If a picture is worth a thousand words, Robert Runyon’s of Texas Rangers on the King Ranch in 1915 with lariats around the bodies of three deceased Mexicans — Jesus García, Mauricio García, and Amado Muñoz — speaks volumes to the murderous extra-judicial terror exacted on Mexicans in Texas from the early 1900s through about 1918.
As the Texas Rangers have found over decades and especially in recent years, the stain of hate, lynching, spilled blood, and lives destroyed persists indelibly in what historian Monica Muñoz Martinez, author of Refusing to Forget (Harvard University Press), calls the “vernacular history” of witnesses and surviving family members pulled unwillingly into the deadly xenophobia that was aimed wide like scatter shot, specific to neither age nor gender of Mexicans.
That bloody legacy of the Texas Rangers — so resistant to white wash or the kind bleaching of time — was once reported regularly and bravely in the early 1900s by Jovita Idar in La Cronica, the Nicasio Idar family’s outspoken Spanish language newspaper in Laredo. It is recounted today by the credible journalists of The Texas Observer, Texas Monthly, Time Magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Times, and The LA Times.
The work of Muñoz Martinez, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow and a professor at Brown University, is of special note among historians who have documented that murderous epoch of Mexicans left dead to rot in the brush or hanging from mesquite trees or the cross-members of electric poles.
This commentary is not an indictment of all Texas Rangers, and in particular not of modern day Rangers of the caliber of the late Adolfo Cuellar from Laredo, an exemplary lawman.
This opinion is rooted in the choice made by the City Parks and Leisure Department to invite a band of Texas Ranger re-enactors to last Saturday’s Pioneer Day at North Central Park. The re-enactors are part of the Texas Rangers Heritage Museum in Fredricksburg.
Despite the earnestness and enthusiasm of former Texas Ranger Bob Bailey — who spearheaded the staging of mock gunfights by Rangers dressed in 1880s gear, the swearing in of Junior Rangers, gun safety lessons, a recounting of Texas Ranger history and lore that glorified their early days, and displays of weaponry and memorabilia — this writer in this neck of the monte, believes the choice to incorporate the Rangers troupe as a historic element in a City sponsored event was insensitive and uninformed.
Right on, MEG!
Innapropriate is too nice a term for the decision and demondstrates the insenstivity and dearth of historical knowledge exhibited by some city councilors. And I’m being nice here.
Their is no excuse why this history is not publish in schools! We as a culture an American society why should we forget! Forget nonsense doesn’t take away the crime they committed against a culture just because!🤔
Right on! As faculty at TAMIU in history and sociology and having taught in Chicana and Chicano and Latin American and Caribbean Studies it does not surprise me the level of ignorance and the impact of settler colonialism that pervades South Texas and Laredo. My grandparents were born and raised here and left young. I was raised in segregated and KKK controlled Taft, TX, 2 hours from here and people in this area know very little about Texas let alone US history. I highly recommend watching John Valadez’s – The Head of Joaquin Murrieta that I shared with my US history students last week, a half hour PBS Documentary on the real Zorro as a metaphor/example of the and violence against Mexicans in the history of the US and the whitewashing of that history by DISNEY –