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NY Times Op-Ed, Feb. 20 2015
When Americans Lynched Mexicans
By WILLIAM D. CARRIGAN and CLIVE WEBB
THE recent release of a landmark report on the history of lynching in
the United States is a welcome contribution to the struggle over
American collective memory. Few groups have suffered more systematic
mistreatment, abuse and murder than African-Americans, the focus of the
report.
One dimension of mob violence that is often overlooked, however, is that
lynchers targeted many other racial and ethnic minorities in the United
States, including Native Americans, Italians, Chinese and, especially,
Mexicans.
Americans are largely unaware that Mexicans were frequently the targets
of lynch mobs, from the mid-19th century until well into the 20th
century, second only to African-Americans in the scale and scope of the
crimes. One case, largely overlooked or ignored by American journalists
but not by the Mexican government, was that of seven Mexican shepherds
hanged by white vigilantes near Corpus Christi, Tex., in late November
1873. The mob was probably trying to intimidate the shepherds’ employer
into selling his land. None of the killers were arrested.
From 1848 to 1928, mobs murdered thousands of Mexicans, though
surviving records allowed us to clearly document only about 547 cases.
These lynchings occurred not only in the southwestern states of Arizona,
California, New Mexico and Texas, but also in states far from the
border, like Nebraska and Wyoming.
Some of these cases did appear in press accounts, when reporters
depicted them as violent public spectacles, as they did with many
lynchings of African-Americans in the South. For example, on July 5,
1851, a mob of 2,000 in Downieville, Calif., watched the extralegal
hanging of a Mexican woman named Juana Loaiza, who had been accused of
having murdered a white man named Frank Cannon.
Such episodes were not isolated to the turbulent gold rush period. More
than a half-century later, on Nov. 3, 1910, a mob snatched a 20-year-old
Mexican laborer, Antonio Rodríguez, from a jail in Rock Springs, Tex.
The authorities had arrested him on charges that he had killed a
rancher’s wife. Mob leaders bound him to a mesquite tree, doused him
with kerosene and burned him alive. The El Paso Herald reported that
thousands turned out to witness the event; we found no evidence that
anyone was ever arrested.
While there were similarities between the lynchings of blacks and
Mexicans, there were also clear differences. One was that local
authorities and deputized citizens played particularly conspicuous roles
in mob violence against Mexicans.
On Jan. 28, 1918, a band of Texas Rangers and ranchers arrived in the
village of Porvenir in Presidio County, Tex. Mexican outlaws had
recently attacked a nearby ranch, and the posse presumed that the locals
were acting as spies and informants for Mexican raiders on the other
side of the border. The group rounded up nearly two dozen men, searched
their houses, and marched 15 of them to a rock bluff near the village
and executed them. The Porvenir massacre, as it has become known, was
the climactic event in what Mexican-Americans remember as the Hora de
Sangre (Hour of Blood). It led, the following year, to an investigation
by the Texas Legislature and reform of the Rangers.
Between 1915 and 1918, vigilantes, local law officers and Texas Rangers
executed, without due process, unknown thousands of Mexicans for their
alleged role in a revolutionary uprising known as the Plan de San Diego.
White fears of Mexican revolutionary violence exploded in July and
August 1915, after Mexican raiders committed a series of assaults on the
economic infrastructure of the Lower Rio Grande Valley in resistance to
white dominance. The raids unleashed a bloody wave of retaliatory action
amid a climate of intense paranoia.
While there are certainly instances in the history of the American South
where law officers colluded in mob action, the level of engagement by
local and state authorities in the reaction to the Plan de San Diego was
remarkable. The lynchings persisted into the 1920s, eventually declining
largely because of pressure from the Mexican government.
Historians have often ascribed to the South a distinctiveness that has
set it apart from the rest of the United States. In so doing, they have
created the impression of a peculiarly benighted region plagued by
unparalleled levels of racial violence. The story of mob violence
against Mexicans in the Southwest compels us to rethink the history of
lynching.
Southern blacks were the group most often targeted, but comparing the
histories of the South and the West strengthens our understanding of mob
violence in both. In today’s charged debate over immigration policy and
the growth of the Latino population, the history of anti-Mexican
violence reminds us of the costs and consequences of hate.
William D. Carrigan, a professor of history at Rowan University, and
Clive Webb, professor of modern American history at the University of
Sussex, are the authors of “Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence Against
Mexicans in the United States, 1848-1928.”
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