Reverberations of Memory, Violence, and History
A conference for the centennial of the 1919 Canales investigation
January 31 – February 1, 2019
Over ninety years ago, State Representative José Tomas ‘JT’ Canales called for an investigation into state-sanctioned violence unleashed on the predominantly Mexican-origin community in the state’s southern border. In 2019, The Bullock Museum hosted a free two-day conference exploring the 1919 Canales Investigation and its ongoing legacies in Texas.
The Conference
Presentations featured internationally-recognized scholars and researchers from the United States, Mexico, and the United Kingdom, who delivered different perspectives on the history of lynching and other extralegal violence in Texas, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and the U.S. South. Topics of discussion included the relationship between Mexican American communities and the Texas Rangers, women’s anti-lynching activism, histories of racialized state violence, and the importance of civil rights struggles throughout the twentieth century, all set within broader considerations of borderlands and transnational history.
The Texas Senate passed a resolution acknowledging that conference as marking the centennial of the first state-led investigation into the Texas Ranger violence.
The Anthology
Reverberations of Racial Violence (2021) was published as a result of the 2019 conference commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Canales investigation into the Texas Ranger Force.
It gathers fourteen essays on this dark chapter in American history. Contributors explore the impact of civil rights advocates, such as José Tomás Canales, the sole Mexican-American representative in the Texas State Legislature between 1905 and 1921. The investigation he spearheaded emerges as a historical touchstone, one in which witnesses testified in detail to the extrajudicial killings carried out by state agents. Taken together, the essays provide an opportunity to move beyond the more standard Black-white paradigm in reflecting on the broad history of American nation-making, the nation’s rampant racial violence, and civil rights activism.
A spanish translation of the book was published in 2024 and is available here.
The 1919 Canales Investigation Conference was co-sponsored by:
National Endowment for the Humanities, Bullock Texas State History Museum, Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture, Glassock Center for Humanities Research, Clements Center for Southwestern Studies, Southern Methodist University, Latino & Mexican American Studies at Texas A&M University, The Center for Mexican American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, and Refusing to Forget
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