PRESIDIO COUNTY — 107 years ago last Tuesday, 15 men and boys from the small riverside village of Porvenir were rounded up in the middle of the night and shot at close range. Their killers — a posse of Anglo ranchers and lawmen — were never prosecuted, but that night’s tragic events led to a reckoning about policing and race still reverberating in Texas today.
For decades, descendants of those 15 men have sought justice through telling their relatives’ stories, whether in books, social media posts, newspaper articles, documentaries or roadside markers. Just before the pandemic broke out, they also pushed to have official death certificates issued by Presidio County, which they feel are a small step toward closure for a traumatic event that changed the course of state history.
Five years later, only one of those certificates has been issued. One certificate was denied, and 13 are pending review in probate court. “It is our hope that they are approved and that we can close this chapter, allowing them to finally rest in peace,” descendant Yolanda Mesa wrote in a letter to the The Big Bend Sentinel.
Mesa and others have been frustrated by a process that they feel has been unfairly dragged out by the county. As of January, there might be reason for hope — since the issue was first raised in 2019, all of the offices involved have turned over, and the new courthouse leadership is hoping to tackle the issue with a fresh set of eyes.
Even with newfound energy, filing death certificates a century after the fact is extremely rare, and there’s little legal precedent to follow. As an exercise in delayed justice, the fight to file death records in Marfa might just make history in its own right.
“The wrong eye”
There’s not much left of Porvenir, and few remember the windy backroads to get there. 107 years ago, during the Mexican Revolution, it was a bustling village of around 150 people within a day’s ride of a long string of ranches and other small settlements along the river.
When the war broke out, General Pancho Villa was viewed by many in Far West Texas as a sympathetic character. That changed in 1916, when Villistas raided Columbus, New Mexico, and a few months later set their sights on Glenn Springs and Boquillas in what’s now Big Bend National Park. As the conflicts wore on, unscrupulous local characters took advantage of the chaos, giving rise to widespread fear of bandits and looters.
On Christmas Day, 1917, raiders from Mexico reached the Brite Ranch between Porvenir and Marfa — a prosperous and innovative outfit whose headquarters resembled a small town more than a dusty cattle ranch. Only the foreman and a handful of workers were on the scene to attempt to defend the ranch from the incursion, and three people were killed: two Mexican nationals who were riding in a car with Mickey Welch, the mailman. Property loss included numerous horses, prized saddles and canned goods.
In the aftermath of the raid, rumors circulated that the villagers in nearby Porvenir had been spotted wearing shoes looted from the Brite Ranch store. Some Anglos banded together to attempt to strip the local Mexican population of their weapons. On January 26, 1918, Company B of the Texas Rangers, based in Marfa, traveled to Porvenir to search for the men and returned empty-handed.
Just a few weeks earlier, the Brite family was enjoying Christmas dinner at the home of Buck Pool when they were notified of the raid. Pool was among the posse of local ranchers who — along with Texas Rangers and cavalrymen stationed in Marfa — went to Porvenir on January 28, rounded up a group of men and boys between the ages of 15 and 72, and murdered them.
Once the sun rose on the morning of January 29, 1918, 12-year-old Juan Bonilla Flores went to the house of his schoolteacher Harry Warren to tell him what had happened. Warren took extensive notes and took pains to identify and catalog the dead before they were carried off to be buried across the river.
The scene described by Warren was chilling even among a litany of violence against Mexican Americans during a period of time referred to by historians as la hora de sangre — or “the time of blood.” The Texas Rangers were sent to the border amidst a major influx in refugees from the war and worries that Villista raids would trickle down from the Big Bend into South Texas. Dozens of innocent people were branded as “bandits” and killed, either by the Rangers themselves or by Anglo mobs.
A grand jury declined to indict the Rangers of Marfa’s Company B, but stories of the incident spread to Austin, pushing Governor William Hobby to disband the unit. José Tomás Canales, the sole Mexican American lawmaker in the Texas Legislature at the time, was so moved by the reports that he launched an investigation into Ranger misconduct that led to a major reduction in agency staffing.
Whatever leaps and bounds in civil rights came as a direct answer to Porvenir were little comfort to a generation of traumatized widows and children. Jerry Patterson, a self-proclaimed “amateur historian” who helped spearhead a documentary on the massacre, said there’s a lot to learn about the dark parts of human nature from the event. “If you’re going an eye for an eye, you’re going to get the wrong eye,” he said.
The Porvenir, Texas documentary — directed by the late Andrew Shapter and filmed at Cibolo Creek Ranch — was part of a push to memorialize the event in time for its hundred-year anniversary. At the center of the project was a privately-funded archaeological dig, led by David Keller of Alpine, that expanded the catalog of artifacts and suggested that the U.S. Cavalry may have played a role in the killings.
The film also featured Monica Muñoz Martinez, a historian at UT-Austin who has made it her life’s work to document racial violence in Texas. Martinez — along with a team of historians documenting la hora de sangre under the banner of a nonprofit called “Refusing to Forget” — banded together with descendants of the massacre at Porvenir to advocate for an official state marker near the site.
Martinez and the Refusing to Forget team’s work piggybacked off nearly two decades of efforts by Benita and Evaristo “Buddy” Albarado, daughter and son-in-law of Juan Flores, the young boy who had run to Harry Warren’s cabin for help the morning after the massacre. Flores had been plagued by nightmares for decades, and beginning to tell his story seemed to help him cope with the past.
Once the centennial rolled around, what had felt like positive forward momentum was hamstrung by politics. That year, the Texas Observer reported on the conflict between family members, Refusing to Forget, state officials and members of the Presidio County Historical Commission — the latter two of which referred to the former as “militant Hispanics” and even speculating that a planned memorial ceremony was a publicity stunt for then-presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke.
The issue made enough of a regional splash at the time that it’s easy to forget that the history of Porvenir almost died with Flores.
Before the aluminum roadside marker was cast, it had been normal — at least in Presidio County — to repeat a completely fabricated story. Cecilia Thompson, who wrote what many consider to be the authoritative History of Marfa and Presidio County, Texas, does mention that Porvenir was a “brutal reprisal” for the Brite Ranch raid and that it resulted in the disbanding of Company B. But she also repeats a dangerous untruth: that Porvenir was “a bandit stronghold” where the ranchers and the lawmen killed “30 bandits” in addition to “some innocent inhabitants of the village.”
For a century, rumors circulated about shoes stolen from the Brite Ranch or about a fictional young goatherd from Porvenir who had to be put into witness protection because he was the only one who would tell the truth about the town’s complicity in the raid — anything to suggest that the men killed that night in January deserved it.
“We’re learning as we go”
Yolanda Mesa — also a descendant of Juan Flores — knew she was wading into a tense situation when she helped launch the effort to obtain death certificates for those killed at Porvenir. A voracious researcher and advocate for her family, she wanted one last official gesture toward closure.
After a grueling back-and-forth, then-County Judge Cinderela Guevara signed the death certificate for Longino Flores in 2019. The victory was short-lived and bittersweet — just two years later, Guevara would tell The Big Bend Sentinel that it was all a “mix-up” and that she hadn’t realized she was signing a special document.
Adding to the frustration, Guevara then denied the next Porvenir death certificate to cross her desk and declined to give a reason. (Jesus Moralez, who fiercely advocated for that certificate on behalf of his grandfather, Manuel Moralez, has since passed away.)
Presidio County Attorney Blair Park said that the “mix-up” could be justified, as the forms needed to review the applications are incredibly specialized and rarely used. VS-128, a “Court-Ordered Delayed Certificate of Death,” is not available from the state online. Its use is guided by Section 193.007 of the Texas Health & Safety Code.
Mesa says that it took months for her to even receive the right form from the county. Park said it took just as long for the county to receive those forms from the state, which provides extremely scant information about the process to fill them out. “I’d never even heard of these,” she said.
Park said that it was much more common — and therefore easier — to amend an existing death certificate, a process that descendants of people killed by lynching have undertaken all over the United States. As attitudes about race change and new historical evidence comes to light, it’s a way of setting the record straight for posterity.
But there was little time for formality in the aftermath of the Porvenir Massacre. Texas had only been requiring the filing of death certificates for a just over a decade when the tragedy occurred. The bodies were buried in Mexico and the survivors fled with no time or desire to travel all the way to Marfa, where the people who had killed their husbands and fathers had their stately town houses.
Mesa also said that she and another descendant were erroneously charged $257 to file for their death certificates — money that has yet to be refunded. County Clerk Carolina Cataño said that Mesa had been mistakenly assessed the same fees as anyone who makes a probate filing under normal circumstances in Presidio County.
Filing a regular death certificate costs $1, but the clerk’s office rarely even has to help folks with that — typically, that process is initiated by the justice of the peace and the funeral home.
Cataño said that she had only had one prior experience with a VS-128 filing: a migrant who had passed away unattended in the desert. But even in a county where unattended migrant deaths are a tragically common occurrence, that process was rarely triggered. “We’re learning as we go,” she said.
Douglas Loveday, spokesperson for the Texas Department of State Health Services — which oversees vital statistics — said that it’s uncommon even on the state’s end. “We typically receive delayed death certificates from the courts 1-2 or so years after death, because the death was not registered timely and the family needs the death record to proceed with administrative/legal matters,” he wrote to The Sentinel. “We do not typically receive a delayed death certificate that is 100 years or more after death.”
Part of the unique VS-128 process is a pair of required affidavits. Normally, an affidavit would be signed by the “physician last in attendance” or the funeral director. Since no such people ever existed, the law provides for two affidavits signed by “any person who was acquainted with the facts surrounding the death at the time the death occurred,” one of which must be signed by someone who is not related by blood to the deceased.
The penalty for “making a false statement,” per VS-128, is 2-10 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.
Cataño said that she had received the outstanding applications. “It’s an unusual situation,” she said. “But we’ve done our part. The rest is up to the judge.”
County Judge Joe Portillo said that a hearing would be held in county probate court over the applications but had not yet been scheduled. He declined to comment much further because of his power over the pending proceedings, but said that the issue was on his radar. “There’s boxes that need to be checked,” he said.
Mesa said that she understood the complexity but hoped the county would take the next steps seriously and keep a clear thread of communication. Her personal connection to the tragedy aside, she sees it as a way to right historical wrongs and set the record straight. “This is about a group of men who, over 100 years later, do not have a simple document afforded to anyone who dies in this country,” she said.