The Injustice Never Leaves You by Martinez Monica Muñoz

Author:Martinez, Monica Muñoz [Martinez, Monica Muñoz]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780674976436
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2018-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

EMBRACING MOB VIOLENCE

The testimony of witnesses during the investigation eventually grew to more than 1,600 pages of transcription. Examples abound of police abuse and extralegal acts of violence. Knight and Moses argued that state senators and representatives from the central and northeastern part of the state had no grasp on the volatile climate on the border. They described an ongoing and increasingly aggressive undeclared war in which Mexican bandits allegedly targeted vulnerable American property owners near the border. In addition to stealing livestock and goods, the alleged bandits also threatened the lives of white women and children. The state lawyers argued that the Texas Rangers were justified in using any violent means necessary to protect white American citizens. To convince the committee, they relied on racial tropes commonly used to justify mob violence against other racial and ethnic minorities in Texas.

In the investigation, Knight and Moses harnessed existing white supremacist ideas that justified the abuse and execution of racial minorities without proper investigation. On numerous occasions the attorneys asked the committee to agree that Texas Rangers should be able to act outside the parameters of the law. More specifically, they suggested that suspending legal procedures and regulations was necessary to protect Anglo American citizens and their property. US congressman Claude Benton Hudspeth, the namesake of Hudspeth County, representing the Sixteenth District of west Texas and a former Texas Ranger, became a star witness. He supported Knight’s argument that ethnic Mexicans in the region were bandits and demanded that Rangers act with brute force. In his opinion, the character of Mexican residents necessitated this tactic. Cloaked in his authority as a US congressman, he stated, “a Ranger cannot wait until a Mexican bandit behind a rock on the other side shoots at him three or four times.… [Y]ou have got to kill those Mexicans when you find them, or they will kill you, as they did Joe Sitter and Mr. Hulen down there.”107 To the congressmen, any Mexican, on either side of the border, posed a dangerous threat.

Hudspeth advocated for local residents taking the law into their own hands. He explained, “The people raised up and surrounded those bandits, and when they rounded them up and killed them.… You cannot handle those Mexicans with kid gloves, not when they come twelve miles below El Paso and steal a milk cow every night or two.”108 Perhaps recognizing that his statements were supporting extralegal murder by state agents and residents alike, Hudspeth later clarified, “I don’t believe in murdering people, but there are a bad class of men along the River that have to be handled in a certain way.”109 His sensational testimony continued with descriptions of the brutality of the people he described as Mexican bandits. Droves of bandits, he explained, waited just across the Rio Grande ready to raid and pillage. Fear of the Texas Rangers, according to him, was the only element that kept thieves at bay. Their brutal methods were an important element in creating an intimidating force. Fear made the agents effective.

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