No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880-1940- 35th Anniversary Edition [Anniversary ed.] 0197686001, 9780197686003

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No Separate Refuge

No Separate Refuge Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880–1940 Thirty-fifth Anniversary Edition

SARAH DEUTSCH

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © 1987, 2023 by Sarah Deutsch First published by Oxford University Press, 1987 First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1989 Thirty-fifth anniversary edition published by Oxford University Press, 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Deutsch, Sarah. No separate refuge. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Mexican Americans—Colorado—Social conditions. 2. Mexican Americans—Colorado—Economic conditions. 3. Mexican Americans—New Mexico—Social conditions. 4. Mexican Americans—New Mexico—Economic conditions. 5. Colorado—Social conditions. 6. Colorado—Economics conditions. 7. New Mexico—Social conditions. 8. New Mexico—Economic conditions. I. Title. F785.M5D48 1987 978.8’0046872 86-32421 ISBN 9780197686003 (pbk.); EPUB 9780197686010; UPDF 9780197686027 Printed on acid-free paper Paperback printed by Marquis Book Printing, Canada

Contents

Acknowledgments vii A Brief Note on Terminology

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Introduction 3 1. Strategies of Power and Community Survival: The Expanding Chicano Frontier and the Regional Community, 1880-1914

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2. At the Center: Hispanic Village Women, 1900-1914

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3. Invading Arcadia: Women Missionaries and Women Villagers, 1900-1914

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4. Redefining Community: Hispanics in the Coal Fields of Southern Colorado, 1900-1914

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5. “First-Class Labor, But No. 2 Men”: The Impact of World War I and Mexican Migration on the Regional Community

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6. On the Margins: Chicano Community Building in Northern Colorado, the 1920s

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7. The Depression, Government Intervention, and the Survival of the Regional Community

162

Conclusion 200 Abbreviations Used in Notes and Bibliography

211

Notes 213 Bibliography 307 Index 345

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Thirty-five years ago, when No Separate Refuge was first published, the field of what we now call Latinx history was at an inflection point. A rapidly rising stream of books on Mexican American history emerged, each pathbreaking, and engendering an ever-widening array of new directions and concerns. And yet, for all that changed, some central issues have persisted. No Separate Refuge revealed the intricate ties—economic, political, and social—that ever more tightly bound together remote rural communities and highly capitalized production outside them. Over the period covered in the book, the notion of a world apart became untenable. Thirty-five years later, as we watch mothers get picked up by ICE while their children are in school, as the horrors of addiction plague remote communities, understanding the dynamics of often strategically uneven development, cultural difference, and migration loom even more pressing, as does the often neglected centrality of gender in those dynamics. In that sense, the story at the heart of No Separate Refuge still has much to offer. The importance of gender in migrant strategies, the ties that link sending communities to migrants, the vulnerabilities and strategies of migrant communities trying to sustain a world where they determine the direction of progress lie at the heart of this book. It may seem surprising that thirty-five years later, the book remains relevant not only in explaining the foundation of current dynamics, but in the

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continuities of the dynamics themselves. After all, the book came out before NAFTA, before Proposition 187 in California, before the INS became ICE, before “Latinx.” Two years after the book came out, a conference at Oberlin brought together people working on Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Mexican Americans (both immigrant and what I might call legacy Mexicans—those who traced their families’ presence in what is now the U.S. to before 1848). At that point, it was novel to bring those historians of seemingly separate groups into a single frame. Terminology came up forcefully as an issue. There was, as yet, no “x” on the horizon, but scholars from the Chicago area argued for “Latino” as an umbrella term, while two women scholars from Colorado and New Mexico voiced their concern that their families and the groups they studied would not see themselves in that term. One of the scholars arguing for “Latino” rejoined, “You feminists are destroying the movement!” The terms of choice change, but the terms themselves remain inescapably political. While some observers now complain that the current dominant term, “Latinx” is a mark of the elitist academy, out of touch with how people outside the academy understand who they are, the term actually arose outside the academy, among activists searching for a term broadly inclusive, one that neither reinscribed male dominance, erasing women (Latino), nor reinscribed heteronormativity, erasing those nonbinary or queer members of the community, hence substituting “x” for “o” or “o/a” or @. “Hispanic,” while still widely used, is often miscredited in its origins to a conservative, hostile and clueless federal government and its adherents in the late 20th century, highlighting the European and erasing the indigenous heritage that pervades many Latinx peoples. The term, is, of course, far older in its usage, particularly among heritage populations in New Mexico and Colorado. That said, that usage in its earliest days at the dawn of the 20th century, certainly partook of the desire to foreground European rather than indigenous heritage as I explain in my note on terminology in the front matter of the book, and as more recent scholars have explored in greater depth.1 The dominant activist term among Mexican Americans in the late twentieth century was Chicano, a term meant to include the mixing of European and indigenous descent. Like other scholars, I found a total lack of consensus among those I interviewed in how they self-identified. Almost all of them used “Hispanic” or “Spanish American,” but understood and accepted why the young people in their lives chose “Chicano.” At least one of them, among the most elite of my interviewees, went on an angry rant when I used the term Anglo to refer to non-Mexican heritage people, scorning what he saw as the claims to “Anglo-Saxon” heritage. I sympathized

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with an early reviewer, himself a scholar activist whose work I admired, when he strongly objected to my use of “Hispanic,” seeing it as an endorsement of imperialist claims and settler fantasies. At the same time, I felt an obligation to respect the terms of my so often disempowered interlocutors. I saw them and their children as one audience for the book, along with the academic audience that would secure my tenure in the academy. I am not sure there is a way totally to escape this dilemma. And while the notion that the book could cross-over from academic to non-academic audiences may seem naive, when I went on two speaking tours of Colorado and New Mexico (one in 1993 and one in 1997), my audiences indeed included people from the northern New Mexico and southern Colorado villages whose stories populate the book. In 1987, I wrote that the field was new, and situated the book in the handful of books on the history of Mexican descent people in the United States and the larger field of immigrant and ethnic history, as well as in what we would now call the history of capitalism. In the decade that followed, an astonishing number of path-breaking books on Mexican descent people emerged, each spawning its own legacy. Among them, in the same year as No Separate Refuge, came Vicki Ruíz’s history of women in the workplace and community and David Montejano’s history of racial formation in Texas, followed by George Sánchez’s history of community and identity formation in Los Angeles, David Gutiérrez’s history of political formation, citizenship, and immigration policy, Ramón Gutiérrez’s history of sexuality and the political economy of sex in New Mexico, and many other field defining volumes.2 Each of these volumes not only shifted the ground of Latinx history; they succeeded in breaching the divide between Latinx and U.S. history, heralding the mainstreaming of Latinx history. In the intervening years, Latinx history has expanded its temporal and geographic reach and retained its character as a cutting-edge, paradigm shifting field. While the early volumes dealt almost exclusively with Texas, New Mexico, and California, succeeding works not only added Arizona (though rarely if ever Colorado). They also provided a robust if slender history of Latinx people in the 20th century Midwest, and even more slender in the Pacific Northwest, and an ever-growing body of work on the long history of Latinx people in the Southeast.3 While the foundational questions remained and continue to generate a wide array of community studies, demographic, policy and political shifts have generated not only the increased visibility of Latinx people nationally. It has generated new lines of inquiry. The history of land grants made to Mexican descent settlers on what is now U.S. soil has come in for

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re-examination, placing contests over that land both in the context of the rise of global capitalism and increasingly recognizing the waves of settler colonialism in which those granted land by the Spanish crown or Mexican government dispossessed Native Americans before they, in turn, were dispossessed by Anglo settler colonialists. Those new histories begin to address the long simmering tensions between Native American historians and Chicano historians by recognizing a far more complicated and fraught common history than activists had imagined.4 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the increased attention to dispossession has led to new approaches benefitting from theorizing about violence and memory. The new work includes studies of cataclysmic episodes of violence and vigilante action that puts the literature on the 1915 Plan de San Diego, a manifesto promising a violent return of the U.S. Southwest to Mexican hands, in dialogue with sustained official and vigilante violence against Mexicans in Texas, as well as the mass death resulting from an explosive fire at a Texas border quarantine station.5 Such episodes, previously neglected by historians and buried by officials, shaped the history of survivors, the literal landscape of the state, and intergenerational trauma. No Separate Refuge attends more to what theorists call “slow violence.” Rather than a single cataclysmic event, it chronicles the accretion of changes that rendered life in the Mexican descent villages of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado increasingly precarious, beginning with the coming of the railroad in the 1880s and including changing legal regimes that enabled dispossession, changing tax regimes that required cash payments, and environmental degradation from industrial waste and commercial grazing as well as water diversion. The policies of slow violence followed villagers as they increasingly migrated for waged labor, policies that made migrants vulnerable to wage theft, instability, and illness. Together, all these policies increased the poverty of villagers and their dependence on low wage uncertain labor outside their home base. While the migrants in No Separate Refuge were largely citizens, when they migrated away from their villagers, Anglo communities and policy makers often cast them as outsiders, not belonging, and conflated them with immigrants. This conflation at times colors more recent histories of the region. The rising visibility of immigrant rights movements, and the rising visibility and vulnerability of undocumented immigrants along with the renewed interest in guest worker programs, has led historians to recast questions about the history of citizenship and generated new studies of the Bracero program that, like No Separate Refuge, often link histories of sending communities with the history of those they sent.6

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The period covered in No Separate Refuge predates the Bracero program, which started during the second world war. A World War I guest worker program that rarely appears in the historical literature plays a pivotal role in the book, but my focus remained on domestic migration. I chose to follow a migrant stream that existed entirely within the U.S. because I suspected that U.S. official manipulations of the migration would be that much more evident. Even though I had those suspicions, I was still startled to find them verified quite so baldly, particularly in the 1930s when the government removed Spanish-surnamed residents from relief rolls six weeks before the sugar beet season began, to ensure they would be desperate enough to take up agricultural work on whatever terms. I came to this study from an interest in the history of cross-cultural relations and conquest, migration, labor, and social justice. I was buoyed by a reading knowledge of Spanish and experience inexpertly teaching English as a second language to a group of Spanish-speaking women in a part of New Haven where bullet holes pockmarked street signs. The dissertation was not an obvious choice in the early 1980s. When I told my peers what my topic was, more than one asked, “Why? Who will be interested in that?” Even my unstintingly supportive advisor, Howard Lamar, instructed me to contact the giants in the field—Juan Gómez-Quiñones and Albert Camarillo—to see if the project was feasible, if there were sources available to consult/ use. They responded that they didn’t know, but that I should do it anyway. Archivists routinely told me, often with some irritation, that no one had asked for these documents or collections before. Along the way, my research overturned almost all my working assumptions. I threw myself on the mercy of the people I interviewed, and they responded with tolerance and generosity. The many people who have worked to transform that research landscape and to move these questions from the margins to the center are too numerous to be named here. The myriad oral history collections, new archives, and prize-winning books testify to their success. The work is, of course, not finished. While Northern New Mexico’s counties have survived as majority Mexican heritage, they are still impoverished and precarious. The powerful dynamics that create internal as well as international borders persist. And the efforts to uncover and understand that history continue.

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1. See, for example, John M. Nieto-Phillips, The Language of Blood: The Making of Spanish-American Identity in New Mexico, 1880s–1930s (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2004). 2. Vicki L. Ruíz, Cannery Women Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950 (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1987); David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987); David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 3. The following are just a very few of the many path-breaking books that have emerged in this field since 1997: on California and labor, Stephen J. Pitti, The Devil in Silicon Valley, Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004; Matt García, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900–1970 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); on Texas, Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Cynthia E. Orozco, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009); on the Midwest, Zaragosa Vargas, Proletarians of the North: A History of Mexican Industrial Workers in Detroit and the Midwest, 1917–1933 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Gabriela F. Arredondo, Mexican Chicago: Race, Identity, and Nation, 1916–39 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Lilia Fernández, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); on legacy populations, Rosina Lozano, An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018); on sexuality Pablo Mitchell, Coyote Nation: Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modernizing New Mexico, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); on the Southeast Julie M. Wiese, Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Perla M. Guerrero, Nuevo South: Latinas/os, Asians, and the Remaking of Place (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017); on the borderlands in the colonial era Miroslava Chávez-García, Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004); Deena J. González, Refusing the Favor: The Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820– 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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4. See, for example, Maria Montoya, Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict Over Land in the American West, 1880–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and David Correia, Properties of Violence: Law and Land Grant Struggle in Northern New Mexico (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013). Add to this the increasingly nuanced histories of Native Americans that reveal the shifting lines of alliances between different indigenous peoples and settler colonialists over the course of the 19th century; see, for example, Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: a Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (New York: Penguin Press, 2008); Paul Barba, Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021), and Paul Conrad, The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). 5. See, for example, Monica Muñoz Martinez’s prize-winning, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); and on quarantine deaths and riots see, for example, John McKiernan-González, Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848–1942 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), and on violence in California and Arizona see, for example, Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández, Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 6. See, for example, Deborah Cohen, Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Ana Elizabeth Rosas, Abrazando el Espíritu: Bracero Families Confront the US-Mexico Border (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014); Lori A. Flores, Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016); Mireya Loza, Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual, and Political Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Ana Raquel Minian, Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); see Juliana Hu Pegues, Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian Entanglements (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021) on the similar depiction of Asian Americans as always belonging elsewhere and of indigenous Americans as always belonging to the past. On citizenship, Mae M. Ngai’s Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004) has been foundational.

No Separate Refuge