The Current Impact of Texas Rangers Killing Mexicans 100 Years Ago
by Cindy Casares Feb 8, 2016
Last week, I wrote about a new exhibit at the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin that signals the state’s first public acknowledgment of a bloody era during the 1910s, when Texas Rangers and other local law enforcement, along with civilian vigilantes, massacred between 300 and 5,000 Texas Mexicans and Mexican nationals living in the Rio Grande Valley. The goal was to clear the region of people of Mexican descent so that white farmers from the Midwest could move in. The majority of readers commented favorably on the state’s decision to support the exhibit and other initiatives of Refusing to Forget, but there were questions raised by some readers that I’d like to address. Namely, why does this story matter 100 years later?
MORE: Texas Finally Acknowledges Rangers Killed Hundreds of Latinos
Some have suggested that this is, in effect, digging up the past to create more racial tension between Texans. In short, whether these revelations hurt anybody’s feelings is of no consequence to me. Tejanos must realize this history, hidden from them for 100 years, to understand how the economic, political and social ramifications of this violent era are still being felt in Texas today. Those who live in the border region must learn from the past how legislation fueled by paranoia can turn their home into a bloody battlefield.
The most tangible and lasting effect of the violence in South Texas during the 1910s was the incredible loss of land for Tejanos. As much as 187,000 acres of Tejano-owned land, that’s roughly the size of Austin, was lost in the lower Rio Grande Valley from 1900 to 1910, according to Benjamin Heber Johnson, assistant professor in history at Loyola University Chicago. This was not wartime land-grabbing. Land-owning, U.S. citizens who were promised all the rights and privileges of white Americans during the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo more than 65 years earlier were robbed of their land through state-sanctioned violence enforced by the Texas Rangers.
With the loss of that land came a loss of economic independence. Families that once ranched their own land were now reduced to picking crops in the fields of farmers who stole their property. It was back-breaking work, and it forced many Tejano families to adopt a migrant lifestyle in order to maintain an income throughout the year.
But destroying their incomes and way of life wasn’t enough. White farmers newly arrived from other parts of the country were horrified to see that up until then, Mexican Americans voted, served on juries and held office routinely in the counties that made up the Rio Grande Valley, Laredo and northern New Mexico. These were the only places in the U.S. where that was still the case, says Johnson.
The Texas Rangers were dispatched to enforce a series of Jim Crow tactics to keep Tejanos from voting. Whites-only political primaries, poll taxes and English-language literacy tests almost entirely eradicated Tejano voting rights by 1920 until after World War II.
“In 1917 and 1918, the very Rangers who had killed so many in 1915 and ‘16 stood in front of polling stations and bragged to [Texas] Governor [William Pettus] Hobby about how dramatically the Mexican vote dropped,” Johnson says.
In short, the violence sanctioned by the state of Texas against Mexicans wasn’t about securing the border; it was about securing the border region for white people, and one event unfolding at the same time gave white Texans the perfect excuse to accomplish this.
“Throughout this time, you have the Mexican Revolution. In many ways, because of the flow of individuals and foreign arms, the U.S. government and the media used that as an excuse to label people as simply ‘bandidos/bandits.’ And so you have this lumping of people as just, ‘bad Mexicanos,’” Sonia Hernandez, associate professor of history at Texas A&M University, College Station, said in an interview about the exhibit.
John Morán Gonzalez, associate professor of English and associate director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, adds that the presence of small bands of lightly armed revolutionary guerrillas scarcely constituted a real military threat. Despite that, he says that the border was truly militarized by 1916, with some 110,000 National Guard troops stationed in the lower Rio Grande Valley using the same equipment they would shortly take to the European battlefields of the First World War.
Militarization of the border? Where have I seen that before? Oh, yeah, here in Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott says Texas will extend the National Guard’s stay at the border. And here, where Homeland Security Today magazine calls the U.S. government’s 2014 Border Security Bill a “treasure trove” of spending for security technology corporations to enjoy. “The spending represents an unparalleled boon to companies specializing in border security technology, particularly those incumbents with proven solutions already under contract with Customs and Border Protection (CBP).”
But back to the “more reactionary” 1910s. The relentless violence of the state through the Texas Rangers and other law enforcement authorities drove both laborers and landowners of Tejano descent into exile, making the stealing of their land even easier. White people took over the region and ushered in the era that historians like to call “Juan Crow.” This Juan Crow regime, Gonzalez says, structured the region’s social relations for the next 50 years.
“To be sure, poverty was not new to the region or invented by Anglos, but there is a big difference between the hardscrabble life of small landowners far from major markets and the desperation of the truly dispossessed. There was a lot more of the latter once the 1910s were over,” Johnson says.
To this day, the five poorest counties in Texas are all five of the counties that make up the Rio Grande Valley. There, one in three people lives below the poverty line. For every 100 students entering a public school classroom in South Texas today, only 12 will earn any type of degree within six years of graduation.
“One hundred years is not that long ago. You miss out on three generations of a decent education. It does end up putting Mexican-Americans at a disadvantage. It’s not about something that was taken away, but something that was never allowed to develop,” Johnson says.
Unlike in the rest of the state, however, the Tejanos of the Rio Grande Valley did not “evaporate” —a euphemism for the extermination of Mexicans used in the 1910s. Today, 95 percent of kids in grades K-12 in the Rio Grande Valley is Latino.
“The project of white supremacy in the borderlands has been a failure, but there are still these huge forces of economic dislocation,” Johnson says.
And there is, once again, the militarization of the border, the depiction of the border region as some sort of heart of darkness and its people as “illegals,” “drug traffickers, criminals and rapists.”
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
But we can learn from the past.
MORE: Texas Finally Acknowledges Rangers Killed Hundreds of Latinos
Some have suggested that this is, in effect, digging up the past to create more racial tension between Texans. In short, whether these revelations hurt anybody’s feelings is of no consequence to me. Tejanos must realize this history, hidden from them for 100 years, to understand how the economic, political and social ramifications of this violent era are still being felt in Texas today. Those who live in the border region must learn from the past how legislation fueled by paranoia can turn their home into a bloody battlefield.
The most tangible and lasting effect of the violence in South Texas during the 1910s was the incredible loss of land for Tejanos. As much as 187,000 acres of Tejano-owned land, that’s roughly the size of Austin, was lost in the lower Rio Grande Valley from 1900 to 1910, according to Benjamin Heber Johnson, assistant professor in history at Loyola University Chicago. This was not wartime land-grabbing. Land-owning, U.S. citizens who were promised all the rights and privileges of white Americans during the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo more than 65 years earlier were robbed of their land through state-sanctioned violence enforced by the Texas Rangers.
With the loss of that land came a loss of economic independence. Families that once ranched their own land were now reduced to picking crops in the fields of farmers who stole their property. It was back-breaking work, and it forced many Tejano families to adopt a migrant lifestyle in order to maintain an income throughout the year.
But destroying their incomes and way of life wasn’t enough. White farmers newly arrived from other parts of the country were horrified to see that up until then, Mexican Americans voted, served on juries and held office routinely in the counties that made up the Rio Grande Valley, Laredo and northern New Mexico. These were the only places in the U.S. where that was still the case, says Johnson.
The Texas Rangers were dispatched to enforce a series of Jim Crow tactics to keep Tejanos from voting. Whites-only political primaries, poll taxes and English-language literacy tests almost entirely eradicated Tejano voting rights by 1920 until after World War II.
“In 1917 and 1918, the very Rangers who had killed so many in 1915 and ‘16 stood in front of polling stations and bragged to [Texas] Governor [William Pettus] Hobby about how dramatically the Mexican vote dropped,” Johnson says.
In short, the violence sanctioned by the state of Texas against Mexicans wasn’t about securing the border; it was about securing the border region for white people, and one event unfolding at the same time gave white Texans the perfect excuse to accomplish this.
“Throughout this time, you have the Mexican Revolution. In many ways, because of the flow of individuals and foreign arms, the U.S. government and the media used that as an excuse to label people as simply ‘bandidos/bandits.’ And so you have this lumping of people as just, ‘bad Mexicanos,’” Sonia Hernandez, associate professor of history at Texas A&M University, College Station, said in an interview about the exhibit.
John Morán Gonzalez, associate professor of English and associate director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, adds that the presence of small bands of lightly armed revolutionary guerrillas scarcely constituted a real military threat. Despite that, he says that the border was truly militarized by 1916, with some 110,000 National Guard troops stationed in the lower Rio Grande Valley using the same equipment they would shortly take to the European battlefields of the First World War.
Militarization of the border? Where have I seen that before? Oh, yeah, here in Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott says Texas will extend the National Guard’s stay at the border. And here, where Homeland Security Today magazine calls the U.S. government’s 2014 Border Security Bill a “treasure trove” of spending for security technology corporations to enjoy. “The spending represents an unparalleled boon to companies specializing in border security technology, particularly those incumbents with proven solutions already under contract with Customs and Border Protection (CBP).”
But back to the “more reactionary” 1910s. The relentless violence of the state through the Texas Rangers and other law enforcement authorities drove both laborers and landowners of Tejano descent into exile, making the stealing of their land even easier. White people took over the region and ushered in the era that historians like to call “Juan Crow.” This Juan Crow regime, Gonzalez says, structured the region’s social relations for the next 50 years.
“To be sure, poverty was not new to the region or invented by Anglos, but there is a big difference between the hardscrabble life of small landowners far from major markets and the desperation of the truly dispossessed. There was a lot more of the latter once the 1910s were over,” Johnson says.
To this day, the five poorest counties in Texas are all five of the counties that make up the Rio Grande Valley. There, one in three people lives below the poverty line. For every 100 students entering a public school classroom in South Texas today, only 12 will earn any type of degree within six years of graduation.
“One hundred years is not that long ago. You miss out on three generations of a decent education. It does end up putting Mexican-Americans at a disadvantage. It’s not about something that was taken away, but something that was never allowed to develop,” Johnson says.
Unlike in the rest of the state, however, the Tejanos of the Rio Grande Valley did not “evaporate” —a euphemism for the extermination of Mexicans used in the 1910s. Today, 95 percent of kids in grades K-12 in the Rio Grande Valley is Latino.
“The project of white supremacy in the borderlands has been a failure, but there are still these huge forces of economic dislocation,” Johnson says.
And there is, once again, the militarization of the border, the depiction of the border region as some sort of heart of darkness and its people as “illegals,” “drug traffickers, criminals and rapists.”
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
But we can learn from the past.
This article originally appeared on Latina.com.