The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas, by Monica Muñoz Martinez, is a powerful and haunting account of the state terror imposed on Mexican people living in Texas in the early twentieth century. Martinez works diligently to uncover and reconstruct the violence Mexicans experienced at the hands of the state (usually the Texas Rangers) and to push Texans to remember this side of their state’s history.
Martinez asks a provocative question: how can a state remember the victims of its own violence? What responsibilities does the state today owe to these people? She notes the dearth of historical markers (and in some cases, a lack of archival evidence as well) to memorialize the hundreds of murdered Mexican people in the early twentieth century. Her investigation into the way that the lynching of Antonio Rodriguez is remembered in the town of Rocksprings reveals the divergent narratives that infuse the town. While the lynching itself became an event with wider implications than just Rocksprings (protests over the injustice happened all over Mexico), white people in Rocksprings remember the lynching as the unfortunate extralegal killing of a man who was ultimately guilty of murder. Mexican people in Rocksprings, in contrast, saw it as the murder of a man who was innocent of any imagined crime. These two diametrically opposed narratives make it difficult for the citizens of Rocksprings to commemorate Rodriguez or the murdered woman, Effe Henderson. Indeed, the centennial memorial celebration sought to place a marker to remember Rodirguez’s lynching, however, Martinez reports that her application to the state was rejected (or stalled).
Martinez’s ultimate point, which she emphasizes throughout the book, including in the title, is that the injustices done to Mexican people in Texas still leave marks on Texans today. The Texas Rangers enjoy a sterling reputation, buoyed by cultural representations of the Rangers as daring cowboys. The brutality and lawlessness of their campaign against Mexican people in Texas disappears from the wider cultural memory.
Martinez’s reliance on oral history provides the book with valuable perspectives not found in the archives. The legacy of violence, reverberating down the generations, manifests itself in the diligent preservation of the memories of murdered people. The state, who commits the violence, also holds the power to preserve memory in the form of traditional sources: death certificates, police reports, court documents. The historian’s reliance on the traditional archive, in these cases, obscures the victims of state violence and terror, who disappear from this source base. The archive acts as another tool of state repression. In contrast, people like Kirby Warnock and Norma Longoria Rodriguez collected the memories of their family members, who speak not with the authority of the historian or the state, but instead with the authority of those who witnessed violence and its effects. It is a powerful reminder to historians that these memories offer the chance to disrupt the archival and cultural narrative and recall stories covered up by repression and terror.