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NY Times, March 4, 2019
Lynch Mobs Killed Latinos Across the West. Descendants Want It Known.
By Simon Romero
EL PASO — Arlinda Valencia was at a funeral when an uncle told her a
bewildering family secret: An Anglo lynch mob had killed her
great-grandfather.
“A mixture of grief and shock overwhelmed me since this was the first I
heard of this,” said Ms. Valencia, 66, the leader of a teachers’ union
in El Paso. “The more I looked into it, the more stunned I was at how
many Mexicans were lynched in this country.”
Ms. Valencia and other descendants of lynching victims are now casting
attention on one of the grimmest campaigns of racist terror in the
American West: the lynching of thousands of men, women and children of
Mexican descent from the mid-19th century until well into the 20th century.
Some victims were burned alive, like Antonio Rodríguez, 20, a migrant
worker who was hauled from a jail in Rocksprings, Tex., tied to a tree
and set ablaze in 1910. Other mobs hanged, whipped or shot Mexicans,
many of whom were United States citizens, sometimes drawing crowds in
the thousands.
Lynchings have long been associated with violence against
African-Americans in the American South, and these atrocities are
remembered at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama.
Lynchings of Hispanics have faded into history with less attention.
Often, they have been portrayed as attempts to exercise justice on
behalf of white settlers protecting their livestock or claims to land.
But a new movement is underway to uncover that neglected past. It has
unleashed discussions about the scramble for land or mining claims that
frequently influenced these lynchings, as well as the traces of such
episodes in resurgent anti-Latino sentiment and the question many parts
of the United States are confronting: Who gets to tell history?
“The conquest of the West is still simply a tale of incredible progress
for many Americans,” said Monica Muñoz Martínez, a professor of American
studies at Brown University who has written extensively about
anti-Mexican violence in Texas.
“But despite the unwillingness to recognize these lynchings as a
tragedy, or even recognize them at all, momentum is building to finally
reckon with these events,” said Professor Muñoz Martínez, who was raised
in Texas and is a co-founder of Refusing to Forget, a group committed to
increasing awareness about state-sanctioned violence against Latinos in
Texas.
Texas, which enshrined white supremacy in its 1836 constitution when
Anglo slaveholders seceded from Mexico, had by far the most episodes of
mob violence against people of Mexican descent, according to William D.
Carrigan and Clive Webb, historians who have documented such cases.
Reasons given for these lynchings varied wildly, including accusations
of cattle theft, murder, cheating at cards, refusing to play the fiddle,
shouting “Viva Diaz!” — even witchcraft.
In 1880, a mob in Collin County in North Texas accused Refugio Ramírez,
his wife, and their teenage daughter, María Ines, of bewitching their
neighbors. The three of them were burned to death, according to Laura F.
Edwards, a historian at Duke University.
In another episode in 1882, a man of Mexican descent identified as
Augustin Agirer filed a complaint against an Anglo man who shot at his
dog. In retaliation, Anglos tracked Mr. Agirer down and fatally shot him
in front of his wife, The Austin Weekly Statesman reported at the time.
In 1922, a group of 10 men snatched Elias Villareal Zarate from a jail
in Weslaco in South Texas, where he was being held for fighting with a
white co-worker. La Prensa, a San Antonio newspaper, described how the
mob hanged him, raising the ire of Mexican diplomats who were trying to
curb such killings.
One of the most contentious lynching episodes anywhere in the West
involved the ancestors of Ms. Valencia, the El Paso teachers’ union
official. The family and several neighbors had settled in the outpost of
Porvenir in a remote stretch of West Texas on the Rio Grande, eking out
a quiet existence as farmers.
But on Jan. 28, 1918, a group of Anglo cattlemen, Texas Rangers and
United States Army cavalry soldiers descended on the village as families
slept. They seized 15 men and boys, the youngest of whom was 16, marched
them to a bluff overlooking the river and fatally shot them at close range.
After burning Porvenir to the ground, the Rangers and ranchmen claimed,
without offering proof, that the villagers had been thieves. They
contended that the victims had been informants for Mexicans who had
raided the nearby Brite Ranch a month earlier. They also claimed that
they had come under fire.
But investigations by the Army and the State Department found that the
Mexicans were unarmed when they were killed. Ms. Valencia’s
great-grandfather, Longino Flores, was among the dead. Her grandfather,
Rosendo Mesa, was a boy at the time. He survived because he was away
buying provisions.
“My grandfather kept everything about the massacre to himself, which
kind of amazed me,” said Ms. Valencia, reflecting on why it took so long
for her to find out about the killings. “Remember, this is Texas.
There’s reverence for the nearly godly Texas Rangers. To this day, the
truth is hard.”
Ms. Valencia found out how hard it is to even agree on the facts
surrounding the killings when historians and descendants of the victims
at Porvenir, a village largely erased from local memory after it was
razed in 1918 and survivors fled, applied to the Texas Historical
Commission for a historical marker.
“Don’t tell me that if the police kill an Anglo in Chihuahua City, there
isn’t going to be some differences about what really happened,” said Jim
White III, 70, a descendant of the Brite family, whose ranch not far
from Porvenir was the one that had been raided a month before the lynchings.
“It was a turbulent time on the border when you had a lot of people
getting killed on both sides,” said Mr. White, who still lives on the
family’s ranch and refrains from calling the killings a massacre. “It’s
2019, right? Playing the race card doesn’t work any more.”
Others who have opposed the marker include the chairwoman of the
historical commission, who cited concerns that it was being used by
“militant Hispanics” looking for reparations. The Presidio County
attorney worried that the dedication ceremony for a marker could serve
as the backdrop for a “major political rally” for Beto O’Rourke, the
Democrat who last fall was a candidate for the United States Senate,
according to The Texas Observer, which wrote an extensive report on the
dispute.
After several delays, the descendants finally got their marker in late
2018 on a highway near the razed village. It came after the historical
commission’s state chairman, John Nau — a beer-distribution magnate who
donates heavily to Republican officeholders — told staff members to
inquire about having markers that described raids that occurred on Anglo
ranches around the time of the Porvenir massacre.
“Chairman Nau's comments were provided as advice about how the county
could address local concerns that the whole story was not being told
about this period in Texas history,” said Chris Florance, a spokesman
for the commission.
While tension persists over how to commemorate the lynchings in
Porvenir, there are hundreds of examples of other documented
extrajudicial killings of Latinos in states aside from Texas, some in
places far from the border.
For instance, in 1919, two Mexican citizens were being held in a jail in
Pueblo, Colo., as suspects in the murder of a police officer. A mob
broke into the jail, drove the two men to the edge of town and hanged
them during a heavy rainstorm in front of about 100 people. The El Paso
Herald reported that Mexico’s consul in Denver investigated the episode
and concluded that the mob had lynched the wrong men.
In Albuquerque’s Old Town Plaza, where gift shops and restaurants now
cater to tourists, three men identified as Escolastico Perea, Miguel
Barrera and California Joe were hanged by a mob of about 200 local
residents in 1881 in connection with the murder of a geological
surveyor, Col. Charles Potter.
“Though lynching in general is to be condemned, yet to every case there
is an exception,” The Santa Fe New Mexican reported at the time. “In the
instance of the dastardly murder of Charles Potter, it is very doubtful
whether justice can be too swiftly meted out.”
California endured its own eruption of lynchings of Mexicans during the
Gold Rush from 1848 to 1855 as competition for mining claims
intensified. Anglo miners used mob violence in an effort to expel
Mexicans or exact revenge. In one episode in 1851, a mob hanged Josefa
Segovia in Downieville, Calif., after she stabbed an Anglo man who tried
to assault her.
Efforts by Anglo settlers to take control of land owned by Mexicans,
along with fears that Mexicans could help African-American slaves foment
revolts, contributed to the sense of hostility around some lynchings. In
the 1850s, several counties in Texas expelled Mexicans, and in 1854, the
city of Austin ordered every Mexican to leave unless vouched for by Anglos.
States on the border are grappling yet again with efforts among
prominent conservatives to label Latino immigrants a security threat.
Some in the borderlands see parallels with earlier outbreaks of
anti-Hispanic militancy in the United States, citing examples like the
armed vigilantes patrolling the Arizona desert, the expansion of the
Border Patrol, and calls for the mass deportation of undocumented
Hispanic immigrants.
“With everything that’s happening on the border, it infuriates me that
these lynchings were just swept under the rug,” said Brandi Tobar, 19, a
college student in San Tan Valley, Ariz., and a descendant of one of the
men killed at Porvenir. Ms. Tobar is a co-writer of a song, “Village
Called Porvenir,” to remember the massacre.
She added, “If we don’t want something like this repeated, it’s about
time for the entire country to know the truth.”
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