On the Texas Borderline, A Solid, if Invisible, Wall

It was as if the Ranger who penned this 1892 report could not comprehend that Garza gave voice to the growing frustration of Tejano ranchers and cowboys at the land-grabbing Anglos; that they might be just a little sick of being treated like a "mongrel race," to use a common insult of that era.

'Border Bandits'

A short walk from the state capitol, at the Hideout Theater, the film "Border Bandits" is upending some of the tall tales from that era of revolution -- tales like the looming race war -- and replacing them with a bloody history most folks don't know about. The film centers on the recollections of Rio Grande Valley ranch hand Roland Warnock, who in 1915 witnessed Texas Rangers shoot two unarmed Tejano ranchers -- both U.S. citizens -- in the back.

During a Ranger-led border crackdown to root out so-called Mexican bandits and suspected sympathizers, meaning anyone with a Spanish surname and two good legs, lawmen and vigilantes killed 5,000; thousands more abandoned their ranches and fled to Mexico. A postcard memorializing the border crackdown flashes across the screen, featuring three mounted Rangers with their lassos tied around dead "Mexicans."

But were they really "bandits"? About midway back to the border, at a converted ranch house with creaky wood floors that now is the Kenedy Ranch Museum, historian Homero Vera fills me in on the back story for the "Border Bandits" film.

"They were revolutionaries, they had their ideals," Vera explains. "They called them bandits because they were hostile, because they did kill some Anglos."

The struggle, of course, was over land. Tejano landowners rebelled against the strong-arm land seizures by Anglos that robbed them of their ranches. Between 1900 and 1910, some 187,000 acres went from Tejano to Anglo hands in just two border counties. Suddenly, Tejano ranchers and proud vaqueros (cowboys) became landless farm laborers.

Inspired in part by this Tejano-Anglo conflict, Tejano rebels launched their Plan de San Diego. The 1915 plot called for the defeat of U.S. rule in Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and California, the formation of a new republic for Mexicans, blacks and Indians, and the killing of every Anglo male over age 16.

Bands of rebels burned bridges, derailed trains and wreaked havoc throughout the Rio Grande Valley. It was the nightmare scenario Rangers had anticipated. And though 80 years had passed since that seminal border battle, the Ranger crackdown evoked that old battle cry of the Texas Anglo: Remember the Alamo!

Spurred by the film, state Rep. Aaron Peña (D) proposed a bill in 2005 to teach this largely ignored Ranger history in Lone Star schools. The bill died in session. Peña never revived it.

Faced with the outcry over 21st-century Mexican immigrants, Texas, he said, wasn't ready to look back at injustices committed against Mexican Americans in the distant past. "It's a less tolerant environment -- a xenophobic political environment -- that we exist in today because of the immigration debate," he says.

But the 1915 Ranger campaign wasn't directed at immigrants, I say. It was directed at Tejanos, meaning: U.S. citizens. Fear, said Peña, made such distinctions irrelevant to Anglos of that era.

A few years ago, as part of a push to get a veterans' hospital built in the region, Peña joined Rio Grande Valley vets on a march to the Alamo. But theirs was far from a hero's welcome at that Texas landmark of freedom.