History Faculty Publications and Presentations
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-2019
Abstract
In May of 1963, a police officer in San Benito, Texas, arrested Antonio Mendoza, a Mexican American, for public drunkenness. After beating him, he placed the dazed prisoner in a jail cell. For more than seventeen hours, no one at the jail saw f it to tend to the prisoner’s wounds, provide food or water, or check on his overall well-being. By the time an official checked on him, Mendoza, overcome by fear, pain, or emotional distress—or by some combination of all three—had committed suicide. “The man was found the next morning hanging by a belt from a pipe in his cell,” wrote Carlos D. Conde, a young Mexican American reporter for the Dallas Morning News and a native of San Benito. The coroner ruled the death a suicide—a decision no one publicly disputed—but many Mexican Americans interpreted it as symptomatic of the racism that defined the town. “Friends of the dead man, including the widow, refused to let it end there. They asked a well-known Latin criminal lawyer of nearby Harlingen, Abel Toscano, [Jr.,] to represent them. Toscano accepted the case without fee.” Ironically, Conde added, “the alleged brutality charges involved a once popular Latin city policeman.”
Recommended Citation
Brent M. S. Campney. ""What we Need Here is Another Crystal City": The Mexican Civil Rights Movement in South Texas, 1963." New Mexico Historical Review 94, 2 (2019). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmhr/vol94/iss2/5
Publication Title
New Mexico Historical Review