Latino Americans

by Ray Suarez

  The long-settled Tejano families living on land wrested from Mexico now faced uncertainty that would not be solved by simply switching allegiance from the flag of one nation to another. Ultimately, it would not matter to many of their new neighbors and fellow citizens how they saw themselves. The newcomers saw them as not all that different from Indians, who had been aggressively pushed off their land by English-speaking North Americans for two centuries. It would be another 150 years before we would call what was happening to Tejanos by another name: ethnic cleansing. The land hunger before the American Civil War, and the widespread social chaos after it, put the needs of English-speaking Americans ahead of the rights of the original Tejano families.

  Not that the Mexican observers of the nineteenth century thought highly of the riffraff, freebooters, and rootless adventurers drifting into Mexican lands from the United States. Jose Maria Sanchez was a surveyor sent by the Mexican government in 1828 to take a look at the U.S. settlements and report on what he saw. The ambassadors of Anglo-Saxon civilization did not receive a rave review from Sanchez, who said of one settlement, “Its population is nearly 200 persons, of whom only ten are Mexicans, for the balance are all Americans from the north with an occasional European.

  “Two wretched little stores supply the inhabitants of the colony: one sells only whiskey, rum, sugar, and coffee; the other rice, flour, lard, and cheap cloth. The Americans from the North, at least the greater part of those I have seen, eat only salted meat, bread made by themselves out of cornmeal, coffee, and homemade cheese. To these the greater part of those who live in the village add strong liquor, for they are, in my opinion, lazy people of vicious character. Some of them cultivate their small farms by planting corn; but this task they usually entrust to their negro slaves, whom they treat with considerable harshness.” Slavery was illegal in Mexico, and the American settlers knew it.

  In 1837 Juan Seguín was elected to the new senate of the Republic of Texas. He was the only Spanish-speaking senator, but managed to conduct his business using a translator, even chairing the committee on military affairs. At the very time Seguín was becoming a leader of the young republic, landless Americans were pouring into Texas, and town after town moved to expel its native-born Tejano Mexican residents. The senator moved into the land business himself, trying to make his fortune in the Wild West atmosphere of what was, after all, the Wild West.

  Another reminder of the fluid nature of nationhood and the malleability of national borders came with Seguín’s support of the Federalist general Antonio Canales Rosillo, who was attempting to set up what would have constituted a buffer state between Mexico and Texas, the Republic of the Rio Grande. Canales would eventually fall back in line with the Mexican government, take up a commission as a general, and fight the Texans in the Gulf Coast border regions that now constitute south Texas. Another Mexican general, Mariano Arista, even contacted Seguín and tried to convince him to join with Mexico and help his homeland retake Texas.

  Though he rejected the Mexican overtures and actively helped thwart a Mexican reinvasion that resulted briefly in the occupation of San Antonio by a Mexican army, whispers began that Seguín was not loyal to the Texas Republic. A Mexican general hinted that the mayor of San Antonio was still a loyal Mexican citizen. U.S.-born Texans began to accuse Seguín of treason. In his memoirs, he recalled how he was driven out of his hometown, with vigilantes hot on his trail: “In those days I could not go to San Antonio without peril of my life. Matters being in this state, I saw that it was necessary to take some step which would place me in security, and save my family from constant wretchedness.

  “I had to leave Texas, abandon all, for which I had fought and spent my fortune, to become a wanderer. The ingratitude of those, who had assumed to themselves the right of convicting me; their credulity in declaring me a traitor, on mere rumors, when I had to plead, in my favor the loyal patriotism with which I had always served Texas, wounded me deeply.”

  Seguín resigned as mayor of San Antonio and fled to Mexico with his family. “I had determined to free my family and friends from their continual misery on my account; and go and live peaceably in Mexico. That for these reasons I resigned my office, with all my privileges and honors as a Texan.”

  • • •

  JUAN SEGUÍN’S PROBLEMS were only beginning. Heading south meant confronting the army and the country he had so recently worked to defeat: “I sought for shelter amongst those against whom I fought; I separated from my country, parents, family, relatives and friends, and what was more, from the institutions, on behalf of which I had drawn my sword.”

  When the Mexicans offered him a choice between imprisonment for treason or military service, Seguín said he had no choice but to accept a commission in the Mexican Army. Before long he was headed back to Texas in the ranks of a force under General Adrian Woll, to fight the United States in the Mexican-American War.

  After the war Seguín asked for permission to return to Texas. “After the expeditions of General Woll, I did not return to Texas till the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. During my absence nothing appeared that could stamp me as a traitor. My enemies had accomplished their object; they had killed me politically in Texas, and the less they spoke of me, the less risk they incurred of being exposed in the infamous means they had used to accomplish my ruin.”

  Before long harassment in the place he had fought to free forced him south across the Rio Grande again, and back to Mexico. “A victim of the wickedness of a few men, whose imposture was favored by their origin, and recent domination over the country; a foreigner in my native land; could I be expected stoically to endure their outrages and insults?”

  Juan Seguín lived his last days in Nuevo Laredo, on the banks of the Rio Grande, just across from Texas and the United States. He died in 1890, at eighty-three. In 1976, his remains were finally brought home to Texas, for burial in the town that bears his name.

  Across what became the Southwestern United States, moving the border, and finalizing the new relationship between the United States, Mexico, and America’s new Mexican citizens, did not end the conflict over land, resources, and status. In the Californio newspaper El Clamor Público (the Public Outcry), an article published July 26, 1856, complained about continued violence against California’s Mexicans: “It is becoming a very common custom to murder and abuse the Mexicans with impunity.” The paper later charged that the English-speaking Americans who had been pouring into California in the years after gold was discovered subjected Mexicans “to a treatment that has no model in the history of any nation conquered by savages or by civilized people.”

  The part-Cherokee popular novelist John Rollin Ridge collected the stories circulating about a Mexican who turned rebel after Americans beat him and raped his wife. His 1854 book The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit mixed fact and fiction to create a dashing Mexican Robin Hood, whose guerrilla battles against Americans were justified by his people’s treatment: “The country was then full of lawless and desperate men, calling themselves Americans, who looked with hatred upon all Mexicans, and considered them as a conquered race, without rights or privileges, and only fitted for serfdom or slavery. The prejudice of color, the antipathy of races, which are always stronger or bitterer with the ignorant, they could not overcome, or would not, because it afforded them an excuse for their unmanly oppression.” As Mexicans do to this day, songs celebrating the exploits of Joaquin Murieta were composed and widely circulated. One of the Murieta corridos included these lyrics:

  Yo no soy americano

  pero comprendo el inglés.

  Yo lo aprendí con mi hermano

  al derecho y al revés.

  A cualquier americano

  hago temblar a mis pies.

  Por cantinas me metí

  castigando americanos.

  “Tú serás el capitán

  que mataste a mi hermano.

>   Lo agarraste indefenso,

  orgulloso americano.”

  I am not an American

  but I understand English.

  I learned it with my brother

  Inside and out.

  I can make any American

  tremble at my feet.

  From bar to bar, I’ve traveled

  punishing Americans.

  “You could be the captain

  who killed my brother.

  You caught him unarmed,

  you arrogant American.”

  In Texas, another brown Robin Hood arose in the lawless and disputed land between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande in the southern part of the state. Juan Nepomuceno Cortina Goseacochea, often called Cheno Cortina or simply Juan Cortina, led a Tejano militia in the 1850s and 1860s against the Anglo authorities in south Texas and the Gulf Coast. The raids and battles came to be known as the Cortina Wars or the Cortina Troubles, and pitted his soldiers (depending on the year and the circumstances) against the U.S. Army, the Texas Rangers, the French invaders of Mexico, Anglo militias, the Confederate Army, and Mexican national forces.

  Cortina’s keen interest in defending the interests of Juan Cortina was backed by what appears to be a sincere rage over the treatment of the people of northern Mexico and South Texas. The manifestos and pamphlets he issued during his military campaign ring with the romance and ardor of nineteenth-century rhetoric and a strong intelligence: “There is no need of fear. Orderly people and honest citizens are inviolable to us in their persons and interests. Our object, as you have seen, has been to chastise the villainy of our enemies, which heretofore has gone unpunished.

  “These have connived with each other, and form, so to speak, a perfidious inquisitorial lodge to persecute and rob us, without any cause, and for no other crime on our part than that of being of Mexican origin. . . .”

  Mariano Vallejo. California military leader, politician, and rancher. His long life spanned three eras of California. He was born a subject of the Spanish Empire, came to prominence a citizen of Mexico, and ended his life an American. Like many of the landed Californio families, Vallejo extended a friendly hand to the first wave of American settlers heading west to Mexico’s northernmost territories from the United States. He was imprisoned by American migrants, his properties looted. Vallejo would later be treated as a foreigner in his own homeland. CREDIT: THE BANCROFT LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

  Cortina was dubbed the “Red Robber of the Rio Grande.” While opposed and pursued by the authorities of two nations, or enlisted to join them to fight the other country, Cortina could see himself as a fighter sacrificing his life for his people. “Innocent persons shall not suffer—no. But, if necessary, we will lead a wandering life, awaiting our opportunity to purge society of men so base that they will degrade it with their opprobrium. Our families have returned as strangers to their old country to beg for asylum.” Cortina goes on to slash at the greed and envy of his Anglo enemies, while expressing the quiet faith that nature would always provide. “Further, our personal enemies shall not possess our lands until they have fattened it with their own gore.”

  With his striking words, Cortina reminds his Tejano constituents what they already knew too well: That the political firestorms that swept through Mexico, Texas, and the United States left them vulnerable to Anglo-Americans who won through conquest what they could not buy. It was a time when “flocks of vampires, in the guise of men came and scattered themselves in the settlements, without any capital except the corrupt heart and the most perverse intentions.

  “Many of you have been robbed of your property, incarcerated, chased, murdered, and hunted like wild beasts, because your labor was fruitful, and because your industry excited the vile avarice which led them.” It cannot be known from the remove of a century and a half whether Cortina was blind to, or purposely ignored, the expropriation of native land, the original sin that gave Mexicans the land in the first place.

  Perversely, two sets of stereotypes came to operate simultaneously in the minds of the Americans heading to lands taken in the Mexican War. On the one hand, says Stephen Pitti, large landholders, even ones like Mariano Vallejo, who extended a warm welcome to U.S. immigrants, were portrayed “as baronial state holders, kind of feudal lords from the Middle Ages who have landed in this nineteenth century but who are products of another time and therefore should be moved on to history and not made part of the modern world.” At the same time, writes Pitti, “Latinos are seen as knife-wielding, as greasers, as dangerous, dirty, threatening figures in Gold Rush society who are also not ideal citizens, but for different reasons.

  “How Californios would counter the stereotypes about them, how everyday Latinos would counter the stereotypes about them would be critically important for the way in which others would understand them in the nineteenth century.”

  Following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, hundreds of thousands of Mexican families became a permanent part of America’s future. That the United States was able to conquer Mexico so easily in the 1840s served to confirm Mexican inferiority in the eyes of many Americans. Pitti maintains that this was one wound that time would not heal. “Anglos in places like Texas and New Mexico and California continued to affirm the basic terms of the U.S.-Mexico war: That an inferior people had been conquered by a superior people. That democracy had won out over feudalism and backwardness. That progress was in the hands of the Americans and Latinos in places like California were destined to extinction. Latinos in California were simply destined to go away in the face of a superior American culture.”

  • • •

  BACK IN NEW Mexico, even after their terrible suffering at the hands of the Spanish, the Acomas did not destroy the mission church of San Esteban del Rey, as ordered by Popay. Today the church stands as a reminder of the New World culture created by the encounter between Spain and the native people of the pueblos. The church includes one of the most extensive and intact seventeenth-century buildings in New Mexico. Its original hand-hewn staircase, altar screen, and communion rails are now almost five hundred years old.

  Don Juan de Oñate was remembered by New Mexico and in 1991, a large equestrian statue was erected just outside Española. In 1998, on the four hundredth anniversary of Oñate’s heading north from Mexico City to establish the new colony, a group of Acomas quietly headed to the site and “amputated” the right foot from the bronze—boot, stirrup, and spur. The Acomas sent newsrooms a statement: “We took the liberty of removing Oñate’s right foot on behalf of our brothers and sisters of Acoma Pueblo. We see no glory in celebrating Oñate’s fourth centennial, and we do not want our faces rubbed in it.”

  The statue was repaired.

  Don Juan’s foot was never returned.

  Americans and Mexican Americans. In parts of cities like Los Angeles and San Antonio, Mexican culture was alive and thriving. At the same time, this culture could be turned into a consumable experience for other Americans, who traveled to places created for the tourist trade to eat Mexican food, hear music and buy crafts. CREDIT: LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY

  SHARED

  DESTINIES . . . MADE MANIFEST

  THE STATUE of Liberty has a name.

  Not Augusta, though the artist, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, did base the giant figure’s face on that of his own mother. The sculpture erected on an enormous pedestal in the New York Harbor is called Liberty Enlightening the World. The tablet cradled in Liberty’s left arm carries the inscription, July 4, 1776, hammering home an important idea widely understood in the nineteenth-century world: that the Declaration of Independence unleashed something meant to be seen in the farthest corners of the world. Carrying the date of the U.S. break from Britain in her gracefully curved fingers, rays of light jetting from her crown, a torch held high, Liberty was meant to light up a world still largely unfree.

  While some hoped American ideas and ideals would
reach the ends of the earth, others had more concrete ambitions. In 1912, President William Howard Taft said, “The day is not far distant when the Stars and Stripes at three equidistant points will mark our territory; one at the North Pole, another at the Panama Canal, and the third at the South Pole. The whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally.”

  For more than a century after a group of farmers, lawyers, merchants, and investors signed their names to the Declaration in Philadelphia, its echoes reverberated around the world. Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín in South America, Giuseppe Garibaldi in Italy, and Charles Parnell in Ireland all took inspiration from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the founders. While the deeds of America’s leaders were often, like Taft’s forecast, propelled by assumptions of white supremacy, the ideals of 1776 were easily exported, especially when they did not face close scrutiny from faraway freedom fighters who wanted to know how well the ideal lined up with the real.

  Leaders of independence movements saw that a relatively small population could resist a larger, stronger imperial power, and have a chance of success. The comparative ease with which people could move from Europe to the United States during the nineteenth-century era of explosive economic growth led to the creation of organizations of foreign-born communities across America that could both raise money and assist in the running of revolutions “back home.” Ramón Emeterio Betances of Puerto Rico, struggling to create a united front in Spain’s Caribbean colonies, organized in exile in New York in the 1860s. The General Council of the First International, one of early Communism’s most influential organizations, moved to New York from London in 1872. Garibaldi, in a lull between revolutions in South America and Europe, found a safe harbor in New York.