On June 11 Captain Fox wrote a heated letter. To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the massacre, Texas state legislators, historians, and Porvenir descendants, are honoring the 15 men killed at Porvenir on January 28, 1918. In 2018, the state unveiled a memorial to the murder victims. The marker was approved in 2018. Captain J. M. Fox and the Porvenir Massacre by Rachel Smith, Collections Assistant Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum James Monroe Fox had a long career in Texas law enforcement. General: all the suffering women and families who have become orphans ask aid of you and our Government.” By February 15 the Mexican embassy led a formal protest with Secretary of State Robert Lansing and asked that the State Department charge assailants with responsibility and “to apply to them a well-earned punishment.”. Texas State Historical Association (TSHA). Porvenir Victims This is dedicated to the victims of the 1918 Porvenir Massacre. With the help of soldiers from the Eighth U.S. Cavalry Regiment, the Rangers and cattlemen woke up the residents and separated fifteen men and boys from their families and neighbors. The letter concluded that “15 Mexicans were killed when they were under the custody of your men and after they had been arrested and unarmed. These Herrera brothers had … reset. accessed April 21, 2021, Porvenir was a community in remote northwest Presidio County on the Rio Grande. Despite the damning evidence, however, no participants in the massacre were prosecuted for their involvement. The purpose of this page is to disseminate information pertaining to the Porvenir Massacre on the 14th of Jan. in 1918. “The Porvenir massacre is an example of the worst type of oppression, the worst type of retaliation against somebody because they are minorities,” Canales said. In the letter he protested his officers being punished because they “unfortunately had to kill any number of Mexican bandits.” Fox accused the governor of giving in to pressure from the Mexican government and accused Hobby of playing politics to secure the Mexican vote in future elections. He also characterized Texas Ranger abuse as the work of rogue untrained agents. The Porvenir massacre unfolded as the Mexican Revolution roiled Mexico, leaving a security vacuum along the borderlands. Harley described Fox’s behavior as entirely unacceptable: “the calamitous rangers and violator of law must not be on the frontier where there may arise political complications which can occasion serious damages to our country and prevent the development of the war in Europe.” Harley charged the men for shooting the victims “without provocation” while they were “defenseless and unarmed.” He continued, while the United States fought in World War I “to overthrow ruthless autocracy,” the state of Texas would not “propose to tolerate it here at home.”, Fox’s forced resignation, firing five Texas Rangers, and disbanding Company B offered a rare occasion when state police faced reprimand and dismissal for extralegal violence. Historian Glenn Justice says the massacre happened during a chaotic time. This massacre was part of a pattern of state sanctioned violence on the Texas-Mexico border, as documented in the invaluable online documentary project, Refusing to Forget. “I’m running my finger along US 90 here on this map.” The Injustice Never Leaves You offers an invaluable account of why these incidents happened, what they meant at the time, and how a determined community ensured that the victims were not forgotten. A tragedy story of a 11yr old boy. Families scoured the brush to retrieve the bodies of loved ones. With growing federal and diplomatic pressure, the Texas governor responded to the mounting evidence. After collecting more than 100 pieces of evidence on behalf of the survivors, on February 15, 1935, Mexican attorney Oscar Rebasa filed Concepción Carrasco de González, et al. A They crossed into Mexico and received refuge and aid from Mexican troops stationed near the border. In 2018 the Texas Historical Commission unveiled a Texas Historical Marker acknowledging the Porvenir massacre as a Texas tragedy. On January 24, 1918, a group of Texas Rangers from Company B and local civilians visited the residents of Porvenir while they slept. In January 1918 the residents of Porvenir were landowners and farmers, who raised livestock, grew produce, and raised their families in an arid desert climate. . Harry Warren maintained a public school where local families sent their children. The captain responsible for the Porvenir massacre was eventually rehired. A short distance from Porvenir, the prisoners were lined up against a rock bluff and shot to death. Martinez reconstructs this history from institutional and private archives and oral histories, to show how the horror of anti-Mexican violence lingered within communities for generations, compounding injustice by inflicting further pain and loss. The Porvenir Massacre was one of a series of clashes between Mexican-descent men and the Texas Rangers set off by the Mexican Revolution and accompanying events. With “all kinds of evidence” the adjutant general condemned the massacre. On WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show, listen to Monica Muñoz Martinez provide historical context for the Trump administration’s violent and racially-charged policies for asylum-seekers crossing America’s southern border: A moving account of a little-known period of state-sponsored racial terror inflicted on ethnic Mexicans in the Texas–Mexico borderlands. He had approximately twenty students, boys and girls. Pete Flores, a descendant of Longino Flores, who was killed in the 1918 Porvenir Massacre, walks by his family's six-acre ranch in Odessa, Texas, on Sept. 18, 2019. Join TSHA to support quality Texas history programs and receive exclusive benefits. The families abandoned their homes. / In the hours, days, and weeks following the massacre, the surviving families had to decide where to seek safety and where to live. Yet its memorialization provided victims with an important means of redress, undermining official narratives that sought to whitewash these atrocities. Tobar is a co-writer of a song, “Village Called Porvenir,” to remember the massacre. Included in the Warren Papers are handwritten notes documenting the Porvenir massacre. A After spending a day interviewing Flores at his house in Odessa, Justice accompanied him and several family members to Porvenir, where the old man led them to … The victims included Antonio Castañeda, Longino Flores, Pedro Herrera, Vivian Herrera, Severiano Herrera, Manuel Moralez, Eutimio Gonzalez, Ambrosio Hernandez, Alberto Garcia, Tiburcio Jáques, Roman Nieves, Serapio Jimenez, Pedro Jimenez, Juan Jimenez, and Macedonio Huertas. Angie Herrera is a descendant of the Herrera family who lived in Porvenir, Texas. Valencia, now the editor of the Porvenir Massacre website, began working closely with Dr. Monica Muñoz Martinez, and in 2014, an application was submitted through the Undertold Marker program for a historical marker to be placed close to the site. State representative José Tomas Canales called on the Texas legislature to investigate Texas Rangers accused of murder, denying residents due process, and abusing residents' civil rights. They described the residents of Porvenir as “thieves, informers, spies, and murderers.” They accused the victims of being suspects in a raid on the Brite Ranch a month earlier (see BRITE RANCH RAID). Historian Lonn Taylor is at a topographical map of Far West Texas, pointing to one of the most remote sections. Artifacts at the site of Porvenir Massacre, collected by Glenn Justice This story originally appeared on Marfa Public Radio. On January 26, after two days of captivity, the Rangers released the residents, only to visit them again days later. Gen. James A. Harley. No thank you, I am not interested in joining. Monica Muñoz Martinez turns to the keepers of this history to tell this riveting and disturbing untold story. The Porvenir Massacre was one of a series of clashes between Mexican-descent men and the Texas Rangers set off by the Mexican Revolution and accompanying events. Martinez’s application for a Porvenir massacre marker was accepted in 2015. Monica Muñoz Martínez, Published by the Texas State Historical Association. Operating in remote rural areas enabled the perpetrators to do their worst: hanging, shooting, burning, and beating victims to death without scrutiny. The survivors provided sworn statements, including Juan Méndez, who wrote an official testimony of the massacre for Gen. J. C. Murguía in Ojinaga. Between 1910 and 1920, vigilantes and law enforcement—including the renowned Texas Rangers—killed Mexican residents with impunity. Despite having no evidence that the Porvenir villagers were involved in recent thefts or the killings of ranchers, the Rangers separated fifteen men and boys from the rest of the villag… Other materials held by the Archives on the subject include oral histories, photographs, and books. The massacre triggered an investigation by the Mexican government. Her research and analyses are phenomenal. He decided to publicly condemn the massacre. The unarmed group was taken into custody, denied due process, and executed en masse. The Texas Rangers Company B was sent to the area to stop banditry after the Brite Ranch raid. Writing is Fun-damental– from Gwendolyn Hoff A Daily Blog (est. This was proven by all kinds of evidence, even by the confession of those who took part and by reports collected by this office and by Agents of the Government of the United States.” Harley continued that if peace officers denied any person, “whether he be white or black, yellow or brown,” the constitutional right to a trial by jury, then they were illegally constituting themselves as both the judge and executioner. A / On January 28, 2018, the centennial anniversary of the massacre, approximately 400 people gathered at the Texas State Capital in Austin, Texas, to remember those that died. Students came from the Bonilla, Flores, Gonzalez, Jáquez, Lares, Moralez, and Nieves families. 100 years ago Sunday, a posse made up of Texas Rangers and the U.S. military raided the border village of Porvenir in the middle of the night. In the years that followed the Porvenir massacre, historians like Walter Prescott Webb justified extralegal violence by profiling Mexicans of this era as bandits and a threat to local Anglo ranchers. Watch the trailer for the 55-minute documentary film, Read a KCET (Los Angeles, CA) feature on the documentary, As a new FBI report shows that the rate of hate crimes against Latinos in the United States is at its highest in nearly a decade, listen to Martinez discuss the “forgotten” history of anti-Latino violence in the United States on WBUR (Boston, MA)’s, Listen to Martinez discuss Texas’s history of racial violence on the podcast, Watch Martinez discuss El Paso on MSNBC’s, Read a CNN.com report on past border violence victims’ descendants’ reactions to the El Paso shooting: “people are doing things like they used to do many, many years ago”, As outrage builds at U.S. Border Patrol and ICE abuses of power at the U.S. southern border, read a CNN feature, informed heavily by Martinez’s research, on South Texas’s history of racial profiling and extreme violence perpetrated against people of Mexican background—including American citizens—by the Texas Rangers, Read an NBC News profile of Monica Muñoz Martinez, Read Associated Press coverage of the “racial terror”—torture, lynchings and other violence—experienced by Mexican Americans at the hands of white mobs, the Texas Rangers, and U.S. Army soldiers between 1910 and 1920, On the nationally syndicated radio program, Listen to an interview with Martinez on the podcast, Listen to Martinez discuss Texas’s history of state-sponsored violence on the news program, Read an interview with Martinez at the blog of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 2019 Lawrence W. Levine Award, Organization of American Historians, Finalist, 2019 Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians, 2019 María Elena Martínez Prize for Outstanding Book in Mexican History, The Conference on Latin American History, 2019 TCU Texas Book Award, Friends of the Texas Christian University Library and TCU Press, 2019 NACCS–Tejas Foco Nonfiction Book Award, National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (Tejas Foco), 2019 Caughey Western History Prize, Western History Association, 2019 Robert G. Athearn Award, Western History Association, evolutionary and adaptive genius of vegetation, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America, deindustrialization, the care economy, and the living legacies of the industrial workers’ movement, Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought, how philosophy might embrace supposedly manipulative mythmaking for liberal ends, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire. Tobar visited Flores on this first occasion to confirm that her great-grandfather Longino Medina Flores was killed in the massacre. On June 12 Harley wrote a scorching letter to Fox. remembering the porvenir massacre old riot, new ranger: captain jack dean, texas ranger and u.s. marshal arvel rodolphus ponton: father of medicine on the texas south plains porvenir massacre marker dedication porvenir massacre and the handbook of texas war in east texas: regulators vs. moderators higher education in texas: its beginnings to 1970 402 likes. On June 4, 1918, Governor William Pettus Hobby disbanded Company B of the Texas Rangers, firing Andrew Charles Baker, Max Herman, Bud Weaver, Allen Cole, and Boone Oliphant, and transferring J. R. Bates, O. C. Dowe, S. H. Neill, A. H. Woelber, A. G. Beard, N. N. Fuller, and Frank Patterson to Company D. He also pressured the captain of Company B, James Monroe Fox, to resign. Survivors suffered segregation and fierce intimidation, and yet fought back. In June 1926, eight years after the event, Mexican attorneys filed twelve separate claims against the United States regarding the Porvenir massacre. He pressed his hopes that “in the judicial investigation there may result not only the resignation of the Captain of the rangers, J. M. Fox, but the punishment which he and the others who are found guilty merit, because this is demanded by justice and the good name of the Federal authorities and of the State of Texas.”. A New Documentary Exposes the Dark Truth of a West Texas Massacre ‘Porvenir, Texas’ explores the search for justice after 15 Mexican Americans were killed at the hands of the Texas Rangers. A moving account of a little-known period of state-sponsored racial terror inflicted on ethnic Mexicans in the Texas–Mexico borderlands. Witnesses and survivors of the massacre, along with their descendants, kept the memories of the tragedy and preserved them a century later. The posse ordered the families to return home, but took Román Nieves, Nutemio González, and Manuel Fierro as prisoners. In January 1918 the residents of Porvenir were landowners and farmers, who raised livestock, grew produce, and raised their families in an arid desert climate. They are descendants of Longino Flores, one of 15 men and boys killed in the 1918 Porvenir Massacre by Texas Rangers. Join TSHA online for the preeminent conference on the Texas Revolution rea. Font size: In her new book, Montgomery shows how plant behavior and adaptation can offer valuable insights for human thriving. The following is a sworn statement taken from Rosenda Mesa describing the massacre. Billy Calzada, Staff / … Residents also cared about education. . Font size: “The Porvenir massacre took place in January 1918, and it's a tragedy that was close, actually, in proximity in West Texas to El Paso, relatively speaking, to how big the state is. 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