April 1920

Several men on their way to a wedding stopped at a corral near the Texas-Mexico border to rest and water their horses.

The travelers were spotted by lawmen who suspected they were smuggling liquor.

What happened next has been debated for more than 100 years. Public records and history books tell one version of the story, while the travelers’ descendants tell another.

The differences are big (who shot first?) and small (how many people were there?). The ramifications still linger.

Family version

Lawmen version

The travelers were going to a wedding in Mexico and carrying gifts for the bridal party. The groom was among those in the caravan.

The travelers were moving along a well-known smuggling route and carrying guns and ammunition.

The Texas Rangers spotted the travelers and then ambushed them and opened fire.

The smugglers spotted federal customs inspectors, dismounted their horses and opened fire.

During the shootout, three of the travelers, including the groom, were killed by Texas Rangers. Two survived.

During the shootout, three smugglers were killed by the lawmen. Four survived.

100 years later

Whose version of the story is remembered has pitted the descendants of the slain men against the Rangers and their supporters for generations.

Members of the frontier force — often stars of Old West tales — are heroes to many Texans. But these Tejano families, whose origins lie in a tiny town in northern Mexico, say there is more to these lawmen’s history.

Texas history has branded these three Tejano men as tequila smugglers who met a deserved fate: gunned down in a borderland corral.

But their indignant descendants have long disputed the official story. For generations, they recorded their version of events in narrative, subversive folk songs known as corridos. The men were among many Mexican Americans with roots in South Texas killed under suspicious circumstances by White law enforcement officers who wielded the power of the Texas government in their trigger fingers, they say.

More deeply, the families are challenging the gritty idealism and heroic vision associated with the Rangers, who personify Texas itself. Organized more than 200 years ago to protect 300 White families invited to settle in what was then Mexican territory, they have been portrayed in dozens of movies and TV series as swaggering, no-nonsense lawmen.

“The Rangers had for years and years a network of enablers and fable factory who promoted this image. That’s what Hollywood wanted and what the newspapers of the day wanted, so that’s what survived,” said Doug Swanson, author of “Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers.” “It’s only half true, if that much.”

The men died at a time when Prohibition, vigilantism, Juan Crow and the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 had led to many bloody confrontations along the border between Tejanos and White authorities. The border violence was part of the ethnic and racial anxieties gripping a changing nation on the brink of a world war. It was also a time when government authorities were exerting more control over a still-porous border where people and goods had moved freely and frequently for generations.

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How we reported on the Texas Rangers and a historical South Texas slaying

Arelis R. Hernández spent months reporting on the South Texas slaying of three Tejanos, whose family say they were ambushed by Texas Rangers 100 years ago.

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The fight reflects a larger tension in Texas — and across the country — over who controls how America’s history is told. Though much of the attention has centered on attacks over the teaching of Black history, attempts to chronicle Latino stories have run into similar conflicts, another knotty period of U.S. history up for debate.

“I believe in the long term that the truth wins out, not fiction, not happy history,” said Texas historian Walter L. Buenger, a University of Texas at Austin professor. “Truth wins out, but sometimes it’s agonizingly slow.”

The Texas Department of Public Safety, which includes the Rangers, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection declined to comment for this story. “No relationship exists between the modern Texas Rangers of today — or the Texas Department of Public Safety — and the incidents you reference,” Ericka Miller, a Department of Public Safety spokeswoman, said in a statement. “The modern-day Texas Rangers are comprised of principled men and women of great skill and integrity who are fully committed to the rule of law.”

Lydia Oliveira Canales, 95

Great-niece of Crescencio Oliveira Jr.

Lydia Oliveira Canales is convinced that the Texas Rangers gunned down her great-uncle.

Crescencio Oliveira Jr., 22, was one of three Tejanos whom the lawmen ambushed and left dying, according to their descendants. The shots came from behind a mesquite fence, from the direction of mounted men with badges the two survivors would later say they recognized as Rangers.

Lydia Oliveira Canales outside her home in Benavides, Tex.

As a child, Oliveira Canales was often sent by her great-grandmother to deliver three sets of flowers to the graves of Oliveira, Dionisio Maldonado, 42, and Vicente Aguilar, 49. The friends, who owned and worked cattle ranches in South Texas and Mexico, were traveling together to Oliveira’s wedding. The nearly 150-mile trip along well-trodden trails should have taken five to seven days on horseback. They were at the halfway point when the shooting occurred.

The gravesite of Crescencio Oliveira Jr. in Benavides, Tex.

But her lifelong obsession with their deaths started at a family gathering in Mexico when she heard a song.

The corrido, recorded in 1948, says five men, including her great-uncle, were traveling as a wedding party to Parás, Mexico, and ambushed by “chicken-hearted rinches,” referring to Texas Rangers, at a corral near the border city of Laredo.

“Lo que siento es a mi Chucha, que dejé pedida y dada,” the song’s Crescencio Oliveira says about his fiancé as he dies. “What I feel is for my Chucha, whom I leave betrothed and alone.”

The ballad offers a version of their deaths that, for Oliveira Canales and many in her family, is just as official as newspaper clippings or police reports.

In the years since, Oliveira Canales has researched the history of the Rangers she blames for their deaths and collected the stories of family members and others who say they remember what happened.

Her great-grandfather, Crescencio Oliveira Sr., told her how the Rangers blocked them from recovering his son’s body. The families mounted a clandestine operation to bring Crescencio Oliveira Jr. home, the story goes. Residents she interviewed said they lined the streets with lantern lights to pay respects to the men as the wagon rolled by.

Nearly every male subsequently born in her family was named Crescencio.

The more she learned, the angrier she became.

“This was senseless,” Oliveira Canales said. “They weren’t doing anything to warrant the killing. I just couldn’t … I still can’t understand it.”

What she heard reflects a brutal time in South Texas history.

Oliveira Canales had grown up hearing about La Matanza, a period between 1910 and 1920 during which, some historians say, 500 to 5,000 ethnic Mexicans were killed in border violence, including by Rangers. (A Texas Ranger Museum article puts the death toll much lower, arguing that there’s not enough evidence to support the higher estimates.)

In late 2022, Oliveira Canales told her story — directly blaming the Rangers — to the McAllen Monitor newspaper, which published an article, citing the descendants’ research, headlined: “Texas Rangers killed three men a century ago; now Duval County says it was murder.”

A month earlier, the Duval County Historical Commission presented a proclamation declaring that the three men had been ambushed and that “justice against the Texas Rangers was never resolved.”

More than 200 people, some of whom had flown in from Mexico and California, tearfully packed into a local courthouse for the event. A duo played the corrido that told their version of the story as people cried and laughed.

“Here we are 100 and some years later, and the Oliveiras, the Aguilars and the Maldonados are still together,” Marianella Quiroga Franklin, great-granddaughter of Dionisio Maldonado, told the Monitor at the time. “We are one big, strong, resilient family.”

But a few days after the event, Oliveira Canales received a phone call from Russell Molina, the chairman of the Texas Ranger Bicentennial Committee.

The call lasted just a few minutes but left Oliveira Canales bewildered. “He told me I was wrong and that it was never the Rangers,” she recalled.

She felt pressured to recant her story but told Molina: “Well, I stand by what I said.”

In April 1920, local newspapers printed the official account of the men’s death. Federal customs agents — not Rangers — had shot back after the gang of seven men — not five — traveling a known smuggling route had fired first. They found no alcohol, but the lawmen logged several pairs of shoes, food and ammunition.

That was the version of the story that Molina, who says he remembers making the call but not the specifics, confronted Oliveira Canales with, she says. The family’s story was unfair to the Rangers, who are too often cast as villains by Hispanics and some historians, he told her.

Molina has spent years defending what he calls the “modern” Rangers, who are charged with working some of the state’s most high-profile and sensitive cases. Since the Rangers were established 201 years ago as a frontier force, agents have gone from fighting “marauding Indians and Mexican bandits,” according to the department’s website, to professionals investigating the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde.

Molina, whose father became the first Hispanic sheriff of Fort Bend County, near Houston, in 1993, says he was surrounded by law enforcement growing up and befriended many Rangers through his business and social endeavors. One family friend, Tony Leal, was the first Hispanic chief of the “modern” Rangers.

The Rangers’ history includes some bad behavior, said Molina, who identifies as Hispanic but said he was raised in the 1970s, when pressure to assimilate “as Anglo as possible” was enormous. But he accuses liberals trying to revise the historical record of going too far, blaming them for casting a shadow over the lawmen.

“You can’t hold the Rangers of today responsible for acts committed in the past. It was bad, but that is then but this is now,” said Molina, who co-owns a western hat store that sells the distinctive off-white cowboy hats — known as silverbelly among hat enthusiasts — that Rangers wear.

When the Texas Ranger Association Foundation, which supports active and former officers, began preparing for the agency’s 2023 bicentennial, Molina was appointed chairman of the effort in 2020. The extensive celebrations, he said, were about fortifying the Ranger story ahead of the state’s own 200th birthday in 2036.

While organizing clay shoots, commemorative cattle drives and school visits last year, Molina also kept a cheat sheet with answers to awkward questions about Ranger history.

The businessman has a color-coded list of members of the state’s Ranger Hall of Fame. Red is reserved for the most problematic of the venerated Rangers, such as John B. Jones, a Confederate captain and enslaver.

Molina is sometimes confronted with questions about the 1918 Porvenir massacre, in which Rangers were accused of unlawfully killing 15 Mexican men and boys in a small village southeast of El Paso.

A 1919 investigation by José T. Canales, the lone Mexican American lawmaker serving in the Texas legislature at the time, documented a pattern of Ranger violence and misconduct in the borderlands, including at Porvenir. The state concealed the report for 50 years, including the firsthand accounts of victims.

No one was charged for the deaths in Porvenir, and survivors spent 100 years fighting for an official state historic marker to commemorate the killings. “The information was always slanted toward the Anglo,” said Arlinda Valencia, great-granddaughter of one of the slain Porvenir men. “The Mexican is always the bandit, always deserved it. We grow up with the black eye of trauma and shame on our names.”

The Rangers had been told that the townspeople supported bandits believed to have carried out a deadly raid on a White family’s ranch days prior, Molina said. (Historians say there’s little evidence the village was involved.) “If you look at the good and the bad and ugly of the Rangers, there is far more good than bad,” he said.

When he was confronted with yet another slight on the Rangers’ legacy from the descendants of the three alleged Tejano smugglers, Molina says, he pushed for proof.

He emailed Graciela Treviño Gonzáles, then chair of the Duval County Historical Commission, which had organized a ceremony honoring the three men, and asked for evidence supporting the family’s story. He sent her archival news clippings to bolster his argument that the Rangers were not involved.

“While it is true that some past Rangers and their adherents have, at times, propagated myths to their own benefit, it is also important to note that there are arguably as many anti-Ranger counter-myths,” he said in an email to county leaders.

A 1931 federal report on Prohibition misspelled their names but listed the men among people killed by federal customs agents, Molina says he told Treviño Gonzáles. “The officers shot in self-defense,” he said.

Treviño Gonzáles wasn’t convinced. “His point was, ‘Please don’t tarnish our glorified image of the Rangers during our bicentennial,’” she said of her conversation with Molina. “But what greater time was there to bring back these stories than now? We just need to give everybody’s version a chance and let others decide.”

Molina hasn’t given up. He continues to reach out to researchers, looking for more evidence that the Rangers were not to blame in the shooting. And he’s “sympathetic” to Oliveira Canales and wants her to meet Hispanic Rangers who could offer her a different perspective of the agency. “The past is something we have to never forget, but we also have to look at where things are today.”

Historian George T. Díaz came across the story of the three Tejanos in the Laredo Weekly Times and other newspapers while researching his 2015 book on border smuggling, “Border Contraband: A History of Smuggling Across the Rio Grande.”

The news writers left no room for doubt: The three dead men were unequivocally bootleggers. In his book, Díaz called the confrontation “the most striking example of U.S. authorities” killing a group of ethnic Mexicans and calling them smugglers.

Marianella Quiroga Franklin, 58

Great-granddaughter of Dionisio Maldonado

But when he referred to the men as smugglers during a public book talk in the Rio Grande Valley in 2018, he faced a thundering objection from Marianella Quiroga Franklin, the great-granddaughter of Dionisio Maldonado, one of the men killed.

He was not a “tequilero,” Quiroga Franklin shouted as her mother raised a colorized portrait of her slender-faced, mustachioed grandfather.

She wanted to correct the record. Maldonado was a deeply respected cattle rancher — not a criminal — who regularly traveled across the border for work and family, she said in an interview. His death was so devastating that his eldest daughter, Cesaria Maldonado, dyed her wedding dress black when she married, family members say.

Marianella Quiroga Franklin poses at the family ranch in Parás, Nuevo León, Mexico.

“It’s important to acknowledge there is another side to the story,” Quiroga Franklin said. “We still have a lot of the same issues of the past, and it just seems like we aren’t learning to acknowledge mistakes so we can move forward.”

The grave of Dionisio Maldonado in Benavides, Tex.

After her father’s death, Cesaria Maldonado, then 17 years old, rarely smiled and later sought to toughen her children so that they would never be victimized like her father, she said.

Díaz said in an interview that he didn’t mean to offend the family and that he gives credence to their version of events.

In his book, he noted the discrepancies that bolster their claims: News articles about the shooting didn’t mention the confiscation of any alcohol. The men were also headed in the wrong direction, south to Mexico — smugglers were usually caught traveling into the United States with their booty, not returning the other way. Also, most smugglers valued discretion and rarely resisted authorities by firing first, his research showed.

After being asked about the incident by The Post, a lay historian, Homero Vera, found a 1972 recorded interview of a retired Texas Ranger, Lloyd David, in the South Texas archives of Texas A&M University at Kingsville. David told another oral historian that he was at the scene of the 1920 shooting. He didn’t share details about how it unfolded but chuckled as he recounted how he purloined a silk handkerchief and a pocketknife from the body of one of the dead men. The loot later became a wedding gift to his wife, he said.

“Everything about that case is fishy,” Díaz says. “Different sources give you a different angle and present a different picture. It’s a record but not a totality of what happened.”

But whether it was Rangers — or customs agents — involved in the confrontation is still unclear, Díaz says.

At that time, it was not unusual for Rangers, federal agents and sheriff’s deputies to ride together or switch agencies when seeking out lawbreakers or patrolling the brushlands, according to several scholars. Some historians also say the term “rinches,” a derogatory word invoked in corridos and by South Texans, is not just an insult directed at Rangers but a catchall term for any Anglo authority with a gun and badge.

While the killing fits the pattern of border policing during that period, Díaz cautioned that liquor smuggling along the route the men were traveling was rampant. Interpreting history means verifying every source — even oral histories — with corroborating evidence, he said.

“They can’t be taken as gospel,” Díaz said. “All these sources need to be weighed and considered.”

Fights over how Texas history should be told have repeatedly spilled across the state, including at the 127-year-old Texas State Historical Association (TSHA).

J.P. Bryan, who claims to be a relative of the “father” of Texas, Stephen F. Austin, said that when he was appointed TSHA executive director in late 2022 to help stabilize the financially troubled organization, he discovered a lack of balance on the board between academics, who skew more liberal in their historic interpretations, and lay historians, who are spread across the ideological spectrum or more conservative.

He pointed to efforts by the board to sign on to a letter asking Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) to veto a bill limiting what public school teachers could teach about U.S. history and critical race theory, and another to support a community college instructor who had been fired for teaching it.

What Bryan saw as liberal bias stifled healthy debate about colliding versions of Texas history, he said, particularly when it promoted a version “that demeans the Anglo efforts in settling the western part of the United States.”

Texas history is full of tales of people being treated unfairly and some heroes who did not always act heroically, Bryan said.

Sometimes those stories are “glossed over” by the writers — often White men — of the first drafts of history, he acknowledged.

“Our real objective is to teach history as truthfully and honestly as we can,” he said. “It ought to be a source of enduring inspiration in how to conduct our lives better and how to give back more fully.”

Among those who joined Bryan’s reimagined TSHA was retired history professor Richard B. McCaslin, who has written dozens of books on historic Texas figures, including the Rangers. The rigorous approach to research he prefers is out of fashion with modern historians more interested in advocacy than facts, McCaslin says.

“That is the line between traditionalists and newbies,” said McCaslin, who serves as the association’s publications editor. “To them, it doesn’t matter what really happened but what people think happened.”

In his recent book about Ranger Capt. William Wright, McCaslin included a brief aside about an arrest the vaunted lawman made in 1921, of Crescencio Oliveira Sr., who had escaped the bullet blasts that killed his son and namesake a year earlier.

Webb County records show that on the day his son was killed, Oliveira Sr. was accused of “assault to murder” against a group of U.S. customs inspectors and former and current Texas Rangers, according to the April 1920 indictment. To McCaslin, the grand jury’s decision to indict Oliveira is proof that he may have been involved in illicit activity, despite what their descendants may believe. (The charges against Oliveira were eventually dropped in 1940.) It’s unclear why he was arrested a year later.

Former members, including many academics, have criticized the transformation of the association. “It is not the job of the historian to ‘inspire’ others,” the group wrote in a 2023 open letter objecting to Bryan’s leadership. “Historical works that avow the ‘greatness’ of a state or a historical figure is not really history at all; it’s propaganda.”

Former TSHA board member Benjamin H. Johnson called Bryan’s changes to the association, and how it talks about historical facts, a “coup” to “whitewash history.” The association’s current leaders are relying on memory, not history, said Buenger, the UT Austin professor whose tenure as TSHA’s chief historian ended in 2023. Dissenting academics split from and started their own rival organization, the Alliance for Texas History.

“Memory by its nature simplifies, eliminates and highlights certain things and buries other things,” Buenger said. “You can’t stop the freight train that is the development of new lines of thought on Texas history.”

The small rural town of Parás, Mexico, that was to be the site of the wedding that prompted the three men’s travels still bears the marks of their deaths. There are streets named after them, and one descendant is the mayor.

During the Christmas holidays, when the town of 700 often swells to thousands, the story of their deaths is retold. Family members sometimes sing along to the corrido that chronicles their killing.

On a recent weekend, Maldonado’s descendants reunited to celebrate a family member’s birthday. A line of cars outside an elder’s home grew long, and every few minutes, a new set of relatives walked through the door to a room full of aunties angling for a kiss. They laughed and sat on aging furniture amid yellowing photographs.

Before long, their ancestor’s story came up. Maldonado’s great-great-great-great-grandson Emilio Andrés Hinojosa is writing a piece for a creative-nonfiction class about the killing and researching the tumult of the era. Hinojosa’s sister, Camila, has dedicated the final project of her freshman year of college to the killings.

Her family still suffers from the pain of her ancestor’s death, she said. “I think the state of Texas owes an apology not [to] us specifically but to all Mexican Americans and Tejanos who suffered racial violence,” Camilla said. “There can be a lot more done to bring attention to and respect our stories and our history.”

The details vary a little from family to family, but the most consistent narrative involves that of a bridegroom anxious to wed his sweetheart.

Crescencio Oliveira Jr. was betrothed to María de Jesús “Chucha” Gutiérrez.

His family was well-connected and could read and write in Spanish and English, according to census records and letters the families provided. While they visited Parás often, Oliveira also worked his maternal family’s 160-acre Rancho La Mota de los Olmos in Benavides, Tex.

Another of the men killed, Dionisio Maldonado, according to several descendants, was a deeply respected cattle rancher who traveled regularly between Benavides and northern Mexico for business and to visit family.

When the third man, Vicente Aguilar, died, the farmer left behind five orphaned children. His wife had died the year before. His son, Pedro Aguilar, was no more than 7 years old when he went to live with relatives. He named his daughter, Vicenta Reyna Aguilar, in honor of the father he barely knew.

Vicenta Reyna Aguilar, 83

Granddaughter of Vicente Aguilar

Vicenta Reyna Aguilar, now 83, did not learn the details of the slaying until Duval County officials presented her with a proclamation commemorating the incident. She’d heard the corrido, and in-laws poked fun at her for being the granddaughter of “tequileros.” Though she believed there was more to the story, it wasn’t until 2022 that she learned what other descendants had uncovered.

Vicenta Reyna Aguilar outside her home in Rio Grande City, Tex.

“Los ‘rinches’ never cared for us Mexicans,” she said as a tear disappeared into the delicate canyons of her wrinkled cheek. “And they still don’t.”

The tombstone of Vicente Aguilar in Benavides, Tex.

“Our father paid a high price for this injustice,” said her brother, Sanjuanita Aguilar, 67. “Sooner or later the truth always comes out. It took 100 years.”

The eldest living members of these families say they don’t expect an apology from the Rangers. But they will continue to tell their side of the story.

Lydia Oliveira Canales, who has spent decades trying to get answers from the Texas Rangers, is passing on her work. She keeps a binder of documents, letters and photos slipped inside plastic page protectors to ensure that the facts she’s uncovered are handed down to another generation.

Her sons have continued the research and started reaching out to other local historical associations for support.

She wants her family and Texas to know that her great-uncle was not just collateral damage of borderland turmoil but a living, breathing person loved by many. A reckoning is needed, she says. There isn’t much to convince her otherwise.

“It’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”