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Winner of the Caughey Western History Prize Winner of the Robert G.
Athearn Award Winner of the Lawrence W. Levine Award Winner of the
TCU Texas Book Award Winner of the NACCS Tejas Foco Nonfiction Book
Award Winner of the Maria Elena Martinez Prize Frederick Jackson
Turner Award Finalist "A page-turner...Haunting...Bravely and
convincingly urges us to think differently about Texas's past."
-Texas Monthly Between 1910 and 1920, self-appointed protectors of
the Texas-Mexico border-including members of the famed Texas
Rangers-murdered hundreds of ethnic Mexicans living in Texas, many
of whom were American citizens. Operating in remote rural areas,
officers and vigilantes knew they could hang, shoot, burn, and beat
victims to death without scrutiny. A culture of impunity prevailed.
The abuses were so pervasive that in 1919 the Texas legislature
investigated the charges and uncovered a clear pattern of state
crime. Records of the proceedings were soon filed away as the
Ranger myth flourished. A groundbreaking work of historical
reconstruction, The Injustice Never Leaves You has upended Texas's
sense of its own history. A timely reminder of the dark side of
American justice, it is a riveting story of race, power, and
prejudice on the border. "It's an apt moment for this book's hard
lessons...to go mainstream." -Texas Observer "A reminder that
government brutality on the border is nothing new." -Los Angeles
Review of Books
A moving account of a little-known period of state-sponsored racial
terror inflicted on ethnic Mexicans in the Texas-Mexico
borderlands. Between 1910 and 1920, vigilantes and law
enforcement-including the renowned Texas Rangers-killed Mexican
residents with impunity. The full extent of the violence was known
only to the relatives of the victims. Monica Munoz Martinez turns
to the keepers of this history to tell this riveting and disturbing
untold story. Operating in remote rural areas enabled the
perpetrators to do their worst: hanging, shooting, burning, and
beating victims to death without scrutiny. Families scoured the
brush to retrieve the bodies of loved ones. Survivors suffered
segregation and fierce intimidation, and yet fought back. They
confronted assailants in court, worked with Mexican diplomats to
investigate the crimes, pressured local police to arrest the
perpetrators, spoke to journalists, and petitioned politicians for
change. Martinez reconstructs this history from institutional and
private archives and oral histories, to show how the horror of
anti-Mexican violence lingered within communities for generations,
compounding injustice by inflicting further pain and loss. Yet its
memorialization provided victims with an important means of
redress, undermining official narratives that sought to whitewash
these atrocities. The Injustice Never Leaves You offers an
invaluable account of why these incidents happened, what they meant
at the time, and how a determined community ensured that the
victims were not forgotten.
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