Monica Muñoz Martinez, "The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas" (Harvard UP, 2018)

[Music] Welcome back to new books in the American West, a channel on the new books network of podcasts. I'm Stephen Houseman, your host for today's interview. I'm very excited to welcome Monica Munoz Martinez to the show. Dr. Martinez is the Stanley J. Bernstein Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University and is a former Andrew Carnegie fellow. We'll be discussing her book, The Injustice Never Leaves You, Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas, which came out with Harvard University Press in 2018, and one awards from the Organization of American Historians and the National Association for Chicano-Chicana Studies. Welcome to the new books network Monica. Thank you so much for having me. Let's begin today by just hearing about you. Why don't you start with this little biography, tell us about yourself, your background, and how you became interested in history and in American studies. Sure. Well, I grew up in South Texas in a small rural community called Evalde. It's about 80 miles west of San Antonio and about 60 miles east of the US-Mexico border. So it's on the NOSS river and it's a part of, you know, it really shaped my understanding of, it inspired questions about the relationship between memory, history, and power. So it's a community that was really important to the Civil Rights Movement in Texas. So I grew up hearing histories about the Civil Rights Movement in Evalde and in smaller rural communities. But those histories weren't taught in the public school that I grew up in. So I was a product of public schools in Texas and it wasn't until I left Texas for school at Brown for college that I was first exposed to histories of ethnic studies that were taught in ethnic studies classes to histories of Mexican-Americans in the Civil Rights Movement. So it was the first time that I had access to a formal classroom education. But I was really inspired by what was a developing and growing field of Latinx history that was so vibrant at the time that I was a student. And I was fortunate to work with professors at Brown, like Jonas Alonia and Macarcea and Eval Mujudahart who were actively recruiting students to learn about becoming professors to learn about how to contribute to the development of the field. And so I was a melon maze fellow at Brown and was able through opportunities to work with faculty like Macarcea. I first learned about methods in archival recovery and how to conduct oral histories, working with him and other students and actually on a research project that he was conducting in California. And so I was introduced to the field of history, but I was also introduced to the ways in which there were really exciting recovering methods that were being used by historians who were recovering histories of racial and ethnic minorities and women that had been ignored by the field for too long. And so I was really gripped not only by the questions that people were asking, but by the ways in which they were actually building archives and recovering histories that were preserved in records and people's garages and in their closets. And I loved meeting the people and recording their life stories. And so I was addicted, really, and then learned about graduate school and how to become a historian. That's really interesting. I've actually had a couple people on the podcast recently and asked them similar questions. They told kind of similar stories about how they really get into history by asking questions about the place that they grew up. But that's kind of interesting to me that you needed to kind of get away from the place where you grew up in order to really find out about its history. Absolutely. Well, you know, it's unfortunate that histories of the civil rights movements and in places in the Southwest aren't a part of the crickulums. And so when we think about what students have access to, they're often not learning about the resilience in their communities and the efforts for social justice that made up the communities that they live in. And so there were, you know, these were the kinds of histories that people told that barbecues and in the privacy of their homes. But publicly people, you know, in a place like Evality, there were tensions around the histories of school walkouts, for example. It was in a community where the school walkouts that took place in 1970 with a Mexican-American student protesting segregation and protesting, you know, they were calling for access to bilingual education. You know, that had been passed, you know, the Biongwell Education Act was passed in 1965. But they weren't, the schools weren't providing bilingual education. Actually, you know, students who suffered a corporal punishment for speaking Spanish in the schools. And so, you know, they were fighting for their basic civil rights. But they were, they were criminalized and they were called communists and they were called militants. And the school board didn't actually address their concerns. They didn't integrate the schools. And so it wasn't until a parent, Hanoi O'Modalis sued the school district. It led to a federally mandated desegregation order years later that those students who participated in that school walkout were, was publicly acknowledged by the state, by the federal courts, that their rights had been violated. So, you know, but, but the memories of that, of that walkout really continued to divide the community when I was conducting all histories years later as a student. And so it was really captivated by the power of mainstream narratives that either acknowledge histories of racism or they cover them up and they either acknowledge suffering and injustice or they disavow those histories. And so those questions about their relationship between memory and power and history really animate my work still today. And that brings us nicely to the next question that I was wondering, which is how or what drew you to the particular topic of this book of racialized violence in Texas in the first couple decades of the 20th century specifically? Well, it's a, you know, the history of anti-Mexican violence is largely not known by people. So when we think about histories of racial violence in the United States, people tend to have some understanding of histories of anti-black violence. The history is of lynchings in the United States. Although I would say that that that largely public education used to do a better job of teaching these histories. But people tend to understand racial violence as existing along a white and black binary. Others have a general sense of histories of conquest and colonization and understand that indigenous nations and people were suffered from genocide and suffered from policies of displacement. But largely the histories of anti-Mexican violence are unknown. And so most people don't know that hundreds of ethnic Mexicans, both American citizens and Mexican nationals were victims of lynchings between the eight mid 19th century and into the early 20th century. And most people also don't know about the histories of state sanctioned police violence. So local law enforcement in Texas, the state police participating in murders. And so in the early 20th century in Texas there were hundreds of ethnic Mexicans that were murdered between 1910 and 1920 alone. So I was really captivated by this history not only because most people didn't know about it, but also because there was a huge archival record to tell the history. And so there were legal records that give us access to families and widows and parents who tried to suggest this for the murder of their loved ones. There were journalists who were writing about this history. And I actually learned and sort of stumbled into this archive when I was reading the publications by a journalist, Holi Dayidad, who was writing for La Cronica, a Spanish language newspaper in La Rada. And she was writing about the injustices of what was this era of Juan Crow laws that were being passed in Texas to segregate Mexicans to disenfranchise them to keep them from voting. And to really displace Mexicans living in Texas from any sort of economic, cultural, or social power or political power. And so she was writing about the injustices that she witnessed, but she was also specifically writing about episodes of Antemites in Violence like the lynching of Antonio Rodriguez in November 1910. And so I was again interested in questions about history in memory because the first time that I learned about the lynching of Antonio Rodriguez was actually when I was conducting an oral history in 2005 with my uncle who was a participant in the civil rights movement in Evaldeley. And he told me about the lynching as he had learned about it when he was a teenager working in the sheep cheering industry. So I was stunned that he had shared this history with me in 2005 and that the details that I was reading about in this newspaper that was published in 1910 had been preserved by community memory. So, you know, he wasn't sharing documents with me about the lynching, he wasn't sharing newspaper records or, you know, the investigations that were conducted at the time, but instead it was this history of racial violence had been preserved by community members. It had been passed from generation to generation. And he was explaining it as a way of something that he learned that helped him understand the kinds of violence that he experienced growing up, the racism and discrimination, the police brutality. And so it was a lesson that he shared with the ease, a way of saying, you know, that racial violence has always been experienced by Mexicans. And there's a longer history to what he was confronting in the 60s and 70s. But that inspired this project that tried to recover this history of racial violence had largely been forgotten, but also trace the longer legacies. Yeah, and that word legacy is one that stood out to me, particularly in the beginning of the book. Because as you already said, this is a book as much about memory as it is about the actual history on the ground. It's about both of those things. And you use that phrase, the legacy of violence in the book itself. And I'm wondering if you could explain what exactly a meme by that. And we can talk about individual examples later on, but maybe broadly speaking, what do you mean by that term legacy of violence? Well, there's a few different ways to think about it. So on the one hand, I was learning about in the archive, I was finding people whose lives were shaken and shaped by this period of racial violence. And so you could think about longer legacies that impacted people on an individual level. So somebody who either experienced, you know, they were a victim of racial violence. They were a family member of somebody who was targeted or murdered, or they were somebody who witnessed it. Right. And so there were people who who suffered from this period of racial violence, and they were impacted and shaped their life for decades to come. So we can trace the legacy on a personal individual or a familial level. But there are also the ways in which entire communities suffered from and were shaped by the legacies of this violence. So the sort of the impact on politics of a community or the impact on legacies of civil rights organizing that were shaped. And so, but also, you know, there's this practice of generational memory. So there were families and communities that preserved these memories and passed them on from one generation to the next, which helps us understand that there are, you know, these episodes of racial violence don't stay in the past. They continued to impact entire communities for generations. And so that was one of the community traces that I was able to study and write about in the book, things about legacies and impacting communities. But there's also the legacies of racial violence that shaped institutions. And so shaped the policing practices on the border that shaped immigration policies. The way in which race anti-Mexican sentiment, anti-immigrant sentiment, shaped our our understanding of justice throughout the 20th century and who can make claims to citizenship. So I think about the legacies of violence and we're able to trace those on an individual level, on a community level, but also on institutional levels. For us to think about what it means to actually reckon with this violence can take multiple forms and it needs to be, it needs to take multiple forms. You mentioned a couple minutes ago the lynching of Antonio Rodriguez in Roxbrings, Texas in 1910. And that's also the first story of violence that you talk about in the book. Can you tell us what happened in 1910 in Roxbrings and how that awful history has been passed down both in the town of Roxbrings and in the Regency Street, more broadly? Yeah, it is. You're right. This is an awful case of racial violence that took place. Antonio Rodriguez was a Mexican national. He was 20 years old and he from what we can find from investigations and records. He was traveling through Texas looking for work and he was arrested by a posse in early November 1910 in Edwards County. He was accused of murdering Effie Greer Henderson who was a wife, a ranch wife, who lived in Edwards County. And he was placed in the county jail in Roxbrings, Texas. And so he was, you know, set to be investigated and tried for this murder. A mob formed and from reports that we have access to, there was a widespread news that this lynching was going to take place because it was reported that hundreds of people came to Roxbrings. You know, it's this isolated rural community in Edwards County that is difficult for people to get to today. You know, it takes, it takes, you know, me, you know, hours of traveling on meandering asphalt to get to this isolated rural community. So for people, for hundreds of people to come to Roxbrings to witness this lynching is a testament to how many people wanted to be there. To witness this spectacular violence. And it was a gross act of racial violence. Antonio Rodriguez was removed from the prison. He was marched to a tree in a ski tree. He was doused in kerosene and burned alive at the stake. And there were competing memories. You know, this is not a case of violence that was forgotten or erased. Actually, people it's quite prominent in local conversations. But there were competing interpretations of the significance of the event and the interpretations of what that event represented. So for, for residents who participated in the violence and who later justified the violence to them, they described him as, you know, a Mexican brute that he was somebody who had committed this awful crime, murdering every Greer Henderson, and that the lynching was an act of justice for her brutal murder. She, she was murdered. She was shot twice and was found dead on her, at her home. And so the people who accused Antonio Rodriguez of committing that crime, you know, described the brutality of his lynching as an act of justice. For people who saw the brutality of this event as an act of injustice, you know, to take somebody who was arrested and accused of a crime, you know, 20 year old, since this young man, to deny him due process, and then to burn him alive at the stake. For people, many people that was seen as an engrossed injustice and as an example of the kinds of racism that was widespread in that community at the time. And so competing interpretations of this lynching described it as this injustice. And because there were no prosecutions, you know, there were, there were this lynching captivated communities, not just across Texas, but across Mexico. Mexican nationals protested the kinds of brutality that that Mexicans were suffering. And they were calling for justice. They were calling for prosecutions for the mob participants. And so there were Mexican diplomats that were that traveled to Rock Springs to investigate. And newspapers in the United States and across Mexico were describing what took place in the, described the lynchings. And it also led to protests in Texas, but also across Mexico, people who really take into the streets to demand justice. And so it's the it's the kind of event that is, is interesting in the historian because we have we have records to study what took place. But also then raises so many questions about why people don't know about the lynchings of ethnic Mexicans. Because it was sensational. It was something that captivated an international conversation. And people journalists were making connections between the kinds of racial violence that was targeting black, black presidents in the United States, African Americans, that was also being suffered by, by American citizens that were ethnically Mexican and Mexican nationals. And so people at the time were making connections. But in our understanding of the history and our memories of this history of racial violence, we've 10 historians and the public has tended to segregate histories of racial violence that targeted different groups. I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves. But when you were describing that story and describing the documentary record surrounding that story, which is very, as you just said a second ago, very deep and very full, I can't help but wonder why that history has been ignored so much. And again, this might be something we get into a bit later, but I just want to ask you now, how is it that these histories have been so ignored by historians and by the general public so much for so long. How does that happen? Well, yes, we certainly have a really long conversation about this, but one, I think one way to think about it is that, you know, the Mexican accounts by journalists in Mexico certainly inspired critiques of the United States and showed the contradictions of American democracy and showed the citizens in the United States and the racial and ethnic minorities that were not, that didn't have access to the protections of the US Constitution that were being denied their rights. And so internationally in Mexico this helped also to fuel calls and revolutionaries who, you know, the Mexican revolution started, you know, soon after this lynching. And so journalists, you know, the attention moved from this lynching to the Civil War itself. But these kinds of these acts of racism and racial violence fueled anti-American sentiment and critiques of what democracy looked like in the United States. But in the United States and in Texas for the most part, the newspapers, the English press celebrated the acts of violence. And so you get these, and so mainstream accounts of these acts of violence didn't describe them as tragedies, but they described them as progress. And so something that I write about in the book is that actually more dead Mexican bodies was presented as an example, as evidence that Anglo colonization of the Southwest was successful and that it was that the border region was going to be safe for Anglos to continue to migrate to and to live there. And the Anglo capital could thrive, that there was going to be a Mexican labor force that was going to be controllable, exploitable. And so when we look at the historical record, what you can see is that these events were interpreted not as tragedies, but as justice and as progress and historians in the early 20th century, didn't raise sympathy. You know, they didn't say that vigilante violence was wrong. They didn't say that police murder was wrong. Instead, historians like Walter Prescott Webb participated in creating a narrative that Mexicans were inherently violent, but they were criminals, that they were bandits, and that this kind of brutality by vigilantes and by police was necessary for bringing about civilization in these regions. And so we could say that these histories were forgotten, but in the early 20th century, there was a lot of work that was put into interpreting racial violence as just and as progress. And one of the major tools of that interpretation was a group or an institution that comes up repeatedly throughout this book. And that is the Texas Rangers, the Texas State Police. I believe those two are synonymous. You can correct me if I'm wrong about that. But tell us a bit about the Rangers. Who were they? And what role did they play, particularly in policing race in the Texas border region in the first couple decades of the 20th century? Yes, so the State Police Force, the State Police in Texas are known as the Texas Rangers, and they have a long history being developed during Texas independence and then as a force throughout the 19th century. They really were agents of Anglo colonization of Texas. And so that meant that they were used to police indigenous people living in Texas. They participated in genocidal violence and massacres targeting indigenous people in what is now Texas. They also police the movement of people who were enslaved in plantations in Texas who were trying to seek freedom by escaping and traveling into Mexico. So they were quote unquote slave catchers. And so they were policing all of these different color lines and enforcing through violence, racial hierarchies. And they also targeted ethnic Mexicans. And so in the early 20th century, they were, they were policing anybody who looked Mexicans. They were, you know, this was state sanctioned violence. They were being called on by governors and politicians and local residents to secure the border, to police the border and to police Mexicans that were in Texas. Mexicans were being, anybody who looked Mexican was being profiled as a threat, as a bandit, as somebody who was a danger to Anglo residents. And so the Texas Rangers, they used extolable violence. You know, they arrested people and shot their prisoners. They called on civilians and gathered posses to commit acts of brutality. And so they were, they really participated in creating a reign of terror and creating fear in communities along the US-Mexico border, but also across the state. So, you know, they were targeting ethnic Mexicans, but they were also targeting African Americans and other parts of the state. And so their work in enforcing strict racial hierarchies was pervasive across the state. And yet the Rangers today are a large part of, of, of, of at least Anglo-Texas identity. I mean, there's a baseball team named after them. So how does that happen? Why are the Rangers remembered as they are today? And where do you think they fit in Texas memory and Texas identity? Well, the Texas Rangers have been celebrated throughout the 20th century and even in the late 19th century, you know, there was the publications of dime novels in the early, you know, in the early 20th century as a production of films honoring the Texas Rangers. And so they have, they have been exalted to the status of icons and, and examples, you know, premier examples of Anglo-Masculinity and superiority and they really are figures of state pride. And that is something that has been developed through the work of historians, but also by in popular culture and of course in teaching in public schools. And so they are a force that is celebrated for making life for Anglo settlers possible. And so they are the protagonists in the way the history is told while racial and ethnic minorities are the antagonists. And so they are the heroes and, you know, Mexicans and African Americans and Native American bear portrayed as, you know, the barbarians and the uncivilized and the threats. And so, you know, they were agents of violence in the early 20th century, but throughout the 20th century, the Texas Rangers continued to be used and called upon by the state administrators to enforce racial segregation and racial hierarchies. So the Texas Rangers helped to suppress labor organizing throughout the 20th century. They participated in police brutality throughout the 20th century and they, for racial and ethnic minorities, you know, is one of the police forces that was forcefully integrated in the later part of the 20th century. So there were investigations into abuses by the state police throughout the 20th century, but in the decade between 1910 and 1920, they were participating in wide mass crimes that it murders and massacres. And so the kinds of, they enjoyed a culture of impunity. Many of them, you know, some of them later testified or described that they knew that they had the pardoning power of the governor behind them. So between 1910 and 1920, they were particularly brutal and enjoyed a culture of impunity, knowing that they could commit murders and abuse prisoners without fearing prosecution. And one of those moments of brutality came in January of 1918 when the Rangers were behind one of the most shocking episodes of violence in the state's very violent history. Can you tell us what happened at Porvenir in January of 1918? Yeah, this is, it's certainly, it's one of the greatest tragedies that most people don't know about. The Plotinic massacre took place on the night of January 28, 1918, a group of Texas Rangers and a U.S. cavalryman visited the community of Boit of Enita of farming and ranching community of primarily Mexicans, living in what of a need and they visited this community in the middle of the night. U.S. soldiers and Texas Rangers participated in waking up the residents from their sleep and they segregated, they separated 15. men and boys from their family members and from records and investigations that were later conducted. We know that the Texas that Texas Rangers who were there massacred these prisoners in mass and so there were no investigations. There were some questioning people, these men and boys were massacred and then the Texas Rangers and left they departed and so the survivors the elderly men and the women and children that weren't killed were left to identify the remains of the victims and you know they in fear for their own lives they crossed the border into Mexico. We remember that in this this decade Mexico was still in the throes of a civil war so they fearing for their lives crossed into Mexico and were helped by Mexican soldiers who put them in touch with Mexican diplomats. They can they they testified they gave depositions about what took place they gave the names of all of the victims and that immediately triggered efforts by these survivors and the Mexican government to call for investigations and to call for the Rangers that participated and the civilians there were civilians that helped participate in this massacre they called for prosecutions but the local county of Presidio County did not indict any of the Texas Rangers or local residents that participated instead they they accused the victims they criminalized the victims they accused them of being bandits without you know any evidence that they had taken that they had participated in any sort of banditry and and actually the captain of that company James Mereo Fox you know filed a series of reports giving an account of what happened that gave a false accounting you know so they described being you know this group of Mexicans you know shooting with them and them shooting in response and not finding out until the next day that a number of Mexicans had been killed and that proved not to be true but the state investigators you know the investigating officer of other Texas Rangers accepted that account by the Texas Rangers that that participated and so that also you know it's a tragedy because of the event itself but it's also a tragedy because you see that despite the record and there's investigations by Mexican consoles by the Texas authorities but there's also calls by investigations by the US federal government and then the the survivors 12 relatives of the victims filed a claim through the US Mexico General claims commission seeking through an international tribunal seeking indemnities for this massacre for the denial of justice for these families so there's this huge there's again a huge archive to tell us about what took place but but one of the things that is is has been quite troubling in this research is to find how corrupt state records are and so it's a lesson for historians and for people who are studying these cases that if you rely on mainstream accounts from the newspapers at the time you know they describe these these people who lived in in Fort Vanita squatters but the records and their financial records actually show that they were farmers and they were ranchers and had long been in this region if you look at the reports from Texas Rangers especially from Fox you would think that there was a firefight if you look at the records by you know the testimonies by the survivors and also by U.S. soldiers who witnessed the event the massacre what you see is that the the men and the boys were unarmed they were in police custody when they were executed and and you see and so that that really asks us to think about these records that are with all of the legal authority of being written by a Texas Ranger or by a sheriff that with that legal authority people wrote records that hid these crimes that criminalized the victims and if we take that as the account of the truth without considering all of the other evidence that's there for some of these cases then you get a skewed history and for over a hundred years many of these cases of anti-next and violence were written by historians that relied on the records that were kept by the people who were committing the murders and the abuse and justifying these crimes and that's an example one of the many examples of the kind of legacies of violence that you're talking about and this is violence that resounds through the archives where certain stories and certain realities of what happened are completely ignored or erased or covered up because of the violence that happened in a particular way in a particular place. Absolutely and so when you're reading reports by the Texas Rangers you know they oftentimes didn't well on the one hand there are many many people who were shot or who were murdered that was not that were not included in their reports and so Texas Rangers especially by the end of the decade were supposed to be submitting reports they gave accounts of their arrests and gave accounts of any sorts of incidents is certainly if they shot somebody and what you see in their reports is you know they don't identify people they describe them as bandits you know Mexican horse thief Mexican bandit and so each of those archival encounters with that kind of a description for me asks me to consider to try to figure out who was that person and and not to assume that they were abandoned because many of the cases that I studied you know found that people were denied due process they were not prosecuted they were simply murdered and so we can't take those records as truth you're right it's certainly the archival records themselves are a legacy of this violence. You mentioned a little while ago how the Texas Rangers operated within what they themselves thought of as a culture of impunity but at the same time there were people in Texas that pushed back against this this state violence and among them was Jose Canales I've heard I've read him described in in some other texts as JT Canales I don't remember which one you you call him more frequently in the book itself but can you tell us who he was and what role he played in affecting changes in this culture of impunity and in what you call in the book a culture of violence that the Rangers that the Rangers kind of kind of existed within in Texas. Yeah Jose T. Canales was he goes you know he's referred to by his full name Jose Tomas Canales but also by JT Canales he was a state representative from Brownsville Texas he was a member of his family was a well respected family they had been in Texas you know for for generation you know they could trace their their their land back to Spanish land grants and so that the Canales family certainly an elite the Hanoi family in the early 20th century and JT Canales was was an alloyer he was well educated he was born and raised in South Texas but went to Michigan for law school and came back to Texas and practice law he was active in local politics and he his family you know was politically and economically influential and he was elected but at the time he that he served in this House of Representatives in in Texas he was the only Mexican American elected representative so he was exceptional in many ways and he also I'm sure many of the people who were advocating for strict segregation in Texas he was somebody who sort of flew in the face of all of that you know he was educated he was wealthy and he was wait he was married to an Anglo woman so he was a part of an interracial marriage but he was also fiercely patriotic so for people for for Anglo Texans you know who said you know any any Mexican is nothing but a Mexican he sort of flew in the face of all of that and he represented a group of the Hannels who had strong claims to belonging and who identified as American first so he was a supporter an early supporter of Texas Rangers and and actually described Texas Rangers of the late 19th century you know who were committing acts of racial violence as heroes of of Texas. But in the 19 teens he witnessed the kinds of brutality that were taking place. And he saw that, you know, Mexican Americans who were law enforcement agents, some deputies and sheriff deputies that were targeted with violence, members of his own family were targeted with violence. He suffered from threats from the Texas Rangers. And so when he started to learn and it was asked as a lawyer to represent different families or to investigate different cases, the scale of injustice became something that he couldn't overlook. And so he called for a legislative investigation to the Texas Rangers in between in January 1919, a hearing took place. There was a commission of senators and representatives that investigated abuse by the Texas Rangers from 1915. Until 1919, over 80 witnesses were called on to come and testify about the abuses that they experienced. And so, can all of us in a submitted 19 charges that he wanted investigated. And so calling witnesses that spoke to the kinds of crimes that were suffered by residents across the state. What that investigation did was it left a record for us for us to study. But it also left a record of the witnesses that were called by the state that were calling for more violence. And that were calling for the violent policing of the border. Representatives like U.S. Congressman Claude B. Hudson, who was from West Texas and represented West Texas and described Mexicans as people who couldn't be trusted, who were inherently violent, and who should be shot on sight. And so, it's this intense archive that on the one hand gives us access to records of some of these accounts that weren't documented. But it also leaves a record of state authorities, politicians, and local residents that described the border as a place that needed to be policed, that described Mexicans regardless of whether or not they were American citizens, as people who were un-American and who were dangerous, described them as murders and rapists and thieves. And it even can all of us himself was his own motives for bringing this investigation to the Texas Rangers. He wasn't acknowledged for somebody who was trying to improve, to trying to end abuse by the police or trying to professionalize the force. Instead, he was described by the attorneys representing the Texas Rangers as having, because of the Mexican blood and his veins, of having an unconscious bias and actually wanting to support Mexican bandits, to be disloyal to the American government. And so, he was somebody who suffered for publicly bringing charges against the Texas Rangers, but he remained committed. And so, he didn't run for re-election, but he did continue to fight for the civil rights of Mexican Americans and Texas. He helped to establish the League of United Latin American citizens, which is an early civil rights organization that was established in South Texas. But he was shaped by this experience of racial violence and intimidation. And it did actually shape more conservative politics that were practiced by Lulac and called for by Canales himself. The period that you cover in this book also coincides with what you might call one of the first real golden ages of photography. And in the book, you actually describe a moment where you came across some of these photographs in a pretty surprising place. And I'm wondering if you could maybe retell the story that you tell in the book here on the podcast. And then maybe more broadly, tell us why souvenirs of murder, if we can call them that, why they were so commonplace in early 20th century Texas and why they have kind of, why they stuck around for a century since then. Yeah, so I, you know, the photographic archive for the history of anti-Mexican violence is is horrific. So, you know, I conducted researching archives in state archives and local archives and the private archives in people's homes. But one of the things that was really shocking to me is that, you know, from looking at archives at Yale, you know, the Bynical Library at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut to archives, you know, at universities in Brownsville and McCallan and Kingsville and South Texas, there were huge postcard collections that were taken, you know, photographs that were taken by photographers that showed, you know, dead bodies, you know, dead Mexican bodies that weren't described or labeled as bandits. And, you know, people that you would say were victims of lynchings are preserved in archives. But I was, so it was surprising for me, traveling across the country and across the state to stumble upon these photographs and archives of the Mexican Revolution. You know, these weren't photographs of people that, some of them were, photographs of victims of the Civil War in Mexico, but many of them were people that were murdered in Texas. So, I was quite surprised by how many photographs there were that could be studied and give us some accountings of what took place. But I, you know, in graduate school, I had started to develop a project on the fight for civil rights in Texas for access to schooling. And so I was, I was in shaping the dissertation, you know, the history of racial violence, I thought, would be one part of that. But, you know, if you think about histories of settler colonialism, there's violence in the form that manifests as things like murder, but there's also the kinds of violence that takes place through social institutions like schools. But it was really when I stopped in a small town called Sabanel, this name's Sabanel Texas, as a pit stop on my way home to Evalde after doing some archival research that I stumbled into this dairy queen that had photographs, an exhibit up honoring the Texas Rangers that had been stationed in headquarters in Sabanel in late 19th and early 20th century. And so there were photographs of Texas Rangers on horseback and photographs of Texas Rangers, you know, all posing the companies posing with their rifles. And there were two photographs of a lynching. And so the photographs themselves, I mean, shocked me to see them casually displayed in a dairy queen. You know, it's a small, rural town where the gathering places for people is limited, you know, it's schools and it's churches and restaurants. And so in this restaurant, where there's a large Mexican-American population, to see this photograph, so casually displayed was striking. And so, you know, I took photographs of it of this exhibition and these photographs on display. And I talked to some of the people, some of the women, the young women that were working there and asked them what they knew about the photographs that were on exhibit, who put them up, and about the lynching photographs in particular. And so that, being in that dairy queen and seeing those photographs so casually displayed, that's the moment that I shifted the dissertation project. I said, this, I have to write about the history of racial violence and I have to write about the competing memories and interpretations. And I have to write about why it is that so many people refuse to acknowledge these tragedies as an injustice, even a hundred years later, that their, that this history of racial violence has been so effectively disavowed that somebody could think, that a community could think that having these photographs displayed on a wall is okay. And so that really launched me into the dissertation project that developed into the book that it is as it's been published. And it really was that experience of being in that dairy queen. It said, this is the project and that it's an urgent project. It's not, you know, a history that could be obscure. It's something that I hope would be widely read. But then it also signaled to me that there was a need to have public conversations about these histories because, you know, the women that I talked to in that dairy queen, they didn't like looking at the photographs. You know, there were Mexican Americans. They didn't like taking out the trash from the trash can. It was right underneath those photographs. And so, you know, there was racial intimidation happening. With that display that for somebody who didn't identify with somebody who could have been lynched in that era, it to them it may have been conical. But the people who felt vulnerable or who had experienced racism, those kinds of things. of photographs inflicted fear and discomfort. And so for all of those reasons I've been invested in recovering this history but also developing opportunities through public history to have public conversations about our past. Yeah, that Derrick Queen story in general is incredibly powerful but especially when you describe the workers at that Derrick Queen not wanting those photos to be there but management keeping them up I thought really encapsulated a lot of what you're trying to tell in the story. It's a really powerful moment in the book. Yeah because what it gets to is and something that I think about is is the memories and the interpretations that people carry within them that that shapes how we walk around on a daily basis. So for example from Edwards County you know with my uncle telling me this story about this this plaque on the outside of the county courthouse in Edwards County that describes the courthouse surviving the community surviving a tornado that took place in 1927. So it doesn't mention anything about the lynching of Antonio Rodriguez but my uncle learned about that tornado as a community members that describe the tornado as a divine retribution as an act of justice for that lynching and you know a tornt this natural disaster that was holding accountable a community that allowed it to happen and for nobody to be prosecuted. And so you know there were different moments in my research when I was conducting oral histories or talking to people that I realized that there's no mention of Antonio Rodriguez Vegas in that plaque but for people who heard that history the way that they remember that tornado has a different significance as a different meaning and so for people who see you know signs up in Texas that say you know we don't call 911. For some people that's comical or it's a point of pride for people who are gun enthusiasts but for other people who feel vulnerable or who have been victims of police brutality you know or or that sort of that bravado that bravado that sort of frontier bravado makes other people feel quite vulnerable unwelcomed and unsafe. There's one other moment that you describe toward the end of the book that I think gets at this broader story that you're telling about the power of narrative and of inclusion and exclusion within Texas state identity and memory and that's an interaction between two two writers and scholars between Walter Prescott Webb and America Paradeus and I'm wondering if you could describe that interaction and talk about how it does speak to the larger story that you're trying to tell here. Yeah it's a you know I conducted research at the Benzen Archives in UT Austin and it was this really interesting these letters that I was reading between a medical Paradeus who's known as the grandfather of Chicano studies. You know he received his Ph.D. and was a professor and helped to build the field. He also helped to establish the Center for Mexican American Studies so in the field of Latinx studies of Chicano studies he lose large and his book that was published with his pistol in his hand was published in 1957 and it's acknowledged as one of the first books to document this period of racial violence to document the atrocities at the hands of Texas Rangers and also to document local residents who fought for their rights in some cases by protecting themselves with their own guns but I was captivated by this letter that I found that by that this was writing to one of the editors from the University of Texas Press so he sent his manuscript to the press and he was hoping that it would be published but Walter Prescott Webb was the chair of the Press's Advisory Board and so Walter Prescott Webb is you know a famous Texas historian he held you know had national and international say you know he'd won awards from the Guggenheim he was president of you know the Texas Professional Historians Associations and he wrote what was recognized as the premier history of the Texas Rangers and it was published in 1935 he sold the rights to Hollywood for movies and he also helped to shape public history in Texas so the celebration of the Texas Rangers he was one of the most important historians in creating that public celebration of them through his writings so for Pares to be writing this history that was critical not only of Webb you know described you know some of the history that Webb wrote as you know racist and described the violence at the hands of the Texas Rangers in his book he was protesting to the press he said you know how could you have sent it to Walter Prescott Webb how could he you know he couldn't possibly be impartial in reviewing my book and deciding whether or not it should be published the press you know assured about it is that that Webb would give recommendations that would make the book better but that he wouldn't stand in the way and they went so far as to say that that Webb had acknowledged that there was another there was there was a different interpretation of the history that needed to be told and so but Evis you know took a chance he made select revisions some that were recommended by Webb and he and the book was published by the University of Texas Press but it was this moment that but Evis you can read in these letters that he realizes that the person who has helped to create this narrative who has celebrated the Texas Ranger who has created this myth and who is disavowed the suffering of ethnic Mexicans that that saying historian was in the position of power to say publish this book or don't and so you know Webb later in his life when the book was going to be reprinted and published by the press you know he acknowledged that there that it needed to be updated it needed to be changed and unfortunately he died in in a tragic car accident before he could make the changes to his own book on the Texas Rangers and so you know but the these two figures of these sort of you know people would say that they're competing interpretations of the history but what I would say what others have argued is that actually that that that Webb's history was inaccurate you know it relied on that corrupt record and so you know but Evis's book was so important but also it was published in 1957 and and still today there are institutions, cultural institutions, there are historians who refuse to acknowledge the injustices that took place who refuse to be to think about and reinterpret this history considering the vast archives that give us evidence of the crimes that were committed and so it also you know you can see the power of history in these letters but you can also see that despite the book being published public history didn't change decades after but Evis's book was written and historians have been have been working actively ever since to have a public history public understandings of this history that are accurate and that that really come to terms with in face of the history of racial violence that have deep roots in Texas. This book and the stories that you tell in this book are really a great example of what we might call like a a dialectic or the relationship between public history and what one of my academic advisors called office history and how the two shape each other and wind around each other in really important ways that they really are two halves of one whole. Yes absolutely I think that you know historians have an important role to play in advancing academic conversations and advancing the field of history and scholarship but I think we're seeing today that historians only speaking to historians leads to publics and misunderstandings of the past and that we don't learn both histories of of violence but also histories of people who fought for justice and so our our people not knowing the history of this racial violence on the border has resulted in centuries worth of policies that were inspired by anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-Mexican sentiment and we're seeing that you know today there are striking parallels between then and now you know you see a culture of impunity, you see crimes by police and by border agents not being prosecuted and that that creates a culture of policing that's pervasive today. You see the political rhetoric when politicians, presidents, the media when they perpetuate a narrative that causes the public to turn a blind eye to violence we see that with a criminalization of refugees and immigrants when politicians use racist rhetoric or they criminalize racial and ethnic groups that creates a narrative that causes the public to turn a blind eye to injustice today and I you know I have no doubt that without accountability from the public patterns of violence will continue and and it will impact generations to come. And so that's, I hear immigrant right activists and I hear journalists that are visiting some of these detention centers. And I hear, they say, I will never forget seeing this. And so that echoes the journalists and the witnesses of racial violence 100 years ago who said who were haunted by what they saw. And they were moved to try to end the injustices that they were witnessing. And so it's unsettling and it's striking the parallels between then and now and to come back to your point that historians, I think, have to be much more actively involved in collaborating with public school teachers to write curriculums, with cultural institutions like museums, and to speak to broader publics to make sure that the field of history as it has advanced for historians is also advancing in the public. I always ask my guests what one takeaway is that they hope readers come away from reading their book might be. And to an extent, you might have just answered that question. But this book feels so immediate in so many ways that I'm wondering if you could maybe answer it, maybe just kind of speak a little bit more about some of the points that you were just making, about what you hope readers do take away from your book. Well, maybe there's two things. On the one hand, I'll say quite clearly that injustice doesn't just stay in the past. And so I think that what I hope to show in the book is that there are longer legacies of violence. And so when people say, oh, that happened 100 years ago, why does it matter today? It's important for people to know that there are lasting consequences. And it's important to recognize how this era of violence lived on and shaped how we think about immigrants, how we think about the border, and how we think about justice today. And we really have to take a more expansive view of these consequences. I also think that we need more public conversation. This book, different chapters of this book end with descendants of racial violence seeking state historical markers, seeking public acknowledgment. And so there are hopeful examples of the book of some of the collaborations between state institutions like the Bullth Museum, descendants of racial violence who shared their private archives, collaborating with historians to tell a truthful accounting. And so there are examples of residents, historians, and cultural institutions working to tell this history publicly. And what I was really captivated by-- and this is, again, you asked for a short answer-- but that public audiences are ready for these conversations, and they want to know what is the history that helps us understand our current moment. And so whether it's book talks that I've given across the state or across the country or these symposiums for these exhibits or on bailings from historical marker ceremonies, hundreds of people come to these different events. And so that is for people who are hoping that they can participate in these public conversations or museums or historians that are thinking about participating, there is such a big audience that wants to learn and wants to participate in dialogue. And that gives me hope in a moment that doesn't feel hopeful. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally feel that. So Monica, this book has been out for not quite a year, but I'm wondering if nonetheless you can give some preview of what you have been working on in the meantime. Are there any projects you're particularly excited about? You've gotten started on since then? Oh, yes. Well, I actually was working-- I've been working on a project with a research team at Brown called "Mapping Violence" since 2014. So as this book was being developed, I realized that there are case studies in the book. There are signal cases that I write about, but there were so many cases of racial violence that I wasn't able to describe or document or write about in the book. But I also realized that there was a need for an archive. We can't try to come to terms with this history of racial violence until we have a full record. But also, I was really interested in the book to find that the histories of anti-Mexican violence and anti-black violence were so interconnected. In some cases, it was the same police officers or vigilantes traveling around the state, committing acts of racial violence. And so I've been working on this project called "Mapping Violence." It's recovering history, these cases of racial violence, both of lynchings of vigilante violence, but also murders by police. And it's also recovering efforts across the state by different racial and ethnic groups to fight injustice. So we're creating this record of racial violence, but also this record of people fighting for civil rights and social justice. It'll be a digital project so that the scholarly findings that we find will be displayed through different visualizations, through different maps, through interactive digital storytelling, using digital storytelling methods. And so I'm really moving to build a comparative archive of racial violence and ethnic violence in the early 20th century, between 1900 to 1930. But I'm also relying on digital tools to help us tell this history. So the idea is to make a scholarly-- to display these scholarly findings in a way that's useful for academics, but also for public audiences. So it's been a lot of work. But there's so many cases that haven't been documented that we've got our hands full for quite a while. That sounds like an amazing project. I can't wait to use it in my classroom. Thank you. I hope that you will. Dr. Monica Munoz-Martinaz is the Stanley J. Bernstein Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University. Her new and award-winning book is The Injustice Never Leaves You, Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas, which came out with Harvard University Press in 2018. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today, Monica. Stephen, thank you so much. I really enjoyed the conversation. I'm so glad to be invited. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING]