El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  Felipe finds Ramona, though not before Alessandro has been shot by an Anglo. She and Felipe decide to marry at the end of the novel, and they also agree to move to Mexico, where Felipe hopes they “might live among men of his own race and degree, and of congenial beliefs and occupations.”173

  Although intended to bring attention to the plight of the Indians, Jackson’s depiction of the mission churches is what enraptured readers. Tourists began poking around the ruins, and soon campaigns were under way to save them. Lummis joined the effort, setting up the Landmarks Club in 1895. To Lummis, the missions were physical evidence that the Spanish were the “first colonizers” and represented “an outpost of civilization in the wilderness.”174 To many people in the late nineteenth century, the churches were the remains of an acceptable, civilized, and civilizing past, with a noble lineage involving Spaniards—not mestizo Mexicans and not Native Americans. In some ways this myth de-Mexicanized the elite Californios and bestowed on them a Spanishness which also coincided with the legal realities of needing to be a “white” Mexican in order to become a full citizen. It also set apart the Native Americans, pushing aside the mestizo reality of California and the harshness of the mission system. Jackson’s work spawned the “mission myth,” painting California’s past as a thriving center of Spanish culture.175 The work of Ruiz de Burton, however, was too full of contemporary realities to be transformed into a similarly romantic tale.

  Around the same time, across the country in Washington, D.C., in 1859 the Italian-born artist Constantino Brumidi began sketches for a painted frieze of American history intended to decorate the Rotunda dome in the Capitol building. Once he set to work after the Civil War, there was not enough money to pay for an actual frieze, so instead he painted the surface using grisaille to make it look as if it were carved.176 Sitting fifty-eight feet above the floor, measuring around three hundred feet in circumference, and just over eight feet high, the work that Brumidi finally started in 1878 in the Rotunda dome displays a panorama of U.S. history. Montgomery C. Meigs, the engineer in charge of building at the Capitol at the time, wanted the decorative theme to show an onward march of American history, explaining that it would illustrate “the gradual progress of the continent from the depths of barbarism to the heights of civilization; the rude and barbarous civilization of some of the Ante-Columbian tribes; the contests of the Aztecs with their less civilized predecessors; their own conquest by the Spanish race … the gradual advance of the white, and retreat of the red races, our own revolutionary and other struggles.”177

  The frieze was designed to sit below the dome’s windows and above its doorways, under the fresco of George Washington hovering in the center of its ceiling.178 The work begins with the allegorical figures of Liberty, America, and History, followed by Columbus making his landing, over the western entrance to the Rotunda. The next panel is Cortez and Montezuma at Mexican Temple, where an apprehensive Cortés, with only a couple of guards alongside him, meets the Mexica leader Moteuczoma, who has a retinue of seven men and women, standing with his right hand on his heart and his left hand out, palm open, to welcome the men. The backdrop is the palace, and all the Mexica are in elaborate clothing and headdresses.

  From there, the work moves toward the east and includes an image of the Mexican-American War over the southern entrance, showing General Winfield Scott entering Mexico City, though this part—indeed the majority of the frieze—was undertaken by another Italian artist, Filippo Costaggini, after Brumidi’s death in 1880.179 This section suggests none of the earlier hesitation of Cortés and his men. The U.S. troops outnumber the Mexicans twelve to four. Scott’s men are in uniform, dignified and orderly, while the four Mexicans are in traditional dress, holding sombreros and wearing sarapes, rather than in the military uniform they would have worn at the time, with the leader—whose beard and wavy hair bear little resemblance to Santa Anna—bowing, his hand outstretched. Behind the Mexicans are aloe plants and palm trees, while Scott’s men are framed by a sturdy oak. The subjugation was complete.*

  IN JULY 1893, at the American Historical Association’s meeting in Chicago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a paper that would go far beyond the conference hall. In what became the essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Turner argued that the conquest of the West gave the United States its unique “American” identity, saying: “The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people.” Those changes were involved in “winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life.”180 This “Turner thesis” was an idea that found a favorable place in the public consciousness, and though historians initially accepted it as well, they have subsequently wrestled with his assessment.

  To Turner, the frontier was the “meeting point between savagery and civilization,” and what marked it was not a physical boundary but “free land,” which enabled successive waves of people to settle it. He presented a strange story, one not identifiable if viewed from the Tejano or Californio—to say nothing of the Native American—perspective. Nowhere in his article did he mention one of the most important factors to have allowed this “colonization of the Great West”: the gain of millions of acres after the Mexican-American War. In his account of the battle to civilize, not a single mention of the Spanish or even the Mexican past appears. There are no mission churches, no presidios, and no ranchos. The relationship between Hispanics and Native Americans before the Anglos or Europeans crossed the Mississippi is wiped away as well, and nothing is made of the active and preexisting hubs of civilization, as represented by everything from a Pueblo village to a mission church in California. Instead, he championed a taming of a uniformly hostile wilderness and Indian “savagery,” only after which the institutions of American life and its economy could take root.

  The people who achieved this were Americans of a “composite nationality”—English, Scots-Irish, and Germans who, in “the crucible of the frontier,” were “fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics.” Nowhere to be found were the people who already lived on the frontier. Turner, by design or oversight, wrote the Hispanic past out of U.S. history in one of the most influential essays of the time.

  Whatever the means, and whoever was involved, there was no denying the outcome. By the time Turner put pen to paper, the United States reached from the bustling cities of the Eastern Seaboard over the Mississippi and past the farms that were strung through the prairies of the Great Plains, traversing rivers and mountains, ending in the golden promise of California. Although it had involved two wars and countless local acts of violence directed against Mexicans and Native Americans over the better part of the century, the United States now stretched from coast to coast.

  * Ramírez continued to be involved in politics and journalism for much of his life, until he was accused of bank fraud many years later, at which point he left for Ensenada, a small town in Baja California about two hundred miles south of Los Angeles, and lived there until his death in 1908.

  * This use of filibuster is not to be confused with the contemporary U.S. term, that is, a legislative tactic used to stall proceedings.

  * Despite Costaggini’s contribution, there was still a thirty-one-foot gap in need of completion, which was eventually done by artist Allyn Cox in 1953. Cox added scenes from the end of the Civil War, a gun crew in the Spanish-American-Cuban War, and the birth of aviation.

  Chapter 11

  Ybor City, Florida, ca. 1870–98

  NEAR THE SOUTHERN tip of the island of Manhattan, a brownstone church sits on James Street. Now dwarfed by tall glass buildings, its elegant Greek revival pillars speak of a different time in the city. Tacked to the shuttered main doors in 2014 was a crumpled piece of paper, with photos of Pope John Paul II on the left and one of a dark-haired man with glasses on the
right, with the text between them reading: “Pray for us and save our church + ora por nosotros salva nuestra iglesia Padre Félix Varela y Santo Juan Pablo II.” Nearly two hundred years after his arrival in New York City, the memory of Varela remains alive.

  A Cuban priest, Padre Félix Varela was a spiritual and intellectual leader who helped establish this parish and church in 1827. A plaque on the front of the church commemorates the two-hundredth anniversary of his birth, praising his time as a priest and educator as well as his work as a “defender of human and civil rights in Cuba and in the United States,” and his bespectacled, serious gaze adorned a commemorative U.S. postage stamp in 1997. The priest served both his religious community and a wider one in 1824 by establishing El habanero, a newspaper directed at Cuban exiles that was also smuggled back to the island, as well as contributing a steady stream of writing about religious and political matters. He also translated works from English into Spanish, including Thomas Jefferson’s Manual of Parliamentary Practice.1

  Varela was part of an earlier group of Cubans who sought opportunities or refuge in the United States, a few thousand people scattered in cities like New York and Philadelphia. Although he was a priest, by the early 1820s in Cuba, Varela’s interests had begun to encompass politics. In 1822–23, during the Trienio Liberal, he served as one of Cuba’s representatives to the Spanish Cortes and spoke of political independence and the need to abolish slavery. When Fernando VII resumed his full powers in 1823, Varela was condemned to death and so fled to the United States. He had spent part of his childhood in St. Augustine, when it was still in Spanish Florida, though this time he went farther north, to Philadelphia, where he started his newspaper and tried to gain an ecclesiastical posting. By 1825 he was in New York ministering to Irish immigrants on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

  In Varela’s time, political change for Cuba was still a way off, though the example of the other former Spanish colonies turning into republics was an inspiration. There had been attempts at independence in Cuba, but the authorities suppressed them with a fierce brutality. The continued fear of triggering “another Haiti” was a powerful incentive. Some frustrated Cubans began to look at possibilities away from the island, and Varela became a beacon to other exiles.

  Varela never saw Cuba again, staying in New York and retiring in 1853 to St. Augustine, Florida, where a statue of him graces the churchyard of the city’s cathedral. Nor did he live long enough to see Cuba make its first large-scale attempt at independence: the Ten Years’ War, which began in 1868, more than a decade after his death. It was ignited with the Grito de Yara (cry of Yara), when Carlos Manuel de Céspedes led a small army, which included slaves freed from his own plantation, to fight against Spain.

  By this point, U.S. interest in Cuba—which still allowed slavery—had cooled after the United States’ own Civil War. Attempts to buy the island stopped for the moment, and any enthusiasm that the Cubans in New York and elsewhere on the East Coast had throughout the 1850s for annexation plans was supplanted by a growing desire for independence.2 However, once the Ten Years’ War began, many people in Washington believed the Cubans, like the Mexicans, were not capable of self-governance. President Ulysses S. Grant told Congress in his 1875 annual message that there was no end in sight for the “ruinous conflict” in Cuba. To Grant, it was not apparent that a “civil organization exists which may be recognized as an independent government capable of performing its international obligations.” This being the case, recognition of Cuban independence was, in his opinion, “impracticable and indefensible.”3 Later, Grant offered to mediate a peace deal between the colony and Spain. Others in Washington continued to hope that Spain would relent and put the island up for sale.4

  The desire for independence was not limited to Cuba. The fellow Spanish colony of Puerto Rico harbored similar dreams. In the small village of Lares, surrounded by the lush green of the Cordillera Central mountains, around one thousand feet about sea level and seventy miles to the west of San Juan, a rebellion broke out in the same year as Cuba’s. In fact, Puerto Rico shouted first. Known as the Grito de Lares, this revolt took place on September 23, 1868. Organized by Ramón Emeterio Betances, it directed much of its frustration at the economic injustices that persisted under colonial rule, targeting the Spanish merchants in the coffee-growing region, as well as officials.5 It was put down by the authorities soon afterward, and no further war followed.

  Betances already had a record with the Spanish and went into exile. He, too, headed for New York and spent time with other exiles. The Cubans and Puerto Ricans could make common cause there, though many Puerto Ricans favored reform rather than entering what they could see was becoming a long-running conflict in Cuba.6 While Betances planned, moderate Puerto Rican delegates—much to his annoyance—sought to air their grievances to the Cortes in Spain, leaving in 1871. They did, however, manage to secure the abolition of slavery, which had been one of Betances’s aims, by 1873.7 He was still in exile and did not live to see the island’s independence, though by the time of his death in France in September 1898, he would have lived just long enough to see Puerto Rico transferred from one colonial power to another.

  TEN YEARS OF civil conflict left Cuba battered, and the exodus of Cubans to the United States grew throughout the 1870s. Some people left for political reasons, but many others for financial ones—the economy was in tatters. By 1878, both sides were exhausted, and negotiations began to bring the conflict to a close, resulting in the Pact of Zanjón. It brought the war to an end, but not before some 50,000 Cubans and between 150,000 and 200,000 Spaniards had been killed.8 In an effort to prevent another uprising the colonial authorities made certain concessions, one of the most significant being the abolition of slavery, though it was to be done in gradual phases, with the practice finally ending in 1886. For some Cubans, however, this was not enough. Now only independence would do, and many regrouped in the relative safety of the United States to determine how to achieve it. Varela’s writings remained influential during this time, and a later independence leader, José Martí, said the priest “taught us how to think.” As Cubans began to plan what would come next, the exile community grew, though this time, instead of New York, its hub would be a little industrial suburb on the edge of Tampa, Florida.

  A small neighborhood of cigar factories and workers’ cottages might seem an incongruous place to launch a liberation struggle, but for the nascent Cuban community Ybor City would become one of the central organizing points of the junta to free the island. The neighborhood’s evolution into the “cradle of Cuban liberty” was not what Vicente Martínez Ybor had in mind when he decided to relocate his cigar factory to a tract of sandy land to the west of the small town of Tampa in 1885. Ybor was a Spaniard from Valencia who, like many of his contemporaries from the peninsula, worked in Cuba. He, however, decided to leave the island for the United States, where the economy was better and where he could escape high tariffs.9

  In 1869 Ybor moved his factory to Key West, which was fast becoming home to a growing exile population, providing a ready labor force to produce his Príncipe de Gales cigars. Ybor wanted to continue to use Cuban cigar makers, as they were famed for their skill, and many were happy to have an excuse to leave war-torn Cuba. From there he moved to Tampa, which had a good port. This was crucial to his success, as he needed access to Cuban tobacco as well as the ability to ship his cigars. He bought his plot of land on the edge of town in 1885, and the Ybor City suburb that bore his name grew and soon became part of Tampa, in 1887.

  During these later decades of the nineteenth century at least one hundred thousand Cubans left the island for the United States, Europe, and Latin American countries.10 The wealthiest emigrants went to Europe, the middle-class professionals to the large cities of the U.S. East Coast, and workers to Florida.11 Some sixteen thousand Cubans came to the United States between 1886 and 1890 alone.12 For centuries, Spain had tried—and for the most part failed—to increase the settlement of Florida. Now, lo
ng after Spanish control of Florida had evaporated, it was turning into one of the largest magnets for people living in the remnants of Spain’s empire.

  Although stable, life for workers in Ybor City was not easy. The tidy fronts of the small wooden workers’ houses often belied the number living behind them, as many as four or five families crammed within their walls. Cubans were also not the sole group of immigrants; Italians and other Europeans were coming to the city to work, too, and there was also a significant Jewish population.*

  The poet and political exile José Martí entered this world in 1891. He had been invited to Tampa by some of the Cuban leaders in the city and traveled down from New York, arriving in Florida on November 25; some fifty people braved a downpour to meet him at the train station. Martí was well-known—he had devoted most of his life to the struggle for independence, having been forced into exile at the age of seventeen, and his works of poetry and political essays also brought him wide recognition.

  The years before his trip to Tampa had been eventful. He returned to Cuba in 1877 for a short visit, using a false name, and soon afterward left for Mexico. Once Cuba’s war was over, he went back to the island and was there during a revolt called the Little War (Guerra Chiquita) in the summer of 1879. This conflict lasted for just over a year, but during this time Martí was forced into exile again. He traveled to New York in 1880 and connected with the exile community there, writing for newspapers and journals. The 1891 trip to Tampa, however, was his first to Florida.