On our cover this week, a look into the brutal history of the Texas Rangers, and some of the descendents of their victims who want the public to understand what happened over a century ago.
Some people, like Gonzales, want a formal, Texas-led investigation in the form of a truth and reconciliation commission. Others aren’t sure what they want, but they know they want something. An acknowledgment and formal apology, perhaps. And both camps agree there are disturbing similarities between the Rangers’ violence and the killing of Black men like Tyre Nichols, as well as the racially charged rhetoric that often dominates the discussion of the Texas-Mexico border.
Mythologized as symbols of law and order on the Old West frontier, yesterday’s Texas Rangers were also the perpetrators of large-scale atrocities and an unknowable number of murders. At least 300 Mexican Americans were killed in Texas in the 1910s, for instance, and some estimates place the number in the thousands. The Rangers were often the ones pulling the triggers or raising the nooses, and their acts made them as feared as the Ku Klux Klan. Worse yet, they did it all with relative impunity.
He eventually ditched journalism for history and found plenty of overlap with his former career. Gonzales was still investigating, only now the crimes happened a century or two ago. “People will say things like, ‘You’re just opening old wounds,’” he says. “But the wounds never healed.”The area where the Porvenir Massacre occurred was as harsh as its history. “Each plant in this land is a porcupine,” wrote one 19th-century traveler quoted in Swanson’s book. “It is nature armed to the teeth.” Texas Rangers Company B undoubtedly passed some of those “porcupines” as they rode into the village of Porvenir, on the Texas-Mexico border west of Marfa, on Jan. 26, 1918.
Christine Molis has a story similar to Valencia’s in that she didn’t hear about her ancestors’ murder until she was an adult. Neither did Molis’ mother. She first heard about the organization when it was opening the original exhibit back in 2016. Her mother was invited to be a part of a panel, and since then, Refusing to Forget has periodically reached out asking for details or other family stories.
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