#OTD on April 7, 1965, two Texas Rangers patrolled Mathis, Texas, during a contested election in which a slate of several Mexican American candidates and a dissident Anglo, calling themselves the Action Party, challenged longstanding Anglo political power.
Mexican American voters swept the Action Party to office, but only after a campaign of intimidation aimed at depressing their turnout.
As the Corpus Christi Caller described it, “voters were required to sign affidavits that they had purchased their own poll tax” and “had no voting aids on their person.” “This is the first occasion,” the reporter noted, “such affidavits have been required here.”
The Action Party’s victory was one of a number of conflicts between Mexican-American insurgents and an Anglo establishment dating back to the 1910s.
The same day, the Mexican American slate that had won control of Crystal City’s government in 1965 in a political earthquake was defeated. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/crystal-city-revolts
The presence of the Rangers in Mathis in 1965 points to both continuity and change in the history of the Ranger force. Rangers no longer engaged in the mass killings of the 1910s, but they were still a weapon of Anglo employers and politicians, and were controversial for this role.
The threat of violence from Rangers and other police was never remote. Five years later, a Mathis deputy shot and killed an activist Anglo doctor, which many Mexican-American residents considered an assassination. https://www.jstor.org/stable/westhistquar.44.4.0437
This thread is a part of the #OTD in Ranger history campaign that @Refusing2Forget is running this year. Follow this twitter handle or https://refusingtoforget.org/ranger-bicentennial-project/, and visit our website https://refusingtoforget.org to learn more.
The key sources for this thread are @MonicaMnzMtz ‘s The Injustice Never Leaves You and Richard Ribb’s Readers Guide to the Canales Hearings
Refusing to Forget members are @ccarmonawriter @carmona2208 @acerift @soniahistoria @BenjaminHJohns1 @LeahLochoa @MonicaMnzMtz and @Alacranita, another co-founder is @GonzalesT956
@emmpask @sdcroll @HistoryBrian @LorienTinuviel @hangryhistorian, @ddsanchez432, @elprofeml, and @littlejohnjeff are other scholars working on this project.
