What do you think?

Yeah, so great question.

Nice to have someone who's focused on earlier history, especially 1700s.

So yeah, mission system is really important.

Here, I think I'm trying to write an account of this that... does a better job of emphasizing the power of Native peoples and how long it lasts, which is not something that Americans, I think, are conditioned to think of, either with respect to Texas or anywhere else.

So in a lot of ways, I show that the Spanish and French actually become more Indian than Indians became Spanish and French.

So they start eating the same food.

So how bad was it?

Tell me about that.

Sure.

So the massacre itself is at the end of January in 1918, and essentially the Rangers, with a bit of a escort from the US Cavalry in far west Texas, the nearest landmark today, if you wanna call it that, would be Big Bend National Park, but it's, you know, hours of driving to get even there.

They come into the small village of Porvenir, right on the Rio Grande, and they separate the men and boys from the rest of the villagers, and they line up 15 teenage boys and men against a bluff, and they shoot them.

And this ends up resulting in a big outcry and eventually the next year in 1919, a very long and well-publicized set of legislative hearings when a state representative basically charges them with crimes against humanity, right, with violating their oath, with killing innocent people.

And there's a long inquest, not only into Porvenir, but into a set of larger killings in the 1910s that probably involved hundreds of victims at the hands of the Texas Rangers and others, almost all of them along the US-Mexican border, almost all of them Mexican descent people, some involved in military actions and banditry, many of them simply being Mexican and being stuck in the wrong time or the wrong place or having land that a neighbor of theirs coveted and fingered and turned their names over to the Texas Rangers.

This is associated with the Mexican Revolution, right? So after a long period of relative calm and actual cooperation for economic development and for the suppression of indigenous peoples between the governments of the United States and Mexico, there is a full-fledged revolution, breaks out in Mexico in 1911.

Uh, can you explain that process and what's going on today?

Tell me about that.

Sure.

So the massacre itself is at the end of January in nineteen eighteen, and essentially the Rangers with a bit of a escort from the US Cavalry in far West Texas, the nearest landmark today, if you wanna call it that, would be Big Bend National Park, but it's, you know, hours of driving to get even there.

They come into the small village of Porvenir right on the Rio Grande, and they separate the men and boys from the rest of the villagers, and they line up fifteen teenage boys and men against a bluff, and they shoot them.

And this ends up resulting in a big outcry.

And eventually, the next year in nineteen nineteen, a very long and well-publicized set of legislative hearings when a state representative basically charges them with crimes against humanity, right, with violating their oath, with killing innocent people.

And there's a long inquest, not only into Porvenir, but into a set of larger killings in the nineteen-teens that probably involved hundreds of victims at the hands of the Texas Rangers and others, almost all of them along the US-Mexican border, almost all of them Mexican descent people, some involved in military actions and banditry, many of them simply being Mexican and being stuck in the wrong time or the wrong place or having land that a neighbor of theirs coveted and fingered and turned their names over to the Texas Rangers.

Uh, can you explain that process and what's going on today?