A selection of Op-eds and essays written by members of Refusing to Forget
Listen to podcasts and audio interviews featuring members of Refusing to Forget
A selection of media interviews and documentaries on the history of anti-Mexican violence in Texas
Uvalde Leader-News (August 22, 2021)
“Texas lost an important keeper of history this week. I am honored to have worked with Benita Albarado and her family, I am grateful that she shared her family history with me and the historians in the public history project Refusing to Forget. We remain committed to continuing her work and sharing truthful lessons of the past with the next generation of Texans.” – Monica Muñoz Martinez
Public Books (July 7, 2021)
“Just as the border is a constructed space, immigration laws and policies are also written and can be changed. Immigration reform has to be a part of broader calls for racial justice.“ – Monica Muñoz Martinez
The Washington Post (June 4, 2021)
“Scholars, teachers and museums have made great strides in incorportating not only Black, Latino and Indigenous histories, but also in addressing racial violence and other forms of white supremecy in the state’s history. The Texas Legislation may end up being a rearguard action in a battle already lost for the hearts and minds of a new generation.” — John Morán González and Benjamin H. Johnson
Houston Chronicle (June 16, 2020)
“Our call to remove the statue is not an effort to remake history in exchange for politically correct fiction, but a call to recognize what the statue intended to represent in its historical moment.” — Sonia Hernández
Austin-American Statesman (August 19, 2019)
“To address ideologies of hate there needs to be an educational component to the state’s response. The continued hold of white nationalism exists because of Texas’s educational failure to address the history of racism and racial violence.” — Trinidad Gonzales
Time Magazine (June 28, 2019)
“Today the nearly 1600 pages of documents are digitally available for view through the Texas State Archives, but the myth of the Texas Rangers continues to loom large. A century later, worrisome trends of police abuse and the denial of rights and protections for migrants continues.” — Monica Muñoz Martinez
The Washington Post (March 31, 2019)
“…films like ‘The Highwaymen’ are counterproductive, encouraging a nostalgic return to outdated and mythical accounts of the past, when the Texas Rangers’ extralegal violence stood for good ol’ Texas justice.” — Monica Muñoz Martinez
Austin-American Stateman (Septemeber 25, 2018)
“The problem is that the story of Texas, at least as we’ve come to know it, is radically incomplete. For every aspect of Texas history remembered this way, there are many more that are forgotten.” — John Morán González
Houston Chronicle (May 5th, 2017)
“…Mexican Americans must continue to work alongside other communities to bend the arc of history toward the peace – and dignity – that flows from social justice.”— John Morán González
Lapham’s Quarterly – By Monica Muñoz Martinez
“This period of state sanctioned violence has largely been forgotten by Americans, due in large part to the work of the press, politicians, and later historians who represented racial violence as progress. Accumulating dead Mexican bodies on the border were presented to mean safer conditions for Anglo settlement, consumption, and capital. Current federal and state policing regimes have deep roots in the violence of the borderlands – the regime of terror practiced a century ago on the Texas-Mexico border is crucial to ongoing conversations about police brutality and the carceral state.” — Monica Muñoz Martinez
Blog: Los Angeles Review of Books – By Monica Muñoz Martinez
“Americans should heed the warnings of immigrant rights and human rights organizations, and the border agents themselves, that warn the abuse at the hands of the undertrained and poorly vetted [border] agents.” — Monica Muñoz Martinez
Texas State Historical Association: Handbook of Texas
“In the early morning of January 28, 1918, Texas Rangers of Company B and four local ranchmen…surrounded the residents of Porvenir. With the help of soldiers from the Eighth U.S. Cavalry Regiment, the rangers and the cattlemen woke up the residents and separated fifteen men and boys from their families and neighbors. The unarmed group was taken into custody, denied due process, and executed en masse.” — Monica Muñoz Martinez
Website dedicated to the descendants of the 15 men and boys that were murdered at Porvenir, Texas in 1918 by Texas Rangers.
Created by Arlinda Valencia
“Brown University Professor Monica Martinez says the dangerous history of ‘invasion’ rhetoric dates back to the early 20th century where Mexican-Americans and Mexican nationals were killed by U.S. residents and officials that were ‘inspired by the rhetoric of politicians’ who painted Mexicans as ‘bandits and rapists.’” — The Beat with Ari, MSNBC
Historians and Latino activists say it’s time to acknowledge the terror experienced by Mexican Americans years before white mobs attacked and murdered African Americans in dozens of cities across the country in 1919.
Border Bandits
Film by award winning Kirby Warnock. Inspired by an oral history collected with his grandfather Roland Warnock.
