From the article…
It wasn’t until I left the dome of life in Red Oak that I realized that there was more to the story of Texas.
That assimilation veil was lifted the moment I set foot in Dr. Maggie Rivas Rodriguez’s Latino Media and Policy class at the University of Texas. There, I learned our state is home to generations of Latinos who’ve molded our culture — George I. Sánchez, who helped end Texas’ segregated schools for Latinos; the Hispanic golf team that won the Texas state championship in 1957 — despite the fact that they weren’t even allowed into the local golf course; and the Chicana cheerleaders in Crystal City who were denied spots on the high school squad and helped start the Latino Civil Rights movement in 1969.
Rodriguez is an associate professor of journalism, associate professor at the center for Mexican American studies, and the director of the Voces Oral History Center, which is dedicated to recording, preserving and disseminating the stories of Latinas and Latinos in the U.S. Her class is where I learned about the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, the nation’s largest and oldest civil rights volunteer-based organization. She also taught me about MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, which also champions civil rights.
Her class is where I learned about La Matanza, or the “The Massacre,” a brutal period of sustained violence against Mexicans in Texas from 1910 to 1920. Cattlemen, U.S. Army soldiers, and the Texas Rangers lynched hundreds Mexicans during La Matanza. Some, like migrant worker Antonio Rodríguez, were burned alive. Other mobs hanged, shot, or whipped Latino U.S. citizens who just also happened to be Mexican, The New York Times has reported.
In the Porvenir Massacre in 1918, Texas Rangers woke landowners and farmers in the middle of the night and executed 15 men and boys, according to the Texas State Historical Association.
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