Left: Dr. Christopher Carmona; Right: “El Rinche Vol 2. Revolución-The African American and Mexican American Experience of Land Theft, Lynching, and Resistance” book cover
Join Holocaust Museum Houston for the second lecture in the Genocide Awareness Month lecture series, with Dr. Christopher Carmona, author of El Rinche Vol 2. Revolución-The African American and Mexican American Experience of Land Theft, Lynching, and Resistance.
This presentation will discuss the shared histories of African Americans and Mexican Americans in the early 20th Century. After Reconstruction ended, there was a significant rise in violence against African Americans culminating in the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. For over 30 years African Americans had established Freedom towns which were Black towns with Black economies and Black run. These Freedom towns were all over the South and Texas. With the rise of what is called the New South came the KKK and its most powerful era. They destroyed and pushed African Americans off of their lands and destroyed their towns. For Mexican Americans in Texas, the Texas Rangers were used as thugs to push Mexican American landowners off of their lands and de-enfranchise people of color. This was the deadliest and most violent era of state sponsored violence for people of color, almost erased from American history.
Christopher Carmona is the author of El Rinche: The Ghost Ranger of the Rio Grande, which was a finalist for the 2019 Best Young Adult Novel for the Texas Institute of Letters. Currently, he is working on finishing this series of YA novels. Book Two is out now. His short story collection, The Road to Llorona Park, won the 2016 NACCS Tejas Best Fiction Award and was listed as one of the top 8 Latinx books in 2016 by NBC News. He has a chapter in Reverberations of Racial Violence: Critical Reflections on Borderlands History discussing intergenerational trauma for Mexican Americans in the Rio Grande Valley.
As an educational activist, Carmona serves as a board member of the national award-winning organization, Refusing To Forget, which researches and promotes the history of violence against Mexican Americans and Latinos in the early 20th Century and beyond. Currently he serves as the Chair of the NACCS Tejas Foco Committee on Implementing MAS in PreK-12 Education in Texas. He was a leader in getting the TEKS-based Mexican American Studies High School Course approved by the Texas State Board of Education, which is the only State Board approved Mexican American Studies course in the United States to date. He served on Responsible Ethnic Studies Textbook committee that was awarded the “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” award for excellence in educational leadership from the Mexican American School Board Association (MASBA).
This event is in person. Admission is free, but advanced registration is required.
