06/20/2026
In the early morning hours of January 28, 1918, fifteen men and boys were pulled from their beds in the small farming village of Porvenir, marched to a bluff above the Rio Grande, and shot to death by a force that was supposed to be protecting them.
Porvenir was a quiet community in remote Presidio County, families who farmed cotton, irrigated their land off the river, and ran a small school for their children. A month earlier, raiders believed to be tied to the Mexican Revolution had attacked a nearby ranch and killed a mail carrier. There was no road connecting Porvenir to the ranch, and nothing tied its residents to the crime, but in the tension of the border at that time, suspicion fell on them anyway. Texas Rangers searched the village once and found nothing. Days later, they came back.
Before dawn on January 28, Rangers from Company B, several local ranchers, and soldiers from the U.S. Eighth Cavalry separated fifteen unarmed men and boys, the youngest just sixteen, from their families and led them to the riverbank. None of them survived. The remaining residents fled across the Rio Grande into Mexico that same night, carrying their dead with them.
When the truth came out months later, the governor disbanded the Ranger company involved and forced their captain to resign. A state investigation the following year found the Rangers guilty of gross violations of the law. It would take a full century, until 2018, before a Texas Historical Marker finally stood at the site to tell the truth of what happened there.
Some history is hard to tell. It still deserves to be told.
