A Line Drawn in Blood: The Porvenir Massacre

In the early hours of January 28, 1918, a frigid air settled over West Texas, colder than was usual for January. In the near distance, the familiar ebb and flow of the Rio Grande lulled the village of Porvenir to sleep. The smell of charred mesquite had dwindled by then. In their small homes, known as jacales, the 150 men, women, and children of the bordertown pulled blankets to their chins as they slept. In the ranching community 170 miles southeast of El Paso, only the starlight above made the silhouettes of weeds and plants visible. Porvenir had settled for the night. The only thing that broke the silence were the sounds of trotting horses, which was unusual for that time of night. 

The men of the Texas Rangers’ Company B adjusted the rims of their cowboy hats before dismounting from their horses. They came to the small farming village on the hunt for a bandit they claimed to be among the hundreds of Mexican-originating people that lived there. They brought four local ranchmen with them. Under Captain James Monroe Fox, these men were out for blood.

At the same time, the Eighth U.S. Cavalry Regiment also patrolled the area. The US Soldiers were sent to monitor activity on the border, and through their work, they became familiar – friendly, even – with the villagers. Unlike the Rangers, the soldiers didn’t believe there were any bandits in Porvenir. These were their friends, the same villagers that fed soldier Robert Keil homemade tamales, tortillas, and burritos as he patrolled the US-Mexico border just that week. 

On the word of Captain Fox, the Rangers and ranchmen loaded their rifles and tiptoed towards the small adobe homes. Their horses whinnied and neighed as the men crept along. While Captain Fox didn’t technically have the authority to order the U.S. Cavalrymen around, the chaotic structure of border enforcement and the Rangers’ local dominance meant that in practice, the Cavalry followed their lead that night. Torn between morality and obedience, the soldiers entered the homes of the villagers, too. 

Upon being shaken awake, the shivering people of Porvenir protested their innocence in Spanish, but it was to no avail. Their innocence didn’t matter – at the time, anyone of Mexican descent was a suspect, if not already a criminal, in the eyes of law enforcement. Through whiskey-soured breath, the Rangers insisted that they were looking for bandits. It was a routine search, they said. 

Keil tried to reassure the villagers that everything would be alright – he told them not to be alarmed, the Rangers were just going to search their homes for weapons. Hearing the word “Rangers” did nothing but exacerbate their fear – they knew what the police thought of them. Keil would later write: “this story will prove, I believe, that the terror was more than justified.”

The Rangers split the village apart, separating fifteen able-bodied men away from the women, children and elderly – fathers dragged from their sons, sons from their mothers, husbands from their wives. Captain Fox dismissed the cavalrymen, who started back to their horses. In their absence, the Rangers rallied the men together like a herd of cattle. 

The Rangers spat at them, “Are you Chico Cano?”

They weren’t the infamous bandit the police were looking for. They were regular villagers, with crops to tend to the following morning. Among them were men like Antonio Castañeda, Longino Flores, and Pedro Herrera.

Standing just three feet away from the men, the Texas Rangers opened fire. The sound of bullets pierced through the freezing air, followed only by the sound of the victims dropping to the ground. The Rangers stood above the mangled men and emptied their guns into what was left of the twitching bodies. The desert was silent for a moment as if it, too, was horrified by what it had seen. A few seconds passed until the soldiers heard an eerie cacophony of simultaneous shrieks, the sounds of Spanish prayer, and the frightful screams of children. 

“We got him, Captain, we got him,” the Rangers said before riding away on their horses. Captain Fox called the cavalry back in. The Texas Rangers would return to their camp while limbs hung from the victims’ bodies. The U.S. Cavalry soldiers would be left to deal with the aftermath. Women sobbed to the soldiers as they waited for a priest to come and bless the bodies of the dead. It would be hours before a priest could make it all the way out to the middle of the desert to the blood soaked sand where the soon-to-be infamous Porvenir Massacre had just unfolded. 

*  *  *

Somehow, the sun still rose in the morning. Golden strokes of sunlight settled over the fifteen violated bodies. Juan Bonilla Flores, who was only twelve years old at the time, had hardly slept. He had survived the massacre – the Rangers spared him because of his young age. 

Juan had grown up in the Rio Grande Valley, certain that he belonged just as much in the Lone Star State as he did in Mexico. When his father Longino Flores was offered a job in Porvenir in 1913, the Mexican-American family made a life there. Juan spent his childhood as a Texan, but his father was killed in the very village they called home. 

Juan was left to wrestle with the destruction of his community and the haunting image of his father’s gruesome execution. He knew there was one person in town who had surely been left unscathed and who could help him face the aftermath. Juan Flores mustered whatever strength he could, unsure if danger still lingered. He made his way through the village, stepping over what was left of his father and his neighbors, careful not to drag his pants in the pools of drying blood from the night before. 

Harry Warren wasn’t expecting anyone, least of all the young boy pounding at his door so early in the morning. In between gasps of disbelief and horror, Juan eked out something of an explanation: the gunshots by the bluff, the cold bodies of the men he loved, and the wails of those who survived. Without hesitation, Warren grabbed his brown leather notebook and followed the boy back into the desert. Warren, a local schoolteacher, was in a rare position: he was a white Anglo man, married into a Mexican family, a figure trusted on both sides of the border. His Anglo identity spared him from being among the dead, but the massacre still devastated his family. 

Warren recognized one of the executed men instantly: his father-in-law, Tiburcio Jacques. His screams were suffocated by the angry wind and by the impossibility of changing what had happened. He did the only thing that he could: he opened up his notebook and began to write a testimony. With shaky hands, he wrote down the names of those killed and records of their lives. These weren’t anonymous Mexicans caught in yet another fatal Ranger conflict: they were, in every sense of the word, Harry’s family. He tried to transcribe the horrific scene to paper, but no amount of pages could recreate the community that had been destroyed. Still, Warren was hopeful that his recollection could eventually bring justice to the people of Porvenir. 

“Capt. Anderson threw a cordon of U.S. soldiers around the houses while the Rangers went in and took the men and boys out of their warm beds, they making no resistance whatever,” Warren wrote. “After the soldiers left them, it was only a few minutes before the latter heard a fusillade of shots. One of the soldiers rode back and seeing what the Rangers had done, (the moon was shining nearly as bright as day), cursed them, and told them ‘what a nice piece of work you have done tonight.’” 

While Warren’s notebook would later serve as a key witness account, justice was rarely granted in cases like these. While what happened in Porvenir was horrifying, it wasn’t an isolated incident. Violent murders at the hands of law enforcers were far too common in bordertowns at the turn of the century. Porvenir was simply the most undeniable case, too brutal and too close to the truth the state had tried to bury. A long, tense history preceded the inhumane acts – one that explains the context, but can never absolve the guilty. 

The history of the conflict was layered and complex, complicating both Mexicans and Anglo Texans in generations of resentment and violence. In 1848, Mexico ceded half its territory to the United States at the end of the U.S.–Mexican War. Tens of thousands of Mexicans became American citizens overnight, though the law didn’t treat them as such. Anglo settlers, with the support of complicit courts, robbed Mexican families of their land through forged deeds, deceit, and, of course, force. The Mexican Revolution of 1910 also sent waves of refugees northward, only for them to be immediately deemed as dangerous. Between 1914 and 1919, Texas Rangers unlawfully killed hundreds of Mexicans and Mexican Americans with little to no legal consequences. Both sides believed that they had their own reasons to fight.

On Christmas Day of 1918, only a few weeks before the massacre in Porvenir, Mexican raiders attacked the L.C. Brite Ranch, killing three people. Though the people of Porvenir had nothing to do with the raid, something multiple testimonies confirm, the Rangers insisted upon their involvement. Or, more likely, they simply needed another group of Mexican people to blame. Captain J.M. Fox and his men searched the village on January 26. They found nothing. Two days later, they returned, and the massacre at Porvenir ensued. Fifteen residents of Porvenir, a witness would tell the soldiers, were marched towards a bluff to await their execution. The men of Porvenir were lined up and tied to each other with nothing but fear and a rope before being shot multiple times at close range. 

In the days after the massacre, bloodied bodies were laid in a wagon where they were hauled over the border to a land that loved them back, a place where they could truly rest in peace: Mexico. Many of the villagers fled with them, grappling with the sentiment that Texas was never really theirs. Soon after, US Soldiers razed the village, the golden embers carrying with them the legacy of the Porvenir people, but also the evidence of the moonlit murders that took place on that cold night. The truth could’ve been buried in the ash if not for the resolve of Texas legislator José Tomás Canales. 

Canales, a State Representative of the Rio Grande Valley, originally from the bordertown of Brownsville, was determined to bring justice to the dead and, in turn, to all Mexican people that experienced state-sanctioned violence. Canales filed House Bill 5, which called for the Texas Rangers to be reformed, about a year after the massacre. While he had attempted to resolve these issues through peaceful conversations with high-ranking officials in the past, nothing had changed. So Canales turned to the law. 

To no one’s surprise, the Rangers were dismissive of the filing. They clung to their heroic, mythologized status amongst white Texans. They vilified Canales, using his Mexican identity to paint him, too, as a suspect of… well, anything. They stalked him around Austin in the days before the hearing, threatening him of what would happen if he questioned the Rangers’ actions. They told Canales that if he didn’t stop pushing for justice, he was “going to get hurt.”

“I do not expect to live six months…if this bill is killed,” Canales told colleagues.

Nonetheless, a full inquiry moved forward, and the extensive hearings dragged the Rangers’ unlawful actions to light, from their drunkenness to their abuse of power to their execution of the fifteen men in Porvenir. Twenty-one charges were filed against them. Canales and his opposition met in a small room on the second floor of the state Capitol in Austin. A twelve day hearing with over 1,400 pages of testimony followed. Canales was determined to prove that General James Harley and others ignored the violent acts that the Rangers committed against Mexican communities. 

However, the defense was equally persistent. But the trial turned personal and Canales found himself on the defense. In an attempt to bring his credibility into question, the Rangers berated him, calling him  a “Bad Mexican,” amongst other epithets. During the hearings, they accused Canales of sympathizing with bandits because of his heritage.

“Now, Mr. Canales, you are by blood a Mexican are you not?” One man, Mr. Knight, asked. Canales, a handsome man with dark brown eyes and hair, responded that he was an American citizen. Knight asked, “By blood?” Eventually, after some more harassment about his identity, Canales acquiesced: “Well, Mexican, you may call it, that’s true, a Texas Mexican.” Canale was the only Mexican American in the chamber. What Knight was doing was the very epitome of why the Rangers were being accused of such violence: they deemed any person of Mexican origin a villain. 

The testimony revealed a chilling pattern of brutality. The Rangers treated Mexicans on the border so poorly that “innocent people were [as] afraid of them as guilty people,” one witness said. Another piece of evidence showed an eerie photograph of Rangers – Captain Fox among them – posed atop horses with lassos tied to the dead bodies of Mexicans. The photo was printed on postcards and sold state-wide.  Charge eleven of the testimony dealt directly with Porvenir, alleging that Captain Fox and his company murdered fifteen men without giving the men “any chance to prove themselves innocent.” 

While Canales’ bill was ultimately defeated, the committee reached an undeniable conclusion: the Rangers committed a slew of violations of civil and criminal laws. The force of Rangers was disbanded, though many of them, Fox included, were later rehired. None were prosecuted for being a witness to or a participant in the violence that bloodied the Bend. Still, there’s something remarkable about the Canales hearings. Instead of looking at what justice didn’t occur, it’s important to recognize that no one else had ever challenged the Rangers’ violence against Mexicans. The Canales Hearing marked a turning point: the fractures began to crack in the Rangers’ impunity. 

* * *

Juan Flores told only one person about what happened in Porvenir the night of the massacre. He swore his nephew Juan Mesa to secrecy. The rest of the family knew nothing about the community’s tragic history or about the terror Juan Flores had endured as a young boy. For most of his life, Juan Flores carried the trauma of that night alone. 

Decades later, at a family funeral, Juan Mesa finally confessed to his relatives what his uncle had told him: that he had witnessed his own father’s execution by the Texas Rangers, that they had destroyed an innocent village under the pretense of hunting bandits. But the family didn’t believe him. They couldn’t fathom that the very people entrusted to protect the people of Texas could have killed their family. 

In 1998, while researching their family’s history, Juan’s great-granddaughter Arlinda Mesa Valencia and her sister Elida Tobar discovered official records of the Porvenir massacre. Among the list of the massacred men was the name of their great-grandfather: Longino Flores. Shocked by the harrowing truth, they decided to ask Juan Flores about the night in Porvenir. They visited him in Odessa, Texas. He was 93 years old then, and through his foggy memory, the horrors of the night remained clear. At last, he chose to tell his story–  to both his family and anyone else that wanted to know. 

In a rare 2002 interview, Juan Flores sat in a chair, his tan skin dotted with spots of aging. He wore a set of navy blue overalls over his shirt and a baseball cap. Somehow, he’s smiling, just as he is in most other family photographs. He was forced to bear these secrets alone for decades: his mother had taken her life years prior due to PTSD from the night, and his father was killed in front of his eyes.

“Everyone of us collapsed, crying,” he recalled of that night in Porvenir. “There was nothing we could do. There was nothing that could help us. To whom could we complain?”

During that interview, Flores led his family to the bluff where he saw his father and fourteen other men executed 81 years earlier. The sun beamed hard on the old man as he navigated the rocky ground, a tan cowboy hat shielding his face. 

His son asked him, “How do you feel coming back to your birthplace?”

“Well, I remember,” the elder Flores replied. 

For the first time, Flores wasn’t alone in his suffering. His family stood beside him, helping him to confront what had happened in 1918 and determined to seek some measure of overdue justice. 

* * *

Nearly a century after the massacre, a group of professors – John Morán González, Monica Muñoz Martínez, Benjamin Johnson, and Sonia Hernández – decided that forgetting such tragic truths of history was no longer an option. They formed a multifaceted project called Refusing to Forget, a name that underscored their intention of honoring the victims of state-sanctioned violence on the border by returning their stories to the public landscape.

They group aimed to erect historical markers near sites where these crimes took place. They tracked down the original transcripts from the Canales hearings and eventually got them displayed at the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin. The group, as well as descendants of the victims, urged the Texas Historical Commission (THC) to move forward with the long-promised marker commemorating the 1918 Porvenir Massacre. 

However, days before the scheduled plan, casting of the marker was suddenly stopped.

“Once again the descendants lost to the power of the Presidio County political dynasty that our own ancestors lost their lives to,” said Arlinda Valencia. The city argued with the descendants over semantics of the marker, worried that the framing was indicative of the truth about the Rangers that they still wanted to bury, decades later.  Detractors argued that the marker could be used as a political tool, especially during the campaigning of Democratic Texas Senator Beto O’Rourke during that year. Others who opposed the marker failed to recognize what happened as a massacre and believed the marker would perpetuate a false perception of the killings as racialized brutality. 

Despite the contention, the marker was finally unveiled on November 30th, 2018 in Marfa, Texas. This was a significant victory for the descendants and for all people whose stories have been silenced.  The marker worked to dismantle the glorified, untouchable fallacy of the Texas Rangers by remembering Porvenir and the hundreds of other unspoken victims of the Ranger’s brutality. 

Texas is obsessed with its own history. But history has often been written from the perspective of the victors. This is why the marker was so important: Thousands of markers are state sponsored and they reach people who would otherwise never touch a history book. The marker serves as official recognition that these things did happen, these people did die, and that they were remembered in this way. In a way, the marker is the tombstone.

Unfortunately, state-sanctioned violence did not end with the disbanding of Company B or with the Canales hearings. It evolved. Certain communities today are treated as inherently suspect – just like the men of Porvenir, alongside countless other Mexican-Americans, were in the 1900s.

Along the border, families still hear stories that sound too much like Porvenir. Late-night raids, doors kicked down, children separated from parents in the name of national security. Immigration enforcement through agencies like ICE has revived a national sense of confusion: The people that are supposed to be protecting us are the same people out to get us? 

Black communities face similar patterns. Dozens of names repeated in protests across American cities have become symbols of what happens when power is met with impunity: Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. Like the men of Porvenir, they were criminalized and murdered because of their identity. Like Porvenir, their deaths exposed systemic failures of law enforcement. 

Still, memory is an act of resistance. Through protests, community markers, and everyday conversations, the truth can no longer be buried under decades of systemic neglect. Instead, people are forced to confront it. Porvenir is proof of this; Because of the bravery of Juan Bonilla Flores, Harry Warren, and J.T. Canales in speaking out, the massacre can no longer be minimized as a rumor or forgotten in the margins of Texas history.

Their persistence ensured that Porvenir is remembered not from the perspective of the state, but from the perspective of the families who lost everything. The memory of Porvenir will live on and force people to acknowledge the harm done, confront the systems that allowed it, and insist that such violence never be forgotten.