Texas Acknowledges Rangers Killed Hundreds of Latinos During Early 20th Century

6.2.16

Texas Acknowledges Rangers Killed Hundreds of Latinos During Early 20th Century: [latina.com] What happened to incite such racially motivated killing? In the first decade of the 20th century, large numbers of white American farmers from the Midwest began making their way to South Texas, a remote region that had managed to remain an enclave of Mexican-American inhabitants. These were Mexican families that became American citizens in the late 1800s with the end of the Mexican-American War and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Now, the reality of their American citizenship came rushing in with the arrival of these white transplants thanks to the advent of newly built infrastructure in the form of roads and rail. Land prices went up exponentially, and many Tejano ranchers found themselves unable to afford the rising property taxes. No sooner did white farmers arrive than they began to invoke the Jim Crow-style of treatment toward people of color that they were used to in the rest of the country. They began stripping Tejanos of their land by simply laying claim to it. Title challenges and outright theft led to a loss of more than 187,000 acres of land for Tejanos in the lower Rio Grande Valley from 1900 to 1910, according to historian Benjamin Heber Johnson in his book.