Texas history has branded these three Tejano men as tequila smugglers who met a deserved fate: gunned down in a borderland corral.
But their indignant descendants have long disputed the official story. For generations, they recorded their version of events in narrative, subversive folk songs known as corridos. The men were among many Mexican Americans with roots in South Texas killed under suspicious circumstances by White law enforcement officers who wielded the power of the Texas government in their trigger fingers, they say.
More deeply, the families are challenging the gritty idealism and heroic vision associated with the Rangers, who personify Texas itself. Organized more than 200 years ago to protect 300 White families invited to settle in what was then Mexican territory, they have been portrayed in dozens of movies and TV series as swaggering, no-nonsense lawmen.
“The Rangers had for years and years a network of enablers and fable factory who promoted this image. That’s what Hollywood wanted and what the newspapers of the day wanted, so that’s what survived,” said Doug Swanson, author of “Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers.” “It’s only half true, if that much.”
The men died at a time when Prohibition, vigilantism, Juan Crow and the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 had led to many bloody confrontations along the border between Tejanos and White authorities. The border violence was part of the ethnic and racial anxieties gripping a changing nation on the brink of a world war. It was also a time when government authorities were exerting more control over a still-porous border where people and goods had moved freely and frequently for generations.
The fight reflects a larger tension in Texas — and across the country — over who controls how America’s history is told. Though much of the attention has centered on attacks over the teaching of Black history, attempts to chronicle Latino stories have run into similar conflicts, another knotty period of U.S. history up for debate.
“I believe in the long term that the truth wins out, not fiction, not happy history,” said Texas historian Walter L. Buenger, a University of Texas at Austin professor. “Truth wins out, but sometimes it’s agonizingly slow.”