Life and Death on the Border, 1910–1920

Life and Death on the Border” powerfully documented the persecution and resilience of ethnic Mexicans (Tejanos) on the Texas-Mexico border between 1910 and 1920. The most compelling stories in this exhibit are the kind whispered by family members to successive generations, not those usually told in a state's official history museum. Displayed on a balcony overlooking the museum rotunda, this exhibit provided a counternarrative to the valorous, mostly Anglo narratives below. The Bullock Texas State History Museum developed the exhibit in collaboration with the Web project Refusing to Forget (https://refusingtoforget.org/), which aims to develop public memory about Texas- and U.S.-sanctioned violence toward ethnic Mexicans. Although the exhibit was in place for less than three months, the American Association for State and Local History awarded the museum its prestigious 2016 Leadership in History Award for the display. The exhibit design conveyed a broader scope than the single decade of the title. The wall panels and stand-alone glass cases were arranged chronologically and contained documents and artifacts from more than one century before and after the 1910s. This ambitious design intended to contexualize the traumatic events of one decade by locating them in the panorama view from seventeenth-century Spanish colonialism to the resurgence of Tejano culture in the late twentieth century. Yet the heart of the exhibit remained the emotionally wrenching depiction of shameful state-sponsored violence, local vigilantism, and political cover-up during the focal decade. For viewers, this exhibit did for south Texas what portrayals of African American lynching have done for the U.S. South

Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Ethnic group · Genealogy · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Persecution · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science · Anthropology · Archaeology and Natural History · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Migration, Health, Geopolitics, Historical Geography

• Racial Violence in the West

  Open Access•Monica Muñoz Martinez•The Journal of the Gilded Age and…•2021

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