Lynchings at the SJ Hotel, a racist lawman?
By Gregg Wendorf
Advance News Journal
Bashing the reputation of a dead South Texas lawman, Tom Mayfield, after whom a local San Juan municipal park is named, decrying hangings at the old San Juan Hotel, of which there is no valid historical evidence, that’s what some people are currently doing, led by a female associate professor of Mexican American Studies at UTRGV.
Toss in the word “lynching” and more media outlets will pick up the story, while allowing the prof to paint Mayfield as a racist Mexican- killing cracker bigot.
Old Tom would undoubtedly refute the charges, but he’s been lying six feet under since 1966, so he has no say in the matter.
Demolish the Hotel?
The old San Juan Hotel, once a local crown jewel, opened in 1920, fell on hard times in the 1960s and ‘70s, was restored in the 1980s to its original glory, which lasted into the mid- to late-1990s, and then crashed once again. Only the last fall came hard. With no attention paid to it at all, soon the windows turned into ugly open sores; then the graffiti started to cover all the interior and exterior walls; the roof leaked; and, well, the building became an eyesore.
For the past two decades, year after year, the old hotel has turned into more of blight for the downtown San Juan area. Newcomers who drive into town, especially from the west along Bus. 83, let’s just say that the old San Juan Hotel — now covered in dirt, grime, filth, and graffiti — isn’t the first thing city officials want visitors to see.
Earlier this year, the city’s mayor and commission voted to hire ERO Architects and spend approximately $40,000 to draw up a preliminary study that might raze the old hotel, yet possibly save the historic front façade, and instead, build a new event and conference center on the lot.
Approximately four months after the city indicated that it might want to raze the old San Juan Hotel and turn it into something of value, out of the woodwork comes a UTRGV prof who wrote a guest column in the Rio Grande Guardian, appeared at last week’s SJ city commission meeting, and laid waste to both Mayfield and the old San Juan Hotel, claiming lawman Tom Mayfield was “one of the principal actors in perpetuating this violence.”
What violence? “As many of you know,” she wrote in the Guardian, “my former students and I have spent some eight years researching the hotel and its connection to state-sanctioned violence in the Rio Grande Valley. Our oral histories revealed that the San Juan Hotel was a site for the public hanging of many Mexican Americans and Mexicans for many years.”
State-sanctioned violence? Public hangings?
Now, at least one of the local news outlets has started describing Mayfield as “infamous.”
Yes, in the RGV, there was segregation for many years. The Anglos living on one side of the tracks, and those of Mexican descent, the other. North or south of the tracks, that depended on the town. In McAllen, for example, the Anglos, for the most part, lived north of the railroad tracks, while those in the minority lived south of the tracks.
Heading east, Pharr, San Juan, Alamo, Donna, etc. the Anglos lived south of the tracks, while the Hispanics lived north of them.
This division, by the way, wasn’t written in stone. It was more of a class division. Back in the segregated day, if you were Hispanic and had money, you could still live any place you wanted in the RGV. North, south of the tracks, didn’t matter. The Anglo bankers, businessmen were all your friends.
Toward the end of WWII, with a lot of vets of Mexican descent returning home to the Valley, the idea of segregation was less tolerated.
“I’m going to go fight for this country, and now you’re going to tell me where to live? Don’t think so.”
By the early 1950s, cracks in segregation were already starting to show. By 1954, for example, the City of Pharr had a mayor and four city commissioners. Of the four, two were Hispanic. My old buddy, Tony Villegas, RIP, was one of them, along with a compadre of his, with dark skin, no less.
The times, they were a-changing, as Bob Dylan liked to sing.
By the early- to mid-1960s, Hispanics were getting elected to local school boards, segregated schools no longer existed, and the rest, as they say, is history. Today, in the RGV, it’s relatively rare to find any Anglo, like former McAllen Mayor Jim Darling, on an elected body.
That has nothing to do with discrimination, but the simple fact that in Hidalgo County, full-blooded Anglos, with no Spanish blood, account for only approximately 12 percent of the population, so there aren’t many around willing to run for office, which still takes a hefty dose of time and commitment.
Along the way, there were indeed local Hispanics, state Hispanics, and national Hispanics like Cesar Chavez, who fought for civil rights, and that part of our collective memory should never be erased, which is what’s happening in ironic fashion to Confederate monuments, no matter their ties to historical fact.
But why turn the entire San Juan Hotel into a Civil Rights Museum, which is the intent on the part of the professor and some of her colleagues?
Because the hotel was the site of many civil rights violations — hangings, lynchings — even if there is no hard evidence to support the claim. Just make up some history BS and run with it. Might even get our names in the press.
Tom Mayfield, the Racist?
Back in the 1980s when a lot more people were alive who were born in, say 1910, I asked around to try and find a first-person account of any hanging at the hotel. I could find none.
I, too, had heard the old stories, and I was interested in finding out if they were true. I mean, a story about some guy being hanged by unruly Texas Rangers, using the tree behind the old hotel as a makeshift scaffold, was worth pursuing.
In the end, I could find no hard evidence, no documentation, no first-person accounts of any hangings/ lynchings at the old San Juan Hotel. Only the old chismé, gossip, that had been making the rounds for years.
Over the years, the rumors of civil rights abuse never let up, and before long, the old local lawman, Tom Mayfield, had entered into the fray. He came to Hidalgo County in 1918 to help buy horses for Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.
As things go, he liked it here so much that he ended up staying, marring a woman of Mexican descent with whom he had a daughter.
During his long law-enforcement career, Mayfield served as Pharr city marshal, a Texas Ranger, an Hidalgo County deputy sheriff, and Pharr-San Juan-Alamo’s deputy constable (1938-1963).
Along the way, in 1915, Mayfield uncovered the infamous German- Mexican WWI plot in nearby San Diego (Duval County), aptly name the Plan de San Diego.
Ostensibly written in the small town of San Diego, it called for nothing less than a Hispanic uprising designed to achieve the independence of the Southwest as a Hispanic republic.
True story, but one of those historical nuggets long forgotten.
Speaking about Mayfield, the man, if you go online and do a search for “Tom Mayfield Oral Histories,” you can find one that says this, according to a “Family Search” source: “About the 22-minute mark there is a story of a man being killed by bad Texas Rangers, and the city marshal (Tom Mayfield) told someone he could not control the Rangers.”
Sounds to me like Mayfield was trying to stop the rogue Rangers; not join in their killing.
Approximately eight years ago, there was a movement afoot to rename Tom Mayfield Park in San Juan, which had served as a city baseball park for years, because, again, some people were claiming he was a racist.
Says who? Mainly people who didn’t know him.
Take a book in print, for example, named “Ghosts of the Rio Grande Valley.”
In it, Mayfield is described as a man who had a penchant for “abusing Mexicans.”
In the same book, there is this paragraph: “Mayfield was an animal of a man who did not bother to jail the Mexican Americans he arrested, preferring to beat them to death with his pistol if he could.”
That’s not all. According to “Ghosts of the Rio Grande Valley,” Mayfield had a reputation as “a monster among the Mexican- American population of the town.”
Of course, the book contains no sources. Easy to libel a dead guy.
To get a glimpse of the old lawman, Tom Mayfield, I spoke to five people in the summer of 2015 who knew him personally. Three were in their late 70s, and two were in their 80s. They have lived here their entire lives.
The five I spoke with are all Hispanic. Actually, one is half Hispanic, half Anglo.
They all said the same thing: Mayfield was a tough lawman who didn’t put up with crap out of anybody, no matter if you were a Gringo or a Mexican. He was law-andorder all the way.
One man I spoke with, actually an old friend, a Hispanic who served for many years on the judicial bench, said, “No way was Mayfield a racist. If he was a racist, he wouldn’t have been re-elected so many times (constable), because a lot of people voting for him were Hispanics.”
Another guy I spoke with, another old friend, said that Mayfield had once pulled him over for speeding while riding his motorcycle.
“Yeah, he gave me a talking to, but you know what, in the end, I was glad he did.”
Who knows, may have saved his life since motorcycles and speed are often a prescription for disaster.
Another man I spoke with, also a veteran of the judicial bench, said, “Mayfield was a fair man.”
And this is a man who endured racism growing up here.
“The Anglo kids got to swim in the pool first. But that’s just the way life was. We soon learned that the way to get ahead was to get educated. Since then, obviously things have changed.”
This week, I called another old friend to ask about Mayfield. He thought Mayfield was a racist, because the old lawman had arrested two of his uncles for public intoxication, and he thought it was an unfair arrest; and on top of that, over the years, he had heard other stories about Mayfield and his abuse toward Mexican-Americans.
Aside from that, what evidence is there that Tom Mayfield was a bully bigot or that hangings/lynchings occurred at the old San Juan Hotel?
None that I can find, and I’ve taken the time to look, ask questions.
No matter, let’s show up at city meetings, write guest columns, and toss around unfounded claims, throw mud at an old once-great hotel down on her luck and a legendary lawman, without any basis in fact.