The Silence Beneath the Mesquite

The Rio Grande flows slow and brown past Roma and Rio Grande City, curling around Starr County like an ancient scar. On quiet nights, you can almost imagine the murmur of voices carried on the wind—men, women, and children whose lives were cut short not by war in foreign lands, but by racial terror at home.

When people speak of lynching in America, their minds often leap to the Deep South—to Mississippi or Alabama, to Black men hanging from oak trees under the gaze of grinning white mobs. What too few realize is that here in South Texas, another campaign of terror unfolded against Mexican and Tejano families.

Starr County, tucked along the border, was not spared. It stood on the frontlines of a bloody era known as La Matanza—The Massacre—that stretched roughly from 1910 to 1920, when Anglo vigilantes, ranchers, and the Texas Rangers unleashed a wave of extrajudicial killings that left thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans dead across the borderlands.

The official records are scarce, but the silence speaks louder than words. In December 1887, decades before La Matanza reached its height, Starr County already witnessed a chilling preview: the lynching of Gerardo Casas in Rio Grande City. Accused of theft, Casas never saw a courtroom. A mob strung him up, delivering “justice” with rope and rage. That single act of extrajudicial violence foreshadowed the storms to come.

Just months later, in 1888, Rio Grande City itself erupted in what newspapers called a “riot” but what survivors remembered as a crackdown. Mexican residents who resisted Anglo control found themselves facing gunfire, intimidation, and, in some cases, quiet disappearances. It was a lesson to local Mexican families: resist, and you risk the rope or the bullet.

By the 1910s, when the border boiled with revolution spilling over from Mexico, the killings multiplied. Texas Rangers—sworn to uphold law—became enforcers of a racial order, often little better than vigilantes with badges. In ranches outside Roma, in old settlements like Casas Blancas, and in the brushlands of Starr County, families whispered the same prayer at dusk: “Dios nos guarde esta noche.” God protect us tonight. The settlement of Casas Blancas was started as a new colony by José de Escandón. The community was largely abandoned following local feuds and alleged murder, which drove the remaining González family away. Because the settlement was abandoned more than a century ago, no modern map shows what remains of the town. Historical records describe it as seven miles west of Roma, Texas, in Starr County. It became a forgotten land in our history.

The stories passed down in hushed tones tell of men dragged from their homes, accused of being “bandits” or “revolutionaries,” and executed without trial. Some were shot in the back as they ran, their bodies left unclaimed in the mesquite. Others were taken by Rangers under the pretense of questioning and never returned. Anglo ranchers, eager to seize land once held under Spanish and Mexican land grants, often looked the other way—or worse, cheered the terror, knowing each family that fled left another parcel open for claim.

What makes Starr County’s place in La Matanza particularly haunting is how the violence intertwined with dispossession. Families who had lived on the land for generations—descendants of the original grant holders—found themselves branded as “undesirable” or “disloyal” simply for being Mexican. The lynching rope and the legal deed worked hand in hand: kill a man, terrify his neighbors, take his acres.

In January 1918, the Porvenir Massacre in neighboring Presidio County would become infamous: fifteen unarmed Mexican men and boys executed by Rangers and soldiers in the desert. But what happened there was not an isolated act. Starr County had lived under the shadow of that same violence long before and long after. The names of its victims—Casas and countless others—may never be etched in marble, but their absence shaped the county’s soul.

Today, when families in Rio Grande City or Roma walk past the plazas, they tread on soil that once drank the blood of innocents. Some of the old trees still stand, quiet witnesses to unspeakable acts. To ignore them is to deny a piece of history that belongs to every Mexican American in Texas.

Black and Brown histories are bound together by this same legacy of racial violence. Just as Black Americans endured lynching to enforce white supremacy in the South, Mexican Americans endured lynching and massacres in Texas to cement Anglo dominance. Our ancestors’ pain is shared pain. Their survival, shared survival.

What we know is heartbreaking: In Refugio County, 1874, two Mexican men were hanged by a mob after being accused of stealing cattle. In Rocksprings, 1910, Antonio Rodríguez, only 15 years old, was burned alive while a crowd of hundreds watched. His death sparked outrage as far away as Mexico City. In the same region, weeks later, another teenager, Antonio Gómez, was lynched by a mob after a bar fight. His small body was dragged through the streets.

The victims were often poor farmers, ranch hands, or teenagers. Their deaths were not just individual tragedies; they sent a message. Stay in your place. Do not claim your rights. Do not resist.

We cannot undo the hangings, the shootings, or the land thefts. But we can break the silence. We can teach our children that the ground they walk on was once theirs, before the rope, the rifle, and the deed book stole it away. We can remind them that unity—between Black and Brown, between the oppressed of yesterday and today—is the only path forward.

The Rio Grande still flows. Listen closely and you can hear the voices saying: Remember us. Tell the truth. Never again.

This isn’t a matter of hating each other. It’s a lesson that matters in the grand evolution of our humanity.

@Janie

@alvarezjanie

Copyright © 2025 Janie Alvarez for FRONTeras.