Manifest Destinies, Second Edition
Page 13
At the age of thirty-six and without having held any prior political office, Beveridge ran successfully for the Senate.139 In an 1898 campaign speech, he said, “We are a conquering race, and we must obey our blood and occupy new markets, and, if necessary, new lands. . . . [The result will be] the disappearance of debased civilizations and decaying races before the higher civilization of the nobler and more virile types of men.”140 In Beveridge’s eyes, America’s great imperial aspiration was the Philippines, which he saw as the first step in expanding American markets to “the Orient.” One of his first acts as U.S. senator was to visit the “front lines” of this imperial project by going to the Philippines in May 1899. While there, he formulated his ideas about the self-governance of natives in American colonies—ideas that would later find their parallel in his attitude toward New Mexico’s natives.141 In the Philippines, he advocated for a colonial government by a strong, federal administration under the slogan: “No self-government for peoples who have not yet learned the alphabet of liberty.”142
Given his travel to and interest in the Philippines, Beveridge appeared well-suited in 1901 to chair the Senate’s committee on U.S. territories.143 Among his first acts as chairman was to block the Omnibus Statehood Bill, principally because of his opposition to statehood for New Mexico, though he also opposed admitting Arizona. Despite passage of the bill in the House,144 Beveridge led the successful move to table the measure in the Senate. In the meantime, he implemented a strategy to permanently scuttle New Mexico and Arizona statehood (though he supported Oklahoma’s admission).145 Beveridge orchestrated a two-pronged strategy for opposing New Mexico’s admission—both parts of which reflected the dominant narrative of race—a public relations campaign and an appeal to good government reform.
The first part of Beveridge’s strategy was to conduct whistle-stop hearings in the three territories, with a subcommittee calling as witnesses census enumerators, educators, and judges. Before leaving Washington for the Southwest, he tried unsuccessfully to line up eastern witnesses who would maximize press interest in the hearings.146 Relying on Beveridge’s private correspondence, Larson shows that the Senate Republican contacted at least four editors of major newspapers with whom he was personally acquainted to generate interest in the hearings and, he hoped, opposition to statehood for New Mexico and Arizona.147 The subcommittee spent the most time in New Mexico, confirmation that this territory was the primary target of Beveridge’s campaign.148 In hearings in Las Vegas, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Las Cruces, and Carlsbad, Beveridge pounded the theme that New Mexico was not ready for admission because its population was still largely made up of Spanish-speaking Mexicans.149 Based on the hearing transcripts, Beveridge appeared to relish calling non-English-speaking Mexican American witnesses to testify in Spanish about their jobs as justices of the peace, schoolteachers, and census enumerators. In Las Vegas and Santa Fe, roughly two-thirds of those testifying before the subcommittee had Spanish surnames.150 In a 325-page report, the committee’s focus was largely on race and language, with two-thirds of the witnesses from New Mexico testifying on these topics.151 Based on a review of newspaper coverage of the whistle-stop hearings, Larson concludes that Beveridge largely succeeded in his public relations campaign.152
The second prong of Beveridge’s strategy was to portray the Democratic proponents of New Mexico statehood as being unethically motivated by their own financial interests. For example, Democratic senator Matthew Quay of Pennsylvania, who sat on Beveridge’s committee (though he was not a member of the whistle-stop subcommittee), was a strong advocate for the omnibus bill.153 Beveridge argued that the only reason Quay supported statehood was because of his substantial railroad investments: “if the [New Mexico and Arizona] territories were admitted the bonds of the [rail]road could be sold ‘for several points higher.’”154 Beveridge specifically pushed this story about Quay’s railroad investments to the press; the Chicago Tribune responded by promoting the view that statehood was supported by “a large syndicate engaged in building railroads in Arizona and New Mexico.”155
At one level, Beveridge seems like the model of a good-government reformer,156 but one need not read too much into his argument to see that this strategy, too, was fundamentally about race and fitness for self-government. The notion that supporters of statehood for New Mexico were unscrupulous politicians (especially Democratic politicians associated with machine or ring politics) went hand in hand with the view of New Mexico’s electorate as consisting of “simple” Mexicans who could be readily fooled. For example, in a 1902 letter, Beveridge wrote that Arizona was poorly suited for statehood because it was no more than “a mining camp,” but he proffered a wholly different rationale for opposing statehood for New Mexico: it was “in a much worse state educationally and her senators will be dictated by certain interests.”157 Others before Beveridge had propagated the idea that “sharp” Euro-Americans had long taken advantage of “simple” Mexicans in New Mexico, citing land speculation as the chief example.158 This story of political corruption, however, works only if one erases the agency of Mexican elites by portraying them as dupes of smarter, more skilled Euro-American politicians. In this way, a strategy of Beveridge’s that might be seen as protective of Mexican interests is revealed to be wholly consistent with the dominant view of race in which Mexicans were believed to be inferior to Euro-Americans.
Given Beveridge’s blatant efforts to manipulate the press, it is not surprising that turn-of-the-century newspaper cartoons generally portrayed New Mexico in a negative light. Like newspaper articles and editorials, cartoons in the popular press played an important role in the effort to spread the dominant view of race relations and to derail statehood for New Mexico.159 Just after it became clear that Beveridge had succeeded in blocking statehood for Arizona and New Mexico in 1902, the Brooklyn Eagle ran “Whoa! Not So Fast!!!,” in which Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico were portrayed as passengers on a runaway stagecoach (labeled “Omnibus Statehood Bill”).160 While Oklahoma was depicted as a harmless cowboy, Arizona and New Mexico were portrayed as, respectively, an Indian wearing a headdress and a Mexican wearing a sombrero. While the Oklahoma cowboy was shown tipping his hat (and without a weapon), both the Arizona Indian and the New Mexico Mexican were shown firing their pistols in a haphazard, dangerous fashion. The message was clear: Mexicans and Indians were too wild and irresponsible, and, until they could be tamed, they were unfit for state citizenship.
Four years later, Beveridge reluctantly supported a bill to combine the Arizona and New Mexico territories and admit them as a single state. Beveridge reasoned that combining them would lessen the negative effects of admitting a majority-Mexican state: “the Mexican population will be in the middle, masses of Americans to the east of them, masses of Americans to the west of them—a situation ideal for Americanizing within a few years every drop of the blood of Spain.”161 This proposal also spawned cartoons in the press. Showing that the dominant racial narrative was not exclusive to the East, Midwest, and South, in 1906 a Colorado newspaper ran a cartoon with the caption: “The Matchmaker: She’s yours, young feller. Heaven bless you, my children.” Historian Richard Melzer’s analysis of the cartoon is compelling:
The [Glenwood, Colorado] Post chose to portray New Mexico as a Hispanic (again), while characterizing Arizona as an attractive young Anglo woman dressed in western attire. Artists of this era regularly drew attractive young females in their cartoons to represent virtuous, coveted beings dependent on dominant males for their ultimate protection and well-being. In this instance, female Arizona [saying “Well, I never!”] strongly resisted the offer of matrimony (or joint statehood) to a hot-tempered and rather sinister looking New Mexico [saying “Carramba!”]. . . . Not even an offer to use the proposed state’s “maiden name” (Arizona) made a difference to Arizonans who dreaded marriage to an alien fellow who could not even swear (no less otherwise communicate) in the nation’s mother language.162
By 1910, when Beveridge’s stamina to
fight New Mexico statehood was waning against a seemingly inevitable tide, the senator began using his considerable power to push through special hurdles for New Mexico statehood.163 These included requiring approval by both the executive and legislative branches after the state constitution was passed, substantially reducing the amount of public land granted to the new state, and imposing requirements regarding the use of English in public schools and in all government offices.164 But Beveridge’s efforts failed; in New Mexico, the constitutional convention of 1910 put the final touches on a proposed state constitution. It declared that “children of Spanish descent” would never be placed in segregated schools, among other pro–Mexican American provisions.165 And in August 1911, President William H. Taft signed the bill making New Mexico and Arizona states.166
Conclusion
During the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the dominant and progressive views of race in New Mexico coexisted, vying for ascendancy, alternatingly embraced by Euro-American elites. Statehood per se did not trigger a transition from the dominant to the progressive view, but the years prior to and after statehood began to suggest the limits of the dominant narrative’s emphasis on the racial inferiority of the majority of the new state’s population. Under the dominant view, Indians essentially were written out of the fabric of political life and citizenry, while Mexicans were portrayed as unworthy of membership in the American political community; in this regard, the dominant racial narrative expressed a nostalgic longing, rather than the new political reality. Buoyed by statehood and the concomitant economic penetration of New Mexico, the progressive view of race had largely supplanted the dominant narrative by the 1920s. By that time, the myth of tricultural harmony had become a key trope in public relations efforts to draw Euro-Americans from other states to New Mexico, whether as temporary tourists or as permanent immigrants.167
Over the course of the early twentieth century, the progressive view of race became entrenched as New Mexico’s official racial mythology and still resonates in today’s public discourse. As cultural anthropologist Sylvia Rodríguez aptly puts it, “The enduring and endearing cliché of New Mexico as a tourist mecca is tricultural harmony.”168 The myth of tricultural harmony embraces the three tenets of the progressive view of race first articulated by Prince. First, there is the emphasis on cultural difference, rather than race, allowing New Mexicans to talk about race without talking about race.169 The reference to “tricultural” harmony alludes to the state’s diverse Indian tribes, to Mexican Americans, and to Euro-Americans. Second, the theme of racial harmony is featured prominently, displacing the long complex history of intergroup conflict. Writing in 1969, a Euro-American historian embodied this tenet in describing contemporary views among New Mexico’s “three cultures”: “Three distinct cultures—Indian, Spanish, and Anglo—live peacefully and cooperatively in modern New Mexico.”170
The third tenet is an implicit explanation of group-based inequality as rooted in cultural difference, not race per se. The economic dominance of the “future-oriented” culture (Euro-American) overwhelms the Mexican and Indian cultures stunted by their adherence to past traditions. Not until the rise of the Chicano civil rights movement of the 1970s, itself largely spawned from the black civil rights movement, was there a sustained (though ultimately unsuccessful) challenge to the progressive narrative of New Mexico race relations. For example, writing in 1968, historian Robert Larson began his book about statehood with this description of the U.S. Army’s 1846 invasion of New Mexico: “For now the energetic, aggressive Anglo-American civilization would be grafted on the aged and somewhat lethargic Spanish and Indian ones.”171 Larson’s statement embraces the progressive view of race, within which racial inequality is naturalized as merely a reflection of cultural difference. Only after the Chicano movement, with its emphasis on racial conflict and its demand for racial equality, did such a statement become unacceptably racist.
This chapter has explored the rise of the progressive view of race as a counternarrative to the dominant view of race in New Mexico. Significantly, both the dominant and progressive narratives were racist: both assumed Euro-American racial superiority and Mexican and Indian racial inferiority. They differed in the degree to which they allowed the participation of Mexican Americans in American civic life. Under the dominant view, Mexican Americans were unfit for democratic self-government because they were of inferior racial stock; under the progressive view, they were considered a more benign presence in New Mexico. The progressive view invented a glorious Spanish past that erased the brutality of Spanish colonialism toward Indians. This claim that Mexican Americans were the heirs of European colonizers of the Indians qualified them for full citizenship, as represented by statehood. The next chapter turns to the dynamics of Mexican–Indian and Mexican–black relations in New Mexico as another window into the process of how Mexican Americans became a racial group. While this chapter has focused on how Euro-American elites negotiated the racial order in the shadow of double colonization in New Mexico, Chapter 3 focuses on how Mexican American elites alternatingly accommodated and contested their place in the new American racial order.
3
How a Fragile Claim to Whiteness Shaped Mexican Americans’ Relations with Indians and African Americans
Writing his Concise History of New Mexico on the eve of the territory’s long-awaited statehood provided Prince with the opportunity to document the progressive racial narrative. Anticipating that anti-Mexican naysayers would not end their criticisms of New Mexico’s native population just because Congress had voted for statehood, Prince used history to attempt to create an origin myth for the state. He placed the anniversary of Spanish settlement in New Mexico on a par with that of the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth Rock: “This date, July 12, 1598, may be considered as the birthday of European settlement in New Mexico; and its anniversary should be celebrated in the southwest, as the date of the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers on Plymouth Rock, on December 21, 1620, is annually observed wherever the memory of the founders of New England is venerated.”1 Prince’s plea for recognition of the initial European settlement—including his emphasis on the fact that it occurred twenty-two years prior to the settlement of New England—elevated the Spanish settlement of the Southwest to the level of the British settlement of the eastern seaboard. In linking the Spanish arrival in the Southwest with the British arrival in New England, Prince—himself a Mayflower descendant—sought to integrate the Southwest into the national mythology.
A second outcome of Prince’s plea, however, was to widen the divide between New Mexico’s Mexican and Pueblo Indian populations. Given his knowledge of New Mexico history, Prince was aware that Pueblo Indians would not want to celebrate the anniversary of their brutal conquest by the Spanish. Moreover, Prince’s focus displaced the Pueblo’s view of the central historical event in New Mexico as the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. His portrayal of nineteenth-century Mexican Americans—the majority of whom lived in New Mexico—as heirs to the Spanish conquest, and Pueblo Indians as victims of that conquest, served to center Mexican/Pueblo conflict and marginalize Euro-American/Pueblo and Euro-American/Mexican conflict. This mythmaking shored up Euro-Americans’ position at the center of the racial order by positioning them as mediators between Mexicans and Pueblo Indians (viewing it horizontally). Significantly, the celebration of the Spanish conquest also shifted attention away from the more recent American conquest of the region. In doing so, it was a harbinger of Americans’ collective amnesia about the Pueblo/Mexican alliance against the American occupation, as well as the longer history of their alliance against nomadic Indian tribes.2
By the late nineteenth century, New Mexico’s racial hierarchy consisted of four strata: white Euro-Americans at the top, Mexican Americans below them, then Pueblo Indians, and other Indians at the very bottom.3 Mexicans occupied a pivotal position as a wedge group between Euro-Americans and Pueblo Indians (viewing the order vertically). This outcome was not inevitable. Under the
liberalized racial policy adopted during the late Spanish and Mexican periods, it was argued that Mexicans and Pueblos were essentially one category of persons under the law—Mexican citizens. Some used this argument in the post-occupation era to assert that Pueblo Indians had rights to federal citizenship under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo as Mexican citizens.4 The vertical structure placed heavy pressure on Mexicans, but it also afforded considerable opportunity to them as the buffer group. The horizontal structure, on the other hand, functioned largely to remove Euro-Americans from the zone of racial conflict, now presented as occurring between Mexicans and Indians.
This chapter explores these dynamics by focusing on Mexican elites, who proactively navigated the transition from the Spanish-Mexican racial order to the Anglo-American racial order. In her study of Hawaii, anthropologist Sally Merry has identified “the ambiguous and contradictory position of colonized elites” who responded to the American colonization there “with varying degrees of complicity, resistance, and accommodation.”5 The position of Mexican elites under American colonialism was equally fractured and complex. New Mexico’s double colonization, as a region colonized first by the Spanish and then by the Americans, made the position of native elites especially tricky. At the time of the American invasion, Mexican elites in New Mexico included the small group of truly Spanish settlers, but also comprised a much larger proportion of mestizos who had climbed higher on the ladder of social status by deploying the strategies for racial and social mobility described in the previous chapter. For the mostly mestizo elites, the two colonizations could not have been more different: in the first they were colonizers, the “settlers” who were the subjects of the colonial enterprise; in the second, they were the “natives,” the objects experiencing the actions of the American colonizers.