For almost two weeks in Austin, a single, courageous lawmaker, José Tomás Canales, put the Rangers on trial. A century later, the transcripts are essential for understanding our current moment—a remarkable document on race and the police, and the mechanisms of state violence and bureaucratic whitewashing.
The Rangers have been portrayed in popular culture as icons of law and order. To Garcia and others, the statue symbolized the myth underpinning their entire history—a lie laid bare by Canales a century ago.
J.T. Canales was a political insider who could never shake the prejudices that classified him as an outsider. Born on a ranch outside Corpus Christi, he studied law at the University of Michigan before returning to a South Texas that was rapidly changing. In the first decades of the 20th century, railroads and irrigation brought Anglos to the Rio Grande Valley in droves. The newcomers pushed people of Mexican descent from their land and took control of local levers of power. But the bilingual Canales—wealthy, charming, and well-connected—found unusual success in the local politics. When he was elected as a state representative in 1904, he was the only Mexican American in the chamber. When the legislature convened in January 1919 to consider the future of the state’s oldest law enforcement agency, he still was.
The Ranger investigation was overdue. As Swanson lays out in Cult of Glory, the Rangers had served since their creation as enforcers of white power. When a president of the Republic of Texas called for an “exterminating war” against American Indians, the Rangers were his muscle. After statehood, Rangers hunted fugitive slaves and committed atrocities against civilians during the Mexican–American War. In the 1910s, ostensibly for protection during the Mexican Revolution and World War I, the state doubled the size of the force and deputized a thousand more men. Governors appointed volunteer “special” Rangers—often as personal or political favors—who were still empowered to shoot to kill. Residents had a term for neighbors who vanished after encounters with Rangers: They “evaporated.”