The height of Texas Ranger violence against Mexicans occurred from 1915 to 1919, with some 300 ethnic Mexicans murdered between 19 alone. Martinez traces the group’s history from its relatively humble beginnings in the 1830s to what it had become by the late 19th century: a state-sponsored terror squad directed to secure white racial hegemony along the Texas-Mexico border.
Martinez makes the salient point that this border region was once a “semiautonomous” cross-cultural zone characterized by free movement and friendly socioeconomic exchange yet by around 1915, through Texas lawmakers’ efforts, the region had become a “political and social boundary.” And most Mexicans still living there found themselves “overwhelmingly relegated to manual labor.” With the aid of Governor Hobby, he mobilized the Texas Rangers to end an era of liberalism along the border and secure economic prosperity for white settlers by keeping Mexicans out. Also not unlike Trump, Hudspeth concocted a phony immigration crisis based on xenophobic fear. Representative Claude Benton Hudspeth, whose racist rhetoric painted Mexicans as “bandits” - an interesting historical precedent for hater-in-chief Donald Trump’s infamous insults. Martinez also retrieves from the dustbin of history once-notorious Texas public officials like U.S. political elites like Hobby made sure that any serious investigation of Ranger crimes through official legal channels would be doomed to failure. Hobby presided over an era that, according to Martinez, saw the “widespread practice of executing landowning men to force the sale of land by their widows through threats of physical violence”- much of said violence aided and abetted (if not directly perpetrated) by the Rangers with official state consent. Martinez is appropriately unsparing in her detailing of Hobby’s consistently anti-Hispanic, anti-NAACP agenda: In short, he used the Rangers as his own personal goon squad in instigating intimidation tactics against minorities. These dates coincided with the reign of not only the disgraced governor James “Pa” Ferguson but also, starting in 1917, the often-venerated William P. Some 300 ethnic Mexicans were murdered between 19 alone. Martinez’s research posits the height of Texas Ranger violence against Mexicans to have occurred from 1915 to 1919. But these are just a few of Martinez’s many examples of lynchings, burnings, shootings, proxy killings and other unjustified anti-Mexican violence carried out by Texas Rangers, vigilante mobs, or both. The 1910 burning-at-the-stake of Antonio Rodriguez in Rocksprings, the double murder of prosperous rancheros Jesus Bazan and Antonio Longoria at Guadalupe Ranch, and the 1918 midnight massacre of 15 unarmed Mexicans by Texas Rangers in Porvenir are the most extensively studied atrocities in the book. Martinez organizes her book around the most egregious extrajudicial killings of Mexicans in Texas in the late 19th to early 20th centuries, incidents that Texas Rangers were either directly responsible for or carried out in cahoots with lynch mobs or local authorities.
The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas Austin to protect settlers - to what it had become by the late 19th century: a state-sponsored terror squad directed to secure white racial hegemony along the Texas-Mexico border. Martinez traces the group’s history from its relatively humble beginnings in the 1830s - as a small band of armed men organized by Stephen F. With these laughable, ahistorical representations in mind, Brown University professor Monica Muñoz Martinez’s The Injustice Never Leaves You serves as a long-overdue reality check on the Texas Rangers’ legacy. Then in the 1990s television gave us an updated Ranger myth in Walker, Texas Ranger, where an aging Chuck Norris plays a modernized lone Ranger who dispatches Dallas-area baddies with poorly choreographed karate moves.
Take, for instance, the long-running 1950s Lone Ranger TV series, in which Rangers are only portrayed as the victims of wrongdoing - never its instigators. The Rangers are often depicted as infallible noble guardians of public order.
The popular image of the elite law-enforcement organization known as the Texas Rangers has long been derived from television fantasies and historical myth.