Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  However, they were different. Because most of them came to Texas for economic opportunity, not to become agringado ("Americanized"), they colonized; they did not assimilate. They wanted to live and work and improve their lot in Texas but not to become Anglos in any way. In this they resembled faithfully the Anglo-Saxons who had entered Texas in the preceding century. The Anglos also came for opportunity, with no intentions to Mexicanize. Few Anglos in the old days ever bothered to learn Spanish; few Mexican immigrants ever adopted English as their primary language. The Mexicans, however, did not enter an empty province, which they could develop and dominate. They rapidly become the most numerous group throughout all south Texas—in some communities 90 percent of the total inhabitants, about 70 percent over-all—but they entered a society totally owned by previous conquerors, and run under very non-Mexican concepts and rules.

  The Anglo attitude progressed through a number of gradual changes. During the long years of border stagnation, the few Anglos, who had complete economic control, continued to look on Mexicans as a useful underclass. Mexicans were small, superstitious, ignorant, and dark by Nordic standards. They performed a function similar to that of the slave caste. Inevitably, the first Texas reaction was to equate ethnic Mexicans, almost unconsciously, with Negroes.

  This Texan attitude was not so arrogant as it seemed; it followed very closely the attitude of the native Spanish elite. Between 1836 and 1880 there was much intermarriage between incoming Anglos, particularly Roman Catholics, and the older families. Some of these families became inglesado or agringado; they Anglicized. Most did not, retaining their profound belief in the aristocracy of lineal descent and superior culture. All through south Texas existed a small but tightly knit aristocracy of which the majority of Anglos were not even aware, even though many of these families retained lands or wealth. After the turn of the century, there was less and less association, for two reasons.

  The horde of lower-caste farm laborers injected a sour note, at a time when original war antagonisms had had time to die. Anglos tended to equate all people with Spanish names, unable to distinguish between a Harvard or Sorbonne graduate named Terrazas and an Indian with a similar last name. The idea of an elite based on culture and family descent was enormously repugnant to the dominant Anglo middle class in any case. They were intensely suspicious of both things. Many older Texas residents of Spanish ancestry looked on the invasion of farm labor with much the same horror that the tiny group of well-integrated Northern Negroes must have seen the coming of the sharecropper millions to Chicago and New York. They dragged down the whole definable group. Most Americans refused to believe that there were class distinctions between Mexicans based on family and descent, or any Mexican culture besides Indian artifacts and folk music accompanied by guitars.

  The apocryphal story of the Texas aristocrat who asked an Anglo doctor if he had read Cervantes's classic, Don Quijote, and was answered, "No, but I believe I saw the picture," was illustrative of an enormous gulf, even greater than smiling Anglos who heard the story realized. The value systems of Don Quijote were not translatable into the English tongue. Between Anglo-Saxons and la raza lay a greater cultural ocean than almost any ethnocentric American understood. Americans shared more values with Germans and Japanese than they did with Hispanic neighbors to the south; yet this, apparently because of geography, was most vehemently denied.

  The Spanish elite had its choice; it could assimilate or not. It did not provide ethnic leadership for the great Mexican mass. The Cheno Cortinases were rare. This class, the hacendados, never provided any sort of political leadership in Mexico, before or after independence. This was simply not a characteristic of the criollo upper class. The political dominance of Mexico came into the hands of the mestizo middle classes, first as military leaders and finally, when enough of them existed to inject a revolutionary fervor and provide leadership for the part or wholly Indian mass, as leaders of the whole society. The old elite in Texas tended to withdraw to itself rather than inject itself into public affairs. This was why the Anglo leaders of the Reds and Blues had no trouble taking control of the politically inert Mexican lower class.

  The Texans in the 20th century applied the same parameters to the Mexican as they did to the Negro, and found him wanting in most respects. Mexicans were segregated officially in almost all south Texas public schools, in separate classes from Anglo students. This segregation was not applied to the Spanish, or almost-Spanish, elite, who were recognizably white. The term "white" was rarely if ever used for ethnic Mexicans by native Texans, although officially the Mexican race was designated as Caucasian—this, in itself, a reverse form of racial arrogance. The terms "white man" and "Mexican" aroused bitterness among those Mexicans proud of Indian ancestry, because it forced the

  Mexican to equate himself in Anglo esteem with the Negro, whom the Mexican, if truth be told, also despised.

  Ethnic Mexicans were almost universally residentially segregated. The new towns in the Rio Grande Valley were laid out with designated Mexican quarters across the railroad tracks. Following the pattern of the Negro, except for voting rights, almost every form of discrimination applied, making the ethnic Mexican another, separate depressed caste. The Negro-authored Texas jinglet presented a truer picture of the real social situation than pages of official study:

  If you're white, well, all right!

  If you're brown, you can stick around.

  But if you're black—stand back.

  Mexicans provided useful services to the burgeoning economy; they were encouraged to stick around. They were not encouraged to meddle in the white folks' business. Intermarriage was not illegal—but unthinkable. It should be understood, however, that this incipient caste system was most pronounced among the old-line native Anglo-Texans. It was never fully adopted by Americans who came from other states. They were more likely to regard Mexicans as somewhat like Italo-Americans or other non-Nordic immigrants.

  This understandable, and finally abortive, effort to equate Mexicans of the lower class with blacks confused much of the real problem in Texas. A great many Texans of goodwill, understanding the Mexican contribution to Texas following World War II, believed that the removal of such arbitrary caste barriers would cause Mexican-Anglo assimilation. They did not understand that the Mexican notion of la raza was a concept held at least as deeply by Mexicans as the Anglo-American preoccupation with the color line.

  The concept of la raza did not translate into English adequately, like Cervantes's elegant language. It did not mean "race" as Anglos thought of race. It was as much spiritual as physical; it stood for a great gamut of almost mystical Hispanic values, most of which were antithetical to the Anglo-Saxon's much starker world. The Mexican, of all classes, was as differentiated in mind and soul and history from Anglo-Americans as the European Jews entering 20th-century Israel were from Arabs. Here, the great American assumption that all peoples were, or should be, more or less like Americans in their desires and values, broke.

  Texas destroyed Mexican segregation—except for some local diehard insistence here and there, and the segregation imposed by income and residence among all races—in both schools and homes. This was done following World War II. At the same time, a great many social barriers eased, if they did not disappear. This did not make an immediate difference, because the great mass of ethnic Mexicans were still lower-class laborers, but it did seem to offer opportunity for the coming generation.

  The Texas Mexican who had matured prior to 1949 on the average had just three years' schooling. He was functionally illiterate, in any language. His opportunities to rise above farm worker or city garbageman were rare. There were so many of him, and he was so disorganized in a strange society, that the lot of the whole could hardly be improved. Unionism was not practicable on farms and it had no support in American law, unlike unionism in industry. The glut of immigration, further, flooded the market; the organization of labor was not possible in a state like Texas, without vast industry, where ther
e was a large surplus of black and brown laborers for most jobs. This glut of indigent people not only drove the whole group down economically but also logically intensified racial prejudices.

  There did grow, slowly, a considerable ethnic Mexican middle class. But this only further polarized an already separate society. By 1965, studies showed that the Mexican resident of Texas had fallen far behind the Negro in acquired education. Schools were open to him; the laws, so far as they could be enforced, encouraged him to attend them. While the average Texan Negro had received almost twelve years of schooling, the Mexican still had acquired seven years or less. The problem was language. The Mexican, overwhelmingly, whether he was first, second, or sometimes even fifth generation, entered the first grade unable to speak English. If he progressed, he was always behind. Too many grew discouraged and dropped out. These joined the hordes in menial jobs, speaking English badly, with strong accents, or took up migrant farm work, homing in Texas, but ranging as far as Michigan.

  It was found almost impossible to induce the Mexican to surrender Spanish, as Italian-Americans consciously gave up Italian or German-Americans soon forgot the ancestral tongue. Spanish was the language of friendship, race, family, home. It gave him comfort; but it also codified his mind, and value system, into ways alien to an English-speaking society long before he emerged into the world. The educators and planners and social workers in Texas crashed, with great frustration, into a cultural problem few Americans even believed to exist.

  The Mexican-American remained too much Mexican to move, or compete, in a social system that stayed foreign to him. He became unique in the United States: a native-born citizen, often of many generations, who was still a foreigner in his native land. Only Europe, with its myriad of ethnic groups, offered a similar aspect, and the example of Europe, where cultural groups clung stubbornly to ancestral customs and languages despite minority status and discrimination within the boundaries of foreign states, could only be depressing.

  In this milieu, the growing Mexican middle class reacted much as did a similar emerging middle class in the province of Quebec, engulfed in an English-speaking sea. This group primarily provided services for its own people, as storekeepers, lawyers, doctors, and, more and more, politicians. With its emergence, political interest also emerged among the Mexicans. In the 1930s, very few ethnic Mexicans held political office, even in areas where they predominated. By the 1950s, this radically changed, as new lawyers, medics, and businessmen began successfully to stand for office, offering leadership to their own race.

  The new middle class was not more Anglicized—although it did, from necessity, speak English—but tended to be more ethnically aware than either the elite or the depressed working class. It felt discrimination more keenly. Educated, it clung to Hispanic values more fervently than the illiterate mass, who sensed them rather than intelligently understood them. It did not learn English with a native accent, and spoke Spanish at home by choice. Above all else, the majority of this new group, like its counterpart in old Mexico, wanted to raise the whole standard of the race. It wanted equality, not Americanization; a sort of fusion, not assimilation, in which both Hispanic and Anglo values would be equally respected and recognized.

  What it wanted was not impossible, but almost impossible to obtain, because the two value systems did not easily fuse. Elena Landazuri, in trying to explain to Anglo-Americans why Hispanic Americans were different, wrote:

  We have a different mental or perhaps spiritual reaction to the world . . . Other peoples, perhaps, desire the means to live, money to build, to do good, to spend. They want to impress themselves upon the world; our treasure is time. We must think, we must chat, we must see, we must enjoy ourselves, we must be.

  Nowhere in the Mexican ethos were the bedrock assumptions, the value system that lay so close to the Anglo heart that no Anglo bothered to rationalize or think about it: work as a virtue, transcending all necessity; wealth as a desirable, if not the only desirable, basis of status; the drive for status itself. The incessant drives of Anglo society struck most thinking Mexicans as barren and inhuman. The incessant argument that to be was as important as to do of the Mexicans struck most hard-working Anglos as pure shiftlessness, if not something far more subversive.

  A Mexican-American, thrown into a dominant society suffused with the American frontier values, trying to compete in an atomistic, consciously struggling, fragmented social fabric whose apex was not honor but success, carrying along not only a mental attic full of organic values but often an extended family group as well, started with impossible handicaps. English-speaking persons owned 80 percent of the property and production means of Quebec, although the French-Canadians had long ruled the province politically. The reason was not discrimination or conspiracy, although these did exist, but something the utterly Latin soul kept trying to reject. The Protestant ethic, whether held by Protestants, Catholics, or Jews, drove its possessor to lengths with which no humanistic thought could compete. The Mexican found it hard to depersonalize. He could not gracefully swim in America's vast, impersonal industrial-financial seas.

  The differences, and the aspects of these differences, were endless; they could not be obviated unless the Mexican either consciously or unconsciously rejected his heritage. Americans offered him the chance to do so, as they offered all other immigrants, and Texans' contempt was extreme when the Mexican, still complaining bitterly because his own values were not accepted, let the offer pass.

  The manifestations of discontent that in the 1960s began to appear—strikers bearing emblems of the Virgin of Guadalupe, union leaders demanding improvement of the workers' lot—were not nearly so important, or so dangerous to the whole society, as the new, sudden demands of the rising classes: bilingual education, instruction in Hispanic civilization, the fused society. These aroused little alarm, because their implications, in the practical and pragmatic, noncultural Anglo society, were not understood. Many people were inclined to grant them, thinking this might make Americans of Mexicans at last. Politicians who needed Mexican votes, and could no longer take for granted a group shaking off its inertia, were inclined even more so to go along.

  The Texas Mexican could make it more easily politically than he could economically, in his new chosen land.

  In the 1960s, when more than half of the nearly 750,000 people in San Antonio were Spanish-speaking, the outlines of the emergence, through political power, of a new Quebec were clear. Few Americans saw this, because few Americans enjoyed perspective. There was a grudging feeling that the Mexican had to be given a better break. Experimental classes in bilingual education were already under way; there were strong pressures to give Mexicans at least ceremonial membership on all public boards and offices, whether they were qualified or not. The day of the Anglo political boss was almost over; the Democratic Party writhed in concern, while the Republicans sniffed the signs of major overturn. It was beginning to be widely said, and believed, that the ballot was the American way to equality and respect. Few dared say that it was also the way to confirm a Mexican nation living entirely within the United States. Less concerned than any were a new horde of American-Anglo businessmen, many from the Northern states, who had realized that the "unique Spanish culture of old San Antonio" held glorious opportunities for profit. "Old Spanish culture," like spicy Mexican food, could be endlessly purveyed, above all to an increasing Northern American mass losing its own sense of identity and roots. Whatever came of this new confluence of cultures in Texas, it could no more be stopped than the original invasion had been, because out of it some men made money.

  The Mexican could make a new Quebec in south Texas, but it was not likely he could remake the greater society to which he, like the Anglo-Texan himself, was irremedially attached. He was probably always doomed to feel somewhat a stranger in his own land, for which he had a profound love. Already, a new Mexican mythos was coming forth: the Mexican had always been there; the land had always resounded to the Spanish tongue; this land was theirs.
All of this was true, but only in limited degree.

  A defeated Anglo politician, driving past the Alamo, was perhaps more bitter than profound, when he said: "Next time, that place will not fall by bullets; they'll use the American way." In this, perhaps, was still a profound hope. At worst, the polarization into powerful Anglo and Hispanic societies could produce new trouble; it was not likely to create worse trouble, or more injustice, than there had already been before. At worst, it could create a Mexican Quebec. At best, it could make, instead, an American Alsace. This much was certain. The world was not made, nor was the great game of cultural life and death upon the planet done.

  Chapter 37

  PLUS ÇA CHANGE. . .

  The old order changeth, yielding place to new

  And God fulfils himself in many ways,

  Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

  ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON