Their brutal, indeed genocidal, past is mentioned here, but also in texts like Dr. Monica Muñoz Martinez' award-winning book titled, "The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas,” as well as in the recent documentary, Porvenir, Texas, on which I blogged last year in a post titled, 'Porvenir, Texas' details massacre of Mexican Americans by U.S. soldiers, rangers. Also see this related review of the documentary published in the October 24, 2019 issue of the Texas Monthly titled, A New Documentary Exposes the Dark Truth of a West Texas Massacre. (For questions you may have about viewings of this documentary, I suggest that you reach out to their Facebook website.)
Let's discard all of these icons to white supremacy and let's unearth and teach this history to our youth who want, and deserve to know, the truth of this history masked by such gruesome icons to a white supremacist imaginary. As scholars and elders, our duty is to keep educating ourselves and to keep telling these stories, our stories, of extrajudicial lynchings and killings in Texas and the Southwest.
I am so happy to also note that Dr. Muñoz Martinez is joining the University of Texas History Department this fall and will teach in the field of Texas-U.S./Mexico Borderlands history.
-Angela Valenzuela
Opinion: Removing Rangers statue acknowledges their brutal past
by John Morán González | June 9, 2020 | Austin American-Statesman
On the surface, the removal of the “One Ranger, One Riot” statue from Dallas Love Field airport last Thursday would seem to have little to do with mass protests against systemic violence targeting African Americans, triggered by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Upon closer inspection, the connection becomes clear. The 12-foot statue, which stood in the baggage claim area since 1963, was modeled upon Ranger Captain Jay Banks, who in 1957 executed Governor Allan Shiver’s orders to block racial integration of Texas’s public schools.
While today’s Rangers are very different from their namesakes, nonetheless throughout much of Texas history the Rangers were the government’s strong arm in violently policing people of color. Paralleling the movement to “de-Confederate” U.S. history and public spaces through the removal of Confederate monuments, the removal of this Ranger statue is the first step to “de-Rangerize” Texas history and its public spaces. The dialogue about racialized policing in Texas needs to stop glorifying the Rangers as beyond reproach and acknowledge their brutal past, in part through the removal of one-sided monuments and historical markers and through honest curricular reform.
The Ranger mythology of “good guys with guns” who made the frontier safe for Texans has been all the more effective for being propagated through radio, film, television, and the public school curriculum. Missing is the long history of state-sanctioned Ranger violence in upholding the state’s version of white supremacy, subjugating not only African Americans but also Native Americans and Mexican Americans.
The Refusing to Forget project has worked since 2013 to return to public consciousness the deadly communal punishment inflicted by the Rangers and other law enforcement officers upon the ethnic Mexican community of the lower Rio Grande Valley between 1910 and 1920, when hundreds were executed without due process under color of authority. And these were not the only ones.
That efforts to remove public monuments of white supremacy are occurring with increasing frequency points to a fundamental truth about what they represent. These monuments are central to the racial policing of public space in the contemporary moment. Initially erected by local elites or municipal governments invested in the control of non-white bodies, these monuments glorify a history of white supremacy in order to project that social principle into the present.
Confederate and Ranger monuments are the material symbols of how black and brown bodies must be regulated by white surveillance, and, failing that, police violence. The movement to “de-confederate” and “de-rangerize” public spaces and institutions seeks to break these links as part of a more comprehensive strategy of social justice.
The removal of Confederate and Ranger monuments represents the tip of the iceberg of the coalitional anti-racist work needed for Texas and the United States to move away from white supremacist roots. Recent approvals of Mexican American and African American studies for K-12 by the State Board of Education amount to a good corrective start in the public school curricula. But much more remains to be done to advance anti-racist work beyond the platitudes of “diversity.”
The multiracial protests in the streets demand an immediate end to the deadly policing of communities of color through the demilitarization of police procedures and the reallocation of police funding away from the carceral state and into community-relevant, community-directed investment. In the long term, these must be matched by state policies that acknowledge the humanity of people of color in public spaces and core institutions. Black and brown lives matter, and it’s time Texas showed it.
John Morán González is J. Frank Dobie Regents Professor of American and English Literature at the University of Texas, where he is director of the Center for Mexican American Studies.
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