The Advance will donate $1,000, if…
The Advance News Journal is offering $1,000 to anyone who can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the racist, violent allegations now being directed at the old historic San Juan Hotel (mass lynchings) are actually true.
The first one who can provide proof that the lynchings are fact, not fiction, can choose a nonprofit of their choice, and this newspaper will write out a check.
Those troubling allegations, by the way, also include one of Hidalgo County’s lawman of old who served the RGV for many years, Tom Mayfield.
It’s a long story that’s both current and old.
Where to begin?
Civil Rights?
For approximately the last eight months, a group of local grassroots civil rights activists, led by a UTRGV associate professor of Mexican-American Studies, Stephanie Alvarez, PhD, has been trying to gather enough names on a petition as leverage to force the city of San Juan to save the broken down San Juan Hotel and turn it into a civil rights museum.
Who would pay for that? Don’t know. If successful, that would derail the city’s current plans to turn the old hotel, built in 1920, into a new cityowned conference center while retaining the historical building’s front façade. Thus ending approximately 25 years of continued hotel rot near the very heart of downtown.
For more than two decades, the broken-down historic hotel has sat just to the west of the downtown section, on Bus. 83, like some piece of urban blight. It’s gotten so bad, that for Halloween, a private contractor leases it from the city and turns it into a haunted house, and no decorations, or at least not many, are needed to make the place look haunted, disheveled, down on its luck.
Even on a good day, that disheveled appearance has become the hotel’s natural look, thanks to natural decay and vandalism. No more windows to break. No more walls to spray paint.
For newcomers to San Juan driving into town from the west, the old San Juan Hotel is one of the first things they notice because it stands out like some homeless guy down on his luck, looking for a handout.
Once a historical treasure, the San Juan Hotel is marked with graffiti, broken windows, and looks like something out of a dystopian movie. Only thing missing are the walking zombies shuffling through the once beautiful courtyard, which was still hosting civic events through the mid-1990s.
Meanwhile, all around it, San Juan is springing up with new commercial development, a new city hall, plans to renovate the downtown, including the old hotel.
The Lynching Allegations
Last year, the city of San Juan’s mayor and commission discussed hiring a local architect to draw up a preliminary study that might raze the old hotel, yet save the historic front façade, and instead, build a new event and conference center in its place.
Approximately four months after the city indicated that it might want to greenlight the project and turn the rotting San Juan Hotel into something of aesthetic value, not to mention functional space, as opposed to continued urban rot, ad nauseum, out of the woodwork came Professor Alvarez, who told the city commission, during public comments, that she and some of her former students had spent some “eight years” researching the SJ Hotel and its connection to “state-sanctioned violence in the Rio Grande Valley.”
That allegation has been around for years, without any substantive proof in hand to back up those claims.
Alvarez said that their oral histories revealed that the San Juan Hotel was a site for the public hanging of many Mexican Americans and Mexicans for many years. (Source: riograndeguardian.com.)
Mix in what Alvarez described as “state-sanctioned violence and public hangings,” and there went plans to renovate the old hotel.At least for now.
Mayfield the Racist?
Not only was the old San Juan Hotel the site of many lynchings, according to the UTRGV prof, but one of its former residents was a racist who was “responsible for the murder and terrorizing of Mexican Americans for decades and displayed souvenirs of his victims in his room.”
Those souvenirs, by the way, are meant to indicate certain body parts. Apparently, based on what he’s being charged with, Tom Mayfield was like Hannibal Lector from the book and movie “Silence of the Lambs,” who had an affinity for blood and gore, if the allegations against him are true.
Those unsubstantiated claims – Tom Mayfield killed many Mexican-Americans for decades -- were also included on the flyer that Prof. Alvarez and her group was spreading around the area in an effort to collect more signatures on their petition: “Save the San Juan Hotel.”
Thanks to those allegations, represented as real history by the professor, thanks to her “eight years of research,” some local media outlets have already started to describe Mayfield as “infamous” in some of its reporting.
In recent months, the professor has appeared at multiple San Juan city commission meetings, speaking during public comments, repeating the claim that the old hotel was the “site of many lynchings of Mexicans Americans,” and that Mayfield was a cold-blooded killer who hated Mexicans and Americans of Mexican descent.
This is the same advocacy group, by the way, that also wants San Juan to change the name of the city’s Tom Mayfield Park, which has been the site of little league baseball games dating back to at least the early 1970s.
Mayfield, who passed away in 1966, once lived in a room at the San Juan Hotel when it was still a thing of historic beauty, and according to this group led by UTRGV Professor Stephanie Alvarez, his motel room was where he kept his “souvenirs.”
Pity the poor motel maid. “What’s this?”
Also, according to a printed flyer being handed out by Alvarez and her group, an RGV Civil Rights Museum needs to be created at the SJ Hotel “so we can learn about and preserve our Valley history and heal from historical trauma.”
Trauma, lynchings, what in the world is going on?
No one can argue that the Valley was once segregated, mainly with regard to neighborhoods, but even by 1954, the city of Pharr had two Hispanics on the five-member city commission.
The PSJA ISD Homecoming Queen of 1958 was Hispanic.
The ethnic barrier was already starting to crumble even further by the time the 1960s rolled around.
Today? The Anglos in the RGV are in the minority, about 85 to 15 percent, maybe 90 to 10 percent, depending on the city, not counting the seasonal Snowbirds, and Americans of Mexican descent hold most elected offices in south Texas, along with most of the wealth.
So exactly what sort of “historical trauma” has a relatively young Hispanic like Prof. Alvarez suffered from being raised here?
A lot of questions.
Our $1,000 Challenge
Question is, where is the proof to back up what the good professor is claiming with regard to both the San Juan Hotel and Tom Mayfield?
Instead, today, there is an historical plaque outside the hotel that reads:
“Tom Mayfield left the Gonzales County farm of his parents, John and Maggie Mayfield, in 1898 to help buy horses for Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Between 1910-1921 Tom served as Pharr City Marshall, Texas Ranger, and Hidalgo County deputy sheriff. His role in exposing a German-Mexican WW I plot in nearby San Diego and his amazing escape from a Mexican firing squad in 1921 made Tom a local celebrity. As Pharr-San Juan-Alamo’s deputy constable (1938-1963) Tom gained the community’s highest respect. He spent his last years as a resident of the San Juan Hotel. (1993).”
That was then; this is now. Now, Mayfield is a racist, according to the professor, and the city’s park should be re-named.
Still, where is the evidence to validate these incendiary claims?
The period of time during which these alleged atrocities took place, according to the professor, would have been during the Mexican Revolution, 1910 to 1920, when Texas Rangers were sent to the border to help quell the violence caused by Mexican banditos who would cross over to raid towns, ranches on the U.S. side.
There is no doubt that some of the Rangers did terrible things.
For example, in Presidio County, near the Big Bend, the “Porvenir Massacre,” as it became known, was truly horrific.
It took place Jan. 28, 1918, outside the village of Porvenir, in Presidio County, in which Texas Rangers and local ranchers, with the support of the U.S. Cavalry, killed 15 unarmed Mexican-American boys and men. (Source: The Forgotten Dead, Mob Violence Against Mexicans in The United States, 1848-1928. Oxford University Press.)_
The Texas Rangers, Company B, had been sent to the area to stop banditry after the Brite Ranch raid. Despite having no evidence that the Porvenir villagers had been involved in recent thefts or the killings of ranchers, the Rangers separated 15 men and boys from the rest of the village and shot them on a nearby hill. (Same source.)
There is no proof, however, that anything of that magnitude ever happened in Hidalgo County or any of the other three counties that comprise the RGV.
Yet, according to the UTRGV professor, multiple lynchings and killings were going on at the San Juan Hotel, courtesy of Tom Mayfield and his band of racist cut throats, not to mention, presumably, with the approval of the local Anglo community.
Yet, there has never been any first-hand accounts of any such atrocities. No photos. Only rumors passed on by someone who heard this or heard that. Long ago.
Our Own Historian
For years, this newspaper’s primary source related to local history was our old friend, Tony Villegas, the former Pharr city commissioner from 1954 who passed away in 2016 at the age of 96. Date of birth – 1920.
Even in his 90s, Villegas’s mind was still as sharp as a tack.
He could tell you the story about one Texas Ranger, Lupe Edwards, a local guy, killing “Cheno” Rodriguez for no reason other than the bad blood between the two for reasons still unknown.
That happened in 1918, two years before Villegas was born, but he still knew the story well because his dad was on the scene when it happened.
In other words, a first-person account handed down to the son.
At the time, Rodriguez was the manager of the Pharr Mercantile, located at 200 W. Park Ave.
A popular guy with the local Anglo establishment, according to Tony Villegas, the murder didn’t sit well with the Pharr locals, who were successful in running off Rodriguez’s killer, Lupe Edwards.
Villegas could even remember the names of the people who spoke up about the killing. Pharr residents like A.C White, manager of the Pharr Depot; Pat Divine; Charles Hensen; Ashley and Charles Cawthon; Marvin Dawas Sr.; and the Zacharys.
That should be considered real history. Places, dates, names. A first-person account.
What’s missing in the allegations made by the UTRGV professor against Tom Mayfield and the charge that the San Juan Hotel was “the site of many lynchings of Mexican Americans” is any substantive proof. If she and her students spent eight years studying this alleged criminality, surely they have some concrete evidence to back up the claim.
Bring that proof into The Advance office, or email us photos, give us written accounts by people who witnessed the alleged lynchings, proof that Mayfield was a stone-cold killer, and this newspaper will donate $1,000 to the professor’s favorite nonprofit.
By the way, before Villegas’s death in 2016, The Advance asked him about Mayfield. After all, Tony was born in 1920 and was one of the best amateur local historians around. If anyone could validate those lynching claims, he would be the guy.
Only thing Villegas said was, yeah, Mayfield could be a tough guy, not someone you’d want to tangle with, but he was that way with anyone who gave him a problem, Anglo, Hispanic, didn’t matter.
When it came to crime, according to Villegas, Mayfield, fluent in Spanish, was an equal-opportunity lawman.
Didn’t matter who you were. If you committed a crime, Villegas said, you were going to get arrested.
So, bring us proof. Anyone?
These days, any legit nonprofit would welcome $1,000.
If not, let the development of a new, better San Juan Hotel move forward, and quit defaming the good name of career lawman Tom Mayfield, RIP.