History of Lynchings of Mexican Americans Provides Context for Recent Challenges to U.S. Death Penalty

From 1846 to 1870, more than 100 men and women were hanged on the branch­es of the noto­ri­ous ​“Hanging Tree” in Goliad, Texas. Many were Mexicans or Mexican Americans and many were killed by lynching. 

In a November 25 op-ed in the San Antonio Express-News, his­to­ri­an Alfredo Torres, Jr. writes that these pub­lic killings are a reminder that ​“the noose, [which] has been iden­ti­fied as emblem­at­ic of vio­lence and oppres­sion toward African-Americans, [is] often over­looked as a sym­bol of ter­ror for Mexican-Americans.” Torres says that no region expe­ri­enced more lynch­ings of Mexican Americans than Southern Texas, and the pub­lic spec­ta­cles on the Goliad County Courthouse lawn (pic­tured), now an his­toric land­mark and tourist attrac­tion, were wit­nessed by Anglo fam­i­lies ​“in a car­ni­val-like atmos­phere, bring­ing pic­nic bas­kets and taking photos.” 

Lynchings of more than 871 Mexican Americans are doc­u­ment­ed across 13 Western and Southwestern states after the Civil War. But Torres says ​“these num­bers don’t com­pare to what was done in Texas,” where his­to­ri­ans William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb esti­mate that more than 5,000 Mexican Americans were mur­dered between 1910 to 1920. That wave of ter­ror includ­ed numer­ous extra-judi­cial lynch­ings and mur­ders of Mexican Americans by vig­i­lantes, local law-enforce­ment offi­cers, and Texas Rangers.

Texas A & M‑Kingsville jour­nal­ism pro­fes­sor Manuel Flores wrote in an October 2017 col­umn in the Corpus Cristi Caller-Times that the death and leg­end of Josefa ​“Chipita” Rodriguez — framed for the 1863 ax mur­der of a White cot­ton mer­chant and horse trad­er in what was still Confederate Texas — sym­bol­izes the racial vio­lence against Mexican Americans in the state and ​“are as per­ti­nent to the state of Texas as that of the Alamo and Goliad stories.” 

Rodriguez was false­ly accused of mur­der and the theft of $600 after the dis­mem­bered body of John Savage was found on the banks of the riv­er near her trav­el­er’s lodge. Though there was no evi­dence of her involve­ment in the mur­der and she insist­ed ​“No soy cul­pa­ble” (“I’m not guilty”), she was quick­ly tried, sen­tenced, and hanged. In 1985, the Texas Legislature adopt­ed a res­o­lu­tion absolv­ing Rodríguez of the mur­der, and Gov. Mark White signed the res­o­lu­tion, posthu­mous­ly par­don­ing her on June 13, 1985. 

Cardigan and Webb say that wide­spread lynch­ings of Mexican Americans per­sist­ed into the 1920s, ​“even­tu­al­ly declin­ing large­ly because of pres­sure from the Mexican gov­ern­ment.” Issues of racial bias against Mexicans and oth­ers of Latino descent in the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty in the U.S. persist.

122 Latino pris­on­ers have been exe­cut­ed in the United States since 1985. Texas has car­ried out 84.4% of those exe­cu­tions (103), includ­ing the con­tro­ver­sial exe­cu­tion of Mexican nation­al Ruben Ramírez Cárdenas on November 8, in vio­la­tion of inter­na­tion­al treaty oblig­a­tions to have per­mit­ted him to obtain con­sular assis­tance from his gov­ern­ment. 373 Latino/​a pris­on­ers are on state or fed­er­al death rows across the United States, with three-quar­ters sen­tenced to death in California (188), Texas (67), or Arizona (27).

A chal­lenge to the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of Arizona’s death penal­ty, filed by Abel Daniel Hidalgo, is cur­rent­ly pend­ing in the U.S. Supreme Court. His peti­tion presents evi­dence that in Arizona, ​“a Hispanic man accused of killing a white man is 4.6 times as like­ly to be sen­tenced to death as a white man accused of killing a Hispanic vic­tim.”

The Court will con­sid­er dur­ing its December 1 con­fer­ence meet­ing whether to accept Hidalgo’s case for review.