In late June 1914 #TexasRangers Ira Cline and H.L. Roberson killed Carlos Morales Wood, editor of the Spanish language newspaper La Patria Mexicana published in Valentine, TX, while he supposedly resisted arrest. Cline and Roberson had a warrant for Wood’s arrest for the crime of “inciting riot” for “publishing articles in his paper purporting to create prejudice of the Mexican people against the Americans,” as reported in the Alpine Avalanche on July 2.
This “prejudice” was Wood’s claim that Rangers and soldiers stationed on the US side of the US/Mexico border where “being murders cut throats and thieves” and “doing many heinous crimes” which the Mexican population should no longer stand for.
But law enforcement was a real, violent threat to Mexican and Tejano people in the early 20th century. Historians like Monica Muñoz Martinez (@MonicaMnzMtz) and Benjamin Johnson (@BenjaminHJohns1) have rigorously documented this in their books The Injustice Never Leaves Youand Revolution in Texas.
Paul Wright, then an associate professor of geology and sociology at Sul Ross State University, sums up the situation well in a footnote to a 1999 article: “reading between the lines makes it clear that a probably unarmed Wood was killed in cold blood” for publishing newspaper stories of this violence.
This post is a part of the #OTD in Ranger history campaign that @Refusing2Forget is running this year. Follow us on Twitter or explore this website to learn more.
