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by Richard Ribb (Author)
"Richard Ribb's skillful treatment of the collision of Representative J.T. Canales and the Texas Rangers and their defenders is timely and compelling, especially given contemporary struggles over police violence and frontier mythos. We are not as far from 1919 as we like to think."
--Benjamin H. Johnson, author of Texas: An American History
In 1919, José Tomás Canales, South Texas patrón and state representative, filed legislation to reform the Texas Rangers that spawned two weeks of hearings in the state capitol. Only Canales could have brought about this series of events. His power, privilege, and perspective made him uniquely qualified to challenge the Rangers. Threatened with violence by a Ranger for daring to call out atrocities, attacked in print and in the state house for his own ethnic heritage, ridiculed as a shill for corrupt political interests, and accused of plotting the elimination of the Ranger Force, Canales persevered to present the full, often unsavory, history of the Rangers through public testimony.
In J. T. Canales and the Texas Rangers, author Richard H. Ribb chronicles the daily testimony and context of the 1919 hearings to reveal the main currents of social, racial, and political forces taking shape in early twentieth-century Texas. Canales was unsuccessful at the time in reforming the Rangers, but ultimately several of his ideas endured in subsequent legislation and policy. This analysis of the Canales hearings provides an unprecedented exposure of state-sanctioned violence and its aftermath.
Author Biography
RICHARD H. RIBB is an independent scholar whose publications include chapters in Reverberations of Racial Violence: Critical Reflections on Borderlands History, edited by Sonia Hernández and John Morán González, and War along the Border: The Mexican Revolution and the Tejano Community, edited by Arnoldo De León, as well as numerous articles and book reviews.
