Porvenir, Texas: Massacre, Cover-Up, and Recognition

The Porvenir massacre was the January 28, 1918, execution of fifteen unarmed Mexican and Mexican American men and boys by a combined force of Texas Rangers, U.S. Army cavalry soldiers, and local Anglo ranchers in the small farming village of Porvenir, in Presidio County along the Rio Grande. The victims ranged in age from fifteen to seventy-two. No one was ever criminally prosecuted, the village was burned and abandoned days later, and its surviving residents fled across the border into Mexico.¹

The Village and the People Killed

Porvenir, whose name means “future” in Spanish, sat on the banks of the Rio Grande in northwest Presidio County, hemmed in by the Sierra Vieja mountains. In early 1918, roughly 140 people lived there, nearly all of Mexican descent. They were landowners and farmers who grew cotton and other crops using water diverted from the river and raised livestock. Manuel Moralez held a deed to 1,600 acres; Román Nieves owned 320.² A schoolteacher named Harry Warren taught about twenty children from families including the Bonillas, Floreses, Gonzalezes, Jáquezes, Lareses, Moralezes, and Nieveses.¹

The fifteen men and boys killed that night were Antonio Castañeda, 72; Longino Flores, 44; Pedro Herrera, 25; Vivian Herrera, 23; Severiano Herrera, 15; Manuel Moralez, 47; Eutimio González, 37; Ambrosio Hernández, 21; Alberto García, 35; Tiburcio Jáquez, 50; Román Nieves, 48; Serapio Jiménez, 25; Pedro Jiménez, 25; Juan Jiménez, 16; and Macedonio Huertas, 30.²

What Triggered the Raid

The massacre unfolded during a decade of severe violence along the Texas-Mexico border. The Mexican Revolution had begun in 1910, and Anglo settlers and law enforcement routinely branded ethnic Mexicans as “bandits.” Scholars estimate that Texas Rangers, vigilantes, and local officers killed somewhere between several hundred and five thousand ethnic Mexicans in reprisals and summary executions between 1914 and 1919.³

The immediate trigger was the Christmas Day 1917 raid on the L.C. Brite Ranch, about forty miles from Porvenir. Roughly forty-five men, described as possible followers of Pancho Villa, killed a mail carrier and two stagecoach passengers, looted the store, and stole horses and saddles. The Eighth U.S. Cavalry pursued the raiders into Mexico and killed ten of them.⁴ There was no evidence tying anyone in Porvenir to the attack, but local white ranchers demanded revenge and suspicion fell on the village anyway.⁵

On January 24, 1918, a combined force of Rangers, soldiers, and ranchers searched Porvenir and found no weapons and no evidence connecting anyone there to the Brite Ranch raid.⁵ They came back four nights later.

The Killings

Late on January 28, 1918, members of Texas Ranger Company B, soldiers from Troop G of the Eighth U.S. Cavalry, and four local ranchers — Buck Pool, John Pool, Tom Snyder, and Raymond Fitzgerald — surrounded Porvenir. They pulled residents from their homes, separated fifteen men and boys from the women and children, marched them a short distance away, and shot them.¹

The next morning, schoolteacher Harry Warren went to the scene with one of his students, Juan Bonilla Flores. Warren’s father-in-law, Tiburcio Jáquez, was among the dead. Warren wrote down the names of every victim and of their widows and children in a notebook he labeled “Porvenir.” That notebook is now held at the Archives of the Big Bend at Sul Ross State University and became a foundational document for everything that followed.⁶

Surviving families crossed into Mexico, where troops stationed near Ojinaga gave them refuge and permission to recover the bodies. The dead were buried in a mass grave on the Mexican side of the river.¹ Days later, U.S. cavalry soldiers returned to Porvenir and burned the empty houses.⁷ The village never recovered. A post office operated from 1926 to 1948; by 1940 the population was down to twenty, and a 2009 count recorded three residents.⁸

The Cover Story and Its Collapse

The Rangers and their allies initially claimed the men had died in a firefight, describing the victims as “thieves, informers, spies, and murderers.” Investigations by U.S. soldiers, the U.S. State Department, and Mexican consuls established quickly that the men were unarmed and in Ranger custody when they were shot.¹

The Mexican embassy filed a formal protest with U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing. Texas Adjutant General James A. Harley wrote to Captain J.M. Fox of Ranger Company B confirming that the fifteen men were “defenseless and unarmed” and in custody when they died. Harley warned that such actions created “political complications which can occasion serious damages to our country” at a time when the United States was fighting in World War I.¹

Who Was Punished, and Who Wasn’t

On June 4, 1918, Governor William Pettus Hobby disbanded Company B. Five Rangers — Andrew Charles Baker, Max Herman, Bud Weaver, Allen Cole, and Boone Oliphant — were fired. Others were transferred. Captain Fox was pressured to resign and did so on February 11, 1918, shortly after the massacre. Fox was never prosecuted, and the Rangers later rehired him as a captain from 1925 to 1927 and as a Special Ranger from 1934 to 1935.⁹¹⁰

No Ranger, soldier, or rancher was indicted or prosecuted for the killings. A local grand jury declined to return indictments.¹¹

The Canales Investigation

State Representative José Tomás Canales, the only Latino member of the Texas legislature at the time, made Porvenir the centerpiece of a campaign to reform the Rangers. He met with Governor Hobby and other officials in March 1918 to raise concerns his Rio Grande Valley constituents had been reporting for years.¹²

He was met with threats. On December 11, 1918, Ranger Sergeant Frank Hamer intercepted Canales in Brownsville and told him, “If you don’t stop that you are going to get hurt,” repeating the threat in front of Brownsville city commissioner Jesse Dennett. Canales reported the threat by telegram to Governor Hobby. Adjutant General Harley wired Hamer ordering him to stop, but no discipline followed. Hamer later stalked Canales around Austin, and Canales required personal escorts to attend the hearings safely.¹³

Canales filed House Bill No. 5 on January 15, 1919. A joint legislative committee chaired by Senator William H. Bledsoe began taking testimony on January 31 and heard from more than eighty witnesses over twelve days, generating more than 1,600 pages of transcripts. Canales called Porvenir “cold-blooded murder” and submitted depositions and survivor testimony as evidence.¹²

The committee concluded on February 19, 1919, finding evidence of “gross violations of civil and criminal statutes” by the Rangers.¹¹ Legislation passed on March 31, 1919, reduced the size of the Ranger force, increased pay, and created new procedures for citizens to file complaints. Canales later said forty-five “undesirable characters” were dismissed from the ranks. Still, no one was prosecuted for Porvenir.¹²

Claims Filed Through Mexico

Families pursued redress through diplomatic channels as well. Juan Méndez wrote an official testimony on behalf of the survivors describing the “suffering women and families who have become orphans” and asking the Mexican government for aid. In 1926, Mexican attorneys filed twelve claims for survivors through the U.S.-Mexico General Claims Commission, established by the 1923 convention between the two countries. In 1935, attorney Oscar Rebasa filed Concepción Carrasco de González, et al. (United Mexican States) v. the United States of America, charging that U.S. and Texas authorities had denied justice by failing to apprehend, prosecute, or punish anyone.¹

What the Archaeology Later Showed

For nearly a century, the U.S. Army maintained that its soldiers had left before the shootings began and that the cavalry had “nothing to do with the affair.” In November 2015, senior project archaeologist David Keller of the Center for Big Bend Studies at Sul Ross State University led a privately funded excavation of the site, the first and only archaeological study conducted there. His team surveyed 2.5 acres with metal detectors and drone-based mapping and collected fifty artifacts, thirty-six directly connected to the massacre.¹⁴

Firearms examiner Douglas D. Scott analyzed thirty-eight ballistic artifacts and concluded that at least nine to ten firearms had been used. Most of the ammunition was military-issue: .30-06 cartridges fired from three different M1917 Enfield rifles, the standard U.S. Army weapon, and .45 ACP cartridges from Colt Model 1911 semi-automatic pistols, also a military sidearm. Civilian ammunition, likely from Ranger and rancher revolvers, made up about twenty percent of the ballistic evidence. One recovered bullet contained embedded human bone fragments. Roughly sixty-one percent of the recovered ammunition came from military firearms.¹⁴¹⁵

The findings, published in an academic journal in September 2022, contradicted the Army’s long-standing denial. Keller noted that many bullets likely remain inside the victims, whose mass grave in Mexico has never been excavated.¹⁵

The Long Fight for Recognition

For most of the twentieth century, the massacre was largely absent from public memory. That began to change in 1998, when Benita Flores Albarado, a daughter of survivor Juan Flores, found documentation of the killings in Presidio County records. Her discovery led to a reunion of descendants and a sustained campaign for public recognition.¹⁶

Historian Monica Muñoz Martinez applied to the Texas Historical Commission’s Undertold Markers Program in 2015 for a marker at the site. The THC approved the marker text on July 27, 2018, and ordered it cast for a September 1 unveiling.¹⁷ The Presidio County Historical Commission and County Attorney Rod Ponton objected, and on August 7 the agency halted production. The American Historical Association condemned the decision, noting that objectors had identified no specific factual errors.¹⁸ The marker was finally dedicated on November 30, 2019, and stands on U.S. 90 about twenty-seven miles west of Marfa. It names all fifteen victims and calls the event a “Texas tragedy.”¹⁹

Neither the state of Texas nor the Texas Rangers have ever issued a formal apology. In 2018, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety, which houses the modern-day Rangers, said the massacre “has no relevance to the modern day/current Texas Rangers or to DPS.”¹⁶

Descendants also spent years trying to obtain something ordinary: death certificates. Under Texas law, when a death certificate is not filed within a year, a county judge must authorize a Court-Ordered Delayed Certificate of Death after a probate hearing.²⁰ Presidio County issued one certificate in 2019, for Longino Flores, but then-County Judge Cinderela Guevara later called it a “mix up” and declined to issue one for Manuel Moralez. Descendants reported being improperly charged more than $250 in court fees for applications that should have cost $1 per certificate. In January 2025, descendant Yolanda Mesa and two others submitted delayed-certificate forms for thirteen of the remaining fourteen victims, asking that the cause of death be recorded as “homicide” with the notation that the victims were “shot and killed.”²¹ On May 12, 2025, visiting Judge Eduardo Gamboa of El Paso approved Court-Ordered Delayed Certificates of Death for fourteen of the men killed at Porvenir.²²

1
Texas State Historical Association. Porvenir Massacre
2
Zinn Education Project. Porvenir Massacre
3
Refusing to Forget. The History
4
Texas State Historical Association. Brite Ranch Raid
5
Encyclopaedia Britannica. Porvenir Massacre
6
Bullock Texas State History Museum. Harry Warren Porvenir Notebook
7
Center for Big Bend Studies. Keller Porvenir Massacre
8
Texas Almanac. Porvenir
9
Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum. Fox, J.M. “Monroe”
10
Refusing to Forget. Porvenir Massacre
11
Bullock Texas State History Museum. Documenting the Porvenir Massacre
12
Texas State Historical Association. Canales Investigation
13
Washington Post. How The Highwaymen Whitewashes Frank Hamer and the Texas Rangers
14
Taylor & Francis Online. Porvenir Massacre Archaeological Investigation
15
Big Bend Sentinel. Newly Published Archaeological Findings Complicate Narrative of Porvenir Massacre
16
Time. Porvenir Massacre Descendants
17
Refusing to Forget. Porvenir Massacre Marker
18
American Historical Association. AHA Executive Director Letter to Texas Historical Commission Concerning Postponed Porvenir Marker
19
Texas Historical Commission. Remembering the Porvenir Massacre
20
Marfa Public Radio. Descendants of Porvenir Massacre Victims Continue Fight to Obtain Death Certificates
21
Big Bend Sentinel. Years Later, Death Certificates for Porvenir Massacre Victims Still in Limbo
22
Big Bend Sentinel. Monsters Walk Among Us: After Years-Long Struggle, Judge Grants Porvenir Death Certificates