Professor Benjamin Johnson

And this ends up resulting in a big outcry, and eventually the next year in 1919, a very long and well-publicized set of legislative hearings happened.

when a state representative basically charges them with crimes against humanity, right, with violating their oath, with killing innocent people.

And there's a long inquest, not only into poor veneer, but into a set of larger killings in the 19-teens that probably involved hundreds of victims at the hands of the Texas Rangers and others, almost all of them along the U.S.-Mexican border, almost all of them Mexican descent people, some involved in military actions and

banditry, many of them simply being Mexican and being stuck in the wrong time or the wrong place, or having land that a neighbor of theirs coveted and fingered and turned their names over to the Texas Rangers.

This is associated with the Mexican Revolution, right?

So after a long period of relative calm and actual cooperation for economic development and for the suppression of indigenous peoples between the governments of the United States and Mexico, there is a full-fledged revolution breaks out in Mexico in 1911.

It kind of destabilizes the U.S.-Mexican border.

It sends lots of migrants from Mexico into the United States.

So there's a lot of social turmoil.

There's a lot of fear.

And for the first time, Anglos are coming into regions along the U.S.-Mexican border, which even though we're now, what, 90 years after, 80 years after the Texas Revolution, still had majority Mexican populations who voted, who held land, who held

local political office in a way that non-white people in the United States virtually never did, right?

So these border regions are very distinctive

There had been a raid on a prominent West Texas ranch, the Bright Ranch, the month before in December of 1917.

And state authorities really wanted to show that they were responsive to the Brights and to families like theirs.

And there's no evidence linking the residents of Port Veneer to this, but there they were.

It was an opportune, you know, they were an opportune target.

And the ranger commander said,

James Fox on the scene had been sent there.

It was well known that he executed completely innocent Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in South Texas in the previous years.