Recalling racist violence in California

The massacre at two New Zealand mosques — in which at least 50 people were killed, apparently by a white nationalist who posted a racist manifesto online — was the latest somber reminder that violence against specific religious or ethnic communities has been persistent throughout history, although it takes different forms.

Recently, New York Times reporter Simon Romero wrote about new efforts to remember the lynchings of people of Mexican descent throughout the American West. In doing so, advocates say, we may be able to better avoid repeating them. He wrote about such killings that took place in California:

An Anglo mob in Bakersfield went on a killing spree in 1877. Their victims: five men of Mexican descent.

About 100 men, some wielding axes, broke into the county courthouse and overpowered the jailer. In their rampage they snatched the men from the jail, held an impromptu trial with mob members as jurors, declared them guilty of horse theft and hanged them on the courthouse lawn.

The case was just one of thousands of lynchings of men, women and children of Mexican descent, a period of racist terror lasting from the mid-19th century until the 1920s. Lynchings of Mexicans, many of whom were U.S. citizens, often faded into history, attracting less attention than the horrific mob violence targeting African-Americans around the United States.

But descendants of lynching victims and historians are now campaigning to publicly remember these episodes in an effort to cast scrutiny on the atrocities and draw parallels at a time of resurgent anti-Hispanic hate crimes. California was second only to Texas in the grim ranking of mob killings of people of Mexican descent, according to historians William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb.

Many of California’s lynchings of Mexicans took place during the Gold Rush from 1848 to 1855, when Anglos chafed at having to compete with Mexicans for mining claims. Never mind that California was part of Mexico just a few years earlier; after the Mexican-American War, the United States annexed California and other Mexican lands that form what is now the American Southwest.

Example of such lynchings in California abound.

A mob accused Carlos Esclava of theft and hanged him in Mokelumne Hill in 1852 before a crowd of 800. Also in 1852, an especially bloody year for mob violence against Mexicans, a so-called vigilance committee in Santa Cruz hanged Domingo Hernandez after he was accused of theft. In 1853, an unidentified Mexican was hanged at Angel’s Camp for giving aid to an “outlaw” — Joaquin Murrieta, the Sonoran forty-niner known as the Robin Hood of the West.

Lynchings of people of Mexican descent continued in California through the 1890s. By then, episodes like the Bakersfield killings of 1877 had provoked claims of racism against Mexicans.

“Several Mexicans or native Californians raided a station or two, in the Vasquez style, and five of them were subsequently arrested and lodged in jail,” said The Lyon County Times of Silver City, Nevada, one of several newspapers around the West to report on the Bakersfield lynchings.

The victims of the Bakersfield lynch mob were not lost to history. They were identified as Antonio Maron, Francisco Encinas, Miguel Elias, Fermin Eideo and Bessena Ruiz.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.