Page 8 - 2019 Fall Newsletter

TCU Texas Book Award

A New Book Explores the History of the Texas Rangers

The Friends of the TCU Library, in partnership with the TCU Press,
honored award-winning historian, author, teacher and activist,
Dr. Monica Muñoz Martinez as the 2019 Texas Book Award Winner.
Martinez was honored at a reception on November 14, 2019, where
she received a $5,000 award.

The TCU Texas Book Award is given every three years to honor the
best book published about Texas. Martinez’s first book, The Injustice
Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas, (Harvard
University Press September 2018) shares moving accounts of a little-
known period of state-sponsored racial terror inflicted on ethnic
Mexicans in the Texas-Mexico borderlands.

At the reception, Martinez shared why she began to focus her work on border issues, the family testimonies and interviews
shared in her book to unearth a profoundly tragic yet little known civil rights era in American history. One of the most
important archives for Martinez is the 1,600-page transcript of the1919 investigation into abuse at the hands of the Texas
Rangers, the state police of Texas.

ABOUT THIS BOOK
Between 1910 and 1920, vigilantes and law enforcement―including the renowned Texas Rangers―killed Mexican
residents with impunity. The full extent of the violence was known only to the relatives of the victims. In her book,
Martinez turns to the keepers of this history to tell this riveting and disturbing untold story.

Operating in remote rural areas enabled the perpetrators to do their worst: hanging, shooting, burning and beating victims
to death without scrutiny. Families scoured the brush to retrieve the bodies of loved ones. Survivors suffered segregation
and fierce intimidation, and yet fought back. They confronted assailants in court, worked with Mexican diplomats to
investigate the crimes, pressured local police to arrest the perpetrators, spoke to journalists and petitioned politicians for
change.

Martinez reconstructs this history from institutional and private archives and oral histories, to show how the horror of
anti-Mexican violence lingered within communities for generations, compounding injustice by inflicting further pain and
loss. Yet its memorialization provided victims with an important means of redress, undermining official narratives that
sought to whitewash these atrocities. The Injustice Never Leaves You offers an invaluable account of why these incidents
happened, what they meant at the time, and how a determined community ensured that the victims were not forgotten.

“A page-turner… Haunting… Martinez has written a book that bravely and convincingly urges us to think differently
about Texas’s past. But she has also written a book that tells us something about the future we are creating right now.”
—Texas Monthly

“Serves as a reminder that government brutality on the border is nothing new. In fact, it was the heart of the Texas
Rangers’ mission a century ago.”— Lily Meyer, The Los Angeles Review of Books

ABOUT THE TCU PRESS
TCU Press has traditionally published the history and literature of Texas and the American West. As the press has grown
steadily in stature and in its ability to bring credit to its parent university over the last twenty years, it has been praised for
publishing regional fiction, which often doesn’t find a market with major publishers in New York and for discovering and
preserving local history.

8 | TCU Library