In the frigid early morning hours of January 28, 1918, eight men from Texas Ranger Company B left their headquarters in Marfa and, buoyed by liquor, descended on the tiny Texas border community of Porvenir. They were accompanied by four local ranchers and twelve soldiers from the Eighth U.S. Cavalry.
As the soldiers cordoned off the village, the masked Rangers and ranchers battered in the doors of the residents’ stone and adobe huts. Then they forcibly dragged from the shivering families fifteen boys and men, herded them to a nearby bluff, and shot them to death.
“They had questioned no one at all, and their first words were threats,” recalled one of the women of the village. They left in their wake several newly made widows and forty-two fatherless children, one of whom was born that same morning.
Victims of the Porvenir Massacre: Manuel Moralez, 47 • Román Nieves, 48 • Longino Flores, 44 • Alberto García, 35 • Eutemio González, 37 • Macedonio Huertas, 30 • Tiburcio Jáquez, 50 • Ambrosio Hernández, 21 • Antonio Castañeda, 72 • Pedro Herrera, 25 • Vivian Herrera, 23 • Severiano Herrera, 15 • Pedro Jiménez, 27 • Serapio Jiménez, 25 • Juan Jiménez, 16
All the victims were native Mexicans and Tejanos—Texans of Mexican descent; some were American citizens. They were, according to the Texas State Historical Association, simply “farmers, who raised livestock, grew produce, and raised their families in an arid desert climate. They were making a life in arguably the most challenging environment in Texas.”
When word of the slaughter leaked out, James Monroe Fox, the Ranger captain who ordered the raid, fabricated a story that his men had been fired upon by the villagers. When this was shown to be false, he attempted to justify the Rangers’ actions as retribution for a recent attack by Mexican bandits or guerrillas on a nearby Anglo ranch.
“They couldn’t get the people that did it, so [they said] ‘Let’s go with the people we know we can get,’ ” says Arlinda Valencia, great-granddaughter of Longino Flores, one of the victims, in the 2019 documentary film Porvenir, Texas. “They were murdered without justification,” she says.
The Army, for its part, claimed that no soldiers were present during the massacre. This was also patently false. While the actual extent of the Army’s role in the killings may never be known, its soldiers were certainly there.
Harry Warren, an Anglo schoolteacher who lived a mile or so from Porvenir, initially knew nothing of the murders. But on the morning after the massacre, twelve-year-old Juan Flores walked to Warren’s house and—after relating what had occurred—took him to the site. There they encountered a group of soldiers standing around a pile of bloody bodies, Juan’s father and Warren’s father-in-law among them. The soldiers claimed to have simply come upon the site by chance, which was yet another lie.
The morning of the killings, the bodies were taken by wagon across the river to Pilares, Mexico, and buried in a mass grave, where they lie today. At one point, Warren took the villagers’ statements. His subsequent written account of what had occurred at Porvenir remains the most reliable version of events. “If it hadn’t been for Harry Warren, the story would never have been told,” says Valencia in an interview for this article.
The remaining 140 residents of Porvenir swiftly abandoned the village. They left without anything to eat or even a canopy to shield them from the cold winter winds. Shortly thereafter, the soldiers returned and burned Porvenir to the ground.
In the 1820s and 1830s, the Texas Rangers had been vital to the colonization of Texas, acting as an armed, initially volunteer buffer between the settlers and the region’s Indigenous tribes. They were later instrumental in bringing to justice such notorious badmen as Sam Bass and John Wesley Hardin. The Rangers also had, says Benjamin H. Johnson, a professor of history at Loyola University Chicago, “a long tradition of anti-Mexican violence beginning with the Texas Revolution and continuing unabated into the next century.”
By the first decade of the twentieth century, the days of the Wild West were over, and the Rangers—in the words of Don Carleton, executive director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Dolph Briscoe Center for American History—“were neither badly needed nor useful.” By 1911, the force had shrunk to as few as a dozen men.
Then came the Mexican Revolution. It raged from 1910 to 1920, turning the Rio Grande borderlands between Texas and Mexico into a war zone. Bloody guerrilla and bandit raids into el Norte became commonplace, driving the ranchers and townspeople of South Texas into a constant state of alarm.
Two things in particular inflamed these tensions. The first, called the Plan de San Diego, occurred in 1916, and was an alleged plot by minority groups north of the border to kill all Anglo males above the age of sixteen and to reclaim the lands Mexico had lost to the United States decades earlier. The following year, a telegram was intercepted in which the German foreign minister offered Mexico these lands in exchange for an alliance with Germany. This prompted President Woodrow Wilson to send 110,000 troops to patrol the border, and was largely responsible for America’s entry into World War I.
University of Texas at San Antonio Special Collections
Four unidentified Texas Rangers pose on a bridge in 1892.
Suddenly, the Texas Rangers were back in the spotlight. Governor James E. Ferguson authorized the outfit’s rapid expansion to around a thousand men and gave them a mission: Clean up the border “if [you have] to kill every damned man to do it.” Giving them free reign, he added, “I have the pardoning power, and we will stand by those men.”
He had, in essence, given them a license to kill.
Unfortunately, in the state’s haste to mount a large force of Rangers, men with dubious backgrounds and criminal records were taken aboard. “There was a very, very low standard for joining the Texas Rangers at that time,” Carleton observes. “The Rangers were every bit as bad as the men they hunted. By this time, the force was full of thugs. They provided ‘security’ in the frontier manner: Shoot first, ask questions after.”
Men such as James Monroe Fox—the products of what Texas Rangers chronicler Robert M. Utley refers to as the “six-shooter culture”—were given undeserved captaincies with wide latitude. Carleton concurs, saying Fox “was definitely a believer in frontier justice. His fingerprints were on a number of atrocities along the border. The guy was pretty bad news.”
“[I]t was common knowledge that Texas Rangers used la ley de fuga—the law of flight—to kill prisoners with great frequency,” writes Texas historian Monica Muñoz Martinez. “The landscape regularly became littered with a great number of Mexicans who had been ‘killed in the brush’ by Rangers.”
The ethnic Mexican population referred to the Rangers as los Diablos Tejanos—the Texan Devils—and it was an epithet well earned.
The ethnic Mexican population referred to the Rangers as los Diablos Tejanos—the Texan Devils—and it was an epithet well earned. By sending these men to the border, Governor Ferguson had opened the door to wholesale, racially based murder and mayhem, with a body count that has been estimated from several hundred into the thousands. Many of the victims were guilty of only one thing: being of Mexican descent.
Initially, the Texas judicial system took no action regarding the Porvenir Massacre. However, as Martinez notes in her 2018 book, The Injustice Never Leaves You, “By asserting their rights as Mexican nationals, widows, mothers, grandfathers, and brothers found a way to charge the U.S. government with responsibility for the murders of their relatives.”
The widows sued the U.S. government for reparations; the case dragged on for years, whereupon their claim was denied. They also appealed to the Mexican consul, who sent letters of outrage to both the federal and Texas state governments. Soon, the Porvenir Massacre was being publicized in newspapers on both sides of the border.
In January 1919, José T. Canales, state representative for Texas’s Seventy-Seventh District, introduced a bill in the state house aimed at reforming the state police, specifically the Rangers. He levied nineteen charges, including the flogging, torture, and murder of prisoners. An attorney and scion of a well-to-do family, Canales was the only Hispanic member of the Texas legislature at the time. And according to historian Charles H. Harris, “[H]e was virtually the only local Democratic politician denouncing the atrocities of the Rangers and vigilantes against Hispanics.”
In introducing his bill before a joint committee of the Texas house and senate, Canales was specific: “There are now, and there have been for some time, in the state Ranger force men of desperate character, notoriously known as gunmen, their only qualification being that they can kill a man first and then investigate him.” He further accused Adjutant General James A. Harley, to whom the Rangers ultimately reported, of being “either negligent” or deliberate in his selection of men to “terrorize and intimidate the citizens of this state.”
During the hearings, dozens of witnesses related countless instances of torture and killings perpetrated by the Rangers along the border. As a result of Canales’s bill, the number of Rangers and Ranger companies was reduced, and a few other positive changes were made, but by and large, the results were disappointing.
Although the committee acknowledged the “unnecessary taking of life,” not a single Ranger was charged with a crime.
Although the committee acknowledged the “unnecessary taking of life,” not a single Ranger was charged with a crime. Ranger Company B was disbanded, and five of the eight Rangers complicit in the Porvenir Massacre were fired. And while an indignant Captain Fox was forced to resign, he was eventually rehired and promoted. No Ranger procedures were changed, and instead of being replaced, as Canales proposed, Harley was commended for his service.
In February 1919, responding to the adverse publicity as well as the protests from the Mexican government, Washington ordered an investigation into Ranger conduct on the border. It was conducted by a Ranger captain, and unsurprisingly, it turned up no evidence of misdeeds.
Harry Warren, for his part, doggedly refused to let the matter rest; he filed a case before the U.S. Court of Claims on behalf of the victims’ families. Although it was listed as “pending” until 1946—fourteen years after Warren’s death—the court never heard the case.
“Warren put a price on his own head, from Rangers, Army, and ranchers, by blowing the whistle,” says historian and author Glenn Justice in an interview. “They would have killed him” had he not made his way to Arizona.
For nearly a century, the story of Porvenir fell between the cracks of Texas history, where it would have remained were it not for the haunted memory of a survivor of the massacre. At age ninety-five, Juan Flores, who as a twelve-year-old boy had found his father, Longino, among the slain, finally overcame his lifelong terror and shared his story. He took his family to Porvenir and showed them where his father and fourteen neighbors and friends had been killed.
For nearly a century, the story of Porvenir fell between the cracks of Texas history.
Arlinda Valencia was so moved by hearing her great-uncle’s story that she began to research the state records, where she found documentation of the massacre, which she shared with her out-of-state cousins. As word spread, other descendants began to communicate with her.
A 2018 remembrance that Valencia helped organize at the Texas state capitol drew more than 400 descendants. Twelve of the original fifteen victims were represented. “Hopefully,” Valencia says, “I’ll live long enough to repeat the event in 2028.”
After a contentious, years-long effort by Valencia and Refusing to Forget, a group opposing racial violence on the Texas-Mexico border, the Texas Historical Commission finally placed a highway marker twenty-seven miles west of Marfa, on U.S. Highway 90, acknowledging the massacre. It lists all fifteen victims and gives an account of what transpired that night. And Valencia was told last year that a new historical center was being developed that would give a historically accurate account of the massacre.
Today’s Texas Rangers form a highly selective investigative unit of the state’s Department of Public Safety. There are Black, Hispanic, and female members, as well as white males. But it serves no one to deny or ignore an event—indeed, a period—in which the Rangers behaved criminally. It is now an established historical fact that on an early morning in January 1918, fifteen innocent men and boys were murdered at Porvenir. A Ranger captain gave the order, and Rangers pulled the triggers.