This is one of two pieces that I'm posting today on the ignominious Texas Rangers that Hollywood and popular culture have glorified despite a history of yawning atrocities. Learn here from this piece written by Tim Murphy in Mother Jones about a long history of violence to which Texas Mexicans and other people of color have been subjected. The story includes one of protest, beginning with the legendary J. T. Canales who at risk to his own personal safety, took the Rangers to trial back in 1919.
Violence against Mexican Americans by the Texas Rangers is not a distant part of history, but rather a fresh memory of horrific state violence as captured in the documentary, Porvenir, Texas," about which I previously blogged.
Glad to see that the Texas Rangers monument at Love Field Airport was taken down in the wake of George Floyd's killing. This action cannot be viewed in any other way than as a symbol of white supremacist "Anglo retrenchment" in support of state violence. My earlier New York Times post on the Texas Rangers takes a look at them in contemporary perspective. Not at all flattering. Quite the opposite.
I am so glad that major national news media like Mother Jones and the New York Times are helping to expose these truths of history. Long overdue, especially considering how such information tends not to be taken up by our local newspapers and his absent in state, public school curricula.
We must all continue to do the hard work to abolish such icons to state, racialized violence, together with the violence itself. As teachers, this can and should involve teaching the truth of Texas history—not to incite violence. Such is not teachers work, but rather, to keep this from happening over and over again.
-Angela Valenzuela
by Tim Murphy | July 22, 2020 | Mother Jones
When the wave of protests swept the United States this spring in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, one of the first monuments to come down was across from a Bruegger’s at the baggage claim at Dallas’ Love Field. It was a 12-foot bronze of a man with a pistol holstered on his hip and a cowboy hat on his head, lowering his left hand to appeal for calm. His name was E.J. Banks, and he was a Texas Ranger.
What precipitated the removal, in early June, was an excerpt, in D Magazine, from a new history of the Rangers called Cult of Glory, by former Dallas Morning News reporter Doug Swanson. In it, Swanson detailed Banks’ story: He was dispatched to North Texas in 1956 to prevent Black students from desegregating a high school. A photographer captured Banks, leaning against a tree, as an effigy of a Black student hanged above the school’s entrance. The statue, titled “One Riot, One Ranger,” was commissioned three years later.
Texas Ranger E.J. Banks was dispatched to prevent the desegregation of a high school in 1956. (Note the effigy hanging above the entrance.) United Press Photo/AFP/Getty
Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, the nation’s oldest Hispanic civil rights organization, told me he was glad to see the Ranger come down—something he had first called for as a Dallas City Council member in 1992. But he and LULAC believed a more substantial change was in order. “The Rangers need to be disbanded,” he said. “They’re a national disgrace.”
It is not the first time the 197-year-old law enforcement division has faced a reckoning. Today the idea of abolishing police departments and other law enforcement agencies such as ICE sounds new and radical to the uninitiated, but in Texas, in 1919, the future of the Rangers was uncertain. Over the previous decade, the Rangers, who had evolved from a frontier guard into a state security force controlled by the governor, had swelled in response to fears of violence on the southern border. In reality, the Rangers instigated a reign of terror in which between 300 and several thousand Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans were killed.
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For almost two weeks in Austin, a single, courageous lawmaker, José Tomás Canales, put the Rangers on trial. A century later, the transcripts are essential for understanding our current moment—a remarkable document on race and the police, and the mechanisms of state violence and bureaucratic whitewashing.
The Rangers have been portrayed in popular culture as icons of law and order. To Garcia and others, the statue symbolized the myth underpinning their entire history—a lie laid bare by Canales a century ago.
J.T. Canales was a political insider who could never shake the prejudices that classified him as an outsider. Born on a ranch outside Corpus Christi, he studied law at the University of Michigan before returning to a South Texas that was rapidly changing. In the first decades of the 20th century, railroads and irrigation brought Anglos to the Rio Grande Valley in droves. The newcomers pushed people of Mexican descent from their land and took control of local levers of power. But the bilingual Canales—wealthy, charming, and well-connected—found unusual success in the local politics. When he was elected as a state representative in 1904, he was the only Mexican American in the chamber. When the legislature convened in January 1919 to consider the future of the state’s oldest law enforcement agency, he still was.
The Ranger investigation was overdue. As Swanson lays out in Cult of Glory, the Rangers had served since their creation as enforcers of white power. When a president of the Republic of Texas called for an “exterminating war” against American Indians, the Rangers were his muscle. After statehood, Rangers hunted fugitive slaves and committed atrocities against civilians during the Mexican–American War. In the 1910s, ostensibly for protection during the Mexican Revolution and World War I, the state doubled the size of the force and deputized a thousand more men. Governors appointed volunteer “special” Rangers—often as personal or political favors—who were still empowered to shoot to kill. Residents had a term for neighbors who vanished after encounters with Rangers: They “evaporated.”
Canales had raised his concerns about the force before, but the promised reforms never came. In early 1918, a company of Rangers executed 15 men in the West Texas village of Porvenir in retaliation for a raid from across the border. The unit responsible was disbanded, but most of its members remained on the force. Allegations of abuse continued. After Canales complained to one of the leaders of the force, another Ranger confronted him on the street. The Ranger—one of those hard men the force hangs its hat on, who later bragged he’d been shot 23 times—told Canales that if he didn’t back off, he was “going to get hurt.”
The stakes were set for a battle. Canales wrote a bill that would shrink the Rangers to prewar levels. Most importantly, they would be bonded so that victims could have legal recourse—similar to the idea of ending qualified immunity. His bill gained steam in Austin. But then the Rangers fired back. Accusing Canales of trying to abolish the Rangers, they demanded a public investigation. Their future, and his, would be settled in the hearing room.
A special committee of seven lawmakers—all Anglos, none from the border—was hastily assembled. The hearings started at the end of January. Canales had not expected to be thrust into the role of inquisitor. He struggled to line up witnesses willing to testify on the record. And he was working in a state of emotional distress, believing he was going to be murdered. “I do not expect to live six months…if this bill is killed,” he told colleagues. At one point, he took refuge in a local jail. The Rangers taunted him by offering to provide security.
Which makes it all the more remarkable that the hearings uncovered as much as they did. Day after day, Canales brought to light new abuses. Toribio Rodriguez was taken from his home and shot in the back by a deputy sheriff working with a Ranger captain, then left in a jail cell to die. A Ranger killed Lisandro Muñoz after mistaking him for another man. Florencio García was apprehended by three Rangers; his bones were later found in a pasture. A judge recalled discovering the decomposing bodies of 11 men off a country road. Canales displayed a photograph for sale around Brownsville: It showed three men on horseback—one a Ranger captain—mugging for the camera above four bound corpses.
And what kind of men were joining the Ranger force, anyway? One of them was hired after twice being convicted of murder (both convictions were overturned). Another received his badge after handing over a prisoner named Rodolpho Muñoz to a lynch mob. One night, while the hearings were ongoing, two Rangers engaged in a drunken shootout near Austin. Internal documents showed how the bureaucracy provided cover for the officers it was supposed to investigate.
The arguments that bad cops make to excuse abuses have not changed much over the last century. The Ranger who shot Lisandro Muñoz said the victim had grabbed his Winchester—the officer feared for his life. Others might have lived had they not tried to run. Then, as now, the evidence of guilt was never so clear as when the autopsy necessitated finding it. Rangers claimed to have found stolen property at Porvenir. Florencio García was a “notorious cow thief”—he was no angel.
