Texas

by James A. Michener

  She moves on, a mature woman of seventeen, granddaughter of a man of honor who had proved with his life that he was entitled to that claim. He had made himself an Hidalgo de Bragueta, siring seven sons in a row without, as he said, ‘the contaminating intrusion of a single daughter.’ Yet before he marched into the morning darkness to fight his final duel he had embraced his granddaughter, telling her: ‘You are the best son I ever had.’

  Across the bleak and dusty wasteland she walks, hoping to spare her splendid horse and oldest friend, Relampaguito. She fords the Medina, that stream which had defined her family’s ranch, then the Atascosa of the meager water, then the Nueces, on whose bloody banks her grandsons will die, striving to protect it. Still on foot, she crosses the Nueces Strip, which entire armies will contest in future years, and finally she reaches those fertile fields along the Rio Grande, where citrus and murder and big families and corruption and untold wealth will flourish.

  From her womb will spring nine Garzas, like her, prolific, until it would seem that she had populated the entire river valley. Some Garzas will go to the Congress of the United States, others to distinguished service in the Mexican army to face their cousins fighting against them in the American. A few will become agricultural millionaires; many will die unremembered paupers; but in each generation some Garza men will exhibit the courage shown by Domingo when he rode alone through Comanche country to claim his bride and punish her betrayer; and with reassuring frequency some Garza woman will display that quizzical half-smile which had distinguished the founder of her family, Trinidad de Saldaña. And like her, she will be memorable and much loved by men.

  … TASK FORCE

  A week before the June meeting in El Paso the three members of our staff asked to see me privately: ‘Dr. Barlow, you’re playing this too low key. We think you should take command of the formal sessions, knock some heads together, keep Rusk from running everything, with Quimper’s help.’

  I sat for some moments, contemplating their unhappiness, then asked: ‘Have you ever heard of the principle which guides many of our best organizations? Primus inter pares?’ Apparently no one had, so I interpreted: ‘First among equals, the best possible definition of a chairman.’

  ‘What’s it mean?’ the young man from Texas Tech asked, and I said: ‘The chairman must never think he’s the hottest thing on the block. Banging the gavel and all that,’ and the young woman from SMU warned: ‘You’d better do some gavel banging or those tigers are going to eat you up.’

  I assured her that when the time came to write our report, Professor Garza and I would form a dependable team in defense of liberal proposals, while Rusk and Quimper, as announced conservatives, should be expected to oppose: ‘That’ll leave Miss Cobb with the swing vote, and remember, her ancestors were liberal senators. If our ideas are any good, she’ll side with us.’

  ‘You work on that principle,’ the young woman said, ‘you’re going to lose every contest. Those three old-timers will hang together in defense of old principles. They’re tough.’

  ‘The governor appointed them for that very reason. And if they weren’t tough, I wouldn’t want them.’

  The young people also warned that Professor Garza’s talents were not being properly utilized, and the young man from El Paso said: ‘If I was in his place and Lorenzo Quimper made one more joke about Texas A&M, I’d quit. Just quit.’ But I said: ‘That goes with the territory. You stay around Garza long enough, you’ll find he needs no protection.’

  And when we met to plan for the meeting, Il Magnifico started right out with his latest joke: ‘You hear the one about the Aggie who …’ and Garza, after winking at me, moved directly up to him, made a tight fist of his right hand, and shoved it two inches from Quimper’s nose.

  ‘You know what that is, Lorenzo?’ and when Quimper said he did not, Garza explained: ‘It’s an Aggie-joke stopper,’ and Rusk asked: ‘How’s it work?’ and Garza said: ‘It moves forcefully against the nose, and Aggie jokes stop.’

  For just a moment, Quimper turned pale, but then he saw me laughing and swiftly recovered. Like a big, friendly teddy bear he embraced Garza, assuring him: ‘Some of my best friends are Aggies.’ The young woman from SMU watched this, and whispered: ‘See! I told you measures were needed,’ and I whispered back: ‘Garza took them.’

  The staff informed us that they were finding the chore of locating a speaker for the June meeting so difficult that they suggested we postpone it till July. The problem was: why has an apparently insurmountable animosity traditionally existed between longtime Spanish-speaking residents and English-speaking newcomers.

  This was a topic fraught with danger, both historical and current, and although the staff had already located several scholars well qualified to lead our discussion, they all happened to be native speakers of Spanish, and to this both Rusk and Quimper objected. ‘I do not care to listen to any more apologists for Spain and the Catholic church,’ Rusk said firmly, and before I could defend our past meetings, Quimper jumped in: ‘Texas is a Protestant state. At least, the people who run it are Protestants, and we don’t need any further indoctrination to the contrary.’

  This was too unfair to let pass, and since it reflected on my leadership, I had to intervene: ‘Gentlemen, could we have had more ecumenical speakers than Dr. Navarro and Friar Clarence? Did they not anticipate the very points you’re making? I heard no misrepresentation or proselytizing. And I’m sure that if—’

  Rusk cut me down: ‘Barlow, just a minute. Didn’t I give those men the respect due them? Didn’t I take steps to have the friar’s talk published? I think that Quimper, Miss Cobb and I have behaved damned well, and now we say “No more apologists. Let’s hear some straight facts.” ’

  When I looked to Miss Cobb for support, she disappointed me: ‘The men are right, Travis. We must have a quite different kind of speaker for our meeting in El Paso.’

  I didn’t know what to do. Every scholar I knew who was qualified to guide us through the tricky mazes of our topic was either from Mexico or someone who was an apologist for Spanish history, and it looked as if we’d reached an impasse. But then Dr. Garza saved the day.

  ‘There’s this excellent older man at Michigan State. A Dr. Carver, if I have his name right.’

  ‘What does he specialize in?’ Rusk asked, for he obviously was not going to allow me to make this important choice.

  ‘That’s the interesting part. I’ve heard him speak. Excellent. And his field is French-English turmoil in Canada, with special emphasis on Quebec Province.’

  ‘Is he a Catholic camp follower?’ Quimper broke in.

  ‘His religion I don’t know. But I heard him give a paper at a conference at Arizona State and again at San Diego State. I did not know him personally, which is why I can’t remember his exact name. But everyone had the feeling that he was one of the best.’

  When our staff had an opportunity to check him out they found that his name was Carter, that his field was minority relations in Canada, and that he had also begun in recent years to specialize in problems along the Mexico-United States border from San Diego to Brownsville.

  ‘What’s his religion?’ Rusk asked, and when a staff member said: ‘Jehovah’s Witness,’ he replied: ‘Jesus Christ!’

  For the El Paso meeting Quimper drove from his ranch into Austin, where Rusk’s jet picked us up for the short flight to Love Field in Dallas. There Rusk himself climbed aboard, and as soon as we were airborne I reassured my fellow members: ‘I’ve checked Carter out, read some of his papers, and he’s just what we’ve been searching for.’ Before either man could respond, I added: ‘We must have a couple of clowns on our staff. Carter’s a Baptist.’

  By the time we landed at El Paso—after a flight longer than from New York to Cincinnati—Rusk and Quimper were in a relaxed mood, and in the long and pleasant evening prior to our meeting they invited us all, including the staff, across the Rio Grande to a festive meal in Ciudad Juárez. But before the waiter could take our
order Rusk stared at the three staff members and growled: ‘Which one of you comedians told me that tomorrow’s speaker was a Jehovah’s Witness?’ When the girl from SMU said: ‘I did,’ and Rusk asked: ‘Why?’ she said: ‘Because you were making such a fuss about it.’

  Rusk pointed his finger at her: ‘He’d better be good, or you’re fired,’ and she replied: ‘If this is the condemned woman’s last meal, it’ll be the best,’ and she ordered extravagantly, at Rusk’s expense.

  Her position was secure, as we quickly realized when we met our speaker next morning on what must be one of the more distinctive of the American campuses—early Tibetan architecture—with one of the more unfortunate names: UTEP (University of Texas at El Paso). Herman Carter, in his sixties, was the kind of scholar young Ph.D. students aspire to be: knowledgeable, with a constantly growing reputation and an increasing interest in the world as he grew older. He seemed at first to have no sense of humor, and certainly the three publications he distributed to us revealed none, but when pressed on some vital point he was apt to come up with just the right witticism to relax tensions. He produced one Ph.D. student every three years, and saw to it that she or he found a good position, for anyone he trained was employable.

  ‘You could have assigned me no topic more difficult than the one you did, but also none more significant to your purpose. Let’s see what generalizations we can establish before the discussion begins, because it would be painful to waste your time and mine in belaboring the obvious.’ With that excellent preamble, to which we assented, he launched into his subject, drawing heavily upon his experiences in Quebec, in Belgium and in Cyprus, each of which was engaged in internecine struggles.

  ‘It would not be easy to find two groups of people less qualified by history and temperament to share a land like Texas in the early 1800s, than the old Spanish-Mexican to the south and the new Kentucky-Tennessee man to the north. God reached deep into His grab bag when He asked those two dynamite caps to share the land between San Antonio and Louisiana. The older group was Catholic, of Spanish descent, family oriented, careless about on-the-spot administration, town oriented, ranchers if they could afford the land and the cattle, obedient to authority up to the moment of revolution, and extremely proud, punctilious as well. The intruding group was Protestant, British, individually oriented, insistent upon good local administration, farmers with a positive passion for the soil, suspicious of cities, disrespectful of any national authority, especially religious, but just as eager for a duel as any hidalgo. Dear God, what an unlikely mix!’

  For an entire day this elderly man threw off ideas like a summer electrical storm over the prairie: sharp flashes of lightning followed by distant and impressive thunder. He had no personal involvement in what was happening along our Rio Grande or along the desert borders between Arizona and California, so he could speak freely and allow his imagination to roam; but he did have an acute concern about the demographics of the Mexican-American confrontation and was vitally involved in the guessing game as to what was going to happen.

  At one point I had to break in: ‘Dr. Carter, you speak as if our problem is nothing but the Quebec-Canada problem clad in serape and sombrero,’ and he said: ‘Precisely. When cultures are in conflict, certain inevitables result.’ I must indicate some of the specific ideas and challenges he asked us to consider as observable in Texas.

  Knives versus guns: ‘You so often find in Texas newspapers a story which appalls white society. Some agitated Mexican immigrant has found life intolerable and has grabbed his knife to carve up five or six of his friends, sometimes even including his wife. Horror! Indignation! But the same paper will carry a story about some decent white anglo who has shot the same number of people when drunk, and this is condoned because of the stress the man was under or because he was such a good fellow when sober.’

  Music: ‘I’m distraught when I live along your border to realize that whereas Mexico and her sister nations have produced some of the most wonderful, joyous songs in the world, things like “Guadalajara,” “Cu-cu-ru-cu-cu,” “La Bamba,” and “La Golondrina,” your popular music stations play only the most cacophonous noise. This gap is so wide, it can apparently never be bridged.’

  Games: ‘The difference between a poetic bullfight and a brutal American-style football game is so vast that words cannot resolve the difference. And it’s symbolic, I think, that each culture looks with real distaste at the brutality of the other. I’ve heard sensible anglo women along the border inveigh against the savagery of the bullfight, but make no comment about their own young men who are killed each autumn playing football or about the scores who become paraplegics for the rest of their lives. I don’t particularly like bullfighting, but I sometimes think that it’s better to kill a bull than to maim a man … especially a young man.’

  Toward the end of an exciting day he threw at us, as if we were performers in a circus having to catch the Indian clubs he tossed through the air, three ideas of such fresh and startling dimension that they became subjects for repeated discussion in the months to come. In this respect he carried out one of the best functions a learned man can perform: he stirred up the minds of his listeners, who could if they wished reject his conclusions but who still had to grapple with his data, hoping to form generalizations of their own.

  A name: ‘One of the tragedies of Texas history has been a failure to devise an acceptable name for citizens of Mexican heritage who have lived in the state much longer than newcomers of Anglo-Saxon heritage. We call these distinguished men and women Mexicans, ignoring their centuries-old citizenship on our soil, their education and their often superior moral condition and manners. But we also call the illiterate peon from Chihuahua who crawled across the dry riverbed last night a Mexican, and the tragedy of it is that we do not differentiate between the two. The most ancient citizens are grouped indiscriminately with the most recent infiltrators, and everyone suffers. One day in California, I asked my Hispanic students: “What do you want to be called?” and they said: “Persons of Spanish name and heritage.” How could you fit that into a newspaper story? What we seek is a single word which is short and without adverse coloring. Chicano is liked by some, deplored by others. It won’t work. Many younger students prefer the contentious La Raza. Too militaristic. In fact, nothing works, and Texas is stuck with an abominable situation. It uses old words to stigmatize new situations, a classic example of how society so often fails to produce words which define the real problems of our society. We need a verbal invention which acknowledges the grandeur of the Mexican contribution, but we can’t find one.’

  At this point he stopped, looked at Profesor Garza, and asked: ‘How do you like being called a Mexican, after the centuries your family has been in Texas?’

  ‘I don’t like it, especially when the person doing the categorizing is some newcomer from Detroit. Appropriates the name Texan. Then castigates me as a foreigner.’

  ‘You see any solution?’

  ‘None. It’s as you say, a cultural crime that cannot be corrected.’

  ‘What do you call yourself?’

  ‘A Texan of Spanish heritage.’

  ‘That’s a hell of a name. By the way, how far do you have to go back to find unmixed Spanish blood in your family?’

  ‘Twenty-one generations, a Spanish soldier in Vera Cruz.’

  ‘So you really are Mexican?’

  ‘Except that in 1792 a wonderful woman of pure Spanish blood married into the family and had nine children.’

  ‘In Texas?’

  ‘Where else?’

  Now Miss Cobb surprised us: ‘Professor Carter, when you referred to your Mexican students in California you called them Hispanics,’ and he asked: ‘I did?’ and she said: ‘You certainly did.’

  He laughed and said: ‘That may be the solution. Garza, what do you think?’ and Efraín said: ‘I’ve never found it offensive,’ and we agreed unanimously that our report would use that term.

  Government: ‘A salient fact abou
t Texas, and one often forgotten, is that in 1824 the Mexican government provided one of the best constitutions our hemisphere has seen. Had this been put into effect, honestly and with respect for its provisions, Mexico and Texas would have enjoyed one of the world’s good governments and separation would not have become necessary. But there’s the overpowering difference. Mexicans had the intelligence and the mental agility to form a splendid document, one of the best. But they never began to have the managerial ability to implement it. So separatism became inescapable, because American settlers, no matter where they went—Oregon, Utah, California—insisted upon a stable government. Today when I read that Constitution of 1824, I could cry. So noble a document to have so ignoble an end. It could have saved Texas for the Mexicans, but no one could be found to operate it.’

  The future: ‘Because the people of the Spanish-speaking nations to the south have such a high birth rate … Did you know that Mexico’s population in 1920 was a mere fourteen million and now it’s seventy, with no upper limit in sight? And the explosion in Central America is even more startling. Same situation in Canada, the French outbreed the British at a relentless rate. “The Victory of the Crib,” they call it. Well, we must suppose that this will continue into the indefinite future, and if it does, we must also expect to see an unconquerable movement of Spanish-speaking people up from the south and the eventual Hispanicization of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Texas and no doubt Florida. Let me tell you exactly what I envisage for Texas. I think that along the Rio Grande there is already developing a kind of ipso facto third nation, reaching from Monterrey and Chihuahua in the south to San Antonio and Albuquerque in the north. I’m not sure that this new nation will require any modification in governmental forms. It could still be Mexico and the United States. But the interchange of people, language, money, jobs, education, traditions, food habits, religion and entertainment will be complete and free. And it will be untrammeled because no one will be able to halt it.’