The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution: an entertainingly good read informed with thoroughgoing scholarship

The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution:

The Bloodiest Decade, 1910-1920.

By Charles H. Harris III & Louis R Sadler.

University of New Mexico Press.

2004. 687 pages.

By Robert Mendoza

Ninety-four years ago this November, the citizens of Laredo were consumed with anxious speculation. Rumors (“gaseous meningitis” in the quaint parlance of 1911) were inspired by the fact that a company of Texas Rangers had set up camp in the exercise yard of the Webb County Jail. One wag reporter for the Laredo Daily Times guessed that Texas Governor Oscar Colquitt, impressed by Laredo 's fame as a health resort, had sent Captain J. J. Sanders and his men to “recuperate in the Gateway City 's salubrious air -- although they appear to be a husky and healthy set of fellows.”

On the opposite bank of the Río Grande , Nuevo Laredoans were uneasily noting the arrival of crack infantry battalions and a squadron of rurales from the interior of Mexico . At La Jarita Station, 20 miles south of Nuevo Laredo , a large force of men were busy slaughtering cattle and setting out beef to cure on long strings. (Air-cured meats were the traditional battle rations of the Mexican Army.)

When the Mexican rurales intensified their patrols of the Río Grande from Nuevo Laredo upriver to Colombia , the Laredo Daily Times sarcastically opined that they “were charged with preventing the river from changing its course during the night.”

Laredo hotels downtown and in the International-and-Great-Northern Railroad depot area were booked to capacity with Spanish-speaking gentlemen of military age and bearing. These booted and Stetsoned men were not accompanied by women, yet porters and bellboys staggered under the weight of their luggage. Perhaps coincidentally during those tense weeks, the Laredo Daily Times prominently featured large advertisements for A. Duetz and Brothers' Hardware, offering to supply large lots of arms and ammunition. It's possible that this ad (occupying a generous one-sixth of a page) was directed at Laredo nimrods eagerly preparing for the opening of whitetail deer season.

On November 16, a sequestered federal grand jury in Laredo emerged to reveal a string of indictments that unleashed a political firestorm, sowing panic and consternation in Laredo , San Antonio , and Austin . Apparently, Laredo had been the stage for a counter-Revolutionary invasion of President Madero's Mexico , led by General Bernardo Reyes. Reyes -- along with San Antonio publisher and powerbroker Francisco A. Chapa, Webb County sheriff and political boss Amador Sanchez, and other prominent figures -- was charged with felony violations of the U.S. Neutrality Act.

If a wink and a vigorous nod were grounds for indictment, then Governor Colquitt also would have joined the conspirators in the docket, and the nearly moribund Texas Ranger force would have been relegated to histories of mid-19th century conflicts with Mexicans, Union troops, and Comanches.

Authors Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler's history of the Texas Rangers opens with the tale of how these Mexican counter-Revolutionists prevented the demise of the Texas Rangers, this state's most iconic institution. Harris and Sadler (emeritus professors of history at New Mexico State University at Las Cruces ) have produced a formidably researched, comprehensive, and insightful history of one of the world's most colorful and controversial law-enforcement agencies.

This is not your granddad's (or dad's) hell-bent-for-leather account of the Rangers, crammed with well-lathered horses and blathering tales of steely-eyed loners staring down bloodthirsty mobs. It is a political history, which is not to say that Harris and Sadler's scholarship precludes a lively and often tumultuous narrative. The subtitle (The Bloodiest Decade, 1910-1920) is literally dead-on; the book's 500-plus pages are packed with enough gory accounts of stabbings, shootings, cowardly ambushes, and wanton maimings (including the odd beheading) to satisfy the most sanguinary of Tarantino or Rodriguez film aficionados.

A disturbing amount of this mayhem was perpetrated by the men who wore the star. Harris and Sadler not only document the excesses committed by notorious rogue Rangers such as Captain Henry Lee Ransom, but they also investigate the shadowy activities of Ranger icons such as William W. Sterling and Frank Hamer. Serious Bonnie and Clyde buffs who have viewed The Other Side of Bonnie and Clyde (starring Mrs. Frank Hamer) will be amused to learn the sordid circumstances that prevailed when Frank met Gladys.

While The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution is a welcome corrective to the generations of fans' notes that succeeded Walter Prescott Webb's timid and compromised The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense (1939), it hasn't the slightest resemblance to Julian Samora et al's Gunpowder Justice (1979), a demonizing screed that attempted to compensate for slipshod research by ratcheting up 1960s-vintage Raza Unida rhetoric.

Harris and Sadler are well aware that many Mexican-Americans, particularly those with roots in South Texas , have always had a problem with the Rangers. The book's introduction acknowledges the “tunnel vision” of Hispanics vis a vis the Texas Rangers, and the authors have gone to great lengths to explore the subtle and not-so-subtle interactions between the Rangers and Texans of Mexican descent. The book also contains the most comprehensive and thoughtful discussion of the salient role played by Tejano political leaders during the turbulent second decade of the 20th century.

Most of the Chicanos that I grew up with in the 1950s in Laredo 's impoverished El Cuatro barrio (less than 500 yards from the riverbank) would agree with the Gunpowder Justice characterization of the Rangers as the Gestapo of the brushlands. Questioned more closely or asked to identify a Ranger, my neighbors would have pointed to the green-clad Border Patrolmen who cruised our unpaved streets in WWII-vintage jeeps.

Many Gunpowder Justice readers undoubtedly will be amazed to discover that Ramiro Martinez (hero of the Charles Whitman/UT Tower tragedy) was not the first Hispanic Ranger. (A total of 25 Hispanics, as defined by current ethnicity guidelines, served as Rangers.) Harris and Sadler also reveal that three of the 13 Rangers in Captain Will Wright's celebrated Company D in Webb County were Mexican-Americans. There were even Hispanic captains -- Captain Tom Ross (of Company B, 1907-10, and a sometime Laredo resident) was a direct descendant of Juan Antonio Navarro, signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. However, the celebrated Manuel T. “Lone Wolf” Gonzaullas does not make an appearance; perhaps the omission is due to the fact that his greatest exploits occurred during the 30s and 40s.

The heart of The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution is the analysis of the 1915-16 Plan de San Diego raids (aka the Bandit or Border Wars) in South Texas . Fraught with violence and racism, this conflict was seared into the consciousness of generations of Mexican Texans. As far as I'm concerned, authors Harris and Sadler own this story. Charles Cumberland may have met the first scholarly deadline in 1954, but their 1978 “Re-examination” in the Hispanic American Historical Review remains just about all you need to know about the series of bloody border incidents that were planned, funded, staffed, and tirelessly manipulated by Venustiano Carranza.

However, The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution contains new source materials not available to the authors in 1978 (specifically, formerly classified Department of Justice and Military Intelligence files that include intercepted, encrypted telegrams), and this book benefits from a quarter-century of reflection and revision.

All this dedicated scholarship notwithstanding, a stubborn cadre of Chicano academics refuses to acknowledge Carranza's role as the grand artificer of the Plan de San Diego . It is not clear whether Harris and Sadler's characterization of Chicano “tunnel vision” is also directed at these well-published and now quite senior university professors. If so, the metaphor is too charitable. The malignity these scholars display towards the Texas Rangers is akin to an atavistic rage. Demonic Rangers are a key element of these Chicano academics' received versions of South Texas' Leyenda Negra.

The 1915-16 Leyenda Negra was basically set out in the 1950s by folklorist Americo Paredes: In this view, the Plan de San Diego was an indigenous insurgency of Texas Mexicans motivated by a desire to emancipate themselves from Anglo racism and economic exploitation. Their noble aspirations (the call for genocide of gringos is usually omitted) were tragically suppressed by Anglo landowners' hired guns (Texas Rangers) and imperialist U.S Army units. Thousands of innocent Tejano smallholders and farm workers were summarily executed. Tens of thousands fled into Mexico as refugees, never to return. The victims' land was then appropriated by Anglos and developed into the “ Magic Valley ,” an agribusiness empire where the insurgents' grandchildren now languish, virtually enslaved as stoop-labor.

The foregoing interpretation of the border raids of 1915-16 and their historical consequences prevails in textbooks such as The History of Texas published by Harlan Davidson in 2005, and a “canon” of monographs published during the last two decades, most notably Arnoldo De Leon's They Called Them Greasers (1983), David Montejano's Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas (1987), Emilio Zamora's The World of the Mexican Worker in Texas (1993), José Limon's Dancing with the Devil (1994), Rodolfo Rocha's “The Tejano Revolt of 1915” (2000), and Richard Flores' Remembering the Alamo (2002).

Only Montejano and Rocha entertain the possibility that Carranza may have been more than a casual beneficiary of the raiders' actions. Rocha grudgingly admits that Carranza possibly may have aided the raiders by providing safe havens in Mexico and was eventually responsible for ending the incidents. The other four academic monographs avoid Carranza by citing woefully dated secondary sources from the 1950s and 60s.

I find it discouraging to note that all but one of these scholars has held tenured professorships at the University of Texas at Austin. Harris and Sadler discovered the evidence of Carranza's deployment of the Plan de San Diego in the Pablo Gonzalez Archive in the University of Texas' Benson Latin American Library. This archive includes Carranza's orders to the raiders' Mexican commanders, as well as such minutiae as receipts for the purchase of horses and corn rations and the conspirators' hotel and bar tabs. Harris and Sadler published their “Re-examination” of the border raids in 1978, several copies of which have long been available in the Benson Library.

In Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Michel Rolph Trouillot notes that memory, in being selective, actively forgets or “silences the past.” In Chicano scholarly discussion of the Plan de San Diego, Venustiano Carranza is the hugely bearded guy in khaki that everyone in the room pretends not to see. Carranza has no role in an indigenous, irredentist parable. At the end of John Ford's film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the cynical newspaper editor advises, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Sadly, our South Texas Leyenda Negra has not been printed on fish wrap, but is perpetuated in textbooks.

In light of the preceding obsessive bibliographic polemic, it is probably necessary for me to state that The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution also covers events that transpired during the other eight years of the 1910-20 decade. The opening chapters relate how the Rangers' mandate to enforce Republican Governor (1905-11) Tom Campbell's support of Prohibition, repression of gambling, and monitoring of elections in rip-roaring Cameron County led to the near-demise of the Rangers. Incoming Democrat Governor Oscar Colquitt was determined to abolish the Rangers until the Reyes Revolution of 1911 caught him with his political pants down. Colquitt was forced to hastily re-invent himself as a neutrality warrior who reinforced the state's Ranger agency.

In the post-Plan de San Diego period, Harris and Sadler detail the anti-subversive activities of the Rangers during World War I. As was the case with their 2002 book, The Archaeologist was a Spy, the authors benefit from formerly classified military intelligence and cryptographic archives. The “Investigation of the State Ranger Force” led by J. T. Canales in 1919 receives a politically nuanced review and, undoubtedly, many Chicanos will be outraged at the authors' downsizing of the iconic State Representative from Brownsville. Others may be consoled by revelations of the intriguing career of Francisco A. Chapa -- a larger-than-life political operator, a Mexicano Colonel Edward M. House, certainly a precursor of fellow San Antonians Henry B. Gonzalez and Henry Cisneros.

The book's Aftermath relates the post-WWI manpower and budget reductions imposed on the Rangers and their response to the challenges of enforcing Prohibition, suppressing race riots, and bringing order to the new and chaotic oil-boom towns.

At 506 pages, The Texas Rangers and the Mexican Revolution is hefty proof that thoroughgoing scholarship is not incompatible with an entertainingly good read. Also, Harris and Sadler have done for the Texas Rangers what Frederich Katz achieved for Pancho Villa. Decades of painstaking and insightful work has been directed at a colorful and controversial subject to get at the truth that has been concealed beneath layers of myth, obfuscation, and plain damn lies.