I started this painting not out of some type of revenge or retribution of any kind, but from the desire to honor and to memorialize my great grandfather Manuel Moralez, who was killed that early morning along with the 14 innocent men and boys killed on Jan 28, 1918 in the village of Porvenir in Texas. I wanted to honor the widows and their children who were left without fathers as well, to remember those lives lost through my art.
I wanted to bring to the surface that which was covered up by the sands of time, and shed more light to the racial atmosphere of that time along the Texas-Mexican border concerning American citizens of Mexican descent in 1918. Art speaks volumes!! As the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” and this artwork speaks of many, from the schoolteacher to my great Aunt Julia born on that night to my Great grandmother Francisca Moralez. In the artwork, I wanted to capture the atmosphere of that morning with the oil colors used so that one could feel it, the morning, the coldness, and the truth.
The very early morning sky is clear and pink just before the January sun rises, as Harry Warren wrote in his journal that night, “the moon was very bright”, not a cloudy morning, even the mountains display the color of that morning. To the best of my knowledge this is the site of the massacre, and this art was also to show how it may have looked over a hundred years ago.
We see the rocky bluff where the men were ordered to stand, I put bullet holes in various places in the rocks. In the sand on the right side of the painting you will notice multiple tracks coming in, to show they brought them there, and then you see the fifteen bloody spots in the sand where each one fell and died, and their blood soaked into the sand.
I put the initials of each man in one of the bloody spots in the painting, while doing this I purposely put the younger men’s initials in the center of the bloody spots, as to show possibly the older men told the younger men to get behind us in order to protect them from what was to come. In the artwork the initials of the older men are on the outside, including my great grandfather, the initials would look like this in the painting, MM for Manuel Moralez.
I put myself in their place, while working on the artwork, feeling sad for them, wondering how did they each feel at that moment, with what was going to happen with rifles pointed at them! Their concern for their families, never to see them again. While painting each bloody spot, I was thinking of each individual as I painted their initials, which did bring heartache, even though I didn’t know them. At least their initials would be in memory of them! I would stop and stare at the artwork a lot, for long periods imagining their thoughts, the thoughts of the killers, and also the thoughts of the two young boys, who saw the killings, my grandfather Leandro Moralez, around 12 yrs old and Juan Flores around 11 yrs old, son of Longino Flores who was also killed that night. Those young boys became men that night.
On the left side of the artwork in the sand you will see the bloody tracks and cart tracks that may have carried the dead away. Anyone looking at the painting will see how I wanted to capture the site just aafter the bodies were taken and only the bloody spots remain that tell the real story. This is how as an oil painter/artist, I wanted to express on canvas, Moralez family history, Mexican-American history, Texas state history, and American history as it still is unfolding.
Let this artwork;
RELEASE things,
REVEAL things,
RESTORE things,
To all who see it.
Ed Moralez
April 2025
