Porvenir was a farming village on the Rio Grande in far northwest Presidio County, home to families who owned their land. On January 24, 1918, Rangers and local men searched its houses at gunpoint. On January 28, Texas Rangers of Company B under Captain James Monroe Fox came back with four ranchmen, Buck Pool, John Pool, Tom Snyder and Raymond Fitzgerald, and soldiers of the Eighth U.S. Cavalry. They separated fifteen men and boys from their families and killed them. The Rangers had been sent after the raid on the Brite ranch on Christmas Day, 1917. Historians say none of the raiders came from Porvenir.
The fifteen
They were Antonio Castañeda, Longino Flores, Pedro Herrera, Vivian Herrera, Severiano Herrera, Manuel Moralez, Eutemio González, Ambrosio Hernández, Alberto García, Tiburcio Jáquez, Román Nieves, Serapio Jiménez, Pedro Jiménez, Juan Jiménez and Macedonio Huertas. Families crossed into Mexico to bury them, and the roughly 140 people left in Porvenir abandoned it.
The Rangers and ranchmen said they had been fired on from the brush. Survivors swore otherwise, and Mexican consuls, U.S. soldiers and State Department investigators concluded the men had been unarmed and in custody. Harry Warren, who kept the village school, recorded the victims' names. The day after the killings he went to the site with Juan Bonilla Flores, a boy whose father, Longino, was among the dead.
The record
Mexico's embassy protested to Secretary of State Robert Lansing on February 15. On June 4, Governor William P. Hobby disbanded Company B, dismissed five Rangers (Andrew Charles Baker, Max Herman, Bud Weaver, Allen Cole and Boone Oliphant), moved seven to Company D and pressed Fox to resign. Adjutant General James A. Harley wrote Fox that the men were killed "without provocation" and were "defenseless and unarmed." No one was prosecuted.
On January 31, 1919, State Representative José T. Canales of Brownsville filed nineteen charges against the Ranger force and asked for an investigation. Frank Hamer and the committee chairman, William H. Bledsoe, both threatened him, and he did not run again in 1920. The committee heard Porvenir among other cases. The legislature kept four companies but cut each from twenty recruits to fifteen, raised pay and set up a way for citizens to file complaints. In 1926 Mexican attorneys filed twelve claims over Porvenir, which reached the U.S.-Mexico General Claims Commission in 1935.
What the families kept
Juan Flores first spoke publicly at ninety-five. His daughter Benita Flores Albarado found Warren's notes in county records in 1998. Descendants and historians applied to the Texas Historical Commission for a marker in 2015. On January 28, 2018, about 400 people gathered at the Capitol, organized by Arlinda Valencia, Longino Flores's great-granddaughter. The commission approved the marker text on July 27 and ordered it cast for a September 1 unveiling. Days before, it halted the casting after objections from the Presidio County Historical Commission, and the unveiling came on November 30, 2018. Paula Flores Smith, Juan's daughter, spoke.
The ceremony was held in the second-floor courtroom of the Presidio County Courthouse in Marfa, and the marker stands beside U.S. 90 west of town. The village site is not a place to visit. The courthouse is a free stop.