Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  They poured in, increasing the ethnic Mexican population of Texas between 1900 and 1910 by 76 percent. In ten years, between 1910 and 1920, 264,503 arrived, and 165,044 in the next decade. Most of this immigration was utterly informal. There was no quota placed on immigration from the Western Hemisphere; in many cases Mexicans simply crossed the river. Years later, there were hundreds of thousands of Mexican nationals living in south Texas who had been residents for three or more decades, but who had never taken citizenship. After a certain period of residence, or the birth of children, they were not deportable.

  Because they came en masse, to an area where there was already a Mexican presence, they failed to assimilate culturally as did other groups; further, there was a deep racial barrier between the dark-skinned Indian-blooded peasant and the color-conscious white Southerner. Mexicans, like Negroes, entered with certain problems not faced by other national groups. The acute problem was only recognized nationally in the 1960s, when the migration, running now at some 50,000 per year, aroused fears in Washington.

  The fact that Middle America was expanding its population faster than any region on earth, with people far outrunning economic development, caught attention. Mexico would have a population of 70,000,000 in the last quarter of the 20th century. This realization resulted in the first quotas ever placed on Western Hemisphere immigration, 100,000 per year. But by 1950 there were already 1,500,000 ethnic Mexicans in Texas, comprising 17 percent of the total population. Increase and steady immigration pushed the percentage to approximately 20 by the 1960s, and all projections, even figuring in the immigration quotas, predicted an increase. One in five of all Texans was Spanish-speaking. This was hardly mere immigration; it was colonization.

  Studies published by the University of Texas as early as 1920 warned of immense ethnic and social problems to come, unless this Völkerwanderung were stemmed. It was already recognized that the Mexican immigrants were not assimilating, in fact, had no desire to assimilate or adopt Anglo culture. The second generation was not learning English. But the developer and farmer in the Rio Grande Valley, the pecan sheller and cigar maker in San Antonio, thousands of housewives wanting maids, were as adamant as the South African Boer would have been, if told he should send his Bantu boys back to the veld from which they came.

  The immigrants were rural Mexicans, and their exodus was very similar to the exodus of rural Negroes out of the Mississippi drainage to the North. The reasons behind both movements were identical. The great social and political revolution that shook Mexico beginning in 1910 affected the rural masses least. The old feudal hacienda system was at last destroyed, allowing the beginnings of social reform and modernization of the state, but as in the United States, the beginnings of industrialism did not mean an immediate improvement for the people on the land. The revolution did little to stem emigration; the slacking of south Texas development during the Great Depression halted it for a time, but only briefly.

  Meanwhile, the Mexican Revolution caused increased problems between Mexico and Texas.

  Relations between Texas and Mexico had always depended in large degree upon whether order or chaos reigned below the Rio Grande. In 1910, a long period of chaos began, and this revived old troubles on the border. The Mexican Revolution, like most revolutions, was markedly antiforeign in tone; it upset the old empirical relationships Porfirio Díaz had hammered out, and inevitably embroiled Mexico in serious conflicts with the United States. The U.S. troop-landing at Vera Cruz and the dispatch of Pershing's army on a fruitless chase of Pancho Villa were not part of Texas history. But a tragedy of these years was the revival of the old racial war along the Rio Grande.

  This region, even after the coming of the land companies, was always violent. Rangers and peace officers, for example, killed sixteen Mexicans between 1907 and 1912 in Hidalgo and Cameron counties alone. But the Mexican Revolution, which turned bloody when Felix Díaz, Reyes, and Huerta revolted against Madero in 1913, and Venustiano Carranza led his own revolt in the north, brought more Texan and American troops and fighting to the border than had been seen since the Civil War.

  As government in Mexico again collapsed, and the ephemeral reigns of a series of warlords began, conditions in south Texas returned to something very much like the old days of the 1860s and 1870s. Large numbers of refugees crossed the border. Some very bloody battles were fought along the Mexican side, from Piedras Negras to Matamoros. The river was open and the country was still brush-choked and wide, and soon large parties of Mexican raiders, owing allegiance to no authority, rode looting and killing across the Bravo. This war was almost unnoticed in the thunder of greater conflict in Europe at the time.

  This provoked a violent reaction against all ethnic Mexicans in the Rio Grande Valley. President Wilson sent large numbers of regulars and National Guardsmen to the Valley, and the Governor of Texas dispatched approximately a thousand Rangers, most of whom were recruited especially for the mission.

  At this time, the loyalty of ethnic Mexicans was genuinely suspect; generally, it did not yet exist. Many Texas-Mexicans went south to avoid military service in 1917; at this time, even old families had not yet decided where their true nationality lay. German propaganda circulated among the Spanish-speaking, and the famous Plan of San Diego, signed both by natives of northern Mexico and some residents of the Texas side, aroused violent fears and reprisals.

  Under the Plan of San Diego (named for San Diego, a town in south Texas, where one of the signers taught school; this same man, under another name, later served in Carranza's secret service in Mexico), ethnic Mexicans were to rise in Texas and proclaim their freedom from the Anglo-Saxon race. The independence of Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado was to be proclaimed, ending the settlement of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Two army corps of Mexicans were to be raised, under the Supreme Revolutionary Congress headquartered at San Diego. No one was to be enrolled in this army unless he was Mexican, Negro, Indian, or Japanese by blood. The revolutionary regime was to reestablish a new government for all captured Texas and Southwestern American towns, while every gringo male over sixteen was to be taken prisoner until all his money could be extorted, then shot. The Apaches of Arizona were to be promised the return of their old lands in return for joining the race war.

  When the revolution had carried the five target states, they were to request "annexation" by Mexico, if this seemed "expedient." The six states adjoining the Southwest were to be forcibly severed from the United States and given to the Negroes, who would then form a buffer between the expanded Mexico and the United States east of the Mississippi.

  When a copy of this glorious fantasy, which in truth aroused certain fevers in the Mexican breast, was found on a Mexican national captured in McAllen, Texas, by a deputy sheriff, the fat was in the fire. It is almost certain that no Spanish-speaking person authored it; although written in Spanish, certain usages were unidiomatic and wrong. Most authorities, later, suspected the Plan of San Diego was devised either by a German agent to stir up trouble at the United States' back door or by one of the many wealthy American landowners who were being dispossessed in Mexico at this time. But the description of the Plan as a "sublime" undertaking, and the reference to Anglos as "white-faced hogs from Pennsylvania" in other papers taken with the Plan, prepared the Anglo-Texans for race war.

  Not long after the Plan was uncovered, the Zimmerman note was made public, in March 1917. This "note," from the German Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs to the German ambassador in Mexico, through the German ambassador in Washington, proposed that an alliance be formed between Germany and Mexico to wage war on the United States. As part of the deal, Mexico was to reconquer Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The sum result of both the Plan and the note was to unleash Texan vengeance on numerous hapless and indiscreet citizens of Mexican or German descent. Many sought asylum in Mexico.

  The events along the border between 1915 and 1919, like those of 1859–76, had been almost consciously put aside by all c
oncerned. It is a part of American history Texans take no pride in, and no one likes. Rangers and local posses, in retaliation for real crimes against American lives and property, committed other crimes. The Rangers, out of tradition, history, and the emotions of the times, "shot first and investigated afterward." This action, serious as the times were, was no longer called for, as dozens of local law enforcement officers later testified. The United States, and Texas, with 35,000 troops on the border in 1917, was in no danger from Mexico.

  The Rangers, as still constituted, were something of an anachronism. Captains were appointed by the governor through the adjutant general, and these officers enlisted their own companies. Such state troops were essential during the frontier wars, but the Rangers had enjoyed less and less success as an internal police force. They performed numerous functions beyond the scope or powers of local authority, but the old partisan traditions, and politics, increasingly got in the way. The 19th century had called for Hays, Ford, and McNelly in Texas. The 20th century presented different problems, in an altered milieu. When one Ranger captain, in the 1920s, shot the tires off the car of a state official who had refused his command to halt, Texans smiled at his toughness. But this man, and those Rangers who still solved law enforcement problems by squaring away and requesting the other party to draw if he dared, were relicts of a frontier that, although it loomed large in Texans' minds, had disappeared.

  Between 1915 and 1917, many Rangers emulated Captain McNelly, in altered circumstances. Instead of genuine partisan warfare, they waged persecutions. They by no means bore the whole guilt; local citizens and sheriffs, and even the army, shared in it. There were numerous cases of flogging, torture, threatened castration, and legalized murder. Even some of this was justified by events, since the Rangers faced some of the cruelest outlaws who ever lived. But enough of this reprisal fell on people innocent of any crime but the one of being Mexican to discredit the whole.

  One incident testified to by Sheriff W. T. Vann of Cameron County was illustrative of some hundred others. On October 18, 1915, Mexican bandits wrecked and looted a passenger train six miles north of Brownsville. Sheriff Vann and a party of Rangers captured four men suspected of having taken part in the attack. The Rangers decided to take the captives into the brush and shoot them, since they had had poor experience in getting convictions at trials. Vann refused to take part in this and was told by one Ranger: "If you do not have the guts to do it, I will." The four Mexicans were shot. Vann, however, commended many Rangers; they were more effective than the army in this brush fighting. But with the good men, there were some vicious misfits in the force.

  R. B. Creager of Brownsville, Republican National Committeeman from Texas, testified later that about 200 Mexicans had been executed without trial by Rangers, local officers, and citizens. He estimated that 90 percent of these had committed no crime. At this time, every male in these counties of Texas went armed with six-shooter or rifle. If an ethnic Mexican were found armed, however, he was sometimes accused of banditry and shot. No record exists of these executions, which were estimated to number between 200 and 5,000, because obviously no records were made or kept. Accounts do exist of the finding of many bodies here and there, and the burial of these. A good estimate, by old hands, suggested that about 300 ethnic Mexicans were summarily executed in reprisals. Most of these were Texas Mexicans; hundreds of others fled to Mexico, where Carranzanista officials extorted large sums from them before permitting them to stay.

  In 1919, J. T. Canales, state representative from Brownsville, introduced a bill in the legislature to reorganize and upgrade the Ranger force. Canales was a member of an old landowning family; he professed no desire to destroy the Rangers, but to rid them of unqualified and vicious men and to remove the force from politics. An exhaustive investigation ensued, and at the end of it, the Rangers were badly discredited. A bill passed the legislature that in effect abolished the Texas Rangers as the principal state police force and sharply reduced their numbers to 76 men. A few years afterward the Ranger functions were given to the new state highway patrol. The Rangers lived on, but as a small, elite force of 60 men, whose work was primarily investigative, but who were available for duty during disorders and situations in which local officers could not keep control. Mexican complaints alone did not destroy the Rangers, though this was commonly believed. The force was intensely disliked by many local law officers and citizens, especially during the Prohibition years. Rangers, operating free of local pressures, smashed illegal gambling casinos, destroyed liquor, and generally harassed some illegal operations that many sheriffs and local powers preferred to have them leave alone. The Hays-McNelly tradition, dear to every Ranger heart, made them respected and loved at large, but in many quarters hated and feared. No Ranger was in the habit of issuing the same order twice.

  Between 1911 and 1920, race hatred was reinflamed along the border, where it had never completely died. Unknown to most Anglo-Texans who took pride in their famous Rangers, Rinche again assumed the proportion of a bugaboo in Spanish-speaking minds. Children were frightened with the term. Almost every lower-class ethnic Mexican alive in those years carried a violent, superstitious fear of Rangers, and the folk-hatred had permeated so deeply into all Mexicans that even third- and fourth-generation citizens, who had never actually seen a Ranger, reacted with an instinctive phobia toward the name.

  Senate investigators, including Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, who held hearings on labor disputes in the Rio Grande Valley in 1967, were puzzled and perhaps given erroneous impressions by the violent reactions of ethnic Mexicans to the sending of a Texas Ranger to the area. This was an ancestral race hatred that Kennedy and even most Texans, with little knowledge of the past, could not quite understand.

  The triumph of the Mexican Revolution ended the bloody skirmishing along the border, but it did not halt continual Mexican immigration. The Party of Revolutionary Institutions, which took power and held it afterward, modernized Mexico in great degree, but the PRI had no real place in its plans for peasants. Industrialization of Monterrey and other centers was pushed and capitalized, while agriculture, at least until the 1960s, languished. Some Mexican peasants in 1960 were poorer than they had been fifty years before, and there was actually less food in Mexico to eat. This continued to force a stream of migration north, both as temporary laborers, or braceros, and as permanent residents.

  However, the restabilization of Mexico gradually eroded the old fears and hatreds along the frontier. While Mexico remained in disorder, it was impossible for Americans to regard the nation with respect. As Mexico began to modernize and, more important, send thousands of new-rich urban shoppers into Texas cities, respect increased. By the 1960s, in some Texas cities the Mexican trade during the Holy Week vacation was as important as the local trade at Christmas. The average Mexican tourist, coming from a society where all manufactured goods were high or scarce, spent more than $1,000 per visit, against the average American expenditure south of the border of $400. Of course, the tourists were of a different type. The Americans were largely young people and schoolteachers; the Mexican shoppers almost entirely from the new-rich, industrial upper and middle class that arose with revolutionary Mexico. In the 1940s, all of the old border forts were closed. Relations among the United States, Texas, and the Mexican nation entered their friendliest era in history. Once again the dominant groups in Mexico were empirically nonhostile to the northern neighbor, as in Díaz's day, and the United States, so long as neither its borders nor its interests were threatened from below, was entirely amiable. Unless some new, unforeseen cataclysm tore either nation, relations had entered a long, stable, and happy phase. Only a newer Mexican revolution, or a violent leftist swing in that progressively more conservative country, could undo this trend.

  But as historic hatreds damped, the emerging ethnic problem in south Texas far from disappeared. The Mexican problem in Texas had shifted its center of gravity from Mexicans in Mexico to ethnic Mexicans in the United States.
<
br />   Here ground was both gained and lost.

  Until 1920, the Mexican population was rural, stable, and inert. Then, it began to move, first into local towns, crowding into noisy neighborhoods, moving out in the fields each day to work. It kept being sucked north, drawn by the lights of San Antonio, until it made San Antonio the capital of that part of Mexico that lay within the United States. Mexicans were inherently urban. This was part of a great worldwide trend; similar groups of rural laborers were streaming to the large cities of South and Middle America, piling into smelly slums and rickety shacks. Sometimes they found work, often they did not. But life was still better in the city. Gradually, those who had citizenship discovered social services and welfare, and ultimately, the great discovery of all urban masses since the time of Rome, political power.

  The Mexican Revolution, and the events of World War I years, produced a decided swing among the older immigrants, and the old Spanish-Mexican stock, toward becoming genuine citizens of the United States. After World War I, and the turmoil and shock of 1915–17 on the border, Texas Mexicans opted strongly toward fusion with the Anglo society. Radicalism and counterreligious activity to the south offended many, while the shock of renewed persecution made most realize they had to take a stand. From 1920 onwards, the basic loyalty and patriotism of the overwhelming majority of ethnic Mexicans could not possibly be suspect. Just as Anglo-Texans responded in disproportionate numbers during World War II, Hispanic Texans responded with even greater élan. They made valiant soldiers. They won a high proportion of the Medals of Honor granted to citizens of the state. They threatened no more revolutions nor spoke of the injustices of the Peace of Guadalupe Hidalgo. They were basically hard-working, and remarkably law-abiding, considering their background and economic class.