El Norte
Page 1
Also by Carrie Gibson
Empire’s Crossroads
EL
NORTE
The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America
CARRIE GIBSON
Copyright © 2019 by Carrie Gibson
Cover design by Gretchen Mergenthaler
Cover artwork: map © alamy; dancers © Yale Joel /Getty;
Mission San Xavier del Bac, courtesy of the author;
Hernando de Soto landing his expedition in Florida 1539 © alamy;
Maps by Martin Lubikowski, ML Design, London.
Image credits are as follows: Images 1.1 and 1.2: Courtesy of the author. Images 2.1 and 2.2: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. Images 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. Image 4.1: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HABS FLA,55-SAUG, 1—13. Image 4.2: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. Image 5.1: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. Image 5.2: Courtesy of the author. Image 5.3: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. Image 6.1: Courtesy of the author. Image 6.2: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. Image 6.3: Courtesy of the author. Image 7.1: New Mexico State University Library, Archives and Special Collections. Image 7.2: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. Image 8.1: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. Image 8.2: Filippo Costaggini. “American Army Entering the City of Mexico.” Frieze of American History in rotunda of U.S. Capitol building. Architect of the Capitol. Image 8.3: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. Image 9.1: James Gillinder & Sons (American, 1860-1930s). Compote, “Westward Ho!” Pattern, ca. 1880. Glass, 11 1/2 × 8 3/4 × 5 1/2 in. (29.2 × 22.2 × 14 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. William Greig Walker by subscription, 40.226.1a-b. Image 9.2 and 9.3: Courtesy of the author. Image 10.1: The New York Public Library. Image 10.2 and 10.3: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. Image 11.1: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. Image 11.2: Courtesy of the author. Image 12.1: The New York Public Library. Image 12.2: The Getty Research Institute. Image 13.1, 13.2, and 13.3: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. Image 14.1: Mural: © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City; Photo: The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Image 14.2: Courtesy of the Author. Image 15.1: “Seven Latino men, arrested in zoot suit clash, seated in Los Angeles, Calif. courtroom in 1943,” Los Angeles Daily News Negatives (Collection 1387). Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. Image 15.2: Courtesy of the author. Images 16.1 and 16.2: Courtesy of the author.
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FIRST EDITION
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Designed by Norman E. Tuttle of Alpha Design & Composition
This book was set in 11.75-pt. Dante with New Baskerville.
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: February 2019
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.
ISBN 978-0-8021-2702-0
eISBN 978-0-8021-4635-9
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A Matteo: amigo, guía y hermano
“How will we know it’s us without our past?”
—John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Contents
Cover
Also by Carrie Gibson
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Maps
Author’s Note: The Search for El Norte
Introduction: Nogales, Arizona
Chapter 1: Santa Elena, South Carolina, ca. 1492–1550
Chapter 2: St. Johns River, Florida, ca. 1550–1700
Chapter 3: Alcade, New Mexico, ca. 1540–1720
Chapter 4: Fort Mose, Florida, ca. 1600–1760
Chapter 5: New Madrid, Missouri, ca. 1760–90
Chapter 6: Nootka Sound, Canada, ca. 1760s–1789
Chapter 7: New Orleans, Louisiana, ca. 1790–1804
Chapter 8: Sabine River, ca. 1804–23
Chapter 9: San Antonio de Béxar, Texas, ca. 1820–48
Chapter 10: Mesilla, New Mexico, ca. 1850–77
Chapter 11: Ybor City, Florida, ca. 1870–98
Chapter 12: Del Rio, Texas, ca. 1910–40
Chapter 13: New York, ca. 1920s–’60s
Chapter 14: Los Angeles, California ca. 1920s–’70s
Chapter 15: Miami, Florida, ca. 1960–80
Chapter 16: Tucson, Arizona, ca. 1994–2018
Epilogue: Dalton, Georgia, 2014
Photo Insert
Time Line of Key Events
Acknowledgments
Selected Bibliography
Notes
Index
Back Cover
Author’s Note: The Search for El Norte
MY JOURNEY TO El Norte was a circuitous one, taking me via England and, later on, through the islands of the Caribbean before ending not far from where I began, in Dalton, Georgia. This sleepy, mostly white Appalachian town had a dramatic transformation when I was in high school. In 1990, my freshman year, the school consisted of a majority English-speaking student body, with only a handful of people in the English as a Second Language (ESL) classes. By the time I was a senior, the morning announcements were made in English and Spanish, and the ESL classes were full. Thousands of workers and their families, mainly from Mexico, moved to Dalton to work, for the most part, in the carpet mills that dominated the town’s economy. I graduated in 1994, only months after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into force. We were twelve hundred miles from the border, but Mexico had come to us. Today, my old high school has a student body that is about 70 percent Hispanic, and the town is around 50 percent.
The complexity of what I experienced then and in the two decades since is what informs this book. What started in my Spanish-language classes was augmented by the arrival of people who could teach me about banda music and telenovelas. Later, I added to this mix by spending a decade researching a PhD that involved the colonial histories of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. Finally, my experience has been filtered through two decades of living in one of the world’s most multicultural cities, London, England.
My family moved away from Dalton years ago, as have many of my high school friends, and I hadn’t really thought about the town, or the question of immigration in the United States, in any serious way until the 2012 election. I was in Washington, D.C., while working on my history of the Caribbean, Empire’s Crossroads. As I watched and read the coverage, I was struck by the general tone of the media conversation. The way Hispanic people were depicted surprised me because the language seemed unchanged from the rhetoric of more than a dec
ade earlier. The subtexts and implications were the same—there was little recognition of a long, shared past, and instead the talk was of border-jumpers, lack of documentation, and the use of “Mexican” as shorthand for “illegal immigrant.” It was jarring because the reality of who was coming to the United States had long been more complex, not least because plenty of immigrants and citizens have roots in all the distinct nations of Latin America. The simmering anxieties about the Spanish-speaking population that such rhetoric exposed exploded in the 2016 presidential race, during which chants of “build that wall” between the United States and Mexico could be heard at campaign rallies for Donald Trump. When I started this project, that election was still years away.
This book is still concerned with the questions that arose in 2012, but they are now given new urgency: there is a dire need to talk about the Hispanic history of the United States. The public debate in the interval between elections has widened considerably. The response to frank discussion about issues such as white privilege at times appears to be a vocal resurgence of white nationalism. For quite some time the present has been out of sync with the past. Much of the Hispanic history of the United States has been unacknowledged or marginalized. Given that this past predates the arrival of the Pilgrims by a century, it has been every bit as important in shaping the United States of today.
I realized, watching my Mexican schoolmates, that if my surname were García rather than Gibson, there would have been an entirely different set of cultural assumptions and expectations placed upon me. I, too, had moved to the South—I was born in Ohio—because my father’s job necessitated it. We were also Catholic, my grandmother didn’t speak English well, and I had lots of relatives in a foreign country. Yet my white, middle-class status shielded me from the indignities, small and large, heaped upon non-European immigrants. Like most people in the United States—with the obvious exception of Native Americans—my people are from somewhere else. In fact, I’m a rather late arrival. The majority of the motley European mix of Irish, Danish, English, and Scottish on my father’s side dates from the 1840s onward. My maternal grandparents, however, came to the United States from Italy in the period around the Second World War—before, in the case of my grandfather; and afterward, for my grandmother. The pressure to “Americanize” was great in the 1950s, and my grandmother, who never lost her heavy Italian accent, felt it necessary to raise my mother in English. She died before I could learn any of her Veneto dialecto. My Anglo-Saxon name belies my recent immigrant roots. What continued to bother me was: why had I—and other Italian-Americans—been able to transcend this but not those with Hispanic names? There are plenty of Hispanic Americans who have a much deeper past in the United States than I do: so why are they still being treated as strangers in their own country?
Language, belonging, community, race, nationality: these are difficult questions at the best of times, but they are especially fraught with pain at the moment. This book is an attempt to make some historical sense of the large, complex story of Hispanic people in the United States. There have been more than two hundred years of wars, laws, and social attitudes that inform the contemporary situation, in addition to an earlier three centuries of an entangled colonial history.
Much of this project also involved plugging the gaps in my own knowledge, as well as connecting the dots of what I have learned, from my Mexican-infused adolescence to my scholarly work on the Spanish Caribbean. However, there was a gulf in the middle. I had crossed the Mississippi only a few times in my life, so as part of my research I set out to experience the vast space of El Norte, a slang term for the United States, yet a phrase heavy with meaning. I covered more than ten thousand miles, from Florida to northwest Canada, stopping at everything from taco trucks to university library special collections, national parks, and historical monuments. My aim was to have a tangible sense of the wide terrain of the Hispanic past and present. The landscape of this historical inquiry often felt as endless and overwhelming as the sky on an empty Texas road. Really, though, it was just the starting point of a much longer journey.
The poet Walt Whitman, writing in 1883 to decline an invitation to speak at the anniversary of the founding of Santa Fe, meditated on the country’s Spanish past. “We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort them, to unify them,” he wrote. “Thus far, impressed by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States have been fashioned from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only—which is a great mistake.” Whitman believed that understanding the nation depended on knowing its Hispanic past, and that “to that composite American identity of the future, Spanish character will supply some of the most needed parts.”1
Introduction Nogales, Arizona
THE DRIVE DOWN Interstate 19 in Arizona from Tucson to Nogales is everything a passenger might expect from a trip through the desert. It is a flat, dusty affair. Craggy mountains seduce from a distance, while scrubby bush blurs past. As the road nears the small city, the flatness gives way to a gentle undulation. Houses appear, dotting one steep hillside in bright pinks, blues, and oranges. Then, when the road rounds a corner, something else comes into view—the sudden shock of it is like seeing a snake in the bushes. It is long and copper-colored, slithering along the hills. It is the United States–Mexico security fence, visible from miles away.
As the presidential election campaign of 2016 made clear, a section of the U.S. public felt this barrier was no longer sufficient. There are in fact two cities called Nogales, one on each side of the border, separated by a fence consisting of giant poles. These allow families to see each other—though the addition of mesh panels along parts of the fence now stop them from reaching through—making it feel like a large outdoor prison. Nogales, Mexico, like many other places along the frontera, has seen the arrival of drug gang–related violence and the departure of tourists, giving it an air of quiet resignation. Even the colorful Mexican tiles and crafts sold in the shops near the border crossing do not banish the gray atmosphere.
For someone standing at the fence, it is difficult to imagine what Nogales was like before the 1880s, when the city was a celebrated connection point between the Sonora Railway and the Arizona and New Mexico Railway, linking the two nations. In some ways Nogales was a victim of its own success. By the turn of the twentieth century, there was so much movement back and forth that the town was divided by a sixty-foot cleared strip of land which permitted authorities on both sides to better monitor the comings and goings of residents and visitors alike.1 Those people would have been not just Mexicans or Americans, but an international mix, including people from Europe and China, who came to work on the rails or in nearby mines, as well as Native Americans. Their lives may well have involved crossing the border on a regular, perhaps daily, basis. Borderlands by their nature are zones of interaction. Some of it is positive—trade, cultural exchange, linguistic innovation—while other aspects are less desirable, not least illicit commerce, racism, and violence. Borders require certain kinds of flexibility, among them the ability to speak multiple languages, calculate more than one currency, or assume different identities. They also, at times, demand demarcation and even militarization. Borders can be a potent reminder of power and possession. These divisions are also, as Juan Poblete has pointed out, something people can carry within as they go about their everyday life, an “internalized border zone.”2
Today the security fence cuts across that old clearing, with Nogales, Arizona, a city of about twenty thousand, on one side, and its southern Sonoran neighbor, now more than ten times larger, spreading out to the south. This stretch of fence is a physical reminder of the long and often troubled history between the two nations, calling to mind the blunt assessment by the Nobel Prize–winning Mexican author Octavio Paz that the United States and Mexico are “condemned to live alongside each other.”3 Or, in the more graphic description of the scholar and poet Gloria Anzaldúa, the border is �
��una herida abierta”—an open wound—and a place set up “to distinguish us from them.”4
Given that the entirety of the Americas was shaped by the arrival of Europeans, the demographic demolition of indigenous communities, and the use of African slavery, what constitutes us and them? Lines on a map? Catholicism against Protestantism? The Spanish language instead of English? The myth of “American exceptionalism” has for too long eclipsed other ways of contemplating the trajectory of U.S. history, even down to the use of “American.” As the Spanish historian José Luis Abellán explained in his book La idea de América (The Idea of America), when a Spaniard used the term “America,” it traditionally referred to Latin America—as it also did for people living there—but “when an American speaks of America, he refers to his own country, the United States.”5* Now that usage of “America” dominates, but a return to its old meaning might be useful. Some historians have long argued that the United States is part of wider Latin America, in studies ranging from Herbert Eugene Bolton’s “Epic of Greater America” in the 1930s to Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s more recent assessment that the United States “is—and has to be—a Latin American country.”6 Thinking about the United States in this way can help make sense of a past that goes far beyond the boundary markers at the United States–Mexico border and instead focuses on the longer hemispheric connections, from Canada to the tip of Chile.
Even when we accept that the United States is part of a larger Latin American community, this still leaves the question of who is Hispanic and, correspondingly, who is American. The term “Hispanic” is being employed here in part to express a sense of continuity, as the word reaches back to the Roman past (Hispania) and forward to the census-taking present. It is at once a panethnic label—the worlds of Europeans, Africans, Asians, and Amerindians were all transformed by the arrival of the Spanish in the Americas—as well as one that today serves as a marketing category.7 It has a long past, yet its current incarnation is the product of constant reinvention.