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Study by economists is thought to be the first to quantitively estimate the effects of racial terror against Mexicans in the U.S. on U.S.-born Mexican Americans

The racially motivated lynchings of African Americans in the U.S. South are well documented, but much less well known are the racially motivated lynchings of Mexicans and Mexican Americans from 1880 to 1930 in Texas鈥攖he state with the highest rate of lynchings of Mexicans on record.

One estimate by researchers for that period puts the lynchings of Mexicans at 27.4 individuals per 100,000 population. New research suggests that the violence may have also caused long-run economic and educational harm to children in communities where lynchings occurred.

In their recently published paper, 鈥�,鈥� Professor Francisca M. Antman with the SM调教所 Department of Economics and fellow economist Brian Duncan with the University of Colorado Denver explore the historical lynchings of Mexicans in Texas and their long-term economic impact on U.S.-born Mexican Americans.

By merging U.S. Census records and historical data on lynchings in Texas, the economists determined that Hispanics raised in a Texas county where one or more lynchings occurred when they were a child experienced negative impacts later in life related to their earnings, education levels and home ownership rates in 1940. However, Antman and Duncan acknowledge that the estimated impacts were small and that more research is needed in this area.

Antman says she believes one reason the lynchings of Mexicans and Mexican Americans are not widely known is that these attacks often occurred during times of more generalized violence in Texas, often associated with the Texas War for Independence from Mexico (Texas Revolution, 1835-36), the Mexican-American War (1846-48) and the Mexican Revolution (1910-20), a civil war between rival political factions in Mexico that resulted in violence spilling over onto both sides of the border.

Incursions by Mexican revolutionaries into Texas during the Mexican civil war fanned the flames against ethnic Mexicans in Texas, who were regularly suspected of sympathizing with Mexican revolutionaries, Antman says. The spike in lynchings of Hispanics between 1915 to 1919 corresponds to the period, with most of the lynchings occurring in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, which borders Mexico, she notes.

Victims of the Bandit War

Earlier historians of the time tended to refer to violence on the border as a 鈥淏andit War鈥� involving Mexican Revolutionaries, Texas Rangers, the U.S. Army and vigilantes. Antman says modern historians tend to view this period through a different lens, one that recognizes that innocent Mexicans and Mexican Americans were victims of violence during this period simply because of their race and ethnicity.

鈥淟ynchings (of Hispanics) were often discounted with the justification of the protection of the Texas territory against this group of people,鈥� Antman says. In some cases, the lynched men were accused of crimes such as murder or horse theft, but generally they had not been formally charged with any crime, she says.

What鈥檚 more, law enforcement鈥攎ost notably the Texas Rangers鈥攃arried out some lynchings, which at the time tended to legitimize the extrajudicial killings, she adds.

The fact that newspapers in Texas at the time published accounts of lynchings suggests that the acts were largely known by the populace, Antman says. Researchers at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, has collected all of the published articles they could find about lynchings on the website , which is the site Antman and Duncan consulted for their research.

Determining long-term impacts

鈥淭o our knowledge, this is the first study to quantitively estimate the impacts of racial terror against Mexicans in the U.S. on U.S.-born Mexican Americans,鈥� Antman and Duncan write in their paper.

To gauge that impact, the authors took the information about the lynchings of Mexican Americans in Texas counties from the Lynching in Texas website and compared it with individual-level U.S. Census data from 1880 through 1940.

Given that the census data does not include a person鈥檚 county of birth, the researchers restricted their sample to U.S.-born Mexican Americans aged 18 to 59 in 1940 who can be linked to a 1930 or earlier census. They further limited their sample to individuals in the 1940 census who were observed in an earlier census at age 17 or younger residing in a Texas county, which the authors for simplicity refer to as the individual鈥檚 鈥渃ounty of origin.鈥�

The census data were then matched to the Lynching in Texas data based on county of origin, to identify the number of lynchings in an individual鈥檚 county of origin when they were growing up, specifically at ages 0-5, 6-10 and 11-17.

In merging census and lynching data, 颅颅Antman says she and Duncan wanted to gauge whether the lynchings had any apparent effect on Mexican Americans鈥� years of schooling, earnings and home ownership, as measured in the 1940 census. Notably, 1940 was the first year in which measures of educational attainment and earnings were collected.

Antman says this research shows that exposure to lynchings in childhood did have negative impacts on long-run outcomes for Mexican Americans, although the magnitudes are small and not always statistically significant. However, restricting the sample to the Lower Rio Grande Valley origin counties generally raises the magnitudes and statistical significance of the estimates, she says.

Given the challenges of measuring lynchings during this period, Antman says results should be interpreted with caution, as a first step in understanding the long-term harm of racial terror in the United States, but she says she hopes the paper will spur additional research.

鈥淗opefully this paper is just the starting point of future work, and hopefully it encourages researchers to explore other areas of the U.S. in which we know this kind of racial violence occurred, and the impacts on additional groups of people.鈥�

Top image: Mexican young women working on a farm in Edinburg, Texas, in Feb. 1939. (Photo: /Corbis)

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