El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  For many Tejanos, the matter was not clarified until the 1856 Supreme Court case McKinney v. Saviego, which ruled that the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo did not apply to Texas, making the Querétaro agreement invalid. This meant that Texas was seen as separate from the Mexican cession, in part because in 1836 it had declared its independence—which Mexico never recognized—and in 1845 it was admitted as a state. The state’s constitution had not allowed “aliens,” including any Tejanos who left during the rebellion, to hold property.57 Mexican governments and legal experts ended up fighting this interpretation of the law well into the twentieth century. Some of the wealthy ranching families in south Texas managed to hang on to their land through a combination of money, political influence, and intermarriages, though less fortunate Tejanos were left with nothing.58

  This land question arose in a time of growing animosity. Anglos continued to cast Mexicans as decadent, conservative, oppressed by tradition, mixed-blood “degenerates,” lazy, and dirty, with the added irritation of not speaking English. One account of a journey through Texas published in 1879 in Harper’s New Monthly described coming upon the “Mexican or ‘greaser’ element” in San Antonio, whom the author portrays as being “not inclined to assimilate their customs and modes to those of whites, but persist in sombreros, slashed breeches, and ornamental buttons ad infinitum.”59 Such stereotypes were also put to use in challenging the legitimacy of Mexican-American citizenship. Although the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo stipulated that citizenship be transferred to all people in the new territories, its application would not be so straightforward. Under Mexican law, mestizos and Indians were citizens. This did not mean they escaped social and economic prejudice, but they were entitled to Mexican citizenship.60 In the United States, however, full citizenship was reserved for free white people. A problem officials now faced was that there was no legal racial vocabulary for Mexicans. They were neither “black” nor “white.” Native Americans in this period were considered to be part of another “nation” and were excluded, though underpinning this were racialized ideas as well.

  The California constitution of 1849, for instance, stipulated that “every White male citizen of the United States, and every White male citizen of Mexico, who shall have elected to become a citizen of the United States … shall be entitled to vote at all elections which are now or hereafter may be authorized by law.” The forty-eight delegates in charge of drawing up the constitution at the 1849 convention had an average residency in California of two years, and only eight were Californios. Their definition of “white” remained ambiguous, though the document’s exclusion of black or Indian people was clear.61 The problem came in judging the mestizo population, who constituted the majority of Mexican Californians. No one knew what a “white Mexican” was, and no law specified how that was to be determined.62 In some areas this left mestizos claiming their “Spanish” heritage in order to be granted whiteness, while Indians often claimed to be mestizo so they could claim citizenship.63

  Ideas about whiteness were also supported by racial pseudoscience, fueled by the growing social Darwinism of the nineteenth century. Nativist vitriol directed at immigrants intensified in the 1840s and 1850s, triggered in part by the arrival of some three million Europeans in the United States between 1845 and 1854.64 Groups like the Know-Nothings espoused anti-immigrant and often anti-Catholic sentiments, which would also feed into ideas about Hispanics. Their Catholicism was considered suspect and at odds with the Protestant Anglo-Saxon culture that dominated political and cultural life east of the Mississippi River.65 Whereas whiteness was linked to “civilization” and productivity, brown Mexicans were always cast as “lazy” and backward. In addition, Anglos were threatened by the fact that Mexican-Americans and Indians often lived within their own communities, and by concerns that black people might “mix” with these groups in the West.66

  The New Mexico territory initially extended full rights to the Pueblo Indians, under the terms of the 1848 treaty. This was gradually stripped away over the subsequent years, as more Anglos arrived in the region and there were legal challenges over the Pueblos’ status, culminating in an 1876 Supreme Court decision that overturned their right to citizenship.67 Once Arizona became a territory separate from New Mexico in 1863, it, too, passed laws similar to California’s, limiting the political participation of Mexicans and Native Americans.68 Likewise, Texas granted citizenship to “white” Mexicans, forcing any Mexican arriving in Texas after 1845 to somehow prove his of her “whiteness.”69

  The flip side of racial division was the question of assimilation. Californios, New Mexicans, and Tejanos were forced in many ways to adapt to these changes, not least by speaking English and coming to terms with life in the United States. What was often a painful transformation appeared to some outsiders as a natural progression rather than a necessary suppression. One such observer was J. H. Watts, an Anglo who left for New Mexico in 1857, when he was eighteen. His father, John Sebrie Watts, had served as a judge there from 1851 until 1854. To the younger Watts, it appeared that New Mexico had experienced profound changes in a short time, in part due to the Anglos and German immigrants who had moved there. In little more than twenty years, he said, the atmosphere had changed radically:

  The feeling against the American population was very strong when I went there. It is not so now. The Mexicans have become thorough Americans now. They say that we are a superior race, and that they have to conform to our manners & customs, & they are satisfied that the American government is better for them than any Mexican government would be … the generation which has now come up is Americanized, & speaks English rather fluently, especially the half breeds.70

  Yet such assimilation was often not enough. It took the ruling in In re Rodriguez in Texas in 1897 to reaffirm the right of all Mexicans in Texas to be full citizens. The case had been brought in 1896—the same year that segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson was upheld by the Supreme Court—by Ricardo Rodríguez, who was born in Mexico.71 He wanted U.S. citizenship, which would allow him to vote, but was denied it on the grounds that he was an “Indian” and thus not eligible. The argument against him invoked rulings supporting the claim that the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship to anyone born or naturalized in the United States, applied only to black and white people, and, based on his physical appearance, under which “he may be classed with copper-colored or red men,” Rodríguez was neither. Nor did he appear to be a true Indian, according to the judge, because “he knows nothing of the Aztecs or Toltecs.”72 The ruling, rather than contesting this interpretation of race or ethnicity, instead turned to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. If Mexicans in the ceded territory had been “whitened” to be made into citizens in the aftermath of 1848, then the same right could be extended toward Mexican immigrants. While the ruling went some way toward securing the right to naturalize, it only further muddied the question of whiteness.73

  These legal and cultural ambiguities meant that the former Mexicans were granted U.S.—that is, federal—citizenship, but this did not necessarily mean they would be granted full rights in states such as Texas or California, or equal access to public services.74 For instance, in 1855 the state legislature in California appropriated school funds in proportion to the number of white children. Three years later, a series of bills segregated schools, with Anglo children put in separate facilities from black, Hispanic, Indian, and Chinese children. This culminated in the California School Law (1870), which was aimed at the growing Chinese community but affected all nonwhite children.75 It would take decades and many more court battles to desegregate California’s schools.

  These states also failed to protect their residents from harm. Mexican Texans or Californians were often forced to reckon with vigilante justice, with little interference from people who were supposed to defend them. In Texas, Mexicans confronted increasing hostility from Anglos, including seizure of their property. People who were unwilling to bow to demands could find a violent resolution awaiti
ng them.76 From 1848 until 1928 at least 597 known lynchings of Mexicans occurred—though estimates range into the thousands—and people lived in fear of mob violence.77 These killings also occurred in places where there was little oversight by law enforcement or, indeed, active collusion.78 This was not unique to Texas, though it had the highest number of such killings in this period, with 232, to California’s 143 and New Mexico’s 87. The others were spread around neighboring states and territories.79

  One of the most infamous mob killings took place in California, its victim a woman known as Juana Loaiza and also called Juanita, though later identified as Josefa Segovia. She was living with her partner, though it is not clear if they were married, in Downieville, California, a settlement in the northern gold rush territory. This was a tough place for anyone, man or woman. In 1850 the ratio was around twelve men to each woman, and these mining camps could be places of rough-and-tumble frontier living.80 Some women were wives of the miners, others cooks or housekeepers, and some engaged in prostitution, though the threat of sexual violence stalked all women there.81 Segovia had outraged the community by killing an Anglo miner with a knife after he tried to attack her at home. A vigilante committee ignored claims that she was pregnant and that she was defending her honor, and she was sentenced to death by hanging in July 1851. According to one account, she “walked alone with her head held high” to the gallows where she proceeded to put the noose on herself, saying, “Adiós, señores” to the assembled crowd.82

  Retribution for these abuses could be swift and just as fierce. One Mexican who fought back in Texas was the “Red Robber of the Río Grande,” Juan Nepomuceno Cortina Goseacochea, also known as Cheno Cortina or Juan Cortina. He was born in Camargo, Tamaulipas, in 1824, but his family later moved to Matamoros. He fought against the United States at the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de Palma during the Mexican-American War. Before 1848, Cortina’s family owned a sizable amount of land, including his ranch, San José. The war’s aftermath changed Cortina’s world, and he angrily pointed out, “I never signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.”83

  Land was at the heart of Cortina’s grievances, both with the treaty and with the Anglos who arrived in the Río Grande valley, but the treatment of Tejanos also enraged him. His family had ended up, like many others, in complicated and costly land dealings. In Brownsville, established just after the end of the Mexican-American War, a group of speculators tried to lure Tejanos into their plans to create a Río Grande Territory separate from Texas. The scheme was soon tangled in controversy and collapsed, but not before many Tejanos had signed away their land.84

  At the same time, there was a lot of agitation over trade. The high Mexican tariffs had led to a rise in smuggling, and to calls for a small free trade zone, which was set up in 1858. It stretched from the mouth of the Río Grande westward into cities in Tamaulipas, including Matamoros and Reynosa, going about twelve miles into the interior.85 On the U.S side, Brownsville became a center of this trade, and the town began to boom, with its population already hitting three thousand only a few years after its founding in 1848. Alongside this grew a political machine, one that used Tejanos for their votes but for the most part kept them out of office. As an 1856 issue of the newspaper American Flag put it: “An hour before the election they are fast friends, ‘Mexicans, my very good friends’—and an hour after the election they were a ‘crowd of greasers.’”86

  Cortina watched these changes with increasing ire, as Brownsville attracted more outsiders ready to buy up land and discriminate against Tejanos. His temper snapped on a hot July day in 1859, after he saw the town’s marshal beat a Mexican man who had worked for Cortina’s mother. Cortina killed the officer after he refused to release the worker. Then, on September 28, Cortina and around seventy Tejano men thundered into Brownsville on their horses in the early hours of the morning, with cries of “¡Viva México!” and “¡Mueran los gringos!” (Death to the gringos!). Their anger over bitter land disputes and other abuses fueled the attack on their long-standing Anglo enemies.87 A number of battles followed, later called the Cortina Wars, which lasted for a decade. Cortina and his cortinista followers took on the U.S. Army, the Texas Rangers, militias, and later even Confederate soldiers.88 He also continued to raid cattle along the border and was arrested in Mexico in 1875 and again in 1877, when he was taken to the capital, found guilty, and sentenced to be executed, though a last-minute presidential reprieve saved him, and he died instead of natural causes at the age of seventy, in 1894.89

  THE WEST REMAINED a political preoccupation throughout the 1850s, as people began to migrate to these new territories, which had yet to be organized into states. A number of bills concerning homesteading were put forward and in 1853, the Democratic senator Stephen Douglas proposed legislation that would become the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Under the prevailing idea of “popular sovereignty,” settlers in these two territories would be allowed to decide for themselves whether to allow slavery. This part of the territory was north of the line established by the Missouri Compromise, which would be violated by a vote in favor of slavery. The 1854 bill split the Whig Party, with southern members voting for it, and northerners against, leaving the party in tatters. Southerners ended up joining the Democratic Party, and northern Whigs signed up for the new Republican Party.90

  Around the same time, some adventurous—if not foolhardy—men had been looking much farther south for new areas to expand slavery into. They were known as filibusters, an adaptation of the Dutch word vrijbuiter, or pirate, and as filibusteros in Spanish.* These men were land pirates, launching expeditions in search of territory. They acted without any official sanction—as many of the Anglo “adventurers” had done in Texas in the 1830s—and, depending on the mission and the result, a blind eye was often turned to their exploits.

  In 1851, a Venezuelan-born general, Narciso López, led an expedition from the United States to free Cuba from Spanish rule. Although most of Latin America was long independent by that point, this sugar island was not. It had continued to cling to Spain, in part out of fear of a slave rebellion. As the decades of the nineteenth century wore on, however, irritation with the colonial regime grew; many Cubans left the island and, from abroad, began to make plans for independence. Some wanted Cuba to be an independent republic; others wanted it to be annexed to the United States. The latter group enjoyed the support of southern slaveholders.

  The U.S. government was also interested in the island; successive presidents had made offers to buy it, but Spain refused—Cuba’s sugar exports were too valuable to forgo. In fact, Spain had been refusing for quite some time. As early as 1810, the envoy William Shaler was sent to “feel the pulse of Cuba” concerning the “incorporation of that island with the United States,” though nothing came of the visit.91 Later, Polk tried to buy the island for $100 million in 1848. Spain rejected the offer, but the idea that Cuba was a natural fit for the United States persisted. One senator, Mississippi’s Albert Gallatin Brown, reflected the general sentiment of the slaveholding south: “I want Cuba, and I know that sooner or later we must have it. I want Tamaulipas, Potosí, and one or two other Mexican states; and I want them all for the same reason—for the planting and spreading of slavery.”92

  Men like López were willing to take matters into their own hands, but filibustering was a risky enterprise, in part because these were men the government could not—or did not want to—control, though sometimes it had to intervene. In López’s case, when President Zachary Taylor heard of the initial scheme, he had the filibuster’s ships seized in 1849.93 The following year, López managed his first expedition in May, landing in the town of Cárdenas, where he raised the flag of free Cuba and declared the town liberated. He and around six hundred men moved east toward Havana, with the town of Matanzas in their sights, as it was one of the hubs of the sugar industry. He was met with far less enthusiasm there, in part because the slave owners did not want a political rebellion to trigger a potentially more dangerous one by the slaves.
Sensing the reluctance, López retreated to Key West, Florida.

  Despite the initial failure, López was greeted as a hero by the southern slave owners, and he counted on politicians like John A. Quitman, a governor of Mississippi and veteran of the Mexican-American War, for support.94 News of López’s exploits spread from New Orleans around the country. The front page of the New Orleans Daily Crescent carried the headline: “Important from Cuba: The Invasion! Landing of Gen. Lopez.”95 López tried again the following year, landing just outside Havana. He had hoped to rally people upon his arrival but instead the expedition went quite wrong—he was captured and executed.

  A couple of years later, in 1853, President Franklin Pierce offered $130 million in another unsuccessful attempt to buy the island. The following year a communiqué between U.S. diplomats was leaked from a conference in Ostend, Belgium, saying the United States “ought, if practicable, to purchase Cuba with as little delay as possible.”96 The island had become “an unceasing danger, and a permanent cause of anxiety and alarm” because Spain failed, in the eyes of the United States, to exercise sufficient control over it. Both the island and the United States were slaveholding societies, and this fed the diplomats’ unease. The memo also echoed the fear that any sort of independence movement might lead to “a second St. Domingo [Haiti], with all its attendant horrors to the white race, and suffer the flames to extend to our own neighboring shores.” The communiqué’s final line noted that “we have already witnessed the happy results for both countries which followed a similar arrangement in regard to Florida.”97 The leak caused outrage in Cuba and Spain, and a diplomatic row for the United States.