Porvenir Massacre
28 January 1918Porvenir, Presidio County, Presidio County, TX
Texas Rangers, soldiers and local ranchers took fifteen Mexican men and boys out of the village of Porvenir at night and shot them. The survivors fled across the river and the village was burned.
Porvenir was a farming village of about 140 people on the Rio Grande in Presidio County, growing cotton and corn on irrigated land. In the aftermath of a raid on a nearby ranch, and amid the broader violence of the Mexican Revolution border years, Texas Rangers accused its residents of complicity without evidence.
Before dawn on 28 January 1918 a party of Rangers, soldiers of the Eighth Cavalry and local ranchmen entered the village, separated fifteen men and boys - the youngest was sixteen - from their families, marched them to a rock bluff and shot them. The surviving residents crossed into Mexico and never returned; the village was burned, and the land was taken over by neighbouring ranchers.
No one was prosecuted. The killings were, however, central to the 1919 legislative investigation pressed by State Representative José Tomás Canales of Brownsville, the only Mexican American in the Texas legislature, who documented a pattern of Ranger killings of ethnic Mexicans numbering in the hundreds. The hearings forced a reorganisation of the force, and Canales was threatened for holding them. Historians estimate that hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of ethnic Mexicans were killed by Rangers, vigilantes and police in Texas between 1910 and 1920.
Sources
- Porvenir MassacreHandbook of Texas, Texas State Historical Associationtshaonline.org
- Refusing to Forget: the Porvenir MassacreRefusing to Forget, a public history project of historians at the University of Texas, Brown University and Southern Methodist Universityrefusingtoforget.org