The burning of Antonio Rodríguez
4 November 1910Rocksprings, Edwards County, TX
A mob took a twenty-year-old Mexican ranch hand from the Rocksprings jail and burned him at the stake before a crowd. The killing set off anti-American protests across Mexico weeks before the Revolution began.
Note: Describes a person being burned alive before a crowd.
Antonio Rodríguez was twenty, a ranch hand from Las Vacas across the border, working in Edwards County. On 2 November 1910 Effie Henderson was shot and killed at her ranch near Rocksprings, and Rodríguez was arrested the next day and jailed in the town.
On the afternoon of 4 November a mob took him from his cell, chained him to a mesquite, piled brush around him and burned him alive. There had been no trial. The historians William Carrigan and Clive Webb, who have documented the lynching of ethnic Mexicans in the Southwest, note that the crowd may have numbered in the thousands - the same public ritual, with the same advance notice and the same absence of consequence, that was being staged against Black men in the South.
The reaction came from the other side of the border. The killing was reported across Mexico and set off demonstrations in Mexico City, Guadalajara and elsewhere, with American businesses attacked and the Díaz government's deference to the United States thrown back at it. That was November 1910; Francisco Madero's call to revolution came on the twentieth of the same month. No one in Edwards County was prosecuted.
Sources
- Rodríguez, AntonioHandbook of Texas, Texas State Historical Associationtshaonline.org
- Rocksprings: Lynching, Identity, and the Construction of the IndividualRefusing to Forget, a public history project of historians at the University of Texas, Brown University and Southern Methodist Universityrefusingtoforget.org