"White Hats"

STORYTELLING CATEGORY

Texas Monthly
11/15/2022

The Texas Rangers are the oldest state law enforcement agency in the nation, founded in 1823 by Stephen F. Austin to defend new Anglo settlements in Texas. For a century, they built their legend on fighting against Indigenous and Mexican people, before evolving into the elite investigative police force they are today, with 166 Rangers across the state.

Texas Monthly decided to launch the podcast White Hats because this iconic Texas institution was at an inflection point. On one hand, the Rangers and their boosters were preparing to celebrate their bicentennial with galas across the state, speeches from Governor Greg Abbott and other top officials, and grand new monuments to the Rangers’ history. On the other, the group had recently come under increasing scrutiny, thanks in large part to the work of Latino historians and scholars, who had grown up learning about the Rangers’ heroic exploits in school but whose own families were marked by the Rangers’ violence. Their voices have been largely ignored in official history.

White Hats opens a window into how certain narratives take hold and become dominant, and how competing mythologies around the same event can create a splintered sense of belonging, specifically for Tejano and Tejana people living in Texas today. The historical events covered in the show are well-documented by historians, but our goal was to center the experiences of Indigenous and Mexican Texans within that history as well as modern conversations about the Texas Rangers.

We based our reporting on primary documents whenever possible, including newspaper reports and official records from the 1910s and oral histories from eyewitnesses. We consulted with more than a dozen historians, including official historians at the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum and others with a more critical perspective. Given the contested nature of the history we describe in this show, transparency in our sourcing was a priority for us; for items such as the historical and archaeological records of the Porvenir Massacre and Jovita Idár’s famous standoff with Texas Rangers, we cited all our sources and explained the debates around disputed facts. We provided complete transcripts, and links to more-detailed sources, on our website.

Our podcast adds to a growing understanding of the history of policing in Texas and the United States, and equips our listeners—citizens who experience both the assistance of and abuses by entities like the Texas Rangers—with a critical perspective on law enforcement in the modern day.

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Submitted by Alicia Maria Meier.