First, the headline from the Washington Post:
Nine members of Mormon family with U.S. citizenship killed in attack in northern Mexico; Trump offers military supportPut in Wilson in place of Trump, and this story could have appeared in a 1919 issue of the Post, or certainly a 1916 issue.
This is an awful tragedy. It appears to be a case of mistaken identify visited upon a group of people in a most violent way. Chances are, we're only reading about it in the U.S. because those killed were dual citizens of the United States and Mexico and had extremely close connections with the United States. Had they been simply regular Mexican citizens we'd likely not be reading that much about it.
None of which diminishes the tragedy.
Mormons have had a fairly long presence in Mexico. We last read about that here in the context of Mormon agricultural communities in Mexico coming under distress during the Mexican Revolution. Poncho Villa seems to have uniquely disliked them for some known reason. Maybe it was because they were closely connected with the U.S, maybe its because their religion was strange to him even though he was an irreligious man, maybe its just because they were different, or maybe it was because Villa was basically unstable. At any rate, many of them fled to the United States during that period, although some remain. I'm uncertain about these folks, but they were in the right Mexican state to have been descendants of those earlier colonies.
Anyhow, this blog has focused intensely on the 1915 to 1920 time period, and its often ran real time century delayed items from the 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico forward. Those have slowed up a lot recently (and readership has accordingly dropped off), but something like this reminds us, in a very tragic way, that the past is still with us. Indeed, the present is merely a developed past.
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