A Review of Monica Muñoz Martinez

A Review of Monica Muñoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas

Amy Evans

In The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas, Monica Muñoz Martinez critically reexamines the historical record, focusing on violence meted out by law enforcement officers, soldiers, and vigilantes against Mexican immigrants and citizens along the Texas-Mexico border from 1910 to 1920. She argues that a widely accepted “celebratory version of events” obscures public memory and ignores the terror.[1] Martinez shines a light on the brutality, forcing the reader to see the time and place not as an area and era of progress, but one that is clouded by institutionalized, racially motivated violence perpetrated by those sworn to protect it. In addition to existing historical documents, community memory, and the landscape, the author uses oral histories to reclaim the narrative for victims and their families. Illustrated by these stories in particular, Martinez further argues that injustice does not stay in the past; rather, these legacies of violence have lasting consequences that often shape current memories, policies, and notions of justice today.

The first three chapters of the book uncover specific case studies of violence in 1910, 1915 and 1918 in Texas. When viewed collectively, these brutal acts against Mexicans at the hands of vigilantes and the Texas Rangers reveal omissions and inconsistencies in previously accepted historical records. Particularly compelling is the author’s recounting of the massacre at Porvenier when local ranchers and Texas Rangers rounded up and executed fifteen unarmed men and boys for being “bandit sympathizers.”[2] By using the memoir of a cavalry private, survivor statements recorded by a teacher, and records of claims filed by Mexico on behalf of the survivors, Martinez shows how the intentional mischaracterizations of Mexican immigrants and citizens were used to justify extralegal, state-sanctioned violence. She notes that the families left to mourn did not surrender when Texas courts failed to prosecute, and she demonstrates how their claims filed with the Mexican government were not only part of their survival strategy, but also defiant acts of “resistance.”[3] She further compels the reader to see how the burdens of these unacknowledged memories haunted the survivors and their communities for multiple generations.

The second part of the book focuses on the role of state administrators and institutions as well as historians who allowed and encouraged “cultures of violence to be celebrated.”[4] In particular, the author seeks to demystify the hero narrative surrounding the Texas Rangers and supports her arguments by delving into records that were previously misrepresented or simply brushed aside. The author begins by highlighting the convergent histories of the 1919 investigation of the agency demanded by Texas state representative José T. Canales, and the simultaneous efforts of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) who challenged the lynching culture in the state to show how state administrators were complicit in ongoing racial unrest and violence. Chapter five critiques how previous historians, museums, school curriculum, and public spaces throughout the state venerate the Texas Rangers, prescribing a particular version of history that disavows racial violence and obstructs critiques. Finally, in the last chapter, Martinez describes recent efforts to increase awareness of and acknowledge anti-Mexican violence, focusing on her work with the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum and the Refusing to Forget team and website.

Martinez seeks to erase the whitewashing of an era and set the record straight regarding a particularly violent period of border history that was filled with prejudices fueled by hysteria, political corruption, and increased militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas. The book offers an important addition to the body of knowledge regarding borderland enforcement, particularly for students of Latino and immigration histories. However, some readers may find the prose polemic and redundant, and at times, the author unnecessarily inserts herself into the narrative. Nonetheless, Martinez provides a well-researched, competing, corrective narrative of the Texas-Mexico borderland that demands to be acknowledged, heard, and remembered. Throughout the book, Martinez argues that whoever controls the narrative also controls the memory; this book seeks to reclaim that voice for Tejanos.

[1] Monica Muñoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 8.

[2] Ibid, 124.

[3] Ibid, 126.

[4] Ibid, 29.