ABSTRACT
Between 1910 and 1920, hundreds if not thousands of ethnic Mexicans died in anti-Mexican violence on the Texas-Mexico border. “Refusing to Forget,” an educational non-profit collaborative, uncovers and presents a period of racial terror absent from public memory and disavowed by Texas cultural institutions. Learning from, and building on, the work of vernacular historians and the first monument to Tejano participation in Texas history, Refusing to Forget undertook a museum exhibit and a series of state historical markers. This essay shows the possibilities and complexities of collaborating with the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum and with the Texas Historical Commission’s Undertold Markers Program and outlines some of the challenges facing the public scholar in working between communities, who have long maintained their own history, and the state, which refuses to acknowledge their painful realities.
