After a Hundred Years
During the century that has elapsed since the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the borderlands have been twice invaded: by Anglo-Americans from the north and east; and, in our time, by Mexican immigrants from the south. The first invasion took place under the shadow of an approaching war between Mexico and the United States; the second invasion culminated at a time when a state of undeclared war existed between the two nations. Throughout this period of a hundred years, relations between Anglos and Hispanos in the Southwest have been affected by the state of relations between the United States and Mexico. In fact, a prime condition to an improvement in Anglo-Hispano relations has always consisted in a clarification of relations between the two nations. After a hundred years, this clarification of relations has finally been achieved—in broad outline, in first principles. As relations between the United States and Mexico have been stabilized, on the basis of mutual dependency and respect, significant steps have been taken toward an improvement of Anglo-Hispano relations in the borderlands. It all began on a cold, raw day in March 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his first inaugural address, pledged the United States to the policy of the Good Neighbor.
1. A Beginning Is Made
While the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs was apparently established without any thought of using it to improve Anglo-Hispano relations in the Southwest, Mr. Nelson Rockefeller was soon deluged with suggestions that it be used in this manner. To many people living in the Southwest it seemed obvious that here was the logical place to invest the Good Neighbor Policy with real meaning and content. On October 15, 1941, as commissioner of immigration and housing in California, I submitted to Mr. Rockefeller a plan for the improvement of Anglo-Hispano relations and similar suggestions were transmitted by Dr. Joaquín Ortega, of the University of New Mexico; by Dr. George Sanchez of the University of Texas; by Dr. W. Lewis Abbott, of Colorado College; by Dr. Ben Cherrington, of the University of Denver; and by Mr. C. J. Carreon, a Mexican-American member of the Arizona legislature.
After some initial hesitation, the coordinator sent Mr. David Saposs to make a survey of conditions in the Southwest. Upon receipt of his report on April 3, 1942, the Spanish-Speaking People’s Division was established as part of the Office of Inter-American Affairs to stimulate and coordinate public and private rehabilitation programs aimed at preparing the Spanish-speaking to participate more actively in American life and to educate the English-speaking to the necessity of eliminating discriminatory practices injurious to the war effort and to our relations with Spanish America.1
Unfortunately the coordinator had great difficulty in making up his mind about the real function of the new division. Limited funds were wasted in trifling ballyhoo campaigns of one kind or another and too often the division functioned as though its prime objective were to induce Anglo-American clubwomen to sponsor Latin-American “fiestas.” In many ways, the division acted as though it wanted to frustrate any real efforts on the part of Spanish-speaking people to improve their lot. Some of the field representatives seemed to be actually afraid of Mexican-Americans, for they insisted on working with the least representative elements in the various Spanish-speaking communities.
On the board of the Southern California Council on Inter-American Affairs, subsidized by the CIAA, not a single Spanish-speaking person appeared although a local Mexican Affairs Coordinating Committee was set up to advise the council. This cleavage perpetuated, of course, the basic fault in Anglo-Hispano relations. A sample of items taken from the bulletin of the council will show how public funds were used to promote the Good Neighbor Policy: a cocktail party for Alfred Ramos Martínez, the Mexican painter, at the Hatfield Dalzell galleries; a breakfast for the Latin-American consular corps; a Pan-American “fiesta” at a local high school featuring José Arias and his Latin-American Troubadores; a cocktail party for the Latin-American consular corps at the Jonathan Club; an exhibit of New Mexico santos and bultos at the Southwest Museum; an institute on community relations which, the bulletin proudly notes, was reported “in a series of colorful and gossipy stories” by Princess Conchita Pignatelli in the Los Angeles Examiner; a series of lectures, illustrated “with many unusual colored slides” entitled “Travelling South Through Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile”; and an endless series of “goodwill” proclamations and radio programs stressing the necessity of Latin-American support in the war effort.
Feeble as these efforts were, the establishment of the Spanish-speaking section of the CIAA must be regarded as a landmark in Anglo-Hispano relations in the Southwest for it constituted a recognition, however belated, that the United States had not fulfilled its obligations under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Also, thanks largely to the work of Mrs. Jane W. Pijoan, not all of the division’s funds were wasted on cocktail parties, receptions, and window displays of the flags of Latin-American countries. Field representatives were stationed in Los Angeles and Austin; grants-in-aid were made to a number of established institutions in California, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and Michigan; in cooperation with the Institute of International Education some ten or fifteen fellowships were provided for Spanish-speaking students; and a series of important and useful conferences were organized in the Southwest.
Patterned on the Northern Colorado Conference on the Problems of the Spanish-Speaking People held in Greeley on May 10, 1942, the Coordinator’s Office organized a larger conference in Denver in June and July 1943; in Santa Fe in August 1943; and at the Arizona State Teachers College in Temple in June of the same year. Effectively organized and well-attended, these conferences initiated action programs which have had a wide influence throughout the region. At the University of New Mexico, four one-week institutes were organized for the training of Spanish-speaking rural leaders and teacher “work-shops” were promoted in many cities.
With funds provided by the Coordinator’s Office, the National Catholic Welfare Conference organized its first seminar on “The Spanish-Speaking People of the Southwest and West,” in San Antonio, in July 1943, which was followed by similar conferences in Denver, Santa Fe, and Los Angeles. These conferences represent, to the best of my knowledge, the first region-wide effort by the Catholic Church to concern itself with the problems of the Spanish-speaking people. While individual Catholic leaders, like Archbishop Lucey in San Antonio, have long been concerned about the Spanish-speaking people, the same cannot be said of the Church as a whole. The principal institutional influence in the life of the Mexican-American, its main contribution to a solution of “the Mexican Problem” has been a policy of religious nationalism and exclusiveness which has further isolated the Mexican from the general community with which he must some day make his adjustment.2
Several points should be noted about all these conferences and institutes. Beginning about 1943, that hardy perennial “the Mexican Problem” began to give way to a discussion of “The Spanish-Speaking People of the Southwest.” Whereas communities had formerly been preoccupied with some situation in their backyards, they now began to realize, for the first time, that the phase of the problem with which they were concerned was related to a much larger situation throughout the Southwest. The particularistic view, in which the camera-eye was focused on some specific Mexican shacktown, began to give way to the generic view, in which the camera swept the whole panorama of the Southwest. Public attention began to focus on Anglo-Hispano relations in the region, not as an intramural, domestic concern, but as an integral part of the much larger question of finding the basis for a new accord between the Anglo part of the hemisphere and the Spanish part.
Once events were seen in this perspective, thoughtful residents of the borderlands began to discuss, not “the Mexican Problem,” but the Anglo-American problem. In the past, the isolation of the Spanish-speaking along a broken border had obscured the obvious fact that Mexicans were a large minority throughout the region and not merely “a local problem” in a few communities. Communities in Southern California, for example, still think of the Mexicans in their midst as though they were the only Mexicans in the United States. As more and more Mexicans began to participate in “Good Neighbor” conferences and institutes, the discussion shifted from a probing of conditions long deplored to a consideration of ways and means by which the Mexican people themselves might be given a chance to improve these conditions. Although the shift in attitude is difficult to describe in a phrase, one might say that the “social work” approach has gradually been replaced by the “social action” approach. What the “Good Neighbor” conferences and institutes reflected, of course, was the rise of a new and a more general interest in the Spanish-speaking people as an ethnic group.3 The interest, moreover, began to be extended in depth as well as in general range. The studies which Dr. Michael Pijoan made of nutritional factors in “the Mexican Problem” threw a glaring light on such questions as the ability of Spanish-speaking children to learn as rapidly as Anglo-American children.4
2. Grassroots Democracy
Of the various projects sponsored by the coordinator, none was more significant than the formation of the “service clubs” in Colorado. With funds provided by the government, the Colorado Inter-American Field Service Commission was organized in the fall of 1944. By January of 1945, Mrs. Helen L. Peterson, the field director, had organized the first Latin-American service club in Rocky Ford. Before the year was over, eight additional clubs had been organized in Pueblo, Walsenburg, Trinidad, San Luis, Alamosa, Monte Vista, Greeley, and Taos. Fourteen of the clubs are now banded together in the Community Service Clubs, Inc., which publishes the Pan-American News in Denver. When the Coordinator’s Office was liquidated in December 1945, the program was taken over by the Institute of Ethnic Affairs.
The Colorado service clubs are an attempt to stimulate grassroots democracy in Spanish-speaking communities. Unlike various left-wing efforts to organize the Spanish-speaking people—such as the ill-fated Spanish-Speaking Congress of 1939—the service clubs have their roots, not in international politics, but in the basic needs of the Spanish-speaking communities. Starting with some simple issue, the clubs have taken up, one at a time, the problems closest to the people. They have conducted campaigns to register voters; they have sponsored scholarships for Spanish-speaking students; financed community health surveys; brought about the elimination of discriminatory practices; fought for better recreational facilities; and secured their rights for Mexican-American veterans. One of the clubs has initiated a $60,000-medical-care program in the San Luis Valley. Tackling the problem of Mexican-American truants, the Rocky Ford Club succeeded in returning ninety percent of the youngsters to the schools in a week. In developing the service clubs, all that Mrs. Peterson has done has been to provide the initial leadership, direction, and guidance. Long eager for some such program, the people have quickly responded and have accomplished significant improvements in a remarkably brief space of time.
In Southern California a similar grassroots, local type of organization has developed under the brilliant leadership of Ignacio López in the Pomona Valley. For all practical purposes, the Unity Leagues which he has organized are similar in purpose and function to the service clubs in Colorado. With Mexican-American veterans playing a leading role, the Unity Leagues have been consistently concerned with the most immediate and obvious needs of the Mexican communities. Indigenous and organic, they represent grassroots democracy at its best, for it is their purpose to enlist the energies of the people. When this approach has been adopted, leaders have been found in Mexican communities without much trouble. In essence what the Unity Leagues have done, as Ruth Tuck puts it, is to “sprinkle the grass roots.”5 In 1946–1947, the American Council on Race Relations sent Fred W. Ross, an extremely talented grassroots organizer, into the citrus belt communities in Southern California to expand the Unity League program. In a year’s work, Mr. Ross set in motion tides of interest and activity which have had the widest ramifications. In Chicago, the Mexican Civic Committee, organized by Frank M. Paz, functions in much the same way. What these activities foreshadow, of course, is a great awakening of the Spanish-speaking people in the Southwest which I feel certain will mature within the next two decades.
3. The Westminster Case
Gonzalo Méndez, a citizen of the United States, had been a resident of the town of Westminster, in Orange County, California, for twenty-five years. Of immigrant background, he had come to be a moderately prosperous asparagus grower. There are two schools in Westminster: a handsomely equipped school with green lawns and shrubs for the Anglo-Americans; and a Mexican school whose meager equipment matches the inelegance of its surroundings. It was not the discrepancy between the two schools, however, that annoyed Gonzalo Méndez. Rather it was the fact, so he said, that he didn’t like the idea of his Sylvia, Gonzalo Jr., and Gerónimo, growing up with hatred in their hearts for the children who went to the beautiful school. In the nearby community of El Modeno, the two schools were side by side; but the Mexican youngsters were always served lunch at a different hour from the Anglo-American students. Concluding that this practice had gone on long enough, Méndez filed a suit in the federal courts on March 2, 1945, on behalf of some five thousand Mexican residents of the district, against the school officials of Orange County.
Oddly enough, this issue had never been squarely raised before in California. The School Code permits segregation of “Indian children or children of Chinese, Japanese, or Mongolian descent,” but says nothing about Mexicans or Negroes. Without formal sanction, the practice of segregating Mexican children in the schools came about in California largely through default of any determined resistance on the part of Mexican-Americans. Once established, of course, the segregated schools were defended and rationalized. For example, the superintendent of one of the schools involved in the Méndez suit wrote a thesis in 1939 in which he defended segregation on the ground of “social differences” between the two groups; the higher percentage of “undesirable behavior patterns” among Mexican students (which one would assume it would be a function of the schools to correct); and the “lower moral standards” to be found in the Mexican group.
In some cases, segregation was accomplished by a fancy gerrymandering of school districts; but the more common practice was to use the arbitrary linguistic device of assigning all children with Spanish names to a separate school. Occasionally the school authorities would examine the appearance of youngsters so as to prevent the offspring of a Mexican mother whose married name might be O’Shaughnessey, from slipping into the wrong school. While the practice varied from district to district, the general scheme was to segregate Mexicans from the first through the sixth, and in some cases through the twelfth, grade.
In the trial of the Méndez case, the school authorities at first contended that Mexicans were a distinct and therefore an “inferior” race; but, confronted by the testimony of some world-famous anthropologists, they soon abandoned this position. As a matter of fact, it had been determined years ago—In re Rodríguez, 81 Fed. 337—that Mexicans of Spanish descent and of mixed Spanish-Indian descent were “white persons” within the meaning of the naturalization laws. The superintendent of schools then testified that Mexican children were “dirty”; that they had lice and impetigo; that their hands, face, neck, and ears were often unwashed (presumably nothing of this sort had ever happened with Anglo-American youngsters); and that, generally speaking, they were “inferior” to the other students in point of personal hygiene.
In a memorable opinion handed down on March 21, 1945, Judge Paul J. McCormick ruled that segregation of Mexican youngsters found no sanction under the California laws and that it also violated the “equal protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Segregation, Judge McCormick suggested, might have something to do with the fact that Mexican youngsters were retarded in English speech. It also had the effect, he said, of “depriving them of a common cultural attitude … which is imperative for the perpetuation of American institutions and ideals” and of fostering antagonism. When the decision was appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court, amicus curiae briefs were filed on behalf of Méndez by the American Jewish Congress, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Lawyers Guild, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Japanese-American Citizens League, and by Robert W. Kenny as attorney general of California. On April 14, 1947, the Ninth Circuit Court affirmed Judge McCormick’s ruling.
In a brilliant concurring opinion, Justice William Denman exposed all the shabby rationalizations by which the school authorities had sought to justify their action. The segregation of Mexican students in the schools, he caustically noted, did not stand alone; on the contrary, it was part of a pattern of discrimination and could not be justified in pedagogic terms however facile. For, as he observed, the Rev. R. N. Nuñez, a Catholic priest, Eugenio Nogueros, a college graduate, and Ignacio López, a newspaper publisher, had been forced to file a suit in the federal courts to enjoin the officials of nearby San Bernardino from barring “Latins” from the public swimming plunges. This discrimination had nothing whatever to do with educational theories; nor had it anything to do with hygiene. For all “Latins” had been barred: clean or dirty, healthy or diseased, black or white; in fact, as Justice Denman pointed out, the prohibition was so broad as to have embraced the nationals of twenty-one South American nations, Mexico, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. In closing his opinion, Justice Denman suggested that the school authorities of Orange County should be punished for contempt of court in having failed to carry into effect the decision of the lower court.
The filing of this precedent-shattering case was in no sense “inspired.” Outside organizations provided valuable assistance in handling the trial and the appeal, but the case had been filed simply because Gonzalo Méndez had “had enough.” That the action was long overdue is shown by the manner in which one Mexican community after the other immediately raised the same issue. In a dozen or more communities similar suits were filed or movements launched to eliminate segregated schools; and in El Modeno the Mexicans followed up their victory in the courts by electing one of the group a member of the local school board.
Forty-five Mexican-American and thirty Negro families make up the little settlement of Bell Town near Riverside, California. The school in Bell Town is a four-room wooden structure built over twenty years ago. Two miles down the road is an attractive stucco “Spanish-style” modern school with excellent equipment and every teaching facility. Only Negroes and Mexicans attended the Bell Town school; while the other school was “lily white” with the exception of three Mexicans and one Negro student who lived so close to the school that they could not be excluded on any pretense. “White” children, regardless of where they lived, were invariably assigned to the better school.
Hearing about the Méndez case, the residents of Bell Town decided that they, too, had “had enough.” Under the guidance of Fred Ross they founded the Bell Town Improvement League and petitioned the authorities to do away with segregation. In this instance, the school officials said nothing whatever about cleanliness or backwardness or godliness but frankly stated that the encroachment of Mexicans and Negroes depreciate property values. After a long fight, the residents of Bell Town won out. On September 16, 1946, the supervisor of schools told his staff: “If there is as much as one segregated Mexican-American pupil see to it that he gets unsegregated immediately.”
Throughout Southern California, Mexican-Americans have been moving toward a new awareness, a new consciousness of their rights as citizens of the United States. Chavez Ravine, in the City of Los Angeles, has a large Mexican population. In June 1946, the 4,500 residents announced that they had been “walking and walking for years and years and now we’re very, very tired” and proceeded to form a civic organization and demand that the area be provided with the bus service which it had lacked for twenty-five years. Today buses are running in Chavez Ravine. When the Mexican-American veterans returned to Clearwater, where most of the Mexicans lived on Illinois Street, they decided that it was about time, after all these years, that the street was paved. Today Illinois Street is paved. This same process is at work all over Southern California: streets are being paved; lights are being turned on; buses are running; and Mexican children are beginning to attend general schools along with other children.
4. “Utilizable Cultural Residues”
Part of the change that is taking place in Anglo-Hispano relationships in the Southwest can be traced to the new interest and leadership that has developed at the colleges and universities. As early as 1912, Dr. E. D. Gray wanted to found a Spanish-American university in New Mexico, for he regarded the bilingual population as a national and international asset. Today, thanks to the leadership of Dr. Joaquin Ortega, the University of New Mexico has a School of Inter-American Affairs which is training students who want to work in Latin-American countries as teachers, businessmen, and technicians.
“New Mexico,” writes Dr. Ortega, “still possesses utilizable cultural residues.” It has the most homogeneous Spanish-speaking and the most cohesive Indian communities in the United States as well as a typical cross-section of Anglo-Americans and other immigrants. Here is the place, he has insisted, to study the process of acculturation in the Americas for nowhere else can one find the three major cultural groups—Indians, Spanish, and Anglo-Americans—living together in large numbers with a common national allegiance yet maintaining their traditional cultures.
“New Mexico,” Dr. Ortega has also said, “is the shortest route to Mexican goodwill,” and to the goodwill of all Latin-America. During the war, we had no more effective spokesman on our radio programs broadcast to South America than Senator Dennis Chavez of New Mexico. While we have not yet learned to utilize the cultural resources of the Southwest, some steps have been made in the right direction. We discovered during the war that Pueblo Indians from New Mexico made excellent spokesmen for the United States among the Indians of South America. And we have begun to use a few Spanish-speaking people in the diplomatic and consular services (Daniel Valdez, who did one of the first studies of the Spanish-speaking people in Colorado, was recently appointed attaché to the American embassy in Montevideo). In emphasizing the importance of understanding and developing these resources, the University of New Mexico has played a prominent part.
In 1936 the university came into possession of the Harwood Foundation through a gift from Mrs. Lucy C. Harwood and immediately set about using the foundation as the spearhead for an educational program designed to serve the needs of Spanish-American villagers. By way of preparing this program, Dr. George Sanchez made a study of Taos County which was published in 1940 under the title of Forgotten People. The publication of this extraordinarily fine, sensitive, and perceptive study of Spanish-American culture might be said to mark a new chapter in the history of the Spanish-speaking people of the Southwest. Based on this study, the university then launched the Taos Project of community and adult education which has attracted nationwide attention. Essentially a self-help, cooperative, community organization project, the Taos Project has some impressive, if limited, accomplishments to its credit.6
At about the same time, Mr. and Mrs. Cyrus McCormick made a grant to enable the University to revise the work of a small rural school in the village of Nambe. This school has since become an important “pilot” school in devising better teaching methods for Spanish-speaking children.7 All of these projects, as well as the founding of the San Jose Training School in Albuquerque in 1930—again to improve teaching methods—and the fine work being done at New Mexico Highlands University at Las Vegas by Quincy Guy Burris—indicate the kind of leadership the universities have shown in the last decade.
Similar developments have taken place at the University of Texas, particularly since the arrival there of Dr. George Sanchez. The Committee on Inter-American Relations in Texas has sponsored such excellent studies as Dr. Wilson Little’s report on Spanish-Speaking Children in Texas (1944), which has been the basis for many improvements in the educational system. Under the guidance of the university, the State Department of Education is now making a serious effort to improve the teaching of Spanish in the public schools and free textbooks are furnished for teaching Spanish at every grade level. A summer school is now conducted by the university in Mexico City and an Institute of Latin-American Studies has been founded at Austin. Recently the First Regional Conference on the Education of Spanish-Speaking People in the Southwest was held at Austin (December 13–15, 1946)—one of the first attempts to consider the education of Spanish-speaking people as a region-wide problem in inter-American education. From this conference has come the Southwestern Council on the Education of the Spanish-Speaking Peoples whose recommendations have begun to have a wide influence in the Southwest. Some fifteen years ago, J. Frank Dobie said that there were only about twenty or thirty Mexican-American students at the university; today one hundred and fourteen are enrolled.*
All this activity of the last decade—the new role being played by the universities, the calling of conferences and institutes, the appointment of Good Neighbor commissions in Texas, and so forth—indicates that leaders of opinion in the Southwest have come to recognize that in discussing the education of Spanish-speaking people and related issues, they are dealing with aspects of a unitary region-wide problem which cannot be precisely correlated, say, with the assimilation of Italian-Americans in New Haven. For the Spanish-speaking minority in the Southwest, rather like the Negro issue in the Deep South, presents a problem in masses. Spanish-speaking people in the borderlands are the fringe of great masses of Spanish-speaking people in Mexico, Central America, and South America. To regard them as “merely another minority” is to gravely minimize the significance of the borderlands as a bridge to inter-American understanding.
5. From De Anza to Juan López
The movement traced in the foregoing section should be regarded as the latest chapter in the Anglo-Americans’ belated discovery of the Southwest. The oldest settled portion of the United States, the Southwest is the newest in point of Anglo-American interest. In this sense, it was discovered by Hubert H. Bancroft and Bandelier in the 1880s. Bancroft’s History of the North Mexico States and Texas appeared between 1884 and 1889; his History of California from 1885 to 1891; and his History of Arizona and New Mexico in 1889. Bancroft worked with documents; the man who really “discovered” the Southwest, as a cultural province, was Adolph F. A. Bandelier. Trained in geology at the University of Bern, Bandelier came to New Mexico in 1880 and in the course of a decade visited every nook and cranny of the Southwest. His Final Report on the Southwestern United States, Part II, appeared in 1892. These works by Bancroft and Bandelier, along with Frank W. Blackmar’s Spanish Institutions of the Southwest (1891) and Charles Fletcher Lummis’s The Land of Poco Tiempo (1893), represent the initial Anglo-American awareness of the cultural importance of the Southwest.
Those who first discovered the cultural riches of the Southwest emphasized, quite naturally, its archaeological and antiquarian interests. Largely as a result of Bandelier’s work, the Archaeological Institute of America selected Santa Fe as the headquarters for its School of American Research in 1908. At about the same time, the influx of writers, artists, and intellectuals began, when Ernest Blumenschein and Oscar Berninghaus arrived in Taos in a covered wagon. Through the work of the Santa Fe and Taos artists, the nation became increasingly aware of the cultural importance of the Southwest. First discovering the Indians, the artists and writers gradually began to discover the Spanish-speaking. From 1920 to 1930 the native New Mexicans were “discovered” with a vengeance. Just as the somewhat earlier discovery of the Indians found expression in a movement primarily aimed at the reconstruction of Indian arts and crafts, so the discovery of the Hispanos coincided with a movement aimed at reconstituting the Spanish-Colonial handicraft arts. What both movements lacked was a social program by which the basic economy of the Indians and the Spanish-speaking might be reconstructed, for the arts and crafts could only flourish as the culture was vigorous and life sustaining.
This missing element—the social program—was supplied by the New Deal agencies in New Mexico in the thirties. Faced with heavy Spanish-speaking relief loads, these agencies were compelled to undertake, in conjunction with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a thoroughgoing survey of natural and human resources in the Rio Grande Valley. The monumental Tewa Basin studies initiated by the Soil Conservation Service represent perhaps the first serious attempt to view the whole human scene in New Mexico and to ferret out the correlations between Anglo, Hispano, and Indian influences in the region. Much of the present-day interest in Spanish-speaking people in the Southwest can be traced to the work of federal agencies and federal officials in New Mexico in the period from 1933 to 1940. If the Indians received more attention than the Spanish-Americans, it was because they were somewhat better organized to demand attention for their problems. But both efforts—to rehabilitate Indian life and to reconstruct Spanish-American communities—were and still are closely interrelated.
What has happened in this process of discovery is that the focus of the Anglo-Americans has finally come to center in the contemporary scene. An interest in mission ruins and Indian relics has been known to lead to an interest in Mexicans and Indians. Hence the focus of interest has gradually shifted from the entrada of Juan de Oñate in 1598 to life in the village of Truchas in 1947; from Junipero Serra’s first celebration of the mass in San Diego to a concern with the present-day Mexican-American colonias. Similarly an interest in Spanish-Colonial arts has gradually ripened into an interest in the handling of the chili crop and in tenant-herding in the Cuba Valley.
The nearer the focus has shifted to the contemporary scene, the more the Anglo-Americans have been surprised by their discoveries. Nowadays, a hundred years after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, they have finally begun to study the actual social structure of the widely varying Mexican-American communities to be found between Brownsville and Los Angeles. From studies of this sort has come the realization, as Lee Casey puts it, that perhaps the Anglo-Americans should “do a little adjusting themselves.” It is significant that the growing maturity of Mexican-American communities throughout the Southwest is closely related, in point of time, to the appearance of this new interest, not in Juan Bautista de Anza, but in Juan López.
* “See Texas-Born Spanish-Name Students in Texas Colleges and Universities: 1945–1946, by Ruth Ann Fogartie, University of Texas Press (March 1948).