The Fantasy Heritage
Long, long ago the borderlands were settled by Spanish grandees and caballeros, a gentle people, accustomed to the luxurious softness of fine clothes, to well-trained servants, to all the amenities of civilized European living. Inured to suffering, kindly mission padres overcame the hostility of Indians by their saintly example and the force of a spiritual ideal, much in the manner of a gentle spring rain driving the harsh winds of winter from the skies. Life was incomparably easy and indolent in those days. There was none of the rough struggle for existence that beset the Puritans in New England. The climate was so mild, the soil so fertile, that Indians merely cast seeds on the ground, letting them fall where chance deposited them, and relaxed in the shade of the nearest tree while a provident and kindly nature took over. Occasionally one of the field hands would interrupt his siesta long enough to open one eye and lazily watch the corn stalks shooting up in the golden light. …
In the evenings one or the other of the patios would witness the gathering of the Spanish dons from the ranchos. Here in the coolness of the evening air they would talk of the day’s events, sipping gentle wines that revived memories of castles in Spain. While the men were thus pleasantly engaged, the women would continue their never-ending routine of tasks that kept the large households functioning smoothly. For the young people, it was a life of unrivalled enjoyment; racing their horses over the green-rolling hills and mustard fields of Southern California; dancing the contradanzas and jotas to the click of castanets. In the evening, the young ranchero strolled beneath the window of his love’s boudoir. As the moon rose high over the Sierra Madres, he would sing the old love songs of Spain. … All in all, this life of Spain-away-from-Spain in the borderlands was very romantic, idyllic, very beautiful. …
Indeed, it’s really a shame that it never existed.
Never existed? How can this be said when so much of the public life of Los Angeles is based on the assumption that it did? Why do churches in Los Angeles never hold bazaars? Why are they always called fiestas? Why is a quarter acre and twenty chickens called a rancho? Why does a leading newspaper gossip columnist adopt the nom de plume of “La Duenna”? Why does the largest women’s club, composed exclusively of Anglo-American women, hold an annual “gala Spanish fiesta program” in which the ladies appear in “full Spanish costume” to admire Señor Raoul de Ramirez’ presentation of The Bells of San Gabriel?1 And, lastly, why do so many restaurants, dance halls, swimming pools, and theaters exclude persons of Mexican descent?
Los Angeles is merely one of many cities in the borderlands which has fed itself on a false mythology for so long that it has become a well-fattened paradox. For example, the city boasts of the Spanish origin of its first settlers. Here are their names: Pablo Rodríguez, José Variegas, José Moreno, Felix Villavicencio, José de Lara, Antonio Mesa, Basilio Rosas, Alejandro Rosas, Antonio Navarro, and Manuel Camero. All “Spanish” names, all good “Spaniards” except—Pablo Rodríguez who was an Indian; José Variegas, first alcalde of the pueblo, also an Indian; José Moreno, a mulatto; Felix Villavicencio, a Spaniard married to an Indian; José de Lara, also married to an Indian; Antonio Mesa, who was a Negro; Basilio Rosas, an Indian married to a mulatto; Alejandro Rosas, an Indian married to an Indian; Antonio Navarro, a mestizo with a mulatto wife; and Manuel Camero, a mulatto. The twelfth settler is merely listed as “a Chino” and was probably of Chinese descent. Thus of the original settlers of Our City the Queen of the Angels, their wives included, two were Spaniards; one mestizo; two were Negroes; eight were mulattoes; and nine were Indians. None of this would really matter except that the churches in Los Angeles hold fiestas rather than bazaars and that Mexicans are still not accepted as a part of the community. When one examines how deeply this fantasy heritage has permeated the social and cultural life of the borderlands, the dichotomy begins to assume the proportions of a schizophrenic mania.
1. The Man on the White Horse
“Three hundred years,” writes Tom Cameron in the Los Angeles Times of August 29, 1947, “vanished in an instant here in Santa Barbara today as the city and more than 100,000 guests plunged into a three-day round of pageants, parades, street dancing and impromptu entertainment. It is La Fiesta. Santa Barbara is a particularly bewitching señorita today. With glowing copa de oro flowers entwined in her raven tresses and with her gayest mantilla swirling above her tight-bodied, ruffled Spanish colonial gown, she is hostess to honored guests from near and far. It is a time when Santa Barbara gazes over her bare shoulders [sic] to a romantic, colorful era of leisurely uncomplicated living. …”
With one thousand beautiful “gaily caparisoned” Palomino horses prancing and curveting along State Street—renamed for three days “Calle Estado”—the history of the region is dramatized in costly and elaborate floats. This year, 1947, the Kiwanis Club enters a float in honor of Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo; Rotary honors Sir Francis Drake; the Exchange Club pays homage to Sebastián Viscaíno. “A traditional wedding party of 1818 escorted by caballeros, canters along. It represents the wedding of Anita de la Guerra and Capt. Alfred Robinson.” Following the charros, riders from San Gabriel and the Spanish grape carts drawn by donkeys with flower girls astride, come the Long Beach mounted police, the Del Rey Palomino Club, Los Rancheros Visitadores (headed by J. J. Mitchell of Juan y Lolita Rancho), and of course the Los Angeles sheriff’s posse headed by Eugene Biscailuz, the sheriff, himself an “early Californian.” The celebration comes to a finale with the presentation in the Santa Barbara Bowl of a pageant written by Charles E. Pressley entitled Romantic California—and very well titled it is.
“Spanish” food is served; “Spanish” music is played; “Spanish” costumes are worn. For this is the heritage, a fantasy heritage, in which the arbiters of the day are “Spaniards.” The Mexicans—those who are proud to be called Mexican—have a name for these “Spaniards.” They call them “Californios” or “Californianos” or, more often, “renegados.” These are the people after whom streets are named in Los Angeles: Pico, Sepúlveda, Figueroa. It is they who are used by the Anglo-American community to reconcile its fantasy heritage with the contemporary scene. By a definition provided by the Californios themselves, one who achieves success in the borderlands is “Spanish”; one who doesn’t is “Mexican.”
This fantasy heritage makes for the most obvious ironies. Cinco de Mayo is one of the Mexican national holidays which Los Angeles, now a Good Neighbor, has begun to observe. It is celebrated by parades, fiestas, and barbecues; speeches by the mayor and the Mexican consul constitute the principal order of the day. Invariably the parade winds its way through Olvera Street and the Plaza—sections of the old Mexican town now kept in a state of partial repair for the tourist trade—to the City Hall. Leading the parade through the streets, riding majestically on a white horse, is a prominent “Mexican” actor. Strangely enough, this actor, a Californio three hundred and sixty-four days of the year, becomes a “Mexicano” on Cinco de Mayo. Elegantly attired in a ranchero costume, he sits proudly astride his silver-mounted saddle and jingles his silver spurs as he rides along. The moment he comes into sight, the crowds begin to applaud for he is well known to them through the unvarying stereotypic Mexican roles which he plays in the films. Moreover, they have seen him in exactly this same role, at the head of this or some similar parade, for fifteen years. Of late the applause is pretty thin and it may be that the audience is becoming a little weary of the old routine. A union organizer of Mexican descent once remarked to me: “If I see that white horse once more, I’m going to spit in its eye.”
Following the man on the white horse will be other horsemen, few of them with any pretensions of Mexican descent but all similarly attired, mounted on splendid Palominos, horses worth their weight in gold, decorated with their weight in silver trappings. At one time there were men in Mexico who dressed in nearly this fashion. The full irony of the situation dawns when one realizes that the men who lead the parade are dressed like the same class whose downfall is being celebrated. The irony would be no greater if the Angelenos put on the brilliant red uniforms of British grenadiers when they paraded on the Fourth of July. For on Cinco de Mayo blood was shed to rid Mexico of grandee landowners who threatened to suck it dry. Here, in Los Angeles, the men who lead the parade symbolically represent the grandees while the Mexicans line the pavements.
These Californios are in no small part responsible for the fact that the Mexican population of Los Angeles—the largest minority in the city—is so completely deprived of meaningful civic representation. Since it is impolitic for any Los Angeles official to ignore the Mexican vote completely, care is taken that the roster of civic committees shall always include at least one name which is obviously Spanish or Mexican. If a quick glance is taken of the list of names appearing on the civic committees devoted to housing, juvenile delinquency, racial, and welfare problems, these same names constantly reappear.
It has only been of recent years that the Californios have been elevated to this anomalous and largely factitious status. There was a time when they scarcely existed in the eyes of the Anglo-Americans. When the Native Sons of the Golden West were asked, in the early 1900s, to submit a list of “the men who had grown up with Los Angeles,” for a civic memorial, they included only Anglo-American names. When the first “pioneer society” was formed in Los Angeles in 1896, not a single Mexican or Spanish name appeared on the membership roster and the bylaws expressly provided that “persons born in this state are not eligible to membership.” Ignored throughout this early period, the Californios promptly acquired a new and spurious status the moment it became necessary to use them to maintain the subordination of Mexican immigrants in the general scheme of things.
Today the typical Californio occupies, in most communities, a social position that might best be compared with that of the widow of a Confederate general in a small southern town. On all ceremonial occasions, the “native Californians” are trotted forth, in their faded finery, and exhibited as “worthy representatives of all that is finest in our Latin-American heritage.” In appointing Californios to civic committees, most officials realize that they have achieved the dual purpose, first, of having a Mexican name on the roster for the sake of appearances, and, second, that the persons chosen will invariably act in the same manner as Anglo-Americans of equal social status. Thus, the dichotomy which exists throughout the borderlands between what is “Spanish” and what is “Mexican” is a functional, not an ornamental, arrangement. Its function is to deprive the Mexicans of their heritage and to keep them in their place.
In community after community, the Anglo-Americans genuflect once a year before the relics of the Spanish past. Just as Tucson has its annual La Fiesta de los Vaqueros so nearly every city in the borderlands now has its annual Spanish Fiesta. It is during La Fiesta in Santa Barbara that the annual ride of the Rancheros Visitadores occurs. This particular revival is based on a practice of former years, when the rancheros made the rounds of the ranchos to pay a visit to each in turn. “In May, 1930,” to quote from the Santa Barbara Guide (WPA), “some sixty-five riders assembled for the first cavalcade. Golden Palominos and proud Arabian thoroughbreds, carrying silver mounted tack, brushed stirrups with shaggy mustangs from the range. Emerging from the heavy gray mist of a reluctant day, they cantered with casual grace down the old familiar trails of Santa Ynez to converge on Santa Barbara. … Here amid the tolling of the bells, the tinkling of trappings, and the whinnying of horses, the brown-robed friars blessed them and bade them ‘Vayan con Dios.’…” This was the first ride of the Rancheros Visitadores whose president, today, is Señor J. J. Mitchell. Since this auspicious beginning, the affair has steadily increased in pomp and circumstance. Nowadays it is invariably reported in the Southern California society columns as a major social event of the year. A careful scrutiny of the names of these fancily dressed visitadores—these gaily costumed Rotarians—reveals that Leo Carrillo, “the man on the white horse,” is about the only rider whose name carries a faint echo of the past that is being celebrated so ostentatiously.
Numerous institutions have been founded in the borderlands to keep the fantasy heritage alive. First performed at Mission San Gabriel on April 29, 1912, John Steven McGroarty’s “Mission Play” was presented at over 2,600 performances and was seen, according to its modest author, by over 2,500,000 people. The Padua Institute, located at the base of the Sierra Madre Mountains near Claremont, is another institution which works hard to keep the fantasy heritage alive. Here, in a beautiful setting, the lady from Des Moines can have lunch, see a Spanish or Mexican folk play, hear Mexican music, and purchase a “Mexican” gift from the Studio Gift Shop. The Padua Institute is dedicated to “keeping alive the romantic life and music of Old Mexico and Early California.” Olvera Street, in the old Plaza section of Los Angeles, is still another attempt to institutionalize the false legend.
Harmless in many ways, these attempts to prettify the legend contrast most harshly with the actual behavior of the community toward persons of Mexican descent. To the younger generation of Mexicans, the fantasy heritage, and the institutions which keep it alive, are resented as still additional affronts to their dignity and sense of pride.
Try as they will, the Anglo-Americans cannot quite enter into the spirit of La Fiesta. Compliments are exchanged between the mayor and the consul-general and the usual remarks are made about Benito Juárez and Abraham Lincoln; but, somehow, the emptiness of the occasion echoes in the platitudes spoken. This meretricious quality is always apparent in the gauche efforts of the press to whip up some semblance of enthusiasm. “Vivas and olas filled the air. … Los Angeles yesterday donned the festive regalia of her Mexican heritage … Cinco de Mayo Festival On, Si, Si”—are excerpts from the Los Angeles Times of May 6, 1947. On the Sixteenth of September 1947, a Miss Frances Anderson was selected as the reigning señorita in one Southern California town; while, in another, a Miss Virginia Thomas was selected. Both towns have a large Mexican population.
In an editorial commending a program to teach Spanish in the lower grades, the Los Angeles Times (August 29, 1944) in a fervor of españolismo wrote: “we have missed learning the homey, friendly gossip of the little people who have big hearts even if lean purses. We have missed much, señores … Viva Mexico! Viva el Español!”
2. The Birth of a Legend
Throughout the Southwest today the most striking aspect of Anglo-Hispano relations consists in this amazing dichotomy between the Spanish and the Mexican-Indian heritage. There is scarcely a public building constructed since the turn of the century, whether it be a library, a post office, or a courthouse, without murals depicting scenes in which Cabrillo, Serra, De Oñate, and Coronado played a part. Nowadays Juan Bautista de Anza could travel over the trail that he blazed from Tucson to San Jose and spend every night in a De Anza hotel. But there is scarcely a single community in the region in which the living side of this tradition has not been consciously repudiated.
“In spite of their willingness to borrow local color from neighboring Mexico,” reads the Arizona Guide (WPA), “the Anglo-Saxons of Arizona have usually made a conscious effort to avoid the adoption of the more fundamental traditions and characteristics of the Mexican people. In general the Arizona-Mexicans have been segregated from the more fortunate Arizonians, both as strangers belonging to an alien race of conquered Indians, and as persons whose enforced status in the lowest economic levels make them seem less admirable than other people. They have consequently retained a firmer hold on their native customs and folklore than have other groups of foreigners less discriminated against.” This same statement could be made of any state in the region. “When one sees the great sums spent to reconstruct the Spanish missions and other buildings of the Latin-American occupation,” writes Jovita Gonzales de Mireles, “one cannot help but wonder at the inconsistency of things in general. If Anglo-Americans accept their art and culture, why have they not accepted the people?”
One reason, of course, is that the discovery of Spain-in-America has been of comparatively recent origin. Harry Carr, a veteran Los Angeles newspaperman, once remarked that when he came to live in the city as a youngster in the eighties, schoolchildren were taught nothing about the epochal adventures of Coronado, De Oñate, and De Anza. Once the Spanish past was resurrected, this early neglect was greatly overcompensated. Discovered as a tourist promotion in the 1880s, the Spanish mission background in Southern California was inflated to mythical proportions. Originating in Los Angeles, the “landmarks” movement spread throughout the Southwest. Today community after community is busily resurrecting its “Spanish” ruins and, in a number of cases, master-plans have been adopted—as in St. Augustine in 1936; Monterey in 1939; and San Antonio in 1938—to rebuild whole communities along lines consonant with the original Spanish conception.2
A second factor has to do with the amazingly heterogeneous character of the Spanish-speaking minority. “Biologically,” writes Dr. George Sanchez, “they range over all the possible combinations of, first, their heterogeneous Spanish antecedents and, then, of the mestizaje resulting from the crossing of Spaniards and various indigenous peoples of Mexico and the Southwest. Historically, they are both old and new to this region—some came with Oñate in 1598, others with missionaries of the eighteenth century; some were a part of the gold rush of ‘49, others came to build railroads a few decades later; many came as contract-labor during World War I. Culturally, reflecting their varied biological and historical backgrounds, they are many peoples—the californios, the hispanos, the mexico-tejanos, and numerous other cultural personalities produced by the range of their antecedents and their environments, by their occupations, by their culture-contacts. These people, of whom only a minority are citizens of Mexico, are most often referred to as ‘Mexicans.’ Their mother tongue, their vernacular, is usually Spanish—though every conceivable variation of that tongue obtains, in terms of all phases of both quantity and quality. In fact, for some the home-language is English; for others a part-English, part-Spanish vernacular is the rule. These Spanish-Mexican Americans of the Southwest, then, defy categorical classification as a group and no term or phrase adequately describes them.”
The native-born Spanish-speaking elements resent any attempt to designate them in a manner that implies a “nonwhite” racial origin. Being called “Mexican” is resented, not on the basis of nationality, but on the assumption of racial difference. Because of the Anglo-American’s attitude toward race, the first reaction of the New Mexican, as Dr. Arthur L. Campa has pointed out, “is to disassociate himself from anything that carries a Mexican implication.” To do this, he must insist on his difference in origin. Thus he is of “pure Spanish blood,” a direct descendant “of the Spanish conquerors,” etc. Carried to its logical conclusion, this line of reasoning results in the deductions (a) that the New Mexican is not “Mexican”; and (b) that he has no Indian blood. “Being American citizens, the next step is to combine the concept of race with that of nationality and the hyphenated Spanish-American is the result. Such a term serves a triple purpose: it lifts from the New Mexican the opprobrium of being a Mexican; it makes him a member of the ‘white’ race, and expresses his American citizenship.” But the difficulty with “Spanish-American,” as Dr. Campa adds, is that, while it suits the New Mexican in the abstract, there is little in his appearance and origin that upholds the distinction he is trying so hard to make.3
The difference between New Mexicans and Mexicans being regional distinctions occurring within a similar culture, the substitution of the name “Spanish” does not change the substance of traits that are undisputedly Mexican. “The ‘Spanish’ suppers,” writes Dr. Campa, “given by clubs and church societies are in reality Mexican dishes to which no truly Spanish palate is accustomed. The ‘Spanish’ songs sung by school children and by radio performers in New Mexico are as Mexican as tortillas de maiz, chicharrones de puerco, chile con carne, and the sopaipillas at Christmas time.”
To the Anglo-Americans of the borderlands, with their racial preoccupations, it is second nature to refer to the Spanish-speaking group as “Mexican”; whereas the Californios, the Tejanos, and the New Mexicans insist that they are “Spanish” or “Spanish-American.” The trouble with all the terminology, as Dr. Campa puts it, is that it is based on logic and excludes the human factor. “The whole thing is characterized by anomalies which attempt to justify prejudices and defense mechanisms.” Certainly the attitude of the Californios, the Tejanos, and the New Mexicans has been a factor in the cultivation of an absurd dichotomy between things Spanish and things Mexican.
3. De Anza Doesn’t Live Here Any More
Still another reason for the persistence of the fantasy heritage has been the negligible amount of immigration from Spain. The number of Spaniards in the United States, in or out of the borderlands, has always been so small that they have never been a factor in group competition. Hence it has always been possible to praise things Spanish without having to accept an embarrassingly large Spanish element. Despite the poverty of its population, Spain has always rigorously discouraged emigration. The number of Spanish-born in the United States was 22,108 in 1910; 49,535 in 1930; 109,407 in 1940 (half of whom were temporarily resident in this country)—0.3 percent of the population. Furthermore, it is a safe assumption that most of the Spanish born have always resided outside the Southwest.
In Florida and Louisiana a few colonies survived after the Spanish withdrew. For example, St. Bernard’s Parish in Louisiana, named after Bernardo de Galvez, once governor of the province under Spanish rule, is still made up of the descendants of some 1,500 Canary Islanders—“the Isleños” as they are called—who settled there in 1770.
In the Far West one can find a few colonies of Basque immigrants who came to this country by way of South America. Today some seven thousand Basques reside in the Boise, Idaho, area. They are, for the most part, descendants of immigrants who moved eastward from Jordan Valley in Oregon as the West Coast flocks began to be driven eastward for pasturage. Basques have been coming to California, in small numbers, for a hundred years. One reads that Yudarte, a Basque herdsman, once grazed hundreds of sheep in San Francisco between what is now Van Ness Avenue and the Presidio. Basque names like Duque, Echeverre, Mindiano, Hermasoillo, and Indiano are not uncommon in California. The Spanish Basques are to be found north of San Francisco, along the Sacramento River, and down the coast range; while the French Basques are concentrated around Fresno and Bakersfield. The Hotel Español and the Hotel De España in San Francisco have long been recognized as unofficial headquarters for the Basque sheepmen or boscos.
There are, also, a few colonies of Spanish-speaking Puerto Ricans in California, mostly in the East Bay area. Most of these immigrants came to California from Hawaii following the expiration of the labor-contracts under which they had been imported to the islands. Mingled with the Puerto Ricans are a few thousand Spaniards who managed to elude Spanish immigration inspectors by going to Gibraltar where they signed labor-contracts to work in the canefields of Hawaii. For the most part, however, Puerto Ricans are concentrated in the City of New York. Today it is estimated that Little Spain or Spanish Harlem has a population of about 350,000 Puerto Ricans. Most of the recent immigrants have come to New York in “bucket seat” planes at a fare of $72 from San Juan.4 To the number of Puerto Ricans one might add some 47,699 Filipinos, many of whom, of course, are Spanish-speaking. However none of these elements—Spanish immigrants, Spanish Basques, Puerto Ricans or Spanish-speaking Filipinos—figure at all in the Spanish-Mexican scheme of things in the Southwest.
In Florida there are perhaps 30,000 Spanish-speaking people: around 15,000 Cubans; 8,500 Spanish-born; and small settlements of several thousand each of Minorcans and Spaniards in St. Augustine and a few other towns. With the exception of those in St. Augustine, most of these people are fairly recent immigrants. The movement of Cubans to Florida began in 1868, when Vicente Martínez Ybor, a Spaniard who owned a large cigar factory in Havana, opened a factory in Key West. He was followed to Florida by other factory owners who sought to evade the import duty on cigars. The struggle for independence in Cuba was, also, an important factor in stimulating this exodus. With the cigar-owners came thousands of cigar-makers from Havana, Bejucal, San Antonio de los Baños, Guines, Santiago de las Vegas, and other small towns near Havana.5 When the cigar-makers first arrived, Tampa was “a wilderness settlement comprising some four blocks of houses.” As the cigar-making industry expanded, several thousand Spanish cigar-makers joined the colony.
The Spanish-speaking colonies in Florida were, of course, “the cradle of Cuban Independence.” At one time the headquarters of the Cuban revolutionary movement was located in Key West. It was here that José Martí, “the George Washington of Cuba,” founded the Partido Revolucionario Cubano in 1892. Originating in Florida, sympathy for Cuban independence spread throughout the nation. Just as there were Americans who took part in the movement which finally won independence for Cuba in 1902, so there were a few Cubans who fought with the colonists in the American Revolutionary War. Today small, scattered colonies of Cubans are to be found outside Florida, chiefly in New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and in Atlanta.
“Cuba,” writes Manuel Pedro Gonzales, “more than any other Spanish American country, has contributed to the evolution of cultural relations between the two races. From 1823 to the present time she had been a kind of connecting link between the two cultures; she has played the double role of interpreter and propagandist of both cultures. For more than a century her most distinguished poets, writers, historians, and philosophers have endeavored to disseminate knowledge in the United States about Spanish America and her intellectual life; at the same time these men, who were far more familiar with the culture of the United States than their colleagues south of the Rio Grande, have tried to interpret and reveal to them through translations and critical studies the literary and scientific wealth of this country.”6
Cuban cigar-makers founded the first trade-unions in the South. One of these organizations, Los Caballeros del Trabajo was a branch of the Knights of Labor; and, from 1886 to 1901, the dominant Tampa group was known as La Resistencia. In 1900, and again in 1910, the Spanish-speaking cigar-makers of Florida conducted militant strikes which were suppressed with great violence. They founded the cigar industry in Florida which in 1908 was valued at $17,175,000; some 10,500 employees of the industry were then receiving a weekly wage of $200,000.
Important as the Florida colonies have been they have had no relationship with Spanish-speaking settlements in the borderlands. And it is a rare case, indeed, when a Spanish immigrant has established any sort of contact with the Spanish-speaking people of the Southwest. Dr. Joaquin Ortega, of the University of New Mexico, born in Ronda, Spain, is one of the few individuals in whose career the two traditions are linked. From 1820 to 1940, the total Spanish immigration to the United States was about 175,000, three-fourths of which came after 1900. During the first World War, a large number of Spaniards worked in the shipyards but returned to Spain after the war. Most of the Spanish immigrant colonies are located outside the borderlands: in West Virginia; Philadelphia; Cleveland; Newark; New York; and Tampa. There is, therefore, simply no relation between Spanish immigration and the Spanish-speaking minority in the Southwest.
Quite apart from these factors there has long existed, as I have previously pointed out, a determination to subordinate the Spanish-speaking minority in the Southwest. One of the techniques used to effect this subordination has been to drive a wedge between the native-born and the foreign-born and to cultivate the former at the expense of the latter. To some extent, elements of the native-born have encouraged this strategy by seeking to differentiate themselves from the immigrants. By emphasizing the Spanish part of the tradition and consciously repudiating the Mexican-Indian side, it has been possible to rob the Spanish-speaking minority of a heritage which is rightfully theirs, rather in the same manner that Negroes have been robbed of their heritage. The constant operation of this strategy has made it difficult for the Spanish-speaking people to organize and it has retarded their advancement.
One of the first conditions to an improvement in Anglo-Hispano relations in the Southwest, therefore, is, as Dr. A. W. Bork has suggested, to give back to Indio-Hispano citizens the heritage of racial pride of which we have robbed them and to teach Anglo-Americans to respect and honor this heritage.7 The first step in this direction is to get rid of the fantasy heritage, the latter-day version of the Spanish prologue, which has so perniciously beclouded relations between Anglos and Hispanos in the borderlands. Once this veil of fantasy has been lifted, it should be possible for both groups to recognize the reality of cultural fusion in the Southwest. This reality is to be sought, first of all, in the nature of the region in which the great bulk of the Spanish-speaking people have always resided.