“Not Counting Mexicans”
When asked how many notches he had on his gun, King Fisher, the famous Texas gunman, once replied: “Thirty-seven—not counting Mexicans.” This casual phrase, with its drawling understatement, epitomizes a large chapter in Anglo-Hispano relations in the Southwest. People fail to count the nonessential, the things and persons that exist only on sufferance; whose life tenure is easily revocable. The notion that Mexicans are interlopers who are never to be counted in any reckoning dies but slowly in the Southwest. To this day Mexicans do not figure in the social calculations of those who rule the Border States. As I write these lines, the Mexican consul-general in Los Angeles has just entered a vigorous protest against the insulting behavior of custom inspectors at the municipal airport.
A majority of the present-day residents of the Southwest are not familiar with the malignant conflict of cultures which has raged in the borderlands for more than a century. Blinded by cultural myths, they have failed to correlate the major events in a pattern of conflict which has prevailed from Brownsville to Los Angeles since 1846. Once this correlation is made, it becomes quite apparent that the Mexican-American War was merely an incident in a conflict which arose some years before and survived long after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It is only within the framework of this age-old conflict that it is possible to understand the pattern of Anglo-Hispano cultural relations in the Southwest today. In summarizing the history of this conflict, one necessarily starts with Texas, for there the first blood was shed.
1. Los Diablos Tejanos
In Texas the Spanish-Mexican settlements were directly in the path of Anglo-American expansion. Unlike the rest of the borderlands, Texas was not separated from the centers of Anglo-American population by mountain ranges and desert wastes; geographically it invited invasion. In a series of belts or strips, its rich, alluvial plains stretched from the plateaus to the gulf. The rivers that marked these belts could be crossed, at all seasons, at almost any point, without much trouble. On the other hand, between the most southerly settlements in Texas and those in Mexico, there was, as Dr. Samuel Harman Lowrie has pointed out, “a great expanse of semi-arid land which at that time served as a more or less natural, though temporary barrier to the effective extension of Mexican influence and control.” Texas was 1,200 miles removed from its capital, Mexico City.
By 1834 the Anglo-Americans outnumbered the Mexicans in Texas: thirty thousand to five thousand. Most of the Mexicans were concentrated in the old Spanish towns or along the border, while the Anglo-Americans were to be found on the farms and ranches. Mexican townspeople had few opportunities for acculturation for they saw very little of the Anglo-Americans. From the outset, moreover, relations between the two peoples were clouded by the fear of war. The Anglo-Americans bore the brunt of Mexico’s hostile distrust of the United States and were, in turn, encouraged to take an unfriendly attitude toward the natives by the unconcealed, aggressive designs of the jingoes in Washington.
As might have been expected, each group formed a highly unfavorable initial impression of the other. To the early American settlers, the Mexicans were lazy, shiftless, jealous, cowardly, bigoted, superstitious, backward, and immoral. To the Mexicans, on the other hand, the Texans were “los diablos Tejanos”: arrogant, overbearing, aggressive, conniving, rude, unreliable, and dishonest. The first Mexican ambassador to the United States had complained in 1882 of the “haughtiness of these republicans who will not allow themselves to look upon us as equals but merely as inferiors.” Still another Mexican official had charged that the Americans in Texas considered themselves “superior to the rest of mankind, and look upon their republic as the only establishment upon earth founded upon a grand and solid basis.” Full of brag, bluster, and spread-eagle chauvinism, the Americans of the 1800s were hardly the most tactful ambassadors of goodwill. The truth of the matter is that the border residents were not a credit to either group.
Under the most favorable circumstances, a reconciliation of the two cultures would have been difficult. The language barrier was, of course, a constant source of misunderstanding; neither group could communicate, for all practical purposes, with the other. The Mexicans knew almost nothing of local self-government, while the Americans, it was said, traveled with “their political constitutions in their pockets” and were forever “demanding their rights.” Although tolerant of peonage, the Mexicans were strongly opposed to slavery. The Anglo-Americans, most of whom were from the Southern states, were vigorously proslavery. The Anglo-Americans were Protestants; the Mexicans were Catholic. Speaking of a Mexican, a Protestant missionary is said to have remarked: “He was a Catholic, but clean and honest.” Both groups lacked familiarity with the existing Mexican laws, for there was no settled government in Texas. Anglo-Americans found it extremely difficult to respect the laws of Mexico in the absence of law-interpreting and law-enforcing agencies. Thus it was, as Dr. Lowrie writes, that “cultural differences gave rise to misconceptions and misunderstandings, misunderstandings to distrust, distrust to antagonism, and antagonism on a very considerable number of points made open conflict inevitable.”
The first Anglo-Americans literally fought their way into Texas. While most of these early filibustering expeditions were defeated, they succeeded in laying waste to the country east and north of San Antonio. Both Mexicans and Americans were killed by these invading private armies. No sooner had the Mexicans driven out the filibusters, than the Comanches raided the entire stretch of country between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. According to one observer, the whole region was “depopulated, great numbers of stock were driven off, and the people took refuge in the towns on the Rio Grande.” Preoccupied with revolutionary events in Spain and Mexico, the government could give little attention to the Texas settlements. After 1821, however, a measure of protection was provided against the devastating raids of the Comanches and many of the settlers moved back across the Rio Grande.
2. Alas! The Alamo
With the Texas Revolution came the embittering memories, for the Texans, of the slaughter of Anglo-Americans at the Alamo and Goliad; and, for the Mexicans, of the humiliating rout and massacre at San Jacinto. Prior bitternesses were now intensified a thousandfold. “Towards the Mexicans remaining within the limits of the Republic,” writes Dr. Garrison, “the feeling of the Texans was scarcely better than towards the Indians.” Memories dating from this period still poison relationships between Anglos and Hispanos in Texas. Some years ago a district judge told of how, as a child, he had heard an old man give an eyewitness account of the slaughter at the Alamo. “I never see a Mexican,” he confessed, “without thinking of that.” José Vasconcellos, the well-known Mexican educator and philosopher, tells in his autobiography of how these same memories poisoned his boyhood in Eagle Pass. After the Texas Revolution, as Erna Fergusson has pointed out, “Texans could not get it out of their heads that their manifest destiny was to kill Mexicans and take over Mexico.”
Throughout the decade of the Texas Republic (1836–1846), the shooting war continued in “the Spanish country” south of the Nueces. Murder was matched by murder; raids by Texans were countered by raids from Mexico. Since a peace treaty was never negotiated, no boundaries could be fixed. Texas claimed to the Rio Grande, while Mexico insisted that its boundary rested on the Nueces. In the bloody zone between the two rivers an uninterrupted guerrilla warfare continued throughout the life of the Texas Republic. In 1839 General Don Antonio Canales launched a revolution on Texas soil against Santa Anna and raised the banner of the Republic of Rio Grande. Of the 600 men who rallied to his standard, 180 were Texans. Awakening to the fact that Texans were using his insurrection as a cover for an attack on Mexico, General Canales finally surrendered but not until his troops had fought several engagements along the border. At the head of a raiding party of five hundred men, General Vásquez captured San Antonio in 1842 and held it for two days. These are but two of many similar episodes that occurred during the hectic life of the new republic.
Throughout the period of this border warfare, the Texas-Mexicans were caught between opposing forces. “When the Americans have gone there,” explained a delegate at the Texas constitutional convention, “they have preyed upon the Mexicans; they have been necessarily compelled by force or otherwise to give up such property as they had. So vice versa, when the Mexicans have come in, they have been necessarily compelled to furnish them the means of support. … Since 1837 they [the Texas-Mexicans] have been preyed upon by their own countrymen as well as by ours.” The Texans constantly suspected the Mexicans of inciting the Indians against them and every Indian raid provoked retaliation against the Tejanos. The Mexicans naturally regarded the Texas Revolution as American-inspired and the prelude to the conquest of Mexico.
However all Mexicans were not equally affected by this complex warfare. A sizable number of the upper-class settlers quickly became identified with the Texans. These Texanized Mexicans or “the good Mexicans” were called Tejanos and were invariably of the rico class. Two of the fifty signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence were native Mexicans and a third, born in Mexico, became the first vice-president of the republic. At a later date, Captain Refugio Benavides commanded a company of Texas-Mexicans which operated along the border against Mexican raiders and marauders.
3. The Mexican-American War
Provoked by the annexation of Texas in 1846, the Mexican-American War represented the culmination of three decades of cultural conflict in Texas. To the Mexicans, every incident in Texas from the filibustering raids to the Revolution of 1836 was regarded, in retrospect, as part of a deliberately planned scheme of conquest. To the Anglo-Americans, the war was “inevitable” having been provoked, in their eyes, by the stupidity and backwardness of the Mexican officials. Not only did Mexico forfeit an empire to the United States, but, ironically, none of the signers of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo realized that, nine days before the treaty was signed, gold had been discovered in California. That they had unknowingly ceded to the United States territories unbelievably rich in gold and silver—the hope of finding which had lured Coronado and De Oñate into the Southwest—must have added to the Mexicans’ sense of bitterness and defeat.
Furthermore the way in which the United States fought the Mexican-American War added greatly to the heritage of hatred. A large part of our invading army was made up of volunteers who, by all accounts, were a disgrace to the American flag. General Winfield Scott readily admitted that they had “committed atrocities to make Heaven weep and every American of Christian morals blush for his country. Murder, robbery and rape of mothers and daughters in the presence of tied-up males of the families have been common all along the Rio Grande.” Lieutenant George C. Meade, of later Civil War fame, said that the volunteers were “driving husbands out of houses and raping their wives. … They will fight as gallantly as any men, but they are a set of Goths and Vandals without discipline, making us a terror to innocent people.”
How bitterly these outrages were resented is shown by a passage which Lloyd Lewis has culled from one of the Mexican newspapers of the period: “the horde of banditti, of drunkards, of fornicators … vandals vomited from hell, monsters who bid defiance to the laws of nature … shameless, daring, ignorant, ragged, bad-smelling, long-bearded men with hats turned up at the brim, thirsty with the desire to appropriate our riches and our beautiful damsels.” The year 1844 had seen the rise of a Native American Party in the states and much anti-Catholic feeling found expression during the war. Mexicans charged that the volunteers had desecrated their churches, “sleeping in the niches devoted to the sacred dead … drinking out of holy vessels.” Two hundred and fifty American troops, mostly of Catholic background, deserted and joined the Mexican army to form the San Patricio battalion. The barbarous manner in which eighty of these deserters were executed in San Angel, a suburb of Mexico City, was long cited by the Mexicans as further proof of Yankee cruelty.
Nothing was more galling to the Mexican officials who negotiated the treaty than the fact that they were compelled to assign, as it were, a large number of their countrymen to the Yankees. With great bitterness they protested that it was “not permissible to sell, as a flock of sheep, those deserving Mexicans.” For many years after 1846, the Spanish-Americans left in the United States were known in Mexico as “our brothers who were sold.” As late as 1943 maps were still used in Mexican schools which designated the old Spanish borderlands as “territory temporarily in the hands of the United States.” It is to the great credit of the Mexican negotiators that the treaty contained the most explicit guarantees to protect the rights of these people, provisions for which they were more deeply concerned than they were over boundaries or indemnities. It should never be forgotten that, with the exception of the Indians, Mexicans are the only minority in the United States who were annexed by conquest; the only minority, Indians again excepted, whose rights were specifically safeguarded by treaty provision.
Just as the end of the Texas Revolution did not terminate hostilities in Texas, so the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo failed to bring peace to the borderlands. Under the terms of the treaty, it became the obligation of the United States to police 180,000 Indians living in the territories which we acquired from Mexico. This obligation the United States failed to discharge for many years. Taking advantage of the confusion which prevailed, the Indians launched fierce raids on both Anglo and Hispano settlements, conducted marauding expeditions deep in Mexican territory, and cunningly exploited the hatred that had been engendered between Anglo and Hispano. The Anglos promptly attributed these raids to Mexican duplicity and instigation; the Hispanos as promptly charged them up to the malice or carelessness of the Americans. Hard-pressed on all sides, the Indians had come to live off the plunder seized in these raids which, with the confusion and demoralization which prevailed in Mexico, were conducted on a larger scale than ever before. It was not until about 1880 that the United States finally managed to bring the Indians of the Southwest under close police surveillance.
Nor were Indians the only troublemakers in the postwar decades. Between 1848 and 1853, various American filibustering expeditions violated Mexican territory in Sonora, Lower California, and at various points along the border. When word of the discovery of gold reached the Eastern states, swarms of emigrant gold-seekers passed along the southern routes to California, often traveling in Mexican territory without passports, and not infrequently helping themselves to Mexican food and livestock en route.
In 1850 José M. Carvajal organized a revolution in Mexico, sponsored by American merchants, which aimed at converting the State of Tamaulipas into the Sierra Madre Republic. Carvajal was a Texan by birth who had been educated in Kentucky and Virginia. Backed by Richard King and Mifflin Kennedy, two of the great cattle-barons of south Texas, the Carvajal revolution was supported by bands of armed Texans who crossed the Rio Grande. The American ambassador reported that these raids, in which as many as five hundred Texans participated, had “awakened a feeling of intense prejudice against everything connected with American interest.”
The fateful strip of territory between the Nueces and the Rio Grande once again became the home of numerous outlaw bands who preyed indiscriminately upon both Mexican and American settlers. In the face of these staggering blows—filibustering expeditions, Indian raids, revolution, war, and constant guerrilla fighting—the Mexicans in Texas constantly retreated and their retreat, of course, gave rise to the notion that their conquerors were pursuing a mandate of destiny. Major Emery, writing in 1859, said that the “white race” was “exterminating or crushing out the inferior race”; and an American soldier wrote home that “the Mexican, like the poor Indian, is doomed to retire before the more enterprising Anglo-Americans.”
4. Slaves and Peons
As early as 1839 fairly large numbers of Negro slaves had escaped from their Texas owners by crossing the Rio Grande and a sizable colony of ex-slaves had sprung up in Matamoros. During the Civil War, the Texans suspected that native Mexicans were implicated in the flight of fugitive slaves, an accusation that found circumstantial confirmation in the known opposition of Mexicans to slavery (Mexico had sought to insert a provision in the treaty barring slavery forever from the territory ceded to the United States). “The possession of slaves in Western Texas,” wrote Colonel Ford, “was rendered insecure owing to the contiguity of Mexico, and to the efforts of the Mexicans to induce them to run away. They assisted them in every way they could.”
To some extent, the movement of Negro slaves across the border was matched by the flight of Mexican peons into Texas. According to Dr. Paul S. Taylor, some 2,812 servants with families numbering an additional 2,572 persons, escaped to Texas from Nuevo Leon and Coahuila in the period from 1848 to 1873. The loss in unpaid debts, which the flight of these peons represented, was estimated by the Mexican government to be in excess of $400,000.
In 1856 a Negro insurrectionary plot was uncovered in Colorado County. According to the Texans, the Negroes had planned to rebel, kill their masters, and, with the aid of native Mexicans, fight their way across the border. Without exception every Mexican in the county was “implicated” and over two hundred slaves were arrested and punished (two were whipped to death). Mexicans were ordered to leave Matagorda and Colorado counties immediately and in Uvalde they were forbidden to travel the roads without passes. “Anti-Mexican sentiment,” writes Dr. Taylor, “based on the belief that the peons imperilled the institution of slavery, broke out in meetings which in Austin, Gonzales, and other towns, passed resolutions protesting against their employment. At Goliad the resolution declared that ‘the continuance of the greaser or peon Mexicans as citizens among us is an intolerable nuisance and a grievance which calls loudly for redress.’” As always, the circumstance that Mexicans were concentrated in the strip of territory immediately north of the border aroused the most dire forebodings.
The Negro insurrection was quickly followed by the Cart War which broke out in 1857. Prior to this time, Mexican ox-cart freighters had been hauling—between San Antonio and the coast and from San Antonio to Chihuahua—an annual cargo of goods and merchandise valued at several million dollars. The Cart War involved a systematic campaign on the part of Anglo-Americans to force Mexican freighters out of this lucrative business. For over a year, organized bands of Texans preyed on the Mexican freight trains, killing the drivers, stealing the merchandise, and generally disrupting the traffic. So tense did the situation become, with the Mexican ambassador filing one vigorous protest after the other, that federal troops were finally dispatched to protect the cartmen.
5. “Red Robber of the Rio Grande”
In the wake of the Cart War came the highly significant Cortina episode. Juan Nepomuceno Cortina—”the red robber of the Rio Grande”—was born near Brownsville. A blocky, powerfully built, red-bearded Mexican, Cortina came from a prominent and well-to-do family. Like so many Mexicans in Texas, he was a magnificent horseman. The Cortina War, which was to last a decade, started on July 13, 1859, when a deputy sheriff arrested a Mexican who had been a servant of the Cortina family. Contending that the arrest was merely another example of gringo arrogance, Cortina shot the deputy and freed the prisoner. On the morning of September twenty-eighth, Brownsville awoke to the cry of “Viva Cortina! Viva Mexico! Maten los Gringos!” as Cortina, at the head of an armed force, swept into the town, killed five Americans, released the pelado culprits from the jail, and plundered stores and shops. By 1860 Cortina had laid waste to the country from Brownsville to Rio Grande City—a distance of a hundred and fifty miles—and inland as far as Arroyo Colorado. Fifteen Americans and eighty “friendly” Mexicans were killed in these raids, while Cortina is said to have lost a hundred or more of his men.
For fifteen years, Cortina was the scourge of the Lower Rio Grande Valley, defying capture, constantly eluding his pursuers. At one point in the Cortina War, Captain McNelly of the Texas Rangers crossed the Rio Grande, in defiance of orders, and gave Cortina’s forces a severe defeat in a pitched battle at Las Cuevas. Incensed by these continued raids, the Texans burned the homes of all Mexicans suspected of being implicated or of giving aid and comfort to Cortina’s forces. On his part, Cortina terrorized the Mexican residents and made short shrift of those suspected of being informers. This continued terror naturally silenced the Mexicans—a circumstance which only confirmed the Texans’ belief in their innate duplicity and treacherousness.
A real expert in border warfare, Cortina hoisted the Mexican flag in Texas, and, so it was said, often raised the American flag in Mexico. Both Texas Rangers and Mexican troops from Matamoros on more than one occasion met defeat at his hands. Although he was a bandit and a cattle-thief, there was unquestionably something of the Robin Hood about Cortina. He had become a desperado, so he said, because the Anglo-Americans had tried “to blacken, depreciate, and load with insults” the Mexican residents of Texas. In one of numerous manifestos, he pointed out that “a multitude of lawyers” in Texas sought to rob the Mexicans of their lands. In particular, he charged that one Adolph Glavecke, a deputy sheriff, acting in collusion with certain lawyers, had spread terror among the Mexicans, threatening to hang them and to burn their homes unless they abandoned the country. “Our personal enemies,” he said, “shall not possess our lands until they have fattened it with their gore.” Major Heintzelman, on the border at the time, stated that after the Brownsville raid Cortina was a great hero in the eyes of the people. “He had defeated the gringo and his position was impregnable. He had the Mexican flag flying in his camp and numbers were flocking to his standard. He was the champion of his race—the man who would right the wrongs of the Mexicans and drive the hated Americans to the Nueces.”
While some Mexicans undoubtedly sympathized with Cortina and gave him aid, it is also a matter of record that others, at great personal peril, joined in the fight to defeat him. Despite this fact, however, the Anglo-Texans believed that every Mexican along the border was in league with Cortina and would, if given a chance, “murder every white inhabitant.” At the request of the American government, Díaz finally brought the Cortina War to a close in 1873 by making Cortina his prisoner; but, as Walter Prescott Webb has written, “the evil consequences lived on.”
6. “The Dead-Line of Sheriffs”
In the period from the close of the Civil War to 1880, there was nothing resembling “law and order” in the territory between the Nueces and the Rio Grande where friction between Anglo and Hispano was intense and continuous. In this strip of territory resided about eighty percent of the Mexicans then living in Texas. For fifty years after 1846, this territory was known as “the dead-line of sheriffs.” American officials refused to provide Catholic bishops safe conduct through the area and even the Texas Rangers hesitated to enter it.
Neglected during the Civil War, great herds of cattle roamed wild in the brush country and plundering expeditions crossed and recrossed the border as cattle-stealing became an accepted business. To complicate matters, Mexico had established a narrow strip of territory on its side of the Rio Grande in which goods could be sold free of custom charges and duties. The existence of this “free zone” was an open invitation to smuggling and greatly annoyed American merchants in the Texas towns. From 1871 to 1875 the whole border was aflame with a type of lawlessness and violence even worse than open warfare. Historians have despaired of listing the murders committed by both sides and have never succeeded in counting the number of raids. On dozens of occasions, American troops were sent on expeditions into Mexico; nor were Mexicans much more respectful of American sovereignty.
On May 8, 1874, a band of Mexican outlaws murdered four Anglo-Texans at Penascal; and, earlier, Albert Garza, a Mexican cattle-thief, raided far and wide in Texas. “Ghastly murders,” writes Dr. Taylor, “and shootings of Mexicans, each attributed, probably often correctly, to the other race, became not infrequent occurrences.”* General Ord reported that the raids were so frequent that the whole territory was entirely in the possession of cattle-raiders and bandits and that it was utterly impossible to “execute the laws at all.” Formerly Mexicans had borne the brunt of frontier lawlessness but, after 1870, the tide was somewhat reversed, and it was the Anglo-Texans who were on the receiving end. The raids culminated in March 1875, when a band of 150 Mexicans crossed the border near Eagle Pass and raided as far east as Corpus Christi.
For this daring raid, the retaliation of the Texans was swift, violent, and indiscriminate. Bands of Texans raided Mexican settlements, burning houses, shooting Mexicans, spreading terror throughout south Texas. Large parties of mounted, well-armed men, wrote N. A. Jennings, “committed the most brutal outrages, murdering peaceful Mexican farmers and stockmen who had lived all their lives in Texas.” The adjutant-general of Texas, who can hardly be accused of pro-Mexican bias, reported that parties of Anglo-Americans had “banded together with the object of stopping the killing of cattle for their hides, but have themselves committed the greater crimes of murder and arson.” Merchants in Corpus Christi began to complain that “every good Mexican is afraid to navigate the roads on horseback or with carts, and the business in these parts has commenced turning into another channel, where less risk is found.”
The temper of the feeling, on both sides, is indicated in a report of General Steele in 1875 in which he said that “there is a considerable Texas element in the country bordering on the Nueces that think the killing of a Mexican no crime” and a collection of “Mexican thieves and cut-throats who … think the killing of a Texan something to be proud of.” Reminiscing about the period, in 1929, a Texan told Dr. Taylor that “Mexicans despised us, and we hated the Mexicans like a human hates a rattlesnake.” Throughout this period, there were elements in Texas who were deliberately fomenting disorder and violence in the hope that the United States would take another slice of Mexican territory; and it is a matter of record that in 1876 President Hayes toyed with the idea of provoking a war with Mexico to divert attention from the shady deal by which he had robbed Tilden of the presidency.1
For this period as a whole, there is simply no telling, as J. Frank Dobie has said, “how many Mexicans bit the dust.” Naturally, robbery and theft went hand in hand with physical violence. “There is a disposition,” as one witness testified before a congressional committee in 1875, “on the part of some Americans, which crops out every once in a while, not to respect the property rights of Mexicans living southwest of the Nueces River.” The “beef packeries” on the American side of the Rio Grande often winked when Texas cattlemen brought in large herds of cattle clearly marked with Mexican brands. It was during this period, writes Garrison, that “large bodies of land that now have enormous value were then secured [from Mexican settlers], sometimes legally and sometimes illegally, for almost nothing.” On the other hand, Mexican cattle-thieves, in raiding Texas herds, laughingly said that they had come to collect “las vacas de tata” or “grandfather’s cattle.” One of the last large-scale raids was that organized by Catarina Garza in 1892 whose raid on the Norias Ranch is celebrated in a famous corrido.2
“Not only were the Mexicans bamboozled by the political factions,” writes Walter Prescott Webb, “but they were victimized by the law. One law applied to them and another, far less rigorous, to the political leaders and to the prominent Americans. The Mexicans suffered not only in their persons but in their property. The old land-owning Mexican families found their titles in jeopardy and if they did not lose in the courts, they lost to their American lawyers. The humble Mexican doubted a government that would not protect their person and the higher classes distrusted one that would not safeguard their property.” In an official investigation in 1878, the American consul in Matamoros testified that the authorities were never interested when a Mexican was killed in Brownsville; but, if a “white man” was molested in any way, “there is generally a great fuss made about it by those not of Mexican origin.” As late as 1879 the Anglo residents of Crio Canyon posted an order commanding all Mexicans to leave the area within three days. “In passing through Bee county,” said Senator Dwyer, “we heard of a Mexican, a quiet citizen, who had been brutally murdered a few days before our arrival, by several Americans because the Mexican would not go and play the fiddle for them.”
7. The Salt War
In 1877 there were about twelve thousand people living along the Rio Grande at El Paso, all but eighty of whom were Mexicans. The Mexicans, writes Dr. Webb, “felt that Texas was by right still a part of Mexico” for El Paso had been “Mexican” for nearly three hundred years. After the Mexican-American War, a few Anglo-Americans appeared on the scene, monopolizing the government positions and showing a general tendency to take over. About a hundred miles east of El Paso was a salt mine which the Mexicans had discovered in 1862. By general consensus the Mexican residents of El Paso had been accorded the privilege of digging salt at the mine, without charge, for their personal needs. An ambitious American acquired control of the salt mine, by a series of devious maneuvers, and announced that henceforth it would be operated as a private monopoly. Outraged by this action and inflamed by the demagoguery of Father Borajo, a local priest, a mob of El Pasoans seized the city on October 10, 1877, killed three Anglos, and committed property damage that ran into thousands of dollars. In the process of restoring “law and order,” the usual retaliations were committed with a number of Mexicans being killed and several more being lynched. As might have been expected, “bitter hatreds were sown” as a consequence of the short-lived Salt War.
From the inception of the Díaz regime, a degree of quiet prevailed along the border until the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. But, even during this period, incidents were constantly occurring. When a Ranger shot and killed Ramón de la Cerda of the King Ranch in 1902, a general resentment against the Rangers flared up all along the border. Annoyed by this protest, a Ranger proceeded to whip a Mexican boy with a quirt and, shortly afterwards, Albert de la Cerda, a brother of the slain man, was shot by the Rangers. Incidents of this kind, with which the record is studded, served to keep the old antagonisms alive.
8. Open Season on Mexicans
From 1908 to 1925, the whole border was aflame, once again, as revolution engulfed Mexico. No one knows how many American and Mexican civilians were killed along the border in these years but the estimates, according to Dr. Webb, range from five hundred to five thousand. As war approached in Europe, the Texans inevitably suspected the Mexicans of being in league with the Germans. “There is a fear constantly stored away in the back of the El Pasoan mind,” wrote Tracy Hammond Lewis, “that these Mexicans will take it into their heads to have an especially-appointed uprising at the expense of the Americans.”3
Fearful of the revolution, Mexican cattle-owners drove tens of thousands of cattle across the border to cash in on wartime beef prices in the United States. Once the ranges were deserted, the feed became, of course, very good on the Mexican side. Raiders then crossed the border, rounded up thousands of American-owned cattle, pastured them in Mexico, and later sold them to one or another of the various factions fighting in Mexico. As a consequence, property losses ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. From Brownsville to Calexico, raiders crossed and recrossed the border, exploiting the confusion which prevailed on both sides of the line. On March 9, 1916, Francisco Villa spread terror up and down the border with his raid on Columbus, New Mexico; and, before much time had passed, the Pershing expedition was deep in Mexican territory. Over two thousand postcards a day were sold in El Paso depicting “Mexican atrocities” while American troops marched through the streets singing:
It’s a long, long way to capture Villa;
It’s a long way to go;
It’s a long way across the border
Where the dirty greasers grow.
In this bloody seventeen-year period, hundreds of innocent civilians were killed. “Americans,” writes Ernest Gruening, “continued to be killed by the vengeful Villistas, at times for no other reason than that they were ‘gringos.’ Mexicans likewise were killed in Texas chiefly because they were ‘greasers.’” In an article in World’s Work, George Marvin reported that “the killing of Mexicans … through the border in these last four years is almost incredible. … Some rangers have degenerated into common man-killers. There is no penalty for killing, for no jury along the border would ever convict a white man for shooting a Mexican. … Reading over the Secret Service records makes you feel almost as though there were an open game season on Mexicans along the border.”
Carranza, in a well-documented report, charged that 114 Mexicans had been murdered on the American side and a number of American officials acknowledged the accuracy of the charge. A formal protest filed by the Mexican ambassador in 1912 complained of the mistreatment of Mexicans in California and Texas and listed any number of lynchings and murders. On November 11, 1922, a Mexican, Elías Zarate, was lynched in Weslaco, Texas. Zarate had been arrested after a fist fight with an American and the Mexican consul had warned the authorities of the danger of mob violence. In its issue of July 12, 1922, The Nation documented a series of cases, all occurring in Texas, in which Mexicans had been brutally assaulted; in some cases, murdered. Following an old-established pattern, the authorities in Breckenridge, Texas, warned all Mexicans to depart overnight. The lawlessness became so widespread that Secretary of State Hughes had to warn the governor of Texas that some action would have to be taken to protect Mexicans. In an editorial of November 18, 1922, the New York Times said that “the killing of Mexicans without provocation is so common as to pass almost unnoticed”—nearly a hundred years after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
Much of the lawlessness against Mexicans in Texas had an official or semiofficial status, for the Texas Rangers had become a kind of “black-and-tan” constabulary bent on terrorizing the Mexican population. Jovita Gonzáles quotes a local historian to the effect that the Rangers had executed, without due process of law, between one hundred and three hundred Mexican residents of the border counties. “The Rangers,” wrote Tracy Hammond Lewis, “are only cold-blooded where the Mexicans are concerned, and this solely because they have learned it is the one manner in which they can be properly handled.” J. T. Canales, a Mexican-American member of the Texas legislature from Brownsville, filed formal charges against the Rangers over the mistreatment of Tejanos and there must have been some merit to these charges for the number of Rangers was shortly reduced and, some years later, the organization was disbanded.
This eruption of violence against persons of Mexican descent had important international repercussions. For example, Carranza at first refused to permit Mexico to join the League of Nations on the ground that the Covenant of the League did not ensure racial equality. Nothing so much infuriated the influential anti-Yankee Latin-American publicist Manuel Ugarte as the conditions which he had observed along the border. “From the very frontier,” he wrote, “the irreconcilable opposition between the two communities presents itself vividly and obviously. The Anglo-Saxon, hard, haughty, and utilitarian, infatuated with his success and his muscular strength, improvises towns, dominates nature, imposes everywhere the impress of his activity and ambition; and, like the Romans in their palmy days, has as his auxiliaries and servants the subject races—Indians, Chinese, Africans—who gather up the crumbs of the feast in return for discharging their subaltern tasks. As opposed to him, the Mexican … continues in his easy-going customs and accepts the fruits of the earth.”4
The general attitude of Latin-Americans was reflected in an editorial of May 15, 1922, in Heraldo, published in Mexico City:
It is thoroughly irritating that while in our country American citizens enjoy ample guarantees and when anything happens to them it is settled by the United States consuls, in that country, on the other hand, Mexicans are still being killed without any effort by the American authorities to punish the murderers. … Up to the present time, not a single person has been electrocuted for killing a Mexican, no matter how brutally or basely he might have perpetrated the crime.
Viewing this record in retrospect, one can thoroughly appreciate the comments, without sharing the conclusions, of F. L. Olmsted5:
…between our South American and the Mexican there is an unconquerable antagonism of character, which will prevent any condition of order where the two come together. … The mingled Puritanism and brigandism, which distinguishes the vulgar mind of the South, peculiarly unfits it to harmoniously associate with the bigoted, childish, and passionate Mexicans. They are considered to be heathen; not acknowledged as “white folks.” Inevitably they are dealt with insolently and unjustly. … Guaranteed by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, equal rights with all other citizens of the United States and of Texas, the whole native population of county after county has been driven, by the formal proceedings of substantial planters, from its homes, and forbidden, on pain of no less punishment than instant death, to return to the vicinity of the plantations.
* Reprinted from An American-Mexican Frontier by Paul S. Taylor. Copyright, 1934, by The University of North Carolina Press.