Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Documenting Terror in the Texas Borderlands

2019; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/rah.2019.0035

1080-6628

Benjamin Francis-Fallon,

Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

Documenting Terror in the Texas Borderlands Benjamin Francis-Fallon (bio) Monica Muñoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. 387 pp.. Illustrations, notes, and index. $35.00. During the second decade of the twentieth century, a wave of state violence took the lives of hundreds if not thousands of ethnic Mexicans living in the Texas borderlands. "An intersecting regime of vigilantes, state police, local police, and army soldiers" as well as their supporters in government justified extralegal killings and other acts of anti-Mexican brutality—that is, when they acknowledged them at all—as necessary to protecting property and lives from "bandits" and lawlessness said to originate in revolutionary Mexico (p. 7). Local prosecutors and sympathetic juries stood complicit in the carnage. State oversight encouraged the Rangers' most ruthless misdeeds. Yet this history of injustice is largely unknown to the public. Monica Muñoz Martinez's superb study is built to achieve two purposes. One is to show how various "keepers of history convinced the broader United States" that this "period of terror" was in fact a "time of progress" fundamental to the making of Texas and, with it, American freedom (p. 8). To accomplish this objective, the author introduces the interests—journalists, legislators, historians, museum directors, historical reenactors, and others—who criminalized and dehumanized the victims of state violence and denied, excused, or celebrated the brutality directed against them. The book's second and perhaps higher purpose is to reveal the struggles of those who would not submit to the violence and its official history. The author chronicles their various acts of "resistance," such as the searching for and burying of bodies, the placement of a memorial cross, and the uttering of the names of the dead. These defiant acts, she argues, are of a piece with the ways that the families and allies of the victims also painstakingly constructed their own histories of this period of terror. In often remarkable strokes, the book profiles the meanings found by those creating personal archives, oral histories, documentary films, and websites that registered the injustices visited upon their forebears and, as they learned of these past wrongs, themselves. The Injustice Never Leaves You charts [End Page 243] the historical and emotional significance of efforts to organize public displays and commemorations of this alternative history. While the book succeeds in both its primary missions, the author's deft integration of these "valiant acts of preservation and remembrance" lends her work a special power and poignancy (p. 5). An introduction sets forth the book's major claims, summarizes Texans' long history of "forging borders with violence," and lays out a research method predicated upon the "search, first and foremost, for lost humanity" (pp. 10, 23). Each of the first three chapters then presents a case study in anti-Mexican violence. Chapter one focuses on the 1910 lynching of Antonio Rodríguez in the town of Rocksprings. It was a gruesome burning at the stake, intended revenge for Rodríguez's alleged murder of Effie Greer Henderson, a forty-year-old white woman. The author aims to tell a "larger story," however, about the ways residents came to remember these violent events and how these memories shaped their understandings about their community down to the present day (p. 32). Rodríguez's killing was "the most well-known and widely documented lynching of a Mexican national in the United States" (p. 31). We learn that the English- and Spanish-language presses (the latter mostly based in Mexico) constructed vastly differing accounts of the event. The former excused and justified the lynching as a necessary defense of property, white women, and national sovereignty. The latter interpreted the mob as the latest Yankee depredation in the region stolen from Mexico. "Untainted by racist assumptions of the victims' guilt," such Spanish-language journalism constituted "important alternative account[s]" of the violence (p. 50). Local people developed their own versions of the events. Community histories that Martinez uncovered reveal how Henderson's family sought to restore her victimhood to a central position in public memory, but Martinez's own interviews capture ethnic Mexicans' different historical memories. They disputed...