On June
18, 1916, U.S. President Woodrow
Wilson ordered 110,000 National
Guardsmen from state militias to the
border for patrol duty. Above,
troops in Brownsville, Texas.
(Runyon Photograph Collection/The
Dolph Briscoe Center for American
History/University of Texas at
Austin)
Mexican
Americans
faced
racial
terror
from
1910-1920
By
RUSSELL
CONTRERAS
and
CEDAR
ATTANASIO
APNews.com
ALBUQUERQUE,
N.M. -
Twenty
years
ago, a
knock on
the door
opened
the past
for
Arlinda
Valencia.
A
relative
had come
to pay
his
respects
on the
death of
Valencia’s
father.
He then
revealed
a
shocking
secret:
The
family
was
descended
from
survivors
of a
1918
massacre
along
the
U.S.-Mexico
border.
In
an
account
later
confirmed
by
Valencia’s
96-year-old
great-uncle,
the
Texas
Rangers
and U.S.
soldiers
killed
her
great-grandfather
and 14
other
men and
boys.
The
massacre
that all
but
wiped
the town
of
Porvenir,
Texas,
was part
of a
campaign
of
terror
that
largely
targeted
Mexican
Americans.
“But
the
older
people
never
said
anything
to us.
Not a
word,”
Valencia
said.
“We
couldn’t
believe
it.”
As
the U.S.
prepares
to mark
the
100th
anniversary
of “Red
Summer”
— a
period
in 1919
when
white
mobs
attacked
and
murdered
African
Americans
in
dozens
of
cities
across
the
country
— some
historians
and
Latino
activists
say now
is the
time to
acknowledge
the
terror
experienced
by
Mexican
Americans
around
the same
period.
In
towns,
villages
and
cities
in the
West,
Mexican
Americans
were
subjected
to
torture,
lynchings
and
other
violence
at the
hands of
white
mobs and
law
enforcement
agencies
such as
the
Texas
Rangers.
Historians
say that
from
1910 to
1920, an
estimated
5,000
people
of
Mexican
descent
were
killed
or
vanished
in the
U.S.
A 1915
postcard,
‘Dead
Mexican
bandits,’
shows
three
Texas
Rangers
on
horseback,
posed
behind
the
bodies
of four
Tejanos
killed,
evidently
at
random,
as
retribution
for a
raid.
(Bullock
Texas
State
History
Museum)
Often
the
violence
was so
barbaric
it
attracted
the
attention
of
newspapers
abroad
and the
fledgling
NAACP.
Then, it
was
forgotten.
“When
you talk
about
villages
and
small
towns
being
wiped
off the
face of
the
earth
...
that’s
what
happened
to
Porvenir,”
said
Valencia,
67, a
leader
of a
teachers
union in
El Paso,
Texas.
Monica
Muñoz
Martinez,
the
author
of “The
Injustice
Never
Leaves
You:
Anti-Mexican
Violence
in
Texas”
and an
American
studies
professor
at Brown
University,
said
Mexican
American
families
often
kept
stories
of
violence
from
their
children
out of
fear
because
the
perpetrators
and
their
offspring
remained
in key
law
enforcement
positions
or
elected
offices.
“Now
there’s
a new
generation
that’s
saying,
‘We need
to make
these
histories
public
and we
need a
public
reckoning,’”
Martinez
said.
As
with
attacks
on
African
American
men, the
mob
violence
usually
stemmed
from
rumors
about a
crime
that was
pinned
on
Mexican
Americans
with
little
or no
evidence.
A
1920s-era
sign
signaling
the
segregation
practices
of ‘Juan
Crow.’
(Russell
Lee
Photography
Collection/The
Dolph
Briscoe
Center
for
American
History/University
of Texas
at
Austin)
In
1910, a
white
mob in
Rocksprings,
Texas,
lynched
20-year-old
Antonio
Rodríguez
and
burned
the body
after he
was
accused
of
killing
a white
woman.
He never
received
a trial;
instead,
he was
kidnapped
from
jail.
Four
years
later,
Adolfo
Padilla,
jailed
in Santa
Fe, New
Mexico,
on
suspicion
of
killing
his
wife,
was
seized
by
masked
men and
chopped
into
pieces.
In
1915,
brothers
Jose and
Hilario
Leon
were
beaten
and
hanged
by two
white
Arizona
police
officers
during
an
interrogation.
Their
bodies
were
left to
rot in
the
desert
gulch.
The
officers
were
later
convicted
of
murder,
but that
was a
rare
outcome.
Mexican
American
families
sometimes
went to
local
and
state
authorities
to
complain
and
often
suffered
violent
retribution,
historians
say.
It
was the
bloodshed
in the
ranching
community
of
Porvenir
that
stirred
the most
outrage
among
Mexican
American
reformers
and in
the
international
press.
On
the
early
morning
of Jan.
28,
1918,
the
Texas
Rangers
and four
local
white
ranchers
surrounded
Porvenir
on the
suspicion
that
villagers
were
sympathetic
to
bandits
or
cattle
raiders.
The men,
with the
help of
a U.S.
cavalry
regiment,
woke up
the
residents,
seized
15
able-bodied
men and
boys and
killed
them.
“For
perhaps
ten
seconds
we
couldn’t
hear
anything,
and then
it
seemed
that
every
woman
down
there
screamed
at the
same
time,”
cavalry
Pvt.
Robert
Keil
later
wrote.
“We
could
also
hear
what
sounded
like
praying,
and, of
course,
the
small
children
were
screaming
with
fright.”
The
Army
returned
to the
village
days
later
and
burned
it to
the
ground.
A
Texas
legislative
committee
investigated,
and Rep.
J.T.
Canales,
the only
Hispanic
member
of the
legislature,
called
witnesses
who told
stories
of
terror.
But
defenders
of the
Rangers
branded
Canales
delusional,
the
committee
absolved
the law
enforcement
agency,
and
Canales
lost his
bid for
re-election
in 1920.
Nine
years
later,
he
helped
found
the
civil
rights
group
the
League
of
United
Latin
American
Citizens,
which
exists
today.
Recently,
a group
of
academics,
activists
and
journalists
formed a
group
called
Refusing
to
Forget
to
educate
the
public
about
violence
against
Mexican
Americans
and set
up
historical
markers
to
memorialize
the most
brutal
episodes.
John
Moran
Gonzalez,
director
of the
Center
for
Mexican
American
Studies
at the
University
of
Texas,
said the
group
has
faced
resistance
from
local
historical
societies.
“They
say
things
like,
‘Why are
you
bringing
this up
now? Why
are you
inflaming
racial
tensions?’”
Gonzalez
said.
“They
are
embarrassed.”
Valencia
eventually
got a
historical
marker
near the
site of
the
Porvenir
massacre,
about a
four-hour
drive
east of
El Paso.
Nothing
remains
of the
village,
and the
bodies
of those
killed
rest in
shallow
graves
across
the Rio
Grande
in
Mexico.
In
researching
the
massacre,
Valencia
found an
affidavit
by her
great-grandmother
describing
the
killing
of her
husband
and her
search
for
justice.
But
justice
never
came.
“She
committed
suicide,”
Valencia
said.
Her
surviving
great-uncle,
Juan
Flores,
who was
13 at
the time
of the
massacre
and
would
later
describe
how he
found
his
father’s
mutilated
body and
other
corpses,
had
nightmares
for the
rest of
his life
and
eventually
underwent
shock
treatment.
Flores
hadn’t
told his
immediate
family
of the
massacre
until
Valencia
asked
him
about
it.
“Everyone
just
thought
he was
crazy,”
she
said.
“But he
was
living
with a
secret
that was
killing
him from
the
inside.”
___
Cedar
Attanasio
reported
from El
Paso,
Texas,
where he
covers
immigration.
Follow
him on
Twitter
at
https://twitter.com/viaCedar
___
Russell
Contreras
is a
member
of The
Associated
Press’
race and
ethnicity
team.
Follow
him on
Twitter
at
http://twitter.com/russcontreras
___
EDITOR’S
NOTE:
Hundreds
of
African
Americans
died at
the
hands of
white
mob
violence
during
“Red
Summer”
but
little
is known
nationally
about
this
summer
of
violence
100
years
later.
As part
of AP’s
coverage
plans
for Red
Summer,
we will
take a
multiplatform
look at
those
who were
attacked
and
killed
by
whites
in
cities
and
towns
around
the
nation
in a
spate of
violence:
https://www.apnews.com/RedSummer