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

In evaluating racial relations in Texas through the lenses of history and ethnic studies, Nicholas Villanueva provides insights into the racialized coding of ethnic Mexicans as "colored," or in the same category as African Americans. In the context of 1910s Texas, that meant that people of Mexican heritage were targets of lynching. Villanueva's work builds on William Carrigan and Clive Webb's 2013 study of the lynching of Mexicans in the United States ( Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848– 1928, Oxford University Press) by zeroing in on the influences of the border and the Mexican Revolution to explain the heightened violence of the period between 1910 and 1920.

In the aptly titled introduction "Rationalizing Hate," Villanueva lays out the book's key arguments. Across the five chapters of the work, he contextualizes the history of the Texas borderlands and the Mexican Revolution, details four specific cases in which men of Mexican descent were lynched in Texas (although he mentions many others), emphasizes the violence of the Mexican Revolution on the border, and furthers the argument that U.S. involvement in World War I marked the decline of such violence in Texas.

Villanueva uncovers the specific cases of Antonio Rodríguez, Antonio Gómez, and León Martínez Jr. in detail. Rodríguez was a Mexican laborer accused in early November 1910 of killing a white ranch woman when she refused to provide him with food. A mob seized him from the local jail and burned him to death. Citing newspaper coverage and the correspondence of local and state-level officials in Texas, Villanueva makes a strong case that Anglo Texans viewed widespread anti-lynching demonstrations in Mexican cities as a threat to their longstanding racialized privilege. Anglo apprehensions were further augmented by their conflation of revolutionary demonstrations against the Díaz regime with the anti-lynching protests that immediately preceded them. The outbreak of the Mexican Revolution thus resulted in increased violence in Texas.

Chapter three examines the "legal lynching" of León Martínez Jr. Fifteen-year-old Martínez received a trial for the alleged crime of murdering Emma Brown, a crime for which he maintained his innocence despite having signed a confession when threatened with summary execution. After his capture, Villanueva shows that due process was not observed due to the rapidity of the proceedings and involvement of members of the lynch mob. Whereas other studies of lynching do not count Martínez's execution, Villanueva forcefully argues that show trials amount to a means of legitimating the same terror enacted in extralegal lynching cases. In chapter 4 Villanueva describes the 1918 Porvenir Massacre in which Texas Rangers slaughtered a group of fifteen Mexican "bandits" for supposedly participating in the Brite Ranch raid. This case is especially significant for Villanueva's argument that the period of the Mexican Revolution witnessed an undeclared "race war" (54) between Anglos and Mexicans in Texas.

Among the book's few shortcomings is a tendency to take oral history evidence at face value without considering the role of time and memory, especially in the first chapter that builds the historical context of Anglo-Mexican relations in Texas. Also, historical actors' citizenship status is not explored in depth throughout the work. Although Villanueva recognizes the importance of U.S. citizenship for Austin lawyer José T. Canales and the Mexican Americans who contested Juan Crow segregation, the citizenship status of lynching victims and those who immediately challenged the extralegal violence remains murky. Canales's 1918 investigation into the Texas Rangers incessant raiding of Mexican villages is shown to be the strongest factor in the decline of Texas lynchings, although Villanueva places more emphasis on Anglos' new preoccupation with German Americans in the context of World War I.

Still, this book is a must-read for scholars and students of borderlands violence in the early twentieth century. Villanueva's key addition to...