MARFA — History was made in Presidio County on Monday after visiting Judge Eduardo Gamboa of El Paso approved delayed death certificates for 14 men who were murdered in a small border village over a hundred years ago. The judge’s decision came after years-long efforts by the descendants of the Porvenir Massacre to obtain official death certificates for their relatives, in hopes of bringing some closure to a particularly dark chapter of state history.
On the night of January 28, 1918, a posse of ranchers and lawmen — including members of the Texas Rangers and the United States Cavalry — traveled to the remote village of Porvenir, upstream from Candelaria. They rounded up 15 Mexican American men and boys and shot them at close range.
The massacre is widely regarded as a form of Anglo retribution for a raid on the Brite Ranch just a few weeks prior that left three dead. It didn’t matter that none of the men at Porvenir were involved in the raid — in that way, it echoed other incidents of racially-motivated mob violence along the border in Texas in the 1910s, where white property owners and lawmen lashed out against their Mexican neighbors for no reason other than that they shared the same skin color as notorious bandits like Chico Cano.
Judge Gamboa said that the darkest parts of human nature were on display that cold winter night 107 years ago. “Monsters walk among us,” he said.
Over the past decade, the descendants of the Porvenir Massacre have banded together to advocate for justice. Building on the efforts of José Canales — the only Mexican American in the Texas Legislature at the time of the killings — they pushed for broader recognition and education of widespread racial violence in Texas during the Mexican Revolution.
An official Texas Historical Commission marker was unveiled in time for the massacre’s centennial in 2018, and a PBS documentary debuted the following year. Historical and archaeological investigations continue — in 2022, a paper potentially implicating the U.S. Army was published as the result of a privately-funded archaeological dig.
Behind the scenes, family members were pushing for the county to finally issue official death certificates to those killed in the massacre. They believed that it was a small but important gesture toward righting the wrongs of the past and offering dignity to the deceased. “Everybody has a death certificate when they die,” explained Amanda Shields, granddaughter of Manuel Moralez, at Monday’s proceedings.
Issuing a death certificate more than a century after the fact turned out to be a far from straightforward process. Form VS-128, or a “Court-Ordered Delayed Certificate of Death,” is a rarely-used piece of paperwork that is typically administered when a funeral home fails to complete required records. In 2019, former Presidio County Judge Cinderela Guevara approved a form VS-128 for Porvenir victim Longino Flores, but later claimed that she had made a mistake and rejected the application for Moralez’s certificate.
Gamboa decided that there would be no more mistakes going forward — he was brought in to serve as judge because of his expertise in probate matters — and extended his condolences to the families. “It doesn’t fix what happened, but at least it was recognized by the state,” he said.
Shields was joined on the floor of the courtroom by former Presidio County Judge Monroe Elms, a descendant of Harry Warren — Porvenir’s Anglo schoolteacher at the time of the massacre. Thanks to Warren’s extensive documentation of the aftermath of the killings, Rep. Canales and others were able to shed light on the issue of anti-Mexican violence in Texas.
Elms said that the Porvenir Massacre was a tragic example of the consequences of racism against Mexican Americans and Indigenous people in Presidio County — echoes of which still persist to this day. “One thing we know about history — if we don’t stand up and take action, history can repeat itself,” he said. “We have to go forward and be a better country.”