Lone Star (134 page)

There were also several important Negro business organizations in Texas, including an insurance company. These provided balance. The great expansion and upgrading of Negro higher education was another large factor in providing an indigenous black middle class. Many of this group found more opportunity working within the black community at home than those who emigrated only to crash against the unadmitted caste barriers in the North.

This middle class did not turn into what the black community called "niggers"—successful Negroes who tried to become imitation whites, by living and working within the white community. Here, the Southern social ethos, and the clear understanding that race barriers existed, prevented the flight of middle class blacks from their own people, and prevented much of the destructive ghetto atmosphere of the North. There was little fragmentation of the black elites into white suburbs. This might do damage to the integration theory, but it seemed to provide greater stability.

Certain characteristics of Texas cities made them less prone to racial tensions than elsewhere. They were all products of the automobile age, and mostly built on open prairies; they lacked compression. Dwellings were overwhelmingly composed of single-family units; the crowded apartment houses and tenements originally erected to house immigrants in the Northern cities did not exist. While blacks were segregated, there were no tight neighborhoods, of either whites or blacks. The black areas generally had almost unlimited room to expand; the Texas annexation laws prevented most cities from being choked off by suburbia.

There were some recorded—and many more unseen—instances in which Negroes from outside Texas tried to rouse interest in demonstrations or public protests in the 1960s. In virtually every case, the local black power structure was hostile to these, and prevented any such action. Significantly, following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the spring of 1968, only one racial incident occurred in the entire state, and this was a single instance of breaking and entering.

One final factor was a generally clear understanding between both black and white communities that the Texas economic and political power structure would not tolerate civic disorder. Few Texas leaders on any level were likely to be gripped by the paralysis that agonized and immobilized Northern political structures in the face of riots. The white community did not believe in social integration, and therefore felt little guilt or hypocrisy about the situation of the races. The white elected officials were rarely dependent on black votes. Texans by and large obeyed the desegregation and antidiscrimination laws because these were the law; they were prepared to enforce local codes as well.

Caste barriers could not be disposed of by fiat in Texas, any more than the Republic of India could abolish untouchability by legislating against it. There were still hatreds, frustrations, and a thousand reminders of the past, for both races. But many enormous changes were occurring with remarkable ease. The Negroes were emerging rapidly, not into the white community, but into the total community as a strengthening entity. Blacks served on police forces, argued on city councils, sat in the legislature, all without dangerous friction. This was not true integration, but a strengthening of one polarized community vis-á-vis the other. It was the most that was possible at the time.

The whites had never believed in true integration; significantly, perhaps, the Texas black community was moving rapidly away from it as a goal. Leadership in both communities, with a general realization that the total society was racist and polarized on both sides and would remain so, struggled for empirical working relationships with each other. They might or might not be hammered out. No society in human history had solved the problems thrown up when two highly differentiated populations were forced to live side by side.

Meanwhile, federal studies described Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and other Texas cities as those least likely of any large metropolitan areas in the United States to experience major disorders.

Seventy percent of the black population of America had emigrated into some dozen industrial centers, where tragically, the Negro, with his limited skills and remaining caste handicaps, was almost as obsolete as he had become on the sharecrop farm. Texas had not solved its Negro problem, but the state had exported most of it.

In the same years that the historic Negro migration out of Texas was taking place, another great folk movement was happening. This was also largely unseen. While Texas exported one potential crisis, it was deliberately importing another one, which was inherently more serious. The 20th century saw the beginning of a huge Mexican immigration into Texas.

The new migration was misunderstood by most Texans and almost all other Americans, because there had always been ethnic Mexicans in south Texas. But statistics reveal a startling pattern. In 1860, there were about 12,000 ethnic Mexicans in all Texas, all in the south-southwest. Between 1861 and 1900, approximately 334 Mexican nationals entered the United States annually; as many departed as entered. By 1900, immigration averaged 100 Mexicans per year. In 1900, 70,000 ethnic Mexicans lived in Texas, or less than 5 percent of the total population; only 5,000 lived in San Antonio, where they were still less numerous than ethnic Germans. By contrast, Arizona contained 14,172 Mexicans, California 8,096, and New Mexico 6,649. No other state had as many as 500.

The first decade of the 20th century brought an enormous reversal of the trend. The reason was the new development of massive agriculture and the processing of agricultural products in the American Southwest. In Texas, the combination of spreading rails, organized land companies, and extensive irrigation projects invaded the old cattle enclaves along the Rio Grande. Surveyors, in the last great American land rush, laid out vast tracts through the brushland where Rip Ford and Cheno Cortinas once rode. New cities were laid out, too, some on old settlement sites, some on new, such as the Western Land Company's bright new town of Weslaco, in rich alluvial soils a few miles from the Rio Grande. With diverted water, the
brasada
and the
ebonal
began to bloom with fields of fruits and vegetables. The Texas citrus industry began; millions of acres were cleared and plowed.

Until this time, economic gravity along the border lay with Mexico. Matamoros was a rich city; Brownsville, after 1882, had reverted to a sleepy small town. The border, separated by the arid country between it and San Antonio, lay outside the economic boundaries of the United States, except for cattle, and more cattle were shipped abroad than sent North. Mexican money was even dominant; border merchants continually complained as falling silver prices depreciated their stocks of "adobe dollars," or Mexican silver pesos, vis-á-vis United States gold. The new development changed all this; it brought the Southwest back firmly into the United States. Tons of vegetables, fresh and canned, were shipped North by rail; towns and cities swelled. New blood came in, because here was a lusty new frontier, where a man with capital could make his fortune out of crops and land.

This entire development was based on Mexican labor. In fact, none of it would or could have taken place without a great mass of low-paid workers from south of the border. Much of the new lands was marginal, and since irrigation and drainage was required, it took enormous investments in capital to develop them. Further, these croplands were separated by immense distances from their markets, almost entirely in the far North and East. The cost of land, irrigation, and crushing freight charges could only be met by using labor cheaper than any other in the United States. Without Mexican labor, the Southwest could no more have been developed agriculturally than the huge cotton plantations could have produced their surpluses for the antebellum South without the Negroes.

Day wages, even for low pay, offered the Mexican lowest class opportunities it did not enjoy at home. Thousands of Mexicans were recruited below the border; others, sensing a new frontier of their own, poured north. The Anglo-Americans had solved the problems of Indians, transportation, and large-scale agriculture in old Spanish Texas, and until all this had been done, mass Mexican immigration into Texas simply could not take place. In each year after 1900, more Mexicans emigrated into Texas than had gone there during all the generations of Spanish rule.

These new workers, hardy, gregarious, polite, accustomed to savage suffering, long bound to the soil, arrived not only as adventurous individuals but in whole family and extended family groups. Very few of them were
vaqueros
from northern Mexico. They poured up from the immense central plateau, where the Spanish had first established the
encomienda
and
hacienda
, from the states of Michoacán, Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Nuevo León. They were predominantly Indian by blood, but long Hispanicized, and they fled from the Mexican regions where landholdings were the largest and conditions for the
pelados
, "the skinned ones," were the worst. Thousands fled to escape debt peonage, as once European peasants fled from manor to town, or took ship for America. These Mexicans entered a new country where most of the land and almost all the means of production were owned by Anglos. They were subjected to fierce exploitation, by American, but not Mexican, standards. Mexican laborers took jobs at 50 cents per day, but still, in a month, some earned more cash than they had seen in their entire lives. No Anglo-Texan could exploit this
pelado
class to the extent it had been exploited in Mexico for four hundred years.

They poured in, increasing the ethnic Mexican population of Texas between 1900 and 1910 by 76 percent. In ten years, between 1910 and 1920, 264,503 arrived, and 165,044 in the next decade. Most of this immigration was utterly informal. There was no quota placed on immigration from the Western Hemisphere; in many cases Mexicans simply crossed the river. Years later, there were hundreds of thousands of Mexican nationals living in south Texas who had been residents for three or more decades, but who had never taken citizenship. After a certain period of residence, or the birth of children, they were not deportable.

Because they came
en masse
, to an area where there was already a Mexican presence, they failed to assimilate culturally as did other groups; further, there was a deep racial barrier between the dark-skinned Indian-blooded peasant and the color-conscious white Southerner. Mexicans, like Negroes, entered with certain problems not faced by other national groups. The acute problem was only recognized nationally in the 1960s, when the migration, running now at some 50,000 per year, aroused fears in Washington.

The fact that Middle America was expanding its population faster than any region on earth, with people far outrunning economic development, caught attention. Mexico would have a population of 70,000,000 in the last quarter of the 20th century. This realization resulted in the first quotas ever placed on Western Hemisphere immigration, 100,000 per year. But by 1950 there were already 1,500,000 ethnic Mexicans in Texas, comprising 17 percent of the total population. Increase and steady immigration pushed the percentage to approximately 20 by the 1960s, and all projections, even figuring in the immigration quotas, predicted an increase. One in five of all Texans was Spanish-speaking. This was hardly mere immigration; it was colonization.

Studies published by the University of Texas as early as 1920 warned of immense ethnic and social problems to come, unless this
Völkerwanderung
were stemmed. It was already recognized that the Mexican immigrants were not assimilating, in fact, had no desire to assimilate or adopt Anglo culture. The second generation was not learning English. But the developer and farmer in the Rio Grande Valley, the pecan sheller and cigar maker in San Antonio, thousands of housewives wanting maids, were as adamant as the South African Boer would have been, if told he should send his Bantu boys back to the veld from which they came.

The immigrants were rural Mexicans, and their exodus was very similar to the exodus of rural Negroes out of the Mississippi drainage to the North. The reasons behind both movements were identical. The great social and political revolution that shook Mexico beginning in 1910 affected the rural masses least. The old feudal
hacienda
system was at last destroyed, allowing the beginnings of social reform and modernization of the state, but as in the United States, the beginnings of industrialism did not mean an immediate improvement for the people on the land. The revolution did little to stem emigration; the slacking of south Texas development during the Great Depression halted it for a time, but only briefly.

Meanwhile, the Mexican Revolution caused increased problems between Mexico and Texas.

Relations between Texas and Mexico had always depended in large degree upon whether order or chaos reigned below the Rio Grande. In 1910, a long period of chaos began, and this revived old troubles on the border. The Mexican Revolution, like most revolutions, was markedly antiforeign in tone; it upset the old empirical relationships Porfirio Díaz had hammered out, and inevitably embroiled Mexico in serious conflicts with the United States. The U.S. troop-landing at Vera Cruz and the dispatch of Pershing's army on a fruitless chase of Pancho Villa were not part of Texas history. But a tragedy of these years was the revival of the old racial war along the Rio Grande.

This region, even after the coming of the land companies, was always violent. Rangers and peace officers, for example, killed sixteen Mexicans between 1907 and 1912 in Hidalgo and Cameron counties alone. But the Mexican Revolution, which turned bloody when Felix Díaz, Reyes, and Huerta revolted against Madero in 1913, and Venustiano Carranza led his own revolt in the north, brought more Texan and American troops and fighting to the border than had been seen since the Civil War.