The American Future (34 page)

Between Brownsville and Port Isabel, where the Rio Grande flows into the Gulf of Mexico, the arid Texas landscape sinks into salty wetness, and the horizon is wide enough to see the curvature of the earth. Streams and small ponds, catching the silvery light, thread through what was until recently duneland, turning it into a dark mudscape over which herons and egrets sail looking for shrimp and usually finding them. This is the Bahia Grande: not so long ago an arid bowl of salt and dust that blew into air-conditioning fans and car radiators and let nothing much grow except a thuggish variety of yucca, not unlike a Joshua tree; spindly fibrous trunks crested by spiky crowns of leaves. The yucca are still there in their thousands, poking comically from the surface like so many prairie dogs on their hind legs. But the roots of the yucca now often sit in that saline water better suited to the black mangroves that diligent high-schoolers are planting as fast as they can in the mud. The weird coexistence of these species, arid and marine, has been the result of a Gulf of Mexico reclamation project that in 2005 flooded 10,000 acres of the Bahia, restoring to wetland what the Brownsville Ship Canal took away when it separated the Rio from its natural outlet to the sea. The pelican and the cormorant, the shrimp, the shrimp fishermen, and the tourists on South Padre Island out on the causeway are all happy about this. It's hard to find anyone around Brownsville, a town which along with its sister on the other side of
the river, Matamoros, lies at the heart of MexTex border history, who isn't. The new-old landscape of the estuary seems to hum gently of an older, slower world.

A few miles inland, at the edge of the zone where razor grass, sage, and prickly pear take over again, there's more singing and yearning for a lost place. Each week, Jesus, Arturo, Alberto, Juan, and a few friends meet in a backyard to barbecue chicken and play Norteamericano music; the music of
la frontera.
This week they're kind enough to play for us in front of a barn, festooned with abandoned car parts, old guitars, and a neon Budweiser sign that picks up in magenta intensity as the evening draws in. The men are all in their late sixties and early seventies, but look enviably younger, especially Juan, one of the singers who is the most handsome vaquero you've never met, sporting a dashing mustache and a certain look in his eye beneath the cowboy hat. Their music is famous for its aching sweetness, sung up and down the scale, the throaty pleasure and the drawn-out pain of memories of land lost, mothers, cooking, lovers. They give “Canción Mixteca” their all in three-four time; “How far from the beautiful land of my birth,” they sing longingly as half chickens are hoisted by their legs from their marinade high into the light and then dumped on the grill to sizzle and char, smoke curling in the air as the band hits a high note. Hiss,
ayy
,
sospiro, I sigh…
and rangy Juan leans into the mike like it was a senorita smooch. Our director had wanted to record the Chicken Club playing acoustic guitars. Not a chance; the men are too attached to their amplifier—driveway authenticity—and as if in vindication, turn up the juice on a rowdy cicada that has just machine-gunned its way into their act.

The sounds of longing fade; cans of beer are flipped open; we all load our plates with chicken and guacamole—and none of your bright green supermarket pap, either. Ricardo, our director who grew up in Chile, asks the musicians straight out whether they think of themselves as American or Mexican. He speaks to Jesus, Alberto, Juan, and Arturo in Spanish, the only option, even though some of them have been in Texas for thirty or forty years. One by one they all answer, forthrightly and without any defensiveness, “Mexican.” And they smile as they say this, seeing no contradiction between this profession and their American citizenship. For they are fiercely loyal to the United States as well; and to the next question, what do they think of the country,
they answer, in effect, “the world”: a good place, the best; the country where a man may make a decent living for his family; the country that is still respected abroad. For the Chicken Club these two loyalties are not in conflict; they are mutually reinforcing. And they have little or no sense of their people being at the eye of a political storm; of being accused of staging a “reconquista,” taking back the country Mexico lost to the United States in the war of 1846–48. How can you take back what was never really lost? Lost maybe to the Mexican state; but the north country has always been a piece of Hispanic America, and a piece of Anglo-America too. What's the difference: They speak Spanish; their children are bilingual; their grandchildren speak mostly English. Things shift and move in the borderland; back and forth like the battered old pickups they drive over the Brownsville bridge without any fuss, without any ceremony.

The trouble with the immigrants, of course, was that they were clannish, “lazy people of vicious character,” overfond of hard liquor and prone to let black people slave for them while they sat around drunk in the heat. Many of them were fugitives from justice in their own country; debtors on the run or worse. “GTT”—Gone to Texas—was a euphemism for being on the lam. They were ignorant of the language, picked fights, ogled the women (whom they then reviled as whores), and huddled together in rickety little towns, the houses not laid out in proper streets in the Mexican manner but scattered about “in an irregular, desultory manner.” Their “wretched little stores” sold whiskey, rum, coffee, and sugar to their own kind with some rice and flour—and of course ball and lead, for they were all trigger-happy. There was no doubt, thought the young artillery officer José Maria Sanchez on a tour of inspection of Texas in 1828, that Anglo-Americans were unpromising material for integration into the free Mexican republic. If they weren't stopped soon, they would swamp the native population and culture. But it seemed impossible, not just to arrest the immigrant tide, but to prevent them from taking land. “They immigrate constantly, take possession of the places that suit them best without asking leave or going through any formality other
than that of building their homes.” When they were discovered settled on someone else's land, the original titles being impossible to find, it became impossible to dislodge them.

Sánchez's senior officer, a veteran of the Mexican War of Independence against Spain, an engineer and scientist, General Manuel de Mier y Terán, had been sent by the president to survey the border with the United States. He was less dismissive of the social caliber of the newcomers and therefore more anxious about the future. From Nacogdoches he wrote President Victoria that only in San Antonio de Béxar was there a substantial Mexican population capable of holding its own against the incoming tide of American immigrants. In most of the other towns they were outnumbered almost ten to one. And since the Americans either educated their children in their own schools or sent them home for schooling, the cultural divide was only going to grow wider. An alien culture had been embedded in Mexican soil, and pruning its vigorous shoot would just encourage a growth spurt. Worse, the Americans were clever enough to exploit the grievances that Tejanos (the local Hispanic population) had with their state government in distant Coahuila and the national authorities in Mexico City. Together, the unlikely alliance might agitate for Texan autonomy or even independence. The Anglos had a genius for converting personal grievances into political umbrage. They all seemed to think they were Thomas Jefferson. “Among these foreigners are…honest labourers, vagabonds and criminals but honourable and dishonourable alike travel with their political constitution in their pockets demanding the privileges, authority and offices which such a constitution guarantees.” But Jefferson was, of course, an eater of territory, none hungrier; a true American. The real problem, Mier y Terán tried to tell Mexico City a year later, was that Texas was “contiguous to the most avid nation in the world,” one which was very unlikely to stay put within its frontiers.

This sudden disenchantment hurt, since it had been the Mexicans themselves who, after securing independence in 1821, had thought Americans might be usefully tame colonists who would populate the arid regions of the north. And how persuasive they had been, those charming wolves! No sooner had Mexico won its liberty than the first of the pack, Moses Austin, erstwhile lead magnate and founder of Herculaneum, Missouri, had thought to recover from a
banking debacle by taking his chances in Texas. In the backwash of the economic meltdown of 1819, the Austins were just one of countless families on the run from the consequences of their improvidence who thought all would be well if only they could land the perfect sweetheart deal. To the Mexicans it looked like a good match. They had too few entrepreneurs, and land to spare. Hitch the one to the other; watch the seedlings grow; in would come eager new migrants, from both south and north; the government's coffers would smile with revenue, and everyone would be happy. What could possibly go wrong? So after a few go-rounds Moses Austin was, in principle, granted the status of an
empresario.
This meant he was entitled to a sizable land title on condition of his ability to attract 300 other settlers. But an attack by bandits on the way home to Missouri left Moses badly wounded and led to his death shortly after. However, his son Stephen would—after much bother—see the promised land. Two years later Stephen Austin became one of three founding
empresarios
and was so successful that before long he had amassed 100,000 acres. The Texan spread had been born.

What had taken the gringos south anyway? American trappers and hunters had long been roaming around the mountainous regions of the northern states of Mexico for hides and beaver pelts. (Every Victorian top hat started as a beaver.) But the real enticement was the possibility of linking the old mule-train routes from Santa Fe, with its loads of silver, wool, and hides, to the river basin of the Rio Grande. Steamboats would change everything. Aboard paddle steamers, those cargoes could reach the Gulf of Mexico and once ports had been built, could be shipped anywhere in the world. Along the route, towns would spring up. They would need feeding, so cattle ranches would supply them with meat, and the hides would be turned to boots and saddles. Perhaps even cotton and rice could be cultivated in the lowlands. Who knew where it would stop?

The plan was unoriginal, which did not mean, however, that it was unexciting. In Edinburgh, Manchester, and Westminster, British political economists were saying the same thing about Bengal or Argentina. In Paris, in the Grandes Ecoles, the French were developing a developer's appetite for Algeria and Egypt. Like their European counterparts, the Americans who cast hungry eyes on northern Mexico and made sententious noises about the March of Progress required
certain conditions to be met—legal and political—before they would be able to realize the ambitions that would benefit all, rich and poor, natives and newcomers, hosts and guests, who together would rise on the swelling tide of Improvement. What was more (another standard lever of territorial insertion), the newcomers would supply security for the native people against the depredations of marauding Indians; in this case primarily the Comanche, who were certainly a tough nut to crack. So, they liked to argue, everyone would gain from their immigration. The parched land would receive the boon of capital and the occupation of grazing herds; the “peons” (whom the Americans regarded as just barely human at all, so steeped were they in sloth and filth) would get a living wage; and the local elite would suddenly find themselves on the highway of the world's traffic. But first there had to be secure law and hospitable politics. The problem in Texas, New Mexico, and California was that there was nothing between the informal law dispensed by local alcalde magistrates with no legal training, and the capricious interference of the central government. Worse, juries were unknown. When the immigrants tried to assert their own understanding of law and were rebuffed, it naturally caused trouble. Thus came into being, for a few weeks, the sublimely named Republic of Fredonia. Its president was not Groucho Marx but an
empresario
called Haden Edwards who had been defeated in court over land claims. What Mexico would not grant, the sovereign state of Fredonia would bestow, so Edwards ran up a flag of his own design, red, white, and blue of course, inscribed with the motto “Freedom, Justice and Independence,” before Fredonia was extinguished by the arrival of Mexican troopers.

As Mier y Terán had observed, the immigrants were quick to invoke the rhetoric of the American Declaration of Independence whenever it suited them; another irony since the Mexican freedom war had been consciously inspired by Washington, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution. It was a commonplace among the American Texans to complain about having to knuckle under to a Mexican regime that, for all its lip service to liberalism and reform, was still, they said, despotic, arbitrary, and priest-ridden. But when, in 1829, that same Mexican government did something that took the American Declaration of Independence's proclamation of liberty and equality more seriously than the United States and abolished slavery,
it was taken as a hostile act, aimed at American immigrants who were overwhelmingly from Southern states and so had brought slaves with them into Texas. This act also made the Americans within the United States sit up, as Mexico—and Texas in particular—looked as though it might turn into a southern refuge for runaways. Compounding the effrontery, a year later, in April 1830, the Mexican government further decided that the only way to preempt the conversion of Texas into a de facto annex of the United States was to shut down American immigration altogether. Americans were welcome to immigrate elsewhere in Mexico if they chose. General Mier y Terán was handed the unenviable job of enforcing the law.

He knew that both the antislavery laws and the immigration ban were a dead letter without a substantial Mexican border force to keep out the Yankees. Mier y Terán built a string of forts from which vigilant anti-immigration patrols were sent out to scout
la frontera,
but it was as porous as it is today and gringo smugglers—white
coyotes
—knew the territory well. The beleaguered commandant then attempted, without much success, to bring Mexican settlers into Texas as a counterweight to the Anglos. But during the four years between the imposition of the ban and its revocation, the rate of illegal Anglo immigration soared, so that by the time of the Texan War of Independence (1835–36) there were around 40,000 of them along with their slaves and the fate of the region was sealed. It was just a matter of time before some grand 1776-like public utterance was made. Mier y Terán knew it; and between being unable to concentrate the attention of the Mexican government on what was inexorably happening and the tide of immigrants from the north, he was eaten up by despair. Seeing the loss of Texas, the loss of all north Mexico, he leaned the hilt end of his sword against a wall in 1832 and fell hard on it. The day before he had written to a friend: “A great and respectable nation of which we have dreamed…can never emerge from the disasters which have overtaken it…we are about to lose the northern provinces. How could we expect to hold Texas when we do not even agree among ourselves…
En que parara Texas? En lo que Dios quierera
. What is to become of Texas? Whatever God wills.”

Not all Mexicans were so pessimistic or so prescient. There were a significant number who despised the aggressively centralizing regime of General Santa Anna in Mexico City as much as the Americans and
were prepared to suspend disbelief and join them in the common cause of an independent Texan republic. Such a liberal state, they believed, could interpose itself between Mexico and the United States. But the declarations of independence issued from local Texan “committees of safety” were imprinted with the American view of what had happened and what was at stake. The San Augustine declaration, for example, stated that they had settled “an uninhabited wilderness…the haunt of wild beasts and hostile savages” but had been rewarded with the outrage of liberated Negroes and, through the 1830 immigration ban, the separation of families. It was time to recognize that “Anglo-Americans and…Mexicans, if not primitively a different people, habit, education and religion have made them essentially so. The two people cannot mingle together…And as long as the people of Texas belong to the Mexican nation, their interests will be jeopardised and their prosperity cramped.”

For Tejanos like José Seguin and José Antonio Navarro who fought on the Texan side of the war, this was ominous. Their ardor was for a bicultural free liberal republic where Catholics and Protestants could each worship in their own way; two languages would be spoken and two peoples engage in a fraternal experiment on American soil; a sweet dream. What they got instead was reality: a dependency of the white United States and more particularly of the slaveholding South. The punitive massacres at Goliad and the Alamo that Santa Anna had inflicted on the Texan rebels before being routed by Sam Houston's army at San Jacinto had made a vindictive aftermath inevitable. Though the second president of the Texan republic was a Tejano, most of its Anglo population thought of its existence as merely a prelude to entry into the Union. Since that future was all but certain, they had no compunction in dispossessing as many Mexicans as they could; clearing them from whole regions just as Indians like the Cherokee, Creek, and Choctaw had been “removed” from their own ancestral homelands by President Andrew Jackson and his successors. Bitterly disillusioned, men like Seguin saw his hometown of San Antonio de Béxar, where he was mayor, become “the receptacle of the scum of [American] society…At every hour of the day and night,” he wrote, “my countrymen ran to me for protection against the assaults or exactions of these adventurers. Sometimes by persuasion I prevailed on them to desist; sometimes also force had to be resorted
to. How could I have done otherwise? Were not the victims my own countrymen, friends and associates? Could I leave them defenseless, exposed to the assaults of foreigners who, on the pretext they were Mexican, treated them worse than brutes?” In 1839, a hundred families were expelled from Nacogdoches. In Matagorda County a meeting, typical of the time, simply ordered a mass expulsion of Mexicans. A newspaper conceded that “to strangers this may seem wrong but we hold it to be perfectly right and highly necessary…in the first place there are none but the lower class of ‘peon' Mexicans in the county, secondly they have no fixed domicile but hang around the plantations taking the likeliest Negro girls for wives and thirdly they often steal horses and those girls too…We should rather have anticipated an appeal to Lynch law than the mild course which has been adopted.” The same would have happened later in San Antonio had not the local German population refused to participate.