Somos en escrito The Latino Literary Online Magazine
Guest Viewpoint
The Mexican American Story—yet to be told
By Felipe de Ortego y Gasca
American demographic knowledge about the Hispanic Southwest and about Mexican Americans in the United States is dismal, evident by spurious remarks by Donald Trump and tweets emanating from Republican presidential election activities this year. Many Americans think that Mexican Americans are a recent immigrant population, troublemakers, and thugs.
They are none of these! Though they are fierce defenders of their culture, language, and national origin. They are Mexican Americans in what is now the United States with roots that stretch back centuries. For example, a branch of my mother’s family settled in San Antonio in 1731 as founders of the city—all too often I have to remind my fellow Americans that 1731 is a few years before 1776. Many families in New Mexico trace their Hispanic roots to the mid-16th century, some 60 years before the founding of the English colony of Jamestown in North America in 1607.
For the record: the 3 million Mexicans who were settlers on the territory of the Mexican Cession in 1848 per the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo became Americans by conquest and fiat, holding on tenaciously to their cultural roots and traditions, though their political roots were sundered. Bear in mind that their land was now a land occupied by an invader force. They did not trek across a border to reach the United States. In other words, the border crossed them.
The territory of the Mexican Cession was larger than Spain, France, and Italy combined (529,000 square miles: third largest acquisition of territory in US history). Americans had coveted that territory for a long time. They got it with President Polk’s trumped up war against Mexico in 1846 on the pretext that on March 12 Mexico had invaded American territory in Brownsville, Texas. Despite the Texas Rebellion of 1836 and the subsequent U.S. annexation of Texas in 1845, Mexico had not ceded territorial rights to Texas. Ergo, Mexico did not invade American territory when its troops crossed innocently into Texas in 1846.
Of the 60 million American Hispanics today (per current Census count), 66 percent or 40 million are Mexican Americans, scattered from California to Maine, the majority of them in the Hispanic Southwest with the next largest population cluster of Mexican Americans in Chicago where I was born. In what I call the Ohio Valley Crescent, that arc of the United States stretching West to East from Northfield, Minnesota, to Johnstown, Pennsylvania and South to include Iowa some 4 million American Hispanics live and work, most of them Mexican Americans. In all, the Ohio Valley Crescent includes the states of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, and Western Pennsylvania.
In this arc, American Hispanics (differentiated from Hispanic Americans from Latin America) have created vibrant communities full of Hispanic culture and language, and except for the Chicago area have been until recently historically “invisible.” It’s in this arc of the Ohio Valley Crescent in Indiana where U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel was born, but who Donald Trump keeps referring to as that “Mexican” judge.
Eight million-plus Puerto Ricans (on the island and continental U.S.) make up 18 percent of the total U.S. Hispanic population. Cuban Americans make up 6 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population. That’s a total of 90 percent of the U. S. Hispanic population made up of Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans.
The remaining 10 percent comprises the “Latino” population of the U.S., that is, Hispanics from the 16 other Latin American countries not counting Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. With the exception of Salvadorians and Dominicans, none of the other Latino groups in their individual aggregate make up more than 1 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population. One can readily see that the elephant in the room is the Mexican American: 2 out of 3 American Hispanics are Mexican Americans. Given these stats one wonders why “the Donald” is alienating them.
Unfortunately, representations of Mexicans and Mexican Americans have tended to cast Mexican Americans and their Mexican kinsmen in the most lurid light, as Professor Cecil Robinson pointed out in his work With the Ears of Strangers. Mexican Americans were inaccurately and superficially represented in books, movies, television and other mass media, sometimes by well-meaning romanticists who distorted the image of Mexican Americans for the sake of their art.
Mexican Americans were characterized at both ends of a spectrum of human behavior—seldom in the middle—as untrustworthy, villainous, ruthless, tequila drinking, and philandering machos or else as courteous, devout, and fatalistic peasants who were to be treated more as pets than as people. More often than not Mexican Americans were cast as bandits or as lovable rogues; as hot-blooded, sexually animated creatures or passive, humble servants. Mexican and Mexican American women fared just as badly cast as females of easy virtue.
Mexican American youngsters were taught about the cruelty of their Spanish forebears and the savagery of their Mexican-Indian ancestors; they were taught about the Spanish greed for gold, of the infamous Spanish Inquisition, of Aztec human sacrifices, of Mexican bandits, and of the massacre at the Alamo. Seldom, if ever, were they told about the other men at the Alamo, their Mexican kinsmen—unknown and unsung in American history—who were killed fighting on the Texas side for independence. American children have still probably never heard of Juan Abamillo, Juan Badillo, Carlos Espalier, Gregorio Esparza, Antonio Fuentes, Jose Maria Guerrero, Toribio Losoya, Andres Nava and more than a hundred other Texas Mexicans at the Alamo.
Information about the historical accomplishments of Mexican Americans from the end of the U.S. War with Mexico (1848) to the present has been nil in American history or social science texts. Editors and writers of American history texts have excluded or minimized the literary achievements of Mexican Americans, first, and Chicanos later, for reasons ranging from jingoism and racism to ignorance and disdain.
A current effort by the Texas State Board of Education to adopt a book about Mexican Americans for social studies characterizes Chicanos as set on destroying America. The book is full of errata and misinformation. Again, one wonders why Texas elected officials are deliberately alienating Texas Mexican Americans. A day of reckoning is coming when Texas Mexican Americans will be the majority population in the state. In 2004, in a Foreign Policy article, Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington ranted about American Hispanics posing a major potential threat to the country’s cultural and political integrity. As Hispanics, Mexican Americans seem to be and have been fair game for American xenophobes.
Like the Palestinians, Mexicans and Mexican Americans are in their homeland which was invaded by the U.S. in its rush from “sea to shining sea” during the era of American imperialism. In the 19th century, when the American empire beheld Mexico to its south, it saw only a nation of brown-tinted people working like serfs (peones) for the elite of Mexico on their plantations (latifundias). And like Cotton Mather in an earlier time who sought to free the Indians of Mexico from their Spanish oppressors, driven now by Manifest Destiny, American disdain for non-white people seized the moment to wrest more than half of Mexico’s sovereign territory as booty of war for its slave economy. Hawks in the U.S. Congress pressed for the total acquisition of Mexico but were staved off by those who argued that Mexican land south of the demarcated Mexican Cession was worthless.
In my work on The Black Legend (la Leyenda Negra), I maintain that the enmity toward Mexicans by Americans was the product of The Black Legend—that historical process of defamation, slander, libel, and stereotyping engendered by the conflict between Spain and England, brought to a head by Spain’s invasion of England in 1588 with the Spanish Armada in an effort to force England into submission and to return to the Catholic fold.
The Spanish Armada was totally destroyed by an unexpected perfect 10 storm. Spain left the field, and capitalizing on Spain’s retreat, England declared victory over Spain due to superior seamanship and because God willed it. England immediately initiated a barrage of propaganda against Spain, maliciously branding it a nation of infidels in league with the devil. That propaganda blitz perdured over the centuries to this day and accounted for the contempt and vicious attitudes of Americans toward Mexicans in the 19th century aftermath of the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846-1848.
Like the “Jewish Problem” in Germany in the last century, the Mexican Problem has loomed large in the United States. In time, anti-Mexican laws a la Jim Crow were passed, creating thus a Mexican-Dixon Line comparable to the Mason-Dixon Line. Americans quickly reduced Mexican Americans to a stage of peonage corresponding to what existed in Spanish colonial Mexico and after the Creole interregnum from 1821 to 1910 at the end of the Porfirato—the 35 year despotic presidency of Porfirio Diaz.
Important to note is that the Mexican War for Independence, 1810-1821, profited only the Criollo elite and a few of the indigenous elite of Mexico. The rest of Mexican society remained a macerated mass subject to the winds of fortune. Much the same befell the Mexicans of the ceded Mexican territory after 1848 in the now United States.
Becoming Americans posed problems of considerable dimension for the Mexicans of the ceded territory —now Americans in name only. They were confronted with a new language, a different political system, and an educational system that did not know how to educate them (see “Montezuma’s Children,” Ortego). Moreover, regarded as a half-breed population they were not wanted in the United States unless they could be herded like black slaves.
Narrative portraits of Mexican Americans by Anglo American writers have exerted extraordi-nary influence since 1848 down to our time on generations of Americans who have come in contact with them. Disparaging images of Mexican Americans were drawn by such writers as Richard Henry Dana, who, in Two Years Before the Mast, described the Mexicans of California as "an idle, thriftless people" who could "make nothing for themselves." In 1852, Colonel John Monroe reported to Washington,
that the New Mexicans are thoroughly debased and totally incapable of self-government, and there is no latent quality about them that can ever make them respectable. They have more Indian blood than Spanish, and in some respects are below the Pueblo Indians, for they are not as honest or as industrious.
In 1868, The Overland Monthly published an article by William V. Wells in which he wrote that
in the open field, a charge of disciplined troops usually sufficed to put to flight the collection of frowzy-headed mestizos, leperos, mulattoes, Indians, Samboes, and other mongrels now, as in the time of our war with them, composing a Mexican Army.
In our own time Walter Prescott Webb characterized Mexicans as possessing" a cruel streak" he believed was inherited partly from the Spanish of the inquisition and partly from their Indian forebears. “On the whole," he went on,
the Mexican warrior . . . was inferior to the Comanche and wholly unequal to Texans. The whine of the leaden slugs stirred in him an irresistible impulse to travel with, rather than against, the music. He won more victories over the Texans partly by parley than by force of arms. For making promises and for breaking them he had no peer.
In that 64-year period from 1848 to 1912 when New Mexico and Arizona became states, the Conquest Generation of Mexican Americans suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous discrimination and contumely much of which continues to this day evident by public characterizations of Mexican and Mexican Americans via media sources. This transition period of two generations did not assimilate Mexican Americans as such a period had assimilated European immigrants. But Mexican Americans were not immigrants. They were sentients in an occupied land that had once been their homeland—and now they were strangers in their own land.
American Hispanics have been present in the United States since its founding in 1776 with Hispanic Jews (Sephardim) in the population mix from the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam which became New York, plus the addition of Hispanics to the American population with the Louisiana Purchase (1803), the addition of Florida (1819), the U.S. War with Mexico (1846-48), the U.S. War with Spain (1898), the Mexican diaspora from 1910-1930), the Mexican Bracero Program (1942-1964), and the steady stream of immigration from Latin America and the Caribbean since the founding of the nation.
Despite their historical presence in the United States, American Hispanics receive scant coverage in the U.S. Media despite the fact that they constitute 19 percent of the total U.S. population--about 1 out of 5 Americans is an American Hispanic. By 2040, Census projections estimate that 1 out of 4 Americans will be Hispanic. And, according to the Census Bureau, by 2095 half the American population will be Hispanic—if fertility and motility ratios remain constant.
American Hispanics receive news coverage only when events cast them in adverse roles or stereotypes or situations of buffoonery. In film particularly, Mexicans have been cast as passive and benign in subservient roles or as jocular and bellicose characters in boisterous saloons or crowd scenes, there to be tolerated as riff-raff. More recently, Mexicans and Cubans have been cast as thugs or gangsters. In whichever roles they are cast they are always “the usual suspects” to be rounded up. American mainstream media has tended to regard American Hispanics as Mr. Hyde rather than as Dr. Jekyll. Simply put, it’s as if the American media sees American Hispanics as a population suffering from mass bi-polarism.
The most intense period of Americanization for Mexican Americans occurred between 1910 and 1930 in a migration north from Mexico that Ernesto Galarza, the Mexican American labor activist, called historic. More than 1½ million Mexicans trekked north from Mexico to escape the hardships of Mexico’s economy despoiled by Porfirismo. American labor shortages accommodated the exodus. But the Great Depression of the 1930s annulled the initial benefit of their presence in the American economy.
The remedy was rounding up the Mexicans and returning them to Mexico. Figures indicate that less than 500,000 Mexicans were repatriated, including many of whom were American citizens. That situation is a lot like the situation today in rounding up undocumented Mexicans in the U.S. Santayana, the American Hispanic Harvard professor, had it right: those who do not learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat it.
This exodus of Mexicans trekking north is important in establishing the basic Mexican American population of today. Despite repatriation in the 1930s, the exodus added to the Mexican American population of the Conquest Generation, augmenting the U.S. Mexican American population considerably.
The third augmentation of the U.S. Mexican American population occurred between 1942 and 1962 with the Bracero Program—permitting an influx of about 1 million Mexicans to harvest American crops in the face of a shortage of American agricultural workers (off to war)—and to work in specialized employment categories such as millwrights, rolling-mill cutters, sheet shearers, and other steel mill categories. These specialty workers were contracted from the Mexican steel center in Monterrey, Mexico. At the same time, Mexico fielded,
the 201st Fighter Squadron (Escuadrón Aéreo de Pelea 201), a Mexican fightersquadron, part of the Mexican Expeditionary Air Forcethat aided the Allied war effort during World War II. The squadron was known by the nickname Aguilas Aztecas or "Aztec Eagles.” –Wikipedia
That Mexico was a key ally of the United States during World War II is lost in American amnesia—so much for “hands across the border” along which Donald Trump wants to build a wall should he be elected president of the United States. Que tonteria! What foolishness!
The Mexican American story is not a Mexican story; it’s an American story. Moreso since 1960 and the advent of “The Chicano Movement” and a people’s coming of age, asserting their rights as Americans. In my essay on “The Chicano Renaissance” (Journal of Social Casework, May 1971), I wrote:
In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan explains that “the medium is the message . . . that the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves— result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves.” Applying McLuhan’s proposition to the Chicano Movement, for example, we can see that the Chicano Movement is the medium for extending ourselves as Chicanos in American society, and, as such, the Chicano Movement becomes the message. Such slogans as Ya Basta, Venceremosand Chicano Power are only elements of the total message; they are simply part of the new scale introduced into Chicano affairs by each of our individual thrusts toward greater participation in American society. Indeed, the personal and social consequences of our extensions into American society have been the result of a new scale of values and aspirations that we have created with each extension of ourselves.
Via the Chicano Movement, Mexican Americans served notice to America that enough was enough; they were not going to be second-class citizens any more. Just as their forebears had done in resisting with arms the American occupation of their homeland after 1848, to emphasize their intent to achieve self-determination Chicanos staged school walkouts, blowouts, sit-ins, protests, civil disobedience, strikes, and defiant acts of non-compliance. In 1971, for example, Chicano students at the University of Texas at El Paso seized the administration building and held the President hostage for 36 hours by way of overcoming the intransigence of the university in establishing a Chicano Studies Program (“Blowout at the University of Texas at El Paso,” Newspaper Tree, December 9, 2013).
The Mexican flag is part of our patrimony, that’s why we carry the Mexican flag at protests—to remind people of American atrocities against us since 1848. This doesn’t mean we are ready to renounce our American citizenship—on the contrary, Mexican Americans are not only a transcendent group but are the most decorated of the American military during World War II and subsequent engagements. Of the 16 million American men and women in uniform during World War II, almost 1million were American Hispanics, principally Mexican Americans (see In America’s Defense, Department of Defense). At 90, I’m among the few surviving Mexican American World War II veterans, dying at the rate of 465 a day. By 2030 there won’t be a single World War II veteran alive.
It’s not thuggery Chicanos have been exhibiting at Trump rallies but acts of defiance at being characterized maliciously by Trump and his Trumpsters who are of recent immigrant vintage compared to Mexican Americans who are of the Americas and whose indigenous forebearers stretch back on the continent some 20,000 years. Most of the time Trump does not know whereof he speaks, for when he speaks about Mexicans an inchoate rush of incoherent babble gushes out in torrents of malice from his persona as “imp of the perverse.” The defining feature of the Mexican American story is the diaspora created by the U.S. War against Mexico.
Felipe de Ortego y Gasca is Scholar in Residence (Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, Public Policy), at Western New Mexico University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Cultural Studies, Texas State University System-Sul Ross.
Addendum:
Keynote Address presented at the commemoration for Martin Luther King, Jr., Texas Woman’s University, January 15, 1991, by Dr. Ortego y Gasca:
In a Letter to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I wrote:
Dear Dr. King:
I was flattered and honored when asked to speak on the occasion of your birth. I said “yes” immediately, but on reflection wondered what I could say that has not already been said? Thinking on it, I remembered a poem by John Milton on the death of his dear friend whom he identified as Lycidas in the verse. It is a paean to his departed comrade and begins with “Once more, O ye laurels.” I realized how apt an epigraph that was in commemorating this day the nation has set aside to remember you and your work.
And though you were honored with the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1967, and your work was respected abroad, you received few laurels from your countrymen, save from those who rallied to your cause. But it was not “your” cause you bore, but the cause of humanity. Many did not realize that then, and far too many still do not.
Yes, forty-seven of the states have memorialized your work by establishing holidays in your honor, but mean-spiritedness persists in three. And in those states that have a Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, things are not as they could be. But you know that already. Perhaps you knew even then–in the tumultuous days of yore–that the seeds of brotherhood sometimes take longer to bloom in some hearts than in others.
Iknow about equality. Just as you knew about equality. We traveled that road together. Not on the actual stones, but on the shoulders of that same road. For blacks and browns could not set foot thereon when we were young. Though I was born a few years earlier than you, we are of the same generation, the same clay.
The schools of our day segregated us by color. Mexican Americans and Indians were placed in schools separate from blacks and whites. Our names were changed from Carlos to Charlie and Felipe to Philip. I repeated the first grade twice because I started school speaking only Spanish. School counselors in the Mexican-Dixon region of the Hispanic south-west did not encourage Mexicans in academic pursuits. Instead I was shunted into shop courses, manual training to ready me for the work Mexican Americans were expected to perform. I dropped out of school in 1943 after the 9th grade and joined the Marines. I survived World War II.
And if we spoke Spanish on the school grounds, we were punished corporally and detained after school until we mended our ways and became good English-speaking Americans. But you know that. Just as you know that we could not eat in white restaurants either. We too were segregated in movie theaters, and institutions like the YMCA had “Mexican quotas”–if they let us in at all. In cities like El Paso and San Antonio where we were the majority populations, we had no political visibility–poll taxes and English literacy requirements kept us politically impotent.
Municipal cemeteries would not bury us. Like blacks, we too had separate burial grounds. Except for those of us who did not look Mexican, miscegenation laws kept us separated from Anglos. The 1947 Westminster v. Mendez ruling in California and the 1948 Delgado v. Bastrop ruling in Texas declared segregated schools for Mexican Americans in those states unconstitutional. Both cases were critical precedents in the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education. Many schools, however, defied that Supreme Court ruling.
It is the same road our people have traveled. In 1896, the year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that blacks could be separated from whites and some 10 years before the founding of the NAACP, Mexican Americans organized the Alianza Hispano Americana to help them in their half-century struggle for civil rights. In 1929 another Mexican American organization came into being, LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens), to pick up the baton for Mexican American civil rights. Yes, our people have traveled the same road.