Behind the Texas Rangers’ reputation as agents of law, order, and progress lies their systematic murder of ethnic Mexicans, carried out with the complicity of the Anglo establishment, including its media, courts, and legislature. Martinez's meticulously researched book pulls back the curtain to reveal this sordid truth while showing why the myth of Rangers as heroes has endured. Along the way, she demonstrates how historians can use oral interviews and private archives to reveal hidden histories of trauma and repression.
The book opens with the 1918 murder of Florencio García by white vigilantes. The author argues that this was part of a pattern of racial violence that took the lives of at least 300 and up to many thousands more ethnic Mexicans in Texas. Rangers and their co-conspirators justified these actions by constructing ethnic Mexican residents as bandits and enemies of progress “who deserved no rights or protections” (22). This campaign of terror, according to Martinez, was an organized effort to take control away from ethnic Mexicans and to quell potential “challenges to Anglo social, political and economic control” (15). Martinez avoids the temptation to celebrate masculine Mexican heroes who resisted violence with violence, and instead she emphasizes people's day-to-day struggles. Demonstrating her command over the craft of history, Martinez makes careful use of well-known sources, while also recovering “unconventional and unofficial archives, often outside of state control,” preserved by local families (25).
The book's first three chapters focus on particular case studies. In Chapter 1, the 1910 lynching of Antonio Rodríguez “offers an opportunity to see the politics of memory on a local level” (33). Chapter 2 recounts the 1915 murder of Jesús Bazán and Antonio Longorio by Captain Henry Ransom. Martinez shows that ethnic Mexicans had to be careful in their daily activities and in their interactions with law enforcement agents to avoid attracting the wrath of the Rangers. She also shows how the Rangers conspired with other law enforcement agencies, the courts, and the legislature to cover up murders and to celebrate Captain Ransom and other culprits as heroes. Chapter 3 turns to the 1918 massacre of the ethnic Mexican community of Porvenir. Here, the author deepens her analysis of how the state sanctioned Rangers and vigilante terror.
Chapter 4 tells the story of the risks taken by Texas state representative J. T. Canales and the NAACP to expose the Rangers. Even as they sought to rein in violence they could not escape a trap that continues to frame Texas politics even today: to convince people to investigate crimes committed by the Rangers, they had to present the individual perpetrators as bad apples, thus upholding the farce that Texas Rangers were a force of good. Chapter 5 traces the process by which the Rangers, in the public's imagination, came to be credited with creating Texas, while ethnic Mexicans have been erased, treated as obstacles to progress, or cast as criminals. Chapter 6 recounts ongoing efforts to reveal historical truth and the challenges of doing so against a resilient mythology perpetuated by museums and historical commissions. In the epilogue, Martinez proposes that even small actions can help bring truth to light and that we must remember the names and experiences of the departed.
This book joins a growing literature by Benjamin Johnson, Paul Cool, and others who offer historical correctives to misleading myths of Ranger heroism and Mexican criminality. My only criticism of the book is a tendency toward redundancy, which might deter some readers or limit the book from reaching as wide an audience as it deserves. This small criticism aside, Martinez's book is an impressive accomplishment. It is a timely contribution to the scholarship that offers a careful reading of the evidence, matched by bold, compelling analysis.
