Twelve shots boomed through the night sky in downtown Laredo. Residents, perhaps on an evening stroll or on their way to a movie theater, dispersed rapidly through the streets as the gunfire cracked. Some took shelter, while the brave and curious followed the sound. Those informal investigators found a group of men grappling on the sidewalk. One was Webb County deputy sheriff Will Stoner. Another was Manuel García Vigil, editor of the local Spanish-language paper El Progreso. Vigil had sustained three wounds—one through the arm, one through the right ear, and the third a graze to his scalp. The deputy emerged unscathed.
The following morning, on May 7, 1913, daylight illuminated the brick exteriors of the Laredo Weekly Times and the Stowers Furniture company buildings. Embedded in the masonry were lead bullets from the firefight.
Law enforcement officers in early Texas were tasked with not only settling the physical frontier, but also controlling the public narrative regarding their work. Then, as now, the official versions of events were challenged by local journalists. In episode three of our podcast White Hats, we explore how that dynamic played out among the Texas Rangers, local law officers, and Tejano news organizations.
Following the extension of railroad service to Laredo in 1881, the growth of the small border town skyrocketed: by 1900, the population of Webb County, where Laredo is located, had risen sharply to 22,000—up from 5,200 in 1880. Thousands flocked to the city in pursuit of jobs, many hoping to work on the railroad. Freight cars were packed with everything from cattle to onions. (In the early 1910s, Webb County shipped out 1,700 rail cars a year full of onions, mostly the sweet Bermuda variety, earning it the title of “Bermuda Capital of the World.”) The rail lines also brought visitors and new settlers, including Anglo Americans, who carried with them new cultures and different ideas of who should wield power and how. During that same period, brewing revolutionary unrest in Mexico led many Anglos to associate Mexicans and Mexican Americans with insurgency and violence, making them targets of attacks by some Anglo civilians as well as law enforcement officers. At the turn of the century, Laredo was home to eleven Spanish-language publications, many of which reported on injustices inflicted upon Mexican Americans. Two newspapers stood out: Vigil’s El Progreso and La Crónica, published by Nicasio Idár. Both papers often published editorials condemning racial abuse and criticizing national politics, such as U.S. involvement in the Mexican Revolution.