org/the-history/

Texas Monthly podcast White Hats Podcast