The Broken Border
The Spanish scheme for colonizing the borderlands called for a strong central colony in New Mexico, the establishment of widely separated outposts in California, Arizona, and Texas, and, eventually, the linking of these settlements into a broad band across the northern part of New Spain. The central colony of New Mexico was finally anchored, after great effort, but more than a hundred years passed before the colonization of the three outlying provinces could be undertaken. While these salients were ultimately established, the colonies were never consolidated. During their existence as Spanish outposts, they went their separate and different ways, with little intercommunication or exchange; each with its own pattern, its own special problems.
The failure of Spain to consolidate the borderland outposts has had important latter-day consequences. For the Spanish-speaking of the borderlands remain, to some extent, separate and disparate groups, sharing a common heritage but never having known the experience of functioning together. Spanish-speaking people in California know little of the experience of their compatriots in New Mexico; and those in New Mexico are unacquainted with conditions in Arizona and Texas. No effective liaison has ever existed between these groups; their experiences have run parallel but have never merged. For the border was broken, the links were never forged.
1. Pimeria Alta
The Mission Nuestra Señora de los Dolores in Sonora was the “mother mission” for the settlements in southern Arizona. From this base, Father Kino established a chain of missions along the upper waters of the San Miguel, Altar, Santa Cruz, and San Pedro rivers: Guevavi (founded in 1692), Tumacacori, San Xavier del Bac. The discovery of huge silver nuggets just south of the present border in the Altar Valley, near a place which the Indians called Arizonac, encouraged the Spaniards, for a time, to make something of the southern Arizona settlements. During this spurt of activity, the missions in southern Arizona, or Pimeria Alta as it was called, enjoyed a brief period of prosperity and expansion. But they were virtually extinguished in 1751 when the Pima and Papago Indians joined in a general uprising. At this time, there were no Spanish garrisons north of Fronteras in northern Sonora and Pimeria Alta was almost wholly unprotected.
In the following year, a garrison was established at Tubac in the Santa Cruz Valley and some of the priests, soldiers, and settlers returned. But the Apaches, who had been raiding the Sonora missions for a century, prevented any effective recolonization. In a report on the state of the province in 1777, De Anza pointed out that fifteen years of incessant Apache raiding had depopulated the settlements; that the mines, haciendas, and missions, if not ruined by these attacks, had been abandoned for fear of them. In a decade devoted to counteroffensives against the elusive Apache, the Spanish had managed to kill only 276 Indians. At this rate it was apparent that the Arizona settlements were doomed to failure.
Always a lightly garrisoned province, the Sonora-Arizona frontier was exposed to renewed Apache attacks when the government withdrew its troops during the struggle for Mexican independence. Taking advantage of this opportunity, the Apaches laid waste to the entire province: mines were abandoned; haciendas were deserted; and any stock that the Apaches failed to kill roamed wild along the border. In the wake of this disaster, the discovery of gold in California induced thousands of Sonorans to desert their Apache-ridden land. Not more than three hundred Mexicans were left in Arizona by 1856 and most of these were huddled in abject terror in the walled town of Tucson. But, within a few years, the population of Tubac and Tucson increased to 1,500 or 2,000, as some of the ex-soldiers returned to their milpas and the miners drifted back from the goldfields. For a brief time, the orchards of Tumacacori blossomed once again and the attractive fields and gardens which Father Kino had laid out near the missions came back into cultivation.
With the commencement of the American Civil War, however, the government withdrew the troops which it had stationed along the border. Once again the Apaches made a bloody havoc of every ranch-house, village, and mining camp in the region of the Santa Cruz. From 1861 to 1871, the famous Apache chief, Cochise, ravaged the entire area from the Gila River far into Sonora and eastward to the Mimbres River in New Mexico. “Throughout Sonora,” wrote Sylvester Mowry, “the Apaches gradually extirpated every trace of civilization and roamed uninterrupted and unmolested, sole possessors of what was once a thriving and populous Spanish province.”1 J. Ross Browne, who visited both sides of the border in the seventies, reported that the mines had been abandoned; that the stock had been driven from the ranches; and that the Mexicans who remained in the province were apathetic, ridden by despair and a feeling of utter helplessness.
While there had once been a few great estates and haciendas in southern Arizona, the territory was miserably poor and indescribably primitive in 1848. For over a hundred years, Arizona had been beset with calamities and misfortunes. It was the orphan, the pauper of the Spanish provinces. Too remote to participate in the trade which developed in New Mexico after the opening of the Santa Fe Trail, it was also too far removed from California to feel the leavening effects of the clipper ship trade. Its missions never attained the prosperity or stability of those in California; in short the settlement of the province was abortive. The Mexicans who were living in southern Arizona at the time of the American conquest were a miserable, landless, bewildered people, living in mortal fear of the Apaches. Twenty years after the conquest, Mowry estimated the Mexican population of Arizona at approximately two thousand, all of whom were pobres for the rich had long since vanished.
The first Anglo-American settlers to arrive in Arizona were mostly from the states of the late Confederacy. Perhaps because of this circumstance, they lost little time in making Arizona “a white buffer state” between the Spanish-speaking people of New Mexico and those of Sonora. Granted separate territorial status in 1863, Arizona thereafter resisted a long series of proposals to admit it, along with New Mexico, as one state to the union. Since the colonization of Arizona had never been effective, the Spanish-speaking people of the state lacked foundations on which to build. Until the copper mines, the railroads, and the large reclamation projects began to attract Mexican immigrants, Indians remained a more important influence in Arizona than the Spanish-speaking.
2. The Tejanos
While a few missions were established in eastern Texas in 1716, they were soon abandoned and the principal settlements remained those at San Antonio, a combination presidio-mission-and-pueblo; Goliad or La Bahia; and Nacogdoches. Exposed to Indian raids on all sides, none of these settlements prospered. The great rolling plains, stretching in all directions, made it impossible for the Spaniards to subdue the Comanches, who showed a marked disinclination to be enrolled as neophytes in the missions. Between 1722 and 1744, the Spanish spent three million pesos in an effort to colonize Texas but the number of colonists was less at the end than at the beginning of the period. By 1791 most of the Indians had fled from the missions and the few who remained were dispersed some years later.
Poorly organized, feebly garrisoned, chronically neglected, the Texas settlements were swiftly engulfed in the tide of Anglo-American invasion. According to Bancroft, there were not more than 5,000 Mexicans in Texas in 1836: about 2,000 at San Antonio; 1,400 at La Bahia; and perhaps 500 at Nacogdoches. If one is to believe contemporary accounts, these Mexicans were a sorry lot: backward, illiterate, impoverished. The former Mexican soldiers, in particular, were a most bedraggled crew: “the lowest type of humanity that could be picked up,” according to Dr. George P. Garrison. Even the civilians were a source of considerable embarrassment to the Mexican officials who inspected the province. By the 1870s those who remained in the old settlements were completely submerged, surviving only as a “picturesque” element in the population: tamale vendors, chili vendors, peddlers of sweets (nueces dulces).
The historians all agree, however, that quite a different situation prevailed along the border. Beginning in 1748, the rancheros of Santander (Tamaulipas) had been encouraged to settle along the Rio Grande in an effort to build a line of defense against the Indians. Most of these settlers came from such Mexican communities as Guerrero, Camargo, and Miero. Over a period of some years a few towns began to appear on the Texas side of the river: Dolores in 1761; Rio Grande City in 1757; Roma in 1767. Once Mexico had achieved its independence, the government parceled out most of the land lying between the Rio Grande and the Nueces in the form of large grants to favorites of the new regime and the movement of settlers into the region became more rapid.
Due to the troubled state of affairs which prevailed during the decade of the Texas Republic, most of the Anglo-Americans settled north and east of the Nueces and this pattern prevailed for some years after the conquest. During this interregnum, however, Mexicans continued to cross the river and to settle between the Rio Grande and the Nueces. From 8,500 residents in 1850, the population of the border counties increased to 50,000 in 1880 and then to 100,000 in 1910. A large part of this increase was made up, of course, of immigrants from Mexico. The early Anglo-American settlers in the border counties were principally large cattle-operators (all of the land originally embraced in Mexican grants in Kleberg County became part of the famous King Ranch); and cattle-raising did not attract a large English-speaking population. As a consequence, sixty percent of the property-owners in Starr, Zapata, and Cameron counties, as late as 1930, were descendants of the original Mexican grantees.
In the Lower Rio Grande Valley a way of life developed that was quite similar to that which had prevailed in early California. Here was to be found the same patriarchal setup in which a few large Mexican landowners lived an idle and lordly existence based on a system of peonage, vestiges of which still survive in the region. The peons were Mexican-Indian, being really more Indian than Mexican; while the landowners and vaqueros were mestizo. The peon was always in debt; in fact, he usually inherited the debts of his father. Landowners sold high-priced goods on credit to their peons, often refusing them permission to make purchases in the towns. Paid six reales a day (twelve cents in American money), the peon was not permitted to cultivate land, even to supply his own table needs; and his ownership of stock was limited to a few chickens, pigs, and goats. Throughout the lower valley, the peons lived in one-room thatched-roofed dirt-floor jacales, with a portal or arbor made of dry cornstalks from which the inevitable olla and its gourd, used as a dipper, were suspended. Closely resembling the California pattern, Mexican ranch life in Texas survived well into the present century.
Taking great pride in their Mexican culture, the landowners encouraged their families to keep the old customs and traditions alive and ruled their establishments like feudal lords. Their square, flat-roofed homes, usually made of stone, were often furnished with luxurious items purchased in Matamoros and Laredo. Here, as elsewhere in the borderlands, the kitchen was built around a huge fireplace and the oven was located in the yard. Since the border ricos consciously sought to retain their Mexican culture, the children were sent to private or parochial schools along the border or in Mexico. One of these schools, El Colegio Altamiro, founded in 1897, is still in existence. As more and more Mexicans came to the border counties, they were “Mexicanized,” not Americanized; for they had few contacts, at the outset, with the Anglo-Americans. Many of the border towns, such as Eagle Pass, developed as Spanish-speaking communities, with street signs and store names in Spanish. “The people are Texans,” wrote Lee C. Harby, “but do not speak English and have kept their blood, language, and manners.”2
The Tejanos, like the New Mexicans, took little part in the Mexican independence movement and had no tradition of self-government. Manhood suffrage was, of course, unknown. The lack of democratic traditions, the system of peonage, and the persistence of the patron-peon relation, combined to produce a type of political bossism similar to that which prevailed for so many years in New Mexico. The Anglo-American cattle-barons naturally assumed the prerogatives of the Mexican ricos and were accepted by the peones as patrons and protectors. Jim Wells, after whom one of the southern counties is named, is said to have bossed the border counties from 1880 until his death in 1920. Property-owners not only “voted their Mexicans,” but, when occasion demanded, brought droves of Mexicans from across the border, held them under guard in corrals and stockades, and voted them, too, on election day. Nor were all the bosses Anglo-Americans: Don Manuel Gerra was the undisputed political boss of Starr County until his death in 1915.
As in California, many marriages took place, at an early date, between Anglo-American men and Mexican women in the border counties. Such names as Lacaze, Laborde, Lefargue, Decker, Marx, Bloch, Monroe, Nix, Stuard, and Ellert, according to Jovita Gonzales, represent families which claim the Spanish language as their own and boast of their Spanish blood. “The descendants of the Americans who married Mexican wives in the 1800’s,” she writes, “are more Mexicanized than the Mexicans.” Some of these marriages, it is interesting to note, were a by-product of the Mexican-American War. One of the early settlers in Rio Grande City, Henry Clay Davis, was a Kentuckian who returned to south Texas after the war to marry a Mexican-American.
Retarded by a hundred years of border warfare, the economic development of the Lower Rio Grande Valley did not get under way until the completion of the St. Louis-Brownsville-Mexican rail line in 1904. Thus for more than a hundred years the Tejanos lived a life apart, cultivating their own customs and traditions. Even after 1848 they knew very little about what was going on in the United States and cared less. When they traveled, they went to Mexico. If they attended school, they were instructed in the Spanish language; if they read a newspaper, it was printed in Spanish. Like their compatriots in the mountain villages of New Mexico, they were hardly conscious of a change in citizenship. The moment the economic development of the region was undertaken, however, this feeling of indifference was soon dissipated.
After the turn of the century, the economic development of the lower valley enabled the peons and jornaleros to profit by the change in rule. Never wholly escaping from a kind of peonage, they nevertheless managed to evade the more obvious forms of control. Those who got jobs in the citrus groves and on the truck farms began to purchase small lots in the towns and to acquire a measure of independence.
The position of the landowners, on the other hand, began to deteriorate with the economic transformation of the region. The ricos were extremely annoyed to see Anglo-Americans come into the valley and, with the aid of farm machinery and the extension of irrigation systems, reclaim lands which they had long regarded as of little agricultural value. Nor was it long before the Mexican-American middle class, which had emerged in the valley, became intensely dissatisfied with the new dispensation. “The friendly feeling which had slowly developed between the old American and Mexican families,” writes Miss Gonzales, “has been replaced by a feeling of hate, distrust, and jealousy on the part of the Mexicans.” By the middle twenties, the word “white,” used to distinguish Anglo-Americans, affected the Tejanos “like a red flag to a bull.”
South Texas was one of the first areas in the borderlands to develop a Mexican-American middle class. The retarded economic development of the region kept the Anglo-American element at a minimum prior to 1900, thereby giving the Tejanos a margin of time in which to develop a middle class of their own. The need for a middle class, moreover, was much greater in the border counties than in the remote mountain villages of New Mexico, where the possibilities of producing a surplus for trade were far less favorable. The emergence of a Mexican-American middle class in Texas has had an important effect on Anglo-Hispano relations.
On August 24, 1927, these middle-class elements formed the League of Latin-American Citizens at a meeting in Harlingen. The formation of the “Lulacs,” as they are called, has been described as “the first attempt on the part of Mexican-Americans to organize themselves for the purpose of giving voice to their aspirations and needs as citizens of the United States.”3 From Harlingen the Lulac movement has spread to the other Texas towns but the nature of the “broken border” has minimized its influence in New Mexico and Arizona, California and Colorado. True to its origins, it has remained largely a middle-class organization.
3. The Californios
The Spanish-speaking settlements in California differed in a number of respects from those in the rest of the borderlands. Unlike the other borderland settlements, California was both a sea and land frontier. The California missions, particularly those in the southern counties, were well administered (from the Spanish point of view) and became quite prosperous. When the first secularization decrees were issued in 1834, the lands and holdings of the missions were valued at $78,000,000. Mission San Gabriel, for example, operated seventeen large ranchos, worked 3,000 Indians, and owned 105,000 head of cattle, 20,000 horses, and 40,000 sheep. While the Spaniards had a great deal of trouble with the Indians of the Central Valley, they encountered little opposition from the coastal tribes. Furthermore, California was inherently a richer province than the other borderland settlements, with a milder climate and a great superiority in natural resources. For these and other reasons the character of the people of California, as Blackmar wrote, “differed from that of every other Spanish province. Owing to its isolated position, there was but little communication with the remainder of the Spanish dominion, and there sprang up an independent spirit not observed elsewhere in the Spanish Americas.”4 Revolutions were a matter of more or less normal occurrence in California.
The population of California, however, was divided by the same sharp class and status lines. At the top of the hierarchy were the Spanish Franciscans, the Spanish officials, and the Spanish officers of the troops garrisoned in the province. Included in this category were some soldiers and noncommissioned officers who did not rate the distinction of being soldados distinguidos but were nonetheless a cut above the average in the borderlands. Some of the most prominent families in California—the Castros, Picos, Bandinis, Alvarados, Ortegas, and Noriegas—belonged in this category. While there were some distinguished families in the province, the number having “pure Spanish blood” has been grossly exaggerated. “A very small percentage,” wrote Charles Dwight Willard, “were pure-blooded Spaniards, although few were ready to admit they were anything else.” Most of these gente de razón families, like the ricos of New Mexico, were related by marriage and constituted a kind of ruling-class elite.
After the opening of the clipper trade, a few of the homes in the presidial towns had an atmosphere reminiscent of the social graces, refinement, and elegance of the Old World. But most of the gente de razón lived the same rough, semiprimitive existence as their counterparts in New Mexico. Always outnumbered by the lower classes in the ratio of ten to one, the number of gente de razón families was never large. Included in the first generation were some well-educated, capable, energetic individuals; but they were certainly a minority element. Accustomed to indolence and denied an opportunity for education, the second generation was demoralized by the ubiquitous use of cheap Indian labor. The inefficiency of this element was unmatched in Spanish America.
Below the gente de razón were the Mexicans: soldiers, artisans, colonists, the cholos of the province. Recruited from among the riffraff of Sonora and Sinaloa, they were certainly a nondescript lot. “Presidial society looked down upon these rustic villagers,” writes Dr. John W. Caughey, “and the missionaries regarded them askance, as being likely to corrupt the neophytes.” * In the towns and on the ranches, the Mexicans were sharply set apart from the gente de razón. Largely illiterate, speaking a different dialect, they thought of themselves as Mexicans, not as Spaniards. Marriage between the Mexicans and the gente de razón elements was, of course, unthinkable. Seldom, if ever, did the Mexicans rise to positions of prominence. Unlike New Mexico, there were no small farming villages in California so that the state never produced a class of independent, self-sufficient paisanos.
In many respects, the social structure of Spanish California resembled that of the Deep South: the gente de razón were the plantation-owners; the Indians were the slaves; and the Mexicans were the California equivalent of “poor white trash.” These sharply differentiated groups reflected a division of labor which had become traditional. The Mexicans were the artisans, vaqueros, and majordomos of the ranchos; the craftsmen and pobladores of the pueblos. The gente de razón held all the government positions, made up the officer class of the military, and controlled the great ranchos. While showing a lively interest in cattle and horses (the care of which they feared to entrust to the Indians), they were never interested in farming so that the agriculture of the province remained largely undeveloped and primitive. At the base of the pyramid were the Indians, upon whose unpaid labor the entire economy was based.
To these elements must be added, however, a unique strain made up of the American, British, Scottish, German, and French adventurers who had infiltrated the province prior to 1846. There were only a hundred or so of these adventurers but they played a role of crucial importance at the time of the conquest. With scarcely a single exception, these curiously assorted characters had married daughters of the gente de razón after first joining the Catholic Church and accepting Mexican citizenship. Once related to the “best families” by marriage, they became eligible for land grants and were permitted to engage in trade. Embracing the daughters of the land, they also made a pretense of embracing its customs, adopting the prevailing style of dress and Hispanizing their surnames. At the time of the conquest, of course, they went over to the American side en masse and, in many cases, induced their in-laws to collaborate with those who were directing the American invasion.
No matter what his social status was–doctor, trader, sailor, or smuggler—the ultramontane adventurer had little difficulty in joining the gente de razón, provided he joined the Catholic Church and became a citizen of Mexico. As long as California remained isolated from the rest of the country, these interlopers were quite willing to pose as hijos del país; but with the influx of Anglo-American women they quickly discarded their Spanish trappings, and often their Spanish wives, and reverted to type. Conversely, those settlers—and there were a few—who married Indian women never achieved the status of gente de razón. To the same point, an early-day resident of Los Angeles once remarked that he had never known “of a Spaniard or Mexican of this section marrying an American wife.” With the breakup of the ranchos, the intermarriage and limited cultural fusion of this earlier period came to an abrupt cessation.
Essentially the difference between California and New Mexico, as Spanish provinces, was that the former was the home of the cattle ranch, the latter of the sheep ranch. In New Mexico, the pastores were permitted to have their own subsistence farms and to graze a few sheep along with those of their patron; but all economic activity in California was centralized, first in the missions, and later in the rancho establishments. The opening of the clipper trade with Boston gave, of course, a great impetus to cattle-raising. The more money there was to be made in cattle, the greater became the clamor to secularize the missions. Once the missions were secularized, the number of range cattle soared to new heights.
Between 1830 and 1846, the period of secularization, eight million acres of land in California passed into the ownership of less than eight hundred grantees. Many of these ranchos were baronial in extent, with cattle grazing “on a thousand hills.” With the discovery of gold, the price of cattle promptly soared from $2 and $4 a head to $20 and $50 and the cattle ranches and vineyards of Southern California became immensely profitable. Of short duration, this soaring prosperity had disastrous consequences for the ranchero class.
The moment herds of cattle began to be driven overland to the mines, the price of California cattle quickly dropped. Soon great herds of beef cattle were being raised and pastured in the San Joaquin Valley and few cattle buyers bothered to make the long trip south of the Tehachapi to purchase scrawny Spanish steers from the rancheros. During two years of ruinous drought, in 1862 and 1864, nearly three million cattle perished in the “cow counties” of Southern California and nearly five-sixths of the land was reported tax-delinquent. Forty percent of the land held in Mexican grants was sold to meet the costs and expenses involved in confirming land titles after the conquest. The Rancho de los Alamitos, consisting of 265,000 acres, was sold for delinquent taxes of $152–one of many similar cases. Interest rates of five percent compounded monthly were not uncommon. The Rancho Santa Gertrudes, worth a million dollars, was forfeited for nonpayment of a $5,000 debt. So general was the debacle that by 1891 not more than thirty gente de razón families in the northern part of the state had managed to preserve even a semblance of their former prestige and power.
In Southern California, however, the gente de razón retained a measure of their former power and influence for some years after the conquest. Here they were concentrated in sufficient number so that they remained an important political factor through the 1880s. In most elections, from 1849 to 1880, the newcomers were pitted against the Spanish-speaking. “Down to the end of the 1870’s,” writes Owen O’Neil, “local politics in Southern California were complicated by a natural tendency to diverge on racial lines. Vast and complex family connections would make it impossible to trace these cleavages by any process so simple as noting Spanish names, but they were a real and potent factor which became more evident after 1865, when so many of the old Californians, once magnates of the land, were being crowded to the wall by economic misfortune.” Among the first representatives of Santa Barbara County in the state legislature were such individuals as Pablo de la Guerra, Antonio María de la Guerra, Romauldo Pacheco (later lieutenant-governor), and J. Y. Cota. An Estudillo and a Coronel became state treasurers and, in Los Angeles, a member of the Sepulveda family was elected to the bench. As late as 1870, native Californians outnumbered Anglo-Americans in Santa Barbara, owned more than a third of the property, and occupied most of the political positions; but, by the end of the decade, the native element was almost entirely eclipsed.
Unlike New Mexico, California was engulfed by a tidal wave of Anglo-American immigration after 1848. While the northern counties received the bulk of this immigration at the outset, the tide shifted to Southern California in the 1880s. “This overwhelming horde of new arrivals,” wrote Willard, “took possession of the land and proceeded to make things over to their own taste.” The Spanish-Mexican appearance of the Southern California towns changed overnight. As much as anything else, this transition was symbolized by the rapid disappearance of the adobes. “Death and emigration,” wrote J. P. Widney in 1886, “are removing them [the Californians] from the land. … They no longer have unnumbered horses to ride and vast herds of sheep, from which one for a meal would never be missed. Their broad acres now, with few exceptions, belong to the acquisitive American. … Grinding poverty has bred recklessness and moroseness.”
If this process of change bore heavily upon the gente de razón, it had a simply crushing effect upon the Mexicans. One after another the economic functions for which they had been trained were taken from them. The Mexicans were excellent and well-trained vaqueros but this function disappeared with the collapse of the ranchero regime. The rapid rise of the sheep industry after 1860 momentarily provided employment as herders and shearers; but the period of bonanza sheep-raising soon came to an end. The Mexican then reappears in the local annals as a farmworker and livery-stable hand. Long before the livery stables disappeared, however, the Chinese began to displace the Mexicans as farmworkers. Visiting Southern California in 1888, Edward Robert noted that the “houses of the Spanish-speaking people are being taken over by the Chinese, who have invaded the adobe cottages.” Anglo-Americans infiltrated New Mexico; they engulfed California. The difference in impact was also a function of the size of the Spanish-speaking element in the two states: 60,000 in New Mexico, 7,500 in California. In California, moreover, there was no buffer group to stand between the Spanish-speaking and the Anglo-Americans in the manner that ten thousand well-settled Pueblo Indians stood between Anglos and Hispanos in New Mexico.
With the eclipse of the Spanish-speaking element after 1880, few visible evidences of Spanish culture could be noted in California. Some Spanish words had been incorporated into the speech and important elements of Spanish-Mexican jurisprudence had been woven into the legal fabric of the state. A considerable amount of Spanish-Mexican blood flowed in the veins of local residents with such names as Travis, Kraemer, Reeves, Locke, and Rowlands. Most of the Spanish street names had been Anglicized, although few of the place-names were changed. At the turn of the century it appeared—in fact it was generally assumed—that the Mexican influence had been thoroughly exorcized.
But what had really happened was that the “old life”—the Mexican life—of the province had retreated “along the coastal plains that reach from Los Angeles to Acapulco.” Just as the Spanish-speaking had retreated from the northern counties to the southern, so they later withdrew, to some extent, to Mexico. But the number of Spanish-speaking residents in Southern California was at all times sufficient to keep vestiges of the earlier life and culture alive. Later, in the period from 1900 to 1920, these surviving elements of the old life were renewed and revived by a great influx of Mexican immigrants and the long-dormant conflict of cultures entered upon a new phase.
4. Lost Provinces
In two parts of the borderlands, southern Colorado and western Texas, the Spanish settlements which existed were even more severely isolated than those in New Mexico. These were the real “lost provinces.” Although both De Vargas and De Anza had explored southern Colorado, the first permanent colony was not established in the Costilla Valley until 1849. The town of San Luis, founded in 1851, is said to be the oldest settlement in the state. Most of the Colorado colonists came from New Mexico, many of them from Taos, which was, in a sense, the parent colony. The Colorado settlements had been planned as a series of listening posts by means of which New Mexico might be forewarned of Indian raids. To induce the colonists to settle in these lonely outposts, the provincial government had made small land grants to individuals and to families.
The first settlers in southern Colorado lived in crudely built jacales which were later replaced with adobe structures. The form of settlement, both in Colorado and west Texas, was the plaza: a series of flat-roofed adobe houses joined together in the form of a square or rectangle with an opening at each end or on the sides. In effect, the plaza was a form of walled village inhabited by a number of families. The enclosed patio frequently served as a corral or stockade into which the stock were driven at night. The thick exterior walls, without doors or windows, had an extension around the roof, called the pretil, which was used as a barricade. Since no glass was available, the windows on the patio side were covered with a parchment or pergamino, made from sheepskin. Doors were ponderous affairs without hinges or locks and the floors were of beaten earth. The well-to-do lived in single-family dwellings, called plazuelas, located at some distance from the plaza.
Farming and stock-raising activities were limited in Colorado by the incessant danger of Indian raids. As late as 1854 there were only two guns to be found in Costilla, one an old musket; and for years the principal weapons were bows and arrows. Everything the colonists possessed was homemade: their brooms and utensils; their household furnishings; their clothing; their agricultural implements. Long after the Indian menace had been eliminated, the thick walls of the patio served to enclose the lives of the people; to set them apart in a world by themselves. In much the same way, the self-sufficient character of their economy made it possible for them to carry over into the present many elements of their Spanish culture. Walled off by mountain ranges, the San Luis Valley has always had stronger economic and cultural ties with New Mexico than with the rest of Colorado. Never having attracted a large number of Anglo-American settlers, it remains predominantly Spanish-speaking (about fifty-eight thousand Spanish-speaking people live in southern and southeastern Colorado today).
If possible more isolated and landlocked than the mountain villages of New Mexico, a folk culture has survived in the San Luis Valley, some phases of which stem directly from the Middle Ages. Olibama López, a native of the region, has given the following vivid description of what happened, a few years ago, when one of the communities reenacted the entire story of the capture, trial, and crucifixion of Christ:
On Wednesday evening a group representing soldiers and Jews led by the armored centurion, riding a spirited horse and flanked by two lacayos or lackeys, to the accompaniment of martial music produced by a fife and drum, went forth to capture “Christ.” The latter was represented by the Image of Christ that belonged to the church, and the priest acted as the voice. The capture occurred in the cementerio of the church, a large patio where the dead were buried during the first years of settlement. The Image was carried in a procession; then it was brought back to the church.
On Thursday morning the story of the capture and trial was read at church. On Friday afternoon, after a procession through the village, in which several men dragged an enormous cross, the Image was crucified in church. A group of piteros—fifers—played a dirge, a plaintive melody that penetrated the very hearts of the listeners, and made the scene they had just witnessed very real to them. On Friday night, after the last mass, occurred the tinieblas, representing the darkness that fell over the earth as Christ expired. … The church was left in darkness except for several candles burning behind a heavy curtain where the rezadores—men who prayed—were stationed. Before the prayers began, one of the rezadores would say in a loud voice, salgan, vivos y difuntes, que aquí estamos todos juntos—come forth ye dead and living for we are all here together. No sooner had he said this, than chains were dragged across the floor, the matracas were rattled, and the pitas were blown behind the curtain. This represented the earthquake and the opening of the graves which occurred as Christ died. … After the tinieblas, the Christ was taken from the cross and laid in a coffin. A bachillero—a talkative fellow—was left to guard it all night, though the soldiers returned every hour to see that the body was still there.
Here in the Spanish-speaking towns and villages the children still play dozens of Spanish games: la pelota, las cazulejas, pitarilla, el canute, el coyotito, la ponsona, la cabra. In former times, the villagers were visited once a year by traveling troupes of maromeros or tumblers from Taos, each with its payaso or clown. Old folk songs, such as “La Cautiva Marcelina,” and “El Vaquero Nicolás,” are still popular. Each village has its poeta, or poet, adept at composing coplas for all occasions. While Mexico and Spain are “foreign” countries to most of the residents, they are addicted to a kind of españolismo: a complacent self-satisfaction with everything Spanish.
While the San Luis Valley is made up principally of small agricultural holdings, it has had, in times past, one or two princely estates. Casimiro Barela, after whom the town of Barela is named, served Las Animas County in the state legislature for forty years (1876 to 1916). His home at Rivera, near Barela, was patterned after the large Mexican hacienda and maintained by a retinue of servants. The owner of important properties in Mexico and a coffee plantation in Brazil, Barela was the “boss” of the region during most of his lifetime. In the southern part of the state, also, is the famous Trinchera Ranch, once part of the 1,038,000-acre Sangre de Cristo grant.
For years New Mexican ciboleros or buffalo-hunters had roamed the famous El Llano Estacado, or Staked Plains of the Panhandle, hunting buffalo with the lance. Crews in huge cumbersome wooden-wheeled carretas followed the ciboleros to skin the animals and strip the meat, hanging it out to dry in the sun. This dried meat the Mexicans called charquí which, on the tongue of the Anglo-Americans, became “jerky.” The routes of the ciboleros were marked by buffalo skulls; hence the name “Staked Plains.” Moving down the Canadian from Las Vegas to a point near the present town of Canyon, the ciboleros had various points of rendezvous along the river.
Out of this buffalo-hunting came the trade with the Comanches, with the comanchero gradually replacing the cibolero. To the plains, the comanchero brought merchandise which was traded to the Comanches at the old rendezvous points along the river: Las Tecovas, Las Linguas (“The Tongues,” so named because many languages were spoken there), and other points. The comanchero trade was long a source of great friction between Anglos and Hispanos in the Southwest, for the Anglos charged, and with some truth, that the stock which the Comanches offered in exchange for New Mexico merchandise was contraband stolen from Texas ranches. Eventually the Anglo-American buffalo-hunters drove the Mexican ciboleros and comancheros from the plains but as late as 1875 one José Taffola was found, with a full caravan of merchandise, roaming the plains in search of Comanches who had failed to keep a rendezvous.
At an early date, perhaps as early as 1830, a few New Mexico families, principally from Taos, began to settle in plazas along the Canadian River. The famous early-day town of Tascosa, from atascosa (“boggy”), was an outgrowth of such a settlement. In 1876 Casimero Romero moved into the region with a huge caravan of fourteen prairie schooners to be followed, the next year, by a number of other families from New Mexico. Down the river the plazas bore the names of the various families: Trujillo, Valdez, Ortega, Chavez, Romero, Sandoval, Domingo, Callinas, Joaquin, Ventura, Montoya. For over fifty years, these Mexican families were about the only settlers in the region, living in their low, flat-roofed stone plazas, grazing their sheep on the plains. Later, when large Anglo-American cattle interests invaded the Panhandle, the Mexicans retreated to New Mexico. “Two of the large ranch outfits,” writes the historian of Tascosa, “set about moving the Mexican plaza residents as soon as they had completed their fences.”5 The last survivor of the old Mexican life in the Panhandle, one Sandoval by name, died near the turn of the century.
* From California by John Walton Caughey. Copyright, 1940, by Prentice-Hall, Inc.