Lynching Beyond Dixie: American Mob Violence Outside the South

4. The Rise and Fall of Mob Violence against Mexicans in Arizona, 1859–1915

• 4• The Rise and Fall of Mob Violence against Mexicans in Arizona, 1859–1915 William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb On April 19, 1915, in a mountain gulch near Greaterville in Pima County, Arizona, Anglo deputies Robert Fenter and Frank Moore hanged and killed two alleged Mexican outlaws named José and Hilario Leon.1 The deaths of the Leon brothers were tragic but not unusual. For decades, Mexicans in the American Southwest had lived with the threat of extralegal violence, often carried out by or with the approval of local authorities. While the murder of the Leon brothers had its clear precedents, what is most unusual is what occurred after their hanging, a reaction unprecedented in Arizona history and indeed in the entire Southwest. What happened was the arrest, trial, conviction, and imprisonment of Fenter and Moore on the charge of murder.2 Moreover, and perhaps more importantly , there is no record of the illegal hanging of any Mexicans in Arizona after 1915. The strong reaction of Arizona’s constituted authorities to the lynching of the Leons did not end discrimination against Mexicans in the state, but it did close the door on what most historians agree was the most dramatic, symbolic, and visible form of racial and ethnic persecution—community-sanctioned, extralegal murder. To provide some historical context for the significance of this turn of events, one only needs to examine the phenomenon of anti-Mexican vio- • 111 • Rise and Fall of Mob Violence against Mexicans in Arizona lence in the neighboring state of Texas. In 1915, shortly after Fenter and Moore started their prison sentences, Texas Rangers and Anglo ranchers responded with indiscriminate mob violence to an uprising led by local Mexicans known as the Plan de San Diego. Estimates vary but even defenders of the Rangers agree that at least 500 Mexicans were hanged, shot, and executed without trial in what local Mexicans called “La Hora de Sangre (The Hour of Blood).” Despite an investigation by the Texas legislature in 1919, none of the individuals involved in the killings were ever put on trial, much less sentenced to prison, and the extralegal killing of Mexicans by Texas authorities continued into the 1920s.3 A detailed examination of the causes of Texas mob violence during this period is not the focus of this essay, but the comparison does highlight the unusual significance of the actions of the Arizona courts in the Leon case. What forces underlay the decisions and actions taken by the Arizona authorities in 1915? While several factors were at work, none was more important than the desire of local elites and state authorities to establish the supremacy and sovereignty of the new State of Arizona, formally promoted from its status as a territory just three years earlier in 1912. Arizona officials worried that lawlessness and the perception of mob rule would dissuade potential settlers and investors while simultaneously undermining the new state’s influence in the national government. Some Arizonians no doubt opposed mob violence for moral reasons, but anxieties about the national perception of Arizona fueled the decline of mob violence in Arizona that began at the turn of the twentieth century. • • • Occupied by Native Americans for thousands of years, Europeans first arrived in what is today called Arizona in the sixteenth century, with the Spanish founding missions in the seventeenth century and then small, fortified villages in the eighteenth. In the early nineteenth century, upon Mexican independence, present-day Arizona became part of the State of Vieja California. The United States acquired central and northern Arizona in 1848 (under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the U.S.-Mexican War) and southern Arizona in 1853 (as part of the Gadsden Purchase). The federal government administered Arizona as part of the New Mexico Territory until 1863, when it created two separate territories. This simple political history belies the practical difficulties that Spaniards , Mexicans, and then the American authorities faced in extending their control over Arizona. The group that eventually established • 112 • William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb sovereignty, the Anglo settlers, did so only slowly, taking more than a half-century. The single most important reason why it took so long to bring Anglo law and order to Arizona was competition from numerous Native American groups. In particular, the mobile and hostile Apache, who had for centuries been the primary force limiting Spanish and Mexican expansion in the region, refused to...