These Bones Can Speak

A damning excavation of American history about the Tejano legislator who challenged the Texas Rangers' reign of terror on the Mexican-Texas border--and the system that ensured he would fail.

In 1919, Democratic legislator José Tomás Canales was poised to hold the Texas Rangers accountable for their reign of terror against Mexican workers and small landowners along the border. Despite amassing damning evidence against the force's leadership--two men who allowed the violence to flourish--Canales, in a dramatic twist of events, failed to call them to the stand and hold them accountable for their atrocities.

In this urgent and groundbreaking work of narrative history, Adin Dobkin unearths the roots of J. T. Canales's fateful decision and how he--the scion of a New Spanish ranching family--was formed by the changing world that birthed him and the Rangers alike. Drawing on investigation transcripts, newly uncovered archival documents, and the material record of the border itself, Dobkin tells the story of a country in flux and a terrain both beloved and brutal: a battleground for land dispossession, labor struggles, radicalism, and reactionism, which bred state-sanctioned violence that terrorized border communities.

At once a multigenerational epic of the Texas-Mexico borderlands and an exhumation of a reformer who could not overcome the limits of the system he believed in, These Bones Can Speak transforms the notion of the Rangers from rogue actors to a powerful political instrument while exposing how a system built on racial capitalism forged--and continues to haunt--modern America.