La Matanza: A Progressive Era Story

Where were you when you first learned of La Matanza? Between 500 and 5,000 people killed in South Texas.

In 1919, Texas Senator J.T. Canales set up a commission to investigate murders and crimes connected to the Texas Rangers in South Texas. In 1935, Texas historian Walter Prescott Webb estimated that between 500 and five thousand people he considered to be Mexican were killed in South Texas. Did you learn of this history in school, from your family, with your friends or at a library?

Chris Carmona, author and public historian, will dialogue about the events and the process of making them public again.

Christopher Carmona, Professor, Our Lady of the Lake University is an author, a scholars and a founding member of the public history collaborative Refusing to Forget. You might know him from El Rinche: The Ghost Ranger of the Rio Grande, which was a finalist for the 2019 Best Young Adult Novel for the Texas Institute of Letters and The Road to Llorona Park, which won the 2016 NACCS Tejas Best Fiction Award and was listed as one of the top 8 Latinx books in 2016 by NBCNews. His story, “Strange Leaves,” was the third finalist in the Texas Observer Short Story Contest of 2014. He was also a Pushcart Prize nominee in 2013. He has published three books of poetry: beat, I Have Always Been Here, & 140 Twitter Poems. He has been published in numerous journals and magazines including Trickster Literary Journal, Interstice, vandal., Bordersenses, and the Sagebrush Review. He has co-edited an anthology called Outrage: A Protest Anthology about Injustice in a Post 9/11 World for Slough Press and was a co-editor for The Beatest State in The Union: An Anthology of Beat Texas Writing. He was also a co-author for a scholarly conversation book entitled Nuev@s Voces Poeticas: A Dialogue about New Chican@ Identities. Professor Carmona is the author of a series of bilingual YA novels, El Rinche Vol. 1: The Ghost Ranger of the Rio Grande (2018);  El Rinche Vol. 2: Revolución (2021); and El Rinche Vol. 3: Matanza (2025). 

Refusing to Forget:  
Between 1910 and 1920 ethnic Mexicans living on the Texas-Mexico border were targets of state-sanctioned violence. Although historians estimate that several thousand Mexican nationals and American citizens were killed, this period of violence has received little public attention.

Refusing to Forget, an award-winning educational non-profit, hopes that in bringing public awareness to this often forgotten period, we can also raise the profile of a struggle for justice and civil rights that continues to influence social relationships today.

The collective has mounted exhibits at the Bob Bullock Museum, received federal grants to bring attention and publish books on the events connected to La Matanza, and is involved in helping people make connections between the Texas present and the Texas past.