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ThisCommunityWillNotin theFutureBeDisgraced” Rafael Benavides and the Decline of Lynching in New Mexico William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb A t 11:15 on the morning of Friday, November 16, 1928, four masked men marched into the San Juan County Hospital in Farmington, a remote town in northern New Mexico. The men seized one of the patients, a Spanish-speaking sheepherder of Mexican descent named Rafael Benavides, and bundled him into the back of a pickup truck. Accompanied by a second vehicle carrying six other men, the kidnappers sped to an abandoned farm two miles north of town. There, they forced their victim to stand on the back of one of the trucks as a rope was tied around his neck and fastened to a locust tree. The vehicle then accelerated forward, snapping Benavides’s neck as his body became suspended above the ground. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, Benavides had been admitted to the hospital with a serious gunshot wound. The injury was inflicted when he attempted to escape a sheriff’s posse pursuing him for an assault upon a local farmer’s wife. According to the physicians who treated him, Benavides had only hours to live. In their words, the lynching “probably saved the criminal a good deal of suffering.” Benavides was thirty-nine years old.1 In many respects the lynching of Rafael Benavides conforms to the broader patterns of mob violence throughout the American West and the larger world. The men responsible for his murder acted in open disobedience of the law and with the approval of elements of the community, and no member of the mob was ever brought to justice. A grand jury hearing on the murder occurred on December 4, 1928. Judge Reed Holloman issued a stern instruction to the jurors to set an example, so “that this community will not “ Rafael Benavides and the Decline of Lynching in New Mexico 69 in the future be disgraced in the eyes of the state and the United States as it recently was.” However, although more than fifty witnesses were called to testify, the jury failed to indict a single member of the mob. As one newspaper observed, the authorities had “run against a rock wall” in their efforts to secure a conviction.2 The Benavides case is nonetheless of crucial significance. The historian Robert Tórrez believes Benavides to be the last ethnic Mexican lynched in the state of New Mexico.3 F. Arturo Rosales, one of the foremost experts on anti-Mexican violence, goes further, arguing that Benavides was the last ethnic Mexican lynched in the entire United States.4 It is impossible to verify these claims for a variety of reasons, including the vexing question of how one defines lynching. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that no later U.S. mob executed an ethnic Mexican with such a public disregard for legal repercussions . The Benavides murder, described by contemporaries as a lynching, therefore represents an important turning point in the history of anti-Mexican violence. Mob violence against persons of Mexican descent was a widespread phenomenon in the American Southwest after the U.S.-Mexican War. Such violence was often committed with the implicit support of law officers and, in many instances, with their direct participation. Benavides was taken by masked intruders from a public place and hanged in broad daylight. The men responsible for the crime were not prosecuted despite the fact that their identities were well known. Although such a series of events had been common in the preceding eight decades, the pattern of mob violence changed after the Benavides lynching. Mexicans continued to live with the danger of mob violence after 1928. However, any attacks against them took place surreptitiously rather than in open defiance of the law, and mobs received more public censure than support.5 This essay places the Benavides lynching both in the context of lynching in New Mexico and within the broader framework of the decline and end of mob violence against Mexicans. The collective, extralegal killing of Mexicans was a common occurrence in the borderlands, but patterns of mob violence differed dramatically from region to region, from state to state, and even from country to country. Lynching in New Mexico contrasted sharply with mob violence even in nearby states such as Texas, California, and Arizona , and the United States was far from the only nation to have its legal authorities circumvented by mobs. Many recent Mexican immigrants to New Mexico had experienced mob violence...

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