Plumbing 
Benita Albarado was a beloved wife, mother, grandmother, and friend in Uvalde, but most people don’t know that she was also an invaluable keeper of history. Her home was full of love, laughter, and family. It was also full of file cabinets, boxes, and shelves full of books, files with archival records, and photographs that documented a Texas tragedy.
I first had the honor of meeting and interviewing Benita and Evaristo Albarado at their home in Uvalde in 2009. They told me the history of what was then a little known tragedy. Benita Albarado was a descendant of the Porvenir massacre. Her father, Juan Florez, was a young boy who witnessed the massacre of his father, Longino Florez, and 14 other men and boys in Porvenir, Texas in January 1918.
The massacre was obscured by historians for nearly a century. The truth about the massacre was hidden largely because it was not a mob or a group of bandits that committed the massacre. 100s of records show that the victims were woken from their beds in the middle of the night, arrested by Texas Rangers from Company B, and without investigation or a trial, they were massacred while in police custody. As I sat in the Albarado home for the first of nearly a dozen interviews, I realized that they were sharing histories of a tragedy that occurred nearly 100 years earlier from what they learned from Juan Florez, but also from decades of research.
When Benita Albarado learned this tragedy from her father, she did not just hold on to the story. She worked tirelessly with her family for decades to research the massacre. She and her husband and children traveled to local, state, and federal archives to piece together scattered evidence. They found investigations by Texas authorities, by the US State Department, and by the Mexican government. They also found the testimonies given by the survivors of the massacre, including Benita Albarado’s grandmother, Juana Bonilla Florez. Those testimonies helped lead to Company B of the Texas Rangers being disbanded for committing the massacre and they prompted an investigation into Texas Ranger abuse. In addition to conducting research in archives, she helped preserve her own family history. Benita Albarado and her family traveled back to the site of the massacre with Juan Florez and recorded interviews with him to preserve his memories.
Recovering the history of the massacre might have started, in part, to find answers for the family, but as Benita Albarado realized the injustice of the event, she and her husband became committed to making sure that more people learned from the tragedies of the past, to have truthful conversations, and to learn lessons of history so that they would not be repeated. She became committed to having the tragedy of the Porvenir massacre acknowledged and shared by public institutions in Texas.
To this end, Benita Albarado worked with historians like myself, museum curators, and journalists. She loaned the Bullock Texas State History Museum prized family documents and a portrait of Juan Florez and his brother Narciso for their award-winning exhibition Life and Death on the Border, 1910-1920. Those artifacts from the Albarado private family collection were on display with artifacts from the Library of Congress, the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the State Preservation Board, and the Benson Latin American Collection. Benita Albarado was not a public speaker, but because she was committed to sharing her family history she confidently spoke with journalists from National Public Radio, Time Magazine, the Texas Observer, and more.
Benita Albarado (center) with her family at the opening of the Life and Death on the Border exhibit at the Bullock Texas State History Museum in 2016. Alvarado’s accompanying family members include (left to right) Elida Lopez, Elsie Routh, Emie Pace, Evaristo Albarado, Emma Albarado and Joey Leal.
Today, the Porvenir massacre is recognized by historians as one of the greatest tragedies in Texas in the 20th century. The massacre has now been featured in multiple exhibits at the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin, it is commemorated in Presidio County with a historical marker from the Texas Historical Commission, it was the focus of a PBS documentary Porvenir, Texas, and dozens of news outlets from from Texas Monthly to the New York Times have shared the history of the tragedy. This commitment to sharing the history of the Porvenir massacre has also been carried on by her children and her grandchildren. In 2009 her grandson Joe Leal helped publish a family account of the massacre online. On Jan. 31, 2019, her daughter Elsie Routh gave a presentation at the Bullock Museum.
When the historical marker for the Porvenir massacre was unveiled in 2018, a Texas Historical Commission representative spoke, “It is humbling to see the interest and the passion that this subject has ignited both locally and across the state, and maybe even across the nation… though more than a century has passed and those directly touched by the violence are no longer with us, we can still gather and remember those who are lost and make sure their memory does not fade.” He gave thanks to all those who helped make the marker possible, including descendants like Benita Albarado. The marker narrative includes the names of the victims, in no small part, because Benita and Evaristo Albarado made phone calls and sent emails to the THC for years, requesting that all 15 of the victims’ names be included in the marker. It is appropriate, then, that as we mourn her loss, that we also remember the names of the victims that she worked so hard to help preserve: Antonio Castañeda, Longino Florez, Pedro Herrera, Vivian Herrera, Severiano Herrera, Manuel Moralez, Eutemio González, Ambrosio Hernández, Alberto García, Tiburcio Jáquez, Róman Nieves, Serapio Jiménez, Pedro Jiménez, Juan Jiménez, and Macedonio Huertas.
Texas lost an important keeper of history this week. I am honored to have worked with Benita Albarado and her family, I am grateful that she shared her family history with me and the historians in the public history project Refusing to Forget. We remain committed to continuing her work and sharing truthful lessons of the past with the next generation of Texans.
Monica Muñoz Martinez was born and raised in Uvalde. She is the author of “The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas.”
