Author: Monica Muñoz Martinez
File Type: pdf
From 1910 to 1920, Texan vigilantes and law enforcement killed ethnic Mexican residents with impunity. Monica Munoz Martinez turns to the keepers of this history to create a record of what occurred and how a determined community ensured that victims were not forgotten. Remembering and retelling, she shows, can inscribe justice on a legacy of pain. **Review In 1915 and 1916, a time of revolutionary upheaval in Mexico, when refugees were streaming across the border, Texas Rangers and American soldiers declared open season on ethnic Mexicans in a time known as the bandit wars. Martinez explores a terrible history that reverberates today not only because of family memory and local curationbut also because so many of its particulars seem taken from current headlines as refugees continue to die in the desert Timely and of considerable interest to students of borderlands history as well as of sociology.Kirkus Reviews With eloquence and corazon, Monica Munoz Martinez has crafted a magisterial study of state-sanctioned vigilante violence in rural Texas. Drawing on institutional archives, oral histories, and family records, she has uncovered horrific events whose deep trauma has carried across generations. She is the first historian to document the anti-lynching campaigns mobilized by Mexican Americans, especially widows seeking justice for their murdered husbands. The Injustice Never Leaves You is a rare, field-defining book that reminds us of the power of historical memory.Vicki L. Ruiz, author of *From Out of the Shadows Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America* In this important and haunting book, Martinez not only documents the painful reality of anti-Mexican violence in Texas, she reveals how, despite the best efforts of the perpetrators, this violence was prevented from fading into oblivion because of the grassroots historical traditions of Tejano communities. The Injustice Never Leaves You opens up significant new insights on everything from state-building along the U.S.Mexico border to questions of collective memory and historical trauma.Karl Jacoby, author of *Shadows at Dawn An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History* The border has always been a place upon which the United States has projected its fears, often at great cost to the people who live here. Much like the time recounted by Martinez, we are in a period of change in every area of life. Politicians have seized upon fears of change to lie about the border, demonize immigrants, and win elections. The history recovered in this book, which sheds light on the consequences of such rhetoric, is an important contribution to the truth.Jose Rodriguez, Texas State Senator A masterful and sensitive work that reveals the ways in which ethnic Mexicans in Texas have dealt with the trauma of state-sanctioned police violence, mourned the loss of loved ones in their communities, and memorialized the victims by creating multigenerational records that counter state narratives.Neil Foley, author of *Mexicans in the Making of America* This compelling book about survival and reckoning examines the efforts of communities in the U.S.Mexico borderlands to wrestle with the meaning of painful episodes of violence. A graceful writer and talented storyteller, Martinez shows the families determination to recover these histories and heal wounds that have lasted for generations.Geraldo Cadava, author of *Standing on Common Ground The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland* Through impeccable archival work and a rich trove of oral history and other testimony, Martinez excavates the record of anti-Mexican violence along the U.S.Mexico border in Texas. The Injustice Never Leaves You is also an indispensable study of the subtler violence along the border of memory and forgetting. A brilliant, important book on the specificities of border history but also on the very nature of history itself.Matthew Frye Jacobson, author of *The Historians Eye Meditations on Photography, History, and the American Present* About the Author Monica Munoz Martinez is Stanley J. Bernstein Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University and an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. She is cofounder of the nonprofit organization Refusing to Forget, which calls for a public reckoning with racial violence in Texas. Martinez helped develop an award-winning exhibit on racial terror in the early twentieth century for the Bullock Texas State History Museum and worked to secure four state historical markers along the U.S.-Mexico border.