In November 1910 two tragic events occurred in Rocksprings, Texas, a tiny rural community almost 200 miles west of Austin and San Antonio.

Within the span of a few days, two individuals were violently murdered, one killed point blank by a shotgun blast to the back and to the head, another burned alive surrounded by a crowd of angry onlookers.

The remains of both people were buried a mere 50 yards away from one another, segregated by a fence, a small gate, and a line of trees which designated sacred ground reserved for one shade of skin and another.

Over one hundred years later, historical retrospection clouds the realities of those fateful days. The power of media, prejudice, and memory both erase and elevate a central moment in history that shaped actions and opinions for years to come.

Today we are examining violence and lynching towards ethnic Mexican people along the Texas Mexico border during the early twentieth century. Particularly we are discussing the mob violence, or lynching, against Antionio Rodriguez in Rocksprings Texas in November of 1910.

Typically when lynching in America is discussed it is in reference to the obscene amount of lynchings against Black people in the United States between Reconstruction and the mid-twentieth century. However, anti-Mexican violence was also a harsh reality of racial violence throughout the American Southwest.

I’m Elizabeth

And I’m Averill

And we are your historians for this episode of Dig

In November 1910 man named Antonio Rodriquez was arrested by sheriff’s deputies for the alleged murder of Effie Henderson, an Anglo-American woman near the town of Rocksprings, TX.

On November 3rd, 1910, the English language San Angelo Standard Times reported that an “unknown Mexican” had killed the wife of a prominent rancher in Rock Springs, Texas. According to the Standard Times’ article, “the Mexican rode up to the house, called ‘Halo,’ and when Mrs. Hendernon [sic] came to the door he shot and killed her instantly.” The paper relayed that a posse had gathered to hunt down the man and went on to describe how the man would probably be lynched by the crowd if they found him.[1]

The next day the English language San Antonio Express picked up the story and wrote more about the apparent events. According to this paper, twenty-year old Antonio Rodríguez whom the report said was from Las Vacas, Mexico, allegedly shot Mrs. Lem Henderson after she “spoke mean” to him. The article said that Rodriguez rode up to the Henderson house around two in the afternoon, while Mrs. Henderson sat out on the porch sewing. Allegedly they argued and Rodriguez shot at her twice, one hitting her in the head and the other in the heart. The only witness was one of Henderson’s young children. When Lem Henderson. arrived home, he found his wife dead and his little girl told him “a Mexican shot mamma.” He then rode to the nearest neighbor’s house and began to recruit volunteers to find the murderer.[1]

Word spread that Antonio Rodriguez was a disgruntled employee of the Hendersons. A posse of armed men found Rodriguez on a neighboring ranch. They arrested him and threw him in the Edwards County Jail, located in the Rocksprings town square. Details of Effie Henderson’s murder were allegeldy obtained during an interogation of Rodriguez at the jail, where apparently under durress Rodriguez admitted to the murder. Meanwhile, a mob gathered outside the police station and overpowered the one extra guard the local sheriff had placed at the jail. The mob took dragged Rodriguez from his jail cell and out into the street. There they tied him to a mesquite tree, poured kerosene on him, and lit him on fire, burning him alive as a large crowd cheered on. According to the San Antonio Express, not one person took pity on Rodriguez and shot him, leaving him to die from asphyxiation and burning alone.

Excerpt from Mexican language newspaper, La Cronica | Mapping Violence

Like the Jim Crow South, the Mexican U.S. borderlands were also a place of harsh racial violence, including instances of lynching. During the 1910s lynch mobs targeted Mexicans in the United States more often than the previous thirty years combined and the lynching of ethnic Mexican people in Texas almost doubled the number of  those in other border states.[2] In fact, by 1915, lynching of ethnic Mexicans was so commonplace along the Texas border that one newspaper coarsely editorialized, “lynch law is never a pleasant thing to contemplate, but it is not to be denied that it is sometimes the only means of administering justice.”[3]

Lynchings like the one perpetrated against Antonio Rodriguez are examples of “spectacle lynchings,” where the public execution of individuals witnessed by hundreds or even thousands of spectators, often including torture or corpse mutilation. Many lynchings of Black men and women in the South were spectacle lynchings, often with huge crowds. Spectacle lynchings of ethnic Mexians were not as common. Their killings more often happened at night or in secluded areas. The El Paso Times reported the crowd size watching Rodriguez’s excruciating death was in the thousands, which is unbelievably large considering Edwards County, where Rocksprings is, was sparsely populated and hundreds of miles from any larger cities. Regardless of the true size of the crowd, it was obviously a large crowd.

However, in the case of Antonio Rodriguez, the spectacle lynching of an ethnic Mexican man was not only a horrendous act of violence, it also became a serious threat to international diplomatic relations.

His brutal mob execution without a trial and the subsequent media coverage of the lynching provoked immediate anti-American reactions all over Mexico. The story broke in Mexico City on November 5th, with the widely circulated newspaper El Pais writing:

Rodríguez was accused of murdering Mrs. Henderson, a rich American who lived here. Despite the fact that there was no proof, the crowd, for simple dislike of Mexicans, took him from the jail and burned him alive in a tree. This savage act by Americans confirms this fact: In the United States Mexicans have no rights and immigration is very dangerous. It is almost certain that if Americans were killed in Mexico under the same conditions, there already would be raining down from our neighboring country numerous threats and demands for compensation. There is indignation among Mexicans here over this lynching.[4]

Angry rioters took to the streets in Mexico city and throughout towns along the Texas-Mexico border. They attacked American owned businesses and burned American flags. One American citizen was shot and killed in Mexico as retaliation for Rodriguez’s execution.[5]

Mexican journalists wasted no time in pointing out how the lynching of Antonio Rodriguez made the contradictions of American democracy and racism clear.

One Mexico City daily newspaper called the people of the United States “giants of the dollar, pygmies of culture and barbarous whites of the north,” and criticized the hypocrisy of the representations of America as being more civilized than Mexico. One editorial framed the lynching as more evidence of U.S. colonization, saying “Not even today are obliterated the traces left by your putrefying claws which in 1847, like hungry buzzards, you feasted upon Upper Calfiornia, Texas, New Mexico…” The were referring to the Treaty of Hildago that in 1848 ceded almost 55% of Mexico to the United States after the Mexican American War. [6]

U.S.  newspapers and politicians constantly portrayed Mexico as a backwards, uncivilized country. The lynching prompted students in Mexico city to circle a petition set to expose this hypocrisy. It read, “Barbarous Mexico they call our country, they who applied the torch to the clothes of Rodiriguez; barborous Mexico, they, who defied and outraged the law, snatching from it a man whose life ought to have been sacred because it was under society’s protection; barbarous Mexico, they, those organized assassins of defenseless strangeers and oppressed Negros…”[7] and it goes on. These students were calling foul on American self proclaimed “civilization”, saying instead the U.S. is a barbours, white supremacist nation. One commentator said that the mob that surrounded Rodriguez as he was burned alive was not made up of “hordes of cannibals, nor equatorial Africans, nor wild men from Malaysia, nor Spanish Inquisitors,” but were instead the “descendants of Washington, of Lincoln, of Franklin… well-dressed, educated, proud of their virtues.”[8]

Sign showing discrimination in Dimmit, Texas 1949 | University of Texas at Austin

The lynching and the fast spread of its news ignited protests across Mexico and sent working-class men, women and students into the streets. Three protestors were killed when law enforcement attempted to arrest student demonstrators and police charged into a crowd in Mexico City with drawn swords. Porfirio Díaz, the Mexican president-dictator who had been in power for the past twenty years and supported wealthy landowners and industrialists was becoming extremely unpopular with a large contingent of Mexicans who believed Diaz pandered

to American business interests. However, Diaz himself believed that the anti-American demonstrations after the Rodriguez lynching were “simply a convenient cloak for Mexican revolutionists…” whom Díaz estimated “are active in every part of the Republic.” As to the depth of the anti-Americanism in the riots, Díaz believed “that the students had been used as a tool to discredit the Government and that the crime committed in Rock Springs, Tex., had served as a pretext to arouse the young men into unlawful action.”[9] Which, in some ways was true as the demonstrators’ anger was more toward their own government’s failure to press for justice for Rodríguez and his family than against Americans. Many Mexicans were outraged over the obvious lack of justice given to Antonio Rodríguez, as well as the glaring hypocrisy of foreign and domestic policies that gave Americans tremendous influence with Díaz, while Mexicans possessed no ability to influence American domestic affairs.

Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson of the United States called the riots happening in Mexico over Rodriguez’s death a disgrace to Mexico City and to the Mexican people, and accused the Mexican government of doing little to head off the riots.

English language newspapers in the U.S. mostly represented Rodriguez’s lynching as a justified means to an end. Often to rationalize racial violence, newspapers and residents turned to familiar racist tropes that said non-white men threatened white womens purity or virtue. Said another way, within this trope white women were vulnerable to rape by non-white men. Ida B. Wells pointed this out in her expose of lynching of Black men, Lynch Law in America, ten years earlier.

This trope was used to justify violence against Black men in the south and  Mexican men in the southwest. Almost immediatly the murder of Effie Henderson was cast in these racial tones of delicate and violated white womanhood.

To prove the point, an editorial in the New York Times said that the mob’s actions against Rodriguez were “justified as the lives of the ranchers’ wives had been unsafe because of the attempted ravages of Mexican settlers along the Rio Grande.” [10]

But who were these “wives” that everyone was worried about, as often they were nameless in print.

Effie Greer Henderson is often erased from the story. Instead, it’s a showdown between masculinities and race. A rancher’s property (his wife) vs a Mexican laborer. Effie’s name is often omitted from current histories as well as articles that were written contemporaneously. She is either mentioned as just an Anglo ranchers wife or as as Mrs. Lem Henderson, her husband’s name.

Effie Greer Henderson was 40 years old at the time of her murder. She was originally from Arkansas and came to Texas to be a school teacher. She married Lem, also known as L.K. Henderson in 1893. He was a cattle rancher and former Texas Ranger. Effie was his second wife, his first wife died nine years earlier. Effie and Lem had five children together, the youngest was born in 1910.  Two years after Effie died, Lem . married the children’s nurse, Mollie Green. He was forty years older than she was.

Effie Greer Henderson was an educated mother of five and wife to a prominent Anglo rancher. On November 2, 1910 she was murdered on her front porch, shot once in the back and once in the head. Accounts differ as to what happened. Effie’s two youngest children were at home with her on the day of her murder. As her second youngest child, Hadie, told it later as an adult, a strange man came up to the house and asked her mother for work. When her mother turned around after telling the man that her husband was out in the field, the man shot her in the back and then “without pity the murderer placed the rifle to the back of her head and sent a bullet crashing through her brain.”[11]

An account by one of Effie’s older sons, Tom, who was nine years old at the time said that he and his father came back to the ranch house at the end of the day. He described a horrible scene. As they came up to the house, they heard the baby crying. When they went in, they found his mother and baby brother lying on the floor in a pool of blood, the baby trying to nurse from his dead mother.

According to Tom’s version, everyone immediately knew it was Antonio Rodriguez who killed his mother because he was an ex-employee of the ranch who had beef with the Hendersons.

Other accounts raise suspicion about the identity of the murderer. Some postulate that Lem was the murderer. Others say that someone else entirely killed Effie and Antonio Rodriguez was picked up as a scapegoat. Oral interviews done by Monica Munoz Martinez show the town of Rocksprings, still to this day, generally divide along racial lines with Anglos believing that Rodriguez killed Effie Henderson and with ethnic Mexicans believing that a racist mob lynched an innocent man.

Media reports from Spanish language newspapers and English newspapers almost immediately began printing these different opinions of the murder and lynching. In these accounts Rodriguez was either an evil brute who ravaged a young mother, or an innocent Mexican in the wrong place at the wrong time who was murdered by an angry white mob.

The Spanish language press condemned the violence, and suggested that this anti-Mexican mob violence was a continuation of the brutality inflicted on Black Americans in the south. One newspaper wrote, “The iron hoof of the Texas ‘Yankee’ in his barbarous and savage sentiments of race hatred, is now trampling upon the Negro; but the rottenness of his core has spread out so as to wound and even kill a Mexican, by the iniquitous method of lynching.”[12]

Mid-century Texas Rangers showing off their uniforms and cowboy hats. | Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

The Spanish language paper in Laredo, Texas, La Cronica, denounced the mob violence in an article titled “Barbarismos” (Barbarisms), and condemned the inaction of local Anglo authorities.[13]

One U.S. district attorney even pointed out that  the federal government needed to pass legislation that gave federal courts jurisdiction to at least try Americans accused of assaulting foreign citizens. He warned that assaulting or killing foreign nationals could lead to war with other nations and trigger attacks against U.S. foreign investments. He said, “Every American who is in Mexico is held liable for the assault because a Texas mob burned a Mexican…”[14] He wasn’t concerned about the racial violence per se, but about how that violence could threaten American diplomatic relations. However, it was one argument that supported federal anti-lynching legislation. If the federal government could not pass such laws to protect individual people, maybe the threat against American business abroad or even war might push such legislation.

However, English-language newspapers continued to fuel the flames. The El Paso Times published an article on November 14th that said an armed Mexican mob was marching towards Rocksprings to exact revenge for Rodriguez’s burning death. The rumors spread quickly, prompting the New York Times to report that more than 2,000 Texas cowboys were heading towards Rocksprings to defend against the Mexican invasion.

Two days later when no violent mobs or mercenary cowboys descended on the rural town, the El Paso Times conceded that the tales of armed Mexican demonstrators were just rumors. The Mexico City newspaper El País derided the erroneous reports:

The American press, dedicated to exploiting and exciting, has published the rumor of Mexicans ready to attack Rock Spring from Del Rio…they didn’t arrive and the U.S. press looks ridiculous…the sheriff looks stupid for warning of danger.[15]

Mexican officials asked to conduct their own investigations into what happened in Rocksprings. The Mexican government announced that it would start conducting its own independent investigation of the Rodríguez affair through its consul at Eagle Pass. At the same time, Francisco León de la Barra, the Mexican ambassador to the United States, presented a claim for reparations to the United States Department of State. In order to have a valid claim for reparations, Mexican officials had to find Rodriguez’s next of kin. They began searching for his relatives in Mexico. The Laredo newspaper La Cronica reported that Rodriguez’s family lived in Guadalajara, Mexico, where he had a wife and one daughter. Reportedly Rodriguez had left his family only a few months earlier, and had mailed letters home as he traveled through Mexico and into Texas.

However the English language press printed stories that Rodriguez was an American citizen and therefore Mexico had no right to claim reparations. A newspaper in Victoria, Texas, printed a story that said Rodriguez was from Eagle Pass, a small Texas city on the border. The Dallas Morning News printed a story that said Rodriguez was from New Mexico, ,which if true would have canceled Mexico’s demand for reparation and made the United States the aggrieved party in the anti-American demonstrations. Thus, the murders of both Effie Henderson and Antonio Rodriguez became parts of larger diplomatic power struggles between the U.S. and Mexico, at least as how it played out in the press.

A trial was convened on December 15th in the Edwards County district court to investigate the mob killing of Antonio Rodriguez. Not surprisingly, the grand jury did not indict any of the mob participants. A newspaper article said that the town lacked any remorse because “the entire town took part in the lynching.”[16]

Monica Munoz Martinez documents how the memory of Antonio Rodriguez’s lynching simmered among the Anglos and Mexicans within Rocksprings for generations and asks what it means for residents to live in a town defined by such an act of mob violence.

The memory sparks different feelings, depending on which victim one mourns. Some believe the lynching was just retribution for a callous murder of an innocent mother, others believe it was an act of violent racism, indicative of such acts played out all over the country. Munoz Martinez writes, “The lynching of Antonio Rodriguez…offers an opportunity to see the politcs of memory on a local level.”[17] I have to point out that Munoz Martinez’s book, The Injustice Never Leaves You, is an excellent look at not only this anti-Mexican mob violence that took place along the border but also how those injustices became ingrained into the DNA of the region, of the landscape and the people who continue to live there. Her book definitely shaped how I framed this episode.

The tombstone for Effie Greer Henderson reads “Mother: Born July 20, 1869 Died November 2, 1910” She is buried on the Anglo side of the cemetery.

Roughly 50 yards away a pink granite tombstone reads “Antonio Ramires [sic] Burned at Stake November 3, 1910.” However many residents say that is not where Rodriguez’s remains are located. In fact, no one knows who placed the granite headstone there and Rodriguez’s name is actually spelled with an “s” on the end instead of the more common spelling of “z.” Townsfolk instead say his remains are buried under an unmarked cement cross and round stone with a hole in it for a single candle. Both the cement cross and the pink granite headstones are located on the “Mexican” side of the cemetery, as the graveyard was segregated between Anglos, Mexicans, and Blacks,  just as many Texas schools and restaurants and public areas were.

Other lynchings

Just one year later in June 1911, a 12 to 14 year old boy named Antonio Gomez was dragged to death behind a buggy in Thorndale, Texas. Gomez was the son of a local migrant worker and was alleged to have stabbed and killed Charley Zieschang, the white owner of a local garage. Various accounts list Gomez’s age differently, as either twelve years old or fourteen.

A mob beat and disfigured Gomez before wrapping a chain around his neck. Mob leaders then dragged him behind a horse, or a horse drawn buggy, the accounts differ. He was dragged into the middle of town where a crowd of approximately two hundred people had gathered.

Again, Gomez’s death was another act of mob violence and spectacle lynching, like Rodriguez’s but also much more like the spectacel lynching of African Americans across the American south. Historians William Carrigan and Clive Webb write about the Gomez lynching, “The dragging of the body through the town paralleled a key element to many of the spectacle lynchings of African Americans. The long, slow deliberate execution of the young man was a blunt gesture of the power of mob leaders and a clear warning to Mexicans about the dangers of seeking revenge on Anglos… the symbolic and ritualistic elements of the Gomez lynching undermine any argument that the killing was necessary because of a low or ineffective court system.”[18]

Again, Gomez’s lynching ignighted protests from Mexican officials that brought unwanted attention to Thorndale, Texas and American racism in general. Gomez’s spectacle death was one of the last spectacle killings of Mexican nationals. Instead, “the majority of Mexican victims of mob violence did not die in ritualized, daylight public killings but in the middle of the night or in remote ranchlands, hidden gulches, and deserted roadsides.”[19] However, by no means did the threat of lynching subsite. An attempted lynching of a fifteen-year-old Leon Cardena Martinez in Pecos meant that the Texas Rangers had to be called in to prevent a mob from killing the teenager. His father said that after he was arrested for allegedly killing the white school teacher Emma Brown, police placed a shotgun to his head and forced him to confess to her murder. Although he was not lynched by a mob, Martinez was sentenced to death by hanging.

Anti-Mexican violence proved a catalyst for the burgeoning ethnic Mexican civil rights movement. Texas Mexicans from both sides of the border met in Laredo, Texas for El Primier Congreso Mexicanista, or the first Mexican Congress in September of 1911. This event was organized by the Idar family who invited members of lodges and mutual aid societies, all Mexican consuls in the state, and Texas-Mexican journalists. They also issued a special invitation to women from the region to come. The event joined Mexicans from all over to address the growing violence, racism, and lack of education and economic opportunities for ethnic Mexicans in Texas and the U.S. Concurrently, women held their own congress, La Ligua Feminil with Jovita Idar as its first president. This group included a cross-class group of Mexican heritage women from both sides of the border who organized to promote bilingual education and support of working women, particularly washerwomen or lavanderas. They also advocated for women’s suffrage in both the U.S. and Mexico.

LULAC Logo | Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

This racialized atmosphere was one of the key factors that motivated leaders of the Mexican-American civil rights movement. Violence along the border intensified throughout the 1910s and attorney J.T. Canales called the race war a “wholesale slaughter” of Mexican Texans. The growing number of deaths led to legislative hearings that exposed the racial crimes of the Texas Rangers. Among the many lynchings, none was more well-known than the burning to death of Antonio Rodríguez. Many of these early Mexican civil rights organizers went on to found other organizations and movements during the 1920s, one being the League of United Latin American Citizens or LULAC founded in 1929.

The 1960s and 1970s saw an upsurge in Mexican American political activism. In Texas, organizing for Mexican American voting rights began to overturn the Anglo political machines that had dominated the state and disenfranchised Texas Mexicans and Black Texans. Additionally the growing Chicano movement began to document and historicize anti-Mexican violence like the lynchings of Antonio Rodriguez and Antonio Gomez while labor strikes in the Texas valley and protests over the Vietnam War fueled young Latinx students and activists to participate in el moveimento, the movement.  Also, newly emerging Chicano Studies programs were growing, particularly at the University of Texas, with scholars such as Americo Paredes and George Sanchez and Jose Limon, who all wrote important and founding books in what was called Chicano history.

Historical Memory

Oral histories, passed among ethnic Mexicans in the region made sure that the lynching of Antonio Rodriguez was not forgotton. One man described the saying that was common, when referring to Rocksprings. He said ethnic Mexicans told other Mexicans “Mucho cuidado con rocke’spring. Son muy desgraciados” (Be very careful in Rocksprings. They are disgraceful and miserable people.)[20]

A write up in the St. Louis Star and Times on November 4th, 1910 said this about Antonio Rodriguez’s death: “…Rodriguez showed no emotion when tied to the stake and died without a plea for mercy.” However, oral histories of Mexican Texans from Rocksprings say that as he burned, he yelled out that the town and its inhabitants would be cursed “from now on.”[21]

Many in Rocksprings believe that a tornado that ripped through the town of Rocksprings in April of 1927, killing seventy-two people and seriously injuring over 150 more was God’s retribution for the lynching and evidence of Rodriguez’s cures. The population at the time was only 1,000 so this loss of life was absolutely devastating. According to some, a man thought to be the first person to throw a match on Rodriguez’s kerosene soaked body suffered an extremely gruesome death in the tornado when the high winds drove a wooden post through his heart.

The Edwards County courthouse and jail where Rodriguez had been jailed was one of the few structures to survive the tornado. The Texas State Historical Survey Committee gave the Edwards County Courthouse an historical marker in 1967, recognizing its importance in the founding of the county.  A marker placed in the town square in 1973 lists the courthouse and the jail as two buildings that withstood the tornado of 1927 that killed so many people.

Rogelio Munoz, a former district attorney, relayed how recollections of people with memories of racial violence show how they engage with public monuments like the courthouse. In oral interviews he said, “Well, every time I go to Rocksprings there’s a plaque at the court house and the plaque talks about the storm that occurred in the 1920s that came to the town. And the Mexicans believe that it was punishment from God for burning this guy.”[22]

So this plaque means one thing to one set of people in the town, mostly Anglos, of the town’s triumph over this storm while many ethnic Mexicans who grew up with their parents and grandparents talking about Rodriguez’s lynching and how the tornado was retribution for his killng, think of this commemorative plaque of the tornado as a reminder of the lynching.

There is not an official historical marker in Rocksprings, Texas,  that designates the history of this watershed lynching. One must travel over 200 miles south to Laredo, in Webb County to see a Texas State historical marker that mentions the lynching. The marker to honor El Primer Congreso Mexicanista in 1911 mentions the Rocksprings lynching as a catalyst for the Mexican Texan civil rights movement.

Bibliography:

William D. Carrigan, Clive Webb, Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence Against Mexicans in the United States, 1848-1928 (Oxfords rd University Press, 2013).

Benjamin Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005)

Arnoldo De León, They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes Toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983).

Arnoldo De León, ed., War Along the Border: The Mexican Revolution and Tejano Communities (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012).

José E. Limón, “El Primer Congreso Mexicanista de 1911,” Aztlán 5 (Spring, Fall 1974).

Monica Munoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You : Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).

Elizabeth Garner Masarik, “Por La Raza, Para La Raza: Jovita Idar and Progressive-Era Mexicana Maternalism along the Texas–Mexico Border,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, vol. 122, no. 3, January 2019.

Cynthia Orozco, No Mexicans, Women, Or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009).

Travis Taylor, Lynching on the Border: The Death of Antonio Rodriguez and the Rise of Anti-Americanism During the American Revolution, Master’s Thesis, Angelo State University, 2012.

Notes:


[1] Standard Times, San Angelo, Texas, November 3, 1910.

[1] San Antonio Express News, November 4, 1910.

[2] William B. Carrigan and Clive Webb, Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 6.

[3] Quoted in Benjamin Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005) 86–87.

[4] El Pais, November 5, 1910 quoted in Taylor, Lynching on the Border, 40-41.

[5] “To Avenge Rodriguez,” New York Times, Nov. 26, 1910.

[6] Quoted in Munoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018) 36.

[7] Quoted in Muzon Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You, 37

[8] Quoted in Muzon Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You, 38

[9] Quoted in Travis Taylor, Lynching on the Border: The Death of Antonio Rodriguez and the Rise of Anti-Americanism During the American Revolution, Master’s Thesis, Angelo State University, 2012: 90.

[10] Quoted in William Carrigan and Clive Webb, “The Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin or Descent in the United States 1848-1928,” Journal of Social History, 37, no. 2 (2003): 428.

[11] Quoted in Munoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You,

[12] Quoted in Munoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You, 36.

[13] “Barbarismos” La Cronica (Nov. 12, 1910)1, as quoted in Limon, 88.

[14] Quoted in Munoz Marines, The Injustice Never Leaves You, 41.

[15] El País, November 16, 1910, quoted in Taylor, Lynching on the Border, 87

[16] Munoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You, 40.

[17] Munoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You, 33.

[18] Carrigan and Webb, Forgotten Dead, 82.

[19] Carrigan and Webb, Forgotten Dead, 83.

[20] Quoted in Munoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You, 62.

[21] Quoted in Munoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You, 60.

[22] Munoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You, 69.



2 Comments

Me · August 9, 2020 at 11:24 am

Hard to focus on anything after you said that Rocksprings was East of Austin and San Antonio

    Elizabeth Garner Masarik · August 9, 2020 at 3:34 pm

    Yikes, you’re totally right. That’s a mistake on my part. Most of my family is from east TX- Victoria and Port Lavaca- so I think I just had east stuck in my head. I’ve updated the transcript. Thanks for the catch.

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