'KILLED WITHOUT CAUSE': The century-long battle to hold the Texas Rangers accountable for their role in the Porvenir Massacre.

• Author: Soodalter, Ron

In the frigid early morning hours of January 28, 1918, eight men from Texas Ranger Company B left their headquarters in Marfa and, buoyed by liquor, descended on the tiny Texas border community of Porvenir. They were accompanied by four local ranchers and twelve soldiers from the Eighth U.S. Cavalry.

As the soldiers cordoned off the village, the masked Rangers and ranchers battered in the doors of the residents' stone and adobe huts. Then they forcibly-dragged from the shivering families fifteen boys and men, herded them to a nearby bluff, and shot them to death.

"They had questioned no one at all, and their first words were threats," recalled one of the women of the village. They left in their wake several newly made widows and forty-two fatherless children, one of whom was born that same morning.

Allthe victims were native Mexicans and Tejanos--Texans of Mexican descent; some were American citizens. They were, according to the Texas State Historical Association, simply "farmers, who raised livestock, grew produce, and raised their families in an arid desert climate. They were making a life in arguably the most challenging environment in Texas."

When word of the slaughter leaked out, James Monroe Fox, the Ranger captain who ordered the raid, fabricated a story that his men had been fired upon by the villagers. When this was shown to be false, he attempted to justify the Rangers' actions as retribution for a recent attack by Mexican bandits or guerrillas on a nearby Anglo ranch.

"They couldn't get the people that did it, so [they said] 'Let's go with the people we know we can get,'" says Arlinda Valencia, great-granddaughter of Longino Flores, one of the victims, in the 2019 documentary film Porvenir, Texas. "They were murdered without justification," she says.

The Army, for its part, claimed that no soldiers were present during the massacre. This was also patently false. While the actual extent of the Army's role in the killings may never be known, its soldiers were certainly there.

Harry Warren, an Anglo schoolteacher who lived a mile or so from Porvenir, initially knew nothing of the murders. But on the morning after the massacre, twelve-year-old Juan Flores walked to Warren's house and--after relating what had occurred--took him to the site. There they encountered a group of soldiers standing around a pile of bloody bodies, Juan's father and Warrens father-in-law among them. The soldiers claimed to have simply come upon the site by chance, which was yet another lie.

The morning of the killings, the bodies were taken by wagon across the river to Pilares, Mexico, and...