We can glean a great deal about the racial attitudes of Euro-Americans by reading the narratives of early foreign visitors to the region, who produced a substantial travel literature.66 These early accounts were often serialized in eastern newspapers and then published in book form. They appeared during a period of increased literacy and high demand for reading material about “exotic” lands.67 Particularly relevant for this study is a narrative written by William Watts Hart Davis, who was one of the first Euro-American lawyers in the region and the first U.S. attorney assigned to the New Mexico Territory. He arrived in northern New Mexico in late November 1864, after four weeks of difficult stagecoach travel from Independence, Missouri. His book is a diary of his travels around New Mexico from late February to early June 1865, while serving as prosecutor.
Davis’s often-lively accounts give new meaning to the judicial concept of “riding circuit” (a term describing a court that is held in different locations, such as the twelve federal courts of appeal that hold court in various states within their jurisdiction). Davis literally rode circuit via horseback, covering thousands of miles, including one thousand miles in New Mexico’s first judicial district alone. He slept outdoors at times or in modest indoor accommodations at lodging houses or private homes (there being no hotels in the territory at this time). Prior to his appointment as U.S. attorney, Davis had not had any contact with Mexicans or with Pueblo Indians. Moreover, it is clear that most of his interactions with Mexicans were superficial and quite limited in nature and time. Judging from his journal, he did not have Mexican intimates, and he interacted even less with Pueblo Indians. From his standpoint, however, drawing group-based conclusions about racial inferiority was not empirically or morally problematic. Indeed, it was eminently natural given the racial order from which he came. In that world, Davis took for granted the inherent inferiority of blacks and Indians, and it was within this framework that he approached his experience in New Mexico. It would have been no leap for him to lump Mexicans and Pueblo Indians with the blacks and Indians at the bottom of the American racial hierarchy. In this way, Davis’s diary simply recorded “the truth” as he and other white Americans understood it.
Early in the book, Davis reveals his understanding of the racial hierarchy he took for granted when he describes the stagecoach crew that took him west: He identifies Euro-Americans by last name, without a racial designation, and often with some personality trait that humanizes and individualizes them (e.g., “Jones, a clever Kentuckian”); he identifies Mexicans by first name only, always indicating their race (e.g., “Jose, a Mexican”); and he does not even name black crewmembers (e.g., “the colored outdriver”).68 Davis frequently remarks on the “semi-civilized” character of Pueblo Indians, calling them a “primitive race” replete with “drunkards” and “beggars.”69 At one point in the journal, he purports to provide a complete dictionary of several distinct Pueblo languages that he says consists of fifty-nine words in total.70
At times Davis seems genuinely perplexed about Mexicans, not knowing quite where they fit in the American racial hierarchy. Because they were “a mixed race,” Mexicans presented peculiar problems of categorization, but, in the end, it was mixture itself that signaled inferiority, relative to Euro-Americans and, especially, Anglo-Saxons: “Here was a second blending of blood and a new union of races; the Spaniard, Moor, and the aboriginal were united in one and made a new race, the Mexicans.”71 Davis was adamant about the physiological consequences of such race mixture on skin color (very dark with “no present hope of the people improving in color”), and he ridiculed “greasy” and “Indian-fied” Mexicans who tried to act or appear white (via attempts to lighten their skin or keep out of the sun to avoid getting darker).72 Just as important as these physical descriptions, however, were what Davis considered Mexicans’ inherent, inferior cultural traits. According to him, Mexicans had an “impulsive nature,” were too obedient, tended toward “cruelty, bigotry, and superstition.”73 In this way, Mexicans, like blacks, were stereotyped as essentially childlike, a characterization that implied they were unfit for self-government and for full citizenship. At the same time, Davis characterized Mexicans as “possessing the cunning and deceit of the Indian.” Contradictions notwithstanding, what was important for Davis—and very likely for his audience in the East—was that Mexicans were far inferior to Anglo-Saxons: “They have a great deal of what the world calls smartness and quickness of perception, but lack the stability of character and soundness of intellect that give such vast superiority to the Anglo-Saxon race over every other people.” Mexican women were singled out for special criticism, with Davis concluding that “the standard of female chastity is deplorably low” in New Mexico.74
Competing Narratives of Race
As Euro-Americans increased their presence in New Mexico over the course of the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s, they differed among themselves about how to understand and characterize New Mexico’s racial landscape. Under what I label the “dominant view,” Mexican Americans were characterized as unfit for self-government because they were of inferior racial stock (compared to Euro-Americans). Under what I label the “progressive view,” Mexican Americans were considered a more benign presence, sometimes even portrayed heroically as conquerors of Indians with their “glorious Spanish past.”75 Significantly, both the dominant and progressive views of race were racist: both assumed white racial superiority and Mexican racial inferiority.76 Where they differed was in the extent to which they sought to exclude Mexican Americans from full citizenship and civic life. As New Mexicans (Euro-Americans and Mexican Americans alike) increasingly lobbied for admission to the Union, the differences between these competing racial narratives became crucial.
Over a period of years, the perception of Mexicans popularized by travelers like Davis who published their diaries in the popular press crystallized into the dominant view about race in New Mexico. In this view, popular among many Euro-Americans who lived in New Mexico but especially among Euro-American elites at the national level, Mexicans’ racial inferiority justified their continued exclusion from the national polity (and, hence, the rejection of New Mexico’s ongoing bids for statehood). Indians (both Pueblo Indians and other Indians) were ranked below Mexicans in the racial hierarchy, and within the dominant view, they fell entirely outside the polity.77
The dominant view surfaced in the New Mexico press, which until the 1880s remained dominated by Euro-American editors. But the national press most consistently articulated this idea of race in New Mexico. For example, in the 1870s, in the midst of one of several congressional debates about statehood, the New York Times ran articles that presented the tenets of the dominant view. First, Indians essentially were perceived as being outside the political system, which involved “Mexicans” and “Americans” or “whites.”78 Second, Mexicans were a race deeply inferior to white Americans. Indeed, the stereotypes of Mexicans as lazy and backward, which persist today, were generated by the leading American newspapers of the era.79 Third, racial conflict, especially between “Mexicans” and “Americans,” was prevalent in New Mexico, leading journalists to comment frequently on Mexican Americans’ resistance to assimilation (used to counter the claim by some Euro-Americans that Euro-Americans would quickly overwhelm “the Mexican element” of New Mexico).80 Finally, because Mexicans were unfit for self-government, New Mexico should not be admitted to statehood.81
In an 1879 front-page article with the subhead “Progress Retarded by a Want of Energy, Lazy Mexicans the Chief Inhabitants,” the New York Times began by noting that “whites” were far outnumbered by “Mexicans,” making it clear, as well, that Indians were irrelevant to the discussion.82 The centerpiece of the article was the claim of Mexicans’ inherent racial inferiority, and in particular what the newspaperman termed their “natural indolence,” which made statehood out of the question:
The women, with the inevitable shawl about their heads and muzzling their mouths, so that all one sees of them are the coal-blac
k eyes and tips of tawny noses, go in bunches [to the Catholic churches], and the men lag along lazily behind, with about as much care for their appearance as the average tramp. Indeed, the Mexican, on the average, is the very personification of tramphood, seldom or never turning his hand to the extent of sweating his brow if his daily bread can be secured by any other means.83
Another article similarly claimed that conflict between “greasers” and “Americans” ran high in New Mexico. The New York Times pointed to territorial politics, noting that both the Republican and Democratic parties had nominated for nonvoting delegate to Congress men “from the old Spanish families.”84 The correspondent viewed these nominations as evidence that “the Mexicans have stood it as long as possible and now break out into open revolt” and joked that, no matter which party wins, a Mexican will be New Mexico’s congressional delegate and thus require “Congress [to appoint] a Spanish interpreter to guess what the nominee says if he ever says anything.”85
The national press frequently and uncritically referred to Mexicans as “greasers.”86 In an 1855 California law, “greaser” was defined as “the issue of Spanish and Indian blood,” and the epithet quickly gained popularity across the nation.87 An article published in 1882 in the New York Times revealed as much in its lengthy headline as it did in its text: “Greasers as citizens. What Sort of State New-Mexico Would Make. The origin and character of the so-called ‘Mexicans’ of that Territory—their hatred of Americans, their dense ignorance, and total unfitness for citizenship—the women of New-Mexico.”88 Mexicans’ inferiority, according to the article, stemmed from their status as a mixed race: “the mongrel breed known as Mexicans—a mixture of the blood of Apache, negro, Navajo, white horsethief, Pueblo Indian, and old-time frontiersman with the original Mexican stock.”89 Not atypically, the prime indicator of Mexican inferiority was racial mixture, yet this article was unusual in asserting two tiers of racial mixture. The reference to “the original Mexican stock” invokes the racial mixture of Spanish and Indian ancestry. Yet greater virulence seems to be reserved for what the author believes is racial mixture of a more recent vintage, perhaps since the Americans took control of the region, drawing on a range of negatively stereotyped Indian groups (Apache, Navajo, and Pueblo Indians), American blacks, and even whites (apparently only low-status whites had mixed with Mexicans, white criminals and mountain men). The author’s intent was not to get caught up in the details of how Mexicans got to this point, but rather to deliver the bottom line: Mexicans were unfit for citizenship because they were too deferential (having a mentality of “servility”) and possessed “a passionate hatred [for] everything that is known to him or her as American.”90
In articles like these, the American press articulated the dominant racial narrative, in which Mexicans were racially inferior and therefore unworthy of full American citizenship. Despite the fact that Mexicans had been granted federal citizenship by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the dominant narrative defined them as racially inferior. Yet the dominant view did not go unchallenged. The story of how it was contested reveals a great deal about the racial politics of the statehood debate, as well as the larger dynamics of where Mexicans fit in the nation’s racial order.
Ironically perhaps, it was a Euro-American lawyer and judge who traced his lineage to the Mayflower who led the fight to dislodge the dominant racial narrative. Lebaron Bradford Prince devised the progressive racial narrative as an express counternarrative to the dominant view of New Mexico’s race relations, and he articulated it in both the press and the law. About a month after the virulently racist New York Times article appeared in 1882, Prince responded with a lengthy letter to the editor, published under the headline “The People of New Mexico and their Territory. The Hon. L. Bradford Prince finds Much to Admire in his New Neighbors—the Spaniards of the Territory and their Qualities as Citizens.”91 It is significant that Prince referred to Mexicans as “Spaniards” (although he did not always do so), an early indication of the popularization of this ethnic label among both Euro-American and Mexican elites (and later Mexican Americans of all classes).92 It suggests that the adoption of “Spanish” as an ethnic label for New Mexico’s native Mexican population was the product of Euro-American racism associated so viscerally with the terms “Mexican” and “greaser,” which had become interchangeable in the dominant narrative.
Writing twenty years later, on the eve of New Mexico’s becoming a state in 1912, Prince characterized New Mexico as having three “different nationalities and forms of civilization—the Aboriginal and Pueblo, the Spanish and Mexican, and the American.” What was remarkable about contemporary New Mexico, Prince continued, was that a (presumably Euro-American) visitor could
in a single day visit an Indian pueblo exhibiting in unchanged form the customs of the intelligent natives of three and a half centuries ago; a Mexican town, where the architecture, the language and the habits of the people differ in no material respect from those which were brought from Spain in the days of Columbus, Cortez, and Coronado; and an American city or village, full of the nervous energy and the well-known characteristics of modern western life.93
Prince depicted Pueblo Indians and Mexican Americans as people trapped in their quaint pasts: Pueblo culture had remained static over three and a half centuries, and Mexican American towns were no different than the Spanish villages of five hundred years earlier. Using an appellation that conflated ethnicity, race, and nationality, he portrayed “Americans” as having a dynamic culture able to adapt to technological and other changes denoted by the wave of “progress” washing over early twentieth-century America. In Prince’s narrative, New Mexico’s many non-Pueblo Indian populations remained invisible, victims of the American military assaults of the late nineteenth century and the reservation policy that segregated them out of view and out of the polity.
Despite a contrived avoidance of the concepts in the quotation, Prince was talking about race and racial difference. In the progressive narrative, New Mexico’s complicated, lengthy history of racial conflict—between Pueblos and non-Pueblo Indians, between Mexicans and Pueblos, between Mexicans and non-Pueblo Indians, between Euro-Americans and Indians, between Euro-Americans and Mexicans—was erased from public consciousness. Instead, public memory was fixated on the notion of cultural difference unmediated by stark group-based inequality in the economic, social, and political realms. Most importantly, the progressive view of race assigned no blame; no person or group was responsible for social inequalities that increasingly matched racial lines, and thus no person or group could do anything to rectify a situation that was, after all, the result of an inevitable clash between a dynamic culture wedded to progress and the native static cultures hampered by their allegiance to ancient, outmoded traditions.
Prince played a central role in New Mexico politics beginning in 1879, when he accepted President Rutherford B. Hayes’s appointment as chief justice of the Supreme Court of the Territory of New Mexico.94 At this time, each of three justices of the territory’s highest court served both as an appellate judge and as a trial judge, riding circuit among several counties. Prince’s district included six counties and covered some one thousand miles. He quickly developed the reputation as the hardest-working territorial judge New Mexico had ever had,95 disposing of 2,667 civil and criminal cases in the district court over three and a half years and, in his spare time, compiling New Mexico’s statutes (which had not been revised since Kearny’s compilation of 1846).96 During his forty-three years in New Mexico (he died there in 1922), Prince served in each branch of government: in the judicial branch, as chief justice 1879 to 1882; in the executive branch, as governor 1889 to 1893; and in the legislative branch, as a member of the territorial council 1909 to 1912.97 Of the Euro-Americans appointed to positions in New Mexico—recall that the top positions in territorial government were appointees of the U.S. president—Prince had the most enduring impact. He was a central figure in politics, and his articulation of the progressive view of
New Mexico race relations had a tremendous impact on the region. Historian Robert Larson, author of the most widely read text on New Mexico’s battle for statehood, notes that Prince was called by many “The Father of New Mexico Statehood.”98
There was little in Prince’s background to have predicted his role in articulating a counternarrative to the dominant view that New Mexico’s Mexicans were not fit for self-governance. He grew up in a wealthy Long Island family, attended private colleges, and entered politics as a Republican. After the untimely death of his first wife, Prince married Mary Beardsley, “like himself of Mayflower and Revolutionary descent.”99 What a strange course of events that the Princes, scions of upper-class Eastern society, would host lavish parties at the rather humble governor’s mansion in a former Mexican capital.100
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