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This month, a gunman in El Paso looking to kill Mexicans massacred 22 people, marking possibly the worst U.S. hate crime against Latinos in decades. But attacks against Latinos are nothing new. Just as Latinos have deep roots in the United States, the history of violence against them is lengthy too.
And while these incidents rarely get widespread attention, from anti-Mexican lynchings in Texas to the forced repatriation of U.S. citizens of Mexican heritage to Mexico in the 1930s, each has reverberated for generations for the families that lived them.
After the El Paso massacre, Latinos wrestle with a history of racism in the U.S. that repeats itself.
Below is a brief history of anti-Latino attacks in the United States. It is far from comprehensive.
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1849: Expulsion of Mexicans from California mines during the Gold Rush
A historical image of James Marshall standing in front of Sutter’s sawmill, where he discovered gold.
(Library of Congress)
At Sutter’s Mill, where the discovery of gold set off California’s Gold Rush, mobs forced out all Spanish speakers in the spring of 1849. In the following months, mobs also forced Mexicans off three California rivers where prospectors were panning for gold.
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1857: Texas Cart War
Starting in July 1857, white vigilantes in and around the Texas town of Goliad began attacking Mexican American ox cart drivers and stealing their cargo. About 70 Mexican American drivers were killed, some of them hanged from a tree that would come to be known as the Cart War Oak. The racist violence took place in an area where there were repeated clashes between Mexicans and whites, dating back decades.
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Dec. 22, 1877: Bakersfield mass lynching
In Bakersfield, a mob of about 100 men seized from jail five Mexican men who had been accused of theft — Antonio Maron, Francisco Encinas, Miguel Elias, Fermin Eideo and Bessena Ruiz — and hanged them after a mock trial.
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1915: La Matanza
“From summer through late fall of 1915, Texas Rangers indiscriminately shot and killed dozens of Mexicans without questioning, solely based on the assumption of allegiance to bandits” in Cameron County, Texas, according to the Refusing to Forget project. The period of time is known as “La Matanza,” or the massacre. The names of dozens of victims are known, but many others are probably lost to history.
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Jan. 28, 1918: Porvenir massacre
A closeup of bullets recovered from the site of the Porvenir massacre in Texas.
(David Keller / Associated Press)
In the early morning of Jan. 28, 1918, a group of Texas Rangers, soldiers and local ranchers surrounded the residents of the village of Porvenir, in West Texas. They woke families from their beds, separated 15 unarmed men and boys from the rest of the community and executed them. As a result of the lynching, residents of Porvenir abandoned the village and fled to Mexico.
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Nov. 16, 1922: Mob pushes Mexicans out of Breckenridge, Texas
Around 300 armed men marched through town demanding that Mexican residents leave. “When representatives from the Mexican community appealed to the mayor for protection, he replied that he could not guarantee their safety,” wrote William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb in their book, “Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848-1928.”
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Feb. 26, 1931: Raid at La Placita
Relatives and friends wave goodbye to a train carrying 1,500 Mexicans, many of them U.S. citizens, being expelled from Los Angeles and sent to Mexico in 1931 at the start of the so-called Mexican repatriation.
(Getty Images)
Immigration agents stormed La Placita, in the heart of Los Angeles, pulling hundreds of men and women into vans and taking them to trains for deportation to Mexico. The raid set off nearly a decade of so-called repatriations of men and women of Mexican heritage, many of whom were U.S. citizens.
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June 1943: Zoot Suit Riots
(Associated Press)
For several days in the summer of 1943, sailors and other American servicemen in Los Angeles led targeted attacks on young Mexican men and other men of color who dressed in zoot suits, beating them and stripping them of their clothes. The so-called riot bears the name of its victims.
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Nov. 8, 2008: Killing of Marcelo Lucero
The coffin containing Ecuadorean citizen Marcelo Lucero arrives in Gualaceo, Ecuador, to be cremated. Lucero was killed Nov. 8, 2008, in a racist attack in Long Island, New York.
(Associated Press)
Seven teenagers in Suffolk County, New York, who told friends they were going to attack “a Mexican” found Marcelo Lucero, an immigrant from Ecuador. They surrounded and punched him before one of them stabbed him in the chest with a knife and killed him. When the case went to court, it was revealed that the teens considered violent attacks on Latinos, which they called “beaner hopping,” to be a sport.
Sources: “Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848-1928"; “The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas”; “Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s”; Refusingtoforget.org; Texas State Historical Assn.; news reports.
