6 February 16-22, 2023 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents nooses, and their acts made them as feared as the Ku Klux Klan. Worse yet, they did it all with relative impunity. This legacy is now part of a traveling exhibit from Refusing to Forget. Originally shown in 2016 and now returning for an encore that began at South Texas College on Feb. 9, Life and Death on the Border: 1910–1920 is a collection of photographs, court records, correspondence and artifacts telling the story of life at the height of the Rangers’ murderous reign. In that sense, the exhibit offers powerful counter-programming to the Ranger museum in Waco and the century of films, televi- sion shows and dime novels lionizing the lawmen. But ulti- mately the exhibit is not about the Rangers. “The exhibit certainly touches on the Rangers and what is probably their most controversial set of events, but it’s not focused on the Rangers themselves,” says Ben Johnson, a history professor at Loyola University Chicago and another co-founder of Refusing to Forget. “It’s the story of the South Texas communities in the nineteen-teens and their impact. We’re claiming this place for ourselves and relaying its his- tory, some of which is bad. It’s a labor of love. “In a tug of war about policing or the Rangers, we lose sight of the victims and their families,” he adds. “That’s one of the reasons it’s called Life and Death on the Border, to be blunt. There are family photos, including people who ended up being killed. We don’t want them to be victims whose only significance is that they got killed.” Knowing the people beyond the tragedy is a motivator for Gonzales too. Before he was a historian, Gonzales was a reporter for the McAllen Monitor. While investigating a major story, he had an innocuous run-in with a modern-day Ranger, who called and asked if Gonzales could share his source. As it turns out, the Ranger was investigating the same crime. He eventually ditched journalism for history and found plenty of overlap with his former career. Gonzales was still investigating, only now the crimes happened a century or two ago. That’s how he found himself in that cramped document viewing room, straining his eyes to complete his dissertation. After he saw his family’s name, he called his mother, who he says was surprised at the find. Then they talked — for six hours — about their family and the stories they were raised on. Some of the stories were violent, but many were not. “My great grandmother died when I was about 5,” Gon- zales recalls. “She owned cattle, and she owned a grocery store.” Later, he is thinking about his mother and great grand- mother while weighing the question so often asked of histo- rians like him: “Why do you want to focus on the bad things the Rangers did?” “People will say things like, ‘You’re just opening old wounds,’” he says. “But the wounds never healed.” They Were All Good Mexicans T he area where the Porvenir Massacre occurred was as harsh as its history. “Each plant in this land is a porcu- pine,” wrote one 19th-century traveler quoted in Swanson’s book. “It is nature armed to the teeth.” Texas Rangers Company B undoubtedly passed some of those “porcupines” as they rode into the village of Porvenir, on the Texas-Mexico border west of Marfa, on Jan. 26, 1918. Their mission was ostensibly to find a Mexican revolutionary named Chico Cano, but an Army cavalryman named Robert Keil doubted Cano was in Porvenir. “They were all good Mexicans,” he said of the villagers. “These people were our friends.” After a search of the huts yielded a shotgun and some knives, the Rangers escorted a group of 15 men and boys to a nearby bluff. They killed the villagers and later burned the huts. A 12-year-old boy named Juan Flores watched his fa- ther being led away, then saw his body. Yet he didn’t share his story until he was 95. “My father never wanted to talk about his family when I was growing up,” Flores’ daughter Benita told TIME maga- zine. Then one day Benita came across a list of Porvenir vic- tims, and a name sounded familiar: a man named Longino, who had three kids. One was a boy named Juan. “I went and I asked my father, ‘Are you this 12-year-old boy?’ And he said yes. It was very hard for him to tell us what happened that day, but slowly he started telling us.” The massacre is now the subject of a PBS documentary and its own website, which is edited by Arlinda Valencia, Longino’s great-granddaughter. Valencia was at a family fu- neral when an uncle mentioned the massacre, and at first, people laughed. It sounded too crazy to be true. But Valencia did some digging, and there it was. She has since spent un- told hours visiting libraries and searching for documents, all the while amassing an impressive repository of details on the web. And like Gonzales and the members of Refusing to Forget, she is intent on sharing history that still feels teth- ered to our current moment. “What happened 100 years ago is happening again to- day,” Valencia told NBC News after the 2019 mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart. “In El Paso, 22 people were mur- dered because of the color of their skin. In Porvenir, it was 15 people. It’s just something that shouldn’t be happening.” Christine Molis has a story similar to Valencia’s in that she didn’t hear about her ancestors’ murder until she was an adult. Neither did Molis’ mother. (“It was ‘adult talk,’ my mom said,” Molis tells the Observer.) Molis is the great-great-granddaughter of Jesus Bazán. On Sept. 27, 1915, Bazán and his son-in-law Antonio Longo- ria were shot and killed because, according to The Guardian, Rangers thought they were cattle rustlers. “You hear so many racial stories throughout history, but it kind of hits harder when you find out it’s your history,” Mo- lis says. She is drawn to the work being done by Refusing to For- get, and she was in attendance at the opening of the new Life and Death exhibit. The knowledge of her great-great-grand- father’s death has helped her find a new community. She first heard about the organization when it was opening the original exhibit back in 2016. Her mother was invited to be a part of a panel, and since then, Refusing to Forget has peri- odically reached out asking for details or other family stories. “From what I understood, and what I gathered from the stories I would hear, it was a struggle for these single moms to raise their kids alone,” Molis says of her family’s life after the murders of Bazán and Longoria. “There were hardships, and the family had to pull together and help each other move forward and find ways to survive without the men. The children would have to go to work very young and help make sure the family has food. A lot of them did farm work.” Hearing that, she says, made her want to learn “as much as possible” about the other families. “Now it’s, ‘What else can I learn about what happened? How much more is there?’” Like many descendants, Molis finds herself wondering what’s next. She has the knowledge; she has new connections. What should justice look like for all these families like hers? “I’m trying to find the right word,” she says. After a pause, she continues. “I want it to be acknowledged. I would like for it to be ac- knowledged that this is history, this did happen. Because there are families out there that are hearing these stories and know it happened, but they’re still pushing it under the rug. I’m not looking for apologies, just affirmation that, ‘OK, this did happen.’ Something to the effect of, ‘Hey, we’re looking into this. We can’t correct what happened, we can’t go back, but moving forward, we can do our homework.’” The Observer reached out to the Ranger museum in Waco to ask if it would consider incorporating some aspects of the force’s violent past into their existing exhibits, Unfair Park from p4 Delcia Lopez Benjamin Johnson is a professor at Loyola University in Chicago and co-founder of Refusing to Forget. Delcia Lopez Looking over the Life and Death on the Border: 1910-1920 exhibit Friday, Feb.10, 2023, in McAllen. Christine Molis is a decendant of Jesus Bazan and Antonio Longoria, who were murdered by Texas Rangers in El Paso. >> p8 Delcia Lopez
