by Juan Batista
Chapter 12:
Would It Work?
And thus ends this alternate history, this indigenous Mexican-centered story of seeking independence from Texas.
Would it work? Would such a plan, four new states breaking away from Texas, be legal?
Absolutely. The American law which brought Texas into the union does specifically allow the state to break into five states. The mechanism for how this would happen is clear. Normally a new state must be approved by the US Congress, and the law specifically bars new states created from already existing states. The only constitutional requirement is a population over 60,000. But in Texas’s case, thanks to the unique resolution which brought it into the US, it is the only state which can be broken apart far more easily.
That it has never happened (at least so far) is simply because there has never been a driving reason for any section of the state to break away, save one: The extreme racism that nonwhites have been subjected to. That same oppressiveness effectively prevented any activism that could have formed separate states. But post-Civil Rights Era, legally sanctioned racism is largely gone. The very reason for breaking away is now mostly absent. It would take something like the threat of legally sanctioned racism coming back to force Mexicans in the state to make their own state(s).
Only the threat of traitorous secession could make Mexicans in Texas seek something as drastic as a new state or states. Anyone naïve enough to think a Texas Republic would somehow not be deeply, viciously racist has no understanding of either the true nature of Texas’s founding fathers, or their would-be heirs alive today in the militia movement and other secessionist traitors. And anyone imagining Mexican-Americans anywhere in the US, outside of the tiniest fraction, actually desire to “return” to Mexico, betrays their own lack of understanding of Mexican people. Even Keith Olbermann seems to have fallen for the lies put out by anti-immigrant hate mongers, that anyone with a Latino name is a foreigner whose loyalty does not lie with America, rather than as what they truly are, indigenous to the southwest and truly the most patriotic ethnicity in all of America.
As the last half of this book has made clear, it would be an incredibly good idea to break Texas up. At time, right wingers in Texas seem to be competing with those in South Carolina for being most detached from reality. The result is why Texas shows up in the bottom in one statistic after another, among the worst in spending on education, in dropout rates, in average wages, in job creation, poorest in health, and number one in many matters which should be a matter of shame, number one or close to the highest in poverty rates, crime rates, unemployment rates, in prison population, and prisoners executed.
But regardless of whether it ever happens or not, the old Texas, what has long been portrayed as the “real Texas,” the land of either rugged white cowboys, or devoutly Evangelical conservative Christians, is less than a generation from a well-deserved end. The future Texas will be Tejas again. It will be a state of people who act and think more like California’s Bay Area than any overgrown juvenile’s Wild West fantasy.
Obviously part of the purpose of this book was to challenge the delusions and myths built around Texas, and the mythical “Texas Republic,” that failed racist terrorist movement that should be a cause of shame, not pride. Another was to chastise Rick Perry, and to warn the public of his recklessness and the dangerous company he keeps. The “Republic of Texas” and other militias rank alongside the Aryan Nation and the Ku Klux Klan in the level of dangerousness they represent. While America has (supposedly) focused on fighting Al Qaeda, most forget that their one successful strike in the US was, to an extent, a fluke. Both post 9-11, and in all of America’s history, more Americans have been killed or terrorized by white American (and theoretically Christian) right wing terrorists than by so called “Muslim terrorists” who, again, are actually largely politically motivated zealots.
It was white right wing terrorists in Texas who committed the last lynching in America, the dragging death of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas. It was white right wing terrorists in Texas, the Confederate Hammerskins, who tried to attack Jewish Temple Shalom in Dallas using cyanide gas. The so called “Republic of Texas” differs from them only in goals, and only slightly in views, and not one bit in methods of reckless terroristic violence.
Americans and Texans fail to heed the threat of such terrorists at their own peril. Governor Perry never answered why he palled around with such extremists. No true American, and especially no elected official, should be the friend to attempted cop killers and would be presidential assassins, men who tried to kill a Republican governor and a Democratic president. No one claiming to be a true patriot, or a true conservative, could vote for such a man. It speaks of the failure of the national press that they never exposed these facts, and Perry went down to defeat instead for clumsy debate performances. It speaks of the even greater failure of the Texas press that they never exposed Perry's seeking the support of terrorists in his own backyard.