The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands by Nicholas Villanueva (review)

Nicholas Villanueva Jr.'s The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands examines the uptick in violence against ethnic Mexicans in Texas in the 1910s. Villanueva shows how the combination of fears of the Mexican Revolution and persistent anti-Mexican racism contributed to a landscape where Texas Rangers and white lynch mobs could act with impunity. While the lynching of Mexicans is deserving of more scholarly attention, it is not clear what new insights are gained through this examination.

The book focuses on a few well-publicized cases of lynching and unfair trials that resulted in execution. William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb have documented 571 cases of Mexicans killed by mobs in the United States between 1848 and 1928, 20 percent of whom were killed in the 1910s. Other historians have suggested that the number of Mexicans killed during the 1910s alone runs well into the hundreds. This book does not attempt to clarify these wide-ranging estimates, but Villanueva argues for expanding the strict definition of lynching employed by the NAACP.

In the first chapter the reader learns about anti-Mormonism, Juan Crow segregation, and the Mexican Revolution, and this background provides context for the cases of lynching discussed in subsequent chapters. The second chapter examines the brutal killings of Antonio Rodríguez in Rocksprings, Texas, in 1910 and Antonio Gómez in Thorndale, Texas, in 1911. Rodríguez, a twenty-year-old migrant worker, was dragged from a jail, "doused with oil and set ablaze" (p. 53). Seven months later, Gómez, a fourteen-year-old, was hanged from a telegraph pole by a mob incensed over the murder of a German American. In neither case was anyone found guilty of the murders.

The story of these killings is based largely on English-language U.S. newspapers and Texas state archival documents. Although Villanueva refers to the protests that erupted throughout Mexico in response to Rodríguez's murder, we only see these protests through the eyes of English-language U.S. newspaper reporters. It would have been useful to see how Mexican newspapers and Spanish-language Texas newspapers reported on these murders, as well as a fuller analysis of the Mexican government's response. The lack of research in Mexican archives results in a U.S.-centric view of a transnational story.

One of Villanueva's main contentions is that the legal system often achieved the same miscarriage of justice as the lynch mob. The chapter on the execution of fifteen-year-old Leon Martínez Jr. for the murder of a young Anglo-American woman, Emma Brown, shows how the legal system worked to condemn Martínez based on a confession coerced out of the teenager under threat of a lynch mob. Facing pressure from Anglo-Texans, Governor Oscar Colquitt refused to pardon Martínez. Villanueva convincingly argues that this execution was a "legal lynching," even though it might not count as a lynching by a strict definition (p. 101).

Villanueva acknowledges class and racial divides within the Mexican community, but some of the complexities drop out in the analysis of particular incidents. For example, Villanueva focuses on José T. Canales's heroic efforts to restrain and reform the Texas Rangers following the extrajudicial killings of hundreds of Mexicans in the wake of the 1915 Plan de San Diego. What is missing from this account is the role Canales and other Texas Mexicans played in opposing the San Diego rebels. While the Anglo-Mexican divide helps explain a lot of the violence in south Texas in this period, some middle-class Texas Mexicans sided with the Rangers against the radicals who threatened their interests.

Villanueva should be applauded for focusing our attention on the large number of ethnic Mexicans killed in Texas by lynch mobs and by a discriminatory judicial system. Other scholars will have to build...