Texas stands out as a state with a long history of discrimination against minorities, in particular people of Mexican origin. The 1910s was an especially difficult decade for this ethnic group because racist sentiments among white Texans of European background often deteriorated into violent attacks against Mexicans. Several factors account for the intense anti-Mexican sentiment: prejudice against dark-skinned people; prejudice against Catholics; protracted conflict between Mexico and the United States that often spilled over the Rio Grande; alarm over the anti-Americanism that flared up in Mexico during that country's civil war, known as “La Revolución”; and suspicions that Mexican Americans were not sufficiently loyal to the United States. These suspicions flared especially high during the US intervention in the city of Veracruz in 1914; the 1916 U.S. military incursion into the state of Chihuahua following Pancho Villa's attack on Columbus, New Mexico; and during World War I, when German agents operated along the US-Mexico border.
Villanueva devotes considerable space to contextualizing the violence perpetrated against Mexicans and Mexican Americans. He provides background on native Tejanos as well as Mexican migrants, refugees, and exiles, and he highlights the uneasy relations of these subgroups with the dominant population. The author also describes social conditions and racial attitudes among European Americans in Texas, especially in small towns. Pointing out that thousands of legal and extralegal executions of Mexicans actually took place in the state during the 1910s, he focuses on three of the 124 documented lynchings; these are the outright murders of Antonio Rodríguez and Antonio Gómez, and the legally sanctioned hanging of León Martínez Jr.
In November 1910 a mob of white Texans forcibly removed Antonio Rodríguez from jail in Rocksprings, Texas, beat him badly, and then burned him alive. Rodriguez had allegedly confessed to killing the wife of a prominent rancher. Seven months after the Rodríguez lynching, a revenge-seeking mob of Texans of German descent in the town of Thorndale snatched 14-year-old Antonio Gómez from law enforcement officials and hanged him. Gómez had stabbed a local German American man in an altercation following harassment of the boy by several men. The perpetrators of the crime were acquitted by a jury. In the third case, Villanueva argues that a “legal” lynching took place in Pecos in 1914 when León Martínez Jr. was executed following his conviction for murdering a white Texas woman, because she allegedly had resisted León's sexual advances. Villanueva contends that a biased legal system in Texas yielded the unfair verdict that ended in Martínez's execution.
The story told in this book is not entirely new. Historians have previously documented much of the racially motivated discrimination and violence against Mexicans in Texas during the 1910s. Villanueva breaks new ground, however, in his meticulous and reflective discussion of the three cases mentioned above, as well as in his detailed examination of attitudes among European Americans in the towns in which the lynchings took place.
