Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature 9780292793538

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Border Renaissance

History, Culture, and Society Series Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS) University of Texas at Austin

Border Renaissance The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature john morán gonzález

University of Texas Press    Austin

Copyright © 2009 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2009 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html ♾ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

González, John Morán. Border renaissance : the Texas centennial and the emergence of Mexican American literature / John Morán González. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (CMAS history, culture, & society series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-292-71978-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. American literature—Mexican American authors—History and criticism.  2. Mexican Americans in literature.  3. Race in literature.  4. Texas—In literature.  5. Mexican Americans—Intellectual life—20th century.  6. Literature and history—Texas.  7. Texas—Centennial celebrations, etc.  I. Title. PS153.M4G59  2009 810.9'86872—dc22 2009006973

I dedicate this book, and all my tomorrows, to Patricia García, amor mía, and m’ija Angelita Annette, the loves of my life.

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Contents



Preface and Acknowledgments 

ix



Introduction Renaissance in the Borderlands 

1

Chapter 1 “Texanizing Texans”: Texas Centennial Discourses of Racial Pedagogy  29 Chapter 2 “This Is Our Grand Lone Star State”: Reclaiming Texas History in María Elena Zamora O’Shea’s El Mesquite  67 Chapter 3 Forging Bicultural U.S. Citizenship: LULAC and the Making of Mexican American Aesthetics  95 Chapter 4 A Mexico-Texan Interlude: Américo Paredes, Border Modernity, and the Demise of Patriarchal Anticolonialism  127 Chapter 5 Mujeres Fronterizas: Writing Tejana Agency into the Texas Centennial Era  157

Epilogue From Centennial to Sesquicentennial 

193

viii  Border Renaissance



Notes 



Works Cited 



Index 

203

243

231

Preface and Acknowledgments

For many years while growing up in my hometown of Brownsville, Texas, the family car would daily pass a tombstone-like historical monument at the entrance to the middle-class subdivision just off Paredes Line Road, where my family lived. Once, out of curiosity, we stopped long enough to read the inscription: The Battle of Resaca de la Palma was fought here May 9, 1846, and the defeat of the Mexican Army under General Mariano Arista by the United States troops under General Zachary Taylor made good the claim of Texas to the territory between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. (Why Stop? 65)

At the time I didn’t give much thought to the course of Manifest Destiny that had made my family “Mexican American,” even if its manifestation as the unequal conflict between the United States and Mexico had started here and a few miles up the road at the Palo Alto battlefield. Nor did I consider the possibility that the gory ghosts of the fallen might decide to cross the resaca one night and pay the González family a visit at number 13. I was more concerned with doing my seventh-grade Texas history homework than with the fenced-off battlefield just beyond the marker, which I had heard was used once a year for a polo tournament, a charity fundraiser. The rest of the time the restless wind swept the tall grass while the granite sentinel kept silent watch. I remember other encounters with roadside markers throughout my childhood. The one at the roadside rest stop on Highway 77 just south of the pueblito of Sarita became a familiar site on my family’s trips between

  Border Renaissance

the lower Rio Grande Valley and San Antonio. Somehow it didn’t seem coincidental that the rest stop sat on the campsite occupied by General Taylor in 1846 as his army moved to change my ancestors’ citizenship. Traveling south from San Antonio, we retraced his conquering footsteps to the valley unimpeded. Journeying northward from Brownsville, we ran the Border Patrol gauntlet of the Sarita checkpoint a few miles south of the rest stop, just when my siblings and I really needed to use the restroom. “American citizens?” “Yes, sir.” Each of us would have to reply in turn as the agent gauged if our English-language skills and “American” mannerisms corresponded to his agency’s notions of just who qualified as a legitimate U.S. citizen. My sister still faces more scrutiny there than her lighter-skinned brothers, even if these days the Department of Homeland Security agent is just as likely to be Mexican American as Anglo. As if this checkpoint and others like it throughout south Texas did not emphasize this point enough, I learned a particular version of Texas history that molded the very landscape into a narrative made familiar through repetition across thousands of miles of Texas highways. Mostly, I learned that Indians had been defeated here and Mexicans defeated there, with Anglos triumphant everywhere, building churches and railroads and towns and civilization in general. The history presented on the roadside markers seemed to commemorate a great many violent events that shaped Texas but did not mention those that, even in days past, did not flatter the Anglo-Texan sense of self-righteousness in “settling the frontier.” Many years and many miles later, I became curious as to why that narrative of Texas writ along the roadside came to mark the landscape, leading me to the historical moment when that impulse took its now-familiar shape: the Texas Centennial. The roadside markers erected for the celebration in 1936 remain the most tangible aspect of the Centennial for today’s Texans. Given the demographic predictions that within several decades Mexican Americans will constitute over half the state’s population, the question of how Texas, and therefore Texas history, might change the contours of this roadside narrative remains unanswered. This is not to deny that the roadside historical marker program did eventually incorporate changes brought about by the civil rights movement and, later, by its depoliticized successor, multiculturalism. The markers erected after the centennial commemoration of the U.S. Civil War toned down the Anglo-Saxon triumphalism, while more recent markers acknowledge

Preface and Acknowledgments  xi

the accomplishments of women, African Americans, Native Americans, and Mexican Americans. However, future Texas history is a qualitative, not a quantitative, issue that no mere proliferation of historical markers will resolve. If the future of roadside Texas history in a majority Mexican American state awaits an answer, then this book is about how Mexican Americans lived with Texas history during the Centennial celebration of Texas independence in 1936, when the state’s official history unequivocally cast my ancestors and other Texas Mexicans outside the imagined community of Texas and the United States. Since the initiation of the roadside historical marker program to commemorate the Texas Centennial of 1936, Mexican Americans have been slowly but surely taking back the property and civil rights so often lost in the aftermath of the Texas Revolution and the U.S.-Mexican War. A Mexican American middle class has emerged from the twentieth century, one that is reclaiming in some small measure the south Texas landscape lost generations before. Born around the time of the Centennial celebration, my parents epitomized that trend with the purchase of the house near the marker in Brownsville. At the northern end of the Nueces Strip, my wife’s parents fulfilled their lifelong dream of owning a ranchito near Corpus Christi, where some of the most violent and egregious seizures of Texas-Mexican land had taken place during the nineteenth century in the Nueces River basin. Their generation grew up imbibing the ideals of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the middleclass Mexican American civil rights organization that figures prominently in my book. In large measure, my parents’ generation lived according to LULAC’s ideals of political and social integration into U.S. civil society while resisting complete cultural and linguistic assimilation. Somewhat insulated from the more radical cultural nationalism of the Chicano movement, they continue LULAC’s ideals into the twenty-first century. Yet at the dawn of the new millennium, huge problems of structural inequality continue to plague loosely joined transnational Latino communities of Mexican Americans and other Latinos, especially recent immigrants from Mexico, Latin America, and the Caribbean. These communities suffer some of the highest poverty and unemployment rates in the United States and face ongoing efforts to criminalize their very presence within the United States, a presence that presages a culturally different, but no less democratic, future for the United States that many have been needlessly led to fear. This fear has already recast Latinas and Latinos, whether citizens or not, as racially and culturally undesirable foreigners. As the erection of militarized border fences along the Rio Grande in the

xii  Border Renaissance

name of homeland security demonstrates, the story of securing civil and human rights for Latinos and Latinas is far from over, despite claims to the contrary. Yet, as the writers examined in this book suggest, the path to social justice lies in the narration of a people’s heartfelt struggles. I hope the following pages will serve to illuminate the paths already traveled and help guide those who will create the paths to come. I have many colleagues, friends, and family members to thank for helping me along my writing journey. Foremost are my wonderful colleagues in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin, who have made my return to Texas the most enjoyable aspect of my professional career so far: Michael Adams, Phil Barrish, Mary Blockley, Brian Bremen, Mia Carter, Evan Carton, James Cox, Ann Cvetkovich, Brian Doherty, Linda Ferreira-Buckley, Don Graham, Barbara Harlow, Jackie Henkel, Tony Hilfer, Neville Hoad, Cole Hutchinson, Meta Jones, Van Jordan, Martin Kevorkian, Wayne Lesser, James Loehlin, Lisa Moore, Gretchen Murphy, Wayne Rebhorn, Elizabeth Richmond-Garza, John Rumrich, Frank Whigham, Jennifer Wilks, Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski, Marjorie Woods, and Helena Woodward. A special thanks goes to Lars Hinrichs for his help with the International Phonetics Alphabet. Department Chairs Jim Garrison and Liz Cullingford have been exemplars of faculty support, while Susana Castillo, Cecilia Smith-Morris, and Amy Stewart have provided extraordinary staff support. Rolando HinojosaSmith has been generous with his encyclopedic knowledge of south Texas history and his keen editorial skills. Domino Renee Perez and Oscar Casares have provided much warm friendship and critical intellectual support. I am indebted to José E. Limón in too many ways to mention. The Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS) has been my second home on campus, thanks to Richard Flores, Dolores García, John McKiernan González, Gloria González López, David Leal, Martha Menchaca, Deborah Paredez, Charles Ramírez-Berg, Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez, Richard Valencia, Angela Valenzuela, Emilio Zamora, and all the support staff. I am grateful to other colleagues at UT Austin: Nhi Lieu, Kim Alidio, Laurie Green, Frank Guridy, Jossiana Arroyo Martínez, and Hélène Tissieres. I would also like to thank colleagues scattered throughout academia, especially Ramón Saldívar, Ben V. Olguín, Javier Rodríguez, Norma Alarcón, Michael Soto, Norma Cantú, Louis Mendoza, Andrea Tinnemayer, Dane Johnson, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, José Aranda, Cecilia Ballí, Josie Saldaña, Jim Lee, Aamir Mufti, Saloni Mathur, Rafael Pérez-Torres, María Eugenia Cotera, Vincent Pérez, John-Michael Rivera, Constance

Preface and Acknowledgments  xiii

Svidler, David Gutiérrez, Antonia Castañeda, Arturo Madrid, David Montejano, and Ben Heber Johnson. Projects such as this book are made possible by institutions as well as individuals, and, apart from UT Austin, none has been more important to me than the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project. Thanks to the Recovery Project under the direction of Nicolás Kanellos, my work and that of many others who analyze the literary productions of Latinas and Latinos between 1492 and 1960 have found an intellectually vibrant home. I have been privileged to have worked with a fantastic set of graduate students over the years, including Jackie Cuevas, Julie Dowling, Laura Halperin, Olga Herrera, Kathy Jurado, Patricia Kim-Rajal, Jennifer Nájera, Virginia Raymond, Ulises Silva, and Alberto Varón. I owe Laura Padilla an extra debt of gratitude for research extraordinaire in the archives of the University of New Mexico. Special thanks go to Christina García for prepublication work and to Carlos Amador for checking translations. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. The librarians at the University of Texas Libraries also deserve great thanks: Lindsay Schell of the Perry-Castañeda Library, Margo Gutierrez, Michael Hironymous, Christian Kelleher, Pamela Mann of the Benson Latin American Collection; Kathryn Kenefick and Aryn Glazier of the Center for American History; and the staff at the Harry S. Ransom Center. I also wish to thank the dedicated staffs at the Catholic Archives of Texas, the Southwestern Writers Collection at the Albert B. Alkek Library of Texas State University, the Texas State Library and Archives, and the libraries of Our Lady of the Lake University and the Oblate School of Theology. Additional thanks to Professor Cecilia Aros Hunter and the South Texas Archives and Special Collections of the James C. Jernigan Library at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, and to Patrick Lemelle and the Institute of Texan Cultures of the University of Texas at San Antonio. Special thanks also go to Tom Kreneck and Grace Charles of the Special Collections and Archives Division of the Mary & Jeff Bell Library at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, and Rachel Roberts of the Dallas Historical Society. Thanks go to Lana Boussidan, administrator of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Museum in Austin, for her help with the Centennial dioramas. Mil gracias to Kim Smith for the wonderful jacket art. I gratefully acknowledge permission to publish materials from the following institutions: the Estate of Américo Paredes, the Center for American History and the Benson Latin American Collection of the Univer-

xiv  Border Renaissance

sity of Texas at Austin, UTSA’s Institute of Texan Cultures, Texas A&M Press, and Arte Público Press. I also wish to thank Arte Público Press for permission to use previously published material from an article about Jovita González. The University of Texas Press has been a joy to work with, and I give thanks to Theresa May, the manuscript reviewers, the Advisory Board, and production staff for their professional guidance and expertise. A generous University Co-operative Society Subvention Grant awarded by the University of Texas at Austin helped bring this publication to light. I would like to acknowledge the generous financial support of the University of Texas at Austin through the English Department, the Center for Mexican American Studies, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Office of the Vice President for Research. I am also indebted to the Woodrow Wilson National Foundation for a critical year of leave time. As inspiration comes from antepasados (forebears) both kith and kin, I wish to honor the memory of Linda Limón and Laura Romero. Finally, this book would have never been written without the love and patience de mi familia: mis padres Juan y Matiana González, Paul and Mari González, Mónica González, Pedro and Angelita García, Pam and Joey Delgado, Kit and Leslie Ashby. Great big hugs go to Lynn, Pierce, and Lillian Ashby, Paul Ryan Delgado, Pablo Abiel, and José Cáleb González. And Mr. Beau, I hope there’s asparagus in bichon frisé heaven.

Border Renaissance

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Introduction

Renaissance in the Borderlands

For nearly two hundred years the Texas-Mexicans lived knowing very little and caring less of what was going on in the United States. They looked southward for all the necessities and pleasures in life. Mexican newspapers brought them news of the outside, their children were educated in Mexican schools, Spanish was the language of the people, Mexican currency was used altogether . . . these people had lived so long in their communities that it was home to them, and home to them meant Mexico. They lived happily ignorant that they were foreigners in a foreign land. Life Along the Border, Jovita González

The Texas Centennial of 1936 was an unlikely watershed in the development of Mexican American literature. The huge statewide celebration of the independence of Texas from Mexico in 1836 sparked an outpouring of literature from the one group of Texans arguably most marginalized by the event: Texas Mexicans.1 The media frenzy that blanketed the state with innumerable paeans to the Anglo-Texan heroes of the Alamo and San Jacinto resounded in the ears of Texas Mexicans like a reproach and a goad. The reproach lay in the Centennial’s racialized representations of Mexicans as the main obstacle to Anglo-Texan freedom in the past and as a persistent social problem for the state in the present. As the modern iteration of a long Anglo-Texan tradition of anti-Mexican representations, Centennial discourses spurred Texas-Mexican writers to formulate literary responses that critiqued the link between racist representations and racial domination while envisioning a prominent and honored placed for their community within the Lone Star State. Prodding onward a process that had been under way since the turn of the century, the Texas Centennial served as an improbable catalyst in crystallizing a new, politi-

  Border Renaissance

cized ethnic identity—the Mexican American—as articulated through an emergent aesthetic practice—Mexican American literature. The result was what Jovita González, a key figure in this book, termed a Renaissance in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, an aesthetic and political rebirth of people of Mexican descent as Mexican Americans struggling for civil rights through the idiom of a culturally pluralist U.S. nationalism. The concept of a bilingual, bicultural Mexican American identity oriented toward the United States was altogether a new development in the cultural life of people of Mexican descent within the United States. Before the 1930s, neither Mexican Americans nor Mexican American literature existed in the descriptive manner typically assigned to those terms today. Rather, a century of racialized conflict waged upon ethnic Mexicans had ensured that their cultural identity and cultural productions would remain defiantly antagonistic to U.S. nationalism’s production of Mexican racial and cultural difference. After the Texas Revolution and the U.S.-Mexican War, ethnic Mexicans found themselves cast as the inconvenient remainder of conquest, as the living excess of Manifest Destiny’s dream of new virgin lands. Occupying a social position characterized not so much by invisibility as by what the postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha has termed supplementarity, ethnic Mexicans experienced their interpolation into U.S. nationalism as racialized and gendered subjects who resided within the legal discourse of citizenship yet existed outside dominant formulations of nationalist agency. This partial presence of ethnic Mexicans within U.S. nationalism manifested itself in many ways. In terms of nationality, many supposed Mexicans were U.S. citizens yet were routinely denied their civil rights, legislatively stripped of their economic resources, and denied the legitimacy of their cultural practices. In political terms, ethnic Mexicans were voters to be herded by political machines, yet not a constituency whose interests its elected representatives would champion. In economic terms, ethnic Mexicans were useful laborers paid a fraction of what white labor received for the same work—skilled or unskilled—but also undesirables who made for neither good neighbors nor good citizens. In legal terms, ethnic Mexicans were white and thus not subject to statutory discrimination directed against African Americans; nonetheless, they suffered juridical, administrative, and customary discrimination justified upon legalized linguistic, hygienic, and socioeconomic grounds that functioned in a manner akin to Jim Crow. While the idea of ethnic Mexicans as a racially oppressed, culturally specific community within the United States had taken deep root by the

Introduction  

late nineteenth century, the concept of the Mexican American would have been largely unfamiliar to early narrators of this experience.2 Prior to the twentieth century, the vast majority of people of Mexican descent in the United States, regardless of citizenship, considered themselves puros mexicanos despite living under U.S. sovereignty. Even the legal fact of U.S. citizenship meant little to the communal self-conceptualization of those with that status, and much less to those without it. Articulating this sense of communal oppositional consciousness in their ballads of cultural conflict, the corrido singers of the Texas-Mexican border region sang stirring songs about the violent clash between mexicanos and los americanos. In the corridos, the key distinction between the ethnic Mexican hero and his Anglo-American antagonists was not any formal legal status of citizenship but rather differences in cultural practices and class standing that demarcated an unjust color line of unequal social power.3 This sentiment was voiced in print as much as in the oral tradition. A perusal of Spanish-language newspapers throughout the U.S. Southwest reveals a strong sense of communal disidentification with U.S. nationalism. Poetry submitted by readers elegized the loss of Mexican cultural identity, while editorials clamored for governmental recognition of Mexican land titles, human rights, and labor struggles.4 What the literary historian A. Gabriel Meléndez has demonstrated for the Spanish-language print culture of Nuevomexicanos after 1848 can usefully be extended to characterize the oppositional cultural stance of periodiqueros (journalists) from California to Texas: “Newspapers became the principal means for Nuevomexicanos to tap the wellspring of their Indo-Hispano literary and expressive sensibility and share it publicly via the printed word. . . . In essence, newspaper publication released the creative impulse of Mexicano thought in the U.S. Southwest”(7). In addition to providing a public forum through which to communicate, debate, and confront the ebbing of mexicano social agency as the cultural and institutional phases of the conquest proceeded apace, Spanish-language newspapers fostered strong transnational linkages with the politics and culture of a Latin America confronted with U.S. imperial ambitions.5 The concept of the Mexican American as the naming of a communal experience and cultural identification is also absent from the nascent literary tradition in English produced by people of Mexican descent during the late nineteenth century. María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, the author of two novels published in the 1870s and 1880s, variously described her beleaguered community as “native Californians,” “Spano-Americans” in the

  Border Renaissance

hemispheric sense, or simply “the conquered.” This last term highlights the conditions of colonial difference imposed upon the Mexican-origin community within the United States despite their designation as U.S. citizens by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Rather, as Ruiz de Burton’s novels Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) and The Squatter and the Don (1885) demonstrate, the very government that pledged to protect Californio property and citizens instead expressed the logic of colonial domination in its dispossession by due process of both Californio land and rights.6 In the context of a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. nationalism that racialized the key terms of civic inclusion, cultural producers within the ethnic Mexican community framed the marginalized social reality of Mexican life in the United States as one in which a cultural formation identified as both Mexican and American was simply untenable as a viable strategy of personal identification, communal survival, and strategic resistance. Not until the Texas Centennial era of the 1930s did a significant number of individuals who now identified themselves as Mexican Americans begin to articulate this struggle for civil rights and state resources. They did so through the cultural triad of the selective transculturation of U.S. legal and political practices, the strategic adoption of bilingualism in English and Spanish, and the literary production of history, fiction, and poetry. For nearly all of the Texas-Mexican writers highlighted in this book— María Elena Zamora O’Shea, Rubén Rendón Lozano, Roberto Félix Salazar, Américo Paredes, Alice Dickerson Montemayor, Jovita González, and the numerous literary contributors to the LULAC News—this trinity of cultural strategies became a crucial point of reference, if not an outright goal. As the first generation to be exposed fully to the Texas-Mexican oral tradition of cultural conflict and the U.S. nationalist pedagogy of the public school system, these Texas-Mexican authors lived the profound contradictions not only between cultural values made antagonistic in a context of racial violence, but also as partial subjects formed between state discourses of democratic citizenship and widespread social practices of white supremacy. Through the merging of cultural practices long considered incompatible in the context of borderlands conflict, many of the Texas-Mexican authors discussed in my book hoped to transform their community’s partial citizenship into what the historian David Montejano has termed “effective citizenship,” or the ability to strategically claim and effectively use the established political and legal procedures of the state on par with other citizens or group of citizens (260).

Introduction  

The formation of a bilingual, bicultural Mexican American subject as a socioeconomic phenomenon is most closely associated with the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a Mexican American civil rights group founded in 1929. Although LULAC has been primarily considered a civil rights organization concerned with political and legal strategies for combating discrimination against Mexican Americans, I emphasize the central role that literary aesthetics played in LULAC’s greater cultural project of forging a bilingual, bicultural Mexican American subject. This nascent sense of Mexican American identity was critically articulated through the creative writing published in the LULAC News, the organizational newsletter, as well as in the few works that were published through other venues.7 While the many editors of the LULAC News over the decade of the 1930s never issued an explicit manifesto for Mexican American cultural productions, nonetheless the consistent attention they gave to creative literature in terms of allotted space in practically every issue indicated more than a casual or coincidental interest in literary aesthetics. An implicit recognition of the centrality of expressive culture to the production of subjectivities guided their regular inclusion of poetry, short stories, and translations. In this sense, the form of the LULAC News itself reflected the very bilingual, bicultural aesthetic they advocated in the merging of English- and Spanish-language periodical conventions. LULAC proved to be not only an early advocate for Mexican American civil rights, but also a central organizational locus for the development of Mexican American literary aesthetics, listing many of the writers of this book as members or supporters. González, Lozano, Montemayor, Salazar, and various other Mexican American writers published creative or historical work in the LULAC News, one of the few periodicals consistently publishing literature by Mexican Americans. In the Centennial edition of Texian Who’s Who, Zamora O’Shea proudly listed her membership in the “Latin-Amer. League” (348). Only Paredes kept aloof from the organization, although he was well aware of its existence.8 In a real sense, these Texas-Mexican writers and the literature they created were part of a new social movement, albeit a liberal middle-class one different in ideology, methods, and goals from the more familiar Chicano movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.9 Like the literature of almost every social movement, the texts written by writers actively involved in LULAC exhibited the silences, contradictions, and outright disagreements among LULAC’s factions (particularly along gendered lines) as well as those the organization had with Anglo-Texas.

  Border Renaissance

The reconceptualization of Mexican American identity occurred in large measure through the Texas-Mexican literary response to the early twentieth-century Anglo-Texan production of Mexican difference that I term Centennial discourses. Texas-Mexican poetry and narratives of the 1930s reveal a profound engagement with discourses of colonial difference constituting the very essence of the Centennial, which modernized and recapitulated the numerous and pervasive anti-Mexican discourses that had historically circulated throughout Anglo-Texas. While the direct involvement of Texas Mexicans in Centennial events varied widely, many of the writers discussed here experienced the celebrations firsthand or actively participated in them; in any case, none escaped their omnipresent media coverage. Although the Centennial was not always explicitly mentioned in such texts as Zamora O’Shea’s El Mesquite, Paredes’s George Washington Gómez, and Caballero (which González coauthored with Margaret Eimer), nonetheless its discourses formed the invisible field of textual force influencing the literary imagination of Texas-Mexican authors during the 1930s.

Centennial Discourses and the Making of Mexican Difference Grappling with Centennial discourses of power and knowledge that circumscribed the social contours of their daily existence, Texas-Mexican authors interrogated the two foundational pillars of that commemoratory rhetoric: history and modernity. Selectively assigning vastly different roles to Anglo-Texan and Texas-Mexican communities in the making of Texas history, Centennial discourses celebrated the historical emergence of Anglo-Texas into modernity through the colonial difference of Mexicans. While the anniversary discourse cast African Americans and Native Americans in similarly subordinated positions, Texas Mexicans served as the crucial foil of colonial difference past and present that made legible the Anglo-Texan narrative of racial progress. Complementary rather than oppositional in their operations, history and modernity formed the chiastic modalities of Anglo-Texan identity within Centennial discourses, which construed Texas history as the fulfillment of modernity’s promise: autonomous subjectivity in the guise of rugged frontier individualism; the development of complex, large-scale corporate enterprises such as cattle ranching, agribusiness, and the oil industry; and the establishment of a white supremacist racial order in law and custom. Bringing together all the elements that made Texas modern, Centennial discourses made

Figure I.1. Mexicans provided the counterpoint to Anglo-Texan modernity in

Centennial discourses of progress, as in this photograph from 1940 contrasting San Antonio’s American future-in-the-present and its Mexican past-in-the-present. (San Antonio Light Collection, UTSA’s Institute of Texan Cultures, No. L-2203-D. Courtesy of the Hearst Corporation.)

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racial sense of the lived Texas present of the 1930s that legitimated the legal and extralegal dispossession, disenfranchisement, and exploitation of Texas Mexicans and other people of color.10 If, as the anthropologist Richard Flores has argued in Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol, the Alamo became the articulating discursive nexus of what he terms “the Texas Modern,” codifying the capitalist reordering of Anglo-Mexican social relations along great divides of race, class, and culture between 1880 and 1920, then the Centennial can be thought as the master narrative of Texas modernity that articulated all the sites, events, stories, and symbols of the colonial difference of Mexicans into a coherent teleological narrative of AngloTexan domination.11 Regarding the Centennial as the master narrative of Texan modernity enables an examination of its discourses as the enunciative juncture of a state that had been, and always considered itself, a nation. According to Bhabha, projects of nation building like the Centennial produce nationalist subjects in the narration of “the people.” Situated between the pedagogical task of locating the historical origins of national identity and the performative moment of the present whose lived contingencies reproduce that nationalist identity as immediately modern rather than merely antiquarian, the nation, understood as the unisonace of its constitutive elements, emerges from the powerful processes of signification generated between the pedagogical imperative and the performative realization.12 Given the extreme class and social slippages brought about by modernity (most immediately experienced during the 1930s as the Great Depression), the strongest sense of a stable nationalist identity for AngloTexans came through Texas history and its narrative of unbridled racial triumphalism. Made a required course in public schools by the Texas legislature in the 1890s, Texas history as a central expression of AngloTexan power and knowledge formed the essential ideological substratum that legitimated the practice of white supremacy as an essential, constitutive element of Anglo-Texan subjectivity. As the historian David Gutiérrez has argued in his discussion of the discursive creation of the American West, the relatively quick phase of military conquest was followed by decades of the “construction of elaborate set[s] of rationales which are designed to explain,” through the victor’s writing of history, “why one group has conquered another” (“Significant,” 520). Writing histories to construct and prioritize categories of knowledge and agency, U.S. historians wielded great social power through their ability not only to interpret the past in a manner favorable to the conquerors, but also to pass off their

Introduction  

categorizations as being legitimate, disinterested knowledge. As Gutiérrez writes, “The critical aspect of the annexation of the West proved to be the power that conquest bestowed on Americans to explain what had occurred there” (“Significant,” 522). Yet even as Centennial discourses produced and legitimated an invidious Mexican difference in the service of domination, the necessary linguistic and cultural slippages between the pedagogical and performative aspects of nation signification created what Bhabha calls “minority discourse” as a critical commentary on the exclusionary principles inherent in the process of imagining national communities. As Bhabha writes, Minority discourse sets the act of emergence in the antagonistic inbetween of image and sign, the accumulative and the adjunct, presence and proxy. It contests genealogies of “origin” that lead to claims for cultural supremacy and historical priority. Minority discourse acknowledges the status of national culture—and the people—as a contentious, performative space of the perplexity of the living in the midst of the pedagogical representations of the fullness of life. (157)

In other words, minority discourse engages in the world-historical project of deconstructing regimes of colonial discourse and renegotiating the power relations that flow from such representations, a project that Texas-Mexican writers recognized as their task vis-à-vis Centennial discourses. They recognized history as the imaginative grounds upon which the parameters of national inclusion were formulated in Centennial discourses; hence, the explicit contestation of Anglo-Texan historiography became a fundamental strategy in their texts. If Texas history had been mobilized by generations of Anglo-Texans to deny that Texas Mexicans had any claim to either civil rights or historical recognition, then these Texas-Mexican writers, recognizing the linkage between the two, would work to assert claims to both. Mexican American literature became, in effect, the cultural front in efforts to claim not only the formal rights of citizenship, but also the symbolic capital and material resources adjudicated by civil society and the state. Yet the cultural work of early Mexican American literature went beyond a critique of anti-Mexican Centennial discourses to a far-reaching examination of their conditions of production, namely, border modernity, or the full capitalist incorporation of south Texas into national and global economies as a consequence of colonial duress. The Texas-Mexican community had indeed endured social changes at least as drastic as those

10  Border Renaissance

in the cosmopolitan metropoles of Europe and the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but these changes were not experienced as an organic outcome of autochthonous development, however welcome or unwelcome. Collectively experiencing the modernist fragmentation of space and time at gunpoint and point of sale, Texas Mexicans encountered border modernity as apocalyptic rupture, but in a different way from that theorized by metropolitan commentators of the day.13 In contrast to the perceived abridgments of individual agency or the fragmentation of individual subjectivities so central to accounts of metropolitan modernity, Texas-Mexican writers and intellectuals of the 1930s analyzed border modernity as a communally traumatic experience in which the radical social displacements of modern life developed within the dynamics of racial domination. The shock of the new for Texas Mexicans came as racial conflict, in the form of the erosion of civil rights, the loss of ancestral lands, and an explosion of violence, physical and symbolic, directed against them. Their emphatic demonization in Texas historiography and gradual erasure from Texas modernity dismally presaged the social death of their community. Unlike the utopian visions available to metropolitan modernists, border modernity held no promise for Texas Mexicans and yet nonetheless demanded a strategy for communal survival. By the 1930s, border modernity had made the social analysis of previous tejano organic intellectuals less relevant to the modern moment; the corridos of earlier generations offered neither viable modes of analysis nor clear lines of action even as this ballad form lingered in residual, increasingly commodified forms.14 Given the traumatic reorganization of everyday life for Texas Mexicans throughout the early twentieth century, the social conundrum was not so much about whether or not to be(come) modern as much as the necessity of negotiating the currents of border modernity that were rapidly changing labor relations, gender roles, linguistic and other cultural practices, and the very sense of a coherent, knowable communal identity. Indeed, the very attempt to reformulate a new Mexican American identity begged the question of whether or not civil rights and human dignity could be found within modernity’s destabilizations of communal identities and individual subjectivities as conceptualized within either the mexicano social world, the putative American one that forcibly displaced it, or the bicultural Mexican American hybrid that sought to supersede both. The response to the Centennial necessarily prompted an intense debate over the impact of border modernity on the Texas-Mexican community itself. Many of the Texas-Mexican authors discussed in this book were

Introduction  11

from long-standing border families who had lost landholdings to AngloAmerican newcomers after 1848 and had therefore experienced firsthand the economic and social decline of family and community fortunes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Out of those conditions emerged an intense debate about the future of the Texas-Mexican community: how should tejanos respond to the changed conditions of communal existence when their community itself had become increasingly stratified by class differences in the modern age? In what fashion were Texas Mexicans to participate in the white supremacist society of Texas and the United States? Would Americanization hold the answer to becoming fully realized social agents under U.S. nationalism? Or would Americanization only reinforce subordination to Anglo-American domination? Wrestling with the dilemma they inhabited, Texas-Mexican writers strove to generate new cultural practices that could more effectively represent a community increasingly fractured by the very social processes they sought to represent in their texts. The Centennial would serve to remind them that the representation of those social processes as Texas history mediated the terms of social agency in a state that thought itself a nation.

Texas Mexicans and Texas: A History of Violence On May l, 1936, Manuel Gutiérrez Castañeda, the editor of the Spanishlanguage newspaper La Voz in the small south Texas town of San Diego, bemoaned the apparent lack of interest in the Texas Centennial exhibited by the residents of Duval County. The key Centennial anniversaries of the Declaration of Texas Independence (March 2), the fall of the Alamo (March 6), and the final victory at San Jacinto (April 21) had come and gone with no special recognition by the townsfolk, prompting Gutiérrez Castañeda to ask his readers, “Y los Texanos de San Diego. Que hacemos? Acaso no hay patriotas en San Diego? Entonces, porqué no demostramos el entusiasmo igual al de los demás pueblos?” [And what of the Texans of San Diego. What are we doing? Are there no patriots in San Diego? Then, why don’t we show an enthusiasm equal to that of all the other towns?] (2). The distinct lack of enthusiasm, Gutiérrez Castañeda argued, could result in a significant loss of touristic revenue for the town, as many celebrations, including the main Texas Centennial Central Exposition in Dallas, were set to occur over the summer. As a stop on the Texas Mexican Railroad and being located at the intersection of two major roads, San

12  Border Renaissance

Diego stood to profit considerably by drawing tourist travel to the town with Centennial events. While undoubtedly keeping the economic benefits of local celebrations in mind, Gutiérrez Castañeda nonetheless emphasized the less tangible “deber cívico,” or civic duty, of his readers to commemorate the Centennial. Calling this duty “una necesidad imperiosa” [an imperative responsibility], Gutiérrez Castañeda volunteered himself, the mayor, and the superintendent of schools to organize San Diego’s Centennial events. Recognizing that these efforts would come to naught without the enthusiastic support of the town’s heavily Texas-Mexican population, Gutiérrez Castañeda appealed directly to them in the name of civic pride: “Tú eres texano. Deja que tu orgullo de serlo te mueva a obrar! Es tu celebración!; ¡Foméntala!” [You are a Texan. Let your pride move you to action! It’s your celebration! Support it!] (2). Yet the townsfolk’s apparent lack of interest in celebrating the Centennial indexed the vexed Texas-Mexican experience of Texas’s highly polarized racial order.15 Anglo-Texans customarily, and sometimes violently, refused to recognize Texas-Mexican membership in the imagined community of Texas and the United States, treating Texas Mexicans as foreigners, even those who came from a family of many generations’ standing in the state. Texas Mexicans widely maintained that the Centennial celebrations most emphatically did not include them. The troubling images of cruel, treacherous, and lazy Mexicans often appeared as the racial antithesis of freedom-loving, civilization-spreading Anglo-Texans in popular Centennial narratives. Given that similar images had long been used to justify social segregation and labor exploitation, the Texas-Mexican community’s silent boycott of the Centennial in San Diego reflected a critical awareness of the politics of modern representation, implicated as it was within the racial hierarchy that was Texas in the 1930s. Underlying the everyday experience of Texas Mexicans of social and economic discrimination in San Diego was the communal memory of cultural conflict and racial violence that had periodically punctuated life in the volatile Nueces Strip, the vast arid region of south Texas bounded by the Nueces River to the north and the Rio Grande to the south. While a shared experience for ethnic Mexicans throughout the U.S. Southwest, the unfolding of border modernity occurred with extraordinary rapidity along the Texas-Mexican borderlands, bringing about violent clashes and sharp contradictions that represent some of the most intense manifestations of cultural conflict within the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The U.S.-Mexican War had started

Introduction  13

over competing claims as to which river formed the international boundary, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had ended that war by drawing the border from the mouth of the Rio Grande near Brownsville, up the river to El Paso, across the Sonoran Desert of New Mexico and Arizona, and finally to the Pacific Ocean just south of San Diego, California. A profound economic, social, and cultural struggle flourished for a century in the formal peace that followed. If Anglo-Texans consistently remembered themselves as the oppressed victims of Mexican tyranny in Centennial discourses, thereby erasing their own subsequent oppression of Texas Mexicans, then the latter did not forget the protracted conflict that unfurled after the treaties of Velasco and Guadalupe Hidalgo, telling of the clashes in corridos and passing the stories along as bitter family heirlooms.16 And they knew the tales all too well. In the mid-1870s, vigilante Regulators scoured Nueces County (which included San Diego at the time) for “prowling Mexicans” suspected of committing heinous murders of AngloTexans (quoted in Taylor, 53). Turning a criminal investigation into a onesided race war, the vigilantes murdered many hapless victims as they made their way across the countryside, lynching Texas Mexicans on the slightest pretext and driving off the ones they did not kill. The mob violence was so great that even Captain Leander H. McNelly of the Texas Rangers, a man who had little compunction about applying la ley de fuga or torture to Mexicans, made known his dismay at the situation in a dispatch to Ranger headquarters in the state capital of Austin: “The acts committed by Americans in this section are horrible to relate. Many ranches have been plundered and burned and the people murdered or driven away; one of these parties confessed to me in Corpus Christi as having killed eleven (11) men, on their last raid” (quoted in Graham, 135–136). Many ranchos were burned to the ground, and only coincidence prevented the vigilantes from carrying out a plan to kill every Texas Mexican in Goliad County.17 Under color of avenging murders, controlling cattle rustling, and curtailing other so-called bandit activities, Anglo-Texans terrorized Texas-Mexican landowners throughout the region, forcing them to sell cheaply or otherwise abandon their holdings. The race war was in many ways a proxy for the economic displacement of Texas-Mexican landowners in the upper Nueces region. What was characterized by Anglo-Texans as the Skinning Wars over Mexican cattle rustling and hide peeling accelerated land transfer from small Texas-Mexican rancheros to large Anglo-Texan enterprises (Montejano, 53). Many of the properties would become “part of two large ranching operations, those of Mifflin

14  Border Renaissance

Kenedy and Richard King” (Graham, 133). Accelerating the wholesale descent of Texas Mexicans into the ranks of wage laborers, this ethnic cleansing of the Nueces basin burned itself into the collective memory of Texas-Mexican communities along the Nueces River. The Texas Mexicans along the Rio Grande at the southern end of the Nueces Strip had their own tragedias to tell.18 Although ushered into mercantile capitalism by Spanish colonization during the mid-eighteenth century, the border region had been only partially integrated into U.S. markets during the late nineteenth century. Despite the displacement of elite Texas-Mexican rancheros by Anglo-American ranchers during the second half of the nineteenth century, the relatively low level of integration into national markets did not significantly transform the nature of everyday life for most tejanos in the Nueces Strip. As Montejano has shown, periodic economic depressions temporarily switched the otherwise exportdriven ranching economy into a largely subsistence mode, cushioning the impact of capitalist market swings and delaying the complete realization of wage-labor relations. Corridos recorded the conflict between AngloTexans and Texas Mexicans during that period. The flash point, however, was not Anglo encroachment upon the everyday operations of TexasMexican civil society but rather the racialized operations of the U.S. legal system, particularly as it functioned in its repressive mode. While the law dispossessed and discriminated, often violently through the actions of the hated rinches (Texas Rangers), nonetheless its operation did not significantly transform Texas-Mexican civil society of home, work, and worship. Civil society remained semiautonomous, removed from overt Anglo-American influence except for the thorny matters of landownership and labor relations on Anglo-owned ranches. What Montejano terms the “peace structure” of the era required the subordination of ethnic Mexicans to Anglo-American authority in law and politics and an accommodation among Anglo and Texas-Mexican elites, but Anglos did not have the wherewithal to impose major cultural changes (34). The late nineteenth-century social world of south Texas that generated the corrido heroes and narratives was thus a starkly polarized world in the sense that U.S. institutions of civil society—religious, educational, and civic—only indirectly touched the everyday lives of Texas Mexicans. The face of the patrón might have changed, but even the Anglo patrones largely adopted Mexican culture, and Spanish remained the dominant language of the region. In essence, Texas-Mexican civil society along the border remained relatively intact through the end of the nineteenth century, even as tejano elites were displaced at the northern end of the Nueces Strip and reached

Introduction  15

accommodations within the new power structures at the southern end. One implication of this accommodation was that Texas Mexicans, especially those within the Nueces Strip, continued to identify themselves politically and culturally with Mexico. Not until the completion of the St. Louis, Texas and Mexico Railroad into Brownsville in 1904 did the Texas-Mexican communities of the lower Rio Grande Valley experience such a complete transformation of everyday life. The arrival of the railroad in the valley not only ended the region’s economic isolation, but also foretold the end of a Mexican way of life on the border that had endured for over fifty years after the U.S. annexation. Aided by the invention of the refrigerated boxcar, the railroad transformed the region’s economy by providing a fast and reliable distribution network for agricultural products, a development that made the previously dry and remote flatlands of the Rio Grande delta valuable for commercial agricultural cultivation. The railroad also facilitated the migration of numerous white Midwesterners to the valley, intensifying the redistribution of land and political power to Anglos and creating a disenfranchised Texas-Mexican working class as wage-labor relations became gradually normalized throughout the region. The first thirty years of the twentieth century saw the often-violent full-scale incorporation of south Texas, and particularly the lower Rio Grande Valley, into national markets and U.S. civil society. Looking to protect their economic interests, the newly arrived Anglo farmers demanded publicly financed infrastructural services that local county and municipal governments had seldom hitherto provided, such as paved roads, public schools, and regional irrigation canals. Such projects constituted a model of government redistribution of resources for the common good that had not existed during the late nineteenth-century ascendancy of ranching, when the cattle barons in control of county governments did not need such infrastructural improvements for their economic profitability.19 To wrest county governments out of the hands of ranchers, agricultural interests formed Good Government Leagues to denounce Texas-Mexican voters, the key to victory for the political machines of the region over the previous five decades. In the guise of breaking machine power, these Good Government Leagues explicitly targeted the TexasMexican vote for disenfranchisement. The implementation of a poll tax (1902), the state Democratic Party’s establishment of White Man’s Primaries (1904), and the enforcement of citizenship, language, and literacy requirements for voting and jury duty effectively disempowered the Texas-Mexican community as a viable political bloc across much of the

16  Border Renaissance

state.20 The simultaneous establishment of customary racial segregation meant that the benefits of this Progressive model of community improvement accrued largely on the Anglo side of the color line, leaving Texas Mexicans to occupy a subordinate political and social position within the emergent commercial agricultural economy of the countryside and the growing class of white-collar professionals in the towns. Between 1900 and 1930, the “peace structure” along the border that had previously accommodated Anglo-American newcomers to the landed tejano elite during the late nineteenth century crumbled before the large influx of white Midwesterners unused to, and disdainful of, any social accommodations with what they considered inferior, nonwhite races. As landownership and political power shifted from the old-timers to the newcomers, customary racial segregation became solidly ensconced in south Texas except in border towns such as Brownsville and Laredo, where the old elites, along with a Texas-Mexican merchant middle class, held some sway. Even in border towns, however, the absolute racial differentiation of the color line radically altered the quotidian life of ethnic Mexicans regardless of class standing. Texas Mexicans across the state found themselves increasingly disenfranchised in political life, marginalized in economic development, and segregated in social life. Just a decade after the railroad’s arrival, the harsh experience of racial segregation and wage labor had become an everyday reality for the ethnic Mexican community at the southern end of the Nueces Strip. The Borderlands War of 1915 erupted throughout the lower Rio Grande Valley forty years after the ethnic cleansing of the Upper Nueces Strip and just two decades before the Centennial. Seeking to reverse their drastic economic and social losses, small bands of Texas-Mexican rancheros and townspeople staged an armed uprising against AngloTexan domination using hit-and-run guerrilla tactics.21 Far from being the passive, unmotivated Mexican laborer so central to white supremacist ideologies of the region, los sediciosos (the seditionists) gave notice that they would react forcefully against the invidious transformation of their everyday lives. An irredentist manifesto linked by U.S. authorities to los sediciosos, provocatively titled El plan de San Diego, called for the restoration of Mexican sovereignty throughout the U.S. Southwest.22 Inspired by the overthrow of the repressive administration of President Porfirio Diaz by the Mexican Revolution, this revolutionary plan called for an uprising of Texas Mexicans, blacks, and other people of color against the Anglo-American occupiers of the Southwest. All Anglo males over sixteen years of age were to be summarily executed. Once victory had been

Introduction  17

achieved, the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Colorado would become an independent Mexican republic. Large parts of the Southwest would be returned to the Apache and other Native American tribal nations while African Americans would carve their own country out of six states bordering Texas to the north and east.23 While no consensus has emerged among historians about a verifiable link between El plan de San Diego and los sediciosos, nonetheless the manifesto and the insurgent tejano group embodied an expressly antiracist militancy that profoundly frightened the Anglo-Texan populace. Nominally led by the Texas-Mexican rancheros Aniceto Pizaña and Luis de la Rosa, los sediciosos destroyed the technology that had facilitated their economic dispossession and social disenfranchisement: irrigation pumps, automobiles, and railroad lines. Raids occurred as far north as Las Norias, an outpost of the King Ranch some seventy-five miles from the border. The most spectacular insurgent action was the derailment of a St. Louis, Texas and Mexico Railroad train in October 1915 in Olmito, just north of Brownsville. Throughout the summer and fall of that year, los sediciosos killed seventeen Anglo men: six civilians and eleven soldiers (Harris and Sadler, 296). Moreover, the actions of los sediciosos were reported across the nation as a possible prelude to a general race war. The New York Times reported in August 1915 that Anglo-Texans in the lower Rio Grande Valley brandished arms “in fear that the overwhelming Mexican population of the section may break out in a racial fight” (“Texans Armed,” 4).24 Indiscriminate collective punishment of Texas Mexicans followed, as the Texas Rangers and local vigilante posses carried out reprisals that often resulted in the death of any Texas Mexican unlucky enough to be in the area, whether or not any actual connection to los sediciosos could be proven.25 Estimates of the Texas-Mexican dead range from a conservative number of three hundred to an upper limit of five thousand, a number arrived at by the historian Walter Prescott Webb, the hagiographer of the Texas Rangers at the time of the Centennial.26 As in the Nueces County conflict during the 1870s, mass displacements of ethnic Mexicans occurred as the Borderlands War raged on. Over thirty thousand left the valley as some fifty thousand U.S. Army troops—“practically all the American armed forces available for combat duty”—flooded the border (Montejano, 122–123). The exodus further cemented the subordinate position of Texas Mexicans in the area as the Rangers and vigilante militias used the conflict to force the sale of Mexican-owned land to Anglos through intimidation or abandonment.27 The reprisals lasted well after the war itself. As late as 1922, an editorial in the New York Times commented that “the

18  Border Renaissance

killing of Mexicans without provocation is so common as to pass almost unnoticed” along the Texas-Mexican border (“Protecting Mexicans,” 11). Exacting a terrible price, the Borderlands War proved to be the last concerted gasp of a Texas-Mexican guerrilla war of maneuver that had flared sporadically throughout south Texas since 1836.28 The situation of the ethnic Mexican community in Texas at the time of the Centennial twenty years after the Borderlands War could best be described as harsh. Racial discrimination against Mexican Americans in housing, public accommodations, and jobs was widespread, if de facto rather than de jure; only the segregation of African Americans was enshrined in federal and state law.29 Beset by decades of this customary discrimination and state violence, ethnic Mexicans in Texas faced high levels of impoverishment, political disenfranchisement, severe public health problems, and low educational attainment. Texas-Mexican laborers on average earned just over seven hundred dollars annually at a time when an annual income of seventeen hundred dollars defined the federal poverty line (Orozco, “Origins,” 42). Even when employed in white-collar professions such as banking and retail or when holding skilled blue-collar jobs such as carpenters and masons, Texas-Mexican men earned only thirteen hundred dollars per year (Orozco, “Origins,” 49). Large urban areas such as San Antonio offered some opportunity for upward mobility, but nonetheless Texas-Mexican professionals found their path blocked by racial discrimination and almost total exclusion from important social networks of fraternal orders and other civic organizations.30 Crushing poverty, coupled with institutional neglect, resulted in appalling mortality rates for ethnic Mexicans across Texas. Deaths from tuberculosis reached near-epidemic levels in San Antonio’s barrios, where ethnic Mexicans had mortality rates two and a half times greater than those of African Americans and almost six times greater than those of Anglos (Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 91). Similarly, the infant mortality rate in San Antonio for ethnic Mexicans was 14.4 percent, compared to 10.5 percent for African Americans and 5.1 percent for Anglos (Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 91). In 1939, one observer characterized the West Side barrio as “one of the foulest slum districts in the world”: “Floorless shacks renting at $2 to $8 per month are crowded together in crazy fashion on nearly every lot. They are mostly without plumbing, sewage connections or electric lights. Open, shallow wells are often situated only a few feet from unsanitary privies. Streets and sidewalks are unpaved and become slimy mudholes in rainy weather” (Granneberg, 423). Conditions outside the cities were no better. In the rural areas of south Texas, a researcher

Introduction  19

for the Work Projects Administration found that “tuberculosis, enteritis, and infectious diarrhea were endemic” in the population, which lived in crowded conditions inside tin shacks with dirt floors and outdoor open toilets (Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 91). Matters were scarcely better in terms of educational attainment, as statistics reveal an appalling dropout rate for ethnic Mexicans within the public school system. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, some 40 percent of Mexican American school-age children never attended school, while approximately three-quarters of those in school were concentrated in the first through third grades. Only 3 or 4 percent attended high school, while an estimated two hundred fifty ethnic Mexican students attended college; all told, only one in twenty-eight hundred Texas Mexicans (or 0.036 percent) received any form of higher education.31 In addition to the hardships of daily living in Texas, the ethnic Mexican community found itself vulnerable to Depression-era scapegoat politics, particularly since the two decades prior to the Centennial had seen a drastic increase in the number of Mexican nationals residing within the state. Fleeing the Mexican Revolution, approximately one million wartime refugees headed northward; as a result, the ethnic Mexican population in the United States grew more than tenfold, from one hundred thousand in 1900 to one and a half million in 1930 (Orozco, “Origins,” 35). The ethnic Mexican population in Texas had tripled to seven hundred thousand, or nearly half of the entire Mexican-origin population in the country (Orozco, “Origins,” 39). Over eighty-two thousand called San Antonio home, constituting 35 percent of the city’s population (R. García 29). Claiming that foreigners were taking much-needed jobs from Americans, cities across the nation, including San Antonio, Chicago, Detroit, Denver, and Los Angeles, organized campaigns in conjunction with federal agencies to pressure ethnic Mexicans into departing for Mexico either voluntarily or through deportation. Between three hundred fifty thousand and six hundred thousand ethnic Mexicans—both Mexican nationals and U.S. citizens of Mexican descent—were “repatriated” between 1929 and 1937 (Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 72). Given this profound history of violence, exploitation, neglect, displacement, and discrimination, Gutiérrez Castañeda of San Diego’s La Voz did acknowledge that the Texas-Mexican community’s nonparticipation in the Centennial might have something to do with resentments and distrusts built up over the years between them and Anglo-Texans, the principal promoters of the Centennial. Moving ahead, Gutiérrez Castañeda suggested, involved setting aside these bitter memories: “Has tú, mi

20  Border Renaissance

querido lector, un esfuerzo por alejar de tí todo agravio personal, todo prejuicio y presta tu ayuda con despego. No le estarás prestando ayuda a ninguna organización, asociación, o persona sino a tu pueblo y a tu Estado” [Make an effort, dear reader, to forget all personal grievances, all prejudices, and lend your help dispassionately. You would be helping not just any organization, association or person but your community and your state] (2). In calling for civic engagement rather than communal disidentification, Gutiérrez Castañeda advocated a change in the way Texas Mexicans acted in their capacity as residents of Texas and citizens of the United States. The reward would be recognition of Texas-Mexican citizenship by Anglo-Texans, who would be forced to acknowledge their participation in the Centennial as proof of their willingness to be considered American. But doing so would come at great cost. Gutiérrez Castañeda suggested that Texas Mexicans would have to forget the state’s history of violence against them, but what’s more, they were, in Bhabha’s words, “obliged to forget” that violence “in establishing the nation’s writ” (160). Full citizenship, Gutiérrez Castañeda implied, meant forgoing the pursuit of justice, with its necessarily conflictual view of the past, for the pursuit of happiness in the present.32 If Gutiérrez Castañeda had no apparent qualms about being obliged to forget, many other Texas Mexicans of the Centennial era would neither forget the injustices, past and present, inflicted upon their community nor remain silent on the matter of asserting citizenship rights. Quiet resistance to the Centennial on the part of San Diego’s tejano residents might have sufficed to derail local celebrations and profits, but how Texas Mexicans should collectively confront Centennial discourses and the unjust racial order it legitimated remained a question whose roots extended to the violence of the Borderlands War some two decades earlier. The Borderlands War and its consequences suggested the need for Texas-Mexican intellectuals of the next quarter century to formulate a new communal identity distinct from the polarized binary of mexicano and American so commonsensical to previous generations. Texas-Mexican expressive culture almost immediately registered the dimensions of this looming problem. “Los sediciosos,” a corrido about the Borderlands War composed in the war’s aftermath, is notable for its distinction between “puros mexicanos” and “mexicotejanos,” the mexicotejanos bearing the brunt of state repression as the puros mexicanos, implied to be Mexican nationals, took refuge in Mexico. Rather than celebrate los sediciosos as heroes who defied the Anglo-American colonial order, the corrido mourned the great loss of life and property suffered by

Introduction  21

Texas Mexicans, the ones who could not retreat into a nation-state that claimed them. “Los sediciosos” demarcates the cultural moment when Texas Mexicans realized that their historical identification with Mexico could not save them from the political realities of living in the United States: “Once identity is constructed from the social borders of socioeconomic and historical conditions of marginalization between two cultures, the expressive, discursive form of that identity also changes” (R. Flores, “Corrido,” 176). The lesson of “Los sediciosos” was that geopolitical boundaries did matter in terms of community safety, however artificial the international line might have seemed to the Texas-Mexican sense of communal identity before 1915. While their disavowal of U.S. citizenship might have had few practical consequences for most Texas Mexicans in their daily lives during the late nineteenth century, the increased incorporation of the Nueces Strip into the nation during the early twentieth century necessitated a fundamental rethinking of the Texas-Mexican political and cultural orientation toward Mexico. Along with the subsequent passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 and the deportation of Mexican American citizens during the Great Depression, the Borderlands War demonstrated how even the partial citizenship of Mexican Americans could disappear before the contingencies of racial violence. For the Texas-Mexican intellectuals of the Centennial era, countering the fact of being effectively rendered stateless meant transforming the cultural and political sensibilities of U.S. citizens of Mexican descent through a command of the English language and the adoption of other cultural knowledge deemed necessary to secure rights and resources. Mounting a concerted effort to critically engage the Centennial and its exclusionary discourses, a determined group of middleclass Texas-Mexican writers organized largely through LULAC sought to change the racialized relationship between the United States and its citizens of Mexican origin without forgoing communal justice. Formulating their demand for civil rights as part of their aesthetic project of reorienting ethnic Mexican communal identity toward the United States, TexasMexican writers of the 1930s would construct the Mexican American subject as their answer to the dilemma posed by the Borderlands War.

Organization of the Book Each of the book’s five chapters examines the dynamic interplay of Centennial discourses and Mexican American literature across specific sites

22  Border Renaissance

of representation. In chapter 1, I look at the Texas Centennial not only as a discrete event, but also as a crucial modernist project that made selected aspects of the Texas past meaningful to Anglo-Texans in the 1930s. Centennial discourses synthesized the historical elements of what historians now recognize as the iconography of Texas into a coherent narrative through which modern Texas emerged. Hoping to shed the national and international image of Texas as an economic and cultural backwater, business and intellectual elites staged the Texas Centennial as the cultural project of making modern Texan subjects by commemorating Texas’s successful revolt from Mexico in 1836. As told through saturation media coverage, Texas history became more than the advertising hook for events such as the official Centennial Central Exposition in Dallas. Becoming a modern Texan meant learning one’s place within Texas’s historical narrative of racial progress. This progress culminated in mass consumer culture, a lesson taught through the numerous works of history, poetry, and fiction generated for the Centennial. Depicting the Texas Revolution as a racial clash of civilizations, Centennial narratives—whether popular or academic—reinscribed race as the key determinant of just which inhabitants of Texas could become modern. A wide range of poetry, fictional literature, and popular histories portrayed people of color, and particularly the Mexican, as persistent and troublesome obstacles to Anglo-Texan progress. Above all, Webb’s The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense (1935) articulated most clearly and completely the Centennial vision of Anglo-Texan racial triumphalism. This hagiographic assessment of the paramilitary state police force by a leading historian at the University of Texas depicted Texas history as the tripartite racial struggle between Anglo-Texans, Indians, and Mexicans for control of the region’s vast natural resources. Indeed, many of these texts attributed the development of Anglo-Texan character—rugged selfreliance, aggressive individualism, and intractable white supremacy—to the struggles to wrest a rich land from lesser Mexican, African American, and Native American races. These narratives provided Anglo-Texans with nationalist pedagogy of race that seamlessly connected the past to the present in the name of the future, while commercial spectacle incorporated that narrative into the lived contemporaneity of the moment. Yet despite celebrating what appeared to be the inevitable triumph of the AngloTexan over lesser racial foes, Webb’s Texas Rangers anxiously anticipated the growing political power of one enemy supposedly defeated in the past and currently held in a state of abject submission: Texas Mexicans. Chapter 2 discusses the discursive struggles between Anglo-Texans and

Introduction  23

Texas Mexicans over the Texas landscape itself as a lieu de mémoire. Here, the focus is on María Elena Zamora O’Shea, a little-known Mexican American writer, and her literary broadside against J. Frank Dobie, the dean of Texas folklore for much of the twentieth century. As a member of the Advisory Board of Texas Historians for the Commission of Control for Texas Centennial Celebrations, Dobie helped consolidate a vernacular understanding of Texas history as Anglo-Saxon progress through an extensive state-sponsored program of erecting historical monuments throughout the state. Approximately 500 roadside markers erected under this program, supplemented by another 264 erected by the Texas Highway Department, created an informal textbook of Texas history that sacralized the establishment of civilization in Texas while demonizing or marginalizing African Americans, Native Americans, and Mexican Americans. In effect, the Centennial historical markers created an easily comprehensible cognitive map of the state that transformed the landscape itself into a monument to Anglo-Texan triumphalism. Contrasting what she considered to be an artificially imposed history of conquest and betrayal with her metaphor of organic Texas-Mexican history, Zamora O’Shea published El Mesquite in anticipation of Dobie’s central role in formulating the historical narratives to be used to commemorate the Centennial. This novella from 1935 chronicles over two centuries of Spanish, Mexican, and Texas-Mexican history in the Nueces Strip of south Texas as witnessed by el Palo Alto, the mesquite tree of the title. El Palo Alto relates the events stricken from Anglo-Texan historiography, particularly the violent dispossession of Texas-Mexican rancheros despite their enthusiastic support for the independence of Texas. Far from positing a naturalized, ahistorical vantage point for Texas Mexicans, el Palo Alto itself falls victim to the very processes of modernity it depicts. Yet, unlike the Anglo-Texan narrative of complete Mexican abjection before a superior white race, El Mesquite suggests that the Texas-Mexican community survives in a new, modernist form, as the very technologies of representation evolve to open new possibilities of communal memory. Passing from oral history to literature, from pencil sketch to photograph, Zamora O’Shea seeks to reclaim Texas history from Anglo-Texan historiography and thereby invert the truth valences traditionally assigned to either literature or history. Displacing history as the locus of truth, Zamora O’Shea’s El Mesquite suggests how Mexican American literature assumes the ideological function of critical counternarrative to dominant U.S. cultural productions. Chapter 3 considers the formative role of LULAC in the creation of

24  Border Renaissance

a bicultural Mexican American identity through literary aesthetics during the Centennial era. In 1934, the organization formed a Centennial committee charged with formulating the organization’s participation in the upcoming celebrations. Recognizing the opportunity to intervene in public perceptions of Texas Mexicans, the committee appointed Rubén Rendón Lozano to write a commemorative history of Texas Mexicans who fought against Antonio López de Santa Anna’s troops during the Texas Revolution. Published in the Centennial year of 1936, Viva Tejas: The Story of the Mexican-Born Patriots of the Republic of Texas reminded Anglo-Texans of what Texas Mexicans had never forgotten: that the two communities had cooperated as equals in seeking freedom from an oppressive tyrant and in creating a modern, multiracial democracy. The narrative was an implicit call to remember the true democratic egalitarianism of comradesin-arms before invidious racialization had set Anglo-Texans over Texas Mexicans in postrevolutionary Texas. Although the publication of Viva Tejas failed to influence the dominant Centennial discourses in any significant way, the effort indicates LULAC’s keen awareness that their goal of securing nationalist agency for Mexican Americans was as much an aesthetic project as it was a legal or political one. My examination of fiction, poetry, and historical narratives published in the organizational periodical LULAC News during its first decade of publication (1931–1941) reveals a complex, nuanced social movement riven by internal debates not only about legal tactics and political strategy, but also centrally about the aesthetic dimensions of a bicultural Mexican American identity. This monthly newsletter was geared toward keeping the membership informed about chapter meetings, fundraisers, and organizational activities combating racial segregation, political participation, police brutality, public health, and public education. Published in English and Spanish, LULAC News reflected not only the practical necessity of reaching a population that was still largely Spanish-dominant, but also the organization’s desire to foster a distinctly bicultural identity fluent in both languages. Following in the tradition of Spanish-language newspapers that presented creative works alongside hard news, the LULAC News became a showcase for an emergent Mexican American literary aesthetic that is bilingual in expression, bicultural in meaning, and self-consciously political in formulation. Chapter 4 centers on the early fictional works of Américo Paredes, the renowned Chicano studies scholar best known for his foundational work on the corrido. His early fictional works, composed during the mid1930s—such as the poem “Alma Pocha,” the performance piece Tres faces

Introduction  25

del pocho, and the novel George Washington Gómez—represent Paredes’s immediate response to the Centennial, through which he examined the impact of a century of colonial rule on an increasingly fragmented TexasMexican community. The critical reservoir from which corrido heroes sprang with pistols in hand, Texas-Mexican culture had fostered the anticolonial subjectivities that had built communal identity in resistance despite decades of Anglo-Texan domination. No longer organically unified by the patriarchal anticolonialism exemplified by the corrido, the TexasMexican community had shattered into class-based factions that were unable to generate anticolonial resistance through the mass culture available to them. As a result, neither the middle-class novel nor the working-class conjunto music offered emergent resources of hope for the beleaguered community. For Paredes, border modernity appeared poised to destroy the organic totality of Texas-Mexican culture itself, the final barrier to the community’s reduction to a pliant state of racialized abjection. As George Washington Gómez in particular suggests, the penetration of U.S. civil society into the borderlands, driven by border modernity, had undercut the possibility of anticolonial Texas-Mexican subjectivities. The title character, who goes by the presumed Indian name Guálinto for most of the narrative, is born during the Borderlands War, the violence of which claims his innocent father’s life. Named to be a “great man among the Gringos” and expected to become “the leader of his people,” Guálinto attends U.S. public schools in the bordertown of Jonesville-onthe-Grande with the intent of gaining the cultural skills needed to defend Texas-Mexican rights. Instead, the full implementation of a U.S. nationalist pedagogy through the public education system results in a deeply compromised postcolonial subjectivity that rejects not only the community’s expectations but the community itself. After a childhood spent vigorously championing Texas-Mexican dignity, Guálinto betrays his community’s hopes by adopting the racist Anglo-Texan disdain for everything Mexican. Formally indicating this historical failure of alternative subject making via the narrative gap between the final section and the rest of the novel, Paredes suggests a modernist aesthetic of negation that makes that failure productive of a specifically postcolonial knowledge of anticipatory liberation. Simultaneously, Paredes’s commitment to patriarchal anticolonialism sustains his erasure of tejana agency in the lived present of the 1930s. Guálinto’s uncle Feliciano, the representative of the heroic corrido age of patriarchal anticolonialism, is unable to restore either Mexican sovereignty or Gómez family honor. In the antiheroic postcorrido age, the

26  Border Renaissance

undermining of Texas-Mexican patriarchal agency precludes any effective resistance to Anglo-Texan domination. Malinche-like, Texas-Mexican women like Guálinto’s sister Maruca and his manipulative love interest, María Elena Osuna, come to symbolize the corrosive effects of border modernity in what Paredes portrays as their sexualized betrayal of TexasMexican traditional culture, symptomatic of the tejano patriarch’s emasculation. However, attention to characters at the margins of Paredes’s masculinist vision reveals possibilities for a tejana feminist anticolonialism only vaguely perceived by Paredes himself. Chapter 5 deals with the modernization of Texas-Mexican female sexuality in writings by LULAC’s mujeres fronterizas (border feminists). Even as LULAC’s male members linked the struggle to gain effective citizenship to its own ideals of masculinist leadership, the women of LULAC fought to gain recognition of women’s rights and leadership through articles, editorials, poetry, and short fiction that critically interrogated traditional ethnic Mexican gender roles. Women Lulackers such as Alice Dickerson Montemayor and Adela Sloss used the pages of the LULAC News to develop a feminist critique of LULAC’s masculinist rhetoric of racial democracy that would nonetheless retain gender inequality in the name of preserving traditional ethnic Mexican culture. Centering their critiques on the unequal gendered division of power within the ethnic Mexican family, LULAC feminists explicitly thematized the trope of companionate marriage as a vehicle to more equitable gender relations in their creative writings for the LULAC News. The writer and folklorist Jovita González stands out as the most prolific and accomplished of LULAC’s group of mujeres fronterizas. She developed a broad variety of narrative strategies for intervening in racist Centennial discourses and sexist ethnic Mexican ones. Throughout her writings, González joined LULAC’s project of restoring Mexican American agency to the feminist project of democratizing gender roles within the ethnic Mexican community. Challenging Centennial discourses that erased tejanas from Texas history, González created “Catholic Heroines of Texas” as a poster exhibit at the Texas Centennial Central Exposition’s Catholic Exhibit. “Catholic Heroines of Texas” represents one of the earliest extant published histories about tejanas as well as González’s trial run for an ambitious historical novel that envisions the modernization of Texas-Mexican female subjectivity itself. González greatly expanded the scope of her project of modernizing Mexican American female subjectivities with the historical romance Caballero. The novel examines the Texas-Mexican community’s options in

Introduction  27

dealing with the political, legal, and gender consequences of the U.S.Mexican War of 1846–1848. While Texas-Mexican patriarchs such as the ranchero Santiago Soria y Mendoza and his son Alvaro preach resistance to the new order through cultural isolation and guerrilla warfare, Don Santiago’s daughters, Susanita and Angela, and his youngest son, Luis Gonzaga, defy their father by forming romantic and pragmatic alliances with open-minded Anglo-Americans. Positing that true acceptance into the United States was premised upon disarticulating patriarchal ethnic Mexican tradition from Mexican American women’s subjectivities, Caballero depicts the transformation of tejanas from patriarchal objects of homosocial exchange to autonomous, desiring subjects. Reciprocating these desires, Anglo-American characters such as Lieutenant Robert Warrener, Red McLane, and Captain Devlin learn Spanish, respect tejano culture, and view the new Texas-Mexican citizens as assets to the nation. Like the collaboration of the two authors, the multiple pairings of AngloAmericans and Texas Mexicans throughout the novel suggest a model of interethnic cooperation for the 1930s. In the epilogue, I consider the legacy of Mexican American literary responses to the Texas Centennial. Even as the entry of the United States into the Second World War initiated a slow improvement in the effective citizenship status of Mexican Americans, the task of rebuffing Centennial discourses would lead Mexican American cultural critique in new directions. I begin with the unlikely pairing of articles by Dobie and Paredes in the Southwest Review for summer 1942. Whereas Dobie’s “The Alamo’s Immortalization of Words” deployed Texas history against the new racial enemy on the frontlines of the Pacific war, Paredes’s “The Mexico-Texan Corrido,” together with his notes on Dobie’s article, suggested that Centennial discourses would be increasingly contested in public letters by Mexican Americans. Transforming the residual cultural practice of the corrido into the emergent anticolonial practice of subaltern scholarship, Paredes did more than shift the terrain of ideological engagement within the U.S. academy. He also laid the groundwork for future Chicano studies scholars like Montejano, whose landmark Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas 1836–1986, published a year after the Texas Sesquicentennial of 1986, demonstrated how a growing Texas-Mexican demographic, political, and economic presence had transformed the way Texans commemorated Texas history. Dismissing the remnants of racialized Centennial discourses still prevalent in Texas historiography, Montejano’s revisionist intervention echoed the actions of Texas Mexicans during the 1930s as

28  Border Renaissance

they strove to become Mexican Americans through the narration of their community’s historical experiences. Yet Chicana/o literature of the 1980s did not overtly concern itself with the Texas Sesquicentennial, an indication of the profound transformations in the social circumstances of people of Mexican descent during the fifty years between the Centennial and the Sesquicentennial. Rather than focus upon Texas history and its effects on Mexican Americans, Chicana/o literature of this decade centered upon the struggles that remain after the practical accomplishment of effective citizenship. In particular, Chicana feminist writers continued the efforts begun by mujeres fronterizas of the Centennial era to expand narrow masculinist concepts of subjectivity to include women as transformative agents. In doing so, Chicana/o writers superseded the historical terms of the Centennial and greatly expanded the scope of Chicana/o literature’s socially transformative project beyond the boundaries of state and nation-state to realize social justice in terms that Mexican American literary antepasados could only begin to imagine.

CHAPTER 1

“Texanizing Texans”: Texas Centennial Discourses of Racial Pedagogy

The Mexicotexan knows about the Alamo. He is reminded of it often enough. Texas history is a cross that he must bear. George Washington Gómez, Américo Paredes

In early May 1935, mere months before the formal observance of the Texas Centennial, a lieutenant and thirteen other sailors from the German cruiser Karlsruhe laid a wreath inside the Alamo to commemorate the “memory of Texas heroes” who had died there almost a century earlier (“German Sailors,” 5). Commanded by Captain Gunter Lutjens, the Karlsruhe was on a globe-spanning training cruise and goodwill mission on behalf of the Nazi regime. After sailing through the Panama Canal and reaching Houston, the men from the Karlsruhe visited several Texas cities, including San Antonio, as part of a weeklong publicity campaign. State and civic leaders feted the naval personnel as honored guests, particularly Captain Lutjens as he and an aide undertook a whirlwind tour of central Texas ahead of the larger contingent of junior officers and enlisted men. At the state capitol in Austin, Lutjens met with Governor James V. Allred; later, the state senate suspended its regular order of business in order to give the floor to the captain. Down the road in San Antonio, the mayor, Bexar County officials, and U.S. military officers escorted Lutjens about the city. Despite a tight schedule that included a VIP luncheon at the exclusive Plaza Hotel, Lutjens requested that he be taken to visit “your city’s famous shrine” (quoted in Young, 1). A quick visit to the Alamo was promptly arranged. Two days later, the larger group from the Karlsruhe arrived at the Alamo “to pay military tribute to the 182 Texans who sacrificed their

30  Border Renaissance

Figure 1.1. Myths of Nazi and Anglo-Texan racial supremacy converged at

the Alamo in May 1935 as German sailors paid tribute to its Anglo-Texan defenders. In the Texas Centennial era, the Texas-Mexican defenders of the Alamo were erased from historical accounts of the siege and battle of 1836. (UTSA’s Institute of Texan Cultures, 091–0308. Courtesy of the Hearst Corporation.)

lives there” battling Santa Anna’s troops (“Germany Honors,” 1). According to the San Antonio Light, “The men extended their arms in the Nazi salute and bowed their heads in silence” (“German Tars,” 1). With no apparent irony, the sailors were treated afterward to “a Mexican luncheon” (Young, 2). The next day, San Antonio’s major daily newspapers ran front-page above-the-fold photographs with captions that exuded civic pride in having “an official arm of Germany” honor the city (“Germany Honors,” 1). The photograph in the Evening News of Lieutenant H. W. Grosse laying the wreath ran with the caption “Germany Honors Alamo Dead”; the photograph in the Light captured the Germans stiff-armed in the dramatic “Nazi Salute for Alamo Dead.”

“Texanizing Texans”: Texas Centennial Discourses of Racial Pedagogy  31

The Nazi salute at the Alamo has largely been forgotten in the post– Second World War desire to distance the United States from Nazi atrocities of genocide, concentration camps, ethnic cleansing, and master race eugenics. Nonetheless, this incident cannot be dismissed as merely the pleasant niceties of U.S.-German diplomacy before the open hostilities of the Second World War or even as the simple, unvarnished recognition of soldiers for a previous generation of warriors who had put their duty above all else. Rather, the event strongly suggests how Centennial discourses about the Texas Revolution had already traversed the globe, spreading a particular kind of racial pedagogy readily understood by imperial powers in an age of colonialism. Invoking an entire paradigm of racial domination through a powerful collective memory of a bygone historical event, the Nazi salute at the Alamo amounted to an implicit recognition of what Texas had become as a result of Texas independence, and what Nazi Germany was even then striving to perfect: a white supremacist state.1 The Alamo as remembered in Anglo-Texan memory became the meeting ground that day between Anglo-Texan and Nazi for cementing a common commitment to the domination of those deemed racially inferior. As a burgeoning empire itself, Adolf Hitler’s Germany recognized in Texas’s social order a common understanding of the pervasive racial problem plaguing occupied territories, or territories yet to be occupied. Using its past to construct the terms of present-day colonial difference, Texas had a century’s experience in the juridical and informal racial management of African Americans and Texas Mexicans. Jim Crow laws formally segregated African Americans across the state, while customary discrimination informally segregated Texas Mexicans in much the same way. Lynching and other forms of extralegal violence supplemented juridical and customary apartheid with domestic terrorism against both communities of color. Situated in San Antonio with its large ethnic Mexican population, the Alamo served to remind Anglo-Texans of the precarious nature of their rule and the consequent necessity for white supremacy. If the Nazi salute at the Alamo highlights the most dramatic aspect of the racial pedagogy implicit within the Cradle of Texas Liberty as what the historian Pierre Nora has called a lieu de mémoire, a historical memory that actively shapes a collective understanding of the present, then the Texas Centennial as an ensemble of commemorations and discourses that invoked the Texas past encoded this racial pedagogy as a coherent narrative of Anglo-Saxon racial progress and disseminated it as a kind of social common sense during the 1930s. Within Centennial discourses,

32  Border Renaissance

Texas’s independence from Mexico in 1836 became the sacred crucible from which Texas had emerged as a modern democratic state; Texas history mediated, in modernist form, the dominant Anglo-Texan population’s mapping of social agency during the 1930s. Employing the category of race as the organizing principle of collective agency, Centennial discourses, whether academic histories, commemorative poems, or popular narratives, forged a racial pedagogy of white supremacy through their figuration of the Texan past. The Centennial fundamentally reshaped the general representational contours of modern Texas, articulating what had been a commonly assumed yet loosely coordinated ideology of AngloSaxon superiority into a coherent popular historical narrative of AngloTexan progress. Relating past and present not as inevitable rupture but as racial fulfillment, Centennial discourses portrayed the contemporary icons of Texas typology as the genius of the Anglo-Saxon race expressed in the flesh throughout history. The Centennial, devoted to commemorating a past in the service of the present, demonstrates what Theodor W. Adorno characterized as the regressive character of modernity in its predilection for seemingly archaic pasts. In his critical evaluation of the works of Thorstein Veblen, Adorno noted that the earlier social theorist had misread the significance of modernity’s apparently paradoxical vocabulary of superannuated cultural forms and practices. What the train station resembling a medieval castle revealed, Adorno maintained, was not, as Veblen believed, a simple anachronistic illusion that feebly disguised the true nature of modernity, but a sublimated desire for unalienated social relations at the very root of modernity’s affective constellation: “To Veblen the phony castle is simply anachronistic. He does not understand the distinctly modern character of regression. . . . It represents the futile but compulsive attempt to avoid and escape the domination of abstract equivalence through self-made concretion. Men prefer to deceive themselves with illusions of the concrete rather than abandon the hope which clings to it” (85). Harnessing this affect in order to advance disenchantment and rationalization, modernity for Adorno required the invocation of apparently disjointed temporalities to affectively establish its own epistemological dominance. In the case of the Centennial, representations of the Anglo-Texan past as invoked in the potent symbols of robust pioneers, ragtag revolutionaries, and rugged cowboys invoked an idealized history of racial supremacy that was mobilized to reify all the more efficiently the utopian sentiment of an organic community in a modern age of extreme social and economic displacement. With affective resonances far beyond its use as

“Texanizing Texans”: Texas Centennial Discourses of Racial Pedagogy  33

a mass-marketing strategy, Texas history as the symbolic center of Centennial discourses served to reassure Anglo-Texans that the turmoil of the Great Depression would not disrupt the social hierarchies, particularly those of race, that fundamentally informed their social identities. Put somewhat differently, Centennial discourses reimagined the key terms of colonial difference for modern times in the vocabulary of nineteenthcentury Texas history. Centennial discourses made legible the terms of colonial difference under which Anglo-Texans and Texans of color would operate, establishing the Centennial era’s parameters of social agency along racial lines. Representing the achievement of a modern democratic state as solely an Anglo-Texan affair, the Centennial discourses cast ethnic Mexicans as the antithesis of everything Texas past and present symbolized. The histories Anglo-Texans wrote for the Centennial to crown their achievements would only bind their ability to imagine the future to the barren racial ideologies of the past.

Texas History, Race, and Democracy On January 1, 1936, Governor Allred issued a proclamation that ushered in the Texas Centennial Year. The Lone Star State had already celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the approval of Austin’s colony in 1921 and had yet to celebrate the hundredth year of U.S. statehood in 1945, but neither centennial would compare to the spectacular statewide celebrations marking a century of Texan independence from Mexico.2 For Allred, a deep respect and affection for Texas history would be best expressed in the numerous events planned to commemorate the Declaration of Texas Independence, the Siege of the Alamo, and the Battles of Goliad and San Jacinto. According to the governor, the Texas Revolution of 1835–1836 had indelibly marked the true moment of Texas’s emergence as an imagined community, as a nation united by the struggle for independence and bound by the memory of that trial by fire. At a moment when the state faced another epic crisis in the guise of the Great Depression, the Centennial would unite Texans as one so that the state’s greatness would be renewed for the next hundred years. “As we stand upon the threshold of our State’s Centennial,” Allred declared, “we must not forget that its purest concept lies in a reverence for the past and a devotion to the perpetuation of that past through an endless future” (“Proclamation,” 6). The road to the Texan future, it seemed, ran through the Texan past. In proclaiming the Centennial, the governor spoke to a deeply ingrained

34  Border Renaissance

sense that commemorative images of the past had been central to Texan identity ever since the Texas Revolution, providing the essential imaginative vocabulary through which the unique, providential community of Texas could be invoked. Yet the Centennial would be more than a grandiose extension of this idea: it would be a reworking of it for the creation of a specifically modern Texan identity. The idea of celebrating a Texas centennial had been first aired in 1923 by the businessman Theodore H. Price, yet the centennial he had in mind was not the 1836 Texas Revolution. In his article “What Texas Has to Advertise and How to Advertise It,” Price argued that Texans could use the centennial of the establishment of the first identifiably Anglo-Saxon settlement by Stephen F. Austin in 1824 to stage a grand exposition, thereby introducing the state to the “thousand men and several hundred women who have both the time and money to travel but have never been to Texas.” According to Price, a former cotton broker turned editor and publisher of the business journal Commerce and Finance, a centennial celebration on the scale of a world’s fair would mark the grand entrance of the Lone Star State into modernity, highlighting the economic and cultural progress that Texas had accomplished over the previous hundred years. Modern Texas was indeed “as cosmopolitan as New York,” but the erroneous perception persisted nationwide that Texas was nothing more than the hot, backwater “home of the cowboy” (Price, 2108). In other words, Texas had an image problem. The self-identification of Texans with the clichéd past of dime fiction Westerns rendered the state sadly hackneyed to cosmopolitan tourists of the day. The contemporary touristic eye demanded either exotic premodernism (most often imagined in the United States as the fading culture of Native Americans, especially in the U.S. Southwest) or the cutting-edge contemporaneity of skyscraping Jazz Age urbanity. Modern cosmopolites had no interest in a frontier experience, however central it might be to the self-image of Texans. In order to attract rich, fashionable East Coast elites and therefore the more modest but far greater stream of middle-class tourism, Texas would have to hype what no other state could claim: a “glorious, romantic history” that had fundamentally impacted the development of U.S. democracy. This unique history, of which Price believed Texans were always “subconsciously aware,” consisted of the collective struggle and sacrifice for “freedom and good government” against “Mexican oppression” (2107). Certainly the popular dissemination of Anglo-Texan triumphalism at major expositions had been long established by the time of the Texas Centennial. Such views had been widely promulgated through texts such as

“Texanizing Texans”: Texas Centennial Discourses of Racial Pedagogy  35

Moye Wicks’s introduction to the official guide to the Texas exhibit at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. In “Texas: A Glance at Its History,” Wicks wrote that “the progress of Texas is an object lesson of survival of the fittest, as shown by the final domination of the Anglo-Saxon over other racial elements.” For Wicks, white supremacy in Texas came about as a result of a divinely sanctioned racial Darwinism underscored by the emergence of a masterful white masculinity. By maintaining a distinct “national existence” in the midst of an alien Mexican culture during the 1830s, Anglo-Texans had “demonstrated the superior manhood” over their Mexican adversaries. As a result of wresting Texas away from Mexico, Anglo-Texans became “‘the heir of all the ages, in the foremost ranks of time’—the only race worthy to cope with its vast possibilities.” The products of vigorous Anglo-Texan industry displayed at the fair, Wicks concluded, confirmed that “Providence favored the possession of this great domain by the Anglo-Saxon.” What Price emphasized, as Wicks did not, was the imperative of making Texas history central to the conception of a grand exposition, not merely the incidental background to the state’s contemporary agricultural and industrial achievements. For Price, the foregrounding of Texas history marshaled both a substantive organizational principle for the exposition and a unique ploy to gain attention in a media-saturated travel marketplace. Texas history granted a weighty cultural and political import to what might otherwise be construed as yet another commercial endeavor. Texas history offered a salutary corrective to a lackadaisical attitude pervasive across the nation that Price believed could be harnessed for civic uplift as well as commercial appeal. Complacent in their political practices, U.S. citizens had endangered their freedom by taking the political rights of democracy to be “a natural right like the air they breathe” rather than the fruits of a hard-fought struggle against tyranny. Unlike the inhabitants of the other states of the Union, Anglo-Texans had never forgotten “the hardships that were endured and the sacrifices made by those who suffered and died that the nation might live.” The ever-present threat of a large Mexican population both within Texas and on its borders, Price implied, kept Anglo-Texans “subconsciously aware” that racial mastery was the essential prerequisite of a democratic society. Texas history writ on a national scale would be “the only cure other than tyranny and oppression” for the benign neglect of politics, rights, and liberties by the rest of the nation (Price, 2107). That Price did not invoke the obvious model for a democratic revolt against imperial tyranny—the U.S. Revolution of 1776–1783 against Great

36  Border Renaissance

Britain—merely underscores his understanding of Texan pride and U.S. nationalism as a specifically racialized consciousness. Unlike that revolution, which could be interpreted as a straightforward political dispute between Anglo-Saxons, the Texas Revolution epitomized a more elementary struggle for racial mastery between Anglos and Mexicans. With the mythical triad of “the Alamo, Goliad, and San Jacinto” as their heraldic standard, Anglo-Texans exemplified for Price an ideal national consciousness wherein political and regional differences were set aside in the name of racial unity (2107). In the midst of such a struggle, “the West and the East, the North and the South would meet and sectional prejudice and antagonism would be dissolved” (2109). Through a great Centennial exposition, Texas could teach the nation that “pride of ancestry, even though it be only a political ancestry,” was the necessary safeguard for “AngloSaxon civilization and democracy” against tyrannous racial Others who yet threatened from without and within (2107). As can be imagined, Price’s comments scarcely included African Americans, Texas Mexicans, or other people of color in his concept of “political ancestry.” Rather, by conceiving of political practice as a function of racial descent, Price suggested that newcomers and Texas-born alike could share in the rights and privileges of democratic government as long as they were white.3 While Price’s suggestion for a great centennial fair to commemorate the founding of Anglo-Texan settlements in 1924 never came to fruition, others readily adopted the idea of a centennial exposition to celebrate the Anglo-Texan triumph over “Mexican oppression” in 1836. As the historian Kenneth Ragsdale has painstakingly detailed in Centennial ’36: The Year America Discovered Texas, the Centennial movement gained momentum during the early 1930s despite huge logistical, political, and economic obstacles. The desire to jump-start the lagging state economy during the depression made the Centennial possible from a political point of view but did not create out of thin air the civic affect so visible during the commemorations. Ultimately, pride in Texas history provided state and federal legislators with the essential emotional impetus needed to fund the Centennial at the height of the depression, when other pressing social services strained the government’s coffers.4 Acting in a special legislative session demanded by Centennial supporters, Texas legislators allocated three million dollars for the Centennial celebration in April 1935. Two months later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a matching three-milliondollar federal appropriation bill into law and visited Dallas in June 1936 for the opening ceremonies of the Texas Centennial Central Exposition, the centerpiece of all Centennial celebrations (Ragsdale, 62–76).

“Texanizing Texans”: Texas Centennial Discourses of Racial Pedagogy  37

A new state entity, the Commission of Control for Texas Centennial Celebrations, was created to oversee funding disbursements. Subsidiary entities included an advisory board for advertising that received half a million dollars—one-sixth of the entire state allocation—to advertise the Centennial across the nation and around the world. Propelled by the largest concerted media campaign ever mounted in the state, the Centennial dominated state newspaper headlines and radio broadcasts throughout the second half of 1935 and all of 1936; the media saturation campaign, according to Ragsdale, amounted to “a thoroughly concentrated historical brainwashing” (xviii). Indeed, the Texas Centennial of 1936 proved to be spectacle on a grand scale, a heady mix of mass culture, New Deal capitalism, and remembering the Alamo. Hoping to attract tourist dollars in the midst of the Great Depression, most every city, town, and hamlet in the state had its own celebration to commemorate the events and heroes of the Texas Revolution. According to one newspaper’s count, 259 official Centennial events were scheduled throughout the state during 1936 (“Centennial Celebrations,” C10). The largest official celebration, the Texas Centennial Central Exposition, transformed Fair Park in Dallas, home of the state fair, into a huge complex of sleek Art Deco buildings complete with a carnivalesque midway. The well-organized business leadership of Dallas, backed by petroleum and manufacturing concerns, made certain that the exposition emphasized the city’s modernity, given that the city—founded in 1841—had no claim to the history of the Texas Revolution.5 Like the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago and the upcoming World’s Fair of 1939 in New York City, the Centennial Exposition melded lofty visions of human progress with mass appeal in its mixing of high and popular cultures. While vendors on the midway-like entertainment alley hawked games, trinkets, food, and peep shows, corporate sponsors had huge exhibits highlighting the latest scientific developments in modern consumer goods. The automobile, that privileged signifier of modernity, was amply represented by the manufacturers Chrysler, General Motors, and Ford, while Gulf Oil opted to sponsor the even more ultramodern ethereality of radio with an on-site studio that broadcast live programming from the exposition. Modern marvels for the home were showcased in General Electric’s House of Magic. An implicit advertisement for New Deal electrification efforts, this exhibit featured the “domestic life of the future served by electricity”: refrigerators, ovens, and other household appliances (Ragsdale, 255). Held during the record-breaking heat of the summer of 1936, the Centennial Exposition was also the first time that air

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conditioning had been employed in a large-scale exhibition; many attendees experienced climate-controlled chill for the first time while visiting the major exhibits. From its technological and architectural elements to its coordination of state and corporate economic interests, the Centennial Exposition emblematized the emergence of modern Texas into the national spotlight. Like previous world’s fairs, commencing with the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, the Centennial Exposition joined consumer desire, nationalist pride, and white progress in its spectacle of modernity. Despite the heavy emphasis on the forms of the modern, whether in technology, architecture, or mass culture, Texas history centrally framed the meaning and import of Texan modernity. Far from forming a conceptual opposition of past and present, history and modernity served as the twin pillars of Texan identity as Centennial organizers transformed the Texas past into modern(ist) mythology. To be sure, the Lone Star State’s iconic symbols—the hardy pioneer, the rugged cowboy, the tough Texas Ranger, and the wildcat oilman—were already familiar from popular culture and academic histories alike. What the Centennial did was articulate all of these mythological elements within a coherent narrative of Anglo-Saxon racial progress that shaped the representational contours of modern Texas, the Texas of today. Above all, Centennial discourses highlighted the AngloSaxon origins of democracy in Texas, becoming in effect a primer about the racialized nature of social agency in modern Texas. The potent combination of history, modernity, and racial pedagogy defined the social order of Texas during the 1930s through celebrating the development of all things Anglo-Texan. Seeking to stir public excitement about the Centennial in late 1935, Commissioner-General of the Federal Centennial Commission Cullen F. Thomas waxed eloquent in the Texas Centennial Magazine about the grand celebration of “one hundred years of unexampled progress, from barren wilderness to modern commonwealth.” The flourishing of progress in Texas could be surveyed only from the “hilltops of our history,” as only the knowledge of an “incomparable heritage” could bring about a true appreciation of contemporary “triumphs of invention and miracles of science.” The Centennial, then, would usher Texas into a full awareness of its own modernity and convey that sense to the world through the lessons of Texas history. For Thomas, Texas’s progress ultimately stemmed from the racial genius “of the plain pioneer men and women who first trekked the unpeopled wilds, with axe and plow and rifle and spelling book and Bible.” Agribusiness, superior technology, the English language, and Protestant Christianity had allowed the Anglo-

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Texan settlers to prevail against a host of racial enemies in founding “an Anglo-Saxon commonwealth.” Not limiting the historical significance of Texas independence to Texas, Thomas nationalized its scope to include Manifest Destiny. He expressed the widespread sentiment that Texas had served as the first, and the most important, domino to fall in the creation of an American empire, writing that the nation had every “right to share” the Centennial celebrations since “1836 was followed by 1845, San Jacinto by Chapultepec and American domain and destiny pushed westward from the Sabine River to the Pacific Ocean” (C. F. Thomas, inside front cover).6 With the seizure of vast Mexican territories as a result of the U.S.-Mexican War, the United States had achieved national greatness following the lead of Anglo-Texans. An editorial titled “A Century of Independence” in the Houston Post echoed Thomas’s interpretation of the significance of Texas to the development of the United States, stating that the victory at San Jacinto had “cleared the way for the sweep of Anglo-Saxon civilization to the Pacific coast” (4). This feat was all the more remarkable, according to Anna Ellis in an article for the San Antonio Express, because it was the result of “a white population of only 30,000 challenging the Mexican nation of 8,000,000” (“Texas Independence,” 1D). These statements all highlight a common sentiment at the core of Centennial discourses: a vision of Texas clearly delimited by race. As the Centennial brought tourist riches and foreign accolades to the Lone Star State, it would also fashion modern Anglo-Texan identity through the explicit foregrounding of Texas history as Anglo-Texan rule over lesser but potentially rebellious Mexicans. Commissioner-General Thomas’s otherwise cryptic comment about the “specter of sectionalism” ominously haunting Texas at a time of joyous celebration can be usefully interpreted in this light. Given that the Borderlands War stood as the last serious seditionist act prior to the Centennial, Thomas referred less to fears of another secession of white Southerners than to suspicions about the patriotic commitment of Texas Mexicans, who had comprised the majority of insurgents two decades before. Given that Texas Mexicans had mounted insurgencies along the border during the nineteenth century, such as those of Juan Nepomuceno Cortina in 1859 and Catarino Garza in 1891, even Texas Mexicans of several generations’ standing as U.S. citizens came under suspicion of racial treason. Past or present, the “Mexican question” stood out as a constant problem of racial management throughout the Texan century. In the past, Mexican tyranny had oppressed freedom-loving Anglo-Texans in a racial

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order turned upside down. In the present, Mexicans remained povertystricken aliens who might be useful cheap labor but who also threatened the social order by racial contamination, if not outright revolt. The sociologist O. Douglas Weeks of the University of Texas, an early sympathetic observer of the nascent Texas-Mexican civil rights group the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), summarized the general Anglo-Texan opinion of ethnic Mexicans: “Ignorant, slothful, unclean, dangerous, and incapable of assimilation or of good citizenship” (257). Widely regarded by Anglo-Texans as a chief example of the deleterious effects of miscegenation, Mexicans demonstrated the dangers of social capitulation to racial inferiors. As the expression of Anglo-Texan assumptions, attitudes, and beliefs, the Centennial further consolidated the social divisions that structured Texas life during the 1930s. Texas residents who lived along the color line, it seemed, were not Texan enough. Numerous popular treatments of the Centennial shared the tenet that the century after independence confirmed the narrative of Anglo-Saxon triumphal progress despite the huge obstacles of harsh environment and hostile races. In terms of racial management, people of color in general and Mexicans in particular were transformed into primitive natives or recent immigrants who had no part in or right to Texas history. The rhetorical erasure of tribal, black, Spanish, and Mexican histories from Centennial narratives served to emphasize the accomplishments of Anglo-Texan settler colonialism while denying any meaningful historicity to these other communities. In that their only historical role was to serve as the racial negation of white progress, people of color were portrayed as obstacles to overcome in the past (Mexicans and Indians) and social burdens in the present (Mexicans and Negroes). Centennial narratives, both popular and academic, hammered home the point that Anglo-Texans made Texas, its romantic history, its democratic government, and its material progress. Following Price’s lead, Commissioner-General Thomas and other supporters of the Centennial made Anglo-Texan history the lexicon through which both commercially and pedagogically minded interests could bolster their bid to have the Centennial funded and staged. Even as economic considerations enabled the Centennial to proceed, pedagogical imperatives became key justifications for massive state and federal outlays. Favorably commenting on a state senate resolution in 1935 that emphasized the importance of the Centennial for Texas schoolchildren, an editorial in the Texas Centennial Review titled “The Texas Centennial and the Schools” praised the teachable moment of the Centennial as “more

“Texanizing Texans”: Texas Centennial Discourses of Racial Pedagogy  41

appropriate to study in the nation’s schools than any project of it’s [sic] kind ever undertaken” (2). The main purpose of this intensive pedagogical effort would be, in the words of Commissioner-General Thomas, to “Texanize Texans” in the modern era. Even the supposed superiority of a Texas birth apparently did not exempt native-born children from needing instruction that would enable them “to know Texas better, to love Texas more and to serve Texas with single-hearted zeal” (C. F. Thomas, inside front cover). As part of the effort to “Texanize Texans,” the state, in conjunction with the Centennial celebrations, launched a massive campaign to foster Texan pride in schoolchildren. Centennial programming targeted every education level in the state’s school system, from grammar school through college. The Texas Centennial Review remarked, “Never has a year been so gala, so filled with programs, pageantry and parades as this Centennial Year” (“Centennial Is Food,” 1). Students in the public schools were the target audience of the Centennial’s major educational outreach programs, which distributed numerous booklets about Texas history, sponsored essay and poetry contests extolling the Anglo-Texan past, and staged historical pageants about “Texas under Six Flags.” As part of this effort, the Department of Publicity for Texas Centennial Celebrations distributed a set of nine pamphlets to public schools across the state. Titled “An Empire on Parade,” the series gave a brief overview of significant historical events as well as their meaning for contemporary Texans. Each pamphlet closed with a sentence asserting a link between an identification with past AngloTexan achievement and a future promise of political and social agency: “As the school boy and girl of today is the Texas citizen of tomorrow, so is he the heir of all that is Texas” (“Empire”). The Centennial educational campaigns, while often not overtly racially coded, nonetheless implied a distinct racial limit on who could be texanized.

The Poetics of Racial Pedagogy after San Jacinto African Americans participated in the Centennial celebrations in the face of scarcely veiled hostility from Anglo-Texan constituencies. According to Jesse O. Thomas, a Dallas community activist who wrote Negro Participation in the Texas Centennial, state and city funding for the “Negroes’s portion had been reduced from $500,000 to nothing” (J. Thomas, 59). All funding, including fifty thousand dollars to construct the Hall of Negro Life at the Centennial Exposition in Dallas, had to come from the three-

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million-dollar federal Centennial allocation (Ragsdale 128). Even then the contractor delivered a substandard building, installing bathroom, restaurant, and concession facilities inadequate to host the more than four hundred thousand people (including two hundred seventy-five thousand whites) who visited the exhibit during the course of the exposition (J. Thomas, 86). Cheaper, less effective fire extinguishers were installed instead of fire hoses despite stricter federal building codes. The interior paint scheme and exterior landscaping added insult to injury. Without consulting the largely African American advisory committee for the exhibit, the contractor had the interior painted deep greens and reds because he “understood Negros liked loud colors”; he also expressed doubt that “Negros could . . . assemble enough exhibits” about African American accomplishments to fill the fourteen-hundred-square-foot edifice (J. Thomas, 21). The exterior of the building was cordoned off from the rest of the exposition exhibits by numerous shrubs, prompting African American leaders to protest that the only purpose of such landscaping was “to segregate the Negro Building from the general outlay of the ground” (J. Thomas, 74). Other problems surfaced during the course of the exposition. African American visitors protested that they were targeted for exploitation by concessionaires. Complaints ran the gamut from having to pay to attend a Cab Calloway concert already included in the price of admission to being charged double the amount that whites were paying for refreshments. Other African Americans could not even make the trip to Fair Park because they were denied bus service ( J. Thomas, 21–22). Rather than reporting these issues, the local press ran derogatory stories about the Hall of Negro Life exhibit. A particularly egregious headline in the Dallas Morning News read, “History of Negro from Jungles to Now to be Shown”; the subheadline added “Centennial to be turned over to darkies Juneteenth” (15). Even the exhibition hall itself met an ignominious fate. The Hall of Negro Life was shuttered during the Greater Texas and Pan American Exposition the following year and subsequently demolished, the only exposition building not preserved for the future. Despite the opposition of state and local authorities to the exhibit, the African American community praised the Hall of Negro Life as the first U.S. exhibit at a major international exposition to highlight the contributions of African Americans to the progress of the United States. African American writers, artists, and professionals used the opportunity of a highly visible public space to characterize their community as something other than a social problem. Four stunning modernist murals by Aaron

“Texanizing Texans”: Texas Centennial Discourses of Racial Pedagogy  43

Douglas emphasized the aesthetic contribution, while poster presentations summarized African American innovations in the arts, music, crafts, education, agriculture, mechanical arts, statistics, health, business, social services, journalism, religion, and law. A daily program of speakers and singers provided a living dimension to the exhibit; of special note was a production of Macbeth by the Harlem Unit of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Theatre Project under the direction of Orson Welles and the producer John Houseman. The prominent scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois wrote a pamphlet for the exhibit titled “What the Negro has done for the United States and Texas”; the pamphlet consisted mostly of excerpts from his recently published Black Reconstruction in America, but Du Bois added an original section about African American accomplishments in Texas. Whereas Centennial discourses sought to downplay the significance of slavery as a central causal factor in either Texas independence or Manifest Destiny, Du Bois reasserted the African American presence in Texas history by arguing that “a natural expansion of vigorous pioneers” led to “a determined attempt to extend the slave system” (8). Reinterpreting the AngloTexan discourse of freedom from Mexico’s supposed racial tyranny into their drive to extend white racial tyranny over the northern half of the Americas, Du Bois characterized the Texas Revolution as the manifestation of “dreams of a slave empire which would reach from the Mississippi Valley to Central America” (9). The economics of cotton, the will to white supremacy, and the ideological hunger for empire led to the U.S.Mexican War at the behest of “the slave barons” (Du Bois, 9). Along his powerful attack upon the white supremacist historiography of Texas, Du Bois also documented the more mundane, yet still significant, material and cultural contributions of African Americans to the Lone Star State. Noting that “three blacks helped defend the Alamo,” he portrayed the history of the state since Reconstruction as an experiment in multiracial democracy. The diverse Anglo, African American, and Mexican American population of Texas, coupled with the state’s vast natural resources, held the promise of “enduring prosperity” if only pursued with “justice and freedom and understanding between men” (Du Bois, 9). Echoing Du Bois’s hopes, Jesse O. Thomas commented that the Hall of Negro Life had improved the situation of African Americans by making a favorable impression upon white visitors: “All of them went away with a higher appreciation of the Negro’s contribution to American Culture and with a more tolerant attitude toward the Negro’s efforts” (J. Thomas, 87). The representations of African Americans and Mexican Americans

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at the exposition and in Centennial discourses mirrored each other in a modernist funhouse sort of way. The African American community was represented through the Hall of Negro Life as contemporary, part of the modern moment even if always segregated by the law and profoundly subordinated socially. Yet many Centennial discourses failed to discuss Texas’s deep implication in slavery, although the state’s military role on the Confederate side of the U.S. Civil War was extolled. Reconstruction received its perfunctory characterization as a time of “Negro misrule” but post-Reconstruction Jim Crow segregation and white terrorism received scant attention. Even the Lost Cause ideology of the New South had little traction within Centennial discourses. As the historian Gregg Cantrell has commented, “Certainly the Texas public did not cease to be essentially southern in many of its racial, political, and cultural values. But by the second decade of the twentieth century . . . the sentimentality of the Lost Cause, with its reminders of slavery, defeat, military occupation, and poverty, held little appeal for the forward-looking leaders who wanted to build a progressive future for Texas” (66). This early twentieth-century reorientation of Texas Progressives, echoed within Texas historiography, from a southern identification to a western one effectively obliterated the African American past in Centennial discourses. In contrast, Mexican American community had no specific exhibit, no contemporary living presence at the Centennial Exposition in Dallas, but nonetheless occupied a central, if despised, place within Centennial discourses. Anglo-Texan histories incessantly depicted Mexicans, both individually and collectively, as the historical foil of Texas. As if to keep fairgoers ever mindful of this, a Texas Ranger station guarded the adjacent half-sized replica of the Alamo on the grounds of the Centennial Exposition.7 But the most explicit anti-Mexican narrative of Anglo-Texan racial progress at the exposition was showcased in the Humble Oil and Refining Company’s Hall of History, an exhibit housed in the Petroleum Building. There, fourteen dioramas—“collected, examined and evaluated by the Department of History of the University of Texas”—depicted scenes from nineteenth-century Texas history (Twice-Told Tales, 3).8 These included the annexation of Texas into the United States in 1845, the Confederate victory at the Battle of Sabine Pass in 1863, a Texas Ranger encampment of the Indian-fighting Frontier Battalion during the 1870s, and a typical cattle drive of the late nineteenth century. Yet as if to underscore the point that modern Anglo-Texan identity had been formed in contrast to its Mexican other, seven of the dioramas were scenes involving putative Mexicans in one form or another. Three were relatively neutral in tone,

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perhaps because they were set during the Spanish era of colonial rule: two of these were large-scale panoramas of eighteenth-century Spanish mission life, while the third depicted Moses Austin’s initial visit to the Spanish governor of Texas in 1820. The remaining four dioramas depicting ethnic Mexicans, however, highlighted the racial conflict between Anglos and Mexicans during the Texas Revolution and its aftermath. Two were implicit studies of the contrast between the racial characters of Mexicans and Anglo-Texans. The first of these showed Santa Anna’s capture at the Battle of San Jacinto, in which the defeated general attempted to evade recognition by dressing in the uniform of a private. The Mexican leader’s cowardice stands in sharp contrast to the cool stoicism of the Anglo-Texans captured during the failed, filibustering Mier Expedition of 1842, the subject of another diorama. In this scene, the Anglo-Texans laugh in the face of death at the hands of their Mexican captors; the caption read, “The Mier prisoners jested as they drew the beans which spelled the difference between life and death” (Twice-Told Tales, 26). The racial distinction between the despotic yet cowardly character of Santa Anna, the self-styled Napoleon of the West, and the manly, disciplined character of the Anglo-Texan commoner highlighted the fundamental difference between those who merited contempt and hatred and those who deserved democracy and reverence. The symbolic crux of the Hall of History exhibit was the two dioramas, easily the most compositionally dynamic of the fourteen, portraying the Battle of the Alamo. In one that depicted the almost certainly apocryphal “last stand” of Davy Crockett a caption read, “When the fight was over, dead Mexicans were piled all around him” (Twice-Told Tales, 16).9 The other diorama showed marauding Mexican troops slaughtering defenseless Anglo-Texans; its caption read, “Within the church, Joseph Walker is killed at Mrs. Dickinson’s feet; Robert Evans is bayoneted as he attempts to fire the magazine; James Bowie is killed on his sick bed” (Twice-Told Tales, 18). In both of these dioramas, the Mexican soldiers are represented as dark-faced brutes bayoneting unarmed defenders, racialized demons hellbent on wiping out Anglo-Texan liberty and freedom.10 These two dioramas were so egregious in their representation of Mexicans as subhuman fiends that the Mexican government, which had refused repeated invitations to participate in Centennial celebrations, threatened to withdraw from the Greater Texas and Pan American Exposition scheduled for the following year in Fair Park. In addition to demanding that the Humble Oil Company “close its entire exhibit or attempt such changes as may

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Figure 1.2. Shown at the Texas Centennial Central Exposition in Dallas, this diorama

of the Battle of the Alamo reinforced racial stereotypes of Mexicans as brutish antagonists of Anglo-Texan freedom. This diorama, along with the one shown in Figure 1.3, was featured in the exhibit’s companion booklet, Twice-Told Tales of Texas. (Courtesy of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, Republic of Texas Museum. Photo: John M. González.)

be required,” Mexican Consul Adolfo C. Domínguez informed the U.S. State Department that Mexican participation would also be contingent upon the Greater Texas and Pan American Exposition not being “a continuation in whole or in part of the Exposition celebrating the Centennial of the Independence of Texas” (U.S. State Department, 711:12/1344 1). The Centennial proved extremely unpopular in Mexico despite a concerted media campaign directed toward Latin American nations.11 A style guide issued to publicity writers for the Centennial Exposition highlighted just how sensitive the issue of language had become. The guide admonished writers “not to use ‘Santa Ana [sic] the tyrant,’ ‘the butchering of Fannin’s men,’ or other terms” of common Anglo-Texan parlance “that might be calculated to arouse resentment among Mexican readers.” The narrative voice of the style guide evidenced awareness that many Mexicans had already expressed outrage over what they considered to be a celebration by the United States of the outright theft of a critical Mexican province. In a remarkable comparison with the contemporary geopolitics of empire during the mid-1930s, the style guide noted, “Remember that

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Figure 1.3. This diorama (a companion to the one shown in Figure 1.2) depicted

Mexican soldiers brutally killing a heroic Anglo-Texan in front of Susannah Dickinson. To the right, a deathly ill Jim Bowie is bayonetted by Mexican soldiers. (Courtesy of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, Republic of Texas Museum. Photo: John M. González.)

from Mexico’s point of view the Texas Revolution of 1836 and the U.S.Mexico War of 1846 appear akin to the creation of the puppet state of Manchuria and the Japanese invasion of North China” (“Data and Style Control Regulations,” 2).12 In 1935, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Josephus Daniels had discussed the possibility of Mexican participation in the Texas Centennial Central Exposition with Mexico’s acting minister for foreign affairs but was informed that even an official invitation would further inflame Mexican public opinion against the United States.13 It would be better, the Mexican official concluded, “to let sleeping dogs lie” (U.S. State Department, 711:12/2792 2). Given that the following year’s Greater Texas and Pan American Exposition was meant to highlight the Roosevelt administration’s Good Neighbor policy, the withdrawal of Mexican participation would have proven a major embarrassment to the U.S. government. Secretary of State Cordell Hull disavowed any connection between the Greater Texas and Pan American Exposition and the Texas Centennial; furthermore, under pressure from the State Department, the organizers

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of the exposition removed the offending dioramas.14 By invoking the Good Neighbor Policy the Mexican government was able to belatedly ameliorate the very worst of anti-Mexican representations at the Centennial.15 Despite their removal from the fairgrounds of the Greater Texas and Pan American Exposition, the dioramas encapsulated the popular Centennial narrative of Texas history, a narrative that scripted every stage of what was considered history—the record of European colonialism from the first explorations of the Spanish to the latest technological achievement of Anglo-Texans—according to a hierarchical scale of whiteness. The dioramas themselves lived on in the popular imagination through Twice-Told Tales of Texas, a narrative guide for the exhibit published and distributed in large numbers during the exposition. Later circulated widely to public schools throughout the state, this booklet gave visitors to the exposition a capsule history of Texas under six flags. Published in two editions over three decades, Twice-Told Tales had a total run of sixtyone thousand copies.16 Photographs of the fourteen Centennial dioramas, along with other illustrations, accompanied the narrative. As in other Texas historical narratives of the Centennial, the momentous events of the Texas Revolution and Texas nationhood were depicted in Twice-Told Tales as the logical outcome of hardworking, freedom-loving Texan patriots, whose efforts at colonization eclipsed previous Spanish and Mexican efforts. The particular success of the Texans and the relative failure of the Spaniards and Mexicans were explained as the result of specific racial traits expressed as distinct approaches to community establishment, wealth creation, and the racial management of native populations. The Spanish “were at best poor colonizers” as “the conquistadores sought a ready wealth of gold, silver and precious stones.” Texas, which offered only “the fertility of its land,” held no charms for the piratical, parasitical Spaniards. Less interested in community development than in personal enrichment, the Spanish “never made a real effort to colonize Texas” in the most meaningful sense of creating a Jeffersonian agrarian community (Twice-Told Tales, 5). Twice-Told Tales suggested that Spanish Texas consisted solely of missions and presidios, a veneer of priests and soldiers who could scarcely build a proper civilization out of the vast Texas wilderness. A few Spanish “missions might defend the rich farm lands of Spanish Texas against the French,” but those lonely outposts, largely staffed by neophytes and mestizos, “were to prove a puny barrier to the flood of frontiersmen” leading an Anglo-Saxon “irresistible tide of land-hungry humanity” (Twice-Told Tales, 9). Ignoring the established civilian pueblos that would have com-

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plicated its narrative of Spanish colonial failure, Twice-Told Tales claimed that despite “a century of Spanish occupation, the country was practically primeval” (12). Having failed to cultivate the land or subdue the tribal nations, the Spanish and Mexican occupants would be forced to yield Texas to the race that could properly conquer, develop, and civilize the region. If ineffective Spanish colonization provided the European prehistory of Texas, then Anglo-Texan settlement, capped by the Texas Revolution, served both the origins and end of Texas history in Centennial discourses. By far the most popular Texas history text of the Centennial era was Texas History Movies, a hugely popular cartoon collection that had originated as a daily strip in the Dallas Morning News in 1926. Presenting history in an easily digestible form, the strips had been collected, annotated with a more detailed historical narrative suitable for older students, and distributed in book form to elementary and junior high schools across the state by 1928. For the next three decades, Texas History Movies would educate Texas schoolchildren in the early history of Texas from the earliest days of European colonialism through the Civil War and Reconstruction. The illustrator Jack Patton and the writer John Rosenfield Jr. injected humor into the dry subject of early Texas history through droll incidental graphics and contemporary street slang. Using irreverent popular culture in its representational details, Texas History Movies nonetheless conveyed great reverence for Anglo-Texan accomplishments in the grand sweep of history. The combination garnered acclaim as an ideal way to teach Texas history even as Texas History Movies relied in its visual shorthand upon the racial stereotypes of the inarticulate savage, the thick-lipped piccaninny, and the lazy, sarape-draped Mexican. While grammar school students typically received a free paperback copy courtesy of the Magnolia Petroleum Company, Texas History Movies was also issued in a deluxe Centennial edition with an extended introduction that extolled the “Southwestern Empire” of Texas (Movies, 7). The brief review of the Texas Revolution expounded the widely held view that “racial differences and the misunderstanding and distrust generated by them were at the base of the Texas Revolution” (Movies, 5). The cartoon panels dealing with this topic elaborated upon this interpretation in rather more explicit terms. In one panel, Mexican and Texan pass each other on the street hurling the epithets “Gringo!” and “Greaser!” at each other, while in another panel an Anglo-Texan complains, “We Anglo-American citizens of Mexico must have relief from oppression” (Movies, 179). Captions such as “The American colonists submitted to laws published in a

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foreign tongue” suggest that Mexican culture itself was the source of their oppression, thereby creating a racial politics polarized as an American and Mexican binary (Movies, 179). Even Stephen F. Austin, who socialized with the Texas-Mexican elite in Spanish and who became a reluctant revolutionary at best, opines in one panel, “I can’t understand the Mexican way and the Mexicans can’t understand the American” (Movies, 181).17 Accessing the past through a thoroughly modern comic strip form, the narrative of Texas History Movies is one of Anglo-Saxon ideals and culture under siege not only by a tyrant but by an entire race as the cartoons systematically conflated Santa Anna’s centralist abridgments of local political autonomy with the cultural practices of the Mexican community— including Texas-born Mexicans—such as the use of the Spanish language. The cultural gulf between the two racialized communities is depicted as fundamentally unbridgeable. In this light, the revolution became the inevitable outcome of an inferior Mexican nation trying to dominate a superior Anglo-Saxon one in political, economic, and social terms. Above all, Centennial discourses as articulated by Twice-Told Tales of Texas and Texas History Movies highlighted the Anglo-Saxon origins of democracy in Texas, becoming in effect primers about the racialized specificity of democracy in the Texas of the 1930s.18 In a similar vein, the Centennial inspired an outpouring of poetry dedicated to the heroic Anglo-Texan past. Like the prose offerings of the Centennial, the poetry offered a triumphalist discourse of Anglo-Texan progress over Mexican opposition. For the most part, Centennial poetry focused upon the Texas Revolution and the Battle of the Alamo in particular. The image of Mexicans as demon-spawn proved quite popular in the Centennial edition of the anthology Poems of the Alamo, sponsored by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. The racially based cultural differences outlined in Twice-Told Tales and Texas History Movies give way to absolute racial difference as Mexicans appear as simply barbaric and subhuman in particularly fiendish ways. “The Men of the Alamo” emphasized the cruel, unthinking bestiality of Mexican troops (“the locust horde” and “wolves”(Roche, 4, 6), while “Siege of the Alamo” invokes the evil incarnate of “the Mexico demons” (Lynch, 17). In “The Alamo,” godless Mexicans lose all semblance of individuality as a “murderous throng” whose members “slaughter all who entreat and implore, / Slaughter them kneeling in prayer” (Corrigan, 27). One poem cast the conflict in explicitly racial terms: “Tejas—Texas” has the Anglo-Texan “heroes of the Alamo . . . defy the Indians’ challenge” (Decker, 20). As the racially inferior opponents of liberty, Mexicans were consistently portrayed as

“Texanizing Texans”: Texas Centennial Discourses of Racial Pedagogy  51

Figure 1.4. Texas History Movies consistently portrayed the political causes of

the Texas Revolution as insurmountable cultural and racial differences between “Americans” and “Mexicans.” (Texas History Movies, Centennial Edition. Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.)

Figure 1.5. Even

Stephen F. Austin, the bilingual, transculturated broker of U.S. immigrants into Mexico, cannot bridge the racial gap created by Texas History Movies. (Texas History Movies, Centennial Edition. Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.)

being outside civilization, outside morality, and indeed outside humanity altogether. Although somewhat downplayed in favor of the romanticized Battle of the Alamo, the Battle of San Jacinto offered Centennial poets the opportunity to join heroics with victory over hellish Mexicans. George W. Winningham’s “The Birth of the Lone Star: A History of the Texas Revo-

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lution” traced the campaigns of the Mexican and Texian armies in the moments leading to the decisive battle on April 2, 1836. Published in 1934 as “a part of the educational program” sponsored by the American Legion’s Texas Centennial Committee, this “Poem in Five Parts, Written in the Simple Language of the Common People” extolled the “good American stock” who built Anglo-Saxon civilization with “homes, schools, and churches” before being threatened by “a despot devoid of Christian traits” (Winningham, 1, 2). As in Texas History Movies, Santa Anna’s tyrannous ways quickly become characteristic of all Mexicans, who are variously termed “despotic sons of a foreign race / Who put to sword the Alamo,” “fiends incarnate urged by hate,” and “imps released from hell” (Winningham, 2–3). The Mexican troops are depicted as simultaneously “a crack battalion of picked men . . . inured to war” and as “fear-crazed troops who milled about” once the actual battle began, an apparent discrepancy explained by the providentially sent battle cry of “Remember the Alamo!” that “burst forth to put the fear of God / Into the heart of every foe” (Winningham, 4–7). If devilish Mexicans tormented Anglo-Texans in the past, then AngloTexans would ensure that Mexicans received poetic justice in the present. Two days after the Centennial anniversary of the Alamo’s fall, the Dallas Morning News published Grace Baer Hollowell’s poem “In the Pearl” in its occasional series “From Contemporary Texas Poets.” The poem took the form of a terse epistle from the Anglo-Texans of 1936, the “we again in the upper reaches,” to “Dear Mexico” (Hollowell, 4). The poem lists all that Mexico had lost by losing Texas, the “pearl” in the crown of its former northern provinces, to a more deserving Anglo-Saxon race that combined an aesthetic appreciation of the Texas landscape (“the daisy that fringes the pine”) with an industrious work ethic that usefully transformed that nature into the stuff of civilization (“the hay-cocks set”) (Hollowell, 4). Mocking Mexicans as “all of you clods, / Gods in clay,” the poem spelled out the consequences suffered in the present by Mexicans for having lost Texas to Anglo-Americans a century ago (“to find us this day”) (4). Metaphorically dirt (“clods”) without being metonymically part of the land (Texas), defeated Mexicans must now work “to breathe at all in the heat / And sweat . . . Of this new day” under their racial betters (Hollowell, 4). Hollowell, who hailed from the lower Rio Grande Valley town of Edinburg, would have been familiar with the sight of Texas Mexican and Mexican laborers toiling in the valley’s cotton fields and citrus groves. A century of low-paying, backbreaking hell, Hollowell implied, was an appropriate payback for the “Mexico demons.”

“Texanizing Texans”: Texas Centennial Discourses of Racial Pedagogy  53

While such fare was standard for Centennial discourses, at least one author attempted to use the Centennial to “subdue racial prejudice” against ethnic Mexicans as well as “stimulate patriotism in the public schools” (Martin, i). Franklin Y. Martin’s one-act play “Death Comes to the Alamo” (1935) depicts the final hours of William B. Travis, Crockett, Bowie, and a number of lesser-known Alamo defenders as they wait for Santa Anna’s army to storm the walls. Set within the chambers of a deathly ill Jim Bowie, the main emotional addition to the usual stoic heroism of the beleaguered garrison is the blatantly anti-Mexican ire of Flanders, a character who periodically punctuates the lofty patriotism of the room with the chorus of “I hate a Mexican” (Martin, 1). Bowie is cast as the counterexample to Flanders through his idealization of his deceased wife, Ursula Veramendi, saying, “Keep in mind that I married a Spaniard, Flanders; and there was never a nobler or more faithful wife” (Martin, 9). When the battle finally begins, Flanders remains adamant about hating “them saddle-colored imps,” but he too comes to realize the futility of war and race hatred at the hour of his death (Martin, 14). Having shot a Mexican soldier who simultaneously fatally wounded him, Flanders extends a hand and a compliment to his nemesis: “Well, you got me, ‘Meck.’ Close to the heart. Congratulations. It was a dandy shot” (Martin, 15). A dying Flanders sees a “great light—in the shape of a cross” that encompasses the Alamo’s defenders and attackers alike in the heavenly embrace of Christianity (Martin, 15). Commenting that “the Mexican I killed on the wall” appeared “beautiful . . . in the light of Christ,” Flanders finds salvation by forsaking his racial hatred in his final words: “It’s funny—I don’t hate—anybody—any more” (Martin, 15). Hand in hand with Flanders, the Mexican soldier’s last words echo in the death-filled chamber: “Me die, too” (Martin, 15). Even in a play meant to ameliorate racial prejudice, ethnic Mexicans found themselves spoken for in Anglo-Texan texts.

The Patriarchal Colonialism of Trombly and Webb Perhaps the best-known poetic treatment of the Texas Centennial was Albert Edmund Trombly’s North of the Rio Grande. Published in 1936, this collection centered upon vignettes of Texas history pitting Anglo-Texans against the natural elements and the racial enemies who would destroy their nascent civilization. As the title suggests, modern-day Texas was built from the Rio Grande northward and forged in relation to its racial

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antithesis south of that international boundary. For Trombly, the creation of modern Texas out of the struggle between Anglo-Texans and Mexicans reflected the particular genius of the Anglo-Saxon race in the tenets of racial management. The thematic centerpiece of the collection, “Texas Centennial Hymn (1836–1936),” sets the triumphalist tone with lines like “They built so well those pioneers . . . / That what they wrought, a hundred years / Could only consecrate.” Present-day Texans performed “the humbler duties” of “the common day” in the wake of heroic ancestors who had ushered in the dawn of Anglo-Texan civilization through the “glamorous morning task” of defeating Mexican tyranny. While the cyclical metaphor of history as the progression of a day implies an eventual decline into darkness, the poem suggests that the Centennial itself was the bulwark working to “keep a people strong” through the remembrance of freedom won (Trombly, 15). As in other Centennial poems, in the poems of North of the Rio Grande the events of the Texas Revolution provided the imaginative setting for the delineation of racial character. Two poems about the key battles of the Texas Revolution frame the contrapuntal nature of Anglo-Texans and Mexicans. In “Beleaguered,” the final battle for the Alamo is narrated in a terse, imagistic style by an unnamed Anglo-Texan defender. The protagonist does not mock the Mexican troops and even identifies Santa Anna, “the stark Napoleon,” as a “master strategist.”19 As the battle rages from dawn to dusk, the narrator reports the inevitable onset of defeat with a defiant stoicism. Surrender comes only with death via a strikingly modernist image in the poem’s final line: “A white flag droops; how like a shroud!” (Trombly, 48). In contrast to Anglo-Texan death with dignity at the Alamo is the craven, cowardly behavior of the defeated Mexican troops in the poem “San Jacinto.” A scholarly prologue informs that the Anglo-Texans’ battle cry of “Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!” was met by the defeated Mexicans’ reply, “Me no Alamo! Me no Goliad!” (Trombly, 38).20 The refrain becomes the focal point of contrasting Anglo-Texans and Mexicans, as the Mexicans misconstrue the battle cry and then mangle their response in English. Finding themselves in the same position as the Alamo defenders after having lost the battle, the Mexican “cowardly knaves” have the temerity to ask for mercy when they gave none at the Alamo (Trombly, 38). Instead, Anglo-Texans ignore “hands supplicating” since righteous vengeance required that “Mexican blood must flow like water” (Trombly, 39). The terrific slaughter creates a horrific scene that the Anglo-Texans delight in: “All night from the heaped up dead and dying / Lugubrious

“Texanizing Texans”: Texas Centennial Discourses of Racial Pedagogy  55

voices, agonized, mad, / Gasp in delirious flashes of terror: / ‘Me no Alamo! Me no Goliad!’ (Trombly, 40). The refrain underscores Mexican inferiority at every turn. Cowardly rather than brave, selfish rather than individualistic, and hysterical rather than stoic, the craven Mexican soldiers are a study in contrast with the quietly heroic Anglo-Texan narrator of “Beleaguered.” According to Trombly, the true legacy of San Jacinto is not just the winning of political independence for Texas, as important as that was; an equally crucial aspect was “a wail of voices that will not away” contained in the words “Me no Alamo! Me no Goliad!” (Trombly, 40). The historical memory of defeated Mexicans was a powerful reminder of the Anglo-Texan need to vigilantly maintain the abjection of Mexicans in the present of the 1930s. If the commemoration of Texas history protected Anglo-Texan racial identity from the enemy of forgetfulness within, then Trombly would remind his readers of the one Texan institution dedicated to keeping racial enemies at bay: the Texas Rangers. Already legendary thanks to countless dime novels, Hollywood westerns, and true crime magazines, the Rangers occupied a privileged place within Texas mythology as the distilled quintessence of Anglo-Texan subjectivity itself. Mapping the defense of national boundaries onto racial ones, Trombly’s poem “Texas Rangers” opened with the geopolitical truism that mountains “solid and tall” shield nations from adversaries both savage and civilized. Nature itself ratified national sovereignty “by the mountains’ infrangible laws,” defending attacks from “oceans” and “Tamerlanes” alike. To smug West Coast denizens who “[think] with Hood and with Shasta to vex us” by noting that there were “no mountains in Texas,” Anglo-Texans reinforced the borders of Texan identity through references to its racial adversaries: “the Apache,” “the Comanche,” and “the Mexican thief and marauder.” The source of “respect for the great Texas border” by “these beaten-back strangers” was the Rangers, “our peaks, our impregnable heights!” Relying on Anglo-Texan will to assert white dominion rather than passively assume its natural emergence, Anglo-Texans demonstrated their racial superiority even among other Anglo-Saxons by securing civilization in hostile environments with institutions such as the Rangers that subdue “white-lipped” racial enemies (Trombly, 72). Not surprisingly, Trombly’s “The Texas Rangers” served as the epigraph to the first edition of Walter Prescott Webb’s history of the Rangers titled The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense (1935). Perhaps returning the favor for having been so honored by Webb, Trombly dedicated North of the Rio Grande to his old friend. Trombly had known Webb

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since the early 1920s, when both roamed the University of Texas campus as graduate students and members of the Texas State Historical Association.21 Certainly the ideological kinship between poem and history merited their pairing, even if Webb’s text became by far the better known of the two. Of all the academic narratives about Texas history published in conjunction with the Centennial celebrations, none had more influence or staying power than The Texas Rangers. An enthusiastic New York Times book review called it “probably the best history of Texas ever written” (Walker, BR4).22 This academic hagiography of the Rangers’ role in Texas history remains the apotheosis of Centennial discourses in its extreme adulation of the state institution that represented for Anglo-Texans all Texas in itself. The aura surrounding the Rangers extended even to its fawning historian: the prestige he gained from writing The Texas Rangers enabled Webb to reign over Texas historiography for more than thirty years at the University of Texas as perhaps the state’s most celebrated historian of the twentieth century. As the historian Albert L. Hurtado has shown, the young history departments of public universities across the Southwest self-consciously promoted avenues of inquiry that would, on the whole, flatter regional elites eager to have their newfound status and riches legitimated by institutions of higher learning. In turn, the universities of California, Oklahoma, and Texas greatly benefited during their fledgling years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the resulting hefty donations.23 Colonial difference and racial pedagogy found in popular Centennial discourses gained intellectual respectability, if not widespread acceptance, through a close adherence to the footnote-embellished narrative of Anglo-Saxon triumphalism prevalent in academic histories such as Webb’s. The Centennial efforts of historical popularizers and poetasters alike certainly reflected a deep-seated tradition of popular Anglo-Texan sentiment, but historians across the state, particularly the Texas history faculty at the University of Texas, had made touting the accomplishments of Anglo-Saxon civilization a core tenet of their scholarly investigations. With The Texas Rangers, Webb focused on the state’s most direct instrument of racial management, celebrating the men who stood “alone between a society and its enemies,” specifically “the outlaw breed of three races, the Indian warrior, Mexican bandit, and American desperado” (ix). Despite the nominal inclusion of white “desperados” (who were more often than not depicted as the leaders of nonwhite outlaws), Webb’s subtitle—A Century of Frontier Defense—indicated how his analysis of the Rangers transformed the paramilitary force dedicated throughout much

“Texanizing Texans”: Texas Centennial Discourses of Racial Pedagogy  57

of its history to the repression of people of color into valiant defenders of Anglo-Saxon civilization against the hostile races massed against it. Founded during the Texas Revolution, the Rangers embodied for Webb the racial genius of “the first permanent settlers,” identified as “AngloAmericans from the United States,” in forming suitable institutions to solve the problems of settler colonialism in Texas (7). The detailed development of the Rangers as an Anglo-American frontier institution emerged from Webb’s comprehensive thesis about the westward movement of Anglo settler colonialism. According to Webb’s The Great Plains (1931), his variation upon Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, the new climates, terrains, and cultural contact zones that Anglo-American settlers encountered in Texas forced a pause in the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny as they adapted to conditions beyond the ninety-eighth meridian. Vastly different from the frontier experience of the Appalachians and the Ohio Valley, the Texas experience required the development of new institutions and technologies not only to handle new threats such as the mounted Plains Indians and Mexican rancheros, but also to provide new means of living where the farming techniques of the Atlantic Coast and the Ohio River Valley were inadequate. Once AngloAmericans had solved these knotty problems, Webb theorized, they stood ready to resume the westward course of empire. In Gente Decente, the literary critic Leticia Garza-Falcón has argued that Webb’s racial views as articulated in The Great Plains “represent a narrativized version of ideas about Aryan supremacy which were widespread also in Europe during the period” (37). To the extent that he tied technological development to institutional development in the context of a war for racial supremacy, Webb could be considered a racial materialist in outlook. In the cultural and technological laboratory known as Texas, Anglos developed the necessary technology and their corresponding institutions to successfully settle the land and to regulate any remaining nonwhite populations to their own political and economic advantage. To the problem of commercially viable enterprise in a dry, drought-prone land, Anglos adopted the Spanish-Mexican practice of ranching but added the innovations of barbed wire and the windmill. To the problem of mounted warfare, they developed new weapons technology (the six-shooter) and an institution to fully exploit its possibilities on behalf of Anglo settlers: the Rangers. For Webb, this paramilitary constabulary, more than a citizen militia but less than an army, stepped in to handle the problems of governability in a borderlands occupied by essentially lawless, racially inferior groups who merited a different standard of justice. “Affairs on the

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border,” Webb asserted, “cannot be judged by the standards held elsewhere” (252). The success of the Rangers as a state institution of racial management stood in contrast to what Webb considered to be the analogous counterparts for frontier pacification within Spanish and Mexican colonialism. According to Webb, the Spanish and Mexican regimes had failed to settle successfully the Texas frontier because their colonization schemes had failed to adapt to the local situation. Rather, Spain and Mexico had tried to impose the colonial model used in central Mexico, sending “the conquistador to conquer, the religious to convert, and the encomendero to exploit.” While this tripartite system “worked with marvelous effectiveness and speed” with the “civilized, sedentary, agricultural” Indians of the Mexican interior, it immediately broke down in the face of “an entirely different kind of Indian” (Webb, 8). Unable or unwilling to alter their colonization strategy, the Spaniards and Mexicans allowed hostile tribal nations to grow “more powerful and in possession of more territory than they were at any time before” the arrival of the Anglo-Americans. The arrival of the newcomers during the 1820s set the scene for the triangulated racial conflict, the “struggle for supremacy,” out of which would “come the unique character of Texas with its dramatic history and peculiar institutions” (Webb, 9).24 Webb viewed Indians and Mexicans alike as clearly inferior to AngloTexans, particularly as embodied in the Ranger. Perpetuating the myth of the vanished Indian, Webb resorted to the opinion of “cultural anthropologists” that the introduction of the horse into Indian communities “did not introduce new culture traits among the Plains Indians but rather emphasized and accentuated those already present” (13). Implying that Indians could not reinvent their own culture, only repeat its wellworn patterns, Webb cast Indians as quintessential antimodernist subjects; unable to think beyond the set limits of their culture, Indians inevitably died out before the superior adaptability of the white man. In a backhanded way, Webb admired the military genius of famous Indian leaders and common Indian warriors of the late nineteenth century. After all, they had kept a far larger and better-supplied U.S. Army west of the ninety-eighth meridian at bay for over a generation. So single-minded were these “nomadic people whose ideals and purposes never harmonized with those of their Europeans foes” that Webb would tally Plains Indian culture in one sentence: “War was the end and aim of the Indian’s life” (11). In Webb’s racial struggle for supremacy, the Plains Indians faced inevitable annihilation with considerable bravery and sheer doggedness.

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Unable to prevail, Indians had faded into the historical past, a place from which Webb, in a fit of imperialist nostalgia, could safely admire savage virtues.25 Webb’s condescending admiration of the Plains Indians stood in sharp contrast to his altogether negative assessment of Mexicans. While their inflexibility in adapting to Anglo civilization spelled their ultimate doom, the Plains Indians had, in Webb’s assessment, at least maintained their cultural and racial purity. In contrast, “the Mexican nation arises from the heterogeneous mixture” of “Indian blood—but not Plains Indians blood—” and “European, largely Latin” (Webb, 13–14). For Webb, this blending of inferior Indian and European bloods resulted in a degenerate race as treacherous as it was cowardly. From this volatile blend came bad, if not oxymoronic, self-governance. For Webb, Mexican politics reflected the Mexican temperament: vicious, volatile, and vice-ridden. Attributing most of the “troubles” Texas had ever experienced to border Mexicans, Webb put the matter delicately: “Without disparagement it may be said that there is a cruel streak in the Mexican nature, or so the history of Texas would lead one to believe.” This sadistic demeanor, stemming from “a heritage from the Spanish of the Inquisition” and “Indian blood,” did not make for a superior fighting ability. Despite “a temperament volatile and mercurial,” the knife-wielding Mexican ranchero was, “on the whole, inferior to the Comanche and wholly unequal to the Texan” as a warrior. Completing the emasculation of the Mexican ranchero, Webb added euphuistically, “The whine of the leaden slugs stirred in him an irresistible impulse to travel with rather than against the music” (14). Whereas the Plains warrior and Mexican ranchero could express only the particular genius of their respective cultures and no more, the Texas Ranger could not only embody the quintessential Anglo characteristics of intelligence, rationality, and stoic endurance, but also combine “the fighting qualities of three races” (Webb, 15). Finding themselves in unfamiliar terrain among unfamiliar opponents, “the Anglo-Americans, henceforth called Texans . . . created the Ranger, who, since he was the latest comer, found it necessary to adapt his weapons, tactics, and strategy to the conditions imposed by his enemies” (Webb, 11). Ranger Major John S. “Rip” Ford’s popular maxim that “a Texas Ranger could ride like a Mexican, trail like an Indian, shoot like a Tennessean, and fight like a devil” highlighted the key Anglo racial traits that brought victory in Texas (Webb, 15). For Webb, the genius of the Rangers lay in their ability to borrow or invent the appropriate response to the conditions of Texas without resorting to the debilitating racial miscegenation that plagued the “Latin-Indian

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race” (9). In the culturally synthetic Rangers, Anglo-Saxon civilization produced the appropriate instrumentality that could give it the upper hand in dealing with the tribal nations on the western plains and the Texas Mexicans of the Nueces Strip. The portrayals of Anglo and Mexican in Trombly’s North of the Rio Grande resonated with Webb’s characterizations. The poem “Rio Grande Valley” implied that U.S. citizenship or residency did nothing to moderate the racial traits of Mexicans. Regardless of which side of the border a Mexican was from, fundamental character traits would out even among themselves. The poem detailed the international machinations of two Mexican rancheros on opposite sides of the Rio Grande, Juan Pizarro of the south bank and Jesús Malgardo of the north bank. Seeking to hide his herd from the army of Pancho Villa during the Mexican Revolution, Pizarro entrusts his cattle to the care of Malgardo in Texas, only to learn later that he “had sold the two men’s cattle as one” (Trombly, 17). Infuriated by the Texas Mexican’s insulting denials, the vengeful Pizarro kills Malgardo “with easy gait and conscience” on an island in the middle of the Rio Grande (Trombly, 18). The poem closes with Malgardo’s widow asking the “border rangers” to retrieve her husband’s body, with the strong implication that she cared only about the insurance money she could collect with proof of his death. Malgardo’s body is disinterred and floated across the river, “towed with a lariat under his chin” (Trombly, 19). The suggestion here is that the Rangers would have probably lynched Malgardo for cattle rustling in any case. The poem’s introductory and closing stanzas detail Malgardo’s torment in hell, where he is surrounded by devils who sarcastically ask, “Any cows to sell?” (Trombly, 19) While the poem sided with Pizarro by suggesting that Malgardo deserved to die for cattle rustling, it also emphasized that the supposedly Mexican racial traits of vengefulness, deceit, and lawlessness were shared across international boundaries. Malgardo ruins Pizarro economically by claiming that the border will protect cattle herds from theft (“Malgardo” being Trombly’s pseudo-Spanish neologism of “mal” (“bad”) and “guardar” (“to watch, keep or guard”). Named after the sixteenth-century conqueror of the Inca empire who killed the Incan emperor after being paid a huge ransom in gold and silver, Pizarro uses the island in the middle of the Rio Grande (“No Man’s Land”) outside the laws of either nation to lure Malgardo into a deadly ambush. Both Malgardo and Pizarro use the border to destroy each other, but the Texas Mexican is portrayed as the more treacherous of the two, having initiated the blood feud by taking

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advantage of the civil peace maintained on the U.S. side to dupe his neighbor in need. The lawless Mexicans of “Rio Grande Valley” stand in sharp contrast to the Anglo-Texan protagonist of “Border Justice,” a poem set in a pair of unnamed border towns that also deals with crime and punishment across the border. The “cowardly Luis Martín” kills “the Gringo plucking his Lily,” that is, sleeping with his favorite prostitute on the Mexican side. The Gringo’s brother Bud vows vengeance but, unlike the passionate Luis “whose blood ran hot as chile” while impulsively slitting the Gringo’s throat, the Anglo-Texan coolly plots his revenge with stoic determination and careful planning (Trombly, 27). Bud first “befriended Luis, but never let go” until “he was kin to the other,” brother to his brother’s killer (Trombly, 27). Luring Luis over to the U.S. side to exact his revenge since with “a Mexican court / He might run greater risk,” Bud convinces the drunken Luis to reenact his knifing of the Gringo (Trombly, 27). Thrusting his knife forward, Luis is shot by Bud in front of “a witness, / Paid by Bud for his stand” (Trombly, 28). Able to claim “self-defense,” Bud “settled the business,” getting away with murder (Trombly, 28). Like “Rio Grande Valley,” “Border Justice” depicts a masculinist zone of violence in which crimes are committed without compunction and scores are readily settled according to the masculinist codes of racial conflict. Unlike Pizarro’s murder of Malgardo in “Rio Grande Valley,” Bud’s murder of Luis is cast as true justice and honorable self-defense. Bud operates within U.S. laws that tacitly allow the legitimacy of “selfdefense” as long as the evidence matched its criteria in the matter. Bud’s cleverness in fulfilling the letter of U.S. law while exacting the justice disallowed by Mexican law aligns with the way Anglo-Texan law enforcement, particularly the Texas Rangers, often dealt with Texas Mexicans along the border. As the long history of Ranger brutality against TexasMexican victims suggests, the widespread application of self-defense by Anglo-Texan law enforcement amounted to a legally sanctioned form of domestic terrorism in the name of racial self-defense. Like la ley de fuga used by authorities to justify the killings of supposedly escaping prisoners without the bother of due process, self-defense provided a legal avenue for simultaneously meeting the requirements of the rule of U.S. law as applicable to an individual and the collective imperative of mastery over inferior races. If Bud himself is not identified as a Texas Ranger, he unmistakably shares the key traits of Ranger masculinity. Like Trombly, Webb con-

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sidered the Ranger to be the highest expression of Anglo-Saxon manhood despite the facile caricatures of popular culture. Pulp novels and filmic Westerns had, in Webb’s opinion, turned the Ranger into a “mere automaton animating a pair of swaggering boots, a big hat, and a sixshooter all moving across the prairies under a cloud of pistol smoke.” Webb sought to rescue the autonomous Anglo masculine subjectivity represented by the Ranger from the ravages of modernity, which threatened to vacate any subjectivity whatsoever. Seeking the true character of the “real Ranger” beyond the exaggerations of popular culture, Webb characterized the typical Ranger as “a very quiet, deliberate, gentle person” going about “his daily task of maintaining law, restoring order, and promoting peace” (ix). The mission of racial management, while at times portrayed by Webb as one of almost domestic routine, demanded a form of autonomous masculinity that seemed threatened by the emergence of border modernity and the closing of the frontier. Keenly aware that his very profession as a historian of the Rangers underscored the disappearance of frontier Anglo-Texan masculinity, Webb worked to collapse the difference between the manly fieldwork of racial management and its ideological justification through the production of knowledge about the Rangers. Webb aspired to the look of mutual recognition of a man among men by becoming a Ranger himself. “Some Adventures of a Ranger Historian,” the last chapter of The Texas Rangers, recounts three weeks Webb spent during the summer of 1924 as an honorary Ranger patrolling the Rio Grande between Laredo and El Paso. Having escaped rural poverty by choosing a professional career in higher education over farming, Webb found himself in awe of the men and the institution he was researching. Well aware that he had received a special commission as a Ranger thanks to political connections in Austin, Webb anxiously determined to panic as little as possible in any shootouts that might happen, given that he “held a commission as a Texas Ranger and could not afford to tarnish the record” (555). Webb even feared that the experienced Rangers he rode with would not accept him as an equal, but rather as a greenhorn: “As a tenderfoot I began to wonder whether these men might plan to initiate me by letting me ‘smell powder smoke’ in a sham brush battle” (555). Apprehensive about his performance before these masculine paragons of racial fitness, he wondered if he had what it took to be a Ranger in the relatively tame present of intercepting liquor smugglers during Prohibition, much less the rough-and-tumble past. Even the “cartridge belt and a forty-five caliber double-action Colt revolver” that came with the Ranger commission

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did not allay his fears (551). Eventually, the “I” of Webb’s narration becomes the “we” of the Ranger posse as Webb feels he is accepted into the group, albeit as a junior member. Back in camp after gaining “a little prestige among the border men” by finding the skeleton of a horse killed some years earlier in a shootout with Mexican liquor smugglers, Webb relaxed with his fellow Rangers in a remarkable scene of bilingual, homosocial frontier domesticity: “As [the Rangers] cooked the evening meal, sans shirts, to the accompanying thump of boot heels on bare floors and the gay jingle of Lee’s and Bob’s spurs, they conversed half in Spanish and half in English” (556, 560). For Webb, the border region represented an antimodernist space in which Anglo men could prove their racially superior manhood without the constraints imposed by modern Anglo-American women. Mexicans—all of whom seem to be male—assume the role of an inferior yet treacherous antagonist whose hostile but familiar presence enables the full expression of Anglo-Texan masculinity. Securing the border against Mexican smugglers and worse revived the homosocial U.S. frontier where white men could deal out death and domesticity on the same day. The notion that the closing of the frontier might endanger U.S. democratic practices developed during the nineteenth century would be the topic of Webb’s next book, Divided We Stand: The Crisis of a Frontierless Democracy (1937). For Webb, the Texas frontier had always been less a demographic reality (as it had been for Turner) than a habitual frontier attitude reflected in state institutions like the Rangers. With the folding of the Rangers, previously an independent state agency, into the new Department of Public Safety on the eve of the Centennial in 1935, Webb considered the Texas frontier truly closed. Dedicated to the task of domestic law enforcement, the combined agency fused the Rangers and the State Highway Patrol in a manner that could only spell extinction for the Rangers. Even as modern automobiles had replaced the horse so vital to the frontier era, Webb elegiacally prophesied, “It is safe to say that as time goes on the functions of the uniformed Texas Rangers will gradually slip away and that those of the Highway Patrol will increase” (567). This change marked the end of the era of frontier defense against racial enemies for Webb. What was left was merely the domestic management of former antagonists after the Anglo-Texan triumph in the tripartite racial conflict; with the disappearance of the Plains Indians and the reduction of Mexicans to tractable wage labor, the heroic age of racial mastery seemed over.26 Yet if the frontier existed to be swept aside in the inexorable march of border modernity, then, at least for a moment among the

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Rangers, Webb could relive the vanishing frontier on the Texas-Mexican border, where he was free “to feel the companionship of men and horses when the saddle stirrups touch in the solitudes” (xi). Riding range on the border—where white men could still classify Mexicans as “good, bad, or uncertain”—completed the merger of Ranger historian with Ranger, of the academic producer of historical knowledge as racial conflict and deeds of violent domination by six-shooter and hang noose (560). While Chicano/a academics as least as far back as Américo Paredes have denounced Webb’s blatant anti-Mexican racism as part of the colonial system of power/knowledge, few have considered The Texas Rangers a symptomatic defensive response to the social changes in gender and racial roles brought about by border modernity.27 Even as the closing of the Texas-Mexican frontier heralded what Webb considered to be the final domestication of the borderlands, a rising Texas-Mexican middle class threatened not only the Ranger mission of racial management through violence but the very existence of the Rangers themselves. The crisis of Anglo-Texan masculinity brought about by border modernity involved not only the closing of the frontier of racial conflict, but also of challenges from the very populations supposedly defeated in the past. In the last chapter of The Texas Rangers, Webb claimed his study came about specifically to counter Texas-Mexican criticism of the organization after the Borderlands War of 1915. In previous generations, the state-sponsored terrorism meted out by the Rangers needed no justification, enjoying the widespread support of the Anglo-Texan public. Webb conceded that the Ranger methods of law enforcement were “vigorous,” an adjective that euphemistically covered a multitude of routine atrocities, including the torture of innocent civilians and untried suspects, the application of la ley de fuga, and the collective punishment of subject populations (ix). Yet even these methods had the approval and consent of the good citizens of Texas, according to Webb, for whom the Rangers’ extralegal actions were most often the justified actions of a frontier era. But at a time when Texas Mexicans increasingly resorted to the state for relief via the courts or the legislature, Webb saw the growing need for an organized ideological defense of the Rangers: “It was the agitation preceding the Canales investigation that suggested the need for a history of the Texas Rangers” (549). State Representative J. T. Canales of Brownsville filed a bill in 1919 to reduce the size of the Rangers, triggering a legislative investigation of the Rangers’ actions in the lower Rio Grande Valley between 1914 and 1919, a period which included the Borderlands War.28 Sensing the mounting threat to his beloved Rangers, Webb undertook the

“Texanizing Texans”: Texas Centennial Discourses of Racial Pedagogy  65

scholarly project of documenting their service to Texas, first manifested in 1920 as a master’s thesis for the Department of History at the University of Texas. He would labor for fourteen more years to expand this thesis into The Texas Rangers. Nearly two decades after the Borderlands War, Webb’s research demonstrated the immense scope of the violence. His estimates of extralegal Mexican deaths at “the hands of the local posses, peace officers, and Texas Rangers” during the Borderlands War ranged between five hundred and five thousand, although he acknowledged, “The actual number can never be known.” Webb expressed no doubt that “the Texas Rangers played a prominent part” in “a reign of terror against the Mexicans” that even he termed “an orgy of bloodshed.” However, he demurred in detailing the atrocities, claiming that “the reader would not be interested in a list of a hundred or more clashes, raids, murders, and fights that occurred between 1915 and 1920” (478). Being heavily invested in the mythology the Rangers represented, Webb could not force himself to testify against them through his research. Rather, the Ranger historian blamed the violence in the borderlands on Texas politicians who had needlessly politicized the Ranger force through patronage commissions and on “a psychology of fear and racial antagonism that made the Rio Grande a battle-line and the border a battle-field” (Webb, 486). That the Rangers themselves had greatly cultivated that battlefield atmosphere through their terrorist actions escaped comment. While specific charges of murder, torture, and official malfeasance were leveled against the Rangers in the course of the legislative investigation, Webb maintained that Canales’s complaints could be summarized as “the maltreatment of Mexicans” (514). However, the investigation threatened to uncover real evidence and real indictments against the Rangers. Never before had a Texas-Mexican legislator, with widespread support from his Texas-Mexican constituency, dared to challenge the Rangers in such a high-profile forum. While the investigation failed to result in the conviction or indictment of a single Ranger, it did damage Ranger mythology and undermine its hitherto unquestioned legitimacy among the AngloTexan population. The official report of the investigation charged that “the Rangers have become guilty of, and are responsible for, the gross violation of both civil and criminal laws of the state” (quoted in Johnson, 175).29 While passing a substantially weaker reform measure than Canales’s original bill, the state legislature nonetheless significantly reduced the size of the Ranger force and, for the first time, established a formal avenue

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of citizen complaint. The victory was limited in scope, yet Texas Mexicans had successfully checked the use of unlimited police power over their community. As my analysis of Webb’s The Texas Rangers suggests, this intervention signaled to Webb the growing inclination and ability of Mexican Americans to challenge white supremacist practices by using the resources and procedures of the state itself. As the Centennial year approached, Mexican Americans, despite the racially triumphalist tone of most Centennial discourses, refused to quietly occupy the abject position assigned to them by Anglo-Texans. As if to throw down the gauntlet before Mexican American intellectuals in the protracted struggle for discursive advantage, Webb conspicuously dated the preface to The Texas Rangers September 16, 1935, Mexico’s independence day. If Webb wished to position himself as an anti-Mexican Ranger historian on Mexico’s foremost day of national pride, then it would be left to Texas-Mexican intellectuals to recuperate not the Mexican holiday of national independence but rather el dieciseis de septiembre of Greater Mexican cultural resistance.30 María Elena Zamora O’Shea, a tejana whose novella El Mesquite was published the same year as The Texas Rangers, would initiate the Texas-Mexican literary response to Webb’s history and other Centennial discourses by retelling the story of racial violence in south Texas from the Texas-Mexican point of view.

CHAPTER 2

“This Is Our Grand Lone Star State”: Reclaiming Texas History in María Elena Zamora O’Shea’s El Mesquite

Perhaps it is because so very [ few] of the writers give the real founders of Texas, the Spanish colonists and Mexicans of Texas origin, any credit that I resent it. But knowing as I do that we gave Texas the Long Horns, the Mustangs, the tall tales adopted by the present generation that I believe it is the place of writers to give our section a slight bath in Spanish Salts. María Elena Zamora O ’ Shea to George Sessions Perry

In the midst of an old grove of live oak and mesquite trees alongside Highway 77 in Kenedy County stands a massive granite slab with a bronze plaque stained by the sun and rain of many years. Over the seven decades since its erection for the Texas Centennial of 1936, people traveling between the lower Rio Grande Valley and Corpus Christi have paused at the adjoining rest stop, perhaps taking a moment to glance at the raised letters of the roadside marker’s inscription: Under this tree General Zachary Taylor commanding the Expeditionary Army of the United States sent to Texas in 1845, encamped on March 15, 1846, while en route with his troops from Corpus Christi to the Rio Grande. (Why Stop? 458)

For travelers curious about Texas history, the implication of the brief narrative is clear: Taylor’s army marched clear across Texas to protect the southern border of the United States from Mexican aggression. The

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plaque does not mention the fact that Taylor’s troops were arguably foreign invaders within the Nueces Strip, then the northern reaches of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, not an uncontested part of Texas or the United States (the strip became part of Texas only with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo some two years later). The rhetorical construction of the inscription would lead one to believe that, as President James K. Polk declared in his “War Message” of May 1846, “Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil” (Addresses and Messages, 1489). The Battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, occurring as they did just north of the Rio Grande, had in fact been fought on disputed territory, territory to which Mexico arguably had the better claim (Griswold del Castillo, 10–11). Like Polk’s pronouncement, the inscription on the plaque enacts the very history it purported to record, proleptically inscribing U.S. history as already accomplished before the actual fact since the inevitable outcome was manifestly destined. Over 750 roadside markers like this one dot the Texas landscape. They were erected for the Centennial in 1936, collectively narrating a vernacular history of the state that celebrated the Anglo-Texan victory over all obstacles, whether natural, Indian, or Mexican. That Texas has far more official historical markers—more than 12,000 as of 1999—than any other state points to its origins as an act of remembrance shouted out on the San Jacinto battlefield on April 2, 1836: “Remember the Alamo!”1 While Anglo-Texan identity has defined itself though “Remember the Alamo” ever since, this remembrance became a primary locus for the articulation of class, ethnic, and racial hierarchies associated with the emergence of border modernity in the late nineteenth century. As the anthropologist Richard Flores comments, “The cultural memory of the Alamo provides semantic justification for slotting Mexicans and Anglos into an emerging social order brought forth by the material and ideological forces that gripped Texas between 1880 and 1920” (Remembering, xvii). If the Alamo itself had served as the material signifier of “Remember the Alamo” for a hundred years by 1936, then the roadside markers thrown up by the Centennial would extend that sentiment’s materiality throughout the entire state. Each marker, an Alamo in miniature, was meant to sacralize the spot where it stood and transform the land itself into the “Shrine of Texan liberty.” As noted above, the network of roadside markers constitutes a conceptual expansion of what the historian Pierre Nora has termed lieux de

Figure 2.1. This Centennial roadside marker in Brownsville, Texas,

commemorates the Battle of Resaca de la Palma (1846). (Photo: John M. González)

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mémoire. For Nora, lieux de mémoire are the various material sites of memory through which selected events of the past are sacralized as meaningful, creating a powerful affect through which group identities may be formed. Emerging as a distinct phenomenon only when the rapidity of social change under modernity disrupts any possibility of a shared apprehension of the past and present as fundamentally continuous (what Nora terms milieux de mémoire), lieux de mémoire take cultural forms as diverse as “museums, archives, cemeteries, festivals, anniversaries, treaties, depositions, monuments, sanctuaries, [and] fraternal orders” (Nora, 11). Whereas Nora’s examples imply a discrete temporal, geographical, or conceptual existence for any lieu de mémoire, the far-flung web of Centennial roadside markers, each with its own discrete historical narrative whose connection to all the other roadside marker narratives is not immediately apparent, suggests a qualitative as well as quantitative difference in the cultural work of making modern Texan subjectivities. As if to pin down social identities made unstable by the uncertainties and displacements of the Great Depression, the roadside markers deposited a distinctly Anglo-Texan identity upon the very landscape through the ideological processes of perception that allowed the landscape itself to be seen as a monument to Anglo-Texan progress.2 As I discussed earlier, this effect is still present. If the roadside markers of the Centennial told a decidedly one-sided story about the making of Texas, then one Texas-Mexican writer of the 1930s would turn to the south Texas landscape to contest the historical narrative inscribed in granite and bronze. In her novella El Mesquite (1935), María Elena Zamora O’Shea contrasted the imposed, artificial roadside marker and the history of Anglo-Texan domination, both natural and social, that it symbolized with the ubiquitous mesquite tree that embodied a naturalized metonymic relationship to the south Texas landscape, much like the Texas-Mexican community that had lived there for several centuries. Subtitled “A Story of the Early Spanish Settlements between the Nueces and the Rio Grande as told by ‘La Posta del Palo Alto,’” El Mesquite describes more than two hundred years of Texas-Mexican history in the Nueces Strip.3 Granting consciousness and voice to the novella’s protagonist, a mesquite tree known as el Palo Alto rooted in the rich soils of the coastal bend near Corpus Christi, Zamora O’Shea related the untold history of Texas: the Texas-Mexican stories missing from the roadside markers and other Centennial discourses.

Reclaiming Texas History in Zamora O’Shea’s El Mesquite  71

Memories of Alice In a twist worthy of the intertwined yet vexed relationship between Texas Mexicans and Anglo-Texans in the Nueces Strip, Zamora O’Shea’s discursive antagonist over the course of the Centennial decade would be none other than J. Frank Dobie, the famed Texan folklorist who oversaw the creation of the roadside markers and who wrote his own natural history of mesquite. Squaring off in a discursive showdown featuring Texas granite and a south Texas tree now better known for its gourmet smoke flavor than as an occasion for cultural conflict, Zamora O’Shea and Dobie debated the historical terms of what Texas meant in the past and the social terms of who would be included in the state’s imagined community in the present. In this contest, as in life, Texas Mexican and Anglo-Texan did not meet on equal footing. Zamora O’Shea toiled in obscurity in the Dallas sales office of her husband’s business. In sharp contrast, Dobie, comfortably ensconced as a professor in the English Department at the University of Texas, wielded considerable influence as the state’s foremost interpreter of Texas folklore. Zamora O’Shea’s and Dobie’s visions of Texas history diverged widely despite the fact that both were born into elite ranching families of the Nueces Strip. These differences reflected their respective social positions as the daughter of Texas-Mexican rancheros and the scion of Anglo-Texan ranchers in an area where cultural conflict had been, and continued to be, intense. Zamora O’Shea was born in 1880 on her father’s family ranch of La Noria Cardeneña in the lower Rio Grande Valley but was reared on her maternal family’s seventeen-thousand-acre La Trinidad land grant on a ranch called La Posta del Palo Alto in Nueces County (Tijerina, xv– xvi).4 Porfirio Zamora, Zamora O’Shea’s father, typified the nineteenthcentury Texas-Mexican orientation toward Mexico rather than toward the United States. In 1862, Zamora served as a cavalry captain for the Republican forces at the Battle of Puebla, where Mexican troops led by General Ignacio Seguín Zaragoza defeated invading French troops.5 By the mid-1870s, Zamora was influential enough in Mexican politics that Porfirio Díaz, the future dictator of Mexico, paid a visit to La Posta del Palo Alto to gain his support. However influential Texas Mexicans might have been in Mexico in the late nineteenth century, the rancheros of the Nueces Strip experienced severe economic and political duress under the U.S. flag after 1848. In his landmark study of 1934 entitled An American-Mexican Frontier: Nueces County, Texas, the sociologist Paul S. Taylor of the University of Cali-

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fornia at Berkeley noted that most Spanish and Mexican land grants had passed out of Texas-Mexican hands by 1860, the last parcel being sold in 1883.6 The costs of land title litigation, exposure to the boom-and-bust cycles of the U.S. economy, and recurrent episodes of anti-Mexican violence had driven rancheros to sell their lands at great loss or to abandon ancestral homesteads. Her life straddling this painful transition, Zamora’s daughter Elena would be among the first generation of the formerly elite Texas-Mexican ranchero families to experience the loss of what had been considered a family heirloom and not an expungeable commodity. Reared into the Texas-Mexican ranching tradition, Elena Zamora learned its folklore and its strictly gendered division of labor. She defied gender expectations in a number of ways. Although she learned to ride sidesaddle, Zamora O’Shea earned the nickname “La Bala de Elena” (Elena the Bullet) through spectacular feats of horsemanship while straddle-mounted (Tijerina, xix). Not restricting her feminist inclinations to the saddle, she began teaching at ranch schools around La Posta del Palo Alto at the age of fifteen. Her subsequent teaching posts included a stint at the King Ranch from 1901 to 1904 (Handbook of Texas Online [hereafter HOTO], s.v. “O’Shea, María Elena Zamora”). Zamora O’Shea furthered her career as an educator by attending the most prestigious institutions of higher education in Texas and Mexico—including Southwest Texas Normal School, the Normal School of Saltillo, and la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México—at a time when few Mexican Americans of any social class had access to higher education (HOTO, s.v. “O’Shea, María Elena Zamora”). A historian of the era identified her as the “first public school teacher of Mexican extraction in south Texas” (Minutes of the 20th Regular Meeting, 21–22).7 However, her decision to become a professional teacher caused a rift with her adored father that “nearly broke [his] heart” since “the women of his people had always stayed at home and accepted what came to them from their parents, without any protest” (Mesquite). By 1907, Zamora O’Shea was principal of the Alice Ward School, where she crossed paths with Dobie, eight years her junior. Dobie had been reared on his parents’ ranch in nearby Live Oak County until the age of sixteen, at which time he was sent to live with his grandparents in Alice to attend high school. The nature and extent of their interaction at the Alice Ward School remains unclear. However, the former teacher and the former student evidently maintained a cordial, if occasional, acquaintance for decades after their time at the school. In a letter written in 1931 to the University of Texas librarian Carlos E. Castañeda, Zamora O’Shea

Reclaiming Texas History in Zamora O’Shea’s El Mesquite  73

wrote that she had recently encountered Dobie, “quien fue dicipulo [sic] en la escuela en Alice, donde yo era maestra” [who was a pupil in the Alice school, where I was a teacher]; she added that “hablamos mucho de tiempos pasados” [we talked a great deal about the old days]. Some three weeks later, she would write to Castañeda that Dobie “me invito a que en el verano proximo visitaramos juntos los ranchos viejos del Southwest” [had invited me to accompany him next summer in visiting the old ranchos of the Southwest].8 A measure of mutual respect thus existed between the two despite their radically different interpretations of Texas history.9 After their brief overlap in Alice, Zamora O’Shea and Dobie took radically different paths in life. The tejana married an expatriate Irishman, Daniel Patrick O’Shea, in 1912, and her teaching career apparently ended in 1918, when her husband, a stonemason, opened O’Shea Monument Works in Dallas. Following a five-year stint as a translator for SearsRoebuck, she became an office worker in her husband’s business office even as she was raising two children (Tijerina, xviii). Zamora O’Shea and Dobie exchanged letters a number of times during the 1930s and 1940s; Zamora O’Shea signed her letters with her schoolteacher name, “Miss Elena,” while Dobie would address her as “Miss Elena” or as “Amiga mia” (my friend). Desiring to reenter the teaching profession in 1941 after rearing her children, Zamora O’Shea asked Dobie if she could use him as a reference for a teaching position.10 Teacher and student had exchanged positions of power in those intervening years. After obtaining a master’s degree in English from Columbia University in 1914, Dobie taught at the University of Texas for three years before volunteering for military service in 1917. He returned to the university in 1919 but resigned the following year to manage his uncle’s Rancho de los Olmos in the Nueces Strip (HOTO, s.v. “Dobie, James Frank”). His job as ranch foreman managing a Texas-Mexican workforce proved epiphanic for Dobie. As the cultural critic José E. Limón has suggested, Dobie’s exposure to Texas-Mexican folklore via the vaqueros, or Mexican American cowboys, became the way for Dobie to symbolically mobilize racial, gendered, and intellectual imperatives in such a way as to resolve “much of his anxious contradiction and allowed him to return to academia as a literary intellectual and as a ‘man’” (Dancing, 47). Until that moment, Dobie had vacillated between the physically invigorating life of a rancher and the intellectually stimulating profession of academic, but then he found the happy medium of folklore to channel the rugged life into literary terms. Returning to the University of Texas

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in 1921, Dobie proceeded to build his academic career through the Texas Folklore Society, shaping the direction of Texas folklore studies for the next twenty years as the editor of the society’s book publications. Dobie’s first book, A Vaquero of the Brush Country (1929), set in the tumultuous last quarter of the nineteenth century in the violent Nueces Strip, was a literary yet folksy rendition of the autobiographical narrative of the AngloTexan cowboy and former Texas Ranger guide John D. Young. Subsequent books such as Coronado’s Children (1931), On the Open Range (1931), Tongues of the Monte (1935), The Flavor of Texas (1936), Tales of the Mustang (1936), Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver (1939), John C. Duval: First Texas Man of Letters (1939), and The Longhorns (1941) solidified Dobie’s reputation as “the state’s leading spokesman and literary and cultural figure during the Texas Centennial decade”11 (HOTO, “Dobie, James Frank”). As the foremost public figure associated with all things Texan, Dobie was appointed to the Advisory Board of Texas Historians for the Texas Centennial despite having no academic credentials in the field of history.12 Reporting to the overseeing Commission of Control for Texas Centennial Celebrations, the advisory board was charged with formulating a plan for commemorating the Centennial through a statewide network of historical monuments, roadside markers, and other commemorative structures. This official coordination of permanent public commemorative history was a first for the state. Prior to the Centennial, the process of erecting historical markers had proceeded on an ad hoc basis. Occasionally, the state legislature would fund specific projects, while private historical preservation societies such as the Texas Historical and Landmarks Association and the Daughters of the Republic of Texas would sponsor yet others as individual interest arose.13 In contrast to these occasional efforts, the Centennial memorials and markers project fostered a systematic, statewide approach to monument placement that emphasized the vetting of projects for historical accuracy, thorough coverage of different geographical regions, and uniformity of presentation. Although the commission had final approval over the selection and placement of monuments, the advisory board wielded immense influence over the process, making key decisions over the relative historical significance of events and personages, the authentication of historical fact, the funding allotted for each project, and the specific language used for each marker or monument inscription. The nearly 500 historical roadside markers placed across Texas by the advisory board between 1936 and 1939 related the history of Texas as widely conceived during the Centennial, supplemented by 264 similar roadside markers erected over the

Reclaiming Texas History in Zamora O’Shea’s El Mesquite  75

same period by the Texas Highway Department.14 Of all the Centennial agencies, the advisory board was in the unique position of overseeing a Centennial project that would be its own commemoration for years to come. The roadside markers were meant to promote a lasting historical consciousness about Texas that would outlast the all-important, although all-too-temporary, history lessons presented at the Centennial Central Exposition in Dallas and at other Centennial celebrations across the state. The Centennial year itself would fade from memory, but the historical markers would keep that sense of Texas history in the popular imagination through a vernacular history text writ as large as all Texas itself.15 Allocated $775,000 in state and federal funds, the advisory board sifted through hundreds of requests, navigating the political minefield of resource allocation by state senatorial districts. The board also had to contend with internal fissures, as Dobie clashed with the other committee members over the aesthetics of commemoration. Dobie intensely disliked what he considered to be the dry, antiquarian approach to monument design and inscription writing advocated by the board’s chair, Louis W. Kemp, a highly regarded amateur historian, and Father Paul J. Foik, an academically trained historian of the Roman Catholic Church. Often outvoted by their disciplinary bloc, Dobie refused to sign off on the board’s report on major projects and in protest presented his own vision of monument aesthetics in a minority report.16 Dobie felt that the Centennial monuments should not depict merely specific historical individuals but rather “the currents that have contributed to the culture and civilization of our state” that those individuals embodied. Dobie opined that the monuments should represent “episodes in our history the mere reading of which makes the blood leap, like the Santa Fe Expedition and the Mier Expedition; factors like cotton and cattle that have changed the ways of life through generations of human beings and inspired literature as well as laws; types of men, as well as individuals, like the Texas rangers, cowboys, and frontier Indian fighters” (Minority Report, 9). The monuments of Texas history, Dobie suggested, should be not merely to great men but to the genius of a great race that created Texas during the course of a century-long struggle with nonwhite races.17 Ever mindful of the need to continue that legacy, Dobie wrote that the representational function of the memorials went far beyond mere commemoration of a glorious racial past to an active shaping of racial subjectivities in the present: “I am earnestly concerned not only as to whom and what we dedicated memorials but as to what effect our dedications have upon those people who look upon them” (Minority Report, 9). The Alamo

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served as Dobie’s paradigm of Anglo-Texan historical memory since the old battle site was its own monument. No marker was needed there because it was “the one edifice that every Texan with the least spark of sensibility claims and reveres” without prompting from textbooks or inscriptions (Dobie, “Space,” 6). As “the core of Texas history, whether being celebrated by a centennial or told over in tenant shacks by men who have never opened a history book,” the Alamo brought Anglo-Texans together across class lines in a unity bequeathed to the present by “the dead who gave us life” (Dobie, “Space,” 6). For Dobie, if bronze plaques and granite markers did not have the Alamo’s self-sacralizing quality, then they should at least proclaim the march of Anglo-American civilization across the Texas landscape for yet another century. Perhaps for this reason he proposed a huge, fortythousand-dollar equestrian statue of Ewen Cameron to be located in Brownsville, the county seat of the Texas county named in honor of the failed filibuster. As captain of the Mier Expedition, Cameron metonymically represented the “strange and mad and glorious episode in Texas history that the monument should tell” since “there is nothing else like it in the history of North America.” According to Dobie, Texas needed to shore up its rightful place in the annals of comparative Anglo-Saxon colonization efforts: “The whole world knows the story of the Black Hole of Calcutta. If rightly executed, that of the Mier Men could be equally eloquent . . . one of the finest monuments in the Americas” (Minority Report, 30). Dobie failed in his modest proposal. One can only imagine the impact Dobie’s vast hoped-for monument would have had on the largely TexasMexican population of Brownsville. Texas Mexicans had long realized that monuments, as the public expression of a national history, were essential to securing the general recognition of membership in the nation’s imagined community. The Great War veteran José Luz Sáenz, Zamora O’Shea’s former pupil at the Alice Ward School in 1908 and a lifelong correspondent of hers, had sought as early as the mid-1920s to raise a large monument dedicated to Mexican American soldiers killed in that conflict.18 Sponsored by the Comité Ejecutivo Pro-Monumento Héroes de la Gran Guerra Mundial and backed by prominent Anglo-Texan and Texas-Mexican politicians and businessmen, the fifteen-thousand-dollar monument project promised to forcefully project the claims of Mexican Americans to U.S. citizenship into the historic center of San Antonio. Although this monument was never erected, the initial visualization of the ten-foot bronze monument depicted an angel ascending toward heaven with a slain Mexican American

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soldier in its arms. The granite pedestal bore an inscription in both English and Spanish: “Erected in recognition of the supreme sacrifice paid by our Great World War Veterans of Mexican descent who fell upholding the principles of Democracy” (“Proyecto”). This symbolic portrayal of Mexican American patriotism in the midst of San Antonio’s Main Plaza promised to make a powerful point. Sacrifices for democracy abroad meant demands for democracy at home, as Mexican American veterans of the Great War desired that Anglo-Americans acknowledge their service on European battlefields by treating them as social equals in public accommodations and as political equals in the democratic process. But more often than not, these veterans found restaurants, theaters, hotels, parks, and pools closed to them, just as inaccessible after the war as before. Sáenz had repeatedly experienced such discrimination as a dark-skinned man before and after his military service.19 Despite a legal sea change after the war that disarticulated race from citizenship, Mexican American veterans discovered that their service to the nation was honored more in the breach than in the observance.20 Even as hundreds of monuments to Anglo-Texans were being raised for the Centennial in 1936, Sáenz characterized the Mexican American Great War memorial as the material expression of the Texas-Mexican demand for “J U S T I C I A” (“A los veteranos”). Perhaps envisioning the struggle for democracy in Texas to be just as fierce as the combat in Europe, Sáenz revealed that his initial vision of the monument was quite different from the treacly version depicted on the fundraising pamphlet.21 Speaking in 1928 before the League of Latin American Citizens (the precursor to the League of United Latin American Citizens) in Brownsville, Sáenz set forth a grim scene of mutual destruction: “Un soldado teuton y un hermano de nuestra raza que se encontraron al hacer exploraciones de trincheras y se arremetieron a la bayoneta quedando los dos trabados de muerte” [A German soldier and a brother of our people bayonet each other while exploring the trenches, leaving them joined firmly in death] (“Discurso”). Sáenz further related that the San Antonio supporters of the project opted for the more traditionally sentimental rendition of public homage that no one would find objectionable. If this violent version may have been “bruto pero no menos heróico” [no less heroic for being brutal] and thus more true to Saenz’s combat experience, then his vision could be read as an allegory of the race war between Anglo-Texan (the “Teuton”) and Texas Mexican that would leave both dead without adherence to the principles of true democracy (“Discurso”).22 Sáenz’s former schoolmate at the Alice Ward School and fellow Great

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War veteran J. Frank Dobie may have felt he knew something about this grim struggle, having already participated in the undeclared hostilities between Anglo-Texans and ethnic Mexicans back home. Before signing up to go to European battlefields, he had volunteered to help subdue the restless Mexicans south of the border, whose revolution had instigated Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus, New Mexico, and initiated the Borderlands War in south Texas. A few years later, about to resume teaching at the University of Texas in 1921, Dobie fought Mexicans under the sign of Prohibition. He “accompanied a group of Texas Rangers . . . on a raid of a Mexican bootleggers’ camp” in which “one bootlegger was killed, six others captured and a load of tequila confiscated” (McNutt, 188). The fear generated by the event seemed to energize Dobie for his lifework ahead. “Mexicans in the county,” he wrote to his wife, “are literally afraid of sticking their head out of houses,” adding, “I’ve never enjoyed two days so much in my life” (quoted in McNutt, 188). Dusty Centennial monuments with dull inscriptions could never capture the Anglo-Texan spirit of adventure, but the land itself could be made to tell the tales if the right interpreter would step forward.

Modernity’s Leafy Antagonist Dobie turned his eye to the south Texas landscape shortly after the Centennial to find the deep historical meaning of the state that had eluded him during his fractious stint on the advisory board of historians. In an article titled “Mesquite” (1938), Dobie named the ubiquitous scrub tree of the Nueces Strip brush country “the most characteristic tree or bush that we have,” a true native of Texas that held “all the memories of the soil itself.” Striving to exert control over the narrative of Texas history that mesquite symbolized, Dobie positioned himself as the authorized interpreter of a native who did not speak Anglo-Texan yet who could tell what no dry history tome could relate. Despite Dobie’s assertions to the contrary, mesquite was not so much the native speaker of local knowledge in his narrative as much as the native spoken for. Ultimately, Dobie’s story of mesquite is the tracing out of human will and control over natural resources with ever-greater efficiencies; the fullest expression of this historical dynamic was the complete capitalist exploitation of every aspect of that resource by the most advanced race to occupy Texas: the AngloSaxon. In Dobie’s quasi-ethnographic account, Indians made mezquitamal (mesquite bean mush) for both food and drink, while mesquite

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leaves, sap, and bark yielded medicines. Going beyond subsistence, Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo settlers sought out the tree for honey, livestock feed, firewood, and construction material. Apparently stuck in the past, “the poorer Mexicans of Mexico and occasionally of the border country on this side of the international line” still used mezquitamal, mesquitebean coffee, and folk remedies just as the long-disappeared Indians once had (“Mesquite”). Yet while perfectly suited to the precapitalist subsistence economy of Dobie’s dead Indians and backward Mexicans, the mesquite stymied attempts to completely rationalize its existence within modern ranching capitalism. Dobie noted that mechanical efforts to render a profitable cattle feed or a glue compound from the tree had failed, while “the trunks and limbs were not straight enough to make lumber in paying quantities.” Mesquites not only refused to acquiesce to the machine age but also literally slowed its progress; sharp mesquite thorns punctured car tires with ease. Mesquites also impeded capitalism itself. Dense mesquite thickets had spread rapidly across previously open range, “stabbing millions of acres of land into non-productiveness” (“Mesquite”). Hemorrhaging profits from a self-inflicted wound, modern commercial ranching created its own biological resistance through the overgrazing of native grasses and the transport of mesquite beans to pasturelands during cattle drives. While Dobie conceded that Anglo-Texan ranchers bore full responsibility for their own predicament, nonetheless he opined that those same ranchers needed to wage nothing less than total war “to reclaim their own land from the usurping mesquite.” Transforming the native into the invader, the exploited into the exploiter, Dobie predicted the inevitable triumph of progress over intransigent resistance: “The mesquite has overspread itself. The machine age is meeting it.” The slow war of position waged by the insidious mesquite was being countered by a mechanized war of maneuver employed by the ranchers. Comparing the ranchers’ efforts with the Nazi war machine then menacing Europe, Dobie wrote, “Ten-ton roller tractors . . . as formidable in appearance as any German war-tank, are to be found slaying the mesquite on the King, O’Connor and other ranches in southern Texas” (“Mesquite”). In other instances, ranchers waged merciless chemical warfare upon mesquites with rootkilling kerosene. Yet if Dobie the apologist for modern ranching capitalism would destroy the mesquite to wring more profit from the land, Dobie the modernist aesthetician would requisition the beauty of this apparently antimodernist symbol. As such, mesquites remained “more beautiful than

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any peach orchard, to which they have often been compared.” Unlike the commercially viable fruit tree, the mesquite’s refusal of capitalist exploitation made possible its use as a purely aesthetic object, so much so that Dobie declared, “The mesquite itself is a poem.” Waxing literary, he then offered the following lines of poetry: “Primrose burn their yellow fires / Where grass and roadway meet. / Feathered and tasseled like a queen / Is every old mesquite” (“Mesquite”). This aestheticization removes mesquite, as a discursive site, from the conflicts of the modern world of south Texas, particularly the history of great racial violence at its very root. For Dobie, the mesquite may “hold all the memories of the soil itself” like the native it is, but those memories must remain unvoiced for its entry into the aesthetic. But like the resprouting of a mesquite after a damaging brush fire, the traces of this violent history emerge from the very location where Dobie would segregate aesthetics from politics. The poem rhymes “meet” with “mesquite,” a poetic rhyme scheme that requires the linguistic transformation of “/mɛs’kitɛ/” to “/məs’ki:t/”. In changing the word’s pronunciation in Mexican Spanish to its Anglo-Texan rendition in English, Dobie unwittingly allows the very formal aesthetic strategies of the poem to encapsulate in miniature the traumatic racial history of south Texas that he would suppress in his celebration of Anglo-Texan progress.

The Taproots of Texas History It is precisely this history, this repressed memory of language and soil, that Zamora O’Shea’s novella El Mesquite seeks to recall. Combining the narrative modes of naturalist observation, oral storytelling, and social history, El Mesquite outlined how the process of creating colonial difference after 1848 involved a far-reaching reordering of systems of knowledge, particularly those of history and linguistics, as much as geopolitical borders. Reacting to the pronunciation change of its name by Anglo-Texan settlers after the U.S.-Mexican War, el Palo Alto comments, “I was a Mesquite to the Indians, a Mesquite to the Spaniards and to the Mexicans, but I am Mesquit to the Americans” (Mesquite, 61). The linguistic shift from the indigenous and Mexican “/mɛs’kitɛ/” to the Anglo-Texan “/məs’ki:t/” marked the cultural and material conflict between AngloTexans and Texas Mexicans in the Nueces Strip. Not coincidentally does the change in pronunciation from “/mɛs’kitɛ/” to “/məs’ki:t/” invoke the homologous shift from “Mexican” to “Meskin”; the latter pronunciation indexed the widespread Anglo-Texan disregard for Texas-Mexican rights

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through the intentional denigration of the communal referent. As el Palo Alto observes, “Some [Anglos] say the word in such a bitter way that it sounds as if it were a crime to be a Mexican” (Mesquite, 59). As a public school teacher, Zamora O’Shea registered how this antiMexican bitterness had long since found its way into Texas history, particularly in Anna J. Hardwicke Pennybacker’s A New History of Texas, the standard Texas history textbook for schoolchildren of the era. First published in 1888 and used from the fifth grade through college levels, A New History of Texas underwent numerous minor revisions while remaining “a staple of Texas classrooms for forty years” (HOTO, s.v. “Pennybacker, Anna J. Hardwicke”). At the time of the Centennial, A New History of Texas was just beginning to be phased out of classroom service; nevertheless, its author was still well regarded enough to gain a seat on the prestigious Texas Centennial Commission, which gave advisory directives to the official Commission of Control for Texas Centennial Celebrations. Even if Pennybacker had not been appointed to the commission, her textbook had already influenced Centennial discourses in profound ways, particularly by inculcating the widespread sense that the true settlement of Texas did not begin until the empresario Stephen F. Austin led Anglo-American families to central Texas in 1824. Some earlier colonization attempts, particularly those of the French, were acknowledged. Pennybacker credited René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle’s ill-fated expedition of 1684–1687 with establishing “the first real European settlement on our State soil,” Fort St. Louis, despite the colony’s quick demise (9).23 In contrast, her assessment of Spanish efforts at settling Texas was curtly dismissive. Even with French rivals out of the way, the Spanish had little to show for a century’s colonization. “This goodly land, Texas, was scarcely more than a wilderness” at the time of Austin’s arrival, Pennybacker opined, because “Spain did not have the true colonizing power” (31). For Pennybacker, true civilization in Texas would be left for Anglo-Saxon colonizers to achieve. Texas under the Mexican Republic scarcely fared better than under Spanish rule, according to Pennybacker. Polarizing the political work of creating a republic along racial lines, Pennybacker identified an “entire lack of sympathy between the Mexican people and the Anglo-Saxon colonists” as “the strongest cause” of the Texas Revolution (97). The political complexities of a Mexican civil war between centralists such as Santa Anna and his Federalist rivals across Mexico, particularly in the Yucatan Peninsula, are erased in Pennybacker’s reduction of the conflict to racial difference, of tyrannous Mexicans versus freedom-loving Anglo-

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Saxons. Other popular, academic Anglo-Texan histories of the Centennial era likewise downplayed the Spanish and Mexican history of pre-Anglo Texas, reducing Spain’s role to the introduction of a few largely ineffectual missions and that of Mexico to the fomenting of anti-Anglo tyranny. The primary effect of this racialist historical interpretation was to erase the substantial contributions of Texas Mexicans (who were largely Federalists) to the independence of Texas, thus marking them and their descendents as forever foreigners to Anglo-Texas. Paul S. Taylor collected the lasting impressions such deprecating pronouncements left upon both Anglo-Texan and Texas-Mexican schoolchildren. Examining the intersection of racial attitudes with economic and political domination in the Nueces County of the late 1920s, Taylor documented “the emotive effect of Texas history and Texas traditions” as taught in the public school system upon social interactions between the two communities (237). He found that the Texas history taught in elementary and high schools actively fostered Anglo-Texan antagonism toward Texas Mexicans in such a way as to reproduce the local economy’s structures of racial domination across class lines. By 1930, Nueces County had virtually erased its Texas-Mexican ranching past in becoming the leading cotton-producing county in the United States, with ethnic Mexicans constituting an estimated 97 percent of the workforce (Taylor, xi, 103). Close contact notwithstanding, one “white cotton picker” identified Texas history as a key rationale for what Taylor characterized as a common Anglo-Texan sentiment: “Do I like the Mexicans? No, did you ever see a Texan who did? . . . My father and mother told us to hate the Mexicans because of the war with Mexico. They are treacherous and are always over the border for devilment. They are not brave. The study of the Alamo helps to make more hatred toward the Mexicans” (273). The political war with Mexico had been long since over, but the racial war with ethnic Mexicans had scarcely begun, if Anglo-Texan histories and south Texas schools were any indication. One Anglo-Texan school official told Taylor, “A teacher can engender feeling against all Mexicans like what was engendered in me” simply by teaching Texas history (273). Several Texas-Mexican informants told Taylor that the Texas history taught in public schools undeniably caused friction between the two communities. One former student related how his sixth-grade Texas history teacher asked for an essay on the topic “‘What would you do with Santa Anna if you were Sam Houston?’” to which “one boy said he would have tortured him, cut him, and put vinegar and salt on him, etc.” (Taylor, 272). Another Texas Mexican told how he had enjoyed close friendships

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with Anglo-Texan classmates in high school until “we came to the Alamo in our study of history, and then it was ‘gringo’ and ‘greaser’”; the onesided history lesson, he complained, “poisoned their hearts against me and was the cause of race hatred” (273). As a result, Texas-Mexican students endured ostracism at school that ranged from verbal humiliation and social isolation to schoolyard beatings.24 Observing how this racial antagonism, tacitly condoned by faculty and administration, often caused the few Texas-Mexican students in the upper grades to drop out, Taylor suggested that “the emotional effects of historical tradition” formed an informal but essential component in suppressing the social mobility of Texas Mexicans (274).25 He also noted dryly that “friendly words and even praise of the Mexican are frequently uttered” by Anglo-Texans “when the issue of social equality is not involved” (274). Zamora O’Shea had plumbed the dismal depths of Texas history for years as a schoolteacher in Nueces and nearby Jim Wells counties. One such instance of the chilling effect of A New History of Texas upon the classroom occurred during her stint as a teacher at the Santa Gertrudis division of the King Ranch in 1902. In this area of the state, where racial domination had assumed a particularly violent and profound social reality, Pennybacker’s treatment of the Texas Revolution served to instantly undermine the highly romanticized mythos of the relationship between Anglo-Texan patrón and Texas-Mexican vaquero so essential to the ranch’s operations. In a letter to J. T. Canales, Zamora O’Shea described how a historical discussion of the Battle of Goliad, in which the Mexican dictator Santa Anna had ordered the mass execution of more than three hundred Anglo-Texan prisoners of war, revived the hostilities that the textbook narrated: “I saw that all the children were stiff in their desks so I cut the lesson short.” Expanding upon this incident in a letter to the Dallas Morning News, she related the same history lesson to two older vaqueros who came after school to listen as she read Spanish-language newspapers and translated from the textbooks: “We had been reading Mrs. Pennybacker’s History of Texas, and they followed the stories anxiously. When I read the story of the massacre of Goliad, Don Mathias was alert, taking in every word. When I had finished, he asked me, ‘Is that all they say about Goliad?’ ‘Yes, Don Mathias, that is all,’ I answered.” (“Sequel,” 10). To the outraged, incredulous vaqueros, Pennybacker’s exclusion of Francita Alavez’s role in saving several Anglo-Texan soldiers from the mass execution amounted to a dishonest attempt to let Santa Anna’s “bad deeds” eclipse “the better deeds of the Mexican people” (“Sequel,” 10). Omitting the actions of the “Angel of Goliad” allowed Anglo-Texans to equate all

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Texas-Mexicans with the dictator, since “‘it is for such deeds as those described [by Pennybacker] that all people of Spanish extraction are judged by the same rule’” (“Sequel,” 10). Zamora O’Shea sought to intervene in Texas history any way she could, often by writing letters to newspaper editors to challenge biased stories. However, public school education remained her great hope for improving conditions for the Texas-Mexican community. In a letter of June 1929 to Castañeda, she described how she had dedicated her teaching skills to urging her Texas-Mexican students to press for equality and civil rights: “I taught school for 23 years in South Texas. Always striving to bring our people out of the rut in which they have fallen. I still hope that they will awaken sometime and take their place in the State of Texas which belongs to them. By inheritance and tradition, more so than to many who have come later and have relegated our people to the back seat.” After her teaching career ended, Zamora O’Shea turned to writing Texas history. As early as 1929, she began composing extended narratives about Texas-Mexican history in the Nueces Strip based upon documents gathered by her father and upon familial oral histories passed down to her by her maternal grandmother. She told Castañeda of her confidence in the truth of her work: “Mi opinion es, que para poner en limpio las malas impressiones que la Sra. Pennybacker dejo con sus fabulas de historia, lo que yo escribi es mas que suficiente para hacer esto” [In my opinion what I have written is more than enough to correct the mistaken impressions Mrs. Pennybacker created with the falsehoods she passes off as history] (c. 1929). Juxtaposing the truth of her writings to Anglo-Texan “fabulas de historia,” Zamora O’Shea considered the erasure of Texas-Mexican history begun by schoolbook historians such as Pennybacker and continued by state intellectuals like Dobie as not merely erroneous but a deliberate insult: No podriamos los decendientes de los primeros pobladores algo que detenga las continuas ofensas que nos dan en sus historietas. Si estudiaran los verdaderos datos, y dijeran la verdad estaria bueno. Pero le pegan tanto a lo que es historia que segun ellos nuestros eran verdaderos brutos. (O’Shea to Castañeda, 4/28/30) [Can’t we descendents of the first settlers do something to stop the continual offenses against us in their history books? If they would study the true facts, and tell the truth, that would be fine. But they twist history so much that, according to them, our ancestors were truly brutish.]

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For Zamora O’Shea, championing the accomplishments of early Spanish and Mexican settlers would vindicate the rights of their descendents to claim full membership in the modern Texan polity. In particular, she desired to disprove, contra Pennybacker, the widely accepted claim in Anglo-Texan histories that La Salle had established the first European settlement in Texas. Enlisting Castañeda’s command of archival resources at the García Latin American Collection at the University of Texas, she voiced her heartfelt commitment to that project to him: “Yo quisiera con todo mi corazon poder probar que Texas estaba poblada y tenia medio de comunicacion con otras partes de Norte America antes de la venida de La Salle” [I want with all my heart to be able to prove that Texas was settled and had means of communication with other parts of North America before La Salle’s arrival] (11/16/29). Throughout her correspondence with Castañeda, Zamora O’Shea was quite self-conscious about her precarious status as a vernacular historian when writing about historical matters to the librarian, who was working on his doctorate in history at the University of Texas during the early 1930s. In a letter of 1931 to Castañeda, she wrote, “Yo aun tengo esperanxas de que algun dia hombres de saber y letras como usted pongan en limpio lo que pone en duda la sinceridad de los primeros pobladores de el Valle” [Even now I have hope that someday men of knowledge and letters such as yourself will prove what has been put in doubt about the first settlers of the [lower Rio Grande] Valley] (2/27/31). She acknowledged that her efforts in that direction, which consisted of a single-spaced typewritten page of notes based on her recollection of the stories told by her maternal grandmother, would scarcely pass muster with academic historians: “Pero como usted sabe estas cosa tienen que comprobarse con sitas de historiadores” [As you know, these matters must be proven with footnotes by historians] (10/20/29). Yet despite her apparent deferral to Castañeda’s institutionally sanctioned authority as one of a rising class of male Texas-Mexican professionals, Zamora O’Shea challenged Castañeda on historical matters on a number of occasions in their correspondence. In particular, she took umbrage at the librarian’s insistence that the Spanish settlement of the Nueces Strip began with José de Escandón’s entrada of 1748. This was, according to Zamora O’Shea, the official history of archive and textbook, and not the actual history of the peripatetic northward movement of settlers from Mexico’s interior: Usted menciona que Escandon autorizo las primeras Villas y pueblos en el Norte de Mexico, pero cuando Escandon visito esos lugares ya habia

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gente, que habia vivido en esas comarcas muchos años. Nomas piense como hubiera podida caminar con el esplendor y gloria que lo hizo si no hubiera habido quien le sirviera, y le diera el abrigo, y sustento que necesitaba para el y sus compañeros. Los Daniel Boonnes de nuestra comarca son los que la historia ha olvidado. (2/27/31) [You mentioned that Escandon authorized the first villages and towns in Mexico’s north, but when he visited those places, people had already lived in those parts for many years. Just think about how he could have traveled in the splendor and glory that he did if there had not been anyone to serve him, and to hand him his cloak, and furnish whatever provisions that he and his party needed. The Daniel Boones of our region are the ones forgotten by history.]

Chiding the young historian not to reduce the past to the official archive, Zamora O’Shea reminded Castañeda that official history lagged far behind the movement of Mexican settlers. The Texas Centennial afforded Zamora O’Shea the opportunity to intervene within historiographic discourse herself, albeit in a mode discounted by academic historians of the time. Hoping to counter the damaging influence of Pennybacker and Centennial discourses, Zamora O’Shea informed Castañeda that she was completing a manuscript about early Texas-Mexican history in time for the Centennial. Describing this manuscript, El Mesquite, as an account of “los costumbres, ocupaciones, y educacion de nuestra gente” [the customs, occupations, and upbringing of our people], she based the narrative on “las leyendas y cuentos que mi abuelita Doña Concepcion García de Moreno me contaba cuando yo era pequeña” [the legends and stories that my grandmother Doña Concepcion García de Moreno told me when I was young] (O’Shea to Castañeda 1934). Family oral history passed from grandmother to granddaughter became the seed for the counternarrative of Texas history told in El Mesquite. Indeed, Zamora O’Shea opens El Mesquite with a sharp rebuke of Anglo-Texan historians for neglecting the Texas-Mexican history so central to the early development and subsequent independence of Texas: From my earliest childhood I remember the open country between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande; that vast expanse of territory that our early historians do not mention in the days of early history. Sometimes I have wondered why it is that our forefathers who helped with their money, their supplies, and their own energies have been entirely

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forgotten. History should be told as a fact, pleasant or unpleasant. (Mesquite)

Having asked Castañeda for scholarly books about early Texas history during the summer of 1934 in the course of her research, Zamora O’Shea informed him in September that her family’s oral history confirmed the information she found in the academic sources: “Hice varias notas las compare con los datos historicos que usted da en sus libretos y otras historias y vi que eran verdaderos datos historicos con las leyendas y datos ella me proporciono” [I have compared my notes with the historical facts that you’ve given from your booklets and other histories and I found that they were accurate historical facts according to the stories and facts she told me]. Reversing the academic standards that valued the objective written archive over supposedly unreliable oral sources, Zamora O’Shea found that the written histories were accurate because her family’s oral history confirmed them, rather than vice versa. Refuting Anglo-Texan histories that relegated Texas Mexicans either to the buried, forgotten past or to the rootless, abject present, Zamora O’Shea asserted an epistemological primacy to familial oral traditions, sustained over many generations by tejanas, otherwise ignored by professional historians. In this sense, Zamora O’Shea’s choice of narrative technique itself comes to figure the epistemological standpoint implied by her selfconsciously marshaled knowledge. El Mesquite consists of the first-person observations and commentaries of the eponymous protagonist, a mesquite tree known as el Palo Alto growing in Nueces County near the present-day towns of Banquete and Agua Dulce: “A guide point for all who passed,” el Palo Alto becomes the organic marker of Texas-Mexican history, personifying the community’s living consciousness of its own past (Mesquite, 2). El Palo Alto, in this sense, is a chronotrope, albeit one in which linear human history intersects the cyclical natural history of the south Texas landscape. Indeed, the landscape finds narrative meaning through the human history. El Palo Alto enters history at the moment Spanish explorers searching for “some place which they called Florida” rest under its shade (3). Prior to that moment, the mesquite tree had experienced only the indeterminate flow of the seasons marked by bird migrations.26 Subsequent episodes of colonial history in El Mesquite served to counter Pennybacker’s claims that Spanish efforts to settle Texas were either treasure-hunting escapades or ineffectual attempts to subdue Native American resistance. A conversation between Father Antonio Margil and

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another Franciscan missionary under el Palo Alto in 1716 suggested that Spanish colonial strategy in the region prior to Escandón’s entrada was fundamentally sound.27 A central figure in the history of Spanish colonization efforts in Texas, Margil argues that the hostile, powerful Karankahua nation could be provisionally managed by treaties guaranteeing “we will not settle any of our people among them.” In the absence of sufficient Spanish military power, these treaties were prudent “as for the present we are not in condition to refuse” the terms offered by the Karankahuas (5). Neither negligent nor incompetent, Spanish colonial policy in Zamora O’Shea’s account took realistic stock of indigenous resistance while planning for long-term colonial control of the region.28 Apparently no indigenous people ever stopped under el Palo Alto prior to this moment (although they do afterward), or rather, their journeys through the landscape and their names for this singular mesquite form an aspect of natural prehistory rather than human (i.e., European) history, according to Zamora O’Shea. Later Spanish colonists, such as the García family who founded Rancho Agua Dulce, where the tree is located, establish such a rapport with the land that they are soon viewed by the tree as even more native than the natives.29 In contrast, Zamora O’Shea implies that the social existence of Native Americans outside of European concepts of private property and ownership immediately disqualifies them from having any history themselves. Moreover, in Zamora O’Shea’s colonial romance, indigenous peoples come to appreciate the civilizing influence of their kind Spanish masters even as they are reduced to a peón labor force. One peón even praises the Spanish missionaries who prepared her people for their future stations as servants, teaching them “to spin, weave, and do all kinds of housework.” The often-violent destruction of a traditional indigenous life becomes a pastoral idyll under benevolent Spanish patriarchal rule, under which the servant comments about “how happy she had been with her mistress, and how her children knew no other lords than the García family” (43). Displacing the racial violence of the colonial encounter entirely onto Anglo-driven Manifest Destiny, El Mesquite depicts the reduction of the indigenous population to peonage as a civilizational advancement that even they welcomed. The colonial fantasy is most palpable here in its imaginary of a harmonious racial order in which colonial others serenely accept their colonized fate as social inferiors. In its celebration of Spanish colonial rule, El Mesquite reenacted the colonial dispossession of indigenous tribal nations while nativizing the Spanish colonizers.30

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El Palo Alto’s identification with Spanish colonial rule becomes so naturalized that the tree cannot imagine existence outside of Spanish colonial systems of private property and racial hierarchy, such that the very landscape registered the class and racial distinctions between Spanish colonizers and indigenous colonized. Reflecting Zamora O’Shea’s contention that the ranchos fostered harmonious relations between putative Spanish masters and indigenous peones, el Palo Alto ranked its own kind into three distinctly hierarchical categories that mirrored Texas-Mexican society. The Arrastrado mesquite, or “common rambler,” served no useful function: providing “no shadow for beast or mankind” and furnishing “very small beans,” this leafy lumpenproletariat merely lives off the land and contributes nothing to the human settlers. The Mesquite proper forms the industrious and productive middle class of the species, contributing shade and livestock feed. El Palo Alto itself is of the elite mesquite rosillo class, recognized by “the first white men” for its “quality” roan-colored wood “excellent for cabinet work” (1). Unlike the other, lower classes of mesquite destined to become firewood, the roan mesquite proved permanently useful even after its demise. Ever eager to serve humanity, its exquisite corpse yielded beautiful furniture in an aesthetically pleasing afterlife. In detailing the daily life on the ranchos during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Zamora O’Shea not only included folkloric elements that pointed to a deep reservoir of cultural knowledge, but also outlined how the rancheros imported the most modern ideas of general education and technological innovation. Whereas Texas-Mexican rancheros were often depicted by Anglo-Texan historians as lazy and ignorant exploiters of the land, Zamora O’Shea detailed how the rancheros first employed windmills to draw water over a century before Anglo-Texan ranchers. In addition to introducing innovations in technology, at least one ranchero sponsored a local schoolhouse where the children of peones learned to read and write. According to Zamora O’Shea, Texas Mexicans valued educacíon, or good manners and customs, as well as preparación, or schoolbook and trade learning, and used all methods at their disposal to ensure that the genteel customs of Spain were passed down as thoroughly as practical ranching knowledge was. The coming of Irish settlers to the present-day area of Corpus Christi in the first decades of the nineteenth century represented a new phase of interethnic relations in colonial south Texas. Unlike the racialized servitude assigned to indigenous people, these newcomers with “eyes as blue as the sky, and skins pink and fair” represent a parallel white community

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that insisted upon keeping their cultural customs while still living in harmony with their established neighbors. Although the Irish arrivals “talk another language,” they also “talk to the ‘Master’ in the same manner” as the Texas Mexicans (11). A common Roman Catholic faith facilitated harmony between the two communities by mitigating linguistic and cultural differences. This vision of a cooperative interethnic past between TexasMexican rancheros and the Irish newcomers underwrites the novella’s vision of interracial harmony in the 1930s, one wherein racial antagonism need not structure everyday life for either native or newcomer if both respect each other’s civil rights and cultural practices. However, conflict rather than cooperation marred the relationship between Texas Mexicans and incoming Anglo-Americans during the tumultuous years between 1820 and 1850. According to Zamora O’Shea, only with the coming of the Anglos did racial violence and hatred take root in south Texas. Reversing the common Anglo-Texan troping of ethnic Mexicans as dangerous bandits, el Palo Alto relates the bloody massacre of a dozen Texas Mexicans by treacherous Anglo-Texan cutthroats. Interethnic relations went from bad to worse as the Texas Revolution and subsequently the U.S.-Mexican War grip the Nueces Strip in quick order. While the rancheros generally supported Texan independence, their location in the borderlands left them in an untenable situation as the contending forces seized resources to wage war and otherwise demanded loyalty. Don Rafael García, the owner of Agua Dulce in 1836, foresaw the trouble ahead: “Those in the section between the Rio Grande and Nueces are going to suffer most. . . . We have lost many horses and cattle. The armies take them for the use of the nation, and the colonists for the cause of liberty. But the owners lose” (58). The narrative sign of impending Texas-Mexican ruin comes when the original pact of interracial harmony between rancheros and Indians is broken at the instigation of Anglo-Texans. Don Rafael is killed in a resulting Indian attack, forcing the rancho’s title to pass from the original land grant family to his son-in-law. Despite the aid they offered in the cause of independence for Texas, the rancheros find themselves under siege from the very Anglo population for whom they risked everything: “Many of [the Anglo-Texan newcomers] drive the old settlers away, calling them Mexicans. If they were Spaniards when governed by Spain, and Mexicans when governed by Mexico, why can they not be Americans now that they are under the American Government?” (61). Zamora O’Shea answers el Palo Alto’s question by indicating how linguistic changes not only reflect but also enact differences in social power. Anglo-Texans invoked racial

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difference to dispossess the rancheros and to deny all Texas Mexicans their civil rights as citizens, particularly their property rights. The wholesale transfer of land titles after 1836 marked a period of violent instability and cultural dispossession as the concept of property changed from a nearhallowed status as the beloved homestead of an elite family in the Spanish and Mexican traditions into a mere commodity useful for commercial exploitation by absentee landlords. No exception to this process, the Agua Dulce land grant’s centuries-long journey from the king of Spain to the Kings of Texas marked border modernity’s troubled transition between different modes of production and their attendant racial hierarchies. The death knell for el Palo Alto and the old Texas-Mexican order is the final integration of the Nueces Strip into the capitalist world-system during the late nineteenth century. Driven by the desire of south Texas ranching barons like Richard King and Mifflin Kenedy to move cattle to market more efficiently, the new railroads changed natural and social landscape alike. El Palo Alto notes that the railroad workers constructing the Texas-Mexican railroad line between Corpus Christi and Laredo in the 1870s were none other than “the children of the former peones, and also . . . some of those men who drove cattle among them,” an accurate account of the displacement of Texas Mexicans into the ranks of wage laborers (65). Some two decades later, the same south Texas cattle barons financed the final rail link to the lower Rio Grande Valley, initiating the transformations that would lead to the Borderlands War of 1915. At the turn-of-the century moment of El Mesquite, the violence and displacements of the Borderlands War would be proleptically visited upon el Palo Alto itself; the Brownsville–St. Louis railway is slated to run over the very spot where the novella’s narrator stands. Sharing the Texas-Mexican community’s fate of displacement, el Palo Alto is not only uprooted but also transformed into railroad ties. The wheels of progress literally roll over the back of the natives, destroying several centuries of living history. Within a mere half century after 1848, Texas Mexicans of the Nueces Strip experience a racialized abjection that affected patrón and peón alike. As Zamora O’Shea wrote in her preface to El Mesquite, titled “The Ranches of Southwest Texas as They Were in the ’80–’90’s,” “Many lost their grants, and all lost their ideal—The Republic of Texas.”31 Yet this history of abjection is not the end of El Mesquite. If el Palo Alto itself disappears, its history survived in both living memory and aesthetic representation. Just before el Palo Alto meets its demise, a descendent of the original land grant family comes to find her ancestral home. Anita García, the new schoolteacher at the King Ranch, searches in vain for

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the material traces of her ancestors: “There are no signs of the graves now. The rocks that marked them have been broken into dust, and have been blown away. Of the walls of the old houses nothing is left”(79). Yet if the material signs of Texas-Mexican history have vanished, the very landscape survives in oral family narratives. Calling out “Palo Alto,” as had the Franciscan missionaries centuries before, Anita identifies herself as the repository of communal oral history handed down from mother to daughter, a history that the ravages of border modernity cannot erase. Learning that el Palo Alto will be uprooted, Anita commits the ancient tree to modernist representation by photographing its last moments as a living entity. The ghostly image of el Palo Alto upon photographic negative becomes the modernist double of a sketch of the tree drawn at the dawn of Texas-Mexican history by an unknown hand. For the very first time at the last moment of its life, el Palo Alto experiences the knowledge of self-recognition in representation: “I saw myself as I appeared to my first master, Don Rafael García, as he stood under me while he examined the best site for his home” (79–80). Recognizing that the end of an organic living history does not preclude the continuance of a meaningful historical memory through the technologies of representation, Zamora O’Shea ends El Mesquite not with the bite of an axe into el Palo Alto’s bark or the tearing of its taproots from the soil by one of Dobie’s “German war machines,” but with the inscription written on the sketch: “Palo Alto, 1575” (80). The literary critic Leticia Garza-Falcón speculates that the date should read “1755,” when Escandón’s settlers reached the area; in her opinion, either the middle two numerals were transposed during the typesetting process or “the Fathers who accompanied the early Spanish explorers, drew the sketch when they named the tree and later passed that sketch down to the García generations” (“Renewal,” xliii). The second scenario seems the more likely, but with one change in detail. Rafael García, rather than one of the missionaries, produced the drawing while scouting for a homestead site in the mid-eighteenth century and passed it down as a family heirloom that his descendent Anita García came to possess.32 If in some sense the history it has witnessed had always been secured by representation, nonetheless el Palo Alto can relinquish the narration of Texas-Mexican history to Anita precisely because she, “as one who can talk both languages so that she can explain and teach these simple-minded sons of toil,” had the linguistic and technological resources to relay that history to the Texas-Mexican community (76). The symbolic preservation of the landscape and Texas-Mexican history becomes itself part of

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the García heritage, explaining why Anita must photograph the tree in order to save what it represents, and why Zamora O’Shea must preserve her family’s traditions and history as El Mesquite. Like the educated, bilingual Anita in her role as artful historian, Zamora O’Shea herself fashioned the living bridge between the Texas-Mexican ranching culture of the past and the modern Mexican American community of the 1930s. Historical, pedagogical, and aesthetic projects come together to supplement older modes of representation such as the oral tradition to preserve communal history for new retellings. If the paternal inheritance of land has been lost, then the maternal inheritance of stories could suture the gap between past and present. The leaves of the once-living tree become the book leaves of El Mesquite, upon which rest the lessons of Texas-Mexican history. Through this novella, Zamora O’Shea offered the hope that Texas Mexicans would learn those lessons, reclaim Texas history, and, through that history, the rights of U.S. citizenship. In effect, El Mesquite is Zamora O’Shea’s history textbook for a new generation of Texas Mexicans coming of age in the new twentieth century, as she felt that only education and a social movement to reclaim Mexican American civil rights could restore the communal agency so thoroughly expunged by a hundred years of Anglo-Texas historiography. A firm believer in the power of education, Zamora O’Shea wrote El Mesquite with a view to help Mexican American children stay in school to learn the cultural skills their community needed so badly. Garza-Falcón notes, “Zamora’s novel reflects the author’s belief that education offers the only means through nonviolence for recovering one’s place in society” (“Renewal,” xxxi). In El Mesquite, Anita’s maternal grandfather Santos Moreno exhorted his son-in-law “to do your utmost to educate my grandchildren so that they will know the laws of the country to which they have been born. Spare no expense, send them away to other parts if necessary, but see that they acquire the knowledge of the language and laws of their country” (Mesquite 68). Once so educated, the Moreno grandchildren could improve relations between Texas Mexicans and Anglo-Texans by stressing their commonalities rather than their differences. Seeking to keep alive the hopes of any patrimony for his grandchildren, Moreno advised, “Choose from these newcomers men and women who are of your own class. Make them your friends, and they will respond and be your friends” (69). The implied desirability of identifying with the United States rather than with Mexico was not at all obvious to most ethnic Mexicans during the early twentieth century. Rather, persistent racism and economic

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exploitation had greatly strengthened the identification of most ethnic Mexicans, whether citizens or not, with Mexico. Yet Zamora O’Shea’s exhortation reflected the approach of a new social movement that imagined a different relationship between U.S. citizens of Mexican descent and Anglo-Americans and that made the shaping of a new Mexican American subjectivity its goal. By 1937, Zamora O’Shea had joined the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), praising the organization for its efforts to improve access to public education for Mexican American children and for its antiracist work to restore Mexican American civil rights. Even as age and care took their toll, she wrote to Castañeda in 1939 that LULAC “esta haciendo mucho por nuestra gente en todo el sur” [is doing a great deal for our people throughout the south].33 For the historian, teacher, and writer from Agua Dulce, LULAC promised to restore the good name wrongly taken and the dignity that had been denied for a century. In this way, Mexican Americans could return to living the honor of their ancestors: “The lives of these simple people of the plains were modeled after their forefathers, for to them their pride was to be able to hand to their children as clean a name as had been given them.” Through LULAC and similar organizations, Mexican Americans would increasingly challenge discourses of colonial difference not only through folk practices such as the corrido, but also through the very legal and political system that sought to erase their collective presence. Working to gain a social agency that matched their formal citizenship, Texas Mexicans sought to overturn the customary racial discrimination that placed them outside the workings of democratic processes and at the mercy of repressive state power. Recognizing the symbolic importance of intervening within the representational field of Texas history, LULAC created its own plans for the Centennial in an attempt to have the significant yet ignored contributions of Texas Mexicans to Texan democracy recognized. Within the context of Centennial discourses, LULAC would forge a new bicultural, bilingual aesthetic that would inform the new emergent subject position of the Mexican American. Refusing to cede the Texas landscape to cold granite roadside markers or Texas history to Pennybacker, Dobie, and the Centennial, Zamora O’Shea hoped LULAC would help reclaim the Texas-Mexican sense “that is our grand Lone Star State.”

CHAPTER 3

Forging Bicultural U.S. Citizenship: LULAC and the Making of Mexican American Aesthetics

Knock, Knock! Who is there? Johnny. Johnny who? Johnny Friegas. LULAC News

The knock-knock joke received a Mexican American makeover in the LULAC News for December 1936, the issue that closed out the Centennial year. This example from a hoary genre might pass as unremarkable except for the bilingual, bicultural subject it posits as the condition of its own intelligibility. At first glance, the language and the very genre itself presumed a familiarity with English and the popular culture of the United States, yet these are insufficient to comprehend the humor invoked. Understanding the punch line involved not only knowing another language— Spanish—but also the popular colloquialism known throughout Greater Mexico “¡Ya no me friegues!” The all-American Johnny, pronounced á lo mexicano, became “Ya no me”; when attached to the imperativesubjective conjugation of the Mexican colloquial verb “fregar,” the phrase translates imprecisely (and politely) into English as “Stop bugging me!” Still, knowing only vernacular Texas-Mexican Spanish by itself would also be insufficient. Only the bicultural subject could simultaneously comprehend and therefore relate both languages and contexts, understanding the joke not only as cross-linguistic play but as a cleverly coded rejection of the cultural interpolation demanded by the opening interrogative. “Who is there?” does not yield the expected answer drawn from a shared

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nationalist framework, but rather one drawn from the Mexican American revision of that framework. “Fregar” also had another, specifically domestic connotation that suggests the degree to which the Mexican American subject being imagined by the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) was gendered as profoundly masculine. This alternative use of “fregar” is most often employed in the context of washing dishes, as in “Voy a fregar estos platos,” an activity associated with women’s unpaid domestic labor. This connotation of cleaning, or bothering, or even flogging something to change its condition adds to the sense that the interlocutor resists any attempt to wipe out an ethnic Mexican consciousness by interpolation via the all-American name Johnny or the genre of the knock-knock joke itself. With wit and humor, this Mexican American revision of the knock-knock joke expressed an emphatic rejection of Americanization as cultural whitewashing and an embrace of a more expansive alternative.1 Simultaneously, that resistance stems from a culturally conservative Mexican domestic sphere from which “Johnny Friegas” can launch his resistance to Americanization while occluding the cultural work of Texas-Mexican women. For the most part, LULAC’s project of gaining civil rights was articulated as the restoration of the abridged rights of Mexican American men to participate within the public sphere. Addressing questions of racial inequality within state governance (such as in voting and jury duty), state services (public education), and civil society (public accommodations), LULAC sought to delink the iron chain of cultural identity and political rights that had been forged by increasingly nativist and xenophobic white nationalist intellectuals.2 So while LULAC believed that a thorough knowledge of the English language and of the U.S. system of governance was largely unavoidable if one sought citizenship rights, it also would claim that the preservation of ethnic Mexican heritage—including the use of Spanish—within the naturalized domestic sphere of the family and community was not only possible but indeed a cultural imperative. The LULAC solution to securing Mexican American civil rights consisted of depicting cultural differences between Anglo-Americans and Mexican Americans as properly domestic sphere issues that should not impact the impersonal operation of the public sphere for all male citizens regardless of other differences. Texas-Mexican women, relegated in the writings of male Lulackers to the domestic sphere by virtue of their allegedly prepolitical nature, would struggle to have their voices heard within LULAC and in the greater ethnic Mexican community (I examine this dynamic in depth in chapter 5).

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LULAC grounded its claims for civil rights by reformulating the distinction between the public sphere of political rights and economic contract and the domestic sphere of cultural heritage and familial affect.3 Often identified today as the oldest continuously active Latino/a civil rights group, LULAC emerged into the Centennial era from the troubled aftermath of the Great War, the Mexican Revolution, and, most important, the Borderlands War. The tragic experience of the Borderlands War, still painfully fresh in living memory, persuaded many Texas Mexicans that their community could no longer ignore the basic political reality of living in the United States. The war harshly demonstrated that the strong cultural and political identification of Texas Mexicans with Mexico neither invoked the protection of the Mexican state nor facilitated the intervention of U.S. federal authorities in times of need. The severe repression by the Texas Rangers and local vigilantes convinced a rising tejano middle class in the years to follow that, in the words of the historian Benjamin Heber Johnson, “in crises they had to be able to call on the powers of a central state to protect themselves” (209). During the Borderlands War, the U.S. Army and other federal agencies had somewhat prevented even greater violence and reprisals by Anglo-Texans, giving hope that “the state could enter the borderlands not only as the agent of conquest, but also as the guarantor of basic civil liberties” (Johnson, 210). Gaining the state’s protection was itself a subsidiary aspect of the greater questions surrounding border modernity’s social transformations. The Borderlands War had stemmed from the ever-increasing penetration of a deeply racialized U.S. civil society into the everyday lives of Texas Mexicans, and the next generation of ethnic Mexican leaders recognized that the racialization of everyday life had qualitatively changed. The impact of border modernity went far beyond the violence of 1915; the changes would influence the very subjectivities of ethnic Mexicans themselves. Already, these changes were both palpable and distressing to traditionally oriented ethnic Mexican parents. As the first generation to attend U.S. public schools, their children were learning English as a matter of course and engaging U.S. popular culture as their parents never had. These developments, along with the fact that Anglo-Texans dictated that only one type of relationship—enforced subordination—exist between the state, civil society, and the Texas-Mexican community, led tejano intellectuals of an incipient middle class to revisit the terms of their community’s engagement with the state in the two decades following the Borderlands War. Seeking to transform what they viewed as the marginal and quasi-

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stateless status of their community, Texas Mexicans, often veterans of the Great War, started banding together during the early 1920s in new organizations that were fundamentally different from the mutual-aid societies, or mutualistas, then prevalent in ethnic Mexican communities. A combination of cooperative bank, informal welfare safety net, and neighborhood social club, mutualistas had strongly stressed a nationalist Mexican identity for its largely working-class membership.4 In contrast, as the historian Cynthia Orozco has documented, new organizations such as the Order Sons of America, the Order Knights of America, and the League of Latin American Citizens stressed their members’ identity as U.S. citizens.5 Even as they retained some of the practices of the mutualistas, such as offering life insurance policies and funeral benefits, these organizations not only advocated a collective engagement with U.S. civic life, but also emphasized creating access to political, social, and economic power. Meeting in the lower Rio Grande Valley town of Harlingen in 1927, these three organizations agreed to pool their efforts, but only after deciding to limit membership in the composite organization to U.S. citizens. This action caused three-quarters of the audience to storm out in protest.6 Other political differences and personality conflicts delayed the official foundation of LULAC until 1929, when the constitutional convention was held in Corpus Christi.7 During the twelve years between its founding and the entry of the United States into the Second World War, LULAC implemented a farreaching project that sought to force the recognition of Mexican American civil rights through legal and political action while simultaneously embarking upon the creation of a new Mexican American subject. Selfconsciously cultivating an identity as U.S. citizens of Mexican descent, LULAC members aspired, according to the “Aims and Purposes” published in the first issue of the organization’s newsletter, the LULAC News, “to develop within the members of our race the best, purest and most perfect type of a true and loyal citizen of the United States of America” (3). Jovita González, an early participant-observer in the formation of LULAC, implicitly recognized the dual goals for the organization when she defined LULAC in 1930 as “an organization of Mexican Americans, created for the purpose of training its members for exercising their rights as American citizens” (“America Invades,” 471fn). The exercise of civil rights for LULAC entailed the fulfillment of civic obligations, including the generally unpopular proviso of willing military service in times of national crisis.8 Eschewing more radical analyses of political economy and cultural

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Figure 3.1. Group photograph of delegates to the founding LULAC convention

held in Corpus Christi, May 1929. (Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.)

self-determination offered by the radical Left during the 1930s, LULAC espoused “the American way of life” to such a degree that the sociologist Benjamín Márquez would later characterize the organization as “solidly conservative” in outlook, with “a strong dedication to American institutions of government and free market capitalism” (10).9 LULAC was by no means a radical organization, as its consistent anticommunism throughout the 1930s demonstrated.10 In terms of the organization’s legal strategy to desegregate U.S. civil society, LULAC’s attorneys depended more on the juridical categorization of Mexican Americans as white rather than on any comprehensive challenge to the invidious legal distinction of race.11 But to insist upon viewing LULAC’s perceived shortcomings in the light of later Chicano nationalist rejection of its politics is to miss one key implication of its focus on citizenship: namely, its analysis that the United States acted as a failed state in regard to Mexican American citizens. Refusing to provide all citizens the equal protection of political and human rights, and indeed actively suppressing those rights, the U.S. state functioned to create a deeply antidemocratic racial order that stood in stark

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contrast to its claims of democratic freedom. For LULAC, citizenship represented the potential fullness of social agency that racial discrimination had negated in actuality, a denial tantamount to the denial of democracy altogether. While this insight led to calls for reform rather than for revolution, nonetheless it powerfully motivated LULAC’s membership to pursue what they believed to be the proper implementation of U.S. democracy. Rather than cede control of government and civil society to white nativist nationalists, LULAC struggled to make the United States live up to its rhetoric, thereby engaging in what the postcolonial theorist Paul Gilroy has termed the modernist “politics of fulfillment” (37). Despite the difficulties presented by the actual operation of the state and civil society, leveraging the rights of U.S. citizenship—something Mexican nationals by definition could not partake of—appeared to LULAC to be the best, if not the only, method for gaining meaningful social agency. The historical relationship of ethnic Mexicans to U.S. citizenship was a major subject of interest to LULAC in the Centennial era, and the theme of claiming citizenship rights became a constant fixture in the LULAC News. While the issue of Anglo racism united ethnic Mexicans across differences of class and citizenship status, no consensus existed as to how best to fight entrenched institutional racism. For many LULAC commentators, the Texas-Mexican community’s social segregation, political disenfranchisement, and economic marginalization resulted from an unfortunate combination of virulent anti-Mexican racism and Texas-Mexican ignorance of their rights as U.S. citizens. Where racism was concerned, the presence of culturally different and racially marked Mexican American citizens meant that the invidious operations of the state and civil society would need to be abolished in order for individuals to realize their full potential. Where the issue was ignorance, ethnic Mexican subjectivity would itself have to be extricated from a historical adherence to Mexican nationalism if citizens were to fully participate in the political and social life of the United States. Most critically, LULAC saw the reorientation of the ethnic Mexican community toward the United States as being more than political in nature: it was emphatically cultural. The Lulacker Adela Sloss commented in 1932 that LULAC had not only politically organized ethnic Mexicans who were U.S. citizens (something that the mutualistas had done), but specifically had grounded that organizing upon a distinct sense of cultural identification as Mexican Americans: “Los directores no se conforman con agrupar a los ciudadanos de origen latino, sino que también

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por hacer obra de cultura que es lo esencial para que el ciudadano lo sea, consciente de sus obligaciones y derechos dentro de la Ley” [LULAC’s officers do not settle for organizing U.S. citizens of Latin American descent, but furthermore do the cultural work needed to inform the citizen of his duties and rights before the Law] (“Importancia,” 15). If nativist racism led Anglos to imagine all ethnic Mexicans as impossibly alien to the United States, then for LULAC the historical orientation of tejanos toward Mexico left them without the desire or skills to rectify the situation through the resources at hand. Addressing the widespread Texas-Mexican refusal to engage U.S. institutions in the first issue of the LULAC News, future president of LULAC Mauro M. Machado wrote that “thousands of our compatriots, born here for several generations, have lived useless and expensive lives . . . because they do not consider themselves full-fledged citizens of this, our wonderful country” (12). The title of an article in the LULAC News for April 1932 expressed the matter even more bluntly: “Are Texas-Mexicans ‘Americans’?” Answering in the affirmative, the unsigned article noted that “the greatest care should be exercised to distinguish between this character of citizen [U.S.-born or naturalized Texas Mexicans] and the alien of latin extraction” (7). As the historian David Gutiérrez has shown, LULAC’s drive to distinguish Mexican American citizens from Mexican immigrants was central to its project of fighting racial discrimination through civil, rather than human, rights.12 Given that actual citizenship status had historically mattered little in the formation of Texas-Mexican identity compared to commonalities—linguistic, political, religious, and cultural—shared with Mexican nationals, LULAC strove to make U.S. citizenship a bright, shining line of demarcation for Mexican American subjectivity. For Rubén Rendón Lozano, chairman of LULAC’s state educational committee, a Mexican American commitment to U.S. citizenship challenged the racialist AngloTexan assumptions of national belonging. He asked rhetorically, “Why shouldn’t we offer due resistance to the idea that we are poor fodder for the cannon of citizenship?” (“LULAC,” 1). Explicitly positioning Mexican American identity against the dominant formulations of national subjectivity of either the United States or Mexico that assumed a natural convergence of race, nation, and culture, LULAC attempted to disarticulate the racial and cultural terms of U.S. citizenship while maintaining the primacy of national allegiance over transnational connections. Above all, LULAC commentators worked to convince ethnic Mexicans who held U.S. citizenship that a profound transformation of communal self-identification was necessary to the success of civil rights initiatives.

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In a two-part article titled “Citizenship” published in the inaugural issue of the LULAC News in 1931, Adolph A. Garza of San Antonio Council No. 2 identified the issue as being “of utmost importance” because Mexican Americans were so precariously situated in relation to the nation (4). Ignorant of both the duties and rights of U.S. citizenship, “people of Mexican extraction” who were U.S. citizens had “placed themselves in the same category as people without a country” (Garza, 5). The dangers of being stateless in the modern era of nations resulted in a profound displacement of communal identity. Lacking clear allegiance to one nation-state, Mexican Americans stood outside the juridical citizenship of Mexico and the cultural citizenship of the United States. Moreover, they were identified as such in both Mexico and the United States: “[Mexican Americans] are neither Mexican in fact, nor Americans at heart. If they go to Mexico they are called Texans, if they are here among the Americans of English or Saxon origin they are not Americans but ‘Mescans’” (5). In terms of interpolation into a national imagined community, Mexican Americans found themselves outside the affective embrace of the United States while still subject to its disciplinary strictures, which were those of an invidious white supremacy. Although Garza excoriated Anglo-Texan racism for its routine denial of civil rights, he also faulted Texas Mexicans for not knowing which rights to demand as U.S. citizens, most fundamentally the right to be acknowledged as fellow citizens. The problem was essentially one of self-identification: “The truth about the matter is that we are not men enough, brave enough, nor intelligent enough to tell the world that we are not ‘Mescans’, that we are Texans, and are proud of it.” Making the demand for civil rights a matter of masculine honor, Garza rhetorically delinked race and nation as he rejected the Anglo equation of whiteness with Americanness: “We are not ashamed of the race of our origin . . . but to be proud of our race does not mean that we must be loyal to another group of our same race.” For Garza, a common racial origin as mestizos shared with Mexican nationals did not translate into a common national allegiance or even similar cultural practices. Against Anglo-Texan assertions that “Mescans” would forever be unassimilable foreigners, Garza suggested that Texas Mexicans, insofar as they were natives of the United States, were really alien to Mexico. Downplaying the diasporic, transnational cultural practices of Greater Mexico, Garza asserted that Texas Mexicans had fundamentally “different customs, different habits, different methods” of living from Mexican nationals (5). That many Texas Mexicans believed otherwise could be attributed, ac-

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cording to Garza, to a powerful fiction of racial identity propagated by post-Revolution Mexican nationalism and nativist U.S. nationalism. Fleeing the Revolution while remaining fervent nationalists, Mexican exiles to the United States continuously spoke of “how unjust the Americans are to you—a Mexican,” thus conflating the real issue of “un-American” discrimination against fellow citizens with the false notion of racially specific nationality (Garza, 6). Garza considered the Mexican expatriate proposition that “if, because we are of Mexican origin, we believe that we must be loyal to Mexico” to be patently “impossible, foolish and absurd”; by this logic, “all Mexicans should be loyal to Spain; all Americans to England; and all nations to the nation from which they won their independence” (9). The erroneous equation of nationality with race furthermore vacated a concrete Texas-Mexican history of political agency that favored the material development of communal self-determination over supposedly naturalized ties of racial nationhood: “First we were under the Spanish rule and we did not like it, so we freed ourselves of Spain. We then were under Mexico until they tried to give us taxation without representation, and we declared our independence and lived under our own flag. Then we deemed it advisable to join the U.S. and we did” (8). While Garza’s narrative can be read as a genuflection toward the celebratory U.S. historical narrative of ever-increasing degrees of democratic freedom, it nonetheless made the then-radical point that democracy in Texas had always been a cooperative political venture between Texas Mexicans and Anglo-Texans and not, as asserted by Centennial discourses, the fruition of an AngloSaxon ideal. LULAC’s goal of combating racist practices while reforming ethnic Mexican subjectivity came together in its great emphasis on public education. While LULAC pursued legal and political avenues for immediate legal relief in the areas of voting, jury duty, public accommodations and the workplace, educational policy and awareness became the cornerstone of the organization’s long-term strategy for ensuring Mexican American social agency.13 Given that racial discrimination prevented Mexican American children from receiving a proper education, LULAC almost immediately began a legal campaign to curb the customary racial segregation practiced in south Texas public school districts. Within a year of its founding, LULAC initiated the first of a series of public school desegregation lawsuits with Salvatierra v. Del Rio Independent School District (1931). M. C. Gonzales, lead counsel for LULAC, argued that the school district’s segregation of Mexican American children in the Texas border town of Del Rio was ille-

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gal, as it separated white Mexican American children from white Anglo children.14 While the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that the deliberate segregation of Mexican Americans by race was unconstitutional, nonetheless it upheld that segregation on circumstantial grounds such as Englishlanguage proficiency or migrant farmworker status was legal. By resorting to economic and cultural criteria such as irregular school attendance due to seasonal migrant labor and imperfect knowledge of English, the courts supported the customary apartheid of south Texas.15 Despite such legal setbacks, the school system itself was the best proof of U.S. democracy in action for many in LULAC. J. M. Longoria, president of La Grulla Council No. 6, praised public schools as “the most democratic institution” in U.S. public life, “open to all without regard to race, color, creed, religion, financial or social position” (4). As the most important institution for facilitating cultural exchange among the citizenry, the public school system, in the eyes of LULAC, represented the best path to Mexican American advancement. Dan Ramírez and P. C. Hernández assigned an almost magical quality to education’s ability to undo the social abjection of Mexican Americans: “Allí está la redención de la raza, allí está el ‘Sesame Abrete’ de la felicidad de nuestras futuras generaciones” [Therein lies the redemption of our people, therein is the “Open Sesame” for the happiness of our future generations] (46). Recognizing that the governmental policy had long emphasized Americanization as a central goal of public education, LULAC saw the public school system as the optimum way to expose large numbers of Mexican Americans to important cultural skills they would need to safeguard civil rights. M. C. Gonzales, president general of LULAC in 1932, saw the typical curriculum of public schools as an invaluable addition to the collective knowledge of Mexican Americans: “We advocate a thorough knowledge of the English language, of American history, traditions, ideals, and institutions only [sic] in that way can we hope to benefit ourselves of the best America affords” (“Aims,” 1). The cofounder and former president of LULAC General Alonso S. Perales specifically identified “courses in English and Spanish, Hygiene, Civics and Government” as the most relevant for Mexican Americans (“Training,” 8). As Texas Mexicans already paid taxes—particularly the despised poll tax—to fund public schools, the leaders of LULAC furthermore urged their membership to encourage school attendance by their children and to pressure school officials to strictly enforce compulsory school attendance laws. Gonzales suggested that the common practice of not enforcing school attendance laws in rural south Texas counties stemmed from

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the desire of Anglo-Texan agribusiness to reproduce a large workforce of uneducated and disenfranchised Texas-Mexican laborers: “It is not to the interest of the cotton land-owners of Texas that these Mexican laborers should get an education . . . as a result over half a million people are kept in virtual industrial slavery” (“Address,” 6). Adding insult to injury, many counties scrupulously counted school-age Texas Mexicans and thus maximized state funding but then funneled “unclaimed” resources to improve the educational experience of Anglo-Texan children. In effect, the absence of Texas-Mexican schoolchildren in public school classrooms perpetuated their community’s subordination at its own expense. When faced with the intransigence of local school boards and superintendents to improve conditions for Texas-Mexican children, LULAC lobbied the state legislature directly. The article “El que no llora no mama (He who doesn’t cry doesn’t suckle), published in the LULAC News for February 1937, urged Lulackers to write their elected representatives in support of a bill that would “withhold the State per capita allotment of educational funds from any school district which fails to provide equal education facilities to all children of school age residing therein” (4). Local school boards would be forced to choose between a fully funded budget that gave Mexican American students equivalent facilities or an underfunded budget that would presumably also hurt Anglo pupils. Making the link between public educational policy and racially based economic interests, LULAC exhorted Texas Mexicans to have public schools serve their community in some minimal way, even if getting an education, for a Texas-Mexican child, might mean sitting in a dilapidated classroom conducted by a poorly qualified teacher in what they hoped would be the short run. In keeping with its emphasis on individualism as part of the Americanization process, LULAC construed all community progress as proceeding through individual success in education. In the words of George Cisneros in an editorial in LULAC News titled “LULAC and Education,” “There is no better road to equality than the promotion of education of the individual, for through the education of the individual comes the natural result of enlightenment, which means PROGRESS” (1). Cisneros reaffirmed the importance of public schooling in fostering the creation of a crucial Mexican American leadership that could skillfully negotiate the Anglodominated world: “It will develop in them those qualities of leadership which are requisites for the assumption of their proper place in social and business” (1). In a speech before the Travis Missionary Women’s Association in San Antonio, M. C. Gonzales specifically identified the public

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school system as the key training ground for emergent Mexican American leaders: “In time the public school will do its work, new leaders will be trained, the level of general education will rise, justice will be nearer, and human happiness will increase” (“Address,” 7). Seeking to create a Mexican American Talented Tenth, Longoria advocated for “the noble task of replenishing the educational fund” established by LULAC to fund scholarships in order to encourage Mexican American youth “in college to help us fight the battles for social justice” (5). Whether writing in English or Spanish, LULAC’s leaders argued that “without an education we are dead, intellectually, economically, and socially” (“Why an Education?” 3). Yet even if LULAC fought to desegregate schools and to ensure adequate campuses, its efforts would be futile without the full backing of Mexican American parents. Seeking to instill “a consciousness for education,” LULAC targeted parents who for economic or political reasons refused to send their children to U.S. public schools (Longoria, 4). In an article titled “Educad a Vuestros Hijos” (Educate your children) Hernández and Ramírez faulted parental noninvolvement for the difficulties encountered by their children in school: No es en la inferioridad intelectual de la raza como malevolamente se ha querido señalar en donde debemos buscarlo, es en el complejo de inferioridad que hemos creado como consecuencia de la apatía que hemos demostrado para llevar a nuestros hijos a la escuela. (45) [The fault does not lie with the allegedly inferior intellect of our people, as has been malevolently suggested, but rather in the inferiority complex we have created as a consequence of the apathy we have shown in sending our children to school.]

LULAC hoped that the commingling of Anglo-Texan and Mexican American children in classrooms and schoolyards would help promote interethnic understanding and, later, social acceptance. According to J. Naranjo, this experience of playground equality would help prevent the development of “that inferiority complex” in Mexican American children that led to “segregating themselves from the American masses”; such early informal segregation only facilitated later customary segregation in public life (10). Mexican American parents therefore had to instruct their children “to mix and mingle with the English-speaking children without distinction of races or anything else” (Naranjo, 10).

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Despite scholarly assessments to the contrary, Lulackers advocated neither an uncritical acceptance of Anglo-American values at school nor the abandonment of ethnic Mexican customs at home. While LULAC considered the Americanization of Texas Mexicans through the public schools on the whole beneficial, the organization reserved the right to reject Anglo-American behaviors that offended the Mexican sensibility of gente decente, or well-mannered, cultured poeple. Printed in the first issue of the LULAC News, the organization’s statement “Aims and Purposes” encouraged members “to assume complete responsibility for the education of our children as to their rights and duties and the language and customs of this country, in so far as they may be good customs” (4). Drawing upon the ethnic Mexican distinction between preparacíon (formal schooling) and educación (polite manners) that was lost in English translation, the former president general J. T. Canales emphasized that ethical value judgment and good behavior were learned at home, not at school: “Mental and physical training is the proper sphere of the public school, but Education embraces more than that. It should include the training of the children in good manners as well as in good morals. Only in the home does a child get this part of his education and the parents are the proper teachers and the ones to whom this responsibility belongs” (“Our Responsibilities,” 14). Pride in Mexican American identity, whether construed as racial descent or cultural heritage, was yet another aspect of education to be taught at home regardless of cultural Americanization at school. “Aims and Purposes” stated the matter clearly: “We solemnly declare once and for all to maintain a sincere and respectful reverence for our racial origin, of which we are proud” (4).16 In addition to reaffirming the everyday use of Spanish and ethnic Mexican mores, pride in a Mexican American background translated into the public celebration of patriotic Mexican holidays such as el Cinco de mayo and el Dieciseis de septiembre alongside the observance of U.S. patriotic holidays like the Fourth of July and Washington’s birthday.17 In that LULAC patently regarded the inculcation of cultural and racial pride to be the responsibility of family and community and not that of the public schools, ethnic pluralism better characterized their outlook than melting pot assimilation. For Lulackers, Americanization, Englishlanguage acquisition, and participation in U.S. government, business, and politics did not conflict with an ethnic Mexican identification in other matters. In a speech given at the national LULAC convention in 1938, U.S. Senator Dennis Chávez of New Mexico professed faith that a spe-

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cifically bicultural Mexican American sensibility could merge cultural pride with U.S. patriotism: “Personally, I feel that we can use and retain the culture and virtues of our ancestors and yet carry out in every respect the ideals and the traditions of those who made this country possible” (32).18 However, educators associated with LULAC also considered the acknowledgment of Mexican achievements in the arts, sciences, and other professions to be crucial not only to the proper education of Mexican American students but also to that of the Anglo-American college students who would become the future leaders of the nation. Seeking to inject the concept of multiethnic citizenship into higher education, LULAC passed a resolution in 1939, written by Professor George I. Sánchez of the University of New Mexico and J. T. Canales, calling for the establishment of “a chair of Latin American culture and Literature in every University in the United States of America” (Sánchez, “Resolution,” 43).19 Recognizing that universities and colleges were key sites of the production of knowledge that validated its objects of study, LULAC sought to have U.S. academia recognize the contributions of Mexican Americans in the fields of “geography, history, education, economics, literature, language, and sociology” (Orozco, “Politics,” 472). Favorably expounding upon the plan, Edward A. Gutiérrez of Council No. 90 suggested that these university chairs develop a new field of study “where not only Spanish will be taught but also our culture, our tradition, and a clear cut program outlining our aim and purpose” (13). Far from advocating the disappearance of Mexican Americans into a whitewashed mainstream, LULAC proposed the institutionalization of Mexican American studies some three decades before the Chicano movement managed to implement the concept, albeit in a radically reconceptualized form.20 The call for inclusion within the vital sites of the production of knowledge in the United States must be understood in the international context of the late 1930s. During this era intellectuals in LULAC viewed the increasingly draconian racial practices of fascism in European nations as a possible precursor of racial persecution in the United States. In the years before the Second World War, LULAC would draw critical characterizations of invidious racial distinctions within the United States and those being advanced in fascist Europe. Explicitly invoking Nazi Germany’s racially purist and culturally homogenous concept of citizenship, LULAC’s leaders did not hesitate to compare fascist ideology overseas with white supremacy at home. Equating the denial of democracy on the basis of race in the United States with the policies of Nazi Germany,

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LULAC President General E. D. Salinas in late 1939 attacked “Hitleristic race differentiations” in a telegram to the Texas superintendent of public instruction as not only un-American but fatally divisive in a time of global crisis (13). By 1940, LULAC’s formulation of an idealized vision of a multiethnic U.S. citizenship would anticipate later wartime efforts to forge greater national and international unity during the Second World War. Shortly before joining the faculty of the University of Texas, Sánchez characterized U.S. democracy as drawing its main strengths from the diversity of its constituent populations. Whereas fascism in Europe arose from culturally homogenous populations, Sánchez argued that democracy thrived in the United States because of “the right of each person and of each social group to seek out meritorious aspects of any culture and make them a part of the American way of life.” In a nation forged from “the assets of many cultures,” the right to maintain cultural differences allowed for “heterogenous social groups and individuals to contribute from their respective cultural wealth to the welfare of the mass.” Far from posing a threat to national unity, “cultural self-determination” stood as the guarantor of U.S. democracy in the modern age of fascist-imposed cultural conformity (Sánchez, “Schools,” 7). According to Sánchez, who would become president general of LULAC in 1941, the benefits of tolerance extended far beyond the nation’s borders; having been enriched by peaceful cultural exchange within its own boundaries, the nation could then, thanks to its enlarged cultural understanding, constructively engage the rest of the world. More than any Centennial or other commemorative event, the nation itself became its own proof of historical greatness: “American culture, itself, is a monument to the democratic ideal of equality of opportunity” because of, rather than despite, “the contributions of cultural minorities.” Only local and state governments that “would barter democratic principles for a special privilege” of race constituted “the last barrier to the widespread application” of true democracy (Sánchez, “Equality,” 20). Rather than promote national unity, the racialized practices of Texas state, county, and municipal governments represented the last and highest barrier to the full exercise of Mexican American citizenship. As the symbolic expression of the Anglo-Texan exclusion of Texas Mexicans from the nation’s imagined community, Centennial discourses became LULAC’s point of entry into the public representation of social agency with the war in Europe on the horizon.

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LULAC and the Texas Centennial Looking for a brighter future through education, LULAC envisioned a bilingual, bicultural Mexican American subject who would achieve social equality through the exercise of civil rights and the fulfillment of civic duties. Yet in a state so dedicated to constructing its modern self through the memory of the Alamo and San Jacinto, LULAC found that the challenge of demanding civil rights in Texas would require a strategic engagement with the very discourses of racialist nationalism invoked to ensure the social subordination of Texas Mexicans. As the nexus of these discourses during the 1930s, the Texas Centennial presented an obstacle as well as an opportunity for LULAC’s project of reform. On one hand, the anti-Mexican tone of the celebration could not but aggravate the already deeply hostile and unequal relations between the Anglo-Texan and Texas-Mexican communities. On the other hand, the outpouring of public financial resources and saturation media coverage promised at least the possibility of securing increased recognition and respect, if not substantial material resources, for the tejano contributions to Texan greatness. As an intervention into the racialist assumptions of Centennial discourses, LULAC’s proposals and counterhistories reveal the imaginative dimensions and limits of the new Mexican American subject as a transformative agent within U.S. civil society. Lulackers consistently attacked what they considered to be the false and damaging racial distinction drawn between Anglos and Mexicans within Texas historiography. Above all, LULAC sought to dispel the Anglo-Texan notion that race alone determined the course of the Texas Revolution. Garza squarely blamed Anglo-Texan history textbooks for exacerbating Texas-Mexican alienation from the U.S. polity. Converting the political alliance between Anglo-Texans and Texas Mexicans during the Texas Revolution into an antagonistic racial conflict between “Texians” and “Mescans,” these textbooks “tell you of the thousands of Mexicans against a few Americans” while saying “very little, if anything, of the Latin Americans, who, because of the oppression of Mexico, did join force with them” (Garza, 8). Gus C. García, a young attorney who later represented LULAC before the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark case Hernández v. Texas (1954), cogently summarized the ideological force of such misrepresentations: As a result of inaccurate history textbooks, ignorance of the true facts, and the ever-present evils of intolerance and racial hatred, the miscon-

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ception exists almost universally that the declaration of Texas independence and the ensuing military activities were strictly Anglo-American versus Latin American in their nature. Members of the latter group, as individuals and as a race, are invariably pictured as plundering, bloodthirsty savages fundamentally cowards at heart. (7)

The repeated iteration of this faulty narrative made all citizens of Mexican descent, in the words of Garza, “again feel that we are foreigners and are only here by their permission” instead of by right of citizenship (8). The distinction between “bias and prejudice” and “true and correct history” allowed LULAC to frame Anglo-centric histories as incomplete at best and racist propaganda at worst. In the absence of the historical corrective offered by the Texas-Mexican perspective, schoolbook histories served to justify the ill treatment of ethnic Mexicans in the present as a direct consequence of their misrepresentations. Countering Centennial discourses that marginalized the contributions of Texas Mexicans to the establishment of democracy in Texas became a major goal of LULAC. Sensing the crucial importance of the Centennial moment for the improvement of the Texas-Mexican image in the AngloTexan mind, LULAC in May 1934 created a Texas Centennial Committee chaired by Canales. Charged with honoring “the memory of the Texas Mexicans and other Latin American patriots who fought for the Independence of Texas,” the committee sought strategies to impact the historical discourse about the Texas-Mexican role in Texas independence and the contemporary perception of Texas Mexicans as productive members of society (Canales, “Resolution”). One suggestion was to petition the Texas Centennial Committee charged with festivity programming in San Antonio to hang a portrait of the tejano hero Juan Nepomuceno Seguín inside the Alamo. The request represented an audacious attempt to circumvent the Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT), the politically influential curators of the Shrine of Texas Liberty. Given that for many years the DRT had omitted mention of Texas-Mexican defenders during the annual ceremony honoring the Alamo dead, the petition for Seguín’s portrait demonstrated LULAC’s keen awareness of the link between representation and power as well as the possibility of enlisting state intervention into racist practices within civil society.21 Other aspects of the LULAC Texas Centennial Committee’s plan focused upon improving the image of Mexican Americans in the eyes of the thousands of Anglo-American visitors to San Antonio’s historic sites. The committee suggested offering the services of Texas-Mexican Boy Scouts

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as bilingual guides at the Alamo and the other missions in the San Antonio area. The bilingual Boy Scouts would offer a public face to LULAC’s patriotic commitment to the Centennial and to the Americanization of Texas Mexicans. Giving advice to the committee secretary and future president general James Tafolla Jr. on how to make this presentation to the state LULAC Texas Centennial Committee, Canales emphasized the point that LULAC would bear all expenses to implement this suggestion: “We are trying to help them and cooperate with them in the success of a Texas Centennial and that we are not asking for anything from them in the way of finances unless they freely wish to give it.” In turn, LULAC’s commitment to the Centennial would give it venues “to further a type of program and the inculcation of ideals tending to amalgamate our cosmopolitan population, rather than disintegrate the mutual interests and common ties of friendship of our people” (“Resolution”). Taxing the meager resources of the fledgling organization, the Great Depression prevented LULAC from undertaking “an elaborate or expensive program of celebration” (“Report,” 1). Instead, the Centennial committee suggested a thrifty plan to “cooperate with the Centennial Celebration Plan of the City of San Antonio,” focusing upon “an educational program with the view of correcting certain inaccuracies in the Texas History and to secure the editing of a new Texas History in which due recognition be made for the services rendered by Texas Mexicans and other Latin-Americans in obtaining the Independence of Texas” (“Report,” 1). In a similar vein, the Texas History Revision Committee of a San Antonio LULAC council sought to change the depiction of Texas Mexicans in public school textbooks. Writing to Canales, Isidore Flores, the chairman of the textbook committee, proposed petitioning the state’s textbook committee to remove “every unpleasant, harsh and injuring word or term” about Texas Mexicans found in History of Texas. Failing that, Flores suggested that LULAC use its political influence to pass a bill with the same effect through the state legislature. Although Canales, a former state representative, demurred in advocating that strategy, he did endorse the idea of pursuing textbook revisions, replying to Flores that he had “a great deal of material to present to the Department of History of the University of Texas so that in case a new History of Texas is written this data should be incorporated.” But Canales was not sanguine about the changes in official textbook policy taking place, and he initiated plans for a counterhistory of the Texas Revolution to be produced and distributed at LULAC’s expense. In late 1934, Canales solicited the help of Carlos E.Castañeda, a research

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librarian for the García Collection at the University of Texas, in researching a list of Texas-Mexican veterans who had received land grants or pensions from the Republic of Texas in recognition of their service during the Texas Revolution.22 By mid-1935, plans for a pamphlet consisting of articles documenting the contributions of Texas Mexicans to Texas independence were well underway. The idea was to distribute the publication at the Centennial. In October, Castañeda wrote to Canales that he had gathered enough material for “a little book of about 200 pages.” The committee also sought articles by respected historians that sympathetically portrayed the Texas-Mexican contribution to Texas independence. Besides Castañeda’s piece, the preliminary list of articles included one by the respected University of Texas historian Eugene Barker entitled “Native Latin-American Contribution to the Colonization and Independence of Texas” and one by the Brownsville attorney (and Canales’s former law partner) Harbert Davenport entitled “Some Mexicans Who Helped to Make the History of Texas.” The inclusion of articles written by TexasMexican and Anglo-Texan historians suggested a model of interethnic cooperation central to LULAC’s goal of integrating the social, economic, and political lives of Texas Mexicans. The committee’s plan stated that the “attractive pamphlet” could be sold for twenty-five cents “through the agency of the Latin-American boy scouts” stationed at historical sites throughout San Antonio (“Report,” 2). Encouraging Castañeda to complete his contribution in July 1935, Canales expressed confidence that the pamphlet would change public opinion about Texas Mexicans “within five years,” resulting in “a new Texas History . . . wherein acknowledgement will be made for the services rendered by the Texas Mexicans in behalf of Texas Independence.” Perales, while perhaps not quite as optimistic as Canales, nonetheless praised the project to Castañeda as “valuable and opportune” at a moment when “Americans of Mexican extraction are striving for equal opportunities for ourselves and our children.” The need to shape the public imaginary about Texas independence during the Centennial was greater than ever, Perales continued, as “so much is being said and published about the heroism of Texans of Anglo-Saxon descent while hardly a word is being uttered or written about Mexican Texans who likewise fought for the independence of our Lone Star State” (10/25/35). Thus, Canales and Perales hoped that representations of patriotic Texas Mexicans would translate into political, social, and economic power. At the very least, the absence of selfrepresentation could only perpetuate the subordination of Texas Mexicans by ceding the representational field to white supremacist interpretations.

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Figure 3.2. Mexican Americans like nineteen-year-old Galeot Tamez of San Antonio

sought to assert the Mexicanist presence in the Texas Centennial through aesthetic venues. Tamez’s postcard sketch, intended for Governor James V. Allred of Texas, supplements the iconic facade of the Alamo with a bell tower that resurrects the Spanish-Mexican past. (San Antonio Light Collection, UTSA’s Institute of Texan Cultures, L-0954-E. Courtesy of the Hearst Corporation.)

While the state LULAC Texas Centennial Committee centered its efforts on the pamphlet, individual councils worked to influence local celebrations.23 Given the centrality of San Antonio and the Alamo to the Centennial, the two San Antonio LULAC councils lobbied to be included in the major official Centennial celebrations for the city. Council 16 took a particularly active role in organizing local Texas-Mexican proposals. The plaza building committee, chaired by Perales, demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of the local politics of Centennial planning. Seeking funding from San Antonio’s Texas Centennial Committee, the plaza building committee proposed a seventy-five-thousand-dollar Plaza Típica Mexicana to be built in the heavily Mexican West Side. The West Side barrio, the focal point of San Antonio’s ethnic Mexican community for three decades, had been largely ignored by the city’s Anglo-Texan business and political elite except as a convenient dumping ground for the city’s underground economy. Lacking many basic public services, the

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ethnic Mexican community of the West Side suffered from high rates of tuberculosis, infant mortality, and unemployment.24 The West Side also had the city’s highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases, a fact attributed by a U.S. Public Health Service report of 1935 “a la anormalment grande población mexicana y a la proximidad de un gran fuerte militar” [to the abnormally large Mexican population and to the proximity of a large military presence] at Fort Sam Houston and other troop installations around San Antonio (Perales, En defensa I, 66). Countering the report’s insinuation that ethnic Mexican women were responsible for spreading sexually transmitted diseases, Perales charged that City Hall purposely concentrated brothels on the West Side “en contra de la voluntad del pueblo mexicano” [against the wishes of the Mexican community] while clamping down on prostitution in other parts of the city (En defensa I, 67). Citing the repeated refusal of city authorities to shut down the informal red light district they had created despite numerous petitions from the West Side community, he identified the neglect and indifference of municipal leaders toward the West Side as symptomatic of pervasive institutional racism: “Somos, pues, víctimas del descuidado de nuestros funcionarios municipales y de la indiferencia de nuestros amigos and conciudadanos angloamericanos en general” [We are victims of the neglect of our municipal functionaries and of the general indifference of our Anglo-American friends and fellow citizens] (En defensa I, 67).25 For Perales, making the plaza a central tourist attraction on the West Side would guarantee the reversal of City Hall’s policy of concentrating brothels there. The typical Mexican plaza project would also create a new, respectable tourist-based economy for the West Side that would far outlast the Centennial itself, bringing infrastructure, jobs, and, perhaps most crucially, a community-oriented neighborhood center. Appealing to the Commission’s national and international interests in making San Antonio a major attraction along the soon-to-be-completed Pan American Highway, Perales argued that the creation of the plaza “sería un testimonio de amistad para los pueblos de la América Latina, especialmente para el mexicano” [would be a testament of friendship for the nations of Latin America, especially the Mexican] (En defensa II, 25). In addition to basing his argument upon economic self-interest and the Good Neighbor policy, Perales called for the recognition of the West Side community’s numerous contributions to the city. The allocation of funding for the project “sería una demonstración de parte del pueblo angloamericano de esta cuidad de que está dispuesto a otorgarle al ciudadano americano de orígen mexicano la justicia social que reclama” [would be a demonstration on the part of

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the Anglo-American community of the city that it is inclined to grant the American citizen of Mexican origin the social justice demanded] (En defensa II, 26). Despite the best efforts of LULAC, powerful interests in the wealthy, deed-restricted, Anglos-only enclaves of Olmos Park and Alamo Heights successfully lobbied for a sports complex (appropriately named Alamo Stadium) in their vicinity.26 The West Side would receive no funds from the Centennial.27 Despite LULAC’s best efforts, the organization’s proposals to Centennial planners met with little success. LULAC managed to secure a place at San Antonio’s Centennial commemoration of the signing of the Declaration of Texas Independence, where Perales “paid tribute to those ‘who planted civilization and democracy in this section of the western hemisphere’” (“Texas Birthday,” 11). Apart from such momentary inclusions, the most tangible result of LULAC’s Centennial undertakings was a collective project eventually written by Lozano as Viva Tejas: The Story of the Mexican-Born Patriots of the Republic of Texas. The outgrowth of the Centennial committee’s pamphlet project, this fifty-page text documented the achievements of the Texas Mexicans who fought on the Federalist side at the Alamo, San Jacinto, and other battles of the Texas Revolution. While Castañeda had been previously tapped for the tentatively titled “Mexican Texas Heroes,” he was engaged in feverishly completing his Centennial project, the first volume of Our Catholic Heritage in Texas. When Lozano wrote to Castañeda in early 1936 under the assumption that he had the LULAC effort well underway, the librarian responded that he could not possibly tackle the project until March or even June, by which time it would be “too late for the purpose intended.” Lozano then undertook the task of putting into writing the research materials that Castañeda and others had gathered. Published in mid-1936 by the Southern Literary Institute of San Antonio, Viva Tejas received a prepublication mention in the New York Times Book Review and, once published, a brief notice in the Journal of Southern History.28 The main argument of Viva Tejas revolved around Lozano’s contention that Anglo-Texans were not the only Texan community to fight for political autonomy from Mexico, as “the average writer of Texas history” had implied “by almost completely ignoring the Latin, or Spanish-speaking element” (Viva Tejas, 5). Anglo-Texan historians not only downplayed the fact that “the small Anglo-Texan colonies would have failed utterly in their struggle for independence had they not received the generous help of the native population”; in addition, the erasure of Texas Mexicans as essential participants in the struggle for Texas independence, Lozano

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asserted, created “a gap between the two races [that] should by all means be discouraged” (6). Calling for direct state intervention in the matter, Lozano argued that “such works should be abolished in school rooms, libraries and all public institutions of learning” even as he sought “to bring out some forgotten facts of Texas history in order that the word ‘Mexican’ shall no more be misconstrued as ‘savage’” (6). Viva Tejas highlighted the political nature of the Texas Revolution in contrast to the racialist narrative told in Centennial discourses. Lozano pointed out that Anglos and Mexicans could be found on both sides of a Mexican civil war, displacing the popular notion that the struggle for Texas independence had been a strictly racial affair of freedom-loving Anglos versus cruel, treacherous Mexicans. Emphasizing that the common charge of tyranny against Mexicans as a race completely ignored historical facts that spoke to the contrary, Lozano squarely blamed the Kentuckian John Davis Bradburn, the Anglo commander of the Mexican military outpost of Anahuac, for oppressive official acts against Texas Mexicans and Anglo-Texans alike: “Strange as it may seem, one of the elements destined to stimulate the ignition of revolution in Texas was the despotism against the Anglo-Saxon element by one of their own number” (13). Bradburn’s imprisonment of William B. Travis and Patrick C. Jack in 1832 had long been cited in Anglo-Texan histories as a key incident in sparking political dissent, but Lozano also related the untold story of Bradburn’s earlier oppression of two Texas Mexicans friendly to the Anglo-Texan colonists. Bradburn had arrested the land commissioner J. Francisco Madero and the surveyor José María Carbajal for trying to entice Anglo immigration to prime tracts along the Trinity River in defiance of the Mexican anti-immigration law of 1830. Upon hearing the news, the “Anglo colonists were ready to take up arms in defense of their friend Madero,” but Stephen F. Austin convinced them to back down (14). Nonetheless, Lozano argued, the incident demonstrated the mutual friendship and shared political convictions of the Texas-Mexican and Anglo-Texan communities, paving the way for joint action once the revolution began. Texas Mexicans, far from uniformly supporting Santa Anna, actively backed the independence movement, enlisting in the Texas army, passing along crucial intelligence about Mexican troop movements, and supplying food, horses, and money to the revolutionary cause. For Lozano, this trait of selfless service to the nation could be seen down to the present day in the military service rendered by Texas Mexicans to the United States:

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“Since the time of the early wars the Mexican of Texas has readily responded to the first duty of a citizen, the one that calls him to make the supreme sacrifice, and many Spanish names from Texas are numbered in all of the wars and lists of the Lone Star State as an independent nation, a Southern State and as part of this great Union” (49). As chairman of the state LULAC educational committee, Lozano attributed the absence of Texas-Mexican contributions in Texas history texts to the cultural ignorance of early Anglo-Texan bureaucrats, who either hopelessly misspelled Spanish names or mangled the Spanish cultural convention of multiple family surnames when it came time to allocate lands for military service immediately after the Texas Revolution. As a result, “many names to which honor is owed in Texas history . . . have been mixed up or forgotten” (49). Seeking to correct these mistakes, Lozano presented extended biographies of famous Texas Mexicans of the revolutionary era. The lives of Lorenzo de Zavala, his son Lorenzo de Zavala Jr., José Antonio Navarro, Erasmo Seguín and his son Juan Nepomuceno Seguín, Lozano wrote, “of even the most prominent leaders of the Texas Revolution . . . should stand out as amongst the most active” (27).29 Turning to the archives of the Republic of Texas, Lozano cited extant records of land deeds granted to many other Texas Mexicans by the fledgling republic in recognition of military or other service as incontrovertible proof that Texas Mexicans and Anglo-Texans shared equally in the founding of modern Texas: “Side by side their ancestors won Texas’ independence and built the republic that was destined to become a great state” (50). This had been the case even at the siege and Battle of the Alamo, the centerpiece of white supremacist accounts of Texas history. Noting that “seven of Captain Juan Seguín’s company of Texas-Mexicans were slain” there, Lozano maintained that the battle demonstrated that “the Texan Mexican population united all efforts with the Saxons” rather than opposing them (24). As Lozano asserted in his poem “The Alamo” (1937), both “Saxon new” and “Latin old” intermingled their names euphonically and indiscriminately upon the roll call of Texan honor: “Houston, Zavala, Navarro, Bean, / Austin, Fannin, and Seguín” (Texas Under Six Flags, 11). For Lozano, the making of modern Texas had not been realized through a clash of supposed racial differences, but rather was the result of a common political commitment to the ideals of democratic nationhood. Even more strikingly, the first official commemoration of the Alamo defenders honored rather than disparaged that commonality. Lozano highlighted how, mere months after the battle, Juan Nepomuceno Seguín had the cremated remains of the Alamo defenders interred with full mili-

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Figure 3.3. The original banner of the LULAC News places the Mexican American

writer as the literary mediator between Mexico and the United States, reflecting LULAC’s goal of creating a new bicultural, rights-bearing subjectivity for U.S. citizens of Mexican descent. (Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin. Courtsey of LULAC.)

tary honors at the San Fernando Cathedral. In his speech at the event, Seguín praised the fallen as “venerable companions” who set “a brilliant example, worthy indeed of being recorded in the pages of history” so that “Texas shall be free and independent” (Viva Tejas, 39). Texas Mexicans, not Anglo-Americans, had recognized the importance of the struggle for Texan democracy by staging the first commemoration for its fallen heroes. Therein lay the most powerful argument of Viva Tejas: if the first Alamo commemoration honored the joint effort of Anglo-Texans and Texas Mexicans in the winning of Texan democracy, then the onus was upon Anglo-Texans during the Centennial, Lozano implied, to honor the civil rights that Texas Mexicans had already earned many times over.

Mexican American Literary Aesthetics in the LULAC News While the official Centennial celebrations elicited concerted efforts by LULAC during the mid-1930s, the organization implicitly responded to the constellation of Centennial discourses throughout the decade. The main print forum for LULAC was the organization’s newsletter, the

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LULAC News, although occasional pieces would appear in La Prensa and other Spanish-language newspapers such as El Paladín in Corpus Christi.30 Publication of the LULAC News began in 1931 with an eclectic mix of genres filling its pages, including chapter proceedings, topical editorials, historical accounts, inspirational speeches, humorous anecdotes, incidental reporting, and creative writing. Despite the constitutional designation of English as the official language of the organization, the LULAC News printed these materials in English and Spanish, reflecting the bilingual upbringing of the upwardly mobile professional membership as well as the keen necessity of keeping monolingually Spanish Mexican Americans involved in the organization’s activities. Although LULAC very much grew out of the regional concerns of Texas Mexicans in south Texas, by 1941 the organization had over eighty chapters throughout Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Kansas.31 In conjunction with the large annual conventions and the monthly local membership meetings, the LULAC News served to bind together the rapidly increasing membership of LULAC across the U.S. Southwest as a new Mexican American community. Throughout the Centennial era, the LULAC News became the principal locus of articulation for a nascent Mexican American literary aesthetic in keeping with the Spanish-language newspaper tradition of promoting belles lettres among the readership. However, the creative literature published in the LULAC News went beyond merely replicating so-called Latin cultural capital. This literature became the cultural crucible for the making of LULAC’s emergent Mexican American subjectivity and, as the literary historian A. Gabriel Meléndez argues for nuevomexicano periodiqueros (journalists) of the late nineteenth century, “a means to mobilize community resources and engage them in literary codification by which questions of ethnicity, identity, and group participation might reflect the status of Mexican Americans in the national life of the country” (136). In the project of transforming a regional mexicano identity into a nationalized Mexican American one, LULAC’s struggles to define what they viewed as necessary changes in racial, gendered, and class terms are evident in the creative work published in nearly every issue. While the LULAC News occasionally reprinted didactic poems by such literary figures as José Selgas and Silvestre J. Zeledón to bolster a sense of Spanish-language literary history, the newsletter more often published original works from its membership that signaled the emerging bicultural subjectivity of Mexican Americans.32 While some contributions, such as Américo Paredes’s anonymously issued poem “The Mexico-Texan,” were

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published without attribution, most pieces mentioned the author’s local council or hometown in a byline. This recognition of members and their local councils increasingly promoted a Mexican American identity rather than a Texas-Mexican one as LULAC outgrew its south Texas origins.33 The works themselves reflected a decidedly amateur level of literary craft, indexing the relative access to and experience with the literary tradition in English. Nonetheless, these Mexican American literary texts revealed not just a determination to become part of that tradition but also an awareness that the tradition itself would ultimately change through these efforts. Much of the original poetry published in the LULAC News was devoted to specific organizational goals. For example, Ana Velásquez’s acrostic poem “Pay Your Poll Tax” laid out LULAC’s reasoning in encouraging Mexican Americans to qualify to vote despite the patently classist and overtly racist nature of the poll tax. The poem, in which the letters of the first word in every line formed the words of the title, developed a three-pronged argument in an easily remembered mnemonic form. First, Mexican Americans should participate in the democratic political process to “put in / Office persons who will be fair and / Unprejudiced towards our / Race.” Given that local municipal and county officials wielded seemingly arbitrary governmental powers that most directly affected Mexican American lives, the specific attitudes and politics of elected officials had a substantial impact on local race relations. The next rationale also involved community self-interest: paying the poll tax would help fund the education of Mexican American schoolchildren, albeit unequally: “One dollar goes to the School fund; Latin American children share in this fund.” Finally, paying the poll tax would also prove the commitment of Mexican Americans to the nation by demonstrating that they “Xercise their duties before they claim their rights.” Many issues such as voting rights were not typically addressed in gender-specific language, although Velásquez’s byline identified her as a member of Ladies Council No. 8, suggesting that the poem especially exhorted Mexican American women to participate in political activities as U.S. citizens (48). Other poetry in the LULAC News praised the organization and its leaders for its role in leading the charge for Texas-Mexican civil rights. Margil López, president of Sarita Council No. 25 and proprietor of López’s Cash Store at the edge of the Kenedy Ranch, became known as the Poet Laureate of LULAC for a series of Spanish-language poems that featured the organization as the heroic protagonist in the struggle for Mexican American civil rights. López’s dedicatory poems, with titles such as “LULAC,” “Poema a La Liga Latina Americana,” and “A La Liga

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Latino Americana y a sus Héroes,” celebrated “los héroes del nuevo continente” [the heroes of the new continent] who formulated “la cívica doctrina de méxico-tejanos” [the civic doctrine of Texas Mexicans] of “sus derechos iguales” [their equal rights] (“A La Liga,” 22). Writing in the tradition of Latin American civic-minded poetry that extolled the virtues of republicanism, López cast LULAC as the poetic muse that linked social activism with the creation of verse. The expression of the beautiful flowed from the civic harmony achieved by the observance of civil rights: “Quien no ha de poder cantarte / Si al sentirte y admirarte / Te revelas armoniosa / Como la esencia de una rosa / En los altares del arte?” [Who has not the power to praise you / If upon knowing and admiring you / You reveal yourself harmoniously / Like the scent of a rose / Upon the altars of art?] (López, “Poema,” back cover). Poems in the Lulac News often extolled the organization for asserting the fundamental equality of democratic citizenship in a hostile political environment: “Noble liga Americana / No has de perder lo Ganado / Más de una vez has probado / Que el Latino Americano / Es igual al ciudadano / Mejor de cualquier Estado” [Noble American League / Do not lose what has been gained / More than once you have proven / That the Latin American / is the equal of the best citizen / Of any State] (López, “Poema,” back cover). López placed LULAC within a masculinist tradition of martial struggle for self-determination and nationalist agency that ran from classical Sparta through George Washington and Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla. Figured as “sol espartano de Cívica” [the Spartan sun of Civics] who never ceased fighting for justice despite the long odds, LULAC epitomized for López the best democratic traditions of Mexico and the United States (López, “LULAC,” 5). Invoking a bicultural lineage of democratic freedom, López implied that Mexican Americans embodied the modern spirit of democracy at least as well as, if not better than, their Anglo-American compatriots who used racism to deny civil rights to their fellow citizens. Turning to the past, López traced the origins of the Mexican American struggle for civil rights to the racialized conquest of the Americas: “Tu estrella inmaculada / Refleja claramente los anhelos / Que soñara una raza conquistada / En tiempos de los indios, mis abuelos” [Your immaculate star / Reflects clearly the desires / That a conquered people dreamed / In the time of the Indians, my grandparents]. Linking masculine honor with racial pride, LULAC entered into that “lucha pequeña” [lesser battle] of fighting for civil rights “porque el hombre nació para vencer; / Y si el

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honor de una joven, es un hombre, / en el hombre, el honor, es un deber” [because man was born to conquer; / And if the honor of a youth is a young woman / in man, honor is a duty]. The poem traced modern mestizo manhood to Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec ruler, whose resistance to Spanish colonization sprang from a sacred duty to the land itself: “Y esa raza de noble proceder, / Unica reina en la región indiana; / No tubo [sic] más ejemplo que el deber, / Y esclavo del deber, fué soberana” [And this people of noble descent, / Only ruler of the Indian region; / Had no more example than duty, / And, slave of duty, were sovereign]. In the present, LULAC members manifested that same devotion to the land as duty to the nation: “Y adelante bandera sacro-santa, / Soldados favoritos con la diestra / Cultivad de la cívica la plata / En este suelo de la Patria nuestra” [And before a sacrosanct banner, / Favored soldiers of destiny / In this earth of our nation] (López, “LULAC,” 5). Imagining a place for Mexican Americans within U.S. nationalism, López’s poems imagined the Mexican American subject as racially indigenous, gendered male, and unapologetically bicultural.34 Poems in LULAC News by male Lulackers theorized the Mexican American subject in much the same terms, often emphasizing the fraternal bent of the organization. In an era when Mexican American professional men were largely excluded from lodges and other male institutions of civil society that held the key to career advancement, LULAC functioned as a professional network that imagined its community in decidedly similar ways. One poem, Henry Cañamar’s “To Our Great LULAC,” was set to the tune of a fraternity drinking song (“The Maine Stein Song”): “To our men organizing—in the heat, rain and cold, / To our men everywhere— who are working for members like men for gold, / To our men who organized and install new councils from day to day / To our great LULAC— getting bigger and better always” (3). In other poems in a similar vein the work ethic of the membership was matched only by the ceaseless diligence of the leadership. Verses were dedicated to the LULAC presidents general J. T. Canales, Ben Garza, M. C. Gonzales, Alonso S. Perales, and Mauro M. Machado. The last in this list received the following characteristic praise: “Mauro M. Machado leads all our Lulac men fine, / His organizing record matchless all the time” (“Fellowship,” 19). The title of a more serious poetic effort by Roberto Félix Salazar, “Address to My Brothers,” perfectly captured the homosocial ethos of the fraternal Mexican American subject. Salazar, perhaps the most accomplished writer published in the LULAC News during the 1930s, compared

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LULAC to a “stalwart tree” that “meets the swords of wind / With undivided strength.” An argument for communal solidarity through LULAC, the poem implored Mexican Americans across class and other differences to “stand like one / Before the storms of life” caused by racial discrimination. Written in free verse rather than the more common rhyming couplets favored by other LULAC News poets, the poem enacts the very unity through difference that Salazar sought. Just as the “limbs and roots / And leaves” make “one stalwart tree,” lines of different meter and rhyme come together as one poem with one purpose. The central metaphor of the poem itself is gender neutral, but the title clearly associates the strength of organizational unity with a male leadership characterized as “True strong and unafraid” (“Address,” 6). For Salazar, the sense of Mexican American leadership stemmed less from a democratic connection to ancient Greece or Aztec resistance to the Spanish conquest than from a patriarchal Spanish colonial lineage highlighted in Salazar’s best-known poem, “The Other Pioneers.” Occasionally reprinted in contemporary multicultural anthologies of U.S. literature, “The Other Pioneers” contrasted the highly mythologized settlement of Texas by Anglo-Texans with the older history of Spanish colonization most often marginalized or omitted by Anglo-Texan historians. Echoing other attempts by Mexican Americans to rewrite their community’s contributions as the vibrant, essential foundation of Texas history, Salazar celebrated the lives “of those of mine who rode these plains / Long years before the Saxon and the Irish came.” Exhibiting the heroic qualities typically attributed solely to Anglo settlers, the Spanish colonizers of Salazar’s poem conquered obstacles natural and human in the winning of Texas. Salazar portrayed his Texas-Mexican ancestors as deliberately moving “toward the hiss of Texas snake and Indian yell” to carve civilization out of the wilderness, pointedly refuting Walter Prescott Webb’s charge of Mexican cowardice leveled in The Texas Rangers (“Other Pioneers,” 32). To the charge that Spanish-Mexican colonization failed to develop either a meaningful civil society or economic infrastructure, Salazar lauded “those who plowed the land and built the towns,” erecting “thickwalled homes” and raising “churches to their God.” Their legacy was not merely material, Salazar maintained, but also richly cultural; aesthetic contributions included “the songs of ancient Spain” that the other pioneers creatively remade into “new songs to fit new needs.” Farming, ranching, Christianity, and Texas-Mexican culture were the lasting lega-

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cies of the tejanos that formed the very core of modern Texan identity, passed from father to son in an unbroken succession of patronymics into the present: “Salinas, de la Garza, Sánchez, García, / Uribe, González, Martínez, de León: / Such were the names of the fathers. / Salinas, de la Garza, Sánchez, García, / Uribe, González, Martínez, de León: / Such are the names of the sons.” Daughters exist within the poem solely as “wives who bore them sons” and mothers who “left their graces and their arts” to future generations. Their worth measured by their ability to bear Texas-Mexican patriarchs, tejanas exhibit pioneer spirit as secondary domestic manifestations of their manly kinsfolk’s stalwart “pride and manly strength” (“Other Pioneers,” 32). Unlike the sisterly recognition afforded by the fellow Lulacker María Elena Zamora O’Shea, who highlighted women’s participation in Spanish colonial history at least as much as men’s in El Mesquite, the fraternal bent of the poetic efforts of male Lulackers, from López’s Spartan and Aztec warrior imaginings to Salazar’s modernist homage to tejano ancestors, can be read as more than homosocial bonding within LULAC. Going beyond that, it asserted membership within the very nationalist civil society from which white supremacy acted to exclude Mexican American men. As feminist theorist Carole Pateman has shown, fraternity is the communal dimension of the otherwise atomistic, individualistic bent of democratic liberalism’s liberty and equality; this democratic triad, Pateman writes, “requires an impartial, impersonal set of rules promulgated by a collective body of men who stand to the law and each other as free equals, as a fraternity” (42). Within the public sphere, all men are rational brothers in abstracted equality before the law, a condition that male Lulackers imagined as possible by segregating most aspects of an ethnic Mexican cultural identity into the naturalized, prepolitical domestic sphere of familial tradition. Yet if the LULAC project of forming a rights-bearing Mexican American subject along distinctly masculinist lines gained its most vocal airing through the poetry of male Lulackers, then a young radical named Américo Paredes would examine the ideological limits of LULAC’s emphasis upon education as the way for Mexican Americans to liberate their community from racial domination. Even as the Centennial celebrations were occurring in Paredes’s hometown of Brownsville and across the state, Paredes began writing a Mexico-Texan novel, George Washington Gómez, that would critically examine what he considered to be the remaining options for Texas-Mexican resistance under conditions of border moder-

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nity. Eschewing LULAC’s optimism about the anticolonial viability of a Mexican American subject formed through the U.S. educational system, Paredes would turn a modernist eye to the exhausted cultural resources of the past and the inadequate possibilities of the present as expressed in the corrido hero and the modern antihero.

CHAPTER 4

A Mexico-Texan Interlude: Américo Paredes, Border Modernity, and the Demise of Patriarchal Anticolonialism

Had we been born back a hundred years My Saxon maid You would have been a pioneer and I A swarthy blade. I would have lived in a jacal You in a hut You would have called me ‘greaser dog’; I, ‘gringo slut.’ “ Texas Centennial,” Américo Paredes, April 19361

There is a modernist moment in Américo Paredes’s novel George Washington Gómez that almost escapes attention yet powerfully captures the vexed intersection of aesthetics, modernity, and patriarchal anticolonialism vital to his vision of Texas-Mexican culture during the 1930s. An epistemological vertigo overcomes the title character when his unwed sister Maruca’s pregnancy, resulting from an illicit liaison with an AngloTexan, precipitates a traumatic crisis that threatens to tear the Gómez family apart. Witnessing his mother beating his sister for compromising family honor, the teenaged Guálinto experiences this scene of domestic violence as a rupture with familiar reality that leaves “the world . . . all disjointed and fallen into parts”: “Everything looked unreal and somehow bigger than usual. The bird that hopped about on the mulberry bush by the side of the house looked like no other bird Guálinto had ever seen. Its feathers were sickly yellow, angry orange, dull black. Each color stood out, separate from the others as if it were part of a different object. Or as if it were a drawing made by a small child” (Gómez 225). Quotidian

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reality breaks down into cubist shards of color and shape for the shocked Guálinto; whereas “ordinarily, things blended into each other to form just one picture,” in this moment of familial crisis “everything stood out, by itself, and clashed visibly with its surroundings” (225). As a result of Maruca’s sexual transgression of traditional Texas-Mexican mores, the social operations of family and the aesthetic imperatives of perspective that had smoothed over minor differences between family members or within the representational field topple as one or both are revealed to be inextricably intertwined. Perspectival certainties melt away as readily as family harmony, resulting in what the narrative characterizes as a disturbing collage of disparate elements. The joint crisis of family and aesthetics threatens to undermine Guálinto’s very sense of self. Seeking to obliterate his battered subjectivity, he feels that “he must find someway to cease to exist until this was over” (224). For an instant, he does, as the uniform march of time itself fragments; for a stunned Guálinto, “the world had stopped” (225). This interstitial moment of existential crisis prefigures the novel’s more famously troubling gap in narrative time between parts 4 and 5, beyond which Guálinto’s Texas-Mexican anticolonialism becomes his assimilationist double George’s anti-Mexican racism. Linking the apocalyptic dissolution of masculine subjectivity with the female sexual transgression of Texas-Mexican patriarchal boundaries, George Washington Gómez suggests the uneasy relationship between a modernist aesthetics of disjuncture, Texas-Mexican subject making, and the patriarchal anticolonialism so central to Paredes’s vision of Texas-Mexican cultural survival. These major concerns of Paredes’s early fiction—narrative aesthetics, anticolonial subjectivity, and gendered nationalism—register modernity’s impact upon the generation of Texas Mexicans coming of age during the Texas Centennial era. In particular, George Washington Gómez highlights Paredes’s concern that the Texas-Mexican community, caught up in the whirlwind of border modernity, could no longer (re)produce the TexasMexican leaders necessary for the struggle against Anglo-Texan domination.2 Depicting the adult George W. Gómez as the agringado, or fully assimilated, antithesis of the corrido heroes who in the past had defended Texas-Mexican rights con su pistola en la mano, Paredes indicates that the days when men fought the invidious racialization and vicious exploitation of Texas Mexicans on behalf of the community were long past. Undermining the patriarchal heirarchy that had hitherto generated TexasMexican anticolonialism, border modernity now only made compromised subjects, intermediary functionaries in the modern management

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of conquest that Guálinto ultimately becomes as George. Foreshadowing and indeed precipitating Guálinto’s own betrayal of the Texas-Mexican community, Maruca’s abridgment of Texas-Mexican patriarchal authority signals for Paredes the erosion of the masculinist cultural resources that had once fostered resistant subjectivities and foreshadows the imminent demise of Texas-Mexican patriarchal anticolonialism within Guálinto himself. Paredes’s examination of emergent Mexican American subjectivities in George Washington Gómez and other works from the 1930s foregrounds the theoretical conundrum that is his legacy for Chicana/o studies. Five decades after the publication of “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero in 1958, Paredes continues to exert a powerful influence upon Chicana/o studies, not least of all because his works interrogate regimes of colonial knowledge making and outline the possibilities of anticolonial resistance. Like other leading anticolonial intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century such as Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, Paredes addressed the general problem facing colonized peoples: how to respond collectively to the political subordination, material exploitation, and epistemic violence of colonialism. A concomitant aspect of Paredes’s oeuvre is the consistent attention to anticolonial subject formation and the aesthetics of cultural production under the specific conditions of border modernity. Certainly his best-known effort in this regard is the iconic “With His Pistol in His Hand,” in which the turn-of-the-century El corrido de Gregorio Cortez serves as the paradigm of communal Texas-Mexican subject making. While not using the academic discourse of subjectivity as such, Paredes focused on how Texas Mexicans resisted U.S. colonialism through expressive practices such as the corrido and in turn how those practices shaped anticolonial tejano subjectivities.3 As important as the specific demonstration of how Texas Mexicans figuratively answered Anglo-Texan colonialism is the subtle methodology Paredes employed to this end. An anticipatory practitioner of what is now called cultural studies, Paredes shifted critical attention away from the great man and white supremacist accounts of Anglo-Texan historiography to the Texas-Mexican community and its folkloric renditions of cultural conflict. Creating a powerful paradigm of subaltern epistemology, Paredes gave nuanced readings of Texas-Mexican cultural productions as a coherent, sophisticated anticolonial counterdiscourse that challenged the colonizer’s production of colonial difference. While “With His Pistol in His Hand” remains his most influential study, Paredes’s entire scholarly corpus demonstrates the same supple thought applied to rendering the

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Mexican American experience visible within the U.S. academy. “With His Pistol in His Hand” stands as a testament not only to Paredes’s successful intervention in the academic fields of folklore and cultural studies, but also to the central importance of such interventions to the shaping of social movements. Often acknowledged as a primary text in the intellectual formation of the Chicano movement, “With His Pistol in His Hand” demonstrates that the seeds of the future may lie dormant but can yield something new and unexpected one day. Yet for all its enabling influence, significant aspects of Paredes’s methodology trouble contemporary Chicana/o studies, particularly those unmarked elisions of difference within the Texas-Mexican community itself. As the cultural critic José E. Limón has demonstrated for “With His Pistol in His Hand,” Paredes’s figuration of an organic Texas-Mexican pastoral society under siege from Anglo-Texan invaders is itself a narrative of “critical, modern tragedy” that conceals “internal” differences among Texas Mexicans as much as it advances anticolonial strategies (Dancing with the Devil, 78). In seeking what Limón terms “a unitary poetics of culture,” Paredes erases differences of class and geographical origin among Texas Mexicans during the heroic corrido era (1860–1930) and then highlights these differences during the postcorrido era (Dancing with the Devil 92). The effect is to assign blame for the modernist fracturing of TexasMexican culture to working-class fuereños (immigrant Mexicans from outside the immediate border region), whose outsider sensibilities cannot apprehend the depths of cultural conflict in the borderlands and whose susceptibility to mass (in contradistinction to folk) culture enables the ultimate triumph of Anglo-Texan domination. While Chicano cultural nationalism imagined the subsuming of class differences among Mexican Americans in the name of a working-class vernacular politics, the Chicano movement nonetheless shared Paredes’s masculinist vision of a patriarchal anticolonialism that reinforced invidiously assigned anticolonial agency according to gender hierarchy. Led by Chicana feminism, Chicana/o studies has long grappled with the knotty theoretical problem presented by Paredes’s patriarchal anticolonialism, in which his profound insights into the operations of colonial difference and his brilliant analysis of Texas-Mexican anticolonial practices remain inextricably entangled with his more problematic conceptions of gender. As a number of scholars have noted, hierarchical constructions of gender underwrite Paredes’s own analysis of Texas-Mexican anticolonialism in “With His Pistol in His Hand.” Paredes’s characterization of Texas-Mexican anticolonialism as an exclusively male struggle

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does more than occlude the differential violence directed against TexasMexican women.4 Within this patriarchal paradigm, the social agency of tejanas is limited to the domestic, heteronormative reproduction of the corrido warrior’s material conditions and social existence. As Chicana feminist scholars such as Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Norma Alarcón, and María Eugenia Cotera have noted in different contexts, exercising agency outside these parameters marks a Chicana not just as an outcast but, even worse, as a cultural traitor, a modern-day Malinche whose choices weaken anticolonial resistance and strengthen colonial domination. Thus even while questioning colonial difference, the masculinist corrido paradigm served to police patriarchal Texas-Mexican gender relations placed under duress by Anglo-Texan colonization. The gendered theoretical aporia of With His Pistol in His Hand has been charted by Limón, María Herrera-Sobek, Renato Rosaldo, José David Saldívar, and Ramón Saldívar, yet far less attention has been given to its significance within Paredes’s early literary work. Paredes the scholar is famous, but Paredes the creative writer is still relatively unknown. Only since the early 1990s have Paredes’s literary works been readily available, but decades prior to his emergence as the preeminent Mexican American scholar of the late twentieth century, Paredes first explored masculinist Mexican American subjectivity in poetry, drama, and fiction during the mid- and late-1930s. Spanning a number of literary genres, Paredes’s early efforts suggest that the question of aesthetics became a key question in his search to represent Texas-Mexican anticolonialism. As his later work on the corrido would emphasize, aesthetics, while not sufficient in and of itself, was nonetheless crucial for the social reproduction of anticolonial subjectivities. The variety of literary forms that Paredes engaged early in his life suggests a protracted examination of how the aesthetic and the political were articulated, encompassing a number of critical questions about how community, nation, and anticolonialism could be represented. The theoretical formulations of With His Pistol in His Hand bear the traces of Paredes’s examination of pocho subjectivity during the 1930s in such poems as “Alma Pocha,” in plays like Tres faces del pocho, and most of all in George Washington Gómez. These texts outline Paredes’s response to border modernity as it affected the possibilities of anticolonial resistance for the Texas-Mexican community. In Paredes’s early literary works, the construction of modernity and modern subject formation inform his methodological commitment to patriarchal anticolonialism, revealing why power differences of gender remain analytically invisible within his theoretical paradigm.

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“Alma Pocha”: Modernity’s Abjection The Texas Centennial of 1936 spurred Paredes to mold his thoughts about the subaltern condition of Texas Mexicans in ways that anticipated his later academic formulations. Despite all the Centennial commemorations occurring across the Lone Star State in 1936, this Texas-Mexican youth from south Texas found nothing to celebrate. For Anglo-Texans, the Centennial marked a century of Anglo-Saxon progress in democratic government, economic development, and moral improvement. In response to the numerous calls to glorify Texas in verse, the twenty-year-old Paredes wrote several poems certain not to win any of these contests. Paredes, then in his second year at Brownsville Junior College, took pen to paper to compose poems expressing his deep anger at the historical tragedy that the Centennial represented for Texas Mexicans. For Paredes, the Centennial was the victory march of Anglo-Texan empire builders over their prostrate Texas-Mexican victims, capping a century of injustice, violence, and despoliation. In squaring off with the Centennial, Paredes’s ideological agonist was not so much an individual or even Texas historiography, although he would critique the racist works of the University of Texas professors J. Frank Dobie and Walter Prescott Webb then and in decades to come. Rather, Paredes’s agonist was modernity itself, or the economic, political and social processes that had radically reconfigured everyday life for Texas Mexicans during the first decades of the twentieth century. Paredes’s response to the Texas Centennial interrogated the modernist ideology of progress at the root of the celebration, refiguring its celebratory narrative of increasing human freedom for all into a tragic narrative of intensifying immiseration and exploitation along racial lines. For Paredes, border modernity promised only destruction, not fulfillment, for colonized Texas Mexicans. Voicing this sense of tragedy, Paredes’s poem “Alma Pocha” (Soul of the Pocho) proved so controversial that La Prensa, the leading San Antonio-based Spanish-language newspaper in the Southwest, declined to print it, despite having previously published several of Paredes’s other poems in its weekly Lunes Literarios (Literary Mondays) literary section.5 Set in the fateful year of 1836, “Alma Pocha” outlines a dire prophecy as to what the Texas-Mexican community would experience over the next hundred years. A litany of future-tense misfortunes made one aspect of the future painfully clear. The Anglo occupation would be harsh, violently expropriating Texas-Mexican land, life, and dignity: “En tu propio terruño serás extranjero / por la ley del fusil y la ley

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del acero” [In your own land you will be exiled / by the law of the gun and the law of the sword] (Between, 35). Contrary to Centennial discourses that portrayed the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Texas as the establishment of U.S. civilization through the rule of law, “Alma Pocha” suggests that the only law in operation during the Texas century had been the piratical law of conquest. By portraying Anglo-Americans as bloodthirsty brigands out for the spoils of empire, the Spanish-language poem recentered the Texas-Mexican experience marginalized by triumphalist English-only Centennial narratives. Recovering that silenced history, “Alma Pocha” links the violence visited upon two generations of Texas-Mexican men to the historical sequence of material despoliation and racial terrorism experienced by the entire community: Y verás a tu padre morir balaceado por haber defendido el sudor derramado; verás a tu hermano colgado de un leño por el crimen mortal de haber sido trigueño. (Between, 35) [And you’ll see your father shot to death for having defended the fruit of his labor; you’ll see your brother hung from a limb for the mortal crime of having been brown.]

Tracing the racial logic of Anglo-Texan violence, the poem ties land dispossession in previous generations to lynching in the current one; the colonial seizure of material resources facilitated the creation of a Jim Crow racial order in which state and civil society coordinated legal stricture and extralegal violence. Tellingly, this violence is visited upon TexasMexican fathers and brothers, leaving the poem’s implied reader, the hapless Texas-Mexican witness to this history, faring no better for having survived the ongoing disaster: Y si vives, acaso, será sin orgullo, con recuerdos amargos de todo lo tuyo; tus campos, tus cielos, tus aves, tus flores serán el deleite de los invasores; para ellos su fruto dará la simiente, donde fueras el amo serás el sirviente. (Between, 35)

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[And if perchance you live, without pride it will be, with bitter memories of all that was yours; your lands, your skies, your birds, your flowers will be the delight of the invaders; for them your fruit will sprout, where once you were master a servant you will be.]

Reduced to a life as wage laborers who harvest the fields they once owned, Texas Mexicans dwelt in the historical negation of state-sponsored loss. The burden of Texas history was the communal memory of past autonomy that so strongly contrasted with the present-day experience of near-complete abjection. Even resistance seemed futile from this historical vantage; the emasculated “rebelde sin espada” [rebel without a sword] can only suffer and await redemption that might never arrive. An ironic response to the celebration of progress in Texas Centennial discourses, “Alma Pocha” highlights Paredes’s lifelong concern with the making of subaltern subjectivities, and particularly with how colonial trauma became a constitutive deformation of male Texas-Mexican subjectivity. With “Alma Pocha,” Paredes suggested that no more corridos or corrido heroes would be forthcoming to contest Texas Centennial discourses in the manner of days past. All that Texas-Mexican expressive culture could presently produce was the pocho, the abject Mexican American who uncomfortably inhabited the nexus of U.S. nationalist discourses of racialized citizenship and a fading Texas-Mexican discourse of anticolonial resistance. As “Alma Pocha” suggests, the historical emergence of the pocho marked the extent to which the institutions of a dominant Anglo civil society had restructured everyday Texas-Mexican life. In other words, the figure of the pocho indexed for Paredes the degree to which Texas Mexicans had lost communal autonomy in the long ideological war of position waged after 1848. The question of what, if any, anticolonial potential modern pocho subjectivity might harbor preoccupied Paredes during the Texas Centennial era. Racist Anglo discourses conflated the pocho with the mestizo, mapping the cultural hybridity of the pocho onto the biological existence of the mestizo. But in Paredes’s early works, the pocho appeared as tragic not because he was mestizo but because he was increasingly isolated from the heroic past of Texas-Mexican anticolonial resistance.6 Having felt the effects of border modernity in his everyday life, the pocho lived with the legacy of the corrido but could not respond in the same way to his changed conditions of existence. The pocho self-consciously realized that

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the corrido was a residual form, a memory of resistance rather than resistance itself. His tragedy was to witness the historical ruin of the anticolonial Texas-Mexican masculinity it represented, to see anticolonial actions as part of a heroic past of corrido forefathers inaccessible to the fallen present of failed patriarchs. What remained for Paredes was to explore the diminished possibilities that this new Texas-Mexican subjectivity might bring to the contested borderlands.

Tres faces del pocho: Modernity’s Longings Recognizing the increasing social diversity of Mexican Americans during the 1930s, Paredes examined various manifestations of pocho subjectivity in the farcical play Tres faces del pocho: Comedia en tres autos, Modelo T of 1936. If “Alma Pocha” repudiated the Texas Centennial’s white nationalist discourse of U.S. nationalism, Tres faces del pocho, in Paredes’s words, “satirize[d] Mexican nationalism and its failings” (R. Saldívar, Borderlands, 91). In tacit recognition of how U.S. and Mexican nationalist discourses marginalized Mexican Americans as anomalous border subjects, the title of the three-act work indicates the pocho’s interstitial status in its equivocal wordplay; the Spanish word “faces,” which can be translated as either “faces” or “phases,” highlights not only the pocho’s multiple, fragmented identities that do not quite add up to a whole nationalist self, but also the antinationalist stasis (i.e., problem) that the pocho represents for Mexico and the United States. Rolling subjectivities out on the theater stage as if on an industrial production line, Paredes highlights the construction of Mexican American subjectivity through disparate and discontinuous nationalist and transnationalist discourses and practices. Each of the three acts presents a different aspect of the pocho’s dilemma in negotiating his Mexican heritage and his U.S. citizenship as he encounters Mexico in various guises. The first two acts depict the difficulties of Mexican American subjectivity as stemming from a profound temporal or spatial disconnect between the Mexico of pocho imagination and the United States of pocho experience. As a result, Mexico becomes a floating signifier completely abstracted from Mexican American experience and therefore an illusion that can fulfill only if unreal and disappoint only if undone. The third act suggests not a synthesis to the previous two acts’ thesis and antithesis as much as a contingent borderland zone of deconstructed racial and national paradigms. The first act presents the Passionate Spaniard, a pocho on vacation in

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Mexico City. Seeking ties to a colonial heritage of heroic European ancestors, the Passionate Spaniard has traveled to discover what the conquerors of the Aztec empire, “raza gloriosa y real de mis abuelos” [glorious and regal race of my ancestors], had wrought in the Valley of Mexico (Between, 38). But his visit dissipates this fantasy of Spanish colonial achievement. Suffering from a severe case of turista, or traveler’s diarrhea, brought on by “a weekend of tacos, whores, and mariachis,” the Passionate Spaniard finds that his imagined Spanish heritage grants him no special privileges in contemporary Mexico (38). Hit up for several mordidas, or bribes of government officials, and losing his wallet to a pickpocket, he also finds his roots questioned by Mexicans who call him pocho, an appellation that identifies him more with Anglo tourists than with the descendent of conquistadores he claims to be (38). Rejecting the reality of a poor, indigenous nation, the Passionate Spaniard distances himself from what he perceives to be the degradation by association by adopting a racist contempt for all things Mexican. Despite the best efforts of the Spaniards to civilize indigenous Mexico, the Passionate Spaniard maintains, only the culturally and racially inferior mestizo Mexico survives, “pueblo bastardo que parió Malinche” [bastard race to which Malinche gave birth] (39). Echoing racist discourses of the United States that represented Mexico as poor, filthy, violent, and degenerate, the Passionate Spaniard would reaffirm his subject position as a privileged citizen of a more civilized, developed nation. But this stance leaves unexamined his triangulation within colonial histories and national narratives. The Passionate Spaniard cannot trace the origins of his cultural and racial identification as putative Spaniard to, in the first place, the colonial domination of Europeans over indigenous peoples and then to that of the United States over Mexico. In other words, his identification with Spanish colonial culture (in contradistinction to contemporary Mexican culture) only confirms his own subordinated status in the United States and in no way protects him from the racial discrimination he experiences in the country of his formal citizenship. In a burst of scatological humor, Paredes suggests that the audience should regard what spews forth from the Passionate Spaniard’s mouth with at least as much disgust as what emerges from the other end. The second act is set far from Mexico in the midwestern city of Chicago. Here, the Second-Generation Exilado celebrates a Mexico known only through movies, records, and radio. Son of a former Mexican consul forced to seek refuge in the United States, the Exilado romanticizes the México lindo (beautiful Mexico) of a romantic past and idyllic present, forging such an idealized identification with his father’s homeland that he

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imagines a south-facing window admits a “slight breeze . . . directly from Mexico” (40).7 The Exilado’s weepy soliloquy is an extended homage to “a country he has never visited”: México, eres tú la tierra santa, la tierra prometida, hacia la cual he vuelto yo los ojos desde mis primeros dias, donde las flores tienen más perfume, donde las aguas son más cristalinas, y donde son más grandes los racimos que cuelgan en las viñas. (Between, 40–41) [Mexico, you are the holy land, the promised land, to which I have turned my eyes since my first days, where the flowers smell better, where the waters are clearer, and where bunches of grapes that hang from the vines are bigger.]

In casting Mexico as unspoiled tropical paradise, the Exilado reverses the U.S. immigrant narrative in that the immigrant has not reached the land of milk and honey but rather has left it for a reduced existence in exile. Most often cultivated by conservative Mexican elites fleeing the Mexican Revolution, the nationalist concept of México de afuera (Mexico in exile) served as a conservative discourse that preserved the “true” Mexico from the popular social and economic reforms of the Revolution. To a large degree, these exiles excoriated what they believed to be agringado Mexican Americans and ignored that community’s struggle in the United States in favor of their continued involvement in Mexican politics. But Mexico can remain “la tierra santa” only at a distance for the Second-Generation Exilado; its tropicalized physical and spiritual virtues grow in proportion to the distance to the U.S.-Mexican border, beyond actual pocho experience. Like the conquistador fantasy heritage of the Passionate Spaniard, the Exilado’s romantic nostalgia indexes his deep embeddedness in U.S. mass culture and equally profound embodiment of Mexican American identity. “La zandunga” played on a phonograph strokes the Exilado’s romantic nationalism, but the jazzy “St. Louis Blues” that closes the scene represents his immediate lived reality in the United States. He conceptually inhabits the South of the United States, not Mexico. Indeed, México lindo is ultimately not his supreme desire, but only something to take his mind off “the Gringa date” who had earlier declined his attempt “to make her in the back seat of a friend’s car” (40). The third act interrogates the nationalist discourses that frame the previous two. Haunting a working-class cantina on the border, el Poeta Pocho rejects the racist response of the Passionate Spaniard and the nos-

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talgic delusions of the Second-Generation Exilado; he knows both nations well enough not to mistake either U.S. racism or Mexican exilic nostalgia for an appropriate rendition of his lived experience as a Texas Mexican. While the cultural identities of the other two characters are formed in large measure through the mass cultural mediations of tourism and the recording industry, el Poeta Pocho grounds his experience in the material reality of cultural conflict in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. Unlike the previous two characters, el Poeta Pocho narrates a communal history of open struggle against economic and cultural domination. Laying claim to the tradition of the corrido singers, el Poeta Pocho invokes the legendary figures of border resistance as his muses: Yo le canto a Pizaña, yo le canto a Cortina, a Jacinto Treviño y a Gregorio Cortez, los viriles campeones de una raza transida que aunque triste y caída no se deja vencer. (Between, 44) [I sing to Pizaña, I sing to Cortina, to Jacinto Treviño and to Gregorio Cortez, the virile champions of a stricken race that although sad and fallen is not yet defeated.]

To honor these men in 1936, rather than the Texas Centennial heroes Stephen F. Austin, William B. Travis, James Bowie, and Davy Crockett, was to state that the ideological war between Anglo-Texans and Texas Mexicans was far from over. But unlike the folkloric corrido singers, el Poeta Pocho relates a general statement of lament and defiance, not specific instances of Texas-Mexican resistance as recounted by the corridos. El Poeta Pocho’s efforts are thus in danger of degenerating into a selfreferential celebration of his ability to ventriloquize communal outrage rather than representing any ability to shore up collective resistance. According to the stage directions, his statement that “éstos son los hidalgos a los que canto yo / these are the heroes to whom I sing” is met by an “echo backstage [that] repeats mockingly ‘¡Yo! ¡Yo! ¡Yo! ¡Yo! / Me! Me! Me! Me!’” (44). Rather than leave this crisis of subjectivity solely within el Poeta Pocho’s interiority, Paredes deconstructs, in a Brechtian maneuver, the hermetic realm of conventional theater practice that separates performers and audience. El Poeta Pocho’s reaffirmation of his Texas-Mexican identity leads him to acknowledge the hitherto unaddressed audience as subjects of communal interpellation as well. Looking straight out at the audience as per the stage directions, he defiantly asks, “¿Y quién eres tú?” [And

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just who are you?] (45). Given that the play has foregrounded precisely this issue of subjectivity, el Poeta Pocho challenges the audience to examine its own interpellation vis-à-vis nationalist discourses and to choose a corresponding ideological stance. With Tres faces del pocho, Paredes suggests that the fourth wall of theater, like the boundaries of nationalist discourses, must be breached in order to supersede the solipsistic selfaggrandizement of the individual artist. Only by doing so can el Poeta Pocho potentially restore the communal Texas-Mexican anticolonialism of the past. The question of Texas-Mexican masculinity is never far off as the play limns the parameters of Paredes’s vision. El Poeta Pocho’s taunt, “¡Oye, cabrón! ¿Y qué chingados me ves?” [Hey, asshole, what the fuck are you looking at?], flung as a parting shot at the audience, emerges from a strictly masculinist line of performative bravado (45). That this challenge is launched from the males-only space of the cantina emphasizes how Mexican American women play no role either onstage or in the struggle; even the implied agonist in the audience (“cabrón”) is specifically gendered as male. As would-be heir to the corrido tradition, el Poeta Pocho desires to confront Anglo-Texan domination in the language of Texas-Mexican patriarchal anticolonialism. Hence only the problems of Texas-Mexican male subjectivity vis-à-vis colonial domination are anxiously rehearsed; el Poeta Pocho represents the emasculated Texas-Mexican patriarch, a partial presence at the borders of Mexican and U.S. nationalist discourses always in danger of disappearing.

George Washington Gómez: Modernity’s Lament If Tres faces del pocho hints at the difficulties of generating new male anticolonial subjects, then Paredes’s most elaborated response to the Texas Centennial, George Washington Gómez, reflects his growing concern that the patriarchal anticolonialism of the corrido era might no longer be viable in the face of border modernity. Worse yet was Paredes’s suspicion that new pocho subjectivities, increasingly distanced from the patriarchal traditions of an organic Texas-Mexican border culture, would willingly embrace the very colonial knowledges and practices that had been previously resisted by the corrido heroes. Ultimately, the novel highlights Paredes’s growing skepticism about the possibilities of a resistant Mexican American subjectivity during the 1930s. It also suggests that his commitment to the paradigm of patriarchal anticolonialism foreclosed the possi-

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bility that Texas-Mexican women could forge a new cultural space from which to launch a new antipatriarchal, anticolonial politics. In a satiric obituary titled “Don Guálinto Gómez de la Garza y Sosa, Carbajal, Chinchilla y Bordoña: His Works,” Paredes recounted the brief and unhappy career of his literary alter ego as it ended on March 22, 1936. “Born—full-fledged like Minerva—in 1922,” the departed belletrist left behind a series of unpublished literary works composed between April and November 1934, including the love poem “Song of Chemistry” and the one-act farcical plays “Loory Love” and “A Painter’s Passion, or All’s Well That Never Begins.”8 However, Guálinto Gómez had returned from the grave before. In November 1934, Paredes had announced the demise of Guálinto in the poem “In Memoriam,” but that pronouncement proved premature as “G.G.” revived to produce an untitled love poem sometime in early 1935. In May of the same year, “The Ghost of Guálinto Gómez” contributed the poem “To the May Queen (Who was elected by the opposition).” This state of limbo that characterized Guálinto’s ghostly afterlife corresponded to the interstitial cultural status he had in life as a “typical Mexico-Texan.” Like the hapless subject of Paredes’s satiric poem “The Mexico-Texan” (1935) Guálinto remained caught in the geopolitical transition between the two banks of the Rio Grande, striving “to be two things” but ultimately “neither.”9 Paredes maintained that the tragicomedic “Don Guálinto is dead and gone where all good rancheros go,” but he held out the possibility that “someday he may come again to life in a novel” (“His Works,” 1). Paredes did resurrect Guálinto as the protagonist of George Washington Gómez: A Mexicotexan Novel. Given that the Texas Centennial foregrounded the need for an appropriate TexasMexican response, it scarcely seems coincidental that Paredes started writing the novel in 1936 as an exploration of what type of response was still possible. Not unlike Don Guálinto, the novel led a ghostly existence for over fifty years in manuscript form. Although apparently completed in 1940, the novel remained unpublished until 1990.10 If Paredes’s paradigmatic pocho subject had only a partial existence in poetry and performance, then the novel appeared to be the appropriate venue for the full expression of his borderline subjectivity given the changed conditions of border modernity. The narrative of George Washington Gómez traces the life of the title character from his birth near the fictional border town of Jonesville-onthe-Grande until his return as a secretive real estate attorney just before the U.S. entry into the Second World War. The protagonist’s early life is marred by the indiscriminate attacks on the Texas-Mexican com-

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munity of the Rio Grande Delta along the southernmost Texas-Mexico border during the armed uprising of los sediciosos in 1915. After Texas Rangers summarily execute his father, Gumersindo, for being Mexican in the Borderlands War zone, Guálinto is reared by his mother, María, and by his maternal uncle Feliciano in Jonesville-on-the-Grande.11 Bound by Gumersindo’s dying wish that Guálinto never seek revenge, Feliciano conceals the truth about his own active involvement with los sediciosos as well as Gumersindo’s murder. Striving to ensure that Guálinto receive the best education possible in the town’s racially stratified school system, Feliciano and María try their best to realize Gumersindo’s dream for his son. Experiencing the indignities of Texas history in the classroom and Jim Crow segregation outside it, Guálinto nearly chooses to end his formal education upon graduating from high school. Disgusted with what he perceives to have been Feliciano’s cowardly act of fleeing to Monterrey, Mexico, at the height of the Borderlands War, Guálinto not only rejects his uncle’s money to pay for college but also his uncle’s dream of TexasMexican advancement through higher education. Only the timely revelation of Feliciano’s hitherto secret involvement with los sediciosos prompts Guálinto to further his education at the University of Texas. Forsaking the Indian-sounding Guálinto for George, the newly minted attorney returns after nine years away at college and law school, but not as a leader of his people in their struggle for civil rights. Instead, the renamed George G. Gómez ridicules the nascent political organization that his childhood friends have formed to challenge the local racial order, derides “Mexican Greaser attitudes,” and plans never to return to south Texas with his white wife and their children (Gómez 300). He has, in fact, become the hated Anglo-Texan enemy, down to the government-issue disdain he displays for all things Texas-Mexican. Becoming a lieutenant in the U.S. military operating as an undercover intelligence agent, he spies on Texas Mexicans in search of seditious activity. As this narrative summary suggests, George Washington Gómez deals with the complexities of postcolonial subject formation in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands during the 1930s. If the corrido heroes of the previous generation had contested racial domination openly by force of arms, George and his ilk of the subsequent generation form a thin stratum of postcolonial functionaries dedicated to policing the discursive, geopolitical, and racial boundaries of the nation-state. The novel assumes the specific form of the bildungsroman, tracing the institutional impact of border modernity upon Texas-Mexican subjectivity. Mikhail Bakhtin considered the bildungsroman the emblem-

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atic narrative intersection of subjectivity and modernity. For Bakhtin, the most highly developed type of modernist bildungsroman exemplified the fashioning of literary aesthetics through the national-historical temporality of modernity. This temporality, characterized by what Bakhtin called the fullness of time, manifested itself in the bildungsroman as the emergence not only of the protagonist’s subjectivity into the world, but also of the world itself through that same protagonist. The world is no longer a static, unchanging environment against which the protagonist must struggle or from which the protagonist must learn. Rather, the bildungsroman depicts the fashioning of both individual subjectivities and imagined communities into a new, world-historical configuration. For Bakhtin, the protagonist of the bildungsroman inhabits an interstitial temporality between the past and the future: “He is no longer within an epoch, but on the border between two epochs, at the transition point from one to the other. This transition is accomplished in him and through him. He is forced to become a new, unprecedented type of human being. . . . It is as though the very foundations of the world are changing, and man must change along with them” (23–24). While acknowledging two examples of the bildungsroman from classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, Bakhtin draws the vast majority of his examples from the early modern period onward, indicating that the transition that most concerns him is modernity. For Bakhtin, the bildungsroman serves as both the harbinger of modernity and its register; it simultaneously figures and enacts the process of becoming modern. In this sense, George Washington Gómez traces the intertwined emergence of border modernity and modern pocho subjectivities, and the character George Washington Gómez figures the transition between the patriarchal anticolonialism of the near past and the postcolonial condition of the immediate future. The new conditions of the 1930s generated the postcorrido subject as Texas-Mexican civil society was reorganized according to the new social relations of wage labor and customary racial discrimination. For the first time, institutions of U.S. civil society disrupted the quotidian existence of Texas Mexicans in transformative ways. A key change in the processes of Texas-Mexican subject formation was the installation of U.S. institutions of civil society, particularly the educational system. As part of the first generation of Texas Mexicans to attend public schools in large numbers, the title character and his cohort experience what their parents never had: the full institutional implementation of a U.S. nationalist pedagogy.12 Ultimately, that implementation targets only the handful who manage to survive a public school system designed to winnow out

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Texas Mexicans. Out of an initial seventy-five Texas-Mexican students who start “low” first grade with Guálinto, perhaps fifteen advance to the fully integrated third grade; only four (including Guálinto) eventually graduate from high school. That the local school system does not formally segregate Texas-Mexican and Anglo-Texan schoolchildren in no way hinders its primary effect of generating a poorly educated, barely literate Texas-Mexican population. In addition to experiencing economic pressures to exit school early to help out impoverished families, TexasMexican students learn that only lessons in humiliation from abusive, illtrained teachers like Miss Cornelia are to be had in school. Given this “process of not-quite-so-natural selection,” Paredes establishes that the public school system functioned as an integral part of what the historian David Montejano has called “the web of labor controls,” or the formal and informal methods used by Anglo-Texans to regulate the (upward) mobility of Texas-Mexican labor (Gómez, 117; Montejano, 197).13 The full implementation of a nationalist pedagogy awaits those TexasMexican students who are either wealthy enough or determined enough to persevere. Throughout his “dear old Gringo school days,” the scholarly minded Guálinto finds his formal education (preparación) increasingly at odds with his familial and community upbringing (educación) (107).14 Given the white supremacist construction of U.S. citizenship that placed people of color beyond its pale, Guálinto’s formal education fosters an ambivalent subjectivity that ultimately subscribes neither to an antagonistic understanding of Anglo-Mexican relations (as does his uncle Feliciano) nor to the cheery melting pot management of classroom pluralism. The result of such an education is a split postcolonial subjectivity, or what Paredes termed the “checkerboard of consciousness” wherein the Texas Mexican is figured as both Mexican and American and yet neither (R. Saldívar, Borderlands, 136). Guálinto consciously represents himself as a Texas Mexican who speaks Spanish, despises gringo injustice to his people, and contests the racist knowledge propagated through the educational system. His alter ego, George W., reads and writes English, admires U.S. material progress, and aspires to become a full-fledged citizen “without the shameful encumbrance of his Mexican race” (148). Throughout his formal education, Guálinto dimly realizes the double bind that organizes his social existence, a condition arguably identifiable as an inchoate and preconscious form of double consciousness. Cognizant of his rights as a citizen yet denied them as a matter of course, the young protagonist vacillates between U.S. nationalist pride and Texas-Mexican anticolonial sentiment, reflecting “the eternal conflict between the two clashing forces

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within him” (147). According to the literary scholar Ramón Saldívar, Guálinto exists as “the doubly crossed subject-effect of both American ideological and Mexican folkloric systems” who incompletely experiences social agency as “the in-betweenness of the borderlands of culture” (Borderlands, 165). Given the importance Paredes assigns to the aesthetic aspects of subject formation, the novel not surprisingly suggests that literary aesthetics most sensitively register the pernicious effects of a colonial education upon Guálinto’s subjectivity. Instead of reassuring himself of his agency as an author of original texts, Guálinto’s inability to distinguish his poetic compositions—particularly his self-described masterpiece “To María Elena”—from those of schoolroom precept provokes an identity crisis: “Hadn’t he heard the lines somewhere? In his mind he went over the list of poets in his text for senior English. No, not Longfellow, not Poe, not Whitman. He was almost sure the lines were his” (207). To paraphrase the postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha, almost right becomes never white; as the colonial mimic of a racialized originality to which he aspires yet which he can never achieve, Guálinto only confirms his derivative positioning in respect to the U.S. literary canon. Casting Guálinto as the supplementary colonial mimic, the narrative self-reflexively indexes the postcolonial subject’s (and the author’s) belated relationship to the very idea of culture itself as construed by the colonial educational system. Rather than contest racial domination, the pocho’s cultural productions demonstrate its ongoing success; influenced by the educational institutions of the colonial state, Texas Mexicans had lost the ability to articulate the anticolonial resistance previously voiced by the corrido. This analysis begs a self-reflexive question of, and for, the novel. How does the novel form—and thus George Washington Gómez itself—figure in the treacherous cultural terrain of a modernizing south Texas? What aesthetic possibilities for communal anticolonial responses lay therein? Given that the subject of the novel is the making of the middle-class postcolonial subject, the answer appears to be, none at all. In contrast to the corrido, the novel form no longer subsumed class difference in articulating anticolonial resistance, but assumed class antagonism among Texas Mexicans. Itself a product of border modernity, the novel both reflected the new class reality of Texas Mexicans and formed new postcolonial subjects whose defining aspect was rupture from, rather than symbolic continuity with, the Texas-Mexican anticolonial past. Radical discontinuity characterizes this postcolonial condition within which Texas-Mexican subjects found themselves divided from the anticolonial

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practices of the past and only tentatively connected to communal strategies of the present. The most dramatic instance of this modernist aesthetics of critical discontinuity is the narrative gap that separates part 5 from the rest of the novel, a gap that formally differentiates George from Guálinto. Readers often find themselves puzzled by this nine-year gap in narrative time, distinguishable from earlier jumps in temporality by its seemingly abrupt transformation of the protagonist’s subjectivity. Prior to part 5, the gap in subjectivity and narrative is depicted as developing but not quite at the ideological crisis that requires complete separation of the two identities. The gap in both subjectivity and narrative remains unrealized because the process of postcolonial subject formation is constantly contested and therefore ideologically inchoate. The unnarrated experiences that open that gap, both in subjectivity and narrative, is Guálinto’s encounter with the nation-state’s institutions of higher education: college, law school, and the military.15 Guálinto’s transformation into George traces out the logical conclusion of a white supremacist education in which every instructor is K. Hank Harvey, the University of Texas professor of folklore and guest speaker at Guálinto’s high school graduation, a figure whose world-renowned status as an expert on Texas Mexicans derives from the racist knowledge he generates.16 Given that the first four parts of the novel detailed the everyday resistance of the young Guálinto to the worst aspects of a racially stratified educational system and the Jim Crow order it reproduces, how can the older George come to accept the white supremacist attribution of TexasMexican political disenfranchisement and endemic poverty as proof of racial inferiority? Adopting its sociological guise rather than Harvey’s folkloric approach, George embraces an ethnographic epistemology that reifies colonial power differences as the pathological folkways of the colonized other. Even Texas-Mexican jokes are reduced to social pathology, as George humorlessly concludes that barbershop banter about weather changes caused by filling too many automobile tires with air demonstrated “they were all a bunch of dum-dums” (297). Romancing those very racialized knowledges as literally embodied by his white wife, who is trained in sociology, George comes to view the Texas-Mexican community as ignorant, childish, and ineffectual in the realpolitik world of racial domination, even if, as his ex–Texas Ranger father-in-law, Frank Dell, reminds him, his own position within whiteness remains precarious. Dell indicates how, from the very beginning, George’s relatives’ attempt to ensure his future as a “great man among the Gringos” by giving him a lofty name

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had already been circumscribed within a white supremacist discourse of racial heirarchy: “‘You look white but you’re a goddam Meskin. And what does your mother do but give you a nigger name. George Washington Go-Maize’” (14, 284).17 As the literary critic B. V. Olguín observes, “The pocho makes deliberate attempts to claim inclusion in the polis, but these ironically mark his exclusion in part because of a lingering accent, cultural mistranslations and transformations, as well as other signifiers of difference” (90). Ultimately, the subversion that a legally renamed George G. Gómez combats is not that of the LULAC-style organization headed by the political firebrand Elodia, which is already committed to the legal path of electoral politics in challenging white supremacy. Rather, he polices the menace he himself represents to U.S. nationalism as the apparently assimilated native intellectual who parlays his identification with white supremacy into the ability to move from racialized outlaw to almost-white in-law. Yet despite his conscious rejection of Texas-Mexican cultural identity, he finds his dreams remain populated by the anticolonial aspirations of los sediciosos. His nights are haunted by “the silly imaginings of his youth” about leading Texas Mexicans to victory over both Santa Anna and Sam Houston, ensuring that “Texas and the Southwest will remain forever Mexican” (281–282). Texas-Mexican anticolonialism is not destroyed but repressed in George’s ultrapatriotic consciousness; the political becomes the personal as tejano resistance constitutes George’s very seditious political unconscious, which is identified with the name Guálinto, as the dreams have their roots in childhood daydreams. If in the present George sees no future for Texas Mexicans, then Guálinto must wage his war for the future in the past. Rewriting history itself not merely as the defeat of the Anglo-Texans at the Battle of San Jacinto but as the worldhistorical reversal of Manifest Destiny, George’s unbidden dreams hint at what R. Saldívar has identified as the repressed ideological content of seemingly private fantasy: “The fantasy structures of the unconscious always return, bringing with them a historical memory that has the practical function of designating an alternative, even if deeply latent and tenuous, content to the formed subject of history” (Borderlands, 175).18 To imagine an alternative past enables the imagining of an alternative future beyond the nationalist and folkloric discourses of either Mexico or the United States. While subaltern fantasy may indeed resist the ideological closure of colonial discourses by restoring seemingly banished social possibilities, George Washington Goméz’s specific figuration of the alternative suggests

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that George’s political unconscious can find communal self-determination and unitary Texas-Mexican subjectivity only in the precolonial past that has slipped away. As depicted in the novel, the fall into coloniality is a oneway journey that excludes the possibility of redemption except by undoing colonial histories. In other words, if history forms subjectivities, then only by changing history can the subject-forming effects of colonialism be erased; once formed by colonialism, subaltern subjectivities can only wish for what amounts to self-annihilation in the desire to efface, and not merely end, the colonial condition. Hence, George’s utopian dreams of the total erasure of Anglo-Texan colonialism and its effects on the TexasMexican community are simultaneously the suicidal desire to destroy his divided postcolonial self, obliterating his pocho existence from history as well. Perhaps this realization accounts for George’s “feeling of emptiness, of futility . . . with the way things ended” (282). The “something missing” is the possibility that would acknowledge the impact of colonial domination while simultaneously generating an anticolonial strategy for the future, in essence imagining a postcolonial Texas-Mexican community. The imaginative gap between colonized consciousness and anticolonial political unconscious marks the inability of the atomized postcolonial subject to articulate a collective vision of such utopian possibilities. Equating this failure to articulate resistant subjectivities with the representational failure of narrative itself, the novel’s aesthetic doubling of border modernity’s gap—both as symptom and figure—generates a critical knowledge of its postcolonial situation. Highlighting its social construction, the novel indicates that it too was constituted by border modernity, unable to foster the communal anticolonialism of the corrido in the present moment. But precisely its difficult diagnosis points to its potentiality as negative dialectic, as a critical counterdiscourse that instructs by its formal failures. While incapable of performing the communal anticolonial cultural work of the corrido, the modernist novel at least offered the possibility of deconstructing the subjective dangers of border modernity for Texas-Mexican communities. Positing no simple imaginary resolutions to the complex, painful postcolonial condition that bedeviled Paredes’s generation of Texas-Mexican intellectuals, George Washington Gómez formally recuperates the loss of corrido anticolonialism through the narrative gap that figuratively doubles the rupture between the anticolonial resistance of the past and the present’s postcolonial evacuation of those possibilities. Unable to imagine an alternative to the present of Anglo-Texan domination or to find refuge in the past of heroic resistance, the novel wearily inhabits the present moment of the “not yet.”

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Conjunto Strains and Modernist Tragedia The novel represented only one of the major Texas-Mexican expressive forms to emerge during the 1930s. If the novel form failed to realize a middle-class Texas-Mexican anticolonialism after the manner of the corrido in Paredes’s estimation, then might an emergent working-class form articulate the communal anticolonial aspirations of the Texas-Mexicans? Had the organic anticolonial subjectivities originating the corrido, and in turn sustained by it, been recast in working-class form? Paredes’s pessimism in this regard is perhaps most apparent in Guálinto’s encounter with the working-class version of the pocho: the pachuco. Late in the narrative, Guálinto finds himself goaded into a knife fight with the cocky Chucho Vásquez at a quinceañera dance in a working-class barrio of Jonesville. Earlier that day, Chucho had taunted Guálinto about his sister Maruca’s pregnancy: “‘I sure wish I had a car like Buddy Goodnam’s. It has the most wonderful cushions in the world. The girls just cry for them. Oh, boy! Ugh!’”(240). Wandering the barrio streets that evening, Guálinto finds and attacks Chucho in an attempt to regain symbolic patriarchal control over the family honor that the pachuco has besmirched. By this point, the social world of the corrido has collapsed; with his switchblade in his hand, Chucho fights not the rinches but only the middle-class Guálinto in an antiheroic parody of the corrido. Getting cut, Chucho loses the fight he picks, further affirming his status as a boastful but inept bravo. Yet Guálinto is no corrido hero either, as the conflict no longer pits imperialist Anglos against resistant tejanos, but rather Texas Mexicans against each other across class lines. Aesthetic violence precipitates physical violence as the fight gets underway the very moment “the accordion began another polka with a sudden, ear-piercing shriek” (243).19 The grating musical accompaniment to this farcical scene is conjunto. Conjunto and the novel constituted the two major Texas-Mexican expressive forms that characterized the aesthetic horizons of border modernity for Paredes. Even as the novel became the corrido’s successor in narrative for middle-class Texas Mexicans, conjunto became the corrido’s successor in music for the tejano working class. As the ethnomusicologist Manuel Peña has shown, conjunto developed in tandem with la pachucada and the phonograph record.20 But if Peña stresses the centrality of conjunto performance for coalescing a vernacular, working-class Texas-Mexican cultural politics from the 1930s through the 1960s, Paredes suggests that conjunto’s failure to construct anticolonial Texas-Mexican subjectivities lay in its origin as a class-mediated expres-

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sive practice whose disorderly aesthetics stemmed from the conditions of border modernity. While Paredes explicitly criticizes the quietism of the so-called Spanish upper and middle classes, the emergent Texas-Mexican working class did not generate clear strategies of communal identity and contestation either. Nowhere was the gap between anticolonial resistance and postcolonial cooptation more suggestively apparent than in conjunto’s aesthetics of disorder: “Suddenly the accordionist picked up his instrument and began to play. The guitar player started after him, but the accordionist was already half through one chorus before the guitarist could get into position. The music was a fast, shrieking polka, played so fast that the tune was barely recognizable” (242). In contrast to the modernist novel’s negative dialectics of rupture, in which literary aesthetics display the distortions of modernity to further a critical knowledge, conjunto performance obliterates all traces of formal musical order and very nearly the aesthetic category of music itself. Whereas for Paredes the social coherence and orderly decorum of the corrido was manifested formally in the unity of two male guitarreros playing the same simple melody and singing the same stirring story of anticolonial struggle, the temporal disjuncture between the accordion and guitar in conjunto music mirrored the disorderly conduct of working-class Texas-Mexican life. Effacing the very possibility of aesthetic value, conjunto seemed incapable of poetics at all, much less a poetics of cultural resistance. Having only the leisure setting of the cantina and associated disreputable bailes de negocios (paidfor dances), conjunto ultimately represented for Paredes the workingclass’s subordination to border modernity’s new racial order.21 Far from fostering an oppositional solidarity among the Texas-Mexican population, conjunto could not even generate a sense of working-class identity as a class in itself. The product of deterritorialized subjects whose only resources were the thin offerings of mass culture, conjunto seemed only to reaffirm Texas Mexicans as a disorganized, unskilled labor force unable to mount significant communal resistance to Anglo-Texan domination.22 Yet Paredes represents the disorder and incoherence of the working class figured in this scene by conjunto not so much as the immediate product of class division itself as of the apparent disintegration of TexasMexican patriarchal authority. The changes in social relations brought about by border modernity were not limited to those of class and race but centrally to those of gender as well. Lacking patriarchal respect for elders and patriarchal discipline between the sexes, the working-class culture out of which conjunto emerged offered no vision of communal cultural resistance, but only leisure-oriented entertainment that fostered unfocused

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male violence and unregulated female sexuality. Conjunto’s disorderly sonic assault on the senses made this music suitable for dancing as well as fighting, bringing together men and women in sexually charged environments unthinkable in the regulated patriarchal world of the corrido. The intimate sexualized contact of dancing merges with displays of male bravado and violence as the fight becomes a homosocial type of dancing that validates the event: “Every one was laughing at a man who had just said that now the baile was a success, because no baile was a success without at least one cutting” (245). Even more problematic than internecine violence is the frank sexuality of the “very dark but very pretty” fifteenyear-old Mercedes, who sends “an almost uncontrollable surge of desire” through Guálinto (246). Casting working-class tejana sexual agency as unbridled sexual license outside patriarchal regulation, Paredes suggests that traditional Texas-Mexican patriarchal authority has broken down in the face of border modernity. Mercedes’s father has even lost the pretense of control over his daughter’s sexuality, commenting to Guálinto, “It won’t be long before she gets married. If she don’t start living with some man” (242). This breakdown in patriarchal authority is precisely what bars Guálinto from imagining a real identification with the conjunto working class. Despite a liquor-induced moment of warmth for “his people, the real people he belonged with” during the aftermath of the fight, Guálinto refuses all exhortations to dance, just as he later rejects the very possibility of cross-class Texas-Mexican solidarity (246). The resignation of the failed working-class patriarch to his daughter’s open sexual expressivity—summed up as “these girls of today”—contrasts sharply with the rage and shame of Guálinto, María, and Feliciano at Maruca’s premarital pregnancy (242). Traditional patriarchal structures of feeling precipitate Feliciano’s attempts to restore familial honor by arranging for Maruca to marry her Anglo-Texan lover, Buddy Goodnam, but subsequent events only underscore the inability of the Texas-Mexican patriarch to do just that. This arrangement falters when Martin Goodnam, Buddy’s father and an influential civic leader, brokers his son’s marriage to the alsopregnant María Elena Osuna, a wealthy, light-skinned “Spanish” woman he deems more acceptable to the racial mores of Anglo-Texan Jonesville. The aftermath leaves Feliciano furious yet impotent. Even if the familial traditions of Texas-Mexican patriarch persisted into the Texas Centennial era, the changed conditions of border modernity prevent its full masculinist expression. Looking every inch the corrido hero with “his hat on

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his head, a revolver and a bottle,” Feliciano is nonetheless forced to forgo violent action to redeem family honor with his pistol in his hand, instead becoming “as pathetic as a drunken old man can look” (237). Insofar as the demise of Texas-Mexican patriarchy is depicted as part of the general ruin of border modernity, the novel explicitly links Maruca’s unpropitious pregnancy to new social and economic possibilities for tejanas who increasingly challenged traditional gender roles and domestic norms of Texas-Mexican patriarchy. With Texas-Mexican women entering the wage-labor workplace, public schools, and other institutions of U.S. civil society, gender relations within the Texas-Mexican community changed drastically. Maruca’s crime is to have not fulfilled her role in the Texas-Mexican patriarchal narrative, which dictated that daughters should “grow up and marry like all girls did” (49). Maruca’s actions disrupt this narrative in such a way as to identify her as one giving aid and comfort to the enemy, “a common soldier-woman” as Guálinto labels her (221). In the eyes of her mother, Maruca becomes a “puta,” or whore, a characterization Feliciano had earlier identified with Anglo-Texan women (223). “Show me . . . one of their women who is not a harlot,” he says in an anti-Anglo tirade (16). His comment links the apparent absence of any patriarchal regulation of Anglo female sexuality with the moral illegitimacy of Anglo-Texan colonial rule. Maruca’s sexual transgression places her in the same category, with the added stigma of being a collaborator with the enemy and therefore an outcast to her family and community. For Paredes, Maruca’s protests that her relationship with Buddy is different belie the fraught history of sexual contact between Anglo men and Mexican women in the borderlands (221). By imagining herself outside that history, Maruca occupies a sexually immoral female subjectivity tied to modern opportunities for social mobility through educational, workplace, and leisure activities and a corresponding physical mobility outside the home. As a result of Maruca’s disrepute, her sister Carmen can no longer work downtown because their mother María believes that she “had the instinct of whores” like her sister and “should not be walking the streets every Saturday evening” (227). In María’s traditionalist view, walking unescorted to and from work becomes seeking business as a public streetwalker who transgresses the patriarchal regulation of female sexuality. Only after proving that she has no virtue to save can Maruca obtain a job downtown as an elevator operator; these circumstances lead to her marriage to an Anglo widower and her subsequent removal from the Texas-Mexican borderlands to California, that land of the wicked.

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María’s role as the female counterpart to Feliciano’s Texas-Mexican patriarch is outlined in Paredes’s notes about George Washington Gómez, in which he characterizes her as a “passive, productive . . . native who hat[es] conflict, hat[es] progress and want[s] old way of life” (“Main Themes,” 2–3). Paredes’s representation of María as the standard bearer of traditional Texas-Mexican culture reflects the role assigned to women within anticolonial nationalisms. As the postcolonial theorist Anne McClintock characterizes anticolonial nationalism’s gendered division of symbolic labor, “Women are represented as the atavistic and authentic body of national tradition (inert, backward-looking, and natural), embodying nationalism’s conservative principle of modernity. Men, by contrast, represent the progressive agent of national modernity (forward-thrusting, potent, and historic), embodying nationalism’s progressive, or revolutionary, principle of discontinuity” (92). Common to both imperialist and anticolonial nationalisms is the naturalized relegation of women to the prepolitical domestic sphere, outside the public sphere of national subjectivity. Thus located outside the nation’s modernity, women are assigned the role of linking the nation’s past and its future as reproducers of national citizens and transmitters of national culture, or tradition. In other words, women under nationalism are authorized to speak and act only as mediators of national concerns, not as individualized national agents; women’s utterances and acts outside the parameters of nationalism betray the nation in the refusal to subsume female existence to national imperatives. Given nationalism’s strong linkage of biological and cultural reproduction, the ultimate betrayal of the nation is committed when a woman bears the child of an enemy, in effect using her body to symbolically erase the nation from the horizon of homogenous, empty time.23 In George Washington Gómez, family is ultimately not the idealized figuration of community, as it was for Chicano nationalism, but the gendered limit of Texas-Mexican anticolonialism. In Paredes’s account of border modernity, anticolonial struggle fails because tejanas undermine TexasMexican patriarchy through their sexual transgressions. Repeating La Malinche’s betrayal of indigenous Mexico in Paredes’s imaginary, Maruca’s is the original betrayal of Texas-Mexican patriarchy and the prefiguration of Guálinto’s own betrayal of the political interests of the Texas-Mexican community. The loss of Texas-Mexican patriarchal regulation of female sexuality results in the loss of Texas-Mexican culture altogether, as demonstrated by Maruca’s fate. Sexually intimate with the enemy, Maruca has light-skinned children, rarely returns to Jonesville, and refuses any part

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of Feliciano’s patrimony, just as the Anglophilic George G. Gómez does eventually. In this sense, Guálinto’s transformation into George by the end of the narrative repeats Maruca’s betrayal, although the specific gender dynamics are somewhat different. Whereas women mediate between past and future from the confines of the domestic sphere, men embody and therefore enact the nation’s authority in the present-day public sphere. In other words, they speak and act as national leaders. Feliciano and María assert without question that Guálinto’s destiny is to become “the leader of his people” (49). National patriarchs do figure in the biological reproduction and cultural indoctrination of future citizens, but these are secondary aspects of their role within nationalism. Guálinto’s marriage to an Anglo-Texan woman is a sexualized act symptomatic of his betrayal but not constitutive of it, as it is in Maruca’s case. Rather, Guálinto’s true betrayal is his conscious and explicit disavowal of his embodiment of TexasMexican nationhood. Refusing his assigned role as nationalist patriarch, George G. evacuates the possibility of Texas-Mexican existence in the here and now. For Paredes, the abjuration of the new generation of TexasMexican patriarchs becomes border modernity’s greatest threat to the Texas-Mexican community and thus the grounds for his tragic modernist vision. This aspect of Paredes’s conception of border modernity becomes clearer in light of his interpretation of the corrido as a Texas-Mexican anticolonial practice. The historically late introduction of fully elaborated wage-labor relations to the Texas borderlands led Paredes to characterize the immediate prehistory of border modernity as the Anglo-Texan’s repressive deployment of the law, particularly the Texas Rangers, as a tool of colonial domination. Hence during the corrido century, border conflict would be represented as the conflict between men in the colonial public sphere and expressively manifested as the Texas-Mexican man’s heroic fight for his manhood con su pistola en la mano. Imagining the colonial public sphere as the arena of Texas-Mexican male anticolonial agency meant ensuring that the corresponding domestic sphere remained intact. For Paredes, only the patriarchal regulation of female sexuality ensured the social coherence needed for communal anticolonial struggle. Border modernity had destroyed the cultural and material conditions of TexasMexican culture that had made the corrido possible, namely, to quote Paredes, “cultural homogeneity, isolation, and a patriarchal, traditional way of life” (Pistol, 241). Paredes reverses the direction of time’s arrow in evaluating modernity; in other words, only the precolonial past, in sharp

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contrast with the postcolonial present, offered Texas Mexicans a rough social equality, an informal frontier democracy, and the pastoral freedom of subsistence ranching. Traditional binary terms of gender remain operative within Paredes’s anticolonial imaginary insofar as the “authentic” anticolonialism of the corrido stems solely from the precolonial social world that generated it. In this sense, the absence of gender in Paredes’s analysis of the corrido is not merely historical coincidence, as Paredes asserts in 1953 in his master’s thesis: “These are men’s songs, about the deeds of men” in which women did “not play any part” (Ballads, xxxvi). Rather, gendered power differentials within the Texas-Mexican community form the structuring absence that allowed the corrido to function as a coherent anticolonial discourse, the organic tejano expression of a patriarchal anticolonialism. Insofar as Paredes held that only a pastoral patriarchal order could form the cultural basis for a communal anticolonial response, the social coherence fostered by the corrido depended upon the strategic erasure of “internal” differences—i.e., gender and class—in the name of anticolonial solidarity. Paredes’s public sphere interpretation of the corrido’s anticolonial value rests upon the removal of tejanas from the anticolonial struggle altogether, a fiction sustained by the corrido itself. Needless to say, this process is repeated by the absence of gender analysis and by the dismissal of working-class resistance in both George Washington Gómez and With His Pistol in His Hand.

Toward a Postcolonial Feminist Subjectivity At least during the late 1930s, Paredes would very much appear to be an apocalyptic modernist. Monolithic in its total obliteration of older strategies of anticolonial struggle and in its cooptation of new potential forms of resistance, border modernity forestalled any possibilities of anticolonial agency or subjectivity; only divided, problematic pocho subjectivity remained, imprisoned within the interstices of nationalist discourses and fettered in its ability to articulate opposition. At best, only a negative knowledge could be generated from the emergent Texas-Mexican novel. But even as Paredes mourned the passing of an organic Texas-Mexican patriarchal anticolonialism with George Washington Gómez, the contours of a postcolonial, feminist anticolonialism can be discerned at the margins of this text. The dialogical nature of the novel allows possibilities excluded by other genres, such as the scholarly monograph, poetry, or

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even drama. In this sense, George Washington Gómez surreptitiously admits alternatives to Paredes’s main narrative of the tragic dissolution of TexasMexican patriarchal anticolonialism. Introduced without a patronymic, the character of Elodia figures what Paredes cannot fathom as a postcolonial alternative to outright capitulation, either politically or culturally. To the George G. Gómezes of the world, strong tejanas such as Elodia pose the greatest challenge to border security. Her commitment to challenging white supremacy flows from her modern positioning as a new kind of tejana, an educated businesswoman. The only Texas-Mexican woman to graduate from high school in Guálinto’s cohort, Elodia finds counterhegemonic possibilities not imagined by Texas-Mexican patriarchal anticolonialism. Countering the Anglo-Texan fantasy of “Texas without Texas Mexicans” propagated by the whites-only restaurant “La Casa Mexicana,” Elodia and her husband, Antonio, establish “La casita mexicana” as a counterrepresentational enterprise and safe haven for political organizing. Even the division of labor at the restaurant hints at the new gender politics of anticolonial resistance created by feminist tejanas. Antonio, the guitarrero who remembers the old corridos, may entertain the customers, but Elodia runs the business. That corridos are played solely as entertainment may be Paredes’s way of indicating just how far the corrido has fallen from its heroic heights, but this characterization also indicates the masculinist limits of Paredes’s politics in his dismissal of Elodia’s emergence as a political actor. Her leadership of the local Texas-Mexican political action committee leads George to pronounce her “crazy enough” to be dangerous, precisely because only the outspoken Elodia names his true mission as an Angloidentified functionary with the epithet “vendido sanavabiche” [son-ofa-bitch sellout] (300, 294). As the literary critic Louis Mendoza writes of Elodia, “Through her active pursuit of change in political and social relations we are reminded of that which Paredes does not name but we know to be nonetheless true: that in this era there were many women who were organizing and speaking on behalf of other women and for all the residents of Greater Mexico” (167). Although marginalized, Elodia’s appearance as a Texas-Mexican civil rights leader in the novel mirrors the historical emergence into prominent leadership roles of tejanas such as Alice Dickerson Montemayor of LULAC and the radical labor organizer Emma Tenayuca. Speaking truth to power, as these feminist foremothers did, Elodia figures the repressed utopian possibilities for anticolonial resistance by Texas-Mexican women not otherwise acknowledged by the narrative.24 In this sense, an antipatriarchal postcolonial feminism is the

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political unconscious bedeviling not only Paredes’s works, but also patriarchal anticolonialisms of all kinds. Ultimately, the historical tragedy of Paredes’s work is precisely his inability to imagine an anticolonial paradigm that would address questions of social justice within the Texas-Mexican community as well as those raised between that community and Anglo-Texans. The question can be neither one of uncritical celebration nor one of outright rejection of Paredes’s theorizations from some transcendent or ahistorical notion of absolute resistance. Rather, the challenge for Chicana/o studies is to understand critically the enabling aspects and the invidious drawbacks of Paredes’s thought for the theoretical needs of the field in the present moment. The modernist aesthetics of discontinuity in George Washington Gómez adds an important element to Paredes’s legacy for Chicana/o studies in this regard. Rather than understand George Washington Gómez as Paredes’s general statement about “the postcolonial condition,” I believe it far more instructive to consider the novel as his commentary upon that condition at a moment when it seemed to him that no political or cultural movements were capable of disrupting new processes of colonial difference that had claimed the very subjectivities of Texas Mexicans themselves. If With His Pistol in His Hand unabashedly celebrates the communal heroics of TexasMexican patriarchal anticolonialism, then George Washington Gómez and Paredes’s other early works reveal that the complexities of Texas-Mexican postcoloniality as border modernity transformed the Texas-Mexican community itself in the capitalist reconfiguration of racial, gender, and class dynamics. Residing at a historical locus of negation during the Texas Centennial decade, George Washington Gómez demonstrates the theoretical limits of Paredes’s vision as well as the historical necessity of imagining anticolonialism in registers other than patriarchal nationalism.

CHAPTER 5

Mujeres Fronterizas: Writing Tejana Agency into the Texas Centennial Era

Ironically, the Mexican caballero gave stern codes of honor to his women— waiting but the chance to dishonor them. . . . Honor! It was a fetishism. It was a weapon in the hand of the master, to keep his woman enslaved, and his fingers had twisted upon it so tightly he could not let go. Jovita González and Margaret Eimer, Caballero

In the issue of the LULAC News for March 1939 an article titled “Doña Paula Losoya, Great Pioneer of Del Rio” introduced readers to yet another Texas-Mexican historical figure overlooked by Anglo-centric Centennial discourses. Since its first year of publication in 1931, the LULAC News, in an effort to educate Lulackers about Mexican Americans’ contributions to Texan democracy, had been publishing biographical sketches of Texas Mexicans who had played critical roles in Texas history. The article about Losoya marked a significant first. Whereas male Texas-Mexican leaders of the Texas Revolution, including José Antonio Navarro, Erasmo Seguín, Juan Nepomuceno Seguín, and Francisco Ruiz, had been profiled, never before had a tejana, much less one with no connection to the military or political events surrounding Texas independence, been accorded that honor. The inclusion of Losoya as a noteworthy historical figure signaled LULAC’s acknowledgment of the growing leadership role of Texas-Mexican women in the ethnic Mexican community. One tejana, Alice Dickerson Montemayor of Laredo, had been elected second national vice president general in 1937, the third-highest office in the organization; the following year, she was appointed associate editor of the LULAC News.1 Other women ran Ladies LULAC Councils and Junior LULAC Councils, often initiating innovative programs designed to spread LULAC’s message throughout the ethnic Mexican community.

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It seemed that slowly but surely Mexican American women were claiming agency within LULAC as well as a prominent place in the pages of the LULAC News. But the irony of the article about Doña Paula Losoya was that, even in celebrating the historical contributions of a strong woman leader, the important contribution of a contemporary tejana in the nascent field of Mexican American literature was itself being obscured by the article’s byline. Although “E. E. Mireles” was credited with profiling the great pioneer of Del Rio, the real writer of the biographical sketch was actually Eduardo Edmundo’s wife, Jovita González.2 At a moment when TexasMexican women appeared to have broken into the male-dominated leadership of LULAC, González’s many accomplishments—including a master’s degree in history from the University of Texas, a two-year stint as president of the Texas Folklore Society in the early 1930s, a Rockefeller fellowship in the mid-1930s, and history articles in the LULAC News published seven years earlier under her family name—had not prevented her husband’s patronymic from asserting itself in the public eye.3 Given that the couple was desperate to raise Edmundo’s profile among Lulackers across the state in hopes of networking for a much-needed job outside Del Rio, González may have voluntarily allowed her husband to take credit for the article.4 Yet even this best-case scenario of self-sacrificing consent was made within the structural constraints of patriarchal gender conventions. The male privilege of access to better employment opportunities as well as traditional ethnic Mexican gender roles within marriage erased the authorial and critical presence of one of Chicana feminism’s most prescient forerunners from the institutional memory of the foremost Mexican American civil rights group of the period.5 Like its obscured author’s life, the circumstances surrounding Doña Paula Losoya highlighted the dilemma of Mexican American women as social agents within LULAC during the Centennial era. From the moment of LULAC’s founding in 1929, Texas-Mexican women had participated in realizing the organization’s goals of combating the customary racial discrimination that prevented U.S. citizens of Mexican descent from acting in a socially meaningful fashion in an imperfectly democratic nation. The participation of women in LULAC had been largely informal during the first four years of the organization’s existence. Although the league’s original constitution extended membership to “American citizens of Latin extraction,” women were not among the official founding membership, although tejanas undoubtedly attended some functions at the founding meetings. While extraordinary women theoretically could have

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honorary membership conferred upon them, for the most part, women were limited to helping organize social events as the wives of members or through ad hoc ladies’ auxiliaries. The authorization of Ladies LULAC Councils in 1933 reflected a recognition of the valuable, if otherwise unrecognized, work being accomplished by women, and perhaps the recognition of an opportunity to place domestically oriented issues, particularly the elementary school education of children, in the hands of those allegedly most well-suited for the task. Given the constraints of a gender-segregated environment, Ladies LULAC Councils were conceived not merely as socially oriented auxiliaries to the men’s councils but as parallel entities focused upon aspects of LULAC’s activism that most affected the domestic concerns of lowermiddle-class and middle-class Mexican American women. For example, Ladies LULAC supported the work of Spanish-Speaking Parent-Teacher Associations set up by LULAC to influence educational policy.6 And yet, even as the political utility of women for advancing LULAC’s project was acknowledged by the organization’s male leadership, the separate but equal approach to women’s participation only underlined the highly gendered nature of their conception of the new Mexican American subject. Early in LULAC’s existence, women members observed that the organization’s democratic promises did not extend to gender relations between Mexican American men and women in their daily interactions. As I suggested in chapter 3, the approach taken by male Lulackers to combat Anglo-Texan racism presupposed the relegation of Mexican American women to the reproduction of children and tradition. Only then, secure in the knowledge that ethnic Mexican consciousness would forever be preserved in the private sphere of familial tradition, could Mexican American men take their rightful place within the fraternal public sphere of government and civil society.7 In the process of disarticulating the question of the civil rights of citizenship from the question of the citizen’s race, men in LULAC simultaneously worked to ensure that gender relations within the organization and the ethnic Mexican community remained untouched by their efforts to modernize and democratize U.S. nationalism. Citizens in public and patriarchs at home, male Lulackers set forth conditions of Mexican American agency that emphatically excluded Mexican American women from its social imaginary. As seen in chapter 3, LULAC’s male leadership articulated their idealized masculine Mexican American subject through poetry as well as editorials and articles in the LULAC News, making the organization’s goal of civil rights an aesthetic as well as political project. Giving expression

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to their opinions about the proper role of women, male Lulackers forgot their commitment to the education of Mexican Americans when it came to tejanas. In a LULAC News article titled “How to Educate Our Girls,” J. Reynolds Flores recommended careful male guidance in teaching “our girls how to be successful wives” who made the family home “the most beautiful spot on earth” (6). Once married to male Lulackers, these women would advance the cause through proper domestic management in their role as LULAC wives; their best traits, according to Flores, would be “unselfishness, perseverance, patience . . . cheerfulness . . . and above all, tact” (J. Flores 6). Formal education was apparently superfluous for Flores, who never mentioned schooling outside the home as a priority for Mexican American advancement. For men in LULAC, the corollary of an education for marriage was an unquestioned dedication to motherhood. James Tafolla Sr. maintained that the Mexican American mother excelled at cultivating domestic bliss and patriotic children because “she is truly devoted to her home” and “shuns most social functions.” This behavior of social abstinence countered the modern tendency of mothers, “especially those in high social circles,” to separate themselves from their children’s upbringing to “attend to all social functions,” thereby leaving such crucial upbringing to “servants” assumed to be unfit for such patriotic duty.8 Invoking a tradition of republican motherhood that stressed maternal responsibility for the bearing and rearing of future (male) citizens, Tafolla added, “Such mothers are the admiration of our land, and the very foundation of our Government” (“Motherhood,” 11). Being the “very foundation of our Government,” however, meant that Mexican American women were thoroughly excluded from the exercise of power and agency. In imagining a bilingual, bicultural Mexican American subject who could successfully embody U.S. citizenship while remaining culturally Mexican, male Lulackers revised U.S. liberalism’s conceptual split of public and domestic in formulating the conditions of their agency. In the public life of government, business, and civil society, the male Mexican American citizen could call upon his familiarity with U.S. political procedures, Anglo-American social customs, and the English language to successfully overcome customary racial discrimination. Among friends and family in the domestic sphere, he could retain the Spanish language and ethnic Mexican traditions so close to his heart and sense of cultural heritage. Reflecting the traditional division of gender roles common throughout Greater Mexico, Mexican American women were commonly cast in the poetry of male Lulackers in the role of helpmates rather than of agents of

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social change in their own right. In the poem “A Las Latino-Americanas” the “Poet Laureate of LULAC,” Margil López, placed Mexicanas firmly upon a pedestal of domesticity so high that he, the earthbound bard, had to make his poetic composition a bridge (“Hacer con mi lira un puente”) to reach their lofty perch of domestic divinity in the heavens (38). Dedicated to “Aquellas que con su talento, su influencia o por amor al bien se consagraron en gran parte al bienestar de mi raza” [those women who, with their talent, influence, or love consecrate themselves for the greater good to the welfare of my people], the poem lauded the selfsacrificing Texas-Mexican women who tended to the domestic sphere of hearth and children. In introductory remarks to the poem, López identified racial pride as the most important characteristic of “Latinas que heróicas son” [Latinas so heroic]; only then could these women, “completamente satisfechas de su propio origen racial” [completely satisfied with their racial roots], teach racial pride to their children as transmitters of ethnic Mexican culture. Firmly tethered to “la mansión celestial” [the celestial mansion] even as they “marchan con la frente erguida llevando consigo como un trofeo la bandera LULAC” [march with heads held high holding before them the LULAC banner as a trophy], Mexicanas were imagined by López as the symbolic representation of the organization even as they were largely—although not entirely—marginalized from meaningful political agency within it (38).9 While most male Lulackers advocated the shoring up of traditional ethnic Mexican gender roles against the social changes of border modernity, some captured the dilemma faced by modern Mexican American women living in a deeply gender-conservative community. J. C. Machuca’s short story “Love and Duty,” published in the LULAC News for December 1936, highlighted the emotional conflicts created by adherence to ethnic Mexican patriarchal traditions in the age of modern romance. The protagonist Consuelo Del Monte Hart, the well-educated daughter of a wealthy nuevomexicano rancher, finds herself torn between filial duty to her aging father and romantic love for her Anglo suitor, the upstanding young doctor Donald Lapoint. The story narrates Consuelo’s ensuing dilemma of choosing between the two men, a choice that has her either abandoning her father and her family tradition or losing her true love to his career in “cutaneous diseases” (Machuca 24). Consuelo’s father, Colonel Juan Del Monte Hart, whose name (“heart of the mountain”) suggests his obdurate inflexibility, “was a God-fearing, hard-swearing, pioneer type of a man, who had inherited from his Spanish ancestors strong likes and dislikes in addition to that jealous love they

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bore to their children.” Cast in opposition to the “modern science” with which the doctor is closely aligned, the colonel’s aversion is congruent with the traditional hierarchy represented by his military background and his centuries-long family genealogy. The colonel’s likes and dislikes have become calcified as a rigid tradition that allows for no change in the familial order. Objecting to Dr. Lapoint as a suitable husband for his daughter, the colonel declares, “None of my ancestors have been doctors, and by God, I am not going to break my family tradition by allowing my only child to marry one” (24). Although the colonel’s protest is rendered as a class-based objection to his daughter marrying someone who works for a living (even as a professional) as opposed to someone of his rank of the landed gentry, the racial subtext of the story implies that the colonel’s objection is to the doctor’s Anglo-American parentage. Dr. Lapoint, on the other hand, is depicted as a modern lover who accepts nuevomexicanos as social equals. To prove his love, he has waited three years for Consuelo’s response to his marriage proposal. Accomplished, worldly, and, above all, patient, the physician finds his union with Consuelo blocked by the colonel’s “strong aversion to doctors” (24). In the meantime, he has traveled the globe, “drawing world-wide attention by his discovery of a specific for leprosy” (24). Whatever the demands of father and lover, the ultimate decision is Consuelo’s, whose “deep respect and love . . . for her father was the only thing that prevented her from becoming Mrs. Lapoint” (25). Even her three-year deferral of the doctor’s marriage proposal has not produced a solution that satisfies the conflicting requirements of familial piety and the yearnings of romantic love, “that something that comes from no source and vanished to its origin” (25). Until the question of her sexual agency had been foregrounded, Consuelo had been able to negotiate between the two imperatives by the strategy of deferral: “She had been educated in the school of modern thought, but she respected and was tolerant of her father’s peculiar ideas and fancies.” Ironically, the colonel’s attempt to fashion his daughter into the domestic ideal of “those essential qualities of refinement which add so much grace to feminine beauty and virtue” set into motion the romance that would make her into a modern desiring subject. He sends Consuelo to “an exclusive eastern college,” where she meets Lapoint. Falling in love, she finds herself so engrossed by the doctor that the very thought of him creates a desiring interiority stretching beyond the “secluded ranch home in the mountains of northern New Mexico” into “the remotest realms of space” (24).

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The dilemma of modernity for Mexican American women goes unresolved in the story, as it ends not with a resolution but with the moment a sobbing Consuelo perceives that she must immediately choose either love or duty: “She knew that tonight she had to make her final decision” (26). Realizing she must now exercise her agency within the difference between the two, Consuelo must choose between being the proper female object of Mexican American patriarchal tradition and the modern desiring female subject of Anglo-American courtship and educational narratives. As presented in the story, the choices are absolute. No middle ground exists to reconcile the competing claims and demands of lover and father. Constituted in the interstices between Mexican American patriarchal tradition and modern U.S. mores, Mexican American women experience modernity not simply as a celebratory liberation from the oppressive claims of the past or as the staunch defense of cherished traditions from the corrosive influence of the present, but as a wrenching impasse created by the absence of other social options. With Consuelo’s decision forever in abeyance, “Love and Duty” suspends the realization of a Mexican American female subjectivity that could exercise fundamental, if difficult, choices over the conditions of her existence.

Imagining the Modern Mexican American Woman The insistence of male Lulackers upon a patriarchal LULAC subject left women Lulackers struggling to gain recognition as agents of social change in their own right during the Centennial era. In their bid to extend the logic of democratic equality and rights within the public sphere to the supposedly prepolitical, naturalized areas of domestic life, women Lulackers published essays, short fiction, and poetry in the LULAC News in an ongoing discursive struggle with their male counterparts over the gendered nature of the emergent Mexican American subject. Largely deprived of authoritative positions within LULAC from which to address issues of gender inequality, tejana authors such as Jovita González and Alice Dickerson Montemayor nevertheless advocated not just for the modernization of the Mexican American community in terms of its relation to the U.S. state and civil society, but also for a modernization of the gender relations within the ethnic Mexican community. Whereas male Lulackers strove to exempt gender roles from the democratizing influence of their civil rights rhetoric, these authors consistently and creatively sought to transform traditional ethnic Mexican gender roles in

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accordance with that rhetoric to create an alternative bicultural Mexican American subject committed to antiracist activism but also critical of the rigidly normative gendered underpinnings of patriarchal nationalism. Ultimately, the early Mexican American feminist impulse to extend democratization beyond the racial categories privileged by male Lulackers touched upon organizational leadership issues but in addition centered upon the ethnic Mexican familial tradition of patriarchal dominance. Using the rhetoric of democratic equality invoked by their male counterparts for the sole purpose of destroying racial discrimination, women Lulackers created a literary record that injected gender equity as a priority in regard not only to public policy issues, but also to domestic relationships of marriage and family. Refusing the racial nationalism of Anglo-Texans, the dictates of ethnic Mexican tradition, and the civil rights revisionism of male Lulackers, Mexican American women writers formulated critical analyses that anticipated the theoretical methodologies of contemporary Chicana feminism in key respects while bound by the limits of liberal feminism of the 1930s. Like Chicana feminists, these women Lulackers struggled for the recognition of power differentials of gender within their social movement; similarly, they rejected the monological imperatives of race, class, and nation advanced by their male counterparts while formulating a multiperspectival, relational analysis that prefigured Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the “new mestiza” and Chela Sandoval’s concept of “differential consciousness.” But perhaps most crucially, early LULAC feminists, like their later Chicana counterparts, focused upon the gendered construction of the ethnic Mexican family as the point of departure for their critiques. While male Lulackers saw the organization’s campaign for Mexican American civil rights as the restoration of full agency for male citizens within the public sphere, women Lulackers asked why the push for democratization should stop at the divide between public and private, thus calling the foundation of the ideological separation of the spheres into question. As the feminist theorist Carole Pateman has noted, the expansion of citizenship rights to women in the modern era raised “an acute problem about the patriarchal structure of private life” that exposed “the contradiction between civil equality and social, especially familial, subjection” (129). In this instance, the contradiction was particularly acute for women Lulackers precisely because LULAC’s call for political and social equality between men so emphatically excluded political and social equality between men and women. Women Lulackers used the pages of the LULAC News to highlight

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this contradiction in the league’s project through political essays and creative writing. Montemayor, an active member of Laredo Ladies LULAC Council 15, consistently raised the question of gender equality in her editorials and short stories.10 In 1937, she published a lengthy article, “Women’s Opportunity in Lulac,” that brought the simmering conflict over the leadership role of women in the organization to a boil. Keenly analyzing the masculinist ideology of democratic citizenship widely promulgated throughout LULAC, Montemayor linked the lack of female leadership within the organization to male Lulackers’ fetishization of ancient Greece’s all-male democracy. Countering the exaltation of the warrior-hero in poems and essays by her male colleagues, Montemayor argued that Greek women had “no place in the activities of her country” other than the “keeping of the homes and the bearing of more male children to build a larger Grecian empire.” Shut out of “the affairs of her own country,” women were not only marginalized from the democratic process but made to forget their potential for leadership “just like in Lulac now” (28). Yet the accomplishments of modern women demonstrated to Montemayor the great capacity of women to assume leadership positions in law, politics, science, and the arts. Citing the accomplishments of the novelist George Eliot, the temperance firebrand Carrie Nation, the scientist Marie Curie, the aviator Amelia Earhart, the actors Helen Hayes and Irene Dunne, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Montemayor called upon women Lulackers to make their way “into the functioning of all phases of world activity as solidly as the men who have held the spotlight for a good many centuries” (28). By invoking high-profile public figures as paradigms of modern womanhood, Montemayor waved a scarlet cape before the LULAC bulls. Many male ethnic Mexican men, including Lulackers, considered modern Anglo women to be selfishly materialistic, sexually promiscuous, stubbornly insubordinate, and inadequately maternal. Montemayor’s examples were less about creating cross-racial female solidarity than about fostering a strategic alliance with other Mexican American women while promoting LULAC’s goal of “the betterment of our body of Latin American citizens” despite the strictures of customary racial segregation (30). Urging Mexican American women to take their rightful place within LULAC’s leadership, Montemayor articulated the argument for a modernized female subjectivity that showed how the old-fashioned idea that a woman’s place was in the home had “passed out of the picture with hoop skirts and bustles” and other articles of female confinement from a bygone era (28).

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Montemayor’s feminist manifesto set off a storm of controversy that eventually drove her from LULAC in 1940, but not before she had the opportunity to respond to male criticism of her ideas in a LULAC News editorial titled “Son Muy Hombres (?)” [They’re Some Machos, Aren’t They?] (March 1938). Montemayor’s call for democratizing gender relations within LULAC had led unnamed male Lulackers to charge that Ladies LULAC had “been a source of trouble, friction, and discontent” (“Muy Hombres,” 11). This supposed unrest, claimed disgruntled male Lulackers, led them to agitate for “suppressing the Ladies Councils of our League or at least to relegate them to the category of auxiliaries” (11). Questioning the manhood of those who believed their virility stemmed from the traditional ethnic Mexican subordination of women, Montemayor maintained that the reactionary motive behind the attacks was male fear of losing control of LULAC and its political agenda: The real cause of the apprehension among those who favor the move, is the aggressive attitude which some of our women members have adopted and shown in the conduct of our League’s affairs. The contributing causes for this state of mind among our MUY HOMBRES (?) is the fear that our women will take a leading part in the evolution of our League; that our women might make a name for themselves in their activities; that our MUY HOMBRES (?) might be shouldered from their position as arbiters of our League; and the fact that some of our wouldbe leaders and members can not get over that Latin way of thinking that in civic affairs and administrative fields men are superior to women (12).

Labeling “those who hate to be under a woman” as “cowardly and unfair, ignorant and narrow minded,” Montemayor characterized the attacks as originating from the same antidemocratic impulse behind the white supremacist denial of Mexican American civil rights (13). She countered this assertion of traditional Texas-Mexican patriarchal privilege with the “equal rights, the equal protection of our laws and the equal opportunities and privileges” granted to both sexes in the LULAC and U.S. constitutions (13). Montemayor would explore the democratization of Mexican American gender roles in her short story “Stolen Paradise,” published in the LULAC News some six months after her fiery editorial. “Stolen Paradise” had its origins in an anonymous typescript titled “An Ideal LULAC Family” that was sent to the LULAC News and reviewed by Montemayor for possible publication. Her proofreading marginalia reveal that she found the ideal-

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ized portrait of middle-class Mexican American family life riddled with the grammatical and spelling errors of a writer “in a hurry” but also “very original” in concept. Rather than reject the submission outright, Montemayor reworked the static sketch of domestic life with its unquestioned gender roles into a tragic narrative of thwarted domestic bliss that suggested how tradition and racial discrimination foiled the realization of the depicted ideal. Thus rewritten by Montemayor, “Stolen Paradise” extended her critique of power relations between Mexican American men and women through its depiction of a utopian Mexican American family as a specifically modern, rather than traditional, institution. When published in September 1938 in the LULAC News, “Stolen Paradise” was attributed to the fancifully named Royamet Nomecila, Alice Montemayor’s name spelled backwards. Perhaps a coded reference to the reversed process of creation wherein Montemayor first stood as editor, rather than author, of the story, the inverted attribution also served as an early indication of the airy refiguration of everyday life so central to the narrative. In the short story, a Mexican American woman daydreams about a perfect family life with her boss, a man inaccessible to her by virtue of class and the suggestion of other obstacles, such as a great age difference, marital status, or race.11 Their meeting as workplace professionals precludes any possibility of creating a domestic life together: “Destiny had mapped out an entirely different life for these two who adored each other like no human beings had loved before, but who were destined to go on loving each other without hope of seeing their dream come true.” All that is left for the unnamed protagonist is to imagine the ideal family life they might have shared “had destiny not been so cruel” (“Stolen,” 16). Covering the next twenty-five years of the impossible marriage, the daydream depicts the couple’s simple, happy, and stable life rearing three children into middle-class contentment. That the narrative showcases LULAC’s upwardly mobile, middle-class orientation is less surprising than the totality of that vision as presented in the story. Every aspect of imagining a U.S. middle-class identity is in place, down to the description of the family home as having “three bedrooms, a living room, dining room, two bathrooms, kitchen, a sun room and front porch.” Given the poverty of most ethnic Mexicans at the time, this house would have seemed a veritable mansion. Other markers of a tasteful yet frugal middle-class family included “furniture . . . of very good quality but very simple so that it would not go out of style.” Instead of living for the moment, everyone in the family, including the children from a young age, would learn the pleasures of compound inter-

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est and deferred gratification as they save “money in a small way, but religiously” (17). Adding to their character as well as to their savings, the children would take violin, piano, voice, and harp lessons to round out their middle-class habitus.12 But perhaps the prominent indicator of the narrative’s creation of modern Mexican American subjectivities is the modeling of modern gender roles within the unrealized ideal marriage. The protagonist imagines herself as disappearing from the public sphere once she marries, and in this sense wife and husband occupy the traditional roles of homemaker and breadwinner, respectively; while “Dad” works as a business executive, “Mother” keeps “that little home like a heaven for her loved ones” (18). While the traditional nature of the sexual division of familial labor is apparent, the story also emphasizes an egalitarian companionate model of marriage in which husband and wife inform and consult each other about economic, child rearing, and other major decisions. Echoing the business relationship they had supposedly abandoned by marrying, “she would have time to play secretary to Dad and give him all her support,” while “Dad in turn would keep an up-to-the-minute financial statement of all home expenses, education policies for the children, his and mother’s life insurance payments, etc.” (17). The family’s increasing articulation within a modern capitalist society shifts both disciplinary and economic functions of gender roles within marriage. Traditional roles of husband and wife still inform the primacy of gender within assigned public and domestic domains, but the coordination of the two, particularly in regard to the welfare of children, appears as a site of consensual decision making even as it replicates a corporate hierarchy in which men manage the family business while women carry out its everyday functions of reproducing the conditions of domestic life. An emphasis on education for the next generation is likewise a key component of this vision in “Stolen Paradise.” Son and daughters alike are encouraged to attend college, albeit Junior is prompted to pursue the more traditionally masculine occupations of business and law, while Rosita and Licha major in music and home economics, respectively. With the educational preparation each has received, the children alternate work and school to help their parents send the three through college and, in Junior’s case, through law school. A graduate of the University of Texas, he becomes “a popular and successful lawyer” who is elected district attorney by a racially diverse constituency. Licha follows in her mother’s footsteps by marrying her former boss, while Rosita, “expecting the

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stork,” is married to “a Saxon” with “‘oodles’ of money” who “is lovely to her” (19). Armed with a middle-class mien and formal educational credentials, the adult children achieve what their Lulacker parents could have only dreamed of for themselves: integration into U.S. political, economic, and social life. The ability to reproduce the Mexican American middleclass family becomes synonymous with full citizenship and social agency in this middle-class fantasy. Yet the apparent triumph of the Mexican American middle-class family is called into doubt by the narrative’s reiteration of this daydream as a “stolen paradise,” a dream not merely deferred for a generation or two but removed from the realm of possibility. The tragic sense of the story is not confined merely to the misfortunes of a man and a woman forbidden to each other. Rather, the foreclosure of the story’s events makes the tragedy applicable to all Mexican Americans in their quest for an American dream that is continuously thwarted by customary racism. But “Stolen Paradise” also references the unequal gender relations within the ethnic Mexican community through its specific characterization of an idealized Mexican American family defined by its egalitarian relationship between husband and wife. The consistent failure of LULAC and the greater ethnic Mexican community to foster gender equality presented the greatest obstacle not only to true happiness between men and women but also to the democratization of social life in general.13 Adela Sloss, one of the first women to write for the LULAC News, addressed the damaging effects of traditional ethnic Mexican notions of marriage upon gender relations in a scathing article titled “Por que en muchos hogares Latinos no existe verdadera felicidad” [Why True Happiness Is Missing from So Many Latino Homes] (1933). According to Sloss, the unhappiness within many marriages can be attributed to the patently unfair moral double standard for ethnic Mexican women and men. Whereas men had the socially sanctioned ability to leave the home at will, often becoming “esposos terribles” [ogre husbands] through their frequent carousing, a wife who merely wanted to accompany her husband for a night on the town asked for “algo fuera de lo ordinario” [something far out of the ordinary] since, in the husband’s view, “‘la mujer se hizo para la casa, para lavar, planchar, para atender a los niños etc.’” [wives exist to keep house, wash, iron, mind the children etc.] (“Por que,” 32). Rather than dare abridge custom, ethnic Mexican women suffered as prisoners in their own homes, undermining the happy home that supposedly came as a natural result of their confinement:

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Resulta que la esposa empieza a sentirse sola y decepcionada. El despego y las malas acciones del esposo hacen que vaya disminuyendo en ella el amor sublime que soñó en los días del noviazgo. Ella continúa sumisa y callada. Existe en ella el bello sentimiento que se le inculcó: “Sé leal y digna”; ya quizá no es el amor la que la ayuda a continuar tal vida sino este último sentimiento. Vive mártir por obedecer a ese bello sentimiento, a esa ley de la vida latina (32). [As a result the wife begins to feel lonely and deceived. This emotional detachment and the wrongdoings of her husband cause the love she felt during courtship to diminish. She remains withdrawn and quiet. There exists within her a noble sentiment that was drilled into her: “Be faithful and dignified”; at this point she survives not on love but on this feeling of duty. She lives as a martyr in obeying that duty, that law of Latin life.]

For Sloss, marriage, traditionally considered the core of ethnic Mexican communal life and the bedrock of its moral steadfastness against the social degeneracy of modernity, served as an ideological chain which men, “con todos los privilegios y derechos” [with all the privileges and rights], used to maintain control over women (31). Ironically, traditional gender roles undermined the vaunted strength of the ethnic Mexican family despite frequent claims to the contrary. The belief that traditional ethnic Mexican households served as bastions of cultural and familial preservation in a corrosive modern world came at the expense of Mexican American women’s emotional well-being and social development, estranging them from their rightful claim to modern citizenship. According to Sloss, such a denial of women’s rights was both un-American and antediluvian: “Las costumbres por otra parte . . . la convierten en la mujer martir de los tiempos antepasados” [Foreign—i.e., Mexican—traditions . . . transform her into the female martyr of the past] (31). Sloss asserted that supposedly degenerate Anglo-American households were on the whole happier than ethnic Mexican ones because in those relationships husband and wife gave each other due consideration: Con frecuencia oímos decir que el hogar latino se conserva y que el hogar anglo-sajón se va a pique. Hay que tomar en cuenta que los hogares anglo-sajones que se conservan, existe en ellos verdadera felicidad, porque la esposa es tan fiel como el esposo, ella es la compañera del esposo y no la esclava. Ella goza de iguales privilegios y el esposo procura no ofenderla con malas acciones (32).

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[We hear it often said that the Latino family sticks together while the Anglo-Saxon household goes to hell in a hand basket. There needs to be taken into account that in those Anglo-Saxon homes that do cohere, there exists a true happiness within, because the wife is as committed as the husband, [and] she is her husband’s companion and not his slave. She enjoys equal privileges and her husband endeavors not to alienate her through inappropriate behavior.]

Deploying the consensual, companionate marriage as the paradigm of democratized relations between men and women, Sloss essentially redefined LULAC’s strategy of creating a new Mexican American subjectivity to fight customary racism into a feminist demand to modernize domestic relationships. Given that marriage was the institution through which most Mexican American women experienced gender inequality in their everyday lives, the question of democratizing the relationship between husband and wife proved to be a central concern for the Mexican American women writers for the LULAC News. Published in the issue for August 1938, the humorous short story “Yawn Goes On Vacation” was attributed to “Mara Villa,” a facetious nom de plume which, translated as “miracle” or “wonder,” suggested that getting LULAC to take gender equality seriously might require divine intervention.14 The narrative consists of two sets of dialogical exchanges: an initial dialogue between I. and Nina Yawn and a subsequent exchange of letters occasioned by I.’s sudden departure for California on vacation. The opening dialogue reveals an ongoing conflict between husband and wife about the wife’s transgression of domestic boundaries. I. Yawn suggests that his wife’s bridge-playing habit interferes with her wifely duty to serve him at the end of a long day. He complains, “Nina, I am getting tired of coming home from work and finding you out” (“Yawn,” 15). Nina counters that he disregards her opinion in forming vacation plans since he insists on traveling to California by airplane when he knows she is afraid of flying. Noting their thin apartment walls and orejón (eavesdropping) neighbors, the Cuernitos family, Nina exploits her husband’s fear of gossip to defer any possible escalation of the dispute, thus preserving, for the moment, her leisure time. In any case, their boredom and miscommunication are readily evident. At an impasse, I. Yawn then exercises what he imagines to be his husbandly privilege of going where he wants when he wants, informing Nina via a note left on her dresser that he has departed on his “airplane vaca-

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tion.” He patronizingly advises his wife to remain “sweet and calm” and not to “be peeved and throw up in the air your pretty, manicured little hands.” Turning his wife’s extradomestic leisure activity into proof of her spatial restriction to their hometown of Aguacuate, Texas, I. Yawn condescendingly grants his “little sweet angel child” permission to “enjoy your bridge games and be a nice little girl” (15). Leaving her with the choice of either staying behind in infantilized isolation (as “niña,” or little girl) or joining him in California, I. Yawn attempts to dictate the terms of their relationship. However, the ensuing long-distance communiqués demonstrate how Nina Yawn rhetorically turns the tables on her errant husband, thereby undoing the marital hierarchy he would enact. To her husband’s first two missives detailing how much fun he’s having in California, Nina at first tersely demands and then tenderly implores him to return. However, when his third letter trumpets his dalliances with a woman whose husband stayed home, Nina changes rhetorical strategies, switching to a mix of indignant legal recourse and sly innuendo. In the first instance, Nina asserts her agency in the legal realm by stating, “Seeing my lawyer Sunday noon.” But her main tactic is to counter her husband’s implied emotional (if not physical) infidelity with hints of her own, thereby deconstructing the gendered double standard he has claimed as his right. Implying that she is having her own recreational affair with the next-door neighbor, whose wife, Pepa, and children are away, her letters describe honeymoon bridge games with Felipe Cuernitos (whose last name translates as “little horned one”), who not only shares her interests, but also appreciates her home-cooked meal of “a nice broiled T-bone steak, with raw onions, lettuce and tomato salad, french fried potatoes, buttered biscuits, iced tea, and home made ice cream.” Suggesting that Cuernitos is making a cuckold of him, Nina ends one such salacious letter with “Have a good time, dear, and come home when you are good and ready.” I. Yawn’s vacation descriptions cease as his letters become at turns increasingly conciliatory and outraged. After Nina informs him that she won’t be greeting him upon his return home because she’ll be out picnicking with Cuernitos “at Fool’s Creek,” the irate Yawn threatens her with divorce: “How could you? Will see my lawyer as soon as I get home” (16). But the joke is on I. Yawn as the final reply letter is not from Nina but from Cuernitos, whose intervention into the couple’s correspondence suggests a level of intimacy that seemingly confirms his worst fears. The neighbor writes to the jealous husband, “Are you crazy? What’s wrong? Come and let’s enjoy the picnic. It’s in your honor.” Cuernitos signs the

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letter, “Love from Nina, Pepa, my babies and Felipe Cuernitos.” One possible interpretation is that Nina has indeed dumped I. Yawn for Cuernitos, suggesting that husbands would be wise to consult and compromise with their wives. But given LULAC’s relentlessly upstanding middle-class orientation, which frowned on adultery and divorce, another plausible explanation is suggested by a seemingly incongruous sentence in Cuernitos’s letter: “Nina does not like bridge any more” (16). Having proved her point of what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, Nina signals her willingness to compromise for the sake of saving their marriage. By routing the conversation through the Cuernitos family, with whom she has discussed her marital problems, she makes clear that her husband must also be willing to negotiate by coming to her directly. Unwilling to accept patriarchal privilege but willing to fight for her rights within marriage, Nina Yawn emerges as a comedic master of language who writes herself into modern feminist agency. Throughout the writings of women Lulackers in the Lulac News, marriage was the central trope for reimagining traditional gender roles. Bertha Piña’s “My Only Gift,” a poem offered as marital advice to her Lulacker uncle on his wedding day, outlined what husband and wife could expect from each other in a modern marriage. If the bride could ask her betrothed to be “the best husband on earth / The best workman at hand” in fulfilling his promise to support her, then the author’s uncle could assume that his wife would not “get old and cranky, / And lose that dimpled smile.” Yet the apparently old-fashioned patriarchal exchange of male financial support for female beauty and sexuality described here yields to a model of companionate marriage in which power is shared for their mutual benefit rather than unquestioningly wielded by the husband. Advocating equality in marriage, the poem urged the groom to seek consensus in decision making: “Don’t start with Sophie Fair / A quarrel or a fuss, / Just be a fifty-fifty pair, / And let no one be boss” (“Gift,” 11). As women Lulackers expanded the meaning of democratic participation in everyday life, egalitarian marriage became both a central trope and a representational strategy in the writings of female Lulackers as they strove to articulate issues of patriarchal subordination with LULAC. The cultural work of advancing this agenda occurred in large measure through literature such as “My Only Gift,” particularly in its suggestion of a Mexican American female subject outside the ken of male Lulackers and their formulation of agency. This hint of a modernized, desiring Mexican American female subject comes in a quatrain in which the narrator urges the happy couple to pledge their love to each other: “Come

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promise one another / Not where the good priest hears; / Not where the questions bother, / But where the conscience feels” (11). Significantly, the meaning of marriage for Piña lay neither within the traditional sanctioning of religion nor in the gossipy opinion of the community; rather, it flowed from the mutual affect shared between desiring subjects prior to any institutional recognition. That “Miss” Piña, as she is identified in the poem’s editorial introduction, is apparently young and unmarried points to the emergence of a desiring Mexican American female subjectivity that increasingly demanded modern egalitarian relationships of both race and gender, a dynamic that would fundamentally shape Mexican American women’s response to border modernity and the Centennial.15

Jovita González and Centennial Discourses While short stories and articles written by Mexican American women and published in the LULAC News suggested the outlines of a new feminist project in the making of a Mexican American subject, nowhere is this process more elaborated than in the diverse and suggestive writings of Jovita González. Born in 1904 in the old border town of Roma, Texas, to a long-established Spanish land-grant family that had seen its fortunes ebb with the coming of Anglo-Americans to the borderlands, González best captured the contradictions of border modernity in her life and in her writings as she navigated its treacherous social currents. If the question of claiming literary agency as a woman remained a challenge within LULAC, as the case of “Doña Paula Losoya, Great Pioneer of Del Rio” made clear, then González would most critically interrogate ethnic Mexican gender roles and Anglo-American racism as they intersected in the south Texas borderlands during the early twentieth century. Dedicated to LULAC’s project of fighting for civil rights through the creation of a modern Mexican American subjectivity, she nonetheless battled traditionalists within the organization who would exclude gender relations from the very processes of democratization that they had enlisted to combat customary racism. Creating what may be the single most extensive body of critical and literary work by a Mexican American during the 1930s, González deployed the discourses of folklore, history, and fiction to interrogate the class, gender, and racial dynamics of border modernity as manifested in Centennial discourses and Texas-Mexican patriarchy. Given that González’s life experiences were formed within the context of border modernity, her close attention to its drastic transformation of

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south Texas reflected the tensions between the traditional social order of the nineteenth-century Texas-Mexican borderlands and its twentiethcentury transformation. Even as the coming of the railroad to Brownsville began to transform the lower Rio Grande Valley in the first decade of the twentieth century, González’s family moved to San Antonio so that she and her sisters “could be educated in English” (“Early Life,” xi). By 1927, she had graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Spanish from Our Lady of the Lake College, but two years earlier she had met the Anglo-Texan who would have the greatest impact upon her professional life during the late 1920s and 1930s: J. Frank Dobie. Dobie, the rising star of Texas folklore in the English Department at the University of Texas, took the young tejana under his wing in his guise of amicable “Don Pancho,” the literary folklorist who would reign over Texas folklore studies for the following three decades. Dobie wielded his considerable influence within the Texas Folklore Society to lobby on González’s behalf for the society’s presidency, a position she held between 1930 and 1932.16 Her initial studies in TexasMexican folklore were published in Texas Folklore Society anthologies that Dobie edited. As the cultural critic José E. Limón has documented, Dobie’s concept of folklore studies consisted less of a culturalist approach (characterized by the work of Professor Franz Boas of Columbia University) or a diffusionist approach (characterized by the work of Stith Thompson of Indiana University) than of an aesthetic appreciation of what Dobie called the flavor of the folk’s unlettered tales.17 As a member of the Advisory Board of Texas Historians to the Commission of Control for Texas Centennial Celebrations, Dobie had eschewed what he considered to be the dry, literal quality of historical fact in favor of grand, inspirational visions (see chapter 2). According to Dobie, folklore was history’s counterpoint, not so much in the details of the past but in their inspirational qualities in the present, a quality only occasionally shared by creative writing: “Fiction that reads well enough may betray a people. History impeccably correct as to facts may fail, and generally does fail to represent the life, the spirit, of a people. But a people’s folk-lore—and all people have such—expresses their genius as surely as the expression on a child’s face reveals its temper” (“Nation’s Folklore,” B4). For Dobie, the task of the folklorist was to gather, select, and transform the rough but picturesque stories of the various Texas folk into “a more literary English with minimal analytical or historical commentary” (Limón, “Introduction,” xx). Thus rewritten, the folklore of socially marginal groups such as rural Anglo-Texans, African Americans, and Texas

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Mexicans could serve as the authentic inspiration for “modern authors to explore regional themes in their writing” (Cotera, “Introduction.” 12). In many ways, González appeared to Dobie to be the ideal bridge between what he imagined to be the preliterate world of the Texas-Mexican folk and the literary realm of Anglo-Texan letters. Coming from a shabbily genteel Spanish land-grant family, González also fit Dobie’s preferences for a native informant whose ties to her community made her gathered folklore more authentic yet whose social standing mitigated the conflictual aspects that could emerge from such an identification. Yet, as Limón and the Chicana feminist scholar María Eugenia Cotera have pointed out, González’s work contested the depoliticized vision of folklore guiding Dobie’s project and the triumphalist version of Anglo-Texas history that made Dobie’s project possible.18 Throughout her published folklore studies, as well as in her then-unpublished folklore-based novel Dew on the Thorn, González fashioned Texas-Mexican folklore into what Limón has identified as “running political commentary on ethnic, gender, and class relations” that anticipated “the use of memory, literature, and folkloric history” in Américo Paredes’s later work (“Introduction,” xxi).19 Cultural critique formed a central element of both her folklore-related writings and her written work in the academic discourse of Texas history. González’s critical output during the Centennial decade began with “Social Life in Cameron, Starr, and Zapata Counties,” a master’s thesis in history completed in 1930 under the nominal supervision of Eugene C. Barker, the well-known biographer of Stephen F. Austin and an influential professor of Texas history at the University of Texas. Barker was, as González recalled years later, “hesitant at first to approve the thesis” as “it did not have enough historical references” (“Early Life,” xiii).20 The professor’s hesitancy may have stemmed from a different source: “Social Life” advanced a counterhistory to the accounts of Barker and indeed to the entire academic field of early twentieth-century Texas historiography. Contesting the triumphalist premises of such Centennial discourses in regard to the settling of Texas, the thesis created “a narrative that offered a Mexican perspective on the history of Texas and contested negative representation of Mexicano culture and people” (Cotera, “Introduction,” 17). González propagated her counterhistory of south Texas during the early and mid-1930s by publishing sections of the thesis in such magazines as Mary Immaculate, Southwest Review, and the LULAC News.21 As the Centennial year of 1936 approached, González made two decisions that would affect her writing for the rest of the decade. First, she married E. E. Mireles in August 1935 and immediately moved to Del

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Rio to join him at San Felipe High School, where she became head of the English Department. Despite being at some remove from the central Centennial celebrations in San Antonio and Dallas, González nonetheless found two venues through which to air her counter-Centennial narratives. The first of these came in the form of an opportunity to perform Texas-Mexican folkloric songs and stories at the weeklong National Folk-life Festival held in conjunction with the Texas Centennial Central Exposition in Dallas that summer. The invitation came courtesy of Sarah Gertrude Knott, the national director of the festival, who had heard González’s presentation at a Texas Folklore Society meeting in April 1936. Perhaps subtly hinting at her understanding of the potentially contentious nature of González’s work in folklore, Knott wrote to her to “come armed with six or seven tales” about Texas-Mexican ranch life. Wanting an additional performance, Knott also asked, “Do you know a Mexican lullaby? Can you sing it?” Knott was apparently unfamiliar with González’s musical abilities, but she did have the opportunity to give performances as expert storyteller and folk musician.22 On June 16, González told “Mexican Tales and Vaquero Stories” on the Grand Plaza Platform, and, on the next day, she delivered a musical rendition, “Legends of the Vaqueros,” in the artists’ auditorium of the food building (National Folklife Program, 1936).23 While the exact content of González’s comments at the National Folk-life Festival has yet to be recovered, she did have another reason for traveling to Dallas for the Centennial Central Exposition. The Diocese of Dallas’s Catholic Exhibit was hosting her “special display of photographs, short biographical narratives, and material culture” titled “Catholic Heroines of Texas” (Cotera, “A Sense,” 170).24 By early 1936, González had started the process of researching the lives of prominent Roman Catholic women who had influenced the course of Texas history since the first Spanish entradas. Some months later, in August, the San Antonio– based Catholic weekly Southern Messenger published the biographical part of “Catholic Heroines of Texas” as “a condensation of a manuscript soon to be published in book form by Jovita Gonzales de Mireles” (“Catholic,” 2). However, it seems that the full historical study was not published in book form, even though the chairman of the Catholic exhibit, Father Joseph O’Donohoe, said in a 1936 letter to her that “one hundred pages will be perfectly all right for the size of your book.” In a letter from 1939, González mentioned to John Joseph Gorrell, possibly a representative of a publisher, that she had “some biographical sketches of famous Texas women” to offer in addition to the manuscripts for Dew on the Thorn and

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Caballero, an indication that, as of that date, “Catholic Heroines of Texas” had yet to be published in its longer form.25 “Catholic Heroines of Texas” apparently never saw publication as a fully realized work, but the abbreviated version marked a milestone in the writing of tejanas into Texas history as perhaps the first published account in English by a tejana detailing their historical influence and importance. Even as Carlos E. Castañeda labored upon Our Catholic Heritage in Texas, a multivolume history of Catholicism in Texas initiated for the Centennial under the auspices of the Texas Knights of Columbus, González turned to the strong historical identification of ethnic Mexicans with the Roman Catholic faith to insert the agency of Spanish and Mexican peoples into Centennial discourses that otherwise dismissed their accomplishments as feeble and inconsequential to the history of Texas.26 Although González included biographies of four Catholic Anglo-American women, the preponderance (75 percent) of profiled women were Native American, Spanish, and Mexican. Unlike Castañeda, who focused on the institutional history of the Catholic Church and its male-dominated hierarchies, in which women had little presence, González highlighted the everyday heroism of women, lay and religious, who served as leaders of their isolated communities far out on the frontiers of New Spain, Mexico, and Texas. The sequence of biographical sketches in “Catholic Heroines of Texas” is chronological, starting with the famed Woman in Blue, the Spanish nun María de Jesus de Agreda, whose miraculous bilocation to Texas served to spread Christianity among the tribal nations in the seventeenth century. But mostly González concentrated on lay tejanas who stepped outside traditional domestic roles to lead their frontier communities with courage and conviction. Catholic Texas-Mexican women such as María Manuela Vellescas Ramon, María Robaina de Betancourt, Doña Patricia De La Garza De Leon, María Carillo, Ursula Veramendi (most widely known as Jim Bowie’s wife), Doña María Hilaria De La Garza Davis, and Doña Paula Losoya operated independently of the thinly stretched official Church of priests, parishes, and bishops while working “for the welfare of our people and the advancement of our state” (“Catholic,” 8/20, 2). In contrast to the image of Mexican women in Centennial discourses as spicy, promiscuous seductresses or passive, pious domestic drudges, González portrayed them as dynamic movers and shakers of Texas history who amassed lands and fortunes through shrewd business ventures, created vibrant frontier communities with innovative public policies, and fostered an atmosphere of racial and cultural tolerance toward the AngloAmerican newcomers. According to González, tejanas who married

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Anglo men, such as Doña Paula Losoya, Ursula Veramendi, and Doña María Hilaria De La Garza Davis, showed how “border magnificence and hospitality” came about as a result of combining the best of both worlds during the heyday of cross-ethnic romances in nineteenth-century south Texas (8/27, 2). Even at the height of racial hostilities during the Texas Revolution, the tejana Panchita Alavez, “the Angel of Goliad,” risked her life to save twelve Anglo-Texan men—her supposed enemies—from execution by the Mexican army.27 In its focus on the biographies of these women, “Catholic Heroines of Texas” becomes as much a critique of Anglo-Texan racial triumphalism as it is a celebration of tejana history. Many of the biographical sketches end with the ruination of the tejana heroines by the very Anglo-Americans whom they had welcomed to the region. The fate of Doña Patricia De La Garza De Leon characterized what would be the general fate of the Texas-Mexican community under the Lone Star: “She was to taste the bitter dregs of that basest of all human failings—ingratitude, for the state she loved so well after its independence unjustly and without reason branded her and her people as aliens and enemies and confiscated most of her broad possessions, until in her old days she saw her wealth gone and her lands taken from her” (8/20, 2). María Carillo, notwithstanding that she was “second to none either in her courage or her financial resources,” met the same fate at the hands of “filibustering characters . . . who robbed the defenseless and cowed Mexican population” in the lawless, racially charged aftermath of the Texas Revolution (8/20, 2). Implicit in González’s condemnation of the exuberantly antidemocratic actions of Anglo-Texans toward Texas-Mexicans is her critique of how racism shaped the state’s imagined community in deeply unjust ways. For González, any true history of Texas had to tell these shameful stories of dispossession along with the tales of heroism, something Centennial discourses resolutely failed to do. González’s most direct challenge to Texas historiography in “Catholic Heroines of Texas” came in the form of a collective biography of “The Women of the Alamo.” This sketch related the story of the seventeen Mexican wives and relatives of several male Alamo defenders. Only six of the women of the Alamo had been identified, González recounted; the others “must remain anonymous to posterity for history has failed to record their names.” The failures of history extended particularly to Centennial discourses and the narrative of the Alamo offered therein. Despite their valiant efforts for the cause of Texas independence, the tejanas of the Alamo had been erased from Centennial discourses as women and

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as patriots: “Many persons are under the impression that Mrs. Dickinson was the lone woman in the Alamo, but the cold facts of history prove something different” (8/27, 2). Reinscribing their story into Texas history, González identified many of these women as “either kinswomen or family servants” of Jim Bowie’s deceased wife, Ursula Veramendi, or of the tejano defenders Gregorio Esparza and Toribio Losoya. However, familial loyalty soon became loyalty to an independent, democratic Texas as the women chose to stay through the siege and Battle of the Alamo alongside its male defenders. Even with “the certain knowledge of defeat and death for those in the fort,” these tejanas “valiantly encouraged the defenders of the Alamo by their fortitude and their prayers, nursing the sick and wounded, cooking for the soldiers and doing in their simple and humble way everything they could to help.” One tejana lost her life, “killed by a stray bullet as she crossed the courtyard for water for a wounded soldier” (8/27, 2). Proving their commitment to what they considered their nation, tejanas had lived and died alongside Texas-Mexican and Anglo-Texan men for Texan freedom.28 Yet if Centennial discourses failed to acknowledge the contributions of tejanas to the making of Texas, so did the revisionist history presented by LULAC. Rubén Rendón Lozano’s Viva Tejas: The Story of the MexicanBorn Patriots of the Republic of Texas highlighted the seven tejano volunteers of Captain Juan Nepomuceno Seguín’s company but failed to mention the tejanas at the Alamo. Similarly, San Antonio LULAC Council 16 formulated numerous plans to ensure that tejanos were given proper homage at official Centennial celebrations. Their plans included petitioning the Daughters of the Republic of Texas to hang a portrait of Seguín inside the Alamo and to have the names of the tejano Alamo defenders recited during commemorations. Nonetheless, no plans acknowledging that tejanas had defended the Alamo were proposed. With “Catholic Heroines of Texas,” González launched a multipronged critique of Anglo-Texan racism and of the implicitly masculinist LULAC strategy for combating it.

Desiring Modernity in Caballero If male Lulackers sought to preserve the gendered subordination of Mexican American women even as they desired to have themselves represented within modern democratic practices, then González would fight to modernize gender roles within the Mexican American community as well as

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to promote pluralistic racial and cultural tolerance in her most substantive engagement with Centennial discourses, the historical romance Caballero. In this novel, coauthored with Eve Raleigh (the pseudonym of Margaret Eimer), González would model an equitable rapprochement between Mexican Americans and Anglo-Americans through the pure consent of egalitarian marriage. At the same time, Caballero would serve as their warning of what would happen to the ethnic Mexican community if it resisted the democratization of gender roles and ignored the modernization of Mexican American female subjectivity. The capstone to literary works by women Lulackers during the 1930s and a foundational text for the Mexican American literary tradition, Caballero summarized feminist arguments about the gendered Mexican American subject in one ambitious novel. Written between 1937 and 1939, Caballero drew upon what González posited as a characteristic feature of “Latin American” expressive traditions in an essay in 1937: “The romantic pathos which appeals to all” (“Latin Americans,” 508). Meant to instruct Anglo-Americans about Mexican Americans as fellow citizens through romance, Caballero is a multilayered love story set in the lower Rio Grande Valley of south Texas during the tumultuous U.S.-Mexican War of 1846–1848. Love blossoms during wartime as the younger generation of the Mendoza y Soría family romantically unites with their father’s sworn enemies, los americanos, much to the dismay of Don Santiago, the family’s staunchly traditionalist patriarch. These enemy lovers overcome paternal obstruction and cultural difference to form marital unions that not only outlast the martial conflict, but also lay the affective foundations of a renewed, racially tolerant United States. Even this minimal plot summary suggests that Caballero seems to belong more to a nineteenth-century literary tradition than to the modernist aesthetics of the 1930s. Indeed, the most immediate generic referent for Caballero in the U.S. context is the romance of reunion of the late nineteenth century, in which the reunification of North and South after the Civil War was imagined as the courtship and marriage between Yankee men and Southern belles.29 Caballero continues this tradition of figuring the political as the personal, yet interpreting this novel as a preor antimodern text obscures the crucial role that the genre of the historical romance played in articulating the gendered conditions of border modernity, and particularly how this historical romance negotiated the terms of national inclusion for Texas Mexicans while simultaneously making the modernization of tejana desire the key characteristic of such a process.

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Ultimately, Caballero is less about the historical actuality of the U.S.Mexican War than about the social and economic transformation of the Texas-Mexican border region during González’s lifetime. The novel narrates the uneven and often unwelcome emergence of border modernity that occurred when “America Invade[d] the Border Towns” during the first decade of the twentieth century.30 Despite its allegorical functioning, the novel’s setting of the U.S.-Mexican War cannot avoid detailing the violence of the war and its aftermath as the necessary antecedent to the later cultural transformation. The novel details historical events such as the wanton sack of the Mexican frontier town of Matamoros by the Texas Rangers on November 4, 1847, in which sixty Mexicans were killed in an area already occupied by U.S. troops for over a year.31 Other common episodes of conflict, such as the fatal shooting of a would-be Anglo squatter by the Don’s men, highlighted how “the aftermath of war is always worse than the war itself” as the conquerors and the conquered vied for control of the precious resource of land in the possession of the defeated (Caballero, 195). In this sense, Caballero functions as a counterdiscursive interrogation of Centennial discourses that celebrated the U.S.-Mexican War as the fulfillment of a national Manifest Destiny begun at San Jacinto. In Caballero, hardy Anglo-Texan pioneers become “the land-greedy who justified their rapaciousness with the word ‘pioneer’ and used it to cover their evils,” an indication of how the novel undoes the cultural work of ex post facto historical legitimation performed by Centennial discourses. The specifically racial dimension of the conquest and its later legitimation adhered in the “pioneers” use of the refrain “Remember the Alamo,” visiting “the sins of Santa Anna upon all his countrymen” and so consider “themselves justified in stealing the lands of the Mexicans” (195). Perhaps having in mind the war-era Mexican epithet of “tejanos sangrientos” (“bloody Texans”) for the brutal Texas Rangers, Eimer and González highlighted how Texas history of the Centennial era could never be sanitized despite efforts to characterize Texas-Mexicans as an inferior race requiring subjugation under the Anglo-Texan boot. If both sides participated in the violence, nonetheless it remained clear which community’s blood stained the pages of Texas history: “There was blood. Texas dipped a pen deeply in it, and wrote its history with it” (22). Yet despite the violence of conquest, Caballero focuses upon the possibilities of a rapprochement between Anglo and Texas Mexican rather than its impossibility. Casting the social changes brought about by border modernity, not the change in national sovereignty of 1848, as the social

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challenge to the region’s Texas-Mexican inhabitants, Caballero traces the impact of these changes on the patriarchal ordering of elite ranchero society, focusing the narrative not only on cultures in conflict, but also on conflict within the supposedly unified Texas-Mexican community. Implicit within such a move is a critique of masculinist constructions of tejana subjectivity, whether of the white supremacist variety, the masculinist version of a reformist LULAC, or the oppositional variant depicted in Paredes’s George Washington Gómez.32 In setting its events during wartime but focusing on cultural shifts within the civilian Texas-Mexican population, Caballero demonstrates how Texas-Mexican patriarchy was challenged not only by the military might of the United States and the racism of Anglo-Texans, but also, much more fundamentally, by the transformation of traditional gender and labor roles within the Texas-Mexican household. Viewed this way, Caballero extends the argument advanced by women Lulackers in their LULAC News articles and fiction, even while presenting a comprehensive vision of just which relations within ethnic Mexican communities needed to be modernized for Mexican Americans to exercise full agency as U.S. citizens. María Eugenia Cotera and José E. Limón have carried out the extensive archival and editorial work necessary to present Caballero in its published form. Rejected by publishers despite numerous efforts by Eimer and González between the late 1930s and the 1950s, Caballero did not appear in print until 1996. In that groundbreaking edition and in subsequent articles, Cotera and Limón, respectively, have offered insightful analyses of this historical romance. Cotera constructs a convincing argument for Caballero as a trenchant critique of Texas-Mexican patriarchy that anticipated later Chicana feminist critiques of Chicano cultural nationalism. According to Cotera, Caballero depicts the exaltation of the masculinized corrido hero-warrior, embodied by the characters of Don Santiago and especially his son Alvaro, as the desperate attempt of a beleaguered Texas-Mexican patriarchal order to retain its power during a time of cultural conflict and profound social change: “Indeed, the authors deploy the crisis of 1848 to elaborate a complex dialectical critique of Mexican patriarchal and class relations . . . [that] reveals the gendered contradictions of resistance narratives even as it deconstructs the discourse of male ‘heroism’ that functions as the unexamined center of such narratives” (“Recovering,” 159). The armed resistance of Texas-Mexican men con pistola en la mano to Anglo-Texan domination justifies a patriarchal code of oppression that invidiously subordinates Texas-Mexican women. In Cotera’s account, tejana resistance lies in the defiance of this arbitrary

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patriarchal power of a Mexican nationalism that would deny the very agency of women to determine the direction of their own lives.33 Taking an approach suggested by Foundational Fictions, Doris Sommer’s influential study of Latin-American literary nationalism, Limón convincingly argues for Caballero as a Mexican American foundational fiction, as a narrative that imagines the consolidation of Mexican Americans into the U.S. national polity on the basis of mutual, consensual desire.34 Limón takes the union of Angela de Mendoza y Soría and Red McLane as the symbolic center of the narrative, stating that this pragmatic marital alliance, of the four romances he identifies, best represents the terms of national consolidation between Anglo-Texans and Texas Mexicans during the 1930s and 1940s. “Far closer to a certain social reality” than the romance between Susanita de Mendoza y Soría and U.S. Army Lieutenant Robert Warrener, the union of Angela and Red is “based not on rapturous love” but on “convenience with consciousness and conscience and on respect and deep mutual admiration” (“Mexicans,” 351). In Limón’s view, Texas Mexicans and Anglo-Texans may not completely love the Other’s presence but have come to realize that strategic alliance is better than disruptive open warfare. Consensus, or at least compromise, replaces the outright antagonisms fostered by racial nationalists on both sides. These two conclusions, reached by Cotera and Limón, respectively, outline the spectrum of critical responses to Caballero. To summarize, Cotera finds in the novel a gendered resistance to an oppressive patriarchy, while Limón identifies collaboration in the making of a more inclusive U.S. national hegemony. But rather than posit the novel as exclusively the expression either of a radical feminist resistance or of mutual collaboration in a new foundational fiction, I examine the possibility that the novel’s critique of patriarchal relations within Texas-Mexican culture fundamentally structures the foundational project of integrating Texas Mexicans into the United States. That is, the discourse of gender critique within the novel accomplishes the task of modernizing a class-specific tejana subjectivity such that national integration becomes possible through the desiring intersubjectivity of the historical romance. Once elite tejana characters become desiring subjects rather than patriarchal objects, the romantic unions at the heart of Caballero form the centerpiece of an antipatriarchal narrative of female liberation in which Texas-Mexican patriarchy, not the invading americanos, figures as the oppressive colonial power through its tyrannical possession of people and land. The operation of Texas-Mexican patriarchal power in Caballero is explicitly cast as the colonial appropriation of female bodies. In the colo-

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nial imaginary of the first Spanish settlers of Nuevo Santander, the land presents itself as a fertile female figure offering itself up for the pleasure of the colonizer, whispering, “I have been waiting for you” to Don José Ramón Mendoza y Robles, the founding patriarch of the south Texas Mendoza clan in 1748 (Caballero, xxxvi).35 This particular mode of colonial epistemology—the conquering male gaze—ensures that patriarchal power constructs all other subjectivities as extensions of the patriarch’s will. In ways akin to el Palo Alto’s fondness for early Spanish colonialists in María Elena Zamora O’Shea’s El Mesquite, Don José’s desire for colonial mastery is projected as the very land’s desire for him to master it. “Monarch of all he surveyed,” Don José Ramón’s grandson Don Santiago Mendoza y Soría looks down from his “throne” overlooking Rancho La Palma de Cristo and feels his power like “wine in his veins”: “Those dots on the plain, cattle, sheep, horses, were his to kill or let live. The peons, down there, were his to discipline any time with the lash, to punish by death if he so chose. His wife, his sister, sons, and daughters bowed to his wishes and came or went as he decreed” (Caballero, 33).36 As depicted in this passage, patriarchal power constructs subaltern subjectivities that not only can be physically compelled to obey, but indeed exist only within that compulsion. Similar in concept to Michel Foucault’s understanding of power’s operation under monarchical regimes, power is understood as coercion throughout the novel.37 Lacking any agency whatsoever, these objects of the patriarchal gaze cannot be imagined as having any existence other than that of extensions of patriarchal subjectivity. Don Santiago’s imperious commands to his daughters to marry as he wishes rather than whom they love reveal the social mechanism by which Texas-Mexican rancheros perpetuate their patriarchal control. The coerced female sexuality of these arranged marriages emphasizes the Texas-Mexican patriarch’s treatment of the female body as the object of homosocial exchange that further consolidates elite male power over land, family, and the peón labor force.38 But unlike patriarchal colonial regimes, projects of national consolidation require desiring subjects, not abject objects. As Pateman has shown, the development of a modernized, heteronormative desire is central to narratives of nation building.39 Caballero depicts this modernization as the coalescing of resistant tejana subjectivities in opposition to a TexasMexican patriarchy that would take the female body as the site of its own reproduction. Don Santiago may send thundering missives to his daughters not to see or even think of gringos, but Angela and Susanita form their characters by creating oppositional interiorities where patriarchal

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power cannot reach. Having its origins “in the mysteries of Americanism” that Susanita and Angela secretly contemplate, this desire for modern romantic relationships with men precedes the formation of any relationship with a specific man (Caballero, 11). Long before meeting the dashing Virginian Warrener, Susanita feels the “impulses as old as life but new to her” stirring at the prospect of marrying for love as she realizes for the first time her status as a desiring subject (40). Secret desire for consensual romance coalesces modern female subjects, who at first demur only within hidden interiorities but who later draw upon this nascent desire to openly resist patriarchal demands. Like the female protagonists in the short literary works of women Lulackers, the novel’s resistant female subjectivities foster revolutionary imaginings of consensual social relations (i.e., romantic marriages) to supplant patriarchal coercion. Desiring female subjectivities in Caballero figure resistance as radical alterity to the operation of patriarchal power; tejana subject formation and its subsequent consensual interactions stand in absolute opposition to the violent coercion of Texas-Mexican patriarchs. Insofar as tejana subjectivities within the novel are depicted not so much as the result of patriarchal power but as causally independent of its operations, then romantic intersubjective desire appears to operate outside the parameters of power altogether and in the realm of the pure consensus of romantic love. Warrener’s flight from an arranged marriage in Virginia only confirms his suitability to be Susanita’s lover. The dialectic of desire in Caballero does not merely unite individual couples, but in fact precipitates the crisis experienced by the younger generation of tejanas over choosing between patriarchal ethnic Mexican tradition and liberating modern U.S. customs of gender equity. The perception that “the rule of the house is shared between man and wife” in Anglo-American households proves powerfully attractive to unmarried daughters who see their mothers futilely “beat hands against the wall of custom and traditions and the laws and rules that cemented them” (Caballero, 228, 109). The Texas-Mexican patriarchal concept of female honor completely circumscribes the ability of tejanas to act even in defense of their own lives or those of their families. Susanita’s midnight ride with a male peón to save her brother Alvaro from being hanged as a guerrillero (guerrilla insurgent) is condemned by Don Santiago as the dishonorable act of a debauched woman. Cast outside her father’s affections for saving her brother’s life, Susanita realizes how the ethnic Mexican tradition of female honor functioned as a form of patriarchal control over women’s agency: “Honor! It was a fetishism. It was a weapon in the hand of the

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master, to keep his woman enslaved, and his fingers had twisted upon it so tightly he could not let go” (280). In contrast to the emotional impasse reached in J. C. Machuca’s short story “Love and Duty,” this epiphany allows Susanita, and ultimately Angela and Luis Gonzaga, to break strong familial attachments in order to find a gender equality that eludes them at home. The revolution in tejana subjectivity reveals the otherwise inexplicably irrational anti-American bias of Don Santiago not as heroic anticolonial resistance but as a desperate bid to retain control over family, lands, and the peón labor force. Overthrowing traditional ethnic Mexican gender ideology to allow national integration to proceed on consensual grounds, Caballero’s romantic unions figure LULAC’s utopian ideal of full Mexican American agency within U.S. democratic discourses and practices as contingent upon the modernization of Mexican American female subjectivities.40 The novel’s most intensely heteronormative couple—Susanita and Robert—remain in the lower Rio Grande Valley to establish Warrenerville. Living closer to Rancho La Palma de Cristo than even Angela and Red, who choose to reside in San Antonio, Susanita and Robert establish their domestic bliss precisely upon the ground in Texas most contested between Anglo-Texans and Texas Mexicans. The Borderlands War is the immediate if veiled referent of the novel’s historical setting, requiring the intensity of their romantic ardor to be directly proportional to the hatred and antagonism of the contending forces in the lower Rio Grande Valley. Indeed, the ideological task for Caballero is precisely to imagine a united Texas-Mexican and Anglo-Texan population after the extreme violence and repression of a generation earlier. Hence, national consolidation must be an end in and of itself, even as Susanita’s and Robert’s love becomes “an end in itself, all things bearing upon it and bending to it” (317). National integration in the valley, where much of the violence in 1915 took place, would necessarily be a heartfelt endeavor and full-time commitment. Even the unions not based upon a fully elaborated romantic love fall into this category, as desire takes several forms besides that of rapturous sexual and emotional attraction. Limón has discussed the marriage of Angela and Red McLane as a pragmatic companionate venture. AngloTexans and Texas Mexicans can build a future together even if they don’t love each other in the romantic sense. Here consensus is figured not as desire but as vocation, a distinction that would otherwise suggest a crack in the façade of romantic nationalism. Angela characterizes the relationship as one in which love is not required for both to have fulfillment: “‘Love? . . . He has not asked for it. I like and respect him, as he does me.

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I do not think we will need what you call love to make a successful marriage. We are different, the Señor McLane and I’” (285). However distant from Susanita’s and Warrener’s love for love’s sake, the marriage between Red and Angela is successful because they can help each other accomplish socially meaningful goals. Rather than require the complete dissolution of the self in love’s inferno, desire can work through difference as long as mutual respect underlies individual fulfillment. Like the middle-class couple of Montemayor’s short story “Stolen Paradise,” in which companionate marriage rather than romantic love enables the protagonist’s unrealized vision of a meaningful family life, Red and Angela do not so much live for each other as through each other. Red’s desire for wealth, prestige, and political power goes hand in hand with Angela’s displaced religious desire to philanthropically minister to the ethnic Mexican community in San Antonio. As a major urban center, San Antonio by the 1930s had long since experienced economic and political integration into the United States and thus already figured, at least at the level of the elites, the strategic accommodation that would be realized only some decades later in the lower Rio Grande Valley. One romantic liaison not discussed at much length by either Cotera or Limón also exhibits the many ways in which desire can be fulfilled for the purposes of creating a new national compact between Anglo-American and Mexican American. Both Cotera and Limón have noted how Luis Gonzaga’s homoerotic coupling with Captain Devlin challenges the heteronormative configuration of Texas-Mexican patriarchal society and how his identification as an artist articulates that antipatriarchal critique to the possibilities of national incorporation. Luis Gonzaga’s dedication to drawing and painting is denigrated by his father, Don Santiago, who considers “painting pictures like a woman” to be “an insult to a father’s manhood” (Caballero 6). Like Susanita and Angela, however, Luis Gonzaga finds the threat of patriarchal negation sufficient to spur his journey of self-realization. Finding in Devlin the mentor his father could never be, Luis Gonzaga forsakes Rancho La Palma de Cristo altogether. Their homoerotic pairing causes the local metiches, or gossips, to whisper, “He went away with an Americano and broke his father’s heart” (Caballero, 219). Accompanying Devlin to Baltimore, New York City, and then Europe to realize his dream of becoming a trained painter, Luis Gonzaga travels furthest from the south Texas borderlands, his geographic displacement figuring his symbolic distance from the Texas-Mexican patriarchal patrimony he has refused. Yet if this removal underlines the narrative ambivalence involved in

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the undoing of patriarchal power through homoeroticism, nonetheless this male coupling performs the important cultural work of disarticulating race from the accomplishments of high culture. If artistic creation is invidiously marked by the Texas-Mexican patriarchal gaze as women’s work that unmans men, then Caballero ultimately suggests that aesthetics assumes a relative autonomy from constructions of gender (at least of the Texas-Mexican patriarchal variety) as well as from racial nationalist politics. In an essay published in the anthology Our Racial and National Minorities (1937), González had argued for the proper recognition of the Latin American contribution to the U.S. aesthetic palette. Implicitly rejecting Centennial discourses that portrayed ethnic Mexicans as bereft of meaningful cultural gifts, González asserted, “Latin-American civilization has had a constructive influence on the artistic and cultural development of the United States in architecture, in painting, in music, and in literature.” Focusing upon the last of these, González identified “legends, traditions, and ballads” as “perhaps the greatest contribution which Latin Americans have made” to U.S. culture, but she notes that only recently had these influences begun “to creep into American literature.” While quickly adding that her mentor, J. Frank Dobie, had incorporated these “folkloric elements” into books like A Vaquero of the Brush Country and Coronado’s Children, González remarked that “this vast store of unexploited materials is waiting the magic touch that will make it part of American literature” (“Latin Americans,” 508). Rather than wait for “the magic touch” of state intellectuals such as Dobie to acknowledge the cultural contributions of Mexican Americans, Eimer and González demonstrated in Caballero how these aesthetic resources could enrich the proficient if limited artistic expertise of AngloAmerican artists. To Devlin, Luis Gonzaga not only “looked like a poet or an artist should look” but also “breathe[d] the soul” into his art, thereby collapsing sign and referent, life and art, in fulfillment of the romantic ideology of the aesthetic (Caballero, 48, 103). Luis Gonzaga brings Latin passion to complement Devlin’s cold Yankee technique. Their relationship implicitly suggests that Mexican Americans could be recognized as true U.S. citizens through linguistic acculturation, political engagement, and aesthetic integration without abandoning their cultural heritage. At the same time, Anglo-Americans could learn to appreciate the accomplishments of Mexican American culture without having dismissive racialist reactions, a precondition for ensuring equitable treatment. The cultural antagonisms of the borderlands can be symbolically resolved within a modernist aesthetic cosmopolitanism even while proving the cultured

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fitness of Mexican Americans for U.S. nationalism, a premise brokered by Caballero itself as a collaborative aesthetic effort between an AngloAmerican woman and a tejana.41 Similarly, the class of Texas Mexicans most often victims of the Borderlands War and customary Anglo-Texan racism had to be courted into U.S. nationality as well. If Caballero mainly focuses on the romantic couplings of the elites, nonetheless the emergent Texas-Mexican working class had to be represented as consenting to the economic modernization initiated by border modernity. Limón identifies the courting of peones into U.S. capitalism, and specifically into wage-labor relations, as the novel’s fourth romance. LULAC had pointedly condemned both peonage and child labor; by 1936, LULAC’s revised “Aims and Purposes” stated, as point 22, “We shall denounce every act of peonage and mistreatment as well as the employment of our minor children of scholastic age” (“Aims and Purposes,” 27). Similarly denouncing peonage as an antimodern form of slavery, Caballero depicts the implementation of wage labor, vital to the peaceful integration of nonelite Texas Mexicans, as one motivated by peón desire to modernize their work situations, to find within the anonymous and abstracted character of wage labor the freedom denied to them in the all-too-personalized and hierarchical debt peonage to the ranchero. The peones learn to desire the wage-labor relationship that promises self-determination, as the ranch hand Esteban relates: “The gringos hire Mexicans, pay them well, and they do what they please with the money. Not like our masters who charge us for rags of clothes and tobacco at so high a price that we are always in debt to them and are never paid a wage.” Freedom for the peones takes the form of contract, and under the new forms of wage labor they apparently gain the ability to consent to the disposition of their labor power rather than be unfairly coerced into debt peonage. This freedom is not merely economic, but social as well. The economic bondage of peonage had also entailed exploitative relationships between patrón and peón in the social field. Particularly onerous was the droit de seigneur, under which patrones (such as the Don’s hypermasculine eldest son, Alvaro) appropriated the bodies of peón wives and daughters for their sexual pleasure. Seeking to escape the iron heel of the master, the peones find in U.S. democracy a formal political equality with the patrones scarcely imaginable under debt peonage, an equality not immediately undone by Anglo-Texan racial animosity. “Not all the gringos hate us,” says Esteban, “and soon their law says we can vote and our vote as good as the masters. Doesn’t that sound good to the ears?” Denied wages, freedom, dignity, and even souls by their haughty masters, the peones of

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Rancho La Palma de Cristo welcome “the rebellion that had been stirring in their hearts for many months” with the coming of los americanos (Caballero, 220). As the literary scholar Louis Mendoza has pointed out, the narrative further connects the struggles of elite tejanas and working-class peones by emphasizing “their shared status as dominated subjects and a common source of domination—Don Santiago”; the resulting furtive, contingent alliance “subverts both the master-peon and the patriarch-family relationship” (52). Yet even as Caballero depicted the modernization of gender and labor relations as offering new degrees of freedom, especially for elite tejanas and the Texas-Mexican working class, González cautioned in other writings that the antiracist orientation of LULAC could be deployed to reinforce other social hierarchies no less detrimental to the democratization of the Texas-Mexican community. As Cotera has observed, González “suspected that LULAC might be used” by its male leaders “to create a vast political machine that would merely perpetuate the disenfranchisement of working-class Texas Mexicans” at another, even more insidious level (“Introduction,” 28). Ever critical of the old Texas-Mexican caste system of peonage, González considered any new form of domination within the Texas-Mexican community to be as equally detrimental to democratic dreams as Anglo-Texan racism. Operating under the twin guises of liberalism—capitalism and democracy—border modernity initiated a profound revolution in class and gender relationships within the Texas-Mexican community and in cultural and racial relations between that community and Anglo-Texas. Formulated in response to those changes, the paradigm Caballero offers—courtship as national incorporation—appealed powerfully to LULAC’s desire for Mexican American effective citizenship even while revising the organization’s gendered imaginary to include tejanas. With power differentials seemingly effaced through the consensual romance that enables the dual disarticulations of race and culture, race and citizenship, Anglo-Texans and Texas Mexicans can not only find common ground on Texas soil but also build a nation there. Eimer and González’s reply to the Centennial suggested that, even when customary racism and customary sexism might dictate otherwise, women would fight together across racial lines to expand democratic possibilities beyond gendered patriarchal boundaries of tradition. In this regard, the coauthors’ critical eye is more attuned to the perils of revived practices of domination than to the new ones that would arise under border modernity. The binary of resistance and collaboration, mo-

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bilized within Caballero’s antipatriarchal narrative of liberation, structures a pragmatic, strategic accommodation between Anglo-Texans and Texas Mexicans that vacates critical analysis once its project of consent is apparently realized. Having banished traditional ethnic Mexican patriarchy, the novel’s liberal imaginings leave no room for discussion of the operations of a modernized patriarchal civil society or the experience of new regimes of discipline and repression that working-class Mexican Americans would come to know all too well on the factory floor and in the fields. That omission suggests a profound narrative inability to account for, and therefore resolve symbolically, the new social contradictions that would arise from border modernity. Even Caballero’s depiction of companionate marriage as the desirable paradigm of gender equality undermines the possibility of further critical analysis of the institution as a gendered construction within the terms of the novel itself. Similarly, critiques of contractual consent in wage labor go nowhere under LULAC’s deployment of liberal discourses about citizenship-based rights. Ultimately, the multiplicity of Caballero’s romances serves to underscore the incomplete and contradictory elements of such a celebratory, consensual consolidation of Texas Mexicans into U.S. nationalism. Keeping this in mind, scholars of Caballero and other Mexican American literature of the Centennial decade must meet the challenge of taking into account the interpretive frameworks offered by the texts themselves. As feminist resistance and desire are imagined in Caballero as being outside the exercise of patriarchal power, the subsequent romantic marital unions seem to be solely the result of consensus. This paradigm ultimately occludes the possibility that different types of power relations also structure romantic marriages, wage-labor relations, and literary aesthetics. Critiques that operate within the binary of resistance and collaboration, or force and consent, are in danger of replicating the critical terms of the novel itself and thus reifying the political liberalism of the United States as the ideological horizon of criticism. Reintroducing the historical social dynamics marginalized by the liberal discourses of Caballero would then make more apparent the hazards of collapsing narratives of resistance into narratives of national development. Tellingly, foundational fictions narrate consensus for nation as the hegemony of (would-be) national elites. Embodying the contradictions of Americanization strategies, Caballero foregrounds the postcolonial condition of the twentieth-century Mexican American community for which consensus, like love, could not be taken for granted.

Epilogue: From Centennial to Sesquicentennial

History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its “ruses” turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious

In the Southwest Review for summer 1942, the renowned University of Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie published “The Alamo’s Immortalization of Words” in an implicit response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the previous December. Examining the discursive aftermath of the Battle of the Alamo in March 1836, Dobie maintained that that defeat had generated the “two sentences originated so far by Texas . . . destined for immortality: ‘Remember the Alamo’ and ‘Thermopylae had her messenger of defeat—the Alamo had none’” (“Immortalization” 402). Taken together, the battle cry and the learned epitaph had the power “to make men defend liberty and fight like tigers against tyrants” (410). For Dobie, Texas was created through an act of remembrance, and the continuous invocation of that remembrance ensured that contemporary Texans would not so much commemorate the actions of heroic forebears as relive them. Even as the United States experienced stinging setbacks from Japan’s military might throughout the Pacific theater, Dobie suggested that the traumatic defeat of a white nation by a nonwhite one was but a temporary setback that would immediately spur the defeated to invent the cultural resources to vanquish the victor. Although not explicitly mentioning “Remember Pearl Harbor” or President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “A day that will live in infamy” as contemporary manifestations of this phenomenon, Dobie nonetheless implied that new patriotic slogans would emerge to

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help win the new war by stirring the most profound sentiments of nationalist fervor. Tracing the origins of the two Texan aphorisms, Dobie emphasized the depths of racial conflict that spurred their creation. At the Battle of San Jacinto, which avenged the loss at the Alamo, Dobie wrote, “the Texians seemed to have kept on yelling as long as they kept on killing” (404). So completely did the battle cry become a battlefield weapon that Dobie proclaimed he could not “recall any other battle in history in which a cry seems so much a part of the substance of the battle itself and to so sum up causes for revenge” (405). He related how one Anglo-Texan combatant, a future Texas Ranger particularly fond of the commemoration of the Alamo, went so far as to refuse General Sam Houston’s orders to “slow down” the one-sided slaughter of Mexican soldiers. Instead, “in his healthy way Captain Billingsley went on remembering the Alamo” (404). In Dobie’s formulation, the discursive commemoration of the Alamo was self-legitimating and self-actuating. But even this uniquely Anglo-Texan commemoration needed its Mexican Other to achieve full intelligibility. Since “it takes both the cry and the anti-cry to make the full drama, the wild music and the epic poetry of San Jacinto,” Dobie gave what he asserted was the response of the hapless, inarticulate Mexicans: “Me no Alamo! Me no Goliad!” (406). Reaffirming Gayatri Spivak’s maxim that the subaltern cannot speak (even while speaking) but is always spoken for within colonial discourse, Dobie’s article extended the racial triumphalism of Texas Centennial discourses to the new war overseas. Anglo-Texans of the 1940s continued to “remember the Alamo” in much the same way, Américo Paredes suggested in a short typewritten note titled “Alamism” that referenced Dobie’s article. Whereas Dobie concerned himself with rallying U.S. troops for upcoming Second World War battles, Paredes placed himself on the frontline of the racial war still being waged in Texas. In “Alamism,” Paredes analyzed how the AngloTexan discourse of the Alamo had transformed a discrete political conflict over a century old into an endless race war. Like other Texas-Mexican intellectuals of the era, Paredes identified Alamism as a key component of the legitimation of Anglo-Texan violence against Texas Mexicans; under the color of Alamism, “murder ceased to be murder, and theft was no longer theft.” Alamism authorized not only the self-interested economic goal of the seizure of Texas-Mexican land, but also a racialized campaign of terror against Texas Mexicans designed to police social interactions. Whether “driving some Mexican ranchero off his land or stringing up a Mexican sheepherder by the testicles for the mere fun of it,” Paredes

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argued, Anglo-Texans well after 1836 commemorated their “patriotism in the manner of the fathers of the Texas Republic.” Recognizing that colonial domination required ideological justification among the colonizers, Paredes argued that Alamism had furnished “the Casus Belli for the attack against the Border Mexican’s property and rights” for over a century. “The Texans had made the word [“Alamo”] a sword” by “controlling the sources” of Texas historiography. By making the Alamo “as familiar as the Greeks did Thermopylae,” Anglo-Texan state intellectuals such as Dobie implicitly sanctioned the most extreme violence against Texas Mexicans in the name of racial empire.1 Paredes then suggested that an anticolonial counternarrative could emerge by reorienting the epistemological framework of analysis with the simple question, “What did Persians think?” (“Alamism”). Indeed, Paredes had implicitly answered the question of what Texas Mexicans thought of Anglo-Texan domination with his first scholarly article, “The Mexico-Texan Corrido,” which appeared in the same issue of the Southwest Review as Dobie’s own articulation of Alamism. “The Mexico-Texan Corrido” initiated Paredes’s post-Centennial examination of Texas-Mexican expressive forms and a new mode of folkloric analysis that would culminate in With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero. With “Alamism” and “The Mexico-Texan Corrido,” Paredes began to theorize the cultural dimensions of colonial legitimation, specifically in its institutional manifestations, that Texas-Mexican intellectuals in LULAC and elsewhere had also criticized throughout the 1930s. The Mexican American literature that emerged during the Centennial decade consistently identified Texas history as a discursive field of social power that shaped the colonial difference of Texas Mexicans. With the collective experience of a hundred years of being cast outside the social imaginaries of Texas and the United States, Texas-Mexican writers such as Paredes, Jovita González, Rubén Rendón Lozano, Alice Dickerson Montemayor, Roberto Félix Salazar, and María Elena Zamora O’Shea highlighted the experience of colonial difference as a constituent element of border modernity. These writers promoted the need for a fundamental reassessment of canonical scholarly treatments of modernity as a lived experience of the twentieth century and of high modernism as the privileged aesthetic venue for the representation of that experience. Not least of these is the question of how scholars might reconsider the nationalist parameters of metropolitan modernity from the critical vantage point of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The possibility that the local experience of modernity may be contingent upon multiple, interconnected, and unac-

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knowledged degrees of colonial difference displaces the centrality of canonical modernism and its ahistorical detachment from social processes. Revising the questions asked about modernity in the light of colonial difference, these Mexican American texts offer unparalleled insight into the racial limits of the modern nation-state by not only interrogating regimes of colonial knowledge making but also outlining the changed possibilities of anticolonial resistance. In doing so, they form the foundation of a uniquely Mexican American literary tradition that, by the time of the Sesquicentennial celebration of Texas’s independence in 1986, had helped to alter fundamentally the terms of Texas history. The Texas Sesquicentennial of 1986 proved altogether unremarkable in the development of Chicano/a literature. Certainly an outpouring of Chicano/a literature did occur during the 1980s. Major works of that decade include Lorna Dee Cervantes’s Emplumada (1981), Cherrie Moraga’s Loving in the War Year: Lo que nunca pasó por su labios (1983) and Giving Up the Ghost (1986), Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1983), Arturo Islas’s The Rain God (1984), Helena María Viramontes’s The Moths and Other Stories (1985), Ana Castillo’s The Mixquihuala Letters (1986), Alejandro Morales’s The Brick People (1988) and Lucha Corpi’s Delia’s Song (1989). Representing the most significant literary output by Chicanos/as since the heyday of the Chicano renaissance in the late 1960s and early 1970s, these works initiated the current phase of Chicana/o literature that, two decades later, shows no sign of abating. Yet in striking contrast to the Mexican American literature written around the time of the Texas Centennial of 1936, these works demonstrate little concern with the statewide celebrations of Texas’s 150th anniversary of independence from Mexico.2 While Rolando Hinojosa-Smith continued to critically revisit the history of the lower Rio Grande Valley through his Klail City Death Trip Series (including Claros varones de Belken [1981], Mi querido Rafa [1981], Rites and Witnesses [1982], and Partners in Crime [1985]), nonetheless the discursive presence of the Sesquicentennial is muted at best in his works. Certainly, the Sesquicentennial was a far more modest affair than the Centennial, even if state and local governments did their best to sell Texas tourism via the anniversary. Popular Sesquicentennial discourses, while still heavily Anglo-centric, downplayed the overtly racist Anglo-Texan triumphalism so constitutive of Centennial discourses. The Alamo continued to draw tens of thousands of visitors (and remains the top tourist destination in Texas to this day), but the fifty years between the two anniversary celebrations had seen significant changes in the ability of people of Mexican descent in the United States to assert the communal agency of

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effective citizenship. Since the 1930s, LULAC and later Mexican American civil rights groups (such as the American GI Forum, National Council of La Raza, and the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund) oriented toward gaining effective citizenship through electoral politics, legal challenges, and educational reform had, as part of the larger civil rights movement, taken major strides in removing the most egregious racialist barriers to participation in the state’s democratic processes.3 Commenting on the relatively successful integration of Mexican Americans into state politics at the time of the Sesquicentennial, the historian David Montejano noted that the election of Henry Cisneros in 1981 as San Antonio’s first TexasMexican mayor since anti-Mexican sentiment forced Juan Nepomuceno Seguín to resign in 1842 demonstrated how “the politics of negotiation and compromise have replaced the politics of conflict and control,” at least within the political arena (306). Conducting Sesquicentennial celebrations in front of the Alamo, Cisneros embodied “the reconciliation that has taken place between Anglo and Mexican in Texas” (306). Montejano’s magisterial history of Texas, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas 1836–1986, encompassed that reconciliation and the tensions that remained unresolved during the late twentieth century. The reconciliation came in the changes between the Centennial and the Sesquicentennial that enabled a small cadre of Mexican Americans to enter the U.S. academy as information workers democratizing the paradigms of official knowledge. The tensions appeared at the metacritical level of U.S. historiography. Montejano’s historical counternarrative critically responded to the remnants of triumphalist Anglo-Texan history still extant in popular Sesquicentennial discourses, but even more to the conceptualizations of U.S. historiography that marginalized complex interrogations of communal histories. Arguing against a racialist historiography that would reduce all social conflict to the essentialist parameters of race and a consensus historiography of U.S. nationalism that would erase cultural conflict altogether, Montejano’s Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas demonstrated that the struggle for cultural citizenship—communal agency beyond nationalist definitions of effective citizenship—continues into the twenty-first century.4 The muted Chicano/a literary response to the Sesquicentennial also reflected that accommodation, at least in the sense that Chicano/a literature of the 1980s, unlike many Mexican American narratives of the Centennial era, did not overwhelmingly focus upon the explicit issue of history as propagated within the public educational system and popular culture. Adequate representation of Mexican Americans in textbooks on the history of Texas and the United States remained a

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real and persistent problem, but changes in the national and global economies, coupled with the antiracist activism of the Chicano movement, had delegitimized the most overtly racist public discourses.5 Yet despite the differences between 1936, 1986, and the current moment midway to the Texas Bicentennial of 2036, the cultural work of countering racialist state policies, as well as the continuation of racist representations in the media and racist practices in U.S. civil society, connects the historical project of Mexican American literature during the 1930s with contemporary Chicano/a literature. Linking epistemological and actual violence against Texas Mexicans to its legitimation in dominant discourses, Texas-Mexican writers of the Centennial era created a paradigm of cultural critique that, in its basic outlines, can be recognized in contemporary Chicana/o literature. The borderlands subject imagined by Chicano/a literature is still informed by early LULAC cultural strategies of selective transculturation, English-Spanish bilingualism, and literary production, even if that subjectivity has been linguistically and culturally pluralized, politically radicalized, and considerably democratized beyond LULAC’s middle-class norms of the 1930s. Today, the ideals and goals of what the Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa has termed “the Movimiento Macha,” the post–Chicano social movement of the 1980s and afterward that incorporated the theoretical correctives of Chicana feminism and queer critique. Chicano/a literature of the 1980s and afterward focuses on the aspects of representation and social agency left unresolved by the relative political democratization of the previous fifty years, namely, questions of unequal power relationships that continue to be reproduced within a dominant U.S. nationalism and oppositional Chicano cultural nationalism. Contemporary Chicano/a literature performs the cultural work of democratizing social relations not equitably addressed—or addressable—within political liberalism, such as racialization outside legal jurisdiction, gender relations, queer sexuality, transnational migration, and labor under late capitalism. In this sense, contemporary Chicano/a literature, particularly works by Chicana feminists, continues the representational activism of women Lulackers of the Centennial era in its efforts to expand the meaning of democratic practice, albeit while having more radical goals and discursive methods informed by more than half a century of sustained communal activism and critical analyses. Committed to a feminist, queer, working-class project of social transformation through grassroots direct action, the contemporary Chicano/a subject rejects the model of ethnic pluralism, with its

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gendered and cultural division of public and private, so central to the Mexican American subject of the 1930s. Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) best represents the transformation of this subject-making project in its multigenre, multilinguistic, multicultural, and polytemporal presentation. Like women Lulackers of the Centennial era, Anzaldúa criticizes AngloAmerican racism, but even more strongly she critiques traditional Mexican American patriarchal practices. As the Chicana feminist scholar Sonia Saldívar-Hull notes, “This new historian subtly prods Chicano males to understand feminist rebellion as twin to the racialized class rebellion advocated by the cultural nationalists” (Anzaldúa, 5). In this sense, Anzaldúa is the historian of contemporary Chicano/a subjectivity, the Chicana feminist counterpoint not only to Sesquicentennial discourses that scarcely acknowledged tejana agency, but also to its exclusion in Montejano’s Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas. If Montejano’s text represents the Chicano counternarrative to the Sesquicentennial, then Borderlands/ La Frontera represents the Chicana feminist corrective to a revisionist history that nonetheless renders gender and sexuality marginal to both the narration of history and processes of nation building through colonial difference. While a longtime resident of California in her later years, Anzaldúa’s sense of Mexican American history was fundamentally informed by her experiences growing up in the lower Rio Grande Valley of south Texas from the early 1940s through the late 1960s. For her, a self-described “seventh-generation American” without “any real ‘original Mexican’ roots,” the question of social identity is not mediated through abstracted notions of authenticity (the shibboleth of identity politics) but through specific communal and individual historical experiences (Anzaldúa, 234). In Anzaldúa’s well-known metaphor, “The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the First and bleeds” (25). Displacing Montejano’s close focus upon Texas, Anzaldúa renders the border as the jarring choque (collision) of two nations, cutting a stillhemorrhaging wound across the body of the Americas and forming a borderlands subjectivity within the people who precariously inhabit this dangerous ground. What Anzaldúa’s metaphor renders visible is the extraordinary gendered violence that generates unequal social relations of the borderlands alongside the macrosocial forces of political economy and national sovereignty. Shifting the discursive terrain away from the necessary but insuf-

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ficient accounting of geopolitical, legal, and market mechanisms to the concrete historical effects upon disrupted border communities, Anzaldúa refigures the history of south Texas as the violence of state power writ upon the differentially gendered and racialized bodies of the borderlands. This brutal process is illustrated in her poem “We called them greasers,” Anzaldúa’s graphic account of the murder of a tejano couple by state authorities, presumably the Texas Rangers. Even as both are murdered with state sanction, the white supremacist strategies of dispossession and dehumanization are highly gendered: the tejana is raped and suffocated whereas “her man” is lynched (157). Anzaldúa reminds readers that not only is state violence differentially enacted upon colonized male and female bodies in the service of establishing imperial domination, but also that the historical narratives of colonial difference invoked therein that subsume these differences perpetuate that violence at the epistemic level. Like Jameson, Anzaldúa reminds us that history still hurts. Two controversies, one Texan and one national, highlight how the relationship of ethnic Mexicans to the U.S. historical imagination remains quite vexed. In early 2006, a controversy erupted in Houston when the city’s new Major League Soccer (MLS) team announced that its franchise name would be Houston 1836. The matching logo was a profile silhouette of Sam Houston on horseback with sword drawn, an image that, according to the historian Raúl Ramos in an opinion essay written for the Houston Chronicle (1), could not be interpreted as anything other than the Anglo-Texan general “leading the charge against Mexican troops” at the Battle of San Jacinto (1). The historical resonance of the name and logo in a state and nation with a long anti-Mexican history could only exacerbate civic divisions of race, class, and nationality. Rather than promote civic unity through municipal pride, the team’s designation threatened to become a symbolic setback for a booming multicultural, polyglot contemporary city of immigrants built upon land dredged by Mexican prisoners of war captured on the nearby battlefield of San Jacinto in 1836. The ensuing debate forced the MLS team to change the name, but the public furor—which included irate emails to Ramos telling him, a tejano born in San Antonio, to “go back to Mexico”—demonstrates that the struggle of Mexican Americans to achieve legitimacy within the state’s imaginary is far from over.6 Similarly, the controversy over the absence of Latino/a stories in The War (2007), the filmmaker Ken Burns’s sweeping documentary about the “American” experience in the Second World War, invites comparison to the situation that LULAC fought to correct in the 1930s: the continuing

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erasure of Latinos/as from the national imaginary. The journalism professor Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez presciently outlined the symbolic effects of expunging Latinas/os from the narrative of the one “good war” in living memory: “General treatments of World War II, of the Great Depression, and of the postwar years in America generally exclude stories of U.S. Latinos and Latinas. . . . It is as if, to apply Ralph Ellison’s analogy to Mexican Americans, they were invisible men and women—part of the landscape, supporting actors in a drama that purported only to affect them, not to be affected by them, a history that denies them the recognition of the very agency they courageously demonstrated time and again” (xvii). If the Greatest Generation is revered as the exemplar of the U.S. commitment to democracy, then Burns’s omission of the wartime experiences of the roughly five hundred thousand Latinos who served in the U.S. military forces during the war reinforces dominant nativist narratives about Latinos/as as recent illegal aliens who have contributed nothing to the preservation of the nation’s freedom and thus have done nothing to deserve its largess. While Latino/a activist pressure forced Burns to add interview footage of Latinos and Native Americans (another excluded group), the effect appeared to be one of token supplementarity rather than absolute necessity. Some sixty-five years after Dobie erased the tejano contribution to Texas independence in refurbishing “Remember the Alamo” for the Second World War, Burns repeated the historical elision of Mexican Americans in that war, a conflict that Paredes and many Lulackers helped to win. Failing to place Latinos and Native Americans at the documentary’s symbolic center, The War circulated a nationalist narrative about the cultural and racial boundaries of the nation that reinscribed the historical marginalization of Mexican Americans. The question of who belongs to the nation—and therefore of who deserves state protection and support—will only become more acute as the United States faces the world-historical transition from a “white” democracy to a democracy of color in an increasingly, but unevenly, globalizing world.7 Unless equitable regimes of representation and economy can be negotiated, social polarization coupled with nativist intransigence may signal an unhappy end to the American Experiment, as rancorous as its history has already been. Yet as cynically abused as the term “democracy” has been in the history of the United States, the utopian impulse at its core has inspired communities excluded from its actual implementation to struggle mightily to put themselves within its expanded circumference. It has become another name for egalitarian justice in a nation that has been all too forgetful in some matters of justice and all too mindful of it

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in others. Emerging from a moment in U.S. history that has been defined by a former president from Texas under the banner of “Remember 9/11,” the United States would do well to consider that every act of remembrance ushers in the future through the portal of the past. In devising that future, the nation must neither confuse the demand for justice with the desire to dominate, nor the call of duty for the abandonment of democratic principles.

Notes

Introduction 1. The issue of terminology is always fraught with peril, particularly as communal self-identification in the Texas-Mexican community changed considerably over the first three decades of the twentieth century. Throughout this study, I use the terms “Texas Mexican” and “tejano/a” to refer to U.S. citizens of Mexican descent resident in Texas, while “Mexican American” refers to U.S. citizens of Mexican descent in general. “Mexican national” refers to a citizen of the Republic of Mexico regardless of residence. “Mexican” refers to the image of Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans alike in the Anglo-American racial imaginary, while “ethnic Mexican” references the transnational cultural identification of Mexican national and Mexican Americans in Greater Mexico, Américo Paredes’s term for the cultural geography of Mexico outside the geopolitical boundaries of the Mexican nation-state. The term “Latin American,” used by the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), requires some contextualization, as it does not match the present-day usage of referring to someone from a Latin American nation. Rather, since the English word “Mexican” was used so pejoratively by Anglo-Texans throughout much of the twentieth century, middleclass Texas-Mexican intellectuals deployed “Latin American” both to retain a sense of identity with greater “Latin” culture (Spanish and French) and to assert their claims to U.S. citizenship in a manner linguistically parallel to other ethnic Americans (e.g., Italian Americans or Irish Americans). In this sense, the term is a contestatory response to their subordinate positioning within the United States and an acknowledgment of the social depths of that subordination. 2. Rosaura Sánchez examines the process by which Californios moved from a communal identity as regional elites during the first half of the nineteenth century to a besieged, proletarianized one by the end of that century. See Telling Identities: The California Testimonios (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Genaro Padilla traces similar developments in California and New Mexico in his study My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993).

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3. No corrido is more telling in this respect than El corrido de Gregorio Cortez from 1901, chosen by Paredes as the paradigm of border Mexican resistance to colonial domination in With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero. See also R. Flores, “Corrido”; Limón, Dancing with the Devil and Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems; R. Rosaldo, Culture and Truth; María Herrera-Sobek, The Mexican Corrido (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); J. D. Saldívar, Border Matters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); R. Saldívar, Borderlands of Culture and Chicano Narrative; Saldívar-Hull, Feminism on the Border (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 4. While much work remains to be done in analyzing the impact of Spanishlanguage periodicals upon Mexican American communities, Nicolás Kanellos’s Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960 (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000) remains an invaluable resource. 5. As Kristen Silva Gruesz has shown in Ambassadors of Culture, nineteenthcentury Spanish-language periodicals in the United States saw their mission, in part, as developing a readership that was culto (refined), and so regularly published poetry and fiction by professional and amateur authors. See Gruesz, 100–107. 6. While Ruiz de Burton’s novels were published, they languished almost forgotten until Pita and Sánchez prepared new critical editions; Arte Público Press republished The Squatter and the Don (1992) and Who Would Have Thought It? (1995) under the auspices of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project. Pita and Sánchez have also collected her letters in Conflicts of Interest (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2001). For additional scholarship about Ruiz de Burton, see the essays collected in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton: Critical and Pedagogical Perspectives, ed. Amelia Montes and Anne Goldman (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). 7. Arguably the most important, and certainly the longest, narratives of this study remained in manuscript or typescript until the 1990s. Paredes’s George Washington Gómez was not published until 1990, while González’s and Eimer’s Caballero was not published until 1996. 8. Paredes’s George Washington Gómez (see chapter 4) is an implicit critique of some aspects of LULAC’s methods and goals. In an interview in 1995 with Ramón Saldívar, Paredes indicated that he did not join LULAC in the 1930s because “at that time the LULACS were extremely assimilationist. They counseled their members not to speak Spanish at all to their children, to bring them up as American citizens and nothing else” (R. Saldívar, Borderlands, 125). However, as I show, LULAC was more ideologically complex and culturally flexible than Paredes, a self-described “very angry young man,” believed at the time (R. Saldívar, Borderlands, 116). 9. Rather than view LULAC as always already hopelessly trapped within the iron cage of U.S. nationalism, as many studies influenced by Chicano cultural nationalism have asserted, I examine an aspect of the organization all but ignored by these studies: LULAC’s cultural and aesthetic project. My book suggests a much more fluid and critical sense of Mexican American identity than these studies would admit. For generally sympathetic explorations of LULAC’s legal strategies and general politics, see M. García, R. García, D. Gutiérrez, and, to a lesser degree, Márquez. My discussion of LULAC is developed in chapter 2.

Notes to pages 8–16  205

10. Chapter 1, “‘Texanizing Texans’: Texas Centennial Discourses of Racial Pedagogy,” expands and elaborates upon this paragraph’s topic. 11. R. Flores’s Remembering, 1–12, develops the concept of the “Texas Modern,” to which my own concept of border modernity is indebted. 12. For full elaboration of this argument, see Bhabha, Location of Culture, 139–170. 13. For commentaries on metropolitan modernity, see Marshall Berman, All that Is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988); Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); David Harvey The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990); Jameson, The Political Unconscious. 14. For more on the commodification of the corrido, see Limón, Mexican Ballads, 39–42. 15. Archie Parr’s infamous Duval County political machine granted minor economic concessions to his Texas-Mexican supporters at the expense of that community’s capacity to educate its children. Keeping taxes low for Anglo-Texan ranch and oil interests, “the Duke of Duval” had created a substandard public school system that by 1930 had resulted in a 25 percent illiteracy rate largely concentrated in the heavily Texas-Mexican population. See Handbook of Texas Online, s.v. “Duval County.” 16. The Treaty of Velasco (1836) concluded hostilities between the Republic of Mexico and the breakaway province of Texas, while the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) ended the U.S.-Mexican War. 17. Relating this episode in A Vaquero of the Brush Country, J. Frank Dobie and John Young give credit to George Sauders for calling off the raid by convincing massed vigilantes that “not all Mexicans are bad” (Vaquero, 74). 18. The following summary of historical events in South Texas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is indebted to Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 50–256. 19. As Montejano demonstrates, the confrontation between the older ranching economy with its cultural axis of personalized patrón-peón relationships and the nascent commercial farming economy with its impersonal, routinized scheme of wage-labor contracts fractured the geopolitical makeup of south Texas. Between 1911 and 1921, the seven counties that had composed deep south Texas had been subdivided into thirteen counties. In an era when “county government was the most important policy-making unit of the national government,” the breakup of existing counties indexed the intensity of the political clash (Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 133). For the most part, the new geopolitical boundaries corresponded to the predominant industry in the area, with farming concerns dominating populous Nueces County along with most of the lower Rio Grande Valley, while ranching interests maintained control of the nine remaining, sparsely populated counties. 20. These measures also served to exclude African Americans from the political process, thus effectively disenfranchising the state’s two major populations of color. See Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 129–155. 21. Described in more detail later in this chapter, the Borderlands War is my term for the uprising by los sediciosos in 1915, the subsequent U.S. military occu-

206 Notes to pages 16–19

pation of the lower Rio Grande Valley, the indiscriminate reprisals by the Texas Rangers and local vigilante groups, and the flight of thousands of Texas Mexicans from the valley. Most Anglo-Texan historians have termed these events “the Bandit Wars,” suggesting the violence was something other than an all-out race war. Recent scholarly histories of these events include Harris and Sadler; Montejano; Johnson; Sandos. 22. Despite its name, the irredentist El plan de San Diego was apparently neither written in the south Texas town of San Diego, nor conceived by anyone from the town, although the plan was named for it. Johnson suggests that the name “reflected the homegrown revolutionary tradition of south Texas,” as the town had been widely known for supporting Catarino Garza’s uprising against the Porfiriato in 1891 (80). He also finds direct connections between El plan de San Diego and los sediciosos “unclear” (93). 23. The information for this paragraph is drawn from Johnson, Revolution in Texas, 71–107; Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands, 81. 24. A recent (2006) popular treatment of the Borderlands War interprets the current situation in south Texas the same way: “And tensions inside south Texas still run deep. The Anglos view the Tejanos as a potentially disloyal group that is capable of violent uprisings. The Tejanos tend to view the Anglos with suspicion, fearing that racial bigotry is always present” (Boardman, “No Quarter,” 45). 25. Even before the Borderlands War, Texas Mexicans of the Nueces Strip had long considered the Texas Rangers, called rinches, the paramilitary thugs of large Anglo ranchers, who used the rinches to drive off or murder Texas-Mexican landowners and to intimidate the local Texas-Mexican population. 26. The estimate of three hundred Texas-Mexican casualties is from U.S. military sources. This figure is deemed “reasonable” by Harris and Sadler (296). Webb’s upper limit of five thousand, proposed in The Texas Rangers, lacks verifiable sources, but Johnson’s recent study of the Borderlands War states that piecing together firsthand accounts and fragmentary forensics evidence suggests “a number in the low thousands” (120). 27. The brutality of the Texas Rangers toward ethnic Mexicans in other parts of south Texas has yet to be forgotten. As recently as the 1970s, Texas Mexicans in Laredo had a popular saying: “Every Texas Ranger has Mexican blood . . . on the tips of his boots” (Colloff, “Law of the Land,” 120). 28. The most prominent of these uprisings included Juan Nepomuceno Cortina’s occupation of Brownsville in 1859 and Catarino Garza’s raids against the Porfiriato in 1891. Skirmishes too numerous to list occurred throughout the lower border region for some seventy years after the end of the U.S.-Mexican War. See Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 32–33, 89. 29. Mexican Americans were legally white in terms of census enumeration and naturalization for citizenship. See Sheridan for how whiteness played out in the courts between the 1930s and 1950s. 30. R. García gives a detailed demographic and social portrait of ethnic Mexican life in San Antonio during the 1930s. Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class, 15–53. 31. These figures are taken from Herschel T. Manuel, The Education of Mexican and Spanish-Speaking Children in Texas (1930). Manuel was a professor of educa-

Notes to pages 20–36  207

tional psychology at the University of Texas who sympathetically portrayed the plight of Mexican American schoolchildren. He was the keynote speaker at the statewide LULAC conventions in 1932 and 1933, and his speeches were reprinted in the LULAC News. The figures were used by J. M. Longoria in “The Education of the Mexican American.” 32. Taking a cue from Ernest Renan’s landmark essay on nationalism, “What Is a Nation?” (1884), Bhabha uses this conundrum to discuss the simultaneous consensual inclusivity and violent exclusivity of nationalism in The Location of Culture. Chapter 1 1. The policy and procedural parallels between the United States and Nazi Germany are often too close to ignore. As the historian David Romo has documented, Zyklon B was first used upon human subjects as part of a racially biased U.S. public health initiative. Mexicans crossing into Texas at El Paso, Nogales, Eagle Pass, Del Rio, and Brownsville were routinely exposed to the powerful pesticide. While the purpose was not necessarily to kill people, as was the case when Zyklon B was used in Nazi death camps, nonetheless a racial ideology of white supremacy common to both the United States and Nazi Germany in the 1930s authorized the treatment of Mexicans as an inferior yet menacing contagion that needed to be controlled. As Romo notes, “Resistance by Jews and the Mexican immigrants to enforced bathing was dismissed by both German and American observers as proof of their physical and cultural uncleanliness” (243). 2. Moses Austin gained the empresario contract from the Mexican government in 1821 but died before any settlement could take place. His son Stephen F. Austin oversaw the establishment of the first large group of settlers from the United States in 1824. 3. In this sense, Price’s ideas have more in common with what Walter Benn Michaels has identified in Our America: Nativism, Modernism, Pluralism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995) as turn-of-the-century racialist nationalism than with what he characterizes as the nativist modernism of the 1920s and 1930s. The difference may lie in Texas’s specific situation in the early 1920s, when the Ku Klux Klan became a major social and political force under the guise of an American, rather than a Southern, white identity. Furthermore, the long-standing presence of a nonwhite population of Mexican Americans had never challenged the Anglo-Texan sense that Americanism itself needed to be protected from nonwhite foreigners becoming naturalized citizens. Anglo-Texan racial identity had been formed during the nineteenth century based upon an absolute distinction between Americans and Mexicans despite the fact that the majority of the latter were already U.S. citizens by virtue of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In other words, the racialized threat in Texas had never come from Mexicans trying to become naturalized U.S. citizens. 4. For an overview of the economic effects of the Great Depression on Texas, see Whisenhunt, The Depression in Texas, and the Handbook of Texas Online, s.v. “Great Depression.”

208 Notes to pages 37–46

5. See Ragsdale, The Year America Discovered Texas, 46–61, for an account of how Dallas won out over Houston and San Antonio for the right to host the Centennial Central Exposition. 6. Others were no less effusive or direct about this articulation of race, Texas independence, and Manifest Destiny. State Senator T. H. McGregor cast AngloTexans as “knights errant of liberty,” the “rarest and purest race of men and women who have blessed this earth with their labors” (5). Creating “a republic dedicated to liberty and consecrated to Anglo-Saxon institutions and civilization,” AngloTexans had precipitated the grand national project of Manifest Destiny: “The planting of American Anglo-Saxon citizenship and government in Texas and the great West—to make one people and one form of government rest upon the Rio Grande and the placid waters of the Pacific” (McGregor, 5, 3). 7. A “Mexican Village” appears on the master plot plan for the exposition. Its location in the midway area suggests it may have been used for striptease shows; many of the foreign-themed exhibits there, such as “Streets of Paris,” featured live shows of scantily clad or unclad women. 8. There is some discrepancy in the historical record concerning the exact number of dioramas shown in the Hall of History exhibit. Ragsdale and the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, the current keepers of the dioramas, set the number at fourteen. However, a U.S. State Department report addressing the Mexican government’s objections to the exhibit in 1937 listed eighteen. 9. While the exact manner in which Crockett died is a matter of contention among historians, the unalloyed heroic version, as depicted in John Wayne’s film The Alamo (1959), has fallen into disrepute within scholarly circles. In another film called The Alamo, from 2004, the director John Lee Hancock presents Crockett’s death as occurring by execution after the battle’s end; the scene is largely, if loosely, based upon an eyewitness account of the battle and its aftermath by Lieutenant Colonel José Enrique de la Peña of the Mexican army. However, this debate has had little impact upon the popular image that still adheres to Wayne’s Hollywood ending. For example, see “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Alamo,” King of the Hill, episode 166, originally aired on the Fox Network on April 18, 2004. This episode suggests that the Anglo-Texan emotional catharsis provided by the legend of the Alamo far exceeds the veracity of any historical fact about the Alamo. 10. The visual representation of Mexicans as demonic racial beasts would have been familiar to Anglo-Texan audiences in film, particularly Martyrs of the Alamo (1915). See R. Flores, Remembering, 95–129, for a full discussion of this film’s construction of Mexican difference. 11. In contrast to Centennial advertisements targeting U.S. audiences, a lavish booklet titled “La Exposición Centenaria Tejana” foregrounded the harmonious joining of European colonial projects in Texas. Both Spanish and English settler colonialism contributed significantly to progress and freedom in the region: “Con el transcurso del tiempo estas dos corrientes del progreso humano vinieron a cimentarse en Texas” [With the passage of time, these two currents of human progress reached new heights in Texas]. The photos and texts in the booklet emphasized the degree to which Spanish and Mexican contributions in ranching, architecture, and commerce blended harmoniously with U.S. sensibilities. As a

Notes to pages 47–50  209

document influenced by the Roosevelt administration’s Good Neighbor policy, the unsigned booklet eschews the long history of cultural conflict in favor of a rosy celebration of mutual admiration. 12. As part of its intelligence-gathering operations in Mexico, the U.S. State Department kept close tabs on Mexican public opinion as expressed in periodicals and in fact created a file devoted specifically to Mexican reactions to the Texas Centennial. See Records of the U.S. Department of State Decimal Files 811.607 Texas Centennial/113. The specific file is 811.607: Texas Centennial. The file shows that the Mexican government lodged several objections to specific Centennial activities. 13. These circumstances apparently did not entirely block official Mexican participation at the local level. The New York Times reported in April 1936 that the Mexican consul in Galveston had “agreed to provide Mexicans for the roles of Santa Anna, General Almonte and enemy soldiers in a centennial presentation of the ‘Fall of the Alamo’” (“To ‘Remember,’” 17). The article did not indicate if the consul planned to be in attendance. 14. Once the Greater Texas and Pan American Exposition ended, the set of dioramas was moved to the Texas Memorial Museum on the campus of the University of Texas, where they remained on display for over three decades. Seeing new light after another three decades in storage, eight of these dioramas were restored in 2000 and are now on display at the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Museum in Austin. 15. The Mexican government also protested a caption-writing contest, widely advertised in major Texas newspapers, sponsored by General Foods through its Post Cereals division. The offending advertisement was part of a nine-week series in which readers were encouraged to write a caption to a scene drawn from Texas history for a chance to win five thousand dollars in prizes. The scene in question depicted “the story of the Massacre at Goliad” (“As a Texan,” 5). A large drawing showed a long line of faceless Mexican soldiers executing unarmed Anglo-Texans, who writhe in bullet-ridden agony; a smaller insert pictured a mustachioed Mexican trooper arrogantly informing an Anglo-Texan captive that “you are not prisoners of war, but traitors to Mexico! You are to be shot down like dogs!” (“As a Texan,” 5). The contest entry was to write the Anglo-Texan’s reply. Within three days of its appearance on April 3, the Mexican government had filed a protest to the U.S. State Department, calling the advertisement “objectionable to Mexican American relations” (Records of the U.S. Department of State Decimal Files 811.607 Texas Centennial/113). The advertisement’s image is based upon Norman Price’s “Goliad Executions.” 16. The Daughters of the Republic of Texas published a third edition of TwiceTold Tales in 2000 as part of a Texas Centennial Project. 17. The University of Texas historian Eugene C. Barker, Austin’s biographer during the Centennial era, put the matter in a more sophisticated, but ultimately equivalent, manner: “Austin’s success was due, in fact, to his complete and wholehearted adoption of the obligations of a Mexican citizen. He strove honestly to make Texas a model state in the Mexican system—a Utopian dream, as he came to realize . . . the causes of failure were inherent in Mexican character and experience, and are not charg[e]able to lack of sincerity, of sympathetic forbearance,

210 Notes to pages 50–63

or of patient, thoughtful labor on Austin’s part” (448). Barker’s view was in fact moderate for the time in that he did not automatically assign primary causality to racial causes. Perhaps this outlook allowed him to become the academic mentor to Carlos E. Castañeda and Jovita González, although he took some exception to González’s master’s thesis. 18. Texas History Movies went through several editions in its thirty-one-year public school run between 1928 and 1959. The “generally unfavorable” depiction of Mexicans in the original Texas History Movies drew protests from Mexican Americans throughout this period; the historian and comics illustrator Jack Jackson notes how Mexican American veterans of the Second World War in particular “protested the way in which Texas History Movies treated Mexicans” (47). In 1974, the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA) issued a more culturally sensitive version titled Texas History Illustrated and then returned to the original title for the Sesquicentennial reprint in 1986. In 2007, the TSHA published Jackson’s complete revisioning “of the little comic book that had shaped the minds of several generations of Texas school children” under the title New Texas History Movies ( Jackson, 47). 19. The vain Santa Anna often fancied himself as “the Napoleon of the West”; his numerous military blunders at the Battle of San Jacinto and during the U.S.Mexican War have made his bombastic boast an easy target on the U.S. and Mexican sides alike. This valence is less certain in “Beleaguered,” which emphasizes Santa Anna’s sound artillery siege tactics rather than the much-mocked human wave assault of the final day. 20. The dean of Texas folklore, J. Frank Dobie, would reiterate this tale as historical fact as late as 1942 in “The Alamo’s Immortalization of Words” (see the epilogue for a discussion of his article and of Américo Paredes’s response to it). 21. Both Trombly and Webb presented papers at the Texas State Historical Association conference in 1922. Trombly presented a poem titled “San Jacinto,” while Webb presented material based upon his master’s thesis research on the role of the Texas Rangers during the U.S.-Mexican War. See “Affairs of the Association,” vol. 26, no. 1, Southwestern Historical Quarterly Online, http://www.tsha .utexas.edu/publications/journals/shq/online/v026/n1/contrib_DIVL1104.html [Accessed Tues. May 29 21:24:43 CDT 2007]. 22. A perennial bestseller on the list of the University of Texas Press, The Texas Rangers has been in print continuously since its republication in 1965. In 2005, the title was in its eighteenth hardcover printing and eighth paperback printing. 23. Hurtado’s “Romancing the West in the Twentieth Century” demonstrates how the history faculty of these three universities had to weather the demands of legislators and business interests who considered history to be a form of state boosterism. At the University of Texas, James Garrison and Eugene Barker firmly established the centrality of Anglo-Texan history as an academic field of study during the first three decades of the twentieth century. 24. The “peculiar institution” of slavery does not merit an entry in the index to The Texas Rangers. The logic of frontier expansion allows Webb to script a triumphant western genealogy for Texas rather than a southern history of defeat. 25. See Rosaldo, Culture and Truth, 68–87. 26. Just in time for the Centennial in 1936, Paramount Pictures released a

Notes to pages 64–70  211

Western action film titled The Texas Rangers, based very loosely upon Webb’s book. Despite the financial windfall it brought him during the Great Depression, Webb dismissed the film as trivial, declaring, “Paramount made full use of the title and little else” (quoted in Garza-Falcón, Gente Decente, 68). 27. The first chapter of With His Pistol in His Hand, titled “The Country,” is Paredes’s caustic attack on Anglo-Texan historiography in general and Webb in particular. 28. The report of the investigation is titled “Proceedings of the Joint Committee of the Senate and the House in the Investigation of the Texas State Ranger Force.” Johnson, Revolution in Texas, 168–175, covers the course of the investigation and its results. 29. Canales was reviled in Texas as “the greaser from Brownsville” for pursuing the investigation. Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, known as the Angel of Death, stalked and threatened Canales during the investigation. See Johnson, 174–175. Webb lionized Hamer as the epitome of the Rangers during the modern era, devoting a chapter of The Texas Rangers to his exploits. 30. Arguably, the University of Texas Press republication of The Texas Rangers in 1965 demonstrated the increased influence of Mexican Americans upon the political process. The press’s “Publisher’s Note” stated that the new edition was “identical with the first . . . with the exception of the front matter, from which the publishers have eliminated two poems” (vii). Although ostensibly done to accommodate President Lyndon B. Johnson’s added foreword, the elimination of Trombly’s “The Texas Rangers” may have signaled a new awareness of the need to downplay the most egregiously racist and specifically anti-Mexican expressions during the civil rights movement. Johnson himself often walked a thin line between personal loyalty and political strategy. Webb had worked for Johnson when he was a U.S. senator, but Johnson also courted the votes and goodwill of the Mexican American community. For further details, see Julie Leininger Pycior, LBJ and Mexican Americans: The Paradox of Power (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997). Chapter 2 1. The figure of twelve thousand roadside markers as of 1999 comes from Why Stop? ix. 2. The Texas Historical Commission sponsors the publication of Why Stop?: A Guide to Texas Historical Roadside Markers, which gives the location of each roadside marker and the exact text of its inscription. The back cover of the second edition states that “these roadside markers let you relive the triumphs and tragedies that shaped Texas—they let you stand where early settlers stood, see what they saw, and perhaps feel what they felt.” If the claim here is that the historical discontinuity between past and present can be removed through the mediation of the roadside markers, then the irony of the publication is that, thanks to the book itself, “you can read and enjoy these historical markers without stopping your car or even leaving home!” (Why Stop?, back cover). 3. Unlike much of the literary work discussed in this book, including better-

212 Notes to pages 71–74

known Texas-Mexican novels of the 1930s like Margaret Eimer and Jovita González’s Caballero and Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gómez, El Mesquite was the only lengthy work of creative fiction published at the time of the Centennial. Both Caballero and George Washington Gómez, although written during the late 1930s, remained in manuscript form until the 1990s. 4. See Scott, Royal Land Grants, for a listing of Spanish and Mexican land grants in the Nueces Strip. 5. The Greater Mexican holiday of el Cinco de mayo, the commemoration of the Mexican victory at Puebla, is celebrated by Mexican Americans even more than el Dieciseis de septiembre, the Mexican day of national independence. The involvement of Texas Mexicans at an unlikely victory has resonated more profoundly with Mexican Americans than el Dieciseis. 6. Some land titles were still contested by Texas-Mexican heirs at the time Taylor conducted his research in 1929. See Taylor’s chapter “Leasing and Ownership of Property” in An American-Mexican Frontier. 7. Father Joseph O’Donohoe, head organizer of the Catholic exhibit at the Centennial Central Exposition in Dallas, nominated Zamora O’Shea for a corresponding membership in the Texas Knights of Columbus Historical Commission. In addition to his identification of Zamora O’Shea as the first public school teacher in south Texas, O’Donohoe praised her as “a vigorous champion of our Mexican people in Texas” (Minutes, 21–22). 8. Zamora O’Shea often did not add accent marks to her typewritten letters composed in Spanish. Quotations from her letters throughout chapter 2 reflect this as well as her idiosyncratic orthography. 9. Dobie’s Mexican American protégée Jovita González also agreed to disagree with her mentor on matters of Texas history: “You see, it was an agreement that we made, that I would not go into one of his classes because I would be mad at many things. He would take the Anglo-Saxon side naturally. I would take the Spanish and the Mexican side” (quoted in McNutt, 251). On González’s problematic relationship with Dobie, see Limón, Dancing, 60–75. 10. Telling Dobie of her desire to return to teaching, Zamora O’Shea wrote that she knew “nothing else besides the old work behind a desk and by the side of a blackboard.” This letter and several others between Zamora O’Shea and Dobie can be found in the J. Frank Dobie Collection at the Harry S. Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Dobie’s personal copy of Zamora O’Shea’s El Mesquite is also here. 11. These titles are still among the most popular published by the University of Texas Press, a testament to Dobie’s continuing influence as a maker of Texas mythology. 12. Dobie never earned a doctoral degree in English; he had to be granted an exemption from the university’s requirement that all tenured professors hold a terminal degree in their field. See HOTO, s.v. “Dobie, James Frank.” 13. Adina Emilia de Zavala (1861–1955), granddaughter of Lozeno de Zavala, first vice president of the Republic of Texas, had been instrumental in initiating historical preservation efforts in Texas. In particular, she had fought to preserve the historical integrity of the Alamo. Her famous stand in the Long Barracks in 1908 to stave off the wrecking ball is recounted in Richard Flores’s introduction

Notes to pages 75–77  213

to Zavala’s History and Legends of the Alamo and other Missions in and around San Antonio (1917). After being forced out of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, she founded the Texas Historical and Landmarks Association, which erected thirty-eight markers throughout the state. She also served on the advisory Texas Centennial Committee. (HOTO, s.v., “Zavala, Adina Emilia de”). 14. Four hundred ninety-seven roadside markers were listed in the final report on Centennial monument projects, titled Monuments Commemorating the Centenary of Texas Independence (1938). The 264 Texas Highway Department markers were also listed. 15. Writing almost three decades after the Centennial, Jeffery Mason Hancock concluded in his master’s thesis that the Centennial “made some contribution to the preservation of the state’s heritage, but much less than it could have”; time pressures had rushed the production of historical markers, introducing error-filled inscriptions that “are in general too literal, too factual, and lacking in spirit” (125). Nonetheless, the Texan mania for roadside markers picked up again in 1962, when the Texas Historical Commission initiated the Official Texas Historical Marker Program to catalog existing markers and add new ones. 16. Ragsdale, The Year America Discovered Texas, 110–111, details the personality conflicts within and political pressures upon the advisory board of historians. 17. Walter Prescott Webb complained publicly that the Texas Rangers had not received an appropriate memorial for the Centennial (“Monument,” 7). The Rangers received one roadside marker in Frio County, where they camped for a year during the 1870s, and the Ex-Rangers Association furnished one room as a Ranger museum in the Texas Pioneers-Trail Drivers-Rangers Memorial in San Antonio’s Brackenridge Park. See Monuments Commemorating the Centenary of Texas Independence, 37, 156. 18. Much of my biographical information about Sáenz comes from Zamora’s “Fighting on Two Fronts.” 19. The Texas-Mexican educator Jovita González, in her article “America Invades the Border Towns” (1930) related how such racist Anglo rejections of the most war-proven Mexican American veterans only damaged the prospects of a true rapprochement between the two communities: “Many incidents which have occurred lately have disgusted the Texas-Mexicans to such an extent that some have changed from the most loyal American subjects to the most bitter antiAmericans” (“America Invades,” 475). 20. The experiences of Sáenz and other Mexican American veterans would seem to contradict the impact of military service upon U.S. legal discourses about citizenship. As the historian Lucy Salyer has commented, “The strong link forged between military service and citizenship during World War I undermined the assumptions of racial nativism” (848). The wartime need for recruits fostered an alternative, experiential model of qualification for citizenship that contested and eventually trumped in legal precedent notions of citizenship based upon whiteness (or its Reconstruction-era extension to persons of African descent). Salyer focuses on the struggle of foreign-born Asian American veterans of the First World War to gain U.S. citizenship, otherwise barred to them as unassimilable racial others, through their military service during wartime. While the resurgence of racial nativism during the 1920s threatened the naturalization of these veter-

214 Notes to pages 77–87

ans, Congress explicitly authorized naturalization of alien soldiers regardless of race by 1941. Mexican nationals who served in the First World War had no such legal impediment to U.S. citizenship, but they, like Mexican American veterans, often found their membership within the nation questioned or rejected by Anglos. Having their U.S. citizenship honored was the common goal of LULAC and its Nisei counterpart, the Japanese American Citizens League (founded 1930). 21. In 1933, Sáenz published Los México-Americanos y la Gran Guerra y Su Contingente en Pro de la Democracia, la Humanidad y la Justicia, an account of his experiences, and those of other Mexican American soldiers, in the Great War. As with the proposed war memorial, he “explicitly conjoined the rhetoric of democracy with the call for the equal treatment of Mexicans in Texas” (Zamora, “Fighting on Two Fronts,” 215). 22. As part of its agenda to encourage awareness of U.S. citizenship among Mexican Americans, LULAC took over the war memorial project in 1929 with Sáenz’s approval. Two years later, LULAC voted to transform the monument fund into an education fund, a strategic move that later helped finance the school desegregation case of Salvatierra v. Del Rio Independent School District. Sáenz considered the case’s promise to assert equality between Mexican American and AngloAmerican children a fitting tribute to the fallen. Once the immediate needs of the Del Rio case were over, LULAC resurrected the memorial fund in 1934, funding it via a one-dollar assessment to its membership. LULAC never managed to build the Great War memorial before the start of the Second World War. However, Mexican Americans were quick to fund memorials for the Mexican American fallen of the Second World War, the first appearing in the late 1940s. See G. J. Sánchez, “The ‘New Nationalism,’” for details. 23. In the 1924 edition of A New History of Texas, Pennybacker footnoted the historian Herbert Bolton’s research establishing Yseleta, near El Paso, as having been founded in 1682. More recent research indicates the town’s founding occurred in 1680 (HOTO, s.v. “Yseleta”). One can only surmise that since the initial settlers of Yseleta were mainly Christianized members of the Tigua nation, Pennybacker did not consider the far-west Texas town to be European and therefore not an auspicious origin for (Anglo-) Texas history. 24. El Club Femenino Chapultepec, a Mexican American group of young professional women from Houston active during the 1930s, wrote a letter in 1937 to the National Business and Professional Girls Council protesting anti-Mexican discrimination in Houston. They identified the teaching of Texas history in public schools as the root of “hard feelings” toward ethnic Mexicans, saying: “Texas cannot, due to Chamber of Commerce and patriotic society activities, forget that Texas lost a tragic battle at the Alamo and won a battle at San Jacinto. This causes teachers to preach a patriotism not kind to Mexican children. Mexicans have been known to stay out of school [in Houston] when that part of history was being taught because of abuses inflicted by pupils and even teachers” (Kreneck, “The Letter from Chapultepec,” 270). 25. Fregoso, “Reproduction and Miscegenation,” 326, relates how the situation was little changed in 1967. 26. Although she never explicitly identifies the leader of this expedition to find “Florida” and “the land of perpetual spring,” Zamora O’Shea rhetorically merges

Notes to pages 88–91  215

the expeditions of Juan Ponce de León with those of Alonso de León (Mesquite, 3). Ponce de León searched for the fabled Fons Juventutis from 1513 to 1521 while attempting to conquer what is now the state of Florida; Alonso de León led Spanish expeditions along the central Texas coast from 1686 to 1689 to find and destroy La Salle’s settlement. The effect of Zamora O’Shea’s formulation is to locate the purposive origins of Texas-Mexican history some 160 years before La Salle’s arrival in a way more substantive than Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s accidental sojourn in the region in 1528–1536. The sixteenth-century Spanish colonial meaning of “Florida” included the coastal regions of the Gulf of Mexico from the mouth of the Río Pánuco in northern Mexico to the current Florida peninsula (HOTO, s.v. “Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez”). 27. Nuevo Santander was the name of the Spanish province that encompassed the area between the Río Pánuco to the south, the Gulf of Mexico to the east, the town of Laredo to the west, and the Nueces River to the north; the province of Tejas was to the north. The Mexican state of Tamaulipas largely assumed Nuevo Santander’s borders after Mexican independence. (HOTO, s.v. “Nuevo Santander”) 28. Working in the literary tradition exemplified by The Dream of the Rood (circa seventh century), Fray Angélico Chávez employed a similar personification of a wooden object to narrate lost nuevomexicano history in La Conquistadora: The Autobiography of an Ancient Statue (1954). The title character is a carved statue of the Virgin Mary that accompanies the Spanish conquistadors on their entradas into New Mexico. The statue narrates, from a first-person point of view, the next three hundred years of nuevomexicano history. Tellingly, the narration starts once a log is transformed into the statue. Narration by a native living tree would resonate more with the claims of New Mexico’s tribal nations than with those of the Spanish colonizers, so Chávez relegates live trees to the precivilizational realm of natural history. Only once transformed by the actions of civilized Spaniards guided by Christianity can La Conquistadora begin to narrate the Spanish conquest and settlement of New Mexico. In contrast, the ultimate destruction of indigenous communities in the Nueces Strip by Texas Mexicans and Anglo-Texans is so complete that no such qualms arise in El Mesquite. 29. Taylor listed Agua Dulce as granted to Rafael García in 1834 by the Mexican government (An American-Mexican Frontier, 180). Texas General Land Office records show that the Agua Dulce land grant was patented by García’s heirs in 1860, although Taylor lists the title as transferred to Richard King (of King Ranch fame) in 1859. 30. This discourse of rancho nostalgia parallels that of the happy preemancipation southern plantation so prevalent during the post-Reconstruction period, which underwent a popular revival during the 1930s with plantation novels such as Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936). 31. Further economic and social changes transformed Nueces County and the surrounding region during the first decades of the twentieth century. Shortly after Zamora O’Shea’s stint at the Alice Ward School in neighboring Jim Brooks County, Alice briefly became the busiest cattle transportation hub in the nation, with Texas-Mexican workers as the main workforce. By the end of the 1920s, cotton production had eclipsed cattle ranching as the region’s top business (HOTO,

216 Notes to pages 92–98

s.v. “Alice, Texas”). Although ranching remained supreme in Kleberg and Kenedy counties to the south, where the King Ranch still predominated, Nueces County became the leading cotton-producing county of the nation by 1930. El Mesquite leaves this story untold. 32. Interestingly, Zamora O’Shea’s obituary in the Dallas Morning News stated that her father’s family received its land grant in Hidalgo County from “the Spanish crown in the sixteenth century,” suggesting that she and her family believed the date of 1575 to be historically accurate (“Services Planned,” 14). 33. During the Second World War, Zamora O’Shea worked for the Office of Censorship in Laredo, translating Spanish documents. However, her deteriorating eyesight forced her to return to Dallas. Chapter 3 1. I am indebted to José E. Limón for pointing this out in conversation. 2. Walter Benn Michaels has detailed the rise of nativist modernism in his provocative Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. While I disagree deeply with his conclusion that the same dynamic informs contemporary debates over multiculturalism and identity politics, nonetheless Michaels’s discussion of U.S. literary modernism of the 1920s and 1930s as an attempt to hermetically seal the concept of U.S. culture from the intrusions of racially inferior aliens remains useful. 3. As Pateman has shown, the historical emergence of political liberalism in the early modern period created the concepts of public and private by dividing social existence into two distinct categories representing the political sphere of civic endeavors and the domestic sphere of familial life. The former, ruled by the impersonal operations of an abstracted legal regime and the invisible hand of the capitalist economy, became the exclusive preserve of men, who were considered the only ones capable of achieving rational, self-interested, individual agency. While ostensibly presided over by women, whose very embodiment of irrational nature made them unfit for the public sphere, the domestic sphere was also ruled by men as paterfamilias. The result was a social world in which women remained subordinated in both realms. Pateman’s argument is fully developed in The Sexual Contract. 4. See D. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 94–99, for an overview of the mutualista tradition. Limón’s article “El Primer Congreso Mexicanista of 1911” examines a large gathering of Texas-Mexican intellectuals in Laredo that anticipated elements of LULAC and the more radical Chicano movement. 5. The first two of these organizations were also known by their Spanish names, Orden Hijos de América and Orden Caballeros de América. Of the three, only the Order Knights of America did not require its members to be U.S. citizens. Orozco’s dissertation, “The Origins of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement in Texas with an Analysis of Women’s Political Participation in a Gendered Context, 1910–1929,” remains the best study of LULAC’s origins. 6. This figure was given by a conference participant, M. C. Gonzales (Orozco,

Notes to pages 98–99  217

“Origins,” 256 n. 36). Orozco gives a full account of the Harlingen meeting in chapter 4 of her dissertation. 7. This merger was not without controversy over personalities and policy, as the large San Antonio chapter of the Order Sons of America refused to participate in the LULAC consolidation. See Orozco, “Origins,” 222–261. 8. The military draft of the Great War came on the heels of the Borderlands War, and, in the wake of anti-Mexican violence, many Texas Mexicans refused to comply with draft orders by fleeing to Mexico. While they refused service for a nation that they believed did not consider them citizens, their actions were interpreted by Anglo-Americans as further proof of their alien nature. The Texas Rangers and other law enforcement agencies pursued these so-called slackers, further exacerbating tensions. See Johnson, Revolution in Texas, 148–153. 9. LULAC’s commitment to the politics of U.S. citizenship over a transnational politics of racial or class solidarity, along with the wartime patriotism of the Second World War, has earned the organization the approbation of many historians and sociologists influenced by Chicano cultural nationalism. Working from the organization’s stated goal, these scholars have aligned LULAC with a quietist, assimilationist U.S. nationalism that reflected only upwardly mobile middle-class interests. Put differently, these scholars have viewed Lulackers (and the entire Mexican American Generation) as internally colonized vendidos (sellouts) who worked to remove those elements of customary racism that stifled their professional advancement rather than challenge the Anglo racial order on behalf of the community. Even nuanced scholars have characterized LULAC’s activism as little better than tepid reformism; Márquez, author of the most recent comprehensive history of the organization, opined that “although LULAC would stridently criticize American society for discriminating against Mexican Americans, it nonetheless tended to promote reform rather than a restructuring of the political or economic status quo” (1). I hope to show not how LULAC was reformist or radical (or not), but how the organization laid the groundwork for a new cultural formation and social movement. 10. Critiques of LULAC from the Marxist Left during the 1930s came from the radical labor organizer Emma Tenayuca, a member of the Communist Party and a key organizer of the pecan shellers strike in San Antonio in 1938. In an article titled “The Mexican Question in the Southwest” (1939), Tenayuca and her husband, Homer Brooks, criticized early LULAC as “colored by the outlook of the petty-bourgeois native-born” that “ignored the need for labor organization among the masses of super-exploited workers” (265–266). However, LULAC had recently begun cooperating with labor organizers, a development that led Tenayuca and Brooks to state, in Popular Front manner, that “it can be confidently expected that this important organization of the Mexican middle class will play an increasing role in the general movement for Mexican rights” (266). Interestingly, a very young Tenayuca had participated in a LULAC-sponsored event seven years earlier. At a “musical literary program” sponsored in 1932 by the San Antonio LULAC Ladies Auxiliary (Ladies LULAC Councils would not be formed until the following year), “Miss Emma Tenayuca” performed a declamation titled “I am an American” (“Musical,” 12). For further information on Tenayuca’s activism during the 1930s, see Vargas, “Tejana Radical.”

218 Notes to pages 99–107

11. Discussions regarding how LULAC viewed race have tended to collapse the organization’s understanding of whiteness as a legal category within which Mexican Americans could potentially find redress to customary discrimination and whiteness as a specifically American social identity to which Lulackers uncritically aspired. Haney López states, “The Mexican American Generation saw citizenship as a key attribute of whiteness and belonging,” suggesting that LULAC considered U.S. citizenship as simply a racial category rather than a complex political one (3). If this were the case, then critiques of LULAC as a whitewashed, assimilationist dead end would be fully justified. However, given that the key legal arguments against LULAC’s attempt to end customary segregation depended not upon citizenship status (except for the purpose of jurisdictional standing) or racial status (Mexicans were legally white), the organization’s legal strategy turned to demonstrating systematic discrimination against a white group not based upon specific, identifiable individual characteristics (i.e., the “other white” approach). Haney López implies that Lulackers adopted this legal strategy as the entirety of their social existence. Certainly there are significant articulations between the law, race, culture, class, and citizenship, but placing the burden upon monolithic conceptions of race to generalize LULAC’s ideology is to end, rather than open, discussion about the matter. For another discussion of the racial politics of LULAC and the Mexican American Generation, see Blanton, “George I. Sánchez, Ideology, and Whiteness,” 569–604. 12. During the Great Depression, this logic led the organization not only to endorse limits upon Mexican immigration but also to support the deportation of Mexican nationals, as LULAC sided with labor groups that argued that unrestricted Mexican migration depressed the wages of U.S. citizens. See D. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 69–116, for a detailed examination of the debates within LULAC over Mexican immigration during the Depression. During the mid1950s, LULAC supported deportations carried out by the U.S. Border Patrol as Operation Wetback. Not until the Chicano movement of the late 1960s did LULAC reconsider its stance toward undocumented migration. 13. See M. García, Mexican Americans, 46–53, for a more detailed examination of LULAC’s legal and political strategies in desegregation efforts. 14. The case arose in the context of a bond election for the expansion of the elementary school. LULAC argued that the bond would be used to improve only the Anglo school building, thus amounting to a racially discriminatory act. See M. García, 55–56. 15. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear LULAC’s appeal of a lower court’s unfavorable ruling on the grounds that circumstantial segregation, as a perfectly constitutional practice, was properly an administrative, not a judicial, function. Not until Hernandez v. Texas in 1954 did the “other white” legal strategy of LULAC yield tangible results, even as the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision two weeks later rendered that legal strategy moot. See Sheridan, “‘Another White Race,’” 122–142. 16. Toward the end of the 1930s, pronouncements about Mexican American racial pride would reflect the increasing influence of the Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos’s idea of “La Raza Cósmica.” In “The Nobility of Our Indian

Notes to pages 107–113  219

Heritage,” Alberto G. García of Austin Council No. 85 castigated those Mexican Americans who would “smother and hide the reality of our Indian blood as something unworthy and humiliating to those who possess it” (24). García cast the mestizo as the ideal subject of modernity, one who could successfully counterbalance the mercurial nature of Europeans with the patient virtues of the “Pan American Indian”; rather than the degenerate evolutionary dead end envisioned by Centennial discourses, mestizo Mexican Americans had “a promising future” (24–25). 17. See M. García, Mexican Americans, 45. 18. In 1935, LULAC charged the local councils of Falfurrias, Kingsville, and Sarita with “the special obligation to care for the burial place of Don Pedrito Jaramillo,” the beloved late nineteenth-century south Texas faith healer who retains a loyal following to this day (“United,” 33). By placing a marker and fence at the gravesite, LULAC acknowledged the need for culturally specific monuments not immediately tied to U.S. patriotism. 19. Two other proposals accompanied the one for higher education. The first of these was to “to see that every Latin American in the United States of America should read, speak and write the English language” (Sánchez, “Resolution,” 43). While this goal reaffirmed LULAC’s commitment to Americanization, less visible is the organization’s conviction that the civil rights of Mexican Americans could best be protected through the use of English. Turning from the linguistic to the economic front, the second proposal focused upon the racialized wage differential between Anglo and Mexican American workers. As the historian Mario Barrera has suggested in Race and Class in the Southwest, the dual-wage system historically prevalent through the U.S. Southwest reserved the best-paid occupations, typically skilled and professional jobs, for Anglo men, while Mexican American men were largely limited to poorly paid unskilled or semiskilled work. Unions often reinforced the color line for skilled industrial jobs, while Mexican American professionals often had difficulties in joining the fraternal social networks so essential to advancement. Seeking equal pay for equal work by attacking the dual-wage system, LULAC sought to undo the economic disparity that affected the entire community, from working-class day laborer to the most educated white-collar professional. 20. Orozco considers the School of Inter-American Affairs (SIAA) at the University of New Mexico, established in the early 1940s through the efforts of LULAC, to be, “in essence, the first Chicano studies program in the United States” (“Politics,” 473). 21. The justice committee of San Antonio Council 16 in 1936 noted that the DRT “deberían mencionarse los nombres de los Héroes texanos en vez de omitirlos completamente como se hizo en San Antonio en el mes de marzo próximo pasado al conmemorar la caída del Alamo” [should mention the names of the tejano heroes instead of completely omitting them as was done this past year in San Antonio during the commemoration of the Alamo’s fall] (Perales, En defensa I, 92). 22. Castañeda maintained strong ties to LULAC throughout the 1930s, although LULAC’s constitutional ban against membership for non-U.S. citizens

220 Notes to pages 114–120

meant that Castañeda would remain an honorary member until he gained U.S. citizenship in 1936. See Félix Almaraz’s biography of Castañeda, Knight Without Armor: Carlos Eduardo Castañeda 1896–1958 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999). 23. The Laredo LULAC Council, in conjunction with a local Anglo amateur historian, had input into the erection of a Centennial monument dedicated to the founding of the city by Captain Tómas Sánchez in 1755. See Francisco J. Flores, “Texas Honors the Spanish Founders of Laredo,” LULAC News 5:7 (October 1938): 7–9. 24. See R. García, Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class, 15–53. 25. D. K. E. Miller responded for the U.S. Public Health Service to LULAC’s demands, stating, “I fully appreciate the demand made by your organization on behalf of the respectable Latin-American citizens for the elimination of commercialized vice from your midst.” However, he quickly quashed any possibility that LULAC could enlist the Public Health Service’s help in lobbying City Hall, adding that “the problem of venereal disease control is extremely complicated and . . . its control by suppression of commercialized vice is open to serious debate” (“Health Expert,” 2). 26. Rivalry between the two San Antonio councils apparently split efforts to realize the Plaza Típica project. While Perales’s Council 16 proposed the project, M. C. Gonzales’s Council 2 threw its support behind Alamo Stadium. Gonzales, LULAC’s President General James Tafolla Jr., and publicist Henry Cañamar were listed as stadium supporters in a San Antonio Express article titled “Hundreds Behind Stadium Project.” 27. In 1937, LULAC successfully lobbied for the first federally funded public housing project in the nation, the West Side’s Alazán-Apache Courts. LULAC also scored a minor victory in 1939 during downtown renewal efforts sparked by the development of the River Walk along the San Antonio River. Downtown developers wanted to remove the old Mexican barrio of La Villita on the river’s south bank to make way for tourist development. The resulting compromise brokered by New Deal mayor Maury Maverick Jr. did remove the inhabitants, but La Villita was preserved as a Mexican-heritage community center, complete with a Spanish-language library. See Grannenberg, “San Antonio Dresses Up.” Artisanal workshops provided much-needed job training in traditional Mexican crafts. In the ordinance designating La Villita as a cultural center, Maverick touted the preservation of San Antonio’s Mexican heritage as proof of the city’s commitment to Pan-Americanism. See R. García, Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class, 215. La Villita remains mostly a collection of tourist-oriented shops. The West Side still lacks certain fundamental infrastructural elements such as proper storm drainage; a moderate rainstorm will quickly flood the neighborhood’s streets. 28. See “Books and Authors,” New York Times, February 9, 1936, BR14; “Historical News and Notices,” Journal of Southern History 2:3 (August 1936): 434. 29. See The Alamo Remembered: Tejano Accounts and Perspectives, ed. Timothy M. Matovina (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), for historical accounts given by tejano participants at the Battle of the Alamo. 30. While La Prensa of San Antonio, the leading Spanish-language newspaper of the Southwest, covered major LULAC activities, for the most part, publisher

Notes to pages 120–131  221

Ignacio Lozano favored the exilic politics of México de afuera on its opinion page over the full engagement with U.S. institutions favored by the civil rights group. See R. García 262–263. 31. The U.S. entry into the Second World War drove LULAC into a nearhiatus for several years as its membership joined the war effort. See M. García, Mexican Americans, 33. 32. Kanellos makes a distinction between the Hispanic immigrant press, dedicated to helping immigrants to the United States navigate new social surroundings while cultivating a nationalistic identity with the homeland, with the “native Hispanic press,” whose “fundamental reason for existence and its point of reference is the life and conditions of its readership in the United States” (Kanellos, “Cronistas,” 4). However, as my argument throughout suggests, the common cultural and political identification of Texas Mexicans with Mexico blurred this distinction in fundamental ways. In my view, the cultural work of the LULAC News was to bring the concept of a press for an ethnic citizenry to fruition among Texas Mexicans. 33. LULAC’s expansion into New Mexico is detailed in Orozco, “Politics.” 34. In keeping with his conception of Mexican American subjectivity as a masculinist construct, López’s other poems in the LULAC News featured individual male leaders such as J. T. Canales, who was the subject of two poems extolling his leadership as LULAC’s president general. Chapter 4 1. “Texas Centennial” was an entry in “Black Roses,” Paredes’s never-realized English-language poetic counterpart to the Spanish-language poems published in 1937 as Cantos de adolescencia. The dynamic of racial polarization across heterosexual desire reveals Paredes’s highly gendered rendering of anticolonial resistance, something I examine further in this chapter. For aspects of this dynamic in Cantos de adolescencia and Between Two Worlds, see Olguín, “Reassessing Pocho Poetics.” 2. My concept of border modernity differs from Schedler’s concept of “border modernism” in its focus upon the material processes of economic and social modernization that unevenly transformed the Texas-Mexico borderlands between 1900 and 1940. Schedler’s concept refers to the formal aesthetic attributes of literary form and content that, on one hand, differs from metropolitan literary modernism and, on the other, still engages the processes of modernity. I do agree with Schedler that reading Paredes and other writers of color from that era as participants within modernism and modernity allows for “an alternative to the ideology of a ‘metropolitan’ high modernism, a critique from the borders” (262 n. 8). 3. With His Pistol in His Hand remains the ur-text of Chicano studies. Numerous studies of this text, especially those by Limón, Rosaldo, J. Saldívar, and R. Saldívar, have elucidated Paredes’s important contributions to the critical analysis of race and culture. 4. Anzaldúa’s horrific account in Borderlands/La frontera of the brutal rape and murder of a nineteenth-century tejana by Texas Rangers is a powerful re-

222 Notes to pages 132–142

minder that violence against subaltern women was and still is a key terrorist tactic of colonial rule. See my remarks on the poem “We called them ‘greasers’” in the epilogue. 5. “Alma Pocha” and Tres faces del pocho were first published in the collection Between Two Worlds (1991), although an earlier version consisting solely of the central sonnet was published in 1975 as “El Pocho (1836–1936).” In a letter written to the Chicano nationalist poet Alurista in 1974, Paredes characterized “El Pocho (1836–1936)” as a “respuesta irónica al pedido hecho en ese año por las autoridades de Texas a todos los poetas del estado, que se escribieran versos celebrando el centenario de la siesta fatal (para nosotros) que se echó Santa Anna en San Jacinto en 1836” [an ironic response to the call made that year by Texas authorities to all poets in the state, that they write verses celebrating the centennial of that fatal (for us) nap that Santa Anna took in San Jacinto in 1836]. Since both poems are dated 1936, it appears that Paredes chose to excerpt the central sonnet of “Alma Pocha” for “El Pocho.” 6. Like the discourses of the tragic mulatto and the tragic half-breed, dominant U.S. representations of the mestizo often emphasized the cultural confusion and physical degeneration of mixed-blood parentage. But unlike those discourses, the tragic mestizo denoted a foreign otherness that could be imagined as external to the racial parameters of the United States and therefore something to be excluded from the nation, either literally or politically. 7. I’d like to thank Patricia M. García for describing the similarities between the Passionate Spaniard’s unrealistic love of an unknown Mexico and that of the titular protagonist of Christopher Marlowe’s poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (1599). Paredes’s ironic stance toward the Passionate Spaniard also indicates his familiarity with Sir Walter Raleigh’s poetic response to Marlowe, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” (1600). 8. These unpublished works can be found in box 11, folder 3 of the Américo Paredes Papers, Nettie Lee Benson Collection, University of Texas at Austin. 9. Paredes indicates in “Don Guálinto Gómez” that Guálinto Gómez was both the subject of and the creative inspiration behind the satiric poem “The Mexico-Texan” of 1935, writing, “His influence I still feel in such poems as my own masterpiece—‘The Mexico-Texan.’” 10. Although Paredes considered expanding George Washington Gómez throughout the 1940s, he stated in interviews that chapters 1–4 had been completed by late 1939, while chapter 5 was written in 1940; he then “set the novel aside for some other day” that “would be a long time coming” (R. Saldívar, Borderlands, 124). 11. Jonesville-on-the-Grande is a thinly disguised version of Paredes’s (and my own) hometown of Brownsville, Texas. The city motto during the 1930s was “Where Mexico Meets Uncle Sam,” a slogan that indicates how the United States was still symbolically justifying the U.S.-Mexican War. 12. During the nineteenth century, most Texas Mexicans had little formal education except for the wealthy ranchero or merchant classes, who educated their children (always in the Spanish language) at private academies run by the Roman Catholic Church or at secular schools run by a trusted belletrist. By the 1920s, secular public education had become the norm, at least in the larger border towns. As the novel suggests, some border towns did not officially segregate

Notes to pages 143–148  223

Anglos and Texas Mexicans, although vastly unequal educations along the color line were evident. 13. For Montejano, the “web of labor control” specifically means “labor repression,” or “the use of compulsion for organizing the recruitment, work activity, and compensation of wage labor” (197). Labor repression comprised a set of informal and institutional practices, ranging from ad hoc “horsewhipping, chains, armed guards, near-starvation diets” to more institutionalized “vagrancy laws, local pass systems, and labor taxes” (201). While the public school systems did not directly participate in labor repression, nonetheless Paredes strongly implies that the success of many of the above-named tactics of labor repression depended upon a poorly educated, demoralized Texas-Mexican population. 14. The difference between preparación and educación can be understood as the difference between the formal content of institutional coursework and socialization into the gente decente, or mexicano polite society. 15. Parikh reads George Washington Gómez as a figuration of the minority intellectual’s dilemma within dominant U.S. institutions. Being caught between the demand to represent his or her minority community and the profession of his or her choice calls “into question the extent to which the material processes of race mediate the class and professional affiliations of intellectual and institutional power” (251). For Parikh, George’s betrayal as a minority intellectual complicates “both dominant and minority formations in the difficulties of his or her positioning” (279). 16. In May 1936, Paredes witnessed J. Frank Dobie’s appearance at Brownsville Junior College, which Paredes attended from 1934 to 1936. In interviews, Paredes states that Dobie’s talk “really did anger me”; his satiric portrayal of Dobie as K. Hank Harvey came from his indignation over the laudatory treatment this mislabeled “best authority on Mexico and the Spanish language” received from Anglo-Texans. In later years, Paredes would revise his opinion of Dobie to “lovable old fraud” (R. Saldívar, Borderlands, 117–118). Reporting the visit, the Brownsville Herald noted that Dobie had “succeeded in having the ‘paisano’ [roadrunner] named the Texas Centennial bird” (“Animal Tales,” 10). 17. Frank Dell’s comment highlights what Velikova has said about Guálinto’s national namesake: “By giving the Mexican child the name of a U.S. national hero, Paredes literalizes the symbolic identification with the American civic ideal only to call into question the possibility of its real existence” (39). However, Dell’s remark also explicitly makes clear the post-Reconstruction racial configuration of that civil ideal. 18. In her article “Wavering on the Horizon of Social Being,” Saldaña-Portillo points out that even as “the Indian name ‘Guálinto’ . . . comes to stand in for an unconscious strategy of resistance to the racism encountered . . . in the segregated Southwest,” George’s daydreams still involve the elemental appropriation of indigenous resistance for the nativized Mexican; Guálinto’s fantasy army trains by “exterminating the Comanches” (157). 19. Paredes specifically references the conjunto music of Narciso “Chicho” Martínez in Tres faces del pocho. Billed as “El Huracán del Valle” in advertisements, Martínez composed the classic conjunto polka “La Chicharronera,” recorded in 1936 and available on Norteño and Tejano Accordion Pioneers 1929–1939 (Arhoolie

224 Notes to pages 148–158

Folkloric 7016). Martínez’s stylistic innovation was to leave the bass line to the guitar or bajo sexto while speeding up the treble melody on the diatonic accordion. His playing style averaged 125 beats per minute, close to the frenetic 135 beats per minute average for contemporary techno-house music. 20. La pachucada is the name given to the imagined community of workingclass Mexican American youth who adopted the pachuco style of dress, behavior, and outlook. Octavio Paz would publish a damning, influential portrait of la pachucada, formulated during his visit to Los Angeles in 1942–1943, in The Labyrinth of Solitude. 21. Bailes de negocios involved women who exchanged dances for cash or other considerations at cantinas, or working-class, male-only bars. These women were not necessarily prostitutes, but their mere presence in the cantinas labeled them as disreputable among gente decente. 22. In this regard, I disagree with Libretti’s reading of George Washington Gómez; he argues, “Paredes uses and transforms the corrido in the novel as a way of rethinking resistance to Anglo domination or encroachment” (119). However, as I have suggested, the corrido itself, along with potential alternatives, has already been co-opted within the fractious class stratifications of border modernity. 23. For additional postcolonial feminist analyses of the role of gender in nationalism, see the works of Norma Alarcón, Hazel Carby, Jean Franco, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Ann Stoler in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives. 24. At various times throughout the 1940s, Paredes considered revising what he viewed as a provisional chapter 5 and making the novel a two- or three-volume work; the new volumes would have addressed “the social and political problems of [Jonesville] during the 1940s.” George would have found out that his fatherin-law had helped murder his father and then become an activist leader after “chang[ing] his mind about assimilation.” Deciding against this “too sentimental” ending at a later date, Paredes then intended to focus on the “unexpected leaders” Elodia and Antonio Prieto (R. Saldívar, Borderlands, 123–124). This suggests that over time Paredes did come to recognize, in some measure, the feminist TexasMexican politics Elodia represents. Similarly, R. Saldívar views Paredes’s short story “The Hammon and the Beans” as his commentary on how material conditions prevented the development of strong tejana leadership; see Chicano Narrative, 50–55. Chapter 5 1. Montemayor had previously challenged customary racial discrimination when she worked as a caseworker for the state Department of Public Welfare in Cotulla, Texas. See Orozco, “Alice Dickerson Montemayor,” 441. 2. I refer to Jovita González as “González” throughout this book because she began her career as a scholar writing under her family name and continued to identify herself that way even after her marriage on the typescript of Caballero. 3. I base this claim on the manuscript of the article found in the E. E. Mireles and Jovita González de Mireles Collection in the archives of Texas A&M

Notes to pages 158–169  225

University-Corpus Christi, which is in González’s handwriting. A matching typescript was also found. While there is always the slim possibility that E. E. dictated the article to her, the fact that González, as an academically trained expert in the history and folklore of south Texas, had previously published a short profile of Doña Paula Losoya as part of her “Catholic Heroines of Texas” poster exhibit for the Texas Centennial, confirms, I believe, her authorship of the LULAC News article. 4. E. E. Mireles had been principal of the San Felipe Independent School District High School in Del Rio for much of the 1930s, and González joined him as head of the high school English Department after their wedding in August 1935. But by 1938, rivalries among Del Rio’s LULAC leadership had sapped E. E. Mireles’s influence. In June 1938, President of the Board of Trustees Pilar Garza informed González that a previously approved three-year contract extension would not be recognized, curtly informing her that “your service therefore will no longer be needed.” The Mireleses spent the next year frantically seeking employment elsewhere before finding jobs in the Corpus Christi public schools, thanks to LULAC contacts. They moved to Corpus Christi in 1939, remaining there for the rest of their lives. 5. The copy of the LULAC News for March 1939 in the E. E. Mireles and Jovita González de Mireles Papers at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi had the following handwritten annotation by Edmundo Mireles at the end of the article on page 15: “González and I lived in Doña Paula’s old house for about two years—it was a beautiful place and I loved it. Ed.” (box 6 folder 22). 6. The comprehensive history of Ladies LULAC remains to be written. The basic facts are drawn from HOTO, s.v. “Ladies LULAC.” 7. All-male LULAC councils supposedly conducted secret rituals much in the manner of similar fraternal social, philanthropic, and political organizations, further emphasizing the ideal of a racial fraternity fighting for its rights. 8. As Kathleen May Gonzales noted in her master’s thesis, “The Mexican Family in San Antonio” (1928), established ethnic Mexicans would hire recent Mexican immigrants as cheap domestic labor, paying them wages prevalent in Mexico. Needless to say, these employees left once they learned what the prevailing U.S. wages were outside the barrio. All told, the class dimensions of Tafolla’s comments work down as well as up the social scale. 9. Even the poem’s title grants angelic status to Latinas: the first two words “A Las” merge into “alas,” the Spanish word for “wings.” They also form the classic English-langauge expression of woe. 10. For biographical information and a sense of how Montemayor’s feminism played out within LULAC, see Orozco, “Alice Dickerson Montemayor.” 11. By 1938, LULAC allowed the spouses of LULAC members who were not Mexican American to join. Hence, the references in the story to the imagined husband’s membership in LULAC does not preclude the possibility that he is Anglo-American or of some other background. 12. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu outlines the concept of habitus in his study of cultural capital, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). 13. As the historian Vicki Ruiz has shown, the community activism of Ladies

226 Notes to pages 171–177

LULAC created “less of a social distance between immigrants and citizens as well as between workers and merchants than the rhetoric of LULAC would lead us to believe” (91). In feminist action as well as feminist discourse, women Lulackers helped democratize LULAC despite the more narrow limits the male leadership might have desired in terms of gender, class, and citizenship status. 14. While I have not uncovered specific archival evidence to confirm this, the humorous treatment of gender issues within the Mexican American family as well as the use of a facetious pseudonym suggests that Alice Dickerson Montemayor is the author of “Yawn Goes on Vacation.” Montemayor was associate editor of the LULAC News at this time, and, as the case of “Stolen Paradise” demonstrates, she could have either revamped another author’s manuscript or written under the name Villa to invoke her revolutionary feminism. 15. According to the introduction accompanying “My Only Gift,” Piña died sometime between her uncle’s wedding in 1931 and the publication of the poem in the LULAC News in February 1932. Unfortunately, the title of Piña’s poem seems to accurately reflect what we have of her poetry. 16. To this day, González remains the only Mexican American woman to have headed this organization. 17. My understanding of the folkloric models of U.S. academia during the 1930s is greatly informed by Limón’s chapter on J. Frank Dobie in Dancing with the Devil and his introduction to González’s folklore-based novel Dew on the Thorn. 18. Limón’s analysis of González’s complex social positioning can be found in Dancing With the Devil, 60–75. Cotera’s useful overview of González’s career trajectory is “Jovita González Mireles: A Sense of History and Homeland.” 19. Edited by Limón, Dew on the Thorn was published in 1997 by Arte Público Press. 20. González’s short autobiography “Early Life and Education” indicated that Carlos E. Castañeda convinced Barker that her master’s thesis “will be used in years to come as source material,” a prediction which has certainly come true (“Early Life,” xiii). “Social Life” remains a central reference for the scholarship of Limón, Montejano, and many others. Thanks to Cotera, González’s hitherto underground master’s thesis has been republished as Life Along the Border; my thoughts about this important republication can be found in my review of Life Along the Border (E3W Review of Books 1.7 [Spring 2007]: 58–60). 21. Her two articles for the latter, a series on South Texas history, were published in 1932 under her family name. This stands in contrast to the eclipsing of her authorship of “Doña Paul Losoya, Great Pioneer of Del Rio” after she married E. E. Mireles. 22. González was not the only Mexican American female singer performing at the Centennial Central Exposition. María Belén Ortega, a classically trained soprano known as “the Nightingale of the Americas,” performed to great acclaim at the opening ceremonies for the Centennial Exposition. Her successful career thus launched, she would later become a cultural ambassador for Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy. See Las Tejanas. 292. 23. In chapter 3 of his dissertation, titled “Texas Centennial 1936: Music and Identity,” Kevin Edward Mooney discusses at length the participation of African

Notes to pages 177–184  227

American performers at the National Folk-life Festival but does not analyze the impact of González or other Mexican American performers. 24. The Centennial Exposition hosted special theme days directed at attracting specific populations. Catholic Day at the Expo occurred on October 11, 1936, and included a “Mexican program.” For a pictorial overview of the Catholic exhibit, see Landregan, “Catholic Contributions.” 25. At the time, the working title for what eventually was published as Caballero was “All This Is Mine,” one of several titles proposed for the novel. Others included “The Hacienda,” “Eyes to See,” “‘Mea Culpa,’” “This My House,” and “Mine! Mine!” (Caballero, xxix) 26. William Stuart Red, The Texas Colonists and Religion, 1821–1836, published in 1924, gave primacy to religion as the privileged site of racial and cultural differences between Anglos and Mexicans. 27. The Handbook of Texas Online gives her first name as “Francita” but acknowledges that her precise name remains a matter of some conjecture (HOTO, s.v. “Francita Alavez”). 28. Subsequent scholarship has confirmed the presence of three of the women of the Alamo named by González: Juana Gertrudis Navarro Alsbury, Andrea Castañón Villanueva (aka Madam Candelaria), and Ana Salazar de Esparza (Las Tejanas, 42). Las Tejanas also documents the heroism of María Jesusa de García, who was gravely wounded while carrying water to the Texan soldiers laying siege to San Antonio in December 1835. Other tejanas lent material assistance and field intelligence to the Texan forces; see Las Tejanas, 39–44. 29. Silber details the cultural work of the historical romance in the post–Civil War era in The Romance of Reunion. 30. “America Invades the Border Towns” (1930) is the title of the article by González that formed the basis for “Latin Americans.” Published in Southwest Review, the article consists of the last chapter of “Social Life in Cameron, Starr, and Zapata Counties.” 31. In The Texas Rangers, Walter Prescott Webb makes only passing reference to this event. He does relate, with evident approval, how Mexicans during the U.S.-Mexican War came to fear the Rangers as “Los Diablos Tejanos” (“the Texan Devils”) and “los Tajanos [sic] sangrientes” (“the bloody Texans”) (119–120). 32. In American Encounters, Limón notes how Caballero and George Washington Gómez emerged as part of a wave of novels from the southern United States, reflecting in part the common economic, political, and social subordination of the Deep South and the Southwest to northern capitalist interests. The parallels between the Mexican American and white southern experience of military defeat began at least as early as María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s novel Who Would Have Thought It? (1872); she would make the comparison explicit in The Squatter and the Don (1885). 33. Cotera’s critique is also clearly aimed at an overly fetishized, masculinist reliance in Chicana/o studies upon the ur-text of Chicana/o academic discourse, Paredes’s With His Pistol in His Hand. 34. In Foundation Fictions: The National Romancees of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) Doris Sommer outlines the development of

228 Notes to pages 185–190

national allegory in the nineteenth-century postindependence Latin American literary nationalism. 35. Nuevo Santander was the name of the province of New Spain that included the area now known as the Nueces Strip. 36. The allusion to William Cowper’s “Verses Supposed to be Written by Alexander Selkirk, During His Solitary Abode in the Island of Juan Fernandez” (1782) foreshadows the ultimate, solitary demise of Don Santiago, who is abandoned by those he thought he controlled. 37. See Discipline and Punish for Foucault’s theorization of power under monarchial and democratic regimes. 38. Gayle Rubin’s influential essay “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of ‘Sex’” outlines the gendered dynamic of “woman” as the material signifier of exchange within a patriarchal economy, particularly within marriage. It was first published in Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975). 39. Pateman traces the development of the modern political ideology of liberalism against theories of natural paternal authority (used to justify governance by monarchies) to theories of fraternal equality that framed contractual relations. The assumed basis of both, however, is the subordination of women; under liberalism, the political equality of men in the public sphere is predicated upon their naturalized, apolitical authority over women in the private sphere. See Pateman, The Disorder of Women, 33–57. 40. Tinnemeyer reads Caballero as participating within and contesting Enlightenment narratives of liberalism: participating in those narratives in that the main female protagonists (Susanita and Angela) must be “white” or “whitened” to be full social agents and contesting those narratives by making all Texas Mexicans (male or female) fit for U.S. citizenship. Certainly the construction of the elite Texas-Mexican rancheros as white is crucial to the operation of national allegory in this text. Yet, as I later develop, Caballero’s discursive universe makes the articulation of social and political claims outside the purview of liberalism almost impossible. 41. González and Eimer most likely met in Del Rio and started writing Caballero between 1937 and 1939. The extent of their collaboration is unclear; GarzaFalcón limits Eimer’s influence to the “functions of an editor” (Gente Decente, 115), while Limón grants Eimer “a strong authorial hand in shaping the romantic plot” (Caballero, xxi). I would tend to agree with Limón, as González (and LULAC) consistently advocated collaboration with worthy Anglo-Americans. Furthermore, their collaboration would have faced even greater difficulties than usual in Del Rio and hence would have served as a more pointed example of interethnic cooperation. As the Berkeley sociologist Paul S. Taylor noted, “The opposition of Americans to social intercourse with Mexicans is particularly strong at Del Rio, as compared with other river towns” (258 n. 8). For a close examination of the politics of authorial collaboration in Caballero, see Cotera’s essay “Recovering ‘Our’ History.”

Notes to pages 195–201  229

Epilogue 1. Paredes would refine his thoughts about Alamism in With His Pistol in His Hand, stating that “had the Alamo, Goliad, and Mier not existed, they would have been invented, as indeed they seem to have been in part” (19). Here, Paredes suggests that fabulation is a key strategy of colonial discourse in the making of colonial difference. 2. Reminiscing about the special Centennial train he encountered as a young boy in the lower Rio Grande Valley town of Mercedes, the noted Chicano author Rolando Hinojosa-Smith noted how different the social worlds of the Centennial and Sesquicentennial were: “It’s another world, of course” (10). 3. A comprehensive history of the relationship between various Mexican American, African American, Native American, and Asian American civil rights groups remains to be written. Blanton, “George I. Sánchez,” discusses some interconnections between the first two groups during the 1950s. 4. The concept of cultural citizenship goes beyond liberal boundaries of political agency as set by the nation-state to include actions by those deemed to be outside (legitimate) social agency. In the Latino/a community, this expanded notion of cultural citizenship could include undocumented workers and those outside heteronormative sexual paradigms, such as lesbians and gays. See the essays in Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space and Rights, ed. William V. Flores and Rina Benmayor (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997). 5. This is not to say that racist expressions disappeared altogether, but rather that the parameters of legitimate public expression shifted to require a more thorough metaphorization of racist expression. Misrepresentation and erasure in Texas history textbooks are still a problem; as Poyo and Hinojosa noted, “The recent official celebration of the sesquicentennial ‘birthday’ of Texas is a poignant reminder of the little consideration given to nearly a century and a half of pre1836 Hispanic history” (“Spanish Texas and Borderlands Historiography,” 394). 6. Some letters to the Houston Chronicle considered Ramos’s position in the History Department at the University of Houston to be fair game for his transgression of the state’s self-proclaimed greatness in all matters. One letter read, “Assistant Professor Raúl Ramos is offended by the name ‘Houston 1836.’ I would like him to know that I, in turn, am offended to learn that someone who is paid with state of Texas funds to teach in a Texas university is teaching his students that our proud state’s history is ‘shameful’” (Speed, “Pity We’re Paying Professor,” B8). 7. The election of Barack Obama as president of the United States in 2008 was an important development in this direction.

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“To ‘Remember the Alamo.’” New York Times, 11 April 1936: 17. Trombly, Albert Edmund. North of the Rio Grande. Dallas: Kaleidograph Press, 1936. United States. Department of State. National Archives and Records Administration. Records of the U.S. Department of State Relating to Political Relations between the United States and Latin America and the Caribbean States, 1930–1944— Department of State Decimal Files 711.12-711.39. Microform. [Wilmington, Del.]: Scholarly Resources, 1988. United States. President. The Addresses and Messages of the Presidents of the United States Inaugural, Annual, and Special, from 1789 to 1846: With a Memoir of Each of the Presidents and a History of Their Administrations: Also the Constitution of the United States, and a Selection of Important Documents and Statistical Information. New York, 1846. “United Latin American Citizens.” LULAC News 7.6 (June 1940): 21–40. Vargas, Zaragosa. “Tejana Radical: Emma Tenayuca and the San Antonio Labor Movement During the Great Depression.” Pacific Historical Review 66 (1997): 553–80. Velasquez, Ana. “Pay Your Poll Tax.” LULAC News 5.7 (October 1938): 48. Velikova, Roumiana. “Américo Paredes’ George Washington Gómez and U.S. Patriotic Mythology.” Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage. Ed. Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Kenya Dworkin y Mendez, 5:35–54. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2006. Villa, Mara. “Yawn Goes on Vacation.” LULAC News 5.5 (August 1938): 15–16. Walker, Stanley. “The Tough, Hard-Riding, Fast-Shooting Texas Rangers.” New York Times, 17 November 1935, Book Review: BR4. Webb, Walter Prescott. The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense. Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1935. Weeks, O. Douglas. “The League of United Latin-American Citizens: A TexasMexican Civic Organization.” Southwestern Political and Social Science Quarterly 10.3 (1929): 257–78. Whisenhunt, Donald W. The Depression in Texas: The Hoover Years. New York: Garland, 1983. “Why an Education?” LULAC News 4.1 (February 1937): 3. Why Stop?: A Guide to Texas Historical Roadside Markers. Edited by Claude W. Dooley and Betty Dooley-Awbrey. 2d ed. Houston: Lone Star Books, 1985. Wicks, Moye. “Texas, a Glance at Its History.” Texas, Imperial State of America, with Her Diadem of Cities. Ed. W. Wentworth Dexter. St. Louis: S. F. Myerson Printing, 1904. Winningham, George W. The Birth of the Lone Star: History of the Texas Revolution: A Poem in Five Parts, Written in the Simple Language of the Common People. [Austin?: s.n., 1936]. Young, Kevin R. “Heil Davy: A Nazi Visit to the Alamo.” Alamo Courier (October 1996): n.p. Zamora, Emilio. “Fighting on Two Fronts: José de la Luz Sáenz and the Language of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement.” Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage. Ed. José F. Aranda and Silvio Torres-Saillant, 4:214–239. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2002.

Index

Numbers in italics denote images. “Address to My Brothers” (Salazar), 123–124 Adorno, Theodor W., 32 Advisory Board of Texas Historians for Texas Centennial, 74–76, 78, 175. See also Texas Centennial (1936) African Americans: and Centennial discourses, 6, 22, 23, 40, 43–44; disenfranchisement of, 205n20; at National Folk-life Festival (1936), 226–227n23; and Plan de San Diego, 16–17; and Reconstruction, 44; roadside markers on accomplishments of, xi; segregation of, 18, 31, 44; and slavery, 43, 44; and Texas Centennial, 41–44 Agreda, María de Jesus de, 178 agriculture, 15, 105, 205n19 “Alamism” (Paredes), 194–195 Alamo: African Americans at battle of, 43; cultural memory of, 68; dioramas at Texas Centennial Exposition Hall of History, 45–47, 46, 47; Dobie on, 75–76, 193–194; films on, 208nn9-10; German sailors at, 29–31; historical preservation of, 212–213n13; and LULAC, 111, 180; Nazi salute at, 29–31, 30; Paredes on Alamism,

194–195, 229n1; play on, 53; poetry on, 50–51, 54; Price on, 36; replica of, at Texas Centennial Exposition, 44; and Texas Centennial, 111–112, 114; and Texas Mexicans, 118, 180; as tourist destination, 196; women at, 179–180, 227n28 Alamo, The (films), 208n9 “Alamo’s Immortalization of Words, The” (Dobie), 27, 193–194, 201, 210n20 Alarcón, Norma, 131, 224n23 “A Las Latino-Americanas” (López), 161, 225n9 Alavez, Panchita, 179 Allred, James V., 29, 33–34, 114 “Alma Pocha” (Paredes), 24, 131–135, 222n5 Alurista, 222n5 “America Invades the Border Towns” (González), 227n30 American GI Forum, 197 Americanization, 104, 107, 219n19. See also citizenship American Legion, 52 American-Mexican Frontier, An (Taylor), 71–72 American West and Westerns, 8–9, 34, 62 Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of

244  Border Renaissance

Texas 1836–1986 (Montejano), 27–28, 197, 199 Anglo-Texans: character of, 6, 12, 22, 38, 59, 208n6; image problem and masculinity crisis of, 34, 62, 64; in Mesquite (Zamora O’Shea), 89–91; and Texas history, 8, 22–23, 32–33, 40–41. See also Centennial discourses; Texas Centennial (1936); Texas Rangers; white supremacy; and specific people anticolonialism: of Césaire, 129; of Fanon, 129; and McClintock on gendered division of symbolic labor, 152; of Paredes, 128, 129– 131, 139–140, 154, 183, 194–195; and postcolonial feminism, 154– 156, 224n23. See also patriarchal anticolonialism Anzaldúa, Gloria, 164, 198–200, 221– 222n4 Asian Americans, 213–214n20 Austin, Moses, 45, 207n2 Austin, Stephen F., 34, 50, 51, 81, 117, 138, 176, 207n2, 209–210n17 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 141–142 Bandit Wars. See Borderlands War (1915) Barker, Eugene C., 113, 176, 209– 210n17, 210n23, 226n20 Barrera, Mario, 219n19 “Beleaguered” (Trombly), 54, 210n19 Belén Ortega, María, 226n22 Bhabha, Homi, 2, 8, 9, 144, 207n32 bildungsroman, 141–142 bilingualism, 4, 24, 120. See also English language “Birth of the Lone Star, The” (Winningham), 51–52 Black Reconstruction in America 1860– 1880 (Du Bois), 43 “Black Roses” (Paredes), 221n1 blacks. See African Americans Blanton, Carlos K., 229n3 Borderlands/La frontera (Anzaldúa), 199–200, 221–222n4

Borderlands War (1915): and border modernity, 97; in Caballero (González and Eimer), 187; description of, 16–18, 39, 78; fatalities from, 65, 206n26; in George Washington Gómez (Paredes), 25, 140–141; and LULAC, 97; in Mesquite (Zamora O’Shea), 91; and Mexican nationals, 20–21; and los sediciosos, 16, 17, 20–21, 141, 205–206nn21–22; and South Texas, tensions in, 206n24; and Texas Rangers, 17, 64–65, 97, 206n21; and U.S. Army, 17, 97; Webb on, 65 border metaphor, 199–200 border modernity: and Borderlands War, 97; and Caballero (González and Eimer), 180–192; and Centennial discourses, 9–12; definition of, 9–10; and demise of TexasMexican patriarchy, 135, 148–153; and Flores’s concept of “Texas Modern,” 205n11; and gender roles, 25–26, 125, 127–128, 148, 150–153, 155–156, 158–163; and George Washington Gómez (Paredes), 25, 128–129, 140, 144–145, 147, 151–153; Jovita González’s critique of, 174– 192; and liberalism, 191; Paredes’s critique of, 25, 125–126, 128–129, 132–135, 153–154; and Schedler’s concept of “border modernism,” 221n2 Border Patrol, U.S., 218n12 Bourdieu, Pierre, 225n12 Bowie, James, 45, 53, 138, 178, 180 Bradburn, John Davis, 117 Brooks, Homer, 217n10 Brownsville, TX, ix, xi, 13, 16, 69, 76, 77, 125, 206n28, 207n1, 222n11, 223n16 Burns, Ken, 200–201 Caballero (González and Eimer): on aesthetic resources of Mexican Americans, 189–190; and border modernity, 180–192; and Mesquite

Index  245

(Zamora O’Shea), 185; critical responses to, 183–184, 188, 226n18, 227nn32–33, 228n40; dialectic of desire in, 185–189; early titles of, 227n25; gender roles in, 157, 180– 192; homoeroticism in, 188–189; manuscript of, 177, 183, 204n7, 212n3, 224n2; patriarchal colonialism in, 157, 184–187, 228n36; plot summary of, 26–27, 181–183; publication of, 183, 204n7, 212n3; women characters and romantic relationships in, 185–188, 192, 228n40; working-class peones in, 190–191; writing of, 181, 228n41 Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez, 215n24 Californios, 3–4, 203n2 Cameron, Ewen, 76 Canales, J. T., 64, 65, 83, 107, 108, 111– 113, 123, 211n29, 221n34 Cañamar, Henry, 123, 220n26 Cantos de adolescencia (Paredes), 221n1 Cantrell, Gregg, 44 Carbajal, José María, 117 Carby, Hazel, 224n23 Carillo, María, 178, 179 Castañeda, Carlos E.: and Barker, 210n17; and LULAC, 219–220n22; Our Catholic Heritage in Texas, 116, 178; on Spanish Texas, 85–86; at University of Texas, 72–73, 84–87, 112–113; and Zamora O’Shea, 72– 73, 84–87, 94 Castañón Villanueva, Andrea, 227n28 Castillo, Ana, 196 “Catholic Heroines of Texas” (González), 26, 177–180, 225n3 Catholicism, 26, 82, 87–88, 92, 116, 177–180 Centennial ’36 (Ragsdale), 36 Centennial discourses: and African Americans, 6, 22, 23, 40, 43–44; and border modernity, 9–12; and civic duty of Texas Mexicans, 12, 19–20; and dioramas in Texas Centennial Exposition Hall of History, 44–48, 46, 47, 208n8, 209n14;

and Jovita González, 174–192, 195; and iconography of Texas, 22; and LULAC, 24, 110–119; and making of Mexican difference, xi, 1–2, 4, 6–11; and Mexican American community, 44–46, 66; and Mexican American literature, 195–196; and modernity, 6–11, 22, 34, 37–39; and nation building, 8; and Native Americans, 6, 22, 23, 40; and patriarchal colonialism, 53–66; poetry on Texas Revolution, 50–56; of racial pedagogy, 29–66; and schoolchildren, 40–41; and symbols of Texas history, 32–33, 34, 38; and Texas history, race, and democracy, 33–41; and Texas History Movies, 49–52, 51, 210n18; and Texas Rangers (Webb), 55–57, 62–66; on Texas Revolution, 22, 31–32, 45–47, 49–50; and Twice-Told Tales, 44–46, 48–49, 50. See also Texas Centennial (1936); and specific authors and their works Cervantes, Lorna Dee, 196 Césaire, Aimé, 129 Chávez, Fray Angélico, 215n28 Chávez, Dennis, 107–108 Chicana feminism, 130–131, 164, 183, 198–200. See also feminism Chicana/o studies: and Chicana feminism, 130–131, 183, 198–200; and LULAC, 108; and Paredes, 27, 64, 129–130, 156, 221n3; at University of New Mexico, 219n20; and Webb, 64 Chicano/a literature, 28, 196–200 Chicano movement, 5, 99, 108, 130, 198, 204n9, 216n4 Cinco de mayo, el, 107, 212n5 Cisneros, George, 105 Cisneros, Henry, 197 Cisneros, Sandra, 196 citizenship: and Americanization, 104, 107, 219n19; cultural citizenship, 197, 299n4; effective citizenship, 4; and English language, 21, 96;

246  Border Renaissance

and LULAC, 96, 98–103, 109, 121–122, 165, 187, 191, 192, 214n20; and military service, 213–214n20; and Mexican-origin community in nineteenth century, 2, 3, 4, 207n3; white supremacist construction of, 143. See also civil rights; democracy civil rights: and education, 104; López’s poem on, 122–123; and LULAC, xi, 5, 21, 94, 96–100, 110, 164, 187; since 1930s, 197. See also citizenship; desegregation; LULAC; voting Civil War, x, 44, 181, 227n32 Club Femenino Chapultepec, El, 214n24 colonialism. See patriarchal colonialism Commission of Control for Texas Centennial Celebrations, 37, 74, 81 Communist Party, 217n10 conjunto music, 25, 148–150, 223–224n19 Conquistadora, La (Chávez), 215n28 Coronado’s Children (Dobie), 74, 189 Corpi, Lucha, 196 Corpus Christi, TX, 98, 120, 225n4 Corrido de Gregorio Cortez, El, 129, 204n3 corridos: on Borderlands War, 20–21; and border modernity, 10, 153–154; cultural conflicts as theme in, 3, 13, 14, 20–21; in George Washington Gómez (Paredes), 155, 224n22; Paredes on, 24–25, 27, 131, 134–135, 153–154, 204n3; and pocho, 134–135, 144; and Texas-Mexicans, 153–154 Cortina, Juan Nepomuceno, 39, 206n28 Cotera, María Eugenia, 131, 176, 183– 184, 191, 226n18, 226n20, 227n33 Crockett, Davy, 45, 53, 138, 208n9 cultural citizenship, 197, 299n4 cultural studies, 129 Dallas Morning News, 42, 49, 52, 216n32 Daniels, Josephus, 47

Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT), 74, 111, 180, 208n8, 209n14, 209n16, 213n13, 219n21 Davenport, Harbert, 113 “Death Comes to the Alamo” (Martin), 53 De La Garza Davis, Doña Maía Hilaria, 178, 179 De La Garza De Leon, Doña Patricia, 178 de la Peña, José Enrique, 208n9 de la Rosa, Luis, 17 de León, Alonso, 215n24 Del Rio, TX, 103–104, 176–177, 214n22, 218n14, 225n4, 228n41 democracy: egalitarian justice as ideal of, 201–202; and frontier’s closing, 63; and fraternity, 125; Garza on, 103; and gender equity, 163–165, 187; poetry on, in LULAC News, 122; and Reconstruction, 43; Sánchez on, 109; and schools, 104; and Texas Centennial, 38–39; Texas History Movies on, 50, 51; U.S. as democracy of color, 201; and U.S. Revolution, 35–36. See also citizenship deportation, 19, 21, 218n12 desegregation: LULAC’s legal strategy on, 99, 218n11; school desegregation, 103–104, 214n22, 218nn14-15. See also civil rights; segregation Dew on the Thorn (González), 176, 177, 226n17, 226n19 Díaz, Porfirio, 16, 71, 206n22, 206n28 Dieciseis de septiembre, el, 107, 212 dioramas at Texas Centennial Exposition Hall of History, 44–48, 46, 47, 208n8, 209n14 discrimination: in education, 93–94, 103–104, 142–143, 214n24, 222– 223n12; in employment and wages, 18, 219n19; in Houston, 214n24; against Texas Mexican, 2, 4, 10, 12, 16, 18, 31. See also civil rights; segregation; violence; voting disenfranchisement. See voting

Index  247

Dobie, J. Frank: on Alamo, 75–76; “Alamo’s Immortalization of Words,” 27, 193–194, 195, 201, 210n20; and Centennial memorials and markers project, 74–76; family background of, 71, 72; folklore studies by, 73–74, 175–176, 189; and Jovita González, 175–176, 212n9; higher education of, 73, 212n12; on mesquite, 78–80; Paredes’s critique of, 27, 132, 194, 195, 210n20, 223n16; as ranch foreman, 73; and Texas Centennial, 23, 74–76, 78, 175; and Texas Rangers, 78; at University of Texas, 71, 73–74, 78, 212n12; on World War II, 193–194, 201; as World War I veteran, 78; writings by, 74, 78–80, 189, 205n17, 212n11; and Zamora O’Shea, 23, 71–73, 212n10 Domínguez, Adolfo C., 45–46 “Doña Paula Losoya, Great Pioneer of Del Rio” (González), 157–158, 174, 224–225n3, 226n21 “Don Guálinto Gómez de la Garza y Sosa, Carbajal, Chincilla y Bordoña: His Works” (Paredes), 140, 222n9 DRT. See Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT) Du Bois, W. E. B., 43 Duval County, TX, political machine, 205n15 education: Americanization as goal of, 104, 107; attendance laws, 104– 105; and democracy, 104; in Duval County, 205n15; and Englishlanguage skills for Mexican Americans, 219n19; and erasure of Mexican Americans, 197–198, 229n5; and desegregation cases, 103–104, 214n22, 218nn14–15; funding for, 104–105; in George Washington Gómez (Paredes), 25, 141, 143–144; and inculcation of cultural and racial pride, 107–108; and LULAC, 103–107, 125, 126, 159; of Mexican

American women and girls, 160, 175; parental involvement in, 106; portrayal of Texas Mexicans, 49, 52, 81–84, 110–111, 112, 214n24; in “Stolen Paradise” (Montemayor), 168–169; and Texas Centennial (1936), 40–41, 49, 52; and Texas history classes and textbooks, 8, 40–41, 49, 52, 81–84, 110–111, 112, 210n18, 214n24; of Texas Mexicans, 18, 19, 82–83, 93, 94, 97, 103–107, 142–144, 160, 205n15, 206–207n31, 222–223n12; Zamora O’Shea as educator, 72–73, 81, 83–84 Eimer, Margaret, 6, 157, 181, 183, 204n7, 212n3, 228n41 Ellis, Anna, 39 empire, 39, 43, 49, 195 English language, 21, 96, 97, 104, 107, 143, 160, 219n19. See also bilingualism Escandón, José de, 85–86, 92 Esparza, Gregorio, 180 Evans, Robert, 45 family. See marriage and family Fanon, Frantz, 129 fantasy, 146–147, 223n18 farming. See agriculture fascism, 108–109 feminism: of Anzaldúa, 198–200; and Caballero (González and Eimer), 180–192; Chicana feminism, 130– 131, 164, 183, 198–200; and democracy, 163–164; and Jovita González, 163, 174–192; of Montemayor, 163, 165–169; mujeres fronterizas (border feminists), 26–27, 28; postcolonial feminist anticolonialism, 154– 156, 224n23; and women’s writings in LULAC News, 163–174. See also gender roles; women; and specific feminists Flores, Isidore, 112 Flores, J. Reynolds, 160 Flores, Richard, 8, 68, 205n11, 212– 213n13 Florida, 87, 214–215n24

248  Border Renaissance

Foik, Father Paul J., 75 folklore studies, 73–74, 175–177, 189 Ford, John S. “Rip,” 59 Foucault, Michel, 185 Foundational Fictions (Sommer), 184 Franco, Jean, 224n23 fraternity, 123–125, 159, 225n7 French exploration, 81, 85 frontier, 34, 57, 63–64, 210n24 García, Alberto G., 218–219n16 García, Don Rafael, 90, 92, 215n29 García, Gus C., 110–111 García, María Jesus de, 227n28 García, Patricia M., 222n7 Garrison, James, 210n23 Garza, Adolph A., 102–103, 110–111 Garza, Ben, 123 Garza, Catarino, 39, 206n28 Garza, Pilar, 225n4 Garza-Falcón, Leticia, 57, 92, 93, 228n41 gender roles: and border modernity, 25–26, 125, 127–128, 148, 150–153, 155–156, 158–163; in Caballero (González and Eimer), 180–192; and democracy, 163–165, 187; in George Washington Gómez (Paredes), 25–26, 127–128, 148, 150–156, 183; and liberalism, 228n39; and LULAC, 158–166, 169–174, 183; and masculinity, 62, 64, 122–125, 148–153, 159–160, 183–184; in modern marriage, 171, 173–174; Montemayor on, 163, 165–169; and patriarchal anticolonialism, 128, 129–131, 139–140, 154, 183; Sloss on marriage, 169–171; in “Stolen Paradise” (Montemayor), 166–169; and Texas-Mexican patriarchy, 135, 148–153; women’s traditional gender roles, 125, 152, 158–163, 169–171. See also feminism; masculinity; women Gente Decente (Garza-Falcón), 57 George Washington Gómez (Paredes): and aesthetic aspects of subject formation, 144–145; on Alamo

and Texas history, 29; as bildungsroman, 141–142; Borderlands War in, 25, 140–141; and border modernity, 25, 128–129, 140, 144–145, 147, 151–153; and Centennial discourses, 6; conjunto music in, 25, 148–150; corrido hero and modern antihero in, 126, 128, 141, 150–151; corridos in, 155, 224n22; as critique of LULAC, 204n8; education in, 25, 141, 143–144; Elodia in, 155, 224n24; fantasies of George in, 146–147, 223n18; Limón on, 227n32; Maruca’s pregnancy in, 127–128, 148, 150–153; modernist aesthetics of discontinuity in, 127–128, 156; narrative gap in, 128, 145–147; pachuco (working-class) character in, 148–151; Parikh on, as figuration of minority intellectual’s dilemma, 223n15; plot summary of, 140–141; and pocho subjectivity, 140, 144, 146; and postcolonial feminist anticolonialism, 154–156; publication of, 140, 204n7, 212n3; revisions to, considered to Paredes, 224n24; and Texas-Mexican patriarchy, 148–153; Texas Rangers in, 141; theme of, 125–126, 144; timeline for writing of, 222n10; transformation of Guálinto to George in, 141, 145–147, 153; women characters in, 25–26, 127–128, 148, 150–153, 155–156 Gilroy, Paul, 100 Goliad, Battle of, 33, 36, 83–84, 179, 209n15 Gonzales, Kathleen May, 225n8 Gonzales, M. C., 103–106, 123, 220n26 González, Jovita: accomplishments of, 158, 175; on aesthetic and political rebirth of Mexican Americans, 2; birth and family background of, 174; border modernity critiqued by, 174–180; and “Catholic Heroines of Texas” poster exhibit, 26, 177, 225n3; and Centennial discourses, 174–192, 195; and cultural

Index  249

conflicts and effective citizenship, 4; and Dobie, 175–176, 212n9; education of, 175, 176; as educator, 177, 225n4; folklore studies by, 175–177, 189; on gender relations, 163; on identity of Texas-Mexicans, 1; on Latin-American civilization, 189; and LULAC, 5, 26, 98, 158, 174, 191; marriage of, 158, 176–177, 224n2, 225n4, 226n21; master’s thesis by, 176, 210n17, 226n20; on racism against Mexican American World War I veterans, 213; as Texas Folklore Society president, 158, 175, 226n16 González, Jovita, works of: “America Invades the Border Towns,” 227n30; Caballero, 26–27, 157, 178, 180–192, 204n7, 224n2; “Catholic Heroines of Texas,” 26, 177–180, 225n3; Dew on the Thorn, 176, 177, 226n17, 226n19; “Doña Paula Losoya, Great Pioneer of Del Rio,” 157–158, 174, 224–225n3, 226n21; “Social Life in Cameron, Starr, and Zapata Counties,” 176, 226n20 Good Neighbor Policy, 47–48, 115, 209n11, 226n22 Great Depression, 8, 19, 21, 33, 36–37, 70, 112, 201 Greater Texas and Pan American Exposition (1937), 42, 45–48, 209n14 Great Plains, The (Webb), 57–58 Gruesz, Kristen Silva, 204n5 Gutiérrez, David, 8–9, 101 Gutiérrez, Edward A., 108 Gutiérrez Castañeda, Manuel, 11–12, 19–20 “Hammon and the Beans, The” (Paredes), 224n24 Haney López, Ian, 218n11 Harlingen, TX, 98 Harris, Charles H., 206n26 Hernández, P. C., 104 Hernández v. Texas, 110–111, 218n15 Herrera-Sobek, María, 131 Hinojosa-Smith, Rolando, 196, 229n2

historical markers. See roadside historical markers Hitler, Adolf, 31, 109 Hollowell, Grace Baer, 52 homoeroticism, 188–189 Houston, Sam, 194, 200 Houston, TX, 200, 214n24 Houston Chronicle, 200, 229n6 Houston Post, 39 Hull, Cordell, 47 Humble Oil Company, 44–46 Hurtado, Albert L., 56, 210n23 Immigration Act (1924), 21 immigration and immigrants, xi–xii, 19, 101, 130, 207n1, 218n12, 221n32, 225n8 infant mortality, 18 “In the Pearl” (Hollowell), 52 Irish settlers, 89–90 Islas, Arturo, 196 Jack, Patrick C., 117 Jackson, Jack, 210n18 Jameson, Fredric, 193, 200 Japanese American Citizens League, 214n20 Jaramillo, Don Pedrito, 219n18 Johnson, Benjamin Heber, 97, 206n26 Johnson, Lyndon B., 211n30 Journal of Southern History, 116 Kanellos, Nicolás, 204n4, 221n32 Karlsruhe sailors, 29–31 Kemp, Louis W., 75 Kenedy, Mifflin, 13–14 King, Richard, 13–14, 215n29 King of the Hill, 208n9 King Ranch, 17, 72, 83, 91, 215n29, 216n31 Ku Klux Klan, 207n3 labor movement, 217n10 Ladies LULAC Councils, 157–159, 165, 166, 225–226n13 Laredo, 16, 206n27, 216n4, 220n23 La Salle, René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de, 81, 85, 215n24

250  Border Renaissance

Latin American, terminology of, 203n1 Latinos: problems faced by, xi–xii. See also Chicano movement; Mexican Americans; Texas Mexicans La Villita, 220n27 League of Latin American Citizens, 77, 98 League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). See LULAC liberalism, 160–161, 191, 198, 216n3, 228n39. See also democracy Libretti, Tim, 224n22 lieux de mémoire (material sites of memory), 23, 31, 68, 70 Life Along the Border (González), 226 Limón, José E., 73, 130, 131, 175, 176, 183, 184, 187, 190, 216n1, 221n3, 226nn17–19, 227n32, 228n41 Longoria, J. M., 104, 106, 207n31 López, Margil, 121–123, 125, 161 Losoya, Doña Paula, 157–159, 174, 179 Losoya, Toribio, 180 Lost Cause ideology, 44 “Love and Duty” (Machuca), 161, 187 Lozano, Ignacio, 221n30 Lozano, Rubén Rendón, 4, 5, 24, 101, 116–119, 180, 195 LULAC: and Americanization, 104, 107, 219n19; and Borderlands War, 97; and Castañeda, 219–220n22; chapters of, 120; and Chicano/a literature, 198; and citizenship, 96, 98–103, 121–122, 165, 187, 191, 192, 214n20; and civil rights, xi, 5, 21, 94, 96–100, 110, 164, 187; critiques of, 204n8, 217–218nn9-11; and cultural and racial pride, 107–108; and deportation of Mexican nationals, 218n12; and education, 94, 103–107, 125, 126, 159; on English language, 219n19; and formation of bilingual, bicultural Mexican American identity, 5, 23–24, 94, 96, 107– 108; founding of, 5, 98, 99, 158, 217n7; fraternal bent of, 123–125,

159, 225n7; and gender relations, 158–166, 169–174, 183; goals of, 98; and Jovita González, 5, 26, 98, 174, 191; ideals of, xi; and immigration of Mexicans, 218n12; and labor movement, 217n10; Ladies LULAC Councils, 157–159, 165, 166, 225–226n13; and La Villita in San Antonio, 220n27; leadership of, 123, 155, 157–158; and literary aesthetics, 4, 5, 24, 119–126, 204n9, 221n34; and Mexican American citizens distinguished from Mexican immigrants, 101; and Mexican American studies in higher education, 108–109; and monuments honoring Texas Mexicans, 214n22, 219n18, 220n23; on Nazi Germany, 108–109; Paredes’s critique of, 204n8; on peonage and child labor, 190; and public housing project in San Antonio, 220n27; reformism of, 217n9; and reorientation of Texas Mexicans toward U.S., 100–103; and school desegregation cases, 99, 103–104, 214n22, 218n11, 218nn14–15; and Texas Centennial, 24, 94, 110–119, 180; use of term “Latin American,” 203n1; and wage discrimination, 219n19; and Weeks, 40; women in, 26–27, 96, 155, 157–166, 174, 225n11; and World War II, 221n31; writers as members or supporters of, 5, 26; and Zamora O’Shea, 5, 94. See also LULAC News LULAC News: banner of, 119; beginning of, 120; bilingualism of, 24, 120; biographical sketches in, 157; content of, 24, 120; on education, 105, 107, 160; on gender relations, 158–166, 169–174; on goals of LULAC, 98; Jovita González’s articles in, 158; knock-knock joke in, 95–96; and literary aesthetics, 4, 5, 24, 119–126, 221n34; on marriage and family, 166–174; Monte-

Index  251

mayor as associate editor of, 157; Montemayor’s writings in, 165– 169; poetry in, 120–125, 173–174, 221n34; purpose of, 221n32; short stories in, 161–163, 166–169, 171– 173; Sloss on marriage in, 169–171; on U.S. citizenship of Texas Mexicans, 101, 102; women’s writings in, 26, 157–158, 163–174, 176 Lutjens, Gunter, 29 lynching, 13, 31, 133, 200. See also violence Machado, Mauro M., 101, 123 Machuca, J. C., 161–163, 187 Madero, J. Francisco, 117 Malinche, 26, 131, 152 manhood. See masculinity Manifest Destiny, ix, 2, 39, 43, 88, 146, 182, 208n6 Manuel, Herschel T., 206–207n31 Margil, Father Antonio, 87–88 Márquez, Benjamín, 99, 217n9 marriage and family: in Caballero (González and Eimer), 180–192; companionate marriage, 171, 173– 174, 187–188, 192; and inculcation of cultural and racial pride, 107– 108; LULAC News on, 166–174; in “Stolen Paradise” (Montemayor), 166–169; Sloss on, 169–171; women’s traditional gender roles in, 125, 152, 158–163, 169–171; in “Yawn Goes On Vacation,” 171–173 Martin, Franklin Y., 53 Martínez, Narciso “Chicho,” 223–224n19 Martyrs of the Alamo, 208n10 Mary Immaculate, 176 masculinity, 62, 64, 122–125, 148–153, 159–160, 183–184 Maverick, Maury, Jr., 220n27 McClintock, Anne, 152 McGregor, T. H., 208n6 McNelly, Leander H., 13 Meléndez, Gabriel, 3, 120 Mendoza, Louis, 155, 191

Mesquite, El (Zamora O’Shea): on Anglo-Texans, 89–91; Anita García in, 91–93; and Centennial discourses, 6; compared with Caballero (González and Eimer), 185; on education’s importance for Texas Mexicans, 93; ending of, 92; Garza-Falcón on, 92, 93; on hierarchical categories of mesquite, 89; narrative modes of, 80, 87; on neglect for Texas-Mexican history by Anglo-Texan historians, 86–87; preface to, 91; on pronunciation of word mesquite, 80–81; on ranchos and rancheros, 89–91; on Spanish Texas, 87–89, 92, 125, 214–215n226; summary of, 23, 70; on Texas Mexicans, 86–94 “Mesquite” (Dobie), 78–80 mestizo, 102, 134, 219n16, 222n6 Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, 197 Mexican American literature. See Chicano/a literature; and specific authors and their works Mexican Americans: erasure of, from twentieth-century textbooks and other historical accounts, 197–198, 200–201, 229n5; as legally white, 99, 206n29, 218n11; problems faced by, xi; and racial pride, 218–219n16; terminology of, 203n1; war monuments honoring Mexican American veterans, 76–77, 214–215n22. See also Chicano movement; civil rights; LULAC; Texas Mexicans Mexican immigrants. See immigration and immigrants Mexican nationals: and Borderlands War, 20–21; deportation of, 19, 21, 218n12; as mestizos, 102; as refugees from Mexican Revolution, 103, 137; terminology of, 203n1; in Texas, 19 Mexican Revolution, 16, 19, 81, 103, 137 Mexicans in Texas. See Texas Mexicans

252  Border Renaissance

Mexico: and Good Neighbor Policy, 47–48; and Mexican Revolution, 16, 19, 81, 103, 137; northern border of, 12–13; and Plan de San Diego, 16–17, 206n22; racist discourses of U.S. on, 136, 137–138; and refugees from Mexican Revolution, 103, 137; romantic nostalgia for, by Mexican immigrant, 136–138; stereotypes of Mexican soldiers during Texas Revolution, 45, 50–52, 54–55, 208n10, 209n15; and Texas Centennial Exposition, 45–48, 209nn12– 13; and U.S.-Mexican War, 2, 12–13, 27, 39, 43, 47, 68, 181–182, 205n16, 210n19, 227n31. See also Texas Revolution México de afuera (Mexico in exile), 137, 221n30 “Mexico-Texan, The” (Paredes), 120– 121, 140, 222n9 “Mexico-Texan Corrido, The” (Paredes), 27, 195 Michaels, Walter Benn, 207n3, 216n2 Mier Expedition (1842), 45, 75, 76 Miller, D. K. E., 220n25 minority discourse, 9 Mireles, E. E., 158, 176–177, 224– 225nn3-5, 226n21 Mitchell, Margaret, 215n30 Mixquihuala Letters, The (Castillo), 196 modernism: and politics of fulfillment, 100; and Schedler’s concept of “border modernism,” 221n2. See also modernity modernity: Adorno on, 32; in Caba­ llero (González and Eimer), 180– 192; and mestizo, 219n16; Mexican American writers on, 195–196; and Texas Centennial and Centennial discourses, 6–11, 22, 34, 37–39. See also border modernity; modernism Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 224n23 Montejano, David, 4, 14, 27–28, 143, 197, 199, 205nn18–19, 223n13 Montemayor, Alice Dickerson: as caseworker for Texas Department

of Public Welfare, 224n1; and Centennial discourses generally, 195; on cultural conflicts and effective citizenship, 4; on gender equality, 163, 165–169; and LULAC, 5, 26, 155, 157, 165, 166; writings by, in LULAC News, 165–169, 188, 226n14 Mooney, Kevin Edward, 226–227n23 Moraga, Cherrie, 196 Morales, Alejandro, 196 mortality rates, 18 “Movimiento Macha,” 198–200 mujeres fronterizas (border feminists), 26–27, 28. See also feminism; and specific women writers mutual-aid societies (mutualistas), 98, 216n4 “My Only Gift” (Piña), 173–174, 226n15 Naranjo, J., 106 National Council of La Raza, 197 National Folk-life Festival (1936), 177, 226–227n23 nation building and nationalism, 8, 185, 207n32 Native Americans: in Burns’s The War, 201; and Centennial discourses, 6, 22, 23, 40; and mesquite, 78–79; and Plan de San Diego, 17; and rancheros, 90; roadside markers on accomplishments of, xi; tourists’ view of, 34; Webb on, 58–59; Zamora O’Shea on, 88 nativism, 96, 101, 103, 216n2 naturalization of alien soldiers, 213–214n20 Navarro, José Antonio, 118, 157 Navarro Alsbury, Juana Gertrudis, 227n28 Nazi Germany, 29–31, 79, 108–109, 207n1 Negro Participation in the Texas Centennial (Thomas), 41–42 New History of Texas, A (Pennybacker), 81–87, 112, 214n23 New Texas History Movies, 210n18

Index  253

New York Times, 17–18, 56, 209n13 New York Times Book Review, 116 Nora, Pierre, 31, 68, 70 North of the Rio Grande (Trombly), 53–56, 60, 210n19 Nueces Strip, 12–14, 21, 23, 60, 68, 70–72, 74, 84–86, 90, 91, 228n35 Obama, Barack, 229n7 O’Donohoe, Father Joseph, 212n7 Olguín, B. V., 146 Operation Wetback, 218n12 Order Knights of America, 98, 216n5 Order Sons of America, 98, 216n5, 217n7 Orozco, Cynthia, 98, 219n20 O’Shea, Daniel Patrick, 73 O’Shea, María Elena Zamora. See Zamora O’Shea, María Elena “Other Pioneers, The” (Salazar), 124 Our Catholic Heritage in Texas (Castañeda), 116, 178 pachucada, 224n20 pachuco, 148–151, 224n20 Padilla, Genaro, 203n2 Paladín, El, 120 Palo Alto, Battle of, 68 Paredes, Américo: on Alamism, 194–195, 229n1; border modernity critiqued by, 25, 125–126, 128–129, 132–135, 140, 144–145, 147, 151–154; and Chicana/o studies, 27, 64, 129–130, 156, 221n3; on corridos, 24–25, 27, 131, 134–135, 153–154, 204n3; and cultural conflicts and effective citizenship, 4; on Dobie, 132, 194, 195, 210n20, 223n16; early literary writings by, 131; education of, 223n16; and LULAC, 5, 204n8; and patriarchal anticolonialism, 128, 129–131, 139–140, 154, 183; and subaltern subjectivities, 132, 134; and Texas Centennial, 6, 132, 140; on Webb, 64, 132, 211n27 Paredes, Américo, works of: “Alamism,” 194–195; “Alma Pocha,” 24,

131–135, 222n5; “Black Roses,” 221n1; Caballero, 6; Cantos de adolescencia, 221n1; “Don Guálinto Gómez de la Garza y Sosa, Carbajal, Chincilla y Bordoña: His Works,” 140, 222n9; George Washington Gómez, 6, 25–26, 29, 125– 126, 127–128, 131, 139–156, 204nn7– 8, 212n3; “Hammon and the Beans,” 224n24; “Mexico-Texan,” 120–121, 140, 222n9; “MexicoTexan Corrido,” 27, 120–121, 195; “Pocho,” 222n5; “Texas Centennial,” 127, 221n1; Tres faces del pocho, 24–25, 131, 135–139, 222n7, 223n19; With His Pistol in His Hand, 129– 131, 154, 156, 195, 204n3, 211n27, 221n3, 227n33, 229n1 Parikh, Crystal, 223n15 Parr, Archie, 205n15 Pateman, Carole, 125, 164, 185, 216n3, 228n39 patriarchal anticolonialism: and McClintock on gendered division of symbolic labor, 152; of Paredes, 128, 129–131, 139–140, 154, 183, 194–195 patriarchal colonialism: in Caballero (González and Eimer), 184–187; of Trombly, 53–55; of Webb, 55–66 patriarchal relations. See gender roles Patton, Jack, 49 “Pay Your Poll Tax” (Velásquez), 121 Paz, Octavio, 224n20 Peña, Manuel, 148 Pennybacker, Anna J. Hardwicke, 81–87, 214n23 peonage, 190–191 Perales, Alonso S., 104, 113–116, 123, 220n26 Perry, George Sessions, 67 pesticides, 207n1 Piña, Bertha, 173–174, 226n15 Pizaña, Aniceto, 17 Plan de San Diego, El, 16–17, 206n22 plantation novels, 215n30 “Pocho, El” (Paredes), 222n5

254  Border Renaissance

pocho subjectivity, 131–139, 140, 144, 146, 154 Poems of the Alamo, 50–51 poetry: in LULAC News, 120–125, 173–174, 221n34; on Texas Mexicans by Trombly, 60–61; on Texas Rangers, 55, 211n30; on Texas Revolution, 50–56. See also specific poets political liberalism. See democracy; liberalism politics of fulfillment, 100 Polk, James K., 68 poll tax, 15, 104, 121 Ponce de León, Juan, 215n24 poverty, 18, 40 Prensa, La, 120, 132, 220–221n30 Price, Theodore H., 34–36, 40, 207n3 private versus public spheres, 160–161, 216n3 Progressives, 15–16, 44 Prohibition, 78 prostitution, 115 Public Health Service, U.S., 115, 220n25 public schools. See education public versus private spheres, 160–161, 216n3 Puebla, Battle of, 71, 212n5 racial pedagogy: African Americans and Texas Centennial, 41–44; of Centennial discourses, 29–66; and dioramas in Texas Centennial Exposition Hall of History, 44–48, 46, 47; Mexican American community and Texas Centennial, 44–46; Mexico and Texas Centennial, 45–48; and Nazi salute at Alamo, 29–31, 30; patriarchal colonialism of Trombly and Webb, 53–66; poetry and Texas Centennial, 50–56; Texas history, race, and democracy, 33–41; and Texas History Movies, 49–52, 51, 210n18; and Texas Mexicans’ portrayal in Texas history classes and textbooks,

49, 52, 81–84, 110–111, 112, 214n24; and Twice-Told Tales, 44–46, 48–49, 50; in universities, 56, 210n23 racism. See discrimination; nativism; racial pedagogy; stereotypes; white supremacy Ragsdale, Kenneth, 36–37, 208n8 railroads, 15, 17, 91, 175 Raleigh, Eve. See Eimer, Margaret Raleigh, Sir Walter, 222n7 Ramírez, Dan, 104 Ramos, Raúl, 200, 229n6 ranching, 13–14, 15, 57, 71, 79, 205n19, 206n25, 208n11, 215–216n31 ranchos and rancheros, 13, 14, 27, 57, 59, 60–61, 71–72, 89–91, 228n40 Rangers. See Texas Rangers rape, 200, 221–222n4 “Raza Cósmica, La,” 218n16 Reconstruction, 44, 213n20 Red, William Stuart, 227n26 Regulators, 13 Remembering the Alamo (Flores), 8 Renan, Ernest, 207n32 repressed ideological content of fantasy, 146–147, 223n18 Resaca de la Palma, Battle of, 68; roadside marker commemorating, 69 “Rio Grande Valley” (Trombly), 60–61 Rivas-Rodriguez, Maggie, 201 roadside historical markers, ix–xi, 23, 67–70, 69, 74–75, 211nn1–2, 213nn14–15 Robaina de Betancourt, María, 178 Romo, David, 207n1 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 165 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 36, 47, 193, 209n12, 226n22 Rosaldo, Renato, 131, 221n3 Rosenfield, John, Jr., 49 Rubin, Gayle, 228n38 Ruiz, Francisco, 157 Ruiz, Vicki, 225–226n13 Ruiz de Burton, María Amparo, 3–4, 204n6, 227n32

Index  255

Sabine Pass, Battle of, 44 Sadler, Louis R., 206n26 Sáenz, José Luz, 76–77, 213–214nn20– 22 St. Louis World’s Fair (1904), 35 Salazar, Roberto Félix, 4, 5, 123–125, 195 Salazar de Esparza, Ana, 227n28 Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina, 223n18 Saldívar, José David, 131, 221n3 Saldívar, Ramón, 131, 144, 146, 204n8, 221n3, 224n24 Saldívar-Hull, Sonia, 131, 199 Salinas, E. D., 109 Salvatierra v. Del Rio Independent School District, 103–104, 214n22, 218n14 Salyer, Lucy, 213n20 San Antonio, TX: German sailors in, 29–31, 30; La Villita in, 220n27; living conditions of Texas Mexicans in, 18; LULAC in, 102, 111– 112, 114–116, 219n21, 220nn25–26; monument to Texas Mexicans in World War I, 76–77; population of Texas Mexicans and Mexican nationals in, 19; public housing project in, 220n27; River Walk in, 220n27; school system in, 105–106; and Texas Centennial, 111–112, 114–116; West Side barrio in, 114– 116, 220nn26–27 San Antonio Evening News, 30 San Antonio Express, 39, 220n26 San Antonio Light, 30 Sánchez, George I., 108, 109 Sánchez, Rosaura, 203n2 San Diego, TX, 11–12, 13, 19–20 Sandoval, Chela, 164 “San Jacinto” (Trombly), 54–55, 210n21 San Jacinto, Battle of, 33, 36, 39, 45, 51–52, 54–55, 68, 194, 200, 210n19 Santa Anna, Antonio López de: and Goliad Battle, 83–84; Martin’s play on, 53; and Mexican civil war, 81; portrayal of, by Anglo Texans, 46,

50, 52; and San Jacinto Battle, 45, 210n19; Texas History Movies on, 50, 51; and Texas Revolution, 24, 30; Trombly’s poem on, 54, 210n19; and U.S.-Mexican War, 210n19 Santa Fe Expedition, 75 Saunders, George, 205n17 Schedler, Christopher, 221n2 School of Inter-American Studies (SIAA), 219n20 schools. See education sediciosos, 16, 17, 20–21, 141, 205– 206nn21–22. See also Borderlands War (1915) segregation: of African Americans, 18, 31, 44; of Texas Mexicans, 16, 18, 31, 100, 222–223n12; U.S. Supreme Court on, 104, 218n15. See also desegregation Seguín, Erasmo, 118, 157 Seguín, Juan Nepomuceno, 111, 118– 119, 157, 180, 197 Sesquicentennial. See Texas Sesquicentennial (1986) sexually transmitted diseases, 115, 220n25 SIAA. See School of Inter-American Studies (SIAA) Skinning Wars, 13–14 slavery, 43, 44, 210n24 Sloss, Adela, 26, 100–101, 169–171 “Social Life in Cameron, Starr, and Zapata Counties” (González), 176, 226n20 Sommer, Doris, 184, 227–228n34 Southern Messenger, 177 Southwest Review, 27, 176, 193–195, 227n30 Spanish-language newspapers and periodicals, 3, 24, 120, 132, 204nn4–5, 220–221n30. See also LULAC News Spanish Texas: Castañeda on, 85–86; contributions of, 208–209n11; and explorers, 215n24; Jovita González’s biographies of women of, 178; and missionaries, 82, 87–

256  Border Renaissance

88, 92; Pennybacker on, 81; Salazar on, 124–125; Twice-Told Tales on, 48–49; Webb on, 58; Zamora O’Shea on, 67, 85–89, 92, 125, 214–215n26 Spivak, Gayatri, 194 Squatter and the Don, The (Ruiz de Burton), 4, 204n6, 227n32 State Department, U.S., 47–48, 208n8, 209n12 stereotypes: of Mexican soldiers during Texas Revolution, 45, 50–52, 54–55, 208n10, 209n15; of Texas Mexicans, 12, 16, 40, 49, 60–61 “Stolen Paradise” (Montemayor), 166–169, 188 Stoler, Ann, 224n23 subaltern, 132, 134, 146–147, 194 supplementarity, 2 Supreme Court, U.S., 104, 110, 218n15 Tafolla, James, Jr., 112, 160, 220n26, 225n8 Tamez, Galeot, 114 Taylor, Paul S., 71–72, 82–83, 212n6, 215n29, 228n41 Taylor, Zachary, ix, x, 67–68, 69 tejano/as. See Texas Mexicans Tenayuca, Emma, 155, 217n10 Texas Bicentennial (2036), 198 Texas Centennial (1936): advertising of, focusing on Spanish and Mexican contributions to Texas, 208– 209n11; Advisory Board of Texas Historians for, 74–76, 78, 175; and African Americans, 41–44; Alamo replica at Centennial Exposition, 44; Allred’s proclamation of, 33– 34; Central Exposition of, 36, 37– 38, 41–48; and civic duty of Texas Mexicans, 12, 19–20; Commission of Control for Texas Centennial Celebrations, 37, 74, 81; and dio­ ramas in Hall of History, 44–48, 46, 47, 208n8, 209n14; and Dobie, 23, 74–76, 78, 175; educational campaign of, 40–41, 52; events of, 11, 22, 26, 33, 37, 41, 114–116,

209n13; funding for, 36–37, 41–42, 75, 110; and Hall of Negro Life, 41–44; and iconography of Texas, 22; and LULAC, 24, 94, 110–119, 180; media coverage of, 37, 39, 42, 110; and Mexican American community, 11–12, 19–20, 44–46, 208n7; and Mexican difference, making of, xi, 1–2, 4, 6–11; and Mexico, 45–48, 209nn12-13; National Folk-life Festival during, 177; opening ceremonies for Centennial Exposition, 226n22; and Paredes, 6, 132, 140; and poetry, 50–56; roadside historical markers for, x, 23, 67–70, 69, 74–75, 213nn14–15; Texas Mexicans’ nonparticipation in, 11–12, 19–20; theme days at Centennial Exposition, 227n24; and Texas Rangers (Webb), 55– 57, 62–66. See also Centennial discourses “Texas Centennial” (Paredes), 127, 221n1 “Texas Centennial Hymn” (Trombly), 54 Texas Folklore Society, 74, 158, 175, 226n16 Texas Highway Department, 75, 213n14 Texas Historical and Landmarks Association, 74, 213n13 Texas History Movies, 49–52, 51, 210n18 Texas Knights of Columbus, 178 Texas Mexicans: and Centennial discourses, xi, 1–2, 4, 6–11; and civic duty, 12, 19–20; civil society of, along border, 14–15; deportation of, 19; discrimination against, 2, 4, 10, 12, 16, 18, 31, 93–94, 100, 214n24, 219n19; disenfranchisement of, 15–16, 18, 100; education of, 18, 19, 82–83, 93, 94, 97, 103–107, 160, 205n15, 206–207n31, 222–223n12; Jovita González’s biographies of Catholic women, 178–180; health problems of, 18,

Index  257

19, 115, 220n25; identification with Mexico in nineteenth century, 1, 2–4, 15, 21, 71, 97; income of, 18; infant mortality rate of, 18; living conditions of, 18–19, 114–115; loss of lands by, 10, 13–14, 72, 91, 215n29; and machine politics, 2, 205n15; middle class of, 16, 64, 97– 98, 166–169; monuments honoring, 76–77, 214–215n22, 219n18, 220n23; mortality rates of, 18; mutualaid societies (mutualistas) for, 98, 216n4; in Nueces Strip, 12–14, 21, 23, 60; population of, 19; portrayal of, in Texas history classes and textbooks, 49, 52, 81–84, 110–111, 112, 214n24; poverty of, 18, 40; and railroads, 15; reorientation of, toward U.S., 100–103; segregation of, 16, 18, 31, 100; stereotypes of, 12, 16, 40, 49, 60–61; terminology of, 203n1; and Texas Centennial, 11–12, 19–20; and Texas Centennial (1936), 44–46; Trombly’s poem on, 60–61; and U.S. citizenship, 2, 3, 4, 96, 98–103, 207n3; violence against, 10, 11–21, 61, 65, 141, 200, 206n21, 206n25, 206n27; wage labor by, 14, 15, 16, 18, 40, 63, 91, 134, 190–191, 219n19, 223n13; Webb on, 59–60; as World War I veterans, 76–77, 98, 213–214nn19–21; in Zamora O’Shea’s Mesquite, 86–94. See also border modernity; Mexican Americans; ranchos and rancheros; women Texas-Mexico border, 12–13 Texas Rangers: and Borderlands War (1915), 17, 64–65, 97, 206n21; and Department of Public Safety, 63; Dobie on raid of Mexican bootleggers’ camp with, 78; and draft for World War I, 217n8; film on, 210– 211n26; founding of, 57; in George Washington Gómez (Paredes), 141, 145; image problem of, 62; legislative investigation of, 64–66, 211nn28-29; museum exhibit on,

213; racial management as mission of, 56–60, 62, 64, 153; rape by, 200, 221–222n4; roadside historical marker on, 213n17; as symbol of Texas, 38, 55, 59; and Texas Centennial Exposition, 38, 44; Trombly’s poem on, 55, 211n30; and U.S.-Mexican War, 182, 227n31; and vigilante violence in Nueces County, 13; violence by, 14, 17, 61, 65, 141, 200, 206n21, 206n25, 206n27; Webb on, 17, 22, 55–60, 62–66, 206n26, 210n21 Texas Rangers, The (film), 210–211n26 Texas Rangers, The (Webb), 22, 55– 57, 62–66, 124, 206n26, 210n22, 210n24, 210–211n26, 211nn 29–30, 227n31 “Texas Rangers” (Trombly), 55, 211n30 Texas Revolution: Allred on, 33–34; Centennial discourses on, 22, 31–32, 45–47, 49–50; dioramas on, at Texas Centennial Exposition Hall of History, 45–47, 46, 47; and Goliad Battle, 33, 36, 83–84, 179, 209n15; Pennybacker on, 83–84; play on, 53; poetry on, 50–56; Price on, 35–36; and San Jacinto Battle, 33, 36, 39, 45, 51–52, 54–55, 68, 194, 200, 210n19; stereotypes of Mexican soldiers during, 45, 50–52, 54– 55, 208n10, 209n15; Texas History Movies on, 49, 51; Texas Mexicans, contributions to, 112–113, 116–119, 157, 179–180, 219n21; Treaty of Velasco following, 13, 205n16; Viva Tejas (Lozano) on, 24, 116–119, 180; women’s contributions to, 179– 180. See also Alamo; Centennial discourses; Santa Anna, Antonio López de; Texas Centennial (1936) Texas Sesquicentennial (1986), 27–28, 196–197, 199, 229n2 Texas State Historical Association (TSHA), 56, 210n21 textbooks. See education

258  Border Renaissance

Thomas, Cullen F., 38–41 Thomas, Jesse O., 41–43 Tinnemeyer, Andrea, 228n40 Travis, William B., 53, 117, 138 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 4, 13, 68, 205n16, 207n3 Treaty of Velasco, 13, 205n16 Tres faces del pocho (Paredes), 24–25, 131, 135–139, 222n7, 223n19 Trombly, Albert Edmund, 53–56, 60– 61, 210n19, 210n21, 211n30 TSHA. See Texas State Historical Association (TSHA) Turner, Frederick Jackson, 57 Twice-Told Tales, 44–46, 48–49, 50, 209n16 U.S. Army, 17, 97 U.S. Border Patrol, 218n12 U.S.-Mexican War, 2, 12–13, 27, 39, 43, 47, 68, 181–182, 205n16, 210n19, 227n31 U.S.-Mexico border, 12–13 U.S. Public Health Service, 115, 220n25 U.S. Revolution, 35–36 U.S. State Department, 47–48, 208n8, 209n12 U.S. Supreme Court, 104, 110, 218n15 universities: Mexican American studies in, 108–109; racial pedagogy in, 56, 210n23. See also specific universities, such as University of Texas University of Houston, 229n6 University of New Mexico, 108, 219n20 University of Texas: Barker at, 113, 176, 209–210n17, 210n23, 226n20; Castañeda at, 72–73, 84–87, 112– 113; and dioramas at Texas Centennial Exposition Hall of History, 44, 46, 47, 209n14; Dobie at, 71, 73–74, 78, 175; García Latin American Collection at, 85; Garrison at, 210n23; Jovita González at, 158; Manuel at, 206–207n31; in Paredes’s George Washington Gómez,

141, 145; Trombly at, 55; Webb at, 22, 55–56, 65; Weeks at, 40 University of Texas Press, 210n22, 211n30, 212n11 Vaquero of the Brush Country, A (Dobie and Young), 74, 189, 205n17 vaqueros, 73, 83, 177 Vasconcelos, José, 218n16 Veblen, Thorstein, 32 Velásquez, Ana, 121 Vellescas Ramon, María Manuela, 178 Veramendi, Ursula, 178, 179, 180 vigilantes, 13, 17, 97, 206n21 Villa, Pancho, 78 violence: in Anzaldúa’s “We called them greasers,” 200; and lynching, 13, 31, 133, 200; Paredes’s “Alma Pocha” on, 133; and rape, 200, 221–222n4; and Skinning Wars, 13–14; against Texas Mexicans, 10, 11–21, 61, 65, 141, 182, 200, 206n21, 206n25, 206n27; by Texas Rangers, 14, 17, 61, 65, 141, 200, 206n21, 206n25, 206n27; Trombly’s poetry on, 60–61; by vigilantes, 13, 17, 97, 206n21. See also Borderlands War (1915) Viramontes, Helena María, 196 Viva Tejas (Lozano), 24, 116–119, 180 voting: and disenfranchisement of African Americans, 205n20; and disenfranchisement of Texas Mexicans, 15–16, 18, 100; and machine politics, 2, 205n15; and poll tax, 15, 104, 121; requirements for, 15 Voz, La, 11–12, 19–20 Walker, Joseph, 45 War, The, 200–201 Wayne, John, 208n9 Webb, Walter Prescott: on film about Texas Rangers, 210–211n26; and Lyndon Johnson, 211n30; master’s thesis of, 65, 210n21; and memorial for Texas Rangers for Texas Centennial, 213n17; on Native Americans, 58–59; Paredes’s critique

Index  259

of, 64, 132, 211n27; patriarchal colonialism of, 55–66; on Spanish Texas, 58; on Texas Mexicans, 59, 124; as Texas Ranger, 62–63; on Texas Rangers, 17, 22, 55–60, 62–66, 206n26, 210n21, 227n31; and Trombly, 55–56; at University of Texas, 22, 55–56, 65; on white supremacy, 57 Webb, Walter Prescott, works of: Divided We Stand, 63; Great Plains, 57–58; Texas Rangers, 22, 55–57, 62– 66, 124, 206n26, 210n22, 210n24, 210–211n26, 211nn29–30, 227n31 “We called them greasers” (Anzaldúa), 200 Weeks, O. Douglas, 40 Welles, Orson, 43 Westerns. See American West and Westerns white supremacy, 8, 11, 15, 16, 29–32, 35, 43, 57, 102, 143. See also racial pedagogy Who Would Have Thought It? (Ruiz de Burton), 4, 204n6, 227n32 Why Stop?, 211nn1–2 Wicks, Moye, 35 Winningham, George W., 51–52 With His Pistol in His Hand (Paredes), 129–131, 154, 156, 195, 204n3, 211n27, 221n3, 227n33, 229n1 Woman in Blue, 178 women: accomplishments of, 165; at Alamo, 179–180, 227n28; attitudes of male Lulackers toward Anglo women, 165; in Caballero (González and Eimer), 185–188, 192, 228n40; education of, 160, 175; in George Washington Gómez (Paredes), 25– 26, 127–128, 148, 150–153, 155–156; Jovita González’s biographies of Catholic women, 177–180; in LULAC, 26–27, 96, 155, 157–159, 161, 165, 166, 225–226n13; and motherhood, 160; mujeres fronterizas (border feminists), 26–27, 28; and traditional gender roles, 125, 152, 158–163, 169–171; writings

by, in LULAC News, 26, 157–158, 163–174. See also feminism; gender roles; and specific women “Women’s Opportunity in Lulac” (Montemayor), 165 working class. See labor movement; pachuco; peonage Works Projects/Progress Administration (WPA), 19, 43 World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), 37 World’s Fair of 1939 (New York City), 37 world’s fairs, 35, 37–38 World War I, 76–77, 98, 213–214nn1922, 217n8 World War II, 27, 76–77, 109, 193–194, 200–201, 210n18, 214n22, 216n33, 221n31 WPA. See Works Projects/Progress Administration (WPA) “Yawn Goes On Vacation,” 171–173, 226n14 Young, John D., 74, 205n17 Zamora, Porfirio, 71, 212n5 Zamora O’Shea, María Elena: birth and family background of, 71–72, 93, 216n32; and Castañeda, 72–73, 84–87, 94; and Centennial discourses, 6, 86, 195; and cultural conflicts and effective citizenship, 4; and Dobie, 23, 71–73, 212n10; as educator, 72–73, 81, 83–84, 212n7, 212n10; higher education for, 72; and LULAC, 5, 94; marriage and children of, 73; Mesquite by, 6, 23, 70, 80–81, 86–94; obituary of, 216n32; research and writing on Texas history by, 84–94; on Spanish Texas, 67, 87–89, 92, 125, 214– 215n226; on Texas Mexicans, 67, 86–94; and World War II, 216n33 Zaragoza, Ignacio Seguín, 71 Zavala, Adina Emilia de, 212–213n13 Zavala, Lorenzo de, 118, 212n13