Porvenir Massacre
Marfa vicinity, Presidio County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Porvenir was a community in remote northwest Presidio County on the Rio Grande. In the midst of military conflicts and raids across and along the international border and in the immediate area during the Mexican Revolution, the small farming and ranching settlement was the site of a notorious tragedy in 1918. A group of Texas Rangers from Company B in Marfa, U.S. Army soldiers from Troop G of the 8th Cavalry, and local ranchers arrived at Porvenir in the early morning hours of January 28, 1918. They came to the ranch of Manuel Moralez and separated fifteen able-bodied men and boys from the women, children and other men. Though initial accounts denied any wrongdoing, later testimony confirmed that these 15 victims were shot and killed. Family members crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico to bury Antonio Castañeda, Longino Flores, Pedro Herrera, Vivian Herrera, Severiano Herrera, Manuel Moralez, Eutemio González, Ambrosio Hernández, Alberto García, Tiburcio Jáquez, Róman Nieves, Serapio Jiménez, Pedro Jiménez, Juan Jiménez, and Macedonio Huertas. In June 1918, Governor William P. Hobby and Adjutant General James A. Harley disbanded Company B, dismissed five Rangers for their actions at Porvenir, and forced Captain J.M. Fox’s resignation. State Representative J.T. Canales filed charges with the Texas Legislature against the Texas Rangers, for the oppression and murder of hundreds of ethnic Mexicans along the Rio Grande. At an investigation beginning January 31, 1919, legislators heard and received testimony regarding several incidents including Porvenir. As a result, the Texas Rangers were reorganized and reduced in size. In the aftermath of the attack, approximately 140 remaining residents of Porvenir abandoned the community. (2015)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Porvenir was a small farming and ranching community on the Rio Grande in remote Presidio County, caught in the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution's border violence. In the pre-dawn hours of January 28, 1918, Texas Rangers, U.S. cavalry soldiers, and local ranchers separated fifteen men and boys from their families and shot them dead. The outcry led Governor Hobby to disband the Ranger company, and State Representative J.T. Canales's charges sparked a 1919 legislative investigation that forced a reorganization of the Texas Rangers; the survivors abandoned Porvenir entirely.
Why it matters
The massacre marks one of the darkest episodes of state-sanctioned violence against ethnic Mexicans in Texas and the reckoning that began to reform the Texas Rangers.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · J.T. Canales
- · William P. Hobby
- · J.M. Fox
Related events
- · Mexican Revolution
- · Porvenir Massacre
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Marfa, TX
St. Paul's traces its roots to English immigrants John and Mary Humphris, who reached Marfa in 1883 and grew the largest mercantile between El Paso and San Antonio. Mary, a devout Episcopalian, gathered worshippers in her home, and the couple financed an adobe church that served many denominations before Marfa's Episcopalians won permission to form their own mission in 1897. The present Gothic Revival church of hollow clay tile and river rock, completed in 1930, stands as the oldest Protestant congregation in the Big Bend.
Blackwell School
Marfa, TX
From 1889, children of Mexican descent in Marfa were schooled apart from their Anglo peers, first in a former Methodist church and later in this thick-walled adobe building named for principal Jesse Blackwell. Generations of Hispanic students learned here under an English-only rule so strict that Spanish words were symbolically 'buried' in a mock funeral. The school closed in 1965 when Marfa's schools integrated, and preservationists have since worked to save it.
Granado Mountain
Fort Davis, TX
This 6,076-foot peak was long known as Granado Mountain for Trinidad Granado (1868–1958), a rancher whose spread lay at its base. The tract had first been acquired from the State of Texas in 1876 by Belgian-born settler Anton Diedrick Dutchover, a Mexican War veteran and civilian stock herder at Fort Davis, whose daughter Dorothea married Granado in 1890. Granado built his ranch on land bought in 1910, and in 1964 Governor John Connally proclaimed the peak renamed Barry Scobee Mountain.
Guadalupe Elementary School
San Angelo, TX
Like most Texas towns, San Angelo ran "separate but equal" schools, and by 1906 its overcrowded Mexican American school had deteriorated badly. Parents fought back—hiring lawyers in 1910 and boycotting the schools from 1911 to 1915—before a cooperative effort with reformer Ginevra Wood Carson produced a modern brick building in 1923 that became Guadalupe Elementary. Through the Depression, community members like Josefa Camunez kept students fed, and WPA funds later built a kitchen, until integration in 1955 led to the school's closing in 1959.