4 February 16-22, 2023 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents The Wounds Never Healed As the Texas Rangers celebrate their 200th anniversary, descendants of the lawmen’s victims seek a reckoning. BY TYLER HICKS S hortly after entering a tiny closet-turned-viewing room, Trinidad Gonzales saw some- thing he still struggles to de- scribe 20 years later. The doctoral candidate had a couple hours of mi- crofilm to review, and toward the end his eyes ached so much that he almost missed it. Almost. He scrolled past the paragraph, then quickly did a double-take. Yes, there it was: his family’s name, in the middle of a 1929 ed- itorial from the Edinburg newspaper El De- fensor. The column castigated a local sheriff for his involvement in the decade-long scourge of murders known as La Matanza (The Massacre), a period of deadly violence against Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in Texas that began in 1910. This was of par- ticular interest for Gonzales, a history stu- dent at the University of Houston. He had grown up hearing stories about his ances- tors’ deaths and the state-sanctioned mur- der of Mexicans, but this was the first time he saw his family’s name mentioned in print as victims. “When you see something that correlates with the story you’ve been told, it’s an inter- esting feeling,” he says. “I don’t like the word ‘affirmation,’ because that feels like I’m not giving enough weight to my family’s word. But I don’t know how to describe it.” Gonzales, now a professor at South Texas College in McAllen, is part of a group of un- known size: descendants of victims of the Texas Rangers. He is also a co-founder of Refusing to Forget, a nonprofit dedicated to sharing the history and enduring effect of the Rangers’ violence. Thanks in part to the organization’s efforts, there is now greater knowledge than ever before of the Texas Rangers’ brutal past. The question is, what to do with this knowledge? Some people, like Gonzales, want a for- mal, Texas-led investigation in the form of a truth and reconciliation commission. Others aren’t sure what they want, but they know they want something. An acknowledgment and formal apology, perhaps. And both camps agree there are disturbing similarities be- tween the Rangers’ violence and the killing of Black men like Tyre Nichols, as well as the ra- cially charged rhetoric that often dominates the discussion of the Texas-Mexico border. “When you dehumanize a whole group of people, it is easier to mistreat those peo- ple, and that is the danger we still see from the past to today,” Gonzales says. In an interview with NPR about his book Cult of Glory, Doug Swanson said of the Rangers: “You know, they didn’t invent po- lice brutality, but they perfected it down there on the border, where they operated as what we would now term death squads.” Founded in 1823 by empresario Stephen F. Austin, the original Texas Rangers were a private force tasked with protecting Austin’s colony of Anglo settlers from attacks by Na- tive Americans whose lands were being set- tled. The Rangers became an arm of the Texas government in 1836, serving as Indian fighters, hunting bandits and patrolling the Texas frontier in the 19th century. Rangers also fought as scouts for the U.S. Army in the Mexican-American War and earned a repu- tation for lawlessness and brutality. Today, the Rangers’ 166 commissioned officers are part of a division within the De- partment of Public Safety, investigating ma- jor violent crimes, public corruption and officer-involved shootings. Mythologized as symbols of law and order on the Old West frontier, yesterday’s Texas Rangers were also the perpetrators of large- scale atrocities and an unknowable number of murders. At least 300 Mexican Americans were killed in Texas in the 1910s, for instance, and some estimates place the number in the thousands. The Rangers were often the ones pulling the triggers or raising the Delcia Lopez/photography from Life and Death on the Border: 1910–1920 | UNFAIR PARK | >> p6
