The Lone Legislator

This is Latino USA, the radio journal of News and Courturre Latino USC Latin Latino USA. I'm Maria Inojosa. We bring you stories that are underreported but that mattered to.

You, overlooked by the rest of the media.

And while the country is struggling to deal with these, we listen to the stories of Black and Latino Studio United Latino Front, a cultural renaissance organizing at the forefront of the movement. I'm Maria ino Jossa nose Bayan. Hello, dear listener, Here's a show from Los Archivos and a quick warning. This story has some graphic references to violence and murder. Over the last few years, there have been several reports of law enforcement agents on the US Mexico border going rogue.

Border Patrol agent Joel Luna has been dealt a twenty year prison sentence for organized criminal activity in a case involving the decapitation of a.

Would be snake.

Had pleaded guilty to possession with intent to distribute marijuana for receiving a bribe.

Importation of Customs and Border Protection agents have traffic drugs, taken bribes, and allegedly raped migrants. In one dramatic case, an agent turned out to be a serial killer.

Juan David Ortiz confessted killing four women in a two week time span in the Laredo, Texas area near the US Mexico border. Ortiz was a border patrol.

What these individual reports reveal is just how much discretion law enforcement has while policing the border, and under the Trump administration's recent policy changes, these powers have expanded even more.

Human rights groups have complained for months that border agents are wrongfully turning away people seeking asylum.

In the US.

The Trump administration began hearings Monday in makeshift tent courthouses in South Texas.

Customs and Border Protection is advancing a program that allows border patrol agents to conte the first interview in the asylum process.

While historically there have been few attempts to increase oversight or reform, the government once actually did investigate the way policing happened on the border. But that was over one hundred years ago. From Futromedia and PRX. It's Latino USA. I'm Mariano Posa. Today, we go back one hundred and one years to a rare moment in time when the State of Texas investigated the way we police our border. One of the early forms of law enforcement on the

Rangers get that first One of the.

Afternoon and a big movie that came out last year and.

You put cowboys on bunnang clubs.

Texas Rangers, but their narrative is complicated. There's a lot of history here, but basically, back in the early eighteen hundreds, the southern border of Texas was disputed by the US and Mexico. It wasn't until eighteen forty eight, after the Mexican American War that the Treaty of Guadelupe Valgo established the Rio Grande as the border. That meant Mexicans who were living in the region were suddenly in US territory

So they are protecting in name, Anglo settlers from savage Native nations and from you know, treacherous Mexicans.

That's historian Monica Munos Martinez. She's the author of the Injustice Never Leaves You, Anti Mexican violence in Texas. She's an assistant professor of American Studies at Brown University, and she's from South Texas.

And so what you have is the recruitment of men who have no training. They can shoot on site, they can arrest prisoners.

Claiming that they were protecting Anglo ranches from raids by Mexican bandits. The Rangers terrorize the Mexican and African American community, beating and even taking the lives of as many as five thousand people. In nineteen eighteen, a group of Rangers was part of a ruthless massacre of fifteen men and boys in the border town of Borbenide, Texas.

It is the most well documented example of gross abuse and injustice in a haunting story because despite the number of witnesses, there were no prosecutions of the Texas Rangers that participated.

After hearing about all of these abuses, one man would decide that all of this was just too much. The Rangers needed to be held accountable for their violence. That man would end up starting an investigation into the Rangers that would capture the nation's attention, and it would leave behind a narrative about the US Mexico border that would linger even today. To tell us the story of how it all turned out, producer Liza Jaeger is going to take it from here.

Jose Tomascanalis didn't really want to be at the center of an investigation of the Texas Rangers, but from the very beginning that's how it was. Well, I mean, I think maybe we should just start with, like, who was he like as a person?

This guy is you know, he's in terms of like top forty hits, right, this guy was a hit.

This is Richard Ribb.

He's studied canalist for years, since he started his PhD back in the nineties. He's writing a book about him for ut Press, and he knows a lot of details.

And he's this incredibly well educated, sharp looking. If I don't know if you've seen pictures of him, he was a good looking young man. Like what very fine cheekbones.

Canalis was born in eighteen seventy seven on a ranch in South Texas, a really huge, fancy ranch.

He was from the landed elite in South Texas, whose family in South Texas dated back into the late eighteenth century.

Canalis is descended from Spanish immigrants who set up in Texas back when it was Mexico.

By the time Canalis is.

Born, they'd been living in the region for over one hundred years, so he's of Mexican descent as well. They're one of the most powerful, wealthy ranching families in the region. But Canalis from early on isn't going to be a rancher. He goes to law school in Michigan.

And soon he is conducting the legal affairs and real estate affairs for the King Ranch.

Back from law school, Canalis starts working as a lawyer for one of the biggest ranches around.

Which would be you know, the equivalent of Exxon Mobile or Amazon or something today.

It's a huge, important job, and Canalis does it well.

He becomes pretty well known, powerful.

And eventually came into the political side of things.

In nineteen oh five, he becomes the sole official of Mexican descent in the Texas legislature.

And it's important to.

Know that for Canalis, being a legislator isn't really.

Just a job.

He was really religious and law legal system. For him, all of that gets wrapped up in his faith.

Canalis is all about the rule of law. If the rule of law breaks down, then we're no more than savage beasts.

Okay.

So that's his mentality and the other thing to know about Canalis he is very familiar with the Texas Rangers.

He idolizes as the Texas Rangers.

Historian Monica Munos Martinez. Again, Canalis is familiar with the Rangers because.

He grew up with them.

He tells stories about the Rangers, like camping on their property, about them swapping horses with the Rangers, and that you know they were glad to see them when they came around, and they you know, they were men of honor.

But as a state representative, Canalis starts getting reports about the Rangers, and they're telling a really different story that the Rangers, especially those rangers who are hired fast in a group, pretty untrained, are not the Rangers of his youth. He hears about men shot in the back just for reporting a crime, or burnt alive, beaten to death, all of this with no prosecutions, no serious oversight, And to Canalis, all of that sounds like the rule of law breaking down.

So he starts to be unsettled by this culture of impunity.

And then a relative of Canalis, a rancher, is tortured by a group of rangers. It happens when he's on his own property. They claim that he's helping bandits. Canalis writes about the case to the governor.

Like, you've got to clean these guys up. These rangers are a destructive force and if he could just talk to somebody, get him to see the light, then they would act responsibly.

But the governor doesn't do anything about it. And then one day Canalis is walking down the street by his law office and.

He hears this shout from behind him and approaching him is this massive individual six four two eighty.

Maybe it's a ranger named Frank.

Hamer, and he says to Canalis, you better stop what you're doing or you're going to get hurt.

As in, stop complaining about the rangers. And that for Canalis that's a turning point.

Him with all of his privilege. He's not even protected from this kind of racial intimidation.

So in January of nineteen nineteen, Canalis arrives at the Statehouse in Texas with a plan. Canalis, lover of law and order, has written a bill, a bill recommending some simple reforms.

And it creates quite a fewer.

He wants rangers better discipline, a bond system, basically meaning that if a Ranger killed someone, the victim's family could seek compensation.

So it comes in and the word gets out that Canalis wants to take down the Rangers. That's the message.

Canalis doesn't want to take down the Rangers. He just wants to pass a bill for more oversight perform.

And Canal you know, way, whoa whoa, whoa. Wait, who's calling for the dissolving of the Rangers?

Not me, But the legislature decides.

Let's let's have a hearing about all this. Let's have a hearing on the existence of the future existence of the Rangers.

Are not a public hearing on the legislature floor.

The committee will now come to order.

So for this next part of the story, we're going to take you inside that investigation, which is over one hundred years old. So to bring it alive, we have some voice actors who will be reading a bit from that transcript.

It's January thirty.

First, nineteen nineteen, and Canalis is in the middle of this six hundred square foot room at the State Capitol in Austin. There are all these rows of desks, a podium up front, and a serious audience. Every Texas Ranger has been called to Austin for the investigation, and they've shown up at the Capitol building filling the room.

You know, there are accounts of the room being so packed that people are spilling out to the hallways and looking in from the windows.

And the plan for this whole thing is get a bunch of witnesses to talk about exactly how the Rangers are acting, and at the end decide are they doing a good job or are they breaking the law?

And Canalis he's pretty much.

Single handedly in charge of making the case against the Rangers.

He's in over his head. He's in way over his head. I mean, this all has come up on the fly, right, It's not like he's been planning this for six months. He's putting this together on a week's notice.

But if you read those first few pages, of the transcript. Canelis seems to start out pretty confident. He has his letter he's written up with a bunch of charges against the Rangers, and he hands.

It out to all these important people in the room.

On the first day of testimony, this big group of men shows up to talk. They're all Anglo businessmen and ranchers, and they're there to talk about general conditions on the border and their personal histories with the Rangers. So one of the first witnesses Canelis questions is a guy who runs a car shop in Idelgo County, in a town called Mercedes, which is right near the bottom tip of Texas.

He jumps right in.

You say you live in Mercedes, Yes, sir, you remember the incident of the young man that came to Mercedes during the Bandit trouble we had in nineteen fifteen on the branch train arrived there about noon and was arrested by rangers. He had his hand in a sling and was arrested by rangers and was found dead a few minutes afterwards.

So here Canalis.

He's reminding the guy of this case where a wounded man had come to town for medical help, and because the man was of Mexican heritage and had arrived a few days after a bandit raid in town where bandits were injured. He was shot and killed by the rangers, no questions asked, even though he had nothing to do with the raid.

This wounded man. You know, it was a day or two after the incident that this man arrived at Mercedes on the noon train with his hand in a sling to see the doctor and was arrested and immediately taken out and shot, thinking he was one of those persons wounded in that.

And Canalis is kind of like, come on, remember this thing that happened, But the car shop owner up on the stand says no, multiple times, No.

I never heard of any such case as that.

And maybe it's then that Canals starts to realize that he's not going to be like collectively putting heads together with everyone in the room to get to the bottom of what's really going on with the rangers. The investigation is going to be a fight one version of reality against another, And for many of the witnesses in those first few days, their reality of the US Mexico border is that it's a violent place. This is an Anglo settler from South Texas on the stand being questioned.

Would you be afraid to continue your residence there if they should abolish the Rangers.

I think it would be dangerous. I think would start all over again. The bandits and outlaws across the river now will come on this side more.

We were almost terror stricken down there.

We look upon the rangers as more or less of a godsend.

To our valley.

They're describing a border region where the rangers are necessary and Mexicans are outlaws.

One lawyer who.

Testifies says the border is infested with banditry, and Canalis has a different narrative. He has a lot of evidence on his side, stacks of testimonies from people who've written to him about ranger abuse.

Except there's a catch.

People know that if you bring charges against the Texas Ranger, you're likely going to be killed. People know this.

People are too afraid to testify in person. The next few days of the trial are just this barrage of witnesses. Canellis doesn't even get his own witnesses on the stand for days, and it's not until the seventh day that Canalis actually gets someone on the stand who is of Mexican heritage a man named Jesus Vireal.

He's in law enforcement in South Texas, a constable.

Viareal says one day he was driving three men to his ranch when a ranger pulled them over. The ranger interrogated them aggressively, and Villareal tells the story on the stand.

They got hold of me by the throat, mouth and nos and they held me that way about five minutes.

They told me to speak. I could not speak.

He says.

The rangers beat them with pistols until they confess to a crime draft divasion, but that it was a false confession.

I told him there was an untruth. Then the cocked pistol was put into my mouth. They told me I would tell the truth or they would kill me.

Via Reel is one of just two Mexican American victims of ranger abuse who speak during the investigation, and at the end of his testimony, he gets asked to do this thing to point out his abuser, the man who he's just told that whole story about.

He's in the room.

The investigation is by all accounts grueling, but janels he feels like he's doing pretty well.

I think that he wholeheartedly believes that if you show the ways in which people are being denied due process, that that is going to alarm politicians, and so I think that he has more faith in American democracy at that time that looking at the conditions, looking at the context, than I would have had.

But Monique says that there's also this bigger thing that's happening. The Ranger investigation is being reported on every day, not just locally but also nationally. It's read by people who've never been to Texas, let alone South Texas.

So people are developing these ideas about what the border is, what Mexicans are, and because many people have been actually been there, the people who are testifying or setting the scene.

Of a place full of Mexican outlaws and horse thieves and draft dodgers on the border, the.

Attorneys create this narrative that there is a crisis on the border and that Anglos are under threat and that they are being murdered in mass by Mexicans, which is not accurate.

It starts to become evident that that's not an accident.

It's a strategy paint.

The border as lawless and Mexicans as violent, disloyal and patriotic and anyone who disagrees probably shouldn't be trusted.

Coming up on Latino USA, the investigation of the Texas Rangers is about to get personal. Stay with us, Yes, Hey, we're back. It's nineteen nineteen and j Di Canales is the only member of the Texas State Legislature of Mexican heritage and he begins a full scale investigation into the lawless behavior of the Texas Rangers, who have been known to arrest, torture, or even murder Mexican Americans on the border with impunity. And in this part of the hearing

The Rangers hearing is pretty well publicized. People in Austin are paying attention, but there's one moment that's advertised in the papers for days beforehand. It's the tenth day of testimony, when Canalis himself is slated to take the stand.

People were spilling out of the room trying to watch what was happening.

It's ten am and Canalis settles into his seat at the front of the room, poised and smiling, and then he starts talking.

So he actually starts with a long monologue he gives he introduces himself to the people in the room, and really it's like he's introducing himself to the journalists who are going to be writing about this.

My name is J. T. Canales. I was born in the old county of Nuess, state of Texas, very near to the present town of Kingsville. I am forty two years old, will be next month. I went to the public schools of my county, came to Austin and attended business College.

He talks about his degrees, his history of service for the state, and Canalis. He's being strategic here, like, come on, you guys, we're on the same team.

We're all from the same world.

He was lighter skinned, his wife was anglow, and so he very much is trying to align himself in terms of his family history and his political work with the other men, the other white men who are in the Texas legislature.

He starts narrating how he feels like the Rangers for almost one hundred years were this great heroic force.

They were a capable set of men and did not need any restriction because their own conscience was a self restraint and law.

But that little by little they've gone rotten.

In nineteen fifteen, so far as my recollection goes, is when the first general outrages perpetrated by Rangers began.

He explains that bandit raids on the border increased because of economic instability after the Mexican revelation, and then he spends the next two and a half hours explaining how the Rangers have come to violate the people's trust as law enforcement.

Are you ready for the cross examination?

And then it's time for questions. The Rangers lawyer, this man named Robert E. Lee Knight, gets up mister Canalis and he starts grilling Canalis mostly about his motives.

Have you not consciously or do you think it is possible unconsciously permitted yourself to be worked into a condition where you are prone to the outrageous perpetrated and magnify the casual mistakes of those struggling with the situation down there? About what you have testified?

Okay, So what's happening here is he's asking this really roundabout question where he's basically saying, don't you have an agenda here?

An anti white, pro Mexican agenda?

No, Sir, I do not at all I say here that the men who killed the Austins and others down there committed cold blooded murder.

Canalis is like, no, I'm not biased. These murders are just wrong. And basically for hours, this is the tone of the back and forth between Knight and Canalis. The committee actually has to take a break for dinner, and when they come back, there's a surprise testimony. State Representative Claude Hudsmith has traveled all the way from DC to testify.

You have lately been elected a member of Congress.

Yes, from the sixteenth Congressional district.

Hudsmith is a really big deal.

He's one of the most respected politicians in the state from El Paso, and from the start his testimony is aggressive.

I don't believe in this, mister Chairman. In extending very much clemency to men who come across that river and murder our wives and children, you have got to kill those Mexicans when you find them, or they will kill you.

He describes Mexicans as inherently violent. He calls the murderers and rapists. You know, it's all transcribed, and he says things like you can't give them a chance. You have to shoot them when you see them, you know, saying if you remove the Texas Rangers, I will calm down from DC and lead a mob if I have to.

Now, I'm going to be candid with you, tell you about mob law. If I had it in my power, I would lead a mob in a minute against them.

You are speaking as a citizen.

Yes, I'm speaking as a citizen. We are not going to stand for those bandits to ravage our country.

After Hudspith, the Rangers lawyer picks up the cross examination of Canalis, and that's when things start to get even uglier, more personal.

Now, mister Canalis, you are by blood a Mexican, are you not.

I am not a Mexican. I am an American citizen.

Your father or grandfather came from Mexico.

My father came from Mexico.

How old were you when he came here.

I don't know. I wasn't born then, And you.

Don't know from family history or tradition where he came. No, sir, and all of your people are not Americans, that is, are not citizens of the United States. Mister Canalis, have you any blood relatives on the other side? I have got some, yes, sir, how many?

I don't know. I can't tell you because I haven't been to Mexico in a long time.

The lawyer is basically saying to the room, look at this guy. Because he has Mexican heritage, we should think twice about everything he says and this whole investigation.

You want this committee to assume that because mister Canalis has some relatives in Mexico, that he is disloyal.

No, sir, I do not. I simply offer it under the ordinary rules the proceedings of this character. Hear me a moment. It will do no harm. There is a saying that blood is thicker than water. Not accusing the gentleman of consciously having motives that are not worthy, but I say that might unconsciously influence him in this matter.

And remember, for Canalis this whole time, the heart of his problem with the Rangers hasn't actually been that they're targeting Mexicans or people with Mexican heritage. He's upset because they're breaking the law. So Monica says, for him to be personally attacked like this, it's a blow.

He saw himself as a Texan, as an American and didn't identify as being Mexican, and in this investigation, in the ways in which he is treated, this is an effort by these lawyers to put him in his place and to say you are a Mexican. Just try to demean.

Him anything, for they're with this witness, Gentlemen absolutely through.

By the time the hearings closed that day, it's been twelve hours since Canelis first took the stand. The hearings end on February eleventh, eighty three people have testified. A few days later, the Hearings committee releases their report.

The committee says, Okay, we've carefully considered this stuff and Rangers are fine. They exonerated them, finest force the world has ever seen.

Kind of stuff.

They go out of their way to commend the Rangers captain and his general for doing excellent work. They've been under trying conditions, the report says, and done a good job in a violent place. They do include a few specific incidents of abuse.

This guy and this guy and this guy were bad apples, you know, like this guy went row, that guy went rogue, you know, this guy.

And there were some big changes afterwards.

Many members of the force were dismissed, mostly the ones that were hired quickly and without qualifications, and a way to hear complaints was put in place. But overall, systematically the Rangers procedures mostly don't change and the findings don't call for any prosecutions. Later, the Rangers captain writes about the report to a friend and tells him quote, the committee report was all we could hope for vindication complete.

But even after the hearings, House Bill five is still around.

This is Canalis's original bill for Ranger reform, but now it's gutted of power. Mostly it just gives the Rangers a raise, which infuriates Canalis.

He fights it to the nail on the House floor, almost coming to blows.

The bill passed.

When Canalis Is asked about it in the newspaper later, he says, I do not recognize my child. Canellis doesn't run for office again. After that session. He goes back to Brownsville.

He continues to work as a lawyer, not.

In politics, via legal advocacy.

And in nineteen twenty nine he helped to found what is one of the main civil rights organizations for Latinos today, LULAC, the League of United Latin American Citizens.

And he then continues to help design this legal strategy for seeking more rights for Mexican Americans, and so the way that he does that shifts, So you know, the idea of who they're fighting for, whose rights they're trying to defend, shrinks.

In the early days, members were US citizens only, and women were not encouraged to join. And Monica argues that in that early advocacy, a particular strategy starts to take shape.

So it's essentially, you know, the strategy of civil rights that says, like, we will through this respectability politics. You know, we are well educated, we have good jobs, we have histories of military service, and we have good patriotic citizens that they, as a legal strategy, claim a category of whiteness.

And she says, canalists latching onto that strategy. It might have been related to his experience in nineteen nineteen in the Ranger investigation.

Historians have interpreted his conservative politics in the twenties and thirties and forties and thereafter is really being shaped by this experience in the trial.

When it comes to what the Ranger investigation meant for law enforcement on the border, this is a moment of some reform, some acknowledgment.

Some people look at this investigation in nineteen nineteen is saying that's the endpoint. The crimes were put on display, and so the Texas Rangers were reformed, and then after that the Texas Rangers were wonderful.

Right for historians like Monica and for many descendants of people who were hurt by the Rangers, it wasn't that simple because mostly the investigation affirmed a culture of anti Mexican policing, one that didn't change after those weeks in the hearings.

You know, dismissing Texas Rangers is not an act of justice when you don't see the prosecutions. It means that many of them also rejoin law enforcement and other capacities. Some of them become federal officers, They become US Immigration Customs Inspection agents, some of them become prison guards. Some of them go on to be in the Border Patrol.

The Border Patrol, by the way, was founded in nineteen twenty four, just five years after this investigation, and it came out of a section of a congressional bill push or by none other than Claude Hudsmith, the guy from the investigation who called Mexicans murders and rapists, and Monicae says the investigation left another legacy too.

What you really saw was that there was a media and pr machine that was being animated by politicians, by Texas rangers to cast the border as a dangerous place and to justify state.

Violence, a place in crisis and full of others. That image that the state lawyers and the Anglo ranchers and the rangers painted of the US Mexico border it stuck.

That's something that actively goes on today, the separations of families, people being denied their legal rights to claim asylum. There's an active effort to portray people, racialize them in a way that denies them any sort of public sympathy and instead sanctions publicly the kinds of brutality that we're seeing on the border today.

And so this idea of the border as this violent, lawless place where law enforcement doesn't have to follow the same rules as they do elsewhere, that's not something new. It's over one hundred years in the making.

Special thanks to historians Monica Munjos Martinez and Richard Ribb. Rib is currently working on a book titled Shame and Disgrace to My Native State, j Ticnalees and the Quest to Reform the Texas Rangers. It comes out in twenty twenty two and special thanks to our voice actors Marlon Bishop, Brandon Gomez, jg Lilly, Tim Lopez, Raul Pes and Brian Pickett. This episode was produced by Liza Jaeger and edited by Sophia Paalisa car fact checking by Amy Tardiff. It was

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