The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas by Monica Muñoz Martinez (review)

The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas investigates a period of terror along the U.S.-Mexico border between 1910 and 1920, when Mexicans and Mexican Americans were murdered by the Texas Rangers and white mobs. Victims were variously U.S. citizens, poor migrant workers, or wealthy landowners; estimates of the number of people murdered during this period vary from three hundred to thousands. Martinez indicates how “[v]igilante violence on the border had a state-building function” that endures in contemporary dominant versions of Texas history, which manage both to conceal and to normalize violence against people who were often described as thieves or bandits (p. 6).

Martinez draws from various archives and historical registers but is always alert to “silences, erasures, and euphemisms” in public history and in the official records held by the state of Texas (p. 276). The book diligently offers witness to the experiences of the communities after the violence; “it lingers in the aftermath . . . to document what happened next” (p. 24). The author uses vernacular history as a way to access alternatives to the dominant story, those of loss and trauma and also of survival and resistance, through family stories, mourning, corridos, poetry, and storytelling.

The Injustice Never Leaves You focuses on multiple incidents of violence against Mexicans and Mexican Americans and how these events are remembered, working against the erasure of victims as criminals and against further traumatizing the descendants of those who survived. The murders were perpetrated by mobs, like the lynching of migrant farmworker Antonio Rodríguez in 1910; and by the Texas Rangers themselves, like the double murder of Jesus Bazán and Antonio Longorio, prominent Tejano landowners in 1915, and the massacre of fifteen boys and men in the small town of Porvenir in 1918. The author skillfully analyzes each case in its particular geographic, economic, and political contexts, while also locating these murders in the long histories of anti-Mexican and antiblack violence in Texas.

A strength of the book is the author’s attention to the role and limitations of academic history and her strategies for academics to effectively contribute to public understandings. Martinez notes that, while she and others are developing new scholarship about the period of anti-Mexican violence, academic resources rarely break through to challenge public perception of the Texas past. With a group of academic colleagues, the author has developed a series of public events, and notably a museum exhibit, which has brought their scholarship to a wider audience. By charting the slow, painstaking work with local officials, the author affirms that “our effort showed that academic historians are learning, with the help of community members, what it takes to change the popular historical narrative” (p. 274). In so doing, The Injustice Never Leaves You is both an important contribution to academic scholarship about the history of the U.S.-Mexico border and a call to arms for historians to be accountable to the communities about which they write.

While Martinez carefully describes contexts of anti-Mexican violence in the early part of the twentieth century, she insists that contemporary readers must “avoid commemorating state violence as a thing of the past” (p. 291). Instead, as The Injustice Never Leaves You demonstrates, “Current efforts to reckon with histories of state violence are occurring in the midst of ongoing practices of police brutality both along the border and across the country. Remembering the past, then, is also about knowing the present” (p. 296). Given recent U.S. immigration and border policies that have led to the proliferation of family detention centers along the Texas-Mexico border, we need urgently, now more than ever, this rich and detailed history of violence in the border region that equips us to better know the present.