Latino Lynching: Fifteen Latino Men and Boys Murdered in Rural Texas
Fifteen Latino men and boys were murdered by a group of Texas cattlemen, Texas Rangers and U.S Calvary on this day near Porvenir, Texas.
The atrocious history of lynching in the U.S. is generally seen as involving primarily African-Americans, along with a significant number of whites in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. A New York Times article on March 3, 2019 detailed the long-neglected history of the lynching of Latinos.
The lynching party descended on the group of Latinos on this day as they were sleeping. The seized 15 men and boys (the youngest was 16 years-old), marched them to a nearby bluff, and fthen shot them all at close range. After the shooting, the lynch mob burned the village of Porvenir to the ground. The mob leaders later claimed that the village residents had been thieves. They also claimed that the people who were shot had been informants for a group of Mexicans who a month earlier had raided the nearby Brite Ranch. Investigations of the atrocity by the U.S. Army and the State Department, however, found that the persons executed had been unarmed.
In 2018 an official historical marker was erected at the site where the village of Porvenir had been.
Read the New York Times story here.
Learn more at MALDEF, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund here
Read: Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States (2014)
Learn more about the Porvenir massacre here.
Read: Juan Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America, Rev. ed. (2017)