Nineteen Fifteen: The Plan de San Diego and La Matanza
Near Mcallen, Texas
In January of nineteen fifteen, a document was drafted in a jail cell in Monterrey, Mexico, and dated to San Diego, Texas, a small town in Duval County. The Plan de San Diego, as it came to be called, was a revolutionary manifesto proposing to raise a multiracial army, seize Texas and four other southwestern states from the United States, and create an independent republic. One of its provisions called for the execution of all Anglo-American men over sixteen years old. It was, in conception, a document of retaliatory fury against the dispossession that had followed the eighteen forty-eight border settlement.
A man named Basilio Ramos Jr. was arrested in Brownsville in January of nineteen fifteen carrying a copy of the plan. Raids began in earnest in July. Over the following year, guerrilla bands led by Aniceto Pizaña and Luis de la Rosa, both from South Texas, carried out approximately thirty raids in the lower Rio Grande Valley, striking ranches, trains, and telegraph lines. Twenty-one Americans were killed during those raids. The raids provoked a response from Texas Rangers, army troops, local sheriffs' posses, and Anglo vigilante groups that was far larger and far less discriminating.
What followed is referred to by historians as La Matanza, the slaughter. The death toll is genuinely disputed, and scholars say as much directly. José Tomás Canales, a state legislator from Brownsville who conducted a formal investigation in nineteen nineteen, estimated that somewhere between three hundred and five thousand ethnic Mexicans and Mexican Americans were killed by American law enforcement and vigilantes between nineteen fourteen and nineteen nineteen. That range reflects real evidentiary uncertainty: bodies were buried quietly, records were incomplete, and Rangers who killed people were not filing paperwork about it.
The violence was not limited to known raiders. Farmworkers, ranchers, and townspeople were killed on the suspicion of disloyalty or on no documented suspicion at all. Governor James Ferguson had promised in advance to pardon Rangers for their actions.
No Texas Ranger was prosecuted. The Texas Legislature did not formally acknowledge the killings until twenty-nineteen, more than a century after they occurred.
