Catarino Garza was born near Matamoros on November 24, 1859, and moved to Brownsville in 1877. By the Handbook of Texas's account he helped found sociedades mutualistas, the mutual-aid societies of Mexican communities, in Brownsville, Laredo and Corpus Christi in 1880, 1884 and 1888. He also ran newspapers: El Bien Público in Brownsville, El Comercio Mexicano at Eagle Pass and El Libre Pensador, which publicized abuses by President Porfirio Díaz's government. Authorities seized his press, and he spent thirty-one days in jail on a libel charge. In 1890 he married Concepción González, the daughter of a Duval County rancher. His autobiography, begun in 1888, described the particularly difficult situation Mexicans faced in Texas.
Rio Grande City
That year a Ranger captain, John R. Hughes, arrested him for libel after he criticized Victor Sebree, a former Ranger, over the killing of a prisoner named Abraham Reséndez. Sebree said Reséndez was trying to escape. Taken to Rio Grande City, Garza was shot and wounded by Sebree. His supporters chased Sebree to Fort Ringgold, where about 200 men gathered. The post commander ordered them to disperse, and they did. Cavalry reinforcements and state militia were sent toward Starr County anyway. Sebree kept his job as a customs inspector.
The plan and the army
The Handbook says Díaz agents killed Garza's friend Ignacio Martínez, an editor, on a Laredo street on February 3, 1891. On September 15 Garza led twenty-six armed men across the Rio Grande at Mier and proclaimed a Plan Revolucionario. They were back in Texas nine days later. Garza's own records, the Handbook notes, claimed more than a thousand soldiers by year's end. The brutality of the Mexican general sent to put down dissent pushed Texans toward Garza, and Texas leaders petitioned the governor for special rangers to drive his followers out.
Captain John G. Bourke, posted at Fort Ringgold, led the Army's searches. In October 1891 he reported that the Mexican majority made it nearly impossible to tell rebels from residents. He described searching villages house by house, writing down names and counting horses, and he urged field officers to learn Spanish. His raids on ranches suspected of sheltering Garzistas earned him lasting hostility among South Texans, the Handbook says. At Retamal on December 22 a soldier was killed. Garza reportedly learned in 1892 that the special rangers wanted him, and he fled Texas.
San Ygnacio
The fighting did not end with him. In December 1892 Francisco Benavides, called El Tuerto, led more than a hundred mounted men against a Mexican cavalry post across the river from San Ygnacio. Newspapers called it a massacre, and General Frank Wheaton reported ten soldiers and two officers of the Sixth Mexican Cavalry killed. By January 1893 the surviving leaders had been captured.
Garza reached Costa Rica by March 1893 and published a pamphlet against Díaz. Official sources say he was killed storming a jail at Bocas del Toro on March 8, 1895. Historian Elliott Young, who wrote a book on Garza, argues that his ideas resurfaced in Francisco Madero's revolution of 1910.
The San Ygnacio Historic District stands across the Rio Grande from where that post stood.