The injustice never leaves you
The Injustice Never Leaves You documents a little known period of state violence in the early twentieth century that targeted ethnic Mexican residents in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. This book takes on the task of explaining why violence occurred, what it meant at the time, and what it means today. It examines a policing regime that killed with impunity between 1910 and 1920. Politicians, historians, the media, and historical commissions of the early twentieth century inscribed a celebratory version of events in newspapers, books, lesson plans, museums, and monuments as a practice of nation building. They disavowed the loss and trauma experienced by residents. The architects of official history and memory, however, did not account for the witnesses and survivors of violence who would pass their own memories from one generation to another. They underestimated residents who would stake a claim in the border region, residents who would share their story with the next generation, residents who would leave records that documented the terror that shaped daily life. More than an act of recovery, this book gives insight into people who lived in a world shaped by violence but who refused to be consumed by it.--