officers and National Guard troops who responded with unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence on anyone who came in contact with them.
The rioting police clubbed and hit journalists, peaceful protesters, and innocent bystanders with no consideration of age or gender. According to the Walker National Commission that examined the police riot, the victims included “persons who had broken no law, disobeyed no order, made no threat” (Walker Report, 1968). The innocent victims were peaceful protesters, onlookers, residents passing through, or living in the area. Six hundred and sixty-eight people were arrested; 425 were treated at temporary medical facilities; 200 were treated on the scene; 400 hundred were given first aid for tear gas exposure; and 110 had to go to the hospital. Unbelievably, no one died. The Chicago police did not fire into the crowd as they did at the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre.
Police Violence and Homicides against Mexicans
The academic and popular discussion of U.S. LEO homicides has primarily focused on police violence against the various dangerous classes in the Southern states and the Northeast, particularly African Americans. Equally disturbing but primarily ignored is the Anglo-American treatment of Mexicans (Romero, 2001). Carrigan and Webb (2013) in their seminal study of Mexican lynchings refer to lynched Mexicana as the forgotten dead.
They use the term “Mexican” to refer to persons born in Mexico and living in the United States and those of Mexican descent born in the United States. They do not use the terms “Hispanic” or “Latino” because those terms were not in use at the time examined (Carrigan & Webb, 2013). In the western and southwestern states, racial discrimination and state violence against Mexicans has a long history (Urquito-Ruiz, 2004).
Following the end of the Mexican-American War and the 1848 Treaty of Hidalgo, Mexico lost half its geographic size with this treaty. The Mexicans already living in the conquered areas that would become Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California were guaranteed their property and civil rights by the treaty, but that is not what happened (Knowlton, 1970). The invading Anglos did not treat Mexican nationals who were in the seized territory as citizens. The Anglos dispossessed them of their homes and took their lands.
The Mexican hatred stirred up by the U.S.-Mexican war was deeply ingrained in the early Anglo settlers. The “Remember the Alamo” battle cry was a significant part of early Texas culture for decades and embodied in the racist and brutal policing practices of the Texas Rangers prior to August 10,1935—the establishment of the Texas Department of Public Safety. Prior to that date, Mexican nationals in the occupied lands were subjected to extralegal violence—lynchings, murders of men and boys, and rape of the women and girls (Romero, 2001).
Mexican immigrants that came looking for work, starting with the influx of Mexican workers during the 1849 California Gold rush, were subjected to extralegal violence and murder. Mexicans were discriminated against by an established system of Juan Crow laws enforced by violent police actions up until the 1950s in Texas. Mexicans were segregated from Anglos in schools, churches, and restaurants (Martinez, 2018). They were discouraged from voting or serving on juries. Mexicans—legal and illegal immigrants—were and still are treated by some as impoverished brown-skinned criminals—the dangerous classes, and a threat to the “American way of life” (Gonzales, 2000).
Although the Texas Rangers, an investigative branch of the Texas Department of Public Safety, is a well-respected law enforcement agency today, this was not always true. In the early nineteenth century, the Texas Rangers were an instrument of racial oppression and terror. Some historians view the early Texas Rangers in the same light as the earlier colonial slave patrols—the first Western vigilante group to be invested with enforcement powers (Martinez, 2018). The fledgling Texas Rangers performed slave patrols objectives after Texas independence in 1836 (Prassel, 1972). Rangers brutally policed the African slaves and prevented slaves from escaping into Mexico. Rangers, at times, crossed into Mexico to bring back runaway slaves.
The Texas Ranger’s Dark History—Anti-Mexican Homicides
The Texas Ranger’s “dark history” reveals their murderous efforts at ethnic cleansing in the early settlement of Texas. From August 1915 to June 1920, an unknown number of Mexicans—estimates run from several hundred to several thousand—were killed by the Texas Rangers and vigilante groups during a race war between Anglos and Mexicans—the dangerous class (Carrigan & Webb, 2013; Onion, May 5, 2016; Martinez, 2018). A 1919 report of the Texas legislature investigation into the actions of the Texas Rangers that was sealed until 2000 has the following passage: “During the course of these events [1910 to 1919], the regular Texas Rangers along with hundreds of special rangers appointed by Texas governors killed an estimated 5,000 Hispanics along the border between 1914 and 1919” (http://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/taro/tslac/50062/tsl-50062.html). The actions of the Rangers and their collusion with vigilante groups was an ethnic cleansing effort to remove all Mexicans from Texas—Mexican American citizens and Mexican nationals (Martinez, 2018). The Texas Rangers during that period used homicide as racially motivated violence.
Knowlton (1970) gives the example of a Mexican American from Texas whose grandfather was hung by the Texas Rangers as his family watched. Anglo-American ranchers drove branded cattle on his land and accused him of stealing them. The Anglos got his grandfather’s property after the hanging. Between 1848 and 1929 there were 597 documented lynchings of Mexicans in the United States—Texas (282), California (188), Arizona (59), and New Mexico (49) (Carrigan & Webb, 2003). Based on the relative size of the population, the risk of lynching was nearly as high or greater for Mexicans in the southwest as it was for blacks in the South (Carrigan & West, 2003: 414). One of the largest lynchings in U.S. history occurred in Nueces County, Texas. Forty Mexicans were randomly lynched for the murder of a white man in 1877 (Carrigan & West, 2003). The Texas Rangers were directly or indirectly involved in many of these lynching’s.
In 1881, Texas Rangers crossed into Mexico to bring back a wanted Mexican national. The Rangers illegally extradited the wanted man, and once back in Texas, they turned him over to a mob that lynched him (Carrigan & Webb, 2003). Following a train robbery in Texas in 1915, Texas Rangers killed two Mexican train passengers suspected of aiding the robbers. The Rangers then took eight Mexican suspects to the banks of the Rio Grande River and executed them (Carrigan & Webb, 2003). The bodies were left on the border river as an example of Texas Ranger swift justice. The 1919 Porvenir Massacre is a tragic example of the brutal tactics of the Texas Rangers as they engaged in the removal of Mexicans from Texas.
Porvenir Massacre
Porvenir, Texas, is in a rural, rugged, isolated area of mountains, desert and the Rio Grande River just across the Texas-Mexico border and the city of Chihuahua, Mexico. In 1918, Anglo ranchers in the area complained that Mexican bandits were raiding their property. It was rumored that the Mexican residents in Porvenir were providing safe passage and support for the Marauders (Harris & Sadler, 2004; Martinez, 2018). The ranchers claimed that men from Porvenir joined the gangs on raids. At the time, only one Anglo—a schoolteacher—lived in the small community. The area was under the jurisdiction of Texas Ranger Company B at Marfa, Texas commanded by Captain J. M. Fox. Captain Fox was ordered by the commander of the Big Bend District to “clean out the nest” of bandits in Porvenir. He did that with a vengeance.
Captain Fox and Company B composed of eight rangers, four local ranchers accompanied by members of the U.S. Eighth Calvary who had been ordered to assist the Texas Rangers in searching for weapons rode into Porvenir at 2:00 a.m. The soldiers woke the residents and had them stand outside their residences. The soldiers who regularly patrolled the area were known and trusted by the residents. The soldiers assured the frightened residents that the hated and feared Texas Rangers would not harm them. Captain Fox dismissed the soldiers, and the Texas Rangers took control of the terrified residents and moved them to a
